Over at Mommy Needs Coffee there is a Ray Bradbury quote on the header that says “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” That was me as a teen and young adult. Reality crushed me and my imagination and writing sustained me. While it has ceased to be that for me as I don’t find real life the scary place it always seemed to be, writing is still as important as air or water or food even. I can’t imagine a life without writing. Without words. But lately I feel as though I am drowning in my own words. I can’t get to the keyboard fast enough and when I do I can’t keep up with the flow of my own thoughts or the pace a which ideas for blog entries, short stories and even novels are flying at me, but nothing looks on the screen like I hear it in my mind or see it in my mind’s eye.

I took my daughter to the pool last Thursday. She loves to go swimming, and we have a very nice little indoor aquatic center in our town. It consists of a zero depth entry pool for all ages, a warming pool area that attracts parents with wee ones to pre-schoolers and a deep area for diving and such. We were in the warming pool when the life guards suddenly kicked everyone out of the zero entry section and began dumping buckets of chemicals in and hauling out the pool “toys” to hose them down in a way that reminded me of Meryl Streep in Silkwood. Someone had vomited. And instead of reacting with the common sense I know I possess and vacating the pool (because it is indoors the normal level of chlorine is just at maximum tolerance for me as it is, any increase in chemicals should send my asthmatic self running for fresh air), I began creating a story. A horror-ish  sci-fi thing that by the time I got us home was a companion piece for the inter-related shorts I am working on already. Everything becomes a blog piece or a short story idea anymore – even my latest rejection email has prompted an idea –  and when it doesn’t, I think – there’s a novel there, maybe.

Recently I was talking with a writer who found me through my blog. She is a real writer. Does it for a living. Books, magazine columnist. She’s been published, and it doesn’t get anymore real than that. In a follow-up email to our conversation, she wrote something that finally brought a problem I have been having with the novel I wrote last November for NaNoWriMo clear to me. It needs to be non-fiction. The novel I have is essentially a fictionalized account of me in widowhood and a bit about Will’s illness and death. For some reason I just haven’t been about to make it work, and the reason is that I have to tell it from closer up. I have to be me. Warty and decidedly non-Lifetime for Women movie-ish. I cannot be Susan Sarandonized and that makes the project so very off-putting because I so dislike the me of the caregiving and widow days. Like most people I grew up with this idea that adversity makes us noble, self-effacing and ready for sainthood. It doesn’t do that at all. Surviving and taking what you learned from hard times to make a better life and a better you does those things, if that is even possible. So if I am going to write my story it has to be my story. But it seems to me that every widow I know, or have heard of, is/has written about his/her journey, and I am just one more wanna-be (and a fairly bad widow example at that). If I do tackle it though, I know what I have to do and that is something. 

And then there are at least two novels from long ago, one done and another a few chapters done but completely outlined that I know I could finish up.

I am writing as fast as I can and can’t keep up with myself and I don’t think what I am writing is all that good. A wonderful thing? I guess it is. There was a time not long ago when I wondered if I would ever be the word machine I was as a teen when I carried a notebook with me nearly all the time like Harriet the Spy. I am almost her again. Now if I could just harness myself a bit, I might make a real writer out of me yet.