To Start

To start, I feel incredibly strange and self-involved starting a blog. There wasn't really a choice, though. I needed to keep my sanity. I have to have something to do while I wait, and writing about this little journey seemed to be the thing to do. I have a second book in the works, but my heart just isn't in it yet. As I told one of my besties yesterday, I feel very precipissy. I don't know what kind of resolve has to come with #1 in order for me not to feel like I'm cheating with #2, but it hasn't happened yet. I found myself getting insanely glum and depressed at not having my 5:30 morning writing mind waiting for me each day, so I decided I would maybe start a blog.

Dan says, “What's it going to be about? The best blogs are about something. Er...um...not that I follow blogs.”

So what's it going to be about? I think since its purpose is to help me stay sane in the in between time, I should write a little bit about why I'm in between.

To catch you up: Two years ago I started writing. Well, I guess that's not entirely accurate. I've been writing for a long time, years, in fact, and had been on a new little journey with The Artist's Way, and had written 80 pages of crap, and THEN, a statement of intent in my morning pages, a story that would completely consume me, something that just HAD to get out. Three days later, I started writing. Isn't that amazing? I've heard other writers talk about people asking that horrible question, “How do you come up with your ideas?” and I'll admit, I was one of those people. I had this desire, and was even semi-confident in my ability, but I couldn't find the story.

So. Asking, receiving, all that brings me here.

These scenes started piling themselves up in my head, vivid detail, an intricate story, way too complicated to have come from me. These beautiful people and their beautiful relationships, coming together from the dust.

I'm a bit . . . intense, and a little . . . uptight too. Within days, I had notebook pages filled with notes that only I would understand:
*center of his pits
*chicken pox
*panties in a figure eight
*he tries to rebel but can't
*do they date? For real?

And words I wanted to use:
*superfluity (excess) does not dissipate
*truculent

And detailed, long, involved lists of the music each of my four main characters loved. I started to get to know them in an intimate way, as if they were my children. You'd think, since I was the writer, that I'd have more power over them than I do my real children, the living people that sleep in my house and have their own minds. Turns out these guys had their own minds as well. I tried to make them do the things I wanted them to do at every turn, but they weren't having any of it. Sure, they would let me write whatever I wanted, but if it was my idea, if it was coming out of my own brain, what I thought was best, or most interesting or compelling, it would inevitably need to be cast out. I found myself evolving into the listener, the watcher, letting them tell me where they wanted to go and putting it on the page. I was merely the transcriber. What a joy.

There were crazy, amazing things that happened along the way and I would like to use this venue to remember every miraculous circumstance. Here I sit, two years later, and two different literary agents in New York are considering representing me. Who knows what will happen? Certainly not me. I don't know if anyone else will be interested in hearing these things. But maybe looking back on how I got here and being grateful for the journey will help me stay out of the waiting place.