Mid-Willamette Fiction Writers

Current Project:Untitled Intrigue
Status:Chapter Four, kind of


Doesn't this book look like a great Christmas gift for a writer? You can purchase it brand new at Amazon for two bucks (or used for $1.85). No, I have not gone to work for Amazon, but this is all I could find when I went looking for a cartoon of Snoopy at his typewriter.

I've mentioned before that I wrote a book while undergoing Chemotherapy. I plotted a book while my husband was having open heart surgery. During another surgery of his this summer, I finished up a proposal and two weeks ago, while sitting beside my mom's hospital bed, I figured out the synopsis for the current WIP. Last week, while my sister visited my mother in the nursing home for a few hours, I completed the current proposal, basking in the realization that I can write my way through anything.

Sister is a thousand miles away now, the long haul is upon us. Missing one day with my mother is like casting her into a fog bank and yet she forgets I've been to see her before I can even get out of the building. Yesterday we discovered the nursing home had only been giving her pain medication if she asked for it. I'm not sure how they expected a woman in such mental confusion to understand how to request it, I only now know she's been there eight days with a broken pelvis and has had one pain pill. We cleared it up and they immediately began administrating them on a regular basis and lo and behold, she's actually more cogent than she's been in over a week.

My point? I can't write. I've thought about this quite a bit and have finally decided that I could write during the other stresses because everything that could be done was being done. Things were in motion, wheels were turning, the car was speeding down the road with an able driver behind the wheel and I could retreat into my head and make up stories (though, frankly, to me, writing always seems less like making things up than relating what happened to so and so on their way to a HE.)

This time, the car is speeding down the road, but the driver is too short to see over the steering wheel. Or, the driver is drunk. Or, the road is being bombed. Pick a metaphor, it doesn't matter, the point is there is no room for retreat. I have to sit in the passenger seat with my left hand on the wheel, helping to steer, hoping to keep the tires on the road and avoid obstacles. If I'm not paying attention, things will get worse. There's no one else to take care of this matter. And while in this mode, I'm finding it very difficult to find a writing place inside my own head.

Everyone goes through these times when events and circumstances overwhelm them. Experience has taught me that I will eventually find a way to deal with my mother's needs and my own and that even if her situation never improves and turmoil becomes the new rule of the day, I will adapt. But it takes a little time and a little patience to domesticate new troubles and they sure can freeze you in your tracks when they first rear their ugly heads.

We use to end a blog like this, but within the last year or so, we usually tack on a question or two. I don't have any questions for you. My fondest wish for each of you is that you have no idea what I am talking about! However, that seems unlikely. Eli just saw her dh through a trying time, many of us have lost parents, Piper is moving -- life is in constant flux, and I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that the theme of many of my books is that things change, embrace change. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I do, it's just that I know I should.