Spin Out

My tires are spinning.  I can’t get any traction no matter what I do.  But there’s nothing discernible causing the spin.  No oil slick, no ice; I’m not bogged down

in sand or sludge.  All systems are operable, functioning as they should and topped off with just the right amount of fluids.  I’m progressing in a carefully controlled and measured way, taking on just the right amount of cargo and passengers.  I’m not over-burdened nor am I stalled out alone.  But I just can’t make anything move.

I bought a car two weeks ago, but I can’t have it.  It’s somewhere in an

undisclosed, apparently unknown plant in Mexico and nobody can say when it will get here, if it will in fact get here. 

I made a huge life decision to quit my job but I still have to stay there for another 15 months. 

I chose and committed to my story and the novel format but I don’t ever seem to have time to actually write it. 

I made another huge decision to sell my house and find someplace cheaper to live so I can quit my job – but I can’t find any scenario that will actually allow that goal. 

I entered three writing contests all promising notification win or lose and I haven’t heard from any of them.

The projects around the house I take on, physically grueling work, make my

heart hurt and contract upside down or sideways or otherwise stab at me until I slink back between the covers of a book, or just sit and stare at all the work needing done that I can’t do until it calms down again.  I’m held hostage by my heart.

The ground squirrel invasion continues unabated no matter what I do.  I have the entire perimeter of my yard stacked with rocks and bricks plugging the holes and tunnels as fast as they dig them while my son watches from his room, shaking his head while googling local dementia care facilities.  And still they come.  They’re squirrels.  They can climb fences.  All the hole-plugging I do doesn’t matter.  It just makes me feel like I’m doing something productive, something active to affect my fate.  Is that what I’m doing with all these other grand schemes?

I feel like a rat in a maze.  I know the goodie is there, I can smell it, my rat whiskers all aquiver – but I just can’t seem to ever get there, regardless of the paths I choose, all the running I do.  All I can do is keep trying path after path,

scarfing up the crumbs along the way that promise the prize.  Seriously – what the hell?  Wasn’t there a book, “Who Moved my Cheese”?  Well, I get that now – I seem to be literally living it.

I’m in an odd insulated time vacuum or something.  I mean, something has to give eventually, right?  I bought the car; they have to deliver it at some point, right?  In 15 months I’ll have to be living somewhere, right?  At some point I’ll know one way or another if I won any contest.  Right? 

Time is going by but somehow I’m outside time, watching it from above,

watching it all just slide by without touching me, all my efforts slamming into the perimeter.  Am I doing something to cause that?  Am I the reason for a spin out, something I did or didn’t do correctly? 
   
For no matter what I do, nothing happens.  I don’t get any results.  Like I’m a

ghost floating through this existence.  I think I’m here, that I’m doing things, but whatever I do it doesn’t have any physical impact.  Life goes by as if I’m not here at all; as though all my actions don’t matter at all.

 Am I being cosmically pranked?

When I find myself beating my head against an immovable wall, I usually learn that I’m on the wrong path; that I’m going after something that’s not true for

me.  But I can’t manufacture that meaning now.  These are seemingly random things that are adding up to a huge weird cluster.  It’s like I’ve ended up as a log wrangler, jumped from my path into a river.  I’ve been riding a hundred different logs, guiding them all down the river trying to get them all where they need to go but now it’s finally too much and everything is jammed all together and nothing can get

through.

At this point I just want an air-evac out.  There doesn’t seem to be any way through and there is no one log I can find that is the focal point, that if I work exclusively on it and free it, the rest will follow.  They’re all just an indistinguishable mess.   I keep adding more logs on top of, or behind the rest, trying to still find a way to get something done.  But it just adds to the pile-up. 
 
What now?  And what’s the life expectancy of a ground squirrel?

Travels with the Writing Group and Susan Tuttle

I’ve been in my writing group for several months now.  It’s turned out to be exactly what I need.  I’m forced to keep my butt in the chair, face my laptop’s mocking blank screen, and sink or swim with every challenge thrown at us. 

It’s intimidating to learn about all the mistakes “amateur” writers make, that “how to” writers write about and editors scoff at (did I just end that sentence in a preposition?! 

And now did I just use an amateurish exclamation point?).  You can pick up any number of these books and find everything that you’re doing is wrong; and of course the promise that their method is the only sure way to fame and fortune. 

Last week I seriously thought I would not be able to complete an assigned writing exercise.  We were given a prompt and had to write a complete story from that prompt in 20 minutes.  Nothing at all was coming to me and I was in that all too familiar

frozen state where I usually find something extremely urgent needing my immediate attention in the garden or kitchen.  Except there in that room, with the other group members, I couldn’t escape.  I was trapped.  In a panic I decided that I just wouldn’t be able to do it and would have to accept utter defeat, face the group and say I just couldn’t do it.  But there were 20 minutes to sit through – I had to do something.  So I just latched on to the first random thought I had, any word passing through my brain, and began typing just to get something down.  I told myself I could still say I didn’t have anything, take a pass, and in that way I managed to keep typing.  The combination of giving up and being forced to stay put and face the screen in a stare-down competition, somehow worked.  I came out the other end with a story and some very nice and positive feedback.  Revelatory.

I need more of that type of exposure to kick me out of my carefully composed compulsion.  Sometimes, the more you learn, the more stuck you can get.  It might be infinitely better to be blissfully unaware, and just write freely, from the heart and worry about shaping it and molding it –

the polish – afterward.  I have a million ideas but for some reason I short circuit out when I have to finish something, actually complete it start to finish.  The quintessential ‘idea man’ which I’ve discovered is just another term for avoidant personality disorder.

The practical experience I’m getting from participating in this group is invaluable and clearly just what I need.  I’m learning I can actually complete something and the world as I know it won’t internally combust; my chair is in fact not on fire.  I don’t need to have every single word vetted and approved by the Left Brain Board Members. 

I need this type of hands-on experience and the format is just what the doctor ordered (well, along with the glut of heart meds of course).  And the course is growing.  Our intrepid leader, Susan Tuttle, just recently published her first volume of this series on which she bases her groups called "Write it Right."

There are excellent lessons grounded in practical and basic writing skills, sprinkled with unique and creative methods to engage the process.  To learn how to write a setting for instance - what’s needed, what’s too much, and how to find that perfect balance - she has the participant write the setting as an actual character.  It can either be a pure description of that character or even a short scene with them.  When I did this exercise I was truly taken aback by what showed up on my page.  He frightened me and made me remember exactly what my setting was and realize I had become too familiar and complacent with that place.
 
There are many exercises like this that take the normal routine drills we’ve seen thousands of times and turn them on their axis giving us a whole new perspective and a fresh approach.

 Susan is planning a total of six books in this series.  I intend to glean everything I can from every word – while keeping my posterior firmly planted in the seat.

Tom Robbins Forever

I snatched up Tom Robbins’s latest book, his non-memoir memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, before the Barnes and Noble clerk could place it on the shelf.  I had been waiting you see, had the date of release marked on my calendar, counted

it down.  Then I did my usual binge and abstinence routine I do with works I particularly adore.  I can’t help but voraciously devour such books but I manage to painfully pull myself back every time from reading them all in one sitting.  It has to last, stave off that mystical depression that inevitably accompanies the ending of a wonderful and long-anticipated book.  This inclination usually ends up with the last chapter waiting for weeks until I can abstain no more.  This book was no exception.

It’s always a risk to read about an author you’ve grown up with, one whose

words helped form and forge you.  Time and again I’ve been predictably disappointed with that intimate glimpse behind the curtain of magical words, looking for the wizard within.  Learning they’re a real person always diminishes the created fantasy and power I carry from the words they created.  I prefer to keep my heroes properly in their magical realm and not allow the taint of reality to touch them.  It’s a way of keeping alive the magic, that intangible essence that only exists in those pages.  I don’t want it tethered to anything. 

I’m not disillusioned reading this book, a huge relief.   I come away breathless, still in awe, and still holding that key to the innumerable secrets hidden in plain sight of all of us.  This book, like all his others, leaves the reader with the implicit understanding they’ve been afforded a peek at possibility; that it’s there for the taking, for simply turning with eyes open.  And nobody’s eyes are more open than those of Tom Robbins.  His life is so full, so rich – uncompromised.  His stories reveal a life, if not depicted in his novels, then certainly imbued there.  This book is still just another Tom Robbins book.  And thank God for that.  It’s him, his words, in just another format.  His voice still speaks to us whether from the deep south, overseas in the military, in an art review, or from getting cursed in some remote village; or from just struggling to survive and make love stay.  It’s still the voice of a modern-day princess, an outlaw, the belly dance of life past and present, eternal perfume and Pan, and the lips of a cowgirl.

Tom Robbins insists this book is not an autobiography.  He likewise maintains it’s not really a memoir either, “… although it waddles and quacks enough like a memoir to be mistaken for one if the light isn’t right.”  Indeed.  Instead this book contains what he likes to term “… a sustained narrative composed of the

absolutely true stories …” that he says he’s been telling all the women in his life.  And there we have the first clue of what’s revealed in this book, and in all his novels – Tom Robbins writes women.  Maybe he writes for them, certainly about them, but also somehow from them.  I have never experienced anywhere else what he captures, no, what he embodies – all things female; the heart, emotion, mind and yes, most certainly that glorious little peach.  His portrayals depict our growth, the process of learning to not only stop apologizing for being female, but to learn to revel in that fabulously absurd endowment.  We learn to truly relish the power and all things magic of being female and how to distinguish truth from the mass marketing depiction of the

sex, that we have not only the right, but the imperative to refuse the delineation.  We learn that it’s ok to feel what we feel, to be smart and display that intelligence in crazy different ways.  And Tom Robbins gets this, he reveres it.  And he wrote about it, making it manifest, so that I always have that validation to turn to in times of doubt.  I carry my gratitude for that every day of my life.

This book is not an autobiography.  It’s not a memoir.  It is, as all his novels, yet another mirror reflecting countless portals, endless opportunities, infinite possibility illuminated for just a moment.  He never

preaches, here or in other works.  We are neither encouraged nor chastised.  A Tom Robbins book isn’t “the answer”; it’s not a “how to.”  It’s a gangplank extended over mysterious waters swirling counterclockwise, from a pirate ship captained by a buxom wench and her leather-clad masked mate.  You’re invited to peer over the edge, be regaled by tales told aboard ship, and witness those who choose to execute perfect half-gainers from the plank, or

spectacular belly flops, into the waters just to see what’s there.  And you understand that you can dive too, in any way you want and to any depth.

Like any of his novels “A True Account of an Imaginative Life” exemplifies possibility and expanded lives peppered with tremendous appetite (and thirst), spice, lust and verve.  I’m left, as always after living in one of his books, insatiable for more yet serenely satisfied.  I have the taste of salt, ripe tomatoes and pie

on my lips, infinite sparkling spirals of possibility in my eyes, a distinct throbbing hum of life in my ears, and desire and excitement in my heart.    

Thank you Tom Robbins, now and forever – for all of it.

The Secret Lives of Writers

I love having a secret identity.  It gets me through the day, every day.  I
have a great and special secret that nobody knows about unless I tell them. 

I have a whole clandestine, concealed life and it is glorious.

I go about a mundanely insane workday, when suddenly, there, in the next cubicle, I hear it; going by my desk I see it – some activating agent has been released into the air and infiltrates my protective shield worn in the normal world.  Carefully eluding notice I quickly steal away into a closet or bathroom stall, whip out my arsenal of pen and notebook, and the Secret Writer is released, tearing through and around the world so fast time is created, turning backward or forward at her whim.  The secret power can’t be stopped at this point.  It’s a part of me yet exists on its own too and it will be set loose.  I can only stand by, the mere conductor between the surging power and the waiting pen. 

With magic rapier activated I can reduce an archnemesis to a comical parody; plant devastating evidence; change the course of history; widen hips and harelips as easily as a slide rule; shrink my enemy’s penis until he is an object of pity in bedrooms and locker rooms alike; and change the world or create new ones.  Only once it is depleted does the Secret Writer relinquish the body and mind back to the setting and withdraw.

Spent but victorious I emerge with my secret safely tucked away again in my bag, nobody the wiser.  There are clues – one day perhaps they read a piece in

a magazine, a book; ‘Why, this sounds like somebody I know; like that thing that happened.’  They may suspect, but my true identity is mine, all mine, and only those I choose are allowed to see beneath my disguise, to what is hidden there, what thrives there.

The grueling, often punishing work demanded of this secret persona is worth it.  It makes me happy, connecting to something physically inside of me.  I can feel the pieces in there rearranging themselves when it emerges, like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces falling into place.  I figure out all the pieces, the strategy, what goes where and when until it clicks, resonates.  It is a feeling of conviction and wonder; of touching something grand and mysterious, that I rarely have or find anywhere else, anytime else. 

Sometimes it resents containment, wanting acknowledgement and to be paraded about in full view.  Other times it buries itself so deeply, I can scarcely

remember it exists.  And every so often a beacon is lit and something cries out for representation, for the truth, for creation of a desperately needed reprieve and escape; and she is pulled forth once more. 

But every secret persona comes with a fatal flaw, a small chink that can bring it down, the inevitable cost to be paid for this superpower identity.  You must know what that is for you, those things that can stop you, make you question this Self and the power it has.  You must become intimately familiar with it so that it doesn’t drag you down to the bowels of writing hell. 
 

It’s different for everyone.  Maybe it’s another alternate identity that rears up alongside the Writer, telling him he can’t do it, dragging him back under time and again until he can no longer emerge.  Maybe it’s the blank page that Medusa-like freezes her motionless at the keyboard.  Maybe it’s somebody's resentment; a critique; or the clock and calendar that conspire.  Whatever it is, find it – find a way to trap it forever under miles of solid ice beneath your secret fortress.

And in this way our League will thrive.  We will exchange knowing glances on the streets, secret handshakes at doors, and meet surreptitiously in underground lairs where we will scheme and plot our plots.