Incubation

Here is my submission for this week’s Stories from the Jukebox prompt, Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper, chosen by Anne J Sharp.

I’ve published 60,000+ words on Substack since June. And there are a few more thousand in the hopper. I actually went down the rabbit hole of counting all those words the other day after having a conversation with a friend about whether or not I can finish writing this book I started… in June.

Last spring, I was enamoured with Shadow and Jackie and the “pip watch”—eagles hatching eaglets. They freaked me out—the way they moved about, they looked like they were really little people in eagle costumes. I got sucked in and tuned in daily to see what they were up to. I was fascinated by how these birds just knew what to do. They knew how to swap places and give each other space. They knew how to keep the eggs warm. How to keep up their strength. Somewhere inside, they knew how to do it.

And one day I had the crazy thought, what would it be like to spend the night in an Eagle’s nest?

And then my imagination went wild. I started building a story around that one little idea that ends up just being a blip in this bigger story I’m writing. Was writing. Am writing. Ish.

Before that, I hadn’t written anything more than a social media post here and there. And I’d stopped doing that years ago because… social media. And before that? It was mostly just gratitude lists and bad poetry.

Still. I can tell a story. It’s what I do. Daily. Whether you’ve asked for one or not.

I started posting stories and essays—and, MJ Polk’s favorite, memoirs—on Substack. Don’t worry that I backed into the whole Substack thing. I still don’t know how to explain to folks how it’s different than a blog. But it is. I don’t know. Don’t ask.

And I mean. Some of them were… woof. Still, time after time, I came back to the page. Not because I knew what I was doing—but because something inside me did.

Time after time, I wonder if Substack is my distraction. If these 450-word pieces are safe. If I’m hiding in the short form because I’m afraid of the long one. The one I’m not sure I can finish. The one I’m not sure I have the discipline to finish. The one I’m afraid I’ll get bored with before I finish.

Time after time, I tell myself that these shorter pieces on Substack are actually a lot more fun. And maybe that’s what I was really cut out to do. A book—one big long story about the same thing? Is that really my style?

And time after time, my mind wanders to the characters in the book and I imagine what they’re up to. Where would they be if I’d kept on creating? And did I just waste the seven or eight months that I could have been working on the book by instead posting weekly on the ole Substack?

Because, I’ve practically written a book’s worth of words here. Except for the connective tissue between 133-ish pieces.

Then again, maybe I wasn’t wasting time but keeping the idea warm. Time after time, I figured out how to trim and when to do it. When I should expand the thought and when to let it breathe. Learned how to polish my words so they shine in the pink glittery way I like them to shine.

So maybe it wasn’t a waste of time?

I recently made my way back to the book. I have a lot more there than I realized. I have an entire story arc. And scenes written out. Dialogue like crazy, because I’m kind of good at that. So I need to get some connective tissue going. And figure out how to land this bird.

Somewhere inside me, something knows how to do this. Time after time, it’s brought me back to the page. And now I’m going to trust it.

And here’s the mixtape.

Time After Time — Iron & Wine
Blackbird — Sarah McLachlan
Dublin Blues — Guy Clark
The Muse — The Wood Brothers
24 Frames — Jason Isbell
Burn, Burn, Burn — Zach Bryan
Call Me — St. Paul & The Broken Bones
The Eye — Brandi Carlile
Desperados Waiting for a Train — Steve Earle

Their voices bellowed so loudly, the knick-knacks nearly fell off the boutique shelves. The ruckus gave Grace enough time to pick her composure up off the floor and flash them a smile… Read GRACELETS over at Southern Writers Guild..

“FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE DOLLARS?”

Gracelets

Time After Time