How to Write a Book Out of Cancer, Love of Land, Fear of Death, and a Pandemic: Everyday Magic, Day 1,121

My new book, The Magic Eye: A Story of Saving a Life and a Place in the Age of Anxiety, is hitting the streets and bookshelves near you soon, starting with a July 17th launch at the Raven Bookstore (but wait, the books just arrived, and you can get your copy at the Raven or through this site). How did this happen? Read on, friends!

After the first surgery

1. Find out you have a cancer you never heard of so didn’t suspect, and in your eye no less! Luckily, you grabbed your notebook when the ophthalmologist said the C-word, so you're already writing.

2. Keep opening that notebook when you meet with all the other docs. “Wait! You don’t need to write it down. I will share all this in your medical records,” the ocular oncologist says. “She has to write it all down,” your husband and dear friend Ravi tell her. “She’s a writer.” Write that down too.

3. Meanwhile, back on the literal farm, keep naming turtles your friend Ben, a turtle researcher, sends you pictures of because the names and the turtles delight and distract you: Yoda, Leslie Jones, Harrison Ford, Gandhalf, Elie Weisel, and others. Also distract yourself by worrying about how you and your husband will save the land -- held in a Gordian knot of legalities -- where you live.

4. Write down all the details about your upcoming treatment, seemingly invented by extraterrestrials on a goodwill mission to earth. Imagine the small gold disk bejeweled with radioactive seeds sewn into the back of your eyeball to disarm the tumor. Freak out about this. Ask questions. Write down answers.

5. Tell people it’s not cool to call your wonky eye your bad eye. Start catching yourself doing the same and vow to not treat your eye like a bad child. Keep writing other metaphors about eyes, seeing, vision, insight, blindness, clarity, and all else you glimpse (so to speak).

6. Before, in between, and after all the surgeries, keep writing even though you can’t see the page well in the dark, and you need the dark because light hurts too much.

7. Keep a sleeve of Ritz crackers on hand, which take on new meaning as one of the greatest foods ever invented. Have iced water too because it’s mid-summer when you’re writing warbling words you don’t want to forget. Don’t worry about how you’ll later find the diagonal scrawl almost illegible.

8. Write about the wind, and when it gets really fierce, the tornado that came through, barely missing your land, or least the land you imagine could be yours, but upending so many other humans and houses.

9. When you and your husband get the call that your 35-year struggle (talks, plans, lawyers, phone calls, prayers to ancestors, more talks, files of notes and letters) to save this land is coming to a head, freak out some. Try to sleep, and failing that, write it down.

10. Write what the doctor says about the chances of the cancer spreading to liver and lungs and the necessity for quarterly scans for a decade. Gulp now, freak out later. Talk to your therapist about how you need to get over your claustrophobia in a hurry. Learn about exposure therapy (or the simple reality of doing scans so often, you sand away your fear).

First batch of books arrived today under the UPS tree

11. Mostly talk to your friends (especially your husband and children), who are and will always be your saving grace through everything.

12. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, which is really a farm that doesn’t actually grow food, speak to the lawyer, the banker, the financial advisor, the accountant. Make charts, lists, and consult amortization tables like a Ouija board. Fill your journals with notes.

13. Write your wishes, which come down to two big wishes: you want to live, you want this land to survive. Go outside and fling your words into the dark. Listen for whatever answers or might answer.

14. While sitting on the porch in the dark (your new favorite thing), listen while your husband researches all the different cicadas we can hear at twilight, then all the katydids we can hear at night. Write about them too.

15. Don’t write about the common wisdom that you'll lose the farm because money rules. Also, don't write about this cancer's mortality rate. Instead, ponder uncommon wisdom stunningly good outcomes.

16. Realize you could lose it all. This place. Your life. But write as if you won’t.

17. Invite in your personal assistant, who is you but far more organized and logical. Make outlines. Scrap outlines. Write and assemble rough drafts, finesse chapters, fill gaps. Wonder if it’s ever going to make sense.

18. Sit on a porch in Arkansas at a writers’ colony staring into the hot towers of rock ascending to high ledges where more trees live. Then turn back to your laptop. Cut and paste. Copy and save. Move the beginning to the end, then back, then return it to the end as an epilogue. Look up and see a large stag standing to the left of the porch staring at you staring at him. Remember to save your file.

19. All the times you don't and can't know if the story would work out on the side of life, write.

20. Ask your doctors if it's okay to use their names and if they prefer literary disguises. Cry when they say they trust you.

21. Send the book to many publishers, hit many walls or the yawning chasm of no response, even after a year. Get a few ludicrous rejections, like the one calling your book a self-help guide on addiction when the only thing you’re addicted to is life…..and chocolate of course.

22. Freak out about whether you’ll ever get this published, but in the meantime, keep revising the #%&# out of it. Read the revisions to your cat, who – like your husband – falls asleep but seems to like the words.

23. Find a press that says yes. Let the whole queendom of here and now rejoice with you.

24. Ask people to blurb the book (write endorsements). Cry when each one says, “but of course.” Cry harder when you get the blurbs.

25. Follow the dots through copyeditor, book designer, and galleys to hold the final copy in your hands. Decide, although during any book-to-publication process you’ll see all that isn’t supremely perfect, that it’s good and good enough. Also, it’s beyond good that you’re here, seeing differently in ways that keep unfurling on land itself keeps shifting, big bluestem rising, cottonwood leaf in the wind, barred owls barking in the woods. Hold the whole galley of body and land in your heart as best you can, a sliver of an edge of a glimpse. Say thank you.