I’m sitting in my bedroom with a humidifier, trying not to cough. Illness is such a humbling experience, stripping us of all the airs of grandeur we dress in daily. This morning I got out of bed, smelling of menses and urine from when the cough was so bad I voided. I went straight to the shower, unable to stand myself. After that, it was breakfast, a conversation with my mother, and more cold medicine. I think I’m back to the yearly thing, the one that requires antibiotics and a stronger than usual cough suppressant. My mother says it’s time for the doctor, but since I haven’t had this long enough to obviate the lecture about how colds and viruses need a week to work themselves out of the body, I disagree. I want my $100.00 and my two-hours wasted to result in a prescription, not a follow-up (i.e., no prescription, one condescending lecture, an appointment for another $100.00 and two more hours wasted). By this point in my life, I know my own body and my own ailments well enough to distinguish between a cold and something more serious.
I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up here, in a blog about writing, except that Adrienne Rich has a poem about how coming out of a fever is like a resurrection, how you feel like a survivor afterward, like you left someone else behind. I always think of that poem when I’m sick because she captures exactly what it is to be well again.
I think too that it’s hard to write about the way the mind betrays us when the body doesn’t respond to whatever power we think we have over it. My novella is about a person who is falling apart in mind, body, and spirit. While each collapse has its source, the collapse of the body exacerbates the other two. It affects her judgment and her responses to things. When I had a friend read an early draft, she could not understand why the protagonist couldn’t just do this or that more obvious and normal thing, so I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of reproducing that mindset.
Speaking of mindsets, I started the story I mentioned last time. I got 345 words down. I don’t really know where I’m going with it. Usually I’ve got a good idea. But I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it because I’m afraid of talking myself out of it the way I talked myself out of writing the poem with the ball, the swing, and the woman at the foot of the stairs. This story is about extraterrestrials, not at all my cup of tea, so developing the right mindset for the characters and in turn for the reader is important.
Now I’m going to stop. I’m rambling far too much. Between the humidifier and the last of the cough medicine with codeine, I’m having to work less hard at not-coughing, so I may be able to sit here and knit while listening to one of my famous audio books. The one I’ve got on the player now is not very good. It’s called The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Normally, I love retellings, hearing the story from another character’s point of view, etc., but this very obviously made-for-film novel has so little to do with the play that I suspect its writer hasn’t actually read the source of his narrative. The two clearest details in support of that fact are that the galanteador of the retelling is in love with a woman named Ana while the one in the source play is in love with a woman named INEZ and that the Don Luis, best friend of Don Juan and betrothed to Dona Ana (with whom Don Juan has a payback quicky before meeting the saintly Dona INEZ), of the play is no where to be found in the novel. I haven’t read the poem by Byron, so it’s possible that this novel is based on that. Anyway, aside from giving me an excuse to be pedantic, this book is helping me understand that I stop reading altogether when I lose interest in something. I still can’t bring myself to not finish a book, however crappy, so I suppose that finishing it slowly is better than not finishing it at all.
