March 09, 2006

The Book That Never Will Be

The good news: Clara Jane's non-napping daycare delimma has been solved. Today, the director proposed that we move Clara Jane to the next level. Even though she'll be 6 months younger than the youngest kid in the next class, they think she's ready. A part of the problem seems to be that she's getting bored with her current class. So, not only is the problem solved, but I get to have that "heh - my kid's skipping a grade" gloatfest.

The bad news: This writing business? Sucks. Shall we replay the past four weeks? On Feb. 16, I was writing crap that wasn't fit to decorate a roll of Charmin, so I called it quits. The next week I couldn't get my shit together. Last week, I was too busy watching my stomach lining exit my body to write. And then there's today.

I got off to a great start with the news of Clara Jane's class advancement. I'd been concerned that I was going to bump heads with the director, which would have me in a non-writing tizz all day. Once I knew that fear would go unfulfilled, I figured I was in for a great writing day.

Here's the problem, though. I don't know how to shut my mouth. I've got this great coffeehouse I love, but so do a lot of other people. Most Thursdays, I know at least half the people there at any given time. You know verbose I am? Well, I'm like that in person, too. A motor mouth, as I have been called by my family since I was, well, fetal, I think. So, Thomas stops by the table, and we chat for a few minutes. Christine comes by, and we gab for a bit. Then Thomas' 4-year-son stops by to draw pictures with me and talk about his new baby sister. Oh, and there's that guy I met two weeks ago, when I was spying on his laptop screen and gave him a job lead similar to the monster.com ad he was reading. And hey! There's Jane! I'll just smile and wave. Or, we can chat for a bit. Hey there, look at the time. We've been talking for three and a half hours. I've written less than two pages, and I've essentially paid for a day of daycare so I can run my mouth for hours without being hindered by my child.

The sick feeling hit my gut around 1:45 this afternoon, when I realized I had written less than two pages in the four hours I'd been there. If I'm not running my mouth, I can usually knock out 12-15 pages in that amount of time. What the fuck am I doing? If I was working a "real" job and I spent the entire day running my mouth and doing 11% of the work I know I'm capable of doing, I'd be in serious trouble. Doing that four weeks in a row, and I would fire my own sorry ass.

I've come to a frightening realization over the past week and a half, and today drove it home: although I fancy myself a free spirit who doesn't care what others think, I somehow spend a stupid amount of time and energy trying to please others via conversation. Being the social butterfly to every semi-familiar face when I know I should be working. Taking time away from my family and myself so I can pounce on emails or the phone, answering whenever anyone beckons, taking care of whatever the mailer or caller needs, taking care of them before I take care of myself. And for what? So I can wind up feeling used, neglected, and completely strung out, all because I make myself entirely too available.

Two weeks ago today, I talked so much that, by 11 PM, I literally had no voice left. I could muster a slight croak, and that was it. I chit-chatted with one of Clara Jane's teachers for 15 minutes when I dropped her off. Gabbed with everyone at the coffeehouse. Called my mom. Called B. Called my mom again. Butted in to give a job lead to that guy at the coffeehouse, and wound up visiting off an on for a few hours. Talked to Clara Jane's other teacher for 15 minutes when I picked her up. Went to dinner with Angela. Came home and returned a call to my neighbor, which drug on for over two hours.

I talked until I felt like my throat was bloody and I don't remember a goddamn thing I said. I doubt if anyone else does, either. I'm starting to think that the only way for me to find my real voice, and really use it, is for me to snip my fucking vocal cords.

So, I've spent my evening trying to figure out why I do this to myself, why I'm sabotaging my writing, particularly, in favor of running my fucking mouth. I don't have any definitive answers, just more tidbits that make me so angry and disappointed in myself.

When I was a kid, I loved being alone. My favorite thing in the world was to hole up in my room with my books, records and typewriter. I did two things in that room: I created, and I absorbed. I was voracious with my music and books, loving nothing more than getting lost in the worlds they created, then working to create my own worlds. I started writing my own novel when I was in fifth grade, and I made a surprising amount of progress.

But being a 10-year-old hermit is frowned upon, and I was highly encouraged to be social. I understand this, and I am thankful that my parents didn't allow me to turn into that pasty kid who doesn't know how to interact with the other humans. But I think I overdid it. I went too far in the other direction, allowed myself to become too gregarious. I've always loved the attention I've gotten from my personality, people calling me things like vivacious, sparkly, bright, friendly. Who wouldn't love being called those things. But the thing is, by going too far into this social realm, I inadvertantly created a world I don't think I belong in. A world where I don't know how to say no. Don't know how to balance my need to take care of myself, and my need to take care of everyone else.

It's a sick feeling, realizing that I've let my need for attention, and my need to be noticed, stomp the fuck out of the introverted person I naturally was. Now, I want both - the attention, the love, the friends, but also the solitude and the company of myself. I don't know how to balance the two, to the point where I feel like I've completely forgotten how to make that connection with myself. I'm too busy looking around the room to make sure I'm not snubbing anyone, only to realize that I'm snubbing myself.

I've let this need to please come before my husband and my child. I've let it come between me and my writing. I've given my ability to make people happy the power to make me miserable. Or maybe I'm using it as a buffer between myself and fulfillment. It's a cushy little pillow that protects me from the intensity of success and the power of the incredible love of my family. If I feel the greatness of the love and the success, I won't be able to stand it if I lose them. So instead, I forge these passing little bonds, things to distract me from what's really important, feeding on people telling me how generous I am, how they can't thank me enough as they take what I offer, leaving me wondering where's my share, too stupid to understand that I willingly gave it away.

This must change, and it must change now.

Posted by Robin at 05:32 PM | Comments (13)

February 23, 2006

Is Someone Trying to Tell Me Something?

Why yes, like last week, I'm blogging when I'm supposed to be at the coffeehouse, working on the book. Like last week, I'm still under the weather, although not so bad that I can justify a sick day. Besides, Clara Jane and I have been cooped up since Sunday. It's time to be out of the house and among the other humans.

I dropped her off at daycare, then started to the coffeehouse, anxious and happy to get back to work. But, oh, that's not what the universe wants. Oh no. As I made the turn to the coffeehouse, I looked down and noticed that my wedding ring was missing.

As my shit began to freak out, I remembered that I'd taken it off to put lotion on my hands. I was 99.9% sure that I'd simply left the ring on the bathroom vanity, where it's perfectly safe .

I now know for sure that I can be driven stark raving batshit by a mere .1%.

But that's not all. Oh no. I ordered my usual - a large 2% latte and a bagel sandwich with egg, sausage and cheese - took my usual table and started unloading my bag. Damn. I meant to pack pens. I've had a pen die during each writing day two weeks straight, and I knew the one remaining pen was on its last legs. While it didn't up and die on me, it was pretty clear that it would like to take a nap.

With the pen set aside, I ate my breakfast and read the draft I wrote two weeks ago. Complete, utter garbage. If I caught my stupid little dog Murphy eating something that vile, I'd pry it from her jaws. That's how bad it is. We're talking the kind of writing that's best left to a seventh grader's little diary with the flimsy lock. Horrid.

I waffled on what to do next. It's never a good idea for me to try to edit something while I'm actively stewing in contempt for it. Editing in those situations tends to become throwing-the-whole-fucking-book-in-the-trash-ing.

I called B. and whined.

I finished my latte.

I decided to just get over myself already and press on.

I dug out the next pages of the first draft to be edited.

And I dug.

Then I dug some more.

Goddammit, they were here last week. I know they were. I remember them being here last week.

Fuck.

You know, when I was at my worst with the anxiety disorder and panic attacks, I would often let myself get wrapped up in believing things were signs or omens. I sure am glad I'm cured, because between the lost ring, the lack of pens, the shitty writing and the lack of first draft pages that I know where there last week, my brain would have split down the middle if I wasn't.

So I'm home. My ring was on the bathroom sink, just as I thought. I'm printing draft pages and have a pile of pens in front of me to take to my bag, once then next 40 pages of the draft finishing printing. The house hasn't burned. None of the animals are dead. All's well. Well, except for that chapter I read this morning. It still sucks large Peruvian donkeys. Soon I'll be headed back to the coffeehouse. Again. To tackle the next chapter. Again. To bang my head against the large copper decorative espresso machine. Again.

I love my Thursdays so.

Posted by Robin at 10:44 AM | Comments (2)

February 22, 2006

Sore Thumbs

I'm annoyed. Severely annoyed. This is my second attempt at posting today. The first attempt was going so well. It was good, and I'm sure you would have enjoyed it. However, someone left the door to my CPU open. The same someone who, when he built my computer last year, opted for the CPU tower with a snazzy door to prevent little fingers from, say, hitting the power button after I've dashed away from my computer without saving my draft. I think you can figure out what happened this morning without me going any further.

It's a sickening feeling, watching helplessly as the computer uses my hard work as a bedtime snack before going sleepy-bye. It's been over three hours and I'm still catching myself thinking, "But if I could just hit the magic button, my writing would reappear!" While I'm at it, I might as well see if the Mystical Lost Writing Recovery Gnomes are back from the mines with my work.

I'm thinking too much like a writer on this and seeing the metaphoricals. With just a push of a button with a tiny finger, my words can vanish, never to be finished and read. Dude. That's some heavy shit. It's relatively new, too. I'll bet writers 100 years ago didn't live with the gut-wrenching fear that all their hard work could be obliterated in a nanosecond. Sure, their work could be destroyed, but even if it, say, caught fire, at least there might be time to stomp out the flames and salvage something.

Two lessons learned today: 1) someone is never going to learn to close doors, and 2) the "save draft" function in Moveable Type is there for a reason.

Another lesson to be learned by someone: if you're too damn rushed to close the damn door on the computer - especially if you're so damn rushed that you leave the damn CD-ROM open for the cat to use as a springboard - then you're officially too damn rushed to be burning CDs at 5 a.m.

Anyway, what was I saying?

Right. This morning, before Clara Jane woke up (doing much better than yesterday, thanks), I opened Firefox with intensions of blogging about something. I don't even remember what, now. When I open Firefox, I have one of those snazzy customized Google homepages as my start-up. I live and die by the Google homepage. It's got feeds from my Gmail, my friends on Flickr,the local weather, enough news to make my head pop off my shoulders eight times a day, an IP address look-up tool (because I'm keeping my eye on you people, oh yes I am), my daily horoscope, and feeds from NPR Recommended Books, Simply Recipes, and wikiHow. I even get a quote of the day. Today's is: "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." - Pablo Picasso. Sort of fitting, since all traces of the reality of this mornings writing have been removed.

Point is, I'm a slave to my customized Google homepage. Let the world fall down around me! I'll still have a bazillion gigs of constantly-updated information whizzing past my head, oh yeah!

I do enjoy the links I get from wikiHow. Everyday, they toss three random how-to guides into the feed. From these, I have learned how to start my own 501c3 nonprofit organization, grow organic spring vegetables, and dress to conceal a large stomach. The trick, apparently, is to wrap ones head and neck in yards and yards and yards of flouncy orange tulle to draw attention upwards. But one of today's wikiHows gave me pause for concern: How to Tame a Free Spirit.

Now, as someone who often gets lumped into the "free spirit" category, I can't say that I want the general public to have access to this information:

Have you met someone who's fiercely independent, and yearn for their devotion? The key to taming a wild soul is to make him or her feel like they can be freer with you than with anybody else. Here's how to have that free spirit eating out of your hand, willingly and happily.

Surprisingly, the instructions that follow don't include the finer points of clubbing your girl over the head to make it easier to drag her back to the cave by the hank of her hair. Really, the instructions could be renamed "How to Function in a Relationship When You're too Insecure to Properly Deal with the Other Humans". Helpful tips like: don't expect your free-spirited partner to do backflips to meet your needs; don't be a suffocating dickhead; roll with the punches; don't impose rules; actually get to know the person; don't be such a tightass; give the benefit of the doubt; free free set them free, etc etc etc. The whole thing reads like it was written by a 16-year-old boy, which it probably was.

So I'm wondering, why are people threatened by free spirits? Is it because if one's spirit is free, one might have the balls to bail out of a lackluster relationship? Perhaps it has more to do with this fear so many people seem to have of honesty. Us free spirited-types, we have a tendancy to blurt out the damnedest things that might hit a little too close to the bone.

I've been watching a situation unfold over the past few days involving one of my favorite blogs. Word got around her small town about her blog, and she found herself with townfolk on her front porch, printed copies of her blog in hand, looking for explainations. Not that she really had anything to explain. Most of her posts pertained to things going on in her own life, which occasionally poked at her sleepy little town. We have that right, right?

I don't live in St. Louis proper. Because of some weird annexing laws, St. Louis is one of those metro areas that's compromised of many small municipalities with their own governments. My own municipality has a population just over 4000, and even though we're a part of the metro area the small-town mentality rules. I bitched about it last year when I got drug to court for my pretend barking dogs and got a big dose of croneyism.

When I wrote those linked posts, I told the truth as I saw it, knowing good and well that the truth is subjective. I know that if you asked my drunken idiot neighbor, or her friend the prosecutor, or her other friend the councilman, they'd have a version that would include the phrase, "That weird girl with the liberal bumper stickers who's only lived here seven years." It's perspective, nothing more, and I can take it. I have my doubts that they could do the same, though.

This friend of mine, with the people distributing burned CD copies of her blog archives around town, made much less scathing remarks about her town last year, around the same time I was throwing my small-town hissy fit. Now, because she had the audacity to state her point of view, she's had to deal with a shitstorm. I'm wondering - hell, I know - the same thing could happen to me. Not that this will cause me to act any differently. People who get so worked up because someone expressed her truth as she sees it rarely do much damage. I'm sure this blogger will be just fine, once these fools get distracted and move on to their next fixation.

But damn. Some days, it just doesn't pay to be a free spirit, especially if you happen to be an eloquent, well-written free spirit with tongue-in-cheek tendancies.

What was that word I thought I made up a few days ago? Homogenity? Turns out, it's a real word, but spelled homogeneity. It has the same meaning as I intended: the quality or state of being homogeneous. I hate it. I really do. I like sticking out like a sore thumb, and I have a deep, abiding affection for other sore thumbs, and a paranoia towards anyone who deems necessary to poke that thumb, especially under the guise of love and attraction.

I don't have to tell you that we live in a society that gives lip service to being an individual, being unique, but communicates something entirely different in its actions: Oh, we love you and we think your free spirit is just the cutest little thing. But we'd love you more if you were a little less, you know, you. Because you, at your full volume, scare the hell out of us. You think differently, act differently, speak differently and in doing so, your uniqueness might bring our own lackings to light. Now come on ... just settle down. I've got a nice palmful of grain. Don't you want a little bit?

Anyone who wants a free spirit to eat from the palm of his hand probably harbors a fistful of poison.

Posted by Robin at 01:19 PM | Comments (6)

January 14, 2006

All Better

Ahhhh. I needed that.

My evening at the Radisson was top-notch. I'm amazed that I got a room for $40, although when I was checking in, I was afraid that the reason I got the room for $40 was because the place was lousy with frat boys. Some sort of annual meeting thing. Luckily I was stashed into an oddly-shaped little alcove and knew nothing of any betoga'd antics that might have been happening further down the hall, although I did have to dodge a lot of empty pizza boxes and beer cases in the hall this morning.

Considering that this was the view from my bed, I honestly can't complain at all:

Anyway, I'm feeling refreshed. I made some progress on the book and some progress in lying about and snoozing. I even took a brisk early-morning walk to the nearest Starbucks for my morning hit. It was good.

I'm sure many of you realized that my recent ranting had everything to do with things going on in my life that I didn't mention on the blog. I probably didn't make that clear, as I was going out of my way to protect the privacy of the people involved. I do appreciate all the kind words and such people offered, and I really hope my ranting wasn't perceived as whoring for comments. It wasn't. In fact, I seriously considered closing comments with each of those posts. I probably should have but ultimately I'm glad I didn't.

I've been thinking a lot about honesty in writing for the past few days. Actually, that's something I think about a lot, since I'm in the process of editing a book that probably falls into the "memoir" category. But I'm completely obsessed with the unfolding drama surrounding James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. I haven't read the book yet; I've had it on my library waiting list for a few months. Only 98 people in line ahead of me - woo! By the time I read it, we'll probably find out that James Frey is really a Munchkin operated by a man behind a curtain. But I digress.

I've read a lot of memoirs in the past year or so while working on this project. Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, Franz Wisner's Honeymoon with My Brother, Haven Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy, Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone (one of my all-time favorite books), Jeff MacGregor's Sunday Money, Donna Gaines' The Misfit's Manifesto and all of Laurie Notaro's essay collections. Obviously, I'm a little fond of this genre. As a writer, I'm drawn to it because I have a hard time writing fiction because I suck at lying. To me, writing fiction feels like lying. I work too hard to make it believable, so I wind up with cumbersome and sloppy writing that screams, "Damn! She's totally making this shit up."

I'm torn on the James Frey brouhaha. On the one hand, I do think it's bad to market a book as a memoir if a great deal of it is fabricated. Especially right now. I mean, good lord. As a society we are so hungry for stories that are "real". Slap the word "memoir" on something that's fiction, and it's nothing more than cashing in on the current obsession with constructed reality. If you're going to blatantly fictionalize, call it fiction. If the writing's good, it won't be a problem at all. The work will stand on its own.

With the works I listed above, most of them could pass for fiction. It's unrealistic to expect every single part of it to be 100% true. Hell, it's unrealistic to expect even half of it to be 100%. It's not necessarily malicious; time and memory play tricks. And really, the truth usually doesn't make for great reading. It's boring. So much gets omitted.

Even in the lowly blogosphere, there's a hell of a lot of omission. I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear about what time I woke up this morning, what socks I'm wearing, when I went to the bathroom, etc anymore than I want to write about that. But if something particularly interesting had happened - say I woke up at 5 AM and, while staggering to the bathroom, had a momentary panic when I saw the looming shadow of the Gateway Arch in my window, which led me to break into a dead run, causing me to slide across the bathroom tile due to my rather slippy angora socks, smashing my face into the edge of the bathtub and breaking a tooth. That, I think we'd all like to hear about (some people more than others).

I think it's pretty obvious that I'm prone to hyperbole. I enjoy writers who are likewise inclined. It makes for more interesting reading. If I wanted just the facts, I would have stayed in journalism school when I had the chance. But there's a line between hyperbole and dishonesty, too. I'm always amused when people take some of the outlandishness as truth. They tend to get really pissed.

I doubt that I'm alone in this, but I omit a lot of stuff on my blog to protect the privacy and dignity of people in my life. No, really. I do. Just this week, I did that. In all my angst I think a lot of you figured out that it was about more than what I mentioned. Of course it was about more. And, of course, I was well aware that it was about more. I made a conscious decision to not go into details because I didn't want to hurt the other person involved.

I've really struggled with this in writing the book. There are things I would like to include, that would maybe piece the narrative together, but in doing so, I know I'd hurt people I care about. As a writer I have a responsibility to be honest, but I also have a responsibility to the people in my life. I thought that would be a hard line to walk, but it's not. Not at all. My alligence lies with the people I love, even if it means my writing might not be as authentic as it could be.

Posted by Robin at 05:22 PM | Comments (6)

December 05, 2005

Writer's Angst, Pt. II

It doesn't seem like that long ago since we had Heatwave Lockdown, Day 1 and Heatwave Lockdown, Day 2, and yet today we had the cold-weather version. Which, all told, isn't quite as bad. The cold doesn't agitate me the way the heat does. I like being housebound when it's cold, probably because I know that if I do, indeed, need to leave the house, I won't spontaneously combust. With wind chills not rising above 20 degrees today, it seemed like a good day to stay inside.

I had big plans. In the morning Clara "Frosty the Snowman" Jane and I would play and play and play. There would be cocoa! And marshmallows! And fingerpaints! Woo-hoo!

Then I came to my senses and realized that fingerpaints + toddler = big scary mess. And she seemed perfectly content to color, read, and perform a few song-and-dance routines, which was fine. Fun. Good, snuggly fun.

Promptly at 1 PM, when she ended the fun by slamming her finger in a kitchen cabinet, she went down for a nap and slept until I went to her room at 5 PM to check her pulse.

Now, with this gloriously long nap, I could have spent my day doing any myriad of things I complain about not having time to do. I could clean my house. Knit. Or, God forbid, do some writing. Did I do any of these things? Well, a little. No cleaning, but I did tinker with some editing and finished a scarf for one of Clara Jane's daycare teachers.

I'm still struggling with the writing. For everyone who offered encouragement last week, thank you so much. It helped. It really did. I made a chunk of progress on the book during the weekend and was feeling great about the whole thing. But today I started reading what I've written and wound up feeling just as shitty as I did on Thursday.

When I left catering, I had promised myself that I'd spend a chunk of the time that I used to spend catering, working on the book. Tonight being my first non-catering Monday, that means my ass had a date with a damn book. B. practically had to kick me out of the house. My enthusiasm, it was overwhelming. But since he was nice enough to bring his work laptop home for me to use, I could hardly say no.

I headed to a local outpost of the ginormous chain of coffee shops (I think you know which one) and made my first venture into the world of Wi-Fi so I could retrieve my work.

Slight problem: I forgot that this particular coffee chain doesn't offer free Wi-Fi, and I didn't feel like dishing out $10 to spend ten seconds grabbing a file. While I may be a Wi-Fi newbie, I'm not stupid. It took me about two minutes to locate a connection with the local outpost of the ginormous chain of donut shops located across the street. Hey - they were closed and obviously they're not too worried about people stealing their signal, since they didn't have much protecting it.

This is why I'm not a crook. Well, aside from being too ethical and nice. I'm far too stupid to be a crook and would wind up on one of those stupid-criminal specials on Court TV in no time. Case in point:

I was working, and although I wasn't using the Wi-Fi, I had left it connected, mainly for codependent reasons. I was furiously pecking away, and happened to look up to find another patron , about three feet in front of me, watching. We made eye contact and he smiled.

"Are you Wi-Fi-ing it?" he asked.

"Um, yes," I said, and giggled. "Sort of. From across the street. Hehehehehehehehehehehehe."

I wasn't even drinking caffiene, and I was this stupid.

"You naughty, naughty girl!" he admonished, grinning as he started to leave.

Before he walked out the door, he turned to me, winked, and in a loud stage whisper said, "I won't tell on you!".

I immediately disconnected and cried a little for two reasons:

1) I'm going to Wi-Fi Prison.
2) I attract freaks.

I did get some work done, though, which is good. And there's a small chance I might not vomit when I reread it in a few days, but I'm not making any promises.

I got home a few minutes after Clara Jane went to bed. This isn't unusual. She and B. have fairly regular solo anti-Mom nights and she's never had any issues with that. But tonight ... as soon as I walked in she started crying, "Mama! Mama! Maaaaaaaaaaaamaaaaaaaaaa!" I went to her room and she reached for me from her crib. I lifted her out and her crying was replaced with happy chatter before she pointed to the rocking chair and asked me to rock her.

Now, this is highly unusual, as she has had no use for that rocking chair in months. But we rocked. I hadn't even had a chance to remove my coat; she nuzzled into the collar, drooling on the suede as she fell asleep. I placed her in bed and went to find B. to tell him of this unusual turn of events.

"I think she really missed you tonight," he said. "She kept saying 'Mama went bye-bye. Mama went bye-bye.' all night." But the clencher - after her bath, she usually sprints from the bathroom, screaming, "I'm naked! I'm naked!" at the top of her lungs. Tonight, she didn't. Apparently because I wasn't there to yell, "You're naked! You're naked!" back at her.

And thus the flip-flopping continues. I felt terrible about writing on Thursday. By Saturday, I knew it was right. Earlier today, not so sure. This evening at the coffeehouse, it was right. But now ... the mama guilt is just about as thick as the codependence.

In a perfect world, I'll get this book written without getting hauled away by the Wi-Fi Police and without emotionally scarring my daughter or driving a wedge into our relationship. Someday she'll read it and will be able to see that I wrote it not only for myself, but for her. And I hope she thinks that it was worth not having me there to chase her as her bare feet slap the hardwood floors every night. And if she does think that, I hope she can convince me to think the same because right now, I'm not.

Posted by Robin at 10:02 PM | Comments (7)

December 02, 2005

...and on days like today ...

...when I pick up the binder that houses the first 1/3 of my book's rough draft and the first 1/4 of the rewrite, and I realize it weighs a ton, I feel a whole lot better about everything.

Posted by Robin at 03:22 PM | Comments (5)

December 01, 2005

On Days Like Today

You've been warned: there's a huge trainwreck ahead. There was a pity party on the train that got entirely out of hand and caused a huge derailment.

When I was a little girl, I was a total magpie. There was one sure-fire way to break my heart in those days: ask me to be quiet or, worse, utter that horrible, awful "ssssshhhhhhhhhhhh". It would set me into a crying jag of epic proportions every single time, no matter how happy I was as I chattered before being asked to pipe down.

All my life, that's been my biggest fear: feeling like I'm not being listened to or heard. Most of the fights and arguments, the broken relationships in my life have come down to this - if I feel like I'm not being heard, or someone's not listening, I fucking lose my shit.

I'm not even sure where this is going, so bear with me.

Every Thursday Clara Jane spends six hours at daycare while I go to the coffeehouse and write. I'm in the process of taking the first 15 months of my blog, most of which was filled with post-partum depression and anxiety, and I'm editing, rewriting and extending it into a book. When I hit a wall in that process, I shift gears and work on the proposal to sell this book.

Overall, I love my Thursdays. As much as I love my daughter and delight in her verbalness, I love getting a break from it. Six hours where I don't have one ear cocked at all times? Pure bliss. For the most part, I enjoy the writing, too, although it's really hard. In a lot of cases I'm returning to the worst time of my life and reliving it. It's sort of like digging at a deep scar with a blunt object. While it's not the searing pain of digging into a fresh wound, it's a different pain, a dull ache that doesn't go away once the poking stops at 2:45 PM, when it's time to fetch Clara Jane.

As much as I enjoy Thursdays, I despise Thursday afternoons and evenings. Clara Jane never takes enough of a nap at daycare and refuses to sleep when we get home. She's always cranky and whiny. And I am too, quite frankly. Shifting gears from writing to mothering is a lot harder than I expected. While I'm always glad to see her, my mind is never 100% here when we come home. It's still rewriting, editing and second-guessing everything I did during the day.

Since I only get this concentrated writing time once a week (and I missed last week because of the holiday, which is probably what's fueling this diatribe), I spend a lot of my writing time backtracking and trying to remember where I was, what I was doing, and attempting to decipher the caffeine-fueled chicken scratches in the margins of my notebook. I go back and read what I wrote the week before, things that felt so good and right when I wrote them, that inevitably sound stilted and trite a week later. So I rewrite the rewrite, feeling my wheels sink deeper into the mud.

Then there's the noise. I get relative quiet during my writing time, only to come home to a whiny, chatting, singing, babbling toddler who, bless her, never shuts up, just like her mother. Add a couple of noisy dogs who've been alone all day, and it's pure cacophony. The external noise of my life collides with the internal noise of my writing world, and lays me out flat on the floor every single time.

By the time B. got home from work today, I had my head on my desk, crying. The noise was simply too much.

Today I'm asking myself, is it worth it? A few weeks ago there was a comment on my blog along the lines of how blogging is going to put real writers out of business because why will people buy books when they can read it online for free. Very discouraging. But I also think of the first time I met Joe, and he said the opposite: that there will always be a place for books because there will always be a demand for good writing ... or something along those lines. I was too busy making an ass of myself at the time (since that's what I tend to do in Joe's presence) to memorize exactly what he said. Ultimately, I know he's correct, even if I can't remember what he said. I know in my case, the blog is nothing but a rough draft, a sketch of ideas that can be elaborated and polished into something worth the paper its printed on. Something that's worth its tangibility, which is lacking in the blog world.

But on days like today, I seriously question whether I'm capable of that. I work on this project one day a week. I mire myself in it. I dig myself graves with it. And I find myself asking: if a book is written in a coffeehouse in St. Charles, Missouri, by a loud-mouthed girl who never shuts up, will anyone read it?

I write for myself, first and foremost. Down to the magazine columns I've written - I write things I would like to read. That's why I left the magazine last sumemr: I was being asked to write things that I had no interest in, and I can't do that. I won't do that. But there's a limit. If a person dreams of being a doctor, does anyone say, "Practice medicine for yourself. It doesn't matter if anyone gets healed."? Of course not! But it's de rigour to tell writers, "Write for yourself. It doesn't mattter if anyone reads it." I do understand where that comes from, and lord knows I've said it plenty of times myself. But right now, if I'm going to be 100% honest, it does matter. To this girl who, from birth, has demanded to be heard, it matters a lot.

Writing is the only thing I've ever wanted to do with my life. I never had a driving urge to be a wife, a mom, a video producer, a chef, a teacher, a student - any of the other titles I've held in my adult life. I only ever wanted to write. But on days like today, when I'm questioning my abilities, and whether I've got enough to give, can invest enough of myself, I can see that I'm putting myself in danger of experiencing my worst fear: I write the book - the one thing I have always believed with every fiber of my being I was put on this earth to do - I send it into the world (okay, to publishing houses and editors), and ... nothing. It doesn't register. No one listens. "Yeah, Robin, that one thing you have always thought you were put on this earth to do? We don't like it so much. Next!"

That's a great big sssssssssssshhhhh that I'm suddenly not sure I'm willing to risk hearing.

Posted by Robin at 05:26 PM | Comments (13)