Thanks for all your suggestions. I'm not using my favorite name which is biblical and not often used because I would like to save it for a future hero of my dreams, imagination and lustful thoughts.
It has to be a name that I like much, and I like strange or unusual names, or names that are common now but weren't then. So I chose Zachary. Everyone but me will call him Zach because I have a weird dislike for nicknames. I don't know why; it's not something I have spent much time analyzing but obviously am now. So I will stop.
Zachary wasn't the last man I lived with, loved or was engaged to. While I found it easy to love again, I found it difficult to trust, and was never sure if it was me or the man or both.
I promised myself that in writing our story I wouldn't let new knowledge, wisdom or thoughts play a role. Am not sure that is possible so I might look at it from all angles. Maybe my only true talent lies in memory; in remembering how I felt at a certain second in time, and why. It is a talent that I hate as pain is remembered as much or more than happiness and in truth my life has had many more happy minutes than painful ones.
I am doing the thing that my writing teacher tried to wipe out of me; I am writing outside and around the story rather than diving into details. But in this new blogging medium I feel a certain peace and a certain knowledge that I can work outside of so called acceptable parameters.
Confusion races through my mind. Why are stories supposed to be told in a certain format? Who set that rule? Then explain how in one country in one century we could have a Faulkner, Steinbeck an Updike, , Capote, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and so many others who broke rules with gusto and love. Yes, love for form, beauty, charm, ugliness, detail, a million little and a thousand big things.
Words enchant me; words terrify me; words fill me with longing for other places, other people, other lives; anything not mine. I'm not an adjective person yet I remember the first time I read John Updike's Rabbit Run and was blown away by feeling that I was with Rabbit at the basketball court. While I'm in the state of Pennsylvania (metaphorically) and on the subject of John's; I remember John Ohara's stories about boys becoming men, and their mother's, younger than I am but oh so much older and dowdier, feeding them breakfast, and not giving great doses of wisdom. Dorothy Parker, how could I have forgot her? Big Blond has always been the most perfect story to me. Yet I'm not home, haven't read it in years, and all I can really remember is the woman sitting at her dressing table. But the image of her making up and brushing her hair has stayed transfixed and fixed in my mind forever.
Do we live in an era when everything is supposed to be homogenized, easily digested, and from the same formula? If that were true than why is there room for so many different style blogs to be popular , and why do people seem hungry to read and learn from one another?
Maybe these are questions that will be laughed at by people who think that they know what makes good and/or sellable writing; maybe they seem juvenile. But I have spent so many years being told how to write that I sometimes forget to focus on why I write. I love the written word.
On this wordy note, I will end to spend tomorrow walking on the beach, not really thinking about anything and thinking about everything at the same time.
Then I will find a bookstore and hope that it has some books by Will Cather because I need a Southern woman writer fix. Maybe it should be Joan Didion because I am in California. Sometimes even reading is confusing.
Zachary didn't read many books; he was more the alt newspaper type. But he was proud that I did.
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