Last ditch attempt

Everything in my life seems to be perpetually falling apart.  I'm not sure if it has always been that way or if it is just since we moved to St. Louis.  Probably the latter.  I recently read through some of my first blog, from the year we spent living in Nicaragua when I was doing my dissertation research, and I realized that I actually used to be a happy person.  What happened?  Hyperemesis.  Finishing my dissertation but then walking away from the thing I'd spent 8 years working towards.  Our Urbana house explosion.  St. Louis.  

But mainly St. Louis.  It is easier to blame this on a place.

For about the first four months we lived here, things were okay.  It was exciting to have a job, and my coworkers were nice.  I no longer spent every minute of the day completely terrified that something would happen to Rob and I would have no way to support my child.  But then we had that house thing happen in Urbana, and everything got really awful for a while.  St. Louis no longer seemed promising.  Nothing seemed promising.  

I began, either consciously or subconsciously, to look for an Exit Strategy.

The form that my grief took was to write a book.  Just do it.  The thing that everybody in my life has spent my entire life telling me to Just Do.

I don't know what I was hoping to accomplish.  I didn't necessarily think of money as being the goal, but it would have been nice if we could have both quit our jobs and picked up and moved to Eugene, OR.  Why Eugene?  Because it is a place (I am told) that is so liberal, Rob and I would be considered "just right of center."  It seems pretty good compared to Missouri.

The book didn't pan out.  Maybe I can write and I just don't have what it takes to succeed the publishing industry.  Or maybe I can't even write.  It's really hard to say.

I'm exhausted.  I just can't put any more energy into it.

A couple of weeks ago, the NGO I was loosely involved with when I did my research in Nicaragua contacted me and asked if I would teach a primatological field course during the winter session this year.  At first I said there was no way.  

But then I took a good look around me and saw how much I don't belong in St. Louis.  I emailed them back and said I'd move heaven and earth to do it.

It would have involved planning and designing the course during the nights and weekends, then maxing out on all my vacation days for the entire year to take off enough time to go down there and teach it.  Rob was going to come with me and bring Will, of course.  I started getting excited for Will to learn Spanish.  To be wild and free and swim in Lake Nicaragua and watch monkeys with me in the forest.

It was only going to be 3 weeks, but maybe that would be enough.  Just enough of an exit to give me the energy to keep on doing this for a little bit more.  Maybe I could get a trumpet for Eduardo and bring it to him.  He wants to go to a university in Rivas and study music.  He wants to start his own mariachi band.

But then the whole thing fell through.  These things happen.  I got the news while I was at work, and I had to close my office door for a while.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if I thought I was going to be able to go to Fuego y Agua with Rob in February.  Oh yes, he's running it again.  But when I tossed out the idea to my coworkers, there was some grimacing.  It would have been much easier to have me gone, even for 3 weeks, over semester break.  Taking a whole week off in February, during the semester, is problematic for everyone.  They put up with it last year for me.  It was kind of a one-shot thing.

And so.

Eduardo isn't getting the money I send him every month.  I'd worked out this deal.  It seemed okay, but that fell through too.  He emailed me and told me the money didn't matter to him.  He'll always think of us as his North American family.  Of me as his Mama Meli.

And meanwhile, I'm still stuck in St. Louis.  Not sure what I'm doing here.

I decided I needed to pull myself together.  To put in one last ditch attempt to stop feeling toxic in my own skin.  

And now is the point at which I actually begin writing about what I intended to when I began this post.

Juice.

Yes.  You read that right.  Juice.

For a really long time, I'd been thinking about getting a juicer and doing a juice fast.  I mean, I'm a vegan, so it's kind of the next step-- right?  I finally took the plunge and did it.  Well, at least I bought the juicer.  It's a nice one.  A Breville Compact that I got refurbished for only $69.  And I bought the fruits and vegetables, a ton of them.  They didn't even all fit in the fridge.

I was so excited.  I just wanted to feel clean and clear-headed.  But what I found out is that I don't actually like juice.  

In particular, I don't like green juice, which is the juice you're supposed to rely on while fasting.  It all goes back to kale.  The first food that made me sick when I had hyperemesis.  I still can't eat it.  One of my main motives for buying the juicer was that I thought I'd be able to consume kale if it were in juice form.  The texture is what bothers me, not the taste so much, or so I thought.

It turns out, it is the taste that bothers me.  And juiced kale tastes about as good as, well, you'd imagine.

Of course you mix it with other things (like celery, cucumbers, apples, etc), but that just makes the other things taste bad.

About 22 hours into the juice fast, I was on the floor writhing in nausea, and I thought, okay, this is not working.  Most people who juice fast probably don't have such strong aversions to kale, and they probably aren't running 5 miles a day in preparation for some as of yet undecided ultra marathon.

So I gave it up.  My last ditch attempt to get my shit together.  I'm not sure where to go from here.

On the plus side, I've gotten Will to drink fun things like carrot-mango-orange juice.  I'd been hoping to sneak some leafy greens in him this way, but the kid knows better than to try anything that contains kale.

I've got no more Exit Strategies up my sleeve.  So, I run.  At some point on this blog I think I said that I run because I need the feeling of pushing myself into a deep, dark, scary place and then finding my way out.  But maybe that's not really why I do it, at least not all the time.  Maybe I run like this because I can't really run away.

Thanks for reading.

Bring it back

When I was 16, I became friends with this guy who was a real creative type (and he still is, so I am told).  He was mainly into music, and that was cool, but he also wrote stories from sometimes.  Once he told me about this dream he had.  I think maybe it was more of a daydream rather than an actual dream he'd had while sleeping, but that didn't really matter to me.  What mattered was that it was nice story; in fact, I didn't even know that guys ever thought about things so nice.  I decided I would write it down for him.  Because writing was what I did.   It took me several days.  I filled in some gaps and embellished a few things here and there, and I even added a couple characters to smooth the whole thing out.  When I was finished, I gave it to him-- under the strict mandate that he show it to no one.

He grinned.  And what did he do?  He showed it to his dad.  Yes, his dad.  I was mortified.  I could have killed him.  His father was some kind of literary aficionado.  I wouldn't have shown his dad my best work, much less this. It was little more than a fairly tale.  And it wasn't even my own.

But his dad liked it.  He called me on the phone-- yes, his father called me-- to discuss my writing.  I couldn't even talk, I was so embarrassed.  And the next day, my friend (if he could so be called) returned the manuscript to me.  His dad had written all over it in pencil.  Underlining certain sentences.  Commenting here and there.  But the thing that has stayed with me all these years was what he wrote at the very top of the first page:  "The world must hear this voice."

 *****

Writing was always the thing I did.  It was my way in, my way out, my way through.  Maybe I thought of it as my ace in the hole.  It never occurred to me to try to make it into a career, it was more like a hobby or something that I would do "someday" if I ever go the chance--or maybe--if I was left with nothing else I could do.

People always told me I was good at it.  My high school friend's father, for example.  My relatives and in-laws.  My dissertation advisor.  Random strangers.  My boss at work.

And I believed them.

But the thing is, when I first started to really do this and venture into the world of publishing, the first thing I found out was that they were all wrong.  Or if they weren't wrong, at least, it didn't matter whether I was good at it or not.

I saw recently that there are 32 million publications out there right now in the US alone, and that doesn't even consider many works that have been self-published.  You've got to have something other than good because even good gets washed out with odds like that.

It's depressing.

I mean, I always knew "getting your book published" was hard, but I've done lots of hard things.  Like survive hyperemesis and give birth without pain medication and run 12 marathons and write a dissertation and spend a year living in the jungle with howler monkeys.  This is different.  It takes something I just don't have.  I'm not quite sure what it is.  And when I saw it face to face, I didn't even want it.

It's taken me a long time to come to terms with this--the idea that I'm not actually good at the thing everybody has been telling me I'm good at since the time I could hold a pencil.  And even if I am good at it, it's not enough.  What it means is, I've got no ace in the hole.  I've got no way out.

I spent a lot of time back in April in a dark room, lying in bed, dealing with this.  In fact, I'm still there some of the time.

So I guess I haven't come to terms with it.  But what I did come to was a conclusion.

I like to write.  I've always done it.  I don't write for a market, I don't have a platform or even a genre.  When I spoke with a literary agent last April, and she asked me who my target audience was, the only person I could possibly think of in the entire world who might like to read this book (other than myself) was my BFF of nearly a quarter of a century, Amy MeyPfan.

And so after a long, long time of intermittently lying in the dark listening to songs the Indigo Girls wrote when one or both of them was going through a break up, what I decided was this:

I'm going to write books for Amy to read.

I felt better for the first time in a long time.

Who cares if New York never gives my stuff the time of day?  I'm writing books for Amy.

So I did.  I brought it back.  I sat down, and I wrote.  And in two months' time, I had a whole 'nother book done.  I just sent it to her earlier this week.  It probably sucks.  I don't know.  Who cares.  But it felt good just to do it, and if I ever really am going to get better at this, I think that's exactly what I need to do.  Learn how to write.  

Amy made her own announcement this week--one that I am overjoyed to share.  She's decided to put pen to paper as well, reviving her lifelong dream to become a writer (actually, she is already a writer), and I've got to say, I can't wait to read anything and everything she writes.  We're both grown up now and with kids, so we don't have the time to talk on the phone or walk through the neighborhood endlessly plotting and coming up with characters.  But now that she's in it, I'm overjoyed, because it makes me feel like I'm not quite so alone.

Thanks for reading.

Pitch

When I was in the 5th or 6th grade, I checked out a book from the school library about an American ballerina (whose name I do not remember).  What I do remember from the book (aside from its puke-yellow binding) was that the ballerina went through a lot of trials and tribulations before she made it.  I think she tried to be an actress for a while before her ballet career took off, and during her teen years, she went to a lot of casting auditions.  She would perform pieces that she wrote herself.  Usually they were melodramatic monologues from the point of view of an a abused and misguided teenager who somehow found herself alone and pregnant, and she would stumble across the stage bemoaning her sorry state and wondering why it felt like she had rabbits jumping up and down in her stomach.

The casting directors would invariably laugh at these performances, but sometimes they would ask her to give a repeat.  They'd even call in additional people to watch.  She'd get her hopes up, thinking that surely they must regard her as a talented actress if they wanted to see her perform again.

But she never got the part.  They weren't asking her to perform again because they were impressed.  They were calling additional people over to laugh at her-- at this ridiculous girl who didn't even fully understand how someone got pregnant, but had written a monologue about it anyway.

This.  This is my greatest fear with The Novel.  That I would parade it out there, and end up looking like a teenager talking about rabbits in her stomach.

And it feels like this is exactly what happened.

 

I went to a writer's conference last weekend, and I guess it was supposed to energize me and reinvigorate me, but instead it made me want to lie in the dark for days on end in a catatonic state.

Please, this is not a rant against the New York publishing industry.  I remain ambivalent towards the whole thing.  This is just the way it is.

To get your book "traditionally" published, you have to have an agent.  Once an agent agrees to rep you, he/she sends your manuscript to various publishing houses and hopes to get lucky.  To get an agent you have to "query" them.  A query is essentially like the thing you would read on the back cover of the book.  It is not a synopsis and doesn't reveal the ending, it is just supposed to "hook" someone into wanting to read your book.

Here are some statistics I gathered from the web: the average agent receives approximately 5,000 queries a year and agrees to represent 4 of them.  Yes.  4.

Of those 4, I'm not sure how many actually make it to publication.

With odds like that, I feel like I might as well go back to academia.  There, at least, you only have to contend with about 200 applicants per position.

In my next life, I am going to choose an easy career.

At any rate, I "pitched" my novel to an agent at the conference.  She was really nice.  I chose her specifically because I had researched her and thought she might be interested in my kind of thing.  She reps YA (young adult), which is what I thought my book was.  But at the conference, I quickly found out that I was wrong.

The problem is that the main character of my book grows up throughout the course of the story, and this is not done in YA lit.  I guess I should have known this.  I mean, what you are supposed to do when you're writing a novel is read every book that has ever been published in that genre and write something that is exactly the same except with a new and exciting twist.  Agents and publishers like to call this "doing your homework."

I really, really hate that phrase.

Now, I have read a few YA titles (a full-time job and child-rearing and writing the g*ddamn novel definitely do cut in to my spare time), mainly those suggested by my BFF (a literary expert), and of course I noticed that the main characters do not grow up throughout the course of the book, but I guess I didn't connect that it was forbidden.

Nobody was mean to me at the conference and in truth, nobody laughed at me or called over a group of people to watch me repeat my rabbit-in-belly performance.  The agent I spoke with was actually helpful and gave me some suggestions (unfortunately, none of which seem tenable to me) to make this book into a YA fiction.

I think the pivotal moment came when she asked me, "Who do you see as the market for this book?"  And I stumbled, "Well, young adults of course."  But as I said that, I knew I was lying.  Or at the very least, wrong.  The agent was right, the industry is right.  A young adult (i.e., 16 year old) really isn't going to want to read about a character who grows up and faces the world of getting a job and paying bills, etc., even if she does end up having to come back and face the mess she left behind when she was 16.  An an adult isn't going to want to wade through the first half of the novel-- 40,000 words of a teenager making horrible life decisions that influence the person she becomes.

Sorry I'm being vague about the plot.

So as I sat there in the pitch session, it came crashing down on me that I have spent 15 months writing a novel that has no genre (it is neither YA nor adult fiction) and has no "market" or "target audience."  I am, quite possibly, the only person I can think of who might actually want to read this book.

It was a very sobering thought, once I saw it for what it was.

I came home and lay down in the dark for a long time, trying to figure out how I am going to get over this.

There are mortal flaws with the book as-is.  In the many long months I've spent trying to revise it, I really cut down on the second half, when the main character is an adult (so that it would seem more like YA fiction), and I think that it doesn't even make sense anymore.  I'm essentially left with nothing, after 15 months of pouring myself into it.  It's embarrassing.  Honestly, I'm ashamed.

I feel very much that the best thing for me to do now is just move on.  I cannot put any more effort into this genre-less, unmarketable book without it killing me.  Unless it already has.

If I would really put myself through the ordeal of moving forward with this, I need to figure out what genre it is and how to retro-fit it into that.  But once you get out of YA, the world of fiction seems to become very murky.  I honestly don't know the difference between literary fiction, commercial fiction, genre fiction, contemporary fiction, women's fiction, etc.  The internet tells you 75,000 different things (which is why I think the phrase do your homework is ineffective and even offensive).  I'm beyond the point of being able to evaluate this on my own; I'm too close to the material and I've reworked it too many times.  I feel like I would need to have somebody outside of my own head to read it, but at this point it has become so deconstructed and so utterly horrible that I would be mortified to let anyone look at it as-is.

I guess I just need to take some time to figure out what to do.  Maybe the end result will be that I take up sewing and swear off writing forever.  Until then, here is the official website for the novel that no longer exists.

The Teal Nightmare

A week ago I ran the St. Louis Rock and Roll Marathon.  It was my 11th marathon overall-- my 3rd since Will was born and my first since he stopped nursing.  I trained pretty well for it, considering that I'm also working full time, caring for a small child, writing a novel, creating a new framework of Alouatta ontogeny, folding laundry, scrubbing toilets, and cooking everybody's dinner in all my spare time.

Weather on race was perfect, and other than being chronically sleep deprived, everything was great.  I dressed all in teal, as you can see below.  I don't know why.  I didn't really plan it.  I centered my wardrobe around those shorts, just because they are really comfortable.  It turned out that the race number was teal too, which I didn't even find out until the day before when I picked up my packet.  Before the race I even wore a teal fleece, which was also unplanned.  It is just the oldest fleece I own and the one I would be the least sad to lose if I ended up just throwing it down on the side of the road.  I felt like a veritable teal nightmare.

Rob's parents visited us that weekend, and they stayed at home with Will.  Rob and I took the metro downtown before dawn, which was nice and also kind of fun.  The train was packed with runners, and I made friends with a nice lady who was running the half.  We arrived downtown by about 6:30 and then stood out there in the semi-cold for an hour waiting for the start.

 

 

 

I ran pretty slow in the first miles, kind of just because I had to.  They did a "wave start" (I was in the 6th corral), which probably helped a lot with the conjestion, but it was still fairly congested.  After the first couple miles went by way too slowly, I got a little panicky and started frantically trying to pick up the pace.  The thing is, it actually felt pretty difficult to run any faster, which should have been a bad sign.  You don't want to feel tired at mile 4 of a marathon.  I ignored it and ran faster.  This is a terrible strategy, I know, but it actually worked for me really well at the Indianapolis Marathon in 2008.  I thought I would be okay.  I ran a couple of 8:15's and then kept it steady at 8:35 for a while.  I thought I could pull off a 3:45 finish.

There were hills.  I didn't worry about them.  I just ran.  About mile 8 I thought, something doesn't feel right.  I'd brought my phone with me and had an "Emergency Playlist" of Amy Ray songs to get me through if something terrible happened.  I never ever ever listen to music when I'm running a marathon, but at mile 8, I turned it on.  I thought, I'll just listen to this for a mile or two and then I'll feel better.

Around mile 9, I saw Rob again.  I smiled and gave him a thumbs up, all the while thinking, why am I giving him a thumbs up?  I feel terrible.  I kept running.  I ate some Clif Shot blocks and took some Endurolytes.  I drank water at every aid station.  The energy replacement drink was "Cytomax," which tasted like Lemon Pledge.  Seriously.  As a public service announcement to race directors: Just do Gatorade.  Always.  I guess it is probably more complicated, involving things like sponsorship and money and whatnot, but Cytomax and Melissa did not mix.  I know, I know.  I should have realized Cytomax was the energy drink at this marathon and gone out and found somewhere to buy it so that I could get used to running with it.  But seriously, I just could not deal with that.  Too many loads of laundry to fold, too many crock pots of chili to make.  I can buy Gatorade at Schucks, so that is what I train with.  During the marathon, I got horrible stomach cramps, so I stopped taking any Cytomax.  I thought, I've got my Clif Shot blocks and Endurolytes... I'll be okay."

There were more hills.  There was a big hill at mile 14.  I'd been running 8:35's but I dropped to over 9:00.  The 3:50 pace group passed me.  I remained convinced that their pace leader was running way too fast and they were ahead of schedule.  I picked up my pace again but felt completely dead and I still couldn't catch them.  I then convinced myself that it was actually the 3:40 pace group that had passed me.  (It wasn't).

I felt more and more terrible.  I took an orange slice from somebody in the crowd.  It tasted good, but I felt no better.  I didn't understand why I just had no energy... I'd eaten a whole pack of Shot Blocks by this point (200 calories)-- which is more than I've eaten during some entire marathons.  I wasn't drinking electrolytes, but I had taken a couple of Endurolytes, which I thought would be equivalent.

At mile 16, I saw Rob again.  I'd been listening to Beauty Queen Sister for a while on repeat by this point, completely ignoring all the cover bands out there on the course who were playing things like Sweet Home Alabama. I must have looked bad.  Rob stayed with me for the next 10 miles, riding off to the side on his Bike Friday.

He said he had a banana and did I want it.  I said yes.  I couldn't even say thank you when he handed it to me.  I took a bite and knew it was a mistake.  It felt kind of like when I threw up kale, except with banana instead.  I'd had enough calories, I didn't think I needed to eat, so why did I feel this way?

There were more hills, and a hairpin turn around a cone in Carondelet Park.  I couldn't handle anything but water at the aid stations, and most of the time I ended up coughing up the water because for some reason my throat wasn't working right.  Around mile 18, they were handing out salt packets and I took one.  I've never done that at a marathon before.  I thought, surely, this will help.

At mile 19, I thought I would call my mom.  I tried to get the voice activation thing working on my phone but for some reason it didn't, and I was too exhausted to mess with it.  I just kept listening to Amy Ray, and I kept looking at Rob on his bike.  I thought, I didn't put Dairy Queen on this playlist.  How could I have forgotten?  It was the song I gave birth to.

There were more hills.

Rob said, "You can finish it in 3:55."  But that was only if I could hold my current pace.

At some point after mile 20, there were a couple guys on the road who cheered for me, and said, "You're doing great, young lady!"

I actually laughed, and I said to Rob, "They think I'm young." **

There was more of a crowd as I got closer to the finish.  During the last couple of miles, I remember a short haired lady along the sideline who looked right at me and cheered and gave me too thumbs up.  I started crying and whispered, "Thank you."

Finally I could see the finish.  I was running exactly 10:00 minute pace, which would put me there at exactly 3:56. I thought, if I can just pick it up a little, even just a tiny bit... I can cross the finish line while it is still in the 3:55's.  Even if it is 3:55:59.  I gave it everything I had.  I gave it to glory.  I crossed the finish line at... exactly 3:56:00.  I have no idea what my "official" chip time is.  I've never bothered to look it up.  I don't really care, I guess.

It was an ugly, ugly, marathon for me.  Not my ugliest by far, but definitely in the top 3 of Melissa's Ugly Marathons.  Afterwards, I was so nauseated I felt like I was having a bout of hyperemesis.  We took the metro home and it was all I could do not to puke.  I was pretty sure that I was Mostly Dead.

We got back home (we have to walk up a big hill to get from the metro station to our house).  I think Will may have been napping, or maybe I got to talk to him for a little while, I honestly can't remember.  I was Mostly Dead.  I had made a crock pot of chili the night before, so that everybody would have something to eat for lunch, but I couldn't really eat it.  I tried to tell myself, I was really sick after Indianapolis last year, but I started feeling better after I actually ate food.  I managed a few bites, but felt even worse.  I got myself upstairs and slept (emesis bowl in hand) for maybe 20 minutes or 2 hours, I can't remember which.  Eventually I realized I was going to live, and I was able to eat again and started feeling better.

I really have no complaints about the Rock and Roll Marathon or the race course or organization, per se.  A marathon is a marathon.  It is going to be hard, it is going to be ugly.  There is really no way around that.  The course was definitely hilly, but how do you have a flat marathon in St. Louis?  You don't.  I thought I would be okay with it, considering that I live here and this is where I do all of my training runs.  Rob pointed out that I run a lot in Forest Park, which is essentially flat.  This could be my problem.  I consider Forest Park to be fairly hilly... at least, with a few gently rolling hills.  I thought, training there would be better than nothing.  I'm not sure it was.  I don't know.  There is a giant hill right by my house, that I have to run up everytime I run.  I thought that counted for something.  I guess not.  I've never survived a hilly marathon very well.

I had to work until 8pm the next day, and that kind of sucked, but not as bad as I'd feared.

I am about 99% certain that I am going to run the Go! St. Louis marathon in April.  The website describes the course as challenging and hilly, so I am probably out of my mind.  But here is my rationale:  I'm not going to do well in a spring marathon, period.  It is just too hard to train in the winter when you've got 2 months of ice on the ground and it gets dark at 4:30pm.  So I'm going to suck it up, use it as a training run to keep myself in shape, and finally (hopefully) get my redemption with my 13th marathon next fall, a year from now.  Maybe then I will have finished my novel and the howler chapter, and we can hire someone to deal with our laundry and crock pots of chili so that I can get more rest.  Maybe it will be easier to travel somewhere and run something flat and fast again.  We'll see.

Thanks for reading.

 

** This references an Arrested Development quote, but I can't find a good website with the line.

Young Adult

A few of you have inquired as to the status of The Novel.  Ugh.  For an update, I must refer you to Amy MeyPfan (a literary genius) who is the only person to have read it.  One of the major things I needed to figure out about the novel was to determine its genre.  Honestly, I had no idea.  Amy provided me with the shock of a lifetime when she informed me that it was "Young Adult."

Seriously.

I had thought there was no way that this book could be Young Adult.  Granted, I was aware that it was about young adults, but these young adults occasionally do bad things, so I had assumed that actual young adults (ie, teenagers) should not be reading it.  Then Amy pointed me to a list of current Young Adult books on the market, and I was all whoa. Life has definitely changed since Are You There God, It's Me Margaret was controversial.  The kinds of trouble that my Young Adults get into seem very, very tame compared to what's out there these days.

It has been very helpful to define this book to a genre, but it has also been problematic.  Mainstream publishers (if I even want to go that route, which is a whole 'nother story, and one that will involve a lot of gratiutous swearing) seem to have a smaller word count limit for Young Adult novels.  For me, this means I would probably have to cut out about 3-1/2 chapters to even get close to this limit.  In addition, a lot of the research I did for this book now seems to be a moot point.  Young adults do not care if I have depicted a realistic scenario of how many days you wait after cutting down the pasture to bail hay.  Young Adults would probably also find the entire second half of the novel to be boring and uninteresting.  I could just cut that whole part out  (that would help with the word count limit), except that then the end wouldn't make any sense.  The reader would be going, "Wait a minute, who's Shannon?" and the book would suck.  Maybe the book sucks anyway, though, I don't know.

If I'm going to move forward with this, I need to make some major structural changes.  Major.  It is amazingly depressing how un-creative the writing process gets when you even begin to consider publishing.  It is like the antithesis of creativity.  It makes me want to scream or throw or burn or break something.

All of this would be a lot easier if I were not working full time, caring for a young child, training for my 11th (or is it 12th?) marathon, grocery shopping, making dinner, cleaning up the house, and writing a howler paper for Mt's edited volume.  I sleep so little that I feel sick all the time.  In fact, I am sick right now.  Something's got to give, you know?

The logical thing would be to stop the presses and abandon the novel.  I should work on the howler paper in all my free time (ha!) so that I am less stressed when the deadline draws near.  Maybe someday when things are more settled down, I could return to my badly-behaving rural teenagers and figure out how to make this novel work.

I should do that, shouldn't I?

There is laundry to fold, lunches to pack, words to rewrite.  And I promised myself I would get more than 5 hours of sleep tonight.

Thanks for reading.

Now what?

 

Well, I finished The Novel.  At least a draft of it.  I mean, there is a lot of editing I need to do, but for the most part it is all there.

Now what?

I really have no idea what to do next.  I know nothing about the publishing industry.  In all honesty, I don't even know if I want it published.  My only thought, all along, was that when I was finished I would send it to Amy to have her read it.  Because she is the only person in the whole world who will be able to tell me if it is okay.  But I haven't even been able to do that yet.

It feels so totally weird to be done with it.  I've been developing this story and these characters since the spring of 2001.  It's not like I've thought about it every day since then, but I have thought about it a lot.  Especially before I would fall asleep at night, I'd play it through my mind over and over again.  Now that it's written, I'm kind of at a loss.  What do I have to think about before I fall asleep?  The things I was trying to avoid thinking about when I started writing this in the first place, I guess.

I am just so exhausted.  I started writing sometime in January, and honestly, every single day and night since then, I have worked on it in any spare moment I've had.  For the most part, it felt like I was losing my mind.  Aside from giving birth, it is the most intense thing I have ever done.  It's not like I ever had any other opportunity in my life to write this, but in a way, I think I was also putting it off all these years because I knew it wasn't going to be easy.  I had to completely enmesh myself in world that was difficult and often horrifying, and the only way I saw to get out of it was to just push myself to finish.

And the end result is... what?  I wasn't qualified to write this thing.  It isn't about me, or really anything that I've ever experienced.  I did a lot of research to try to make it as realistic as possible and to try to really put myself in the shoes of the character whose story I am telling.  But really, I don't know the first thing about any of this stuff.  I could have gotten it all wrong.  When I'm reading it over, I get the feeling that it is mediocre, half-baked, and overly melodramatic.  I have a friend who is a real writer, and I would be horrified at the thought of her ever reading it.  It is not densely symbolic.  It is not artistic or literary.  It may have an overarching message, but I doubt it would do much to make the world a better place.  When all is said and done, it is really just a story about a girl.  Probably not even that good of story.  I could send it to a hundred publishers and it would get rejected.  Or if someone actually did publish it, it would be bound to get a lot of criticism, and I don't think I could handle that.  Seriously, reading or hearing negative comments about this thing that I've sunk so of my life into might just ruin me.  Writing The Novel was time that I could have spent with my son.

So, I don't know what to do.  In one sense, it is a relief to be done.  But in another sense, it is just so disorienting.

Tomorrow, or Friday maybe, I will print it out and send it to Amy.

Thanks for reading.

Stressed

My blogging has definitely taken a hit as a result of The Novel.  In fact, pretty much everything in my life has taken a hit because of The Novel.  To make matters worse, a "colleague" recently invited me to contribute a book chapter to an edited volume he is publishing.  This is an academic publication, totally unrelated to The Novel or my full-time job.  It is a great opportunity for me to sort of keep my foot in the door, but I honestly have no idea when I am supposed to get it done.  Oh, and also I am supposed to somehow collaborate with another researcher, who lives in a different country, who I have never met, and whose data are largely un-similar to mine.

Does this person look stressed?

I am so desperate for a good night's sleep that I walk around half-sobbing sometimes.

I recently used up all of my remaining "comp time" at work to lock myself in my office and have a (an?) hysterical phone conversation with my BFF of the last 22 (!) years.  Words cannot even describe how thankful I am for her.

At this point, I am not sure if The Novel is making my life better or worse.  It does provide a nice distraction from the almost daily messages sent by the universe to remind me that moving to Saint Louis was the worst idea I ever had.  But the thought has recently occurred to me that maybe... just maybe... if I was not working on The Novel and instead forced myself to go out and explore this god-forsaken city, I would hate it less.  I don't know, though.  Every time I consider going somewhere, then I look at the news and see that there have been 60 jillion auto fatalities that day, and I decide I'm just going to stay at home instead.  And write.

I'm in the midst of Chapter 13, going on 78,000 words.  Getting sort of close to the end.  And then what?

This is probably stress induced craziness, but here, I'm going to for the first time ever provide an excerpt of The Novel for you to read:

 

 

“It’ll be okay,” she said, and she peeled out onto the hard road.

 

 

How I'm dealing with it

Just so you know, it has been about a month since Will nursed, so I guess we are done with that.  We made it almost to 19 months.

He was having a really rough couple of days during that time, when 2 of his canines were coming in.  Normally when he is in that kind of frantic mode, he nurses and then he feels better.  He was kneeling on my lap, screaming and pummeling me with his fists, so I offered to let him nurse.  He looked at me, kind of perplexed, covered me over with my shirt and patted me very nicely.  Then he climbed off my lap and got a book and came tearing back over to me so that I could read it to him.  And that was that.  He hasn't nursed since.

In some ways it's nice, I guess.  I have more time to clean up the kitchen after dinner now that he's not nursing.  And Rob can put him to bed while I'm folding laundry or something.  Now that I think about it, I just want to curl up and bawl my eyes out.

So the way that I am dealing with it is to not think about it most of the time.  I have thrown myself into the writing of The Novel.  It is so intense; i did not really realize how difficult it would be not only to write this thing, but also to write it while working full time, caring for a small child, and still attempting to run.  It is crazy.  I work on it from about 8:30pm until about midnight or 1am.  Then I'm up by 7 and at work by 8:30 so I can squeeze in another half hour (usually editing what I wrote the previous night) before work.  I do my job until "lunch" and then I close my door for an hour and write.  It is weird.  I worked there for like 6 months without so much as ever taking a 5 minute lunch break.  Rationally I know that I am not paid to work over "lunch," but for some reason it still just didn't seem right for me to take a real actual lunch break.  I am making up for that with gusto.  When I finish the work day, I come home and deal with dinner, childcare, etc, and start working on it again, and thus the whole cycle repeats.

The whole household is mobilized regarding The Novel as well.  Rob got me some really amazing software called Scrivener that is quite possibly the best thing ever.  Seriously.  I wish I had used it while writing my dissertation.  Without Rob, I would have been writing this thing in a Word document like some sort of chump.  He said he did it not just to help me, but also for self preservation.  He assumes that "we" will publish it as an e-book, and Scrivener software allows you do to this with a touch of a button (I keep hoping I don't actually touch that button before it is ready, which bear in mind could be years from now), whereas it would apparently be an infinitely more difficult process to format a Word document for the same thing.  The only drawback to Scrivener is that it doesn't autocorrect typos/spelling errors, but oh well.  The rest of it's wonderfulness more than makes up for that.

Rob also has been a superb source of information for me on many and varied topics.  Well, in Part 1 of The Novel, one of the main characters is a high school boy, so Rob has been giving me a lot of insight into what that is like.  At times this has been quite hilarious. Though I must point out that the guy in the book is nothing like Rob ever was (and I assure you, is nothing like any high school boy I ever knew or had a crush on.  This is fiction).

Last weekend, Rob also took me to go meet with Cousin Don (no relation), who happened to be in town.  Cousin Don is another information source for me; wouldn't you like to know what I asked him.  At any rate, this was a completely altruistic act on Rob's part: he knew that if he did not arrange for the meeting between me and Don, then drive me over there (I would never have found it on my own, plus I am still terrified to drive anywhere in Saint Louis besides the grocery store), and entertain Will while Don and I talked, it never would have happened.  I told him thanks for doing that, and he smiled and nodded, but I don't think he is aware of how much I appreciate it and how much it means to me.  He must really believe in me, and in The Novel, to go to so much trouble.

So I am beginning to feel like the stakes are high.  I am putting in an extraordinary amount of effort on this.  I have told people I am writing it, mainly so that I can get information from them.  And the people I have told about it want to read it.  Are you kidding me? No way.  No one who knows me or is related to me is ever allowed to read it.  The subject matter is a little bit... how can I put this?  I don't even know.  I'm not sure if it is even suitable for Rob to read.

Since it is doubtful that I would ever actually publish it or allow anyone to read it, I sometimes wonder why on earth I am doing this.  But ask Amy or Jolyne or anybody I was friends with while growing up and they will tell you, this is how I deal with things.  I write.  I just couldn't do this the whole time that grad school was sucking the life out of me.  But now that I am not clamped by the iron fist of grad school, It is easier in many ways to pour myself into The Novel rather than deal with the reality of the financial crisis we recently suffered, or the fact that I have weaned my only child, or that I still sometimes wonder if I should have fought harder for Eduardo, or that I occasionally question the wisdom of irrevocably taking myself off the tenure track.

I promise to go to bed before 1am tonight.

Thanks for reading.