Coincidentally, since the summer of 2023—when I, like Georgia O’Keeffe, decided to do nothing but wait for myself to be myself again—an eye injury as horrible as it was pivotal kept me home all week long (temporarily blind) in a darkened room. It was a week of absolute boredom and loneliness. It was there that I listened to the audiobook of the book I had started a few days earlier: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The tears were pouring, not necessarily for the content of Tropic of Cancer, but for the power of a book to take you to the places you wish to go and places you wish not to go. I wasn’t sure if I was crying for the pain in my eye or for a long-awaited passion finally stirring madly within me. I knew then: I had to write my first novel. But I had absolutely no idea how, or what it would be.
The initial idea for my novel has since morphed a hundred times through too many drafts. My indecision was the primary symptom. I decided to document my thought process to keep the noise and madness at bay. That quickly turned into a record of everything: dream analysis, snapshots of memories, faces, places, and the slow bleeding of my own life into the characters. Through years of journaling, I found myself asking how much one can separate the story from the writer, or the writing from the writer. How much of those ideas, experiences, inspirations, and memories can truly be separated?
Now the manuscript of my novel is completed and in a couple of literary agents’ inboxes, so the beat goes on.
You can catch up chronologically or just drop in where you land.
What can you expect?
A sort of unhinged journal/blog/diary delivered weekly.
+
Lots of book, film, and food
This is merely a treatment for a person who is afraid of sharing. To cure sharing issues, one ought to overshare. So here we go! 🙂