Alterations

OK, I know they call it spinning class because you spin your bike wheels around, and don't really move anywhere, although your legs burn and your heart thumps and you leave looking like a saltwater drenched rat. But as it turns out, my brain wheels were also spinning during class yesterday.

It happened this way: I had reached the end of a certain stage in my revisions last week, and took a minor break to help my daughter move, which turned into a longer break due to uninvited germs romping through my body. But somehow, though it all, that busy tailor in the cellar of my mind* kept sewing. So, as I was sweating out the last germs of my illness in spin class, she suddenly said, "HEY! Look at this!" She held up a lovely vision of how to shift a major piece of my manuscript from one spot to another. The seams of the plaid fabric lined up perfectly and everything. I was so impressed.

You should also be impressed with my sewing metaphor, since I don't communicate well via needle and thread in real life. I tried sewing curtains for a patio door once and when I got to the end of a long, long seam attaching two panels together, there was a six inch difference in the two sides. I'm not kidding you. Six whole inches. I gave up and hung a sheet over the door for the last few months we had in that house before we moved. Shameful, but true.

What's also strange is that I often see fabric, beautiful swathes of intricately decorated cloth, in my mind's eye. Sometimes, the fabric is made into amazing clothing. I'll wake from sleep and remember a dress to die for, or a truly hip trench coat, or even a chic purse. It's so weird. How can I dream these things, hold them briefly in my head in order to admire them when I'm barely awake, and yet have no way of ever turning these visions into reality? You'd think the envisioning was the hard part, right? But no, just like writing, it's the MAKING that's hard.

So thanks, industrious little tailor. But I still need to thread the needle, and poke it in and out about a thousand times, sewing each word to the page until every seam matches.

*From Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: "There in your unconscious, where the real creation goes on, is the little kid or the Dr. Seuss creature in the cellar, arranging and stitching things together. When this being is ready to hand things up to you, to give you a paragraph or a sudden move one character makes that will change the whole course of your novel, and you will be entrusted with it. So in the meantime, while the tailor is working, you might as well go get some fresh air."