Little Drops of Blood

“Writing is very easy. All you do is sit in front of a keyboard until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.” 

And so, I have just returned from Maryalice’s Writer’s Colony, where a lone writer of one, struggled and strained to write 10 pages of the first chapter of her new book, a memoir, on how she raised and educated children ALTERNATIVELY. Now it isn’t that I haven’t been working on this project already- years actually, and I have a stack of pages which all sound trite and empty, so I began completely over…and I finally like it! I didn’t sleep one night at all, the next night I got up at 2:30 and wrote all night. It is just amazing the amount of adrenelin surging through your body and the creative juices flowing once it begins.

Maryalice thought of the idea of staging my book from the modeling stand of a life drawing platform in an art school (I had this occupation for 25 yrs- those of you who don’t know me well). She said to use the fact that you sit there and think and reminisce and muse and project into the future- that it will be my FRAME on which to HANG my stories. I can revisit the model stand repeatedly throughout the 22 yrs of raising kids and employ it where I need it and where it works for me. I think she is a genesis. And it made good stuff come out of me.

My husband was surprised- the staunch German work ethic maniac that he is- he said he would have thought that I’d have 100 pages complete in 4 days. Annie Dillard, the Pultzier prize award writer (“Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”) who commented on my 1st book jacket, sometimes wrote only a few GOOD sentences a day. So I am not going to feel badly.

It’s still a long time coming, but I am 10 pages closer. Thank you for your gift Maryalice- 4 days every month for 4 months- that’s the schedule! (Would that be a good 40 pages then? Enough to send out to find a publisher? THAT would motivate the shit out of me! A contract!