11/24/21 7:04 pm (pg 76 of 97)
notice still losing pgs on the top count
thats me pruming passages, all the
beats that try to humanize // normalize
him, it feels good to be cutting slush /
years of folk telling me what this novel
should do,
every day now i run ip on unacceptable
segments and cringe and i know i got to
perform emergency repair before i can move
forward and thats primarily cut cut anything
thats not thresshold strong its got to go
and generally i have to step away
cant cut immediate;y but when i get
back to it i find the cutting come easy
god im like have i found the answer or
am i j just spinning my craftless wheels
is there a chance that i, after all
might be at least a good novelist
dare i still hope for great
11/24/21 7:04 pm (pg 59 of 98)
clocking pages, i will not allow
myself to question them
11/23/21 5:23 pm (pg 55 of 100)
didnt move forward much, had to go back
to beginning and make sure previous text
reflects current minimalist understanding
notice the top pg count downn by 6 in
one day, im being ruthless, feels good
11/23/21 10:10am (pg 54 of 106)
okay, cutting all the slack, seeing what
the new novelgon be, gon be about
120-150 pages, a long poem
big diff is cutting all the stuff
i put in to humanize him,
cutting trash is easy, whats hard
is th embarassmennt of knowing
ellen and the industry was subjected
to all this, ima cut this bad boy to
the minimalst bone and make a
puzzle of it, fuck everybody
this 1st stage, hold your
nose and marchh thhru
later
11/22/21 12:45pm (pg 54 of 106)
torture, fucking torture
just like w/asecret society assage, cant fix it wo
reworking the entire thread, asking myself the
big 3, what is this passage doing, what did i
mean it to do, what could it do
which openns up wholle thread and these
are not a b c questions, these are essay
questions, i got to ponder on them
okay, i got to remember, Im on a 5 pgs
a day scheduke, i got a little cushion
at the rate i been clocking but lets not
go there, stay steady rick, morning for
moving forward
11/212/21 12:19pm (pg 53 of 106)
as you can see im moving right along
this is good, means i will get thru initial read
with plenty of time to focus on rough spots
and whats promising is i find myself
cutting stuff im not really invested in
and got in there cause i felt like it
should be, like family / meta beats
all thats going going gone
and beats that are only there because
ellens readers over the years asked for
them, anything i dont think critical, its
going to be in truth a book length poem
and its gon be tight tight tight
and does not have to reflect reality
say that again rick, get it thru
your thick skull, it does not
have to reflect reality, did reality in memoir
this thereticaloly frees me up and Im feeling it
as i work my way thru initial read, ay go
back and see earlier cuts, we will see
11/22/21 pg 40 of 108 (clocking pages)
field of justtiice 2020 @smwallday
hello world, deep into the draft, at the rate Im
going i will have a good draft by end of year
so thats my new goal, damn near halfway thru
in a week, which means i dont agree w/industry
about the value of what i do, they had me
reeling w/that last round of rejections, 13
so im taking out the meta beats and got a coupe
of passages need more enriching than i can give
them on the fly but these days i write like a 70
odd year old man ready to go or be incapacitated
any moment, boom, cut, so i write in quick drafts
this draft i want to just clean it up according to
current understanding, surely the powers that
be wont take me out in next 5 weeks, surely
god could not be so cruel,
then i will take the next 6 months, till my
bday in july, for serious enrichment of any
passages noted last draft as could be richer,
then i will take a deep breath, thank god
and ask for another 6 months . . . .
11/20/21
okayy so much for driving thru
ran up on my 1st i gotta do better patchj
got to rethink it
got to spin my wheels
but of course
i got a hoodoo secret society
but i use my reallife colleagues
so i didnt do much with them
but now that ive used memoir
to immortalize them i can fully
fictionalize in the novel, which
frees me up immensely
11/16/21 11:42 am 11 of 108 pages
afro out by @fabiogomestrindade
flowing smooth so far but
i know its gon get rough
what i been doing is taking out all the
teaching and preaching, which i thought
was lean but im extracting it all, leaving
just the lyrical narrative and then when
i have cleaned up my daily 5 i go back
thru and riff char beats that are terrible
but its all process, ima enrich these
characters if it takes me a year
thats what Im scheduling
end of year for initial pruning
and big revisions, a year of
enrichment, we will see
i want a good new draft by the
end of the year cause im afraid
god will clip me before im done
this is a standing fear
so i want critical mass asap
then i can take my
time refining
got to go, got to stay on it
so many pages, so little time
all my love
11/16/21 9:48 pm
taking flight by nisian
hello world, im relieved to report my novel
is not as bad as i feared, at least not to me
after 13 rejections i had lost faith
but 8 pgs in i like my stylee still
i know its gon get more challenging as
i dig in but i dont have to reinvent the
wheel, i just got to work the rough edges
then ima start sheopping it alternative
and / or university, no problem, i just
want to to exist
im gone, got to do my daily 5, at single
space thats more like 10, which might
be rushing it when you want to be
meticulous, we shall see
im feeling fey today,
dear regulators
its like i love everybody
the whole world today
strange
i got to go
okay, started to sign off - all my love
which is one of my traditional closures
but at the moment im actually feeling it in
a manner conscious and unprecedented
as is this attempt to articulate it
is it a sense of responsibility
for everybody, i dont know
wanna heal everybody?
i dont know what im feeling
but i know its a path worth exploring
kinda reflecting experience of having
dug deep in memoir and working on
the life as pilgrimage text, some new
me fighting thru on the page / life / ??
feels pretentious now
but its what i feel
all my love
11/15/21 9 am
okay did 7 pgs yesterday, 2 so far this morning
ima go for 5 a day,
11/14/21 11:09 am
okay, its not as bad as i feared, im on page 8
and only done moderate changes, mostlly
cuttiing fluff, but the early chapters are always
the easiest ones, before you got to start weaving
all those threads, i got to go, its good to be
back in the saddle
11/14/219:08 am
hello world,how do i express this, i dont know whats
happening, i finished draft of almanac, sent off
to james and casey, its become special
life changing for me as an artist
in the stage of life that im in
so ive been pondering since finishing memoir about
that damned novel, 13 rejections, 20+ years
been wanting to give up but it aint in me apparently
and writing that memoir has changed me
some how and one of my missions has
been to show folk what a contemporary
hoodooman really do but i did that in
memoir, my novel dont have to carry
that weight anymore and i want to
be less meta and more fantasmical
for what surely must be the last major
draft but whatever it is Im doing is
obviously not working, got a
juneteenth on my hands
if it was just the industry dismissing
i could dismiss them but my friends
dont finish it either, im doiing something
wrong and since industry has given
me another round of nos and Im
in my 70s Im like fuck them
this just me and the generations
im not sure what that means tho
i just know its gon be different
and i know im not triumphant like
i am in that text i started in my 40s
the 70 year old me closing down shop
is the tone i am going to reflect,
a mythmaker at the end of days
im about to rewrite this book from scratch
all these years i been doing additions on
a 20 year old concept, i got to be organic
so i been scared to actually dig in
at this stage all you can see is failure
the failure of the previous draft
the lack of insight about whats needed
the fear that it will finally be proven
beyond any shadow of doubt you
just dont have it in you
so any way, this morning i finallly dug in
ima go para by para over the next year
and force each one into higher ground
so this is the 1st para, the old one and the new one
the new one is raw, proto draft, so it wil evolve but i
think it gives you an idea of what im about to do w/
the text, so this the old one, it has that triumphalist
tone Im gon extract from this draft:
I am Flowers of the Delta Clan Flowers and the line of O. Killens. I am hoodoo, I am griot, I am a man of power. I am mythmaker. Attend me, Lord Legba. It is I, Rickydoc Sunstrider, the High Hoodoo of Memphis, would tell the tale of a people, a prophet, a way. In the name of the Conqueror, let this work be done, let this work be a healing:
and this is the new one, thats gon engage the old storyteller trope
ima lean on, prophetizing, mythmaking, and the novel as magical text
basically this is where i end up previous
draft, this draft tihs where Ima start:
I am Flowers of the Delta Clan Flowers and the line of O. Killens. I am hoodoo, I am griot, I am a man of power. I am mythmaker. Once again I have come to tell my story. To gather folk around the sacred fire and provide the visions without which the people will perish. This is a story I have to tell. A baby myth. The Long March of the Firstborn. I have tried to tell this story many times, many ways, all to no avail, I have failed to give it the power it needs. Too many times folk have shifted about, glanced at the moon, drifted away from the sacred fire, too many times Ive lost them, and now my own sun sets, the fires that have driven me faint embers now, my voice no longer the powerful instrument I am accustomed to, I speak in short breathless bursts now, where once I sang I now must shout, but it will have to do, this one last time, I will shift the tone, the way I sit, I will try something new, I cannot imagine what, but this one thing I know, this one thing that keeps me going. I believe I have something important to say and I just got to say it so folk see it. I still believe that. I will continue to conduct myself as I aspire to be. There is a recurrent dream I have had, me macking with all my heart, mack mack macking with all my power and with every word a new world comes into focus and solidity but sometimes I stumble and I falter and the world around me thins into insubstantiality, fantasy and illusion, while I flounder about like catfish in the bottom of the boat, mouth hooked and desperately looking for the right words and when I find them, hidden in the mire of deep delta mud, I get to macking again, mack mack macking until you see what I see. The Long March of the Firstborn. A star faring folk leaping at the sun. Folk think prophecy about foretelling the future. Au contrary. Prophecy about correlating current behavior with destinic consequence, Continue to conduct yourselves in this manner and your generations will suffer. Listen to me and they will thrive. God told me this. I must be heard. Attend me, Lord Legba. It is I, Rickydoc Sunstrider, the High Hoodoo of Memphis, would tell the tale of a people, a prophet, a way. In the name of the Conqueror, let this work be done. Let this work be a healing:
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