A small spark

I’ve been sitting on a story that I’ve wanted to write–and desperately wanted not to write–for 37 years now. I started this blog in an attempt to finally tell it, but then I got caught up in the early, heady days of blogging and forgot my purpose. I forget my purpose a lot. Where was I?

Oh yeah, the story. I’ve tried to write it for NaNoWriMo at least twice and stopped cold each time. I tried to write it as a screenplay once; got to page 30. I even wrote a book proposal and five chapters that I sent to a well-known literary agency, which responded with interest and wanted more–and I froze. Couldn’t do it. Never replied. Went into an emotional tailspin that eventually resulted in losing my job, my house and my career. I trace much of my travails of the past ten years to the loss of that dream, and to my own lack of courage.

Now I see that courage is what the story is about. I’m feeling a small spark of inspiration tinged with fear that I’m going to flop publicly yet again, but I know that I must nurture this spark, blow on it and try to bring it to life or I will be forever deeply disappointed and disgusted at my lifelong cowardice. So I’m going to try to screw up my courage again, and try yet again to write about what happened so long ago.

The story will be called Dotty’s Diner, the name of the restaurant my mother bought in 1960 when I was 14, and where I spent much of the following ten years. While I came of age there, the sixties happened. Assassinations, war protests, violence, rock and roll, drugs and the sexual revolution swirled around my mother’s small diner, changing us in ways we never imagined.

I thought about password-protecting a special section of this web site to avoid any potential publishing rights problems later, but that’s where I got stuck with the NaNoWriMo episodes. I need readers. I need you. So I’m going to tell the story one chapter at a time, here where it belongs, on BornFamous.

Contradicting myself as usual, I need to preserve an illusion that no one is reading what I write–or maybe it’s an illusion of the opposite–that someone is reading it. I’m nervous about leaving comments on because they distract me from the story, so I’m going to turn them off.

This is a first draft. Some of it will be good, most of it will be awful, and I hope some of it will be wonderful. I can’t let myself think about which is which until the rewrite, so please don’t write to me about it. Just read it, enjoy it–or not–and let me focus on the next chapter.

Thanks.