Just When I Thought I Was Out...They Pull Me Back In

I’ve been on vacation for the last six days, and that’s part of why I have been able to pound out the last three fairly length blog posts (which have doubled as warm-up exercises for National Novel Writing Month, all of them containing more than the necessary daily word count to stay on pace for 50,000 words by November 30th); but another part of it is that getting that many words, in one writing sitting (which can encompass several hours and overlap the doing of other things unrelated to writing, such as cleaning the bathroom or organizing photos from the pumpkin patch), seems to have gotten easier since I have started actively working on it over the last few days. Intuitively, this makes sense, given the old adage that practice makes perfect; but there have been many nights where I have struggled mightily to get even a fraction of the 1700 words I have surpassed in each of the last three posts. (And it remains to be seen how well it will work when it comes to fiction. Most of what I wanted to write in these last few posts has already been in my head. Once I start in with National Novel Writing Month, I’ll be making most of it up as I go along. That’s where I’m afraid that I will run into trouble with pacing.)

Now that I’m back to work, there is much less time for writing, either fiction or blog posts. I started on a little story this afternoon, though, and had nearly 1300 words almost before I knew what was happening. Like much of my writing, it’s a fiction piece that started out with little nuggets of things that actually happened—and then it went off in directions I had not begun to imagine. One of the things that I find myself struggling with in real life is the issue of family. Other than the people living in my house with me—my wife and my son—I do not have a close relationship with anyone in my family, either on my side or on Amy’s side. Other than Amy and Jackson, there are only two people—again, on either side—that I even see on what could be considered a regular basis. That would be my mom and dad, who still live where they have lived since not long after I arrived on earth. Amy and Jackson and I live in the same zip code they do, though we could not live much father apart and still be in the same zip code. We live about half a block east of Emerson, where 46219 becomes 46201; and they live two blocks west of Post Road, where 46219 becomes 46229.

And that’s pretty much it. My brother lives in Kansas City, and we see him maybe once a year when he comes home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I have four cousins, only one of whom lives in Indianapolis—at the moment…I think—and I never see him or his mom. The other one lives in Chicago, and I can’t remember the last time I saw him, although it must have been at Grump’s funeral. One of the others still lives in Jersey, I think, but I have no idea about the fourth—she’s in the theatre business and travels a lot. Their parents still live in Jersey, but I haven’t seen them since my grandmother’s funeral, going on eight years ago. I could probably find some or all of them on Facebook, but I have no interest in Facebook. I’m not close to anyone on Amy’s side of the family; the likeliest contestant there is her youngest brother, but we only really ever get together for holidays or the occasional Kings Island or Cedar Point trip, and even when he agrees to get together on holidays (not always a sure thing), I miss those events a lot of the time because of my job. Amy’s middle brother is only slightly less isolated from the rest of his family than North Korea is from the rest of the world; and he keeps reptiles.

This is not, however a forum for airing the family’s dirty laundry—which I have no desire to do—so that’s about as far as my theorizing about why I’m not close to anyone is going to go; but I’m beginning to feel the compulsion to explore these things in my writing, especially the Jersey connections on my side of the family. And just like the little story started to erupt from within me this afternoon, so too has this blog post, such as it is so far, erupted from within me in the thirty-odd minutes that I’ve been sitting at the computer since I got home from work. That thirty-odd minutes has yielded about 500 words (to go with the 200-odd I got on this before I went to work), but I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere near 1700. That means I probably won’t post this, since I’ve only been posting the ones that make it to 1700 words in one day’s worth of writing. (Note: I started this on Tuesday and finished it on Wednesday, though I had most of the words down Tuesday night. I had to cut some things and edit a couple of paragraphs to make the main points clearer, but it was mostly done Tuesday night, and so counts as a postable NaNoWriMo exercise. The point is to work on finding the time and inspiration to get out enough words each day to stay on pace. This exercise took longer than the ones I have posted previously, but it accomplished the same end.)

I’m not averse to airing my own personal dirty laundry, however. Whatever responsibility I bear for not being close to anyone in my family hinges on two things: the first is my job, and the second is my failure (so far) to make a living as a writer. I started doing the movie theatre grind when I was eighteen years old, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college; and back then, I loved it, because that was where my friends worked, and the hours were agreeable to someone who had never (so far as I can recall, at any rate) been a morning person. Those were also the first heady days of being able to say “no” to my parents when they said that it was time to do something or go somewhere. Whether I wanted to or not, I often had to work when they had planned some kind of family function, and I have no doubt that there was a part of me that reveled in being able to do this thing—go to work at a place I loved and being with people I loved (or at least really liked a lot)—instead of doing whatever it was that my parents thought I should be doing. I gave myself to it wholeheartedly, and the result was that I worked really hard at the job and became very good at it—and managed to distance myself from my family in the process. This was not intentional, but it was a consequence of what I was doing at work.

(One of the worst work-related decisions I might ever have made was when I quit a job one of my professors at IUPUI had offered me in order to take an hourly management job at the theatre. The professor had asked me to help her in the very early stages of creating an online Shakespeare course, and I had accepted the job and begun the work—which started with scanning into a computer images from an illustrated screenplay of Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour, 70mm epic version of Hamlet, from 1996—before I got the offer to move up into management at the theatre. If memory serves, I actually tossed the idea around for awhile and thought about what I would be leaving behind, because there was no way that I would be able to do both things; but I thought I wanted the management job more than anything else in the world at that point in time, and I took it. I don’t remember if I called the professor or told her of my decision during class or while I was doing some work for her one afternoon; but I did tell her that I could no longer do the work that she had offered because I had accepted a job doing something that I had wanted very much to do almost since I started working at the theatre. I had a chance to get in on the ground floor of creating online college courses, and I passed, for a fucking hourly management job at a movie theatre. I don’t know what else there is to say about that.)

The other thing is my failure to make a living at writing. I could use parentheses at this point to say that I have only “so far” failed to make a living at writing, but that ain’t the truth. I have failed at it. I have failed at something that I am very, very good at. Writing, in fact, might be the thing that I do better than anything else. But it doesn’t pay the bills, and I had always sort of thought that by this point in my life, it would. From here to the end of this paragraph is second-draft material, because what I started to get off on was why I have failed at writing; but that’s not why the fact of it has contributed to my not being close to people in my family (and this applies to people other than family, too). What makes it an issue with me and family is that, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing to answer the questions about writing the same way, year after year—“I’m still working on that novel that I’ve been working on since college.” Look at me, what have I done with my life in the—yes—thirteen years since I graduated from college? Not a goddamn thing. This is not a pity party, however. This is an exercise, part of an attempt to understand how family and writing are related and how the fact of one influences the fact of the other. I think that part of the answer might be that I need to write about family in some way in order to come to terms with those issues and move past them in order to get down into whatever deeper themes I really want to write about. I think one needs to understand one’s place in one’s family—not just be aware of it, but really understand it—in order to truly know oneself. That’s a hurdle I need to clear.

Another one is finding out why my dad thinks he “can’t” tell me any more about his uncles and the Jersey mob than he has already done. But that’s another story entirely.