the zone

A friend of mine recently birthed her second baby. Like many new mothers, she is housebound by breast feeding and new baby exhaustion, and is living vicariously through her laptop. Yesterday, she sent me an email enquiring after this blog. She requested an update.  I admit I have been rather lax about blogging these past few weeks, but I can think of nothing to write other than an explanation for my absence.

I’ve been rewriting my second novel for the fourteenth (maybe fifteenth) time. During all the other drafts, I felt adrift, but this time it’s different.  I have, after five years of struggling with the flow, finally reached the place I like to call the zone. The zone is like the surge of endorphins a marathon runner experiences, when the burning pain in  muscles magically disappears and the rhythmic act of placing one foot in front of the other sends you into a trance state.  Colour blurs, the air funnels up your nostrils and you can taste the wind rushing by. Your mind is blank, your body focussed.

In the long process of writing a novel, the endorphin rush is cerebral but it quickens your pulse nonetheless. The rush comes when the strands of the story pull together,  the characters you’ve worked so hard to carve out of the air seem to act on their own, their voices ring in your ears as if they’re real people standing at your shoulder. In other words, you’ve created a fully formed world and you can see it. Your mind lives inside the realm of the novel, your consciousness splits, divides like a stem cell into the minds of your various characters. Your focus inward is so intense reality becomes iffy, an annoying distraction. Your loved ones irritate you with their need for conversation, kisses, hugs, fried eggs, lasagna, steamed veggies, fresh laundry.  Your own physical needs devolve into rounds of  two minute noodle dinners and slices of buttered stale bread for lunch. Tea sustains you. Calcium sucked from your toothpaste stops your bones from disintegrating.  The language centre of your brain sings, you no longer need to refer to Roget’s for synonyms, the words fly from your fingertips, coming as hard and fast as the complacent husband of a sexless marriage during a visit to a brothel.

Blogging, on the other hand, requires the mind to amble. In order to dream up posts, you must set your mind adrift, allow it to flit from thought to thought like a stoned roach looking for a tasty morsel to fatten into an idea.  It needs a kind of mental wanderlust at odds with the zone state. In the zone, the blog is just another disregarded loved one screaming for attention. However, I shall try to nurture this blog, if only to entertain you, Lisa, since you may be my only remaining follower after this period of neglect.