The Write Idea

The Write Idea

This is where I've been living lately. A twilight zone where night and day blend into one, where breakfast is a banana, lunch is a cup of craisins, dinner is a smoothie and going to bed means waking up with your head against the computer.

I finished a manuscript of 234 pages this morning at 1:30 am. I felt like I'd squeezed the very end of the toothpaste tube, and there was just no more in there. The last 72 hours I've slept in short bursts of 4-5 hours, dreaming in metaphors, so by the time I burned my file to a disk, the words were swimming around on the screen free form. I just couldn't do the final, final stuff: margins, title font etc. and the last two chapters are really four and a half chapters, not divided up properly. Who cares anyway, I decided.

Dee took it to Kinko's at 5:30 am, and now I've got it, in the flesh. Hard copy. Today I hand it over for editing. It feels like taking my brand-new baby in for open heart surgery. I'll get it back, cut to shreds and bloody with red ink, wondering why its perfect little parts got taken out, and why some artificial bits have been wedged in.

And then I'll have a week to patch it back together, with invisible, dissolving stitches and hope it holds up. Then it's done. My first novel.

Writing a novel is very different from writing history, like I usually do. This book has turned out to be historical fiction because I just don't have it in me to make up stuff that didn't or couldn't have happened. It seems like a slap in the face to folks who actually lived through such times. So I've researched like crazy (I've read 37 books since April on subjects like The American West, Bordellos in the 19th Century, Everyday Life in the 1880's, Cowboy Slang, The Cowboy, Pioneer Women, Children in the Old West, etc.) I feel bad to abandon these good friends to the shelf after we've spent so much quality time together.

I've read fifteen western novels, and watched at least parts of a dozen western movies, just to get the jargon, the vocabulary and the mood. And I've also read eighteen books on how to write a novel, from Paragraph Practice, to Writing a Scene, to The Joy of Writing about Sex, to Revision and Editing, to Writing Emotions, to Creating Memorable Characters, and over a dozen more.

Now I want to write a book about the emotions of writing a book, a step-by-step of how not to write a book, and I want to re-write this book starting from scratch, but knowing everything I've learned from writing it. And I want to somehow serialize Son of a Gun on my blog. How could I do that??

But first I'm celebrating by editing a biography this weekend. I'll be slashing and re-arranging, releasing my tension by painting someone else's pages red.

I suddenly feel like an empty nester. After six months of long, intense days and nights, today I could have slept til noon. But I came sleep-walking back to my tidy desk at 5:30 this morning, just to see what was going on. I had to touch my fingers to the keyboard just to see what I had to say.

Is it weird to feel like this? Sad and lonely because my make-believe friends are moving on?
Now what shall I do with myself? Maybe I'll go back to bed.