Productive procrastination

and other book problems

I am making a table for wedging clay in our front room. It looks like this at the moment:

The table frame is on the floor, to the left. The butcher block I’m using as a stand for my mitre saw will become the tabletop. Today, I’m adding legs.

My book is due in 61 days.

In the mornings, now, Ori leaves with the cord to our wireless router, my phone, and the cord to our Xbox, with which we stream movies and play video games together. I am beginning to wonder if he should also take the remote, which is technically accessible for me, a way to maybe flip through our Roku, though I don’t think it works as a television, and we no longer have it hooked up to our little antenna, to get live TV. I feel so restless, reading the manuscript. In some ways it feels close, and in other ways it feels impossibly far away. I wish I knew a little about what my editor might want, though of course none of this really matters in the ways I think they do. I just have to write what I am writing, do what I am doing. I worry I need more time, though I do not have more time. At some point, soon, I need to get paid for this book, and if I don’t turn it in shortly, I will not be able to get paid. We may need this money in the future, to buy groceries, pay our mortgage, our gas and electric bill, Ori’s membership at the Y. And my riding, which is always expensive, something I try to hang onto, but something I almost always can’t afford.

I know I am exceedingly lucky to be on a book advance contract. So many of my friends are writing new books without the benefit (or difficulty) of having a contract. Some of them would like to have that contract. For others, it’s a challenging pressure, a way that might press the book into something it’s not. For me, I write to find out, to understand what the world looks like, and so in some ways, having a book advance contract helps me figure things out. In some ways, this is exactly the book I proposed, and in other ways, it’s a total departure from that world. Inevitably this is true of all books written on proposal: they evolve.

So I’m making a wedging table. It’s a little over-engineered, perhaps too sturdy, a problem that will require further analysis and understanding of the angles of our house if we are ever to move. Or disassembly. I am making pots, now, too, more carved and not-carved cups, with the translucent porcelain I have come to use lately. I will have a sale soon, I swear, cups and ornaments and various other items. I may also try to have an in-person sale, for those who are local to the Chicago area. If you’d like to read more about ceramics and revision, I have a little piece in the newest AWP Chronicle. If you are not an AWP member, I swear I’m working on trying to get this made available on my website if I can.

Maybe the ceramics table is the book, and maybe not. It feels like productive procrastination, somehow, to make the table, to spend time with it, understand its geometry. It is not something I particularly need, at least not urgently. If you were to look back on the archives for this substack, you might remember that I said I would make this table a year ago. I needed it, I explained, to wedge clay, to make things. Wedging clay is when you knead it, to make all the particles go in the same direction, remove air bubbles, to make it easier to throw it on the wheel. It was vital for my existence. But apparently not so vital that I needed to make it immediately. I wedged clay on the wheelhead instead, or didn’t wedge, made lots of work with tiny bubbles in it, skewered the bubbles with my needle tool, programmed slow fires in the kiln so that way the risk of explosion was smaller.

There is probably a metaphor in all of this, somewhere.

Lately, I have been trying to explain the book to new people. I judged a contest recently, and they asked me about the new book and its new title. The title of the new book no longer matches this substack. It might change again, but I don’t know. The book’s aboutness feels like an unsolvable problem, murky, difficult. I am in the thick of it, cutting 2x4s, trying to make each sentence right, to say what it is supposed to say.