A writing routine I’d been doing pretty well with crashed and burned last week. For a couple weeks, I’d been hiding out in a library near work during my lunch hour to pound out or edit a few pages of my book. It wasn’t much, but enough to get me back into the story, with a clear direction of what I would work on during the weekend.
Last Saturday night, I dreamed that I had a baby — a beautiful baby boy, much like the one I had in real life nearly thirty years ago. But there were these people, there must have been five or six faceless beings, shadowed in dark hoods. They snatched my baby out of my arms and threw me out the door.
My first day of AWP was exhausting! My two morning panels were excellent – one on writing personal essays in the age of the internet and the second on turning adversity into art. After that it was all tripe. My friend and I didn’t stay for the keynote speaker as that event didn’t start until 8:30 PM and ran until 10:00. Who planned this? Are they completely and utterly mad? Do they not know that I go to bed by 9:00?
I was working on my book this weekend and was in a section where I needed to remember how I thought and behaved when I was in my twenties. I flipped through some papers and journals (yes, I’ve been writing down my thoughts for that frickin’ long!) and ran across something I wrote on February 9, 1982.
Ah yes, drought… I survived February. But this papery-thinness is how it left me.
I dream of the day I wake up and words pour freely out of my head, I suddenly grasp depth of field and know how to perfectly operate all the settings on my camera, and I ride my bike effortlessly up a hill of slippery snow and zig zag through trees without holding my breath.
