…and I would stay up late at night tapping away my latest short story. (No, it didn’t sit on my lap.) High school had to wait for me. Except…it didn’t. And I spent four years playing catch-up. Not my forte…catching-up. But, back to the writing part. I was thirteen years old and an avid reader when one day it occurred to me that I could also write a story. I did. I’m not going to go into that embarrassment in any detail. I wasted hours writing fiction (tap,tap, taptaptaptaptap, tap…I had taken a typing class starting my freshman year with Mrs. LeClerc, who allowed no erasures and demanded we not watch our fingers and insisted we type really, really, fast. And I’m aware of those adverbs, but I need to make a point. Point? I got pretty good at the keyboard.) when I should’ve been doing homework. By my junior year, it became painfully apparent that I was, well…behind. But, seriously, I had given myself a pretty good education in writing. At least, the formal structure of a manuscript. I can only imagine what my poor parents thought I was doing in my bedroom, right next to theirs. For anyone reading this who was born post PC-life, the typewriter was not a quiet machine. The tapping that came from my bedroom at 2 am must’ve driven them crazy. My poor dad worked tower shifts at the local paper mill. God bless him; he must’ve thought I was gonna make a million on my first novel. If I’d just written that vampire story in 1959…
This is going to go somewhere, I promise.
Today I spent a couple of hours with Maya, my agent/manager who patiently went through the techy-stuff, again, and got me back onto this blog and fixed my Facebook for me, then straightened out a few other computer issues for me. I’m not completely stupid, but…well, yeah, I am. I have no patience with this thing (it ain’t a Smith-Corona), and one little mistake, one little finger out to the wrong key, and I’m off into the ether of my own making. So after getting me cleared up, with new passwords and usernames and email crap, we actually spent a few minutes going over my writing. It didn’t take long, because I haven’t been doing much in that department. I’m hung up on Mother, Night, and Water, which is already published as an ebook. It’s not anything as serious as acedia, or blocking, but I’m trying to get back to my new novel again, which I’m pretty invested in with about fifty draft pages in My Documents and on flashdrive, yet MNW keeps pulling me back in. I left that meeting with Maya with more direction. Surprising what happens when someone who’s more distant from the work can set me back on track. I made a commitment to Maya to write this blog tonight. And, sure enough, tonight, as I was finishing up another tour of The Weather Channel as it cycled and recycled through the national weather (how many times did I get the west to east coverage?), Maya texted me. She knows me well, my youngest. And so here I am, in bed, my laptop tapping (quietly) away as Janis sleeps next to me. Keeping my commitment. And I thought…god, if anyone could see me in my underwear, in bed at 7pm, writing a desperate blog entry…and then I thought, shit, I’m still not writing on that novel. Okay…tomorrow morning: New Novel will progress! Wait…after I get that oil change at Bill Dodge at 10 am.
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