Last night at 4:30 a.m., I woke up with words ready to be put down on paper. I thought about getting up, and then thought harder about falling back to sleep. I'm serious about working on my Bipolar Girl Rules the World memoir -- a real honest to goodness book -- and the feeling of that early (too early) morning desire stayed with me until after I had eaten my oatmeal, drank my coffee, and put aside the New York Times Sunday Styles section.
So I've written for at least a couple of hours on what I imagine to be the Introduction -- I know that I've written long enough to get hungry again, and to do three loads of laundry. I was pretty grossed out by what I was writing when I started, so it was a moral victory to continue onward. I'm going to take the radical step of stopping now, and giving myself some credit for getting work done. I even have a calendar I use to mark out the work I do on my own creative projects, to show progress, and to present evidence when my emotions lean toward catastrophe (you never, you won't, you can't, how dare you believe).
I think I'll post essays as I go along, and I would obviously LOVE any response to my writing. Right now, I'm working on three sample chapters to submit to agents. At the North Carolina Writers Network fall conference, I took a step past the slush pile with two NYC agents, and was asked to submit a proposal for the BPG book. So I guess I better write the darn thing. But I'm building up good support team -- an editor to read the chapters when I'm ready, a possible writing group, and an ex-Random House editor to vet the whole proposal when I'm ready. None of this (except the writing group) is free, but it feels like the right people are lining up to help get'er done.
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I so enjoy the creative flow of your thoughts ~ the ambiance of your words ~ the honesty of your soul.
And so I read your writing to activate my envy that someone would actually take hours out of a perfectly good day (or night) and give herself over to simply outing herself.
The hope is that envy will resolve itself in self-reflection and I'll then ask myself: "So do you really want to write? And might there be something inside worth sharing? And might you benefit from the sheer act of translating imaginings into w-w-words? You?"
And then after I've read your stuff and tasted again my envy and asked myself those questions, then maybe I would at least write back to tell you that I read your stuff and I envy your drive or discipline or doing of it.
So please keep writing, Dawn.
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