LIVING IN FRANCE

The First of Two Dozen Reasons Why My Novel Remains Unfinished Nine Years After I Moved To France To Finish It . . .

OK, Finishing The Novel Wasn’t The Only Reason I Moved Here.

At 68, I wanted to do something different with my life, to prove to myself that I wasn’t too old for adventure. Nine years on, I’m happy to say . . . mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, I can’t make the same claim for the book.

A diary entry from my first month in France.

I am going to finish the book. That’s what I tell everyone I’m here to do. And I am. I’m going to finish the book. I really, really want to finish the damn book. I do. And I will.

But I didn’t. Why not? Difficult to say. I’d landed in rural France. Long peaceful days with no other demands on my time. Nothing to do but hole up and write.

So why the lack of progress? Let my diary entry explain:

It’s not that I’m not writing. In fact, I can’t stop writing. My brain is buzzing with things to write about. I’m tapping away on the keyboard late into the night like a demented Fred Astaire if he tapped on a keyboard instead of — but here’s the problem. The things that I want to write about are not the travails of the characters in my book.

So even rural France with little in the way of distractions . . . was distracting.

Diary entry:

Honestly, I’d rather be writing about tomatoes . . . or radishes. The radishes at the Super U, for example. are a different shape to the ones at Safeway. Longer and more oval than round. I could go on at length about radishes — the French kind — and how good they taste with bread and Normandy butter.

Well, what wouldn’t taste good with that pairing?

And speaking of bread, what about the French baguette? Is it a cliche, that image of the long loaf being carried home from the boulangerie? Do the French secretly prefer Wonder bread? It doesn’t appear that they do.

Everyone seems to carry baguettes: under the arm, sticking out of a shopping bag. One young woman couldn’t get hers home before she broke off a piece to eat.

I did look around Super U for the French equivalent of Wonder bread–just curious, I have no desire for Wonder bread myself. I saw something square and sliced and wrapped in plastic, but I haven’t seen anyone carry such a loaf. It would probably be considered unpatriotic if they did.

And do French men really wear berets? I decided that was probably a cliche until yesterday when I saw a man wearing a beret, cigarette between his teeth, riding a bicycle! A double cliche; triple if the cigarette had been a Gauloise. I couldn’t tell.

And then there are my French classes taught by Mme Chantal with her dyed to match outfits and imperious manner. I actually had to beg her (in English, unfortunately) to accept me into her class. I promised to devote at least three hours a day to conjugating verbs. I could easily spend the same amount of time writing about Mme Chantal.

Meanwhile, my characters are whining and clamoring for attention. What about us? Don’t we interest you anymore? You used to find us fascinating, what happened? Perhaps if I relocated them to Occitanie, or what if the boy Margaret met was French instead of . . .

Okay, okay, I hear you . . .

But their clamoring was to little avail. Nine years on, France is still just as distracting as it was when I first arrived and while Margaret and her cast of characters still call out on occasion, I’ve given up on trying not to write about France.

It’s just too entertaining.

But Margaret can be very persuasive and she eventually managed to call me back . . . although she faced competition from yet another distraction. Here’s what happened.

A few more stories from the past nine years.

I thought Mme Chantal was intimidating until I met Mme Chignon.

A story about my life before I came to France

Did you know that you can also listen to my stories . . . Just press the listen button at the top of the story to hear it read aloud.

And, if you’re not a Medium subscriber and you’d like to read more than five stories, just click on the link below to read all of my stories and thousands of others on all kinds of topics. You’ll be happy and so will I.

Merci!