Blog Month, A Retrospective

In the past thirty days I've blogged at least once every twenty-four hours, and boy are my mind, heart, and fingertips tired. Now it's time to reflect on why I've done this, what--if anything--I've learned, and where as a writer I go from here.

Brock and I have frequently discussed why I'm blogging and not working on the book. I feel as if the blogging is working on the book, though I'm not sure if it's the one I've already written or an entirely new one altogether. Lala was a topic of some, maybe a fifth, of my entries. Many entries dealt with the frustrations of growing up and not being ready for it, not feeling adequate enough to accomplish the difficult (even the easy!) things life requires of grownups. In all of them I wade through guilt, misery, bugginess. In all of them I try to figure out who I am while also trying to find meanings in what is outside of me. In all of them I'm trying, sometimes futilely, to love.

A manuscript entitled Lying in Translation sits in the bottom draw of my big wooden desk, just feet away from where my feet are propped up on my chair at this very moment. I've held the book, the first draft of my life with Lala that took a much-too cursory glance at something so complicated, several times since I finished typing it four and a half years ago. I've had to hold it--we've moved a few times since then. Always it felt radioactive and too close, and my mind would flash the "Too Soon!" sign earnest people get if you make a celebrity-death joke too quickly after the passing. If ever I open the drawer while searching for paper clips or highlighters, again with the Too Soon! At this point I can't imagine touching it, flipping the pages. But I'm aware that reading my own work is essential to moving forward on this project that means so much that, if I didn't have it on my radar, I'd have nothing.

One of the reasons the book scares me so is very clear: I don't know how it ends, but I have the stinging sense it should be with a death. This is awful because my two greatest fears in life are Lala dying and King dying. (I love so many people so intensely, foremost my husband and mother, but for some reason Lala and King top the death-fear list.) Two fears, two inevitabilities. Daily I'm weeping for reality.

Back when Lala lived with us for a couple of months after Katrina, Brock cheered for my literary blessing: this is how you end your book! We were lucky enough to have all Lala, all the time: Lala sneaking food to King, Lala reminding me how much I loved to have my chepita kissed when I was a girl and asking me if I got addicted to it as a grown woman (wink wink), Lala popping Valiums if the nightly news was too intense, Lala batting her eyes at Brock, her Meester Cleenton.

But it didn't seem right to me. I still hadn't dealt with how scared of and drawn to her I was. Four years later I haven't quite done that yet. Maybe I never will.

Still, I have written 50,000 more words. And hopefully that counts for something.

One thing I know is from here my writing goes private. I must return to the blue and white of Word and work on what I have, discard what's not worth working on. From here I go back to the solitary writing world, one I've been rather unproductive in since I got the writing degree proclaiming me a master in it, and hope that as a result of this experiment I can stick to the schedule I've developed with my promise of my one blog per day.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons I chose the blog format to begin with. It was a promise I was making not only to myself, but those readers I loved. I couldn't screw that up because it would mean public failure. This format, though, was also dangerous. I became horribly sad and insecure when I went unread for days, when my boxes went unchecked, and would think to myself, "If the people who love me most in the world don't want to read me, then no one else will! Why am I writing! Or living!"

Etc., etc. Sad, sad.

This is the kind of gratitude I showed to my readers who, by the grace of Whomever, have decided they love and respect me and my writing. Any comment at all, any glimmer of encouragement, means so much, is so helpful. And I should bestow on each reader gallons of gratitude for seeing my writing, for understanding, for letting me be myself. Because when they write to me, I feel great. At least for a little while.

Thing is, I'm Lala's granddaughter. I always want the more-more-more. The chocolate milk with the cereal. Another plastic toy from TG&Y (which, incidentally, she taught me to steal if I really wanted). The indulgence of being swept away at night into the French Quarter and being kissed and assured repeatedly how perfect I am.

Readers, I love you, but I need to be adored, like, constantly. More than human capacity dictates. I'm holding all of you to the impossible Lala standard.

I'm still finding ways to both blame and thank her for everything. I could've gone to therapy, but while I don't know where I'm going, I like where the book (or thoughts about the book) is taking me.

These thoughts recall one of maybe five statements I remember Rodger Kamenetz telling me as I finished up my MFA degree: "The world doesn't care if you're a writer. If you never write again, the world won't blink." Some may see these as unnecessarily harsh or obvious, but no one can doubt it's veracity. Much as I'd like to hope my favorite online journal Brevity has just lost my email address, which is why its editor isn't requesting my submissions, the truth is I have to sell myself and my work to Brevity. To an editor and agent and hopefully to many, many others. And the prospect is exhausting. Imagine what the actual work will be like.

So where I go from here is I open up a book I began, in some form or another, six years ago, at 23 years of age, when I wrote an entry for a nonfiction workshop about my grandmother telling me it's good in life, sometimes, to literally take it up the ass. It was the anecdote to end all anecdotes. Classmates chuckled at the Wit. Rodger said I had a real Character. This anecdote would begin the thesis I submitted for cursory approval in April 2005.

Now I don't even know if Lala actually ever said that, or if I just had this idea in my mind of how sexually perverse she could be (sprinkled with the times she behaves as if she's never done the deed in her life: four immaculate conceptions, she had).

My other fear: that half my book's stories are largely bullshit, me as a writer just mounting the bardic steed across the page, saying something because it sounds good, but not really meaning it.

It took growing older to learn how to mean it. In many ways I sorta believe I was a better writer in grad school, under the force of so many watchful eyes, than I am now. But if I didn't mean half of what I said, the book isn't worth a damn. In the last few years, through the struggles of near-poverty and love of a good man, and because of the hard work I accomplished to take care of him and myself, I've learned to mean what I do and write, even when I feel craptastic, even when I'm wrong. Shit, I might be pissing in the wind like a damned fool, but I mean every minute of it.

At least, I think so.

Brock, who also takes care of me, told me recently how we should come to terms with our writing despite the small amount of success we've had so far: "Do your best to make the work as good as it can possibly be, and hope the world needs your work when you're ready to show it."

More than twenty years after I wrote in a diary entry that I wanted to become "A Teacher, or An Artist, or A Writer," I think I'm ready, finally, to take on the third of these. Though I need to do it alone, I know I'm never alone, because for all my maudlin insecurities about readers not wanting to read me, I know the truth: you love me, you really do. I'll continue working, among other reasons, for you.