Weepy, Shaky, Trembly, Angry as all get-out -- Perfect Time to Edit Onion!

Art is a wonderful thing, isn't it? And my art is especially wonderful. Not because I'm so great a writer. I'm an okay writer. I'm not particularly good. I rewrite everything at least thirty times and my friends are always put upon to help me hone my stories. It takes me ages to get through whole paragraphs because I literally go from word to word, stumbling over fear, embarrrasment, bad English, bad grammar, wrong "narrative voice" to get a perfect thought.

But my art is wonderful in one thing: it's from the deepest part of my heart. All my love, all my hate, all my anger, all my fear, all my pain -- end up in my novels. Not partially, mind you. But all of it.

So now I'm weepy, because I'm so sick this week and because the fibromyalgia's making me shaky, and because I feel hopeless with my only hope being God, and because I'm angry at social workers who intrude and oppress and hover over folks like Nazi hoverers. So yeah, it's a perfect time to work on My Life as an Onion. Because there's a scene in there about social workers trying to take a kid away, because there's a subplot in there about grief and illness, because I can be utterly utterly utterly painfully honest and that is what hooks my readers.

I do wonder where I got this penchant for writing stories so bare and shamelessly honest. Even when I'm ashamed of being such an open book, I have to write it down. I suspect too much poetry and indie films. Oh yeah, the indie film syndrome. So many isolated sad characters, and so many long stresses of nothing seemingly happening. That's my big problem, I think: the pacing. I love films where nothing apparently happens but where all this stressful stuff is happening internally. But dang! I can't really write like that. Takes a master/mistress who can depict internal stresses/tensions to write long pages of nothing that's a page-turner. So indies -- and Asian indies at that-- have not entirely affected me for good. Yet, I am what I am and I write what I write.

So Onion, here we go! Hand moist, body trembling (my poor characters all seem to have to deal with inner shaking), angry at "THE MAN" and weepy as all get out. . . I edit fiercely. Adelante.