In the Hallway: Fog in LA

It’s foggy in LA. It has been for three days. Usually, I’m all about that. I love the cold, the rain, the ambient glow of overcast. 

But I’m foggy in LA, too. I’ve just emerged from a deadline for a ghostwriting project that felt like a deep dive I haven’t fully emerged from, yet, and I don’t like when the weather and I are wearing the same thing. Like… one of us should change, bitch – it’s embarrassing. 

I promised the full story, though, so foggy me and the story of the never-ending Groundhog Day Deadline is what you’re gonna get. 

I got the second shot, last week. I was thinking I could blog from bed, afterwards, but I just curled up in my bed and watched about seven hours of Dateline murder mysteries and sipped on cucumber water. As I result, I am extra-hydrated, almost fully vaccinated, and never going to trust anyone who seems “perfectly nice” ever again. 

I don’t think I felt as shitty as other people, but, as many a burned-out millennial will tell you… the fact that I had a reason to sit and not feel guilty about being unproductive was something I liked. (10/10 would recommend taking breaks. It’s almost like humans were created to need them? Like it’s not good for us to run ourselves down to the bone or something?? Siri, remind me that I need to look into this). But as I sat there, watching the reenactments of a jealous lover stalking her unsuspecting prey into the woods, I knew I, too, was unable to escape the date that awaited me:  the work I’ve been putting off for weeks, now. 

This week, I’ve been focused on my ghostwriting gig – my day job. I’ve been working on this book for almost seven months, now, and the last 30,000 words just felt like a mountain I couldn’t climb. To be clear: I am grateful for my day job – absolutely, and especially in this past year. But there’s a special kind of separation that has to happen when I write for someone else. An emotional distance, if you will. At the risk of making a terrible comparison – it’s like story surrogacy. I grow this story like it’s my own while it’s in my care, but these characters don’t belong to me. They are someone else’s, and I will eventually hand them over. It takes a special headspace to be able to do that, especially when I’ve had a hard enough time trying to find the strength to finish even my own work on my own projects. 

People ask me all the time how I get over Writer’s Block. It’s very real, it’s a pain in the butt, and I don’t think it ever goes away, no matter how many books and screenplays you’ve got under your belt. You just learn to deal with the feeling of doubt and lethargy and “what’s the point”, because you can’t edit what isn’t done, and maybe the words might not be as bad as you think once you get some distance. But lately I’ve been choking back the response I really want to give when someone asks me how I deal with Writer’s Block, because it’s something like I remember that I’m fucking poor and have tiny babies to feed. Speeds that process right up. 

Just put that up there with the sage wisdom of Stephen King and Anne Lamott. I’ll wait. 

But it’s true. And my writing process wasn’t incredibly glamourous before the pandemic, either, but at least I could use my favorite Fossil messenger bag my mom got me for Christmas the year Aryn was born and go out. I could order a latte and sit near a window and imagine someone was falling in love with me from across the room because I actually did my makeup and that’s the only result that could come from that kind of effort. (I imagine this happens all the time, but they never approach me because my wedding ring inevitably glints in the low afternoon light and they just walk away without saying anything. I almost feel bad, knowing how many hearts I’ve probably broken at Klatch Coffee.) Even on the workdays (which were, once upon a time, Monday/Tuesday/Thursday) where I was feeling more like a half-functioning lizard person, I’d just drop my kids off at school, grab coffee, and slither back home in my sweatpants to hole up in my office. I’d go at least eight hours without talking to a single human being, and that was bliss. I’d stop work at four, figure out some dinner, and go pick my kids up. The lines between Work Life and Mom Life were clearer. 

For the past year, it has all run together. A melted, soupy mess of roles that blur and mix. Writing a few sentences and then checking on Aryn, because she’s doing school online but I’ve been hearing the pencil sharpener for a minute straight and I know she’s not paying attention. Go back to work for a bit and then walk to my mom’s to check on the kids – they’re fighting over Calico Critters and River’s having a breakdown, so I sit for a bit to sort it out before walking home. Chug more coffee and help Aryn find a worksheet she misplaced. It’s a HomeWorkWritingRefereeTwoWorkingParentsThreeKids stew. 

Usually, when I’m coming up on the end of a novel, I would go out so I could focus. This time? This week? This deadline? It was different. Every deadline in the pandemic has been. 

It looked a lot like this: I woke up later than I wanted to this week. I wanted to blame the fatigue from Mother Moderna, but I think the more likely culprit was Liam, my four-year-old son who has created a habit of running into our bedroom at around two o’clock every morning and situating himself directly behind my lightly sleeping body. “I got spooked out,” he always whispers, curling into my back and sticking his hands under my shoulder blades while his tiny little raptor-claw feet shove their way under my butt. “I’m cold,” he explains. I try to give him a blanket, but he doesn’t want that. The radiating heat from my now fully-awake form is enough for him. Thanks, bud. 

Nighttime was always the time for panic attacks when I was a kid. The still, dark room with one glowing light from the smoke alarm. The whir of a fan. The ticking of a clock… it always set me on edge, and it wasn’t long before it felt like there was something dark sitting on my chest, its fingers plunging through my ribs. My thoughts would spin and adrenaline would burn through my limbs and just when I thought it was over, another one would hit. It’s taken years of therapy and medication to get past that, but I still feel myself priming for battle when I wake up in the middle of the might. Which, as a mom to three young kids, happens a lot. I can go back to bed, now, but it takes a while to power my brain down and fall back asleep.  

So basically, sleep deprivation mixed with pandemic lethargy and just a bunch of I would rather do literally anything else but this, actually vibes made it so this project sat on my desk a lot longer than it needed to. 

But the fact is, I need to be paid. So, I had to do the words. 

Tired or not, I stumbled out of bed and chugged coffee, feeling not in the least bit ambitious (sorry, Dolly). I’d stare out the window for a while, letting the sun thaw my skin as I watched my mom’s two cats (remember the fosters from last Fall? They live two doors down, now) try and fail to catch bugs on the hillside behind our houses. When I could no longer put it off, I put on a fresh pair of sweats and shuffled to my office. Ross took the kids over to my mom’s (she’s been a lifesaver during this pandemic), and then went and locked himself in the bedroom to do a day of therapy. I sat in my office, working for hours until I heard Ross ushering the kids upstairs for bath time. I’d wash hair and sing bedtime songs and say get back in bed, River Grace twelve thousand times, and No, you can’t read in bed until you’re tired, Aryn, about three thousand times. Liam wants to see pictures of megalodons, sharks, lobsters, and t-rexes before he finally decides to sleep, so I made sure to sit next to the bed and pull up Google images that wouldn’t scar him. When the kids were finally out, I’d take a bath and massage my aching hands. Being that deep into drafting can feel like deep-sea diving, which I’ve never done and can therefore confidently use as a comparison. I wanted so badly to connect to other things. I wanted to come up for air, especially with this project. But I was on a mission, and I couldn’t disengage until it was done.

This week, the days felt the same. Even more than usual, and that’s saying something this year. 

Wake up. Eat. Stare at Mocha and Mochi on the hill; they’re so dumb and I love them. Write. Dinner. Kids’ bath. Get in bed, River Grace. No, you can’t read, Aryn. Megalodon, shark, lobster, t-rex. My bath. Bed. Didn’t I just get out of bed like an hour ago? What is time, even?

And I told myself that once I was done, I’d get to work on my own stuff. My heart projects that have taken a back seat this past month. That’s how you know you’re a writer, Ross joked: your carrot for finishing writing is more writing.

I daydreamed about my playlists. The plot twists. I’ve got a feature screenplay in the works – a revenge story that’s basically Promising Young Woman meets Jennifer’s Body. But with werewolves. And my agent greenlit my first adult fantasy: a grounded, Neil Gaiman-esque, standalone fantasy about a girl and a lighthouse. These stories excite me. They wake me up. I thought about them as I wrote to keep my lights on and pay for the daycare that’s re-opening in June. 

I did about 10,000 words a day until I was done. Then, I edited, polished, sent it off, and stared into the void for a couple of hours as my brain re-solidified. 

“Is your brain actually mush?” Aryn asked as I sipped La Croix at the counter. “Because that’s gross.” 

“It’s just a figure of speech,” I said, pressing my knuckles against the cold can. They were swollen.  

My turn, I thought. Now it’s my turn. My work. 

But I’m sitting here, now, at my desk. Nothing between me and my werewolf feminists or my mysterious lighthouse girl. And I’m a little burnt out. 

My managers and I are strategizing for my new pilot and book adaptation stuff. We’re talking about a meeting I have next month that I’m stoked about. I applied to two huge fellowships and incubators, and the notification dates are coming up in a few weeks. The answer is probably “no”, but right now it’s a “maybe”, so I’ll take it. There might be cool book stuff getting the “yes” soon, as well, though it could also be another no. 

I want something I’ve already written – something that’s out already, something that’s already ready – to open a door. But it might not. It might be this next thing that will, so I’ve got to write it, first. My hands still ache, so I’m going to give myself a bit of a break, I think. I’m sending out some CVs for professorships. It would be nice to keep the lights on in a way that didn’t completely wring me out, though I know that’s also a long-shot, too. But isn’t it all a long-shot? 

It’s foggy, still, and I’m over it. I’m over the monotony of it. The way a dreary day feels like it could be 11am or 3pm and you can’t know. I want sunshine, now. I want a change. I want it to be next week, when I’m finally fully vaccinated. I desperately want to be pretty in a Klatch Coffee again. 

But that’s not going to change today, and today is what I need to be present for. So I’m going to go for a walk and not look at my phone. It’s late Friday afternoon – I’m probably not getting any life-changing news from NY or LA, now. I’m almost done with a Jen Wilkin study on Exodus, so I’ll do some of that. Dinner will be something easy – probably grilled cheese with spinach smoothies. The kids will want to do a “dance party”, which is where I blast a probably-inappropriate Spotify playlist and let them jump off the couch onto a pile of pillows. I anticipate at least three fights and two meltdowns, but the fun will outweigh that. I’ll toss them in the bath and then get them to bed. I don’t know if the sun will be out tomorrow. I hope so. 

But we keep going, even if it’s not.