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.