behindtheax

adaptation

I sort of have it fixed. It was the ac adaptor that got busted but I didn’t know that at first because this old laptop hasn’t had a working battery for years. Anyway, it will sometimes still conk out on me right in the middle of things but I am happy to have it back. I’m actually using duct tape to hold parts of it together. I was getting desperate to fix it because I just can’t do the long hand anymore. I have nine pages of the first page of a short story and it’s getting sadder every time I start it over. And there is only one line out of every three where I can actually decipher my handwriting. I guess over the years I have just grown too accustom to popping up a new document – giving it a working title and typing away: twisting and turning and changing and deleting and adding how ever I saw fit just to find a bit of joy when filing away a crisp and clean sheet of type even if it was only a bunch of clichés and poorly constructed sentences. Now on the other hand, my paper and pen approach makes me feel out of control, where my every day challenges with structure and organization come flying up out of the loose leaf at me – it is a scribble mess of pen marks, cross outs, squeezed to death words balanced on the heads of other words, lines with arrows twisted and contorted through every paragraph and up along the margins. It is a chaotic, scarred looking place where a spell check never ventured and any sane word counter would run screaming.

It does upset me, this realization that I lost the ability to write down a simple story without needing all these bells and whistles but I confess I need them. Although now I feel the computer has erased away all my romantic notions about writing. I always thought that someday, when I finally found the desire to pour my whole being into writing something, I would simply run off to an isolated cottage somewhere along the banks of the great Gaspe coast. And I would spend a whole winter there writing away with the chill of the north
Atlantic sweeping along the gaping mouth of the St. Lawrence, banging at my storm windows, causing the porch swing, out front, to creak and move reluctantly in its tarnished frame. And there I would sit snug inside the tiny cottage, in front of a small wood burning stove, scratching away at a story hours at a time and when my pen got too heavy, I would bundle up and wander down to a long and empty stretch of winter beach and watch the ocean rise and fall and think of my characters walking out from the surf.

But now I know the truth - that without an ac adapter and Internet I would probably last about four days before I started making paper dolls and airplanes out of my potential epic and perhaps even go running off into the surf myself thinking there must be a service provider just beyond the next wave.

posted by mary j. @ 2:47 PM