Writing This Was So Much Harder Than Writing About Falling On My Ass

When my son got me started on this blog thing, I went into it with a pure heart and but one purpose: to write.
Elementary school, for me, was nothing but a means to an end- to learn to read the magic letters, to learn to write the magic letters, the ones written perfectly on the green strip of cardboard that ran above the chalkboard- the ones in all the books.
They gave us those fat pencils to write with and why? Little hands and fat pencils have never made sense to me but we struggled with our fat pencils, our tongue-tips firmly between our loose front teeth, to write the big A's and B's and C's on the thin paper that had the dotted line in between the solid lines to show us where the bumps and humps should rest. We sharpened our fat pencils, we erased until the paper dissolved, we learned.
I learned the letters fast and I learned the sounds they made and next thing, quick! before you knew it! I was reading everything I could get my grubby little hands on. My school had no library and the only thing even remotely like a library within miles and miles of where we lived was in the Roseland Garden Club (still there, but now it's the Roseland Community Center), only open on Tuesday night for library purposes, a few shelves filled with donated books and Mrs. Mockeridge with her little stamper with tiny, geared wheels that changed the date so you would know when your books were due to be returned, although it never took me a week to read the books I got. Days, maybe. Usually minutes and then what? Panting for more, that's what, and soon I'd read every book in the Roseland Garden Club Mrs. Mockeridge deemed appropriate.
I started writing too. I wrote poems, I wrote little songs. I wrote stories.
We moved to a bigger place and there were real libraries and I wrote more stories and poems and speeches and I won prizes for those speeches. Whoo-boy, could I write a patriotic speech and deliver it with panache!
You bet!
Life, life, life happened. Bad things. A lot of bad things. A few good, of course. But no matter what happened, what fresh horror life delivered me in the form of a stepfather, responsibilities and worries that permanently bowed my spine, there were books. I went from trash to treasure, didn't matter. War And Peace one week, some sort of Georgette Heyer the next. Gone With The Wind, David Copperfield, The Catcher in the Rye, The Yearling. There were finally enough books.
And inside of me, there was such a yearning to write my own.
More life. Some college, some babies, a husband, some gardens, more college, a different husband, some more babies.
When the oldest two were still toddlers, I finally started writing a novel. It was about a waitress in Aplachicola- a place that begged on bended knee to be written about- and soon, my waitress stole my heart. Over the course of years and years, she told me her story, her voice was so strong. I learned to write by writing her story.
Miraculously I found an agent. "Oh yeah, I'll sell this book," she promised. I never could believe her. How could such a dream come true?
I was right, she was wrong. She never sold it. Do you know the courage it takes to send an unsolicited manuscript out? Do you? You're supposed to go to writing school, make connections, get published in university journals, then go from there.
I came from nowhere.
I went nowhere.
For a year I was a community columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat. I wrote about Tallahassee, my kids, gardens, Wakulla Springs, gay rights, all the things that mattered to me. I loved that year. I got so many letters. People, actual real people, were reading what I wrote.
I started other novels. I struggled with the knowledge that I was going nowhere, but I kept writing. Only, of course, after all the laundry was done, the floors were swept, the kids were taken care of, the dinner planned and started. Minutes here, hours there, too long between sitting-downs and doing it.
But I did it because I had to. Hours and hours of gloriously lonely work, always feeling guilty because...what was it for? No money from it, no acclaim, no heavy-weight of book in hand, with a cover, pages littered front and back with the magic letters. So why was I doing it?
Because it felt so damn good. Because I had to.
And then came the blog. The simplest thing became possible. I wrote, people read.
Now it's a huge part of my life. I read other people's blogs and sometimes they're dreck and sometimes they're so good my soul grows green with envy and they get interviews on TV and in the Wall Street Journal and then...they get book deals. Someone wants to take their words (their magic words!) off the ethereal almost-real internet and put them down on pages of paper, bind them up with covers with pictures and send them out into the world where people can hold them in their hands.
I can only imagine.
I can't imagine.
I'm getting old. Book-publishing is a business whose light is growing fainter and fainter. No one reads anymore, they tell us. Trees being slaughtered for books to languish and then be remaindered?
People don't want to take the time to create the pictures in their minds anymore. There are movies, videos, youtube. Why bother?
My hope, like the light of the publishing business, fades until it's hardly a tiny pinpoint of brightness in the vast darkness of the womb where unpublished authors float, waiting for that miraculous day when something might get born.
But what can I do? I can only keep writing.
Another novel grows and although the words haven't caught magic, my job is just to get them down and then polish and polish until some sort of gleam begins to shine through.
It's all I can do. Because for some reason, I have to.
And beyond that, far, far beyond that, it's my joy.
There is nothing in this world more satisfying to me than sitting here, letting words come and typing them out. If I am never published, ever, it's still been the grandest thing. I have written some things. Some people have read them.
Right now, this very second, I get to do that. It's pouring rain outside, it's thundering, it's lightening, and I am writing. Once I sat in this very same spot as a hurricane whipped through, beating the trees into submission with its wind, flooding the yard with its waters and I did not stop writing.
Some days I think, "Why? I'm not clever, I'm not funny, I'm not cool. I'm an old mother who writes about the chunks and slivers of life I've been handed. So what? Who cares?"
Then I say, "Shut up."
And I sit down and I write.
I may not have magic. I may not be magic.
But the words, writing the words, always is.