My last blog was entitled “Edith Emerges.” Somehow, however, in the past month she’s gotten stuck in the hole she’s emerging from, probably from the waist down, since she’s a little round like her creator who is even rounder after a week that’s included Mexican appetizers and marguaritas and sixty people in her living room. I thought that with that kind of stress, I would lose weight. I, however, had to taste every enchilada, guacamole dip, Mexican meatball I created. Not to mention the trial marguaritas.
So Edith got stuck. However, I need to be honest. It wasn’t the south-of-the border party that stuck her. It was me, stuck deeply in my own hole of depression. You see, I had entered a screenplay, which I dearly love and which actually won small awards in a couple of contests, to a BIG contest. For $50. Tax deductible, I figured. I didn’t expect to win, but an honorable mention would have sent a surge of hope, as well as a reason for the next thrust of queries to Hollywood or whomever. Personally, also, I admit I was hoping for a pat on the back as an aging woman still hanging in there. So out of 6000 entries, I did not make the top ten percent. After a bout of wine-solace, I found a scrap of paper and a pencil and figured out that the contest managers had taken in, from the 6,000 of us with stars in our eyes, $300,000! Minus, of course, the $5,000 prize and whatever an interview with a producer costs.
I wished the winner well. No way could I write a dystopian movie involving four-breasted beings with six fingers, and who knows what else, in a ravished landscape somewhere east of Portland. And then I gave a thought to the inhabitants of my real world, writers like me who keep churning stuff out, sending queries, paying sometimes to win or find a place for our precious words, hoping for . . . for what?
And that was the question. Why? And somehow as I squirmed my way out of my black pit, I found my answer. I have a retirement fund; I don’t need money. I have grandchildren who love me, so I don’t need fame. I have at least fifty friends and acquaintances who have bought my two ebooks, so I have been read. What more is there?
What more is that I need to get Edith, my seventy-year-old protagonist, out of her pickle. Tomorrow she will escape to go on to get into more trouble. Me, too.
Depression is like quicksand; the best way to escape is to stop struggling. The effort draws you in deeper. Agents and judges are a dead end. Write what makes you happy.