Tuesday, March 21, 2006

cold mountain and rider

Something about the movie Cold Mountain fucks with me.

Not the book, but the movie. The credits have been over for a while. I'm still crying. I'm not sure if it's the war, the moment of love that the characters have that is not like anything I've ever had or ever will, the lost green place. The place that becomes sacred the moment I leave it. Every time I leave the Santa Cruz Mountains for anything more than a week or two, it hurts like soul-deep starvation. I tell myself I'm childish. It doesn't help.

The only place where the land felt more like home to me was Virginia, during a week-long trip in the fall of 2004.

I just finished a novel called Rider. Not finished -- the draft has tons of ugly spots -- but finished in the framework. Rider is about me. It took me four years to complete the draft. Partly that was because the elves-at-Helm's-Deep scene in The Two Towers, speaking of movies, distracted me for a year resulting in Stealing the Sun, but partly because Rider is about defeat. About fighting for abomination and knowing it. About public failure and private emptiness. I always identify with my characters, but Rider is more about me than the others. Morgan is more me than my other characters are.

I wonder sometimes late at night where all my friends have gone.