So, I was thinking of my first typewriter this morning and the place that I lived when I was so much in love. That really big love, of one’s twenties. The one that you never get over, maybe. All loves are different in life. Anyway I used to have this really old typewriter when I was going to college. It was a Smith Corona electric portable, and I lived on a street that faced the ocean behind this door. I had transferred to UCSB, and I was really in love. This book I’m writing is about that time, and is a means of putting things in perspective in terms of the New Adult genre. Pretty hard to go through the door again, actually. I wrote a flasher for ERWA about it, that I think they wanted for the Christmas edition, and today I am going to write the love scene, one of many for the next week. Trying to capture that time as an artist does, if I can.
I liked the way those keys of that typewriter struck the blank sheets of paper. The letters made an impression that was physical, and in many ways far more romantic than what we use now?
So, anyway there was this door on a street called Red Rose Way.
And the thing is, that a writer has all these doors inside — and so we are always opening one of them to get at the text or the context of things — and a lot of that is memory — good and bad, and so today I’m writing the good as best I can because later, by the end of this week and into the next I will be writing the crux which is going to be very hard to do.
But I know the love scenes inside and out because I can remember them as if they were yesterday. I really can. It’s just a matter of going in that door.
I’m at 28,456 words now. That’s 100 pages.
So, I have Steinbeck at my side — his “Cannery Row.”
And I’m going to open the book and see a sentence he did on that page, because he was once on page 100 too.
Wish me luck!
I still have the little white doves I’m going to be writing, in this scene.
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 