Crow and Rabbit

Good morning, universe.

The crows are not messing around today.

Last week I saw them standing atop electrical boxes and lampposts like feathered secret service officers, heads on the swivel, silently monitoring human foot traffic. Today, they're dive bombing people as they walk into the coffee shop. Two crows took a swing at me as I crossed the street, and when I was in line, waiting, I saw a woman running, her hands over her head, ducking, the crows CAW CAW CAWing at they chased her down.

I felt bad, laughing, but how could I not? She was like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Only there was no real danger.

So I drank coffee and watched the crows continue their reign of terror. I figure they must be expectant aunts and uncles. There's a crow baby somewhere nearby and they're outside the nursery, ready to kick some ass if you get too close.

The crows didn't bomb anyone walking a dog. Having a dog is like having private security. The crows glare, but they stay on their perches.

This wasn't the only wildlife sighting of the morning. We were jogging when a fat brown bunny burst out of a bush and ran out in front of us. Run! P called out. Run, rabbit!

The rabbit needed no encouragement. It left us in the dust. Later, at the coffee shop, the barista told me that bunnies are overrunning the central district. Coyotes have returned too. Nature is returning to balance, he said.

The coffee shop was playing late nineties music on the stereo. We'd come to the end of the road, Boyz 2 Men crooned. It's been a cool, drizzly summer so far and I keep seeing signs of health in the city. Little things. People holding doors open for strangers. More transit lines coming online. Old, abandoned retail becoming art spaces, galleries and collectives. Thriving nonprofit cinemas. Small businesses. We stopped outside a cafe under construction and one of the owners stepped outside to introduce himself. His husband was inside, painting, getting ready for the opening. We introduced ourselves and shook hands.

There's so much life here, I keep thinking. So much pop and crackle that the city is bursting at the seams.

Lexicon Work

Let's begin the writing day with lexicon work. A lexicon is just a writer's collection of words. Contrary to popular imagination, words don't just fall out of the sky, they need to be gathered up like pretty rocks on a beach.

Today, I'm thinking about words linked to darkness, cold, fear, metal and dizzy. I have a scene coming up that needs those words, and it's worth picking up some pretty rocks now, so I have them at the ready.

I begin with the easy stuff. Cracking open my copy of the Emotion Thesaurus, a Writer's Guide to Character Expression, I note down some of the reactions that accompany fear. I note down reactions that feel like they'll fit my character.

That's a good starting place, but I find the words gripping, racing, and flashing to be rather common. That sends me to my Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus in search of alternatives.

Under grip I find clutch, hold, clasp, clench, and seize.

For race I think of gallop and surge, and the thesaurus offers specific options for a heart racing, such as pound, throb, thump, hammer, pump, pulsate, and thud.

An image can flash in the mind. Can it do anything else? Possibly light up, flare, blaze, burn, burst, or display.

I don't know what words I'll need but at least I have some possibilities scribbled down. Sometimes, the simplest word is best, other times, I want something stronger Lexicon work can feel tedious, but I've pasted my notes into my lexicon under the heading Fear so I can use this again in the future.

Switching gears, I think about dizzy. There is a moment where my character will be extremely dizzy. But we're in a world of show, not tell, and if I was the kind of writer who had my characters say things like “Wow, I'm so dizzy!” I'd be writing screenplays for Disney+, where the narrative arts go to die.

(I digress)

I have to be more specific. What do I mean by dizzy? In this case, I mean floating through space! Dizzy is a weak word. A placeholder.

They will spin.

There will be nothing to grab onto.

It will be dark.

Objects will blur with motion.

It will be cold.

There will be total silence.

Complete disorientation.

For each offshoot from the concept of dizzy, I'll think for a moment on my own. Try to visualize. Then I'll poke into my thesaurus if needed. Bland words like “cold” and “dark” annoy me the most, but in truth, I know it's the rhythm of the sentence that will guide me in the moment. Sometimes “dark” is the right word as much as it irks me.

Can I also think about metaphor here? As dark as... ? What things are dark? Things that are so dark that they frighten you. So impossibly black and empty that you feel every bit of hope and warmth drain from your body?

Hmm. Hope and warmth draining away... is that something? Possibly. It sounds rather melodramatic.

Things that are dark include caverns, shadows, the inside of a monster's throat, locked rooms with the light off, the woods on a moonless night, walking through a big park alone after midnight, sewers and tunnels, the trunk of a car, being deep underwater, closets, walking through a cornfield, being on the water far from land, the heart of someone evil.

What other things could be dark? A dark truth. A dark secret. A dark discovery. The darkness we hold inside; all those things we want no one to see.

At this point, I'm just spitballing. Playing around. I haven't written the scene yet, thus I'm not really sure what words I'll need. I have blurry mental pictures of what will happen, a vague sense of the emotions involved.

When it comes time to describe what's happening, I hope that some of this work will be useful. Either way, I'm expanding my lexicon. Not just the one I have written down, but the one inside my head.

Okay then. Enough prep. Into the book I go!

#today #wip