Psychosomatic Symptoms

You know the feeling when you finish a really spectacular book and you just can't move on? You're hanging around on the last page, musing over the last few lines, perhaps turning to the mysterious blank pages publishers include and hoping for a secret little bit more. Like when I went to the movies as a teenager and waiting around until the credits had finished rolling rewarded me with an intimate fifteen seconds of something. Good movies don't seem to do that anymore. But that's a story for another day. I've got the book-finishing-psychoses of a rabid reader and a writer working against me. I find myself wishing for more and more and more book and also wondering why it is I think I've got something in me that will make somebody else feel the same way. And what's the point of writing if i haven't? I want to turn pages more than I've ever wanted to turn heads, to facilitate cramped hours in bed ravishing sentences long after bedtime, to fan crushes and crush expectations to finest metaphorical powder.

But I finish something like Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star and I just don't feel like a contender.

Secrets are for Suckers

I'm a writer. I don't believe in privacy. This is mostly true. I'll share just about anything if I think it will make a good story, and as some of my favorite stories are of the dangerous and dirty and little human kind, and my life is so very, very mundane, I'll end up confessing everything eventually. A fictional mouth isn't even always necessary, though sometimes, I need two. But, I am at heart a consummate sharer. I can't not. I remember reading as a girl that Libras are particularly good at keeping secrets, and while that may be true for yours, it's never, ever true for mine.

I am a woman of my time, though, and relish, too, controlling the flow of information from me to you. I want to tell when I'm ready to tell. I want time enough to find the best way to say it. So it's entirely possible I have things from my eighth year I might be crafting still for a reveal in my eightieth. Online and on the page I can spill the beans in as careful a pattern as a like, a mess that arranges itself into a silhouette of shame or regret or artless lust, so much prettier than the snotty, pajama-clad mess that holds the pen or punches ragged-nailed fingers against sticky keys. I think you'll like her better. I know I do.

You know what else I like? Little intimacies. Like my husband's hand on my belly when he imagines I am sleeping, when my arrested breath alerts him to the fact that I am not and it's all the change that either of us can feel in my slowly-growing-strange body. I like writing it. It's like we're all closer together. You and me and baby makes three, thirty, a thousand dreams.

Saturday's Child: Imaginary Lovers

I prefer sexual tension to sex. There's a reason the characters in my novel don't kiss for more than two-hundred and fifty pages, and it isn't because they aren't hot and bothered for each other after a scattering of charged dialogue. One, because it is so much more fun as a writer not to give them the things they want straightaway, and two, as a reader, the payoff is so much sweeter if I've been sucking my own lip for fifteen chapters in hopes they'll get the hell over themselves and shag or snog with the wanton abandon of the young and stupid. Because I've never been (young). I've over thought just about every single thing when it comes to the opposite sex since I was old enough to develop a crush on a playmate in kindergarten over a rousing game of Hi Ho! Cherry-O.

The standard fare just isn't enough to get me hot. It's all bodies; no heart, no brain. Give me Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest or Son of the Shadows, especially, Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen, or of late M.K. Hobson's Native Star. If I've read Dreadnaught Stanton purging himself in blood and desperate clinging to Emily once I've read it twelve times. I don't need or want a love triangle unless it's a reasonable complication (and not something conceived of by editors to drive teenage girls wild; I'm looking at you). And while I want love and my fair share of understated lust, there's got to be more driving the story than the human hyperdrive to procreate.

Some of the best science fiction television programs, especially, do better than throw me a literal bone when it comes to romantic subplot. Farscape had more than Muppets with John Crichton and Aeryn Sun, and Star Trek: Enterprise's third season boasts some of their best writing and more of Trip and T'pol than I thought I'd ever see. Don't get me started on Ten and Rose (and don't watch if you haven't seen the whole of their story).

Suffice to say, I'm a sucker. But you've got to work for it.

On Magic Lamps: You're Doing It Wrong

There are a few things I take very seriously that are very silly. One of them is wishes. When I was a child I used to become visibly irritated by that joke that people always make when genies or other divine and magnificent dream-makers are mentioned, that if given only three wishes their first wish would be for more wishes. Didn't they understand a single thing about the way these mythical figures operated? Didn't they know that they were defeating the entire purpose of being granted only three wishes, and not being in the least little bit clever? It was the principle of the thing that bothered me, that one person felt they should have unlimited access to whatever they could possibly want, forever. In my opinion they just didn't know what it was to want something so bodily that you wouldn't be able to keep yourself from making a desperate request at the first chance.

And also that in fairy tales your ass was just going to get burned for being greedy, and you really ought to know better.

Even now when it comes to things like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake or breaking the wishbone or plucking a rogue eyelash from a cheek and blowing a breath of hope across a finger or thumb, I feel that the language I use to articulate my heart's desire is very important. I can't leave anything to chance. As a student when I took every opportunity to ask to just graduate already, I had to be sure to specify that I graduate on time, with good grades I'd earned, and without having to jump through the hoops of fire I was sure my African American Studies professor kept in his desk. Of late when I wish for things like babies and book deals, I hope explicitly for a healthy body that can produce both, all seven pounds and one-hundred-seventy thousand words.

It's a manic sort of thing, I know. But I'm just covering all my bases.

Touch of Grey

I found my first grey hair. Like a fat-toothed comb my fingers parted hairs until I could pluck it free, be sure it wasn't paint or light or my eyes playing tricks in the sterile fluorescence of the bathroom. But the hair was silvered pale, delicate as thread, and I sealed it reverently in a plastic container to show my husband when he came home. He wasn't as convinced as me, though my evidence of age is very little when compared with his salt and peppering beard. "It looks white."

"Maybe I'll go white instead of grey."

That could be pretty bitchin', to have a few Rogue years between my sorry youth and sure to be sorrier middle age. That's more of a dream, I think, than thinking that one won't sprout in time one hundred.

Before I threw it out I twirled it once, twice, three times around my finger, less than I would have been able to after a recent hair cut. I'm nearing the end of my twenties, but for all I regret at their passing I have more to look forward to, more ahead than I have behind. A writing professor I had as an undergraduate, a man I admired greatly and for shame have yet to read, mused to me that I might have only one really good story in me as a young person, and that perhaps I had already told it. But more would come, later. He was of the opinion that most people were not worth reading until they were in their thirties, even if they'd been writing for years. I didn't balk at the idea at the time and I don't now, either, because I know that I always have more work to do. I can only hope to be given the time to do it.

And with NaNoWriMo but a few days away, the many kicks in the pants I need to keep from squandering my last year as a twenty-something on World of Warcraft.

False Starts

In one of my creative writing workshops, before I gave up on giving a damn, the instructor distributed to us in our first hour together a weighty stapled packet including eleven different first pages of a novel she'd recently sold. Green all over girl that I was, I couldn't fathom how her story could change so much from one beginning to the next. Now, of course, I can only think I'd hang myself after eight. Sometimes I begin writing here without being sure about what I want to say, only that I must say something. That's how I approach my writing some evenings, too, but the gut-gulping feeling that drives me to story tell is so much different than blog talk. I'm not guaranteed a listener in either case, but I've got no one to answer to but myself if I don't.

So I thought I'd share a few false starts to blogs, words dangling like heads from broken necks or legs, conversations I haven't quite decided how to have with you yet. Or with myself.

I didn't work out today but I consumed more than my fair share of carbohydrates. The precious hours between work and the listless dark I spent writing instead, eating French bread and drinking iced Thai coffee, penning a world absent of both (and other luxuries, for all the boys are handsome and the gals daring). I realize I'm really avoiding querying by insisting on getting a start on the second novel, but among the many promises I'm making myself is that I'll only live delusions for a little while.

Like the fact that I'll exercise every day when my quota of responsible things I'm doing as an adult is met utterly by arriving to work on time, eating fruit for breakfast, loading the dishwasher, flossing after I brush. How can I keep up with what I ought to be doing when I'm too busy doing it in halves, when there's the internet? I'm a kid rushing through my homework so I can go outside and play.

Lying in bed listening to Regina Spektor croon about how it's alright, alright, alright (that everyone can't have everything) I find that it is only too appropriate that my expensive pajamas are matched but wrinkled, that one ear bud dangles free so I can hear my husband  brush and floss and bemoan the sore throat I've given him. If I can still delight for so little done right I know I've got growing up to do.

If I plan to write for a living I know I can't ever grow up too much.

Perhaps the moment passed for this one. It's still true.

Returned from Chicago to the most desperate of cats and dishes I should've known to do before I left. My dreams of eating things like Toaster Strudel while I am alone this week were shattered by the fact that they weren't on sale at the grocery store, so I bought bagels and cream cheese and fruit and whole grain, organic fruit loops. Today I consumed half-meals when I was hungry and cleaned the kitchen when I wasn't.

This isn't what it's like to live alone, I know. I have more space than I need for just me and mess leftover for two. It's quiet because I'm afraid of leaving the windows open with nothing between me and suburban hooligans but thin screens, but I can hear birds and buzzing things and distant vehicles like muffled televisions through the walls. I turn on the television when it gets too quiet.

What I wanted to say, I think, was that I'm boring.

To friends on Saturday night I readily admitted my eagerness to turn twenty-nine this year, to be eventually thirty-five and "have my shit together." Whether that will be the case or no, my twenties are not exactly what I would consider to be free-wheelin' years. I've spent most of them "in" things: in college, in debt, in the shit with my family.

The woman I'm made today considers a day spent responsibly a day well spent, a day of domestic comfort among the highest I can claim.

Still true. Still boring.

Though I reached the realization years ago that what I missed most about my family was intrinsically tied to being a child and belonging to a family, the heartache is staggering still, sometimes, especially when I think that I will surely someday want a family of my own.

I remember keenly the use of the word disown in my

Family. The comforts of writing and friends and hot drinks, memories rock candy crunchy. There's as much of me in what I haven't finished as in what I have.

Whiskers

You know how dreams sometimes combine the elements of your day(s) in odd ways? That's how I write poems, when I write poems. Lover, in the bath you grip me like a cat, my domestic airs forgotten as the water meets my hips before my toes are dipped. Shed hairs tickle your lips but you can't hold me down and brush them from your face without risking losing it if I should decide to scratch instead of splash.

Pilgrim's Progress

Met my goal tonight on the second novel and stopped writing with the muse(s) still chattering. It's been a little over a month since I finished edits on Book of Icons (now that you know that it has a name, that makes it legit), and I've received a response from every agent and publisher I queried. I'll say one thing for rejections in this season: they're awful timely. Grieved as I was a few days ago when I received the last one (and those of you unlucky enough to have befriended me on Facebook and suffer live action roleplaying photographs as well as childish rants, forgive me), there was one line in particular from the letter that made me feel something totally inappropriate: triumph. The publisher claimed that they did not feel my novel would be a "commercial success" in the current market. It's a form letter and I'm not taking it (too much) to heart, but I can't help but feel that when I look at the current market, when I discard book after book after book after only three chapters reading, that while of course I'm writing because I want to be read, I'd rather it were for the right reasons, by the right people. If to be commercially successful I've got to scrap whimsy (which isn't to say I believe that I do), I'm not gonna. I joke big time about writing lusty vampire fiction because it seems to me when agents say they want fantasy they don't mean epic, and when they do, they want Robert Jordan. But while there are some gals who are writing urban fantasy in a seriously spectacular way, those aren't the dreams I'm dreaming.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make money, didn't want to make it big. But I can't be something I'm not, can't write what my heart isn't in. And for now, it's this story, this girl who is more than she appears to be and more still. It's spinning folktales fat as spiders that in turn spin themselves, my cob-webbed brain resurrecting all of the things that I love best about living and reading, licking and sticking and pinning them on the page like postage stamps or luna moths. I'm writing for me. For now.

(Hot) Flash: Daddy Played Bass

For this I googled "chambers of the heart." Better title? Maybe. It was after her third miscarriage that she decided to have an affair.

She picked the bass player, not because he was unassuming or sulky the way she imagined most bass players to be, but because he had a beard bolting new-red along his jaw. The color made her think he must be younger than she was, even if she couldn't guess by how much. It was like buying herself a birthday present, choosing him, eyes saddling his frame the way his hips did his guitar.

There wouldn't be any other birthdays to celebrate, besides.

The bar without her husband was like learning to dance again, but discovering she had only one leg, or three. Her lipstick spotted smoke against the glass of Malbec she lifted and pressed against her mouth, pressed and put down again without drinking. The bass player swilled something bottled and microbrewed on stage, his right foot braking against the amplifier pedal. For her the motion was something else, all four chambers of her heart flooded with gasoline, left atrium pumping poison, ventricle sucking off. Her blood moved, the bleeding that should've stopped but hadn't inking her panties in a language she couldn't understand. Her body talked. She didn't listen.

The bass player leapt from the stage at the close of their set and she rose, smoke and light catching in the hollows of her cheeks, her eyes, the places where once she'd had feeling. Her husband would forgive her. She'd already forgiven herself.