Photograph by Jane Underwood.

Janine had been passing him on her way to the drugstore for weeks now. She never went into the diner – too much saturated fat, not enough green stuff, unless the dye they used in their mint chocolate chip ice cream counted – and, to be honest, she had other reasons not to go in, too.
 
Ever since returning home to pack up her mother, she’d been stepping inadvertently into the past. The town itself seemed stuck in a time warp, with all that neon and the thriving Mom and Pop stores (who would have thought that northern New Jersey was so retro?). It was the kind of  place where people stayed, aged in place. The pharmacist at the corner drug store was a high school acquaintance, a former football cheerleader who was brainier than anyone knew. The guy who pumped her gas was the brother of Janine’s best friend from elementary school. The clerk working at the library circulation desk was the person who introduced Janine to marijuana, that first secretive toke during a school trip into New York.
 
Janine was tired of going through the dance of friendly interrogation. Over time she developed a willful blindness and only saw the path ahead of her. That was difficult enough, considering the state of her mother's apartment, the tangled and rotting neurons clogging her mind. This time he saw her. “Janine! Janine Rickenbacher?”
 
It was Tommy. In the same job he’d had since high school, handyman/janitor for Zorba's. Some things never change, but Tommy had. He’d hardened, his eyes had darkened a shade, were brassy and brittle. He took off a glove and reached for her, his hand calloused, the fingernails bitten to nubs.

Tags: writing, Janine, fiction, New Jersey, hometowns

I’m standing before a pool of pristine water, circling my arms through stifling summer air. The sun is a hole in the haze, a bright round portal to nowhere. Marked by its unchecked rays, my shoulders are beginning to blush, the pink deepening to red as I kneel by the pool’s edge.

Like the Bay in November, the water looks thick, as though it’s huddling against itself for warmth. I insert a hand and quickly remove it. Too cold. I straighten up, circle the pool, and try dipping a toe in the water. I can’t do it. There will be no swimming today.

Off I go to the air-conditioned house to blog about my inability to leap.

I haven’t written anything substantial for weeks. Today was a lucky day. The kid is napping as I type, a rare occurrence. I took care of a few blogging tasks, ate lunch, and decided that today was the day I would take a look at my months old short story.

This was serious stuff. I set up the laptop at my new, improved writing space. Knowing how distracting the Internet can be, I disabled our wireless connection, told myself to be strong. I opened the file with anticipation.

Every word was questionable, every description hackneyed. I circled the edge of the story, but couldn’t submerge myself. And now I sit writing a blog entry about how damn hard it is to write fiction. Hard because what is in my mind is so difficult to get on the page. Hard because I want to write layered stuff and what I’m writing at the moment seems so simplistic and clichéd. I know that that writing takes practice, but I want to be good at it. RIGHT NOW!

I could look at the bright side. I’m writing more now that I ever have. Even when I am working on a blog entry, I am still writing. When my brain is unlocked, I am capable of just letting the words flow.

Writing blog entries is easy, relatively quick, and satisfying, with almost instant positive feedback. It gives me a chance to organize my thoughts, to mine the mysterious subconscious. Sometimes that puts distracting thoughts to rest so that I am able to write about things outside of my own experience. Writing fiction (or even creative nonfiction) is more plodding and risky. But, oh, for the chance to do it well, to create something that gets beyond the walls of my own skull. Surely the benefits are worth the pain? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to keep at it.

Beginning next week, the kid will be in school three mornings a week. I will have guaranteed, uninterrupted time to write in the daylight.

I expect mornings of glorious suffering and struggle.

That’s not too much to hope for, is it?

Tags: storytelling, fiction, wasting time, writing

Things are changing, rushing along, right? Even though my writing feels like it's in stasis -- what DO I write about next? -- new synapses are forming, neural networks are sending offshoots and intertwining even as I type. I'm not the same person I was two weeks ago and I'll be in a different place tomorrow morning.

I can do this.

So much of what I've written is confessional, or revealing: here, see, this is how it was for me, this is what I've hidden under my shell. Secrets and shame. I can't seem to write about anything else.

Today I thought I'd try something different, a short piece about how running has helped me both with writing and with pushing through a tough year in my marriage. Running, like writing or maintaining a relationship, takes discipline. You run through reluctance, bad weather, and physical pain. In most cases, things improve with effort and persistence. Even my "inspirational" running story turned an emotional striptease. Though as I write about it here, I can see a way out of that ... I'll have to think about it some more.

Taking the interesting bits of my life and thoughts (if I could figure out which, exactly, were the interesting bits) and writing fiction -- that would be the way to go, the way to really transcend my personal pain-o-rama. But fiction is SCARY . I've barely poked my toe into the murky waters of the personal essay form. Yes, we should do things that call to us, even if they are scary. But I'd like to feel competent in some form of writing first. Work on one neural network at a time.

Ah, well. Maybe just one short story ....

Tags: running, fiction, emotional striptease

Is this a lucky day?

Another long no napper today. My ole nubbin brain keeps on shrinking, with very little to show for it. I did learn that toddlers (at least my toddler) enjoy raking clean cat litter and can turn almost anything into a digger -- even themselves with the proper equipment (dust pan and litter scoop).

I'd like to transcend the day now, please.

I've been reading Beautiful Children , a first novel by Charles Bock. Some of it is very well done. The portrayal of how a marriage can slowly fall apart captures a sense of sadness and inevitability when people no longer communicate, can't bridge the distance they've built between themselves, but still care about each other. What happens to the couple when their only child goes missing is also poignantly written. Many of the characters are real and believable. It's a long and ambitious book with various interweaving story lines. I can feel the struggles he had writing it -- ten years and at least four rewrites -- and it is on the bombastic side, well maybe some lower form of bombasticity, since his language is simple for the most part. Just over the top. Maybe he should have stayed with the couple and their struggle, but I'm not sure that would have been as interesting for Bock or his readers.

Tags: fiction, reading