Today I began the process of querying my novel This Tangle of Thorns. I could obsess, but instead I’ve let go, let my compass swing back to the novel I’ve recently started (my fourth). That’s my north while the agents do their thing.

Fourth novel…third approach. First novel I wrote the main scenes, then built bridges. Next two, started writing until it felt done. This time, I’m dreaming.

Dreaming is a very simplistic description of the process Robert Olen Butler offers in From Where You Dream, a candid kick-in-the-pants distillation of the literary  boot camp lectures he gives at Florida State. (The book is beautifully edited by Janet Burroway. whom I spent a few hours with recently in workshop at the Loft Literary Center.)

Pen and 3x5s nearby, I drift. Down I go, past the detritus of life—lists…and lists of lists. There’s Mighty Mouse and Foghorn Leghorn (you tell me!). I smell cumin and hear the clicking whir of Grandma’s hand-held eggbeater. My breath quickens, then falls, seeing her in the casket. I kick off from the fear of who will be next in the box and careen off the certainty that I have nothing left to give the page and then…

A man in a field watching another man bleed to death from the sharp, accidental swipe of a scythe…two ladies (and I’m the only man, jah!)…a hobo camp and man whose hands smell of a woman…a short, portly rural postmaster balanced on the edge of counter like Shamu begging for fish…a boy whose belly is clenched from hunger…a Indian child who can smell and foresee the end of safety…a lonely married woman enlivened by the call of the fiddle and a leading touch she just might follow.

Just 40 to 60 more of these dreams and then I’m ready to start seeing how they fit together. So it’s back to dreaming. Talk to you later…