The Flu Sucks

There's no other way to put it. It just does. There's not much they can give you, you just have to hunker down and ride it out. I have been doing a three week freelance job that threw me from relative isolation in the loft to rush hour subway traffic and a building of people who'd all had, were having, or were on their way to having the vicious flu going around.

Did I get it the one day I didn't wear gloves on the train and forgot to wash my hands? Was it from the coughing co-worker who stayed home the last few days I was in the office? Was if from the hundreds of teachers I was exposed to at a two day educational conference I was videotaping? I will never know anything except that it was inevitable as soon as that door was opened.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend yesterday and today in bed or on the couch recovering, eating soup and drinking hot lemon and honey tea. I swallow glasses of Emergen-C and sleep as much as I can, put as much moisture back in the air as I can while the steam heat sucks it out and leaves me with a persistent low grade sinus headache. I don't feel like writing, my head aches, I feel punch drunk from little flash fevers that drop me into sleep then vanish. I don't want to sit at a computer and stare at a screen.

Then I remember The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and how I resolved after seeing it never to complain about any petty obstacles I may face in writing, compared to total paralysis except for one eye. So this is a warm up. I must be getting better.

The whining has stopped.

The Night Life

I enjoy going out in New York. Sitting with friends talking over food about our lives or the issues of the day -- sex and politics, the parentheses of most New York conversations. We had just left a reading at Bluestocking, a benefit for the Audre Lord Project. One of my friends was a reader, and we all retired afterwards to Pere Pinard on Ludlow to revive him post-performance.

I missed casual conversation when I lived in Los Angeles. There, almost any social exchange seemed like a business transaction, no words wasted that didn't achieve an end or ingratiate you to someone who could help you achieve it. In New York, conversation is its own reward. If any barter's involved, it's in the exchange of ideas. It's not that we don't do business as well, we just get it out of the way up front or at the end so we can enjoy the rest.

Last night, within a few hours we'd covered everything from the candidacy of Barack Obama to whether or not "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was a literary classic or trashy pulp romance. In between, we veered around updates in academia and the arts, in and out of a few near fights, raised and had to lower our volume many times.

I've been reading up on the Harlem Renaissance for the new novel, and the more I take in, the more I see them as we are today, a ring around a table at a bar, drinking, eating and smoking their way into ideas to change the world. Lately, as rents rise and brownstones give way to luxury towers, I've wondered how New York will stay a city of ideas, where those who discard the box will meet and mingle. Today it's down down downtown, below Houston and into an area on the Lower East Side overlooked in the 80s. As the city changes, so will the focus.

The youngest member of our party left to go home the greatest distance, out to Greenpoint. One day, as the Lower East Side continues to grow into midtown, he may find himself living in the heart of the art scene, and we may all have to commute out there to keep hope alive.

Life in a Dream

For the last three weeks they've been demolishing two buildings behind my home, so they can build more luxury condos in Brooklyn, because we have so few. I woke almost every morning at 7:30 or 8 in the morning to the sound of heavy machinery tearing down brick and cinderblock, digging up concrete floors. My cable was ripped out as a wall fell, despite calls to Time-Warner to warn them. I spent four days without internet or cable TV, and found myself floundering.

I read books, I listened to music, but realized that we live in a sea of media distraction that hooks us like a drug. Deprived of it I fell into a kind of dream state, lost in time without my shows to tell me when I was, cut off from e-mail and the web. After a few days I withdrew enough to remember that there had been a time when I'd lived without any of these things, with a 12" Sony and only broadcast channels turned on only when something I REALLY NEEDED TO SEE was on, not just because it was there.

They finished tearing down the wall and Time-Warner finally came out and reconnected me. I turned in my old standard box I was told wouldn't work after February 28th, and when I hooked up my new digital box I got hundreds of options I hadn't had before. I spent a day locked to the screen like a baby to a teat, sucked in the clean new imagery like a man who had recently regained his sight and wanted to see as much as possible in case he lost it again.

In the next few days, I found myself more and more annoyed by the intrusion. The days without seemed like a distant dream once the cable was back up, but once I had it for a while, I found myself returning to my days of deprivation, now seen as freedom. I turned the TV off instead of desperately grazing for something, anything worth more than five minutes of my attention. I listened to music, wrote and read. In writing this I realize I don't need the TV, much as I love pop culture. I tasted a freedom I'd lost and am looking to regain. The writer's strike had stopped me from watching my two soaps, as they were reduced to hollow puppetry and wooden words. Now I see that bad scab writing and months of reality shows and reruns have soured me on my milk, and I seek nutrition elsewhere.

Where better to look than within? I fall back into my new book, I read my research and find that Zora Neale Hurston's collections of folk tales are far more entertaining than syndicated sitcoms and reality shows. I take them and other research and play with the pieces, assembling them into my own entertainment. Like warm water, it envelopes me and I float in a dream of my own making. I remember the name of a band -- "Kill Your Television" -- and suddenly I get it.

After Effects...

After my mother's car was towed away by charity yesterday, I cried. I never made it out to see my friends, I ended up running so late that I stayed home and sat on the couch instead, feeling miserable. It took me a while to figure out why I was weepy over giving away a beat-up rundown old car that was inches away from breaking down. It was because it's my mother's car, and just another thing she was giving away on her way out of life, no matter how near or far away her end may be.

The day had been an emotional ordeal of anger over stupid errors easily avoided. It was only after it was all over I could step back to see what it had really been. Losing the car was just a step closer to losing my mother in my mind, as if she'll vanish the moment she finally gives away all she has. I had to be honest -- my mother is only twenty years older than I am. Watching her decline only inspired fears of my own future fade, without me to take of me when that time comes.

Western society, particularly America, seems to have so little concept of how to deal with the end of life. We warehouse the elderly, kept alive by medical science, but past any useful existence. When my mother moved into the apartment she's in now, she complained that all she saw was "white faces and white hair." I couldn't argue. The people who spend the most time inside the building are the more infirm, and I've seen people in the elevators and dining room who seem barely aware of where they are.

I tell myself that I'm a writer, that my mind exercises daily, that even keeping a blog like this will help stave off early senility. I search for reasons my old age will be different than my mother's, why I will be physically stronger, like my father, or able to take advantage of massive advances I'm expecting genetics and stem cell research to make in the next 20 years before I'm in my 70s. In the meantime, I go to Pilates classes twice a week at the local Y and consume antioxidants like a kid with candy.

I joke too much to be kidding with friends about putting my aging brain into an eighteen-year-old cloned replacement body when I'm 90, to enjoy the fantasy of knowing what I know now with the body and energy of a teenager. At a friend's office Christmas party, several of us got into a conversation about caring for our aging parents, and ran down our options for our own "retirements". My friend had already settled on an overdose of "dolls," like a Jacqueline Susann heroine. I was leaning towards a series of increasingly younger and more disreputable lovers as I aged until one ran me down with my own sports car like Pasolini was, or as she put it, the "'Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone' approach."

None of our witty urban banter masked the real fear of being old and alone, ending up helpless in a body that insults us, mind drained of data like a faulty hard drive, unplugged too soon to ever access again. Writers find it far too easy to fall into fantasies of our fears. As I care for my mother, I remind myself to enjoy the time we have together, while she still knows who I am and can enjoy my company, instead of mourning her now, instead of mourning my own old age.

There's a dance in the old girl yet. My mom has a neighbor across the hall who adores her and ferries her through her days, keeps her mind sharp, as she gets him up and out to activities to amuse her that help him recover from back surgery. In her old age, my mom has found a new relationship that gives her joy she hasn't allowed herself for some time, even if I imagine it is a lot like "50 First Dates" or "The Notebook." I'm learning to look past my fears and fantasies to see the reality -- that my mom's fine, and my sisters and I are here to make sure of that.

As for me, I'm still betting on that clone body, or being a talking brain in a jar. ;)

The Horror, the Horror....

I've been having what I call a "shoot the freak" day, filled with irritating tasks that needed to be done but all went slightly awry, as if the universe had taken aim at me. I had called to donate my mother's car to charity and managed to get a ticket for double-parking it after I returned from having my mother sign the title -- improperly as it turned out, and properly, but one didn't quite make up for the other in the eyes of the tow truck driver. I forgot to give him the key, and then managed to cut my friend's website off at the knees and offline while trying to update it...

And so on and so forth. As the sun sets, I feel better and am on my way for drinks with friends, which should soothe me. It was a day my horoscope told me I would be taking off, and indeed, not one word has been writ until now. I have been wrestling with my writing schedule, and the difficulties of leaping from part time to full time novelist. I keep comparing it to turning a huge massive wheel of a big hand cranked machine that takes a while to get up to speed. Now it is an ordeal, but soon I hope and pray the gears will be running smoothly and it will take only a light hand on the wheel to keep it all in motion.

For the first time in my life I have an opportunity to rebuild how I approach my creative life with relative freedom. Flaubert said "Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." It was written on a piece of paper pinned to William Styron's office door, and it works for me. The more orderly and predictable my mundane tasks become, the less I have to think about where my food comes from, how my clothes get cleaned, what condition my loft is in, and the freer I am to write.

I worry I am losing ground already, running like Alice as fast as I can to stay in place. But in reality I know my landscape, the characters, their desires and the consequences of their desire. The new book is where it needs to be, and as long as I keep wandering the world I am building in my head as I run errands I can see where it needs shoring up or demolition. I've written pages and pages of details on characters and their histories already. I have two months to see where I am and how far I have to go, and that' a good thing, because there's plenty of time yet to increase production, as it were. The real trick is to keep it all "fun", or I might as well get a real job. I remind myself I want to live "like a good bourgeois," not be one.

Not that there's anything wrong with that... ;)

And So It Goes...

It's the first day of 2008, the first day of my new life as a published novelist. At the end of last year, my agent got me a two book deal with St. Martin's Press to publish my first novel and an unwritten sequel, based on my synopsis. I have until December 1st to turn in the second manuscript, and now that the holidays are over, am awaiting notes on the first novel. In the words of my friend, Jody, I've made it to the next step of a journey that began seven years ago and am starting a new seven year cycle. I have everything I asked for seven years ago in LA when I decided to come back to New York and take my fiction writing seriously, and now I have to take it seriously. I have never been more frightened and thrilled in my life.

My home office is completed and ready for work, I have a cubicle in an art space down the street for a reasonable price I can use to write in during the day when construction starts behind my building, I even have a nice new electric tea set from my sister for Christmas. All that stands between me and finishing the next novel before the end of the year is me.

I've spent the last month researching, laying out my characters, writing descriptions and doing somersaults in my head, flipping around ideas and plotlines, possibilities. I've put some of it on paper in my notebook of bedside notes on the laptop, but the majority of it's piling up in my head, waiting to be downloaded to paper so I can see what I have, how much of it makes sense and what to do with it. Now that work begins, laying out the landscape and my population, seeing what's missing and what needs to go.

At this point it's all terribly exciting, isn't it, a new world for the taking, people to meet, places to see. At the back of it all is a fear that somewhere in the middle I'll feel aimless and lost, or dry up, and all of that is true from day to day. But not forever, and that's what I've learned more than anything in the last year of rewrites on "Bite Marks." A novel keeps moving, on its own sometimes, and it gets done if you believe in it enough. So it begins, my new life, and I'll see soon where the road takes me this time.

It seemed a good time to dive into the blog world, as several friends have. I can use this to share the journey, but also to help me understand it. As my life takes on new meaning in midlife, I'm also shepherding my mother through the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease. She's been moved into assisted living near me, so spending time keeping her safe and sound is part of my path as well.

People aways wonder about horror writers, what kind of people we are and where we get our ideas. There are as many answers to those questions as there are writers. We're God's little snowflakes, no two alike. But maybe this endless impromptu narrative will answer some of those questions for you, and me, as it rambles on. It will be an interesting year. Whether or not it will also be an interesting blog, we'll find out together... ;)