The truth is that while I am but a pale shadow of this description, it may be largely true of the young woman potter heroine in my yet-to-be-named novel; It’s completion date keeps receding into the ever more distant future. A character mentioned only in passing flares into life and demands a name and a piece of the action. Issues meant to be subordinate swell and swell like rising bread until they threaten to spill across the whole book, creating chaos in my original orderly plot plan.
Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite....
I hope finally to make my way out of this Western river canyon (the setting of my heroine’s adventures) before that most universal of all target dates---the Year 2000.
As an ever-supportive friend said to me, It is good to have some long range purpose in life.
So to marathon novelists everywhere I send this Message:
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First unpublished “novel” (15 pages) written at age ten. During high school wrote second unpublished novella--highly romantic and tragic. Third unpublished novel, taking place in a women’s’ small liberal arts college during Vietnam era. Written while teaching college. Intermittent production of short stories along the way, some published in small magazines. Nearly became a journalist, starting a journalism major in college. During vacations worked as a reporter on the hometown paper. But in junior year detoured into another field where I subsequently invested my career life. I am a recently displaced New Englander, exchanging frostbitten fingers for mossy toes, in a move from Boston blizzards to Oregon drizzle. I share my house with an eight-year-old Sheltie and the ghost of a once nineteen-year-old Main Coon cat. In hopes of learning enough about the process of pot-making to lend credibility to my heroine’s passion for becoming a master potter, I take the occasional pottery course. So far my pottery pieces have tended to be mostly lumps and blobs. My heroine’s works, however, are, almost without fail, very, very good--(unbelievably good?) |
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