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... ;)