The Writer's Blog

One thing about having your own web site is that you can put whatever you want on it. Right now I'm pretty darn excited about my sister's newly found talent as an artist. The reason I feel this story can be of interest to those beyond my family is that Liz started painting when she was 46 years old. She's turning 48 next week, and I think you'll agree that she's pretty far along the scale for someone who's painted for less than two years.

This must be something that runs in my family - at least among the females. My mother was a painter who didn't find real success in selling her paintings until her early 60s. She was a trained artist, having gone to the Ringling School of Art when she was a young woman, and then painting when she could while raising four children. It wasn't until she was 60 that she started to work in a focused, dedicated fashion and her work took on a whole new look. More concentrated, meaningful, artful. And her paintings sold like crazy.

I started writing when I turned 50. I'm 53 now and still a beginner when it comes to how much I know and how much I have to learn, but still I've thrown myself into it, much as my mother did. And I've had some success so far, enough to keep me going on this path. My mother died before I started writing, but I'd like to think she'd be proud. She admired hard work, even if she wasn't a fan of lesbian mysteries and romances.

I think there's no question Mom would be proud of Liz. She too has discovered her passion in middle-age and has made huge progress in such a short time. It's inspirational, really, and the message I really want to impart is that it is never too late to find that which makes you feel passionate, that which makes the time go by as if it didn't even exist, that which makes you feel intensely proud and humbled at the same time. And if you do find it, the other part of the message is that it - the craft, the art, the hobby, whatever - doesn't develop itself. Like everything else, you get out what you put in, and when you work hard at developing skill, the rewards can be enormous. The reward, in fact, is the work itself.

I figure I'll get to be a good novelist about the time I'll be thinking of retiring from real estate. And that's just about perfect. What better to do with my time? I sometimes wonder what things would be like if I'd discovered writing when I was in my twenties and not so much later. I can't imagine, but I do know that had I not discovered this love at 50, I'd still be 53 but without a published novel and six or seven stories published in anthologies. It's never too late to start.

I don't think we need to go to apocalyptic thinking, but sometimes the headlines lead us in that direction. Here's a painting my sister recently did that may reflect that underlying fear we all have.

After returning to civilization following my month long writing retreat, I've found myself strangely unconcerned by the rather horrible state of our economy. Mind you, I am a real estate agent and my phone has virtually stopped ringing. By all rights, I should be worried. The money I put away while real estate was crazy hot has now lost a good deal of its value, but soon I'll have to sell stock to have cash to live on while the market remains quiet. My partner is in banking, and though her bank is one of the safest in terms of its overall stability, it's still banking - a pretty vulnerable place to be. As a couple, we are a ground zero of the new economy.

Why am I not worried? I really have no idea. I still am doing some transactions and there will be some closings along the way. I'm staying on top of what's going on in the business, staying in touch with my clients, and ready to be there for them when things pick up again. And in the meantime, I'm writing. Maybe that's why I'm not worried. I have something else I care passionately about and I can devote myself to that with the time I now have. When real estate picks up, I'll flip flop the ratio of time I spend on each. I guess I feel that somehow I'm being taken care of - not necessarily monetarily, but in a broader sense. Things are happening as they are supposed to, and I'm going to make the most of the situation as it exists. This coming year will be a challenge to my bank account, but if I can get another book written, how much richer am I? Richer in spirit, I mean. I don't see myself writing a best seller with the next one.

But you never know.

I was recently interviewed at an on-line lesbian fiction site called Kissed by Venus (kissedbyvenus.ca). The editor of the site is Alexandra Wolfe, who lives in Quebec City but is a woman of the world. It's a great web site and I encourage you to visit it. My interview can be read here. Alexandra also published a story of mine on the site, Thirty Days Has September, which can be read here. The story is about a woman who is bottoming out on alcohol, and the reaction to it has been so interesting. Recovering alcoholics who read it can instantly relate to the cluelessness of the narrator. Non-alcoholics who read it are amazed at the cluelessness of the narrator, but it's my hope they have a little more understanding of the power of denial, and the power of addiction, after they read the story. I recently heard from someone who took the story into a woman's prison where she does service work. Her group of recovering women read the story and had quite a lively discussion about it. That's the best feedback I've ever gotten.

Have a wonderful holiday season.

This photo is from the book launch for Sometimes Quickly. I've just sent my next book off to find a publisher, so I hope to be reading from it sometime in the next year. Fingers crossed!

I have been back from my month long residency for over two weeks now, and still haven't found the time or energy to write about my experience there. My last blog entry was written the day after I arrived, and the feeling of deep satisfaction that I felt then only increased as the month of October rolled on. Let's see if I can describe it briefly, without too much reverence.

A month can seem like an incredibly short or long time, depending on a host of variables. My month at the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts felt very much what I imagine a month is in real time - I was aware of nearly every moment, I was able to plan my day and then live it without distraction, I was never pulled away from what I intended to do, unless I simply changed my mind about doing it. The four weeks was a substantial amount of time, but only in the most comforting of ways. The time was not racing by me, throwing my into a state of fear that it was all going to be gone in a flash. Nor did it drag on ad infinitum, throwing me into another type of fear - fear of boredom, fear of being too much with myself, fear of not accomplishing as much as I should.

My intention was to finish writing the first draft of my novel in the first two weeks of my stay and to edit during the final two week, and strangely, that's exactly what I did. The wonderful brick house that I lived in was occupied by only one other writer and the resident manager, it was quiet, my window had a gorgeous view, and the weather was sublime. Everyday I woke up, drank coffee while I looked over the pages from the day before, ate breakfast, wrote, walked to the friary for lunch, wrote, hiked the trails in the woods. Then I'd start editing what I'd already written that day. Dinner at the friary, and then more editing followed by a TV show I'd downloaded onto my iPod during the day. The internet connection was so slow that it took all day to download an hour long show.

On Monday nights I walked a few steps out the front door to one of the Friary buildings where yoga was held each week at 6:30. On Sunday afternoons I'd drive twenty minutes into Louisville and go to the big Barnes and Noble they have there, and that was my outing for the week. It was the simplest life I'd led since I was too young to complicate my life - let's call that five years old. I worked like crazy and felt completely energized by it. I left the retreat with the book completed, amazed that I'd accomplished what I set out to do. But even if I hadn't finished the book I accomplished something in that month I think I needed to accomplish. I proved to myself that at long last I am comfortable enough in my own skin to absolutely enjoy my own company, to know what I did and didn't want to do, and to just accept every part of me as being the way it needs to be, at least for now. I wish everyone had the luxury to do what I did.

The only problem, really, is that while a month away seems like a reasonable amount of time when you're the person away, the people left behind have a different perspective. It happened that it was a particularly bad month for my partner, with the financial crisis exploding early in the month and her father falling ill toward the middle of the month. I guess it's too much to expect that everything will go exactly the way I want it to. It certainly wasn't for my partner that month.

The other thing that was a little shocking is that a week after returning from MACA, I got an e-mail from them saying they'd shut down the whole program! I got in and out in the nick of time. I'm not sure why they closed, but it's probably the same reason most arts programs don't make it - lack of funds. It's really too bad, because I don't think I really adequately described how conducive that was to my writing.

Now I've edited the book as much as I can see to do and sent it off to my first choice in publishers. The waiting now begins, and it can be agonizing for a double Aries like me. The only answer is to start the next project.