On Vacation

Writing time

I’ve got all the time in the world (at least this week) and a nicely set up office. It’s time to write.

Except that I feel overwhelmed by the writing task ahead of me — start writing on a book I started and did not finish. That is less daunting than starting a new one right now.

My writing partner just showed up:

This is Chloe, by the way. Our youngest cat and my shadow. At the moment, she’s laying in a sunbeam in the office. Eventually, she will climb up into my lap, making typing all but impossible. Some writing partner, eh?

Another cat came to keep me company:

This is Girlie-Girl; she’s a fourteen-year-old, and she’s about as grouchy as you can imagine. Right now, both are rather sedate, but I don’t expect that to last long. Not much writing will get done when they fight.

But I need to write

I keep putting the writing off — I’ve put it off for three months, to be honest. But I have seriously mixed feelings about my writing these days. I have gotten little traction, which makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with my writing. It’s more likely that I haven’t done advertising too well, and that my topics are unusual (or, as agents like to say, “imaginative” and “unique” just as they reject me.) But I think too much and get myself in trouble.

I think I’ll put this off a little more because lunch is happening soon and I want to rest before writing. I’ll let you know tomorrow if I’m successful.

My New Office Setup

Let me tell you about my office

(I’m sorry I haven’t been here the past couple of days; I got clobbered by some nasty bug (not COVID) and I spent a lot of quality time in bed. Now I’m up again and enjoying my vacation.)

Because we couldn’t go anywhere for Spring Break, and I wanted a writing retreat, Richard cleaned the office for me. To give you an idea of what this entails, the “office” is the designation of the smallest bedroom of this 3-bedroom 1913 kit home.

The room itself seems too small for a bedroom at all, being about 10×12 total. It could be the kid’s room — that is kid, singular; it would be hard to fit another bed in this room unless they were bunk beds. As an office, it’s an ideal room. With peaches and cream walls, bookshelves, and a classic library table for a computer desk, it’s a comfortable space.

Except that we cluttered it the way middle-class Americans do: with old technology that failed to deliver its promise; with paperwork we haven’t yet filed; with half-used legal pads bought and forgotten over the years. There’s a celebratory poster from my first novel that I need to frame. And a box of cookbooks I got from my mom when she died we haven’t shelved yet. If we ever had to move, we’d have to rent a bevy of semis.

My desk (there is still clutter to the side of me that may never go away)

A present for me

My husband cleaned the office for me, as I stated above. This meant taking most of the boxes of detritus and stuffing them in the closet. That worked for me, as I didn’t open the closet door the last time it was full of detritus. That’s what happens when one cleans out a closet: other things take its place because we’re used to shoving things in closets.

Right now, Richard is dusting down the office. (Yes, he’s the sexiest man on earth when he does housework.) It’s feeling like a real writing retreat and we have designated it as mine unless I need to lend it out to Richard.

All the room is waiting for are my posters celebrating my book publication.

And for me to write already.

Feeling the Tug of Writing

It’s about time

I didn’t write yesterday, but I really wanted to. I was tired after a day of meetings and taking care of my husband (the stomach flu, not anything dangerous). But I felt the Spring in my bones, and I felt my muse over my shoulder and I wondered if I could get back into my story that needs writing.

Stories on the docket

I have, in fact, two stories that I could write. One of them is contemporary fantasy, taking place on my fictitious collective Barn Swallows Dance, and in the realm of the Archetypes, InterSpace. Changes happen such that the Archetypes are slowly being fired from their task carrying the essence of humanity and thus humans’ lives. The Archetypes explode at their sudden lack of purpose. The only person who can stop the bloodshed, if at all, is a pregnant eighteen-year-old girl who carries the gift of influencing history randomly. To do so, she faces the dangers of a human in InterSpace.

The other is fantasy romance, about a thirty-something librarian who encounters a charming neighbor who she falls for, to her friend’s surprise. When the man disappears, the librarian meets his goblin accomplice, and she embarks on a journey to rescue her man from a very possessive queen of Faerie.

So there are two stories that I could write — and a third option, which would be to come up with a new story. I don’t know that I have any knocking around my brain right now. I am inspired by the extrordinary relationships of ordinary people, the surprising things hidden in plain sight, and the unexpected consequences of seemingly ordinary things. And people, beautiful people who I can write fanciful things about.

All I need to do is write.

The Muse

Meet my muse

My muse showed up in my dream last night, pale and red-haired and willowy, and kissed me on the forehead, then darted away.

My muse, the Muse of Things Hidden in Plain Sight, reminded me of my purpose when I thought I had long lost it.

My muse appears as a friend of mine, but isn’t really, because that person would not kiss me in dreams, however chaste. I would also not want to get in trouble with my friend’s wonderful wife. I understand symbolism, however. Long red hair and mischief speak to me. Muses should be wild, unpredictable, capricious. One does not possess muses. Muses possess one instead. So, of course, he would appear like my friend, knowing it would rattle me.

The message

What is the message when my muse leans in and kisses my forehead? The first message is that Spring is here, even though we don’t feel it yet? Astronomical Spring is in 20 days (or so), and the weather has become warmer. The robins aren’t here yet, but the mourning doves are making plans for chicks. Snowdrops haven’t broken the ground yet, but my seedlings in the basement are making their way to true leaves.

The second message is that it’s time to write, and that there are reasons to write. I write about relationships — some of them romantic; others not. The muse’s kiss awakened my characters and gave me the blessing to write about them. The muse reminds me of who I am and what makes me who I am.

The end of winter

I guess I have been going through Winter. The last time I wrote significantly was November (but to be fair, I wrote a book that month.) I didn’t feel like writing; I didn’t feel inspired to write, and I didn’t know if I was a writer anymore.

For me, to be a writer is to be beautiful and mysterious, to hold within oneself multitudes, to hear strange harmonies. I think I might be there again.

Five Minutes

Growing up gifted

I hate the word “gifted”, but I don’t know what other word to use to convey the place I was when I was younger. I had some of the highest grades on standardized exams that had ever been seen in my school district. If I got a B in a class, it was because I marked questions wrong that were right, so as not to be caught daydreaming. I saw it as nothing special, and in fact all my brains did was make me a pariah.

And, of course, it also made me the teachers’ darling. I grew accustomed to the praise I got from them. In high school in particular, I started receiving honors and scholarships, and seeing my name in the paper was a secret thrill. I was a big fish in a small pond. Further, I didn’t have to do anything to get praise but be myself.

Coming down to earth

This continued through my undergraduate years — though I wasn’t winning scholarships by then, at least I was on the honor roll and the Bronze Tablet for my grades (it’s a University of Illinois thing — I was in the top 2% of my class.)

Then I became a professor in a university with many people whose abilities equalled or excelled mine. There are no rewards for doing one’s job. But those of us who became addicted to praise, like myself, are left to wonder where our value is.

Five minutes of fame

I am growing to understand that I had my five minutes of fame in high school. It demanded little of me, just an accident of birth. There are so many others like me who were just as accidentally lucky — good looks, the right Instagram post, a darling cat. Hard work may help, but it is the lucky moment that launches someone into the limelight. I think of the actors in the science fiction genre who will never become well-known stars outside of those who watch science fiction, the people who work in jobs that we assume are unskilled, all the people who are unrewarded for their excellent work.

I’ve had that praise. It’s time for me to give up the limelight.

Coming on Two Years of COVID

Two years ago next week

Two years ago, it was late February and we in the United States had just started hearing of a virus called SARS-CoV-2 that was spreading through China, then Europe. As I read the Internet accounts, part of me dreaded the inevitable pandemic; another part of me became convinced that it would stay across the ocean and peter out, as other SARS infections had. Then, when it reached the coasts of the US, I still monitored the news while assuring myself it was a big city infection that would not reach the rolling hills of Northwest Missouri.

During my spring break (I teach at a university), I watched my emails to see how the university would react to the looming threat, all the while panicking at the virus creeping ever closer, a quickly advancing threat which left in its wake so many people making inexorable slides toward death, kept alive on ventilators until their bodies gave out.

Then, halfway through Spring Break, while universities hustled to continue education online as a brave new experiment, my university sent emails warning us we might follow in their footsteps. Then, a day later, we were told we had a week and a half to move all our instruction online, and that students would not come back to campus from break.

Isolation

The state’s shelter in place order fell into place, and I panicked. I hyperventilated while trying to clean our chaotic kitchen, and I worried I was having a relapse of my bipolar from all the stress. I called my psychiatrist’s nurse, and she told me many people were having the same symptoms.

So many changes bombarded us: the working from home (which didn’t affect me as I was already working from home), the precautions of shopping, the prohibition on social activities. My life shrunk to the walls and window of my living room. My husband masked up and braved the grocery stores with their six-foot distancing.

I decided that, instead of spending all my time in a panic, I would learn to make sourdough bread with a starter I captured myself. The starter made a fine whole-wheat sourdough, and I bought 50 lbs of white whole-wheat flour because the stores were out of it.

We picked up our restaurant meals curbside, and it was not quite the same eating a steak out of styrofoam go containers.

Closer to normalcy

After a while, the shelter-in-place orders expired and my college started meeting again (with distancing guidelines). The restaurants opened up, and the stores started getting more food in stock. The mask ordinances evaporated, although my university required them and most of my colleagues and friends continued to wear them in public, as I did. Slowly, even these restrictions faded. Until this week my university has made mask-wearing suggested rather than required.

I don’t know if I’m ready to go maskless yet, given that I have been masking for so long. But when I’m free of a mask, there will be things I can do, like wear makeup and be heard in class without yelling.

A life post-COVID

I don’t know what a life post-COVID looks like. I know that, over the past couple of years, we in the US hadn’t suffered as much as other countries with crowding, with less advanced medical systems, with fewer preventative measures. But we suffered, if mostly in our day-to-day routines. And we are not done with the pandemics — another round of COVID may be in our future, or another microorganism we didn’t count on. It’s inevitable with access to other countries and terrains, where we don’t have natural immunity. Maybe I will never lose my mask, or only have it off for short periods of time. Maybe we’ll have another shelter-in-place. But what I don’t think we’ll have is a post-COVID celebration, because we’ve lived with it so long that it seems normal.

Brought to You by the Color Blue

A lazy Saturday

I have spent the morning looking at gardening plans — or what passes for plans for me. I have seeds growing in the basement, most of these herbs in the mint family. Orange thyme, lavender sage, winter savory, Korean giant hyssop, orange balm. Why grow what I can buy at the store? The Thai eggplant looks like it’s growing good and the cardoon looks like it’s going to take out its neighbors. One tray, however, looks like it’s going to fail on me, so no sweet violets or mitsuba.

Once upon a time, someone pointed out to me that there are very few truly blue flowers. Many are periwinkle, others are blue-violet. Some mauves are mistaken for blue. There are blue flowers, like a pure cornflower. Is this flower a pure blue? I’d say grey-blue.

Am I blue?

I feel like I should get a lot more done today than thinking about my garden. I can do nothing concrete about my garden right now; it’s too cold to break ground or plant or amend soil. I can’t even plant more seed — I’ve planted all I can until it’s basil season, during which I will plant impossible amounts of two different basils and wonder what I will do with all of it.

What I really want to do is drink affrogato and watch Instagram reels. A relaxing Saturday.

And what would that hurt? Not a thing.

Maybe the blues aren’t such a bad thing.

Thirty Pounds to Celebrate About

I didn’t get any likes from any agents in #sffpit yesterday, but I celebrate myself for thirty pounds lost. To make my doctor happy, I have to lose thirty more pounds. Please understand that I will still be overweight by American standards, because it would take putting myself in danger in losing any more weight than that. But my doctor will be happy, I’ll be healthier, and I’ll get to wear cuter clothes.

The Blog is Having an Existential Crisis

Too many things (and bad habits) in the way

It’s no excuse, as I’ve said before, but my writing seems to be placed on the back burner with teaching classes, taking care of my seedlings downstairs, and trying to talk myself into writing books. Early morning used to be my usual time, and I have been doing flighty, wasteful things in those hours like surfing social media that seems forever the same. Even now, I’m surfing instead of writing this, and the internet has gained few charms.

A time and a place

I need to find a time and a place to write, one which allows me routine. Perhaps I need to promise myself half an hour every day after tea and before I go to work. (Yes, I have daily tea, usually pu-erh, which is Chinese health tea, and an acquired taste).

I also need to find a reward

I’ll be honest with you; I don’t have too many readers to serve as an incentive, and I don’t know how to get more readers. So I need another incentive. I write a newsletter that has about 2400 readers, so I could let them know there’s a blog. But then there’s another consideration —

I need to agree on content

Is this a personal blog? If so, should anyone want to read it? Is it a current events blog? If so, can I do as well as others who are in that line of work? Is it a writing blog? I’m certainly up to that, but there are better and well-read clients.

I’m looking for an identity for this blog because I need one to — *gasp* — market it.

I hate marketing

This is my weakest link. I don’t enjoy bragging about my work. I don’t enjoy getting in people’s faces with a project I love. I don’t even know how to do it well, but I know that without it, nobody knows what I’m doing. Who am I? What is this blog? Nothing special. You can see why I don’t do well with marketing.

Seeking help

If you have any perspective to offer (do not offer services to me because I cannot afford them) please let me know!

Hello! I’m Back! (and a little about depression)

How long have I been gone?

According to my log of posts, I have been gone exactly a month from writing. It feels like longer. I need to write again.

Why have I been gone so long?

I could say “things got busy”, but that’s not the whole truth. I had free time, but I slept much of it. Writing my novels fell by the wayside, although I proofed a couple novels using ProWritingAid, because it was easy and didn’t take too much thought on my part. I dealt okay with routine things, but did nothing truly creative.

I have to break out of the cocoon that depression wraps around a person, the lassitude, the negativity, the self-loathing. I’m working with my doc to remedy the depression on the medication front. The rest is up to me.

I was depressed.

I’m still depressed, but I realize that I have to reach out again to break out of my solitude, just in case someone responds. I have to put myself in the stream of humanity, so it reminds me I am part of it.

I have to go back to writing, to find my soul within the flow of words.

Hello again! Expect my usual content soon.