Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

My back hurts. My head often hurts lately. My shoulders hurt. In belly dancing tonight, one of my classmates explained and demonstrated the Maya 2 step to me in a way that I could finally understand and emulate. But it hurts, dammit!

This “novel” I’m writing for the November writing challenge is proving to be a chore. I write reasonably well, I think, and have a good grasp of the English language. But when it comes to making up stories, I have very little innate imagination. Most everything I write that is “fiction” is actually disguised truth. Writing group has been very good for getting me to be more inventive, but it’s still difficult for me.

So for the novel I started writing the story of my friendship with the Duchess and our subsequent estrangement upon the interference of certain wedge drivers, sprinkled liberally with what goes on in my singing studio. It could very well end up being a handbook on vocal pedagogy. I have changed names, but that is all, and I find myself reliving all these memories and the whole experience is hopefully a cathartic one and I will be able to put my own demons to rest in the process. But I feel very strange actually articulating these things in writing, as there is no way anyone ever would be able to read this without knowing exactly to whom I’m referring, and that would be wrong, really wrong.

I expressed my misgivings to another participant in the challenge, and she reassured me that when the final writing is submitted for the word tally, the text has been first scrambled so that no one actually reads it. That is reassuring, somewhat. She also suggested that I keep at it because the stuff I write now could be background material for a subordinate character in some future work that I undertake, and that all writing is practice for more writing. So, I’ll persevere. But it’s hard.

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