Living Outside of My Comfort Zone by Maggie Barbieri

Maggie Barbieri is the author of the Murder 101 series published by Minotaur Books.  The sixth book in the series, PHYSICAL EDUCATION, will be out on  November 23^rd.  The first book in her new series featuring Maeve Conlon—THE COMFORT ZONE—will be available some time in 2013.  Maggie lives in the Hudson Valley of New York State with her husband, two children, aforementioned Westie, and intrepid Maine Coon, Diego.

 

Living Outside of My Comfort Zone

by Maggie Barbieri

Thank you, once again, to the incomparable Kaye Barley for inviting me to post on her wonderful blog.  Every year, posting with Kaye gives me the opportunity to reflect on the past year and think about what is to come for the new year.  This year has been an exciting one:  I appeared in Good Housekeeping in a story about overcoming Stage IV melanoma, I found out that I will be writing two more books in the Murder 101 series, and I also was offered the opportunity to write a new series about a soccer mom/vigilante (she only kills bad people, folks!), something that makes me giddy with excitement.

It was a chance conversation with my wonderful editor at Minotaur Books that set the wheels in motion.  I wondered aloud if I was capable of doing anything beyond the Alison Bergeron series.  Since I began work on Murder 101, lo those many years ago, life had been a bit complicated, first with one cancer diagnosis that involved chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and the more chemotherapy and then a second diagnosis that was so dire that a prognosis wasn’t even discussed.  I threw myself into writing about a college professor with a propensity for finding dead bodies, desperately trying to write myself back to health by focusing on the one thing that I loved more than my family and my life.  As I’ve often said, I credit writing—along with some amazing medical support—with saving my life.  I didn’t have time to think of much else during that time but I always had time for writing.  There were regularly scheduled treatment visits, two children to raise and a house to keep running, not to mention the very emotionally needy West Highland Terrier who let her wants and desires be known every moment of every day.

About four years after I started treatment, I started feeling better and then I started doing things that I never would have dreamed of doing B.C. (before cancer).  On a whim, I rented an apartment in Paris for a week and packed the family off for the trip of a lifetime.  I bought a ridiculously small car that the kids hate but that makes me smile every time I see it, its shape and color reminding me of Nancy Drew’s “little blue roadster” from the books of my childhood.  I stopped saying “yes” even though the answer was “no.”  I told the emotionally needy West Highland Terrier to quit bellyaching because her life would never get any better than it was living with us.  And somewhere in the process, I started thinking about the future, something I had not allowed myself to do for a long time.

What was it that I loved? I asked myself.  Writing.  I love writing.

And when there was more room in my brain, a brain that had spent far too long thinking about cancer and treatment and side effects, my brain started telling me that there was another woman, a woman who wasn’t Alison Bergeron, who needed to get her story out.  Her name was Maeve Conlon and she had a complicated past, a past that wouldn’t let her go, wouldn’t let her breathe.  A past that was keeping her from living her present.  A past that needed to be acknowledged.

My complicated past is different from Maeve Conlon’s but thinking about how my brain had been filled with something that I finally allowed myself to let go of allowed me to understand this complicated woman. I guess you could say that writing about her has encouraged me to get out of my writing comfort zone, in the same way that cancer did for me in terms of my personal comfort zone.  I wouldn’t recommend facing down a serious illness as a way to explore who you are and what you want to do, but I am all for getting out of your own way, so to speak, and letting your mind take you places that you normally wouldn’t allow it.

You’ll be amazed at what you find out about yourself.

I'm a Writer - Right? by Maggie Barbieri

Maggie is currently a freelance writer and textbook editor, as you now know, in addition to being the author of the Murder 101 series, starring college professor Alison Bergeron and her New York City Detective boyfriend, Bobby Crawford.  Third Degree, the fifth installment in the series, was published in November.  Maggie lives in Westchester County with her husband, Jim, two children, and a very emotionally needy, but lovable, West Highland Terrier named Bonnie.

I’m a Writer—Right? 

by Maggie  Barbieri

A big, loud New York “thank you” to the incomparable Kaye Barley for inviting me to blog with her this week.  Your hospitality and kindness is unmatched, my friend.

A friend and I were out recently when we ran into someone we hadn’t seen in a long time.  That person asked me, “What do you do?”

I replied, “I’m a freelance college textbook editor.”

My friend, the other half of our “writer’s duo”—we really don’t consider ourselves large enough to call ourselves a “group”—laughed and said, “No, you’re a writer.”

I am?

I had forgotten.  You see, I spend the better part of every day at my “day job” which requires me to be available to my textbook publishing clients from around eight o’clock in the morning until around four o’clock in the afternoon.  If there is a lull in the action—say a book goes to the printer earlier than expected, an author doesn’t have an unexpected crisis—I can write.  I am under contract to produce one book a year in the “Murder 101” series, each due every December 31^st, and usually, right about now, panic sets in.

So being the pragmatist that I am, when people ask me what I do, I always fall back to the thing that I do for about forty hours a week during everyone else’s waking hours.  I edit.  And cajole.  And fix.  And browbeat.  That’s my job.

It got me thinking, though:  when will I consider myself a writer?  I try to sneak out every year to a couple of conventions and talk with other writers.  The best thing about these conventions is that I get to meet other writers as well as fans—you know, writing  being a lonely profession and all.  I heartily pshaw when an unpublished writer doesn’t think themselves worthy of the title “writer,” yet I still identify myself as a “freelance college textbook editor” when someone asks what I do.  And this after five published novels.

It begs the question:  when can you consider yourself a writer?  Is Stephen King a writer just because we all know him?  Same for Kaye’s buddy, Lee Child.  Or is a writer someone who just sits themselves down in a chair every day and tackles the onerous task of putting words on a page?

Yes.  Yes.  And a hearty YES.

I live in a very small village where everyone really does know my name and not because I’m a writer.  If you spend enough time in the local gourmet shop, you’ve inevitably heard me imploring my son to stop eating the free bread and artichoke dip, or asking my daughter if halibut is one of the things she’ll eat.  It’s during many of these excursions where someone will sidle up to me as I’m pulling an artichoke-encrusted plastic knife out of my son’s hand and say, “I heard you’re a writer.  I really want to write.  But I’m SOOOOO busy.  I really don’t have time.”

Really?  I want to ask.  Then you don’t want to be a writer, I think.  Instead of saying what’s obvious to me and any other writer, though, I nod and commiserate.  Yes, it’s hard to be a parent these days what with our overscheduled children and demanding social lives.  It’s really hard to find time to do the things that we deem necessary—grocery shopping, laundry, maybe exercise—so to carve out time to write?  It’s nearly impossible.  But if you’re a “writer,” you find the time.  You write while dinner is heating on the stove, or when your artichoke-loving son is at guitar lessons.  You write while you’re on the train heading to the city for an appointment.  You write, in your head, while you’re stopped at traffic lights.  You write while you’re waiting for a conference call to start or even when the conference call is going on (go ahead—no one can see you).  You write because you love it and because it is your dream come true to create characters and stories and lives.

You write because you have to.

If we ever meet, I’ll be the one who identifies herself as a “freelance college textbook editor,” but really, I’m a writer.  And so are you.