Not a true story

I am writing this down because it’s starting to get confused, and I want to be clear, perfectly clear about what happened here. I’m not trying to defend myself, nor am I trying to offend anybody else. I never wanted to hurt her; that’s never been my goal. I don’t know if the same thing could be said for Ruth.

I, (name here), being of sound mind and body, do hereby testify that the events related in this document are real. They happened. I don’t want to get into an epistemological discussion of what’s really real, and what does it mean to say that something “happened,” and why the past doesn’t matter anyway since you can never get it back; I don't want to discuss how you can reassemble as many of the pieces as you can gather, get then into the same room painted the same yellow-white with the plastic radio playing the Bee Gess, the same exact dents on the bedspread from where we lay on it with our shoes on leaving the same shadows exactly; how you could bring both of us in and force us to re-do it all, but we could never bring that day back. It lives in my head, and it lives in her head; it has two separate lives, like a kid with divorced parents, both of who expect you to love them best.

This is what happened:

It was a Thursday. I was reading papers in my office on campus. It was about threeish, I guess, but since I’m going for solid facts here (instead of the liquid facts I’ve been stuck with lately), let’s call it quarter after three. The phone rang, I answered. It was the breathing.

This had happened once already this semester – a student, probably, angry over a grade; that was the most likely. Who else calls and breathes when you speak, refusing to answer – a grown up? The thing is you never know who it is; you can suspect, but you can never be sure, and that’s what the breathing is meant to say: I am a living human who actively hates your guts, and I could be anybody you know.

At first I’d wondered if Mark might be having an affair, until I checked his email and his phone, and discovered that he wasn’t, that he was too boring to have an affair. Not a single one of his emails or texts was interesting in any way; even the porn in his browser history was vanilla. Still, I didn’t mention the strange call to him, not because I didn’t trust him, but because I didn’t want to give the whole thing too much credence, too much life. I didn’t want Mark to start asking if I’d gotten another one of “my phone calls.” It wasn’t mine.

In the interest of full disclosure I will say that from the first call I thought I knew the breathing, the shape of the nose the breath was drawn through, the tenseness of the throat. Even when we don’t speak, our breath has a voice; I learned that at a party from someone who taught Linguistics. The rate at which we breathe, the depth of the breath, the amount of force we use to expel it; he said he could tell before a caller said hello who the caller was.

“That’s because it’s always your wife,” I said. “I know who’s calling before he says hi because it’s Mark. Who else would it be?” 

But this wasn’t Mark calling. This wasn’t Mark’s breathing. This was a breath I’d known many years ago, getting ready to whisper something in my ear, sleeping next to me on the cot in my room my mom had bought because she slept over so often. I was going to say something, something besides “Hello? Hello?” which I’d already said; I was going to say “Who is this?” but I was afraid of the answer. Then the caller hung up, and I slumped back against my chair.

It was nothing. A wrong number, a student too shy to speak.

It didn’t happen again. I went on with the semester, staring at each of the students as they bent over their in-class exams, trying to tell by their scalps who might have called me. I thought I had someone pegged, a sophomore named Gustavo, who seemed to pay an extra intense attention in class sometimes, so I made sure to discourage Gustavo, to turn to him with blank face and eyes and smile deadly at him in class so he saw I had neither fear nor interest in him, but apparently it was all for naught, it was me flattering myself, and I had to admit that I must have somehow hoped that Gustavo would call me and hang up.

That it had happened once and did not happen again was irritating too. I was constantly expecting it to recur, never able to relax. It had to happen again so I could get more clues about it. It had to happen again or I might have misremembered, made it up. Six weeks passed, then eight. I had stopped suspecting Gustavo but had eyed an emo freshman who cut class a lot and stank of marijuana, until I had to concede that she too was not interested enough in me to stalk me.

Almost three months had passed. I was starting to “forget” about the call, meaning that I was sometimes able to go twenty minutes at a time without thinking it. But I wasn’t forgetting, not by a long shot, and any time my office phone rang with an unrecognized number, I felt myself get excited and scared in a way I haven’t known since childhood, and was inevitably disappointed when it was a colleague, or a student (though they all tried to call after hours so as not to speak to me, my voice mail time-stamping their calls with “two…forty…three, a.m.”), or even a friend. 

It was a Thursday, quarter after three. I’d been looking online for new gynecologist, so I could switch from the one who kept urging me to get pregnant “before it was too late;” I had “calls out,” as they say to several doctor’s offices. I didn’t even get my customary chill when the phone rang; I assumed it was a doctor and said “Hello?” in my most ingratiating voice.

It was the breathing. I knew exactly who it was. “It’s you,” I said, and tears sprang to my eyes.

The breathing didn’t say anything, didn’t speed up or slow down. Just breathed. Not making a point of it, but not moving the mouthpiece away. Just kind of being there, together. Not having to talk. There are certain people in your life who are such a terrific relief because you can be together and not have to talk. With everyone else, it’s a constant battle of wits. The breathing was almost soothing, someone else there on the line. Proof of the rest of the world.

I started to say her name, “Ruth,” but in the space between opening my mouth and sound coming out, she hung up, leaving me to say it out loud in my office. Ruth.  

Cranky and Bereft

Theoretically, I am very happy that I ended the month with 53,347 words more than I started it with, but in fact, I am in kind of a shit mood about it, which is so dumb, because there are actual problems in the world to be in a shit mood over and waaah, I wrote a bunch of pages this month is not one of them. But I'm not here to defend my feelings; I'm just here to describe them. Sometimes I have felt very good at the end of a project. This is not one of those times.

Probably because this is not the end of the project, not by a long shot, nor is it the glorious first draft phase when you're flushed with discovery, and every hour spent writing feels like an hour of intimacy with a fascinating new love. There is so much hard work to go, and so much self-doubt and second guessing, and sometimes it feels like I get a good idea, but then I pounce all over it and smoosh all the goodness out of it until it's flat and squishy, hokey and overdone. (That happened, like, six times from 2006-2008.) And once I've botched it, I can never get back to that original idea that was so good, like when you wake up from a dream and start trying to describe it -- "We were in some kind of...place...a school, or on a office, or an auditorium or something" -- and with every word you apply to it, you ruin it more, because that wasn't it.

Books I read this month while writing this whatever it is:

Jessie Sholl's DIRTY SECRET
Coming out next month -- a very accurate, honest, and empathetic look at her mother's hoarding.

Rachel Lloyd's GIRLS LIKE US
Coming out in April 11 -- a vivid life story/manifesto about commercial sexual exploitation.

Piper Kerman's ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK
Ooh! She went to prison! I always sort of wondered if I could make it in prison. Turns out no. 

Rachel Reiland's GET ME OUT OF HERE
Borderline Personality Disorder from the inside. Interesting and honest, but not as good as Stacy Pershall's LOUD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSELF, coming out in January.

Caroline Kraus's BORDERLINES
Borderline Personality Disorder from the outside. Co-dependent Caroline suffers at her BPD BFFs hands. Emotionally gory! Fun stuff.

Steketee and Frost's STUFF 
An engaging non-fiction overview of the psychology behind hoarding. 

E.L. Doctorow's HOMER AND LANGLEY 
Fictionalization of the story of the famous Collyer Brothers, who were, coincidentally, hoarders. Very well-imagined, not a lot of action, just kind of a'ight for me, dawg.

Emma Donoghue's ROOM 
Yes, I read this icky bestseller, told from the POV of a five year old who's lived his entire life locked in a room with his mother by a psycho captor, and I'm sorry for being such a prurient sheep and so much Part of the Problem, but it was like a big dumb movie I couldn't resist, and it was secretly very satisfying, much like when I watched It's Complicated on cable.

Suzanne Collins' THE HUNGER GAMES, CATCHING FIRE, and MOCKINGJAY
Baa.

Sue William Silverman's LOVE SICK 
A woman's recovery from sexual addiction. Too much recovery, not enough addiction, but good enough to recommend.

Patti Smith's JUST KIDS
She was much cooler than anybody else ever has been or will be, so the rest of us can just give up. 

The Lexapro Diaries

I'm taking medication because my mother won't. 

Last year around this time, I was dragging my mother to the doctor, hoping to get her medicated again. After a few months off her meds for Multiple Sclerosis, a disease she's managed for the past twenty years, she was wobbling and reeling enough for her to accept my help, after my ten-year near-absence from her life. She'd stopped paying for her health insurance, as she was facing bankruptcy and foreclosure; she, her fifth husband, and their twenty three cats, stood to go homeless.

The next six months were a book nobody wants to read ("Too dark." -- Major Publisher). They were an over, over long episode of Hoaders, where the crazy old person is still living in feces at the end, and the (oxymoronic) adult child combusts with sadness and rage until they give up. In the end, I got her back on her MS meds. I never got her back on Haldol.

Oh, the halycion days of Haldol! Back when I was in high school, after the group home and before I left to live with Sebastian, my mother was on an "anti-anxiety" drug called Haldol. She'd got it from a shrink she was seeing, someone she saw on Tuesday evenings, while I babysat in her Park Slope apartment. Haldol was one of the things that helped her finally leave her psychotic fourth husband (and I don't use psychotic as an insult, just a descriptor, so you understand what he was going through); it was one of the reasons I was able to come back and live with her again. It was how she was able to sit, night after night, placidly knitting in front of the TV after her toddler was put to bed, instead of pacing, biting her lips ragged, making calls. Haldol saved us both.

One day, Sebastian was over at her/our place, and he cornered me in a bedroom. Who's on Haldol?, he wanted to know.

My mom, I said. It's for anti-anxiety.

No it's not. It's for schizophrenics. That's the shit they give you when you take too much acid. That's some hardcore shit.

Okay, I said, shrugging it off. Well, she takes it for anxiety.

Years later, at my own shrink's behest, I look up "Haldol" online. It's for schizophrenics. What does that tell you?, she asks.

That she needs to take it. That she was better off when she was taking it. That I don't know when she stopped taking it, but it's pretty clear that she should probably start again. 

Right. And: that your mother is schizophrenic.

The last six months have been about swallowing that bitter pill, and more recently, taking my own. I haven't taken an anti-depressant in thirteen years, unless you count marijuana, in which case I have taken anti-depressants pretty much my whole life since I was fifteen. But it was time to start again. This summer was tough, dealing with last summer's trauma; I completely fell apart during acupuncture for my arms, and was diagnosed with PTSD. Is that why I sat up bolt upright at 4 a.m. every night for thirty-eight days during the Gulf oil catastrophe? At the time, I thought that was the rational thing to do.

So, meds; the shame that comes from taking meds; the conversations with friends you didn't know were on them too; the thanking god for being able to treat your first-world problems with drugs while the people who suffer the most don't get them (see, it only works up to a point; I'm still kind of watching, as David Foster Wallace called it, "The Suffering Channel.").

It is sane to be sad in this case, as in most cases in life. I think the appropriate response to most of life is sadness, horror, grief, and fear -- a lot of fear. But it's also sane not to want to suffer. I wish my mother would take steps to alleviate her own suffering, but she won't. So I will.

Like the Dickens

Besides the usual shit-ton of memoir (Foreskin's Lament, which is a really funny and horrifyingly accurate portrait of the type of mental torture I've been putting myself through for the past few years, and by "few" I mean "decades' worth"; also Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man, totally salacious but with beautiful writing), I've been reading a lot of Dickens lately, sort of going back and forth between the two genres. I'm into the less popular novels now, the Martin Chuzzlewits and the Dombey and Sons -- the thicker the better, I find. I like to see a longitudinal study of several intertwined lives over ten or twenty years; I like watching the kids, with their terrible parents or their wonderful uncles, find their way to adult personalities, systems of morality. It's like watching six seasons of a really good cable drama, one episode after the next. 

That's what I want to do in fiction; show characters evolving episodically over a long period of time. Let you experience everything the character does and thinks and feels as a kid, and watch how those experiences shape that person, understand every one of their thoughts and actions from the inside. But it's not children's literature, or maybe it is. I was at a picnic with a four year old not too long ago, and I showed her my copy of Our Mutual Friend, showing off how many pages it is. "Yeah," she agreed, "but it's got pictures."

Charles Dickens helped found Urania Cottage, a home for what they used to call fallen women. Then he put characters based on some of them in his books. Does that make him an exploiter? Am I?

My mother looks like Sarah Palin

Or, my mother used to look like Sarah Palin, back when my mother was forty and thin. She had the cheekbones, the wide, slightly open-mouthed smile, the big eyes behind the big glasses, and especially the hairdo, the one she'd been wearing since the early seventies, after she cut her long, flat-ironed Crystal Gayle hair; a betrayal, somehow, at which I'd cried and cried. The hair then became a Jiffy Pop bouffant in the back, and two sculpted swoops in the front, framing her gorgeous face, and it stayed that way until the mid nineties, when she gave up. It took hours; she had to shower the night before and spend half an hour with her curlers and pins and setting spray to put it in place. Then she slept with this acrid wire cage on her head; then it was another half hour in the morning blow-drying it, unrolling it, fluffing it, spraying it with Aqua Net, always with the Merit 100 burning on the edge of the sink, threatening to incinerate the apartment. Sometimes women on the street would stop and ask her where she got her hair done, and she would brighten -- "I do it myself!" The color and everything. She had naturally dark auburn hair which she brightened with dye, sitting in front of her heat lamp with her cigarette, her hair slathered into a purplish, sideburned mohawk. The women who asked always had lipstick outside the borders of their lips.

My mother looks less like Sarah Palin these days, though she agrees with her one hundred percent. I get into my mother's car, on the way to take her to the neurologist, and her radio is tuned to right-wing talk. The host is talking about "Obama," and his eyes are rolling so hard it almost gets gutteral for a second, "Obghama." He's making fun of the "way...Obama...talks sometimes...," which, truly, can be ponderous, but oh my god are you fucking kidding me? After that moron Bush, who couldn't spit out two words without mangling them and draining them of meaning, you're complaining about how Obama talks? This is the reality in my mother's car: Left is right, up is down, good is bad, and we have always been at war with Oceania.

At the neurologist, the doctor has her say the date, the year, count backwards from 30, spell her last name, identify the president, and tell her something that's going on in the country right now. "Well," says my mother, confused by this last one, "Obama's ruining the country."

The doctor happens to agree. They both look sideways at me like they know I'm one of them. Enough said; my mother is lucid, if not sane. 

Later, she tries to drive the wrong way down a one-way street, gets lost driving in the town she's been living in for eighteen years. She hasn't cut her toenails in months; I saw them in the doctor's office, they're gray and yellow and fungal. She has twenty-four cats and she doesn't always remember all their names. But Obama's ruining the country.

I really detest Sarah Palin. I hate her willful, blithe ignorance; I hate her arrogance; I hate her insistence that you don't have to be good at anything, or know anything, in order to be politically influential. You just have to keep that wide, open mouthed smile going and your hair plastered in place. 

Full of it, as usual

Last week, I led two writing workshops -- my weekly one at GEMS, with a group of girls age thirteen through twenty, and a private one, with a group of women in their late twenties. I managed to recycle a few exercises between them, including one of the hardest: Write nice things about yourself for five minutes. 

The GEMS girls groaned; "I can't think of anything." I made suggestions. "Just make a list of things. Try. Five minutes." Some of them got down to it right away; others flopped around on their forearms, exhaling a lot. Seven minutes later, they were all still writing. 

The twentysomethings groaned; "This is hard." "Don't worry," I assured them. "We're not going to read these out loud." This helped, but not a lot. "I know it's hard, but you need to practice it. I'm going to do it, too." Seven minutes later, we were all still writing. 

I always try to do this one; I do most of the exercises along with the group, and sometimes find myself writing nice things about myself for ten or twelve minutes in a given week. I still don't get it right. I find myself qualifying, waffling, talking about things "I wish was better at," criticizing the writing itself in my head. But I think I'm getting better through practice. 

I know; it's twee. It's uncomfortable, it's embarrassing. Unfortunately, it works. You write nice things about yourself for five minutes, you feel better, and you feel more inclined to write. Sometimes, you even go for eight.

Welcome to Writing Group (A Syllabus)

A. What is writing?

• Writing is just putting words on the page or the computer.
• Any time you are putting words on the page or the computer, you are writing.
• Writing makes an idea into something physical, something you can see and/or hold in your hand.

B. Writing makes your life better

• Writing is time that’s spent on you.
• You can communicate with yourself in the future and in the past.
• It helps you to remember things that happened, or things you want to make happen.
• Writing can be therapeutic, but it doesn’t have to be.
• You can communicate with more people by writing than by speaking.
• It helps when seeking employment.

How do you think writing could help you?

C. Tools for writing

1. Pen and paper or computer

• When you’re writing, you have to actually put words onto paper, or into a document or email. Otherwise, it’s just “thinking about writing.”
• It has to be something you can read later on.

2. Time

• Writing takes time!
• You can’t write while you do other things (like talk or watch TV).
• You can listen to music while you write, but you can’t write while listening to music – the minute you take your main focus off writing, it doesn’t work.
• Even writing for five or ten minutes is a big accomplishment.

3. Privacy

• If you feel like somebody is going to read your writing and you don’t want them to, it will make it very hard to write.
• If you feel like you will be judged for what you write, or for not being the best writer in the world, it will be hard to write.
• You don’t have to write for an audience. You can write just for yourself, and you don’t have to share it with ANYBODY.

What else do you need for writing?

D. Rules of writing

1. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. Spelling and grammar do not count in creative writing.

• Most people are not good at spelling and grammar.
• You can always fix those things later, or ask someone for help.

2. Originality counts. Good storytelling counts. Being real about your emotions counts.

• When you read something, you will like it more if it’s something you didn’t read before, if it’s not too long or boring, and if it makes you feel what the writer was feeling.

3. Anything you write is better than writing nothing.

• Even writing for five or ten minutes a week is better than not writing at all.
• It’s like those TV commercials for exercise equipment – get results in just minutes a day! Except with writing, it’s actually true.

4. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

(Well, it’s still hard, but you get used to it.)

Exercises

Write a letter to a friend. The friend can be somebody you haven’t spoken to in years. The friend can be dead. You do not have to send your letter. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t.

Write down an important conversation from your life. What did you say? What did the other person or people say? How did it make you feel? What other details about place, time, and setting can you remember?

Write something on the subject of "The first time I ever..."

Remember

1. Write it down so you have it for later.

2. Something is better than nothing.

3. You don't ever have to show your writing to anybody. You never have to publish anything. As long as you write, you are a writer. So keep writing.

The worst blogger in the entire world

Want to hear my lame excuses for why I never update anymore?

1. "Writing about my personal life caused my window to fall open and smash on the floor during a blizzard."

Okay, none of us really believe this one, do we? I mean, it's a nice metaphor, but it's bullshit. The window blew open because it was unlocked. Writing about my personal life had nothing to do with it. If writing about my personal life caused household disasters, our entire building would be submerged in the Marianas Trench. And it would be on fire. And covered in bees. Cancer-causing bees. 

2. "I'm so busy! Uh, writing."

Well, this is kind of true. Lately, I’ve been working on a proposal for a technical book, a side project unrelated to my first two books, which I’d be writing under a pseudonym (Janice Scurry, maybe? Or…Janice Timberlake?); meanwhile, I continue to work on the incredibly painful and personal stuff I insist on writing and publishing under my own stupid name, because I never learn. I've also been volunteering again, serving on the Board of Directors for Girls Write Now, and lending a hand at GEMS (also helping to throw the GEMS tenth birthday party/reading on Friday, May 8 at 7pm at the Bowery Poetry Club – like how I worked that in there?). But I know plenty of people who are way busier than I am – with, like, day jobs and stuff – who manage to blog much more frequently than I do. These people are empirically better than me. 

3. I don’t have anything to write about.

Really? Nothing to write about? How about, you know, everything? How about the gift of life, in all of its miraculous complexity? How about social evils, and how they are bad? You know, I used to blog about feminist issues…until I got tired of having the same arguments again and again, and just decided to give up and agree that I am a feminist because I am an ugly frigid prude. (Side note: I read some reports from the SXSW conference, and it turns out that everyone on the feminist blogger panel has received death threats. Nice!) But I have not blogged about anything socially relevant in ages, which is unconscionable – I could have cured sexism by now, with the power of my blogging! But instead, I seem to write only about myself, and my upcoming readings (Sunday, April 5 at 4pm at Cakeshop – like how I worked that in there?).

Satia even wrote to me recently with a suggested topic, which had to do with giving and receiving feedback on writing, and how one can trust one’s own critical eye, not to mention others’, when tastes are so subjective. My answer: You kind of can’t, but you go with your gut anyway. Damn, I should have saved that for another post.

4. I am having an ongoing existential crisis, which manifests itself in a morbid preoccupation with death and suffering, feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness, crippling anxiety, overbearing self-loathing, and persistent anomie (that is, “a feeling of disorientation and alienation from society caused by the perceived absence of a supporting social or moral framework”).

Awww, boo hoo! The world stinks, nature is indifferent, and I’m going to die, just like everybody else! And yet I still manage to vlog about American Idol. So it would seem that I could spare a few moments from obsessing over the unknowableness of the universe, and whether or not I should drop off the grid and start leading an ethically and ecologically sustainable life (quick answer: yes I should, and no I’m not going to) in order to update my fucking blog once every pink and purple moon.

5. I’m lazy.

Soooooo lazy. Is Idol on yet? I sure do like that Anoop Desai.

"You should write your story because you will someday die"

 

"The reasons for writing a memoir are many, but in this introduction, I want to talk about one reason in particular...You should write your story because you will someday die, and without your story on paper, most of it will be forgotten." 

That's from Dave Eggers' introduction to The Autobiographer's Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing a Memoir, a book that features plenty of practical counsel about writing memoir, some of it from me, and some of it from writers like Frank McCourt, Tobias Wolff, Nick Hornby, and Elizabeth "Eat, Pray, Love, Sell a Million Bazillion Copies" Gilbert. It's illustrious company, giving illustrative advice on subjects like where to start your story, how to find your narrative arc, and the art and science of getting published. Also included: a few words from my good friend Melissa Plaut, aka the other New York hack, and the ever-awesome Wendy McClure, on turning your blog into a book. And all proceeds from this book go to benefit Eggers' 826 National, a program devoted to inspiring and supporting creative writing in grade schoolers. All of which makes it an excellent book to purchase and read...before you die and everyone forgets about you! Thanks for that thought, Dave...

How to write when you're not writing anything

So the story collection I was working on this summer, which bore the most recent working title Top Friend, was gently rejected by my editor the other week. I’m not too distressed about it; I’d sort of lost enthusiasm for the project – as a matter of fact, if he’d accepted the proposal and set a deadline for a finished draft, I’d have been screwed. And I’m grateful to be able to work with someone who can tell me, in a caring and supportive manner, “This is not your best work; I think you can do better.” He inspires me to do so.

But now I’m left project-less again, which is not a comfortable place for me to be. I banged out a few freelance pieces in the past two weeks – one will be online on Monday, the other I’m reading at Thursday's Nextbook show in Boston – but now I’m just sort of sitting here at my desk, twiddling my thumbs over the keyboard. I’ve been keeping productive – dreaming up more freelance pitches, noodling around with some vague ideas for stories, taking care of dumb to-do’s like going to the dentist. And continuing to show up at the blank page, even when it feels pointless, even when all I do is churn out crap, because I know that, even though nothing’s happening right now, nothing will ever happen if I don’t at least show up and try.

At the same time, I have the sense that I may have been trying too hard – I think that’s why I jumped the gun on the story collection, and tried to sell it on the basis of three story drafts and a title. Maybe if I hadn’t been so desperate to say, “THIS IS OFFICIALLY MY NEXT PROJECT,” I might have let the thing evolve at its own pace, and actually finished it before dragging it out into the marketplace half-baked. Or I might have come to the conclusion that it wasn’t in fact my best work, which may have been happening anyway; that may account for the flagging enthusiasm I experienced. I don’t think there was any harm done in this case – my editor doesn’t think any worse of me for having tried something new, nor do I think any worse of myself, and we were able to salvage the one story I still liked, Twins, and get it out into the world. Still, I have to be aware of my tendency to pounce all over a fragile, newborn idea and inadvertently stomp it to death in my eagerness.  

So as tempted as I am to take the germ of an idea I had the other day and bray about it all over town, to call it my Next Official Project and set ridiculous deadlines for myself (Preliminary outline by Dec. 1! Proposal by Jan. 1! Finished draft by August 1!), I’m not even touching it right now. I’m not even thinking about it. I’m not going to the bookstore to research similar titles; I haven’t set myself a reading list of works that pertain to the subject matter for inspiration. Instead, I’m working on something totally unrelated, in between freelance pieces – something I don’t currently plan to publish, or even to finish. I’m just writing for the sake of writing, for the sake of getting the story out of my head and onto the page. It feels strange, for someone as goal-oriented and deadline-driven as I am, to have no goals and no deadlines for my next book, but all right. My goal is to write something great. My deadline is to do it before I die. In the meantime, I’m learning to enjoy the twiddling of my thumbs over the keys again.