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This pretty kitty belongs to Kate Moses, whom I first met when writing for Salon.com. Kate (along with Camille Peri) went on to edit two anthologies on motherhood (I was lucky to have an essay in both volumes); to write Wintering, the Sylvia Plath novel; and, most recently, to complete a memoir called Cake Walk, which will be out next year. She is a dear and good friend, an impassioned hostess, an enthusiast, a seasoned romantic, and one of the only people in the world who has ever called me Bethie.

A few days ago, I sent Kate the smallest snatch of this novel I am writing. I am ready to read more, she wrote back.

Sometimes it's just words like these that keep us writers going. You who comment on this blog: You keep me going, too.

The wind whips, the rain slaps, the trees shake off their leaves (too soon, don't be in such a hurry). It is autumn turning to winter here. It is winter coming.

I am summoning the courage today to return to a book that I've been writing, off and on, for two years. An historical novel that, I fear, I've written too precisely. So that there isn't enough air between the words. So that a reader has to hear a very particular background song to hold the rhythm, therefore the characters, therefore the mood, in place.

I am up early, searching for air.

My dear friend Kate Moses rendered Sylvia Plath so three-dimensionally in her novel, Wintering, that I now feel compelled to read any Plath-infused story I find. Yesterday it was the New York Times piece on the Ted Hughes letters, a piece that concluded with the following lines:

Earlier, while Plath was still alive and they were together, there is his unstinting reassurance, rejoicing in her successes and praising her work. Above all, after her death there is his searing defense of her shattering “Ariel” poems. To Donald Hall, an admirer who nevertheless found “Ariel” too sensational to be first-rate poems, he wrote:

“Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do,” Hughes wrote. “When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”

A mantra then, a new one: Let us not argue ourselves out of the bruises art delivers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/books/03book.html?ref=books