Well, I am fast approaching the conclusion of my novel. The work that I have done on it the past few days has brought me to a point where I believe tomorrow will see me beginning the final chapter.

I can’t explain what a strange feeling this is; I have been thinking about and living with this character in my inner life for a year now, and as I draw close to finishing her story, I feel a mixture of great anticipation and great sadness. It’s not just that this novel has as its theme something of intrinsic sadness; it’s also that I will be sad, on some level, not to be writing her anymore.

It is also a time of no small amount of fear as well. A year is a long time to devote to one specific and treasured project. Now that I have created this “baby” of mine, I must subject her to the hands of strangers, who will poke into her every nook and cranny and pronounce her viable or not. She will be cut and pasted, reworked, edited, and molded, a process that every writer knows can be painful and bruising to the ego of the Creator, and that’s just finishing school, not the Show itself.

But I know that without these “surgeries”, this baby may never have the chance to live a life outside of her Creator’s mind, so I will willingly, though worriedly, subject her to the necessary procedures. (I’m already looking for the right doctor.)

I cannot say I’m not relieved, though, to be approaching the end. There have been many times over the past year that I thought I’d never get to this moment, but here I am, head down, wind roaring in my ears, fast approaching the end of the race. Let’s just hope that this time, there’s a place for me in the winner’s circle.

I will keep you posted.

Whew–I reread yesterday’s post and I don’t care what the university thinks, I write “Depression” really well.

For those of you concerned that I mightn’t bounce back from yesterday’s devastating rejection, I am writing, first, just to be writing at all, and second, to reassure you that I am made of tougher stuff than that.

The snow, indeed, stopped falling in the night, leaving lovely huge drifts of distraction for me to shovel later today; the sun is shining brightly again through my office window; I am back at my keyboard, determined to keep on keeping on.

A million years ago when I was still a teacher, I used to say that it was so hard to know if you were doing a good job, because the opportunities to see your “finished product” (a happy and successful former student) came so rarely. Those times when a newly-minted young adult stopped by or wrote to me to tell me how they were doing were precious precisely because of their rarity.

At least as a teacher, you have the opportunity to see the faces of those you are hoping to touch (figuratively, not literally, of course). You have the chance to see the lightbulbs snapping to life over students’ heads, and you know that you are making a difference, at least at that moment.

But as a writer, unless and until you gain a following, you operate in a vacuum, where the only sounds you hear are those of your own words bouncing back to you. It’s difficult to know for sure if what you are writing is good and true, or merely sound and vibration. Those crystal clear moments of feedback that arrive in the form of rejection letters, anonymous postings to Web sites, or words of advice from your well-respected mentors are sometimes the only indicator you have of whether or not what you are doing is worth doing at all.

Then again, I have to remind myself occasionally, for whom am I writing? Do I write for myself? Am I writing for an audience? I think it is some combination of the two. I will write, always, for myself, because there are thoughts and visions that swirl around the inside of my head, darkening and coalescing and keeping me awake at night with their intense conversations, that simply must come out.

But the simple fact is, yes, I want someone else out there to read what I have written, to experience what I have wrought, and to share in that world with me.

So–today, I am back in the saddle again. As I wrote to a friend, I can’t be bucked off that easily, but neither can I deny that falling certainly did smart. 

No one is quite rid of me yet.

A dream died today. I don’t know how else to put it. A vision of a possible future I had cherished, had longed for, worked for, shared my hopes for with friends and family alike, died a sudden and most unexpected death. Today–this cruel day when that tease,  Spring, darted back into the frozen woods of my longing, mocking me for thinking that She had returned–on this blank and gray day, I am destroyed.

For those of you following my path with interest (all three or four of you), I received my Masters Program rejection letter today. Having been accepted into a previous program in another state, I guess I had built it up in my mind already that acceptance here must then be a surety. I was marking each day off my calendar in blue, that eternal shade of optimism, waiting for the Day I Would Find Out. And it is here, and I have found out, and I am lost.

The letter referenced intense competition, even kindly pointed out the vast number of applicants (350) competing for such an infinitesimally small number of spaces (12). But that means nothing to someone who is not one of the Twelve (ask Judas what it felt like to be applicant number 13.) 

This wasn’t like receiving a rejection letter from a publishing company; I can laugh those off with one arm tied behind my back. This was like having the next two years of my life carpet-bombed. I’d already made plans; I’d already been working out logistics, and finances, and now, there is nothing, just an endless crater of What-Do-I-Do-Now?

I know, I’m taking this hard, but I only opened the letter half an hour ago, and have yet to make it through all the official Stages of Grief that accompany a death in the family. Denial: They must have made a mistake and sent this letter to the wrong address. Pain: It hurts to be conscious. Anger: Those who can’t write teach writing courses! (apologies to those professors, and you know who you are, C.S., who are the exceptions to that angry statement. Remember that people often say things in anger that they do not necessarily mean.) Depression: I am a poor writer, I will always be a poor writer, and I had no possible reason to think that anyone would ever think otherwise. I am defeated.

Upward turn, reconstruction, and acceptance are the stages that are supposed to follow, but I think since I barreled through the first four stages simultaneously (Call me a prodigy) I sense that it might take a while yet for me to start looking on the sunny side of things.

What now? Do I chalk it up to intense competition this year, and apply again, perhaps somewhere else? Do I scoff at their rejection, and make myself a cheering list of all the fabulous writers who not only do not have M.F.A.s but who make fun of people who do? 

Or do I take this as a sign that I wasn’t good enough…do I turn in my keyboard and my thesaurus?

I am not sure at the moment. Perhaps tomorrow, when the snow has stopped falling and I’ve managed to work past these first gut-wrenching hours of disappointment, I will have an answer. After all, tomorrow is another day…

And today, oddly enough, was such a good day of work on my novel. Strange irony.  Perhaps it wasn’t as good as I thought.

I know, I know–I should be working on my novel. The open file glares at me accusingly, waiting for me to actually spend some time with it today, but at the moment, I just can’t.

I don’t think writer’s block is my problem; I know exactly where I’m going next with this chapter, with this character. My problem is more in the area of motivation: I feel like I need a break.

I’ve been working on this novel for the better part of the year and I feel like the end is finally in sight. But instead of being energized to sprint through the last few chapters remaining, I feel a soul-deep weariness of the work dropping me like a stone in sight of the finish line. Is that writers’ block? I don’t know–maybe writers’ fatigue is more accurate.

I can hear some people snickering out there:  Fatigue? How hard is it to write for a living? You want something really hard? Try being Bobby Jindal and being the closing act for Obama last night–that’s hard. 

But scoff if you will, truly, writing is not easy much of the time. It requires a level of concentration and focus that is often hard to sustain, and mental exertion can tire you just as physical exertion does. And I am tired. I am tired of this book. I am tired of dealing with my characters’ problems. I am ready to wrap things up,  ready to start pulling the strings shut on this bag of tricks, ready to type those beautiful two words “The End”, and yet, I still have so far to go.

I remember running track in high school (for all of five minutes) and the coach telling me that it was when you could see the finish line that you had to push the hardest. Mentally, I recognize this, but in practice, I am having a hard time recovering my motivation to complete what I began a year ago. I am a feast for Distraction; she stalks me relentlessly, ready to devour my thoughts at a moment’s weakness.

The sun is shining brightly through my office window; I see an occasional bird chirping at the feeder outside; I can hear the steady dripping of the icicles melting down from the roof. The signs of Spring, that horrible tease, have come to Minnesota for the afternoon, and they are calling me to come out and play just as they did when I was a child.

Is it cabin fever? Is it boredom? Does this mean I’ve gone wrong somewhere in the last couple of chapters and veered off track somehow?

I don’t know. All I know is I’m ready to be done with this book now, not in a month, when I think I will be.

Okay, then. I’ll allow myself one final, lingering glance out the window at the sun sparkling on the dwindling snow…ahhh.

Back to work.

About a month ago, I went grocery shopping with my daughter. As I went to return my cart, I saw a package of juice boxes on the bottom of the cart and realized I’d forgotten to pay for them. I was horrified. I dragged my daughter back into the store with me, lecturing all the way about how important it was to do the right thing and go back inside to pay for the item. I felt very good about using my mistake as a morality lesson for my daughter (former teachers never quite go gently into that good night).

But this afternoon, I was out shopping alone. The woman ahead of me at the checkout line had a toddler in the cart. I watched him playing with various items his mother was placing on the belt. As she swiped her card to pay for her purchases, her little one dropped a toy. When I bent down to pick it up for him, I saw that there was a package of raisins under her cart. Remembering how mortified I’d been by my own accidental brush with “shoplifting”, I alerted the woman to the item still hiding under her cart (oh, stop–I can hear the epithets now: “busybody”, “buttinski”, and some other unprintable ones–I am a compulsive “goody goody”, as my middle son would say, so deal with it.)

But the look the mother sent me was anything but pleased. I began to wonder if it was due solely to her thinking I was being a horrible Nosey Parker, or if there was something deeper to that flash of something dark in her eyes. I wondered: What if that was not the action of an absent-minded parent momentarily distracted by a child? What if the action was a deliberate one? What if this woman was a single parent, without a job, without support? What if she was desperately fighting to keep her child fed and clothed, and couldn’t afford to pay for that package of raisins, or for anything else in her cart for that matter? A month ago, I wouldn’t have asked myself those questions; I would have assumed I was doing the right thing.

Maybe it’s the ever-worsening economic tidings; maybe it’s having friends and family being affected by work slowdowns and layoffs. Maybe it was tuning in to watch the Academy Awards last night, that ultimate self-congratulatory Feast of the Haves entertaining the worldwide audience of Have-Nots; maybe it was the hangover effect of wondering if all those celebrities couldn’t have donated food items to local food pantries in return for borrowing jewels from Harry Winston, or if they couldn’t have had designers and celebrities make charitable donations equal to the cost of each of their exquisite gowns in return for displaying them on the red carpet. But suddenly, there at the grocery counter, I found  myself questioning what was right and what was wrong.

Maybe, after all, it was just the dirty look the mom in the store shot me. But whatever the cause, the end result was that I was no longer certain anymore that pointing out the hidden item about to walk out of the store was the right thing for me to do. I feel like my moral compass has been shaken a bit. I believe that that will be another bit of fallout from these economic before-during-and-aftershocks: the feeling that the entire world has shifted around you from a place where everything is pristinely black and white to a place where there are only shades of grey. And we’ve already seen what destruction a world governed by moral elasticity can wreak.

For me, I fervently hope for a time  when we can safely return to a world of moral clarity; without it, we will all be lost.