Trees, Terror and Tumble Drives

The Bones of Trees

A fuzz of green leaves is pretty enough
But the bones of trees, the stripped skeletal
Most honest form of the thing,
All the flesh stripped right back,
Is the most basic honesty of the tree.

Each Spring is a single systolic thump
In the life of a tree, a single
Gasp of air, a single pounding thought.

Human flesh is so ephemeral.
Its systolic thumping so rapid
That a human hardly starts thinking
Before it dies. But the tree
Watches centuries pass, castles rise and fall,

And still stands, a silent sentinel
Stretched out over a silent earth.
And stripped bare, showing every small bone,
The tree has a lasting grace
That outlasts the comings and goings
Of the years, and of the leaves.

I haven't been blogging, because I have been writing. And I haven't been writing as much as I could, because I have been gaming. Gaming is meant to be a gentle introduction to the screen for me, easing me into sitting still so that I can write without twitching. Don't worry, I'm judging myself.

At the next meeting of the local writers' group I was thinking of workshopping this poem, even though it is older work and I'm happy with it. The theme for the meeting is nature/supernatural, and this was my take on nature one special day long ago and far away, when I went outside and looked at a freezing but clear blue sky through the stripped skeleton of a golden Robinia, all its gold dropped into autumn mulch to keep its roots warm, as deciduous plants try to do. And by spring and the annual surge of growth, that mulch will have turned into nutritious compost. Really, I grieve every time I see people raking fallen leaves.

From memory, I went back inside and pulled a few Tarot cards, and they all featured trees in one form or another. At that moment, writing the poem became inevitable.

There is something inevitable about writing, generally. I started trying to write at eight, and I was certainly reading adult literature plundered from my parents' library before I was ten. There were none of these YA books back then, and a good thing, too. The authors I read as a tween and a teenager respected my intelligence. Reading omnivorously sets you up nicely for a life of writing, and I had a life of writing, with one six year break in the middle of it. An upheaval meant that I lost everything I wrote before my late forties, but that is not such a problem. The past is past.

I wrote for my own amusement. I wrote for my own pleasure. I occasionally gave copies of things to other people, for their amusement and pleasure. It was only when I firstly came here to Dubbo, secondly joined the writers' group, and thirdly decided that at last I was formally retired, that I finally gave myself permission to "write properly."

A little under two years ago at the group meeting I workshopped the first chapter I'd written that week, of a bizarre psychological drama, that people around me are currently calling "crime" for no better reason than crimes happen in the book. I don't think it fits the crime genre at all, but what would I know.

When I presented that chapter, I had a shadowy idea of the general arc of the book, and very great clarity on the final paragraph, but no real intention to write it. The group received it so well, though, that I kept on writing, at the pace of a chapter every so often. I was enthralled by the odd relationship between my two living characters, and another relationship between one of them and a dead character.

Because I wasn't working with any speed or discipline, it took me over a year. In October 2022 it became obvious that I'd have it finished before the end of the month. November is NaNoWriMo - (inter)National Novel Writing Month - when a diverse spread of people the world over all sit down to write 50,000 words of a novel, and for the last few months a diverse bunch of characters had been rattling around in my head screaming "Write our story! Write our story!"

I knew if I did, Raven would be badly neglected, so I kept saying no to them, and when I finished the manuscript a week before the month's end I put it away so that I could come back to it with fresh eyes, and resolved to spend NaNoWriMo writing that other book that so desperately wanted to be written.

Barranarra is completely different in tone. There is a much broader cast of characters from differing backgrounds, who are thrown together in close proximity against their will, and have to deal with privation in that psychologically uncomfortable situation. 

Writing 50,000 words in a month requires daily writing, at a rate of around 1,700 words a day. It was my hope that taking part in NaNoWriMo and being forced to write every day would help me develop a work ethic. And it did - in that sense at least, it was wildly successful. I had significantly over 50,000 words at the end of the month, and was more than three-quarters the way through. I kept up the daily writing - three more weeks finished the book, whereupon I went back to the manuscript of Raven and did some serious revising. That gave me a break from Barranarra, and I was able to go back to that one with fresh eyes, too. 

But guess what. Even during the first half of Barra, I had two other books screaming at me. One, a memoire of five years of my life when a lot of bizarre things happened, and an SF book, slightly dystopian in parts, utilising an interstellar transport method that I wrote about it in the lost literature of my twenties, and which I don't believe the physicists have started thinking about yet. 

I'm currently working on the memoire. And true to form, the characters in the book I haven't started yet are all screaming at me, wanting me to write their story. Last month I relented slightly, and wrote an opening chapter for one of the major sections of the book - I don't believe it will be the first section, though it might be. I took it in to the group and workshopped it with them, and some of them liked it. They kept quizzing me about aspects of the society, and the history behind the routine surgery that the pilot had elected not to have, which I would have preferred to have been revealed organically through the text - which it will be, for all others.

But I'm not writing that book now! Not yet. I have the period of my life between early 2016 and the end of 2020 to get through, first. Those characters can just take a backseat in my brain and bicker amongst themselves until I am ready for them. I'm ageing badly - some unkind souls might say I'm not entirely well. It is my job, now, to try and keep myself alive long enough to write these two projects. Then if another starts demanding to be written, to write that as well.

Until then I shall stand like a winter tree, stripped bare of the fresh, green leaves of my Spring years, branches stretched over these unwritten books, hammering my poor keyboard into submission.