Things I’m doing

Did I mention I’m writing again? I am writing again. Thank you god and Sue Goyette, who helped me unlock myself. She always somehow knows exactly where in the pants I need to be kicked. She looked at me and said, I had a dream about you. You were so sad.

I had to swallow hard then to keep from crying. I do the bravado thing pretty well but she’s too smart for me. She sized me up and said, you need to leave your house to get writing done.

And whaddya know, she’s right as usual. Saturdays now, after the farmers’ market, I take myself down the street to the cafe. I have a hot drink and a cold one and maybe lunch, and I write a scene. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to keep my oar in. To be writing. I write a scene, I take my characters to the precipice and leave them, so that all week I can think about where they are and where they’re going next. And then I get a little tiny cupcake and I eat it on the way home, and I breathe out. Because I am writing.

It will take forever, but I will write the damn novel. Saturdays. If that’s what it takes.

In other it will take forever news, I am “learning” to play the piano. Or, more properly, I am taking piano lessons (I always want to mis-type the instrument as the paino. Which in my ways it is, especially for my neighbours.) I am working on Jingle Bells. It is June. I am sorry if you live near me. Soon perhaps I will move on to Frere Jacques. And won’t that be fun for all of us.

These are the things we do, the practises we build. We play Jingle Bells for half an hour because doing so will help us get better, and move on so that perhaps by December, we will be able to play Sweet Caroline. We write every Saturday so that eventually some months hence, those Saturday scenes will accrue into a first draft, and from there a second and sometime after that into a finished book.

And in between I walk and feel the muscles I’ve neglected stretch out into themselves again. And it’s all practise all of it, always and over and over.