Stanley is sleeping in on Election Day. Stanley doesn’t vote in mid-term elections. Don’t be Stanley.
He had needed to fall asleep, he had had to fall asleep, not even grief or rage or any of it could stretch the endurance of a six-year-old beyond the point of endurance and when he fell asleep it was like a kind of unconsciousness, not like nodding off but actually falling beaten and broken from the church spire to crash through the glass dome below, and landing there in his misery he found himself falling still, plummeting through the sky alight with stars and moons of colors he had never seen before, and they sang with her voice. He knew then, even in the dream, that it was not her, that she was never coming back, and that this was some message left behind for him in the full knowledge that he would find it and take something from it. And when he reached the ground he realized that he had been falling like a feather, cradled by a warm wind like the breath of the woman whose bossom he had clung to in his first moments in the wide, cold, senseless nightmare place that was outside, the place with its unfair rules and its twisted, mean people. His feet touched the carpet of grass as if he’d taken no more than a step. Abe looked up with a smile, and he wasn’t green but true, immortal brass, and along the base of the statue was a winding vine from which sprouted white flowers. As he watched, it snaked downward and the ground sprouted more, the plants forming for him a pathway that lead down the hill, faster and faster, faster than he could run on his legs, and as he feared he would lose this messenger it stopped and from the ground ahead of him burst the trees and bushes and underbrush that parted as he sprinted into it and came to a scraping stop. There in the center was a statue—
I promise, I was writing yesterday. Tonight, as I wait for the election results to roll in, I am staring at a whole day of writing that amounted only to 1,679 words. I continue to mash my way through a long, complicated scene that is actually two parallel scenes intercut, and which will end in alarm on both ends. Unfortunately, my plotting was such a mess leading up to it that I have also been going back and adding some stuff to build up to this scene.
The source of the problem here is that I have for the past two freaking years or so been writing this very intermittently. Now that I’m diving into it, there is so much stuff that I wrote aimlessly or with no clear plan. This is the tangly, hard-to-pin-down part of the book, where many threads are going at once and a lot of the main characters are not yet truly confidants. That will resolve itself soon as I approach a unification of a lot of these threads, but it is such a tangled thicket in the meantime that I feel as if I am bludgeoning my way through it out of sheer meanness.
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