Seeking direction again

(Note: I am experimenting with larger print for a reader of mine.)

Idea for my next book from the idea file:

Luke Dunstan, 6000-year-old Archetype, serves as a liaison between the immortal Archetypes and the humans whose cultural DNA the Archetypes hold. An edict from the Archetypes’ Maker bids the Archetypes prepare to return these memories in the trust of the humans. Facing their loss of identity, the Archetypes draw battle lines; countless human lives are at stake. It is up to Luke and one young woman, Leah Inhofer, to stop the battle of Archetype against Archetype.

*******

I really need to get back into writing. Or at least editing.

I’ve been editing a bit, but even then I often skip out on it because it’s tedious to go through a document to kill all the extra “have had has was were”. I haven’t written on a novel since finishing Whose Hearts are Mountains in December. I have some old ideas in my file (see above) but no new “a-ha” falling in love with the idea motivation.

Writing the blog every day, as I mentioned yesterday, is my lifeline to writing. As long as I write in my blog I’m still a writer. Right?

I’m afraid that if I keep getting rejections, my current lack of commitment puts me in an easy place to just walk away. This might be a good thing for me in the greater scheme of things, but it’s not good when I think about being a writer.

So I’m musing about what to do. Again.

Why I write (almost) every day

For those of you who have been following me, you know that I write this blog almost every day, sometimes twice in a day. I write first thing in the morning, right after breakfast, before tending to the other duties of the day. Usually, I write this sitting on my living room couch, lap desk in lap, typing on a Microsoft Surface. There’s usually at least one cat nearby — today, Buddy is taking up Richard’s seat on the couch.

There are many reasons I write this blog daily. The first reason is because it’s a writing habit, I haven’t written on a novel in a couple of months because I’ve been editing prior novels for developmental edits, but I’m still writing. I’m still keeping my fingers limber and my ideas fresh for when I start noveling again. (Is ‘noveling’ a word? My spellcheck doesn’t think so.)

A second reason is because I feel a rapport with my readers. I estimate there are only about 20 of you regular readers, and that most of you are people I know. A few of you I’m pretty sure I don’t know, given that you come from places I’ve never been to like Germany, France, and Portugal. I like to write for you, and I’m glad you’re reading.

A final reason is that I hope to be published someday, in which case I’ll need to have a blog, because it’s what writers do. You regular readers know that I fret about whether I’ll be published, and some days I feel down about it. I feel down about it today, as a matter of fact. Keeping a blog helps me hope that the rest of the trappings of being published — readers, recognition — will come to me.

My brain is slow today

I can’t think of anything to say today. But here’s a kitten:

Sasha, my ghost cat

I’m hopeful my ghost cat has moved in again.

I suppose I should explain my ghost cat. Some thirty-two years ago, when I was a graduate student, I owned a small, feisty black cat named Sasha.

I lived in a second floor, one-room apartment in an old house, with the porch roof just outside one window and access to the wooden fire escape out the side window. In the Illinois summers I had no air conditioning, so I tried to keep cool with a box fan and open windows.

I wanted to keep Sasha an indoor cat because I lived on a relatively busy thoroughfare in Champaign. Sasha had her own agenda. She found a way to pop the screen out of the front window, stroll across the porch roof to the fire escape, then bound down the stairs. She would eventually sneak upstairs with one of the other residents and sit outside my apartment door until I returned home.

Until the time she didn’t. Tommy, the alcoholic hippie down the hall, strolled upstairs that evening to announce that he put a dead cat in the dumpster and figured it was mine. My friend down the hall and I actually raided that dumpster at 10:30 at night to find the reeking garbage bag that contained the remains of my Sasha, and buried her on university farm property.

Soon, another cat found me, a grey and white polydactyl I named Kismet, who followed me halfway across town to become my cat. It was fall by then, and I no longer needed to keep my windows open. Kismet, like all young cats, would go into a chasing-nothing sort of frenzy, running around the small apartment, bouncing off the walls.

Except. Except that he would stop at the window, the window that Sasha used to break out of, and peer around the corner to the side of the porch, then run around to the side window as if watching something go down the stairs. And then friends would come and ask me if I had a cat, and I explained that Kismet was out somewhere, and they would ask, “What about the black cat?”

Eventually I moved, and moved again, and moved halfway across the country and back again, and I forgot about Sasha. But then, day before yesterday, my cat Chuckie started chasing around the living room. I thought nothing of it because cats do that. But then he turned a hard right and slammed into the French doors to the dining room. He stared into the dark room as if he saw something we didn’t, something that crept away from him.

If Sasha has found me again, I welcome her with open arms.

Thinking of chocolate.

Today in Maryville,MO, the First Presbyterian Church holds its Nth annual Chocolate Festival. Consisting of two parts — the chocolate dessert bar and the take-home chocolatey cookie and candy bazaar — it’s an opportunity to treat oneself to a pre-Valentine’s Day indulgence.

Chocolate has become synonymous with Valentine’s Day in the US (So has Halloween, but Halloween candy isn’t GOOD chocolate). Probably because in the lab, chocolate consumption has been linked to oxytocin secretion by the body, and oxytocin is the cuddle chemical. The jury is out on whether you can bribe someone to love you by giving them chocolate, however. (Note, you can also get oxytocin by hugging a friend, an animal, or even a stuffed sloth.)

I prefer my chocolates at the extremes — very bittersweet dark chocolate and white “chocolate”, that cocoa butter confection that just melts. Mass-produced American chocolate leaves me cold; Belgian and Swiss chocolate make me very happy. Chocolate caramel, chocolate truffles, chocolate-coated marzipan … but not chocolate-covered raisins or gummies. My favorite chocolatier in the US is L. A. Burdick, but I can’t afford their chocolate (well, I could, for a treat. However, I can’t afford their shipping.) They produce their chocolates with imaginative fillings that vary with the seasons and holidays. They just got done producing their Lunar New Year Asian-inspired chocolate palette; now they’re in the middle of Valentine’s season now.

I’m looking forward to the Chocolate Festival today. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually like caramel better than chocolate, and my favorite dessert at the festival tends to be the chocolate pecan pie bars. This doesn’t mean that I won’t eat good chocolate when it’s shown to me.

Making Peace with Winter

I’m definitely dealing with the winter blahs.

I’m not depressed-depressed, just feeling bleak. My life matches the outdoors — icy gray, devoid of new growth. I have no new ideas for writing right now, no inspirations, no breakthroughs in getting published.

I need to make peace with this winter. Do I always need to be productive, always striving toward something, always trying to make something blossom in my life? I don’t know; I feel best when I’ve just sent out queries, in love with the potential of my work being brought to a wider audience. I feel worst when I get a rejection — I got another one last night. Thus is the way of winter.

How does one weather winter? By sheltering oneself against the chill and waiting. Maybe this is what I need to do — take a break from writing, from editing, from sending out queries, from calling myself a writer. Maybe I need time to figure out how to reinvent myself again, as that’s been a big part of writing for me — trying to reinvent myself.

Maybe I will become something new come spring, when the ice melts and seeds come bursting out of their shells.

Excerpt from Voyageurs

Here’s an excerpt from Voyageurs, the next book I will put through the query process:

(Wanda and Harold met me just outside the soup kitchen, on the cracked sidewalk, negative two years from my natural time —

“What now? I groused. “I was just about to eat lunch at the Mission.”

“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 Harold dared me to.

“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. You can’t change time.”

“I’m going with you,” Harold reassured me. “We’re jumping a minute 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 time and the cup won’t tip over. It always works that way.” I’d tried it — I could win the game with data I’d gleaned from the future, but I couldn’t change the outcome of the game itself.

“But what if I change one or two other things at the same time?” Harold smiled, and I felt his charm dissolve my reluctance. “How would the timeline know which event to change? With one or two other changes at once, I hope to confuse things so that you can tip the right cup and ruin the game.”

“But what about crossing ourselves?” I demanded. “I only get what — four minutes before crossing myself kills me?”

“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.

I needed to reach in and tip the cup with the ball under it at the exact moment that the mooch would guess the whereabouts of 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. But he had faith in me …

One exhilarating moment later, I tipped the cup, revealing the ball to be in a different cup than it 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.)

Google First

A joke among writers is that, if law enforcement officials were to check their Internet search history, they would be booked for suspicion of murder.

There’s truth to that. Writers create all sorts of scenarios in their stories, gruesome as well as delightful, and some things don’t lend themselves well to the old adage “write what you know”. So you don’t need to shoot people or ballistic gelatin to find out how bullet wounds work, nor do you need to slice people to know the difference between arterial and venous bleeding. Thank goodness, because I’m a rather peace-loving person. (Note: I have searched both of the mentioned topics.)

Most of my internet searches don’t appear so gruesome. Google maps has allowed me to map a cross-country trip from Pickle Lake, Ontario (yes, it exists) to Wilson Sink Reservoir, NV (yes, it too exists) and inspect the terrain around the latter for Whose Hearts are Mountains. I have examined rooms in the Grand Hotel in Mackinaw Island and boarded the Strena Spirit in Gdynia, Poland for Prodigies.

Before the advent of the Internet, I would have had to do all of this research in libraries, by locating experts (without Googling them), or with hands on experience. I quit writing Whose Hearts are Mountains 30 plus years ago, because I couldn’t find good documentation on what a desert was like,. Now the Internet allows me to pick a spot of desert, find out what the flora and fauna are, figure out the temperatures at night in March, and investigate how one can raise food through greenhouses and dry land farming.

The important thing to note about getting details right is that, if the writer doesn’t get the details right, the readers will — and they will not let the writer live this down. “That’s not an AK-47, that’s an AR-15” is a common refrain of gun aficionados on the Internet, and each knowledge base has its experts and fans who will find the mistakes in the writer’s narrative. Usually, of course, by Googling.

So it’s best to Google first.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.