Always Dating God

A couple of weeks ago, something slammed home inside of me, and I've been working full-tilt on the novel. I'm about 2/3 done on a huge re-edit. Then after that, go through for a fine tune. Then send it to the editor/novel doctor I have helping me. Then another rewrite. Then onto the next phase.

I've been working on it for ten years now. And I've let a fair amount of people read the drafts as they've gone along. It's never been given a warm reception. I've yet to have anyone tell me: this is good. And with good reason. It hasn't been good. Up until the last few years, with the multiple weekly blog posting regimen, I haven't been a very good writer. But I'm a decent writer now. I've found that "voice" that folks are always talking about, that "voice" that needs to be found if someone is to create something true and of genuine value.

The book has also been trapped inside of who I was ten years ago, and she's not much fun to read about. She lived in a box she constructed based on what she felt she had to show up as. Reading someone who's writing from that place just feels sort of boring and pathetic and mundane and stilted and untrue. I'm none of those things now, and so I'm breaking her (the novel's main character) out of the box that I wrote her into ten years ago. (It's a lot more painful that it probably sounds.)

The current edit is serving two functions: fix plot problems, and take a jackhammer to the writing that's solidified like ten-year old verbal concrete. (The latter hurts so f*cking badly in those places deep inside the emotional sarcophagi that house the ghosts of my past.) With a little coffee, though, I'm enjoying doing both, as on the other side it feels like losing several pounds of existential weight.

I've no idea what to title it. The original title was "Dating God", which obviously is where the title for this blog came from. But there is some confusion around what the title actually means. Does it mean dating a god, dating the god, or does it mean the god of dating? It's true meaning is as in "always dating god" as in the folks we love wear the face of god for us. But I'm not sure how to make this more clear yet. And I can't think of naming it anything else. I'm sure I'll know soon enough what the deal is.

I've been haunted by this story for a decade now. The bare bones of it is autobiographical, a sort of "what if" that rose out of a breakup. Or maybe it was the story that ran in my head after the breakup. Or maybe none of it is real, just psychic echos from times in my life I no longer remember straight on.

I first wrote it, so very freakin long ago, and have only a vague recollection of how it happened. I woke up one morning, or came home one night, and began writing, furiously, and didn't stop, day or night, for three months. I was in a horrible place in my living. Very sad. Very isolated. I'd taken a job waiting tables. I smoked and drank a lot during the writing of that first draft. I quit both soon after finishing that draft, as if something had been exorcised and no longer had to be held down with nicotine and alcohol.

I've no desire to do anything other than work on this. Other than what feels like things that feed it, like read books (doomer p*rn and the new Anne Rice novel and Tom Cruise biography) or listen to music (Stuart Davis and Ben Lee and Glen Hansard and Liam Finn and Blue October and Afrocelt Soundsystem) or watch tv via the web (Battlestar Gallactica and Lost) or movies (I'm obsessed with The Island right now and watch it over and over, each viewing giving me a new piece of the puzzle for the book). I've changed my holistic work schedule around so that I only schedule work on Mondays and Tuesdays, which wasn't such a huge deal as in the past two weeks, I went from doing 6 to 8 sessions a week to 1 or 2, and had to postpone the latest class series til next month because of low registration.

There was a small panic when the realization hit me that I had very little income happening. But then a great inrush of energy, this huge NOW, kicked in, welding me to this computer, to the file marked "Dating God, 2008". And what followed was an immersion into the world that lives in the story, and an understanding of all of the mechanisms and workings of "plot" and "b-story" and "action versus telling". It stopped being an emotional story that I was lost in, and became an inspired slice of "reality" from a different dimension that I'm obsessed with getting right, both the emotional content and the mechanics. It's no longer enough for me that I get the story. I need for you to get it, too.

And I've reached a deep understanding that no one gives a shit if I finish it and do it well, or if I even finish it at all. I get that there is no one on the other end of the phone or an email or a cup of coffee encouraging me Valiantly Onward. There is no one who'll fully support me maxing my credit cards, refusing to Get A Job or jettison the Stoopid Art Thing. And I'm okay with that. All of it. In a way that makes my insides hum in the most glorious way. (Do you know how f*cking freeing it is to throw off the tether of outside approval?) The only real action truth takes is stepping up and refusing to lie. And I need that stepping up, that refusing. I get it. And I'm okay with the costs.

Of course, underneath it all runs this current of Oh Shit. As in: the economy is tanking, I really need to get a job; my money is rapidly evaporating, credit cards maxing, I really, really need to get a job. But there is this acknowledgment that I've waited ten years to both know how to finish the book, and the energy and surrender to do it. How stupid would it be to trash this completion because I'm experiencing fear around a possibility that may or may not come soon or maybe later?

And yes, as always, why not yet again throw in my little five dollar bet and yet again have a laugh at being brave and crazy and committed and stoopid and unattached to Success even as I Go For It balls (and/or ovaries) to the wall? So often in my living, I've been so grateful that I have nothing to lose: no home, no savings, no husband, no kids, job or career. Because mostly what I see is that without these things, I've always been free to follow the energy that flows through me. I move up and down and around the east coast. I live in an ashram. I live in NYC. I write a book. I move to the wilds of upstate NY to study with a meditation/spiritual/honest living teacher for half a decade. I write another book. I go back to school and get a master's degree. I move to my hometown in NC to finally take care of the wounds of my childhood. Instead of a job I have a life that is vibrant and asymmetrical and flowing. Instead of a family or a social life I have a world I've created inside of me, bright and rich and amazing and luscious and dark and as close to the truth as anything else I've been witness to.

Who cares if I'm 42? If I die tomorrow, it would be laughing at how hilarious it all is, how gorgeous and succulent and silly and sweet and inconsequential it all is. And how very grateful I am to have had such a vast wingspan, such a genuine love of all aspects of flight.

As with anything else I've dove into, I understand that on the other side of this may very well lay heartache and ruin and upset and disappointment. But like the other things, I'm okay with that. The real satisfaction is in getting the master's degree and the journey it took to get it, not taking a job that requires it. It's in moving back to NC to heal the wounds, not finding success and popularity and my tribe. It's in finishing this book in a way that feels honorable and surrendered and ferociously truthful, not to me, but to what the book is supposed to be. (Those of you artists out there know exactly what I'm talking about.)

Do you know that feeling when you complete a painting or play a song or dance a set or act a scene or write a blog post and press "publish", when you know, absolutely know, that something true and raw and of worth has just been let loose into the world? I need that feeling, in printed form, as a book in my hands. I need to be able to flip through the pages and see them, run the tips of my fingers across the pages, feel the raised ink underneath. I need the story to be told. I need to finish so that I can move on.

Because for me, art is love, writing is truth, truth is food, living is a flow of connecting the dots to create a river of Yes.

Life is good. Always. All ways . . .