I always write my blog when the sun enters a new sign. It’s an easy signal. This month, I had the best intentions to meet this semi-deadline, but then I got busy. Two or three of my authors announced deadlines of their own—“I gotta get this book in print,” one of them said—and then I decided to do some editing of my own work.
I never object to being busy, of course. First, Income Is Useful. (That’s one of my mantras. The other one is Breathing Is Good.) Second, anything I read while I'm working beats daytime TV. Third, editing and writing keep my brain sharp.
I’m keeping up with eight authors, plus one not-for-profit organization. Two memoirs, one of which is very, very long. (The author is 91 years old. He’s had a very interesting life.) A couple nonfiction books, one from an author in Europe whose first language is not English. Two novels. A couple of blogs by authors who write shorter ones than I do and write them more often. The nonprofit’s monthly special report and president’s letter. It’s a perfect mix. Life is good! But all that editing takes time. I charge by the hour. Yeah. Life is good.
And then, thanks to the kindness of my friend Sherry Wachter, who is a book designer and typesetter, I’m working on a long novel (170,000 words) that I first wrote twenty years ago. Sherry is typesetting it for me, and we’ll take it to CreateSpace, and I’m also thinking seriously about selling it as an e-book, too. What all this means is that I’m looking at a learning curve that goes nearly straight up. As my son reminds me, I’m stumbling into the 21 st century as I learn new technology. I’ll also get to learn more about Facebook and Twitter.
My novel, Secret Lives, is about a circle of women who worship the goddess. Most of them are elderly. They’re crones, but none of them know they’re supposed to act old. Other characters in the novel are the daughters, granddaughters, and husbands and boyfriends of some of them, plus a talking cat, a dragon, an ageless Neolithic shaman, the Green Man, a couple of bureaucrats, and the Norns in disguise as dotty old women. The style of the book is magical realism. When I first wrote the novel (on a used IBM Selectric typewriter) in 1990, most of the women lived in Anaheim (I lived in Garden Grove), and most of the action took place in Orange County. One of the things I’ve learned from presenters at the two writers clubs I belong to, however, is that a good way to publicize a book is to build a local audience. I live in Long Beach now, so I moved most of the characters, the retirement residence many of them live in, and much of the action to Long Beach. But I didn’t live in Long Beach in 1989-90, which is when the book is set. Time for some research. I went online and looked at the Rose Park Neighborhood Association website. I asked questions of people I know. I sent an email to a columnist for the Long Beach Press-Telegram named Tim Grobaty. He was kind enough to reply and answer my questions about what Long Beach was like in 1989.
So I’m editing for my various authors and thanking them for being patient. I’m editing all twenty-seven chapters of my novel, too. Two Saturdays ago, I sat down at my computer at 7 a.m. and didn’t get up again (except to go to the bathroom) until about 11:30 p.m. I even ate here, which I never, ever do because I’m paranoid about spilling stuff in my keyboard. I’m very careful with my keyboards. A few years ago, Heisenberg threw up on one. You can’t get cat puke out of keyboards. But I digress.
I’m doing all this editing for my authors and myself, and I also had dental appointments and meetings to go to, and … and … and … well, everyone knows what busyness is. When was I gonna write this blog? What was I gonna write about?
Every night for the past two weeks, I’ve gone to bed thinking, Gotta write that blog! Ideas wandered around in my head. I’d start sentences and follow them like I was following pieces of yarn in a great big tangle. Some of them were really good sentences, too. But they all went away. I have trained myself to remember the really good things that come to me in the middle of the night, but none of my hypnogogic musings were good enough to save. Click. Delete. Snooze. Pet the cats, sleep, dream. Sometimes I am editing in my dreams. I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed about writing a blog.
I have no objection to procrastination. I read somewhere that if something is worth doing, it’s as worth doing tomorrow as today. Procrastination is also a good excuse for writer’s block. I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block, but I have certainly been known to procrastinate until I’m just hours before a deadline. Have I been procrastinating about this blog? Using my busyness as an excuse not to write because I just couldn’t think of anything I really wanted to write about because my mind is filled with the action and the characters of my novel? Because it’s really more fun to go to the theater and watch movies from Netflix? Because the cats demand to be petted?
Let’s just call these rhetorical questions and say that I sat down this morning and wrote the blog. More about my work on Secret Lives and what I'm learning next month.