on the road to carpal tunnel....
I have eight-thousand words to write in two days, two nights. I think I can complete it. I'm not sure. I discovered three things during this NaNoWriMo.org lunacy.
1. I can write 42,000 words, maybe even 50,000, in thirty days. I can contruct a large story arc with multiple characters and scenes and events and tie things together. To be honest, I am not taking care with my words at the moment, I'm just shoveling them on the page like manure, and though they smell like you-know-what, the technical story has an integrity. I think I would have made a good composer.
2. I find no joy in the writing except in the few and far between places where I capture an elusive memory from some half-life of mine and rewrite the names and places. During those moments it's real, I feel I'm there, nothing else exists.
3. What all this means, hell if I know. Or wait. I do know. I'm just a girl, I'm stuck in my past, I'm a person who photographs feelings and develops them in some mental dark room, I'm a rodeo queen who ropes, hogties herds of memory. I'm not an Avon Lady though I pass out brochures and samples and collect small change for mascara, I don't know what I am other than a deep time holograph spinner.
Every time I sit to work on the novel my past knocks me upside the head and yells at me to write it, to write it and I push it away, tell it to wait. Something is breaking my mind into a million words of some unfinished plot and I'm putting the pieces in my pocket for later.
The day after Thanksgiving I realized my Avon order, due Monday, consists of only three customers, each chosing something small, a lipstick, a bottle of bubble bath, a tube of body lotion. I'm not making a living, I'm spinning my wheels, I can't keep up with the novel and the Avon and the kids and the pets. Thank God I don't have a social life. I felt so desperate, so afraid, that I even wrote a letter to an advice columnist. How does a mother of a zillion with no practical experience and no current skill set make a living? Damned if I know, but it sure ain't through stupid Avon.
If the mystics are right, and you choose the path you walk in this life, then I picked a life just sideways of normal, something off the path, inside a thicket with bunnies and strawberries and lots and lots of prickers. And I forgot to bring a lunch, a compass, a bottle of water, and I don't know how to find that dirt road, how to find me, how to find rest.
4:26:44 PM 
|
|
