Batteries Included

By Mary Margret Daughtridge

On Wednesday August 3, I was so deep in denial that even though I was about to drown, I hadn’t noticed the water was up to my chin. And rising.

I waked up feeling unusually bad—even worse than the terrible, which had become my new normal in the last three months. When I checked my blood pressure and pulse, the BP was 88/54 and my pulse was 41.

Despite visits to cardiologists, tests, etc., it still never occurred to me that something was wrong—I mean seriously wrong—with my heart.

Fortunately, I already had a doctor’s appointment that day and as the CMA took my blood pressure I thought I should ask her what the red zone for BP and pulse was. Like how low did it have to be before I called 911? With Spock -like detachment, as if she’d never pondered the question before, she turned round Hershey’s Kiss brown eyes on me and after a second said, “I don’t know. Let me ask the doctor.”

Ten minutes later I was wheeled into the ER where, unprecedented in my experience, the clerk waved me on and said he’d fill out the forms and take my insurance card later. I had never before been ushered into the presence of the High Priests of Medicine without proof of ID and insurance coverage.

As the minion rolled me past cubbies and glass-enclosed rooms and curtained-areas, I saw all the patients, and in a world-changing identity switch, for the first time I was not a guest, not a visitor – I was not, as always before, there to help or support them. I was them.

Secure in my denial, I was a little ticked off when all the doctors, nurses, PAs, orderlies, and even the housekeeping staff assumed I was being admitted for a pacemaker.

Fast forward: today is Friday and I have a pacemaker. In case you didn’t know, pacemakers are about the size of a fifty cent piece and the price of a new car.

Romance writers are concerned with affairs of the heart. We describe and ascribe feelings, states of being, and even truth as arising from or about the heart. Think of all the ways we use it: heartfelt, softhearted... Linguistically, courage and heart derive from the same root word. A lover is a heartthrob.

I find myself wondering, where does a heart that needs to be wired to a battery fit in? I pondered this little philosophical conundrum with a friend, also a romance writer, who suggested I make friends with my pacemaker and name it. I decided in the best romantic tradition to call it my beloved. Like the romance writer I am, I named it mon coeur.

And one day after surgery to insert the tiny device, I feel better than I have in a couple of years. My friends and loved ones look at me and exclaim, “At last, you’re back!”

And I am. This time, batteries included.

Process in Progress

Okay. Another learning experience.

I didn't post here early this morning. I thought I "knew" where the work would take me today.

I rearranged the order of one sentence, changed the punctuation of another and added exactly one word--all in the space of three hours.

Productivity, that is not.

So what happened?

Two things. Okay three.

(1) I was stymied by the time line.

I've never been good at time line in everyday life. Is it any surprise I don't work well with it in plotting? Now that I force myself to look back at the two previous books, I understand the the time line didn't solve itself until I was more than three quarters of the way through. I can't see how many weeks or days I have ahead of me. The only way I've ever been successful with time line was to go to the goal and stepwise work backwards.

In plotting terms, the only thing that's going to work well for me is to write the story and accept that the time line will need to be adjusted--maybe even invented--after the story is written. I'm hereby setting a rule. No worry about about time line until I've written "The end."

(2) I was floundering trying to figure out what Riley's "problem" is. Here's the right question, what problem does David need? I invented Riley in the first place because JJ needs him. For economy it would also be good if Davy can learn a lesson from him. Which leads me to the third way my thinking was un-useful.

(3) I know how I plot. I must go from emotional stage to emotional stage--I can't think of things to happen until I understand the emotional stage the thing will take the characters through.

I understand my end goal. Davy and JJ must go from the decision to get married--seeing marriage as a way to defend themselves from unchosen fate, move through all the stages of falling in love complicated by being forced to adjust to each other at the same time, and finally to commit to be married.

Unchosen fate. Davy and JJ enter into marriage as a way to sheild themselves from the pressures life is putting on them to change. But they have a deal. Living up to it institutes a series of changes and new experiences. The new experiences take them through the changes, some of which they choose, some they resist, until we get to the deepest part when they must make the deep choice to live or die.