(The excerpt below is as told to one of my characters, Dante.)

Several years ago, Dante had once had a conversation on a train with a woman who mesmerized him with a little story. She noted that some people were charming because they were unpredictable–and sometimes, in spite of it. Seemingly, no matter what, when you were with them, you always ended up having what might most charitably be called adventures: usually small, but always exasperating. Nothing ever went as planned; even less than with most people: You would start off on a perfectly prosaic trip to the laundromat, and end up in Peru.

The woman had a beloved—and charming—friend who somehow brought her to Peru fairly often. And rarely to a mysterious city gleaming of gold, but to a eighth-rate hotel opening onto a sticky alley in a strange little town, where the woman’s job was to translate for the friend—with gesticulation and small stick figure drawings.

Dante loved metaphors, and was delighted as his companion described herself as trying to escape her repeated fate, but nothing would do.  Not even living in another city was sufficient, because the other was an old and beloved friend, after all, and the woman would visit. Besides, the friend was kind-natured and generous to a fault. She never meant anything by it. She would always cheerfully assent that the planned activity for the afternoon was merely the laundry; nothing more, nothing less. At most, she might hint that the airport was on the way.

But the woman on the train had learned to be wary. She would tell herself firmly that she would never go to Peru again; in fact, she would remind her friend that the hotel had been really frightful. (The friend would shrug and laugh merrily, and say that she enjoyed meeting really interesting people.) The woman knew that they would be driving past the airport, so she would brace herself, holding fast to her little purse with the laundry quarters. In vain would she invent excuses: She was completely out of clean clothes; she lacked airfare; had no holiday time; allergies to things in the jungle; a deep-seated phobia of customs officials; a psychic prediction that she would die in the Andes.

All these would be brushed cheerfully aside: Her friend had an outfit or two she could loan—and she could always do the laundry later; she would pay for the airfare; the woman could call in sick; they could pack antihistamines; she would get the woman a teddy bear for customs; and maybe the Andes the prediction referred to was a factory filled with the chocolates. And off they would go, the woman unhappily peering out of the window at the ground, hoping that maybe this time the hotel would not be dreadful; but it almost always was.

After Dante had done laughing, the woman soberly said that her eventual homecomings always had two features in common: She always, always swore that she couldn’t possibly be enticed away again–and her laundry had never been done.

But one evening, she had finally escaped Peru:

In this real example, she had been visiting the friend, and had unsurprisingly gone on a Peruvian excursion which had lasted just long enough for her to miss her last train home. And so, she would be stopping overnight; although, of course, both greatly unwanted and unplanned. (She had noticed that many Peruvian visits did this, and she had also noticed that these occurred after politely refusing an invitation to prolong her stay.) But there was no fixing it, and so she and the friend had been driving back to the house, when the friend said that she had promised to get a hanging geranium for her mother’s porch, and announced that Glory Gardens was just a short way away.

Glory Gardens, the woman explained to Dante, was an impressively vast superstore chain in her area. They had everything desired by anybody who had so much as brought home a kindergarten radish in a milk carton. The woman adored gardening herself, and knew that if she were to go in, she would leave all her money in their registers. And no, leaving her wallet behind wouldn’t much help. She knew that the smells and colors would turn her into a happily brainless animal with acute ADD, and that she would wander around all night, petting things.  So she cheerfully told the friend that she would just stay in the car, thank you.

Her friend assented, but when they pulled into the lot and turned off the car, the friend—who indeed had been driving for a bit—said, “Get out of the car; I need to walk for a while.” The woman obediently got out of the car, it not occurring to her that she was about to be locked out of it. She did note in the back of her head that the sentence had been just like that, voiced in the imperative, which was annoying, but it was a pleasant summer evening. A little stroll around the quiet lot would be nice enough. She had driven distances, and knew that sometimes you needed to stretch your legs.

Thus, she was a little surprised when the walk arrowed straight from the car to the door of the store.

The woman found herself thinking, “No-o-o. No, this can’t be happening. She knows very well that I really don’t want to go.” But there they were. And in the doorway, the woman resolutely ignored the colors and smells, and the large sign saying “SALE!”

Once more, she firmly reminded her friend that she didn’t want to go into Glory Gardens.

“I need to get a geranium.”

“Do you really need me along just to pick up a geranium?” (The friend gardened herself, so fortunately had no excuse for needing a native guide.)

“No,” admitted the friend, with a chipper and affectionate smile. ‘It’ll only be a minute. Come on!” The woman smelled peat moss. She knew that she was at the very threshold of Peru. For the second time that day. She felt very tempery.

“No. Really.” (“In my mommy voice,” she told Dante.)

“OK,” said her friend, perfectly cheerfully. “You can just wait on the bench outside, then.”

The woman did so, while noting that, although it was a lovely night, and she was not in the store, she was in fact on Glory Garden’s bench, and not comfortably in the car, which had been her plan.

Her friend soon emerged with the geranium, and the woman sighed to herself, as they headed back to the car. She asked, ”Um, just what part of ‘I don’t want to go into Glory Gardens’ didn’t you understand?” Her friend failed to understand the question. She looked amused and quizzical, and shrugged with a laugh.

The woman persisted. Finally the friend—who was, after all, an old friend—admitted that it had never actually occurred to her that she had ever been doing anything at all, except “offering options.”

“I opted,” the woman said wryly to Dante, “not to go to Peru.”

“I’m going to bake some chicken, Mummy.”

“It’s 9:30!” (At night.)

“Did you have dinner?”

(pause) “No, I had peanut brittle!” Well, peanut chikki. By any other name…

It was a pretty good day, filled with a little of the old ultraviolence. Well, a lot. I poisoned somebody horribly and arranged to send his semi-preserved head to his parents; then I bashed somebody else’s head in with a baseball bat and dismembered them. One of these people had it coming, the other didn’t. (I did soothe a rape victim in between, though.) I’ve come a long way from feeling squeamish at my first kill.

(I felt uneasy with that paragraph, wondering if the FBI would pay me a visit. Then I remembered that this is an Internet with *****************, with your most bizarre nightmare filled in there. I still feel nervous, but that’s probably because deep within, I’m culturally a nice Irish Catholic girl.)

What made that first kill particularly trying is that the readers found her enormously likable (in only half a dozen or so pages). Hell, I liked her too. I was overly artsy about describing her death, so they had this big denial thing going on, which I’ve done myself. For a while, I toyed with just having her be badly injured, but . . . nahhh. Jaded though I am, I still feel really bad about today’s innocent victim, who was only a teenager. I don’t suppose my serial killer can just symbolically gut stuffed bunny rabbits?

My hands hurt. The left one is just being whiny, because almost all of today’s work was longhand. Not counting breaks, it was about a six or seven hour writing day. My daughter was concerned; said my head would explode. But I was on a roll, and am thinking of doing some more transcribing. A piece of today’s transcription stands alone, so I’ll pop it in next post.

So. Here I am. Got Pandora on what started out as my default writing music station, but I have to start over; things kinda got ballocksed a little when I added Emilie Autumn.  (Emilie rocks, mind you.)

I’d sort of bumped into WordPress here and there across the Web, but today I decided to dive on in. I’ve screwed around with other blog attempts here and there, but I think this’ll be it. I’ll unpack the baggage bit by bit as I figure out how to get things arranged.  (Did you like the consciously pretentious metaphor there? Knew you would!)

The thing about me is, I stall. I’ve learned to at least TRY not to hate myself for it too much. My head is like a dryer–things sort of tumble around, while you go get a pop, and fidget on the godawfully uncomfortable plastic bench too narrow for your butt. Sometimes there’s a weird smell of something that didn’t really want to be dried; you self-consciously get the bathroom key from the attendant, and the next thing you know, you have a fluff-dried and clean-folded PhD. Woo!

Well,at least I did.

All my life, everybody told me I should be a writer. So one day in freshman year of high school, I tried it. I wrote a short science fiction story about this science fiction writer with a little alien familiar, called Crit. That’s all I remember about the story. I was really proud of it, and I read it to my two best friends. One of them said that she really liked it, but the alpha girl of our pack made a lot of fun of me and pointed out that I’d basically retold a fairy tale. I don’t remember which one. Anyway, I was completely humiliated and cried. So much for that.

In junior year, I tried it again. I got a black’n’white composition book, because even back then I knew I was prone to pages getting shredded out. I covered it with some sort of decoration, and I started writing. I wrote two or three stories, and I think a couple of poems. I pestered my favorite English teacher to read it. She was a complete love, but her response burrowed deep inside with sharp little teeth. Not a total loss, because it’s made me a more humane composition teacher, but still.

A couple of years later, I joined up with a couple of apazines. For you youth (and probably most people not familiar with science fiction fandom), these were blogs on paper, with comments by mail. It wasn’t as horrific as it sounds–we’d work on them during breaks from churning the butter, making our own shoes, and cutting silhouettes. Anyway, my zines were a lot easier for me to write, because all I had to do was . . . well . . . if you were me . . . hold forth at some loquacious length on something, often beating some hapless soul to death if they couldn’t argue as well as I could.

The big problem with apahacking is the stalling thing. The individual zines had to be sent to a single person with serious mental challenges, who would then copy the un-precopied (most), collate them, and then send them out again. So there were deadlines, and, well . . . I’ve gotten oodles better at pushing deadlines and actually whacking things out in the nick of the time without noticeable quality loss, but I’ve had about 20 more years of practice now.

Meanwhile, of course, I was keeping journals, and dragging my way through papers in school. Not too many as an Art major, but then I switched to English in grad school, and really got my nose rubbed in how bad my academic-style writing was. It couldn’t have been all that bad, because my show paper is what really got me from UW Madison into Harvard. But once there, the beatings continued, and I was screamingly well aware of how differently I saw life from my fellows in the academy. (For one thing, my paper tone isn’t very far from the one here.) I secretly despaired about the looming dissertation. Yow.

Somewhere around 1998, I started a fiction story about some of the people in my head. It didn’t get past Chapter 4 or 5, and (as all the rest of my stuff, frankly) sucked. And then I got divorced, and started having all manner of adventures.

In 2004, I found my way back to Harvard and dove into the dissertation, without much hope. I was saved by Professor James Engell, whose utter wonderfulness should in no way be tainted by his association with these pages. Jim is the most patient and insightful reader in the academy, and I have those sort of fantasies where I get to donate him a major organ. I mean, the man handed me my brain; what else can I possibly do?

That said, I wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t have nearly crippling joint pain, particularly in my knees. (Nobody yet knew what the deal was, but basically for 25 years my body had been having this big argument about how much vitamin D it wanted and doing mulish things with its calcium. So my bones were dissolving just a teeny bit. I had something called hyperparathyroidism.  It’s pretty much all betta now. Vitamin D. Beats the oxycontin: Cheap; and missing a dose doesn’t make you jones.) Anyway, walking 3/4 of a mile to the Yard would bench me on my couch for a few days. Bad. So somehow, I got hooked up with the little Harvard shuttle bus. Every morning, it would be waiting for me at 10 a.m., and if I missed it, Bonnie at the shuttle office would call me. She’s really nice, so I tried to be good.

The bus would drop me off at Widener Library, and pick me up six hours later. Which meant I schlepped up to the English library, opened up the laptop, and looked for a way to stall.

I’d heard that the way to start writing is just to start writing. Meaning, just start blah blah blah. So I just started talking, again, to the people who lived in my head. I wrote imaginary e-mails and IMs between varying people in this cast of characters. Then I could ease happily into the diss. (PLUG: Phinished.org was also crucially helpful in getting done; check ’em out if you’re writing a thesis.)

In late spring of 2005, something in my head hit flashpoint, and, according to my file dates, over one weekend all those people in all those e-mails turned into a coherent fictional universe, and I started to write. And ya know what? It was really good.

I finished the dissertation, and then had more adventures. But throughout, I kept writing. And it kept being good.

The big, central adventure was finally admitting that you don’t have the interesting life that I’ve had without some fallout. I crashed and burned. But I was writing.

Nowadays, I’m still on disability. It was a big crash and burn, but then I sort of had it coming, all things considered. And I’m getting much, much better. The great thing about a burn is that it clears the way for a clean re-build. One of the insights I was forced to make was admitting that I’m not a 9 to 5 sort of person. I am, heaven help me, a creative. Which in many ways sucks. But I tried to be a good little soldier for years, and it just didn’t work.

So now I’m . . . writing. Last year, I got inadvertently roped into writing a non-profit grant for which I did about 50% of the narrative, and it ranked first in the city. Trying that on for size. Finishing the novel, which is scary and hard, but at least it’s good.

And now here I am, figuring that stalling from writing by writing worked really well last time. We’ll see how it goes.