Haven’t written lately, life keeps getting in the way – at the moment I’m sitting in a cold dark store while an electrician works next door with the power off as I wait for FedEx to deliver a shipment. Luckily I brought my notebook since I’ve been waiting for five hours now.  So far, I’ve done both the New York Times and Boston Globe Sunday crossword puzzles and today’s LA Times Suduko. Too bad I forgot the tedious Elizabeth of York biography I’ve been trudging through, but it'd probably make me sleepy. So I’m stuck with my workshop assignment. The past few weeks our facilitator has been sick and we’ve been writing on our own, although last week instead of a prompt we read from our various projects and ended up having a conversation about our processes. We all do it differently, and the conversation led to this week’s prompt.

I’m a pen to paper kind of girl because of my painting background; I’m all about mark making. I’m also big on layers and will write something repeatedly until I feel like I’m done before I type a draft that will get revised until I’m satisfied. If it’s for this blog, I’ll copy and paste it to the site and then fiddle with it so it sits nicely between the margins. On the other hand, the novel I am currently, and hopefully, in the final edit of, has been rewritten multiple times. Originally it was told by the main character and done by hand in the grid paper notebooks I’m partial to. Then, and this is the process, I went back through that version and rewrote each page on the one facing it, the back of the previous page, and made whatever changes I felt necessary. Then I transcribed it into a fresh new notebook. Often this involved literal cutting and pasting, or more accurately, taping, whole sections in other locations until I had a version without anything scribbled on it. Then and only then did I type it into the computer starting with the opening of the story straight to the end. Once it was done and spell checked, I sent it to a friend for proofing. But before I got it back from her, I decided the three other characters should also speak, which meant writing the story over in each of their identifiable voice, and in their own individual notebooks, with a complex outline to keep the timeline moving naturally. We’re talking stacks of grid paper notebooks, several rolls of tape, and an entire box of the micro-ball pens I like. This all got typed up too, and revised of course, until eventually I was ready to have people look at it. Which was also about the time I joined the workshop and started reading it out loud to the group. 

And yes, revising it even some more based on the feedback that I found helpful. Sometimes this feedback was about the structure, but usually it had to do with distractions or flow. Both of the people who’ve finished this version have said not to make any big changes because they like it the way it is. Because, really, the book is finished, I just need to tweak the typos and get better at presenting it to the public. Nit picky, just like the way I paint, but I don’t understand going with a first draft. I want perfection; and since it’s me, I’ll copy this again before I type it.

The assignment at this week’s writer’s workshop was to compose a letter to a contemporary of the same age and gender with a similar background who lives in Afghanistan. This was for a possible book the group might put together, Greetings From Provincetown, that sort of thing, but alas, after some Internet research that only confirmed what I already knew, I simply would not exist in Afghanistan. I am older than the life expectancy for women there, it’s sixty-one, although the average age of death for them is closer to fifty given the high childbirth mortality rate and the undisclosed number of honor killings.

I never had children, but I did get divorced and earned a college degree. I’m also an artist and obviously a writer, and have supported myself for over forty years. None of which would bode well for me in Kabul, but what most certainly would have done me in was my sexual behavior as a younger woman. I’d surely have been stoned in my promiscuous twenties, or perhaps later for shaming my family or community by being the victim of a felony assault that involved both a knife and a gun. And if I survived into my forties, my brush with cancer at forty-three could have killed me since I wouldn’t have received treatment or seen a doctor in the first place.

More likely, I’d have been forced into marriage at twelve and promptly beaten to a pulp or thrown myself off a cliff. Instead I was lucky enough to grow up a white girl American with the privileges and luxury problems attached to that status. I may not make as much money as my male counterparts, but I can vote and choose to live alone or how to dress regardless of what other people may feel about my choices. 

So. No Afghani contemporary to correspond with; no letter written, addressed or sent. But not an exercise in futility either, it was more one of gratitude, because I am grateful for my health, my opportunities and my life. Which was probably, wink wink, the point of the assignment to begin with.

This Tuesday’s prompt at the writing workshop was a little embroidered felt yurt ornament and a small ceramic box shaped like a lighthouse that might have held kitchen matches. There were some interesting responses from the group, poems, a bit of fiction, a limerick, but I was too caught up in my taxes, don’t ask, to work on it until now. My first thought was about the Tibetans I had met while living in New York. They're the most beautiful and generous people, both physically and spiritually, I’ve ever known. There was one in particular who had lived in a yurt with his yak herding family until he came to America to make money to support them. He arrived not speaking a word of English and immediately had to learn to navigate the subways to get from the room he shared in Queens with another Tibetan to his job as a janitor at the store where I worked in Manhattan. Imagine. Not only did he have to deal with the noise and dirt and turbulence but abrasive New Yorkers as well. He'd just smile and nod and push his broom, he was the essence of gratitude.

I also thought of writing about the Tiny House movement because I'm fascinated by it having lived in a few tiny abodes myself. The Arkansas shack I mentioned a while back, and my first apartment in Soho that was 14x14 feet with the ceiling and walls all painted park bench green and felt like a forest cave. The cabin I had my first summer here was small too, it was half the size of my current living room but very cute.

But it was the ceramic lighthouse box that caught my attention. It was probably made in China, I didn’t look for a label, and no doubt had been bought in a tourist trap only to end up being sold again at a flea market or yard sale from a collection of knickknacks that decorated a kitchen shelf. Someone, or several someones, had taken the time to design and make it, then someone or several someones had bothered to buy it. And there it sat, along with an embroidered yurt ornament, on the table upstairs in the library where our writing workshop meets in front of the big windows with the view of a real lighthouse out in the harbor.

We have three lighthouses in Provincetown. The one you see from the library is called Long Point, another at the west end of the harbor is known as Wood End, and the third at Race Point is on the ocean side beach off Herring Cove. All of them are picturesque and show up all the time in paintings and photographs of Cape Cod. They’re our Statue of Liberty, beacons, symbolic; although my favorite is the lighthouse is in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard because you can walk right up to it on the beach. I did it on a frigid gloomy February afternoon almost ten years ago. I’d gone there for a job interview and was so sure I had the gig I had put a deposit on a funny attic apartment, but it was not meant to be. I was heart-broken when it didn’t happen, but I've got over a hundred pictures I took that day, and the knowledge, at least now, that if it had happened I most likely wouldn’t have found my way here – how sad would that be?