Writing

The Naked Philosophy Lesson

Ernesto Pestalozza and disciples, by Roberto Fantuzzi, Rome - 02My yearly exam was not something I looked forward to any more than any other woman. Still, having to go through all of that in French and when I was not sure of exactly how things worked with one’s gynecologist in France…this added a whole new element of the unknown. Uncertainty was not always a bad thing, but it was not something I particularly wanted to experience at a gynecological appointment. For example, Franck’s mother had informed me the night before that gynecologists were not referred to as “docteur” in France, but as Monsieur or Madame. Voilà! There was one potential faux pas narrowly averted right there. How many more were lurking in the treacherous path between the receptionist and the stirrups?

Embarrassingly, I still hadn’t completely overcome my phobia of doctors, particularly foreign doctors. Franck’s family doctor (and now our family doctor) in Burgundy, Le Père Dupont, had gained my trust with his tatty espadrilles, prodigious smoking habit, and rotund belly. Michèle and Stéphanie warned me that their gynecologist, Monsieur Le Courbac, was a completely different genre of doctor. He was technically competent, they assured me, but possessed the approximate warmth of hoar frost.

By the time I was ensconced in Monsieur Le Courbac’s waiting room, thumbing through the vast selection of Paris Match and Madame Figaro magazines, my fight or flight response was in full bloom. Pounding heart, dizziness, burning face, nausea, a sense of impending doom –all of the usual suspects were present and accounted for.

A tall gentleman wearing an impeccable white jacket over a suit materialized in the waiting room. He announced a woman’s name. A thin and elegant sixty-ish year old woman in capri pants and Hermès scarf got up from a chair near mine and followed him.

I had almost finished a long article in Madame Figaro about Charlotte Gainsbourg and her alluring husband Yvan Attal when the doctor appeared once again and called for “Madame Germain.” My heart made a strange thump as I shot out of my chair to follow him.

He didn’t say so much as bonjour until he was seated behind his desk – a sleek structure of shining metal and glass. Even the chairs were clear plastic and très à la mode. I sat down in one. They were also uncomfortable for all but the smallest of skinny French derrières.

“What can I do for you Madame Germain?” he asked in a disinterested voice.

I noticed then that he was wearing a silk neck scarf, or foulard. There was something deeply disconcerting about finding that urbane article of male clothing on my gynecologist. Whereas Le Père Durand ‘s tatty espadrilles eliminated my fear, Monsieur Le Courbac’s foulard ramped up my heart rate. He watched me, waiting, with icy blue eyes.

“I just moved here from Canada a few months ago,” I stumbled over my French. “I didn’t have the chance to have my yearly physical before I left. My sister and mother-in-law are patients of yours, so I made an appointment.”

I realized belatedly that I had used the informal “tu” form instead of the “vous” which I imagined was de rigeur in conversations with one’s gynecologist. I always found myself slipping into “tu” without realizing it whenever I was under pressure. It was, after all, far easier to conjugate.

Monsieur Le Courbac narrowed his eyes at me for a few moments before opening what looked like an empty file on his desk with a plain piece of paper stuck inside. “Do you smoke Madame Germain?”

“No.”

“How much do you weigh?”

Definitely more than his previous patient – I was certain of that - but I actually had no idea. “I’m not sure.”

“Any major health problems?” He made no eye contact and did not so much as crack a smile. I began to shiver...the hoar frost effect.

“No.”

“Children?”

“Two daughters. Two and four years old. They were both born by C-section.”

His Mont Blanc pen stilled. “Why was that?”

“My first one was…” I struggled to come up with the French words for ‘coming out feet first’ and mangled my explanation. “The second was just…kind of….” My hands flapped in bizarre movements as I tried to convey my answer. “She was positioned in a diagonal fashion…she wasn’t coming out…she was…you know… stuck.” I realized belatedly that I had used “tu” again instead of “vous.

He raised a brow at me, then scribbled a few more things on his piece of paper. “Please go in the next room and remove your clothes.”

My face was on fire. I knew in an abstract way that a human body was just a human body, but hadn’t I already been humiliated enough for one day? Did I really have to take off all my clothes and get into a examination gown now? Maybe the French version would be more stylish and self-explanatory than the Canadian one. At every annual physical back home I would find myself sweating bullets over whether the ties were supposed to go at the back or the front.

I somehow managed to get myself up from the chair and walk into the next room, which was large and bare except for an examination table.

“You can remove your clothes in the cabine,” the doctor said, gesturing behind his head to a little room just off the main examination room. The cabine, I noticed immediately, appeared to be lacking a door or even a curtain. Luckily Monsieur Le Courbac was still sitting at his desk with his back turned.

Merci,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as though it was an everyday occurrence for me to disrobe a few feet away from a disapproving man wearing a foulard.

I put down my purse on the floor and removed my jacket.  All I could see in the room was a wooden stool, a coat hook, and a digital scale. No gown. Now where would they hide the gowns in France? Was there some secret drawer or compartment that I was supposed to know about? Maybe you supposed to bring your own, like the bags at the grocery store.

Pardon,” I called out.  “I think you have forgotten to leave a gown for me.”

Monsieur de Courmac swiveled around in his chair and eyed my still-fully-clothed self. “There is no gown.” He swiveled back to his file.

No gown? How was I supposed to get from the changing cabine to the examination table? It looked like a long, lonely walk to take naked.

“Have you removed all of your clothes Madame Germain?” the doctor askeda few seconds later, impatience coloring his words.

"Non," I said.

“Please let me know when you do, and don’t go to the examination table right away. I need to weigh you first.”

I noticed a scale on the floor by my feet. So he was going to come in this tiny little room and weigh me once I was naked? “OK,"I said faintly, stripping off my clothes. A terrible thought occurred to me - what if I had understood him incorrectly and I wasn’t supposed to be completely naked at this juncture? That was the awful part about conducting your life in a second language - living in fear of misunderstanding some absolutely crucial piece of information

"I'm ready," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

When the doctor walked into the cabine, I was still debating whether to sit on the stool or remain standing. More importantly, where was I supposed to put my hands?

“Please stand on the scale Madame Germain,” the doctor said, making no eye contact, dieu merci. Part of me was very relieved at this, but the other part of me wished he would so I could get a clue of whether I was doing this right or mortifyingly wrong.

I stood up on the scale. He peered down at the number after it beeped and scribbled something on his piece of paper. He went into the exam room and sat on a little stool at the foot of the exam table.

“Please come to the exam table Madame Germain,” he said.

I took a tentative step into the exam room and then decided that I was fed up with feeling cowed and intimidated. I was naked anyway - how much more embarrasing could this get? People could only intimidate me if I let them, I reminded myself. Surely this rule applied, clothes or no clothes. I strode across the room and hopped up on the table.

“Please lie on your back,” he intoned and I lay down.

I quickly noticed that there was a cluster of comics and quotes taped on to the ceiling just above my head. It was, I thought, strangely considerate of Monsieur Le Courmac to supply strategically placed reading material for his patients.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live,” I read, a quote by Jean Paul Sartre and compared it to,“I may be no better, but at least I am different” attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The quotes were certainly effective distraction. Being naked somehow made them more touching and more profound. I never expected to brush up on my French philosophy at the gynecologist’s office.

“Interesting quotes,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I choose them myself.”

This, for him I was learning, was a remarkably expansive answer. All of the doctors in Canada were gifted at making innocuous chit chat during a pelvic exam, talking about he weather, politics…anything expect what was actually going on. Monsieur Le Courbac clearly did not feel the onus of the conversation lay on his shoulders, yet maybe I could divine something about him from his choice of quotes. I contemplated a Pierre Deproges quote, “Culture is like jam – the less we have the more we spread it around.” Was this what Monsieur de Courbac thought of New World countries such as the United States and Canada? Well, maybe we did have less history and perhaps less culture, but at least we had gowns at the gynecologist’s office.

C’est fini Madame Germain,” the doctor pushed his stool away from the exam table. “You may go and put your clothes back on again.”

I walked tall back to the cabine but put my clothes back on with alacrity. I picked up my purse and went back to sit in one of the doctor’s uncomfortable chairs.

“Everything appears to be in order Madame Germain,” he said, neither reassuring me nor alarming me. “Come back and see me if you have any problems, or if not in one year’s time.”

“All right,” I said. “Merci.”

I watched as he wrote more things on my piece of paper, unsure of whether I had been dismissed or not.

He looked up at me after a few seconds. “You can leave now.”

I stood up. “I hope you have a good afternoon,” I said, trying to retain my dignity

It was only after I sped down the stairs and out into the crisp pre-winter air that I realized I had committed the cardinal sin of “tu-toie-ing” my gynecologist yet again.

My Grape Village - A Sneak Peek

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I have begun editing My Grape Village, the sequel to My Grape Escape. Yowza!  Big Job. Still, I love delving into the mess of my rough draft  and seeing the story take shape.  Here is an excerpt:

***

“Are they going to survive?” I asked Franck.

I clutched the white metal gate as I watched our two daughters make their way through the preschool playground. I had never seen such a place of utter lawlessness.

Despite the larger than life statue of the Virgin Mary that loomed over the courtyard, French children were punching each other, taunting each other, and bullying each other while a cluster of three teachers stood well off to the side of the mayhem, chatting as they sipped coffee out of china espresso cups. I had learned about the French laissez-faire philosophy in Grade Eleven history class and here it was in action. It would have been entertaining to watch if not for the fact that Franck and I had just jettisoned our daughters into the deep end of it all.

Two and a half year old Camille in her yellow sundress and white sandals glanced back at us and furrowed her dark eyebrows. She lifted her shoulders and lowered her head as she marched straight to her classroom door. She made eye contact with no-one. I couldn’t take it, I just had to make sure she-

I began to open the gate, wincing as it made a screeching sound.

Non!  Non!  Non Madame Germain!” One of the teachers in the cluster shook her finger at me.  “No parents allowed in the courtyard during school hours!”

“How did she see me?” I turned to Franck. “She didn’t even turn around when that red haired kid was yelling for help when the other boy was beating him to a pulp.”

“They see what they want to see,” Franck said, putting his hand over mine and closing the gate. There was more metallic squealing and the teachers heads all snapped in our direction.

“I bet they don’t have the gate oiled on purpose,” I muttered.

I noticed Franck’s knuckles were looking rather white as well. “Allez,” he said. “We must leave them.”

I caught sight of four and a half year old Charlotte walking to her classroom, which was unluckily located at the far end of the schoolyard. Her blond hair was pulled up with two ladybug barrettes and she dragged the Barbapapa that we had bought her the day before. She smiled at a boy who was running in her direction. He shoved her as he ran by and knocked her cartable off kilter. Charlotte steadied herself and kept walking with that brave smile still plastered on her face.  A little girl with angelic blond braids stuck her tongue out at my daughter. Charlotte was blinking back tears by the time she reached the classroom door, even though she was still smiling. She saw us and gave us a small wave that was so courageous it made my heart feel like it was splitting in two.

Franck had to drag me back up the path and out the heavy wooden doors of the school that were promptly locked behind us.

Once we were in the parking lot I threw myself against his chest. “We’ve made a terrible mistake,” I mumbled in his T-shirt.

The girls weren’t even supposed to be going here to Sacred Heart in Beaune, they had been all signed up to attend the village schools in Magny-les-Villers and Villers-la-Faye. Three days ago a teacher friend of Franck’s had phoned to tell him they couldn’t take Camille – there were simply too many children in her year. We had been left scrambling to find a school for the girls so we could have some time to work. Franck had thought of Sacred Heart because it was where I had gone to school during my Rotary year in Burgundy. They luckily – or so I had thought at the time – had spots for both of our daughters. Now I knew why Sacrée Coeur wasn’t full like most other schools; this place was where Burgundian society put all the hardened future criminals.

Franck kissed the top of my head. “We just need to give it time Laura. We all have to adapt. I went to preschool in France and – régardez! – I’m still here.”

I stared at the now locked doors. “I can’t stand the thought of my girls locked in there with all of those horrible French children and the teachers who don’t care if they get kill-“

“We had good reasons for coming back to France,” Franck interrupted. “Not just for us, but for them.”

Maybe we did, but my daydreams of family outings to Beaune’s market, introducing the girls to pain au chocolat and escargots, and having them become completely bilingual in French had lost all meaning.

“I can’t remember why they were so compelling, can you?” I asked Franck.

Franck glanced at the closed doors and frowned. “Not at the moment, to be honest. I do know one thing though.”

“What?”

“Stéphanie told me about a Judo class that Tom takes.  After we pick up the girls from school today we’re going straight there to sign them up.”

Five Reasons Why Self-Publishing was the Right Choice for Me

The debate between self-publishing and traditional publishing rages on. I am the first one to pounce on any essay or blog post by self-publishing trailblazers such as Hugh Howey, Martin Crosbie, or Jasinda Wilder to name only a few. They are invariably a damn good read. Rather than pit black against white, however, my choice to self-publish boiled down to five highly personal and idiosyncratic reasons.

 

1. I wanted to teach myself how to self-publish a book

I am not the sort of person who learns well when someone is trying to teach me things.  Within five minutes I zone out and ants start to hatch in my brain.  I can only learn things by hurling myself in the deep end and doing them.  This accounted for my appalling French mark all through high school (to the desperation of my parents, my french teachers, and my french tutors).  When I went on my Rotary exchange to Burgundy in high school and lived with four non-English speaking French families, I was fluent in four months.

I wanted to learn how to build a house from the ground up, so we built a house in Victoria in 2010. I now know how houses are built.

When I decided I wanted to know how to self-publish a book, I knew the only way I could learn was by doing it myself.  This doesn't mean I did everything myself - far from it.  Just like we had a general contractor and plumbers and electricians build our house, I recruited great people to help me with the parts I knew I couldn't do well - the conversion of Word documents to Createspace and Kindle files, cover design and format by a graphic artist, etc.  However, I did figure out how the process worked from beginning to end and learned a ton that I will apply to publishing my next book.

2. I am impatient

You can just ask my husband, impatience is one of my dominant qualities.  Being diagnosed in 2012 with a rare and serious auto-immune liver / bile duct disease (PSC) exacerbated it by about...oh...around one hundred per cent. One of the most difficult things us PSCers have to live with is crushing uncertainty. There is currently no effective treatment for our disease except eventual liver transplant, which of course brings its own set of risks.  We are at a far higher risk for liver and bile duct cancer than the general population, and because the disease varies so much from person to person we could be asymptomatic for 20-30 years or need a transplant next month.

All this uncertainty compounded my impatience. I decided that I was unwilling to surrender the timing of My Grape Escape's  release to anyone.

3. I knew I had a ready-built market for the book 

We started renting La Maison des Deux Clochers fifteen years ago.  I learned quickly that we did not have to work very hard (or at all, actually) to sell the idea of France or Burgundy. It has already been accomplished in the collective consciousness, and rightly so.

When we lived in Burgundy for five years between 2004-2009 I wrote a popular blog called "The Grape Journal."  Over the years countless guests, many of who we have stayed in contact with, asked me to write a book.  So before I even started the self-publishing process of My Grape Escape I knew that I had 15 years of past vacation rentals guests who would have a personal interest in my memoir about our Burgundian renovation.  I was able to market it on our Grape Rentals Facebook page and we will soon be redoing our Grape Rentals website and linking it more effectively to my book(s).

4. I wanted to donate a portion of my royalties 

Because PSC is so rare (only around 100,000 people in the world have it so it is officially an "orphan" disease), most pharmaceutical companies have no interest in researching treatments - there is just not the return of a new treatment for something far more common, unlike a disease such as Hepatitis C.  One doctor actually laughed in my face when I asked about new treatments coming down the pipeline.

I do indeed donate 10% of all my royalties to PSC Partners Seeking A Cure (and will continue to do so with everything I publish and sell).  This motivates me to write more books and sell more books.  It is a win-win for me.  I could be mistaken, but I suspected most traditional agents or publishers wouldn't have agreed to this and it was of primary importance to me.

5. Most agents wanted me to remove every mention of my struggles with anxiety from the manuscript.  

I went into this in more detail in an earlier blog post "Panic Attacks and Pain au Chocolat" . Basically, almost all the agents who read the full manuscript of My Grape Escape said they were uncomfortable with the fact that I wrote about my struggles with anxiety during and after my Oxford law degree and while we renovated La Maison des Deux Clochers.  They felt it just didn't "fit" with an often humorous memoir about the renovation of a revolutionary era house in Burgundy.

I thought long and hard about their comments, but concluded that for me the anxiety was a crucial part of the story I wanted to tell.  Self-publishing gave me the freedom to publish the book as I wished.  So far the overwhelming majority of readers do not seem to feel it is out of place. On the contrary, they tell me that exposing my own vulnerabilities allowed them to connect with my story.


So there you have it - the highly personal reasons why self-publishing was the right choice for me. I'm grateful that writers have options these days.  It wasn't like that in the bad 'ole days ten or even five years ago.   

How about you - what made you choose either self-publishing or traditional publishing (or that new beast - the hybrid)?

 

 

Fiction Snippet - "Agnes"

tuscany-hills-view I had five minutes today between making pancakes for a Charlotte and a gaggle of her friends and taking Camille to find a posterboard for her upcoming school project on Tanzania.  I snuck my computer open (I have to do this veeeeeeerrrrryyyyy quietly at my house as Clem has superpower hearing and feels the overpowering urge to sit on my lap whenever she hears me open my laptop) and surfed around in my old writing files, looking for something to do writing-rise while I wait for my rough draft of My Grape Village to "rise" for a week or two before plunging into editing.

I found this old fiction manuscript - working title simply "Agnes" (the title of the main character)  - that was originally inspired by a woman I had met flying back to Canada from Oxford during law school.  Agnes' story is about the collision of the "dream" life she has built for herself in Tuscany and a different, less glamourous path that may include her soulmate.

Here is a bit from the first chapter (keep in mind this is pretty rough):

"It was amazing how awful a dream life could feel sometimes.

I stared at the frozen luggage shoot, trying to will its metal teeth into action.  The grime from twenty four hours of traveling, three airports, and two airplanes encased my body like congealed wax.  I’d brushed my teeth quickly in the first bathroom I could find after the flight from London had disgorged us in the pristine halls of the Vancouver airport, but my mouth still tasted like the bottom of a bird cage, albeit with a minty finish.

An owlish woman standing beside me let out a beleaguered sigh.  “Do you think it’s broken?”

I searched the gaggle of passengers around us, wondering who she was talking to, until she turned and fixed me through her thick lenses.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,’ she prompted, just as I remembered how, unlike Italians, Canadians felt utterly comfortable striking up conversations with complete strangers.

“Maybe.”  I shrugged, but she kept staring at me, expecting more than that.  “Back in Italy this would be completely normal,” I added.  “You can pretty much be guaranteed that whenever a plane arrives all the baggage handlers decide it’s the perfect time for an espresso.”

“Italy?’" she breathed.  “I knew you weren’t from here!  I can always tell that sort of thing.”

A flash of satisfaction made me feel friendlier.  Despite my disheveled appearance there must have been something, maybe my Armani sunglasses or the Prada scarf thrown over my shoulders, that proved I was no longer a bumpkin.

“I grew up in Victoria, but I live in Tuscany now, in a little village near the Umbrian border called Monterchi.”  I peeked at my watch.  It was midnight in Monterchi right now.  Dante was undoubtedly sound asleep in our whitewashed bedroom in our big wrought iron bed, with his favorite painted icon of the Virgin Mary smiling benevolently over him.

The luggage belt groaned to life and the chute began to spit out suitcases.  If one of mine came in the first ten, they’d all arrive, I promised myself.   Italy had done nothing to cure my superstitious nature.  If anything it had made it worse.

“What do you do there?” Her venerating gaze made me feel like the Virgin Mary.   Except for the Virgin part, naturalmente.

“I run a country inn with my husband Dante.  He’s Italian.”

Suddenly my legs began to shake, and I looked longingly at my luggage cart.  More than anything, I just wanted to collapse on top of it and ask my nosy  neighbor to push me clear through customs.  Adrenaline had coursed through my thighs almost non-stop during the past twenty-four hours.  I might be a glamorous globe trotter, but the embarrassing truth was that I was still terrified of flying.

She grabbed on to my arm and squeezed hard.  “Oh you lucky, lucky thing.  An Italian husband!  Is he gorgeous?”

“He’s very handsome.  He’s well on his way to becoming a renowned chef.”  In a few hours Dante would wake up just as the ochre rays of sun caressed the Tuscan hills undulating around our property, as though our Inn was a pebble thrown in a still pond.  He would speed off to the market on his Vespa and harangue all his favorite vendors to find the best food for our guests.

Our guests.  Guilt twinged the nape of my neck.  By coming here, I was abandoning him at one of our busiest times of the year.  Part of me was exhilarated beyond belief to sneak away at this exact moment; guests needed constant pleasing and lots of guests meant lots of constant pleasing.  Whereas this used to be one of the favorite parts of my life, somewhere along the line I had begun to resent it.  But I loved Dante, and he loved our guests, so…

“It’s just so romantic.” The owl lady’s eyes glowed.

“I know.”  I had every reason to be proud.  Dante was wonderful and Tuscany was as beautiful and seductive as he was. 

I had left Canada ten years before with my heart cleaved in two, but just look at what I had carved out for myself; the kind of life most people can only dream of. If certain people, especially a certain person didn’t realize I had moved on, they certainly would now.  But that didn’t matter, I chided myself, because he didn’t matter anymore.

I rubbed my forehead.  A migraine was taking root at the back of my left eye socket.  

“You must be so deliriously happy,” the woman sighed.

“I think I see my suitcase,” I lied.  “You’ll have to excuse me.”  She opened her mouth to say something else but I deftly disentangled myself from her iron grip.  “I hope you get yours,” I said, and slipped through the crowd to the opposite side of the conveyer belt.

Happy.  My head throbbed as I tried yet again to make sense of the word.

No point in mulling over that now, anyway.  That was the whole reason I was here - to close the chapter on him for good - to prove to him that I had forgiven him and, more importantly, forgotten him.  Then I would be free to be completely, totally, 100% happy."

 

On Panic Attacks and Pain au Chocolat

429602_552639564756498_198065503_n "I can't believe you wrote about your anxiety and panic attacks.  That was so brave."

Since publishing My Grape Escape in November I have heard this from many readers.  I always find it surprising.

For me, writing about the anxiety and panic attacks I struggled with during and after my law degree at Oxford wasn't a conscious decision.  They were so intergral to that juncture in my life that to leave them out would have felt (to me) like I was telling a story that made no sense.

The agents who read my full manuscript weren't big fans of the anxiety aspect of my story. They said it would be a hard sell to publishers.  I believed them.  I am not sure where it is written (I personally blame Peter Mayle) but there appears to have developed a rule whereby memoirs set in France should stick to descriptions of fresh baguettes, humourous linguistic misunderstandings, and eccentric french people wearing berets.  The only acceptable emotions are exasperation and wonder (and just for the record, Peter Mayle is a master at these two).

Of course, My Grape Escape includes a lot of the above - because during the months we renovated La Maison des Deux Clochers we did enjoy lots of delicious french food and wine and were surrounded by a crew of fascinating, eccentric french people (we were in Burgundy, after all).

My story, however, also included the emotional messiness underneath the surface.  This made a lot of people very uncomfortable.  I heard from another agent who said he would be interested in taking on the book if I eliminated the anxiety angle altogether.  I thought about this long and hard but decided that I just couldn't do it. The story of My Grape Escape without talking about anxiety felt inauthentic at best, dishonest at worst.

Don't get me wrong, I am as much a sucker for glossy surfaces as the next person.  I find it bizarrely soothing to flip through a copy of Real Simple magazine and delude myself for about fifteen minutes that life can really be that tidy.

Still, glossy images capture my attention for a while, but never for very long.  Honesty is ulitmately what holds my interest - in people, in writing, in life.

Honesty always leads me to the same conclusion.  This human journey we are all on is a wild, complex thing. It is joyous, it is tortuous, and it is anything but tidy.  More importantly, we are all on this journey together.  The more honest we are, the more we can support each other.

I am most touched by the readers who thank me, most often in urgent whispers, for writing openly about my struggles with anxiety.  Somewhere along the line these people have been made to feel that they are defective because they are a mix of many complex, seemingly incoherent parts.  "No," I tell them.  "You are not defective.  You are just beautifully human."

A glorious life is still possible with depression, or an anxiety disorder, or health issues, or family trauma.  You can have your panic attack and enjoy your pain au chocolat too.

 

 

 

 

In Praise of Merdiques First Drafts

photo.JPG7Merdiques, or in English, "sh!tty" first drafts are the only way I get anything written at all. My fellow writers who by some manner of sorcery are able to produce polished or, even more incredible, publishable first drafts make me green with envy. Alas, I am not that kind of writer.

I am messy in writing just as I am in life - I paint messy, I parent messy, I pin up my hair messy...

I am one of those writers who, like Anne Lamott, author of the genius book "Bird by Bird" (which if you haven't read you should run out and buy right away) lives in fear of dying in a freak accident and having people discover my sh!tty first drafts. They would marvel over my vague words, pointless scenes, stilted dialogue, and blatant overwriting (see all those adjectives I just used?) and shrug their shoulders. "Wow. I guess she couldn't write after all."

I have tried to be a neater, more organized writer. The problem is that every time I attempt to be even margially coherent in my rough draft I end up swimming around in circles like a one-finned dolphin. I change and edit, then eliminate, then add again. I could never finish a rough draft that way, let alone a publishable draft.

Right now I am finishing up the rough draft to the sequel of My Grape Escape, called My Grape Village. I have produced almost 80,000 words of...well...frankly speaking, mostly crap.

Still, without that crap I would have nothing to mold. My rough drafts are the equivalent of throwing my clay on the potter's wheel.

There is a strange and perverse pleasure to be found in how epically bad my writing is in the first go-round. The sheer mess shines with a sort of transcendent beauty. To me, anyway.

Not so much when I sit down for the first re-write - at those times I feel like I am at the foot of Everest and The End of my book is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay up there at the top. So far up there in the clouds that I can't even see The End. I want to be at the top already. It would be so nice to have my mansucript almost completed instead of requiring life-saving surgery. I do give it major surgery though because, for better of for worse, that is the only way I know how to write. The silver lining is that wading through the blood and guts I invariably make magical connections and dicoveries.

Merdiques first drafts are how I have produced every essay through high school and University, every blog post during the years we lived in France, and every single one of my manuscripts.

I decided around two years ago to stop trying to tidy up my innate messiness and to work with it instead. I gave myself permission to paint messy, coiff my hair messy, and especially write messy.

It is no coincidence that these past two years have been the most creatively prolific years of my life.  For me, messiness = creativity.