Writer's Bloc

Since Dr Patch's passing, I have found myself in a creative morass. A few pages of this, put it down, a few notes and diagrams for that, toss it aside, blindly scribblingly pushing through a blog post, mulch that one for revision later... Something has wrought mad havoc on my prose, thrown withering prussic on my prose, and completely unscrewed my lightbulb. It's been hard finding the threads again in the dark. 

I find my thoughts wandering through backhills, from time to time drifting to the page, and then away again. I've caught up on some TV. I've visited some friends. There has been some lovely tulsi coming up in the back garden. The market at Mr Chen's is selling fresh ghost chilis. Leaves are falling. The last full moon was lovely—hung there like a cathedral's eye. 

A play about writer's block. A long poem on Birmingham history. No less than three essays on American Horror Story (and one on this season's trashy but irresistible stylistic inspiration, SyFy's Paranormal Witness). More Lallie and Pat mysteries. Snow and an overabundance of pencilthin moustaches. Priests and baptism. Repeatable routines. Sad lonely snippets spun off and landed out of sight. Most require rewrites. Most require restructuring. 

I'm writing. I'm putting words on the page, on the screen, and I'm happy to do it. But it doesn't feel right. Like a gutterball. You can tell when it leaves your fingers. Doesn't have to hit the lane. The spin is off. You're out of focus. An issue of depth perception. Burnt facts. Staged election. Undeserved access, discovered and cut off. You do not have access to this server. Lost permission is a bitch. 

So I turned to something I have felt proud of: my Tenth Book Prize-winning novel The Furnace. After being bought up by Presse le Conseil, there have been a few revisions as it lingers in galleys—all of which have received "once-overs" by Rex Patch. Dr Patch's input was invaluable in fashioning a vast tangle of a book into something more digestible and far less fibrous. Although Presse le Conseil has not offered me any firm dates in terms of the release of The Furnace, I assume as soon as they okay these last rewrites they'll rush the print. Still, the significantly trimmer Furnace coming out (which holds a much firmer grip upon its structure) leaves behind some significant chapters. Rewrites have made the chronology of certain trimmed sections impossible—although the events depicted within them don't feel so much zeroed out as highlighted in the process. 

Take, for instance, this chapter from a past draft: in it, Daniel Hardiner has just returned to school after his grandfather's funeral (a chapter about which, in an adjusted position, made the cut—so far—), having missed the first day of classes. He ends up attacking a journal assignment very vigorously at a party, where he and his roommates have come to unofficially dissolve their friendship. 

This new-calved story contradicts the closeted Daniel in the early chapters of the new book, but somehow that doesn't make it any less... true.

Daniel surely went to the Pelham house, met Billie and Philip Stokes. John was there, and the older two Lemorder girls hit on Mitch. Dan told his roommates about silk and hinted about the whiskey, he humored Helena Pelham in the basement, and he said goodbye around a peculiar black table in the library before he moved out. None of that happens in The Furnace. Daniel hews close to his room. The black table turns up elsewhere but unmoved, with other palms against the grain. Contingency. A parallel thread in the ribbon. A true thread, and one that bolsters The Furnace from the outside, while on the inside another Daniel hews close to his room. Maybe it's a dream.

In celebration of writer's block, here's to the dropped stories, which somehow gain spindly spiderlegs as, well, perhaps not a prequel, but maybe rather a requel.  

And before we go, a note from Dr Patch written on a printed draft: "Well, it's a book series in 15 pages. It's your book series, and it's staggering, and I can't wait to see you write it. This chapter [scribbled out] central—just not to this book. Harry would have loved the fractal. It's your wholecloth. Still, it has to go. You've got to tighten up, David, and make this something to read, not to ponder. Let's go over the front end of the book over coffee."

We got that coffee. Bless that man.  

Black Tie

More than a month has passed since Dr Patch died, and although thirty days in retrospect was arbitrary, it seemed absolutely critical to me this time in July that some distance between myself and that graveyard grew and cooled before I tried to write anything more tributary to Rex.

Really, all this time, the only thing I've come to peace with is that his full name was actually Pacey Reginald Patch. That he for some years in his undergrad tried to go by by "Pongo Patch" is still far too troubling to consider for any meaningful length of time. Both of these things I learned at his funeral, which was short, but full of friends. No luminaries to wow the lay person, but members of the Society of Algiers—which Patch founded—lined up to speak and drop a fistful of clay in. Zachary Osgood called him a "Mithraic enigma, but only in the phonological sense", and I still haven't worked up the balls to email him and ask him what that fucking means. I had to write it down. So of course I started writing down the things the last two speakers said as well: Hattie Kerlin (Hi himself had had an accident a few days prior—nothing serious, just a slipped disc—and could not make it graveside), who said "He once wrote Hap was a bung fiend and I just about tore him a new rooster", and a man I'd never met, or heard of, named Bayless Rogger, who spoke with an accent, but very clearly said that "Rex knew where Harry is. He told me that he did, one night, when [we were] very drunk. But that damn devil son of a bitch ever was coy, so coy." And then something about how coy he was that I couldn't quite make out but that Jazra Jaban laughed at and nodded. Mr Osgood looked angry. Guess I don't blame him.

Dr Patch was not remembered for quick he was to laugh, but how he worked and who he worked with. Dr Patch was certainly always ready with a chuckle or a blore, but it's true that I have found myself thinking back more on his work, and our emails, and his notes... Never forgetting his entertaining style (brunch, lunch, or dinner, he would always offer custom omelettes and champagne), never losing sight of how he smelled like birch tar—it's just, damn he wrote a lot.

When he wasn't writing essays on Harry Hardiner and critical theory and popular culture, Dr Patch was emailing ten-page philippics on modern economics and attempting to "redraft" the US Constitution and journaling and diarying and churning out spec scripts and using pennames to submit to magazines and newspapers and newsletters and circulars and the man WROTE COPY FOR REST STOP TRAVEL BROCHURES. Listen, all I'm saying is, I may have had the starriest dumb luck chance ever to spend time with Dr Patch in his final years, but I knew him through the page and the screen. In person, he seemed diminished. Like an unmasked commedia character. Il spretato.

Dr Patch was an enthusiastic musician, but I can't remember any of his very earnest tunes—some of those lyrics, though, are gonna stick with me forever. Just like a couple of those supper omelettes. One time he had truffles to shave on top and he put a mound on mine. As he walked away from my plate, he glanced back and declared it, "Bougie." He promised in his next ten-page email that the next time he found truffles in his back yard, he would have some edible gold leaf ready to gild them with. Immediately following this avowal was a long paragraph on the rarity of the truffle, the volatile chemistry of its flavors, the relative merits of pigs over dogs, and a pretty lengthy stretch of page dedicated to a dream he'd once had about a tie-dyed truffle which sang like the Andrews Sisters and the idea it had given him for a poem about particolored fungi that he inserted brief snippets from. Every time I have gotten the chance to visit the type of restaurant that serves something called a "mushroom medley", I order it, despite my not liking mushrooms at all, and, I confess, I am always and forever disappointed that among the chanterelles and lobsters there are no paisley portobellos, no plaided oysters, not even a measly maitake with a shimmering, shifting neon rainbow flowing through it—and not a single stem or gill has sung a note of any song more technically impressive than the most basic Nickelback. Mr Patch and his writing has ruined me.

And, I've got to be honest, it's making me feel like a deficient human being. I can't begin to describe him as a whole person, but he left me his final notes. We shared recipes. HE LEFT ME HIS FREAKING DOG. And I am blogging about how he wrote and made omelettes and once talked about mushrooms. Sherman, by the way, is a deerhound, and has been dead for about 25 years. Sherman was probably not his name in life, but that was the name Rex gave him after Harry Hardiner brought him the stuffed thing as a thankyou for "being another set of eyes on" (Patch for "editing") Jettison Jemison. Sherman is at my place, by the front door, looking bored and slightly crosseyed. Hardiner said he bought it in Bookbright. Because possibly the only man who has ever claimed to know where Harry Hardiner now rests or resides will never walk through it again there is a dead dog from Bookbright, Tennessee in my front entryway. Every time I pass it I'm afraid my reality will unfold beneath me. Every time I open my front door I'm almost afraid I'll see Harry Hardiner on the welcome mat, or Sherman transformed into a naked Johnny Kite shivering on the parquet. It's an unbelievable honor.

In fact, a bluntly inconceivable honor—if you'd told me ten years ago that that name I had read in so many bylines, the hand behind the Companion that helped me limp through Rise when the almighty internet failed to produce so much as a schema for its penultimate madness, this master of the rule of threes who would wail in anguish at an "unfinished" list—if you'd told me HE, Rex Patch, that ink titan across my shelves, would even answer my first letter, let alone pick up a years-long correspondence and partnership, I'd have prayed you were right while cussing your fool tongue. I've got Patch memorabilia now to fill a museum, or at least a fancy little shrine. Neat little reliquaries of newsprint and trade paperback. Handwriting. Memories.

His nurse told me at the funeral that before he lost consciousness, Dr Patch was puzzling out my last Wallreaders code. It's an ignoble end. She said he got so excited—kept pointing at the screen yelling "Tie! Tie!" I didn't know we were keeping score. In my book, it was no tie—Dr Patch won, hands down.

Rest in peace, Dr Patch. A month was not long enough, but I fear it will be the same in October, and next January, and this time next year. Rest in peace, rest in peace. Put the pen down and send it off to the editors.