Saturday, September 13, 2008

Saturday morning

     M and A have gone off on some adventure or other. I slept poorly last night, having watched the coverage of Ike slamming into Galveston, and I woke up and put the TV back on, then promptly fell asleep. I vaguely recall A whispering in my ear, "Mama, did you turn on the TV or was it fairies?" I think I said fairies. Anyway, the house is quiet. M has a car show tomorrow he's preparing for (he has a 1964 Series II Land Rover) and I'm sure he took A to the art supply store to get a gift for a friend whose fifth birthday celebration is this afternoon. I like to think about M and A tooling around town in that musty truck, she in her booster seat beside him, he wearing some kooky old hat. I love them.
     I am in the homestretch of a first chapter (if you consider homestretch to mean barely begun) for novel workshop; I'm due to turn in tomorrow for Wednesday night workshop. My problem is one of mental momentum: everything I see lately somehow will fit perfectly into this book. So, in it goes. Saw a crazy tease for baby footwear on CNN sometime overnight; it's going in. What this means, of course, is that I am still formulating the characters, still deciding what I want to write about, still procrastinating actually writing it. 
     I did not hear back from Dr. J's office so I choose to assume they didn't have a chance to mull over my predicament. In any case, it's unlikely I'll start chemotherapy this coming week, though they've waved me in pretty darn fast in the past. Trying not to worry about it. Trying.
     M and A are home -- A says she found evidence of fairies in the car. Gotta go!

2 comments:

JR's Thumbprints said...

Don't let that mental momentum diminish your word count. Continue writing; there's plenty of time to edit the fat.

E. said...

Yes, JR, you are right! Thanks for the advice.

I'm a little clenched over something I read about a week ago -- that writing the first few sentences, or paragraphs, or pages is, like making choices in life, a process of deselection. In other words, the more I write, the more I lock myself in -- my characters in -- to their fate. It's yet another way of psyching myself out. But when I forget it all and just write, it comes, and all that accumulated "content" I've squirreled away lo these forty-odd years will make it onto the page, if it's meant to. And whatever is not meant for this book I can edit out later, as you say.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and offering encouragement.

E.

 

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