Life Tip # 549,432

Gladys's Life Tip Number 549,432 is:



Don't ever expect to "just go look something up quickly" in Blogger Help.



I went to Blogger Help to find out about how to host images, as I have been playing with some new toys (inspired by Barb, as usual).



Instead I found this. And--since "write something" was on my list of goals for November (about which more some other time)--I decided "why the hell not?"



Thus: the novel which will shortly be in progress. I'll Blogroll myself once I get well and truly started, but come the first of November, there will be novel-bits posted at that site.



My novel-writing history, alas, is a checkered one. When I was in eighth grade I started one, but never got far. Then, my freshman year in high-school, I got about 120 pages into what became known, among my friends, as "Gladys's Trashy Nuclear War Novel". Maybe someday I'll post excerpts; I actually have the hard copy somewhere.



That lasted til junior year, when Chris (the First Boy) came into the picture. It's hard to write anything substantive when you're making out like crazed weasels all the time. Teenage hormones fucked up my typing skills. (Okay, actually it was more than that--my senior year was a very fraught time in my life. Again, that's another post, but it was characterized by an incredible one-sided rivalry between my best friend Maura and I. Anything I could do, she could do better--and that included writing.)



Freshman year in college, however, I started again--a novel called "The Lost Children", based on a projection of what I imagined my life could become. It was cast with the four people who made up my tight-knit little circle--Darius, Debbi, Artie, and Samantha--and imagined what might happen, one day in the distant future, if we were all to just give in to the nascent sexual tensions within our little enclave. (Eventually, most of us did--to one degree or another. That's ANOTHER another post--is anyone keeping a list??--but this group is still significant in my life for two reasons: Darius was the one who introduced me to JP, and Artie was the cause of my original meeting with Firefly.) That novel--remember, we were talking about novels?--got to be about 140 pages or so...I'm still trying to find a way to read the disk it's saved on.



The next novel was started my junior year in college. This was while Firefly and I were roomies; the novel was what I did while everyone else was either studying or socializing. It was called "The Amethyst" and it was a fantasy novel--again, based on something that had happened to me. (Another post. That's now four, I think.)



I got over 200 pages into that one by the time I moved back to Chicago for my student teaching, at the end of the summer of 1991. About two weeks later, Darius took me to a party and I met JP and Stephen and Justin and Frank and all their hangers-on...and suddenly what was happening in my life was no longer as interesting as what COULD happen.



It was my next novel that got me in real trouble. I was only about 20 pages into it when David, my husband at the time, found the disk in our computer--the disk which contained not only the novel, but also my journal. That was how he found out that I was sleeping with JP--in fact, I managed to hold his suspicions off for a couple of days by telling him that the journal was fiction too, part of the novel I was writing. Eventually he found me out, of course.



For the next year, I wrote nothing but poetry--lots and lots of it. Some of it was even good. And that became part of the dream--JP was going to be a rock god and I was going to be his exotic poet girlfriend, following him all over and changing the world every time I picked up my pen, the two of us cocooning in famous hotels, shooting up in the finest suites and lying to everyone but each other. We were going to be legends.



And then JP died, and the dream died with him--I was suddenly Courtney with no Kurt, Nancy with no Sid. Half of me was gone, and it was the half that believed in anything. I quit heroin, started drinking, took up the guitar, and started trying to write. The first few months were drunken crap, composed in the middle of the night in the back bedroom at my mother's house--whole pages barely coherent, raw and bleeding, dripping with grief and terror at any future that didn't include JP. I gave up in disgust and did all my writing in chatrooms and IMs for nearly a year.



About halfway through my stay in North Carolina, I started to write a story which had been percolating in my mind since 1991, shortly after my first party at JP's. I was in a phase where I was compensating for what seemed to be months of excessive self-pity and wallowing--otherwise known as Perfectly Reasonable Depression--and so I put myself on a rigid schedule: I was working two jobs, leaving at 7 AM and getting home at 7 PM, and I would then force myself to write at least 8 pages before I could go to bed. I even had a little wall-chart for my progress--anything, anything but unregulated conscious thought seemed to be my strategy. Had I stayed in North Carolina, I might have made it; as it was, I was well over 225 pages by the time I moved back to Chicago.



I drove back with Lou, the guitarist who'd lived with JP and I, who'd confessed a few months later that he'd always been at least half in love with me. I knew I didn't love him but I needed to hang on to whatever pieces of that past were left; he came to North Carolina and drove my car back while I drove the U-Haul, and we weren't in Chicago more than an hour before we scored our first bags of heroin in over a year. From there it was all downhill; less than three months later I was forced to admit defeat and move back to my mother's house. By October, four months after leaving Charlotte, I was in rehab.



That was where I met CR. A few weeks after we met, he told me he loved me; not long after that, I gave him a binder full of my poetry to read. He took it home, to the trailer where he lived with his "roommate". The next time I saw it, it was a drift of torn pages scudding across the snowbanks of the trailer park, catching in the pine trees, as his "roommate"--really his girlfriend--stood in the doorway throwing pieces of CR's belongings, including my binder, toward my car-- all the while calling me every kind of bitch there was.



I gave up. I remember sitting in the front seat of that crappy red Dodge with the caved-in Bondo roof, thinking That's it. I'm done. I've had enough--it's over and I'm not even going to bother to write anymore. (It never occurred to me that it would be better to keep writing and swear off CR forever. Well, not THEN, anyway.)



That was in 1997, and til I started this blog, I really HAD written nothing since then. E-mails, of course, but no poetry, no novels, nothing. And let me tell you--that gets tiresome. It's like trying not to pee for seven years--not only is it painful, it's not terribly healthy. But I didn't really know I missed it--after all, there was CR, and all that drama, and there was heroin; then there was more drama with CR, culminating with the point at which he left; and there was the job, the job, the job...and suddenly here I am, seven years later, wondering what happened to my late 20's and my early 30's, and realizing: I'm not going to be a child prodigy, am I.



It takes off some of the pressure--but it's a sad realization anyway. I've wasted so much time trying not to remember, just holding my breath and waiting for the ache to go away. I'll write when I feel better. I'll write when I'm over it. I'll write...someday. Maybe. And here I am, another October, and in a few days it will be nine years since I lost JP. I'm happier now than I've been at any time since that night in 1995--but when you dig down to the center of the earth, you're still in a hole no matter how many ladders you climb. I don't think I'll ever be "over it"--I don't think I'm ever going to be "okay" in the sense that most people mean it. I think it's time to adjust myself to that fact, and try to make the best of what's left--because at any other time in my life, what I have now--the infamous what's left--would have made me fucking ecstatic.



So--time to write. (Actually, time to go to bed, since I unaccountably have to go to work tomorrow. Again: another post.) Do me a favor, though, and read it once in a while--will you?? I'd hate to do all that work in a vacuum.