Launching Novel #5 Past the Asteroid Belt

I have written five novels in my life. This is not a boast, but an admission, since only one of the five has so far made it to the bookshelves, and that was right at the end of the last millenium. The next three are in the proverbial ‘drawer’ and the fifth, well, that was only just really finished this week so its fate is anyone’s guess. If you were a betting sort of person though, and you looked at the odds, you might be forgiven for thinking novel #5 is a long shot in the field.

I, however, am not a betting sort of person. Plus I am a hopeless optimist. I was thinking about that phrase today as I drove to work: isn’t it an oxymoron, to be a hopeless optimist? Nevertheless, that is what I am. And as a novelist in this world, it’s most likely a really good thing. Because the odds of getting your literary fiction novel published in 2018 sometimes feel less than the odds of riding shotgun in Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster past the asteroid belt.

Nevertheless, the excitement of finishing a novel in a way that feels right and just cannot be understated. I have been working on this novel since last July. I wrote a euphoric and fairly full first draft in just 48 days, a record by any mad novelist’s standards. Then I spent seven months “onwriting” 22 further chapters to the novel. See my earlier blog posts (or just watch The Wonder Boys). By the start of this Spring, I was really starting to wonder when an ending would ever present itself. But based on experience, I knew that it eventually would.

Around 5am one morning last week, wide awake with my usual predawn insomnia, the ending to my novel wrote itself out. I had started the last chapter the day before, after getting the idea on the treadmill at the gym, and I knew from the feel of it that it was the final chapter of the book. It had a quality none of the other ‘extra’ chapters had had. It wrapped up two of the important storylines. It featured all the main characters in one place in a pivotal scene. It had vital comic elements, it felt very final, and it sort of wrote itself.

Somehow I had to decide how much of the extra chapters to include between the original ending and the new final chapter. Most of those chapters are what Hemingway referred to as the iceberg: everything below the surface that informs what you actually show your readers. You know, that small cold block that sank the Titanic. Unhelpful metaphor. Moving right along.

I put about seven new chapters in and tinkered with it until it felt whole. Printed it out. Cover letter for the publisher. Ready to send. No idea if there’s a market for it. Frankly, it’s a little scary to think about finishing the thing. I mean, what will I do now when I’m awake from 3-5am? I miss my characters, so I guess there’s no reason to stop writing their story for my own private fun. I could do what Grady Tripp in The Wonder Boys did: just keep typing till the page number starts with a 2 and has 3 digits after it...

Rider Down

Three miles into my training ride this morning, a firetruck passed me going up White’s Hill, sirens blaring. At the summit of the hill, a bicyclist was down. The firetruck was parked skewed across the road to stop traffic and paramedics were strapping the guy to a backboard. There was a car. It did not look good. A cop was letting through all of the cyclists clustered at the top of the hill. As we passed him, he kept repeating “bicyclist accident” as though we could have missed this alarming and sobering fact.

When I see someone in trouble like that, my nursing instincts kick in. Despite the paramedics present, so clearly better qualified than me to tend to the guy on the ground, I have a strong urge to stop and help. Instead, aware that in that situation I was just another passerby, I passed by on my bike, whispering wishes for his wellbeing, freedom from pain, quick recovery. May you be back on your bike soon, my friend.

Sure puts a dent in the ride, to see something like that and be reminded of the fragility of our wellbeing as we share the road with 4,000-pound chunks of metal travelling at fifty miles per hour. I rode on, grappling with my fear for my own safety; with the fear I had been feeling when I woke in the night about attempting a 60-mile training ride solo; and with the general sense that I experience in my work as a hospice nurse that life is only loaned to us for a pretty brief span of time. Everyone’s destination is the same.

But the beauty of the day, the abundance of wildflowers in the ditches, and the sun on my face and skin gradually erased the distress of seeing the accident. By the summit of Big Rock, I was back on top of the ride, looking forward to taking a selfie at the crest of the hill I sometimes drive during work hours between patients. When I took out my phone, there was a panicked text from my daughter. A fireman friend of hers had let her know there was a biker down on White’s Hill just about ten minutes after I left the house. What were the odds? I texted her back right away: I’m fine. I saw him, but I’m safe. 

And there at the summit, perfectly placed to enhance the mood of relief, was a guy in a giant clown suit. As I took my selfies, riders began to stream by in the opposite direction. Watch out on the downhill, guys, said the clown over and over. Then I spotted a jersey: it was a training ride for the AIDS ride! My Climate Ride sort of pales in comparison to what these riders do. San Francisco to Los Angeles, 7 days, 545 miles. All the way down Big Rock mountain and out to 101, I passed hundreds of them. Boy, did I feel like the one fish swimming the wrong way in the river!

There was something extra sweet about making it home after the ride today. Just the feeling of opening my gate and pushing my bike through was pretty special. Someone didn’t make it home today. All afternoon, I quietly celebrated being alive, being safe, being lucky. And then I went grocery shopping and accidentally bought a tub of Ben & Jerry’s “The Tonight Dough.” No, I am not making this up. New flavor. Caramel and Chocolate Ice Creams with Chocolate Cookie Swirls and Gobs of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough & Peanut Butter Cookie Dough. Yeah. Good to be alive...

If You Ride Up Hills, It’s Your Own Fault

I was chatting with a biking friend this evening, someone who has been riding many more years than me and has also undertaken things that would kill me, such as marathons. She mentioned a hill that is close to us. It happens to be a hill I have to ride up in order to gain access to the vast riding paradise of West Marin. This hill divides East from West Marin and is thus a cultural as well as a topographic landmark. It also happens to be a real bitch to ride up. I vividly remember the first time I was able to ride it without stopping. I thought I would burst a lung.

The road up White’s Hill has numerous twists and turns and even when you know it well, like I do, from driving it fifty thousand times, it’s hard to remember on the bike how many stretches of the hill are left. The only thing I ever know is that the bridge stretch comes last. When you can see the bridge, you are almost there. However, by the time I see the bridge, I am always so exhausted that the sight of it entirely fails to cheer me, because the other feature of the bridge is that it’s about the steepest stretch of the whole hill. So not only am I perilously close to the end of my strength by the time the bridge comes into view, but I now realize I have the very hardest stretch of the hill left to do. The fact that it is also the last stretch generally fails to thrill me at that point, since one or both of my lungs are about to burst.

My friend had a beautifully succinct way of describing her feelings upon riding White’s Hill, specifically the moment when the bridge comes into view: “F**K you!” I know that feeling really well, but had somehow imagined I was the only one who ever feels it, since all the other riders about seem to power fairly gleefully up hills and are always talking about even steeper hills they have ridden than the one that just nearly made me give up and sit on the side of the road with my bike and cry.

There is a hill that starts about an eighth of a mile from my front door and goes all the way up into the stratosphere, and probably beyond. Even when I am driving it (which is the only way I have ever gone up it) I am constantly thinking what an utterly endless hill it would be to ride. Thus, it is a big goal of mine to get on my bike one day and ride it. I know that one day I will be able for it. I just wonder when that day will be. It sort of feels like the day one would choose to give birth. You know, eight months and twenty-nine days pregnant, you wake up one day and go, ok! today I really want to go into labor!

But I can imagine the rush of actually summitting Pine Mountain. Plus there would be the impressively drawn-out reward of riding back down it: part euphoria, part terror, as it is extremely narrow and windy and there are no barriers of any sort. Puh! Barriers! This is the birthplace of mountain-biking we are talking about. This is where repack was invented!

So one weekend day, in the near or distant future, I will get up at first light, have three cups of coffee and maybe some methamphetamines, and then I will ride up Pine Mountain. I’m going to do it on my own, in case I have to get off a few times and cry, or reinflate my lungs. But when I get to the top, you can bet I will be taking a selfie because I take selfies on all my rides, and they uniformally feature big silly grins. My plan is to have them all printed one day and make a ride album. However, this will just be for me, I will not be inflicting it on any of my long-suffering friends. They already have way too many fb posts of my training rides cluttering up their feeds.

And when I have taken the selfie, I will get back on my bike and brave the prolonged rush down Pine Mountain. And then I will go home and have more coffee, maybe even some eggs, or maybe just lie on the couch for a few months. And then it will be time for some other hill: some steeper, longer, more insane climb that makes Pine Mountain look like White’s Hill.

A Day in the Life...

Yes, I’m a hospice nurse. So no, it should not surprise me that I witness death more than occasionally. And yet when I do, it is sometimes deeply surprising, deeply mysterious, and depending on the circumstances, deeply unsettling.
This morning, I had an early call from the daughter of my dying patient. From what she described, I knew he was close, possibly on the very brink of death, and I told her I would be there as soon as I could. I drove the 40 minutes through Friday morning traffic and I confess to having yelled more than once at a driver who was less than speedy to turn a corner or start up at a green light.
When I got to his house, my patient was indeed close to death. His family were gathered around his bed. This man had been vital and almost fully functional when I first met him just eight days ago. Now he was transitioning out of his body, out of his life. Pancreatic cancer. My private name for it is the rapacious beast. I have another less polite name for it also.
It was an ordinary Friday morning. As he took his last breaths, I saw someone walking their dog on the road outside his bedroom window: the uniquely ordinary as a backdrop to the extraordinary scene unfolding in the room. The sacred and the profane.
I tried to keep him comfortable. I tried to comfort his grieving family. I told them that what we were seeing was not unusual, and that he was probably beyond feeling distress. We say these things, we hospice nurses, and we hope that they are true.
I left them and went upstairs in their house to put in some medication orders. I just felt bad about leaving them there, and as though I should stick around just for a few minutes. Finally, there was nothing more for me to do and I went downstairs into his room to tell them I was leaving. As I got there, I witnessed, as they did, his final breaths. I watched him die.
Eight days before I had chatted with this man about his hospice prognosis, his goals for care, and his plans to fly across the country this week to see family. The rapacious beast had other plans. I stood in his bedroom as his wife and daughters said goodbye to him, and I felt like an intruder. I had a job to do - to confirm the absence of a heartbeat or breath, to note a time of death for his death certificate, to call the mortuary and arrange for the collection of his body. It all seemed like an intrusion on this family’s terrible grief.
I thought about my own mom’s death in 2015, how it felt to me that day as though the world had changed forever. I remembered wondering how anyone could be having an ordinary day that day, when my world had shattered. Today was like that for this family. I was witness to the shattering of their lives.
When the time seemed right, I took care of the details I needed to and I left them.
I had four more patients to see. As I drove to the next visit, I realized my own grief was too strong for me to stuff it down and just go about my day. I pulled my car over on a side street and sobbed. People were out walking their dogs. There were men doing roadworks. I sat in my car and felt wracked with a sadness that wasn’t even fully for my patient or his family. Sometimes it’s like all the deaths, all the losses mount up and the sadness of one triggers the accumulated sorrow of all of them. I called some members of my team hoping to talk with someone. Eventually I connected with my awesome team leader, and I cried on the phone with her and she listened and talked me through the meaning of our work. She reminded me of our capacity as hospice workers to help people who are suffering. And she honored the heaviness of what we do.
Then I drove on to my next patient, and the next, and the next. Happily, like pretty much every day doing hospice work, there were funny and absurd moments throughout the rest of my day and I probably laughed nearly as much as I cried.
Plus it’s Friday, so tomorrow I will get on my bike and ride out into the wilds of West Marin where the Spring flowers are bursting out on the roadsides and hawks soar on the thermals and at the edge of our continent the waves just keep on washing up on the beach like there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow.

Riding Fool

I keep expanding my blog description as I find new things I want to write about. Now it’s “the curious life of a poet novelist hospice nurse and riding fool.” Let’s hope I don’t take up any embarrassing crafts or things will just get out of hand.

In the spirit of writing about what is most up for me, I want to write about my ride today. I’m in training for the Climate Ride (road bikes, 5 days in May, 320+ miles south along the California coast taking in the Avenue of the Giants, Mendocino Coast, and a final day ride over Mount Tamalpais and across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco). Even writing about the ride gets me excited. This is a dream of mine. I’m having to raise $3k for climate action to participate so it combines two of my biggest passions, and it’s becoming a little more of a reality every day.

Today I needed to do 50 miles. I woke at 5 and pre-ride anxieties crowded in. What if I get a flat today? What if I’m just not up for 50 miles? What if some moron in an F150 tangles with my bike?

I was riding with my buddy Michael. As I drove my bike to his place in San Geronimo, the thick fog dispersed and sun broke through. Felt like a metaphor. The moment I got on my bike and clipped in, I felt it again: that clarity of joy and delight at being out on the road in the chill air and crisp sunshine with nothing between me and Marshall but a couple hours of pedalling.

Being on the road allows you a sweet abundance of time to think. There’s no phone, no work emails to check, and you can’t see how badly in need of cleaning your house is. Today as I rode Highway One north from Point Reyes Station, I began to understand what I had read about ‘becoming one with the bike.’ That was just words to me when I first read it. Today I realized I was shifting gears up and down without thinking. Tap, clunk. Tap, clunk. My body was responding to the flow and tilt of the road without having to think: left upper shift is chainring up, right lower shift is cog down, which is harder, for downhill. Today, after months of riding, my hands were just shifting the gears in tune with how I saw the road’s character ahead. This left me free to think and dream and let lines for a new poem form in my head.

As we rode, Michael told me about the Climate Ride he just completed in Death Valley. He described the optical illusions that occurred on the steep hills there: how riding up for a long period, his eyes would start to tell his brain that the road ahead was downhill, so his brain got really confused because he was having to pedal so hard to ride down hill. The reverse was also true on the downhills. I know Death Valley intimately, but have never ridden there, only driven and walked, so this was fascinating to me. I tucked the information away in case I need it on the long hills of the climate ride.

Towards the end of the ride, Michael observed that I was riding faster. I thought I was really slowing down. The long north side of Nicasio Hill, I felt like I was riding through molasses.  “Must be the eggs,” I said. As I get close to the end of a long ride, I always start to plan how I’m going to cook my feast of eggs when I get home. As we spun down the south side of the hill and into the San Geronimo Valley, with Michael’s house and my car in sight, I realized it was more than just the promise of protein: it was that pure heady rush of joy and accomplishment that I feel at the end of a long ride. It was the acknowledgment of how lucky I am to be healthy and strong and able to ride my bike for 5 hours on a Sunday. And it was thankfulness that I live in paradise and that the morons in their F150s gave me a free pass today.

Cat Finishes Novel For Me

Conversation with my cat just now:

Me: Get off the kitchen table.

Boo Radley: It’s okay for cats to be on tables.

Me: No, it really isn’t. Get off.

Boo Radley: Well. I’ll be here on the table if you need me.

Me: Really? Could you make me a cup of coffee?

Boo Radley: No.

But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. Today is rainy, and I am home sick with nothing to do but curl up on the couch and work on my novel. It is at the tricky stage of having been endlessy prepped from every angle to show to the publisher. Every angle except for the minor detail of the ending. 

Never my strong point, endings pose a variety of challenges. They have to be brilliant, for one, and leave the reader feeling that that was hands down the best novel they have ever read, if not the best ever written. And they have to be deeply satisfying, providing just the right amount of closure to every door the novel opened, but without being predictable or cliched. They have to be stunning. Did I mention the bit about the best novel ever? Yeah. So no pressure.

The first draft of this novel ended in a kind of cliff-hanging way. I was going for a sort of Italian Job effect (the first movie, not the Markie Mark remake). And I think I achieved it. The sad part is, as an ending, it pretty much sucks. The main character is heading off for an event the outcome of which is unknown and deeply significant. I know the outcome, because I am the author. But I didn’t tell it to my readers. Because that would be, I don’t know, spoon feeding? Because I wanted to leave it mysterious? Because I actually couldn’t decide between the two possible outcomes? It was all of the above, really, but it leaves me with the problem that the ending to my novel sucks. Thus, it will have to be rewritten before I can show it to the publisher. See paragraph about endings above. 

In an effort to recraft the ending, and because I could not bear to stop writing about my characters, I have written some material beyond the original ending. Right now, that material stands at 140 pages of dense type. I really, really loved these characters. The good news is, I have plenty of material to pick and choose from to retool my ending. The bad news is I have no idea where I should go with it.

Happily, I have a bad cold, I can’t go to work today, it’s raining so I actually want to stay indoors, and oh yes, I have a cat who is there when I need her. She’s currently napping on the piano, but I feel confident that when she wakes up, she will help me solve the ending to my novel. Cats are known for their narrative and character development skills. Boo Radley has a deep understanding of the arc of a story. When she stares at me, I believe I can almost see the perfect ending to my novel in her eyes. Either that or she’s thinking Do I have the energy right now to leave the piano and go nap on the kitchen table?

Onwriting

I’ve invented a new verb: onwriting. It’s when a novelist ‘finishes’ their novel but can’t actually bear to let the characters go, so she keeps writing their story. I’m currently about 140 pages into the onwriting of Orvieto and I can’t seem to stop. 

Yesterday, I realized that onwriting is actually a good thing, and not just some weird, unbalanced hobby of the crazy novelist. It’s keeping me writing fit - working out daily at my keyboard, honing my comedic timing, my dialog, my storytelling, and thus playing a vital role in my writing health, just like going to the gym is crucial for my physical wellbeing. So it’s actually important and I don’t have to stop. Sweet! Because those characters: did I mention I can’t let them go?

When I’m not onwriting, blogging can play the same role. I realize it doesn’t really matter to me what I blog about, I just want to write. I want to make people laugh, and think, and nod their heads yes, that is exactly how it feels to be a human on the planet in this time, and feel that sense of connection that a good writer can generate by distilling ordinary human experience into the perfect paragraph. I want to write gorgeously, so I stop my readers in their tracks, so they want to re-read my sentences because they are so beautiful. Like any skill, that stuff doesn’t just flow out of the pen unbidden. You have to work at it. Really hard. Every day. Onwriting is building sweat equity on the page. And I’m not nearly at gorgeous yet.

I’m in Los Angeles with my High School Junior on our first trip to look at colleges. I splashed out on a hotel on Venice Beach so she’d have the best experience possible. From the first time she saw L.A. last summer, she knew she wanted to be here. Flying in this time just confirmed it for her, something about the shimmering sprawl, the endless waves of city fanning out in all directions, no edges in sight even from a thousand feet up. I pointed out the Hollywood sign to her, and we tried to identify the actual Downtown among a number of downtowns. So immense, diverse, and exciting for a kid who’s grown up in the bubble of Marin.

Ten minutes on Venice Beach and she had new shades, a new nose ring, and a new town. She doesn’t know which college or what major yet, but she knows she wants to be here. And I think she’s right. L.A. would not be for me, but our kids have this strange knack for being utterly unlike us. Who is this kid? My frequent thought when she was small. Now it’s more like look who this kid is! I love her for her excitement, her thrill at the new and adventurous, her easy certainty about what’s right for her. 

We’ve always travelled well together. Me, I get excited the moment I smell jet fuel from the 101. She’s a little less thrilled about the process, but loves now to be elsewhere. And loves to go home. After annual trips to Ireland since birth, she’s a pretty savvy traveler and can find her way anywhere. I rely on her iPhone navigational skills to help me get around foreign cities. Last year she directed me out of Florence on a busy Sunday afternoon. Yesterday she got me seamlessly from LAX to our hotel. But there’s always something to learn.

As we passed through the checkpoint exit of the rental car place, the attendant asked me to sign one last piece of paper. What’s this now? I asked, as I signed. Existing damage to the car, he said. I hadn’t even checked it. I could have been signing anything. Ok ma’am, you just signed away your daughter. We will take her now. Thank you, have a nice day.

Always read what they’re asking you to sign before you sign, I advised her as we drove away laughing.