Ah, the writing life! It’s pure joy when the stars align and all the world is  the next scene and brilliant prose. And then there are weeks like this. I belong to a writer support group comprised of some members of my VC graduating class. Our commitment includes weekly check-ins: group e-mails in which we share: how many pages/chapters/sentences we wrote that week, what we are discovering, problems with our writing, pitfalls and successes. It’s a way to stay honest, stay committed, stay motivated, and stay connected. Usually I wait until some of the others check-in before posting my report. This week, I decided to go first:

Hi all,

I’m sitting here with a glass of chardonay and a back of chips, wishing you were here with me. It’s already Wednesday and guess what I’ve accomplished writing-wise this week? Nothing. I haven’t pulled out Otter Song to continue revisions. I haven’t done my morning pages. I haven’t expanded on any of those great picture book ideas or created new ones–which means I have failed at my commitment to generating-picture book-ideas month. I haven’t finished reading a book–or read more than 10 pages of anything. What is worse, at this very moment, I haven’t a clue when I’ll get back in the game. But I am thinking about finishing something–this bag of chips.

You have got to have had more forward motion than I have this week. I’m looking forward to reading about it.

Cheers (raised glass), Kelly

Oh, and since I haven’t posted a blog entry for this week, I think I’m going to post this message–that will be 2 things I finish…3:  wine, chips, and a blog posting.

Blog P.S. The chips are gone…

I’ve been writing and rewriting the same novel, a middle grade novel about a girl who rescues a stranded sea otter pup and it saving it finds herself story, off and on for ten years. The switch had been stuck in the OFF position for the past 2 years because lacking the knowledge, energy and/or talent to do what needed to be done to make it readable, I had abandoned it. It wouldn’t stay OFF though, and so in mid-August, as a birthday gift to myself, I flipped the switch and began revisions with renewed zeal. Up until a month ago, Oct. 15^th, the work had been going beautifully, I was digging deep, re-dreaming and re-visioning the story rather than simply re-writing, working hard and feeling good about my progress. Then I got busy with school visits and festivals in celebration of my new picture book, Dance, Y’all, Dance, and was simply too dog gone busy to work on the novel.

Last week my agent, Erin, sent me an e-mail nudge asking how Otter revisions are coming. I ignored it. She sent another oh-by-the-way query in a note today—which I skipped over without responding. (Let her think I haven’t checked my e-mail yet, I reasoned.) I needed time to figure out how not coming Otter was, and how it might never be coming. Not working on the revisions coupled with the doubts that come from reading brilliant debut novels, including Joy Prebles’ Dreaming Anastasia, which left me feeling humbled and awed and like there was absolutely no way I could write anywhere near as well as she and maybe I should quit trying and who the heck did I think I was? had me close to flipping the switch again. And then this article in O about Junot Diaz comes along.

In it Diaz describes how after publishing his first book of stories he wrote 75 amazing pages of a novel followed by 5 years of writing schlock and finally even quite writing and became “a normal. A square,” he notes, “I didn’t go to bookstores or read the Sunday book section of the Times. I stopped hanging out with my writer friends.” And slipped into what he calls his “new morose half-life” before eventually, one hot August night, pulling the novel back out of the box. Finally, a decade after beginning he finished it.

Diaz’s story, as published in the O, The Oprah Magazine, was referenced on author Libba Bray’s blog, which eventually reached my VC classmate-sister-mentor-friend, Cindy who sent the link to our VC class list-serv following a check-in during which several of us noted that our current works-in-progress were messy, ugly, unpublishable scribbles—because that’s what we writers do when we are feeling inadequate, we read and share other writer’s anguished overcoming-our-inner-critic-and-pushing-through-to-published stories.

“That’s my tale in a nutshell,” Diaz concludes. “Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.”

Yeah! Me, too Junot! Me, too! Even if there is not hope, even though nothing I am doing is showing any sign of promise, I’m going to keep writing this flipping Otter novel. The switch is back ON!

Thank you Oprah, Libba, Cindy, and any/all other links who helped bring Junot Diaz’s message to me.

Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Read the whole article: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200911-omag-junot-diaz-writing

One of my writer-idols, Sandra Cisneros, says she dreams or day dreams scenes before writing them. I fear I may have taken it one step backward. I thought I wrote a scene but seem to only have dreamed I did. I wrote it sitting in bed in the Royal Plaza Hotel on Scotts Road in Singapore. The memory is so vivid I can picture myself plumping up the pillows—and even stealing one of Curtis’s before settling in to write. My legs are still singed from the heat of the computer on my legs—or at least I think that’s what it is…although it could be prickly heat….. It was a really good blog posting, too. One of my best. A follow up to my stuck-on-the-deserted-highway-with-a-flat story. In engagingly prosaic prose it revealed how I climbed out of my car to walk up the road to read the highway sign facing the other direction even though I know one is never, never, never, ever supposed to leave the car, but rather should roll up the windows, lock the doors and wait for help. In it I brilliantly described how the late afternoon sun reflected off the shiny black pick up that pulled to a stop while I was walking up that lonely road and how I knew, even as I kept walking closer to the pickup that I was signing my own missing persons report and how I hung up on the AAA operator after telling him we would “try to fix it ourselves and call back if we ran into trouble” (the “we” being the stranger  heroic enough, or brazen enough, or demented enough, to stop for a damsel in distress). Those inspired words and phrases I recall typing: the way the condensation on the Pabst Blue Ribbon 12-pack nesting on the passenger side seat glistening in the gloaming, how trepidation about  accepting the curly-haired strangers offer to change my flat was overridden by my fear of missing dinner and drinks with Liz and Dorothy; the way his curls leapt each time his head snapped up to check for oncoming traffic; how for perhaps the first and only time in recorded history, during the entire, seemingly endless, clock-stopping, fifteen-but-felt-like-fifty minutes it took him to change my tire,  not one single, solitary vehicle cruised down that side of I-45, how his teeth glistened as he cranked down on the tire jack, were too vivid, too perfect to be just a dream. The posting was so near perfection I almost cried when I discovered it gone. After searching every file trail I knew to search, I implored Curtis to apply his arsenal of file recovery tactics. All to no avail. My brilliant blog posting may be gone, but the flat-tire-on-the-deserted-highway will never be forgotten, nor will my hero, Rick Rochelle, hopefully not the last man in Texas brave enough and heroic enough and kind enough to stop to help a traveler in distress.

Okay, so maybe, after being stuck there on that long, lonely stretch of I-45 far from anything that way and even farther the other way, depending on how long it took the AAA assistance to arrive—despite my way cute short black dress and matching leggings which I thought I looked so cute wearing—I might have unearthed the jack myself and tried changing the darn flat tire on my dang rental car. But thankfully, I never had to try.  Thank you, thank you, Rick Rochelle of somewhere near Fairview, Texas.