Fifty percent
This morning I passed the fifty percent revision mark. Les Mailles sanguines contains 81 chapters or scenes varying from one to ten pages. Always provided with the pages revised by Perig, who gives me his corrections every Tuesday, when we meet as a choir, I open Scrivener, reread the passages, and focus primarily on the elements noted by Perig.
Once a chapter is completed, I save it in Word format in a directory called "done." Scrivener also allows synchronization with other software and a website: Simplenote. These same chapters are, therefore, in a cloud that I get back with my iPad. If I’m in the subway, in a café, I can continue the work. When I come home, I do a new synchronization between Simplenote and Scrivener.
I have no difficulty writing in a public place unless music that is too discordant fights against my inner rhythms. I consider that I really started writing during my first significant love pain. It was in 1981, I’ve already told it elsewhere. My pain, as gigantic as a cliché, made me flee an apartment where a too painful atmosphere reigned. I took refuge among the people, the onlookers.
Lurking in the shadow of a table corner, I started spying on people and telling myself stories. Now, like a proper adult, I carry my whims with me, and I manage to invent, not from scratch, but still to create characters. But I will never be able to separate myself from reality. There are too many people around me who unintentionally tell me about their experiences, who share looks, smiles, anxieties, and vices. Too many men who tell me, on the Net, about their deep impulses, their inadequate responses to pain.
Just yesterday, a guy was telling me about his torment. Her lover, just out of the closet, having children, decides to live his life to the fullest. Understand that he doesn’t want to be faithful yet, that he has a life to live, that he wants to remain a friend, blah, blah. People, even if they are reasonable, sincere, remain selfish.
Another who tells me that he has caught syphilis and that he must warn his last lovers, ashamed. It’s not your fault, though, that I’m telling him. No matter how careful we are, viruses and bacteria take advantage of our blind desire to be loved to slip from one skin to another. He thanked me as if I had just given him absolution.
I’m not talking about all those other stories I’ve heard, from women as much as from men, about everything that’s usually weakly said, or not at all, because it’s too complicated.
In short, I am at fifty percent of the revision of my little invented story. In a year, or maybe a little earlier, I’ll have to look for another one.
It is not true that everything has been said in literature since everything is starting all over again, that the colors of truth are transformed as tectonic plates are formed, as stars are born and hearts die.
Fifty percent. Coincidentally, this fortieth chapter entitled "The Will" is a pivotal scene. I didn’t mean to. Quite undoubtedly, this is, in my case, a desire for geometry, for scheduling. And I’m glad things are happening like this right now. I really needed it.
