Bornfamous

So I re-upped to do the NaNoWriMo thing yet again. I didn’t finish the first two times, what makes me think I’m gonna finish this time? I don’t even feel like writing.

It’s all my friend Barbara’s fault. Every time I tell her some story from my past, she says, “LaVonne, you really have to write about that.” Thanks, B. Just what I need. She’s the one who got me started on the whole blogging thing when she said, “You have to write a book!” This, after I told her the Johnny Cash story. I thought blogging every day might actually make me turn out a book. That was back in December, 2000. No book yet.

This last time, I was telling B about the rooming house we lived in when I was in high school. More of a skid row hotel, really. My mom married the caretaker and we moved in. They paid $7 a week for me to have my own room, but we all had to share the bug-infested bathroom with the drunks and winos who lived there.

Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? The truth is that I loved it. The three years that I lived there, went to school and worked at my mother’s diner a few blocks away, were some of the best years of my life. It was the richness of the setting and the characters that made my little writer’s soul so happy. I knew that someday I would write a book about these people. And then I didn’t.

So of course, B tells me to write about it and I say, “Yeah, I think I will”–planning to maybe do some blog entries about kind old Ben, who smelled like sweat and cigars, and sad John, who gave me a dollar every time I made his bed because his daughter’s name was LaVonne too, and young Slim, who was slick and seductive in spite of his limp–and next thing I know, I’m getting an email from the National Novel Writing Month folks, reminding me that November is coming and asking me if I want to sign up again. And of course, I do.

How dumb is that?