Starting again

I haven’t written anything in months. Just couldn’t think of anything to say, especially after I discovered that a really good entry about my Monterey hospital adventure had been lost. It was disheartening, and I couldn’t bring myself to try to reconstruct it.

Well, that’s not how ‘real’ writers do things, is it? We don’t give up. We write x number of words per day, no matter what. (I say ‘we,’ even though I have not been acting like a ‘real’ writer for some time, in order to remind myself that I can start again any time—right now, in fact—and so I am.

I came across an article by Srini Rao, who has overcome ADHD (a big problem of mine) to become a prolific writer by sheer force of will. It was the start of his success—the foundation, really: writing 1000 words a day. It reminded me that sticking to a similar goal was what got me to write two very short Kindle books and two first-draft memoirs, still on my hard drive awaiting revision.

And yet, I forgot. Or did I? I think I just gave up.

Writing a book just feels too hard when you look at it from the perspective of what you want it to be at the end: a fucking book: 200-300 pages, 50,000-100,000 words. How on earth can I think of that many words? And we’re not talking about just any book here. It’s got to be good, right up there with the best-sellers and Pulitzer Prize winners I admire.

So, of course I gave up.  It’s just too much, too many decisions.

It’s the same pattern I have followed over and over, every time the going gets too tough. I’m not tough, so I do not get going. I stop. I freeze. I convince myself I don’t really want to be a writer. I want to travel. I want to crochet. Anything but write. And I stop for weeks, months, years… even decades at a time.

But how do books get written by anyone? Not all at once, perfect in their completeness. They get written one word, one page, one day at a time. A thousand words is a good start. How hard is that? I can do that.

And so I’m starting again, a thousand words a day.

Of course, even though that sounded like a good finish, I’ve only written 400 words. I need to come up with 600 more before I am off the hook for today.

Well, let’s talk about subject matter. What is it, exactly, that I want to write about?

I have this vague plan, to gather my best blog posts since I started this nomad thing, and stitch them together with new writing while I go on the road trip I have been dreaming about for years: around the western United States and Canada, a female version of Travels with Charlie—only with Scout—because by God, I have some grandiose idea that I can compete with the great Steinbeck, who, unlike me, never gave up on writing, who kept working at it every day of his life. Silly me.

But that’s the idea.

I’m leaving in a month or so, timing the trip with the weather and my finances. I’m excited and a little scared. It’s the unknown that worries me: where will I stop for the night? What will I find? What if I break down?What if I have to talk to strangers?

But that’s the adventure of it. If I knew exactly what was going to happen, what would be the point?

I’m at that time of the year when I start thinking of myself as the next year older. I’m 71 but I’ve passed the halfway point, so I get ready by thinking I’m 72. I guess it eases the transition. I will turn 72 on the trip, so might as well.

Seventy-two. What an odd thing to be. I still think of myself as 42, but I’ve had some scary health issues in the past couple of years so age is becoming a reality. There was the surgery for a bowel obstruction (I don’t even want to think about that), two mini-strokes due to high blood pressure, a heart ablation, and a seizure thanks to wrongly-administered medication. I’ve spent too much time in hospitals and an unpleasant stint in a nursing home recovering from surgery.

I feel a bit like I’m walking a tightrope trying to avoid falling back into more of the same. But thanks to a good doctor, my blood pressure is finally stabilized, the congenital heart thing is fixed at last, and I am committed to never being constipated again. (Ugh. Getting old means having to keep track of bowel movements. Whoever warned us about that? Well, I’m warning you younger folks now: poop every day, dammit. You’re welcome.)

So I think I’m ready for this six-month, 6,000+-mile trip. Well, except financially. I still haven’t saved up an emergency fund but I have managed to cut my expenses enough to cover my gas budget for the trip ($200/month) plus stashing away another $200/mo for said emergencies. I have new tires and plan to get new brakes before I leave. If the van doesn’t break down, fingers crossed, I’ll be fine. If it does, well, I’ll deal with that when I come to it.

Almost 900 words. Not sure I can make it to the finish line. I’m hungry. Scout needs to go out soon. It’s raining. What on earth can I talk about for another 90 words? I don’t know, but I don’t want to let myself off the hook. 74 words now. 71. Christ, I hate this. 66.

Stephen King wrote the perfect description of how a writer can go insane, his main character writing in The Shining, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over, page after page. In the movie, Shelly Duvall’s horror when she discovers what her husband has been ‘writing’ reflects the horror the writer feels when confronted with his/her own true self: blank, empty, with nothing to say.

1010 words. I made it.