Claudia and Mark Twain and Marie

Stops Along the Way

She was all red face and flailing limbs when she was new. Bruce and I had named her Claudia, which seemed far too big and extravagant a name for this slight, eight pounds of a human being. The charge nurse watched me watching my first child. When I noticed her presence I wailed into the air, “I have no idea what to do, I’ve never been around babies.” With a voice made smooth with practice the charge nurse said, “The instructions come with them. She’ll be fine.” The woman was right. Claudia is now grown and fine. Since I’m her mother, I’m allowed to say more than fine.

That memory gave me sustenance when I was writing a novel out of an idea that had crept around me for a couple of years. It nagged particularly when I was with my Seattle writing group or going to writing conferences. When I finally started the book with daily writing sessions, I discovered I’m a ‘pantser.’ It is as appears. I write by the-seat-of-my-pants. Unlike ‘plotters,’ I had no grand plan for the story, no sixteen points with the crisis to erupt in chapter twenty-two. I preferred taking instructions from the story in the same way I’d taken instructions from my baby girl as she grew. There were similarities across the processes. I had to listen carefully and the commandments of the day were not posted soon enough for my fancy sometimes. For all that, I finally managed to wrangle enough pointers from the ongoing narrative about how to proceed to make the story whole.

I also had to delete wrong words along the way. That was advice from America’s revered raconteur, Mark Twain. He once claimed, ‘Writing is easy. All you do is cross out the wrong words.’ He is correct in that too many adverbs thin the narrative broth. I would challenge the man on writing being easy though. It is bloody frustrating when the words don’t do what you imagine they should be doing. When that happened, I ended up with huge doubts about my legitimacy as a writer. I suffered from imposter syndrome all by myself in the obscurity of the room where I was working. To shake out of those swamps, I lectured myself I was engaging in a high-class version of self-pity. '“C’mon Beth. You’re retired with the time to make it better.”

Almost as tedious as the periods of slog was the intrusion of AI. Word wanted me to use it to finish off my sentences. If I’d let it, everything I wrote would have been as predictable as birds scrapping at the feeder. I wondered if this is the future. A narrowed, pinched vocabulary for us all. Then I learned how to turn the bleeder off and immediately felt released. Enormously released. I thought that while I may be an imposter, I have a daub here and there of original language. If nothing else it was put there in defiance of AI.

In between I had Marie, my editor. Everyone needs a Marie in their life. She read the book and never once said, “Oh dear,” when such a remark would have been warranted. Instead, she engaged me in conversation about character motivation and thinking bigger and pushing out the edges. Like Claudia as a baby, she gave me instructions without spelling them out.

All that to say the novel is going to make its appearance soon—as early as Valentine’s Day this year. It’s called ‘One Move, One Mouse, One Marriage.’ As a debut novelist, I can be excused for utilizing my experiences but the real juicy parts are fiction. When the publishers sent me the hard copy review I had the same delighted feelings as when I attended my daughter’s college graduation. Then as now, every aggravation, inconvenience and sighing connected with the process of bringing the book to maturity was forgotten.

A very big thank you to Claudia, Mark Twain and Marie and everyone who is helping me achieve a long held desire. The video is me with my hard copy review.

https://ingeniumbooks.com/beth-weir/ is my author’s page. Along with patting the hard copy, I click on it periodically because I tend to think I’ve imagined it all.