My Summer Secret

The Beach. A few hours on the beach and suddenly I can write again. That is my summer secret. When I can’t write. When I cannot find the words. When I am not sure I will ever write another sentence I go to the beach.

It does not have to be an exotic beach that requires a plane ride. It does not have to require the three hour drive to my favorite beaches in Amagansett. It is as easy as the hour ride to Long Beach.

The sound of the ocean, the smell of salt water, an umbrella, a chair, a cooler with refreshments and within a few hours I can write again.

I don’t come to the beach to write. I come to sit and to read someone else’s writing. Not the newspaper. Too depressing. Fiction. Memoir. Escapist literature. And from the words of someone else I am left inspired.

About a month ago I had a conversation with a very successful French Canadian businessman who remarked how ridiculous the hours are Americans work. He found it incredulous that the corporate work ethic is this country does not see the benefit in breaks, that they miss the point that often it is those times when we completely remove ourselves from those crammed schedules, without phone or email access that we get our very best ideas.

It would have been considered sacrilegious back in my corporate days had I ever suggested to anyone I worked for that perhaps what we needed to shake things up, to find our creativity, that new idea, the one we were looking for, was an afternoon on the beach.

My summer secret would have been seen as bad work ethic, the culture too attached to the idea that only constant motion will propel things forward. When the truth is that the separation is the thing that makes everything look so much clearer.

Now that my secret's out, Beach anyone ?

Taking Note: Maryann McFadden

By now, you all know that I love inspiring stories. I continue to be amazed at how many I learn of and the ways in which I trip over them.

I found Maryann McFadden on Facebook. As I generally do when I make new friends I look to see who their friends are and any commonalities I might share. Which is how I found Maryann. An author with a long background in selling, in her case real estate, I sensed a connection. So I friended her. I also immediately went out and got myself a copy of her first book, The Richest Season. (released in paperback in July)

As it turns out, The Richest Season is a story of reinvention. The main character, Joanna (no kidding) is off on a reinvention journey. The influences of Corporate America play a role in her story as well as that of her estranged husband, Paul. A third character, Grace, is interwoven to illustrate just how short life really is.

The Richest Season is one of those books, you really don’t want to end, taking place in a location that made me want to get in my car and drive to Pawley's Island immediately. The writing is the kind that assures you will read everything else you can get your hands on by this author.

So go get yourself a copy. But before that, let me tell you what I learned about Maryann’s own story.

She always wanted to write, but like many of us with a true passion, got sidetracked. And when she did put attention on her writing, she suffered the rejection that is all too common in today’s publishing environment. Good, fresh voices are also seen as big risks. While as a writer we may be out of the daily four walls of the office cubicle, the decision making process that occurs there still affects us. Good new talent is often passed for what might be seen as a safer bet or a bigger name. In other words, more revenue for the company. If you follow the publishing world, you know that often results in huge advances that don’t necessarily pay out.

Maryann McFadden got tired of rejection and decided to self publish as well as self market. The Indies loved her and that took her to the agent who got her a 2 book deal with Hyperion. Her second book, So Happy Together was just released in hardcover.

Maryann’s story, both her fiction and her real life inspire me. She had a dream, she held on to it, and it was realized. Perhaps not in exactly the way she had planned, but then the Universe is like that. It always delivers. Our job is to hold to our vision and detach from the route it takes us to get there.

In The Still Of The Night

I don’t miss that feeling of fear I used to get when I would wake up in the middle of the night. Whether it was 2AM or 4AM, I would panic. I am not talking about those moments where you open your eyes for a split second and roll back to sleep. I’m talking those wide awake experiences, where even when you try, your eyelids refuse to close.

I would panic because I needed my sleep. I needed it to function through my eight, sometimes more hour days. And because of that panic I would not get up. No matter how much I tossed and turned I would pull the covers closer and wait. Wait for sleep to descend again.

I am one of those people who needs her sleep. I can function pretty well on 6 to 7 hours, but it has to be uninterrupted, good sleep. Without it, by early afternoon I can feel as badly and as hungover as I would if I had drank two bottles of wine by myself, not to mention cranky.

I would lay there, thinking ahead to how tired I would be and how little I would accomplish if I did not get more sleep. I would pray silently and offer thanks in advance that by the time the alarm did go off I would have gotten another precious hour in.

Often it was at those moments that my next sentence in my book would pop in. At first I would ignore them. Mostly because writing was not yet my day job. My day job was paying the bills and it took precedence. And I needed my sleep to function.

After a while I caught on that if I did not write them down, they would escape into the ether, only to be seen again if I was very, very lucky. So I would keep a note pad next to me, scribble down the words and hope I would be able to understand my own handwriting in the morning.


But that was then and this is now. Yesterday when I found myself awake at 4AM, a brand new week in front of me, I lingered. It was Monday. I needed my rest. Then ideas started to rush forth. For a blog. For the next sections in my new novel.



I got up. I turned on the computer, made coffee and in the dark of the early morning, before the sun started to rise on the East Side of Manhattan, I started to write. I didn’t worry about my sleep. I didn’t dread the possibility that hungover feeling would start to creep up. Because if it did, when it did, I could just go take a nap.

Confessions Of A Teenage Typer

I cheated. I confess. I cheated in typing class in high school. I was thinking about this the other day when I was doing some free writing, morning pages a la The Artists Way and I realized I was not looking at the keyboard as I had back then but instead at the framed watercolor print of Aspen Mountain that hangs over my desk. I realized that while I had cheated in high school, I had somehow along the way managed to learn where each letter sits on a keyboard and can indeed type without looking.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to master this skill back then. I took the class only because I had to. It was a requirement. You needed it to graduate.

The classroom resembled one of those old office typing pools you only see now in black and white movies, row after row of desks, each with a big clunky manual Smith Corona sitting on it. Electric typewriters, while in use at the time, had not made it into this NYC public school class. At the front of the room, above the blackboard a replica of the keyboard hung. We were instructed to keep our eyes there and not look down. This was going to help us learn.

But I cheated. I would look at the keyboard in front of me every time the teacher turned her back. I hated it. I didn’t care if I ever learned to type much less how fast. I only wanted to pass.

Back then I didn’t see any need to learn to type with any degree of proficiency. Yes, there were term papers and projects that I had to type but beyond that my view was typing was for secretaries. And while I had little idea what I wanted to do at the time I knew that was not my career path. It sounded far too traditional for a woman of my feminist leaning mind. Apparently I was not alone in that thought since today we call such individuals administrative assistants.

So I cheated. I didn’t envision a world in which one day we would all be sitting affixed to a computer screen no matter what our job title. I couldn’t imagine that I would communicate with friends and business associates as much through email as I would phone. It never occurred to me that the keyboard would eventually be committed to my memory out of necessity.

So I cheated. I hated when I made a mistake. Hated whiteout and correct-o-tape and all those antique accoutrements that accompanied the days before computers became commonplace.
I hated the noise of the machines and the lining up of carbon paper between sheets if you needed to make a copy.

I cheated. And still somewhere along the line I learned where all the letters sit. I can type and look at the screen in front of me or the blue and green wash of the town of Aspen. I can think and write and not agonize over where each key sits. Mistakes can be corrected as easily as hitting a delete button or spell check.

I confess. I cheated. But I still don’t care how fast I type. Only what I type.