Do you know what intra oral massage is?
For your sake, I sort of hope not, because honestly, it’s not a lot of fun. It induces that sort of pain where you’re not voluntarily crying, but your eyes just start to water like crazy and you’re counting the seconds and wondering just how much more you can take, all the while trying to unclench your muscles.
But more about that in a minute.
In the acknowledgements of The Kitchen Sink Sutra, I wrote that, although you write a book mostly by sitting in a room all by yourself, no book is never written alone. I didn’t know how true those words were until I started The Date Square Dharma.
I realized recently just how many people I have supporting me in all sorts of different ways.
Like Jenn, who loaned my book to her friend Chioni (who has the best name, don’t you think?) Chioni took the time to send me a note telling me how much she liked Kitchen Sink Sutra and then she loaned her copy to her mother and her grandmother.
And my partner Mariann who does everything from clearing the snow off my car for me to saying, “I’ll make dinner, you go write,” and who serves as my personal plot doctor every time I get stuck. She also tells me hard truths, but always in a gentle way.
And my friend Shauna, who is such a great cheerleader and who says things like, “Oh, you’ll figure out the second half of the book, just keep writing…”
And the person who bought an ebook on Amazon on Nov 15. (I don’t know who you are, but thanks!)
And Lorelei, who took the time to talk through a “meaning of life conversation” with me, when I was trying to write a tough scene.
And Lesley, who said exactly the right thing to me about grieving when I was puzzling through my chapter ten problem.
Most of these people don’t have any idea how much their support helps, week in and week out.
But right now, this week, the real hero of the story is Roxanne, my massage therapist, who has special training in temporomandibular joint related disorders – which is to say, she works on the muscles of my neck and face and jaw – and performs the aforementioned miraculous (and dreaded) intra oral massage.
Because to be honest, it’s been tough sledding these past couple of months, getting words down. I’ve been a little stuck, trying to figure out where the story was going and what to keep in and what to cut out. Everything was cramped and clenched and sore.
But last week, after a particularly gruelling thirty minute session of Roxanne working her (dark and occasionally quite painful) magic, I drove home, opening and closing my jaw without pain and marvelling at this fact and suddenly, it hit me – my jaw has been clamped shut for quite a while now and it had silenced me.
Now maybe I am just prone to thinking in metaphors, but you know what?
Now that Roxanne has unlocked my jaw, I have been writing every day since.
So, how do you write a novel?
One word at a time.
And with a whole lot of help.
P.
P.S. I am sitting in a Starbucks, with a latté, writing a blog post on my MacBook Pro…I believe I have just achieved the state known as “peak author cool.”