Now I Know What It Is -- What It Lives Like

One of my earliest stories.

I started to "write" -- that is, to put writing in front of everything else, no matter what kind of writing, and in the beginning it was reporting for a little weekly "shopper" newspaper -- I started at age 22, while I was still working as a chemist in New Jersey and living with R, the man who'd become my second husband.

In that first breathless savoring of writing-by-choice, instead of writing for school or writing work reports, what exhilaration I found! Nothing else mattered as much. Fortunately for my partner and my income, at that point I wrote something once a month for the paper. Life could go on, in between.

Poems, those were different. I grew up writing poems; my mother wrote them, not the deep kind but the happy rhyming ones that were for children or to enliven an evening party. By 1972, when I graduated from college, I'd write a poem any time; if I liked you, I'd give you a poem. I didn't revise. I didn't re-think. I didn't think a whole lot, really, just scribbled them down. Thanks, Mom.

In 1996 I wrote The Adventure Guide to Vermont, for a plain fee, for Hunter Publishing; the editor said "it's your book" but it was work-for-hire in my life.

Then a Vermont novel seized me, and I wrote The Darkness Under the Ice, was told I'd written the wrong book, and started over, writing The Darkness Under the Water (published in 2008). With that, I discovered the heady sensation of creating characters and their world, and marveled that in one day, something came alive that hadn't existed before.

But I'll tell you now -- it was always Work. Triumphant when done, but ... Work.

What would it be like to be obsessed, compelled, by something I was writing? To breathe it in, around the clock? To find my life's core, the way I did when I found DK and gave him my heart and received his?

Now I know.

I'm writing a book that is always on my tongue and in my pulse. At night I turn the bedside light back on, to write a note about something for the next chapter. In the morning, I am impatient with breakfast and dishes and ordinary earning a living, because I have more notes all over my desk and they all involve what I will write when a pocket of time opens, later today or early tomorrow. (I meet commitments to others, before I indulge.)

It's waiting for me. I miss my DK, of course, always. But he'd understand what is happening, probably better than I do, and if there's a sort of post-life cheering section, he's standing at the front of it, pounding the air with a fist, and singing something by Arethra. He really loved Arethrea. Also Alicia Keys. I'll tell you about that, some other time.

Right now, there's a new segment waiting to be written, and I'm in love.

PS Don't expect me to vacuum in the corners. As I said: There's a new segment waiting. https://bethkanell.medium.com/