I spent this past weekend on my feet talking about What Remains Unsaid to anyone who walked by. That’s not as weird as it sounds, since I was at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, California along with a handful of other authors published by Sand Hill Review Press.
Sand Hill Review Press Booth
We’re an award-winning bunch: ten over the last few years. Those little circles and rectangles on the badges below represent IPPYs and IPAs.
When I was searching for an upstate New York setting for my new novel, What Remains Unsaid, I couldn’t find the perfect town. So I made one up.
I grew up in a small—very small—town. One traffic light, one grocery story, a post office, and a population of 1,500 or so spread over fifty square miles. But the real town of Hillsdale wasn’t quite right as a setting for the book.
Hillsdale’s traffic light (from Google maps)
For one thing, it was too far from Syracuse, where much of the book’s early action takes place. Also, I wanted no confusion about the fact that this book is fiction, not memoir (you’ll see why when you read it). So I came up with the fictional town of Dyerville. I conceived of it as Hillsdale transplanted a couple hundred miles to the northwest, about halfway between Syracuse and Ithaca.
Working on marketing for “What Remains Unsaid” after attending two births in three days for my day job as a birth doula. (Okay, day AND night job.)
I’ll make this quick, because I’m kinda fried.
On April 22, I marched for science in San Francisco along with an estimated 15,000 in that city. More than 600 marches were planned worldwide, though I couldn’t find after-the-fact estimates of total participation.
If I hadn’t become a writer, I’d probably have become a environmental scientist. Also, I’m the descendant of scientists and the parent of a likely future scientist. I’m alarmed, as many are, by plans to shift government resources from programs and agencies designed to preserve, support, and protect to ones intended to destroy, divide, and plunder.
In Justin Herman Plaza (photo by Audrey Kalman)
I never considered myself to be someone who has a problem being vulnerable. After all, I put myself out there every day—as an editor, a speaker, a teacher, a birth doula, a parent.
But my self-conception may be, like most people’s, somewhat inaccurate.
This becomes evident as I count down to the release of my next novel, What Remains Unsaid, on May 15.
Hiding behind an inaccurate concept of myself
Suddenly, as I review the finally proof, I fear the writing is terrible. I can’t believe I’ve had the hubris to create such a dreadful book. I can’t believe I am asking people to read it, never mind buy it and review it.
Doesn’t that make you want to rush out and pre-order a copy?
Four writers sat around a table, commiserating.
“I write a lot about what I’m going to write. I have pages and pages of notes.”
“I have so many ideas… but I just can’t get started.”
“The story I end up writing is never as good as the one I imagined.”
“I get so antsy when I sit down—it’s impossible to concentrate.”
Believe it or not, these are all symptoms of writer’s block.
Before I began researching this affliction for a mini-workshop I was facilitating after the March meeting of the SF-Peninsula Branch of the CWC, I didn’t think I had ever suffered from writer’s block. My vision of a blocked writer was someone sweating in front of a blank page or screen, unable to write the first word. I never have that problem. But it turns out that, as with so many modern afflictions, the disease category is a lot bigger than we thought.
Please don’t stop reading if you don’t think of yourself as a writer, because the symptoms, causes, and potential cures apply to almost any creative endeavor.
Writers around a table
“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Once a year, award-winning and nationally recognized health and sexuality writer August McLaughlin invites bloggers to participate in her Beauty of a Woman BlogFest. This year’s, BlogFest VI, happens the week of March 6-11. Fittingly, International Women’s Day (March 8) falls right in the middle.
I don’t regularly write about women and beauty but I always welcome the opportunity to do so as part of August’s wonderful roundup. To read more entries, and potentially win a fun prize, visit the fest page between 9 a.m. today and 11 p.m. March 11th (PST).
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