The last few months I’ve gotten into a writing rhythm that has really been working for me. I’ve been doing a blog post every day during the week, and weekends have been devoted to my new book. When I decided to get serious about the blog and to write on a regular basis, it was really to bring this little blog back to life. It never occurred to me that the discipline of taking care of the blog would bleed over into my creative work and prove a boon to that, but it has. Because I’ve written something of my own every day during the week, I find on weekends when it’s time to get back to the book, it’s much easier to pick up the thread. So, steady progress has been made, and although I have no social life, I’ve really been terrifically happy about it all.

And so it was something of a surprise how off-kilter I was all last week. LA was great, and I was thrilled to see my pretend children — I didn’t get a chance to blog about it, but the twins third birthday was an all-day affair involving much chirping of “It’s my BIRTH-day!” out of both of them. Three is such a fun age — and although infant twins are something of a logistical nightmare — they’re so funny now that they can talk to and play with one another. Their conversations alone are worth the price of admission — very very funny.

But it got me off my schedule. And then my internet connection was screwy all last week — I had no connectivity at all at home from Tuesday until late Thursday and it really threw me. I had to go out there in the mornings — out to the coffee shop where there are other people, where I had to get dressed in real clothes and where I ran into people I knew. It wasn’t a bad thing, but it did throw me off my game.

And so this weekend was lovely. My internet was back. I had my precious two days of silence, and puttering around the house, and descending into my basement office to pull up the book I’m working on. I did laundry and shopped for groceries and lo! my book had not actually turned into a pile of drek while I was away from it — nor had it gone entirely feral, snarling in the corner of my office where I’d neglected it. I finished a chapter. I started a new one. I read On Chesil Beach. I did laundry (the washer/dryer is in the basement, and I’m afraid I’ve become a little pavlovian in my love for the white noise of the laundry while I’m writing.) I even managed to outline a few topics for blogging this week.

My routine has been restored and it feels like my world is back on kilter. (Michael Ruhlman writes about the importance of a writer’s routine in his memoir House — it’s a terrific story about the importance of a home to a family and to creative work.) I know writers, like my friend Nina in LA, who can get work done among the chaos of family life — but I have never been able to do that. It takes me a lot of silence to be able to hear what’s going on inside my own head again — walking with the dogs helps, as does knowing that on the weekend I have two whole days stretched out before me where I’m not beholden to anyone else’s needs — like I said, I have no social life at the moment. But it’s winter in Livingston, a time when the wind howls, when darkness falls early, and when all the writers in town retreat to their offices and try to make up for the time we wasted playing outside during our short summer.

I spent my long weekend painting the two grotty little bedrooms in the basement, and turning one of them into an office. It was one of those projects that, for much of the weekend, felt like I’d never get to the other side of it. First I had to move all the furniture out of those little rooms — I’d been using one as a guest room, so other than moving a queen-sized mattress by myself, it was pretty simple. But the other room I’d been using as a combination office/storage space and there was a lot of stuff left in there from Patrick’s apartment and from the process of settling up his estate (a word that always cracks me up — as if cleaning out that apartment, dealing with his stuff, and paying his bills was an “estate”?) — that room took a little longer because I had to box up all the last of the Patrick stuff, and then deal with all of my graduate school notes and notebooks that were in there. In the back corner of the basement there’s a canning closet, and it was perfect for storing all this stuff — so, Day One, I got the basement organized and cleaned up. Day Two I painted — I don’t mind the actual painting, it’s the taping and prep that is so boring — but at any rate, by the end of day two I could start to see that the colors were right, and that it was going to be nice down here. Day Three and Four I moved the library. I have a funny little room off the kitchen upstairs — I think it was a bedroom. My house is only about 1500 square feet but they raised 8 kids here, so any space that could be a bedroom, was a bedroom. When I first bought the place they’d been using that back room as a laundry room, because the old lady who lived here had gotten too old to go down the stairs — and I wound up using it as a library. It took me nearly two days to unpack the bookcases, wipe them down, and carry them, one by one downstairs. Took a little while to figure out how they’d fit — and indeed, I lost one bookcase in the process — it just wouldn’t fit — so that meant I had to do a pretty strict triage on the books. I whittled them down significantly — keeping just the stuff I thought I’d actually look at again — fiction and poetry were the least-touched categories, while religion and nonfiction took the biggest hits. It was really freeing, actually, to get rid of most of the theory books from graduate school — not all of them — I kept the ones I liked or that were useful. For example, I kept Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography and The Pleasure of the Text by Barthes, but shucked off S/Z and Mythologies which I only read out of obligation. All the Genette and Todorov and most of the Irigaray went too along with some weighty philosophy/religion stuff that I’d bought at some point but had never read.

And so this morning I walked the dogs, then came home and retreated downstairs where for the first time in weeks I pulled up the screenplay I’m working on. In the basement one can’t be distracted by the garden, or the dishes in the sink, or the anxiety- and guilt-induced siren call of the Real Job in the front room. In the basement I worked steadily for a little bit, and found a shred of hope that I might be able to breathe some life back into my moribund literary career.