Bo-Bo Knows Whiplash

When I finished the rough draft of my novel, I expected to go out of my mind. Tears maybe? Dragging Bo to the beach so I could run off some energy? Bowling over Mike with the atomic force that comes from crashing through a lifetime spent telling myself I just don't finish what I start? Blinking at my computer screen as my brain came to the surreal realization that the fifth book was the charm?

I did feel joy, and I did celebrate. But there were two celebratory obstacles.

The first was the easy one. The end of the rough draft means the start of the revision. While embracing a forward-ho! approach did wonders for powering through this draft, it left quite the mess in its wake. Think of it like hosting a literary block party in your living room--all cocktails and music and fun--only to wake up with so much cleaning to do you have no idea where to start. Not to mention the gaping holes in the wall...

The second obstacle was harder.

On November 5, I learned that one of my closest friends has stage four pancreatic cancer. I heard the news the way a sister might take such news about her brother--hard. But when I started to shut down, I rallied myself. My friend is a brother-in-art who helped me embrace the pioneering spirit of creative living in a largely apathetic world. He believed I was a writer before I believed it myself. His enthusiasm for this novel was and is unconditional and constant. Shutting down was just about the best way to spit on everything he taught me. So I rallied. On November 7, I finished the draft. It was fucking done!

But with exhilaration came whiplash.

That first weekend, spikes of joy alternated with the flatline of loss. I finished the book with a stubborn insistence that putting it off was to dishonor all the ways my friend has supported my writing, but any joy I felt about reaching "the end" gave way, eventually, to guilt. A wise friend told me this guilt was natural, but I had to let it go. That life is too short to waste worrying. That I had to embrace joy when it comes.

People say life is a roller coaster--you're up then you're down, screaming and scared one minute and laughing like a loon the next. But there's got to be more to life that strapping yourself in and bracing for the loop-de-loops. We have more control than that. We have to. Life is more like a see saw--one minute you're riding high and the next you're on you're ass, but you have the power to stay on the ground or launch yourself back skyward. And no. I'm not quite on board with my life-as-see-saw metaphor, either, but you get what I'm saying about our hand in pushing ourselves up and away from the ground. What I'm trying to say anyway. Embrace joy when it comes? I did. I tried. I'm trying.

Bo-Bo Knows Hope

I didn't walk Bo on this this near-60 degree November morning; I bounced. I smiled so much, people smiled right back at me.

For the first time in my lifetime, the United States elected a president that gives me hope infectious enough it spread from my mind to swallow my heart. I know electing President Obama doesn't fix the many hurts of this country. I understand that electing President Obama means the work is just beginning. But I also understand that the prospect of the right kind of work beginning, finally, brings a national hope I've never known.

My morning walk takes me right along the ocean. The sea was calm today, lapping like a lake, and I couldn't help but feel like that was the earth itself taking a deep breath and saying we can, we will, we must.

Bo-Bo Knows to Vote Yes on 3

I admire people who rant tirelessly in support of the great issue of their lives and metabolize their sense of justice into activism. But as much as I would like to have a missionary's spunk, my heart beats to a less warlike rhythm. I see twelve sides --at a minimum--to every story. Choosing just one can be problematic.

On Tuesday, November 4, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to ban greyhound racing. A yes vote would make racing illegal as of January 2010.

Although the kindly and curious people who stop Bo and me in the street used to chat about Bo's top speed, these days they all ask me how I think they should vote on question 3. They're looking for a hell, yeah! A passionate cry! But what I tell them is this:

I think the tracks in Massachusetts are better than the horror shows that pass as racetracks in other countries, but I didn't like what I've seen given my experience with Bo. I'm voting yes.

Don't get me wrong: I understand that adopting one greyhound doesn't exactly make me an expert on this issue, so here are the links to the arguments from both sides:

YES--The argument for ending racing.
N0--The argument to keep it going.

That said, here are my Bo-infused reasons for voting yes on 3:

1. Scrawny Bo--When we adopted Bo, he weighed ten pounds less than his current svelte--but healthy--weight (the photo above shows Bo-Bo's fresh-from-the-track, xylophone ribs).

2. Wormy Bo--Bo came to us with a pooper full of worms.

3. Abandoned Bo--We adopted Bo through the Wonder Dogs adoption program at Wonderland Dog Park. The staff was very responsive to our requests for information, the program pays to spay and neuter adoptive animals, and the adoption director allowed us to visit the kennel to choose our Bo. They even helped us identify the dogs that were gentle enough I wouldn't have to worry about him around friends and family--particularly my then-3-year-old nephew Ryan. We narrowed the choice to an as-yet un-spayed female dog and the dog-who-would-be-Bo. When we couldn't decide, the program organizer had a solution: take the neutered dog for the weekend and see how it went. He sent us home with Bo, his papers, and instructions to call if we had a problem. No one from Wonder Dogs ever called to see how we were managing.

4. Nameless Bo--Bo's kennel name was Ricky, but he never once responded to it, yet he started responding to to "Bo" and "Bo-Bo" after living with us a week.


5. Stretchy Bo--At our house, Bo spends most of his day sprawled out to his full length across one of three of his ginormous pillows. In his more spaztastic moments, Bo will co-opt one of his many squeaky toys for a rousing game of pounce-and-toss. In the kennel, Bo lived in a crate lined with shredded newspaper. Though he could stand and lay down, a full sprawl was out of the question. He had no toys.

6. Skittish Bo--Bo shies away from strangers holding canes, crutches, surfboards, clipboards, or balloons. When I took him to a fun run at Wonderland last spring, he shook. I know that the shaking was probably about being in a building with hundreds of people around him at once, but the image of him with his head drooped in his alma mater is one I can't get out of my mind. During his race, Bo clocked in at 27 miles per hour out of the gate, but by the time he reached me, he had slowed to a trot and started whimpering. His eyes had the same haunted look he gets when I'm getting ready to leave. Hey, I know that there isn't exactly a one-to-one relationship between what it looks like a dog might be thinking and what he's actually thinking. But crying is crying.

The thrust of a commercial being aired by the opposition to question 3 focuses on the 1,000 Massachusetts residents who will lose their jobs if racing is banned. But if question 3 passes, these employees will have more than a year to choose an alternative path. Greyhounds never had the luxury of choice. On behalf of my favorite retired racer, I'm choosing yes on question three.

How will you vote?

Bo-Bo Knows How to Keep His Ass in a Chair

There's an old truism that successful writers know how to keep their asses in their chairs and write. I used to think this was pretty straightforward--the secret to writing as simple as finding the time to write. But there's a little more to it than that.

As I near the end of the rough draft of my novel, I'm finding that I paid so much attention to braiding the main storylines together that I failed to notice all the loose hairs I dropped along the way. I know that stray hairs are supposed to be tamed by the hairspray of revision, but you try ignoring a shrieking chorus of the what-about-mes and see how much progress you make! I would be galloping happily along and then--bam!--fallen tree. Sure, I could leap over it, but every time I tried that, the chorus only screeched all the louder: What about me?

These brain banshees made the nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart.

These were the moments I most wanted to check Facebook, play with Bo-Bo, study Greek, clean the toilet, torture myself with articles about Sarah Palin, and just generally invent hours of distraction under the guise of letting the fiction problem percolate at the back of my brain. But detours cause delays, and every day I'm still--still, STILL--working on this (expletive deleted) rough draft, I'm in grave danger of inappropriate laughter (yesterday, I laughed at a student when he told me how bummed he was that the only win his team logged during the entire football season was the result of a forfeit).

So for the sake of my sanity and social niceties, I kept my ass in the chair and forced my fingers to keep moving on the keys. And then the weirdest thing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, a character I hadn't realized was even in on the present dilemma showed up on the screen in my head and started hauling off that tree (oh, just stay with me a minute because telling you what he was actually doing would make very little sense given that you haven't read a lick of my book). I started to describe what the character was doing, and soon the tree was gone, and I was back to galloping.

In her novel, "The Fiction Class," Susan Breen says writing description is "like watching a Polaroid picture develop--first come the blurry shadows of the central forms, and then the details emerge slowly."

Yeah. What she said.

But I will add this. Our job as writers, then, is to keep our asses in our chairs long enough that our Polaroids make themselves known to us. Because once those Polaroids appear, you're not going to want to move your ass until your fingers have done their keyboarding thing.