A schedule

I'm off schedule--both in terms of blogging and general writing-- since I was away for a long weekend, visiting family and getting some beach time. But as I wrote about last week, I had a major epiphany with the story I'm working on. And now I have a plan to tackle the story: I'm going to start over. Completely over. Just rewrite it from scratch. I've done this before and found it helpful, though I'm not sure why. Maybe not having something to fiddle with makes me try things that I wouldn't try otherwise. In any case, here's my plan to get a draft down this week:

Today: At lunch, go to the hospital near my office and journal about being there--the sounds, smells, sights, etc. This is important since my story takes place in the hospital.

Tomorrow: After work (before hitting a jazz concert with B), write the first scene, where Janine brings her husband to the hospital after convincing him that he is having a heart attack, not indigestion. They're nasty to each other, and he brings up the fact that she killed his dog.

Thursday: During lunch, write the second scene, where Janine fumes in the patient lounge, and overhears a doctor apologize to a patient and be forgiven. She fumes even more about not being forgiven for something much smaller, that happened much earlier.

Friday: After work, before doing whatever B and I are doing, Journal about Janine's friendship with Rita, who comes into the next scene. I need to get a better understanding of how these two interact.

Saturday and Sunday: We have a few plans this weekend, but I will find time to write each day, getting through: the third scene, where Janine's friend Rita comes to the hospital, and asks Janine a bunch of questions that makes us (the reader) realize that what Janine has been thinking/telling us about her marriage isn't exactly true. And the final scene, where Janine finds out her husband came out of surgery alive, and she realizes how much work she has ahead of her to repair her marriage.

This is the first story where I'm using an unreliable narrator. I'll probably blog about that experience sometime later this week.

Sunday Scribblings: Solace

For the third week in a row, my Sunday Scribblings is a look at the world in the eyes of my fictional character, whose husband Bob has just been taken in for bypass surgery.

I went to the patient lounge seeking solace. But even the lounge was cold--both in terms of the air temperature and the general feel of the place. The couches and chairs were upholstered in the thick plaster of diner seats. Probably easier to keep clean, but certainly not cozy. One wall had large windows, but they overlooked a parking lot, and a large building sat about 20 feet away, blocking any farther off view.

I sank into the plastic couch and put my head back. I planned to just rest my eyes, but I must've fallen asleep. I woke to the sound of hushed voices, voices that, I assumed, were trying not to wake me.

A man with a slight accent--Indian? Middle Eastern?--said something about this being the best space to talk in, despite the lack of privacy. A pipe had frozen overnight and flooded his administrative office.

The other voice, a woman's said, "Fine, fine." She sounded annoyed. Like Bob sounded with me a lot.

"I just wanted to apologize again. I can explain to you exactly how the mistake happened if you like." His voice sounded a bit warmer than it had when he was talking about his office flooding.

I heard one of the people shift in their seats, and imagined the woman shifting in reaction to the doctor's apology.

The doctor continued talking, faster now, obviously nervous. "Now none of these are excuses, I know that. There are a number of things I did wrong in the situation. But anyway, it was the end of a 14 hour shift. My twin babies had cried throughout all of the night before, and even though my wife does night duty on the days before my hospital shifts, it's amazing the wails these little bodies can expel. They wake me sometimes even when she's brought them downstairs to protect my sleep. Anyway, I was tired. And the nursing staff who was supposed to assist me got held up in another operation. So the people in the OR weren't familiar with your case.

Again, I'm sorry. None of this excuses what happened. But I hope you can understand. It wasn't just blatant uncaring, or recklessness. It was a series of mistakes, but the responsibility for the end result resides with me. And I am sorry." On these last words, his voice sounded so soft, like he was talking to one of his babies, not an adult.

Of course I was dying to know what this doctor had done. I opened my eyes a little in hopes of getting a glimpse of the patient. Maybe she would be misshapen in some obvious way. But I barely saw her. My eyes stopped on the face of the doctor, a slight man with dark hair and dark--almost black--eyes. It wasn't his looks that were so striking. It was his look. His face looked the same way I knew mine did when I talked to Bob. When I pleaded with him to forgive me, to try to understand that my hitting the dog was an accident, that he was in my blind spot, and that I felt terrible. He had the look of true remorse on his face.

The woman--a chubby , 40-something year old with black, curly hair-- unfolded her arms and sighed. She, too, seemed caught by his gaze. "It's...Well, it's not OK. What happened is not OK. But, I forgive you." She smiled at him. "These things happen."

The man sighed, and then took her hands in his. "Thank you. Thank you." The words seemed to flow out of his mouth on his breath. "I haven't slept since... Haven't eaten. You don't know how much this means to me."

But I did. I knew just how much being forgiving meant. And then it hit me--Bob would never forgive me. It'd been months now. And it wasn't that what I'd done was so unforgivable--"these things happen" after all. It was that he didn't want to forgive me. And that--that--is unforgivable.

Sunday Scribbling: Ghosts

Like my last Sunday Scribbling, this is in the voice of a fictional character whose story I am currently writing. This is background info that probably won't even make it into my story, but which I know will help me understand my character.


I don't believe in ghosts, but that doesn't mean I don't feel the presence of my parents--my mother in particular. They died in a car accident when I was 32--bad weather, an inexperienced driver going too fast on the highway.


I had been living in Manhattan at the time, enjoying my life despite a recent bad break up. That's how I ended up moving back to upstate N.Y. I needed to tend to their house, which I assumed I'd sell. But I just couldn't. I felt my parents there in a way I didn't anywhere else. I'd occasionally smell my mom's floral scent on a towel I hadn't yet used and washed. I'd hear the oldie's station echo through my parents' bedroom with the same acoustics as it did every morning when their alarm rang. Sometimes I would have to do a double take because I'd swear I'd seen my dad leaning against the kitchen counter, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other.


So I got a job as a paralegal at a small firm near Albany. I took an absurd cut in pay, which was fine since I didn't have to pay absurdly high city rents-or any rent for that matter, since my parents had paid off their mortgage.


It was hard to be there without my mom, who was really more like a sister to me in her last years. If she had been there, we would've been going to the farmers markets together, stopping for lunch at the dinner on the way home and planning what we'd make for supper over our greasy grilled cheese sandwiches. Instead I was doing those things alone. Which was fine, just not the same.


Years passed. I made some friends through work, connected with a friend from high school, Lea, who I hadn't seen since we graduated. She and I got very close, but she had a family--a husband and two little girls. So there were still plenty of weekends where I went about my shopping and cooking and relaxing alone.


I was happy, though a bit lonely. And time was a ticking. I wasn't baby-crazy in a serious way, but like any woman who has crested the hill of 35 will tell you, it's pretty impossible to avoid thinking about the topic of fertility and motherhood when you're starting to realize that you might not have a choice as to whether or not you join that particular sorority.

So maybe that's why I was so grateful to find Bob when he came into my life. Maybe that's why I was so willing to overlook some things I didn't like in how he treated me, namely what Lea calls looking at me without seeing me, listening to me without hearing.

***
To read other ghost stories, click here.

Sunday Scribblings: My oldest friend

I immediately had a very personal story tug on me when I saw this prompt, but I want to try to use Sunday Scribbling as a means of getting deeper into my fiction writing, so here is the story of my new main character Ellen's Oldest Friend.

**So just to reiterate, this is fiction. Don't want anyone to think I'm airing info about my failing marriage over the internet. (Not that I even have a failing marriage. Thankfully!) :) **

I always thought that my husband would be my best friend. I thought that's how it worked. I'd have to watch our wedding video to verify this, but I think I even wrote the word "best friend" into our wedding ceremony. But I guess you can't make a person live up to their promises, can you.

Let me be blunt: I killed my husband's dog. No, I never liked the thing. But no, I didn't mean
to kill him either. Bob knows this. He must--I've told him a thousand times, even had him back my car out of the driveway so he could see that the dog just happened to be lying in the car's blind spot, and that there was no way I could've known he was there until I felt the impact and heard his little bones crushing. Even though I'm no animal lover, that sound replays in my head sometimes, and I get so nauseous I have to sit down.

There's no way I could've killed a dog on purpose.

And I guess that's the crux of the problem, I'm coming to see, how can I be with someone who doesn't know that about me? Who can't, even after 6 months, accept my apology and allow us to move on?

It's not that he says he doesn't believe it was an accident, or even that he doesn't forgive me. No, he's much more on the passive side of the passive-aggressive equation. He "jokes" about my killing his dog, for instance. In front of other people. As in: In response to something I've said that he doesn't agree with: "This from the woman who killed my dog!" Or, if he's trying to get out of doing something he doesn't want to do, he'll say he can't do it because he's overcome with grief. Convenient that the grief only lasts as long as it takes for me to do whatever it is myself.

At the beginning of the story, when I take him to the hospital because he's having chest pain, I'm scared for him. I'm a bulldog (no pun intended; Shasta was a yellow lab, anyway). I bark at the nurses when they don't get him tested right away to see if he's having a heart attack. I repeat Bob's long list of allergies every time a new orderly comes in to give him some new drug. I'm scared, to be honest, that after all the hard work I've done to try to save my marriage after not being able to save Bob's dog (and then working overtime to pay for the $2,000 vet bill), he'll die on me. And I love him, I do. I tell him that as they roll him into heart surgery. He doesn't say it back.

But then, I witness a doctor-patient apology: he operated on the wrong side of her body. I see in his face the same pain and true regret that I felt about Shasta. I wait for the patient to come back with some nasty comment about the surgeon's incompetence or to call her lawyer. But she doesn't. She accepts the apology, saying she'll need some time to deal with this news, but that she knows he didn't mean to hurt her. She smiles.

After that, I know it's time to leave Bob. If he loved me, he would forgive me and see how much anguish this situation has put me through.