The hardest part of the writing process for me will always be choosing a focus and sticking with it. A mentor once told me that this was a feature of my personality type. On the Myers-Briggs I'm an INFP -- an introverted, intuitive, feeling perceiver. I see the very big picture, not the task at hand. Every choice, every project, seems equally attractive, and when forced to choose a focus, I will immediately begin grieving the choices I did not make.

This was the last day of my writer's retreat, and I'm very busy congratulating myself for having chosen a focus and sticking with it over an aggregate of about fifteen hours. I had taken my entire fiction crate with me -- folders full of fragments, exercises, character sketches, two completed short stories (yes, only two) a "well begun" (my former tutor's words) contemporary novel, and my 19th century saga, which has 7000 words but which hasn't been touched in a year.

And so I chose Selena, whose story has about 1500 words and hasn't been worked on since May, when I stopped working with my tutor.

I'm not going to tell her whole story here. Some writers say that talking about a work in progress robs it of energy, that you tell the story to death and people give reactions that contaminate your process.

Selena is a character who first appeared last March. She goes to funerals. A lot. She doesn't know any of the people whose funerals she attends. She just goes to them because it gives her something to do during a period of unemployment. The first one is by accident -- she's walking by the church on a hot day just as the funeral party arrives and she imagines how cool it must be inside the church. Then she goes to another. It becomes a habit, and then an obsession. 

Why Selena now? Probably a combination of three things. I went to a lot of funerals in January, and I had a weird experience at one. Right after I signed the guest book I caught sight of the deceased's head in the coffin (he was the father of an old friend) and suddenly was unable to walk into the room. And when I opened my notebook Sunday I found a note from Lynn stuck to the Selena material. I must have printed the piece out and left the notebook open on my desk. Lynn read it, and left a sticky note that said, "Marm, I liked this." Despite all that reading aloud I did while she nursed, she is not a fiction fanatic, so work that can elicit a comment like that from her must be pretty compelling.

It's a little unsettling to work with Selena. She's isolated, partly by her own doing. She has a hard time relating to other people, she doesn't know how to maintain friendships. She worked at the same job for twenty years without advancing, without learning new skills. When she lost her job in a reorganization, she lost contact with the friends she had there. When a community group she belonged to disbanded, she lost contact with the friends she'd made there too. "Selena was the kind of woman people needed to see all the time or they forgot about her," I wrote in the story.

And Selena is unsettling because in a lot of ways she is me. She is especially the me I was in 1974 or thereabouts. At the library yesterday I read part of John Bayley's book that was made into the movie we saw Saturday night. "For me," he wrote, "friendship was a question of contextual bonding, as I believe psychologists call it. I had met people at school and in the army whose company was agreeable at that time and in that place; it did not occur to me to ask whether or how much I valued them as friends. When the situation changed, so did my acquaintance, so that I retained nobody who could be called 'an old friend.'"

Don't get me wrong. Selena is an exaggeration of even the lonely young woman I was thirty years ago. I have a lot of old friends, very valued friends, some from that time whom I see or write to frequently. But there are many more who were very dear to me once but, because we no longer share a context, have slipped into that second or third tier of acquaintance, or I into theirs. And I wish it were not so.