Yeah, yeah, I know, Ann Packer stole my title -- believe me, you, I had it first. (Sh)it happens. There are only so many titles in the world.
Anyway, the manuscript's been at the top of my mind these days. I'm itching to work on it again. I'm poking some irons in the fire.
I mean, I love my YA writing and my YA books, but there's something about my women's fiction that speaks to me where I live, that reflects all the raw, often-bottled, and once-in-a- while-unleashed angst of being a woman, wife, mother in this day and age.
There's just something so damned cathartic about taking my real feelings, and the small, mundane events in my life, and blowing them up and out of the water (if you will), to leave them heaving and bleeding on the page.
There's something about the mood of my women's fiction that fills me, that I just don't get from my YA.
Take this bit I was reminded of today because of this photograph I came across from the beach where I swim . . .
John lowers himself onto me and we kiss, as around us the yard hums and above me the clouds drift by in stretched wisps across a perfect cornflower blue. Everything is sharp-edged yet floating, as if I have fallen into a Magritte painting and might reach up to find my own features gone, replaced beneath a black bowler hat by clear sky and clouds passing through.
This here, this is not me.
N’est pas une pipe.
I let my eyes wander, follow sky, and breathe him in like air. He lifts my shirt, and slips his hand in, and as he kisses me, his fingers find my breasts. He moans and grinds his pelvis against mine, and the ground swirls and disappears.
Where am I? How did I get here? Who took my old life away?
∞ ∞ ∞
From Swim Back to Me.
- gae
