Introduction

Picture a writer, hunched over her desk, beside her a wastepaper basket filled with rejects, piles of crumbled papers that just didn't make the cut.

That was me.

Well, except for the crumbled paper part. I just had page after page of deleted text. Does anyone really crumple paper anymore?

When I was thirteen, I wrote an entire novel. I haven't read it in many years, but the last time I did, it wasn't that bad. It gave me hope, because I had always wanted to be a novelist. Or at least a journalist. Or, at the very least, someone who writes the movie descriptions on the back of the DVD boxes. Or maybe just names the crayons.

Whatever the case, I wanted to write. I started young, at five, with a story about yet another visit to the hospital to visit my chronically ill mother, though I'm still not sure what made her chronically ill. Like I said, at thirteen there was a novel. It wasn't really about me, but it was kind of about who I wished I could be. As a high school student, I wrote about everything. If it had anything to do with writing, there I was. All over it. In college, I carried notebooks around with me, devoured books by Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker and Kurt Vonnegut, and wrote down clever little quips and vignettes that I'd use in my next novel.

Which was never written.

Instead, there came my parents' divorce, estrangement from my manic-depressive mother, a broken engagement, a rekindled love-affair, a surprise pregnancy, a six-month quarrel with my child's father, and then a marriage. And now, five kids later, the novel still hasn't come.

Last year, for NaNoWriMo, I determined that I was going to puke out that novel. It's not that I haven't had ideas...it's just that I can't seem to put three words together to form a full sentence. But ideas, they come all the time. Ideas about life-changing events, ideas about people just living day-to-day, ideas about fantastical things that happen that could only happen on paper. Lots of ideas.

So I pulled out one of those ideas, set it up on a shelf and prepared myself to write my very first real novel.

I failed.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the writing process. Okay, so it is that I didn't enjoy the writing process. I just couldn't get it out there. I had a concept, but I had no beginning, middle or end. That makes it fairly difficult to write a story.

Now, this is very painful for me, because I have always felt that, as a writer, I was just gifted. Seriously. I never had to try hard to write a thing in my life. I would just sit down, and words would fly onto the page, kind of like the story of how Stairway to Heaven was written. Not anymore. Now, I have to bang my head on the desk, distract myself by reading other people's novels, roll my eyes at how simple they are and how much better I could have written the same story, check my e-mail four or five times a day just to see if there's anything inspiring there, and take long baths accompanied by someone else's novel and a bag of Good-N-Plentys.

So, last year's novel didn't go over so well. I still think about it, and I hope to finish it one day, but it just didn't seem to...go...anywhere. Chris Baty should really start a NaNoFiMo, or National Novel Finishing Month, so all of those really good concepts that you started but can't use because it would be cheating could just get finished. Or at least get worked on. Or deleted. Or something. Because now it just sits there and says, "Hey. Ahem. Excuse me. Did you forget something? Or am I just not attractive to you anymore?"

The sad truth is, Novel, that you are exactly write. I did forget something. And you're just not attractive to me anymore. You really looked good when you were something that was all in my head. The concept of you was just awesome. But once I saw you, in the flesh, naked and exposed there on the screen, well...you just didn't turn out to be what I thought you'd be. I know. I'm a cad. But I'd rather tell the truth and hurt your feelings than carry on with this facade.

This year, when NaNoWriMo came around, I wasn't sure I'd even try, but when I got that e-mail from Chris Baby, I figured if he cared enough to remember me, then I could surely care enough to give it a shot.

The first idea, once again, was a really good one. But, once again, I couldn't stand the look of it there on the screen, and it just felt like every word was an absessed tooth, useless, rotten and painful to extract.

So today, I tossed it all. Everything I've written since November 1st at midnight, I deleted. I was drawn--lead, I guess you could even say--to write about something that I understand, something that I have experience with, something that I know very intimately.

Me.

See, when I was a kid, and when my mom had the time to tell me stories, I would ask her to talk about my life as a little kid, or her life as a little kid, and it really felt good to hear those stories. I would laugh listening and she would laugh telling, and it was just such a great thing, to know that this funny thing that happened really and truly happened. And it had happened to me. I was the star. I was the story. Now that my mother and I no longer speak, those stories are the things I cling to when I feel homesick, when I need a mommy. Thinking of her sitting at our kitchen breakfast bar, telling me about the time her sisters buried her under a pile of leaves and a car ran over her, breaking both of her legs--that's what makes me feel like I'm back home.

And the truth is, those stories haunt me. They creep into my dreams. My childhood home is so often the backdrop for the stories my mind weaves while I'm sleeping. Those stories have woven themselves into my very being.

Someone once said that when a man dies, a whole world dies with him. I think about that a lot, that I have stories in me that I intend to tell my children, but I never seem to have the time, or the energy, or it never seems to be the right opportunity. And I think about the stories my mom told me, how some of them have become a bit twisted with others and how some I can't remember at all. I know that she and I will someday speak again, but will I remember which stories I want her to tell? Will we get along long enough for her to tell me? And, God forbid, what if she dies before she and I reconcile. The thought sickens me and is really beyond anything that I can stand to think about for longer than a few seconds, like the realization that what you thought was a nightmare isn't really a nightmare but has actually happened, and I push the thought to the back of my mind.

But with my track record, even when my mom and I speak again, she'll tell me the stories and I'll neglect to pass them on to my kids, or they'll forget to pass them on to their kids. And the whole person of me, of my life, will just be gone forever.

Then, silly me, I sit down to write a stupid novel about people who don't even exist, people I don't even know. I have to MAKE UP everything they do! What a load of work!

But with MY story, it's MINE. I was there. I remember it. I felt it. I lived it. I dream about it. And it means something to me. And, hopefully, it will mean something to my children, if not now, then someday, when they can appreciate me like I appreciate my mother, even though we never speak.

So, since you can only truly possess what you experience, and since I don't intend to let my story die when I'm pushing up daisies, here is...

Experienced Possessed.

Bard, this is for you. And for Houdin. And for Monet. And for Sweetheart. And The Baby. Because I love you all more than my very own life.