I’m writing a book. No, really. It’s about always being late. Like always. All of my life.
It started with a revelation I had a few years back in a “shame” workshop. Listening to another woman’s heartbreaking story about the ruination of her acting career by being late to an audition that was the biggest break in her career (she was subsequently blackballed), I suddenly realized how much of my life I had screwed up by being late myself, all the time. In fact, I didn’t just “realize this;” it was more like I was struck by a thunderbolt.
Believe it or not, most people who are late all of the time don’t realize just how severely they’re ruining their lives, and probably the lives of others. Seriously. I’ve interviewed several dozen such poor souls just like me, and they all live in a whirling cycle of constant anxiety, panic, abject apologies, and self-flagellation, just like I used to do. The difference between them and me is they’ve never gone to a shame workshop like I did, and they’ve never been struck by that thunderbolt, when they really see the ugly truth of how they’re living their lives, a truth that causes them to finally say, “Hey, this is a problem. Like seriously, a very big problem.”
So that is my personal Writing Project Number One.
Others are:
My published short stories:
“Midnight in the Garden of Sid and Eva” Chicago Quarterly Review, 25th edition
October 2019
“Changing Lanes,” Noyo River Review
May 2019
My blog on my Women At Woodstock website
My posts on my online magazine, Upside of 50
The ghost-written article and blog posts I write for my clients
My guest posts on Sixty and Me and Roommates4Boomers
My submissions to journals and competitions (aka “rejections” – too numerous to list here)