The Secret Paths
Nov. 28th, 2021 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueI showed the kids one of the secret paths today, the one from behind our house to the reservoir; I pointed out the markers but don't think they paid enough attention to remember them. Our town is full of old walking trails that aren't on maps - maps in the US are for cars. The trails are mapped out in the parks and forests nearby, but not the old trails that connect them, the trails that sneak behind people's backyards, trails the town keeps quiet so that the trails themselves stay quiet.
They're there, though, a whole footpath network, the kind of thing a detective would discover fairly late into a "bucolic small town" mystery. Knowing the secret paths even though I didn't grow up here, while many people who grew up here don't, is one of the ways I am like a wizard - speak friend and enter. When you pass by people on the secret paths, which you do, there's a mutual bashfulness and conspiratorial quality which doesn't exist on the publicly known trails through the fells; it's like bumping into someone in fairyland, or in the Secret Garden. People immediately want to tell you how much they don't know, how much they are visitors. But they do know. They know enough to know the paths.
For the last few weeks, I've been intermittently outlining a new novel, something like a Graham Greene thriller if he wrote science fiction. I haven't been writing the novel, just outlining it, and I kept arguing with myself about why I was doing it; I've been worried it's a way to procrastinate finishing another novel, three films, and two short stories. I'm still not sure that it isn't. I've also noticed that I keep returning to time travel stories (this is a time travel story) and have worried that I'm in a rut creatively - haven't I said what I need to say about time travel?
But the other pieces, the unfinished ones, although they are excellent, are things I started before the pandemic; they are gentle and expansive, about people figuring out how to form communities and confidence. I think right now I need a place to explore mistrust and paranoia. Those other things, I still believe in (the ideals and also the projects, which I intend to finish) but I think I am using my creative energy of that type to hold together bits of the real world at the moment, and it's hard enough to write bold fiction without also needing to fight my own mood. And my own mood reflects what I see around me, which is people trying to jump backwards and forwards in time, trying to pretend they are any when but now.
They're there, though, a whole footpath network, the kind of thing a detective would discover fairly late into a "bucolic small town" mystery. Knowing the secret paths even though I didn't grow up here, while many people who grew up here don't, is one of the ways I am like a wizard - speak friend and enter. When you pass by people on the secret paths, which you do, there's a mutual bashfulness and conspiratorial quality which doesn't exist on the publicly known trails through the fells; it's like bumping into someone in fairyland, or in the Secret Garden. People immediately want to tell you how much they don't know, how much they are visitors. But they do know. They know enough to know the paths.
For the last few weeks, I've been intermittently outlining a new novel, something like a Graham Greene thriller if he wrote science fiction. I haven't been writing the novel, just outlining it, and I kept arguing with myself about why I was doing it; I've been worried it's a way to procrastinate finishing another novel, three films, and two short stories. I'm still not sure that it isn't. I've also noticed that I keep returning to time travel stories (this is a time travel story) and have worried that I'm in a rut creatively - haven't I said what I need to say about time travel?
But the other pieces, the unfinished ones, although they are excellent, are things I started before the pandemic; they are gentle and expansive, about people figuring out how to form communities and confidence. I think right now I need a place to explore mistrust and paranoia. Those other things, I still believe in (the ideals and also the projects, which I intend to finish) but I think I am using my creative energy of that type to hold together bits of the real world at the moment, and it's hard enough to write bold fiction without also needing to fight my own mood. And my own mood reflects what I see around me, which is people trying to jump backwards and forwards in time, trying to pretend they are any when but now.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-29 12:07 pm (UTC)