Uncategorized

Fallow Fields

 

gsl-1

 

Sometimes you just need to rest.  In 2004, I started writing UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH, and almost without taking my fingers from the keys began my first novel, THE FOUR SEASONS.  On the heels of that I wrote PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER, followed by THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, and a novel in draft, THE INTUITIVE.  My most recent publication, THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, came out in early 2014, ten years after I first decided to give this writing for adult audiences a try.  Publishing five book in ten years is a pretty rapid pace, but actually, since I finished THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER almost three years ago, my pace was five books in seven years, with all five appearing in print between May 2008 and April 2014, a six-year period.

I guess you could say I was on a roll.  Life intervened when my beloved partner Jim died in April 2012,  only a few months after a diagnosis of terminal cancer.  I stopped writing altogether because i didn’t want to be living with my made-up characters when I had the last few months with the central character in my real life. And he was indeed, quite a character!  Then, after Jim died, I decided to just let my life float, not trying to focus on anything or accomplish anything in particular.  I had another important job to do–reinventing myself and making a new life.  I couldn’t do that buried in another world.  (I posted a lot about this period, so if you missed that you can scroll back in this diary to read about my world during his final illness and after his death). Then, once I was feeling  restored to life, I discovered I just didn’t want to go to that difficult place where novelists live when at work.  Reinvention just hadn’t pointed in that direction.

It’s funny how when I say I am not writing now, people generally respond with something resembling the hope, or assumption, that it is temporary.  I’ll get it back, they seem to be saying, as if that’s the correct trajectory for my life.  I don’t ever recall anyone saying the opposite when I was writing, patting me on the arm and telling me that I’ll get my non-writing life back on track eventually.  I guess we are so oriented toward concrete outcomes that we can’t find much to praise in anything else.  Even a fallow field implies that its real purpose is yet to come.

One of the key concepts in Daoism is wu wei, often translated as “effortlessness.”  This is not to be confused with the couch potato approach to life, but going with what doesn’t have to be forced.  The field with the weeds and butterflies is closer to wu wei, although any analogy to human life falls a little short.  When the time is right to work on a novel, that feels like wu wei too. But it’s not feeling like that time now.

Sometimes I am on author panels where people say they just don’t know what they would do if they couldn’t write, and I feel like looking down the table and saying, “Really?”  My life is very full without a work in progress.  In some ways it is fuller. There is nothing like the thrill of seeing a book come to life, but there’s also nothing like the best drive you’ve ever made down a fairway, or an awesome put away shot in tennis, or a glorious morning walking in the park, or time to read or visit with friends.  Sometimes the effortless path, the truly sustainable one, has no end product. Sometimes it does.  Like writing a novel, you just have to keep going and see what happens next.

 

Uncategorized

Breathe, Smile, Repeat

I knew I had been remiss at updating my diary here, but I was shocked to see how long it has been since I last posted!  Apparently I didn’t even post on the launch day for my fourth novel, THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER. Can I even call it my new novel since it it now nearly six months old?

 

Let me list a few reasons (not excuses–I am beyond thinking I need those):

 

I am not writing anything at the moment, and in that situation, I think less often about the kinds of things I might write about.

 

I have been utterly swamped with appearances in connection with THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER.  In June alone I had around thirty–averaging one a day, which means some days I had more than one.  Not all were precisely on the book.  I also taught a four-part course for the local Jewish Community Center on the historical period in which the novel is set, the centuries of Convivencia, in which Jews, Christians and Muslims all lived together in Iberia.

 

I’ve been traveling a lot.  I was in New York and the San Francisco Bay area promoting the book early this summer,  and spent three weeks just a few weeks ago cruising the Baltic in connection with my utterly fabulous side gig, enrichment lecturing for Silversea Cruises.   here i am, lecturing on the Vikings somewhere in the Baltic Sea.

232323232_fp93232_ydnpcuvbwsnrcgu_586_nu_3235_462_693_WSNRCG_36_9_6_6_326nu0mrj

 

And the biggest one–I decided rather suddenly to retire at the end of the Spring 2014 semester.  I had been having worsening problems with projecting my voice over the last year or so, and it got to the point where even using a mike in a small classroom of 35 students, I was choking and hoarse and utterly exhausted at the end of every day.  It’s a chronic inflammation of the supporting structure around my vocal cords, and something I can best address through not trying to project my voice at all.

 

And one bonus reason–for those of you who followed me through my last months with my beloved husband Jim, you may be interested in how I am doing two and a half years later.  I have rebounded well.  I have a new man in my life who has given me some new directions for my energy, most notably golf, which I have taken up with a dedication that surprises me.  I am also playing in a tennis league for the first time this fall, and doing some more cruising.  Not ready to write yet, but I do love it, so I suspect something will eventually show up in my head with the kind of insistence the women of my books have shown in the past.

 

For now, breathe, smile, repeat….