Millicent and Mortimer

   Millicent had always wanted to write. She had never confided this to anyone but her cat Mortimer. He was an uncritical listener unless she was late feeding him because of her daydreaming, but quick to forgive once his plate was full. Millicent had received a few good grades for essays in high school English a hundred years ago and some compliments on reports she’d had to write for her job. She could picture the ridicule, or worse still, the embarrassed silence that would ensue if she told anyone she knew that she wanted to be a writer based on this. She had promised herself she would try to write once she retired and the children were grown and gone. Now both those things had come to pass and the urge to write was still there. Unable to ignore it any longer, she picked a random date on the calendar as the start of her writing career.

   That day she exhausted every possible reason she could think of for procrastinating. By evening, her house was immaculately clean, her books and canned goods were listed alphabetically on their shelves and Mortimer was glaring at her from under the coffee table, having just been dragged to the vet to catch up on his scheduled vaccines. The car had been inspected, the oil changed, and the tires rotated. There was no reason to put off the start of her writing career any longer. This was the first day of the rest of her life. No, cut the clichés, she told herself severely.

    She was out of excuses for not writing and totally out of her comfort zone. She stared at the yellow legal pad and pen and laptop on the desk before her. Though brought up in the era of handwriting and typewriters, she could cut and paste with the best, but was still wary of computers. They were like badly behaved dogs who might shower you with affection or might bite. It was also amazingly easy to wander off into the weeds of news and gossip online and find an hour had gone by before you knew it. Dickens and Tolstoy had done perfectly well without computers. She settled on a compromise. She would write ideas on the legal pad and type them up on the computer.

   Now, what to write? Millicent loved crime stories and whodunnits. She also loved thick historical and family sagas that transported her to other times and places. Romances were alright unless they contained love scenes that read like a cross between soft porn and a medical textbook which made her feel extremely uncomfortable. She had loved her late husband Henry, but he had not inspired sweaty passion. Science fiction, fantasy worlds and spy thrillers were low on the list, though a little magical realism could be enjoyable. She made no pretense of being intellectual and had mixed feeling about literary novels which tended to make her insecurities worse. It was very daunting to finish a book which according to the critics’ blurb, should have made her feel uplifted and inspired or some other lofty goal, but which had succeeded only in confusing or irritating her. She had certainly read plenty of books that she felt she could have written better.

    That first day was disappointing, but not a total loss. She wrote a few sentences, cringed and tore them up. As she told Mortimer, she realized that lightning bolts of inspiration do not strike randomly. Millicent signed up for some online writing classes at the local community college. The anonymity of being online gave her confidence. The writing assignments were fun and the back and forth of the chat was stimulating. She realized that she’d come to rely overmuch on Mortimer for company. She even participated in some writers’ groups online and attended some workshops. 

    However, just as she felt she was making a little progress, she was bombarded with emails about how to find a traditional publisher or self-publish, learn different writing software programs, figure out which market she wanted to aim for and how to utilize social media. She complained to Mortimer that she just wanted to learn to write first. Not only was her protagonist supposed to land in a crisis and overcome a flaw in an entertaining way, but now she would have to deal with social media too? Facebook alternately irritated her, when people felt the need to post pictures of their fire ant bites, their food, dumb memes and hateful, often misspelled comments, or stressed her when people posted about their mental health or other personal issues. In her opinion, twittering or tweeting or whatever it was called, was a recipe for disaster. To paraphrase Mark Twain, better to have people think one stupid than to tweet and remove all doubt. Her nerves would probably be so shot trying to figure out new software that she would be too flustered to write a word with it. How could you aim for a market until you could write something for it? She sighed, feeling totally overwhelmed again. She had never thought it would be this complicated. Maybe this was all beyond her.

   Mortimer jumped onto her lap and butted her gently with his head, purring. Her anxiety subsided as she stroked his soft fur. Millicent suddenly had a revelation. She might never publish anything in her life. She might publish a book that no one liked. If so, so what? She wanted to write, and she would write, whether she did it on a napkin or on a laptop. All her adult life, she had put others’ needs first, Henry, the children, her job. Now it was her turn. She would not even try to emulate other authors. She would write from her experience. Granted, her life experiences were not that unusual or earthshaking, but they were uniquely hers and her viewpoint was original. Learning how to write about it was the important part and the rest would follow somehow. Feeling as if a weight had fallen off her chest, she gently put Mortimer down and started to type.