Bursting through the door on arrival home from my first day of first grade, I fell into my mother's arms, sobbing. "What's the matter?" she inquired. Blubbering tears and snot, I relayed the source of my anguish: "They didn't teach me to read!" True...the good sisters at Nativity B.V.M. (blessed virgin Mary) had failed to bestow upon me the knowledge and gift of how to decipher the hieroglyphical symbols I saw on the page to unlock the ideas and stories they represented. How dare they...
It had all started with memorized books that my mom had read to me; something about the mental imagery nascently derived from words... I wanted, needed to learn how to read for myself...
Didn't take long for me to take up the second "r" in the academical trilogy. You see, I had ideas and stories of my own metastasizing inside my skull and as soon as those nuns did teach me how to grapple a pencil and scribble my own etchings onto a sheet of paper, I was off...
Fiction is my preferred method of conveyance of thoughts and ideas. Fiction often allows the one to more effectively expose truths that are sometimes timidly skirted in non-fiction. There is also often more opportunity to express art and creativity, I think...
So my goal early on was to master fiction writing, specifically long form fiction, ie. novels. At the University of New Hampshire, I majored in English with a special emphasis on creative writing and was tutored by some wonderful professors, most notably John Yount who once had one of my favorite authors, John Irving, as his student. In conference one day, after ripping apart a miserable piece I'd hurriedly scribbled to make an assignment deadline, Mr. Yount then bestowed upon me what I later considered to be either a blessing or a curse...he said that in my writing he could see that I wrote because I had to, not merely because I wanted to...
At the time, I remember my spirits being wonderfully uplifted by his expressed sentiment. Years later though, through much tribulation, failure and rejections too numerous to enumerate, I no longer feel so uplifted. And yet, professor Yount was right about me, I cannot stop writing, and I cannot stop submitting. My forehead is lumpy, scarred, and perpetually bloody from repeated knocks against the brick wall of publishing. Oh, I had a few minor, "successes." A smattering few published short-stories and magazine and newspaper articles; just enough to fuel my delusions. I should have recognized the ominous portent when my first published work, a surfing magazine piece, went monetarily unrewarded, when after months of repeated correspondence with the editor to recompense my due, I received notice that the rag had gone belly-up...
Oh well, I was gonna be rich and famous some day, and that experience would provide mere anecdotal fodder for my eventual literary interviews after publication of my great American novel...
Of course, there's this thing, this sometimes annoying thing, that exists outside the realm of my fictional proclivitous mind...it's called "reality." Truth, the real truth is, I'm an unpublished "novelist." My big, fat, first unpublishable tome sits on a shelf in my office. It is horrid. But like your own spawned child that you are too ashamed to admit is homely, imbecilic, and doomed to mediocrity, at best, I've not yet mustered the courage to drag it down the riverbank and plunge it under the surface until it stops breathing...
So there it sits. And me? I continue to write. Currently, I have two completed novels, one a children's chapter book, the other a detective/mystery based on the protagonist of my first published short story. Both are in search of a empathetic agent, someone to take pity on my decades long struggle to get a book published. I send out emails and hard-copy proposals...wait months for responses, sometimes getting none and occasionally getting nibbles, but ultimately no bites... And I keep writing...
Now, how ironical as well, that I should be diagnosed with A.D.D. at 50+ yrs old. Oh, I've always known myself to be a scatterbrain, and I have a real born child also afflicted. Jaysus, the memories of his redfaced frustration...my own as well, sitting at his desk, angered tones, trying to comprehend why he could NOT focus on his schoolwork... Ironical that I'd never connected the dots, never acknowledged the same issues in myself...
Mr. Yount once told me I write because I have to. And that's because, with my A.D.D. the thoughts, the ideas, the characters and plots, keep cell-splitting in my gray matter. I probably forget or discard more ideas than I retain, as they fire off like a string of firecrackers. And I have to get at least some of them out, let them ooze onto a page or computer monitor, lest my head explode! The problem is, finishing them! I've got partials written for six other novels and two non-fiction projects, in addition to the book I'm trying to finish now. I get ideas and I usually pen them off in a flurry of fevered writing. I want to have something down so I don't forget. Even when I'm not actively working on them, they're percolating inside my head. Sometimes, when I get an inspiration on one of them, and I'll set aside the story I'm currently working on and go add my new idea to one of these "backshelf" drafts. People ask me: "How can you keep it all straight in your head?" Hell, I don't know! But I do. Only the plots and characters and ideas are usually swirling around like simmering broth, shellfish and vegetables in a succulent seafood bouillabaise side-dish, and I must pluck them out individually to briefly gorge...before I return to the main course entree...
The frustration for me, is that I don't have the time to finish everything I start. And I don't have the freedom to just write. Cuz there's that other nagging reality, the need to put a roof over my head and food in my belly and clothes on my back, and taxes in the government's coffers and all the other BS that gets in the way of me release-valving the constant boil of stuff in my cranium, that I have to write down!
It ain't easy bein a writer, 'specially an unsuccesful one...with A.D.D. and limited means...
Oh, wait, there goes a butterfly...
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