After four weeks of writing, last night I made the final revisions to my latest short story, Samuel’s Wife.  This morning, I sat in my study drinking a cup of coffee, my dog at my feet, my family still asleep, and read the story one last time. When I finished, I held the thirteen sheets of typed, double-spaced paper in my hands and thought of how much time I put into each short story I write.  When I say I wrote for four weeks on Samuel’s Wife, I don’t mean I wrote off and on, now and then, a few minutes here and a few minutes there. I wrote eight hours a day at least four days a week while laundry piled up, while dog hair accumulated on the red oriental rug and in the corners of the hardwood floors.  While my family slept and went to school and spread straw in the garden and bought groceries and watched television, I was locked in my study creating conflict and struggle between two strong women. My medical appointments were postponed, invitations declined. Many nights, I’d still be researching life in southern Georgia during the 19th century until well after midnight.  I studied the Trail of Tears and my own family history involving Indians.  Interruptions from the outside world caused me considerable stress.  For three days straight I had to drop my writing in order to complete end-of-year reports for a women’s club.  If you are a writer reading this, you know how difficult it can be to abandon a manuscript and focus on other projects.  When writing, I tend to become reclusive with an urgency to control the door that leads to me.  But it is never possible to control events beyond my study.  Life goes on and pulls me into it, like it or not.

Samuel’s Wife is written in first person present tense.  Some say this is one of the most difficult and limited formats for writing, yet for certain stories I prefer the sense of immediacy that comes from first person present and the distinctive voice it demands from the narrator.  The opening line of Samuel’s Wife is “Here comes Bess.”  To be sure, I tried retelling the story in first person past and third person past, but the story fell flat.

When I wrote Sleeping on Paul’s Mattress there was no other point of view and tense that would work.  It needed a strong voice and first person present pulled the narrator’s anger and hurt to the surface where it pulsed with life. Sleeping on Paul’s Mattress starts with, “From my crouching position under the house, I watch a hearse back into the yard and stop right short of the front porch.  It’s late in the day, and the sun is bleeding red across the sky for as far as I can see.  Four men with fleshy faces climb out of the hearse, straightening their ties, flipping imaginary hairs from their dark suits.  They look like white sugar frosting on a shit-pile if you ask me.  You can’t dress up poverty like ours.  No, you can’t color our house anything but ugly no matter how many polished shoes walk up its decaying steps.”

I don’t always write in first person present tense.  Most of my stories won’t accept that limited format, yet I’ve learned to be true to myself and buck off the rules of writing whenever I need something fresh and alive.  By doing so, I often open myself up to criticism, but if I am afraid to plow new ground, then I have no business planting words.

           

Just a little under a year ago I made a decision I was sure would impact the rest of my life for the better. I was only a year out from graduating college with a degree in English, but I had another passion: weather. I decided that I would finish my English degree and then proceed immediately to Georgia Tech to study Earth and Atmospheric Science. From there I would get a good job working at the Weather Channel and somehow – somehow – find a way to pursue my passion out onto the Great Plains each and every spring for storm season. I was set. I was excited. My future was fresh and promising.

In the midst of my excitement, though, I had to face reality. Quiet evenings which were spent reading Shakespeare one hour and studying physics and calculus the next were often interrupted by ambulance sirens and long stays in the Emergency Room. My mother was ill. She’d never been particularly healthy, but things were getting worse now. She’d always been there for me and I was determined not to leave her side, even if it meant lugging a bag full of books up to the hospital day after day. Finally she told me that she and my stepfather had decided to move back to England so that she could be with the rest of her family.

“Will you go?”

“No.” I answered immediately, looking out at the horizon where a particularly beautiful cumulonimbus cloud was alight with the setting sun. “No I won’t.”

But the thought of being left alone in a country which had never quite felt like home became more than I could bear. And then there was always the writing. Even when I was determined to be a meteorologist I was still adamant that writing would be a large part of my existence. After weeks of soul-searching, I decided that I would always have a passion for the weather, but my passion for the pen and for my family was much stronger, and they were both passions which could be more actively pursued across the pond.

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I've decided to start a blog which will chronicle my journey as a college graduate while I try to slide into the professional publishing and writing community. It will follow my escapades from the sticky, kudzu-covered fields of Georgia, to the busy, ruthless streets of London, England. You can follow my blog on wordpress.com, by following the link below. 

nbickers.wordpress.com

You can also read the blog here:

 

A Single Snowflake in the Flurry of Life:

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I have lived at 35 different addresses in my life. 13 of those addresses were before I turned 18. The 22 apartments and houses since then are the legacy of an ex-military dependent who spent the bulk of her childhood moving, saying goodbye, saying hello. My husband, who spent his entire childhood and adolescence in one neighborhood and in one house, is resigned to my relentless restlessness (eight of the 35 moves were with him.)

It’s my belief that the feeling of belonging and travel are not mutually exclusive. I think, to a certain degree, we travel in order to feel like we belong. Not only does travel give you a glimpse of the rest of the world, and therefore a snapshot of your place in it, it also helps you to see that we are all a part of one large human family.    

In fact, the expatriate experience—one that you’d typically think of as apart or separate from the collective group—is really a definitive exercise in belonging. Nowhere is the feeling of belonging more strongly felt than when you live abroad and happen upon a fellow American. This could be someone you might not bother to cross the street for back home, yet in this context—say one where they are the only American besides yourself in a room of foreign nationals—they are met with real pleasure and enthusiasm.

Think of all the expatriate clubs and organizations in Paris, for example. First, there are an astounding 165,000 Americans living in France today (50,000 in Paris, alone) so they have no problem getting a taco party together to watch American gridiron or feeling like “they belong.”

Then, of course, there’s the technological revolution and how it’s affected the expatriate. When my husband and I lived overseas—he in the late seventies and me in the mid-eighties—contact with family and friends was expensive and slow. A letter to New Zealand from the States could easily take two weeks to get to me. The phone calls—expensive and infrequent—had serious quality issues, (like a humpback was squatting on the cable that threaded along the ocean floor from Jacksonville, Florida to Auckland, New Zealand.) My husband and I often remark how much easier it would be to live in a foreign country today, with skyping, and the instant gratification of cell phone contact. During the decades that he and I lived overseas, we felt truly and completely separated from our support group of friends and family back home.

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I didn’t rejoice when Borders announced they were going belly up, but I didn’t really care, either. I’d long since stopped buying even paperbacks there although it was still nice on an unhurried lunch hour to browse through their magazine shelves to see periodicals I never knew existed. Except for the odd gift here and there, I can’t remember buying a hardback book in any of the big box bookstores for at least five years. And since the advent of the affordable e-reader, I haven’t even bothered picking up a paperback book from Wal-Mart—not when it’s so much more convenient, not to mention cheaper, to download it to my Kindle. So how come, the picture, above, saddens me so much? Why does it feel like the world turned its back on reading and literature—not just the method by which it was delivered to us? (Brick and mortar bookstores require climbing out of your bunny slippers and driving. Real-place bookstores require parking and standing in line. When I want the third book in the Hunger Games series, I want it NOW.) If anything, we’re all reading much more than before. We’re reading in line at theatres, in doctors’ offices, and even while waiting for traffic lights (well, maybe that’s just me). Now that whole libraries’ worth of reading material fit onto our smart phones and other e-readers, we’re reading every where. (And, now that there is no tell-tale cover of heaving bosums or pre-teen sci fi, no one can see what we’re reading either.) The sad, bare shelves aside, it isn’t reading we’re turning our backs on, even though that’s how it felt these last few weeks felt as we picked over the rumble sale that has been Borders Bookstore. It’s the community it afforded. Reading is a solitary pleasure but the big box bookstores gave us a steady stream of coffee and plush chairs and brought other bibliophiles together. They surrounded us with all the lush colors of one magnificent book cover after another—in fact rows and rows and stacks and stacks of them—the objects of our mutual desire. It was such a lovely little world. And for awhile it didn’t matter that we weren’t actually buying anything. I wonder, amid all the wondering of what the future of bookstores will be, if there might someday once again be a place to congregate—with coffee and plush chairs and other book lovers. Oh, that’s right…that’d be the Internet Book Clubs. And the coffee is chez vous and the plush chair is your living room couch. It’s just that, it seems to me, especially on top of the worry that my Boomer generation often confesses to about our children’s generation possibly having difficulty “connecting” in person, might this be another nail in the coffin of personal interaction?

Maybe it’s just the Recession, but what seemed possible a few years ago, in many ways feels not possible now. I once wrote a book called “Quit Your Job, Move to Paris.” I wrote it after a young dewy-eyed college grad interviewed me at the bank where I was working in the advertising department. (Dear God, I’m depressing myself just writing the words.) She’d recently graduated with a degree in advertising and wanted to know what she should do to, basically, get my job. I looked at her and asked: “Are you married?” She blushed prettily and shook her head. I said: “So no kids?” She reddened not so prettily and frowned at me. “Of course not,” she said. “Do you own your own home?” “I’m only 21,” she replied, as if speaking to a seriously mentally impaired individual. (Kind of like how my teenager speaks to me all the time but that’s another blog.) I said: “So, no ties, no mortgage, no private school tuition. My advice to you is…” She poised her little pen over her little steno pad.

Well, you can probably guess what I said (see above title of aforementioned book) and she did not appreciate being led on as she put it. In addition to being a new college graduate, she also happened to be the daughter of the bank’s vice president so I’m not sure why she was even bothering to get my take on anything. She should’ve just gone to her Dad and said: “I want her job, please, Daddy.”

But see, I had a mortgage and a kid (plus two step-kids, but again, another time, another blog) and the idea of “living my passion” or waking up and smelling the croissants on the Rue de la Paix or spending a year writing a novel was about as possible as starring in a Broadway musical. She was young. She had her whole life ahead of her. Her choices hadn’t been made yet. From my perspective, I thought she should take advantage of her freedom while she had it, as if passion—for writing or travel or acting or anything—would dry up or run out like sand in an hourglass.

I did write the “Quit Your Job” book and, in the process, researched various sections on several different life situations: married with kids, single with kids, etc. to suggest ways and ideas of how moving to Paris for a period of time might be possible. During the course of my research, I discovered how it would be possible for me to go, too. Unfortunately, the information I came up with was good and bad. On the bad side, I learned that even though there definitely was a way for you to move to Paris if you wanted to, you still might not go. And that’s because, on the good side of the ledger, you became aware that you weren’t kept from going…you actually chose not to go. Yeah, I know. It sucks. But sucks or not, it helps to know. I didn’t pack up the kid and the husband and shoot off to France in 2001 because I realized I wanted other things as much or more. Things that couldn’t happen if I took the Paris option at that time.

Funny thing about passion, though. If it’s real, it tends to stay with you. I don’t work in a corporate advertising department any more. I write full time. As for the Paris thing, well, my son is sifting through his college acceptances even as we speak which means, next year, he’s launched into his grand adventure. And guess what? Turns out, Paris is still there!

Guess that silly college girl was right about one thing: there really isn’t a time limit on passions after all.

If you’re interested in doing a little armchair traveling, I hope you pick up copies of my best-selling books The French Women’s Diet, Little Death by the Sea, Toujours Dead and Murder in Provence. Warning: don’t read hungry. (I am not kidding!)

http://myfrenchlife.org/2011/10/01/interview-carolyn-davenport-moncel/

http://www.girlsguidetoparis.com/archives/shopping-pointers-and-top-shopping-areas/

http://www.laurelzuckerman.com/2011/10/interview-with-karen-fawcett-founder-of-bonjourparis.html

http://myfrenchlife.org/2011/09/23/french-myths-busted/

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/

Now Professional Members of GWA can add blog pages. You can add a page with a bio, links, pictures, videos and thats it or you can write a regular blog. Either way professional members are getting more exposure for their books and services. 

If you want to write a blog (great idea) but do not have much time to maintain a blog - consider recycling old blogs, articles, or columns. Read this great column by Chris Brogan about recycling old content.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/recycle-your-blog/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+chrisbrogandotcom+%28%5Bchrisbrogan.com%5D%29