Up, down, and sideways

 

Probably most writers agree, but that’s how I felt about my writing today. At the beginning of the week, a good friend came by for a glass of wine, and I waxed eloquent to her about my progress, the proposal I’d submitted to an interested editor, the new mystery I was just beginning to think about. “I’ve got my groove back,” I announced, perhaps prematurely.

I will have to wait however long for word on the proposal. But meantime, I can work on the new mystery. I wrote 3000 words. Then I decided they were trash, discarded them, and spent a couple of days starting over—some 700 words that first day. If you realize that a mystery is at bare minimum 60K words, you know that 700 words is hardly worth talking about. Yesterday I added 1300 words, but I didn’t feel good about them. That’s not unusual. Authors generally write, think it’s a bunch of trash, let it sit, and go back to it.

So that’s what I did today, and re-reading, I plugged in facts and dialog and things that came to my mind, and before I knew it, I was at 2700 words. Not much new copy, just expanding and polishing what I’d written. But this time I felt good about it. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, except that I know I have to make enough potato salad for ten people for Sunday’s Mother’s Day lunch. Still, maybe I’ll get a few words in. And maybe, sooner or later, I’ll hit my stride with this book, and the words will flow. At this point I think I can tell you who is murdered and who is the prime suspect (but innocent)—but you never know. These things change.

Things I figured out today: a mystery author on a writing thread I follow talked about how different it was to compile a guest list for her son’s upcoming virtual wedding, rather than the lavish affair she’d always thought he would have. That sparked my memory, and I realized I’ve been to one virtual wedding and a funeral since pandemic started. At both of them, I sat silently as a spectator, feeling that everyone else knew each other and I was kind of an outsider. The wedding was my New York niece’s, replacing the wonderful blowout she had planned for the Caribbean, but I felt that the guests were all the people she had grown up with. My two daughters and I were silent spectators.

I knew even fewer people at the funeral which was for a neighbor I’d gotten to know when her grandson and Jacob were in kindergarten together. The boys were great pals briefly, but when the grandparents moved away, the boys grew apart. Still the neighbor lady, Mary, and I had a common background—she had gone to osteopathic medical school at the college where my dad was president, though after his time. Still, to this day anyone from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, seems like family to me.

Tonight, Christian cooked dinner, and I was grateful for the break in cooking chores. Let me amend—he cooked the entrée. Chicken Francese, which he aptly described as chicken piccata without the capers. Jordan fixed Louella’s rice, a family favorite, and a terrific salad. It was a wonderful dinner, and I’m full and sleepy.

Jordan and I did one of our frequent calendar reviews tonight and figured out that, except for Sunday’s Mother’s Day lunch, we will not have dinner together again for over a week. I have plans Monday and Thursday, she and Christian will be out Tuesday and Wednesday, and she leaves Friday for a weekend in Austin. We are definitely getting back to normal after quarantine.

I’m not sure getting back to life as it was is reassuring. I read today that Tarrant County new virus cases are up—110 today, over 200 a couple of days ago—and so are deaths. And here’s a statistic that should alarm and inform all of us: U. S. deaths of unvaccinated people, 577,000; deaths of vaccinated people, 74. From what I read that figure is for the entire duration of the pandemic to date. It makes you want to shake the anti-vaxxers who endanger all of us by encouraging the growth and spread of variants. Why oh why can’t they see what they’re doing to the rest of us?

Maybe for the same reasons I can’t see the road ahead in my mystery. We each have our own fixed ideas. What’s a problem is reconciling those with the good of the community at large. Having said that, it seems futile to say, “Happy dreams.” But nonetheless, that’s my wish for each of you.