It’s been one year and five months since I wrote the first page of my current novel. That happened in December of 2010. Granted, that first page was more the expanding on an idea than an actual start to the thing. It came to me right after a surgery I had and I was only three weeks post op when I wrote that page. So after that, I sat on it for six months. The real start happened in June of 2011.
The original idea was borne of a breast cancer scare. The surgery the previous year had been a lumpectomy. When I first noticed there was something odd going on and went to have it checked out, I didn’t tell a single person. Then, when I had a biopsy and was told that I had a “precancerous mass” and they recommended surgery to remove it, I still didn’t tell a single person. Then, when I got a second opinion and they concurred with the first opinion, adding that they wouldn’t even know for sure if it was malignant until all of it came out, I scheduled the surgery and still did not tell a single person. The not telling alone was strange for me – I’m a big over-sharer typically. I don’t really have any boundaries in that sense (but I’m working on it).
I started behaving strangely in other ways after that. I became totally disinterested in all things worldly, acutely aware in a visceral way of the fact that no “thing” is coming with me to where I’m ultimately going, not even my own skin and blood. It wasn’t an awareness of the mind – I had no thoughts of death or any conscious theories about materialism – but of the body. I simply felt impulses and I went with them. I quit my job. I went to Hawaii by myself. I sold all my furniture. I got rid of most of my clothes. I broke up with my girlfriend. I booked a trip to Europe. I spent a lot of time alone, finding that I was mostly disinterested in the company of anyone, even my best friend.
Above all though, it was the way that I was feeling that interested me the most, perhaps brought about by facing the real prospect – for the first time in my whole life – of my own death. It was this feverish anticipation for that mysterious void known as death that fascinated me. Feverish because it contained a range of emotional states from utter terror to regular nervousness to stage fright to performance anxiety to excitement approaching the level of lust.
I finally told some people what was going on, but not until a couple weeks before my surgery. I attended to practical considerations, like the very scary fact that I would have to take narcotic painkillers afterwards. Scary because this was the first time in ten years of sobriety that I was going to have to face dealing with mind and mood altering prescription drugs – things I used to abundantly abuse along with alcohol. Even if that surgery ended up being the beginning of the end for me, I knew I wanted to die sober, so I arranged for my very first sponsor and best friend to fly to San Francisco and police my meds for me until I didn’t need them anymore. I also arranged for my mom to come out and be with me for the recovery. Those were about the only practical things I did.
As soon as the pathology screening of my removed mass came back with the “all clear” for cancer, I was back to absolute normal. I went back to my job. I got back together with my girlfriend at the time. I purchased some new clothes. I resumed enjoying the company of friends and family. Just like that. It wasn’t until then that I realized how abnormal I had been in the weeks and months prior. I was especially intrigued by that strange and eerie anticipation for death that I had experienced. It was the impetus of the idea for my current novel. And the novel has changed so very much since then, but that’s as it should be.
My production in terms of word or page count has been extremely stop and go. I started writing more in June. In November, I started writing a lot more. I went from something like ten to ninety pages inside of five days in November. After that, it was a regular stream of production that choked down to a trickle in January and February. During that time, my friend, Peter Nichols, also a writer, advised me well to attend to my novel every day, even if just to touch it then walk away. For example, write a sentence or two. A few words, maybe. Add a semicolon, at least. So I did that much.
Part of the problem that was slowing me down was that this novel includes kind of a lot of extremely explicit sex. Although it’s been fun to write that stuff, it’s been anxiety producing. Mainly because I know that my mom is always dying to read whatever I write. And writing stuff like that while imaging my mom reading it isn’t easy. I know I don’t have to allow my mom to read it, even if she really wants to (which she will). But for some reason, it makes me sad to think of not letting my mom read it. I mean, it’s not like she’ll give me useful feedback. I could right the word “soap” eighty thousand times and format it with chapters and section breaks. She would read that and say, “it’s so edgy and experimental, I love it! You’re brilliant!” On one hand, that means nothing. Yet somehow, it means everything.
Aside from my mommy issues, it’s just hard to write a novel. I have a full time job and a life and friends and moves across the country and break ups and new relationships happening all the time. Well, at least twice per novel cycle, it seems. OK, twice for this novel. (I admit, I exaggerate a lot.) At the end of 2011, I started breaking up a relationship. The writing was extra slow if at all for a while there. Then, in March, I fell in love. You’d think that something like this would further slow my production, but it did the opposite. I began writing wildly every day, in excess of a thousand words per day. I’m sure it helped that part of what my character is dealing with is mad, passionate, commit-me-to-an-asylum love, because how inspiring, right? Now, I almost have a first draft complete. The ending is still unclear to me, but I trust that it will reveal itself within the next few days to a week as I forge on.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing the first twenty or so pages of the manuscript to submit to journals and magazines in an attempt to garner an early publication credit. Toward that end, I just finished reading those pages aloud, recording them, playing that back to myself, and editing as I listen. Following that process, I feel so crazy confident and excited about this book. Mainly because I’m half certain that this is the most phenomenally compelling opening to a novel that I’ve ever read. As sickeningly arrogant as that sounds, it’s the truth. And I say it from as objective a perspective as I can get, listening back to it as I do. Now, I state this after just yesterday believing that the whole thing from start to finish was steaming crap. Thus is the crazy making ego of the writer, particularly of the novelist. One has to be stunningly narcissistic to write any novel because how else would we take ourselves so seriously as to believe anyone would give one crap to read what we have to say? At the same time, we’re crippled by such deep self-doubt that we’re daily ready to burn the manuscript (or more accurately, the laptop) down along with the whole house and just end it all.
Sigh.
With that, I give you my rough draft dust-jacket description of the novel in progress titled, DANCING WITH THE TME THAT KILLS ME:
The story is the first person account of Rue, a 33-year old college professor who, after developing symptoms from a rare genetic disorder, is left by her husband. She undergoes surgery and enrolls in an experimental drug trial at the urging of her doctor. While some of the more dangerous symptoms like seizures do subside, others begin to appear that Rue is only mildly aware of, including a new and overwhelming lust for death. Believing she will soon die, her behavior turns erratic and incongruent to her established character. Her fascination with an encroaching fantasy of death leads to explorations in eroticism, (bi)sexuality, love, how language mediates these passions, and the connections between them and dying and death.
When Rue notices the gradual but steady loss of her vision and hearing, she decides to ensure her imminent death with a planned suicide. The story unfolds through a mix of first person narration and letters Rue writes to her first female lover, with whom she reunites for the first time in thirteen years at the place where she secretly plans to die.
Ultimately, Rue’s lust for death, eroticism, love, and language delivers her from the limitations of physical disability, takes her to the brink of annihilation, through the frozen instant of her own death, and back again, where she emerges blind, deaf, and in possession of a new inner spaciousness and a new, tactile love affair with the immediate world.
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