rootwork the rootsblog: a cyberhoodoo webspace

what it take to move a work from bad to good to great

MONDAY 10:42 am

done deal, the day before classes start,
hows that for making my deadline

you da man rick, you da man

o i got some rough beats but its a viable draft, it is not
yet a clean draft, too many new, ie raw passages but it
serves if something were to happen to me tomorrow

thats all i ask for the moment

3 mos it will be good to go
one more summer woodshed
and it will be primetime

all my love

 

MONDAY 3:30 am

finished confrontation at the crossroads
still not perfection but it will do

all i got left is my closure beat, two measly pages
but the most impo pages in the text, we shall see

can i count this as a win, as a draft in on deadline
when my char sequences need another redpen

something i can easily do in a week but schoolhouse
always a crises mode and the work  falls by the wayside
no matter how stressed i get i got to do my morning 3
no more 24 hour work till its done woodshed days

as to if i count this as a win, of course i do
that way i encourage myself to keep going

im flexible that way - all my love

MONDAY 1:54 am

to tell you the gods honest truth i dont know where i am
got the last two beats, the confrontation at the crossroads
and the closure beat at the river, a couple of hours work

appears i am afraid to touch it because its my endgame
and its got to be primetime, its got to cap the work

just man up and do it rick, earlier you do it the quicker
you can get to my syllabus for class thursday

over semester maintain morning 3 production
schedule: whole text and the char sequences

i will always remember penda saying you have to have
the patience to move a book from bad to good to great
over next 3 months i move it from good to great

quicker you man up and do these last 2 beats,
the quicker you can focus on your syllabus

im out, all my love

rdoc

the more things change

THURS 8/23 11:07

did i finish my text, well yes and no
finished many drafts actually, a draft
that im satisfied with, well no

my characterwork is weak, so ima spend
the next 3 months leading to xmas woodshed
just enhancing char and doing flash fiction beats
that enhance char and concept - thats just touchup
i can do touchup during the semester, a weekend
here, a weekend there - its doable

then during that last woodshed push i prune the
weak beats and it should be a stronger novel
put a couple of poetry drafts on it and i should
be good to go, we will see-  im gone

got pages need clocking, i figure 3 more
days, sunday ima focus on schoolhouse

and go into a 3 hours a day schedule instead
of glorious whole day all week i been on

life is so hard core
never any rest

all my love

rdoc

 

 

FRIDAY

in a funk, ive finished the draft basicallly, i havent redpenned the last 10 pages or so
cause it woulld be a counterproductive use of my time, thats ike a couple of hours of work

but i got too many glitched passages, where either the char work is thin (all of them)
or the conceptual gears arent meshing as finely as i would like, so ima concentrate

strictly on char the next 3 months, my char work will still be weak, character is
not my forte, ima idea kinda writer, i got the vision, a draft strictly working chars
will make them stronger, not strong but stronger, thats all i ask

lets say i got 10 days i can continue to give this novel
can i enhance my char work enuf to send to agent, i
want her to see what im doing but i got to be patient

also working my array, getting better, working out brer beetle
but its not fun, its focus and discipline, cause i got to get good

im just trying to get good enuf not to embarass myself

 

THURSDAY

was reading this and felt need to post it
talking about trump, charlotte and the repubs:

It is possible to trace this devil’s dance back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the emergence of Richard Nixon. After the passage of the act, the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln to which black people felt considerable fealty, turned on those people and stabbed them in the back.hose people and stabbed them in the back.

In 1994 John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser and a Watergate co-conspirator, confessed this to the author Dan Baum:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The era Ehrlichman referred to was the beginning of the War on Drugs. Nixon started his offensive in 1971, declaring in a speech from the White House Briefing Room: “America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”

The object of disrupting communities worked all too well — more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for drug-related offenses since 1971, with African-Americans being incarcerated in state prisons for these offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that for whites, according to Human Rights Watch.

In 1970, Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

time out i guess

WED  8/16 11:25

hello world, this fool trump has pulled me out of my woodshed
i have given up on a viable draft, i have too many glitchy passages
i have gotten thru them but they are thinner than i would prefer

mostly that problematic final 40 - but i have made it clean enuf
so that my fear of dying w/o a text is alleviated, at this point
its just about making it better, another summer woodshed

now as for trump, his charlotteville response has been illuminating
trump gives it to you straight and he just says what  lot of folk are
thinking but prefer to hide, the repubs will not forsake him, they

will make the sounds he should have made and continue their
equally bad policies but with the figleaf trump refuses to don

so race dialogue ensues in spite of folk preferring to avoid it
but whats cool is it will hinder trumps agenda, which i believe
is to subvert the constitution and take power thru the placement
of his loyalists in critical governmental positions but i would not say
that anywhere else as i dont want to be judged a conspiracy freak

also i have to say seeing how that race based ideology can
go so bad that i am once again reconsidering my own

race based holybook, in which i try to inspire blackfolk
by giving them this mission of evolutionary guidance

but i look at the response of folk to obamas mandela missive
about folk loving each other and i would like to gain that
kind of love from the world but i feel like i got to come
real and get blackfolk out of this historical trickbag

its clear i will always be questioning myself and my most
fundamental assumptions which is i suppose a good thing
but it means there is no rest for the weary

i will have to try to take my holybook to higher ground
next draft, something heather heyer would want to read

a white woman who gave her life in the struggle
says something black nationalists need to hear

another quick point, i often comment on wapo and nytimes
artricles but i never get a like, damnedest thing, recently
got booted when i asked how israelis felt about supporting
donald trumps neonazi administration, i was gon protest

but they unblocked me, but i was thinking, only reason
im still there is making commentary that might be of
interest to future scholars and i thought instead of

commenting to other readers ima speak to the generations
instead, my comments there will be addressed strictly
to the historical record, that should be interesting . . .

im gone, i need to be working
instead of talking about working

i will make my deadline on novel but only by streamlining the
glitchy passages, it will be a readable draft but not the draft

its that last 40 pages that still needs work, needs expansion
and conceptual clarity, it is my endgame and it has to sing

all my love

rdoc

 

 

MONDAY 3:07 am  pg 46

doing a lot of structural revision now but still moving forward
sometimes i read it and its good, sometimes i read it and i cringe
same passage, i can no longer judge, just write it best i can

its clear i will have to do a couple more drafts, too much
new manuscript, too much major revision, its not clean
until all you doing is refining the poetry, im so sick of
reading this text, it is an act of sheer fucking discipline

tho i no longer have confidence i still got faith

the incidents in charlotte, the rise of the right
& the presidents clumsy expressions of support
commit me ever more to getting my work done

im gone, got pages need clocking

maintain

 

SUNDAY 8/13  9:34 am   page 35

moving forward again, been fixing glitches, they have lined up on me
i got so many balls in the air now i no longer know where i am w/text
keep force marching, keep cleaning up glitches whenever i got cushion

 

 

FRIDAY 8:23
took me all day to input my 20 pages, got 2 glitched
sections that have to be fixed before i can continue

wow, i jut noticed i have archives going back to 2004 or more
and its like damn near 2 decades i been doing this, i have
generated a lot of wordage to not have no readership

hopefully they will be of use to some generation some day, i
wouldnt mind seeing how ive changed but who got time for that
one thing i can bet on, bet i was still struggling w/this text
if that aint discouraging i dont know what is, focus rick

FRIDAY 5:38
incorping redpen, pure grind, sitting at the sacred
desk, hour after hour, grinding away - no fatally
glitched passages as yet  -  pray for me 

FRIDAY 10:01
yesterday i felt good about what i was doing
today not so hot, too many dicey passages but
i got to keep working thru, i got to have faith 

FRIDAY  4:35 am
having to do some serious judgment calls regarding
tone - looking for profound and keep finding corny

 

THURS   8/10 

so i had the car packed, was a day or so behind schedule
computer crashed, IT gave me a loaner but it didnt print
so i went into office to print out the days work, i was

determined to maintain production on the road but i was
very uncomfortable being this close to a real draft and
subjecting myself to the vagaries of the road this close

i did 10 pages yesterday and i was like damn 7 days and
i will have a real draft and when i got to office there was a
book from colleague jon dee and i was quite moved by it

and i was like jon got his work done, ima do mine
im not leaving till i got a draft, turned around, car
still packed and went home, did 17 pages today
(10bpt singlespace = 40 or so)

redpen you just reading thru and responding
bulldog drudgework, ran up on a glitch passage today,
one so wrong ima have to stop and rewrite it, i assume

i will find more and more of them deeper i get
into the novel but mostly they reading clean, means

my subsequent drafts will be less than a week or so
poetry drafts, with occasional new beats that

require a little bit more time and attn, got 10 days
before moma opening of terry adkins exhibit on 19th

i can do this, i know i can

7 pages a day will get me to the promiseland, i did 20 today
plenty of room for fixing up glitchy patches, i can do this

after this one every time i hit it i will just make it stronger,
but this will be the draft that i can live/die with

ive done 30 pages in 2 days, damn thing aint but 70, its gonna
get harder, it always does, coming in about 200 pages of text

i kinda expected my opus epicus magnus rex to be well bigger
but it is what it is, all thru ive had to adjust to its narr demands

im gone, its 10:35pm, im on page 27, going for 30 by midnight,
i can do this, by god and all thats holy, i can do this

all my love

rdoc

 

 

COUPLE OF DAYS AGO???   8/8???

havent done a lick of work, not a lick
im not sure whats happening, apparently
im taking some time off i guess, been
sleeping mostly, catchup paperwork
computer crash, maintenance

ma try to get a groove on tonight and
get on the road tomorrow

 

its not research that will make this novel sing

SATURDAY 8:43 pm

starting a new draft its like a wall of fear
fear that you will fail, that it will once and
for all be proven you dont have it in you

the fear will not go away till you are deep
into the text and got some momentum

so i girded my loins and started writing
on it today, all of 2 pages but once i
loosen up my writing hand i will pick
up the pace, 5 a day will do the trick

5 a day = new draft in 14 days, true draft

showtime  -  all my love

rdoc

 

SATURDAY 6:25 am

i am afraid, i look at this text and i am afraid
because its still not what i need it to be

i am going to start clocking pages today, its not
a clean text & i dont know how to not work/try, i
got 21 days, find the zone & i can make it happen,
i need a text that will justify my existence

 

SATURDAY 8/5 (already?)   4:35 am
i got to make that delta run, now or never

mr ima do this and ima do that aint done nothing but zombie out
i been rolling all summer, body decided it was shut down time

also fuck research, research beats will not make this novel sing
what will make this novel sing is deeper character depth and

conceptual grace, i got about 20 days to make this happen
dont waste it on research, clock pages, research supplemental

lets say i got 20 days before schoolhouse grind starts, 70 pages
(singlespace 10pt) 4 pages a day will do the trick, 5 a day even
better, give myself a cushion, use today and sunday to get
ahead of the game for those days i will lose on the road

 

all my love