And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
I unexpectedly ended up with a week off from work and found myself with some extra time. An emergency that surfaced ended up not being an emergency at all, and as I’d already called off my classes and clients for the week, I decided to look at it as a surprise gift and settled in to have what was essentially a stay-cation.
Well, if you can consider a stay-cation to be when you do some more purging in your home. I cleaned out the coffee table in my living room. The table is actually a bench from the 1950’s, complete with the figure of a nude woman on the front, made out of decorative tacks. Over the years, it became our storage for DVDs and VHS tapes…most of which have not seen the light of day for a long, long time. Many were Michael’s. I took five garbage-bags full of these to Goodwill. What remains – my Columbia House DVD collection of the entire Waltons series, the entire series of Dr. Katz, a VHS collection of the children’s show Today’s Special, which I fell in love with when my kids from my first marriage were little, our Christmas DVDs, and my favorite ever movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, now fit in a clock in my back room, which has shelves in its belly. The coffee table is essentially empty, with just a couple of my big books on clocks and my Nintendo Switch supplies. I also cleaned out the cedar chest at the foot of my bed, in yet another attempt to find my missing jewelry box (nope). And then I tackled the kitchen drawers. I discovered that all those times Olivia and I complained that we couldn’t find any scissors and Michael came home with two or three more, they were all actually there, hiding in an ever increasing number of “junk drawers”. I had two and a half dozen scissors in my drawers. I kept eight (I don’t know why) and piled the rest and all of the other junk into two more big bags of garbage.
I actually have a tool drawer now. And you can SEE the tools.
But in between that and sleeping, I did something else that I haven’t been doing. WRITING. I’ve written every single day this week. Every. Single. Day. I’ve almost hit page 200 of my new novel. And here’s the thing…I returned to my roots as a night-writer.
And oh, it felt soooo good.
My natural body clock has me set as a night owl. When I’m not battling insomnia, and that insomnia has been gone since Michael died and I instead began to battle exhaustion, I am still up until the middle of the night. If I went only by what makes me comfortable, I would be up at night until about three in the morning, and then I would sleep until noon. All of which I did this week.
Night-writing started out of necessity. My three kids from my first marriage were all born within four years. Child 1 and 2, Christopher and Andy, were born 26 months apart. Child 2 and 3, Andy and Katie, were born 13 months apart. So when Katie was born, I had a 3-year old who was just barely potty-trained, a 13-month old who wasn’t walking yet, and a really, really colicky newborn. That first year was…well, let’s put it this way. I’ve pretty much pushed it out of my memory.
But I am phenomenally organized, and so I began to organize my children too. By the time that first year was done, they all willingly went to bed at the same time. 8:00. As soon as I kissed them all goodnight and shut their bedroom doors, I shot down the basement stairs to my little office. I wrote until at least midnight, often later, and then came upstairs, too jazzed to fall asleep. So I’d watch an hour of the Waltons (at that point, on the Family Channel), get my daily cry in, and then pour myself into bed between two and three in the morning. While I couldn’t sleep until noon with three little kids at home, they were really good about playing quietly in their rooms until about 8:00, when I would get them breakfast and take whoever was going to preschool that day to school.
Eventually, though, my life changed. I worked various jobs outside of the house, usually in the evenings so that my then-husband would be home with the kids. When I began to teach, I very quickly got into the groove of teaching in the morning until lunch, and then teaching again from about 4:00 on. That left the afternoon, and I became an afternoon writer.
This has worked for me, though often, when I sit down to write, my head is so full of the manuscripts I just discussed, and the manuscripts I will be discussing later, that it’s hard to stuff myself into my own work. I’ve developed a few tricks to deal with that, the best one to assign a song to whatever book I’m working on. I play the song every day before I write, associating it with the book, and like Pavlov’s dog and the ringing bell, I begin to drool. I also start each writing time by reading out loud what I wrote the day before. This gives me a running start and reminds me of what I intended to do next.
But this week? This week, I cleaned and organized during the day, which helped my mind be at peace. I sat down to write about 4:00…and I kept going as it became dark, then darker, then darkest outside. And I wrote. And wrote. I wrung myself out. And then I wandered downstairs to the television, usually with two cats on my lap and a dog at my feet, and I watched, not the Waltons, but I finished the whole series of Everybody Loves Raymond, and I started watching (again) Night Court. Where I used to cry every night after writing and before bed, now I laughed.
I felt fully back in my skin. I was doing what I love the most – writing – at the time I loved the most – middle of the night, no one awake but me. No distractions. Quiet. My whole focus, my whole mind, lost in the story I was writing. For those that don’t write, this is the time that you stop seeing your own world around you, and you see the world you’ve created.
It’s magical.
When I’m asked into a classroom of kids, anywhere from elementary through high school, I borrow a lesson I learned from John Boy himself on the Waltons. He was encouraging his little sister Elizabeth to write, because she was having trouble with her schoolwork. I took his lesson and expanded it. I had a bag of slips of paper with what appeared to be random words written on them. I’d have kids volunteer to come up, pick a slip out of the bag, and then write their word absolutely anywhere on the board. Words were everywhere!
I’d point them out and say, “Just words, right? Well, look.” Then I took each word and put them in order, forming an intriguing and exciting opening sentence. And the eyes would widen.
“Magic!” I would crow.
“Magic!” the kids would shout back, even the high schoolers.
And then we’d begin to work on their own stories.
Oh, I felt the magic this week. The words which have been scattered throughout my whole being came together and formed sentence after sentence, and I just RIPPED.
And another thing – in my fiction, I do not write about myself. Part of the magic is being able to slip into other lives, other souls, other feelings. But what I will do, from time to time when I find myself personally disturbed, facing something I don’t know how to deal with, is put a character in a similar, but not exactly the same, situation. And then I let my ability to tell stories unwind and watch how my brain gets that character out of the mess.
Then I know I can get out of the mess too.
So it’s probably not surprising for me to say that this book started out as a reaction to Roe vs. Wade being over-ruled. It continued that way for a while.
And then Michael died.
Dealing with grief has entered this novel. Roe Vs. Wade is still there. But Audrey, my main character, has lost her husband of only six years to Covid. And I’m watching as she twists and turns through grief. And I’m throwing out words at random on the page. Then they all come together in sentences. And paragraphs. And pages. And she is finding her way.
I will too.
And when I return to being an afternoon writer next week? I’ll be just fine. The midnight oil is burning bright within me now. I will tap into it at noon instead of midnight.
Magic.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
