Well, I'm in it now. As sure as if I had been away for the weekend, I've been gone. Oh, I was here all right. Didn't physically leave the County.

But even while I was going to yard sales, haggling over prices, taking pictures for ebay ( can you believe I sold a little earring holder for over $13 Dollars!?!) watching for the frogs, painting the magazine rack for the bathroom and attempting to talk to my new neighbors in astonishingly badly accented Spanish, I was, in a way, Gone.

That's because I'm writing again. A story. It's stupid how I call them "stories" but that's how I think of them. It sounds so pretentious to say "I'm working on a novel." If I ever say that it reminds me of a quote from the Steeley Dan song "Shame About Me"

"Well, I've been working on a novel, but I'm just about to quit
Worried about the future, now, or maybe this is it.
...Take a good look it's easy to see
It's a shame about me."

So. Anyhow. It's a story, but it will surely be a novel leangth one. And, I guess I ought not really blab on and on about the details on the internet.

When I told The Hub I was going to go back to work on a story, I told him I had three ideas. He was familiar with one of them from me mentioning it to him before. As I began to outline the second one for him, he stopped me in the middle of our walk on the beach. "That's the one you have to do."

"But you haven't even heard the third one yet!"

"I know, but I don't even like to read the style of fiction you're talking about, and I can't wait for you to tell me what happens next."

"But I don't know what happens next. I mean, I know how it ends. I'm just not sure how all those people get there to that ending."

"You always know on some level. I've seen you do this before." The Hub said, "Write that one."

"Well, okay."

So, I started. I have one chapter done and I am in the thick of it now! Writer Rick ( aka Rick Ten Cats) is always pointing out that many good writers don't create their stories in linear thought processes. Rather, like a sculptor who looks at a piece of stone, picks up her chisel and frees the shape within, many writers "excavate" the story from within themselves.

If you're going to write a story you have to accept that everything you write is comming from inside you. Every character you create is a facet of your personality. For some reason I'm terribly fond of pointing out that really Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were the same person....and so was Moriarty. Got an idea for a really terrible villian? Guess what? He's you. Makes you wonder how Thomas Harris ( the creator of Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of The Lambs ) gets anybody to sleep with him....if, indeed, he ever does. You know, people talk about about suffering for their art and making sacrifices. But not too many people would want to have Hannibal Lecter running around loose in their head for 20 years.

So, excavating is what I'm doing. I'm writing along and realize that there is a big antique desk in the room of a house I'm describing. Later, reading the passage to The Hub he asks "What's that for?"

"Haven't got a clue!" I answer, furiously scribbling. I'm writing the first draft of this thing long hand so that I can literally take it with me everywhere I go. So far, I've been working on it for two weeks and I have worked on it in the lunchroom, in the ladies room, in bed, at the beach, at the kitchen table, and in one interminable line at the grocery store. So far, while working on it, I've been hit by flying laundry ( accidentally, by The Hub) a goober, a tail and a dog toy ( by Winston) and a blast of hot air by CSM in the lunch room. But I don't notice, don't answer, don't respond, because I'm Gone.

And creating characters isn't exactly like making people up either. It's more like meeting people. You realize these people are all in your head, and, evidently, they must have been in there for awhile to have developed fully formed personalities as they seem to have. So far, I've met two college students, a desperate couple on the skids, an 85 year old gardener with an inexplicable prejudice towards all things "liberal arts" about 17 hazily understood space ailiens, and a very tall, hairy, profoundly quiet landscaper named "Squatch". And the villian hasn't even shown up yet. I can't wait to meet him!

You know how J.K. Rowling won't say if Harry Potter dies in the end of her series? Everybody thinks that's such clever marketing. I'm here to tell you - it could be because she doesn't know.

These are just many of the reasons why people who write are often thought to be insane. It may be the reason why people who write sometimes GO insane. And you just can't do it without it impacting the rest of your life. I mean, I had to describe the details of a frat party. Do I seem to you like somebody who is in any shape to party all night with a bunch of 20 year olds and a keg? I'm tired in the morning!

Of course, I'm tired in the morning whether I'm writing anything besides my blog or not. I'm just saying all of this to make a point. Someone might see me sitting under a tree in a park chewing the top of my pen and writing in short bursts and think, "Huh, wish I could get away with wasting that kind of time ." They have no idea that, writing in the first person singular I have lost my shoes in the blackest part of night and and stumbling through the bushes trying to decide if I should look for the source of a blood curdling alien scream.

"How was your lunch?" Queen P. asks.

"Well, I lived through it." I reply seriously, rapidly adjusting back to the job-in-the-box.

I'm just telling you, if you know a writer, and that person is a little weird, this is WHY they're weird. I really believe that the only people who would willingly live like this are the people like me who don't really care if they ever get published or not. It's that we have stories inside us. If we don't write, then everything we say comes out as a story. If we don't talk our dreams come out in narrative form. And if we can't face the story, all parts of it, good, bad, and ugly, many of us do turn to alcohol or drugs or some other kind of self medication/destruction.

I really don't mean to go on in the vein of some pompous, suffering artist who is "working on a novel" and blathering on about "the writing life". In writing this blog I'm running the risk of turning into something I can't stand: some self-absorbed, self-described artist for whom the "process" has taken over the work.

Unluckily, it seems like writing anything is all about risk. And I still don't know exactly what Squatch is up to.