From A Place Of...

...Suffering.

That's where Drain began last winter.

My daughter Daney, almost ten years old, was stuck in a cluster of grand mal seizures. She was tired. She was sore. She missed a lot of school.

It was terrible, watching this kind, bright, lovely girl suffer.

I worried how she'd get through it. I worried how I'd get through it.

Of course, I had stopped going to writing group. I had stopped writing.

Until Christy (who knows I'll try anything she tells me) challenged me to come up with a few new pages. Which, somehow, I did: a story I thought had nothing to do with anything. A story that ended up having everything to do with something--of seeing suffering, without being able to stop it.

That first draft, it was rough. I was writing it on two hours of sleep, between ambulance rides and hospital visits and EEGs. I was was writing it with Daney tucked into bed beside me.

The voice came out hollow, realistic but cautious, sad, and slow.

Exactly the way I felt during those dark winter months.

What I Learned So Far At The Writing Conference

It's been 11 months, and I'm at the same conference in the same hotel. I had the same first dinner at Pasha Grill, only this time, author and wonderful human Mitali Perkins was there, too, and we were talking about gyros.

It's been 11 months since the last SCBWI Western Washington Conference, and paranormal is dominating, and voice is still the deciding factor in publication.

The same Starbucks coffee is dripping from the same endless vats, and Kim Baker is still running around, making sure the keynote speakers are all wired and starting on time.

It's mostly the same, here, after 11 months, but it's incredibly different, too.

Because last night, when I stepped onto the Redmond Town Center cobblestones, I realized how much of my life has changed.

After what was undoubtedly the toughest year of 39 for me, I learned more than I thought I would here--just by getting out of the same car: that I am enormously blessed that my husband really loves me, that our daughter might be sick, but that inside she's the same girl she's always been. I learned that if I never publish, there are four amazing people in a little gray cottage in Ashland who think I'm brilliant and talented and can fry up a serious pancake. I learned that, though I may be missing the three-book deal, I'm a survivor because I came through 333 days of a lot of crap, and I'm still breathing, at least, and maybe even smiling a little bit.

And after all that, I can definitely twist up my plot a little, as HarperCollins Editor Jordan Brown suggested today. I can put on my striped hat and let creativity free flow, like former Farrar Straus & Giroux editor Lisa Graff said. I can take big risks with character and plot, as Egmont Funny Girl Elizabeth "L-Bone" Law urged.

I can and I will do all of those things, but I'll hug my handsome husband more, too, and I'll tell my daughter how smart and strong and pretty she is, and I'll kick the soccer ball around with my boys, and I'll let my laundry pile up to the ceiling.

I'll be glad--I'll be grateful--that I have a gift--that no novel could possibly give me.

WWYK

I can thank my aunt for the serious interest my second manuscript, Drain, is generating. She'd been telling me, Write What You Know.

My first book was about everything I didn't really know: boys, Division I recruiting, crime. It was interesting to write, and I had a focused macroperspective, but I had to talk to a lot of boys, especially athletes, and coaches, and judges, and probation officers, and criminals to be able to deliver it.

Afterwards, I wrote Drain during the hardest three months of my life. Of Daney's life.

Newly diagnosed with epilepsy, the nine-year-old had launched into a long serious of daily grand-mal seizures. She was ambulanced and hospitalized and tested and treated. And even with the medicine, she's had two more seizures.

Now, Dave and I are not strangers to tragedy. Since we were 18, we've pulled each other through deaths and sickness and surgeries and other things that will wait for another post.

But this one killed me; I couldn't get past seeing Daney shake and stop breathing.

My writing group let me take two weeks off. And when I came back, crying, with Daney all loaded up with books and sketch pads and Calico Critters because I couldn't let her out of my sight, they gave me seven days to return with something.

I told them there was no way.

But the next Wednesday, I brought Daney again. And the first few pages of Drain.

I didn't really know what I was writing: the story of a Seer. Her voice was hollow. She was all alone, despite all the people around her. She suffered over not being able to change things.

It was starting to sound pretty familiar.

I didn't know what I was writing, but I was Writing What I Knew.

Next time, I would love to write a quirky book: lighthearted and funny.

It's not in me right now.

But it will be.

Where It Came From

Daney's neurologist has had to convince Dave and me that our daughter's recently-diagnosed epilepsy is genetic.

We've told him there's no one in either family, no one, with epilepsy. We're sure.

But I've done my own digging, (of course), and I've found that quirky things which both families do have are definitely related to the condition.

For example, Dave and his brother have had years of sleep terrors. Like Daney's seizures, these terrors occur at night, during exhaustion.

My family has a history of migraines, which are also tied to epilepsy. The National Migraine Association claims that "both disorders are characterized by paroxysmal, transient alterations of neurologic function." I think that means that it's the brain that causes these short, frequent episodes. Which brings me to the prefix "epi": a medical term derived from Greek that means pretty much any preposition.

Julius Caesar, Napolean, and Vincent Van Gogh all had epilepsy, but we aren't related to any of them.

The creepiest connection comes from something I don't like to happen, or think about, let alone bring to the public domain. It's this weird thing that happens to me after I do yoga, when I'm all tired out and laying there, breathing, in sivasena. After a few minutes, when my mind is clear (for once), the world behind my eyelids begins spinning a little, then a little more. Then it feels like my spirit or something is pulled out of my body; it starts from my head, and just rises for a second or two, hovering above me, until it it sucks right back in.

I know.

It's crazy.

I never thought it was really real. I thought maybe I was falling asleep.

But a New York Times article published in 2006 about a study in Geneva reports this occurrence (what some people, but not me, call an out-of-body experience) as a current flow, related to epilepsy.

So, I'm learning that magical Daney, our only daughter who prays for peace and read the entire Harry Potter series in three weeks when she was nine, who plays Calico Critters with her little brother for hours, who sews pillows and writes letters, love notes, and stories, this girl is an unfortunate confluence of two families' neurological conditions.

I see now how her doctor can say her epilepsy is genetic.

Which doesn't help as I hold that shaking girl in my arms, or as I watch her run in a field and wonder if she's getting too tired. It doesn't help when she has to stay up all night for a seizure-induced EEG, or when she has to have a blood test, or when I watch her sleep, zonked out by the medicine.

And it doesn't help at night, when I hear her mattress creak or crunch.

All this, after all, is just the where the condition came from. It's not why Daney got it, or how, or when, if ever, it will all be behind her.

How it helps is that I tell myself that Daney's epilepsy has come from her families, families which also have otherwise good health and happiness and strength and coping skills. She knows all that's there, and I know it, too, and that's how we get through it.