Got a chapter written.

It’s one I have been sneaking up on and avoiding and not knowing how to approach for a week, maybe two. I spent the past few days reading through the book-so-far, revising, editing, hoping something would come to me. Nothing did. I ate peanut butter on crackers, drank pots of tea, and snapped at my younger son while he was briefly home between things because he wanted my attention urgently and he wasn’t on fire; he could wait until I was free but NO. He apologized, but snidely, with air-quotes so clearly around the “sorry I bothered you, when you’re so busy doing important things.” I had been sitting on the couch staring at nothing when he came in. So of course there were air-quotes around his “apology.” But what is hard to understand, even for me, even in the midst of it (so of course for my child, come on) is that it takes so long to burrow in to writing and then getting yanked out makes it deeply, horribly unlikely you’ll get back there. You get the bends. You get the despair. You get snappish and impatient. Or, I do. Especially when the writing feels stalled to begin with and I have to admit the stinging truth of what he was implying: I was “so busy” doing NOTHING. He took care of what he needed by himself, made plans to meet friends downtown, was cheerful and sweet in leaving. I felt guilty after the door closed. Maybe even before. I thought about how quickly time passes, how few times he will need me urgently, going forward.

Time is a big theme in this book, and it makes me a little melancholy. My younger son is so much taller than I am now.

He doesn’t look like this at all anymore, except sometimes for a second, out of the corner of my eye.

At one point, beverage girl that I am, I clonked my glass of water onto the top of my mug of tea and almost had a disaster. It turned into just a small mess, luckily. I pressed save before I wiped it up. I read some more of my manuscript, then some of a book I’m in the midst of reading, then read the entire internet; made a fresh pot of tea, cut up an orange to stick a slice into my fresh glass of water, and had a thought: Maybe it isn’t as big a scene as I’d assumed. Maybe it’s a quiet scene. Maybe my main character comes home and is in her apartment alone. Then what? Try it.

This new chapter may be awful or be usable, I have no idea. I won’t reread it until tomorrow, so I’ll find out then.

Both my kids are out, away, tonight, is why I got to work so late. Most days I have to finish with my writing much earlier than this, because that’s the rhythm of our family life most of the time. It took me all day to get to the part where I was typing new words into the manuscript, and my husband came home as it was beginning. I didn’t even kiss him hello. We’ve been married a long time and he’s such a good guy; he gets it. Now my eyes burn and it’s almost 8PM. I haven’t showered or made dinner. I haven’t left my apartment. I think it may have been warm and sunny out today, and I missed it. I love late summer. I love early September. I didn’t step into it even once today.

I am fully swabbed out.

Sometimes in writing you wobble into a thing, like my younger son in that picture, and your balance is off and your feet are really round balls of dough more than stable planks to stand on. You put your arms out to balance and you know probably you’re about to topple over. I mess up more than I don’t. I write a scene that doesn’t work, I’m not as patient as I should be, I spill. But maybe I can remind myself to smile a little in the midst of it, even if it’s a drooly smile, because… it’s a start. Even if it turns out the whole thing I wrote today is just tomorrow’s food for the delete key, this is how it goes, sometimes. Pretty cool.

It was a good day.