Soft Owl Hoots of Emerald Woodland Hymns in Thick Clump Snow
Social media disdain, the writer's time struggle, and a Stomp Bigfoot story update.
The emerald green of a hemlock grove is frosted in a deep coat of white. A hanging mist finds solace in a muted snow globe vacant of sound.
An owl named King Toodles sits upon a pine branch, humming an old owl hymn, as he peacefully knits a winter scarf from ten regurgitated mouse carcasses.
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Welcome.
Soft Owl Hoots of Emerald Woodland Hymns in Thick Clump Snow
When I break out of Stomp’s voice to write as myself, I am The Undertaker at Wrestlemania, standing atop a steel cage in front of 18,000 fans, deciding to break character and recite poetry.
Exactly. Like. That.
Hello, readers. Roamers. Stompers?
I have been delighted to see a myriad of decadent poop-talk essays about the corrosive, soul-crunching aspects of social media this past month or two. “Poop-talk” is an oversimplified word—they’re carefully constructed and damn, why didn’t I save the links? Maybe because I was trying to stay off Notes, AKA social media. Oh, nope, here’s a great one:
Thanks,
.Mine is not a sweet glee of social media disdain—I deeply want to connect. Much of my adult life has been an anguished battle between embracing my solitude and hoping to be around a campfire every night with six people scraping the ash of a stick against a warm stone. My world is often muted, like the vacuum of sound that soaks up in drifts, like froths of snow that clump over dens and leave little poked holes with animal feet marks. It’s isolated. I sometimes embrace this, and oftentimes need to go out and elk-bellow at a coffeeshop window or scratch my back against a telephone pole.
My brain has, at resting state, an overabundance of stimuli. I can only write 1,500 or 2,000 words a day by putting the cocaine away, AKA my phone. I will find other ways to cross your paths. I hope and try.
BUT. I do hop on the app once or three times a day, rationing myself like a shanty hermit with his beef sticks. Occasionally I’ll fire off a thought, applaud myself for sharing, delete it, double down on calling myself brilliant, post something, recognize I don’t have time to respond to my own post, and then tell myself to stop fretting and go heat up some chili. The other day, I put up a note in response to an essay by
, called “Writing Doesn’t Pay.”Shaina Read’s essay described personal experiences and struggling with the creative life, and you can go read her essay to heft the full weight of it in your hands. I wrote that note to describe a reflection on life as a working writer, the hard feelings of isolation, and the struggle of time.
The concept is so universally frustrating that people make spreadsheets, write books, and slowly tug their eyebrows out thinking about how to use their time. If you asked Time, they’d probably say, “Stop manipulating me! You can’t use me!” And then they’d do a little emo hair flip and run out of the room. Or they might get dramatic and throw your clothes out in the snow and tell you to leave, because even though you pay the rent, this is their house now.
Sometimes when I don’t have time, I try to be grateful. Sometimes I try to accept it. Sometimes I try to treat myself, which looks like going to an 1840s inn on the Delaware River, trying to do a normal human thing, realizing there’s no service in the building, destined to be seated right in the middle at dinnertime, and awkwardly hoping I can construct my body language in such a way as to be casual and un-Gumbylike. Yes, thank you, waitress, please do bring me three beers at once and I’ll rotate them and I’ll pretend I’m ordering drinks for friends who haven’t arrived.
The past two weeks, I diligently made it about 6,500 words deep into Stomp drives plow and solves murder in a February Nor’easter. I hope you love it. But I’ve realized it’s what we now call a novelette, and it needs more of that…time. Needs another 3,000 words of percolatin’.
So, I plan to publish Stomp drives plow and solves murder in a February Nor’easter next Sunday, the first week in February. I contemplated my feelings about this yesterday. The answer: I’d rather have my entire subscriber list put eggs in my muffler and leave than publish a sloppy story.
I thought to send this as a quick email, but realized, naw—I’m not the only writer on here who struggles with the time to create. Or even the willpower and motivation. I may be alone at this little desk with a handful of colored pencils for my child-like story notes, that can only be used by gripping them tightly in a fist, but somewhere here in this network, another person is sitting in a little apartment letting out a deep sigh and hoping that they can accomplish more tomorrow.
So, really I just wanted to say:
If you’re writing, if you’re even thinking that you want to write but don’t have the energy, you are doing enough.
had so many great perspectives that can be used as tools in her new writing guide and memoir (co-written with Sharon Fagan McDermott) called Millions of Suns (Look at me learning how to plug). One essay stays with me now, on writing block, and here are two quotes:An overgrown garden is still a garden. Untended—still a garden. Unplanted—a garden. Wild—a garden. It still cycles with the days and seasons. It still grows and fails and dies back. Even when I have turned my face away from it, I learned, it does these things. And though unobserving of its progress, I am still its gardener. Whenever I am ready to subsume myself in it again, it will be there: my garden.
She continued:
I don’t have to be typing or scrawling on a page to be writing. I’m churning language inside of me, always. Reading is writing. Noticing what it feels like to be alive is writing. I may neglect my documents until they are overgrown and wild, but my writing hasn’t disappeared. It may take some time to untangle these thoughts and see them through to their fruiting phase, but they are still alive… If you have the will to write, then you are already doing it.
Every action you do as a writer, every thought, supports your writing. I find solace in this. The rest I give myself supports the energy of my writing. Going out to a show or a coffeeshop—hearing the inflections of conversation, the mannerisms of character, the feel of a hot cup, the sight of wispy steam, and that guy in the beanie who took his cotton candy vape pipe and made the bathroom smell like Willy Wonka’s feet—it all informs the writing.
Thank you for your patience with my stops and starts, this ebb and flow, like a winter current that calms for a season so it can know the taste of ice chards. Stomp will return next Sunday morning at 7 a.m., hopefully in the company of a damp mist and shades of white and green.
I’m so glad you came along for this little ramble essay. You can tell I am smitten by winter imagery right now. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can share the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.
How deep into this world do you want to go? Read my last adventure, Words of the Wood: Fantastical Shepherd Pan Ewert-London Talks Booze and Activism, as I ventured in state forest wilderness, alone, to interview a Fantastical activist in a tree. I’m just glad I made it out alive.
Feeling that crunch myself.
Perfect