Writing from the Dark Side

I stood face to face with my dark side last night. I felt a sense of panic, as I always do when facing that mirror, clutching my hair and chanting “this is not me”.

My dark side deals in visions of obsessive seduction, sticky strands of need and betrayal in silent midnight rooms bled of color. It revels in its story: my inevitable fall, my contemplation of suicide.

All of us have a dark side which stands counter to who we believe we are. If we deny it, if we romanticize it, we may fall to it because it demands that we pay attention to it. What we need to do is to accept our dark side because it’s part of us.

I accept my dark side, the sulky drama queen in the mirror, but I do not let it run my life. I have built a satisfying life in the golden light of autumn, with a humorous husband and five cats.

Me, coffee, and cat. This is a good life.

Sometimes I write from my dark side — half-elven children who want to kill their elven fathers, succubi with a pang of conscience, a young man who can kill by touch. I write these with my light side, though, framing these characters in dilemma, in conflict.

Darkness must contrast with light to be appreciated. If the writing contains nothing but darkness, it ceases to be dark and is merely mechanical, a factory of death and gore. The light must be there to be taken away, so that we grieve for the individual trapped in their circumstances.

I look at my dark reflection, the person I most fear, because she has the capacity to ruin my life. I nod, knowing that if I try to annihilate her, I become her. She leans over my shoulder as I write, helping me to add her darkness to my bright words.

Getting Practical about Dreams

Dreams don’t work the way I want them to.

For the last couple nights, I’ve been dreaming that I got picked up by a major publisher, and I felt light and strong and perhaps even validated.

Unfortunately, I know why the dreams occurred, and it wasn’t because of precognition. I’d been working all weekend in moulage, and that’s a very visible thing to be working on, and I got a lot of compliments on it. That translated in my dreams to getting recognition in my other life.

Dreams pick up little fragments of real life and sort them out in a peculiar way. I’ve read that we don’t dream of anything we haven’t encountered in real life. From my experiences, I don’t believe that unless I’ve been in a large underground city whose corridors walled in white glossy formica, accessible by a basement door in an old hunting lodge with a kitchen with avocado appliances.

I interpret my dreams, usually by a Gestalt method, telling the story from the viewpoint of each significant object (human or non) in the dream. What happened in the interpretation of the dream of the hunting lodge became the first draft of my first novel, the one I struggle to re-edit, Gaia’s Hands.

The dream of getting published is easier to interpret: I want to get published. I figure it will be as satisfying as moulaging. I can’t wait to get started.

Another year of Missouri Hope in the Books

Another successful three days of moulage at Missouri Hope.

I haven’t written because I was really busy! I had a crew of three volunteers and my husband, and we managed to moulage about 150 people to go out into the field to play victims of a major tornado.

Here’s a couple examples:

I didn’t get a lot of pictures because I was too busy moulaging.

As you can imagine, we were pretty busy with all of those people to moulage, but I can credit my team with making it a pretty painless experience. Usually we’re several people behind by the time it’s time to place them into the scenario, but we consistently finished on time.

It’s great closing on another successful year! And I’m SO tired!

Missouri Hope has come.

Missouri Hope has come upon us, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it.

For those of you new to the blog, Missouri Hope is an annual disaster simulation held at a park near here. Participants range from emergency and disaster management students to area police and emergency personnel. Missouri Hope is huge for a disaster management exercise.

There will be, over Friday through Sunday, approximately 240 volunteers, who will serve as our “victims” for the exercise. And I, with a small team of moulagers, will turn these people into victims using makeup.

That’s a lot of people.

Today’s the day I do last-minute shopping (for face wipes and eyeliner pens), do a little inventory, and try to prepare myself for the frantic rush of doing all this makeup.

Wish me luck.

What am I going to do for NaNo?

Someone visited me from Nepal yesterday. Hello!

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NaNoWrimo starts a month from now (November first). In Nano, one must write a 50,000 page novel, or realistically, the first part of a novel, as novels generally run twice that length. The organization prefers it’s a new novel instead of adding to a novel you have because it’s easier to write from scratch.

I was all ready to submit Gods’ Seeds as the novel I was going to write, but then I opened it up to find out that I’d already written 21k of it. This was the novel I started for NaNo and quit when Trump got elected President. It wouldn’t be a cheat to work on Gods’ Seeds as long as I didn’t count those 21k words, but it would be harder to get back into.

I could start a new novel. Not sure what that would be yet.

Or I could be a rebel, which would be writing anything but a novel. This way I might be able to edit/develop Gaia’s Hands, which I’m editing and at the same time wondering what I can add back. Or I could write more short stories that fit in the Archetype universe, or …

I don’t know what to do. I’m committed to write, because I’m hosting a NaNo write-in space at the Game Cafe. If you have any ideas, let me know!

Sleepy.

I’m so tired this morning.

I’ve had to retype the above sentence twice because I couldn’t find the home keys. My hands are twitchy on the keyboard and my head keeps nodding.

I slept well last night, and kept sleeping till my alarm woke me up. Usually I’m up before the alarm.

I’m up, though, if not totally awake, and I’m going to rescue myself with a good cup or three of coffee. Today’s coffee, from Mokaska Coffee, promises not only caffeine but epiphanies.

Hope that wakes me up. I’ll let you know if I have any epiphanies.

Editing Gaia’s Hands Again

I actually started working on editing Gaia’s Hands yesterday while sitting at Mokaska Coffeehouse in St. Joseph. Their new digs are amazing, by the way — spacious and warm. Their coffee is always full of intriguing hints — spice and chocolate, or bold berry, or citrus.

How did it feel editing Gaia’s Hands after a long break? I see things that need to be smoothed out, things that need to be added. I have a better feel for the characters than I’ve had before, and that’s saying a lot, as these are two characters I’ve lived with for years.

I remind myself that I literally have known these characters for years, as Gaia’s Hands was the first novel I wrote. Jeanne Beaumont, the scientist trying to ignore the web of mysticism she’s being drawn into, and Josh Young, the mystic grounding himself in writing. They represent the yin and yang symbol, constantly shifting roles.

The sad thing is that I will have to take a break from them again, first because Whose Hearts are Mountains will soon return from dev edit, and second, because November will soon arrive and I will work on a new novel for NaNaWriMo.

I hope, soon, to get Gaia’s Hands in shape for some sort of publication.

The Woman Syndrome

Note: To the Ukrainian bot that hit this blog 18 times from three different operating systems and without hitting a single post, I have one thing to say: I have no information about Joe Biden.

That said, I continue to write and to try to get published. Writing has become part of who I am, even if I started at it late. Let me correct that — I never took myself seriously before. If someone liked what I wrote, I said, “Oh, that little thing? It’s nothing.”

This sort of self-deprecation disguised as modesty is part of the baggage women are taught from an early age. We’re told — at least women in my generation were told — that we shouldn’t upstage the men in our life, so if we excelled at something, we should play it down. We should deny it. Women were taught not to brag; “to brag” meaning “to assert any talent, quality, or achievement; to tell the truth about their accomplishments”.

Inwardly, however, women were taught to castigate themselves for not being perfect. The grades are never high enough, the job performance never good enough, the house never clean enough.

What a dilemma — women must be inwardly perfect while preserving the illusion of mediocrity. So women hide the 98% they got on the exam while beating themselves up about the other 2%. In this schema, women not only can’t win but shouldn’t win.

I don’t know if women are still brought up this way, but when I discuss this with my students, the women nod knowingly. I’ve had several female students say, “I don’t want to brag”.

I wonder if this gets in the way of my getting published. I send things out to journals and publishers with the thought “I don’t know if this is good enough,” and when I get rejected, I think “It probably wasn’t good enough.” I wonder if this attitude of mine is reflected in my cover letters and pitches. I wonder if my attitude causes good things to be reflected from me in some sort of reverse “The Secret” (a new-agey book about how we can attract good to us; a lot of bunk).

But that is part of the syndrome. Not only do I hold myself responsible for rejections, but I hold myself responsible for not attracting success to myself.

I really think I should cure myself of the syndrome.

Letdown

Yesterday I woke up with that feeling that something good, really good, was going to happen.

Instead, I got two rejections.

It’s laid me a bit low. It’s not that I haven’t been getting rejections all along; I can be a bit superstitious at times, and I felt as if the universe bitch-slapped me.

I’m stewing in the very common writer’s self-castigation: My writing isn’t interesting enough, my writing isn’t good enough, I’m not good enough.

Still, I turned my pitch for Prodigies to Pitch Wars, which is a competition to find established authors who will work with you to improve your pitch materials so that they entice agents.

I keep trying, because I will never get published if I don’t try.