...STARTING OVER
AGAIN…AND AGAIN
I have already imagined the book signings, interviews, and
lecture dates. I have imagined people
telling me how my story changed something in their life---for the better, I
muse and assume. In my mind, I have
started on my next book, my next project.
This is so wrong!!
And it’s wrong because it is not helping me finish the first draft of
this stagnant Still Moving manuscript.
At night, I talk to the various drafts of the book---or rather to the
image in my mind of all the disparate pieces of writing that fill those dozens
of journals, shelves and boxes of words, sentences, chapters, in my house. There is the two-thirds completed manuscript
about my three years as a Playboy Bunny during the amazing Sixties in
Manhattan…and there is the gentle novel based on the question , Who might I
have become if, at a special turning point in my Life, I had turned left
instead of right, or had gone east instead of west or had said no instead of
yes…When I was working on that hidden, wishful-thinking, self-realizing,
self-aggrandizing gem, I was a Gallery
Owner in Santa Fe, imagining (!) what it would have been like to have chosen a
music career—to have become Lola, a
sexy, blues singer in some exotic place like maybe New Orleans…Or, suppose I
had just settled for a smaller private Life---like Shirley, my invented character who worked at a big
Truck Stop at the edge of Amarillo? And
then there was Barbara, the wife of a career Army Officer…and Clara a lonely
successful Physicist…I have let those wonderful women languish in the vortexes
of incomplete adventures and truncated conversations with other invented human
characters who may or may not have ever existed…Having abandoned them, I let
their secrets die---and some of my own as well.
However, I am a believer in immortality for everyone and everything and these
tales can be resurrected (or not) at any time---or to be more precise, whenever
I get my shit together. Now, wait! That’s not fair. It’s not shit. And even if it were, it’s together. Just not finished!
Yet.
It’s all there: the
writings on The Alphabet Institute; the
counting the days backwards to my death journal; the compilation of favorite words of a wide
variety of people; the erotica; the pursuit of places I built during vision
questing; the reports and revelations
gleaned from travels to Fiji; Egypt; Scotland; Uzbekistan;
Patagonia…Everywhere!
Until Now!
Now, I am ready, directed, capable, and excited to begin to
start over after many beginnings have ended.
Photo: Tanya Taylor Rubinstein
