Writing came first. In fact, I always knew I was a writer. As mentioned in another posting on this blog, I even took a solemn vow to be a writer, standing in front of a mirror, holding up one hand and swearing on a Bible (I think it was "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing.) Shortly after making what I considered to be the most important spiritual commitment of my life, I wrote my first short story.
I was always afraid of my writing because it wasn't like other people's. I didn't know how to write what was considered a "traditional" short story, for example, with a beginning, a middle and an end, with an arc that resulted in a perfect "climax" about three-quarters of the way through. Then I took a short story writing class at Boston College and learned that I might simply not write like other people and that was perfectly OK. Maybe my stories started with the end, and didn't reach a climax until the last chapter - actually, the beginning of the story! Knowing this, armed with this indispensable piece of writerly wisdom, I began to write not only my own quirky, experimental stuff, but found that I was also capable of writing "straight" - I could do the traditional thing and do it well, too. What a revelation! Writing took up my time and thoughts day and night after that.
What I didn't realize was that I was also a "visual" artist. I put quotes around the word visual because I have come to believe...no, I have come to know...that all the arts are visual. I was a very descriptive writer. I create images with words, especially when I write fiction. That's why I like fiction. When I write a novel or short story I can be a completely visual artist. I can conjure up vivid images the same way I do on the pages of Google+ as Cutzy McCall. In fact, I wrote this poem about it:
art
idiosyncratic magick
inimitable synchronicity
alchemical anomaly
spice cinammon flower clove
ubiquitous woman love
floating dream box alarm clock
patterns colors Amy Lowell white
dress
state of my heart
poem
Still, it haunts me. When I am writing, that's what I'm into. When I'm doing art, it's all I want to do. I would love to be able to combine the two, because when I am not doing one or the other, I have deep feelings of guilt. "I should be writing" and "I should be doing art." However, except when I post images on Google+ and exercise my jones for writing titles, the two don't seem to want to go hand-in-hand. Perhaps the only time I did put writing and art together was with a series of erotic short stories called "Transitional Woman." To accompany these stories I created a series of extremely graphic paintings (a little too risque for Google+) to go with the stories, which feature a driven, sensual and passionate feminist who is fatally in love with men and can't resist having tempestuous affairs with the "wrong" partners. She is always "fucked over" by the end of each story, despite her strength. (Each story takes its title from the male characters, archetypes of American mythology: "Doctor"; "Lawyer"; "Businessman"; "Security Guard"; "Cowboy"" (drug dealer), etc. The "transitional" part is her conflict about being "free" of men yet unable to resist them. Like all my writing, tragic or otherwise, I tried to make it funny. I have learned, from reading widely, that the best writers are witty. A piece of fiction stands or falls on its "tone." A tone of wry bemusement, where the writer holds back just a little bit, perhaps smiling behind his/her hand...that's Tolstoy. A writer whose sense of humor is black, bleak and hilarious...that's Dickens and Stephen King.
For the past year and half since my husband died suddenly, horribly, and I realized that he was never coming home, art has been my companion. I have done over four thousand images in that time span, sometimes ten a day. Art has, basically, been my companion, my "true" love, a stand-in, no doubt, for the man who was that to me for twenty-four years. However, all this time, as the Goddess delivered up one amusing image after another and allowed me to publish it on Google+ to a certain amount of acceptance and appreciation, another part of me has been sitting like a little toad on my shoulder, to remind me that I have books to finish, most notably a novel based on a murder I "witnessed" in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when I lived there for thirteen years before coming to Las Vegas. My agent wants it, my friends want to know what happens at the end. I feel like a baker whose cake has been in the oven at two hundred degrees. Is the damned thing ever going to get done? Hell, I can smell how good it is, but it's still too not toasty around the edges.
And now another book has come into my consciousness. It's a hit, I can tell. It hasn't even been "born," but it's making its presence known. It's kicking ferociously. It wants to get out. Is it Rosemary's baby? Yeah, something like that. It's the sequel to the one I wrote twenty years ago after I got a call from a man who asked me to help him find the person who murdered his girlfriend. I was a psychic advisor, with a column in a national publication. He had called the toll free number published in the magazine. He wanted to know how the police investigation was going. He turned out to "probably" be the killer. I called the cops, they checked him out, found he'd made a confession to the murder on a national confession hotline. They arrested him. They bungled the job. They had to let him go on a technicality. I appeared on "Unsolved Mysteries," in an episode about the murder and the suspect. He knew I had turned him in. That was the jist of the novel, "The Calling." My character, a psychic detective, knew he would come for me. I tucked the book away. Didn't think it was good enough to publish, didn't believe anyone would be interested.
Now another, similar subject, has come to light. (Ever since my appearance on TV I've worked with law enforcement, FBI and private parties to find criminals and missing people.) Now I'm a retired psychic detective. I didn't think I wanted to be involved any longer. But we all know the mystery/thriller formula: retired cops or detectives come out of retirement because fate puts them in the path of yet another "circumstance" they can't ignore. What should I do? Hole up in some hotel room for a month writing my brains out until the thing is finished? (It's how I do it, traditionally?) Go back and forth between creating art and writing? Guess the Muse will inform me. Hope I don't screw it up and lose my art - or (gulp) my life.
For my friends on Google+...
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