All Done Here

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’ve been trying to complete my normal ritual of cleaning the house and getting to bed at my usual time.  I’ve never seen the point of toasting the new year at midnight, when it’s dark and cold.  I enjoy instead getting up at sunrise on New Year’s Day.

However, I’m having a hard time this year because I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.  I’ve achieved none of the goals I set for myself this year.  I didn’t finish any books or screenplays.  I didn’t find a job.  I didn’t lose any weight.  I didn’t finish mourning Hal.  Essentially, I’m no better off this year than I was last year or the year before that.

I don’t have anything to look forward in the New Year.  Instead, I have a list of things I have to endure, a list of things to give up.  I feel like a person who had one year to live and now realizes she wasted most of it.   Only it’s not me that’s dying, it’s my stories and my characters.  I will go back to work next year, assuming I can find a job, and the characters I’ve spent the last year falling in love with will die of neglect.  I don’t have the energy to both work and write.

In any case, this blog is done.  I will take it, along with my first blog, and combine it into a memoir of what my life has been like since my husband died.  Maybe someone will find it instructive.   I’m not sure I did.

Home Stretch

It’s been more than a month since my last post.  Since then I’ve gotten part-time work as a writer, hit a wall with my screenplay, done some work for screen credit and gotten out some older projects with the goal of working on them again.  None of this, however, is what I want to write about today.

In less than a month, I will have been in Denver for a year.  It’s been less productive than I hoped; I don’t have a contest-ready screenplay, a publishable novel or a memoir nicely assembled from my journal entries and blog posts.

I realize now that I had a lot of hard work to do since moving to Colorado, and very little of it had to do with writing.  I’ve been upset that I’m not writing more, writing on a more regular schedule or writing better.  In the meantime, I’ve been ignoring–try to ignore–my grief.  I’ve been going to writers groups instead of grief support groups, paying for writing classes instead of psychotherapy.

Despite having my priorities turned around, it would seem that I got the work done.    If I look at how I spent my days since Hal died, I’ve probably worked a good 40 years a week at grieving and getting my life together.  I even got paid for this work, since I used his life insurance proceeds to meet my expenses while I was doing it.  Seen in this way, my writing has been a good, solid hobby that gave me something to do in my spare time.

And now, as the year is coming to an end, I’m about to lose my job.   It seems to me now that I shouldn’t end this blog on December 4, the first anniversary of my arrival in Colorado, or on December 31, when the calendar year comes to an end.  Instead (unless I change my mind), I’ll wrap up this blog when I get a job that meets my living expenses.

For now, I’ll try to enjoy the holiday season.  It will be my 4th Thanksgiving and Christmas without Hal, but my second Christmas with my sister’s family.  I’ll try to think of myself as on an extended vacation from work.  I’ll write and play with my nieces and nephew.  The job hunt will begin in earnest on January 1, 2011.

 

 

No Cow Today

Yesterday I got up after a good night’s sleep (a rarity) eager to write the next 10 pages or so of my novel.  I had a really good idea, and I was sure it would be brilliant, insightful, poetic, etc.

Then I opened my email program and found a hateful message from someone I’d never met, a lurker on one of my discussion groups who objected to something I posted earlier in the week.

As a result, I wrote nothing yesterday.  Or more accurately, I wrote about 5 drafts to this blog, then erased them.  I finally gave up and spent the evening in front of the TV.

For someone like me, who is struggling with depression and all that goes with it, a single nasty email is devastating.  It as if I were solving one of those word puzzles where you change one letter at a time to get a new word, beginning with “drug” and ending with “brig.”  (Drug, drag, brag, brig)  So my day went something like this:

C.D. didn’t like what I said –> I said the wrong thing. –>  I always say the wrong thing. –>  I never do anything right. –>  No one likes anything that I do. –>  No one likes my writing. –>  No one likes me. –>  I’ll never find anyone to love me.  –>  I’ll never make it as a writer. –>  I’ll never get a job. –>  I’m going to end up broke. –>  I’m going to be a burden to my family. –>  I’m worth more to my family dead than alive. –>  Why don’t I just die and leave my money to my family?

So, thanks for nothing, C.D.  Jerk.

As usual, a night of TV followed by sleep has turned my attitude around a bit, and this morning I sat down with new determination to write.  I imagine myself as a successful author, and C.D., forgetting about the nasty email he sent me yesterday, would one day want to meet me.  I imagine myself telling him to do something that’s anatomically impossible.

It’s got me thinking about the way I do things.  Because I checked my email first thing upon sitting at my desk, I lost an entire day of writing.  If only I’d done the writing first, then checked my email at the end of the day, just before turning on Jeopardy!

Should I isolate myself from the outside world so nothing can ruin my writing day?  Can I do that every day?  Or should I have days where I do my research, set my schedule, go to appointments and keep up with my online contacts and other days when I remove myself from this world and live in the world of my novel?

Trying to figure these things out is tortuous.  The problem with creative work is that no one can tell you exactly how to do it.  There’s no step-by-step process for writing.  As a result, I’m continually frustrated.  Do I write in the mornings or late at night?  Do I take frequent breaks or none?  Do I outline my story or just do what Stephen King does–put my characters in peril and see what happens?  Is it possible to write full time?  Do I write a little every day or a lot a couple of days a week?  Do I edit as I go or just gut it out and get to the end?  When do I do my filing?  What should I be reading while I write?

I hope that by the time I finish this novel, I’ll have figured these things out and my next novel will go faster and easier.  The problem is that this assumes that the rest of my life won’t change significantly, and if nothing is going to change, why am I bothering to write?