The alternate title to this post, relating to the photo, is "It Isn't Here Anymore." Sometimes that's all progress has to offer. There was something, and it isn't here anymore. The house I'm sitting in front of, 3 lots down the beach from where I grew up, isn't here anymore. This house used to float on water, then it settled down and became a summer home. I used to play here when the family came. I've always played here when they were gone too, headed to the marshy backyard to pick pussy willows, thrown sticks over the creek for my dog. When the tide is very high, and we've had heavy rain, neighbors have been able to row a boat around in the yard. It's been a month or two since the house stood and not quite two years since I sat for the photo. But even then there were rumors that it would go and that's why I wanted the picture. When I knew it was gone, I put off walking by the bulkhead for a couple of visits. Then, I decided I could manage it. It's gone and I miss it, but I feel all right. I feel more all right than I expected and I think it may be because of how much that house exists in my mind. For years and years I've dreamt of it and it is always different, it is never the same house, and it is always that house and I can always let myself in.
I knew it was time to write a new entry here, so I've been thinking about what's being going on since I last wrote. Some of it has just been the progress that is time moving forward. But there has also been what I could call making progress. In the last couple of months Mariesa Bus finished an editing round of my complete story collection. She handed the big printed manuscript back to me at our last meeting. Thank you, Mariesa! Some stories we've passed back and forth and workshopped and talked through over coffee, and dinner, and wine and I've been revising those. Others needed less attention. There are some I've only begun to revise, and that's the work I'm heading into.
My progress has been getting organized. There are handwritten notes from Mariesa and from me all through the manuscript, and then there are the versions I have on my computer, and there are newer documents that already take into account the notes on the manuscript and are more up to date than the printed draft, and it was all starting to make me feel like I didn't know which way to turn. So, I have a list. As I work through each mark on a story, I create a new document and store it in a new folder so that all the current drafts have a home together. I'm in the middle of that, but I'm feeling better now. My list is also a list of which stories are finished, which need a few edits, which need deep revisions. I have a list and I have a plan. Since creating those I have had fewer mornings when my first thought, before I am fully awake, is that I am a disappointment. Anything that arms me against that is progress that is more than just moving onward in time.
Sometimes, my writing gets such a short end of the stick there's barely anything to grab hold of. When people ask me about it, my answer could be "It isn't here anymore." But I know that's not true. It is here, and part of that is due to how much I love it, and part of it is due to the encouragement of friends, and part of it also is due to the attack on my unguarded mind in the early mornings, the sinister shadow of failure. It looms and I am threatened into action. One day I'd like to write an entry about that shadow titled "Progress: It isn't here anymore."
