Maybe I should have written about community. Because, as obsessed as I have personally
been with the question of what a public and adult disabled female voice sounds
like—probably more of a thing if you have a voice that’s not always clear in your
own head, as well as one people are not used to hearing. Maybe it’s not a
thought enticing to publishing pros, who, in turn, are trying to decide what
engages the book-buying public, to whom, despite everything I’ve been dreaming
forever(and that sometimes makes me feel I’ve been at this a long time,) my
flashes of activity might look like signs of sunstroke. If I take my eagerness
for a hugely validating capital-M Moment out of the equation, it makes every
bit of sense for the people with novels that aren’t hope on a hard drive to get
the blog posts first.
Fifty-something or
not, I’m still a rookie, and one who was lying to herself when she thought that
getting into the magazine without the aid of First Stories would put to rest a
lot of her questions about her overall gifts. It helps. But maybe not as much as I imagined it might
when I was sending out the six, or eight, unpolished or possibly unfinished
stories that the magazine, rightly, as it turned out, failed to pay attention
to. (Maybe I’ll finish one of them,
though there are a few that I will chalk up to experience as the moment for
police procedurals, at least from my outsider’s desk, seems to have passed. Not
that I nailed anything with them but a passable-for-a-chick-from-the desert
Richard Price impression anyway. )
“I am Queens Boulevard!” except for all the ways I am so
clearly not. Maybe Phoenix doesn’t have much of an identity, either. Maybe
thinking of us as working it out together might help me feel better about the
other reasons I have to stay. I generally love a project..
I couldn’t have written a more traditional PI story, though. Not without cribbing so violently from other
writers that it would make “Murder By Death” look like a documentary. I don’t
really know what “lone wolf” feels like. Maybe not that great, since the bottle
of scotch in the desk(or in the case of the women, a punishing-sounding
exercise regimen) comes pretty standard, much like the office with the dead
plants.
I have never run five miles, much less felt depleted because
I skipped a day or a thousand. I have only rarely solved a problem due to some
individual effort of mine—and if you add in my need for personal care—don’t
ask, if you think identity struggles don’t go easily with blog posts, you have
seen nothing compared to all that stuff—my Individualism count plummets to about
one, depending on how fast I can get this post out.
Part of me still wanted to lie, or at least research my way
into hiding all that—I’ve done it before.
So the form I halfway love, and my form, that I halfway don’t, had to
adapt(pun not intended) and make “Wedded Twist” possible as a PI story where
the hero gets help when she needs it.
