What I think about when I think about writing

Is this... the creative process?

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What I think about when I think about writing

I walk around the room. I lay on the floor. I notice the way the floor smells. I wonder if I should clean the floor. I remember I had the idea to look up if reuseable Swiffer cloths existed, and they did- a sort of cotton sock you put over the head of the Swiffer, they came in a four-pack- and I bought some. I haven’t opened them yet, they’re in the pantry. Maybe now is the time? How do I mop the floor without running water? I’ll heat water in the electric kettle and put it in the dish tub with some dawn. I visualize the whole process in my head. The chihuahuas are stirring on the couch. They would like to be scratched under the collar. I peer in Kinnikinnick’s mouth- two of her teeth are loose. She needs to go back to the dentist. Is she in pain? It doesn’t seem like it. She’s already had 24 teeth pulled, what’s a few more? Maybe I should’ve had them take the rest out when she went a few months ago. I already soak her kibble with water to make it soft.

There’s a sunbeam on the couch. I lay in this sunbeam and look at the “off grid homesteading” facebook group I’m in, along with over a million people. People are fighting about the definition of “off grid” again. There’s a plague of ticks in Missouri. They’re swarming up people’s legs as soon as they step off the porch. Even if they tuck their pants into their socks, coat their pants in permethrin, wrap their ankles in tape. Even if they clear all the brush away. You should get guinea fowl, the commenters say. Put out dog food to attract possums, someone else says. No possums don’t eat but a few ticks a day, another helpful fellow chimes in. You have to get guinea fowl. We got guinea fowl and they got rid of most all the ticks.

But I don’t live at my property full time. I don’t have a fence.

They’ll stick around. And they’re hearty. They can survive the winter. Get a dog to protect them.

I look up pictures of guinea fowl. They’re from south Africa. I listen to the sounds they make on youtube. It’s godawful. I imagine an abandoned property with a moldering trailer, a dozen bellering guinea fowl and one matted, hungry, aggressive loose dog. The idea for a new novel starts to grow in my mind, and I stamp it down. No new novels until the current novel is in the world. I look at the facebook group again. People advise each other about solar panels and share AI pics of idyllic cabins (and then criticize those pics- the rain’ll run off that roof right onto the front porch!) but mostly they’re really, really angry about taxes. Especially property taxes. Even if those taxes are only $45 a year. And California. I try to understand why they’re so angry at property taxes and California, enough to make it their whole personality, but I can’t wrap my head around it. I put down my phone, feeling heartbroken about the way working class conservative people have been manipulated into hating all the wrong things, when really the working class should be uniting and rising up against our corporate overlords.

I’ve left the front door open so the dogs can lay in the sun on the porch and suddenly there are a hundred flies inside. They all cluster at the fifteen foot high window on the front wall of the cabin, the one I’ll never be able to reach. In a few days they’ll die up there and their dead bodies will lay on the windowsill for a hundred years. I remember that I ordered one of those magnetic hanging screen door things and I decide now is the time to hang it up. There’s some staples in the doorframe still from when the last tenant hung up theirs. I have a stapler somewhere- what a joy to have all my items in one place! And I dig it out and do a really good job hanging up the screen, and then I feel proud of myself. I use treats to teach the dogs to go through the screen, pushing their snoots into the middle part where the magnets connect. For hours afterward Quito goes in and out as he pleases, alternating between laying on the porch and laying on the couch, and this brings me joy.

1 (one) log

I’ve been wanting to build something. I dream of building a log cabin someday. I visited some friends a few weeks ago on their land where they’re building a log cabin- I peeled 1 (one) log and was alarmingly sore the next day. I watched youtube videos of log peeling afterward, learned I had not used the proper ergonomic stance. I’ll do a better job next time, I thought. There was one video of a guy peeling a log in fifteen minutes, in real time. I felt a spark of something competitive rise within me. Eye of the Tiger played softly in my subconscious. How fast could I peel a log, if I had the proper ergonomic stance? And maybe sharpened my log peeler thingy? I asked my friends when next they’d be out there working. Probably the fall, they said. We’ll have a wall tent with a woodstove. Fall in Alaska is like what winter feels like in a lot of the lower 48. I wondered if I’d be tough enough to work outside in that, in freezing rain, perhaps a dusting of snow. Maybe not. I go out in that kind of weather for moose hunting, because that’s the only way to get moose meat, but otherwise I despise the liminal space between rain and snow, think it’s the worst weather there is. I do really want to peel more logs, though.

my friends are cool and know a lot of stuff

Sewing is a kind of building that you can do inside, with materials that don’t take up a lot of space. I used to sew in my mid twenties, on my housemate Helena’s excellent machine- simple crossbody bags from thrifted fabrics, those little bike hats everyone used to wear. I look at the MYOG (make your own gear) reddit threads while I’m in the shitter. They say that if you can’t afford $$$ for a really nice new sewing machine, the second best thing to do is buy a really old sewing machine, because really old machines are made entirely of metal and are easily repaired and generally built to last forever. Redditors exalt the virtues of the Singer 401a, which was made in the 1950s and resales online for hundreds of dollars but if you get lucky you can find one at a yard sale for next to nothing. 24 hours later one appears on Facebook marketplace in Fairbanks for $40. It’s even in its original table thingy. I buy it from a woman in an apartment where everything is white- white carpet, white furniture, white fake-fur accent rugs. It was her great aunt’s, she’s moving out of state. Does it work? She doesn’t know, but her aunt took really good care of it. The woman helps me carry the machine to my Subaru. The dogs, who I bring on errands in order to give them additional enrichment, explode into barking in the backseat. The machine comes with a tub of accessories- spools of faded nylon thread, a yellowed manual, a red tomato pincushion full of pins. There’s even a cookie tin of bobbins, tarnished thimbles, seam rippers and extra needles. At home I move the table around the cabin, trying to figure out where it fits. I wedge it next to my writing desk. I plug in the machine and press the pedal. It grinds to life, the foot stamping furiously. It works! I thread it with one of the old spools of thread. The internet says I should clean it and oil it, probably. I add buy sewing machine oil to my to-do list.

she’s beautiful

I take the dogs on a long walk in the woods and have a fantasy about starting a business making bags from discarded clothing I find at the dump. I’ll go to the dump, where there’s an area to leave useful items that often contains ripped-open trash bags of old clothes, and I’ll find the most incredible fabrics. Each bag I make will be different- I’ll let the fabrics I find guide me. At first making the bags is fun, but then I can’t source the right supplies when I need them, and then I run up against the limitations of my seventy year-old sewing machine, and finally I burn out. Never start a business making bags, I say to someone at a party, several years in the future. I’m smoking a cigarette for some reason.

I float the Chena river through town with some friends. It’s extremely slow, less than 1mph, and as we drift we speculate about the backyards of the houses that butt up against the river. Having a huge deck with multiple sets of outdoor furniture is such a wealth flex. Anything in Alaska that involves modern building materials is such a wealth flex. Everyone else is drinking but I’m sober so eventually I get bored and walk back to my car. On the walk I take a wrong turn and end up at “pioneer park”, where a miniature steam engine carries children past a sod house and an old log cabin. As white North Americans severed from our European pasts, the campy horrors of colonization are our only shared cultural memory. The “United States” was created on unchecked resource extraction, there was an illusion of abundance. Now those resources are gone and the illusion is gone too.

I lift weights at the gym. I don’t pay attention to how much I’m lifting, or how many reps. Go til failure, I remember a friend of mine once saying, so I do that. Will this get me strong? Who knows, but it feels good. Afterwards I shower, along with all the other dry cabin residents. While I wash my hair I wonder if the Planet Fitness corporate headquarters ever wonders why the showers of its Fairbanks location are so busy.

A friend texts me about a blood test an online company is selling that could help me figure out if the health issues I’m having are perimenopause, or something else. The test is a really good deal, she says. My naturopath told me about it. I buy the test and take the order to labquest, where they draw five vials of blood. This test is a really good deal, the phlebotomist tells me, as she switches out the vials. I can’t look, I say. I’m afraid of needles.

I won’t look either, she says, which makes me laugh. No really, she says. I once had to draw blood in a nursing home at 3 am, and they didn’t want us to turn the lights on, so I drew blood in the dark.

That’s hardcore, I say. Everyone in Fairbanks is like this, really friendly. I start up conversations at the dump, when I’m throwing away my bag of trash, and with the neighbors when they walk by with their old dogs.

Sometimes I do actually write. I’m far enough along in the editing process for my novel (like 9 drafts deep) that there are just these stuck bits, like snarls of yarn, that I sit on for a week at a time until finally I see a way through and then it takes me like twenty minutes to right the thing and afterwards I feel such relief, like I’ve been constipated for ages and I finally took a shit. I need a developmental editor now, and a copyeditor. Alejandra sends me updates about the cover, and each iteration is more beautiful than the last. After going back and forth about the title for years I’ve finally settled on BETS. All caps. My goal, I decide, is to get the thing into the world by January 1^st, 2025. I can’t wait to share more updates when I have them.

That’s all for now,

Carrot