Cooking the book

Living the dream these days: I have all the time in the world to work on my novel. Whenever I want, as many hours as I like. What author doesn’t long for that kind of freedom?

The shocker for this never-before-at-leisure scribe: The writing thing isn’t like calling for a pizza. No delivery to your door. No words on demand. Nope. More like making your own pie in a beat-up kitchen. Points of view arrive lumpy and unformed. Plot development is erratic: Voice splashes; characters stick to the shredder; transitions turn to mush. I toss a round of pages into the air, but a full chapter doesn’t fall back into my hands. It hits the floor. Splat.

This hiatus from full-time journalism is a gift, right? I want to be productive and move my Work in Progress closer to a completed first draft. Nothing is less seductive than my empty laptop screen, though. I pound the creative dough relentlessly. I knead it, then fold it back over itself, then knead it more. I roll it out, season it, bake, and taste. Throw out many slices; save too few.

Walking away hungry was far less painful when I had only ten minutes to devote to “Bloodstrains” on workdays that began at 5:15 a.m. and ended at 11:15 p.m. I sat in a newsroom ten to eleven hours each shift; I couldn’t get a full chapter written in six weeks, for falling asleep while transcribing changes into my manuscript on the weekends. That pace would be delicious now. I’ve chained myself to a different chair with a lot less to show for it thus far.

I’m on a deadline, self-imposed but no less important: first draft done by the end of June, if not sooner. I hope to have a full-time job by then, as well as a full manuscript. So this is my new recipe: Write, write, write, without revising — Career editor, stay thy hand, please! — and let the ending bubble up from the 45,000 words I’ve already cooked up.

I’ll spread my crust and build literary flavor with ingredients only I can blend. And when the current chapter has baked, I’ll start another, then another.

Maybe I’ll end up making a medium pizza instead of a large. Maybe it will be a plain pie — you know, fewer toppings or less exotic ones. As long as the dish is well done, and tasty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retail therapy

Had to get out of the house the other day, to make way for some work there, so I did what everyone looking for her next job does: I went shopping. Who knew I’d find wisdom in the displays?

Wisdom may be going a bit far, but everything’s relative: One person’s sappy saying is another’s Aha! moment. The arrow above reminded me of that Longfellow poem from third grade, you know: “I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where.” It’s the knowing that the arrow will land that’s important, and that you need to follow the adventure where it takes you. Archery has never been my strong suit — my arrows don’t fly straight and quickly to their targets. But they get there. Time to find that new trajectory, that’s all.

Have I said it’s more than time for me to stretch and bend in as many ways as possible? Not just talking about comfort zones here, I mean physically. I’ve been investigating joining a gym — for someone who hasn’t done any regular exercise in more than a dozen years, it’s a big deal. I’ve narrowed my options down, and I just need to do a little more reconnaissance work before signing on the dotted line.

Because I am who I am, I’m hoping this will be an act of defiance of the fates, as well: If I commit to a class or a regimen, I’m bound to get a job that will complicate my ability to  honor that commitment. Right?

I’ve been working on my latest Work in Progress, that murder/thriller reboot of an old literary effort. Still writing, then revising, then rewriting the chapter of Bloodstrains I started a few weeks ago, then revising an earlier chapter so everything lines up the way it should. But too often lately, I’m also checking email and job boards, and exploring foreign-language apps as I try to practice/expand my limited mastery of Italian, and updating my Goodreads library, and testing meditation apps to help me wrap my head around this whole hiatus-from-the-newspaper-world thing. I’m a little overstimulated, in a still-too-understimulated way.

Yet it’s been gratifying to realize that self-knowledge and mindfulness are possible even through a few minutes of mindless wandering in a store aisle.

In January, when stopping to smell the roses isn’t easily done, stopping to see the signs is my new next best thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s my ETA?

Time to move on, time to get going, just like Tom Petty said: What lies ahead, no way of knowing. Or how far I’ll have to go. Or how long I’ll wonder as I wander, to quote still another song lyric.

By now, you’d think I’d know: It takes as long as it takes. Employed journalist to unemployed journalist to re-employed and several-times relocated journalist. Single woman to wife to divorced woman. Mother to single mother. Wife again to widow. Reporter to editor to novelist. Only child to middle-aged orphan. Every new start takes its own direction.

I suppose I could chart the last few chapters of my life, seek out patterns that might help define this new course. I could plan strategies, set specific goals. Why not give the slow-and-steady route a go?

I’m not a patient-enough soul, that’s why. I’m a seat-of-her-pants girl, just as I am a seat-of-her-pants writer. I prefer to make stuff happen, any stuff, and then see where it leads my characters. I rewrite a lot. But sometimes, maybe several scenes later, maybe several chapters later, it all makes sense. Instinctive internal logic kicks in. Chaos is averted, or promoted, as appropriate. The plot develops, the action proceeds, the drama builds and resolves according to a discernible arc.

There’s no arc to discern right now, alas. I am on hiatus. Between assignments, for the first time in many, many years. There are no alarm clocks ringing, no deadlines. I want to enjoy the journey, to say, “Yes,” rather than “I can’t,” and not get myself tangled up in worries. Loose, smooth; if not carefree, then also not careworn: That would be the ideal me-in-waiting.

Instead, the melody inside my head is discordant; the verse, arrhythmic. I’m looking into a bright light and able to see only what’s at the edges. I can’t wait for that distracting aura to fade. I want the migraine of real life. This change business is, well, so impermanent.

How many cheesy metaphors will I have to mix before I hit on the right formula for concocting a new me? How long before I find my new way?

There’s no knowing, not today. Probably not tomorrow either, or the next day.

No magic buttons to push in the meantime. No special incantations to utter. My estimated time of arrival is anybody’s guess.

 

Working it …

Performers, it’s all about stage presence, right? Gotta stand out. Gotta own the spotlight. Gotta have every eye on the room on you, baby, nobody but you.

Writers, for us it’s all about page presence. Gotta keep them reading, keep them moving through the words you’ve sweated over and screamed over and just wanted to beat your head against the wall over until they were perfect. Except there’s no applause when you hit that soaring note until you’ve amassed so many soaring notes that there’s an actual story, poem, novel, play. And getting there is, sigh, so hard sometimes.

Hard? What do I know of hard? My life is not about war or famine or flood or even just battling to get through day to day. First-world problems, do they still use that phrase to describe the self-absorbed carping we, the lucky, indulge in so often? I plead so guilty.

Frustrating, then, I’ll allow myself that, when I want to write something worthy of people’s time and energy and eyestrain. When I want to entertain, do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks, and show them how versatile I really am.

One book published, one waiting in the publishing wings, one in need of a little rehearsal, one in mid-creation. Just gotta keep my butt on the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.

I can own this spotlight and shine.

 

 

Escape strategy …

Made it to a beach this summer, the lovely spot you see here, Francavilla al Mare. First time since my son finished eighth grade — he’s 32 now. Planted my bum in one of these very chairs. Let the waters of the Adriatic tickle my toes. Hunted seashells with my Italian cousin’s eight-year-old daughter. Lost what my friend Roslyn calls our office indoor death pallor — I still have some color, almost a month later.

Learned again how important physical escape is, how relaxing, how restful and energizing at the same time. I’d forgotten. I’d wanted to go all these years, but, you know, stuff happens. Sick husband, then death and the dealing with it. Sick mother, then death and the dealing with it. Three-and-a-half novels substantially written in between, during those too-numerous staycations. Demanding day job that, on top of everything else, sometimes left me with too little energy to enjoy my down time in any season.

Yet escape I did during those days when I yearned for waves and salt air. Escape I did through other people’s books as well as my own writing. Detectives and demons, vampires and Victorian romances, all helped me keep my wits about me.

Every reader knows that one good book is all it takes for the sun to kiss your skin, the breeze to blush your cheeks, and your imagination to fly you away to a place your body can’t immediately reach. In the last few years, I’ve been to Istanbul and Paris, Brussels and the Scottish highlands without a single TSA check-in. (Haven’t racked up many frequent-flyer miles, but you can’t have everything.) Even on this beautiful beach, I sat reading a Craig Johnson “Longmire” novel. Wyoming (by way of Philadelphia in this particular installment) in the middle of Abruzzi.

Summer may, for all but chronological purposes, be over now, but I’ve got a stack of books and a whole load of chapters to finish on my current work-in-progress. I may not return for, oh, months.

See you around sometime.

 

 

Settling my accounts …

Hope you’ll forgive me for looking at July 2016 through July 2017 in balance-sheet terms. I am, by trade, a business journalist, after all. And I began my career covering education, in late June in Pennsylvania, school-budget season: nine stories about district deficits, unfunded federal mandates, millage per $10,000 of property value, commercial tax ratables. Some habits you just can’t break.

Losses for this period have been considerable, in terms of loved ones no longer here with me. But the memories that remain and the insights I have gained are such treasures. On balance, I am so much richer today. My profits are intangible, but priceless.

I have acquired a deeper understanding of my own strength, a resilience nurtured in me by generations of formidable women. I appreciate every day the degree to which I share this strength with my family and the degree to which they share their strength with me. I have found new friends and new professional and writing colleagues I value greatly. These are my many assets.

My liabilities, far too numerous, remain on the ledger, some carried over from year to year for too long. But I’m trying to sand away the rough edges, buff and polish as needed, and behave as like the mature individual my mother hoped she’d raised.  Of course, she exhorted me to have some fun too, which I’m working very hard at. I think she’d see progress there.

Prospects for growth seem promising, with a second novel at the publisher’s, the third awaiting revision, and a fourth in progress. I hope to outstrip expectations in the next four quarters.

Just you watch.

Hi, Tootsie …

I inherited his Irish complexion, his facial structure, his inability to wink out of both eyes, and his tendency to laugh at horror movies. It wasn’t all nature versus nurture, yet what I learned from the ever-smiling Stewart McLaughlin I derived more from example and goofy sayings than from lessons explicitly taught. Dad wasn’t that kind of guy: not highly educated, not well read, just instinctively wise about some things and just as impossibly naïve in a good way about others.

He was the walking embodiment of the Golden Rule, big on doing unto others without expectation of any return. He was respectful of his elders and women: an opener of doors, a lender of hands, a carrier of packages. All of which would have been useful advice had he been the father of sons, and which rendered the real world sort of a shock to his only child when she realized not everyone was like him.

He drilled me in parallel-parking. He instilled in me a healthy respect for electrical hazards and an appreciation that some repairs are best left to professionals. He urged me not to be “sourcastic” (which is actually how he pronounced the word).  He embarrassed my adult self into making the beds each day by going over to my house and doing it himself until I got the message.

“Crying never got anyone anywhere,” he told me repeatedly, which turned out to be excellent counsel for a woman who would become a single mother, then the wife of a chronically ill man, then a widow. Disappointments happen, he knew, having lost his own mother when he was just nine years old.

“Keep the change and buy a comic book,” he’d say when he sent me to a corner store on an errand. Live in the moment and enjoy the small pleasures, in other words. “Don’t be serious all your life,” I can hear him warning.

Mostly he taught me, while never quite putting it this way, that being the peacemaker when no one else will is important, and that acknowledging your mistakes and apologizing for them brings both forgiveness and the determination not to make them again.

Quite the wise guy, my father.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On reflection …

Maybe it’s because my birthday falls near and sometimes on Mother’s Day that motherhood didn’t freak me out as much as I expected it to. Maybe the whole “circle of life” thing was just something I recognized early on, though I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of becoming a mommy (a doctor, or maybe a director, yes).

Maybe growing up in a household with three adult women imprints on you the idea that being responsible for someone is important, a job that always changes but never ends. My grandmother, my aunt and my mother practiced three very different kinds of mothering, each wise.

Maybe I learned from them that it’s not giving birth that makes you a mother, but rather raising a child who respects others, acts kindly, thinks critically. That you never really know if you’re a good mother until someone acknowledges what a good person your child is, and that even then it’s best until several people have done so. Maybe I learned that being honest with your child is part of the job — telling her what she doesn’t necessarily want to hear, and helping her understand that she might someday see the point you’re making.

I did not become a mother identical to the one my mother was, nor did she become the mother hers was. If anything, she became the grandmother my grandmother was: slipping my son money; loving him pretty much unconditionally, leaving me to play bad cop. But I learned a lot of lessons too. Chief among them: Your child is always a part of you.

This Mother’s Day, my first without Mom, I feel very much her child. I hear her voice telling me to live as fully as possible, for as long as possible. Her strength is my birthday present this May 14, just as it was at 9:10 on a long ago Saturday night in May.

Find a chapter, write a chapter

Only one problem with trying to adapt a thirty-three-year-old manuscript into a new novel: Thirty-three years have passed. I spend more time skimming through the old typewritten pages of that murder mystery to find what I need than I do actually writing.

That’s not precisely true, of course — fiction writers take liberties, after all — but it sure feels like it some days. Feels like it would be easier just to start from scratch.

Yes, I spent the better part of two weeks re-reading the original version of Bloodstrains, and yes, I’ve been kicking myself for months now for not saving the two or three chapters of a sequel I began about 1991. But I’ve become reacquainted with the original plot and remembered where I was headed back in the Nineties. I know now what this new novel demands to say, and I want to incorporate the best of that first book and its unrealized sequel. I’m tucking in the reworked older material at strategic points in each new chapter. My hope is that those glimpses of the old book bring an intimacy to my story of past loss, relentless self-recrimination and a fading dream of redemption. (Wow, that sounds dark, doesn’t it? Too dark?)

At one point last Sunday morning, I had more than a half-dozen piles of yellowing manuscript pages spread out in front of me. For the new Chapter Four, I’d need a bit of the old Chapter Thirty-eight, to show how the protagonists met. For the new Chapter Five, I’d need a passage from the old Chapter Thirty-two to illustrate the bond of friendship two young women shared. The old Bloodstrains had way too many characters. I’m killing them off in the most heinous way: by not acknowledging they ever existed.

When this is over, I may go back to that third sequel to my book, Never Before Noon, the one I started two Novembers ago before my mother got sick, under the overly optimistic illusion that I might write a vampire novel in a month. (This from a woman who, given her job schedule, considers it a victory when she spends more than ten minutes each workday on her writing.)

For now, though, my challenge is as follows: Reanimate Bloodstrains and send it off into the world. It’s waited an awfully long time to be read by someone other than me.

 

 

 

 

 

I was so much older then …

So, yeah, I’m quoting Bob Dylan suddenly. I’ve been thinking about this song a lot in the last week, and its meaning: about stepping back, appreciating the perspective gained from time’s passage, and realizing that all those things we were absolutely certain we knew when we were younger we really didn’t know at all.

What we really learn is that we can’t even guess at the questions the universe might throw at us, let alone be sure of life’s answers to them. We shuffle around and grab at what we insights we can and hope we’ll make the best choices — or maybe just better choices this time around.

Within reason, I’m an optimist. I’ve handled my share of fate’s curveballs and figured out what needed to be done. Good thing, because this is an odd-numbered year, with odd things bound to happen to me — I’ve learned, over time, to expect them, you see. For instance, for the first time in eight years my job is about to change significantly. My second novel is off to the publisher (I’m waiting to be assigned an editor) and my new literary work-in-progress is actually progressing. I’m two utility bills away from laying my mother’s estate to rest, finally, an amazing relief, and I’ve met someone I like. That’s a lot of change already, and it’s only late April. What’s next, I can only wonder?

All change is stressful — even the best kinds of change (new homes, new relationships). It disrupts our rhythms, spins us out of our comfort zones, makes us uncomfortable even about being comfortable. Too many things we can’t anticipate. Too many factors we can’t control because we’re essentially starting over — maybe not from the beginning, but along terrain sufficiently unfamiliar that we’re gritting our teeth, crossing our fingers. Don’t look down, we tell ourselves, just inch along and we’ll find our way. Oh, please, please.

To cite the words of the 2016 Nobel Prize laureate in literature: “Good and bad, I define these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow.”

Somehow, no doubt, all will become quite clear one of these days. I’m just young enough to appreciate that now.