Something

 

 

I thought I would make you hungry. This doesn’t have much to do with the story I’m telling, except that I mention the Carnegie Deli in New York, and at the time I was writing about it, it was closed. I wondered if it still is. It is open, and here is a picture of their Rubin sandwich.

 I should have sent this blog four days ago when I was hyped, tickled, and excited.

For some reason, I’m not today.

Maybe I’m scared. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe it’s a completion let-down. Maybe that our washing machine broke down and I need to clear the space for the delivery man to bring in the new one. - Life happens.

Maybe it's not knowing if this novel I’ve had in the works for over thirty years will go anywhere. Yet, yet, I love my characters. They deserve a life, not to sit languishing in my computer.

In my novel,  Song of Africa: Miss Sara Rose wrote at the beginning of her journal:

“There is an old saying that once we start weaving, the gods will provide the skein.”

It turned out to be true for Sara and for me. I did not know when I began writing this story where it was going or where it would end. But the ending came.  A second Sara, a young Sara, entered the picture and completed the story.

I did not see that coming.

When I began this novel, I heard that a protagonist needed to be young and beautiful. So, out of rebellion, I choose to write about an unmarried 65-year-old schoolteacher who retires on the first page. She is beautiful, I couldn’t resist.

“A spinster school teacher?” said a friend. “That will never fly.”

“Oh yes, it will. You don’t know what happens in the story.”

Also, at the beginning of this writing, I didn’t know how a 65-year-old woman would feel.

What a difference 30 years makes.

Of course, I haven’t been working on this story for all of those 30 years. I have done other things, but I kept going back to it. I have aged. My story has evolved. I figured it was my learning story. At first, I wrote by hand, then I learned to compose on the computer. And when I tried to add dialogue, exposition, and description all wrapped together as true novelists do, I felt like the carnival performer spinning plates on vertical poles. The performer runs from one pole to another to keep the plates spinning, if one gets wobbly, it is likely to fall.

Five days ago, I was about ready to chuck the whole thing, for I couldn’t get the beginning right, and after tearing the chapters apart to have time jumps, I put them all back together in chronological order.

Miss Sara Rose leaves her little town of King’s Valley, Kansas, and embarks on her lifelong dream—to ride a river in Africa. And there enters The Rocinante, not the river boat of her dreams but a broken-down old launch (named after Don Quixote’s horse) that takes tourists up and down the Gambia River. The Rocinante has a skipper, a Caucasian engineer from Los Angeles, California. Thus enters a new life for Sara, a romance, a granddaughter, and when another Sara, Miss Sara Rose’s namesake, arrives, well…how much should I tell?

Surprise, I unintentionally ended up with a beautiful young protagonist.

It is the story of three women, Miss Sara Rose, her granddaughter, Patrice DeShane, and Sara Andrews, Aunt Sara’s namesake, their lives and loves. At the present time, it isn’t so outrageous to write about older people falling in love. See, if you wait long enough, your idea will become common. Better get with it to be on the leading edge.

I love hearing about work in progress, so I thought I would tell you a little about what I am doing. And that it is important to complete a project.

When I read the Introduction to Rosamunde Pilscher’s, novel, the NY Times bestseller, The Shell Seekers, where her publisher tells her he would love to make her rich and famous, but so far, she hadn’t produced the goods, she asked what that might be. “A story that spans your life,” he said. “a big fat novel for women.” She took the challenge and in her 60’s wrote The Shell Seekers. When she heard the news that it was a best seller, she was home alone in Scotland, so she shared a celebratory whiskey with the dogs.

I took that as a directive for a novel that spans some 80 years.

Song of Africa, a novel of 96,326 words.

Working cover by me:

 

And I though Last Week was Tough

When someone asked Isaac Asimov, "If you knew you would die tomorrow, what would you do?"   

He answered:  "I'd type faster.

I have adopted his answer.

Not that anyone told me I was going to die tomorrow, but when you go into the hospital, they always bring up the end-of-life directive. They want to know what to do with you if your heart stops beating.

I had a heart attack this past week and was in the hospital for two days.

But now I'm home and talking to you, and my little fingers (not little) are typing faster.

I had a super stressful event, and I thought my reaction was an adrenaline rush, except that after my daughter badgered me into having a blood test, it revealed that the enzyme that is released when the heart is damaged was in my blood.

See, your heart calls out for help when it needs it.

Take that advice to heart. If you need help or support, ask for it. Our mission is, or should be, to support each other.

And see how often we use the word 'heart'? "Bless your heart." "Heart-break," I love you with all my heart."

Your heart is sweet and lovable—love it back.

The afternoon after I came home from the hospital, I lay on the couch reading a novel. Sweetpea our little dog lay on the pillow beside my head. Zeke, our 3-legged German Shepherd lay on the couch at my feet warming them. And Laffe, the coon-hound lay on the floor beside me.

 This is heaven, I thought.

 

  

Since I believe in the Mind-Body-Spirit connection, that our physical issues are not separate from our minds, and that our minds are not separate from our Spiritual understandings, I'm here to say, I don't know what the f* I'm talking about.

But I do know about being grateful.

I love my life, and I love having one. I love having the opportunity to express myself on the page and having people read what I write. There are many reasons to be grateful.

And today I just had a conversation with my husband about LIFE.

As I have mentioned before, I signed up for a major in Biology after the college professor yelled out over a class of about 200, "This is the study of LIFE."

Biologists study living things—and dead ones. But they don't know about life.

Nobody does.

The subject moves into an esoteric, philosophical, theological, idealistic, and magical reality, and yes, a biological one, but that's the physical part.

We are more than our bodies.

Think about it, we have always been alive—except for First Cause, and I don't know about that. We came from our parents, who came from their parents, back and way back some 300,000 years to the Mitochondrial Eve, the first woman. How did she come into being?

Here we are, a result of that magical progression, and look what we are doing. Instead of saying, "Wow, look at us. Aren't we lucky!" We gripe and complain, and treat each other, as well as the animals and the earth, poorly.  I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the collective humanity. Which, it seems to me, is having an identity crisis right now.

Collective humanity doesn't know who they are or what to think. Or they believe so strongly that they will beat their fellows over the head with a belief system, or shoot them.

Yet, they have the spark of life in them.

Where did that come from?

You might say, "From God," but that is magic. What is Life?

Those ova and sperm were alive before they got together and fired off an entirely new set of instructions.

 

It's time for me to reconnect with some of my long-held inspirations and motivations.

Are you with me?

Here is my oracle for the day from Thomas and Penelope Pauley:

"The sooner you define your life, the easier it is for the Universe to create it for you."