My 250th entry!

Today marks my 250th entry in this blog.

I’m really surprised. Previously, blogs I have started have generally lasted about two entries before I didn’t know what to write anymore. I think this is mostly because they were just journaling, out loud, when I was feeling bad about something. They weren’t so much blogs — they were emotion dumps, and I was so embarassed by them I couldn’t let them continue.

My husband and I (mostly my husband) kept a blog together once. This was more of a journal about our lives — “This is what happened today”. I think the reason we quit writing that blog was Facebook, which is largely a forum of short-form “This is what happened today” essays. Facebook proves that we are all writers at heart.

I tried something new with this blog. A combination of observations about writing, essays about writing skills, and personal works, this blog strives to talk about what it means to be a writer, and that one can be a writer in spirit without ever publishing. I hope I have done what I set out to do.

Thank you for reading!

In the End, I’m Still a Writer.

I wake up at 5 AM US Central Standard Time every day — yes, I know that’s really, really early — so I have time for getting ready, and eating breakfast, and prepping for the day at work — and writing.

Yes, that’s how much writing has become a part of my life. It’s like a dysfunctional boyfriend. Writing flirts, it teases, it demands my attention on its schedule, and when I need it to be there for me, it flees, taking my ideas with me. Still, I can’t break up with writing, because it fascinates me. I sit at the coffeehouse and hope that writing will show up for me.

On the flipside, my imagination may be the chaos that writing seeks to tame. I, and my passions, may well be that muse that challenges me at coffee (“Tell me who you think I am”), who I have personified as an incarnation of Pan, all intensity and chaos, joy and panic, abandon of all things sensible. (I’ll admit this is disappointing in a way, because Pan is sexy as hell.)

I am the storm; I am the storm’s eye.

For this reason, I have to write.

Thank you for listening.

Depression and how it feels

I stare out the window at a bleak landscape of snow and dead trees. I can’t go outside; the doors have drifted shut. The walls of the house whisper to me that I will always be trapped in this house and the others will leave me to die. Time passes; I can’t tell how much time, but now the walls tell me that when I die, I will have left nothing behind me. I will disappear as if I have never existed.
Nothing will change; nothing will ever change.
*****
Note: I’m not REALLY hearing the walls talk to me. This is figurative, damn it.
*****
I’ve been struggling with depression. It happens sometimes; if it persists or gets worse, I will have to see my doctor. I don’t usually struggle with my neurodiversity — i.e. not being wired like everyone else, which refers to a variety of mental differences one could have such as bipolar, autism spectrum and other mental health issues. However, when my moods go too far above or below the imaginary line of normal, I struggle.

You may have heard that depression is not just a “bad mood”, an accurate description. I can present to my students an enthusiastic facade. I can even be that enthusiastic, chipper person while I’m teaching. I can even “catch a mood” and feel chipper for a while afterward. But in depression, that state doesn’t last long, and I fall back to a feeling of hopelessness.

I’m ok; I’m doing what I need to do. My husband is keeping an eye on me.
Still, pop in and say hi if you’d like.

*****
It looks like I’ll still write — although I may not go the novel route for a while. I’ve never cared about getting anything else — like my poetry and essays — published, so I won’t deal with the rejection. I’m here because I think I have things worth saying.

What I Discovered from Thinking About Writing So Far

I’m still thinking about it. And I suspect this doesn’t make for interesting reading, but I need to sort it out and maybe crowdsourcing will help.

This is what soul-searching uncovered:

I may be having trouble with my medications (depression/sleeplessness). Keeping an eye on that.
What got me interested in writing part 1: Writing is fun to play with. It turns nebulous pieces of imagination into a captivating work of art.
What got me interested in writing part 2: expressing my emotions. This is why I want to be heard — because expressing them is not enough, as anyone who’s posted a frustrating story on Facebook only to get no responses knows.
What kept me in writing part 1: Learning more about it; perfecting my craft.
What kept me in writing part 2: The possibility of getting published. I’m a little bit addicted to recognition, and I haven’t been getting much from my day job in oh, say, the last ten years.

Then I evaluated the status of the above:

I readjusted the dosage of a suspected medication (the label suggests a range of dosage as needed), and have yet to see whether that fixes the depression and sleepiness. If not, other action needs to be taken.
Writing is still fun to play with. Lots of fun. I love subverting paradigms — a romance novel where neither of the characters are beautiful, a battle without violence, a fantasy that involves very ordinary people who have powers and are still very ordinary. This might be part of the reason I’m not ready for prime time genre fiction. I don’t know.
I can still express my emotions while writing. I don’t know how I feel about posting my works not knowing if any live persons read them or what they think/feel.
I still love perfecting my craft. I’ve learned all I can on my own, and it hasn’t gotten me published, so I suspect it’s not enough. Now I need a professional developmental editor. I can’t afford an editor right now because I’m the only earner in the household. I’ve learned all I can from non-professional editors as well.
I just don’t know where this stands. Agents pick what they like, which is what they know and what they think they can sell. Rejections can mean they don’t like my work, they don’t think it will sell, and/or they’re not familiar with my style. I don’t know which, because the only critique I ever got back was “brush up your query letter”, which I did. There’s no way of knowing with form letters. I still have stuff out there, however.

Deep down, I had a fantasy that people would say “Don’t stop writing! I like your stuff!”, but that’s a fantasy that doesn’t lend itself to adulthood. In adulthood, I have the ultimate decision to continue, or not continue, or give up sending queries and just write novels (six with two partial documents on the way), or go back to just writing poetry for myself.

I haven’t decided yet. Any comments would be appreciated.

New Years rituals. What are yours?

Do any of you have New Years’ rituals (regardless of when you celebrate the new year?)

I’ll share a few of mine. First of all, I do not go out and party New Years’ Eve, even when I was younger and could drink more than one alcoholic beverage a year. I don’t stay up till midnight these days because I turn into a pumpkin after 9 PM. But every year, my husband and I do a silent worship-sharing in the manner of Quakers to tuck the old year in to sleep.

The next day, we eat good luck foods — noodles for long life, pickled herring, black beans and greens (I love Hoppin’ John!), things like that. I think Richard is attempting Japchae, a Korean dish, this year.

I also have a ritual in which I do a little work on everything I want to accomplish this year. So, a little blogging, a little query-writing, a little work, a little play, a little walk, a little writing, a little prepping my seedling room for the winter seed-starting season, a lot of petting cats …

This is a little short today because I’m prepping for classes, which can be nerve-wracking, especially since I need to tweak some classroom material. This means you can respond with your own New Years rituals!

I love you all.

Writing with Cats

One of the things that doesn’t become obvious when you read my blog is that I have five cats: Stinkerbelle, Me-Me, Snowy, Girlie-Girl, and Charlie. Each of them have multiple nicknames:

Stinkerbelle: She’s the rotund black-and-white cat. She goes by Stinky, Soccerballee, Turnip Head. She’s 11 years old and lives next to the food dish. We have to prod her every now and then to see if she’s still alive. She’s not sick — she’s just that lazy.
Snowy: Almost pure black longhair. She goes by Ironic Cat, Snewy, and No-ee. She’s the prima donna of the batch, sitting with paws politely crossed.
Girly-Girl is a patched tabby. We call her Squirelly-Girl, Twirly-Girl, Cattywumpus and Butterbutt. Very prosaic, as if she were a farm cat in her last life. She can jump four and a half feet from the loveseat to the couch and jump over me on the couch with minimum effort.
Me-Me is a petite blue tabby and white. We call her Meemerz, Weemerz, Meemer-butt, Wiggle-butt and Weebles. Pretty little con artist, but pretty independent.
Charlie is a six-month-old buff tabby and the only male in the bunch. He goes by Chuckie, Chuckles, Chuckroast, Chuckie Monster and No! As you might expect, pure energy and mischief.

Snowy, AKA Ironic Cat

Stinkerbelle when younger

Me-Me, who looks like she took this selfie.

Girlie-Girl, my editor

Charlie, in a rare non-evil moment.

The average morning early writing goes like this:

Snowy sits on the arm of the couch next to me. A few minutes later, she gives me The Paw. Then both paws. On my right arm while I’m typing. This is a signal to drop everything I’m doing so I can pet her. One hand is now occupied.
Girlie jumps on the couch on the other side of me and plasters herself against my leg and purrs, even though I’m not petting her. Just wait.
Girlie starts giving me The Paw. Only one paw, but she pokes at me in her rapid Kung Fu fighting strike. I pet her with the other hand.
Snowy feels neglected because I’m not petting her hard enough, She starts headbutting up against my arm. I pet her twice as hard.
Me-Me lounges on the floor, waiting expectantly for something. Charlie saunters down the stairs; Me-Me jumps up. They touch noses, the equivalent of shaking hands in the ring. Then they start whacking at each other.
Girlie jumps off the couch to turn the twosome into a free-for-all MMA match, employing her Kung Fu fighting strike to the middle of the pile. Nobody is yowling, which makes me wonder if they like to fight.
Snowy jumps off and saunters to the loveseat, where she sits on the back, since she doesn’t have to compete for attention anymore.
The three-way fight on the floor breaks up with three cats scampering. Girlie jumps on the loveseat with Snowy, Me-Me sprawls on the ground, and Charlie bites my toes, then scrambles off.
Snowy runs over to me for reassurance, with both paws and headbutts.
Richard turns on stereo.
Snowy stands on my lap, in my face, meowing, headbutting my face.
Charlie sharpens his claws on the speaker. Richard yells, “No!”

This is life with my cats.

When I became a writer: A bio of creativity

I started writing in third grade — poetry, it turned out. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Kuh (an unpleasant sort for the most part) taught us poetry — difficult, advanced poetry. Diamante and haiku and limericks — although we were too young for the most amusing examples of the latter form, dirty limericks.

My first poem, a haiku:

Come here, small firefly.
Let me see your glowing light
shining bright and gay.

Note the six beats in the first line where there should be five. I didn’t quite have the hang of haiku in third grade. Blessedly, I do not remember my third-grade diamante.

In fifth grade, my mother unwittingly put me up to collaborate in plagiarism. My neighbor in high school had to write a poem for Mrs. Schobert’s class, and his mom asked my mom to ask me to write a poem for him to hand in. I was scared not to comply, so I wrote him a poem. I earned an A on his poem, although Mrs. Schobert may have wondered why he wrote like a fifth grade girl.

In sixth grade, I wrote very amateurish stories about the guy I had a crush on. (He came out of the closet after graduation.)

I gave my junior high (Middle School for you youngsters) English teacher everything I wrote throughout seventh and eighth grade, because my mother didn’t seem too interested in them. At the end of junior high, she returned them to me in a folder and told me to keep writing and to work toward getting published. Thank you, Miss Myers, for giving me a goal.

In high school, I took a creative writing class with Mrs. Schobert, who didn’t recognize that my writing style looked like a high school boy’s writing of several years before. I learned the very basic basics of everything — diamante and haiku, descriptive writing, short stories, and playwriting. I wrote a short fantasy play based on a story my mother had told me about the year her family couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. The reviews in my head ran: “A heartfelt but saccharine attempt to catch the magic of Christmas.”

In college, I wrote many, many poems. Most of them related to the ups and downs of being in love. One of my exes, who broke up with me for a girl he met at a party, explained to his new girlfriend, “She wrote poems. I never understood them.” After that, I wished I could pull off the Goth look to emphasize my feeling of being misunderstood.

My college poetry class almost killed my desire to write when the published poet who taught it lauded a student for her “original” — “like a moth to the light”. On the other hand, he called my work “greeting card trash”. My poems might not have been great, but how could I have improved them from that screed? Mr. Guy Whose Name I’ve Forgotten, you created my hatred of being critiqued.

When I was in grad school, I dated a folksinger. (He hurt me badly; I kill him off in this current book I’m editing). He played a combination strum/fingerpicking style and composed beautiful, intricate pieces. He’d play around with a tune, and the following conversation would ensue.

Me: I have a work in progress that would work with that tune.

Him: How? It’s 5/4 time with syncopation!

Me: Try me …

So we composed music and performed together, and we had a fan or two and earned $2.50 busking. More importantly, I got to sing about my heartbreak and trauma and crushes and people listened. Many had their favorites — the most popular song was “World’s Worst Blues Song,” which is exactly as advertised. We married, we divorced, and I have a handful of songs I can’t perform because I can’t learn guitar and my voice (husky contralto) isn’t what it used to be. So, Adam, thank you for helping me get my words heard. Do not, under any circumstances, contact me. I’ve killed you off, after all.

I didn’t write novels until about five years ago. I couldn’t comprehend writing novels because they required an extended and gripping plot, a certain amount of continuity for many, many pages, and attention span. (I may have ADHD. Never diagnosed, but watched carefully by the school district.)

But then I fell in love with a world and its characters. I first met them, I believe I said once, by interpreting a dream, then by interrogating the dream by questioning its characters. I kept writing short stories about the same people and the same world, tracing the progression of their very strange relationship in a background of present-day spirit activity. Richard (my second and real husband) said, “You might as well write a book,” and I wrote one. And then more, because I kept getting ideas about where this world and its people were going. Thank you, Richard, for appealing to my best self, the one who dares.

I am editing that first book for perhaps the third time. That first book has always seemed problematic, and I would fix things one at a time (search for places that needed more description, search for places that needed better verbs, etc.) and I still felt dissatisfied with it. For the past few days, I’ve dug deeper. I’ve culled sections that distract from the action and added more hints a là Chekhov’s Gun. I’ve added more menace, more potential dire consequences for the protagonists and a foreshadowing into the next books in the series. I’m less shy about Josh and Jeanne’s relationship (but still just as shy about the sex. I’m not a prude, honestly, just not happy about how sex ends up on paper).

Yesterday, I felt joy at ripping this novel apart and reassembling it. Joy from editing, from improving, from making this novel solid and not tentative, making it menacing and joyous.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could own the identity of “writer”.

Thank you, all of those in my past and all of you in my present, for supporting me along the way.

Josh and Jeanne: Telling their stories truthfully

As I re-re-edit Gaia’s hands in a number of ways for a number of reasons, I’ve learned a surprising lesson — it’s possible to be scared of your own writing.

There are some things about the book I’ve understated — too much, in fact — because I didn’t know how people would react to them. The biggest one, I guess, is the relationship between Jeanne Beaumont, a tenured professor and Josh Young, a student (but not one she’d ever have in class) at a midsized university. I looked at the rules at her university, and there is nothing in the conduct code that would present this, as he will never be her student.

Note how I try to justify myself already? If that first part didn’t startle you, they fall in love with each other, despite the difference in their ages and the differences in where they are in life. She’s settled in her faculty responsibilities yet starting a new venture in permaculture design. He’s at the beginning of his adulthood, but focused on getting a PhD in creative writing and a writing career. She tries to avoid problems while he tries to breeze past them, but they go toe-to-toe with each other because their relationship is too important to evade.

I’m not sure the above is even the most startling part — the most startling part may be that Jeanne and Josh are attracted to each other. This includes sexual attraction, even though he’s a slender 20-year-old and she’s a zaftig 50-year-old. In short, they are the two groups of people we regard as least sexy in the US — a young, small-boned Asian American man and a large, older woman. And the younger one, not the older one, is the pursuer. (There are, however, no explicit sex scenes in this book because I thought you should use your imaginations there.)

I created the characters like this on purpose — to challenge the reader, to expand societal notions of what is possible, to give a view different than our notions that Asian men are sexless and women of a certain age are desperate. My books are full of oddballs — perhaps because oddballs are my people — for better or worse. I could have put ordinary characters against the subtly extraordinary events of the book, but I was afraid they’d wash out. Jeanne and Josh are not ordinary.

If I myself cannot face my characters — good and bad — my writing loses power and coherence. It’s possible that this book will never get published because I believe an older woman/younger man relationship is not only possible, but believeable. There may be people out there who think a semi-sentient vine and a plant superpower are more believable than Jeanne’s and Josh’s relationship, but I will not try to erase them or their relationship from this story. The story deserves better, Josh and Jeanne deserve better, and I deserve better.

Teaching in Writing Fiction

Writers have to provide a certain amount of solid grounding in their world, whether it be realism in an “ordinary world” or explaining the rules in a world of magic. But they have to do it carefully — not enough grounding and readers shake their heads at fancy words with no meaning; too much explanation and it comes off like sitting in a lecture in a stuffy classroom.

I wrote that “sitting in a lecture in a stuffy classroom” metaphor very deliberately, because grounding a reader in the rules of the world is, in effect, teaching. Doing this grounding not only helps the reader understand the world, but teaches them something new.

I remember a Jayne Ann Krentz book I once read (yes, I have read fantasy, and some of it is quite good) where the lead male owned a winery. At one point, he strides through the winery checking up on things. That’s about the only detail Krentz provided about the winery — he could have been touring an aircraft carrier for all we knew. This really stood out to me because I used to make wine at home and had considered starting a commercial winery at one point. My character would have stopped by the lab to discuss pH levels and brix — sugar levels — of grape must going into the process and the percentage alcohol and residual sugar of a batch waiting to go into oak barrels if it was red wine or bottling if it was white. He would tour the barrel stock and take a sample from a 55-gallon barrel with a wine thief and taste how it began to mellow under the influence of the oak. With these details, the reader understands more about wine — and the male protagonist is portrayed as having a keen eye on details, an understanding that winemaking is as much a craft as a business, and a rapport with his workers. That’s the beauty of teaching — done right, it develops the rest of the story — character, plot, theme, or all three — as well as teaching the reader about something new.

I do a certain amount of teaching in my own writings — I am, after all, a professor. I write what would be called magical realism if I wrote literary fiction instead of genre fiction (e.g. romance, science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, erotica). Sometimes what I write just has to be revealed rather than explained because there is no logical explanation — for example, the mystical aspects of my writing such as seeing visions and hearing the voices of the Gods (sounds epic, but the recipients of these preternatural events are a twenty-year-old college student and a fifty-year-old architect.)

Some extraordinary things need to be explained — such as the rules around time travel:

p.p1

“Ahh, the rock principle.” Ian referred to the fact that when Travellers exacted non-significant changes in a time period — not interactions with major players or major objects — an innocuous change would be made in terms of those non-essential players and objects. For example, if a Traveller picked up a rock in 1620 that an ordinary human of the time would trip over, the timeline would substitute another rock to compensate. In my case, I supplanted the red and white airplane. Significant changes would not be allowed according to the rock principle.

And sometimes I teach the most prosaic things:

p.p1

Her permaculture guilds for Barn Swallows’ Dance would be bigger, more complex. Daunting, even. Two acres of six-layer guilds centered on apple trees, surrounded with hazelnut and sea holly and various cane berries, where the tree’s dappled shade would benefit them. Perennial herbs and greens such as scorzonera and chicory would be planted toward the tree’s drip line where they would get enough water. Groundcovers like bunchberry and violets, which would block weeds, and edible vines that grew up the trees, would complete the scene.

When I pick up a book, sometimes I want it to broaden my world. Maybe it’s just me, because I teach college for a living. But if the book can explain something in a non-didactic (non-lecture-y) way, I’m all for it. I hope I’m doing a good job of it.

The Stories We Tell: Oral Tradition

Before the development of writing systems, storytelling was one of the only methods of communicating the wonder of the world. Storytellers would regale the gathered people with tales about gods, about successful or unsuccessful hunts, about their history. Someone in the next generation would memorize the stories so he could take the storyteller’s place around the fire someday.

The tradition continued around the world even after the invention of writing, with the Gaelic shanachie, family stories at holiday gatherings, sermons in churches all over the world. Even social gatherings have their share of swapped stories.

I grew up in a family with a rich oral tradition. My father’s side, a mix of Welsh, French Canadian, and Ojibwe, told stories about their lifestyle, which centered around the North Woods and hunting, reckless adventures growing up poor in Milwaukee, and a certain amount of bravado and subsequent error. My mother’s family told stories with word play and puns, with my grandmother serving as the straight man.

A hunting story on my father’s side:

Grandpa had decided to teach his sons how to hunt pheasant. “Boys,” he said, “What we do is line up in this field here, and spread out aways from each other. The dog’ll flush up a pheasant, then each of us has a try to shoot the pheasant flying by.

“Unless it’s a hen pheasant — they’re the brown ones. You’re not supposed to shoot hen pheasants. So if you see a hen, shout down the line so that nobody else tries at it. Got it?”

All three boys nod.

It was a bad day hunting — the hunting dog stayed listless and quiet. The spirits of the hunters drooped, because the pheasant was to be their dinner.

Suddenly the dog yipped, running toward a tussock. A pheasant burst out of the grass.

The youngest, my Uncle Larry, who was no more than four and wasn’t even armed, yelled “Hen” in a quavering voice.

The middle son, my Uncle Ron, at 7, again not armed, yelled “Hen!” miserably.

My father, age 9, kept his shotgun down and sighed, “Hen!”

Grandpa thought for just a moment, raised his gun and shot —

“Hen! Heh heh heh.”

The family had supper that night.

A story from Mom’s side of the family:

Seventeen-year-old Aunt Marie approaches Grandma with a proclamation: “I’m going to marry Wayne.”

“I forbid it,” Grandma snapped.

“Then I’ll elope,” Aunt Marie countered.

“You can’t elope!”

“You watermelon!”

(If you don’t get this, read it aloud.)

I have changed these stories by writing them down. I have tried to use the language of the people involved, but my writing techniques have crept in. In the spoken story, I could merely use tone of voice and gesture and not provided cues to emotion. However, these changes would have happened even in the transmission of the stories from generation to generation. For example, a Native American cautionary tale about white animals being sacred, one passed down in my family, has morphed into a story about a hunter shooting a white deer and being arrested by Wisconsin Conservation.

I have changed these stories by writing them down in a way that freezes them in time and place. When you read a written story like these, you read an “official” version of the story, and you will go back and read this again to get the story right. It has no way to adapt to the needs of the generations to come — a change in the settings, a change in the consequences. Grandpa will always be the one to shoot the hen. The elopement story will always be between a mother and daughter.

This is why, when someone suggests I collect my family stories and save them so others can read them, I am reluctant to do so.