Have a heart

Today I intended to do a bunch of house stuff, even though I did a lot of it yesterday, but I have been going back and making small edits to some previous chapters as things occur to me. More than that, I took out the gel pens and ripped out a page to color while I got a good mental grasp of everything I want to accomplish in the current chapter. I’m taking an old one and altering it, because it’s impossible for me to leave anything alone, ever. If I were to have a headstone one day, it might read, “Wait. Let me change that last chapter. AGAIN.”

This is the page I picked to color, and boy, did I think of about a million things as I filled in all those hearts with pens from three different sets, and for the first time, I ran several pens completely out of ink. It’s for the best. Most of my pens are old and drying up, so I’m constantly having to shake or warm them to use them.

Someone I know once told me, when I was talking about something and said I loved it, “You love EVERYTHING,” and began to recite a list to me of things I’d said I loved. At least it means she was listening to me, but it wasn’t said in an approving way. It bothered me enough then to still stick with me, and mercy, it’s been DECADES since then. I remember the moment I made peace with it sometime afterward. If somebody thinks of me as that chick who loves everything, there are a lot worse ways to be. Like: that chick who hates everything. I wouldn’t like that; it’s a word I use infrequently for a reason.

I don’t know why that’s the preamble to a different comment Lynne made a few days ago on the phone. Keep in mind that Lynne has known the characters I’m writing as long as I have. She was the first person who listened to me and helped me shape them so I could write them. WE WERE CHILDREN. When I wrote them again, I was in my early twenties. THE WORST DECADE OF MY FREAKIN’ LIFE. When I wrote them yet again, I was a true grownup trying to be a writer. When I look back at those manuscripts, I shudder in horror and won’t read them. I feel like half my chapters ended like a drama-fraught episode of “Dynasty,” or at least “As The World Turns.”

The world has turned. I’m a different writer. These books do have plots, but what they really are is character studies. In the old days, I only had backstories for two of the characters. Other people came in and out of their lives, and I didn’t give a shit who they were or what their motivations were. They served the DRAMA of the TWO.

Now I spend so much time with all of them, even when I’m not writing them. I’m thinking of them. Figuring them out. Making plans for them beyond even this Neverending Saga to a different saga. Now I know their motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and flaws. There are some characters who will reach justly-deserved bad ends (or at least unhappily ever afters), and most of the characters I once wrote flatly as “hurtful,” “cold,” “controlling,” “dishonest,” “acerbic,” or, Lynne’s preferred term, “worm vomit,” still commit some wrong actions. They make mistakes. Bad decisions. And Lynne’s comment, an observation more than a criticism, was, “You made them all nice.”**** Maybe they aren’t really all nice, but I hope I’ve made them all human. They are written differently now because I understand them. I like them more. They make me laugh sometimes. I forgive them. I feel compassion for them.

I love them. I’m the chick who loves everything.

****ETA CORRECTION: Lynne tells me she said, “You made them all soft.” And she is right, in that except for the really bad guys, I’m showing their softer sides. When all the novels are written in this series and I reread them beginning to end, I’ll have to see if I stand by that choice.