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Interest piqued? You bet it is. Confused? You won’t be after reading the book.

Transferring my lovely, handwritten pages to the computer is laborious: I’m just a step or two above hunt-and-peck typing. Sitting at the keyboard pounding out words, scenes, chapters is certainly more efficient. But that method lacks the sense of having written something that belongs to me. The physical act of putting pencil to paper and watching my hand form words makes the story real for me, confirms that it sprang from my head. One of my favorite quotations is “Without the heart, there can be no understanding between hand and mind,” which, I admit, I first saw in Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. However, that quotation is actually a rather more romantic rephrasing from Thea von Harbou’s 1920′s novella, Metropolis: “The mediator between brain and muscle must be the Heart.” (Sidenote: Metropolis is both an excellent read and a great film.) I find my heart refuses to mediate when I attempt to plug my brain straight into the computer.

My writing desk holds a stack of notebooks, a pile of favorite books (currently The Great Gatsby and William Stafford’s poetry book, Passwords), and some writerly reference books, books with exercises and tips on how to write yourself out of a slump. There’s usually a Diet Coke among the paper as well and music blaring from one source or other. Funny, music is one of the few things that distract me…

What will I be? Does it matter? Because I will still mourn the unloved books hiding on the shelves, hoping that they are not the weeds that will be pulled.

And in-between writing sessions I’m brainstorming. Ideas keep appearing right before my eyes; I suddenly know not only where I’m going, but how to get there. Last night, for instance, a character spoke to me and her role in the novel has greatly expanded.

Still, I estimate I am only about 10% done with my work. I have a good outline to keep me on track, and I’ve written many, many scenes. But right now the scenes are only patched together. They do not yet make a cohesive whole. Ultimately my work is still a sketch with many scenes resting only on a post unconnected to the rest of the fence.

My plan now is to read. That’s right: not write, or edit, but read. I need a break from my work and I also need to study how my favorite writers sew their scenes into a chapter, their chapters into a novel.

And so Happy New Year’s to all, and to all — read a book before you turn out the light.

At the same time I reject (or at least dismiss) definitions from the outside. Many have tried to define me. In fact it’s a standing dare. But outside definitions miss the mark. They can only view a fraction, a faction, of that which is Me. I exist on a timeline, but also outside the continuum, when my past self flows to the present and tandoms along. “I am complex.”

What bothers me most, or perhaps frightens, is being defined by my characters, which I am unable to dismiss as easily. I used to have alter egos, personas I used in my place in my stories. One was unsure and blundering, one sweet and happy, one wild and unhappy…. But now my characters are not me. They are amalgams, pieces of me that want out in random order. When my thoughts become penciled words on the page, when these words begin to breathe eraser dust and exhale an exclamation of characters and plots and settings, I no longer have control over what they say. I’ve loaned them bits of myself to guide them through the novel, but do you know which bits? Do you? Will you assume the worst, or deny that it is possible? Would you consider that I am both or neither? “I am undefined.”

And don’t you forget it.

I can get an idea from anything. Sometimes ideas come to me out of thin air, in the middle of the night. Sometimes I write about something that happened to me or someone I know. I have favorite subjects (baseball!) and themes (Grecian Urn Theory) and character types (strong independent females) that populate my stories regularly. Actually, a great number of my story ideas are re-imaginings and extrapolations of real life. It’s both fun and therapeutic and the end result is good fiction (I hope).

My characters, all of them, have some piece of me in them. Their motivations, their mannerisms, their dreams, their nightmares… something was mine and I have loaned it to them.

Now my biggest problem is this character won’t stay in character. She’s supposed to be passive, but she keeps speaking up. At times she’s a know it all.

I think I may need the Internal Editor to come out of hiding and beat this character down. The only problem with that is then I may not get the Internal Editor to leave. She’s a pushy one.

For me, I like to write somewhere familiar, but private. When I lived with my parents, I wrote in my room. On the floor, on my bed, at my desk, in a pink Queen Ann chair. In my first house with Diver Dan in Kansas, I wrote in the dining room or on the back deck. Now I’ve claimed the sitting room off our bedroom as my space, and I write at a desk facing the windows (I promise, no stories about squirrels!).

My refusal to go Walden like these writers is because (gasp) I don’t take my inspiration from nature. Sure, spring makes me slow down and traispe through the mud, but I’m most likely headed to a baseball field to sit on the bleachers and daydream about baseball stories (but I do that any time I see a baseball field). And winter’s just cold.

So where does my inspiration come from? Random things. A name overheard at the airport. The smell of new books. Pictures. A good workout. Stuff I wrote years ago. And none of it is tied to the season or the sight of squirrels frollicking out my window.

And speaking of stuff I wrote years ago, it seems that I’ve been inspired in spurts. 1987 was a prolific year, as were 1995 and 2000. The years inbetween? Well, that’s when I worked on the ideas that I had in my banner years, and, as I told that college professor when he asked why I didn’t have more to show him after the summer break, I was living life. And now that I think about it, that’s really where my inspiration comes and why I could never isolate myself from the world:

Living my life inspires me to write.