10:10am My Daily Pages 49° Boise
Warming up out there, it will be spring soon and I've barely begun writing my book. I wonder how many more years I'll be at this before I get one ready to publish? At least I write every day and now that I'm writing this way, the process should accelerate. One would hope. The best part about this blog-typing, it's stored on Blogger, not on my computer. It's safer this way.
Yesterday was a holiday, President's Day, and I ended up staying home all day, went out only once to bring the garbage cans up. It would have been a nice day to go out somewhere, maybe take a drive, but I didn't. I was going to go to the studio and work on cards but I didn't. I showered and washed my hair and sat here on Facebook. It's amazing to me how busy I can stay just dinking around on Facebook! I did talk to my brother Jimmy for an hour, then later I talked to Clint for almost two hours. I watched a movie, finished watching a three part documentary and then caught the latest episode of Downton Abby. Final season for that show and that's too bad. But six seasons is respectable, for sure, and what a gem for future viewing! So there, that's what I did all day and I enjoyed every minute of it!
I started a new book on CD yesterday as I washed up. Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure. I'm also reading her book, Writing Down the Bones. I'm getting the idea about how to write the memories and how to bring my family to life on the page. It's the details. Yesterday I wrote out the dates of when I lived in California. They were also the dates that my mother lived there and that Stephen lived there, all except his last few years where I was here in Boise and he was in North Hollywood. I can start in on my earliest memories in part one and go from there, ending up with a six part story.
I Googled 'California Dreamer' last night, I thought it might be a good name for the book, but I found out that it was another term for a blow job. At first I was repulsed and then I thought, really, kind of appropriate in a sad, sick sort of way. Stephen was a sex addict which may have come with the drug use or may have started in second grade when he beat his poor peepee up so badly I had to apply salve to it and warn him to be more kind to himself. It just occurred to me that he might have been trying to have an orgasm, knowing instinctively that there was more coming with that activity but, being so young, his body was unable to make that happen yet. Is this the kind of information I want to share with the world? In addition to all the other warning signs I got that he was different and possibly troubled, would it help someone else to know these things about my dead son? In the interest of being thorough, I'll not censer myself for the first draft. I'll just lay it all out there and then go back over it in the first edit and see what gets to stay, what gets altered and what has to be cut. For now, the working title of this version will be California Dreamer and that's that.
Now that I've written my warm up and my report from yesterday, I'm ready to go write some other stuff. This is fun, this morning typing. There's a whole different feel to this kind of writing and it's fast. I'm enjoying it and now that I've figured out to write in my spiral on the weekends, that I'm not abandoning it entirely, I'm satisfied that I can do both kinds of journaling, here and hand-written. I'm very happy with that.
OK, off I go at 10:49 --- I whipped this out fast this morning! Yaaaay!
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