Okay, its the end of a very quiet week where I could have gotten a lot of writing done but instead I hid behind excuses of “research” and “backstory” and “Winter Olympics” instead of tackling head on the Annie’s Fish rewrite that must be conquered.

I went through stages of “I’m not good enough,” “the story’s not good enough,” “why did I ever think I could write a book, everyone in the WORLD wants to write a book, the competition is too high,” and other familiar feelings of inadequacy and self loathing. This went to the point of keeping me, and consequently my husband, awake at night fretting.

But, as anyone in their right mind knows, there’s no way out of this kind of situation but to dive in and do the work. Nobody’s going to do it for me, and if I let it scare me stiff, it will never change to something less scary, and it will never get done.

So this morning, cue the Rocky soundtrack fanfare (which is easy to do as they’re playing the newest Rocky movie, the one where he’s old, on French TV this weekend, thus lots of commercials), I cleaned off my desk. I put all the unfinished paperwork, uh, somewhere else (don’t look at the desk behind me), I moved my standing file folder that stares at me saying “you should be job hunting, you should work on your illustration portfolio, you should finish this other book you started writing a few years ago, the manuscript’s right here” to a different shelf, out of eyesight. In its place, I put the flowers I received for Valentine’s day and my lucky Day of the Dead skull with bright pink flowers in the eye sockets and turquoise curly-cues on the cranium. I cleared my schedule, whipped up a raspberry Emercen-c, and I’m gonna do it.

Our fish tank is maybe 4 feet wide, and holds about 20 fish. Of those 20 there are 3 couples, one male and his harem, and 4 clown fish.  The couples stick together and have their little territories within the tank.

One of the couples is of the species Neolamprologus brevis. They have a shell for a house. The female, Samantha, is often in the shell, and the male, Jean-Claude, floats above it to keep guard, but at night they both sleep in the shell together. In another corner there is a couple of Altolamprologus compressiceps, who are tall and flat, gray and brown, and have big under-bites with little teeth sticking out. We named the male “Igor” because he’s so handsome, and we call his girlfriend “Igor’s Wife” (or rather, La Femme d’Igor in French). Igor’s wife never leaves their little domain, which is an area of maybe 7 inches square and a little cave. At feeding time, Samantha will travel maybe 8 inches away from her shell to eat, but usually stays within a few inches of it.

I thought to myself, that must be sad, staying in such a small space all the time. I wondered if they would live in a bigger small space if they hadn’t been abducted from Lake Tanganyika and put in a fish tank. But then I realized that I, as a writer/artist, spend the majority of my time in a 10 by 12 foot room, or more precisely, sitting at a 3 by 5 foot desk focusing all my energy on the, wait let me get a ruler, 8.25 by 13 inch square of light and numbers that is my laptop screen. I have the whole world beyond my desk, but I spend an awful lot of time looking at it through a 8.25 by 13 inch square and not getting out of the house.

I suppose the difference is I’m thinking about the world out there, and I have access to just about anything I want to see through my square of light and numbers. I don’t know if Samantha or Igor’s Wife are thinking about much beyond protecting their future offspring, but if so, I hope their little corners in the tank keep them well enough amused.

The premise for Antoinette’s Fish was inspired by a number of different, seemingly unremarkable events and factoids that all came together at just the right moment.

First is me. It’s unremarkable that I grew up in Maine, and have a fascination with Africa. Everybody grew up somewhere, and everyone is intrigued by something.

Second, is the 300 liter aquarium my husband keeps. At the beginning of our relationship I thought his fish were little more than an expensive hobby that took too much of his precious time away from me. But as I got to know them, I became more interested. They are all from Lake Tanganyika, and they all have very strong personalities. We have three happy couples, a pair of neolamprologus brevis, who sleep in a shell, and a pair of altolamprologus compressiceps, who are the biggest but always hide, and a pair of neolamprologus tretocephalus, who eat snails. They must be French. There are also 4 eretmodus cyanosticus (clown fish) who smile a lot, and a harem of cyprichromis leptosoma, led by a rather lascivious male who we’ve named Casanova.

Third is the fact that I now live in France, and my language skills are far from perfect. To train my ear, I download French podcasts and listen to them while I walk. One of these podcasts is a radio show called 2000 Ans d’Histoire (2000 Years of History) from France Inter. One unremarkable day, I was walking to the supermarket, listening to a story about a French explorer named Guillaume de Monfried. He’d been all over the world in the beginning of the 20th century, and was famous enough to have a movie made about him. The interview was with his grandson, who never met the man. On the day that the grandson (as a child) was finally going to meet his eccentric, explorer grandfather, the old man disappeared.

And the final unremarkable inspiration that tied everything together came from a dinner conversation with friends who told us about their adventures SCUBA diving in the Red Sea. I had never imagined people doing SCUBA anywhere but in the ocean, and the thought of it rather blew my mind.

A few eyes of newt, powdered frog hearts, and a lot of typing, and there you go. Antoinette’s Fish.