When No News is Okay News, Glitch-wise

Sometimes it's good that agents don't respond immediately to queries from writers.

Last night, sleepless in Portland, visualizing the  empty wine bottles I'll have to recycle in the morning, worrying about glasses that probably will break in the washer, regretting the hors d'oeuvres turning green because I forgot to put them in the fridge, my party obsession floated away in a cloud of fragmented conversations.  The party was over.  Even I had a good time.  So move on, I whispered into my pillow, to your other obsession, the one you put aside in a frantic week of rolling out phyllo dough and filling empanitas.

Twelve queries sent, two rejections, ten to go. Takes time, I told myself.  These people get a thousand queries a month.  Then I  imagined my email page telling me I had a thousand new messages.  Not a comforting thought. Uneasy, my imaginings stumble on to Ellie, the old lady my queries had mentioned.

Just how old is she?  67, I think, just past the 60 is the new 50 stage and into a little arthritis and a bum hip.

Wait a minute.  Her son is 28, as is our villain.  Which means Ellie was almost forty when he was born.
  
Which is okay, but didn't I have her describe escaping as a teenager from grandmother's house by getting pregnant?  Marrying a no-good who left with a toddler after a year or two? She  lived with her grandmother until she's almost forty?  My grandmother could have lived with me when I was forty.  Despite my careful  outline of Ellie's and my other characters' lives, I'd misplaced maybe thirty years.  Unless I change her backstory, she should be 46, definitely not a crotchety old woman.

Tomorrow I will go back to Ellie, figure out how she got a son at age 39, having left her grandmother's home almost twenty years before.  I know HOW, of course.  What I'm  not sure yet is WHY.

This is why I love both writing and jigsaw puzzles.  The puzzle/story seems to be coming together, sort of, but there are always the pieces that have fallen to  the floor, the ones the player doesn't see until she leans back and looks around.

So today, I'm okay with not getting a request for one hundred pages.  By the end of the week, I'll be checking my email obsessively, as usual,  and Ellie will be glitchless.

Night Thoughts: When Counting Backwards From 100 to l Didn't Do It

At 3:00 a.m this morning I realized that I should not have sent out twelve query letters for Graffiti Grandma the same week I laid fifty invitations to  a Holiday party on the doorsteps of my condo neighbors. I can now expect rejections in not one but two areas in my life and I'm not sure my ego will survive.

Just how much stress can an old lady handle? An even better question might be: Why did she think she needed to do either kind of reaching-out?  And what inspired her? The long hours in front of the computer, the tentative smiles from strangers on the elevator, the panting novel, the hope to move past smiles to names?

In the midst of that night-churning I forced myself to think about other things,  about the four novels I've finished.  Each is about a woman who needs to solve a few problems.  In fact, one of the protagonists is dead already, but still trying.  And each woman is older than the one in the previous book.  Just as I am getting older.  They've gone from sexy to arty to philosophical to crabby.  Just like me.  They worry about marriage, divorce, children, loss, and redemption in the same ways I have.

What seems to be clear now that it is light outside and I've had my coffee is that I've spent the past fifteen years chronicling my life as I wandered through it.

How uncreative of me, I think, pouring another cup.  Then I run my glance over my book case full of old and new books that I love enough to make me unable to donate them to the library used book sale.  I see that I am not alone.  Roth, Updike, Hemingway, Smiley, Proulx and even Evanovitch, I betcha, seem find their truths and their characters first in themselves.  I'm thinking that most writers do.  While I'm not in the same league as these writers and most of the others on my shelves, I am beginning to understand that I write to learn more about myself.  And that it is okay.  Maybe even healthy.

So my next story will involve a woman who sits bolt upright in a midnight bed and discovers a way to deal with  an heavy onset of rejection.  Maybe she'll start testing recipes for Holiday punch and discover that after a few swallows, rejection isn't that big a deal, just life.