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Green InkJanuary 28, 2007 I have green inkstains on my fingers again, and a folded paper towel that looks like a Rorschach test, also in green. This is good. I started Squatters' Speakeasy in two notebooks. Part 1 was written in brown ink, part 2 in purple. After maybe 120 pages of scrawl I realized that this wasn't a part 1/part 2 thing: the two parts riffed off each other and had to be interwoven. That's what I've been doing since the first of the year. Day before yesterday I was overwhelmed by the raw material for the scene I'd just started working on. The computer offers too many distractions and diversions for the overwhelmed: FreeCell! Rat Poker! Spider! Tetris! E-mail! Mud of the Place taught me that the best antidote for STUCK or BLOCKED was to take a yellow pad and a pen and go somewhere else. Several years later I'm still turning up yellow pads with character sketches and monologues and floor plans on them -- grist for Mud, all of it. Usually I can see how each bit composted into the eventual whole, but I don't remember writing any of it. The handwriting, however, is undeniably mine. So yesterday morning I picked a pen from my box and, after a few moments' indecision, filled it with green ink. Green is the color I used for morning pages when I did Julia Cameron's Artist's Way workbook (highly recommended!). It wasn't brown and it wasn't purple, and I did have two bottles of it. I visualized my character. He was stuck: he had an editorial to write and an imminent deadline, and he didn't know where to start. I didn't either. I don't especially like this character: why should I help him out? Because the scene was stalled until the editorial got written, or at least started: that's why. I started writing. Line after line of green ink. An hour later I knew what the editorial was about and where my character got his main theme. I don't know what it is about writing in longhand. Wrapped around a pen, my fingers tap right into my brain; poised over a keyboard they shy and spook and won't settle down. I've got several pens and bottles of ink currently waiting their assignments. For now the ink on my fingers is green, and green is good.
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