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Jimmy and Pip are asleep on two different dog beds. Jimmy in ‘his’ bed which is right beside my main desk, and Pip on the bigger bed that is pretty much in the middle of the floor. They are both lying on their sides with their paws stretched out, deeply asleep. Jimmy at fourteen just came up and laid down, and once he was certain I was actually going to be writing for awhile, he went to sleep. Pip, at a little over a year, played with and crushed the empty water bottle I let him have, then laid down to sleep. This is one of the longest peaceful times the two of them have had together in my office. Usually I can only have one of them at a time since Pip hit puberty, and Jimmy decided he was old, but wasn’t backing down. Infact, the old man often starts the trouble. He has been writing checks his body cannot cash.
But we’ve been working with Pip on obedience and letting him know that Jimmy isn’t in charge, we are. It’s calmed him down a lot. We took him to a local outdoor cafe this weekend, and he sat at the table with us and didn’t try to jump up on a single person. A reord. He only tried to put his paw on the one lady who petted him. He didn’t bark once, and was very calm. The socilization is really helping his confidence. We also had a professional dog trainer out to the house to watch the dogs interact in their home environment. She was the one who pointed out that Pip isn’t aggressive, he’s afraid, and doesn’t know how to be boss, and doesn’t know who else is boss. He’s a dog, somebody has to be boss, but he’d really rather it were someone else. So it’s us.
I’m about a hundred and fifty pages in on A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT. If you’ve been reading the blog regularly you know that I’ve had some family illness, and it’s certainly effected my ability to concentrate on the writing. Preparing for tour also cuts into things. Getting our daughter ready for school to begin again, also takes time and attention. Though Jon’s mom helped with that this year.
I read how Eugene O’Neill, the playwright had his third wife, Carlotta, make sure that no one bothered him in the morning while he worked. No phone, no callers, nothing. Not even if the house were on fire. Everyone went around on tip-toes, speaking in hushed voices. At lunch she was afraid to even move to make her chair squeak for fear of disturbing the man’s concentration. She also sorted his mail, which frankly is a fine idea, but the rest . . . Yeah, it’s occasionally appealing to be that protected from the world. But how would it possibly work? What, I have a nanny to tend my daughter and never see her? You just give up your entire life to other people, and care only about the writing?
There are other writers that did similar things. Asimov worked an average of twenty hours a day, and supposedly never left his office during a work session. His wife brought him food. There are numerous other stories about writers that did that. Most, if not all of them, male, but I don’t see how it would work. I mean was O’Neill not told if his mother was ill, if he was in the middle of a play? Did he only learn of it afterwards? Was he that protected? Or did emergencies disturb the great man’s schedule? But what, I’m not going to greet my daughter home from the first day of third grade? I’m going to miss that? I don’t think so.
My husband and I were both there huddled under an umbrella in the unusually cold down pour, when she got off the bus for the first day of third grade.
I don’t know how to balance real life with the writing. I really don’t. But I just don’t think I could isolate myself to the degree that some have done and be happy with the decision. It would be as if the writing were more real than your life. How weird would that be? Also, truthfully, the thought of making everyone tip-toe around and whisper because I was working is a little too primadonna for me. I would feel silly asking my family and friends to do stuff like that. But hey, that’s just me. Eugene O’Neill was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He won four Pulitzer prizes for drama. Some scholars claim that he’s the third most widely translated and produced dramatist after William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Not bad, not bad at all.
So who am I to say that his schedule sounded prissy? I don’t have a Pulitzer, or a Nobel Prize. But I’ll say this, I can’t imagine thinking I could order my family and friends around to that degree and there not be a palace revolt. I take my writing very, very seriously, but so seriously that the squeak of a chair could disrupt my creative process — that serious I’m not.