really, really short

I haven’t been wise.

I’ve tried to converse with illusion,

To know the doppleganger of my desires.

I’ve made a character from travelogue pictures

And tried to divine his intent from silences.

I’ve come to mistrust him

For all the thoughts I haven’t put in his head.

I ask forgiveness

He didn’t ask for any of this.

What is my blog about?

I’ve noticed that the tone of this blog is not consistent. I originally set out writing about the craft of writing, writing the blog entries as I learned. I still write this way from time to time (yesterday’s post). I decided that I sounded a little didactic (i.e. like a professor teaching class), and I included personal writing examples in the analysis.

Then I realized that people reading — most of whom I suspect aren’t writers — enjoyed reading those excerpts and short stories and poems, so I sometimes posted creative writing without analysis.

And then my depression leaked in. You likely knew when it did, because my normally positive self despaired over every rejection and my writing took on a tone of desperation. In retrospect, I kept it in the blog because the experience of depression is real and maybe one of my two readers struggled with it or its mirror twin, mania. And now I’m writing on a semi-creative book about living with bipolar disorder.

So what is my blog about now? I believe it’s still about writing — writing on one’s journey through a forest of skeletons, writing about delighting in a beautiful creature, turning one’s visions into a character’s journey. It’s about the practice of writing — the choice of words, the way they’re used, and sometimes the way they’re misused. It’s about being a writer — publication joys and woes (in my case, it’s woes), lost material. It’s about writing as a way of understanding one’s personal baggage and acknowledging our common humanity.

Most of all, it’s about honesty — I choose my words, but I don’t censor my image. I claim the adjectives “raw”, “honest”, and “TMI”. I speak to the people who haven’t found their voice, whose voices shake, and whose voices have been taken from them. I also speak to the people who have had smooth lives, that they understand the world of those of us who haven’t. This is my calling as a writer, more than just putting pretty words down. I want us all to find our true homes.

*********

The reason I’ve written this is because yesterday, I was interviewed by Jennifer Peltz of the Associated Press about the progress of women speaking out about sexual assault over the past twenty years, from Take Back the Night marches to today’s #MeToo movement. I spoke both as a professor and a role model, as a victim of rape and as a survivor. I don’t know how much of the interview, if any, will be included in the article, or whether anyone will read the article. If it gets published, I may stay in relative obscurity. I may get harassed, have my life threatened and my contact information published on the Internet. I see my honesty about my experiences as my calling at least as much as my writing is.

If the worst happens, I may need your support. Please keep that in mind.

And thank you.

More or Less an Analysis

One of the things I wrestle too much with in my writing — am I telling the reader too little? Too much?

The first thing I think of is Chekhov’s Gun, the rule that if something is important to the plot, it should be introduced before it becomes important. My first segment, then, is a veritable Clue game (“Look! There’s the candlestick that Mr. Mustard will use to kill the deceased in the parlor!”), but is it too much? Or too little?

What do we know from yesterday’s post of the first segment (yesterday’s post)?

Annie’s mother is a cultural anthropologist who supposedly told Annie odd bedtime stories when she was a child;
Annie doesn’t remember her childhood;
Annie has chosen to follow her steps, focusing on urban legends;
Annie’s stepfather was/is a renowned cryptographer for the government, and kept possession of codes when he left his position and changed his identity;
Annie dabbles in cryptology and inherits his cipher box and codes;
Her parents die three months after that passage in a home invasion;
An unknown time has passed, and Annie is remembering the incident.

I worry about whether I’m doing the right thing by not explaining these things more, but the too little/too much dichotomy runs through my head when I reread it:

Are the items above too much for the first thousand words of a book? Should I put in more description so it doesn’t feel like an information dump?
Have I given too little reference to time, so that I strand the readers in limbo and give them no clue as how the segment fits in the book?
Does Annie not worry enough about coming into possession of what might be government secrets?
Can I just leave Annie’s casual mention of not having childhood memories (a rare thing to not have any before a certain age) as something she just accepts, or do I have to explain more?
And, most importantly, does this beginning make my readers want to read more of it?

Just under a thousand words, and I have this many questions to answer. In some ways, writing fiction reminds me of writing my dissertation way back when — I’m relieved when the number of comments in red in the margins finally becomes less than the number of words I’ve written.

The first baby step

Miraculously, I’m at a coffee shop editing the beginning of Whose Hearts are Mountains. This is how the book begins. I might have posted an earlier version earlier, but this has been tweaked. I’d love it if you let me know whether this is too random or weird to start a book with.

********

“Once upon a time, there were beings who looked like people, only they weren’t the people you see every day. For one, they were stronger than ordinary people, and they lived a lot longer than ordinary people do. They existed to help people understand who they were and where they came from. By the few who knew them, they were called Ancestors, Archetypes, or sometimes Alvar.

“They lived in a realm far away, yet as close as a thought. In this realm, they existed rather than lived, mere vessels for the ancient memories they held. Some of them tired of this passive role, and wanted to go Earthside to see these people they represented. So they jumped to Earthside, which was only a thought away, defying their Oldest. These Alvar occasionally chose to bring children into the world, which defied their Oldest to a degree that could not be forgiven. Of those Alvar were born the Earthbound Alvar, who lived among people.

“There was one of the Alvar who was born of the male Alvar of the Kiowa and a female Alvar of legend, Lilith. They left their son (for Alvar were born full-grown) with the Kiowa to learn about them and to help them. All he remembered of his birth was that two people, his parents, told him he was special and that he was never to give the secret of his birth away to anyone.

“The Kiowa shaman named him “Old Man” even though he looked young, and as time passed, he did not age as the others did. Eventually, the band felt frightened of him because of his lack of aging, and he left to join other bands of the First People to hide his true age. He understood that others grew old and died, and he didn’t understand why he didn’t. He also wondered why he had never been young like the babies born to the Kiowa.

“Eventually, he was kidnapped by evil people who put him in chains, people who didn’t realize he was Alvar, but he escaped by jumping – something he had forgotten he could do – back to the place where the Kiowa, his original people, banded. They had gone away, but he became a cowboy, moving from place to place and job to job so that his true nature – which he didn’t understand – wouldn’t be detected.

“He lived like that for years, and finally found himself at a place of learning, so he could discover who he was. He fell in love with a woman named Allie, who looked at him as if she knew him, and asked him lots of questions that tipped close to uncovering his secret. One day, Allie took him to talk to their professor, who was very wise. The professor, Mari, told the man, who called himself Will that she was different in the way he was. Mari told Will and Allie about the Alvar, and Allie grew to love Will even though he was not like her.

“One day, they made a child, born fully grown as children of Alvar and humans were born. All of the pain of Will’s past washed over him at the sign of his offspring, and his mind shattered. He disappeared before Mari or Allie could stop him. Allie never stopped loving him, or the child they had together, and she surrounded that child with all the love she could muster, love enough for two.”

“Mom,” I groused, setting aside the cipher box I fiddled with and pulling myself up on the floral print couch, “that’s not a bedtime story for a child – that’s an anthropological treatise.” I wasn’t joking – my mother, Alice Schmidt, had been a preeminent anthropologist who studied Plains cultures at the time of arrival of white people. The story went that she had been trained by the famed Native American anthropologist MariJo Ettner, who had disappeared ten years before and left her coveted research notes to my mother.

“What did you expect?” my mother asked, her green eyes laughing. “You ask an anthropologist to tell a bedtime story, and you get anthropology. If you told a bedtime story, it would be a fable about an encrypted ghost that terrorized hackers.” Mom, of course, was right – not only because I had chosen to become an anthropologist specializing in urban legends, but because I was my father’s daughter – and my father had been, before his disappearance, a key government encryption expert, and he and I played with the tricks of his trade, cyphers and algorithms.

“So that’s the bedtime story you told me,” I chided, hiding my annoyance that I couldn’t remember my childhood once again.

“It was the best I could do,” Mom shrugged, then looked at me searchingly, as she often did. Arthur Schmidt — no, Durant Smith after the Witness Protection Program gave him a new identity — strolled in, all rumpled blond hair and steel-framed glasses. Durant was my father figure, but not my father, and my clouds of hair and green eyes came from my mother. My unknown father explained the deep chestnut color of those clouds of hair. “I packed up your car,” he sighed. “The backpack I gave you is under the passenger seat. Take good care of it.”

“Are you sure you want to give me that backpack?” I queried. “You’re giving all your toys away.”

“I’m giving Arthur’s toys away,” my stepfather quipped. I hugged Durant, who was a short man who came to just above my chin. I hugged my mother, plump where I was slender. I studied their faces, which looked just a little older, just a bit more worn, than my first memories of them five years before.

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Six months after that memory, my parents were killed in a home invasion while I was halfway across the country in graduate school. As a cultural anthropologist, I have chased many stories in my life. The story my mother told me, like the memory of much of my childhood, eludes me.

Baby Steps Back

Right now, I’m considering going back to Whose Hearts are Mountains — not to finish it up yet, but to sit down and look at the 70,000 words I’ve already written to see how I can balance the travelogue through a post-Collapse United States with the protagonist’s personal reactions — and field notes, because Annie IS an anthropologist.

I also have to make it plausible that the myriad of “incidents” (i.e. attacks) Annie experiences could be random malfeasances rather than the signs of a plot by Free White State’s government to capture her. I’m covering this for the next book in their series. I have to make the dreams and hints hint only toward her identity as a half-human, half-preternatural creature rather than the conspiracy that will be in the next book.

I also should work on the mental health book, which is going to require some primary sources. I’m too much an academic to use the Cliff Notes of bipolar disorder, Bipolar Disorder for Dummies. (I kid you not. Not even a tiny bit.) Biological psychology and psychiatry articles don’t intimidate me that much — ok, biopsych intimidates me a bit — it’s just that there’s so much “We don’t know what causes bipolar, but neurotransmitters are involved somewhere” that I can read without my brain going numb.

Yes, this is a lot of work I’m doing for something that may just be for the fun of it, given my total failure to find a agent. I may take a friend’s advice and try for literary fiction agents but not right now, not while I’m fighting off depression. Part of me wonders if writing, or at least putting 85,000 words into a novel (and I’ve done that with six so far) is a waste of time if I can’t get published. I like my creations to have an audience and speak to people, just as knitters want their family and friends to appreciate the gifts of socks and hats.

This is my dilemma, the one I have to get a handle on before I write again.

Conversation with A Fictitious Author

I sat at an isolated seat in Starbucks sipping at a blonde espresso. My computer sat before me, unopened, as I wondered how to start writing again. I glanced up, and a man in his thirties, dressed like a professor in a red sweater and white Oxford shirt and jeans, strode toward me. He didn’t look like any of my colleagues, although as time passed, it seemed I knew fewer and fewer of them. This man could have blended into a faculty reception without notice — of middling height and slight build, myopic brown eyes behind round steel-rimmed glasses —

I recognized him as he sat down, and understood why nobody else noticed him. The wide, vaguely almond-shaped eyes crinkled when he smiled at me —

“I figured I’d find you here.” Josh Young, chronicler of the sociomagical experiment known as Barn Swallows’ Dance — and writer of magical realism to the outside world — peered at me. “How’s progress on the book?”

“Books,” I corrected. “Two fiction and one not-so-fiction.” I studied my paper cup of espresso. “They’re not going well. I’m having trouble getting back to writing after my latest round of rejections, but you wouldn’t know that.”

The New York Times bestselling writer, who had won that distinction by the time he was thirty, suddenly seemed a little taller and more substantial. Of course — it was his connection to the earth-soul Gaia, to the sprinkling of trees that grew outside the library Starbucks. Nobody else, again, noticed. “Do you know why I’ve had the success in getting published?” I heard leaves whisper in his tenor voice.

“Because you’re really good at writing?” I met his gaze and his challenge.

“Because you wrote me that way. Because you wrote me as someone who studied writing fiction and wrote literary fiction and sent it to literary fiction agents. You wrote me as someone who not only had great talent, but great luck.”

“I wrote you to be a better writer than me?” I stammered.

“I can’t be better than the person who’s writing me — you see?” Josh chuckled, a dry sound that reminded me of leaves again. “I will say, though, that you wrote some lofty aspirations for me. If this wasn’t fantasy, I’d get rejected just as much as you do. The idea is to tell your truth, and tell it over and over until someone listens.” Josh walked his fingers toward my espresso, and I tapped his hand with my spoon in warning.

“But what if no one listens?” I threw the rest of the quad espresso down my throat as if it were a shot of whiskey and slammed the paper cup on the table.

Josh raised his eyebrows and peered over his glasses at me. “Then that’s their problem, because if you don’t listen and discern, you don’t learn, you fail to adapt, and you die. The first law of nature.”

I remembered when Josh was a college student, a little more frail with spiked hair and bright t-shirts. This man, thirteen years later, was no less beautiful, but he had calmed from the black-clad, precocious poetry slam artist to an equally precocious, wry and weighty scholar. He glanced down at the table, breaking eye contact. “Yes?” I asked.

“There’s a question I need to ask.” He paused for a noticeable increment of time. “Will I outlive –“

I knew the end of that question, and why Josh wanted to know. The love of his life, Jeanne Beaumont-Young, was thirty years older than him, which I guessed made her about 63. Of course, I had written about the end of this committed couple’s life together.

“Jeanne will live an extremely long life,” I ventured slowly, “and she will outlive you, but by only six months.” I withheld his cause of death, an undetected aneurysm, because it would make no difference — the fatal defect would be inoperable.

Josh nodded. “You could have taken the easy way out and had us both die at the same time, or you could have made me wait twenty years.” He stood, shook my hand, and wandered off, looking like any other professor who frequented the campus Starbucks.

Soon, to my surprise, he returned, eyes twinkling, with another stout blond espresso. “Writers need their coffee,” he grinned, and faded into the crowded coffeehouse.

Thank you — and a guided meditation story

Just a quick thank-you for listening. I know I’ve been writing pretty heavy stuff lately (except for Marcie segments), but I write from the heart, and that is where my heart is right now. It will not last forever, nor will it end in heartbreak. I have a purpose in life, even if I don’t know what it is right now.

********

Last night, I decided to do a guided meditation. I suggested to my walking mind that I find a safe place, and I ended up in a forest, a fantasy forest as if illustrated by a gifted child. The forest was full of huge trees with plump purple trunks that grew so tall I couldn’t see their branches. Pillowy moss grew underneath.

I sat, huddling against the immense trunk of a tree.

What do you need? A voice, a mother’s voice but so much not my mother’s.

“I don’t need anything. I take care of myself.” Even as a child, I saved myself. There were never any princes to rescue me. I shifted against the rough, black-grooved bark of the tree.

I love you.

“That’s what you say. Of course you love me. You’re me. I know how guided meditation works.”

Yes, but that’s where all things start.

“What can you do for me?” I snapped. I asked for little; I demanded even less. “Can you make this hurt go away?”

I can be there for you. I can remind you you’re never alone.

“Of course you can. You’re me. That makes me feel worse rather than better.” There I sat, in an imaginary forest, having a conversation with myself.

But I’m always here. Who else can say that? When it’s three in the morning, or everyone else is busy, or they don’t understand what you need, I’m here for you.

“I guess that makes sense.”

I curled up and fell asleep under the trees.

For the bipolar book — and for your understanding.

The things you don’t do while depressed:

· You don’t drive alone on deserted country roads where there’s no speed limit.

· You don’t stay alone. Even if you want nothing more than to be alone, complete solitude allows nihilistic thoughts to take hold. Coffeehouses remain a favorite refuge, even though you have to make small talk occasionally.

· You don’t tell acquaintances you’re depressed. It makes them uncomfortable.

· You don’t pick up broken glass without a sturdy pair of leather gloves.

· You don’t smash the things you love. You don’t delete all your writing or destroy next summer’s garden under the grow lights, even though your writing and plants are living things and you are not.

· You don’t give up your livelihood. You do not stay home from work no matter how bad you feel. You do not slack off on your work even though you’re sometimes so confused you don’t remember what to do next.

· You don’t do anything that would put you in a behavioral health ward, because it will wipe out what little self-esteem has not been scoured away by the depression. The things the behavioral health ward does for your health and safety – taking away your phone, prohibiting you from doing work, taking your shoelaces, leaving you almost no alone time – depersonalizes you. Being in the ICU seems almost cheery in comparison – at least the nurses talk to you in kind voices there instead of flat parole officer voices.

· You don’t let yourself eat or drink too much, do anything too reckless, or even speak the desire to flip your middle finger at an uncaring world.

The things you do while depressed:

· You read the inspirational quotes your friend posts on Instagram and Facebook and assume that they’re not for you.

· You answer, “How’s it going?” with “I’m doing pretty good”, even though you’re not.

· You push yourself, push yourself, push yourself – until you can’t push yourself any more for that day, and then you sleep. Sometimes dreams are the best part of the day.

· You try to find value in yourself and come up empty. The encouragement people give you seems to have come from a different world with different rules than the one you now live in.

· You look for one thing, just one thing, to go well, knowing that your mind will merely dismiss it as irrelevant. You experience all bad things as the world’s way of telling you your demise is near, death by a thousand papercuts.

· You call your psychiatrist, of course, and make an appointment. You feel like a failure doing so, even though you took your meds as instructed. You feel like a failure even needing to call your psychiatrist.

· You wonder if you were being delusional all the times you felt you were accomplished, literate, and likeable.

Callings and the Household’s Stories

First off, Marcie says hi. She’s just about done with her first novel, Chucky the Cat Saves the World. She’s tried to convince Chucky to illustrate it, but the negotiations haven’t been going well.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to convince Girly-Girl, who’s sitting next to me, to write a memoir. I’ve suggested the title I’ve Seen Everything and I Don’t Care Anymore. She didn’t care for that.

i’m trying to convince my husband to seek out an agent. He writes in science fiction and he understands the genre very well — its subject matter; its focus on machines, science, and battles; its masculinist roots. I believe he could find an agent pretty quickly, and I wonder if the reason I felt called to writing was to get him to write, and find him a career.

I’m still confused as to what I’ve been called to do, and whether I’ve been called to write. Callings are very important among Quakers — we believe that if we sit quietly enough, God will show us our callings. I haven’t felt anything as a calling for so long that I feel adrift.

When I start writing again, calling or no, I don’t know what I’ll start writing on again. I’m afraid of the creative memoir about bipolar disorder. Although it’s attractive being heard, I don’t want people to think of me as “THAT person,” the one you have to keep an eye on. Yes, as open as I am about my situation, I am afraid of people who judge. Sometimes I want to run away from this blog because I’ve talked about it here.

I feel stymied by Hearts are Mountains. It’s reading like a depressing travelogue, and I don’t know what it needs. It’s a bit flat. I might want to go back to Prodigies, but I wonder if that’s going very well either. I doubt everything since all the rejections.

I hope that I find my direction soon — in or out of writing, I don’t know. But I hope I find my calling.

I haven’t written in two weeks.

I’m still trying to sort out my relationship with writing.

If’ you’ve followed this blog for long enough, you’ll know that I’ve said this so many times that you figure I’m crying wolf. You’re probably right — I say this when I’m deeply depressed and I can’t shoulder any more stress and I don’t want to think of those hundred-some rejections I’ve received so far in my life.

Here are the questions I need to consider:

1) Why do I write? I think with me, it’s complicated:

30% because I have ideas
20% because I want to improve as a writer
30% because I want people to read my stuff
10% because I want my world view (diversity, nonviolence, interdependence) to further get a toehold in the mainstream
10% because I want to get published.

What makes this complicated is that it will take getting published for people to read my stuff; it will take an editor to improve my writing; it will take getting published mainstream to get those ideas looked at in the mainstream.

2) Would I be comfortable being self-published?

Likely not. The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. The bad thing is that everyone does, regardless of talent. I’ve read a selection of self-published books — Cassandra Bruington, your memoir was awesome. The romance novels — lowest common demoninator, not written well — the exception is when one of my favorites Robin D. Owens self-publishes, and she’s a professionally published author with a large number of romance fantasy books. And then there’s the others — writing that could best be described as barely developing the plot outline, plot lines that only exist to justify a book-long sex scene, and the occasional Twilight clone. In the first scene of one book, which had the promising title of King of the Gypsies, the author was obviously getting too turned on by the antagonist’s thoughts upon watching the woman he was going to rape and kill. I had to take a bath after reading that chapter.

I don’t like my chances of getting read in this scenario.

3) Would it help to take a break?

It wouldn’t hurt — I have six completed novels, two novels in progress, and two non-fiction ideas in progress.

4) What about that editor?

We’re going to see what we can afford when the income tax return comes in.

5) Will you still write this blog?

If you’ll still read it. Let me know what kind of posts you like to read. (I know you all love to read Marcie, but Marcie will continue to guest-write rather than take over this blog. She has homework to do, and she keeps insisting she’s writing her first novel of ten pages.)