Category: blog

Welcome to the new digs

… which are pretty different from the old ones. I hope you enjoy the new look and structure. It’s meant to be more clear and more user-friendly. If it’s not, or if you find anything broken, please let me know at (contact at kelleyeskridge dot com).

And one of these days I’ll get a handy spambot-proof email link generator so that I don’t have to keep spelling out the addresses.

This blog takes the place of Virtual Pint, my former virtual space for reader interaction. It’ll take a while to transfer all those conversations over to this format — there are over a hundred questions/comments/responses spanning nearly five years — but they are still available here in the old format.

This new space — “talk about” — will be more of a proper blog than Virtual Pint. You can expect to find random musings as well as pointers to things of potential interest.

And we can still get interactive. On the sidebar is my offer to talk to me. You’ll find a form where you can make a comment, ask a question, or start a discussion. I’ll respond as soon as I can, and since it will take the form of a post, anyone who visits can comment. That feels even more like a real conversation to me, and I’m looking forward to it.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new space and stop by often.

The Rule

As I’ve been thinking more and more about the writing I want to do next — the fiction, and the screenplays — I find myself wanting to publish The Rule on billboards from Hollywood to New York. And maybe tattoo it on a few foreheads.

I first came across The Rule in 1985, thanks to Alison Bechdel. It’s one way of assessing a movie from a feminist perspective.

The Rule is:
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.
(and the optional 4th element — it’s really cool if the women have names!).

Go ahead, do the math. You might be surprised how many movies don’t pass the Rule Test. Or maybe you wouldn’t.

Does this mean that Right-Thinking People shouldn’t see movies that can’t pass the Rule Test? Of course not. Good lord, it would certainly leave out a bunch of great film with all-male casts. But if your movie includes women, wouldn’t it be cool if they were real people too? And got to do real people things just like the guys?

Me, I think it would be great. I’d much rather see a film with no women than a film where the men are human beings and the women are mirrors.

See The Rule in action. With thanks to Alison Bechdel for putting it in the world, and her friend Liz Wallace for nailing the idea.

Giving thanks

I am thankful. I have a good life. I love Nicola and she loves me. I love my handsome old cat who sleeps at my hip and harasses me for drinks of warm water from the bathtub. I love the work that colors and shapes my life, that takes me to places in myself that I can’t go any other way. I get to live other lives when I write, and that makes me live my own life more deeply all the time. I get to do it anytime I want, in a house that feels like a haven to me, with someone who understands my work and helps me do it better, and doesn’t get offended when I leave the dinner table to go make a note about something. I am so grateful for these things.

I am thankful. At a point in life when many people are set on an unswerving course, I find myself suddenly in new territory — learning to write screenplays and discovering that I absolutely love it, and that there’s a real chance I might be very good at it one of these days. I’ve spent a year exhausting myself in the race to stay on the leading edge of the learning curve, getting up at 4 AM because the only way to learn fast is to do twice as much work as an experienced screenwriter would do in the same number of days. I have learned a lot about discipline and focus and sucking it up and going back and making it better. I am so tired and I have had so much fun. I’m grateful for it.

I am thankful. I started to believe a few years ago that I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all. Being able to write isn’t the same thing as being a writer. I wrote tens of thousands of words in the years after Solitaire, beautiful words that told stories that didn’t ring true, that didn’t take my characters or me anywhere meaningful. Stories that didn’t matter to me. Stories that I thought would be good for my career (I know, blech, I know, but that’s what it was). And then along came the screenplay and it mattered so much and suddenly I found myself full of story, flooding with story, and I sat down and in six weeks wrote the 25,000 words of “Dangerous Space,” and it took me places that left me gasping. And now I am a writer again, with a passion for my work and a confidence in my ability that I have never had before. I am so grateful for that it makes me weep.

I am thankful. I have wonderful friends, intelligent, passionate, funny, caring people who love experience and conversation and connecting. I have four parents who love me and are proud of who I am and what I do. I have a family of in-laws who love me and are glad I am with their daughter, their sister, their aunt. I have good neighbors, and we help each other. I’m grateful for all these people and for the community they give me, that I never expected to have.

I am thankful. The hard things in my life are not hard beyond bearing. Nicola’s multiple sclerosis that kicks her in the teeth sometimes, the way it changes our lives and steals our hope in little bites, and my terror that someday she won’t be able to fight back. The worries about money and career and whether anyone will even give a shit about books in ten years, the dread in my heart over the inevitable death of the cat who has been our companion for 16 years, the fact that I’m the only child of aging parents. The sick feeling that no one will ever publish another of my books. The sadness I feel sometimes because my life is sometimes smaller than I wish, because I am sometimes smaller than I wish. The choices I regret making and the things I’ll never do that I regret even more. And more stuff, boring boring, blah blah blah. These are things that are hard for me, but they don’t kill me and they only shut me down temporarily. I am grateful that I’m becoming enough of a grownup to handle them.

And I’m thankful for everyone who has taken the time to read my work and find something in it to touch you, to make you feel or think, to make you yearn , to help you hope. I’m grateful to you.

Happy Thanksgiving to us all.

More hope

Hi Kelley —

Found my way into some of the comments in your Virtual Pint and felt inclined to comment. First that article on Joshua Bell’™s experience was fascinating. I was thinking that if they had tried it at the end of the day instead of at the beginning when people had more time — it would be different, but then there were the people standing in line for the lottery tickets with time to spare. What that says about our society is kind of frightening really. On the flip side, I found the lack of the public’™s appreciation for him mitigated by the $40/hr he took in. Not so bad really. I wonder what percentage of the number of people who passed through appreciated him vs the percentage of the number of people in our general population who would appreciate him if placed in context for them. That is to ask is that percentage any different than how many people in our culture appreciate classical music? than how many people can see through their own crap and appreciate beauty for beauty’™s sake? Reading that article did not make me feel hopeful.

Then one post led me to another and I read the discussions on hope, that lead me here and here. My first reaction when reading about the Goss book you mentioned was to vehemently disagree, but on reflection, I’™ve about decided that I’™m going to order a copy. (I already checked and my local library doesn’™t have it) I really think the reason I (we) continue on is because of hope. Otherwise, at some point or another it just wouldn’™t be worth it anymore.

While I do agree with what she says about acceptance and about life not turning out the way it ‘˜should’™, I think that’™s more a matter of accepting that life is not ‘˜fair,’™ and not a matter of giving up our hopes, dreams, plans, and/or goals. The idea being acceptance rather than resistance; resistance gives a thing more power and takes the energy away from the solution. Maybe my issue is just that I would probably define hope differently than she does.

As for the question of what is hope? I think it what helps us conquer fear. I don’™t believe we can expel fear from our lives. I think it will always be there, but what I can do is continue on despite the fear. Hope helps me to do that. I wouldn’™t call it the opposite of fear, but I would say it’™s the conqueror of fear (along with action). One could say that actions conquer fear, but how can one act without hope? Call it hope or faith (in myself, my loved ones, the universe), belief, vision, or even goals. It is what keeps the human race going isn’™t it? I understand the argument that accepting failure would negate the fear of it, but I’™m not buying it. Where does the motivation come from? It sounds like she’™s saying that failure is a foregone conclusion. Well, ok, I accept that there will be (have to be) failures along the way, but not that the ultimate outcome will be failure. Maybe we have to change our concept of what that ultimate goal is because of the things we learn from our failures, but if the path has heart, so will the end and so will we. Maybe hope is part of having heart.

That doesn’™t mean that I believe in false hope. I think I understand what you mean about not hoping for a cure for MS. I have faced the loss of hope of a cure for ovarian cancer a loved one facing a recurrence of that. There is a difference between facts and possibilities. It’™s a hard line to draw. Doctors these days are reluctant to give out statistics and predictions for terminally ill patients. The reason for that is they have seen what the results of doing that are; patients who are told they have 2 months to live are more likely to die in two months than those who aren’™t told that. I have seen this happen for myself. Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment. I’™ve faced that choice and had to let my lover know that I faced it with her. Maybe if I’™d faced it sooner, I could’™ve supported her better. Or… maybe when she saw that I had given up hope, she deteriorated more rapidly than necessary. It’™s something I still wonder about these 9 years later. I watched another close relative experience a very similar path with the same disease with a different attitude; one of denial. She was much older, yet lived longer. Who can say why, but it makes me wonder.

Belief/attitude/hope is a powerful force.

Can’™t say I have any answers. This is something that’™s definitely been weighing on my mind lately. Forced into thinking about it as I try to decide if I need to re-work my Plan B or come up with a Plan C…..

I realize this discussion is several months old now; I’™d be interested to hear if you’™re still in the same place with it.

I too loved that quote you had from M L King.

Then this quote from you is why I’™ll read/watch anything you ever write:

“I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon.”

Blah, blah, blah. Way too much out of me. Feel free to edit this if you put it up.

Best —

Jennifer

No editing necessary. I don’t think I can respond to every point right now, because there are baked potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge with my name on it (and I don’t mean that to be flip, just that I’ve been thinking about your comments a long time and could think about them longer, but then you would never have a response). I appreciate the conversation and that you’re willing to take so much time to continue it.

It’s been a wee while since you sent me this (my bad, very sorry) so I’m curious — did you get the Goss book? As much as I’ve talked about it here in the virtual pub, I’m pretty sure I haven’t yet found the right way to encapsulate her point (oh ho, maybe that’s why she wrote a whole book about it, laughing now). Or perhaps it’s that I find my understanding of “hope” is changing as I try to integrate her perspective into my view of things.

Am I in the same place with this? Hmm. Yes and no. I don’t feel hopeless, but I no longer rely so much on hope. I think that what you said above — Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment — is perhaps a good parsing of her point. If we rely on magical thinking, if we decide okay, I will get this thing or person or result I want if I don’t step on a crack, or if I don’t call her first, or if I pray hard enough, then maybe we miss the opportunity to just give a rebel yell and do the thing to the fullest in the moment when it needs to be done. And if we do the thing, and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean we did it wrong. It doesn’t mean we were wrong to reach for it, to throw ourselves out there (to, as they say, dance like no one’s watching). It just means that it didn’t work out. And that’s how it goes sometimes. Right now, I think that’s what she means, and right now I can mostly be okay with that. Would I be okay if it were the death of a lover I was talking about, if it were Nicola’s death? Probably fucking not. So I’m not sure where I am.

Except that I know I’m in a doing place, a place of action without as much expectation as before. I do think that it’s possible to act without hope, by which perhaps I mean this expectation that things will work out the way I want them to. I still want them to work out, on some level I still hope they will — I just don’t necessarily pin my self-esteem or lifetime happiness or sense of worth on it the way I used to. And in some weird way this has freed me to, among other things, be braver about what I write and love my writing more. Why? I don’t know, it’s a mystery.

And since I’m in quote mode at the moment, here are a couple more:

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. ‘” Anais Nin

We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.
‘” Mary Catherine Bateson

I know this is in no way a complete answer to your very thoughtful comments. Thank you for them. And thank you also for your kind words about digging and spoons. It’s true, that’s what I want in almost every respect right now. Life’s short. Let’s just reach right in.

It’s a party!

Nicola has recently published her new novel, Always, and it rocks. Find out more here. Get it at your local bookstore or on amazon.

Next on her horizon: And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life. This is a fabulous thing: a memoir of Nicola’s childhood and early adult life with emphasis on how she became a writer –” the events, people, feelings, challenges, fears and joys that led her to the work.

It’s more than a book (although there are over 45,000 words of text): it’s a beautifully designed object, a box of Nicola that includes several small volumes, photographs, juvenilia (Christmas lists, an early poem, her first crayon-drawn book), reproduced diary entries, a CD of songs with her band… and more.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Imagine that someone hands you a small box, perhaps like the cigar boxes of my youth in which kids saved their most precious objects. And in the box is a story in many dimensions, multiple media, so many different ways to experience the memories and feelings and thoughts of the person herself… I think it’s seriously cool, and I think it may well set a new paradigm for memoir. [Edited in 2009 to add: And I’m apparently not the only folks who think so. ANWAGTHAP won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for memoir.]

See for yourself.

But hurry: it’s a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies, and that’s all there will ever be.

Art and commerce

For your Strad.

Sarah

Thanks very much for sending this. I don’t know whether to laugh or pound my head against the wall: it’s the perfect demonstration of how hard it can be to make people hear (literally, metaphorically…). Of course I hope I’d be one of the people who stopped, but maybe not –” it’s so easy to hurry by beauty and skill when it’s offered in passing, when it’s not ritualized by setting. When art is offered out of context, it makes a lot of people nervous and grumpy. It’s weird that our culture is so monetized that we regard freely-offered public performance with suspicion: after all, no one’s making anyone listen, and no one’s making anyone pay.

I wish the economics of art were different, both for artist and audience. And I think those economics are changing. Anyone keeping up with the music industry (a giant rollercoaster ride these days) knows that MySpace and P2P and recent developments about payola and royalty payments are changing the ways that people make a living with music (artists, distributors, broadcasters, promoters, labels… everyone’s world is different today). In February 2009 Someday, there will be no more analog television. Nineteen screenwriters are changing how writers play in the Hollywood sandbox. And what will happen in publishing? I don’t know, it’s a mystery, but I’m confident it won’t be business as usual.

As long as we don’t all end up like Strad… for those of you not familiar with my short fiction, she is the protagonist of Strings, the lead story in Dangerous Space, which I’m delighted to say is now available from Aqueduct Press at a reduced price through June 15 (the official release date). If you’d like a personalized copy, you can order one now from University Books.

[Edited in 2009 to add: I don’t have the personalized arrangement with U Books right now, but if you want a book personalized you can arrange to send it to my PO box. Contact me at info at kelleyeskridge dot com.]

I hope people will enjoy the collection, and that some of you will want to talk about it over a virtual pint. There’s always room at the table.

Cheers.

Words in my head all the time

[Kelley’s note: This post refers to an unpublished story that used to be available on the old website. It isn’t here right now. Maybe one of these days I’ll get it posted… it’s interesting now to me to look at it in light of “Dangerous Space.”]

I read “Shine” earlier this morning and it has stuck with me throughout the day. In trying to determine why, I found myself going back to the story, trying to find those pointed barbs that usually catch my mental attention when I’ve read something good that stays with me. However, this story doesn’t seem to have “points” that are meant to catch the reader (me) as much as it seems like an emotional road that travels from point A to B with a lot of fractional stops in between. There is an emotional movement to the story, starting in the realm of emotional panic (?) of realization towards an ending of acceptance…but then I continue to question myself, could it be an ending that is focused on searching? I loved the movement in the story but am wondering what she would be doing in the next week or the next month. Will she find something in her searching and singing or will she even recognize it should it come her way? (Is she capable of realizing it?) I suppose my question is, if you took this story any further, in what direction do you see it going? Or do you see any direction at all?

I liked it and thanks for posting it.

Christine

I’m glad you liked it. Thanks for letting me know.

“Shine” is the first fiction I wrote after Solitaire, and it reflects my search for the next thing — in writing, in life, in myself. Joanne’s older than Jackal; she’s wrestling not with the complexities of assuming an adult identity, but with the damage to our dreams and sense of self that seems inevitable as we live adult lives. In the two years after “Shine,” I wrote 16,000 words of one novel and more than 20,000 words of another… still looking for that next thing. I talked a little over a pint or two about wrestling with these books; and ultimately I had to step away from them because I couldn’t find my way past the pretty writing into something that was both risky and real for me the way that Solitaire was, and “Eye of the Storm” (the most recent story prior to “Shine,” written while I was working on Solitaire).

Walking away from 36,000 finished words (plus many, many more in draft) was not a happy experience. I wondered in public (somewhat indirectly) a year ago if I was even meant to be a novelist, and what I was really thinking was that perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a writer. There was a difference between doing (even doing well) and being that I could see but not touch, much the way Joanne came up against her own reflection in the rain.

And then came screenplays — and I fell in love with the form and thought, Okay, I’m a writer after all, but maybe not a fiction writer. And then I threw myself headfirst into “Dangerous Space,” the new novella for the collection, and it was…amazing. 25,000 finished words in six weeks and the only reason I stopped was my deadline. Unlike “Shine,” unlike the aborted novels, “Dangerous Space” is a story that makes me excited and nervous and itchy to have people read it. I think some people will find it eyebrow raising. I think some people will hate it a lot. I hope some people will find all the layers in it that I think are there, underneath the in-your-face surface.

When Matt Ruff talks about a writer walking the line of not embarrassing herself (in his blurb for the collection), I think he’s talking at least in part about this story — and no doubt some people will think I have embarrassed myself. And you know what? That’s fine. Because it’s the first fiction I’ve written in years that puts me right out there on the edge of myself as a writer, not because it’s so beautifully stylized, but because it is as transparent, as lacking in ‘style,’ as I could make it. And that, brothers and sisters, is where I want to be right now. I want to be writing pretty words that don’t show. I want you to mainline the story, to feel yourself inside the characters, have the experience of living with them jack right into your system and run away with your brain without you needing to appreciate how clever and articulate and wordcrafty I’ve been.

And now I’m just so in love with writing again that I can’t see straight. Words in my head all the time. It’s just astonishing.

Which means you may not see a story quite like “Shine” from me again, at least not anytime soon. It’s a good story, and there’s a lot of truth in it — it rings clear to me (see my essay with Nicola about writing if you want to know more about what that means) — but it’s a chronicle of a journey, not the journey itself. And right now as a writer I want a more direct experience when I write and when you read. I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon (and there’s a little taste of “Dangerous Space” for you).

I hope that the sense of ’emotional movement’ you’ve described will always be a part of what I do. And as for your question about Joanne — well, if you have come away from the story wondering what she’ll do, caring about what choice she makes, then it’s your story now to continue as you see fit. I’ve talked before about my belief that once the story is out of my head and in yours, that I as the writer don’t have any particular authority over how you should read it. But if you’d like to know what I think, then here it is: yes to all of it. Yes, it’s acceptance. Yes, it’s searching. It’s Joanne acknowledging that this may be all she ever has of her dreams, so she’d better have it with all the gusto she can. And it’s also Joanne continuing to want the rest. Does the knowledge that she will never be a rock star keep her from being the best rock star she can be? I don’t think so.

Screen and short stuff

Long time, no pint.

Congratulations on finishing your FIRST screenplay! This is very exciting stuff! What’s the title? What is it about? I’m working on a family drama called A Simple Kind of Man. Did you happen to catch the Screenwriting Expo in October?

Out of left field and rambling (grin)… Perhaps I should stop by more often and hoist back a few with everyone else?

Cheers!

Lindsey

It’s feeling like old home week in the virtual pub (grin). Glad to see you again, Lindsey.

I’m excited about the screenplay, and wish I could talk more about it right now –” but it’s Out In The World as we speak, and I think it’s best to let that process play out before I start slinging details. Although right now it seems that everyone has left Hollywood for the holidays so the process is that the screenwriter sits and waits.

Not that I’m bored. I’m working on a new short story for a collection that I hope will be out next spring –” I’ll post details as soon as the publisher and I have a contract. For those who follow my short fiction, the new story is about Mars (a character about whom I have written before, not the planet). I love the Mars stories and am delighted to be living inside one again for a while.

I’m also working on new screenplays. Regardless of what happens with the one that’s under submission right now, I’m serious about walking through this door that’s been opened for me –” and that means plunging right into the next thing. I’ve got some ideas. Now I have to swim. Robert Frost said in a poem that “work is play for mortal stakes,” and that has never been more true for me than now. I’m having serious fun, fierce fun, and the personal stakes are very high for me.

So, now that I’ve been so annoying uninformative (laughing), can I ask about A Simple Kind of Man? What’s it about, and are you enjoying working on it? What’s it like for you?

I didn’t go to Screenwriting Expo, although I scoured the panel descriptions with longing and would love to be there sometime in the next couple of years, god willing and the creek don’t rise. I’m also dying to attend one of the three-week courses of TheFilmSchool here in Seattle –” intensive learning experiences work pretty well for me as a rule. The last six months have certainly been intense. I’ll look forward to talking more about it when I can.

How’s Bonnie? I remember her quote, “Love and work are both four-letter words” every time I feel like throwing something I’ve written against the wall–¦.

Back to serious fun. Happy Holidays to all.

Hope and happiness

I had been vacillating on whether to come on board and say hey ever since before last week’s Election Night. Reading this decided me.

Your more than gracious response to my own rant after the 2004 election came back to me unexpectedly in the days running up to this year’s election. I found a printout I had made of my rant and your response while cleaning the house and carried it with me as a talisman against the crippling fear of a repeat disappointment. I was terrified before the election, but only vaguely cognizant of what exactly I was afraid. Corruption, stolen elections, a continuation of the triumph of the politics of fear and hatred and lies. What you wrote about hope had to serve as a placeholder for my foundering hope for a few days until the election, which turned out much better than I had been hoping. So thank you again!

But this post has given me more food for words, as follows:

— First, I haven’t read Tracy Goss’ book, but based on your description, I think I’ve had a similar first reaction to yours. It just doesn’t read for me. If I’m following you, Goss’ point is that acceptance of hopelessness leads to freedom from fear and, as you quoted “…the opportunity, instead of giving up, to play with full engagement…” But without hope, what motivation does one have to show up in the first place? Why be fully engaged with no hope? In other words, if one does not have a ‘hope’ for a certain outcome in a given endeavor, why bother engaging in the endeavor at all? What is hope if not inherent motivation, a reason to go on? Maybe I’m splitting semantic hairs here, but acceptance of life as it is does not require for me letting go of hope. To let go of hope is, in a strong sense, letting go of life itself.

— Second, but relatedly, you ask “are hope and fear two sides of the same coin?” The metaphor implies that they are opposites, but I don’t think that’s true — I don’t feel that fear is the opposite or absence of hope, or vice versa. They co-exist, in some cases very closely, but I don’t see it as a 1-1 correlation. While they are sometimes connected, I don’t feel that the amount of hope one has directly determines the amount of fear one has (as if one could quantify emotion!) And I certainly don’t believe one must lose hope to conquer fear. I’ve seen too many folks conquer fear as a direct result of having hope to believe that.

— Finally, you ended with a wonderful Castaneda quote, which reminded me that I often use quotes as a source of solace, or joy, or hope. And one of the more hopeful new quotes I’ve encountered in the past year, one, in fact, I’ve often repeated to friends, family, co-workers, goes like this:

“I still believe in plans, but more and more, I think it’s a Plan B world.”
— Kelley Eskridge

Keep passing the open windows (—John Irving)

Adam D.

Hey Adam,

Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking about you at the elections, as a matter of fact. There was a certain amount of anxiety in our house too…. and at the same time, I believed it would turn out the way it did. Very gratifying, and in some sense so predictable. The wheel turns.

I can recommend the Goss book, if your definition of “recommend” includes wanting to throw a book at the wall but then being compelled to read it again just because…. And I don’t think I’ve represented it accurately (maybe not even coherently). But there is something about it that speaks to me lately.

I don’t think it’s so much that she is asking people to not bring hope to the party. Or maybe she is asking that — and maybe the real issue is what does each of us mean by hope, anyway? I think she’s saying that many people having a notion of hope as a kind of crutch, almost as a blueprint for “here’s how my life should be, and I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue or until my life turns out this way.” I think what she’s trying to say is that kind of hope can hold us back, because instead of desire without expectation, we tie ourselves to a particular vision of how things should be, and then regard any variance from that as “failure.” And then our hope is “lost.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately. It’s been said that all anger is the result of failed expectations. I know that most personal conflict I’ve experienced comes down to disappointed expectations — I “expect” that strangers will honor the social compact and not cut me off on the highway, or be rude to me at Starbucks. I expect that my closest people will always be wise, kind, and respectful of my little personal quirks (along with being able to read my mind). Et cetera. I know that my greatest mistakes with other people happen when I write scripts in my head for how things should go in any particular interaction — and then discover, much to my surprise, that everyone else has failed to learn their lines, and in fact aren’t acting in my little play at all.

I have not let go of hope — in a big way, I’m all about hope and always will be. But I’ve been astonished by some of the things I’ve been able to do in the last year by releasing hope and instead just doing the thing I yearn to do, or the thing that needs to be done (which are sometimes the same and sometimes not). I don’t hope for the thing to work out in any particular way. I just do it and see what happens. I don’t assume that it’s “good” only if it works out the way I want it to. I don’t know how to explain it better right now, but it sure is making me think (grin).

I agree that hope and fear are not opposites. And I don’t think hope is in any way a bad thing. But I believe that hope gives fear a doorway into our lives. We fear the loss of what we hope for. Is it better sometimes to live without hope? Is it possible to live without hope and at the same time to not be “hopeless”? I dunno (scratches head).

Although, actually, that’s not true. I do know, in some ways. I no longer hope for a cure for MS, for example. I look at Nicola and give great thanks for my life with her. I don’t look at Nicola and think that if we only do the right thing, make the right choices, if only we are good, that she’ll be without MS someday. I no longer regard MS as something that might go away. It never will. Is that hopeless? Or is that simply moving hope out of the way so we can get on with our lives?

This doesn’t mean I never hope. I just don’t want hope for a particular thing to define my happiness.

I think I’m starting to climb down my own navel here. Apologies. And these are real questions, not rhetorical ones. Comments welcome.

I’m glad you like the Plan B quote. I still stand by it (grin). Here’s another one I like:

— Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
— How?
— I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
— Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love

The conversation

Hi, I saw the reply about you and Nic separating and was wondering, what makes your relationship work? It’s very rare to hear about couples succeeding in the long term — and you two still seem very happy, passionate, and seem to genuinely like each other. 🙂

Also, (if it’s not too personal) I was wondering why you chose not to have children? By the way, I love both yours and Nicola’s work and can’t wait until “Always” comes out next April and the “Solitaire” movie is out! Thanks for everything!

Candace

I’m not the goddess of all relationship wisdom (that would be Carolyn Hax). I don’t know that I have anything profound to say about it except that we love each other and we make it work. And that I think most of the credit belongs to Nicola.

There’s a story in a book called Fierce Conversations about a “typical marriage” (Is there such a thing? Who knew?) in which a husband wonders why his wife keeps wanting to talk about their relationship all the time. Couldn’t they just have one giant conversation about it every once in a while and move on? And then it finally occurs to him that the conversation isn’t about the relationship: the conversation is the relationship.

Nicola and I have a lot of conversations. Some are more fun than others. Some are very, very hard, but I know down to my toes it is better to have them than to keep silent. Knowing this has changed my criteria for important relationships. I don’t offer intimacy of any kind to people who aren’t willing to have the conversation.

We don’t have children because Nicola has multiple sclerosis, and because we decided that we would rather focus on taking care of each other than taking care of a child. I believe if we had a child, I wouldn’t have much of a life right now beyond service to the needs of others, and that’s not enough for me. Nicola and I would maybe not have had time for all those conversations (and beer, and writing, and exploring, and adventures…). I don’t regret any of that. I do occasionally mourn the lack of relationship with a teenage and adult child –- I think I’d have enjoyed that very much, found it very rewarding. No choice without loss.

We’re looking forward to Always (a fun, fine, fierce book, wonderful stuff). And wouldn’t it be fun to have the lights go down and Solitaire come up? I get a lot of pleasure imagining it….