“I trained as an actor in New York, and one discipline I studied was the Stanislavski technique, the basis of which is to live truthfully in the imaginary circumstances. That is what I try to do when I write. I set up an imaginary world, and try to let the characters live truthfully in that world.” DeLauné Michel

The Euro and I talk a lot about the interplay between acting and writing. It was the Chekhov-Stanislavski connection that finally made him realize what I was trying to do as a writer wasn’t so very different from what he was trying to do as an actor. And that, maybe, I wasn’t as nonplussed by his art as he imagined me to be.

His emotional engineering and mechanics of expression are much more concrete, much more tangible than mine. He uses his body, his face, his physical voice. Engages the real eye and not just the mind’s eye. He’s all about immediate interactions and reactions and sussing out wants and needs and objectives. In this last regard he’s become freakishly Freudian.

I don’t have his talent. His stage presence, or his life presence. And when it comes to certain communications, I don’t do physical or verbal very well. Lines drawn on paper and algorithmic keystrokes that turn 1s and 0s into meaning…those are my choice emotional mediums. I accomplish more with writing than I ever do with speaking. With writing, I can make you understand. When I speak I often lose all train of thought and any eloquence I might possess. I may as well beat both our heads against a brick wall. It would be more satisfying and we could get on with things quicker.

So, we talk a lot about acting and writing these days. The truths that join them both. And agree even through our disagreeance that he is perfectly suited for one and I the other. We also eat a lot of chocolate.

Flynn and I are going on a mini-break next month. The last time we were together we were both living in the North of England. I was working for the Crown Prosecution Service and she was studying literary criticism and pulling pints in the Northern Quarter. I have some vague recollection of looking at bones and mummies…anthropological brain candy.

- Journal, September 2009

“One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.” – Carl Sandburg

Images, compliments Flynn and me, were all taken at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara. There’s something very comforting about Connemara. Like it’s waiting to be someone’s Walden Pond. Like it was.

When Sandburg died, his wife, Paula, just up and left. She took nothing with her. The house remained as it always was, donated to the National Park Service.

I have the loveliest back garden. With climbing ivy and purple flowers and white hydrangeas and a massive rose bush covered in little yellow sprays. Two tomato trees I’m determined to grow. My mother grew hundreds. Quite literally, hundreds. I can grow two. Probably not.

I thought, for a moment, back in May, I’d like to have tanned legs this summer. That thought came back to haunt me. The legs remain, as ever, poultry-coloured.

The tops of my neighbours’ houses, lined up all symmetrically, remind me of Brighton Beach houses. This makes me smile.

I want a hammock. Something bright and colourful. To swing in and catch Vitamin D in and just be all good-feeling in. But I don’t want ticks in my hair. Ticks terrify me. I use to love sleeping in the grass. I don’t do that anymore. Ticks are why.

Maybe I’ll put up a massive Moroccan canopy instead. I saw something like this once, at a friend’s house in Greece. It shaded patios and pillows and pools. Books about espionage. I could do nothing but sit beneath it until it got too hot for me to sit any more. With a tea set my mother gave me.

There’s always the problem of the sun, of course. My splotchy hands – my leopard spots. And that fat ole Robin that keeps mistaking my hat for a nest.

I love these houses. They’re on the beach, next to where we stay, and I take tons of photos whenever we’re there. I want to live in the green one and write on the widows walk in the early a.m. I want to pull my hair up, slap on some factor fifty and drink something-fruity while writing query letters to the publishing gods. That’s all I want.

*© Flynn

I’m allergic to the sun. More or less. Mostly more. I don’t exactly burst into flames. Not exactly. But there is that blinding light that radiates from my legs. (Although I like to think of it more as a Twilight-Style sparkle.)

Still, there’s something hypnotic and pulling about the ocean. It’s the four elements thing. And our caveman selves.

Reckon a girl could keep a jelly fish for a pet? Anyone know?

I tried my first cuppa kombucha tea the other day. Loved it. It’s become a bit of a staple in my effort to wean myself from those diet sodas I’ve been consumed with these past three years. (Can fake sugar possibly be as bad for you as that real and refined stuff? Probably.)

Yogi kombucha green tea. Goes doubly well with Moroccan couscous.

Dinner.

————
LATER

I tell myself it’s not age that has me in the floor with my legs in the air at 5:26 this morning. It’s really not. It’s Tracy Anderson. Despite all those lovely familial assertions that “you’re just getting older, honey”, I’m in better shape now than my younger self, my teenage-self, ever was. But I’m not in Iron Man shape. As evidenced by my trying to tie Gwyneth Paltrow’s workout, courtesy Tracy Anderson, to my regular routine sans stretch or warm up.

Not good.

I have five stock smiles I choose from when cheesing for a photo. The Euro says I should throw the stock away. Go natural. But the truth is, my eyes are a bit boggly and it takes very little for me to look certifiably insane.

Case in point – my genuine, unfeigned delight as I prepare to tuck into a piece of cheesecake the size of my head. (You may remember, I have a superbly large head.)

I look like someone straight off the ferry from Shutter Island.

I don’t take compliments very well. They make me feel all squirmy and uncomfortable. But Flynn doesn’t compliment lightly. Or insincerely.

I received the most touching note from her the other day. And her words made me feel capable. And worthy. I like words like that.

I look awful. My face is puffy. My eyes are overlarge. My head is terribly unstable. Hubble keeps telling me my speech is slurred. He’s right. The muscles in my throat are tight and uncomfortable. But that’s not it. That’s not the cause of the slurring. I just don’t feel like opening my mouth enough to elocute. I want to roll my tongue in large exaggerated jabberwocky gestures. It loosens up my face.

I use to do this all the time when I was a kid, whenever I was sick. My sister HATED it. She still hates it and tells Hubble he should hate it too. My high school choir teacher called me obnoxious. Once, in college, I had a professor ask if I were on drugs: “Buffy, are you…are you stoned?”

You can sod right on off.

That’s what I wanted to say. It was exactly how I felt and I’ve always found it a fabulous turn of phrase. Then he went and gave me a C. I hated those things – Cs. They were average and I was already average enough without them. So, I went back later that week. To explain. I left with an A. I didn’t thank him.

This afternoon I went to bed and slept for three hours. I thought it’d help. The sleep. It didn’t.

Once every five years, my brain explodes. Oozes out my ears. In cold little streams filled with something very hot. I always think ‘this is something Dostoevsky would write’ just before I think ‘how do you transliterate that name’ and ‘how did he ever write at all’. Then I remember how, or think I do. Because now, when that part of my brain that normally sits quiet doesn’t quite sit quiet any more, I do some of my best stuff. I’m not sure that one is at all related to the other. But I know it limbers up my mind. Frees me of all sorts of inhibitions I didn’t know I had. But it leaves me feeling awful. Just, lousy. Really out of sorts.

It’s hard to write when you’re really out of sorts.

I might read poetry. Poetry helps. Spiritual things. Not the deep stuff. Song of Solomon is sometimes nice. I use to be partial to Oswald Chambers. Elizabeth Gilbert is okay too. The Guru scoffs at Gilbert. And that’s fair enough because he is The Guru.

I use to read the New Testament in Koine Greek. Then I admitted, but only to myself, the only reason I did it was because it looked more impressive than reading it in English. Classical trumps Germanic. Any day. I don’t think that way anymore. Anymore, I read Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat, Pray, Love, my darlings. That is all.