The Novel I'm Not Writing

There's a perpetual question for teachers. "What do you do over the summer?" I always try to come up with something good to answer, because, damn, I don't know what the hell I do over the summer. Somehow day after day, I just use up the time, and then after the exhaustion from the school year has finally passed and just when I'm starting to get bored, it's time for school to start again.

My first year, I bought my ticket to Hungary at Christmas time, so that I knew I was earning something good for surviving until June. The trip was only two weeks long, but no one had to know how short it was, and I could answer with confidence: "I'm going to Hungary to build houses." Theoretically this was enough for a summer. It sounds impressive, anyway.

Two years ago, I told everyone about my brilliant knitting-pattern book idea and pretended like I'd spend my summer working on it. I even fooled myself that year, because I spent some time at the library researching architecture for my patterns and talking to librarians about the idea. Notice: I said talking about the idea. Very little in the way of knitting-patterns actually got put to paper that summer. Still, you know, it was a great answer to the question and gave me all sorts of freedom not to plan another trip to Hungary to build more houses.

Last summer was the summer I was writing my novel. Writing my novel was an outstanding answer to the question. I explained that November is National Novel Writing Month, and I pointed out that I can't possibly write a novel in November, when school is in full swing, so I would have my own personal Novel Writing Month in July. Perfect. Well, almost perfect. It turned out that the thought of a novel paralyzed me. I wrote fewer words last summer than ever before in my life. The thought that what was supposed to be coming out of my fingers was a Novel was enough to shut down my brain. I had nothing. I can't even call it the Summer I Had Writer's Block, because that's giving me too much credit for trying to write. It'd be more fair to call it the Summer I Slept in a Lot and Took Buddy to the Dog Park.

All of which just increases the amount of impressed I am with all of those regular people who started their novels today. I'm not doing it. I might write pithy little blog posts this month, but I leave the novel-writing to the un-paralyzed.

Writing Club

I joined a writing club today. We sat at a coffee shop and did timed exercises. Here's one of mine. The prompt was "Willie's husband died. She bought a Harley and dyed her hair flaming red..."

...but you can't change who you are, because after a jaunt across country and the prerequisite pilgrimage to Sturgis, her roots came back as mousy brown as ever and the Harley gathered dust in the garage. Willie just couldn't hack it as a biker chick. Of course, she had had some meaningless sex in Sturgis - with a guy who arose the next morning and pulled on a grimy t-shirt that read, "Of course I love you, darling, my dick's hard, ain't it?" which was enough to get the poor asshole kicked out of Willie's warm bed forever. Even before he revealed his true nature, though, sex with the nameless man in Sturgis only made Willie feel lonely and cold. Did he really think she was the type of person who had flaming red hair and drove a Harley? Would he toss his head back and laugh if she farted in bed? Could she tug on his earlobe if she had something to say while he slept? Would he snore companionably beside her so she could pace her breathing to his and sleep, finally sleep, the way she hadn't been able to since Frank?

Typed out it looks much shorter than it does written out longhand on the page. Huh.