The Tango Write

I am wanting to find the joy in Ruby's pain. How can she find her innocence again? How can she find her faith. This creative process is an exercise in bravery...I am afraid and I have courage. Do I? Ruby and I have forgotten what joy is. We need to find it together...

What is light in the dark?

She watches the man and woman dance the Argentine Tango. Slick, sensual, quick, slow, eye to eye, lip to lip. Silence in their grace and drama in their connection.

Joy. Ruby never knew what that truly meant until she watched the dancers. Inside the primal rhythms, the synchronicity, the exclusion of others, the female dancer's world built on the placement of her leg wrapped around the man's thigh. How intimate and entwined in each other's passion are their souls? They aren't laughing, or smiling or jubilant. Their joy is a blending of each other's raw presence and lust.

They hold hands as they walk off the floor and embrace, all perspired, content. They lift a glass of wine and devour a plate of paella. The succulent shrimp, rice, spices. The mood lifts, they are small and run after each other around the dance floor. Little children, dancing, playing. Nothing can make them sad. The world is a safe place. Free.

Today I am entering into the next phase of my ultimate novel

I have been mindsculpting and feeling and seeing myself write.
I am entering into the unknown and allowing the flow

I have days when I don’t write...and I am feeling and thinking
But hungering to write.
This novel is turning into something thrilling, frightening and healing
Exploring aspects of myself that are untamed and unknown, edgy death
Allowing for spills, mistakes and being lost
Allowing for imperfection
Not doing it right
I feel the anxiety in my belly
I want to write about this woman’s journey
Into the heart of her soul
Her primal self
Where love is a yearning for the divine
Where her lover is a reflection of the divine
What makes one love a person
What qualities?
The yearning, the surrender, the passion
The ultimate sacrifice to jump off the
Abyss and allow ones’ heart to break
How does a heart break from yearning
When it is comfortable and safe?
Each day I ask the small questions of the character
I ask what is she wanting, where is she going?
Will she live or die?
Will I live or die?
Big questions, small moments of words
Awakened, I fall into despair.
Safety, mediocre, mundane
The usual and ordinary, the invisible
Through the small steps of inquiry
Through the imagining, the guided imagery
The self love, lack of judgment and criticism
Breaking all the rules through small ordinary ways
How can I make Ruby's journey playful? What is playful about fear and insanity.
I guess it's a free for all...anything goes...follow the dark star, the white star, the distant star.
the speed of light...Ruby needs to use her pain to find her way back to her innocence.
The dark night of the soul makes someone braver? I don't know...but I will find out.

Ruby Drags Me Into Her Web

Cross legged, sitting on my couch I stare out at the swaying palms that flip about in the wind. A sudden fear rips through my body. Will I ever finish my novel? Ruby has gone through three life-times in three different versions of her life. She has traveled to ancient Mesopotamia, ate hot dogs at Ebbets Field and smoked pot, lost her virginity and channeled Mary Magdalena. Will I create the necessary plot points to make the readers glued to their seats? Is Ruby a schizophrenic, a prophet or just an average girl with a wild imagination? I twist and turn her body and mind and she twists and turns mine. She is under the bed, in the closet, jumping off a cliff. I am free falling with her, afraid that she will kill herself and grab my ankle so we both pummel into the abyss. I drop into despair, jump up in glee and wake up at night wondering if she will commit suicide or marry the boy next door…..So who is Ruby writing for? Why does she want to tell her story? Does she want to be on the top best seller list and have everyone know how crazy she is? Is it true if she self publishes her story that she really doesn’t exist. Why doesn’t she leave me alone?

Over and over she hears voices, “You can’t write for yourself. You have to write to get published. You are only an author if you get an agent.” Ruby doesn’t care; she just wants her story told. Unconscious arrows are slung at the her heart of her expression, “Too much dialog, too little dialog, too much narrative, not enough conflict… does the opening sentence have a dynamic hook? Ruby screams, I don’t care. I just want to be seen and heard.

“Do you want others to read your story?” I poke at her face.

Ruby breaks a chair. “I am living my life for me, not for you.” How high are the stakes if Ruby doesn’t follow the rules? She doesn’t care if everyone hates her, or that there is no happy ending. Doesn’t care if she speaks in metaphoric tongue. Doesn’t care if she has a climax. Well maybe she cares about having a climax, but maybe there isn’t any resolution to her climax… maybe the climax hangs in mid-air without a place to go. Eternal climax.

So will Ruby publish, perish or live her own damn life? Will she try to get an agent or be her own agent? Or will she drop to her knees and pray for an answer to all her problems. Ruby is alive and well and she doesn’t want to perish for sure, wants to be published, but it will take many prayers for it all to happen.

I am dragged through the sheets at night hoping that Ruby will tell me everything. I need to know about her… but I have to promise her that I won’t allow others to tell her who she is and how she wants to tell her story. I wonder. I cry, I eat three Hershey’s, a bag of chips, scream, doodle on my pad. Draw the shades and write.

Writing Night Sweats

Tonight I will write about Ruby entering into the mental institution. This is hard writing...Painful writing. It isn’t fun writing, yet. I still feel worthless before each time I write. But once I lose my critic and drop in, it is sexy, sensual, passionate, crazy, raw writing. It comes from my body, my genitals, my belly. A run on sentence with no ending.. no resolution...Does crazy last forever? Or can crazy be tamed? Does there have to be a right ending? That’s art isn’t it? Some will love it, some won’t. When I was little I wrote from my imagination to escape my feelings. Imagined a world, wrote about my feelings, but I didn’t feel them. Now I write from my body, my emotions, my experience and then the images come. I lead from my psyche, my unknown, feelings first. I don’t know when the plot points will fall into place. But my body will feel them. I have to be brave, courageous… My coach Debora said to me, “It is easy to go with the flow. Harder to swim upstream.” I want to swim upstream. Martha, my plot coach, screams you have a message, forget what others say or think. I don’t like following the herd. I want to find a new path…. So does Ruby. I’ll follow her. She never says the right thing. Ever.

"Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumphs? It doesn't equate...Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife or husband. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything."

-Norman Lear