It’s gone summer and I’ve dropped through a hole

into a floating time.

Up until the very end of spring I was in a normal time, working hard, making progress, with a driving feeling. Purpose. I was in a window of extreme and joyful discipline. I set and instantly obeyed my alarms to:

*wake up *stop drinking coffee and make my way to my writing space *enter the writing space and get set up with my candles and potions and this-and-that *ring a little bell and begin working for real

Some 24,000 words poured out of me over the course of a month for this new version of the Oona book, and I thought my god! I’m unstoppable! I’ll have a new draft by September!

But all summer had to do was appear

and a little secret wind blew me out of my office and down this hole.

I’m not supposed to get out yet. I can tell by how much I don’t want to. (I hung a little sign in my office letting the story know I’ve fallen into vacation and I’ll return as soon as a different wind tells me to.) So until further notice I’m going to wander in this weird summer dreamscape, one or two layers below regular life. This dreamscape has its own rules which will probably shift around but I’ll be ready for that.

Rules of the Summer Dreamscape

accurate as of 6/23/22 but subject to change as soon as 6/23/22

When it rains, watch samurai films with my oldest son, who will be interested.

If the sun is out, try not to exist between 11:30 and 3:30. Don’t let the sun interrogate you like this with its overhead light. You didn’t do it. You’re innocent. Go nap in a cavern.

Celebrate dusk because dusk means twilight is coming. Stretch twilight out very far, even if you have to imagine you’re still in it after it’s passed. Twilight is very important and we don’t know why. Oh right: because neither day nor night can pin its rules on you. You’re a samurai from neither the day nor the night lineages. You work alone. You serve whatever and whomever you feel like serving.

If you visit a pool in your imagination, make sure it’s a private pool surrounded by greenery in all directions, except for the big good house of your imagination. Go at dusk. Don’t talk to anyone unless you really really and I mean really want to. You don’t have to be friendly at the pool. You can lounge by a hedge in the twilight, walk around on the pool floor. I guess some of you swim. You can do that.

Midnight film festivals, only foreign films. Imagine walking from theater to theater down balmy walkways past frondy plants and green-dripping trees under the black skies. Night could go on for days but it’s still one balmy night. In between films, eat spicy mango salad with your friend on a bench and feel like you’re in the movie.

You are welcome to pretend you still smoke, and pretend you’re French, and pretend you are in a complicated, gently doomed romance. You’ll have been watching all those French films so it’s only natural.

The more French films you watch in summer, the healthier you are. For samurai films, watch Seven Samurai, mostly. You can watch Yojimbo once but that’s enough.

See if this is the year you figure out how watercolors work. Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t be. You have the right to try. Same goes for colored pencils, everything. Don’t be good at anything, don’t make something you need, don’t prove anything. Get the brush wet and booble around. Draw a foolish template for your painting in pencil before you start, or don’t. It couldn’t matter less.

If you stay up too late, good. Everybody’s dreams are out, at least in the nearby sleeping part of the world. You can do something with that.