For the past many months I’ve written very little, either for this blog or for my current novel, Orphans and Methane Breathers Preferred, because my head space has been taken up with a major life change: applying to rabbinical school. It took me years to decide this is what I really wanted to do, and then quite a long time to go through the epic saga of placement exams, essays, interviews, financial aid applications, all that fun stuff. But I got into both the schools I applied to and finally decided which one’s right for me, which means I’m tentatively allowing myself to get excited by what the next few years will bring and my brain is now freed up to do things like writing again for the brief window before classes start (afterwards, my hope is that my writing will follow the rhythm of the school year: bursts of activity in summer and around holidays).
So today, after months of mourning that I just didn’t have the wherewithal to tackle Orphans, I spent a couple of hours struggling to write a little more than one page, single-spaced, and another couple of hours cleaning up all the notes and false starts in the manuscript. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but the writing is that first creaking of the gears, remembering how words work, remembering that the characters need to sound and act like themselves, reacquainting myself with what’s happened in the story so far versus what I was holding in reserve for later, versus the ideas I nixed because they didn’t quite fit.
I showed up at the page. I showed up for hours, and I’m left with a manuscript that’s stronger, clearer, and which I’m actually excited to work on. Here’s to more progress tomorrow, in all things.
Lisa Batya Feld 