Are my current friend group.
I’m half way through the first rough draft of my book, a turning point I celebrated yesterday as it finally felt like it was taking shape.
I seem to have adopted the slightly tortured writer lifestyle – minus the copious amounts of alcohol. I wake anywhere from 4am onwards and start writing around 6am, going to bed at 9pm. Perhaps if I was doing the drinking part I may be going to bed at 4am – it does sound a bit more glamorous than the reverse.
Which means by lunchtime I’m done. I can’t write all day and some days it’s only 2-3 hours because there’s a lot of emotional content in what I’m writing. And I just hit a wall depending on the day, the topic, how much or how little I slept. Today I doubt it will be a lot since it was just before 4am when I woke up.
Which brings me to Grey’s Anatomy. I started watching it from the start, and I’m on Season 14 now – not sure I should be admitting that. And I realised last night that they have become my (very thin. They are all very thin) friends.
I’m not going out much or socialising or doing much else than parenting or writing, which works for me right now as I seem to be on a roll. And I have become overly invested in the lives and deaths of fictional characters – looking forward to the next episode to see how Meredith or Christina (sadly, she’s left the show at this point) are getting on. Excited to learn how Alex and so many other characters are taking their next steps, sobbing at the deaths of patients and characters. Wondering how I survived all my relatively recent surgeries as lots of people seem to die of less on the show – the last two words being the giveaway as to how.
Really, I do become totally absorbed in it all. It’s just about the level of social interaction I can seem to handle currently. It’s also a departure from serial killers which is my usual genre of switch off series watching. I tend not to get excited for the next episode of ‘who has been slaughtered yet’.
My book writing has been churning up a lot of memories, nothing I haven’t processed a million times before, but deep enough to remain disturbing despite that. Let’s just say that when I moved to writing about a war zone, it was a relief. A real life friend, not a fictional doctor, remarked that perhaps when I moved on in the book I may get out of newborn sleeping patterns. FFS.
However, with my new cast of friends and my ploughing through the writing, I am loving it. I can see how it was impossible to have done this before now, because I never had the time, headspace, perspective or luxury of being able to dedicate weeks and weeks to it.
I had a summer filled with children, selling a house and moving, recovering from (another) toxic job, settling the kids back into school and then could start writing. I’ve had a month of space, being alone a lot of the time, in a flat and area that I absolutely love, with Grey’s Anatomy and my dog for company. Allowing me the freedom to not just write, but process a lot of what I am writing – it wouldn’t, couldn’t, happen without that.
And for that, I am immensely grateful. Because, fuck it, I’m finally doing something I’ve talked about for 30 years. Of course I want it to be successful, but I’m also totally fine if not. I will give this my best shot, the planets have aligned to make it all happen – from the book, to the screenplay to the TV thing.
It’s nearly 5am, must be time for my second coffee.
Life Changing Times 