Waiting…waiting…waiting!

To hear from my agent about the hajj novel.

I don’t know, that last revision really took it out of me.

I feel like I’ve been wrung out like a dish rag and someone’s using me to sop up a spill.

In the meantime I’ve been starting a new novel–began the first chapter today.

What a change! Light-hearted and funny–a mid-grade. Really needed that!

And I’m watching a LOT of stand up comedy to absorb the timing and style of it.

And know what? Most of it isn’t very funny.

Might make you crack up a bit, but it’s definitely not memorable!

It’s so pointless.

Something I noticed–the better the writing is going, the worse the blogging gets.

I’m reading over my sentences here and I sound like I slapped them together incoherently.

That’s what I feel like.

Incoherent.

Tired and incoherent.

I did get the reader’s report for the Hajj novel and it’s amazing!

And the fact that my agent sent it to me means that most likely that’s the way they’re going to feel about it, but I never celebrate until it’s official.

Won’t know that till this weekend some time what my agent actually thinks.

Can’t wait.

But in the mean time I MUST.

On another note, went to a farewell party for a dear friend of mine.

All the ladies there were so young.

I felt like a dinosaur.

And I realized right then that my seventeen year old self would have felt like my worst nightmare had come true.

When I was seventeen I vowed that I never wanted to grow ‘old’.

And I’m not talking about aging. I actually rejoiced when I got my first grey hairs.

That doesn’t bother me so much.

It was the thought of getting ‘old’ in my mind that scared me.

I just look at these young women with their neuroses and their silliness and I think to myself–I used to feel like that and I didn’t think it was silly back then.

Who’s right?

Me at seventeen or me now? And I can’t help thinking that it’s me now.

And yet in some ways I have less ‘power’ now.

At this same farewell party, this lady came in, all dolled up, quite full of herself. She greeted the three ladies next to me and somehow skipped over me.

I didn’t even notice–too busy with my thoughts–till another lady pointed it out, and nudged her to greet me too, like she’d given me some kind of sleight.

And then when she absent-mindedly did greet me, I realized that she HAD given me a sleight. I just hadn’t noticed.

She had dismissed me as a frumpy old middle-aged lady not worth her stylish notice.

And I filed that little scene away in my imagination, like I always do when some curious little scenario plays out.

Who knows if I’ll ever use it in a book.

I end up using the oddest little things.

I remember visiting an old friend of mine five days before she died of leukemia. Seeing the way her brother was holding her hand.

It hardly seemed to impact me at the time, and yet when I was doing my latest revision of the Hajj novel, that one moment of barely noticing something, bloomed to life and became a poignant moment that really makes the scene.

When I was younger I would have felt so insulted by the way this lady treated me. I would have gotten all riled up and thought to myself, ‘who the hell does she think she is?’.

Funny how age can change your perspective of these things.

Now I just look at her and feel sorry for her.

And think that she’s really rather silly.

And the conceited part of me thinks that she really didn’t know what she was missing when she passed me over. *g*

Oh subhanallah! I shouldn’t be so conceited!

But unfortunately I am.

Maybe in another ten years I’ll grow out of it.