Tuesday, May 01, 2007

we’re getting warmer

It’s the beginning of May, but it feels like summer: sunshiny, warm, and the beach beckons.

Summer? Wait a minute. Summer was last year, summer came right after I graduated . . . is it possible that it came a year ago??

Oh dear. Does this mean that my great, glorious, First Year as a Writer is nearly done?

I think I expected to be much farther along than I am . . .  Let’s see. A novel done, maybe two (or at least, working on the second one). I planned to have a stack of my poems circulating through the magazines. (There was actually talk of sending out fifty—about ten a month. Yeah. Woke up from that dream pretty fast!) A handful of smart, intelligent essays on various editors’ desks. And short stories: several brilliant, breath-taking stories, hopefully being nominated for prizes.

I would eat words for breakfast lunch and dinner, I would learn Beethoven piano pieces in the meantime, I would cook everything lovely from Gourmet magazine, run for office, and cure world hunger.

As it is: my novel has large painful feet, and it keeps tripping over them. I am still going through that gorgeous plan I concocted a while back . . . And I’m a bit behind, to tell the truth. I had hoped to have all my characters outlined and breathing. This week, I meant to charge ahead on settings, creating the worlds that these people live in. But, to tell the truth, I’m still sitting with my characters, taking their temperatures, listening to their complaints, and diagnosing their aches and pains. The good news? They really do keep growing. They’re just not done yet.

So this week, it seems, I’m juggling. I’m trying to hurry my characters along, to bring them to life as quickly as I can. (Is that contradictory? Can you do such work quickly?) At the same time, I’m imagining settings and places and time periods. And, I’m trying to research. Pneumonia hit during my precious research weeks, and I was too sick to write in my journal, let alone dig through history books. So Saturdays have become the Sacred Research Days . . . only I haven’t been researching.

Help!! What am I thinking? Am I just too far behind now, will the novel never be done by December? Should I write polite notes to Random House and Little, Brown and say “I’m a big fan, and I hope to submit a novel before I turn forty”???—jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 05/01 at 10:33 AM
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