Drive: some thoughts on anxiety

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Today, the only thing I can find to write about is fear. And I don't want to write about fear.

I am sick of fear. I don't want sympathy. Instead, I want to hear the strike of metal against another person's truth so that the room fills up with the hum of Tibetan bowls. Fear, I've found, tends to elicit something else: a desire to comfort, along with its attendant Hallmark cards and pep talks and "you're-too-hard-on-yourself"s. I have a had time with these acts of kindness. They make me feel...exposed.

But fear it is.

I am scared to death, really, to be a real writer. I was once told (and I think I have said this here before) that if you want to look at what you are committed to, look at what you already have. This is true. I have exactly what I can handle. I want to write and, in the solace of my living room, I want to think that what I have written may be meaningful and good. I want to imagine that I could be successful, am about to be successful.

The list of things I do not want to do associated with being a writer is somewhat longer and it involves any kind of public embarrassment and openness to criticism and rejection, any kind of standing in front of people looking prettied-up and confident, any kind of telling people all about what I can do.

Because—at my core of cores—I don't think I can do anything.

This is what this is really about. Perhaps most of you will not know what I mean, because perhaps most of you are not sexual abuse survivors who are recovering from alcoholism and bulimia* and have spent most of your lives out of the work force raising kids. But—maybe, maybe, some of you, despite not being all the same kinds of messed up, will still know what I mean.

I don't think I can do anything. I am surprised I can cut apples. I am thrilled I can sweep floors. When I applied for my job as an instructional assistant at the local schools six years ago, I was terrified. I had run a daycare, twice, taken child development classes, and had been raised by a mother who worked almost all my life in the schools, but I still didn't really think I could do the job. I couldn't make copies, I thought. I didn't know how to use the die cut machine, I thought. I was sure I would not be picked.

After I expressed all this, my husband looked at me like I had spouted several additional heads.

"You're worried that you're not qualified to be an IA?" he asked. I was.

They hired me anyway.

Now, I tutor and I don't think I can do that either. The parents of my students think I can. I act like I can. And I seem to be able to go through the motions of planning and teaching an individualized lesson for each child, and they seem to learn, and everyone seems to be pleased, but I'm still, on some level, utterly sure that I can't really do the work, or that someone else could do it better than I do.

In my solar plexus—I know.

One of the things I wrote about in my book is that I didn't learn to drive until I was 26. I just felt safer letting other people do it. When I finally learned, I took only a month and I had to learn to do it while having full panic attacks. Once I'd been driving several months, the panic attacks went away (except for when I drive in heavy freeway traffic, or in high winds, or late at night, or on the side of very high cliffs).

I think writing, for me, is a bit like that right now. I have my foot on the gas, but I am tapping the brakes constantly and trying to keep from crying as my adrenalin surges, telling me I need to get off the road RIGHT NOW. And I seem to be off in all directions: updating my LinkedIn profile, trying to get freelance work, researching magazines to submit to, getting help to update my blog and create an author page, ordering books on queries and agents. Trying to figure out what I should do with beta readers. I cannot focus. I just get up and do something every day. Take some action. Drive somewhere. Take notes. Tap brakes. Breathe deeply. Start again.

Before—I was just writing. I know how to write. I do not know how to be a writer.

I did learn to drive, and perhaps I will learn to be a professional writer, too. Perhaps something will yield. Perhaps all this garbage in my head about platforms and business plans and writer's groups and publishing will form itself into something actionable.

Perhaps.

But for right now, again, fear is my teacher. I have the opportunity not to run but to stay and confront it, to put my feet on the pedals. Or to take a break and ask what I am doing and why I am doing it. Or to ask for help. Most of all—to show up and tell the truth. It's all I have: the Truth. It's why I like writing. It's why I am doing this. It's why I am telling you. Not because it's sad (it's not) or because it's interesting (it isn't really). Because it's true.

Not just for me, but in some way, for someone else.

Life was never the same after I learned to drive. Suddenly, I could go where I wanted to, when I wanted to, drive as fast or as slow as I wanted to go. I could choose the grocery store I shopped at. I could drive my kids out to the beach. I was in control of something that before I was just the recipient of.

I don't feel ready, but I'm ready. I'm ready to drive my career. Where, and how, I do not know.

And it may take months  before the panic subsides, during which I will have to take action anyway. That seems to be how it goes. Yes, I've done therapy and yes, I once took anti-depressants for a long time (and I still panicked while driving) and yes, now I meditate virtually every morning. But none of this gets me out of being who I am, which seems to include a certain amount of panic and hysteria to which most people are just not prone.

The other side of this coin is that I kind of like myself: panicky, over-wrought, tense, and complicated. I know that seems impossible, given what I've said, but it isn't. I've spent a year writing my whole life down and I am now intimately acquainted with Me.

I kind of admire her. She has guts.

My youngest son, who has auditory processing disorder, has not yet been able to earn his first belt in Tae Kwon Do. When called to the front to do his forms, he tends to forget them. He tends not to notice he's been called to the front. He tends to be doing the wrong thing. He tries very hard and so he feels bad about all this.

"Listen," I told him one day, "You are working harder than anybody else."

"I am?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Your brain has to work just to hear them calling your name, to hear them call out the count. You have to work harder and it is going to take longer than others to do the same thing because of that. It's not because you're not as good. It's because your job is harder than theirs."

"Oh," he said, relieved. "Ohhhh."

And it's no different with me—with people like me—I suppose. If it takes me fifteen nervous emails to friends and a thousand scatter-shot web searches and thirty mornings of meditation and that many days of feeling like I am crawling out from being crushed under a rock—all to figure out one thing I really need to do next for my writing—then that is what it takes, and it is not because I am not as good. It is because my job is harder than the people who woke up this morning confident in who they are and what they do. It is because I have put in the work of a PhD in order to get an associates**.

I am not less because I struggle. I am more.

So, today, in honor of every woman I know who has stayed up late with flashcards well past when she knew the material for her test, and every teenager who has dressed and primped for a party and then realized at the last minute that she's too ugly to go, and every woman who doesn't even apply for the job because she can't bear to hear the words "You are unqualified." I say:

You did good work today. Carry on, and fight another day. Breathe in, breathe out, foot on pedal, inhale again. Exhale.

Now drive.



* I am grateful to say 20 years of recovery now.
* *This is a metaphor. I don't even have an associate's and I am not dissing anyone who's earned a PhD.

Into the Tidal Zone Part Two: Making Justice

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Welcome to part two of Into the Tidal Zone. Part One can be read here. This is intended for audience participation, so please comment, and comment on comments, and follow comments, and otherwise keep things interesting in a respectful way. This series is intended to explore in a variety of ways those areas of our lives that we might call spiritual, religious, ethical, or whatever name you have for the magma core of who-you-are. I call mine my spirituality. Today I am delving into the issue of obligation to make justice, or change, in the world.

*

At the church of my childhood, there is one religious teaching I remember most: Make justice. This is the thing that got stuck on me.

It was the 1980s and the government of El Salvador was killing its own people (10,000 by 1980). My church was part of the Sanctuary Movement at the time. After long deliberation, the adult members of the church had decided to harbor a family from El Salvador in open defiance of federal law. The family had two children: Marta and Jesus. When they first came to us, we played a game with them and, all the other kids, where our names were drawn out of a hat.

"JEE-SUS?" my friend Karuna whispered, holding a slip of paper in disbelief, before someone corrected her.

Marta was around my age. She was taller than I was and had long dark, wavy hair and a broad-lipped smile. She seemed shy without more English, shy out of her world, but likable and kind. This hiding of people was an important secret that had to be kept, or Marta might be dragged away to blood-covered jungles, I imagined, where, taken by the military, she would be turned into black smoke. Disappeared. One day we went with her and her brother to the county fair, and I was scared the whole time that she would be recognized and dragged away with the cotton candy still sticky and pink in her hands and teeth.

This was how I learned that justice was something that real people needed and real people provided, that it was imperative, and that it included risk.

I wondered why we didn't do more.

"Would you give up your TV if it would save a starving child in Africa?" I asked an adult friend one day, when I was twelve. (All the starving children were in Africa in the 1980s.) She thought about it and answered honestly.

"No."

This drove me crazy about the world. I gave up eating meat when I was seven, but everyone else ate it. If I asked questions about why, they tended to say that they thought it was wrong but that they did it anyhow, which bothered more than the people who said they thought it was all right.

When I was fourteen, my friend and I walked into Macy's and, examining all the make-up, left it with stickers that said "This product tested on animals." When we were caught, the store clerk was kind and gentle and didn't yell at us, but simply asked us to stop. We did. Having walked in as nonviolent protesters, we left as reprimanded kids. We walked on to the food court to order a calzone.

When, at twenty-two,  I was getting ready to have my first baby, I was hearing about the conditions of workers in China in factories. No baby things from China please, I asked everybody.

"Here," said my grandmother, proudly, handing me a stuffed animal for my coming child. "This seal was made in Sri Lanka."

"You're not realistic enough," people told me. "You can't make them stop."

"I know," I told him. "I think I'm still supposed to try."

There were no diaper bags that weren't from China. At least not in our price range. So we bought a Chinese one anyway. Would you give up your TV? Maybe I wouldn't... Maybe not...

Having been presented with no more refugees to be friends with since middle school, my heart ached for something meaningful to do. How do you make justice? I wondered. Does it always mean making someone mad? The kind of justice I was trying to practice seemed to involve $5 cookies from Whole Foods, made locally with all-natural dyes. It seemed to make shopping harder, make life harder and bring no obvious reward. Thinking in terms of justice, without getting next to injustice, was like walking around barefoot on hot and rocky ground.

*

Today, I look at the world and ask myself the very same thing.

Today, I buy ethically-questionable meat along with ethically-questionable rice and sometimes the only thing I can be sure of are the bunches of lettuce from my yard. I sob inwardly at the mountains of fire and the young firefighters killed and think, Surely, we could do better than this. Surely I could do more to prevent the climate change of the world! I become exhausted by the need for action and justice-making and do nothing, too often, when something would be the thing to do.

But still I am moved by the need for justice. I let my heart be engaged. I watch the films posted of children who, having grown up in America, then face deportation because they cannot get the right paperwork*. I wonder if Marta ever became a citizen. Did she go back to El Salvador? Or was she deported, after learning to love cotton candy, and learning to speak easy English, and calling this nation her home? I wonder.

I carve out small spaces and do what I can: I give up paper towels, plant a garden and learn to grow food in a way that does not make war with the earth. I eat eggs from chickens that I keep and tend myself. I strive to teach and love and honor each child that I am given to teach and love—mine or someone's else's—in a way that makes both of us larger than we were. We make small donations. and read and try to stay awake.

It does not seem enough.

When my teenage son came back from Mexico this April, where with his own hands, he built houses for those living in dirt-covered shacks, I saw the face of justice-making: he was exhausted, nauseated, dirty and, getting in the van, he told me:

"I want to go home and take a shower and eat real food and go back to Mexico again."

*

How were you raised to understand justice and action to the change the world? Was this part of your religious upbringing?

Has this understanding changed?

What have you lost? What have you gained?



*You should really try and find time to watch this moving film. Gather tissues first.

Not Today.

My mountain, back in 2011, after we came home, as we watched it instead of Fourth of July fireworks.

Two years ago today, I was at a hotel in Albuquerque, spending down all our emergency savings while evacuated from a wildfire threatening my town. Back home, ashes fell, smoke choked the air, and, hopefully, my ducks were still alive. Mike drove back and forth from Los Alamos to work for the county, we went to the pool, we watched the news, which said nothing useful, and stared at Facebook, which had up-to-the-minute updates on what was really happening. Friends, having evacuated as far away as Colorado or Oklahoma all connected online to find out about each other's well-being. I missed my underwear back home.

Photos were released of the fire. It was gorgeous, in the way that Balrogs are gorgeous: beautifully rendered power, indomitable. In the midst of the plumes and walls of flame and the mushrooms of smoke walked firefighters—hotshots—running straight into what we had packed up and fled like so many cockroaches fleeing the scene of a fumigation. They were sooty and sweaty and they looked absolutely like gods. No one could have been more potent, more heroic, more good.

On July 3rd, we got to go home. They saved our town.

Today, I woke up and found out that 19 hotshots had died in a single devastating fire. 19 heroes snuffed out all at once. I felt sick. On the nearby main thoroughfare, cars and trucks drove by all morning, and all morning they have sounded just like skycrane helicopters: big, orange birds dropping retardant on the flames. I keep checking and they're still just cars. But, inside again, I'm sure I hear the helicopters once more.

I held my breath and Googled "Granite Mountain Hotshots" and "Las Conchas Wildfire" and—yes, they are the same ones. The same ones that saved my home, my town, my ducks, my garden, my patio, my savings, my memories. The very same team, among others, that did that. I can't bear it. I can't bear the incessant drought and the endless wildfires and the loss of homes and now the deaths and the slow-turning consideration that perhaps we should address global warming and perhaps we should fund our forest management and perhaps we need to understand nature better. It's not soon enough. Not today.

Not today.

The Lustful Lettuces of June

Once, when I was a dewy-eyed twenty-three year-old I told my friend Amy that I wanted to live on a homestead with a geodesic dome and several goats.

She snorted at me. It was very rude. (I'm not sure why I was—and am, after almost fifteen years—still friends with her.)*

"What?" I demanded. She said something about fantasizing. I was deeply offended and drew myself up to accommodate the large stick now materializing in my rear end. "How do you know this isn't my life's purpose—my POSSIBILITY?" I asked her.

"Because," she told me calmly, "it doesn't make you happy when you talk about it. It makes you flustered—and annoyed that you don't have goats."

That seemed to put the conversation to rest.

I still don't have any goats and, given the state of my back yard after years with only a dog in it, I think goats may be out of the question. That said, I have gone on to have ducks and then chickens and to  put in one garden after another at my house (completely without geodesic domes).

So, perhaps we were both right, in a way.

It is nearly July now, and it is hot. It has been in the nineties the last few days. I planted quite a lot of lettuces this March and we have been eating them since May. Every time I harvest a small head here or several leaves there, another lettuce merely stretches out and yawns, relieved to have been given the extra space. I can't get rid of them. They appear to be multiplying. Every night the menu is something and salad. We have to eat this lettuce, I tell everyone. I can't stand waste.

"Yum," I say.

So, now the lettuce is thinking to itself, "Ahhh, it's hot." It is starting to feel sort of sweaty and sexy and wanting to reproduce. The lettuces now go shooting up seed stalks with pretty little flower crowns atop their heads. Some of them can do this, fine, and I will harvest the resulting seed. But a whole half-bed of lettuces in flower, too bitter to eat, I do not need. So, we are gifting lettuces not yet bolted to our friends.

"Here, have a lettuce! Take two! Have a ladybug with that!"

We are pulling things up willy-nilly and calling this Bacchanalian scene of lettuce lust a wrap. And thinning carrots. Because, for some reason, I haven't done this yet. I am pulling up itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny onions crowding in on the great big beauties and preparing, perhaps, to make onion frittatas for little elves. My littlest son is with me, goggling over purple carrots, sticking his little brown fingers deep into the soil to feel around the tops of tap roots and pulling others out. He is holding lettuces like bridal bouquets and feeding some of the sun-starved leaves to chickens, who are begging for scraps like a horde of gypsy children rushing tourists in a square. We are nibbling sugar snap peas as we work. And, of course, he is shirtless and wearing his pirate costume pants inside out. Which is exactly as it should be.

So, things are perfect. Although, I think you will agree that the situation could be improved by a few goats.

*unless it's because she's been the sort of friend that coached me through two births, one divorce (not in that order) and makes an hour to talk to me anytime I need to talk to someone who will "get it" and know that she is the only one.

New Series: Into the Tidal Zone

Photo Credit: Morguefile  

What I call the tidal zone is the transforming edge of human experience, that place that is neither sea nor is it shore. It is a place apart from the ordinary concerns of daily life but close enough to them that are not fully lost to the ineffable greatness of the sea. In the tidal zone, sometimes things are clear and beautiful; sometimes they are murky and scary and dark. The world there teems with beauty and it all lives on the knife's edge between birth and death.

The tidal zone is the spiritual world: the world of longing, prayer and wonderment; the world of finding, grace, and bliss. 

It doesn't matter, really, if you think you are religious. Life will take you down to the shore. The questions and answers you find there will shape you and make you who you are. We all come out different from one another —some of us more different than we'd like.

I wrote a whole book about my life in the tidal zone. And I'd like to start exploring some of these ideas here. I want to start with a spiritual experience—mine or someone else's—and open up a conversation about it to see if we can find the common places and the places where we find different answers, take different paths from one another, and why.

*

Witness

It is Sunday and I am in a black church somewhere in my county because my daddy has been singing with his gospel choir. The pews are long and wooden and old, and I am shifting in them; feeling white and blonde and not Christian, feeling curious, feeling pale. I am small and I am an audience. I am a visitor. I am blue and cream and pale. All around me is coffee-colored skin and deep emotion and conviction: souls uplifted, assenting "Mmmmmm-hmmmmm. Yesssss." I am quiet. I know the words to the songs by heart and I know they are not real. Daddy sings "Just like Jeremiah..." I don't know who Jeremiah is, but I know how to sing. The Lighthouse Singers clap and stamp and move their feet; I want to get up and burst into thankful song with them. 

In a bit, there is more church service. This is quite unlike my church. In my church we stand and sing "We Are a Gentle, Angry People" and, afterwards,  there is a fish shredded into salad, at the buffet, and molded back again into the shape of a fish. It has olives for its eyes. Before the fish, before leaving, before Sunday school, we light a chalice and we quietly reflect. My feet have to be still. I have to think. I like my church. But the singing is better here.

Up in the front of the room is an old black woman with a trim church jacket: pink, and a hat on which perches a coiled fabric rose. Music swells and testimony rises to the low rafters and back down to where I sit. She is asking the congregation, "Will you look for Jesus?" People stand up and say loudly, surely, that they will. As a man stands up right near me, I feel whiter and stranger and less Christian than I ever have before. I feel hungry. And, as each person stands and says that they will accept Jesus, that they will listen for Jesus, will look for Jesus, I find that I am doing that, too. I am scanning the room right now for Jesus, hoping he will come in the side door. I am waiting for something blazing to happen, for some miracle to occur. I want Jesus to happen to me. I want to be invited and I want in. I want it to be real. The gospel song goes:

Jesus is real, I know the Lord is real to me. 

Jesus is real, I know the Lord is real to me. 

(Sometimes when I'm feeling low,) (no where to go,) 

(Jesus comes along) (and He makes me strong.) 

For I know, oh, Jesus is real.*

So I stand up. And this black woman is looking at me, this woman as smooth as dark molasses with a voice like the rumbling of a deep-bellied purr. She looks at me, with seriousness and affection, and she asks me,"Will you look for Jesus, child?" 

"I will," I tell her. And I sit back down, feeling so much better than I did before. 

Later, in the car, my dad, who is not Christian either but loves to sing, doesn't seem perturbed. His choir full of white people—Jewish, Buddhist, hippie, Christian, Nothing—sing gospel music. They sing about Jesus, who is real, and now—so do I.

*

Here's your question: What was a time when you can remember being exposed to the faith practices of other people in a way that actually got inside you, and in some way, and changed your feelings about life? 

What made this experience different from all the times you saw people believing differently and were not changed?

Are you still informed by this experience?

Your soundtrack: Jesus is Real by John P. Kee

Author's Notes: The memory I've included here is a bit of a collage of experiences I had. I found that I had a very clear memory of the woman speaking but not of her exact words or the circumstances of the day, so I filled in with what I could remember, in general, of sitting and watching gospel and how that felt to me.

If you want to read more about my experience of religion, or religious history read this.

*Song by John P. Kee.

Moving Violations: a review

To buy Moving Violations at Amazon click here.

I can't stand book reviews.

Here's why: reading reviews in a serious manner is like asking a group of kindergarteners what their favorite color is, and on that basis, choosing how to dye your hair. I also find that highly opinionated reviews drift frequently into the absurd. Kurt Vonnegut put this best: "Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

My favorite writers at the moment are David Sedaris (who is "boring, not very funny, mean and bitchy, and too lazy to write a novel"), Anne Lamott (of whom it is said: "reading about someone else's needless suffering is about as attractive as watching it in person"), and Glennon Melton, who inspired the following sentiment: "After reading her book, I think I'd go batty if I were in her company for more than half an hour." For me, these writers are best friends that exist in 2D form. For others, obviously they represent something altogether different—perhaps small pox, or crab lice.

For this reason, I feel that I would generally rather not add my voice to the general din. Who, honestly, cares what I think about other people's books?

Nevertheless, I'm going to do just this. Why? Nicole Amsler. I met her at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference last April when I went. She was in every way pleasant, congenial, well-mannered, good-smelling, and friendly. I consider her a friend. She has written a book and this book is now in print and—what's more—it is really good.

I want to tell you about it.

Her book, Moving Violations, is a collection of short stories concerned with themes of transportation and death. There are nine of these in all. The book, at 89 pages, is slim enough to hide under a pillow so that young children cannot find it. (This is probably a good idea, by the way. There are some themes of sexual abuse and grief which would not necessarily make good read-aloud material.)

The stories showcase Amsler's considerable range as a scribe of the human experience. A self-described writer of "Midwestern dysfunction," her characters are, in each story, put through their moral paces and asked to redeem themselves. It's as if we, as readers, are Peter at the gates of Heaven and the protagonists, in turn, show up, are summarily stripped of the trappings of their egos and are made to justify their actions on this earth. Make no mistake: this is not an insipid, predictable touched-by-an-angel motif. Each studio-sized plot is well-wrought and believable, if fantastic in being a worst-case-scenario.

We first meet a grieving widower as he confronts the loss of the wife he lost to breast cancer; he is giving away her belongings at a garage sale put together by his insensitive daughter, who just wants him to move on. Amsler artfully manages to convey strength, anger, grief, attachment, and compassion in her believable dialogue. Immediately, I was hooked and wanted more. I consumed the book more or less whole, like a small carton of sorbet that was supposed to last the week.

My favorite of her nine stories is "Burnt Offerings." For a parent, reading it is somewhat like watching a cat kill small robins in the nest. And yet it's compelling. The character, Cole, is a jerk; horrible, contemptible; he thinks of a sweet little girl on the airplane as "Mongloid," is unable to see or really understand the heart of his own son. But—boom!—life punishes him in such a way that you can't help but want to hold him, to soothe him and tell him it's OK. Amsler keeps us with him, through the moment of loss and disaster, and well after—through brutal pain, humanization. She expertly paints every single tiny detail in the landscape of misery and redemption so that, in the locus of horror, we see how he learns how to love.

Each of the six other stories—whether that of a sorority sister going through airport security in a red negligée; or of a girl taken out for driving lessons (and worse) in a family hearse; or of the first responder at the sight of an airplane crash who meets a victim with the same name as his late wife—is a complete meal in itself, one that, like me, you'll probably eat too fast.

Moving Violations is fabulously dark but ultimately hopeful. The characters are genuine, the plots believable. Amsler has done her job here in crafting plots and characters. All this sin and redemption, death, and moving from one place to one another are somehow about all of us: We are magnified and cast in shadow, driven off roads and set on fire, blinded, haunted, and bursting with momentary glory—before we flash finally off the page.

Note: I was not compensated in any way for this review.

I wrote a book.

I have written the ending to my book. Or, rather, I have written it again. I have now revised each chapter 20-40 times, until the language, sentiment and plot of as interesting to me as watching Koyaanisqatsi without the aid of any hallucinogenic drugs. It is too long. Far too long. And I wonder what parts of my life I will ultimately deem "unnecessary to the plot." This is the story of my life so far—a memoir—because certainly what the world needs most is more memoirs, you will agree. I can do nothing but give the world what it needs. I am called to serve.

I have passed through the predictable stages of writer's schizophrenia which have first caused me to suffer from the belief that what I have here is a work of shocking genius ready to be set on the shelf next to my favorites: Lamott, Sedaris, and Melton; to take its place in the canon of literature which, in a bold, new way, illumines the human soul. "A victory," the review will say. Next, I have realized that what I have here is the carcass of a toad: stinking, in a state of ego-fueled, narcissistic decomposition, an embarrassment to everyone around. Then, I have thought: "Meh."

But—here's the thing: I have finished something. Until my eldest child reaches the age at which he can be, at least legally, said to be adult enough to leave my home, I have otherwise finished nothing of length or import. I have dropped out, left early and quit everything without fulfilling on what some especially kind people have called "my potential." Now, you see, I have finished a book. Out of respect for those of you with more sensitive natures than mine, I will be polite and refrain from calling it what I truthfully meant to call it, which was a mo$#erf&&king book.

I finished a book!

Sort of.

It is, as I have said, too long. And I want to run it by what they call BETA readers, which are the people who will read my manuscript and tell me exactly and specifically in which way they think it sucks. I did this once and was promised a copy of the book when published. As a volunteer gig, it was kind of fun; like eating pizza and saying "Push!" at someone else's birth.

After the BETA reading bit, I have to try and convince someone at a publishing house, who has sold his soul to Satan in exchange for a red pen, that this is something someone would want to buy. I am not, to say the least, looking forward to this. My relationship to promoting myself is similar to Ted Kaczynski's. I like to deliver my words in plain-looking packages and separate letters explaining what I am about. I hope these will have an impact on the world, but I like to maintain my privacy. The thought of a book proposal makes me physically ill.

Besides, I'm not sure anyone would want to buy it. Why would they, when they could spend their money on thneeds?

Privacy is a concern. It is all good and well when you are sitting at home writing your innermost thoughts onto Microsoft Word, but it is not so well when you imagine several thousand someones reading them. And the criticism! "The author cannot seem to make up her mind about who she is," I imagine that they'll say. "Profoundly full of herself." "Pretending to be wise." I can only imagine that I will have to plead guilty as charged.

Of course, more likely, I will simply receive a form letter: "Game Over. Thank You For Playing."

At any rate, like all achievements, the book was more fun when it wasn't done than it is now.

That said, I am doing this anyway. Because—

I wrote a mo$#erf&&king book.