Preparing for Buffalo and Dreaming of Humboldt While the Novel Writes Itself
I was on the phone with my mother-in-law, whining pathetically about my disappointment that Humboldt County didn’t pan out as I had thought it would, when she said five words that rocked my world. “What about moving to Buffalo?”
Huh.
Honestly, I had never considered moving to the east coast! I don’t really know why, other than that I’ve always lived on the west coast. I love the east coast. My brother lives in Maine, which isn’t too far from Buffalo. My in-laws and my sister-in-law and her whole family live in Buffalo. We love them all and we have visited multiple times, of course, but never with a “could we move here?” set of eyes.
Here’s the thing. My youngest, AJ, has had very little contact with his father’s side of the family. His father passed away when AJ was two months old. As hard as we all tried to keep correspondence up after my husband passed away, it has never been easy from all the way across the country.
Let’s talk housing. Holy cow. Rent was so much more affordable than the bay area, it made me want to weep! The downside, and this was a big one, was that I knew my eldest would not move with us. He made it clear he wanted to stay on the west coast for college, which he would start the following year. That being said, the housing prices in the Buffalo area were so low that I would be able to fly him to us several times a year. Or we could fly to him. Not ideal, but we could make it work.
That settled it. We were overdue for a visit to the in-laws, anyway! I immediately bought plane tickets for Thanksgiving break.
That done, I needed to consider work prospects. I couldn’t keep my job in California while living in New York. I needed to determine if I could even find work in my highly specialized field! After hours of research, I found a grand total of one agency doing my sort of work in the entire county. Just one.
OK then. I contacted the company, scheduled an interview for the week I would be there, and hoped for the best. That done, there was nothing left to do but wait. And wait. And wait some more.
It might be worth mentioning that I don’t do well with boredom. Or waiting. We simply do not get along. This kind of waiting is the worst, though. It’s one thing to wait with a definite plan in place. At least I could keep myself busy, knowing what to expect and when. But not knowing where or even when? It made me feel like I was in limbo. Purgatory! I knew I wanted to move at the end of the school year, but where? When, exactly? I was twiddling my thumbs. No plan in place and bored! So bored.
Meanwhile, I kept busy by journal-writing. I have done this on and off my entire life. I have always loved writing. In the process of working on my journal, I found myself re-reading some of the older journal pages I had written over the years. As I did so, I felt myself slowly sinking. Each page I read made me feel more and more depressed. The more I read, the sadder I became. I started asking myself where I went wrong? What happened to me? My life story did not read as very inspirational. It was quite the opposite.
My high school years were full of activity. Full of life. But once I hit college, things slowed down for me. I became lost. Sure, I found my career and I got married, but a huge piece of me was missing somehow. I got married, had my first child, then got divorced. Through it all, I was in a fog.
In walks Brian.
Have you ever met someone who sees you…really sees you…and still likes what they see despite every flaw? That was Brian. My second husband was my soul mate. He got me. I got him. Sure, we had ups and downs and a lot of outside forces complicating the holy hell out of things, but it didn’t matter. I was happy. And I felt alive again. Free.
His death hit me like a ton of bricks. Maybe it was the soulmate thing that made it so incredibly painful, or the fact that he died so young with so much yet to contribute to the world, or maybe it was that our son was still an infant. I don’t know. It was all those things and more, I suppose.
I was not one of those women who put on a brave face and came out on the other side of a tragedy a better person. No. I came out broken and sad and lonely and half the person I was before. That is the straight-up truth. I shut people out. I was depressed for a very long time. I did what I could to be the best mom possible for my kids, but it was hard every day.
To make matters worse, about four years after my husband passed away, the back problems I had my entire adult life turned into nearly unbearable chronic pain. What I thought was just another flare-up turned into a few years of praying I could get out of bed without agony that day. Praying I could get from my car to my son’s class to pick him up on time, or at least without crying in pain. And here’s the thing about prayer: it was hard to do after my husband died. Very, very, very hard. Still is, actually.
After my back went out, I couldn’t work at all. There was no way. To make matters worse, before I knew it, short-term disability dried up and I was refused long-term disability. I disputed it and I was still denied. Consequently, I found myself heartbroken, in a tremendous amount of physical pain, and with almost no income.
It broke my heart, but I had to sell the home I loved in order to pay off my debts and live off the profits for a while. I just hoped that my back would heal enough to get back to work before the money from the house dried up.
Depressing, right? In case you’re wondering, I am a lot better now. I still have a lot of pain, but my back is stronger now and I’ve been able to work part time for the past three years.
OK, back to my point. Sorry about the major digression, but it was important to my writing process.
I was reading my journal and I thought, “God, this is depressing. Remember when I was happy? What happened to turn me into this negative, glass-half-empty person? I wasn’t always like this.” Then one day, a totally random thought entered my head. “What if I were a different version of me?” (I know that sounds weird, but I’m pretty weird, so it fits.) Then I asked myself, “What would a different version of me even look like, anyway? And why would she be different? What would happen, or not happen, to make her different?” Then I asked, “What if, after losing Brian, I met another ‘version’ of Brian?”
Those questions led to a few more, and a few more. Suddenly, I was closing up my journal document and opening up a new one. I started writing a fictional story about a fictional me. A me who grew up in San Francisco. A me whose father was still alive. A me who suffered the same kind of loss but who reached out to loved ones for help.
As I was contemplating what to write, I was still incredibly disappointed that Humboldt didn’t work out. The area just captured my attention so thoroughly. I might have become slightly obsessed, if I’m being honest. So, my imagination started churning. I was daydreaming about the beautiful forestry, the beaches, the small-town feel…
So, can you guess what the backdrop of my story became? One guess where my character moves to escape the city and recover after her tragic loss? Yup. There was only one choice. Humboldt County! I wrote about the beaches, the trees, the mountains, the eccentric people and places, and the small-town vibe that I loved so much.
I can’t explain the process fully because it all happened so fast. All I can say is that as we waited to take the trip to New York, I spent every free moment I had writing. And writing. And writing. And when my back pain became intolerable, I lied down and dictated the story into my phone.
I drove my kids nuts. I could not stop writing. The story poured out of me like from a spigot. I barely knew what I was doing. It was as if the story was simply telling itself. One idea led to the next without effort. I didn’t storyboard. I didn’t brainstorm. I didn’t create a timeline. (Though I did these things after the fact, during the editing process.) I just wrote, as if some supernatural force was working within me.
Before I knew it, the first draft of the book was completed in less than two months time. And, after doing some research and realizing it was way too long, I realized I had actually written two complete books.
How did this happen? Maybe it was that I had so many years of pent-up creative energy in need of an outlet that it developed a life of its own. Maybe it was that I have read so many books over the years, it was inevitable that I write one myself. Maybe I had a weird version of a nervous breakdown. A manic episode? Who knows?
All I know is that by the time we were ready to go to Buffalo, I was already working on the next book in my series and asking my dearest friends to patiently beta-read the first ones for me.
To be continued…
