Not only did my first major magazine feature go to print this week, but I got some exciting news about a new opportunity - and no, it's not a "flip this house" workshop in which I'll learn to become a millionaire after a two hour pep rally. I was invited to be one of 100 women at the AROHO Women's Writer's Retreat this year at the Ghost Ranch.
AROHO stands for A Room of Her Own - as in, the absolute most important thing a woman writer needs to further her own career, as stated by Virginia Woolf. The Ghost Ranch is the former home of Georgia O'Keefe. Yes, I did write back to confirm it wasn't a clerical error and that it was really ok if I showed up there. Confirmed twice: they're letting me in. I apply and submit proposals to oodles of stuff, and mostly get rejected because that's just the way the process is. Competition is tight, better luck next time.
I wrote my first book under a vow of poverty and living in a really crappy apartment with two roommates, Princess Shy and DJ Needles, in South Central Los Angeles. My bed was a stack of five mattresses that Princess Shy got from Goodwill. I spent a lot of time alone and watching Law & Order on a 27" television and I wrote. I couldn't sell it to an agent or publisher, though. Total bummer.
I wrote the first half of my second book living in a friend's spare room and paying her $200 in rent because that's all I could afford and she was cool with that. I slept on an air mattress the first month, and spent my days in a coffee shop where the barrista showed up in thematic costumes each day. It made me feel legit because it was almost like a workplace. I had a schedule and a place to go. I spent $1.75 each day on a beverage and then sat for 5-6 hours and poured myself out onto the page. That's a thrill. There's nothing like it.
I wrote the second half of that book making $9 an hour taking the elderly to the grocery store and to doctor's appointments. Sometimes, I had to clean their bathrooms. Once, I had to take out someone's diapers. That day sucked because she took all kinds of weird old person medication and that bin smelled like something I'd never smelled before. I was "able" to do that because I have an amazing husband who supported finishing the book, making next to nothing so that I would have the free time to get it done, edit it, agonize over how awful it was, edit again, send it to a few friends, and then spend two years trying to get it published and being roundly rejected via email, post, and even face-to-face. I'm not telling all of this since "now I've made it" - because, like, no way. I'm not even close, but this week I have a glimmer of hope. My application was 30 pages of my new book (my third), and they accepted me. I'm still a big loser who is totally nowhere in her career, but I am really excited anyway. I don't get into exclusive things - not even bathrooms at nice hotels - so this is a big deal for me. They admitted, on their website, that they let me in and they used my real name, not the fake name under which I open credit cards and buy delicate figurines of fairies and vampire fan fiction. This is fucking progress, yo.
I really couldn't do any of this if I wasn't married to someone who understood that it was important to me and who agreed that we could jointly make sacrifices so that the space for me to write was there. I'm pretty lucky. 13 days = year 3!!
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