This was what I was referencing yesterday: patience. You’re not always going to feel uncreative. States of mind pass. Getting depressed or upset about them doesn’t help, though I understand the impulse to get upset or depressed. It’s hard to take the long view, to wait, especially when your compulsion is to work. Writing yesterday about how I wasn’t writing, I was trying to take that tack. I wasn’t enthusiastic about anything I had going on. I’d mentioned my short essay about aging wasn’t taking off, inspiring me. And when I woke this morning, the fix was right in front of me: cut the first three paragraphs, start from when I lost one of my teeth last year and revise from there. Of course, that got put on the back-burner, because even though I woke with that idea, I had another last night that I wanted to focus on, so I got straight down to work on that.

The idea came to me last night while reading Pax by Sara Pennypacker. I’ve mentioned here that I’ve been reading that to my children lately, and last night, reading time didn’t go as planned. We had run out of the children’s toothpaste and needed to pick up more, so my wife ran out to Target and took our daughter with her while I oversaw my son getting showered and into his pajamas. I knew the Target trip would mean that my daughter’s shower and all kids’ teeth-brushing would be later than usual, but my daughter is like molasses when it comes to brushing teeth. I remind her it should take about 5 minutes: 1 for flossing, 2 for brushing, 1 for the fluoride rinse with another minute tacked on for the miscellaneous moments between where you’re loading up the toothbrush or spitting or throwing out the floss. But it always seems to take her 10. I don’t know why, except when you’re a kid, there’s no reason to rush toward bedtime, is there? For me, I’m looking forward to unwinding by myself, to the brief period in the day where I hold no responsibility toward anybody else. She’s looking forward to…shutting her eyes and waking in the morning. Which is less exciting than alone time, I’ll admit. Even though I do value my sleep.

And I have a philosophy toward reading to my children at night. Or maybe it’s not so deep as to be a philosophy so much as it’s more a loose guideline: I will read any time after 7:30, and I stop at 8:30. Which means, if they get their teeth brushed and are with me by 7:30, we get a good chunk of a book read, but if they’re pushing 8:15, which they were last night, it can seem almost pointless to begin. But begin we did. We reached a part of the book where Pax, the fox, heads off to a minefield where a friend of his, Gray, just died. I believe his mission is to disarm the mines (though I’ll admit it wasn’t entirely clear what he was doing there); a female fox called Bristle follows him, and Bristle’s little brother comes along and gets himself blow up. Now I know I didn’t just offer a spoiler warning. I’m assuming grown people are reading this, and if you’re disarmed as a grown person by children’s book spoilers, we may not see eye-to-eye on some things. Then again, I’ve never cared about spoilers. It’s how an action happens, the way it’s described that matters to me. Otherwise there’d never be a point in reading a book a second time. But I digress. We had just reached that chapter in the book when I remembered a story I wrote almost a decade ago, called “The Elusive Black Truffle.” Like Pax, its human protagonist was named Peter, and like Pax, it involved anthropomorphizing Peter’s best friend, in this case, a dog, and right then, sitting there reading Pax, I got that little flicker of an idea.

Could the “Elusive Black Truffle” become a book? A children’s book? I mean, the original story was written in a time where I was being playful. I wasn’t writing with any real purpose in mind, I just wanted to be zany, to write something fun and out there. I didn’t even have my own children yet (I suppose my wife was pregnant with our daughter). It was full of digressions and footnotes and songs and fantasy/adventure. But the problem with the story was all those things, combined with the style in which it was written, placed it in that strange category where it was a children’s story written in an adult style. But what if I take that story and apply a children’s style to it? I had always really liked the story itself, but could never figure out how to make it work, and again here, I’m referencing a point I made yesterday, which is that you can’t revised a blank page and that’s why it’s important to work. It might take years but sometimes old stories return and you find new ways to tell them, and sitting there with my children, I got excited about the prospect of return to the Truffle world, and as I put them to bed and went downstairs to watch Halloween: H20 (as I’ve mentioned, if shops can start selling pumpkin lattes, I can start watching my seasonal horror films now), I pulled out a little moleskin notebook and began jotting ideas about how to expand the story and deepen the pre-existing characters.

And if anything bodes well for the story, it’s that I could still remember the three primary characters pretty clearly, even though I’d drafted the initial story in 2012, without having to reference any of those drafts. Peter, the boy looking for a truffle in the woods with his dog, hoping to find one to please his arguing parents (his mom is a foodie and he thinks if he can find one it’ll please her); Chris, his tagalong friend; Scratch, the aging St. Bernard Peter inherited from his grandfather, who’s half blind, but still about to carry on due to his keen sense of smell. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t pull out the old drafts when I woke this morning and sat down to write. I did. I keep everything I’ve ever done compiled in a google account where I send all my drafts to have them saved in one repository. And I referenced the first few lines of the story to start creating the opening tapestry of who Peter is and why he’s searching for what he’s searching for. A good 650 words to start with. And then breakfast: my wife makes egg sandwiches twice a week and today was egg day, and I was happier today than I was yesterday because I got my work out of the way before anything else took place. And now I can be me. I don’t have something nagging in the back of my mind, telling me I’m not doing enough to get where I want to be. And I know what I’m going to be doing tomorrow. For the time being, I know where I want to go.