Juggling Manuscripts

Everybody has his or her own eccentricities about writing.  Truman Capote, about whom I was writing yesterday, liked to compose in pencil on a yellow Big Chief legal pad while lying down on the couch.  Roald Dahl had a special writing hut built in the yard of his home, and there are pictures of him - looking, as his former wife Patricia Neal said, "like Virginia Woolf in drag" - seated in a big comfy chair in his hut, pen in hand, an afghan over his knees and a Writing Board he'd had specially made supporting the paper. The hut was equipped with a light outside the door, and when the light was on, his family knew they were taking their lives into their hands if they bothered him. (I know.  He had it good.)

I like to sit in the dining room, which is large and has a sitting area, with my feet propped up on the coffee table and my laptop where it belongs - that is to say, on my lap.  I type with the index and middle fingers of both hands, and have been typing this way ever since I flunked out of the interview for Katie Gibbs Secretarial School.  That's right - I flunked the interview.  They asked me, "Why do you want to enroll at Katherine Gibbs?" and I bluntly replied, "I don't. My mother is making me do this."  I wanted to do the same type-with-the-index-and-middle-fingers thing when I got a cell phone with a darling little keyboard that pulls out for texting, but my teenage son physically restrained me, seizing me by both hands and hissing, "Mom.  Use your thumbs."

The other thing I like to do when I write is have more than one manuscript going at the same time.  Which makes sense, because I'm usually reading more than one book at a time.  My nightstand resembles the Tower of Babel, except for the fact that all the books are in English.  Everything I write is also in English, albeit liberally sprinkled with foreign phrases so that people will think I'm smart.

I think the reason I like to be working on more than one thing at a time is that, no matter how smoothly I'm bowling along, I invariably hit a point where I experience complete burnout and an utter lack of inspiration, and find myself sitting there looking at my laptop in dismay thinking, "Now what?"  At which stage it is a real brain-soother to say, "Doesn't matter, I'll just write the other one for a while."  It rests me, and I usually come back to the manuscript that had me stymied with renewed vigor after I've pecked away at Manuscript Number 2 for a while and then hit a wall with that.

At this moment, I'm juggling three works in progress (four, if you count this blog - I don't.)  There's my novel, entitled The F.U. Diet.  That goes very well - until it suddenly doesn't.  I know what I want to do; I know what's going to happen; and I know how I want to do it. I'm loosely structuring it as a riff on Jane Eyre, but I'm employing a lot of the literary tropes and conventions of other nineteenth century novels as well.  But sometimes, I grind to a halt, at which it's time to switch screens to the just-for fun first-person memoirs of my dog, which I have decided to call From Wags to Bitches: Memoirs of a Canine Cinderella. Those of you who have met my dog know what I mean.  Diva doesn't begin to describe that little Entitlement Brat.  For starters, she likes to eat lobster. And caviar.

And finally - also for fun - I am putting the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" into rhymed, metered verse.  Which is huge fun - I've already done a half dozen others, and am going to turn them into a book one of these days.  I love Andersen, but find it irresistible to compose these without poking fun at the fact that he, like Edgar Allan Poe, thought that the loveliest stories are the ones in which you kill off your heroine at the end of the tale. Actually, quite a few male authors of the nineteenth thought this was the nicest thing you could do with your female characters...which is why The F.U. Diet is a departure from type.  I don't like to kill people off just as I've gotten fond of them and have put some little effort into their upbringing and development - not even the ones who don't, in fact, exist.