My last blog was entitled “Edith Emerges.” Somehow, however, in the past month she’s
gotten stuck in the hole she’s emerging from, probably from the waist down,
since she’s a little round like her creator who is even rounder after a week
that’s included Mexican appetizers and marguaritas and sixty people in her
living room. I thought that with that
kind of stress, I would lose weight. I,
however, had to taste every enchilada, guacamole dip, Mexican meatball I
created. Not to mention the trial marguaritas.
So Edith got stuck. However, I need to be honest. It wasn’t the south-of-the border party that
stuck her. It was me, stuck deeply in my own hole of depression. You see, I had
entered a screenplay, which I dearly love and which actually won small awards
in a couple of contests, to a BIG contest.
For $50. Tax deductible, I
figured. I didn’t expect to win, but an honorable mention would have sent a
surge of hope, as well as a reason for the next thrust of queries to Hollywood
or whomever. Personally, also, I admit I was hoping for a pat on the back as an
aging woman still hanging in there. So
out of 6000 entries, I did not make the top ten percent. After a bout of wine-solace, I found a scrap
of paper and a pencil and figured out that the contest managers had taken in,
from the 6,000 of us with stars in our eyes, $300,000! Minus, of course, the $5,000 prize and
whatever an interview with a producer costs.
I wished the winner well.
No way could I write a dystopian movie involving four-breasted beings
with six fingers, and who knows what else, in a ravished landscape somewhere
east of Portland. And then I gave a
thought to the inhabitants of my real world, writers like me who keep churning
stuff out, sending queries, paying sometimes to win or find a place for our precious
words, hoping for . . . for what?
And that was the question. Why? And somehow as I squirmed my way out of my
black pit, I found my answer. I have a
retirement fund; I don’t need money. I
have grandchildren who love me, so I don’t need fame. I have at least fifty friends and acquaintances
who have bought my two ebooks, so I have been read. What more is there?
What more is that I need to get Edith, my seventy-year-old
protagonist, out of her pickle.
Tomorrow she will escape to go on to get into more trouble. Me, too.