Pulling Ahead

It's three weeks into my Great Book Writing Adventure. It's been a wild, wild ride so far. To be honest, I thought I'd have fallen off by now. Lingering somewhere in my own personal no-man's-land between the excited beginning and the triumphant end. The horse latitudes.

I finished the story of my ex. It took two solid writing days and a whole schwack of Kleenex. It was sweet in the beginning as I remembered what it's like to be fourteen and infatuated. (Yes, I fell for him at 14.) And then, just as it was in real life, it got worse and worse until I was a sobbing mess on a Friday afternoon.

I finished "his" section and I opened up the twenty-some-odd word processing files that comprise this book so far. I wrote down the word count of each of them and added it up. Just for fun. To see where I was relative to how I felt.

I needed to check in, what with the focus-pulling freakshow of the Great Jones Surprise Party on the weekend, followed by the Marathon of Idiots of this week's condo renting extravaganza. I figured, actually, I was screwed.

I punched numbers into my calculator, not looking at the running total. Numbers like 1372 (How My Paris Dream Began) and 2042 (A bunch of lists such as Lessons Learned from the Barbes Market and various bits of dialogue, such as the conversation between the shyster epicerie owner who shortchanged me 7 Euros).

I've been writing pieces by piece, story by story, or as Anne Lamott would say...bird by bird. When I wrote a rather terrible novel two Novembers ago, I wrote it in one enormous Word document, pages and pages electronically reaching far out of sight. This time, I just open a new file every morning and see what happens. One day I'll have to string them all together, and that day is coming soon, but not today.

Anyhoo.

I finished adding. I looked at the screen of the Casio calculator I stole years ago from either my dad or my friend Alison. Imagine my genuine surprise and infinite delight at seeing this number: 29, 211.

Thirty thousand words! In three weeks.

And it isn't even that I care about the actual number per se, it's that I'm doing it. I'm writing this book. It's happening and I'm so grateful for that. Grateful that I've found whatever it is you need to find in yourself to sit down and put your fingers to the keys. Grateful that the Great Creator has chosen to join me on this journey. Grateful for the people in my life who support me on it.

There is a lot of work to do yet, but I know I can do it.

The past two writing days have been emotionally hard. It reminds me of Paris when I had to kill Charlie, one of my characters. (Who came back to life in the second draft. Who now is about to be written out completely. Regardless.) It was sad. But deliciously sad.

How marvelous to dive into creation. How marvelous to put your head down and work at this task filled with love and then to look up and see that something real and living is taking shape.