There I was thinking like I was bullet-proof once again when suddenly I wasn't and it was like I'd have to relive the last six years of my life to take a step forward.
When I sat down to write 'Four and a Half Hours' it was no big deal. I said I could and so I did. I wasn't concerned by how long it would take because I knew I was doing it just like one more thing in a crazy busy life. I was living on the coast and though there were problems I felt huge in the circles I was travelling in. A big circle of Western Canada, Seattle, Alaska, The Territories and the Yukon. My god I was a giant. The book was done and I still had everything else going on so I treated it like another notch in my belt not stopping to give it a second thought. It wasn't until my then life stopped dead in its tracks that I considered writing as possibly therapeutic and a good step in rehab. The problem was I couldn't write two words together that made any sense in my head. I consciously avoided any written-word like it was the plague and I metaphorically crawled into a cocoon.
I didn't try to write again until I returned to Ontario in 2009. I'd been back two months when I finally admitted to myself that I should send a letter to my girl friend back in Vancouver. She was the love of my life and leaving her and our possible future together had hurt like hell. I tried to explain.
The letter writing was rough and I joked with her that it would make more sense if I had used crayons instead of a pen as that was how inept I felt I sounded. Barely two pages, I wrote her every week. Pretty soon I was writing twenty page letters as bad as they were.
She had loved reading 'Four and a Half' the screenplay so I told her I'd try writing something like that for her. Two or three months later I sent her 'Long Hair & The Beach'. A month later 'Dancing Bears' was in the mail and two weeks after that 'Harem Scarem'. I was tearing it up. During the NPR interview I thought aloud if returning to a novel format wasn't something I should try even though I was still afraid and unsure of my capabilities now that I had been damaged.
'Magick' didn't take long for me maybe six weeks but I'll say two months with the editing. I hated what this said about us. I wasn't with her any more but as a long distance muse she was the best thing for me. I think she realized what was happening before I did because she said so. Our futures wouldn't be together with her there and me here. Moving for either of us wasn't an option. In grief I wrote 'Maacland' as a tribute to her and as reassurance for myself that I could write a novel again without her in my life. At the very end of of August 2010 I was done and I said to myself that I'd take a break for the film festival. I couldn't write two words together until January 2011 and at that it was like pulling my own teeth.
I sat down and wrote eight hours everyday with nothing coming together. Two or three times I thought I was on to something and squeaked out twenty thousand words. Once I even managed to get forty-thousand words down before I had to tear it up because I hated it so much. I needed a new approach is what I said to myself but the real problem was that there wasn't a shred of a story in my head. That's why no outline or story board; hard to write those things down when they don't exist.
With the letters and then the short cycle time of my three plays and two novels I had grown accustomed to seeing my work finished in very quick order. The gratification of seeing your words between covers is a drug and now with a long cycle time with nothing to show for it, I was jonesing for a fix and chasing my own dragons. When you sense 'block' you grow very afraid especially when block is something you've had bad, like I did for four years. You over-think everything and now what was on my mind was that I had never written anything without a muse in my life. I had no muse. I tried to write.
The drug angle of a fix for my joint seemed like the solution. I thought about it and that's when I decided to blog about the progress of writing my book thinking this would spur me on in spite of nothing there with the shame of admitting it publicly making nothing something. The blog is good for the instant buzz but as a writer it just leaves a big gaping hole where a story should have been. It's two different mindsets and the blog robs your words and ideas that you now can't put in your book because of copyright issues later on. A poor excuse for documenting the process, I had to stop.
I forced myself to sit down, writing about nothing, for day after day in eight hour stretches. When I figured I had written 100,000 words I wrapped it up thinking I find something I could use in the edit. I did. 100,000 words became a 20,000 word story which you might as well shove up your ass. I was back to where I had started.
Except in the nothingness there was something and then I started to write the book that I just finished.
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