After the shouting

I'm not doing so well the alliterative posting schedule (Marfan Monday), mostly because life has been a bit hectic. Even if I can't stick to Mondays, I will try to post weekly.

and now

on with the Marfantastic Show.

The shouting and flailing all have to do with the 7 stages of grief. I may have gone through grief before, but this was the first time I woke up to cheeks that were damp because the tears had been falling while I was asleep.

Because this wasn't the first time something awful had happened to me, I knew some of the things to do--exercise, massage, talk to my therapist (I said it wasn't the first time something awful had happened).

One morning, as I was walking, something the doctor had said when she gave us the diagnosis popped into my head. "This can be a difficult diagnosis for a teen athlete." My daughter is no athlete--she's always preferred cooperative games to competitive ones and loves to dance--so getting out of the team sports part of phys ed class was no big deal.

I started imagining what it would be like for a middle school student, one the same age as my daughter, but a girl who built her whole life around a sport, the way I've seen some kids do. I knew how she would field. The world as she knew it was over. But she was only 13. What was she going to do with her life now.

Since I'm a writer, I knew what I had. But I also resisted. I'd been working on a story about a first overnight. I wanted to finish that story. I didn't want to work on this story, because it felt like I was exploiting something that wasn't necessarily mine to exploit.

That was in April 2001. By July I had accepted that this was a story I had to write, even if, in a way, I still didn't want to. I was the only person who could tell this story they way I thought it needed to be told. In September, when my daughter started school, I started to draft.

It didn't pour out. Some days it barely dripped out. But I didn't stop. I wrote the really sh**ty first draft Annie Lamotte talks about. I wrote I don't know how many more drafts. I shared it in bits and pieces with my writers group. They critiqued. I revised and revised some more. Three years ago I finished "Spider Fingers." It's my first completed novel manuscript.

I've submitted "Spider Fingers" to a number of editors and one agent. So far no takers. At the moment, it's with another agent and soon I'll query others as well as submit to a couple of specific editors. My goal for 2009 is to find a home for "Spider Fingers," while I work on several more.

I don't believe that when life hands you a lemon you should make lemonade. I'm with Calvin of "Calvin and Hobbes," who once said, "When life hands you a lemon, I say, zing it right back and add a few of your own."

"Spider Fingers" is not sweet. Having to find a whole new identity at age 13 is not a sweet thing to have to do. But I hope my novel finds readers who take comfort in knowing that someone else their age was able to find a way to make her life satisfying again.