When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.Wrote two more lackluster paragraphs. I may have napped in between them. It’s always special when your own work puts you to sleep. I wish I could say that I’m filled with confidence and positivity. On the contrary this project feels like pure folly today. Just more wanking in the wank yard. You know what I really hate? When writers are interviewed and they gas on about their process. You can tell Terry Gross that your process is the Betsy Lerner Thirty Minute Mental Hospital Method. By the way, it’s DAY 12, bitches!!!
What makes you crazy?
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Betsy Lerner 
The casual mention of the Very Famous Person in the acknowledgments for their help. And you know that’s how they got their book deal (not that I’m a jealous bitch or anything).
😂
I’m stuck on “more wanking in the wank yard.” Caught me off guard, and I spewed water.
What makes me crazy is when I can’t even remember what I wrote on the page before, much less all of the other minute details I drop hither and yon, the forget to write them down. This. This is how we create crappy plot holes.
But I got my word count in. So there.
Then forget. Not “the forget.” Then. Then. Then.
For the record, that makes me crazy too – typos after I post.
I’m not our bitch. And this is no lecture. It’s an observation. In your shoes (size?), I would comfort myself with the reminder that it’s the item I’m—or, in this case, you’re writing— that’s a bitch and not that you lack the chops to be a writer, which is every writer’s worst fear, as you pointed out in TFFTT.
What? No edit button?
Lord have mercy, I didn’t get to write in the morning, so I’m here on the West coast, the wee electric fireplace glowing, and I’m gonna TRY. This is super very hard to do, especially since I quit drinking and now is the cocktail hour. But …. if you guys can do it, so can I. Not expecting much. I’d rather turn on Netflix. MUCH RATHER. But 30 minutes shouldn’t kill me, right? Here goes ….
1) Technology
2) Digital fashion
3) November
4) Price gouging
semicolons; semicolons make me crazy!
Auto-incorrect aka unpredictable text.
Yes, Damhnait (I loved New Girl in Little Cove, btw) and yes, yes MikeD, to all of that. What makes me sad, not crazy, is that there is a goddamn good unfinished book collecting cyberdust on a cybershelf. Do I resurrect? Is it abandoned forever, a lost child? What I am doing with my dirty thirty is mostly freewriting, trying to find some spark. Maybe if I were crazy…
Diane, I loved New Girl in Little Cove too.
Day made again! Thanks Carolynn and Diane!
Thank you so much! You’ve made my day!
Keep going, Diane; you never know when that spark is going to ignite.
Wrote my thirty and a couple more thirties after that. I feel as if I have really accomplished something and yet – why the hell am I doing this? Oh, I know why, but I’m not telling.
“What makes you crazy?”
Never having had the opportunity to tell Terry Gross about my process, that’s what makes me crazy.
Ha! No, it doesn’t. Nothing makes me crazy. My crazy’s already made, cold-forged in some sweatshop in a back alley off The Street With No Name, in downtown Unforgiving City.
Write on, me mateys! We’ll not make shore if we don’t bend an oar!
I’m not going to bring up my mother again, so I’ll just say it’s this sense that I don’t know what I’m meant to be writing. I can’t maintain the momentum in a story where the characters are lovable and straightforward. They all go sideways and become awful, and then a sex scene will start to unfold after I’ve sworn off writing them, or someone begins to plan a murder, and suddenly I’ve got this whole other thing I didn’t want to write but which also feels inevitable. It’s like Dr. Jekyll plans the story but Mr. Hyde sits down to write. So awful.
I don’t know. A straightforward lovable character who begins to plan a murder sounds like a pretty good premise!
I was going with something vaguely like this in my head, too. (Interesting that your dilemma has caused at least several of us to be thinking about it in our downtime!). In some way, I would bet you could play out the Jekyll/Hyde scenario in a novel. It might be super intriguing and rich.
Hmm. I dunno. Maybe you’re right and I should just go with it. Devil take the wheel!
My dog barks at everything she sees out the front window – dog, truck, power walker, squirrel, baby carriage, cat and the occasional family of wild turkeys. Yes, they walk down the middle of the street. Today, thirty minutes was like nails
on a chalkboard but I went over 30 working on an old short story. Now I want to cry and eat ice cream.