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I’m holed up in a hotel room in downtown Richmond, where last night, with five children under the age of eight, we partied like rockstars and celebrated the 30th birthday of my sister and writing partner, Patience Salgado. Well, the partied like rockstars part is pure fabrication, but I just love that image. Instead it was more like Britney on tour with Justin a jillion years ago–all the kids passed out on the floor, candy wrappers stuck to their faces, completely wasted on joy from too many whoopie cushions and that hilarious pay-per-view Curious George movie. You should’ve been here.

Since I am not a kid person, believe it or not, and because I am still in deep recovery from the delightful, though stunningly screechy Moira, my adult family members have taken pity on me and left me here alone, while they feed the tribe at a local dive. All the eggs and bacon five wild things can eat. They took the whoopie cushions with them, God bless them.

So I’m soaking in the silence–blissful silence–before everyone returns and we go Rock Climbing. Yes, that is rock climbing with capital letters. Five more posts like this and you’ll think I’m actually the kind of person who is athletic and adores children. Hmm…The make believe life of the Internet, gotta love it.

But I digress.

There are other, actual true things I’d love to write about this morning.

Like the dilemma of the extraverted writer. Notes to Self–who I will be linking to shamelessly as I continue my search for kindred creative spirits on the web–had a great post on this the other day, in her blog about her writing. If you are the kind of person who requires big doses of contact with other human beings, how do you get to the place where sitting down alone in a room doesn’t feel like some kind of torture? How do you tend to your work knowing that it means you will have to initially forgo all the stimulation that the outside world brings?

My magic happens when my non-writing hours are packed with people. Drama in the neighborhood, all night births, adventures on my bike, heavy deep and real conversations at the kitchen table, listening while anyone/everyone spills their guts, telling stories, watching my kids run wild in nature, getting their two cents on life–anything where the soul collides with everyday life. A little insanity and high paced activity in large doses and before I know it silence is the thing. I have to be alone, so I can spill into words all the beauty I’ve been holding, since the last time I wrote. It’s a little trick I play on myself that almost always works.

There’s always this strange transition period between collecting and spilling, where I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and I beat back the gremlins that tell me I really must be kidding to think I’m any kind of “real” writer at all, with all this anxiety over starting, all this fear that it’s over–this writing thing–that I just used up my last best sentence, five minutes ago. But somehow it keeps happening–like right now, two days after I started this damn thing–and I’m able to say what I wanted and it’s not too late.

It’s the beauty of the chaos that pulls me back from the edge everytime. That and the knowledge that there’s more delight in the world than I thought possible–both in the thirtieth time Jack sat on his whoopie cushion and the thirty minute reprieve I get from having to listen to it. If I weren’t so engaged in my extraverted life, I might never know. I might never need so badly to have this chance to put it all down, a story that can only be made into a tale when you’re tired and alone–at last.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 12:11 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.