It’s a Writer’s Life for Me
There I am in the crowd behind Kwame Alexander, at the filming of America’s Next Great Author. photo courtesy of ANGA.
By now, it should be no news to anyone that I’ve taken a self-imposed writing sabbatical. Self-imposed because both L and I decided that I needed it, and self-inflicted because I have turned down jobs that were going to pay me a lot of money to do what I was trained to do. But I keep looking at the pie charts that say we were taught to value money, status, and success, and somehow I keep trying to walk away from all that. I don’t want success if it isn’t on terms that I respect.
It’s fall now, I know it because of the crispy crunch of the leaves underfoot as I walk. Instead of damp swamp, it smells like dry mulch. The sun sets sooner, and the sky is a pastel tapestry at dusk. The other reason I know it’s fall is that there was a dead squirrel on the road. Surrounded by the acorns it was no doubt trying to hoard; one dead squirrel means that more squirrels are out and about and prone to being hit by cars.
From the moment I open my eyes, my mind fast-forwards with all the things I have to do, most of it tending to the needs of others, before getting around to my own needs.
It’s no wonder that the Moderns, myself included, have this bad habit of picking up their phones as soon as they get up, start to scroll and doomscroll and fill their minds with uselessness as a way of delaying facing this low-rent simulation we call life, written with the pretense that our actions on this earth matters, that we are not just minute instances that fall between frames in the film reel of history.
The cats are crying because the house is 64 degrees. Too cold for a cat, but perfect, finally, for me, when I am under three blankets. It’s hard to imagine that we are in the same city that was 96 degrees in the summer, buggy and sticky with the dampness of the earth, the dampness on your skin, the dampness in the air. This morning it was 43 degrees, and a cold blast came through the door when I tried to let the cats out. They both sat there, sniffing the air, tempted by the sounds of the birds and the busy activity of the squirrels, but completely deterred by the thought of cold paw pads and icy noses.
I put on a thin robe, even though I know that the only way to get myself working is to put on ‘real clothes’, my writing uniform of a gray shirt and black maternity pants, or at least my daytime muumuu. But I was angry and the cats were crying and when I looked in the mirror, there were dark circles under my eyes, the likes of which I haven’t seen since I started this self-imposed sabbatical and have been fairly well-rested. Well. The eyebags are back. I make the bed and put on my watch. I drink half the liter of water on my nightstand. I put on my slippers and head to the bathroom to pee. The cats have followed me to the door and one sits there meowing up at me, refusing to step onto the frigid tile floor with his delicate baby feet. I pad over to the thermostat, where I turn it up to 72. I wonder if it takes more energy to heat a house if it hasn’t been running all night. The cats have followed me from the bathroom to the hallway. They feel the immediate relief coming from the vents and stop crying. In the kitchen, both cats crowd around their food bowls, which are still half full, but I put down two fresh cans anyway. I check their litter box and it looks clean. Finally, one jumps up onto the hammock and the other, after a brief snuggle, heads back to the bedroom for their first nap. I open up the house. The blinds in the living room are fairly new, but their operating mechanism is inscrutable to me. There is no string or post; they go up merely by pushing them up, which is both easy and hard at the same time. I brush my teeth and spend an inordinate amount of time looking for a hair tie, since my hair has grown long and we are a thousand miles away from our trusted hair stylist in New York City. I can’t find a single hair tie in this house and I don’t know why. I poop. I stand in the kitchen and decide what to have for breakfast, perhaps the first hard decision of the day. I settle on hot oatmeal with blueberries; the juicy fruit sounds good, maybe combined with a little sweetness of cream and maple syrup. The baby kicks every time I bend over to fetch something from the fridge or use the microwave, a gentle reminder that she is the one I’m really feeding right now.
When I finally sit down, my first goal of the day is always to write, write, write. Get the pages down before the muse goes away. But I am briefly distracted by the news of another COVID wave, a few emails asking me for things, text messages that start me spiraling. The sentences in my head slip away and I am angry at myself for a moment. Angry that I got distracted, angry that the world distracted me, angry at my pregnancy brain which seems to allow the clouds to roll in more often. I breathe, I go put some clothes on, put on my blue light blocking glasses, and get to work.
Writing News:
I’ve had 2 COVID poems (finally) published on Ariel Press; you can sign up for free and read them.
One of my pieces, Free99Fridge, was published on The GOAT POL, a truly awesome site that you should check out anyway. Add to that, they PAID me, so am I a real writer now?
I was selected to be a semi-finalist for the pilot taping of America’s Next Great Author. Spoiler alert, I didn’t win, but I did write a Medium post about it. That’s the picture you see at the top of this email.
In January 2023, I’ll be writing a poem a day for 30 days for Tupelo Press. These poems will be published on their website. More info to come regarding a fundraiser for Tupelo Press.
New posts on Doximity and Baseline Med.
Lastly, I have an agent! Trinity from The Bindery is representing me for my non-fiction work, and hopefully, for any future books I’m going to write. This is super exciting news that I’ve been waiting to share until I was sure. I wrote my proposal over the course of a month and submitted multiple queries, and had about half a dozen agents ask for a full proposal, and I’m so pleased that I signed with Trinity.
I don’t want this to sound like a post where everything is going right, so I wanted to say that for every query response I got, there were probably two agents I didn’t hear back from at all. I obviously didn’t have the winning pitch at America’s Next Great Author, and also, I didn’t win Shtorytime! this year (though I will be posting my story submission on Medium). But this writing thing, as with anything, is a numbers game, so it’s a good thing I’m bean counter. I keep throwing things at the wall to see if they’ll stick. And, eventually, enough of them do.
Lastly, I have revamped my website ONE LAST TIME, and I am super proud of the design this time. Some of the links have yet to be filled out, but all the elements are there, and it is something I am proud for people to see when they Google me. Check it out:
Until next time, always go black tie!
