Date:         Sun, 21 Sep 1997 19:32:22 -0400
From: Cybele10@AOL.COM
Subject:      Filler: Brightly,
              with Feeling: Tell us about yourself and your interests, Cybel

Well, I always wanted to be a writer.

Even when I was telling myself that I didn't really want it, that I would
come back to it later, or maybe be a weekend novelist when I reached the age
of sixty after reaching my acceptable professional pinnacle in business, I
wanted to be a writer.

Then, about two years ago I bought Julia Cameron and actually did everything
she said. I am not sure why I did in the midst of everything else I was
doing, raising a toddler, finishing an MBA, creating a fairly respectable
career. I wrote pages and pages in endless unruled sketch pads, in red pen
and crayon and rollerball. I analyzed my character, examined my fury at
people who were already dead, and remembered that I wanted to be a writer,
but that there was always some fairly transparent obstacle that stopped me,
and made it more reasonable to concentrate on my real career, the one that
cut me regular checks.

So, one day, I began, instead of writing out my endless monologues and petty
furies, to create characters that were not me, to map out plots and record
dialog, wake up in the morning with several lines of poetry in my head,
appearing like a shiny quarter under my pillow.

Then things got really bad. I was burningly, almost pathologically resentful
of anything that took me away from the voice in my head, the real one, the
one that was writing all day long.  My next career step would have been a
promotion to VeePee. I imagined the dressing and driving on the tollways and
the radio in the morning giving me snatches of news of the world I had no
time to see. The smell of coffee warmers, accessorizing, elevators. The more
I imagined it the more heinous it sounded. I would sneak a   yellow legal pad
into my office and close the door, panicked, surreptitious. Stealing time.
Over a number of months I realized that while I had once thought I desired to
write, it was actually far stranger: there was something in process that
desired me, my attention, and everything else I was doing was an enormously
creative way to deny it.

Looking around wearily one day, I walked out on my job with the yellow legal
pad under my arm. This is literally true. I am in the process of writing a
novel that I began a year ago, the one that kept calling me at my office when
it should have respectful enough of my denial not to call me at work. I
rearranged my work space so that one whole room is devoted to books, my
journals piled high in one corner, and then, several weeks ago, began to rip
apart my closet, bagging and trashing everything I hated, the suits, the
nylons, the frilly things my mother buys me, all of it.

Tell me about yourself, Cybele.

I am too superstitious to say that I am never going back. I from a family of
older, perfumed divorced women who look at you amusedly and say, " Do you
want to hear God laugh?" But so far, since I have in two months burned every
single enemy bridge to the ground, it doesn't look likely.