Tim Mook Sang: my (small press) writing day: Saturday, 6 January 2018

~9AM

I like to think of every day as a writing day. Avanthi, however, tells me, “Tim, for a guy who always talks about writing, you sure don't do a whole lot of it.”

She's right.

My problem is that the ratio between the time I spend planning on writing and actually writing is something like 1000:1. By the time I end up finishing any substantial body of work, I will have likely won the lottery.

My productivity in the morning is low. It's hard to think, so I bypass the thinking in favour of the doing. Reading is the closest thing to writing one can do before the act itself, so I usually start there.

I have about thirty pages left of In Cold Blood, and I'll feel good if I can polish them off this morning.

~10AM

I read about twelve pages before falling asleep, but I'm up again and am ready to produce.

On a good day, like a Saturday without any family lunches and with no errands to run and when I don't have one of the strange headaches I seem to have after Friday nights, I have about five or six hours to write. I have around a dozen projects simultaneously on the go. My methodology involves doing a little bit of each here and there so they will all come to fruition together. Some of the projects have been on the docket for some time (one is an elegy for a friend who died back in July, and I started it that day). This approach is likely why I've only completed thirty poems in the last ten years.

I revisit the list of projects to determine which I'll focus on first.

The path of least resistance today is finding a printer for a picture book, The Cardinal Rule, I first self-published in 2013. I spent a lot of time last month playing with GIMP to edit the images and with Scribus to redesign the layout. Nothing left to do but pull the trigger.

A quick Google search shows that there is a printer, Katari, one block from my house. It feels like -38ｰC outside. I won't be looking any further.

~11AM

I'm back from the printer (it's as cold as they said) and have a bit of energy left to turn toward another of the easier projects: BestOfTheCheapStuff.com, a blog I use to review cheap wine.

After reviewing over a 150 bottles of sub-$15 wine (it took its toll) last year, my process is fairly dialed in. Since I know nothing about wine, the legitimacy of the reviews is not my primary concern. The wine serves as more of a jump-off point to write about anything else, to get the ideas flowing and my fingers moving, to air my grievances in a public forum. What's grinding my gears today is “Gluten-Free” labels on rice cakes. Obviously they're gluten free. And who cares about gluten, anyway?

I'd like to monetize the blog but nobody reads it.

~1PM

Took a couple hours for lunch. I'd rather not work on a full stomach, so I read a bit more of In Cold Blood and took another nap.

In all honesty, with regards to writing, I usually don't make it past here, but having successfully found the printer and having also published a blog post, I'm riding on a high. I decide to turn my attention to a project on the other end of the difficulty spectrum, something I've listed vaguely as: “poems.”

I deliberate for a bit over what poems I could've meant. I again scan the list of projects and stop at the elegy.

I had lost some faith in the elegy over the last couple of months. I'm starting to understand that my writing process must involve not looking at works for a while because I need time away from them in order to see how cringe-worthy they really are. Looking at the elegy now, I understand. I delete almost half of what's written in the document. The poem is better for it.

But now, maybe, the elegy is too short, totalling a mere twenty six lines. Surely, my late friend deserves more than twenty six lines, doesn't he? I reread the poem three more times and decide to put it away. Writing in this way is like baking a cake (though not as easy as pie). The poem needs a bit more time in the oven. I'll revisit it next week to see if it's done.

~2PM

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to start using pencils instead of pens. I Google, “best pencil for writing,” and am drawn into a hole from which I only emerge some hours later. By this time, I've read numerous websites and reviews; I now understand the relationship between wood texture, lead grade, lead longevity, eraser quality and shape.

I order four dozen Tombow 2558, B, pencils from Japan. Shipping takes two months. Little can get done until they arrive.

Tim Mook Sang has studied and worked across Canada. He is currently working as a schoolteacher in Ottawa, ON. His poems, essays and stories have been published mostly in Canadian magazines and journals. Most recently, he published a chapbook, A Functional History, with bird, buried press. He reviews cheap wine at BestOfTheCheapStuff.com.

My (small press) writing day: Nicole McCarthy

I don’t have a desk anymore; I have an inspiration alter instead. Pinned are photographs of favorite moments and favorite people; objects given to or made for me; sculptures and installations and headdresses and erasures, all keeping space in my head. They all serve as conduits to activate my creative energies. This is how my morning begins.

*

I write throughout the day when moments come to me—I pull out a post-it note and jot the words down, words insistent and flurried, and shove it in my bullet journal. Jars at home are bursting with multicolored notes just waiting.

For the past six years, I haven’t gone anywhere without a notebook in my bag. I only buy purses big enough to carry writing notebooks and there’s usually at least three loose pens floating at the bottom.

Periodically throughout the day I work on brand management in between my actual job (business editorial work). I share the work of fellow writers and poets on social media to elevate and support their voices. I research presses and publishers and take time to share book love. I answer emails and inquiries about upcoming readings.

*

I carry around a small, green malachite stone with me at all times. I rub it back and forth between my fingers to create a moment I can step into to write:

back and forth

back and forth

back and forth

When it’s not being used, my stone lives with my pens and highlighters; I like to think it spends its off time charming my writing utensils, giving it pep talks and insisting they write with unparalleled gusto.

I don’t know at what point in my life I realized I couldn’t work from home, but I’m only productive when burrowed in corner booths at local coffee shops. I have one I visit 3-4 times per week; they ask me about the status of my book & bring me coffee without having to order. Five hours will go by before I realize I’ve finished two projects and the café has cleared out.

Almost nightly, I meet a small group of writers here. We trade ideas and provide feedback on pieces that we emailed each other the past weekend. Then we sit in a comfortable silence, working. We chat in between writing sessions but our task master keeps us in check (for the most part).

Arriving home around 10:30pm, I attempt to make a dent in my to-be-read bookshelf.

Nicole McCarthy is an experimental writer who earned her MFA from the University of Washington Bothell. Her work has appeared in Glass: a Journal of Poetry, The Shallow Ends, B(o)ink, Crab Fat Magazine, Ghost Proposal, FLAPPERHOUSE, Tinderbox Poetry, The Fem, Civil Coping Mechanism's A Shadow Map anthology, and forthcoming in the 2018 Best American Experimental Writing anthology. Her work has also been performed and encountered as projection installation pieces throughout Tacoma and Seattle.  She can be found on Twitter @GarbytheSass and her work can be found at nicolemccarthypoet.com.

Anna Maxymiw : Writing day

Before writing a book, and then doing the edits for that book while also working a full-time job, I never had days on which I scheduled writing. I figured that if I was struck with inspiration, I was struck, and I’d be able to find some time to sit down and scribble something out. Now, I find I have to schedule everything, or I’ll never get anything done.

A writing day begins whenever I can lever myself out of bed, depending on how late I stayed up the night before. I work from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., as a news copy editor, so it can be hard to put myself to sleep early enough to get up at a fruitful time the next morning, especially after absorbing information all night. To that end, I leave my laptop on my bedside table, balanced on a pile of books, so that I can just roll over and grab it in the morning as a way to get started earlier.

Some combination of peach-pear La Croix, sweatpants, and the need to pull back the curtains and see if it’s dumped snow overnight gets me upright and eventually vertical, if I’m choosing to write at home (plusses: being able to go to the bathroom at any time without worrying about someone pinching my computer, not having to pay for expensive caffeinated drinks, not having to look presentable; minuses: temptation to sit at my desk and eat crackers while watching horror-video-game playthroughs on YouTube is very high, no one around to judge me). (If I go out, I choose Starbucks - there are five near where I live, and they have fast internet and really sweet coffee drinks, both of which appeal for manic writing.)

And then I just do it, inelegantly and usually with one leg hitched up to my chest as I sit on the desk chair, or balanced on a pile of pillows if I’ve migrated back to the bed. It’s never by hand - I’m not a journaller, and I don’t have the patience to make notes on paper. Music is a necessity to drown out the constant sounds of construction. Aside from that, there’s not much else. I do what I can until it’s well into the last hour before I have to go to work, and I’m panicking because I need to put on real pants and pack a lunch and probably eat something and definitely brush my hair and put on concealer so the rest of the world doesn’t have to see my dark circles. If I think of something I need to add while I’m putting mascara on, I yell at Siri from across the room and ask him to add it to my weird mish-mash “Writing” note that I refer back to for ideas. If I think of something when I’m at work, I have a Google doc called “Scratchpad” where I can jot things down - “Flesh out relationship with Sweetpea”, “Look up how big an eagle’s wingspan is”, “More about Rob”, “Where do the Hudson Bay Lowlands officially begin?”

And then all over again, on whatever day I can manage, somehow finding time to do laundry and cook food in between, but definitely not cleaning the bathroom or sweeping the floor as much as I should be.

Anna Maxymiw lives in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in such publications as The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and Maisonneuve Magazine, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book, The Lodge, will be published in 2019 by McClelland & Stewart. annamaxymiw.ca

Missy Marston : My (small press) writing day

My favourite Elvis Costello album is Armed Forces and my favourite Elvis Costello song is Accidents will happen. It begins: I just don’t know where to begin. And it ends: I know, I know. If I am lucky, every writing day is like this. I feel like I don’t know where to begin, I begin anyway, I figure something out.

People sometimes ask me how I write books when I work full time, have a family, etc. My answer is it takes forever (I am fifty years old. I have written two books.) and, I write on Sundays. I write on vacation, too, and when I’m ill – I got an incredible amount of work done once when I had pneumonia – but mostly, it is Sundays.

Sunday begins with our two dogs, Mary and Munro, waking me up between 5:30 and 6am. (They are Chihuahuas. Their bladders are tiny. It is amazing to me that they don’t just pee on the floor in the middle of the night. But they don’t! They just get up at 5:30.) I get up, feed them, take them out into the backyard, and then we all go back to bed to sleep or read for a while. (I read, they sleep). Because it is Sunday after all.

(Munro and Mary, the dogs)

When I can’t stay in bed anymore, I get up. I go downstairs and drink coffee and eat breakfast in my pyjamas, then shower, get dressed, make a thermos of tea and head to my “office”. My office is in our son’s bedroom. After he left home to go to university, my husband built a desk and shelves at one end of the room. I keep books there that help me write or that are otherwise reassuring. Reference books, art books, books about rock and roll, books by friends. And just really astonishingly good books. Books that seem impossible to write. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Zombie by Oates, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, etc. Books to dream on.

You can see there are also gadgets. A mini Christmas tree that changes colour, a rubik’s cube. Things to fiddle with or stare at while thinking.

(The desk: writing HQ)

I also have a cork board that I tack things to that seem to have something to do with what I am writing. Images, lists, timelines. Also, there are pictures of people I admire that I cut out of magazines. Sometimes I like a picture so much it feels like bad luck to throw it out. Saul Bellow mid-sentence, a young James Merrill looking exactly like Matthew Broderick. Helen MacDonald sitting in her apartment with a giant hawk on her wrist looking like she hasn’t slept in a week. Wallace Stevens looking like the undercover poetic super-hero he was. Shipwrecks. Machines. That’s what it is like in the office.

(The corkboard. I don’t know what it means. It just helps.)

This is where I am supposed to sit and write. And I do. But I also roam around the house. I like to write at the kitchen table or on the couch in the living room. The couch is the best because dogs are there and also because you can flop down on your back in frustration when you get stuck. It can be magic. You flop down on your back, totally lost, and after a few minutes of staring at the ceiling, something comes to you, a place to start, and you pop back up and write a bit more.

Other ways of unsticking myself that I use include pacing around, taking a bath, folding laundry, staring out the window. They all usually work.

Another important factor in keeping to my Sunday schedule is this: every Sunday my husband goes down to the basement and paints all day. He is committed. This helps me. If he were around to talk to, to waste time with, I would never write a word on Sundays. But he goes down into the basement and makes oil paintings like the one below and listens to music so loud that I can often hear it two floors up. Regularly, I go down two flights of stairs, scare the life out of him just by appearing in the basement, and gently ask him to turn it down. Then back up two flights of stairs. Exercise!

(the kind of thing Peter Shmelzer makes in our basement on Sundays)

That’s it. Each Sunday, I do this sort of thing (typing, sitting at the desk, flopping down on the couch, stomping up and down the stairs, bathing, folding, pacing, staring) until 4 or 5pm. Then we go to the pub.

Missy Marston’s first novel, The Love Monster, was the winner of the 2013 Ottawa Book Award, a finalist for the CBC Bookie Awards and for the Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers' Choice. Her second novel, about daredevils and heartache, will be published by ECW Press in 2019. She lives in Ottawa.