Heather Mackey » composting http://www.heathermackey.com/blog Writing while sleep-deprived Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:42:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Copyright © 2010 Heather Mackey hcmackey@yahoo.com () hcmackey@yahoo.com () posts Writing while sleep-deprived hcmackey@yahoo.com No no http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg Heather Mackey http://www.heathermackey.com/blog 144 144 Aerating http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/2007/08/08/aerating/ http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/2007/08/08/aerating/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2007 04:21:00 +0000 Heather http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/?p=7 The problem I have with composting right now is that it’s not enough simply to put in the vegetables that have gone bad in the refrigerator, or to be dutiful about collecting the remains on the cutting board – like the broccoli stalks that I really should eat but toss because I always have what feels like an abundance of broccoli around and I’m just disgustingly profligate with it, or to scoop up the melon rinds that suddenly are everywhere once the kids feel like devouring half a watermelon. No, the problem is you can be conscientious – even saintly – about making the trip out to the compost bin and depositing all this stuff. But that’s only half the battle. You then have to aerate it. You have to deal with all that half rotten slimy stuff and mix it around. This is the step I avoid, and it’s why I’ll probably never be a really first-rate composter.

But I’m thinking about aeration issues and why you really do need to get in and mix things up every now and then because I am – of course – rewriting. And it’s night. And I’m not going to eat chocolate (which is how I got to the point of having written something that needs to be rewritten in the first place; sometimes people ask how I did it with kids, job, etc. etc. and the answer really is good dark chocolate.) When I’m stuck like this – going through the Word file for the umpteenth time, knowing the thing by heart – I end up doing tweaks. It gets down to word choice and punctuation. Useless. So tonight I’m going to move chunks around. I know I’ve needed to do it and I’ve been tweaking instead. But this seems exactly like the kind of pitchfork job I could do on a somewhat brain dead night like this. That is, not think about the language or anything tweakable, but just get stuff moved around and in place. Then I’ll have done the kind of manual labor, like aerating, that always makes me forget everything else while I’m doing it, and I’ll feel very virtuous afterward. Hopefully…

]]> http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/2007/08/08/aerating/feed/ 1 The art and poetry of compost http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/2007/05/06/the-art-and-poetry-of-compost/ http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/2007/05/06/the-art-and-poetry-of-compost/#comments Mon, 07 May 2007 00:21:00 +0000 Heather http://www.heathermackey.com/blog/?p=4 I think the reason that composting appeals to me so much as metaphor is that it’s essentially a process of taking odds and ends, bits of leftover junk, letting it sit, stirring it occasionally, and then producing something nutritive and great. Or at least that’s the idea.

So many of my writing projects stretch on for years, with all kinds of flotsam accumulating over time. Essentially the way I write depends on an organic and fairly lengthy time to dump stuff in, let it break down, mix it up, and then see what takes root.

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