I live on a busy corner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  There's also a parking garage a couple of floors below me, and another almost directly across the street.  On mornings when either or both are short handed, cars line up waiting to park and block the street.  This results in much horn honking early in the morning, despite a sign that reads very clearly, "Don't Honk. $350 Penalty."

This morning, I wrote a poem about it. I know the syllables are off for a true haiku, so let's call this a Honku:

Cacophony
on the street below
my alarm clock

Grrrrr..................

 

 I'm just back from a writing retreat at the fabulous Mabel Dodge Luhan house in Taos, New Mexico, where I wrote some poetry -- something I don't normally do.  Those poems aren't ready to share yet, but here's one I wrote on my last writing retreat, led by the splendid poet Molly Fisk.

IOWA SUMMERS

Small town streets
exotic to my city-girl eyes.
Single family houses,
carefully clipped lawns,
farm smells edging in.

Walking to the motel with my sisters,
we navigate by churches.
Turn left at the Second Christian Reformed,
past the Lutheran and the Dutch Reformed,
to the First Christian Reformed and cross the street. 

Pass Casey’s bakery with the almond patties in the window,
and the dress shop where you bring things home to try them on,
then come back and pay if they fit.
Wave at Aunt Cap at her register in the grocery store,
skip past Uncle John’s butcher shop,
and hope Auntie Ann doesn’t see you pass without stopping. 

A moment of freedom,
then trapped by small-town eyes and ears.
“You must be the girls from New Jersey,” they say.
We nod and smile.
Forced politeness again. 

Like in church on Sunday.
The morning service.
Trapped on a rigid wooden pew.
White lace handkerchiefs clutched in sweaty palms.
No fidgeting.
No leg swinging.
No slumping.
Pretend this is normal,
Like you do this three times every Sunday.
Listen attentively to long sermons about the devil,
ready to pounce at every turn. 

Don’t reveal even the smallest hint
that this pew is a foreign country.

I went to see Coraline this weekend at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City.  It's one of those grand old theaters with a huge screen, a balcony, and fancy doodads and curlicues all over the place.  The kind of theater where you expect a stage show before your film begins. A great place to see any movie.

I have to admit that I was bored. It took way too long for Coraline to discover that all was not well in her secret other world.  If I remember correctly, the book did a better job of that.  It's been a few years, but I remember the book going from creepy to scary pretty quickly.  One of the brilliant thing about it was that secret, innocuous little door leading to a world just like Coraline's every day world, only better -- at first.

Maybe I think it's brilliant because I did the same thing in my first novel.  I was ten.  My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Azzolini, praised my writing and said that I should think about becoming a writer one day.  I immediately leapt on the idea.  Until then, I had wanted to be a librarian. I loved books, so becoming a librarian seemed like a wonderful idea.  i I guess I didn't really think about where the books came from, or the fact that people wrote them.  They just were.  It only took me three seconds to throw off the idea of becoming a librarian and take on the mantle of writer.

I started my novel in a fresh notebook. It was a about a girl who found a secret door in her apartment and it led to a secret room, with a secret closet.  Have you ever watched Hannah Montana?  Picture that room and that closet, and you'll have an idea of what I imagined.  The coolest room ever, the coolest clothes ever.  Basically -- the perfect life.

There was no conflict. No plot.  Just a cool room and cool clothes. I never finished. Every time I made a mistake I had to start over in another fresh notebook, and I quickly got bored with the whole project.  But the idea of becoming a writer never left me, and I still love the idea of secret doors leading to better worlds.

Last week an editor asked me what I really wanted to be writing, and I went blank.  I tried to hide it -- babbled on about how much I love middle grade fiction and about how intensely I read as a child.  All the while I was sort of horrified by my blankness in the face of the question.

What is it that I really want to write?

Last year I wrote seven media tie-ins and one mystery for a series which shall remain nameless as I was a ghostwriter.   I also revised the first novel in my historical action/adventure series, and wrote the first draft of the second.  I call these historical books "mine" because I got an advance for them, and they'll earn royalties (unlike the media tie-ins), and my real name will appear on the covers.  But the truth is that I came up with the series proposal because an editor called and asked me to put something together about boys and war.

It's been a long time since I wrote something that bubbled up from inside--a story that insisted I put it down on paper.  I certainly had moments of inspiration and writerly joy in the last year, but it's been very clear to me that I'm writing all of these books for the paycheck. it was a tradeoff I made when I left the corporate world.  I get to work at home in my pajamas, but I sometimes have to write other people's books to keep the roof over my head. The problem is that they've all turned into other people's books.  I'm not complaining.  The media tie-ins are fast and easy and pay well and have taught me huge amounts about plot and characterization. The historical series feeds my love of history and my love of fiction. I've grown passionate about my characters and their worlds, but the series is not something I feel compelled to write.

And I'm still unable to answer the question.  What is is that I really want to write?  I think I've been ignoring the creative spirit (or muse, or whatever you want to call it) for so long that I can't hear it anymore.   

I'm reading Elizabeth Lesser's THE SEEKER'S GUIDE: MAKING YOUR LIFE A SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE.  It's a wonderful book, rich and dense and full of things to think about.  There's a meditation early on in the book called," Connecting with Your Spiritual Longing."  I'm using it to get in touch with the creative spirit again.

I'm taking time each day to be quiet.  To journey into my spiritual heart. To let myself be pulled into the deep well of my spiritual heart, and use my breath as I would a high-beam flashlight to uncover the answer to that question.

I've forgotten myself.  I've let my connection to my muse drop. But she hasn't forgotten me.  I know she'll come back.  If I'm quiet long enough, and listen hard enough, she'll start speaking to me again.

Okay, so I thought I was signing up for JoNoWriMo and by mistake I signed up for LiveJournal and now have a blog, hence the title THE ACCIDENTAL BLOGGER.  

I'm not exactly a Luddite, but I also haven't gone out of my way to embrace new technology that feels unnecessary.  I've never really liked the phone much, so I was an early proponent of e-mail. I love the internet for research, for wasting time, for shopping, and for looking at ridiculously expensive real estate I can't afford.  But I'm still not on FaceBook or My Space or Jacket Flap. They feel more like time wasters than anything else. Yet somehow, by an accidental keystroke, I have a blog.

I'm not sure I'll keep this up, and for now I'm keeping it a secret, but here I am--blogging.