rus vanwestervelt

Now that “In the Living Years” is published and off the docket, my plate has been cleared to finish the final revisions to Journey to Cold Rock, the novel I wrote last November during Nanowrimo. I wanted to finish it much earlier in the year and have it sent off (and under contract, and published, and bringing in tons of money in royalty checks…), but alas, that was just not meant to be (thanks in large part to the “Living Years” piece–but that’s okay….it needed to be written, at that time, in that way…). I do want to finish it, though, before October 1, when I start gearing up for the big Nano Show in November….

So I’m now immersed in rewriting the climax, where the protag needs to be more aggressive in taking ownership in dealing with his past. The challenge has been in merging the old text (which, for the most part, I love) with the new (which gives the protag more control over his destiny). I don’t want to delete too much of the old, but I have to let go of some of it to make the scene work effectively.

Which leads me to this:

Yesterday, during a 5-hour workshop in cultural proficiency, I was sharing with a great friend of mine (KC) what this experience has been like working on this final scene. I drew (I always draw diagrams when I talk—God be with you if we ever go out for a drink…) a circle inside of a circle, and inside of that circle, I drew a bold dot. In my mind, I was thinking, bullseye, center of the zone, the core.
“That,” I said to KC, is where I was last night as I was revising Cold Rock.”

She looked at the diagram and said, “You were the sun?”

And that was just when I had one of those moments where the world washes over you in a giant watercolor brushstroke, and find yourself on somebody else’s canvas.

“The sun?” I asked. “You mean, like the big bright ball in the sky?”

“Yeah. Center of the solar system. All that.”

I looked back to the diagram and saw it. Last night, I was the sun. I could not have been closer to the core of the origin of creativity and of life. She was right.

I then focused on the circles around the sun, and I started identifying the planets by their rotation around the sun (this, though, required a little help from our in-house astronomer), and KC asked:

“So where are you now?”

How perfect was this analogy? I looked at the diagram one more time.

“Oh, I’m definitely venus right now. Definitely.”

She smiled, and I knew that we had stumbled on what I am certain will be a most brilliant and long-lasting analogy that will be so overly used by yours truly for weeks, months, oh hell, YEARS to come.

me :)

oh–and just in case you are wondering….I’m mercury right now!