Hilary Fields's Blog, page 4

Great, but does it have legs?

I’m brewing up a new book idea.  It’s fresh, it’s clever, and I don’t think it’s been done in women’s fiction before. (Of course, this can be tricky with my genre, as one wants to be innovative without straying too far from the fold.)  But the important thing is, I’m excited about it.

Like, when I talk about it with friends, kernels of ideas pop and things get wacky.  My favorite part of writing – the “Ooh, and then maybe this happens, and then, like, that happens, and THEN…” – the spitballing, brainstorming, brewing, and machinating all kick into gear.

Later, it gets tricky.  Because you have to wrangle all that out-there energy and wrestle it into one coherent plot. Characters get nailed down, and storylines emerge, from which one best not deviate.  The hard work ensues.  What makes sense?  How do I get the protagonist from A to B to C?

And all the while you wonder… does this kooky idea have legs? Can it go from clever premise to 400 solid pages?

Now’s a time of possibilities, and uncertainty.  Anyone who knows me knows I love the former and loathe the latter.  I appreciate this time of creative freedom – I really do – but I’d like to know I’m on the right track… soon.

So this idea… I won’t say much, but I will say two movies are inspiring me right now. Galaxy Quest and The Net.  Whee!

Tagged: creativity, ideas, novel, writing

Refilling the Well

Since I handed in Last Chance Llama Ranch, I’ve been wondering… what’s next? I’d hoped to leap instantly from Merry and her fluffy friends to our next enchanting heroine, but… I discovered the creative well needed a few days to refill.  So, I’ve been taking it easy, crocheting and watching gobs of TV, enjoying Santa Fe while the weather’s good. It feels amazing to have finished another novel, but… I won’t be passionately engaged again until I’m working on my next project.

I’d thought about doing NaNoWriMo, but after handing in a novel the very day before it started, there was just no way. I sat there with my laptop open, and… nothing.  Zip. Zilch, nada, nowaygo. Now I think I may have the beginning of a cool new plot forming in my fevered brain.  It’ll take some research (which I hate, because it’s such a stumbling block to getting started) but it may be a lot of fun.  We shall see.

What I do know is that, while creativity is not necessarily something you have to woo with flowers and chocolate, it does require a little finesse. Perspiration may lead to inspiration, but there’s something to be said for creating a non-threatening environment for it to sneak in, make a little nest for itself, and feel at home. Trying to bludgeon a new idea into being wasn’t going to work. I needed to let it wander around at will, and still need to, though I think I may have laid out the welcome mat now.

Wish me luck nurturing this new zygote into a novel!

Tagged: creativity, novel, writing

Last Chance Llama Ranch, At Last

Last Friday, October 31st, I finished my novel and handed it in to the publisher. After a year of death, divorce, and devastation, it felt like a Herculean task, and I have to admit there were a lot of times I wasn’t having fun writing it. But I learned something about writing. You don’t always have to be having fun to do your best work.

And I think this may be my best work.

I think there’s humor, and craft, and solid characterization. I think there’s growth, and interpersonal conflict. And, for what it’s worth, there are alpacas. Lots of fuzzy alpacas. I’m pleased and proud of what I’ve wrought (writ?), and I hope my readers will be too.

So now the $64,000 question… what should the next book be about?

Tagged: alpaca, fiction, novel, writing

Easy Like Friday Morning

Today I feel like having a gentle morning. It’s been a balls-out month of writing (30,000 words in 30 days) and I am thrilled with that. I intend to have another good day of writing today too. But I think I need to approach it in a softer way today.

So much of my life this past year has been stressful, dealing with death, divorce, and heartbreak, and soon, a big cross-country move. I’ve earned that new streak of grey hair, for sure. And I’m still kicking–fiercely sometimes. Often, I don’t even feel like I’m breathing; I’m just plowing along, shoulders in the traces, trying to stay alive and not lose the things I still have. It can be hard to appreciate the things that make life beautiful at a time like this, or even to look up and see them.

I haven’t gone to see the aspens in their golden splendor, or hiked my favorite trails in months. I haven’t fed the birds in my yard, or eaten in my favorite restaurants. Haven’t strolled downtown, peeked in art galleries, gone shopping.

I have had some lovely laughs with good friends, here and there. I have had the pleasure of using my craft, and knowing I’m doing the thing I was meant to do with my life. I know things will get better as I move through this phase, and I know there are good things in store. I just have to treat myself in a loving way if I want to get to the finish line.

Tagged: writing, writing process

Writing is like sex… in a very weird way

I was talking to my friend BB the other day, as we were huddled over our laptops trying to write our books. And I asked him, “Hey, do you ever get that thing where, after you write a really great couple of sentences, you feel like you have to pull back, look away, focus on something else for a few seconds even though you’ve suddenly gotten into the flow better than ever?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Absolutely.”

“It’s like sex,” I mused. “Like, you’re getting too close to your orgasm too quickly, and you have to hold back and not blow your wad, as it were.”

“We guys are very familiar with this phenomenon,” BB assured me dryly.

I still find it weird. Why, just when I’m grooving, do I suddenly need to check Facebook, feed the cat, do a load of laundry? Maybe it’s a fear of getting lost in that flow. Maybe it’s too exhilarating. Or maybe it’s simpler than that, and inspiration only comes out in little puffs at a time, especially these days when we’re all so used to shattered concentration, multitasking on multiple screens. I don’t remember anymore if I used to be able to cruise along in the flow, be carried away rather than resisting. The internet and its distractions have been a part of my experience too long.

For now, I’ll take the little puffs of inspiration, and hope they lead to a satisfying climax in the end.

Tagged: climax, distraction, inspiration, novel, writing, writing process

Pumping out the pages

It’s true what they say. It ain’t about the inspiration, it’s about the perspiration. I think I’ve written about 25,000 words in the last three weeks, and we’re nearing the home stretch on LAST CHANCE LLAMA RANCH.  Woo hoo!

After a year full of hell and high water, I wasn’t working very hard for a while there, except on keeping my head above those waters.  Now… I’m finally writing like I’m meant to, in the thick of it, the meat and the bones, and quite frankly, the gristle.

Writing is HARD!

Writing is FUN!

Writing is an insane occupation I have no idea how anybody ever came up with. Who the hell sits around parsing words and dithering over it should be “dilly” or “dally” all day? Yet even when I was a little kid on the playground, I’d always be coming up with scenarios for my friends and I to act out at recess, so I suspect fiction has been in my blood a long, long time.

Today, I’m just glad it’s in my fingertips too, and that those fingertips keep tapping the keyboard.

Tagged: creativity, novel, writing

With a Little Help From My Friends

Today marks four years since my mother died. I’d planned to spend it cooking and writing, alone in my house. Oh, and did I mention moping?

My writing buddies had other plans.

I still cooked – matzo ball soup and home-baked challah, since it’s the Jewish holidays and these were my mom’s favorite comfort foods – but I wasn’t alone.

“Make me a pot of coffee and I’ll vacuum your place,” Pam said, after I protested I couldn’t have guests because of the cat fur tumbleweeds.

“I’ll bring chocolate and snacks,” said Rebecca, and boy did she ever. (Trader Joe’s has the best EVERYTHING, and I’m pretty sure she emptied the shelves.)

And before I knew it, the glum, grim day I’d expected turned into a party of dough punching, chocolate-almond munching, and writing at the kitchen table with some of my very favorite Santa Fe friends. A day of sorrow turned into one of gratitude, and laughs, and productivity. A day that reminds me life goes on, and brings with it unexpected joys.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

Tagged: baking, bread, challah, cooking, friendship, grief, matzo ball soup, writing

Cover Reveal!

Folks, I’ve been sitting on a secret…

For weeks I’ve known just how fabulous the cover for Book Two looks.  But it’s only just now that I’ve been given permission to shout it to the world. So, with great delight, I bring you…. LAST CHANCE LLAMA RANCH!

LAST CHANCE LLAMA RANCH drops August of 2015

 

 

Tagged: alpaca, book cover, llama, new novel, novel, writing

The Ugly Dishes

Today is very likely the last day I will ever spend in my parents’ house. Months after my father’s death, the apartment is in contract and I’m getting it ready for the buyer to take it over. I’m at their dining table right now, the same table around which we ate so many meals, preparing to say goodbye to all the things of my childhood.  Preparing to let my parents truly go.

I find it’s the little things that get me right in the heart. The dated blue light fixture that hung in my brother’s childhood bedroom. My mother’s battered old food mill, with which we made so many batches of Thanksgiving applesauce. The seventies-style coffee cups rubbed raw from decades of spoons stirring in sweetener. Even the utterly atrocious paintings that have hung over the living room sofa since I can remember.

I’ll be taking these things with me. They will uglify my own home now. They’ll look at odds with everything I own. One day perhaps I’ll be ready to part with them. But right now they’re the last pieces of the people who raised me, the last tangible link with the things they touched and imbued with meaning.

So much is changing. My time in Santa Fe may be coming to an end soon. I’ll be finishing my new novel before long. Leaving some friends behind, reconnecting with others. I’m not the sort of person to find change exciting. I dread it. I fear it. But here it is, and I hope I’m up to the challenge. Because like it or not, life goes on. And so, perchance, will I.

Tagged: family, grief, loss, memories

Of Breath and Boys

When my first love died, I learned a lot of things. Things I didn’t ever want to know, things that have changed my life, crashed and burned my life; even, eventually, bettered my life in small but significant ways.

I was twenty two and he was twenty six, and we weren’t together when it happened. We weren’t ever officially “together,” though there’d been a decade of intense and passionate connection between us. Of secrets, and sex, and infatuation, infantile and otherwise. He died in another girl’s home, in a fire, and she died too. I never asked if they were together. I never asked anything, except How am I going to live without the one person I could never imagine the world not containing?

I don’t think I have ever answered that question quite to my satisfaction, though it’s eighteen years and several loves later.

I wrote poems after he died. Book dedications. Had near-constant dreams where he came back to me, kind and generous as he never was in life, wanting to be my husband. I could smell his scent, and then, after a while, couldn’t. Remember the way he said my name, sweet, or cajoling, or even reproving as the mood took him. The way sweat would bead on the top of his nose when he drank or got up to no good. The booming sound of his cough, the wild and ferocious gleam in his blue eyes when he got an evil idea in his head. These things I haven’t forgot.

The whole first year after was just me, poleaxed, trying to breathe and not scream, not tear aside walls with my fingernails until, somehow, I might find him.

And for seven more after that, I sought him in bottles, and strange beds, and bulimia.

I didn’t find him, but I did, in pieces, find a greater understanding of life. I understood true unfairness for the first time, and powerlessness, and, in a certain way, strength. You survive the loss of something you think is impossible to lose, and yet, there you still are. You are, whether you like it or not. You stand on two feet, however wobbly, and your blood still sloshes around your body and your lungs still billow with what passes for breath.

My lungs, my lungs. Somehow, with loss, it is always about the breath.

After he died, I was able to quit smoking. I just told myself that cigarettes were dead like him, and nothing could bring them back. I could mourn, and ache, and sweat it out, want them fierce like nothing else, but they weren’t coming back and I had to live without them.

I had to, and I did. And eighteen years later I still don’t smoke.

And I still miss that boy, who died around this time of year.

Now I’ve lost another love, though this one to sanity and circumstance rather than death. The loss isn’t the same scream of disbelief; it’s not the cry of shocked anguish (everyone and their brother saw this one coming), but it’s again a rent in the fabric of my breath, my sangfroid, my fantasies of a future together. I can long for this live boy, it seems, every bit as deeply as I did for the one who died.

Somehow knowing I survived this and worse once before is no comfort. I had forgotten what a wound it is, how a thousand times an hour you can find your breath stopped in your chest, a bargain with the universe brewing behind your lips to make it just not true, just not today, just please, can’t I have what I want this one more time?

And when the answer is no, you can’t?

There’s no air left when you know that answer. It’s all turned into a fist inside your throat, a stranglehold that suffocates and makes you think, no, this time I won’t survive.

Or worse, you will, but it won’t get better. It’ll always be this loss-loss-loss-loss-loss.

But that’s silly, says the voice of reason and time and experience. Take a deep breath. You’ll survive.

I know I’m looking at long weeks, or months before I’m totally okay. And maybe “totally okay” isn’t even what it will be. I met a man recently who told me he’d had his heart broken not that long before. I said, “How did you get over it?” and he said, “You don’t get over it. You just find a way to carry it with you.”

It wasn’t the answer I wanted. I wanted, “Take two of these and call me in the morning,” or “The fever will break in a couple of weeks, and you’ll be back to yourself in no time.”

You’re never back to who you were, though, are you? You’re someone new, with a life that took a left turn and isn’t going to look the way you expected it to, not ever again.

Yet it’s not the expectations I miss. It’s those blue eyes, then those brown eyes, that each in their own time made me catch my breath.

Tagged: boys, breath, breathing, grief, loss, relationships