Why, I thought you'd never ask. For lo, it has become my life. My main character is once again my BFF, and she demands my time almost every waking moment that is not involved in work or socializing or mundane basic stuff (dude, my refrigerator is nearly bare now and I don't want to waste time going to the grocery store). The other day I walked through the kitchen and noticed that dishes had really piled up. I'm not usually that bad. It's just that I've been in another world altogether (sort of literally) and had not noticed until it hit a critical point. My eccentric writerly self needs a personal maid. The muse does not like housework.
But you didn't come here to read about housework.
So here is a strange little bit of history about my current project that some of you know and some of you don't. Remember when I compared my "old school" novel, that novel that I've worked on in some variation for like 100 years (or at least since the mid-90s) to a bad boyfriend who wears leather and treats me poorly but whose bootie calls are too hot to drop? Well, here is its story. For it deserves its own blog post.
I wrote a short story once, crica 1995. I can't even remember what the hell it was called and I've mercifully blocked most of it out of memory, which is all that is left of it, but I do remember that it involved a night shift at a publishing company (what a coincidence, I worked in one at that time!) and a tornado and a ghost. Let's face it. It was not my finest hour and it was full of tropes galore. My friend read it and told me that she didn't like it and that it was trite. This is a friend who has always been admiring of my writing all our lives, so for her to say that was really hurtful and I knew it was the truth so it shook my world a bit. I was determined to write something completely awesome to impress her. I would write the most awesome story in the history of awesome stories and she would admire my writing again and the world would shift back in balance. I wasn't sure what this grand story was going to be yet.
At around the same time, I had bought some of my first cds. I had only gotten a cd player for the very first time in 1995, after years of those old fashioned tapes (I totally missed the whole 8-track era). So I had a very limited collection of cds so far, but one of them (*cringe*?) was UB40's Greatest Hits. So I was listening to this pseudo reggae island music over and over again, and daydreaming about tropical islands as can only a girl who lives in the middle of corn fields can do. My gaze landed on a fancy perfume bottle that my friend (the same who called my story trite) had brought back for me from Eastern Europe, and suddenly this scenario just fluttered into my daydreams. I saw a girl sitting on a hill (with the sea in the distance) holding a perfume bottle. I knew she was in great danger because it was the ancient relic of [blah-blah-blah-evil-person] and that it involved a journey to a tropical island. I also knew this girl lived an ordinary life and had never been in any sort of danger in her life. She worked at a pet toy company, for crying out loud.
That summer ('95), I started writing and I couldn't stop. The story grew on itself and ate my brain and became my identity. It was my main companion when we moved to another city and I was lonely and had no social life and only a part-time job. I daydreamed about it constantly. That and actually moving to a tropical island because by then I was living in northern Illinois and those winters don't f*** around.
As the years passed, this novel became part of my identity as a writer, as well. I joined a writing group and every week we used to share a new chapter of our book(s). We had inside jokes about all of our stories, my friends got to know my story and characters as well as I did. We talked about our characters as if they were real friends of ours. It felt so good, like a shared universe. And most importantly, the friend mentioned above read parts of it and she kept talking about it afterwards for awhile, like it had made an impression on her (a positive one). I remember once she painted her nails with glittery nail polish and said, "This reminds me of [insert fictitious place in my novel]" and I knew I had fully arrived.
Then I dropped the whole thing for about five years. I was distracted by other things in my life and took on other writing projects. I felt disgusted and disappointed with myself for not just finishing the whole thing, for not following through. My story seemed dumb and non-original. I felt like no matter how many versions I came up with, I was never going to be satisfied with it the way it was. I always got this perfectionistic attitude about how it needed more umph here and the characters needed to be better developed here. And the endings were weird and underdeveloped and some things just didn't make sense and I couldn't seem to make them make sense. My characters were pissing me off and going rogue like rebellious teenagers and I knew I had to do something or I was just going to kill them all off. And speaking of teenagers, maybe the characters needed to be in another age group so Take Five or so of the novel was rewriting it as a young adult novel.
Anyway, I'm starting to get bored with writing this post, so I'm going to fast forward. In 2008, when I was in Trinidad and indeed lived on an actual tropical island, I had the opportunity to be part of a wonderful writing workshop led by Elizabeth Nunez, a well known Caribbean writer. By then, The Novel That Refused To Die was in its eighth variation and had lost quite a bit of its original shine. I couldn't see that. I only wondered why my writing felt flat. I wondered why my characters seemed boring. I wondered why I kept picking over the same scene over and over again. I wanted to go deeper, to go for the jugular. I wanted to write without worrying about what anyone thought. I wanted to write those naughty scenes without picturing my grandma reading it (sorry, Grandma, if you're reading, LOL). I wanted to write the darkest things without worrying about the disapproval of people in my life that prefer Disney endings. I wanted to release the most moving parts of my soul. And I just couldn't seem to do it. I scrapped the whole thing again and started to write about a terrorist who puts a bomb on a bus and what led up to it. It was going to be a Middle Eastern version of Les Miserables and mercifully this was a short-lived obsession. Later oh-how-I-cringed at the pretentiousness (the title was "The Light From Our Souls" for heaven's sake) and woefully bad execution of it, that this is the first time I've ever confessed to the existence of this novel. It still mocks me on my hard drive.
Then in May 2008 came the darkest night of my life when a knife WAS held at my jugular and worse things happened. I really understood then what jugular meant. After that, I went through a very dark few years, and the novel evolved in that direction, too. Take Nine of the novel was the darkest version possible, and it wasn't until the summer of 2009 that I really saw that. I had needed to write that dark version, but the original spirit had long since died (RIP in the year 2001, I think). The original, old school version certainly had its dark moments, but it also had a kind of innocence to it, and it was playful, full of heart, with some humorous scenes. I didn't take it so darned seriously and had so much fun with it. I wanted that back. After a few not-so-great receptions of that latest dark version from about three different people, I reopened (for the first time in maybe 10 years), my old school version of this novel. I read it from beginning to end. I laughed, I cried, I loved it. I had missed those characters the way they were. I was so grateful I had kept it on my hard drive all those years. I decided that it needed massive editing, but that that plane needed to be brought in for the landing for the last and final time.
So this long story was an explanation as to what I'm doing for Nanowrimo and how it breaks the rules of what Nanowrimo is supposed to be (writing a fresh novel from scratch). I'm going through all 752 pages (12 pt font, double spaced). I divided 752 by 30 (30 days in November). I decided that that meant I was required to work on and edit 25 pages per day. I am already four days behind. That's okay. I have been enjoying the process more than I can possibly express. I'm back in the saddle as a writer. I am more focused with my writing than I have been in possibly years. My muse loves me again. She brings me flowers. And chocolate.
Most importantly, I feel like my identity as a writer is legit again.
