Page 13

Sorry I’m late!

I got myself into a bit of a snit.

Tuesday night, I wanted to do other things. It doesn’t matter what they were. I just didn’t want to practice writing as much as I wanted to be free to attempt this other thing. I practiced writing anyway, and even I didn’t want to read it.

Wednesday night rolled around. Wednesday evening should find me editing and photo-taking, not staring at the blank screen where my first draft should be.

Is it my fault Handsome Supportive husband would make a great Levi’s model? He just prances around the place – okay, he doesn’t actually prance, but he might as well – doing supportive things like doing the weekly grocery shopping before I get home from work. And he didn’t just grocery shop. He did it well. He bought all the right things that we like that really needed replacing.

If it were me, doing a chore that was traditionally (in our particular relationship) the other person’s chore, like say plowing the driveway, I might do it somewhat badly so the chore stays firmly in the other person’s wheelhouse. Anyway, he did my chore so I would have needed time at my desk.

What did I do? Well, it was before I noticed that there were avocados in the fruit bowl and cans of tuna and salmon on the pantry shelf. Nevertheless, I complained somewhat lightheartedly that he hadn’t made cookies.

I like a small healthy-type nibble with my afternoon coffee. Having the more demanding sweet tooth in the household, I take it upon myself to keep the cookie jar stocked with my home-made cookies.

Anyway, HSH shopped. I eventually noticed and thanked him profusely.

Clearly, the thing to do was go directly to my desk and do the thing husband had made time for me to do. So I wrote a terrible beginning of a short play in honor of earth day. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek but actually unearthed (Ha!) some unconsciously held beliefs that were serving no-one, least of all my dear Mother Earth. Talk about a hot button! Such ghastly selfish angry thoughts, I couldn’t bear for you to know even one of them.

Anyway, I took my little snit down to the fireside and shared it with Greg, who was understandably perplexed.

By the time I was boiled off, I had very nearly decided to quit or take a long sabbatical from my fledgling blog.

“It’s just too much pressure! And they’re not going to want to read what I really want to write, which is fiction.”

In times like this, Handsome Supportive Husband sits very still and changes color to blend in with his surroundings.

“Nobody likes my fiction,” I said to L at a not too distant but not terribly recent (outside) cocktail party.

She made a delightful sound like a cross between a gasp and a guffaw.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“It seems they stop reading at about page 13. Then the manuscript sits around for weeks while I try not to mention it.”

I could see she was thinking something along the lines of… ‘seems like you ought to take a gander at page 13 and see what went wrong.’ Or it could have been, “Wow, that’s a lot of boring in a very small space.”

The conversation veered off in another direction, or perhaps she glided away to more rousing companions. Anyway.

So here I am back on that page 13 feeling, staring at Greg, who is trying to look like an empty brown recliner.

I whined on and on for awhile, poor brown chair, but the gist of my fuming is that I want to write fiction. But by the time I produce my blog post each week, there’s no time for fiction. At which point, I may have started blaming you (yes, you, dear reader) for reading my non-fiction.

Now that I say it out loud, it does sound a tad petulant.

Now, it’s Friday afternoon, and I am back in the realm of my senses. (Not that I didn’t thoroughly luxuriate in my non-blogging Thursday evening. I did. I told myself I quit you and acted accordingly.) By the last drop of my afternoon coffee today, though, it dawns on me that I owe you a debt of gratitude.

Hunting for 750 right words to describe a moment to you will eventually make me a better hunter. A gathering metaphor would seem so much gentler, but alas hunting it is. Sneaking up on a feeling, throwing a net of words over it, trying not to bend a feather yet hold it still for you to make a thorough inspection…feels like hunting.

Thank you for being my reader these past nine months. There’s something about gestation and growing in there, but we don’t need to parse that here, now. Your standing beside me, taking 5 minutes to inspect my catch each week, means the world to me.

I do want to write fiction, too. Maybe a fiction button will appear on this web page.

In addition to thanking you, which I do heartily, I also want to mention that I may change the frequency of posts for a little while. I think its time to take a gander at page 13.