Broken Ice

Blessings on teacher-friend Heather, whose invitation for a writing date finally motivated me to break the ice and spend some time with my book. I had to go down and stand in the guest bathroom for a while to reorient myself with the chronology and sequence. It seems like ages since last I joined my heroines in their fictional situations. But I took the leap and managed to crank out a new page and a half of Eurydice's story. She met Rhea and was directly asked about her family for the first time. Kind of awkward since the mythological original has none that I can find any reference to. Suffice it to say that in my story, her people weren't Catholic, which is all Rhea cared about anyway.

Rhea is a combination of women I grew up around: wealthy Pasadena and San Marino matrons. She's a lot more uptight than my own Pasadena Granny was, but they share a sense of style and, to a degree, a classist elitism. Granny did have a driver named Ed and a family who were often employed to serve holiday dinners, but Rhea has a full-time staff made up of multiple members of the same Hispanic family. As chilly as Rhea can be, she will ultimately be the key to Penny's liberation, so it's hard not to like her despite her many character flaws.

I am hoping that having written again at a lower altitude in a less-than-idyllic setting (only relatively speaking), I will now be able to continue to work on the book more regularly. I really want to finish the plot-draft (that's how I think of this incarnation of the story) so I can get to the revision and the enhancements. Now that we're back in the swing of things at school and the English department is staffed with at least five active writers, perhaps regular writing dates can be an ongoing event. Having a writing partner sit across from me certainly makes writing seem less lonely, even if I am the only one in my story. The challenge of the extrovert engaged in the introverted art form...

The Demonic Verses

Here's what George Orwell had to say about writing a book:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I hope I will be able to get back to my demons once the madness of starting school subsides a bit. It's hard to believe that the summer has ended (at least for teachers where we work...)