Winter At Hand

As October wraps up, it occurs to me that it has been a cold and grey month. I like cold grey weather, I really do, but I worry as I look out over the lake day after day as the semi-dark day gives way to total evening darkness by 5:30, that this hibernation suited weather may get old after a few months.

This fall has felt more like winter in Northern California: wet, grey and cold. Again, it’s not that I mind this kind of weather. I like the peace it brings. The coolness of fall seems to insist that we slow down. It turns down the rapid pace of summer and eases us into the gentle lethargy of winter, it’s a good thing; it’s why we Minnesotans live so long, I’m sure. We get the animalistic hibernation of long winter months to rest and recharge our batteries. And in the spring, we wake up again, come back to life.

However, living in Minnesota, I know that if this weather is the start of our inevitable decline into winter, we are in for a very long haul. Winter doesn’t leave us here in Minnesota until early April…at the earliest. So we’re looking at half the year gone to darkness, cold, and hibernation. It may (as it often does in Minnesota) become the classic case of “too much of a good thing.”

We also need sunlight, oxygen, exercise and fresh air. All of which I have been very short on these past weeks. I pushed out my first prenatal with a new midwife yet again because I am still coughing. And though I feel immensely better than I did a few days ago, all it takes is a trip out into public to realize just how sick I still am compared to healthy people. I can’t control my cough and desperately need to blow my nose every minute-and-a-half or so.

But I’m pushing through, Twila is pushing through. It seems like a small miracle to feel healthy after experiencing that level of discomfort. There were moments I thought we might never again feel like ourselves. But we’re close now. We’re close to Wellness.

And the Tapestry team and I are close to getting my book ready for publication. It’s great to have a ‘team’ working on it. I feel supported at this final stage of the editing process and that small fact feels glorious.

I began to feel, in the process of this project, that I was at the end of a very long relay race. I had sent my manuscript to a number of publishers, spoken to countless professionals: editors, agents, publishers and adoption professionals, and everyone seemed to have different advice about how to make the book marketable to a broad audience. I was so dizzy by the time I met Tapestry’s president that receiving his sound advice that eventually unfolded into a year-long relationship full of valuable guidance and industry wisdom felt as full of relief as passing a baton at the end of a relay leg.

So it’s going well. It’s a project wrapping up and that feels incredible. It feels almost as good as being in the thick of the first draft process of my first fiction novel. That process is not wrapping up but is getting deeper and stickier and feels like walking through quicksand as I get more deeply entrenched in the characters and their plot twists and the overall difficulty of making a story interesting. I guess I’m at a bit of a stalemate to be honest. It started to feel last week like the fast-paced excitement was waning into boring stagnation. But I love it.

I love the challenge that’s being extended to me to listen to the characters, to get to know them better and more deeply and hear how they would lead this story on, how it will unfold at their hands. And in that regard, the prospect of a very long winter sounds thrilling.

What better time to get intimate with my laptop, missing keys and all, and just wrestle with the story that is trying to be born. What better setting to be pregnant with and eventually give birth to a fully developed, fully cared-for story than the deep freeze and dark afternoons of a long Minnesota winter?