Going Back to School

Today is the first day of my Disaster Mental Health certificate program. I can’t believe I’m going back to school after getting a PhD and this late in my career, yet here I am.

As it turns out, I have a good role model in my father. My father got his high school diploma and learned electronics in the military. I remember growing up with him taking a correspondence course in electronics with all these little paper booklets that were individual lessons. Later, he would go off to Dublin, Ohio to take various courses on the changing technology of his job, installing telephone switching equipment. A lot of his colleagues didn’t take the company up on their training, believing that the union would protect them. The union did not protect them, and so they slowly got transferred and laid off. Eventually, my dad was one of the few remaining workers in an increasingly automated system. AT&T would hand him a building full of equipment and a 32-page schematic and tell him to throw the switch and lock the door when it was done. In addition to this, he took a pastry chef class at the community college, and my family let him make the pie crust from then on out.

I did my first lesson this morning, and I found the material engaging and worthwhile. Maybe I haven’t forgotten how to be a student!

A different tribute to my mother.

I look like my mother looked, or so people tell me. I think they’re cluing in on the structure of my face, my not insignificant nose, and my overabundant mouth. (The deepset almond-shaped eyes and the strong dimpled chin come from Dad.)

I act like my mother acted — somewhat. I have her extroversion, her enthusiasm, sense of humor, and intelligence. I also have some of her dark side — the weepiness the relentless pessimism, the neediness, the rage, the hatred of getting older.

I try my best not to have her dark side, knowing that it probably came from untreated bipolar disorder. She tried her best, hampered by wrong diagnoses, inferior medicines, and the lack of awareness that comes with bipolar disorder. There were times she couldn’t mother, and there were times she embarrassed us.

I loved my mother. I still do, despite all her flaws. At her best, she was a creative whirlwind, a storyteller, a sparkling woman with a flair for the dramatic (the latter of which I did not inherit). At her worst, she was betrayed by her own mind — it’s hard to realize how much your feelings dictate your sense of reality instead of the other way around, and that’s the curse of bipolar disorder.

My mother died — what? Eleven years ago? Has it been that long? I have dreams of her sometimes where I’m told she’s dead, but then I visit my parents’ old house, and she’s there, wearing her nightgown. She’s sick, as she often was in her depressions, lying on the couch, but she’s not depressed. She’s not dead. She tells me, in a matter-of-fact voice that she’ll die soon and she’s hiding from the world who thinks she has already passed away.

But she’s not dead yet. Not in my mind, eleven years later. She’s in my mirror and in my mannerisms and in my stories, and in the voice in my mind that is her best self as she spins among the stars. She’s not gone — I merely can’t speak to her.

Redbird

I was 25, and I was going through a hard time in my life. I faced waves of agitation and depression, flashbacks, a relationship in flux — and a persistent feeling that there were evil influences lurking in my life. The latter may have been the fact that my bipolar was not at that time treated, or it could have been that I believed in those things at the time. Or those could have been one and the same.

One day, I was in a neighborhood in Champaign I hadn’t been in before — it was a sleepy boulevard, complete with mini-park tucked into the median. I had gone there because I had a bad crush on someone even as my maybe-boyfriend gave me mixed signals — and I wanted to see where he lived. (I don’t think I ever devolved to the point of being a stalker, but I worried about it some nights.)

I was sitting on the bench in the mini-park, watching the occasional car drive laconically by, and suddenly I felt a feeling of dread, ominous dread, blossom from my stomach through my body. Something bad was going to happen — I could imagine the strains of foreboding music in the background.

And then a cardinal called. I looked up, and he sat on a phone line directly above me, flame red and stalwart. I felt a flush of calm pass through me. He launched himself in the air and landed on a tree branch a few feet away, then stayed there. I followed him there, and this dance continued until I was away from the boulevard.

I was safe.

**********

Almost thirty years later, I don’t know what to make of this still. Yes, the feeling of foreboding may have been from the tricks that bipolar plays with the body. Remember as well that mania triggers the religious/mystical elements of the brain.

But the bird was real. Whether it was a cardinal acting peculiarly or a flame-feathered spirit guiding me to safety, I will never know. I will not pretend to know — there is no certainty in mysticism. But there is one more story:

During that same time period, I left a party because I felt like I was barely holding myself together inside a great glass bubble that distanced me from everyone. My heart was breaking, and at the same time, I was afraid that I would be taken advantage of by someone or something malign if I opened up. A friend of mine walked me home from the party to protect me from what I felt was out there (Scott May, if you’re reading this, thank you. I never appreciated you enough).

I got home and was lying in bed shivering and hugging myself. All of a sudden, I heard a commotion just outside the window and saw a cardinal, male and shining red against the lowering clouds, fighting a starling with its black, speckled wings.

I heard a voice in my mind: “Do I have to knock you out to help you?”

“Yes,” I thought back.

I instantly fell asleep.

*******

I have to wait for dreams now to have these experiences, possibly because of the medication, possibly because of the fact that I’m older and busier and not accustomed to living between worlds anymore. I don’t know what the “real” interpretation is, but the belief that the redbird was a kind spirit that protected me against malign forces makes for a better story.

Flashbacks

My beta-reader told me I need to have some more character building of the villians, Harold and Wanda. This, I admit, is hard for me to do, preferring shadowy threats. By the beginning of the book, my main character and the villains are not as good friends as they’d been — it’s actually probable that they’d never been close friends, even though they were Kat’s friends at a vulnerable time.

So Kat has only three direct interactions with the villains during the book, and when someone’s trying to kill you, there’s not much time to build character. So how do I do this?

Flashbacks!

I like writing flashbacks, but I usually reserve them for scenes that would ordinarily be one big information dump so that I can show, rather than just tell, the audience what had happened. But I hadn’t thought of writing flashbacks for Kat’s interactions for Harold and Wanda.

But my readers can’t react to what’s in my head if it never makes it on paper.

(Wanda and Harold met me just outside the soup kitchen —

“Hey, I’ve just had lunch,” I groused, “Do you expect me to jump on a full stomach?”

“Don’t be a bitch,” Harold said loftily, as Wanda looked down her nose at me as if I’d crawled out from under a rock. “We’ve got an experiment we need you to do.”

“Why me? I’m a Junior Birdman. You’re the King.” I knew, deep down, that i would do whatever he asked me to, because they were my friends. And Harold — Harold was special. I would probably do it for him.

“You’re faster than I am. I need someone fast to do this. I bet you can’t do it, though.” Harold examined his hands, probably for invisible dirt specks, as I’d never seen him with his hands dirty.

“You bet I can’t do what?” I demanded.

“Change the outcome of that game over there.” Wanda interjected in her haughty voice.

“But that won’t work!” I groused. “The rock principle will keep it from changing.”

“I’m going with you,” Harold reassured me. “We’re jumping into the past to that shell game over there and you’re going to tip over the right cup so the mooch sees he’s getting conned .”

I protested. “By “we”, you mean me. How would I know where the ball landed?”

“You know,” Harold gritted his teeth. “You always know. I’ve seen you run that game.”

“You can’t change time. I try to change that and the cup won’t tip over. It always works that way.” I’d tried it — I can win the game myself, but I can’t change the outcome of the game itself.”

“But what if I change one or two other things at the same time? The rock principle only maintains one material fact at a time. With one or two other changes at once, I hope to confuse things so that the rock principle doesn’t change the shell game.”

“But what about crossing ourselves?” I demanded. “I only have what — four minutes before I die?”

“You’ll have to do it quickly, I guess,” Harold shrugged. “Unless you don’t think you can — “

“Alright. I’ll do it.” I always knew I would.

We jumped to three minutes before the start of the round, and Wanda came with us as witness. She and Harold stepped back while I walked up to the game, which involved a mooch and a grifter (as we called victims and fraudsters on the street).

The idea was to reach in and tip the cup with the ball under it at the exact moment that the mooch was to guess the whereabouts of the ball. He wouldn’t — the sleight-of-hand of the operator guaranteed it. The big trick was to tip the ball and jump before the grifter caught my wrist and took me behind the nearest building to beat me to a pulp. I wondered why Harold would subject me to that risk, or the risk of crossing myself and being crushed, if he was my friend. But he trusted me…

One exhilarating moment later, I had tipped the cup, revealing the ball to be in a different cup than it would have appeared to the mooch, and I jumped back to my present time without dying. I bent over, gasping and laughing.

“You’re the best,” Harold clapped me on the shoulder. “I knew you could do it. I think we should make a game of this. Call it — Voyageur. Like Traveller, but provocative.”

Then we blinked out of sight before the irate con artist reached us.)

Little Pieces of Psychology for Characterization

I use psychology to help my characters to sneak into the reader’s mind at a subliminal level. Here’s a partial list:

1) The character who dislikes the protagonist the most has the same character flaw as the protagonist. In Prodigies, the book I’m currently working on, Romak Matusiak, Minister of Culture in Poland hates Grace presumably because she’s black.The issue may be that she’s black and cultured, which he feels is the province of upper-class whites.

2) People have “tells” when they’re lying and withholding information. Pursing their lips, closing their eyes for longer than necessary, blinking rapidly, sweating, and looking away (purportedly to the right if they’re right-handed) are all different “tells”. Sprinkling this into descriptions of people lying gives a heads-up to the reader that something’s up. Related is the extensive focus on body gestures of two Japanese characters in Prodigies — much of Japanese communication is unspoken.

3). Archetypes — or more correctly — archetypes in the Jungian sense. Joseph Campbell believed in a universal story, and in his story, roles that correspond to Jungian archetypes such as the hero/heroine, the mentor, the trickster, the innocent, and the magician. To some extent writing archetypes comes subconsciously, but it helps to be conscious about it.

4) Dreams and visions. I’m a Jungian at heart, I’m afraid, and that means that I impart important information about the psyche of my protagonists through their dreams. As is true to dreams, the sequences are symbolic, fragmented, and often mystical.

I have fun with psychology; my characters have no idea how much psychology goes into them.

Of course we want to be read.

I feel invigorated, simply because I’m being read.

I have three beta-readers now, and I’m getting constructive feedback that’s helping me make good substantive changes to Voyageurs. And, occasionally, expressing what they like about the book.

You, the reader, have read excerpts from this and other books here online, but it’s different. I don’t know if any of you are real or just bots. I assume some of you are real, or else I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. But its murky, and since I know only a few of my readers, and I know nothing about whether you’re enjoying what you read, it hasn’t been like being read.

As a result, I am becoming increasingly convinced that writers don’t write just for themselves.

If they did, there would be no self-publishing. There would be no Wattpad. There would be no FanFiction.net. There wouldn’t be a whole industry based on improving writers’ skills if writers didn’t want to be read.

There would be no hashtags on Instagram like #writersofig. No writing-related memes on Facebook that the writers (usually the unpublished ones) reblog. There would be no shirts like the one in my closet that says “You’re coming dangerously close to being killed off in my next novel”.

There’s enough of us who want to be read that there’s a multi-million dollar industry who wants to make money off us.

Therefore, I will quit apologizing for wanting to be read, and for agonizing over rejections. I write for myself, but I want to be read, and I am willing to craft my message accordingly, even if I won’t change my themes or characters.

A Sense of Purpose

Having a beta-reader read my work has been a revelation.

All the frustration at not being published has dissolved in a sense of purpose I hadn’t expected to find. It seems I want my writing to improve more than I want my writing to be published. I actually anticipate the latest chapter report from my beta-reader as an opportunity to refine the book, to allow its message to shine.

This is who I am. At least this is closer to my self-image than the frustration I felt when getting rejections that gave me no idea of what to improve. With my writing, I don’t want to be told “It’s not you, it’s me,” I want to be told what didn’t work. (On the other hand, in relationships, I’d rather be told “It’s not you, it’s me.”) To tell me what’s wrong and what needs improving communicates that my work is worth improving.

So I welcome my beta-reader making comments on “This scene goes by too quickly” and “What’s all this focus on smashing his eggs?” and I’m taking her out to dinner when this is over. Thanks, Sheri!

****************
I know my blog posts have been really short lately; I hope that isn’t a problem. revising a class of mine from the ground level. All my deep thoughts are going toward family resource management, poverty, and basic financial skills — which is my field of study, but still requires wrestling up a lot of material to inform the class.

I’ll keep writing because I enjoy talking to you, and I hope you enjoy reading. This too will pass. And if you want to be a beta-reader (or just want to say hi), drop me a message!

Seeking beta-readers

I would love to invite you to be beta-readers, now that I understand how absolutely invigorating they are to the writing process.

I know this is a little bit of work on your part, but on the other hand you can say “I knew her when…” someday (ha!)

All I would need from you:

1) read a manuscript
2) comment on it honestly (at least chapter by chapter).

You’ll be recognized by name in acknowledgements if it gets published.

Please let me know!

A Pattern to my Days

As a professor, summer has a different pattern than the rest of the school year. The belief is that professors are “off for the summer”, and that’s generally not true for the faculty I know. The focus of our work changes, and we teach more concentrated courses and hold our office hours in Starbucks. We do research projects and revamp classes and write, and we may supervise internships and field experiences.

I’m currently splitting my days into three parts. Early in the morning, instead of writing this blog, I work on the next week in my drastic revision of People, Money, and Psychology. Instead of running it as a cognitive psychology class about money, I’m creating a class about poverty and all the ways it’s not just about lack of money. I’m two-thirds the way through the lesson plans. The rest is easier once I have a shape to the class.

After that, I write the blog. Not that I don’t love all twenty-something of you, but I have to give my freshest coffee-fueled brain cells to the classwork first. I haven’t felt too inspired lately on the blog front, and I apologize.

Finally, my day is split between getting some sort of walk in, editing Voyageurs, and planting plants in my soon-to-be amazing garden.

So what are you up to today?

Pushing toward growth.

I have one condition I need to fulfill before I keep writing — well, maybe 2 — a developmental editor and beta-readers for my finished books.

I need to find beta-readers. This is a difficult task, although my beta-reader for Voyageurs, Sheri Roush, is doing a wonderful job of pointing out where my book gets confusing and where it’s really working.

I need to find money in the budget for developmental editing.

I need to find beta readers.

Would you like to be a beta reader? Let me know!