Back in the saddle

It's been a tough summer. Unrelenting heat in the notheast has sapped the energy of everyone. Too hot to work outside, too hot to work up enough motivation to do anything, even write.

All of this is just a poor excuse for not blogging. Worse than that, no writing at all. My second book of poetry, Oliver Twists in America, did finally get published. It is a short collection of poems written over ten years ago describing the kids in placement at the residential treatment center where I worked as psychologist. But no new writing since Finding Jackson, my sequel to Shrink.

So, why now am I suddenly motivated to finish Nobody, a second sequel? A discussion with Abe (identified as Irv in Shrink) about our recollections of growing up in New York City, me in the Bronx and he in Brooklyn, led to his observation that people become more interested in the lives of their parents and grandparents around age fifty. I mentioned that in my early years of professional writing I would save my published papers in folders meant for my children. They were never rally interested in reading them and eventually I destroyed the folders. Even my semi-autobiographoical novel Shrink aroused bad feelings in my daughter because my character and alter ego, Morrie, said spomething unkind about my first wife, her mother. "That's temporary," Abe advised. "Wait until they are a little older. They will become more interested in what you've had to say about yourself. Keep writing."

I returned to the manuscript this morning, which was sitting on my computer,untouched and without an ending. Morrie is asked to treat an man with intractible pain in his arm and no neurological evidence of a cause. In the course of treatment the patient reveals that he is Confederate Civil War Commander Stonewall Jackson, accidentally killed by his own men at Chancellorsvile, but now reincarnated. I had painted myself into a corner in my story about a year ago and put it aside. Now I must extracate my character and solve a crime. In Nobody Morrie is the victim of the penultimate identity theft. In attempting to find the culprit and make things right, Morrie's clinical acumen and emotional resources are seriously challenged. Now I've got to help him find his way. We'll just have to see how this turns out.