Now that we are settled in the cottage (the cottage! the cottage! the cottage I love so much!), it was time to face The Rest of My Life. Which means: if I have this beautiful writing nook, I needed to start actually writing in it.
So, four days ago, on July 29, I actually did.
I slipped out of bed at 4:30 a.m. and crept up the stairs to the nook. I made myself a pot of tea in my Wedgewood teapot. I curled up on the couch under a blanket. I turned over my beloved hourglass and picked up my clipboard, pad, and pen. And I started to write.
I didn't know what to write, so I just started talking to myself on the page:
WRITING NOOK - DAY ONE! RETURN TO WRITING!
ONLY GOAL: TO WRITE - to play - to explore - to reenter this world and reinhabit this identity
I don't know WHAT I will write, only THAT I will write.
I am always thinking about reinventing myself as a writer, so I wrote a list of possibilities. Try writing - gasp - a book for grownups? Personal essays? Make a serious commitment to poetry?
But every time I consider reinventing myself as a writer, I always come back to my first and best love: children's books. And now I was drawn to writing a book for young readers set . . . in a cottage! On a street like my new street! I made this goal for myself: to create a fictional world readers will want to live in and never leave, a world filled with whimsy and wonder, like the world I am living in now.
I started making notes... asking myself questions... walking each day on Bluff Street with a writer's eyes alert for story possibilities. I decided right away that this book is going to be, defiantly and unapologetically, just what I want to write, a book with an old-fashioned sensibility (think Maud Hart Lovelace, Eleanor Estes, Elizabeth Enright), a quiet book without a page-turning plot, a book radiating kindness and generosity toward its characters and its readers.
ALL I want right now is just to LOVE writing this book with all my heart. Then whatever happens is up to the universe. The ONLY point right now is LOVE.
As of this morning, day four of my return to writing, I have 13 pages in my tiny handwriting of scribbled notes.
Each one a labor of LOVE.
