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:

 

An old Friend Blog from Nine Years Away

 

"Bon appetite." Have any of us said that phrase in a normal voice since 1964?

Do you know anyone who hosted a TV show and never tried to change themselves?

 

 Apparently, Julia Child did not. 

 

(Above photo Photo of Julia and Paul Child)

With Julia, what you saw was what you got. 

I am reading Julia Child Rules, Lessons on Savoring Life, by Karen Karbo. I was struck by the notion that we have been trained that something is wrong with us, that we need to change, or that we ought to work on ourselves. 

More "How–Books abound than any other. On top of that, we need "Life coaches" because we can't figure it out for ourselves. I am guilty of all that myself, having taken more seminars than you can shake a stick at (I never understood why anyone would shake a stick at anything, but it was one of those sayings mothers perpetrate on their children.)

Most of us want to savor life but don't know how. 

Apparently, savoring life was built into Julia. There she was, a 6 foot 3-inches tall, a young woman in the 1930s, too tall to play the damsel in distress in school plays, so instead opted to play the Emperor. Even after shaving three inches off her height, she was too tall to be accepted into the WACS or WAVES during wartime (talk about discrimination), so she because an OSS researcher instead. That was dreary work, typing files, so she moved to India on a whim, where she was knee-deep in classified information and where her organizational skills were appreciated. Julia was not a typical desired young woman to be courted; she was a spinster until age 32, but in India, she met and later married the love of her life Paul Child. 

She and Paul were rare birds—mix-matched, he was shorter than her by 6 inches, a sophisticated French man of the world, interested in intellectual pursuits and love affairs—she a giddy free spirit. Yet, they married and lived a forty-eight-year love affair.

Paul introduced Julia to French food. She introduced herself to the Le Cordon Bleu Cooking School; the rest is history. "How magnificent to find one's calling at last," she said. She was thirty-eight years old.

After seeing the movie Julie Julia, you know that publishing her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was no small feat. After many failures, she decided that writing an 800-page cookbook that didn't sell was better than working on an 800-page novel that didn't sell, for they still needed to eat, she still had the recipes, and she still loved to cook.

When her mayonnaise recipe, one she had successfully made thousands of times and even made to bolster herself up after a cooking failure, did itself fail, she turned her attention to the scientific interaction of ingredients, or was it the bowl's temperature or the eggs? Julia made so many mayonnaise recipes that Paul finally called a halt, and she threw gallons of mayonnaise down the commode. See, people do research because they want to know. (I need clarification on why her mayonnaise failed, Karbo didn't say, and I'm not making sixteen gallons of mayonnaise to find out.) 

When Julia turned 80, a birthday she would have preferred to ignore, her vast following was in the mood to celebrate her. And, according to Karbo, Julia, who had the stamina of a shed dog at full peak training, attended all 300 birthday bashes. (Some commanding $350 a plate.) 

Julia was robust and healthy, except in later life, her knees failed her, and she sometimes cried in pain at the end of the day.

 

Julia followed her own rules, "Obey Your Whims," "Live With Abandon, "Be Yourself," and she became an original. She will long be remembered as The French Chef. (Who was neither a Chef nor French. Don't you just love it?)

Well, I have a Revere Ware pan in my kitchen, not French standard issue, a travesty by French standards, but it is over 50 years old, I have burned more food in it than I care to count, and I have expended more elbow grease in cleaning it than I care to mention. On top of that, I need a decent kitchen knife in the house. I'm no French Chef or a chef of any other nationality, but I love watching cooking shows.

 

 Here's butter to you, Julia.

Excuse me, I'm going out to eat…