the sisters

Keats and Osage, embodying mystery, magic, and independence.

what came next

I could ramble on about this part but the kernel of it is this: I dedicated a regular time and place for writing the book.

The first draft of the first novel was written over the course of a year, every Thursday night from 6-9:30 or so, at a little table in a coffee house. At that point in time, I couldn't write at home and I couldn't write in my office. The child energy was too strong at home and the client energy too strong in my office.

This worked very well for that year, when I was writing first draft. When it came time to revise, the noise of the coffee house became too distracting, and I decided to push myself to try out my nice quiet office for the revision work.

When several Thursday afternoon clients finished up therapy processes, instead of putting new clients in I added THAT time to my writing time. Which then meant I had from 1 p.m. until 9:30 or so on Thursdays! It was a full writing "day."

I signed up for a 6-week critique group with Peggy Payne and from there formed my own group of writers who wanted to meet weekly to seriously critique our books and make them better.

I went to a writers' conference and got jazzed about the idea of querying agents.

Etc. Etc. One step at a time, but the essential thing was devoting time to the book - not trying to squeeze it in whenever I could, but making room for it and prioritizing it highly enough that it had a prominent place in my life.

One note: I seemed to have stored up a ton of material during the years I didn't write, so that when I finally started it was like a geyser. It hasn't yet stopped. I have three complete mss now and several more outlined, waiting in the wings for me to get to them. While many writers struggle with writers' block, I seem to struggle with "can't stop." (which is its own problem, especially when one needs to set the ms aside to get some distance and refuel) Point being: we all have our little issues that interfere. It's just a matter of learning what they are and figuring out how to work through them!

Ask away if I have left something out or triggered questions.

how it all started

these quotes from Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival:

The book of the summer was given back to me in the winter. Without the book and the daily act of creation I do not know how I would have gone through that difficult time. With me, everything started from writing. Writing had brought me to England, had sent me away from England; had given me a vision of romance; had nearly broken me with disappointment. Now it was writing, the book, that gave savor, possibility, to each day, and took me on night after night.


I knew the walk by heart, like a piece of music.


Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories.


***


I had typed these in earlier today and after Shara commented on a previous post, I realized what the quotes were in reference to.

All of them do explain, in one way or another, how I came to focus in and start writing seriously.

I had been writing since I was very young - even before I knew how to form letters. I would scribble "pretend" writing, pages of it, with what became later my writing tools of choice - a good blue ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad.

For many many years I wrote stories and vignettes. I called them The Fragments. Everyone who read them said they were pieces of a novel, which I had no ability to even consider at that point in time.

In my late twenties I developed a very vague idea that when I eventually got married and pregnant, I would not only give birth to a child, but to a book. It did not turn out that way -- I had no idea how difficult pregnancy would be for me, and that the last thing I would be able to do was focus on a novel!

Once my son was born, I didn't even think of writing. It wasn't until my second-born, my daughter, was nearing two that something began to shift. I started reading incessantly again, began to attend author readings, and set up a desk and computer. I had an old box with hundreds of pages of notes and writings inside, and I got it out of storage and put it in the same room with the desk and the computer, but high up on a shelf. I wasn't yet ready to open it.

I consider my work in the sand - sandplay therapy with a wonderful man who flew in from California once a month - to be the key that opened the door to writing seriously. It was mid-way the therapy process, which lasted for nearly two years, that I began to make room in my life for the book.

Those Naipaul quotes say it very well.

But there came a time, for me, when not writing simply didn't work anymore. It was a physical sensation, totally visceral and real, that felt like a tremendous pressure inside my head, as though it might blow right off, up through the roof of the house and into the sky.

That's how it started. More later on where it went next.

the view from Friday

In the sky, one of many:



In the barn, Dickens (E. Wickens) peaks out from behind Keats (aka Weats-Anne, aka Wee)



Jungian aside:

The photo I had saved for today would not open. It was titled "The Shadows of Things" and the computer informed me the file was probably corrupt. Maybe time to move on to the Real Thing, versus Shadows. :)

the week got away from me

After leisurely Wednesday passed, the week took off running. Thursdays I see clients and Friday was absorbed with pony club clinic prep. Today we got up at 6 a.m. and I spent the day with my daughter and her pony, watching dressage in one arena and jumping in the other, and helping her some when it was her times to ride.

I am EXHAUSTED.

However, I have to say, watching these girls (and one boy) work so hard on their riding skills while obviously adoring their mounts of various colors, shapes and sizes is a really nice way to spend a day.

Tomorrow it is back to business as usual.