A Literary Promise and A New Baby!

New Baby House is on the Way!

August 31, 2011, 3:02pm – I make this promise:  I will finish Ruby’s story before March 1st, 2012.

“Nice,” you may say.  “Who cares?  You haven’t finished her story in 17 years, what’s another year?”

You probbaly didn’t say that.  And if you didn’t, thank you.  That’s Mildred speaking, my inner editor.  She’s a doozy, that Mildred.  And though I try to follow my own advice every day about imagining her inside a giant Monty-Python style catapult and launching her into the stratosphere, she’s one tenacious octogenarian.  She keeps coming back for more nasty down-with-Kristen talk.

And I have a secret: Mildred is calling for reinforcements.

A baby, to be specific.

Little did I know that right about the time that Ruby started telling me her story, I was growing another story.  The story of my new baby, who is due to be born on March 19th.

Oh, how excited I am!  Baby socks and baby clothes and tiny poems about tiny baby fingers!  Late nights and early mornings with milky breath on my cheek.  Long walks in the pram, yards of white linen pressed into pleats around the bassinet, twirling tiny wisps of hair between my fingers.

And no time to write about Ruby.

So March 19th, or whenever new Baby House decides to arrive, will be baby time.

And until then, Ruby, it’s all about you, baby girl.

Here’s how we start, just as I tell my students.

1.  Outline.  I have pages and pages of Ruby’s story outlined.  I’ve poured over the details just long enough to start changing them.  That’s a key indicator that it’s time to crack into prose-writing.

2.  Back-stories.  I have motivations and histories for all of my main characters crafted and completed.  Even if I never touch them, it’s proof to my own doubting nature that I know my characters inside and out.

3.  The promise.  If I say it out loud, I’m going to hold myself to it.  And there may be a fair amount of guilt and nagging from my husband and my mother and my writerly friends.  I welcome it.  And so does Ruby.

Strangely, my first chapters won’t be the first chapters in the book.  Those first pages are far too important and too delicate to bludgeon with my first prose attempts in this novel.  The first pages call for a light hand and strong, present voice of a character who has lived and breathed for quite some time.  I’ll start in medias res, in the middle of the story, and work my way outward to the ends.

And the most important part of getting Ruby written is to write every day.  To write madly as if my hair were on fire.  To write as if this story is the last one I’ll ever tell.  To write as if today is the last chance to redeem my word-starved soul.

Because it is.

Now off to write.

Missing: Lost and Found

August 4th was my grandmother’s birthday. She would have been 85 today had she not passed away nearly three years ago. And I find myself struggling again today, wishing I could just pick up the phone.

But that’s where life is right now – in flux. I have been kept from my own writing by circumstance and by my own body – so worn out and exhausted that it demands I sleep. But I can’t sleep. And I can’t write. And despite my best efforts to launch my inner editors, quash my worries, and focus on restorative decisions that make me feel happy, I’m left staring at walls.

My husband is away on business, and the kids spent the night with my mom last night. I had several hours to myself in my own pretty house. A meatloaf cooled on the stovetop. I watched an Elizabethan film that my husband would have instantly vetoed. I mopped the kitchen floor without two wild boys running through the clean, smudging the shine. And as I was washing the dishes at my sink, there she was. My Mammy. Or her memory, at least.

I hadn’t realized her birthday was right around the corner. Or at least, I hadn’t said it out loud. And I’m fairly certain that her presence was triggered earlier in the evening by a giant smudge on my living room wall where Shephard, who had been standing in time-out for ages, had wiped a long, spaghetti-colored handprint. I found some Pine Sol and a paper towel and scrubbed it and realized I was “warshing walls” as she would have said.

It did not escape me either, in my night of solitude and rest, that my grandmother was never alone. And rarely rested. Her evenings were spent watching the news or a movie, but she always had sewing in her lap. If she sat at the table with a cup of black coffee, she had a pen and paper handy to make a list of things to do that day. If she shopped, it was with a purpose. And a budget. And I was being positively indulgent last night.

It also does not escape me that Ruby, the character in the book I haven’t been working on, talks as my grandmother might have spoken when she was a teenager in Lebanon, Kentucky. They’re like bookends to me now – a child and an old woman – both specters who haunt me, relentless in their urging. Mammy who never tired. And Ruby who has never had her story told.

Had my grandmother been a writer, she probably would have published hundreds of books, applying her unflagging work ethic to the art and the craft of word-smithing. And if Ruby were a wall to warsh, I would have done it already.

But she’s not. She’s a story. And I’m just so tired that I worry I don’t know where to start.

I wish I could pick up the phone and call my grandmother. I’d ask her about how her old Kentucky Home smelled at the start of springtime, when Ruby’s story starts. I’d have her tell me about walking and riding a bicycle around town. I’d ask her to tell me about someone in town she didn’t trust. Or didn’t like. I’d have her tell me what her mama used to to cook for supper on Saturday nights.

It seems incredibly cruel that when someone dear passes away, not only do you lose their physical bodies, but also their phone numbers, their birthday cards, their reassurances. Somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a consolation prize for loss. A once-per year phone call from Heaven where she could say something, anything. I’d settle for a chiding reproach about why I don’t call more often.

To Ruby, I’ll start writing soon, girl. I promise.

And to Mammy, Happy Birthday, you old thing.