An excerpt!

This is an excerpt from “Toppled”, my current project. I skipped ahead to something I thought would be more motivating for me. Ichirou and Grace and Greg have “talents” — strange abilities hidden under the mundane talents they have as prodigies. This gets into talents ethics, and — well, bumbling attempts at relationships. This is from Ichirou’s point of view — he spent several years in a school that tries to cure hikikomoris, or teenage recluses. Grace’s parents put her in residential music schools for most of her life, and she has little parenting as a result. Greg’s family was killed in a bombing about 13 years ago.

Because this is an excerpt from the middle of the book, you may have some questions. Go ahead and ask!

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I sat in the copse of trees that the cabin nestled in. I focused on the birds singing to keep the pressure of the air from crushing me. Ayana-sensei taught me how to do that, to keep me from retreating into what she called my own mind. I didn’t correct her – I retreated to a place, not my own mind.

And now I would tell Grace-chan – Gracie in her language — about this place, and she would doubtless think I was crazy. But I would not be an impostor to her.

I glanced up, and I saw Gracie stroll toward me, tall and lean and poised. She had the perfect demeanor, the perfect body – I stopped the thought there by thinking of the birds, some of which sounded familiar, some not. One bird called “cheer, cheer, cheer!” and I knew I had once heard it in the world I retreated to.

Gracie wore shorts and a t-shirt and a black baseball cap with a white symbol that, after much scrutiny, I realized were initials intertwined. The Yankees, of course. She sat down next to me, unnervingly close, and I smelled a distinctly chemical, un-Gracie smell. She handed me a bottle. “Good. You have a hat. Rub some of this on so the ticks don’t get you.” I did as directed, and I too smelled like cleaning fluid disguised by artificial flower scent.

“So why are we here?” she asked, cocking her head as she peered at me.

“It’s time to tell you something.”

Of course, Gracie’s brow wrinkled at my dramatic choice of words. “Time to tell me what?”

“Where my talent comes from.”

“Comes from?” Gracie would say that, because her talent, or the talent beneath her talent, developed from her childhood need to be listened to and appeared to come from her own subconscious.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I felt the slight breeze pushing against my skin. “Your talent comes from something inside you. My talent comes from a place outside of me.”

“What do you mean?” Grace-chan stammered.

“Do you remember the video I showed you the day we met?”

“I can’t forget that –” she snapped. “I spent half an hour with you in a pitch-black lounge watching bunnies turn into flowers and finding all the pain of my childhood – which had no bunnies or flowers – lying dissected in front of me.”

“I miscalculated,” I shrugged. “Too much happy and not enough comforting.” I paused. “But that’s not the point.”

“Not the point,” Gracie echoed.

“The reason I wanted to meet here is because I wanted you to know where my ideas come from.”

“They come from your mind?” Gracie asked, and I couldn’t identify her tone of voice.

“No, Gracie,” I corrected. “There’s this place, and I go there – “

“And the place is in your mind,” she insisted.

“No. I go someplace. Someplace else. When I was a hikikomori, the world would become too much for me to deal with, and I would go to this other place with no sound but pictures flowing like waterfalls, and it would tell me stories in pictures, and I started to retell them. Sometimes it showed me horrible stories that I swore I would never share. But most of the pictures show me things the world needs to see. And I retell them.”

“And you’ve assigned yourself as the arbiter of what people need to see. How conceited of you!” Without another word, she stood up and stalked off.

I sat with my back against my tree and my eyes closed, trying to pay attention to the sounds rather than going back to my world.

“Ichirou, let me give you a piece of advice.” I opened my eyes, and Greg, lanky and unkempt in his second-hand fatigues, squatted next to me. “When dealing with women, it’s best not to dismiss their emotions lest they get angry and stomp away in a huff.”

A short note …

I will be participating in Camp NaNo in July, and if you want to join me, please do! If you want to watch my word count progress, look me up. I’m lleachie, as I am everywhere else on the interwebs.
In other news, I sent another query, this time to Quirk Publishing. Wish me luck.

I love you all, and so do the Nephilim cats, who will hover in front of your face to get your attention.

Our Families Shape our Worlds and our Words

It’s Father’s Day here in the US, during which we celebrate our fathers. Mother’s Day passed by a month ago. Today I think of my parents, and my relationship with my parents, and how my view of it has changed over time.

When I was much younger, I thought only of the injustices of my childhood (of which there were many — enough that a social worker once wondered aloud how I could have come out of that childhood with my personality intact). I think I focused on these when I was younger and less experienced because, face it, when you’re younger and less experienced, you’re afraid you’re not going to make it and you berate your parents for not equipping you with the skills you need.

As I got older, and I realized I would survive adulthood and that the quirks I developed from surviving my childhood weren’t fatal, I began to see the shining parts of my parents’ personalities as well as those parts where they were all too human:

My father just turned 80. He has a strong (and humanistic) sense of right and wrong. He took care of my sister and me through very difficult times in the family. He stayed in a job he’d grown to dislike rather than indulge his dream as a chef because he was the breadwinner for the family. He remarked that if any of my suitors would have asked for my hand, he’d have said “ask her yourself!” He always supported our right to make our own decisions.

My mother died eight years ago. She recognized her eccentricity a long time before and lamented that she wasn’t rich or famous enough for society to accept it. Mom was what is now termed as “a maker”, never wanting to be a beginner at any hobby she picked up. Her eye for design — and my eye for design — led to us collaborating on a few one-of-a-kind embroidery projects. She excelled at putting together outfits for my roles in school plays. She forever debated whether artifice pulled away people’s perceptions of substance.

My characters capture some of the traits and characteristics of my parents. The 6000-year-old Luke’s stoic commitments mirrors my father’s commitment to his family (not to mention his sense of humor). Jeanne Beaumont, the botany professor, captures my mother’s mature beauty. Chasity Howell throws a phenomenal hissy fit that reminds me of my mother as well.

Again, our lives are in our writing as much as our writing is in our lives.

*****
Update:

After passing five FEMA short classes, I’m back to writing. Yesterday’s fun searches: what is the Russian mob called? How do you say “He hit on her” (it’s not a direct translation, but slang) in Japanese?

I haven’t given you an excerpt for a while

I hadn’t given you an excerpt for a while; this is from what I’m currently writing.

Background: Grace Silverstein, an eighteen-year-old viola prodigy, and Ichirou Shimizu, a seventeen-year-old graphic design prodigy, have just escaped gunfire from the place they had been invited to participate in an international assembly for prodigies in Krakow. Through a combination of luck and craftiness, they have holed up in an all-night pierogi place in the Stare Misto. They eat dinner, given that they barely picked at their food at the earlier banquet, and discuss their predicament:

Ichirou interrogated me after the waiter had left. “How come you have money?” He studied me through his steel-framed glasses.

“I’m 18. I’ve been handling my own finances since I was 15. I have a credit card.”

“As a high school student?” Ichirou peered over his nerd glasses at me.

“As a trust fund baby.” I peered back at the youngster.

Ichirou pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Trust fund baby?”

“My parents died in a plane crash when I was fifteen.”

“I’m sorry,” Ichirou murmured.

“It’s complicated. I spent most of my life at boarding schools — music schools — I never really knew my parents as Mom and Dad.”

“That’s strange,” Ichirou replied. He paused, as if he would say more.

At that moment, the waiter came back with our drinks. Ichirou scrutinized his cup of hot water with a teabag beside it. My water came in a bottle and appeared to be bubbly.

“I would recommend looking at the Krakow Misalliance,” the waiter smiled, reaching toward an invisible lock of hair and then stopping. “It takes a while to cook, though. Your pierogis will be out in a minute.” He wandered off, and I noted that he glanced over his shoulder at the door.

I glanced at the door again, and thankfully I didn’t see any beefy men striding through. “Do you think they’re going to find us here?” I fretted.

“Hard to tell.” Ichirou took a sip of the tea he had brewed in his cup. “This is tea?”

“This is the way the rest of the world drinks tea, Ichirou,” I smirked, then sobered.

Ichirou took a deep breath. “What happened back there? At the Palace?”

“I think they want people with talents. Not talents like ours, but talents like yours. Like what you knew would happen when I watched your screen saver.”

“I didn’t know for sure,” Ichirou responded. “I thought it might.”

“You tested that on me without knowing what it would do?” I hissed just as the waiter came by with our plates. Ichirou gave me a warning look.

“Venison pierogis for you,” the waiter handed me my plate with a dancer’s grace, “and cabbage pierogis for the vegetarian. Let me know if you need anything.” The waiter walked off, glancing over his shoulder again.

“So you think they’re after me because of my animation,” Ichirou conjectured between bites. “What about the others, then? What about you?”

Good question, and not one I’d been able to answer. “Nastka — Anastasja — I overheard her talking to Matusiak about practicing something — and did you notice that her talent was not mentioned in the introductions? And the twins — they’d had contact with this bunch before, and they were terrified.” I remembered the white faces of the children and their mother, and I remembered the gunshots as we fled the building, and wondered what their resistance had cost them. “As for me, my only talent is music — honestly.”

“We’ll see,” Ichirou responded, rubbing his chin. “You’re here.”

“Whatever,” I responded.

I have a month and a half to wait on my manuscript that’s with HarperLegend — if I hear nothing by August 1, I have to regroup again.

AAAAAAAAGH! Writer’s Block!

In the last couple days, I have written six lines of my story. Normally, I write up to 2000 words/day, as when I participate in NaNoWriMo (http://nanowimo.com) or Camp Nano (campnanowrimo.org). I’ve only not won NaNoWriMo once (50,000 words) and that’s when Trump had just gotten elected. (I didn’t have the heart to write.)

I’m not sure why I struggle to write right now. The current book (working title: The Ones who Toppled the World) isn’t much more difficult than most of what I’ve written. I have a relatively good outline to plantz from. I have more time to write than I do during the school year.

This leaves me with several possibilities:

I need a kick to the imagination.
I need a vacation from writing 😕
I’m letting my discouragement get to me.
I find the current story more challenging than I’m letting on.
I’m writing in my blog too much 😜
I need a more atmospheric place to write than my couch.
I need a soundtrack to write with.
I haven’t fallen in love with my characters yet. These characters — the sardonic Grace and the analytical Ichirou; the calm and prepared Ayana and her partner, the chameleonic Greg — I’ve barely scratched their surfaces. Maybe I need to have a chat with them to get to know them better?
I’m not seeing myself as a writer lately.

Ok, I have ideas to play with now. Let’s chat sometime!

Flow, happiness, and writing

Caution: My day job is a Human Services professor, and I teach a positive psychology course. Classroom lectures come out of my mouth (figuratively and literally) at the most unusual times.

According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990),

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing
times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is
stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something
difficult and worthwhile.” (Csikszentmihalyi, M., 1990)

The quote above refers to a concept called flow. In flow, sense of time is lost and all that remains is oneself and one’s skill and the challenge. Flow becomes a source of well-being.

If you have a creative life, you have probably experienced flow. The night on the stage where you become the character; the dance where you merge with the music, the rhythm of your feet on the floor, the movement of your partner; the writing session where time passes without your notice and you’ve captured the moment you’re writing about.

(I do not mean to imply that flow only comes from creative endeavor — people with noncreative talent experience flow as well — repairing a car engine, cross-stitching a sampler, or teaching a class.)

I think creatives, having experienced flow in our creative lives, crave it over and over — and do not always find it. Dancers have days where they miss their landings, where every movement is effort without reward. Actors have days where they’re handed a new script and they can’t encompass the character even if they’re Method and have literally put themselves in the character’s shoes.

Writers have those days when they can’t motivate to write, because we look at what we’ve written and the characters don’t shine or threaten, because we’ve lost the thread in the side plots, because the plot that looked iron-clad has a hole the size of a small house, because we had to go back to doing research (that pierogi place in Krakow haunts me in my dreams). Trust me, I know, because I’ve dealt with all these lately.

These will pass. Because we’ve paid our dues and found a level of proficiency that allows us flow, we will find it again when we hone our abilities, regain our focus, and pursue excellence.

Oh gosh — I discovered a new wrinkle for the world I’m writing in, and it’s about flow:

So I have prodigies with “normal” talents who also have talents in less normal categories, talents that can be “weaponized” — emotional manipulation, perfect recall, fire-starting, etc. These shadow talents are not always available — could it be because the shadow-talents are fueled by flow?

Trauma, experience, and characterization

“I tell my story over and over in my head, over and over to my readers, struggling to make sense of it …”I wrote this line almost thirty years ago in a short story — if you’re interested, the story was called “The Repentance of Nicholas”, was about surviving sexual assault, and about a glimpse of the possibility of amends. It just appeared to be written about an incubus, because people find it easier to believe in the redemption of monsters than of human males, because it’s harder to get angry at creatures that are not real.

I will not share this story, because an older and wiser me sees the redeemed monster as self-serving, manipulative — not truly redeemed, perhaps a more subtle and self-justified version of who he’d originally been. The world doesn’t need a false epiphany.

I mention it here, however, because of the line I featured above — The main character, obviously, wrote; she wrote to make sense of a traumatic memory. I used to write for that reason — to make sense of traumatic memories, and maybe to change the ending of the stories to get closure.

Thirty years later, I’ve told the stories over and over for long enough, and the trauma has faded to understanding of my situations in 360 degrees, as modern business jargon has it. My understanding informs the creation of characters not like me and situations not like mine — the architectural genius whose career crumbles to ruin after a period of reckless brilliance; the ancient Archetype who realizes his need for control has led to the Apocalypse; the cop who has too little faith in himself that he has not noticed the rottenness of the town he serves.

My characters are not me, but they are of me. My life experiences, traumatic and merely annoying and transcendental and mundane, splinter into purified essence of situation and reaction, and I find my characters, even the villains, enriched for it.

I hope it makes me a better writer.

Real and Facade

In the lobby of the Waters of Minoqua, I notice log ornamentation on the lobby, the furniture, the walls. Mounted deer heads line up on the walls like a gallery. Birch log accents with peeling bark display cheeky plastic birds.

At the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Ojibwa museum, I study canoes of birch bark and of hollowed logs, dresses of beaded flannel, leather moccasins adorned with dyed porcupine quills, instructions for spear fishing — and a history of how the whites banned spear fishing on reservation land, then poisoned the fish.

I have a vested interest in the reservation. I am one of the many descendents of Ikweseke and Michel Cadotte. My ancestors walked away from their family and heritage, and thus became white. My family called me the “papoose” because I had some of the look of my Ojibwa ancestors. Even though I’m too pale, I know what they’re talking about now as I walk by the social services building on the reservation.

I can tell real from facade when I look at the spaces — the real functions as tools, as baskets, as clothing, as sacred objects. Functional objects can be ornamented, not just function as ornaments; I learned this from the Ojibwa museum.

If I choose to accept my Ojibwa ancestry without having lived on the reservation, having had my livelihood destroyed, or having lived in poverty, would that be facade or a reflection of the complicated history of my heritage?

If I ignore it, do I ignore the comments from my childhood about my face, the story about the white deer, the ancestry?

Can both be real? Facade?

Even when not writing, I write…

I’m on the road, visiting my father in Wisconsin, and I haven’t taken out my computer since I set out on this trip. This is not to say that I haven’t been writing.

Writing happens all the time. I listen to the news and wonder what implications the EC’ s step away from Trump will have on Europe — Poland, Germany, Russia.

While I sit and the coffeehouse in Watertown, three bespectacled teens set up easels with art projects against the wall of the coffeehouse, debating whether to take the protective plastic with the glowering clouds. A sliver of sun peeks out, further muddling the questions. Two plump yoga moms walk in for a coffee date. One carries her daughter, who wears hot pink rubber boots with her rompers.

Some people take photographs; I tell stories like my dad and his family and my mom and her family. I listen to my dad’s stories and realize that they will show up in a future story.

The stories — all stories — are important. May I learn yours?

Why you are not in my book.

Writing characters can be tricky. What do they look like? What is their backstory? What is their function in this story? How would they react to rejection? Danger? Challenge?

I have written characters that remind me of people I knew almost thirty years ago (I met many interesting people when I was in college). I have written characters that remind me of people I’ve known more recently. But when I say “remind me of”, this means “their appearance reminds me of this person” or “their voice reminds me of this person” or their personality or maybe even just one cherished belief of theirs reminds me of that person. My characters develop as a combination of looking like someone I know (because I have trouble constructing a visual appearance in my head), sounding like another person (because that’s how I hear that character in my mind), the interests/vocation of yet another person (because that’s an interesting hobby), the emotional intelligence of yet another person …

This is why you’re not in your book. Someone with a characteristic or two of yours may be in the book. But the character is not you, reacts differently than you, makes different choices than you.

So when I write the standard writer’s disclaimer — the “Any resemblance to people living or dead is truly unintentional” that’s what it means.

******
Also, tomorrow I’m going to the wilds of Wisconsin for a couple days to see my dad and eat in Mad City (Momos! I get to have Momos!). I might manage to get online then; I might not. I’m hoping to write, however; but you’re not one of my characters.