I was in LA last month at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s “Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices.” For a week, every day between 8:30 am and 9 pm, I attended my non-fiction workshops and various lectures about the craft of writing and the business of marketing one’s writing, and all in the gorgeous surroundings of the American Jewish University in Bel Air, overlooking all of San Fernando Valley. It was a luminous week; every day felt purposeful, reminded me why I write, why I’ve written my book, CROSSING STYX. I returned to my home in Vancouver re-invigorated and spent several days, head down, immersed in further revisions. Then the funk hit. My revisions, for the most part, were complete, and once again I was staring at an 86,000-word manuscript that I have been writing and re-writing for six years. I’m tired. Sometimes the structures that I’ve built in my mind in order to live—go to a day job that does not feed my soul, interact with my parents and my siblings that, for the most part, do not want to hear about my life and why I write what I write—come crashing down inside and I do not know what I am doing with my life, my days, with my memoir. I’m embarrassed to admit, at 45 years old, that I feel lost, that I’m not sure about any of it. I forget what compelled me to write this book in the first place. I called in “sick” to my day job today but if I’m sick it is only in my heart that I’m unwell. The dark horse called depression is always one step behind and today it caught up, or I slowed down, and I had to remind myself to still get out of bed, to shower, shave, eat my three scrambled eggs, dry toast and coffee, go for a walk by the ocean. To at least try and look through the diffused winter fog that permeates. Some days I want to withdraw my retirement fund, the little that I’ve saved, and buy a one-day ticket to Budapest, walk the Chain Link Bridge to Buda, sit in Café Gerbeaud and drink a melange, stroll along Váci utca. I want to do what has very little to do with writing but has everything to do with living. Then I remember that no matter how much I deceive myself, think my magical thoughts, running away will not bring me what I want most to achieve. If I forget why I write, why I wrote my memoir, it’s time to stop and rest, see the trees and not stay lost in the forest. Life is everywhere. All is well.

In three days I will join Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2010 “Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices” in balmy California, a state that recently had the common sense to repeal the voter-approved decision to oppress a people. And while I’m on that topic, which is not really the topic of this post, I understand there’s now been some debate about the judge who overturned Prop 8. Why this judge’s sexuality would even be discussed, mentioned, debated at all, is beyond me. Whether he is or is not “gay” has, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing to do with his decision. Nada. Nix. Besides, what about all the so-called straight judges who have, since the beginning of the Constitution, been rendering decisions on behalf of a straight majority? And I say “so-called,” since it would not surprise me at all if more than a few decisions to oppress homosexuals have been made by closeted gays who wish to squash what they cannot face within themselves.

Anyway.

As I said, in three days I will join a class of 32 other writers at Lambda’s retreat in Los Angeles–at The American Jewish University in Bel-Air, to be exact. I’m deeply appreciative that I was even invited, and thoroughly pumped for the experience. I’ll be workshopping part of my memoir, CROSSING STYX, about my six years in a therapeutic cult trying to “cure” my sexual orientation, and the lawsuit against my former shrink for treating my homosexuality as a disease (all of which occurred between 1989-2002). That last part of the book, the lawsuit, has, in recent revisions, taken a less central focus of the book than the first part, my six years in the therapy, five of which while living in a “therapeutic house” the doctor had called “the Styx.” The irony of living in a house called “the Styx” was lost to me during my many years of prescription drug-induced stupor (near fatal doses of prescription medication was one of the doctor’s many ways of “reverting” me to my “innate heterosexuality,” but in retrospect seemed more like a prescription for death), but became a central theme as I wrote the book.

As I prepare to dive head first into a week of intensive workshopping, I’m pondering the years I’ve invested into the writing of this memoir, CROSSING STYX. I’m always amazed and not a little but dumbstruck when I hear writers say they did maybe “4 or 5 revisions” to their now-completed book. Huh? 60 or 70 revisions would not be overshooting the number of times I have “revised” my own. Not that I’m complaining. The book is, today, not the same book I started writing soon after my lawsuit against the doctor concluded in 2002. Maybe I needed all those revisions in order to find a voice. The right voice. Maybe I needed to rip the guts out of this book and build it back again, one word at a time, in order to find the story that needed to be told. Which, as it turned out, was not the same story that I thought needed to be told when I sat down at my laptop in 2004.

How long has it taken others to write their own books? I know it’s always difficult to count the number of times we revise on computers, but if you were to guesstimate, what number would you come up with?