Labors of Love

For most children, the beginning of summer represents a long season of possibilities. Early in June, my thirteen-year old daughter (who writes circles around me) tagged me to a NaNoWriMo Duel. In a nutshell, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every year, in November, would-be novelists from all over the country challenge themselves to craft a novel in a month (50,000 words) and keep track of their progress on the NanoWriMo website.

I spend an awful lot of time worrying whether or not my daughter is "okey-dokey" with life. Her upbringing has never sailed an often navigated course. For those of you who don't know, Gina has two little brothers with autism. She's grown up inside of an often frenetic life that requires a whole lot of giving from her and precious little take. So I not only stop to relish the rare events she asks to "take" a little--I dive in head first.

That my daughter wanted to train for such a monumental event *with* me spoke volumes. She wanted to celebrate her artist within, and she wanted to do so with me. For once, here was a place where I could serve as my daughter's role model. So we spent our summer stealing bits of time a long walk to talk plot, or to sit by the pool allowing our imaginations to run wild. We'd invent obstacles and motivations, and develop dimensional characters designed only to delight ourselves.

On days when walking was not an option, and the boys needs would not allow us one moment to sneak away, we'd have a writing party after Gina's brothers had finally fallen asleep. Some days, we even employed instant messaging to share our thoughts from her upstairs lair to mine downstairs.

If I am to be truly honest, my effort to feed my daughter's muse was not only for her benefit. I needed this time, too. The often bitter advocacy wars related to autism can consume my every waking moment. As a writer, I needed to be challenged, because I'd allowed life obstacles to lock my daughter's favorite part of me away. Instead of working my way out of my quagmire, I stirred myself into a major writing funk. I poured out my writer's angst to anyone who would listen to me (the garden statuary, mostly). I bemoaned my utter inability to craft more than one page of coherent words in a week's time. If I pushed myself to create more, my cold-hearted bitch of a muse left me high and dry.

In short, I was one burned out super-mom. And my daughter saw right through me. I accepted her challenge so that both of us might learn that much of our life's course is based on the choices we make.

We chose November.

As the summer drew to a close, and NaNoWriMo loomed ahead of me, I chained the evil bitch muse to my bedpost and ball gagged her. ( Kinky, yes, but highly effective). Freed from obsessing about creative inspiration and large blocks of free time, I put myself on a word count "stamina building" program. I decided to I extend my writing by a half-page per day, even if that extra half-page meant laying words on paper in fifteen minute chunks. I did this by working on my blogs, writing meaningless dribble, or writing a story to read to my kids (one of them which I actually LOVE).

Yesterday I met my pre-Nanowrimo goal. I wrote twenty typed, double-spaced pages in one day, on the same story. I even solved a plot problem in the process. I laughed a lot. I had scads of fun. My daughter and I crawled into the center of my bed last night, and she hooted and howled as I read my work to her.

"Mommy, I want to be like you when I'm grown. You're so cool."

Here's to November, baby girl.

A Big,Fat Piece of Cold, Hard Truth

I have a confession to make.

Sometimes, I am downright mean to people who whine that their lives won't let them write. I get tired of hearing the various conspiratorial life obstacles would-be writers blame for circumventing their dreams. I probably show such little patience for the blame game because I'm as guilty of leaning on those obstacles as the next aspiring writer.

One day my husband asked how far along I was in completing a painful and awfully close to home story that's haunted me for a while. While the story is ultimately hopeful, its progression begins in tragedy. The story centers around two parents, who love each other and love their severely autistic child, but come drawn into bitter battle over the how far medical science should go to intervene when this disabled child falls into a semi-conscious state. Michael Schiavo had just re-emerged on the news radar, providing another reminder that Willo' the Wisp's (book's title) time was now. I'd already been kicking myself for avoiding returning to the manuscript. So beyond having the plot, synopsis and two agonizing to write chapters sitting on my hard drive, I'd wasted an awful lot of time doing everything imaginable to avoid diving into that story.

"How far have I gotten? How far?," I ranted. "You're gone all the time. I have three kids here, two of them autistic, and one of them in puberty. The school dumps crisis after crisis on me and you want to know my f***ing word count? And did I mention that the last time I actually had a chance to write, you used it up to go to Home Depot? Try doing your job under those conditions."

Then that man my mother told me not to marry said the most vile thing any would be writer ever heard. "If you aren't writing its only because you don't want to."

Thud.

"What a horrible, rotten, low-down thing to say!" I stomped around the house for days, proving exactly how little time I had to spend creating. The flames of my rage drove me like a dervish as I whirled through every room. I cleaned closets, rearranged rooms, boxed up years of outgrown clothing, and saw the bottom of the laundry hamper for the first time since Monica's dress got stained.

What my husband said to me represented a very low blow. It was pretty hard to swallow the fact that someone who is supposed to love me would serve me up a big, fat piece of cold, hard truth. Admitting to myself that the pompous one had made a dead-on observation regarding my stalling tactics just plain hurt. Blaming life for my paucity of writing time allowed me to turn my back on the real truth for years. You see, not writing at all is far easier than to risk falling butt first into failure.

A new book fell into my hands not so long ago. It was a thin paperback, very simply bound. Someone actually thought my nonverbal son might enjoy it. And he did, immensely. We both cried as we read that book together.

The writing was spare in the way of haiku. I'd have enjoyed the work even had I not read the back cover copy. You see, the fact that this author's thoughts ever made it onto paper in the first place is nothing short of miraculous.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was written by a paralyzed, nearly vegetative author from what would soon become his death bed. After a catclysmic neurological event left him paralyzed everywhere but his left eye, he dictated this luminous contribution to literature to an assistant without speaking, signing, or even pointing to a single word. He communicated his artistic vision by blinking a code with his left eye designed to tell an assistant what letter it was that he wanted committed to paper.

Read it.

If you still doubt that your life will never allow you to orchestrate a way to lay words onto paper, then I promise you that you never will.

No more excuses.

Go write.