Moon Pools and Mermaids

Rearview Exits

2011-10-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm piling them up, shuffling the stacks as I come to realize that a good portion of these will only have the first few pages read and some of them barely that. Like decisions that I could have made differently years ago, these are books whose reading time I've bypassed.

Especially when I'm at Half Price and the books are thinner and the artwork on the covers familiar, I'm tempted to believe that they will read easily. Some do and some begin with the willful wistfulness that dissipates as the story moves into its track. Usually it's the story of a girl or of a warrior. Gossip flows around the character and I start to become restless.

By this time, I'm already at home and the book falls into a stack of things I "need to read, sometime." Stacks teeter and sometimes leap out at dogs that aren't careful enough of them. After they jump back, I look at covers that I haven't seen in months and grind my back teeth. Each unread book is an accusation that I moved on without proper care or consideration, that I have a rather slutty approach to reading that does me no good.

Several years ago, I was buying books while participating in a writer's group, hung up on the notion that we paid for our "free" space in the bookstore by book purchases and Frappucinos. I didn't finish anything nor did I sell anything, but I paid dues in stacks of unread novels, natural histories, and how-to-write books.

When I'm tempted to write now, I think of those books. I think of people with more willpower just walking past the shelves and ignoring the effort that pleads like a lost kitten for a warm bookshelf and perhaps a cozy reading. I imagine abandoning my ideas to mewl on the shelves and decide to neither read nor write, but to put a CD in the stereo and wash the dishes.

Perhaps I will shuffle some of the books to the shelves in the back, where I don't look for reading material because it's either already been read or rejected. My husband will eventually give in to the piles and reorganize the books. He's thinking about getting a library program that will track them, similar to the one he has for his comics. I will be able to search for author and title and tote up the randomness of a reading list that stretches like the highway--places I've been, those I missed, and those I hope to get to eventually.

Seeing the exits in the rearview as they stack against the shelves, time becomes heartbeat underfoot, tires spinning beneath me.

Art/Escape

2011-10-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered what kind of bauble machine would appear in the kind of grocery store that caters to people who jog or bike over from their bayou-side condos? One of them would be the art-o-mat, a re-jiggered cigarette dispenser that now provides boxes the size of a deck of cards filled with the flotsam of creative people.

It's genius. And a good excuse to stash the Pumpkin King in the car and drive down into the the city and remember what it was like to not be afraid of the freeways, to deal with the constant construction, and to see the new face of Houston as it swells out along I-10. For me, this counts as a vacation (meeting the following criteria: I haven't been to this particular store and I hadn't driven this particular freeway in at least a year and it was at least an hour away from the house).

We had a fun time playing grocery store tourist and I had a blast deciding on the piece that we would bring home. My brother the art snob thought it was hilarious, but I think it's easy to miss the point when you're fenced in by criteria (or possibly just have to look at a lot of "draft" art). This happens to me when I'm writing, when I forget that I'm telling a story to someone.

The piece that I have is by Klop and it consists of a copper wire that holds two strands of found beads within its web. The artist included a brief note regarding where the materials come from, how they found themselves tangled in this egg-shapped armature that looks like art nouveau sieve that accumulated wooden beads that have lived through washing and fumbling fingers and one clear blue plastic bead that functions as the soul of the piece--it is the one thing that will not change or wear as even the metal will over time.

I can look around my desk and open drawers and see the kind of flotsam that I acquire. I am the Sargasso Sea, a still spot that spins around the things that come to it until there is an imagined ecosystem that gathers rather than wanders. But...that's just the structure of how I chose to interpret the things around me, including this new piece that seams to be a metaphore for the whole. The truth is that everything that I hold close is proof that I've slipped out at times. Even if the escape was no further than to a suburban dream of an urban grocery store.

Library Day

2011-10-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

The odd thing was that I thought reading Saberhagen would be painful, then picked up a short story collection of his anyway. I thought the stories might be garishly grotesque or grimly technical, mechnical devices that ground the reader through an interstellar mill until you were a fit flour to be baked back into human form by the intensity of your reaction.

What I found in the book is far better than I deserved. These are entertaining stories and they give you at times that snap at the wrist of great fiction, the kind that reawakens you to the memory that you used to read for pleasure, rather than just to get through that tremendous stack by the bedside.

It is clear to me that being a writer is something that I couldn't have learned from all the lectures that my former writing group gave or from all the books on creating interesting first lines, etc. Not that those things weren't helpful. Rather, they encouraged in a vague way the things that are crystal clear in a good story. Catch the reader's attention and keep it long enough to tell the story. Remember that you're writing for humans and we know the difference between artificial and real decisions.

This last is the most persuasive and sticky thing from the book so far. In a story about an alien world that bent my brain a bit trying to imagine it, there was a man who did something...stupid? rude?...and then repeated that action, separating himself from his actions with potent lies conjured out of nostalgia.

Reading that chain events I felt the slight sickness that comes when I recognize the dark gravity of my personality tugging at me. This is something that I have done.

Characters human enough to induce guilt are well-tuned. You might not have the same reaction to that character's actions, but I think he was written well enough that you would at least recognize the reality of his impulses.

Library day is rarely this successful and I'm looking forward to seeing whether the entire collection and the rest of the books are this good.

Presence or Testimony

2011-09-13T12:18:00.001-07:00

I am embarrassed to admit that I had a rather one-note, reductive reading of Piers Moore Ede's Honey and Dust. That reading might be summed up as "What about the women?" In his celebration of honey and, by extension, traditional culture, the lack we may feel as city dwellers is part of the destruction we wreak upon traditional culture without appreciation for its natural values and balance.

That his experience of these cultures was often mediated by a male guide similar to Moore Ede in age and often seemingly in inclination and included only the male (and relatively high status men) voice while women peeked around corners and made the food while the author droned on about natural ways of life at times made me want to shriek.

This boiling irritation is mostly personal. I have an unsatisfied taste to see things that I haven't and plenty of empty space in my currently jobless life to go and see them. I have a serious jones to see New York City from the a sidewalk park or a street corner in Manhattan, to see Chicago from an art museum window...heck, to see Austin from a taco truck somewhere in the city. The idea that it's easier for a guy to drop everything and take off is something of sore spot for me.

When the author speaks of clay being kneaded like a woman's breast in the hands of a potter, I wonder if he sees all those nameless women as a pack of Galateas waiting for the sculptor to carve away modernity and set them all back in their proper forms. He spends so much of the narrative pressed so deeply inside of himself, though, that this metaphor reading extends as much to him as it would to the nameless women he brushes past in telling his story.

Each guide and each forgotten way of keeping bees and searching for honey seems to offer the potential for a healthy mirror in which to look at who he (and we) could be. The scenes are beautiful and arresting. The book is a chronicle of the choice that witness can make a sort of presence out of the absence of the traveler. Even so, I can't help but feel discomfited by the absences that seemed inherent in the witness itself.

Summer Returns

2011-09-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

My grandmother, once upon a time, was a nurse in Pennsylvania. After the death of her first husband, she supported herself and my mother there until she met and married my grandfather. She came south to Texas when my mother was a teenager with her second husband, a captain of a tankers out of Port Arthur, and lived in a small house in Port Arthur until, at my grandfather's retirement, they moved into a house down the street from my family.

Her story tumbles through me when our a/c blows a faint scent of vinegar heat beneath the coolness. Her Lake Jackson living room develops from this tang, the ironing board stiff before the great cabinet television while the iron clicks and slides in the dimness. My grandparents had purchased a house with few windows in the living room to counter the dark paneling and dark carpet. It was a flat cave for the TV. The rest of the house felt exposed by comparison.

In the living room, you could read in the one chair by the glass door (the only light in the room, save the TV, during the day) or dump the old plastic toys out across the white marble of the coffee table and arrange endless iterations of cooking and cleaning for the molded families while grandmother performed endless examples of the same. Iron or wash or fold or cook or just sit and watch the over-shampooed soap stars glitter through whatever brittle venality kept you moving and shaking your head.

Those toys were generations removed from my experience. The men wore hats and smoked pipes. The women wore kerchiefs and kept baskets of eggs. One family was pressed into the same clothes as the Leave it to Beaver clan. Their material was soft, almost like rubber, and they were monochromatic: the farm family yellow, the suburban family and eerie pink flesh color, as if their skin included sweathers, bobby socks, and shoes.

Perhaps the heat in the garage and in the attic is pressing that smell through the vents. The summer is encouraging me to remember today my former places of refuge. Until now, I had only had intimations of threat.

Something That I Have Mislaid

2011-09-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

I am racing through the stack of books beside the bed. Today I put down The Mays of Ventadorn and scooped up Stirring the Mud, pausing for a bit of coffee in between. Both books are discursive memoirs, both by writers, and both explore the idea of land reflecting through a writer's mind and becoming grammar and verse.

The traces of thought in Stirring have a more personal feel, with the writer deriving her ideas and building an alien imagination out of the ground of her present habitation. It is a vacation from my own imagination, tangled as it has become. As I read, I rub the cover of the book with each shift and slide the paper cover in to mark my place as I pause to let my eyes rest.

Distracted from the bones of a short story, the text before me wavers and fades. I am still reading, but softly. There is another image growing in the verge of my own imagination, a comfortable closet of a Half-Price Books, the one down near the city where we used to shop before we moved out here in the suburbs that have soaked all the way out the highways to beyond the airport. Did this book come from that bookstore?

We shopped there because it was cheap but also because it was homey, wooden shelves, alcoves, and sections that spilled out into smaller shelves along the walls. It was a place that had toys and blankets along the top of the shelves. Once, it also had a book on weaving dog fur. I should have bought it; I carried it a bit, then left it behind.

Because of that one book, Wynn is also here, snoozing at the edge of my thoughts. He was a American Eskimo, standard size at 40 lbs. and a master at producing free-roaming fur clumps. I could have a scarf of his softness against my neck, had I the wit to realize that a random find is a treasure only once lost.

It was easy to say to myself that I neither spin nor knit and wouldn't have learned just becuase of a fuzzy dog. That first small denial, the refusal to be curious, was enough to bar the way. Soon enough we had moved from that area, north as I had once fervently hoped. We live within an easy drive of two Half-Price Books, neither of which feel like welcoming hideouts for interesting books and my curiousity is blunt anyway, having been dashed again and again after the same shallow interests and short travels.

Wynn isn't curled around my neck and the words, into which I had relaxed, have scattered into silence like the frogs in Stirring the Mud. I will finish it soon and slip the paper covers back into their proper places. I will not think about the casual ease of the words to turn the mould of my own stagnant imagination. There are other books on the shelves.

Conan Rant, Day 2

2011-09-09T17:51:00.000-07:00

Driving to lunch this afternoon, we passed through the haze of the wildfires to our north. This morning, the news was carrying a story about asking random people to evacuate their house in 5 minutes and finding out if they could. A few days our governor was cheered by a bloodthirsty crowd for his vicious idea of justice. These are things that I cannot handle today.

Instead, I am posting a second day of Conan ranting. Let me start by saying again that I think the writers and the director and producers of the movie that we saw fundamentally didn't understand what they were making. In their hands, they were making a simple, bloody story in the form of so many other stories recently come through the multiplex. They were making a dress in a particular shade cut to the same specifications as 15,000 other dresses in slightly different shades--instead of one of yellow spandex or one with glowing green lines or one with a nifty cowl, this one is fur and leather, accessorized with a missing sword that must be eeeeeaaaaarrrrnnned. Work it, hero.

Grrrr. Each twist of the story was a simple wooden mallet on a single xylophone note. Tough childhood--ding! Advanced skills from an early age--ding! Immature understanding of heroism--ding! Geas of dead parent--ding! Some willful child is banging on the notes, but the resonance is missing.

What if Conan had emerged, not the toughest child in what appeared to be a rather fearful bunch, but the best among an already tough (not bigger, but brave, skillful, and deadly) group? What if we'd seen none of this as fact, but received it as rumor throughout a movie that involved a quest that was motivated by a warrior with his own purpose? Would it have mattered if none of the childhood stuff were true if the character himself had been strong and interesting from the start?

It seemed to me that most of what we saw in city settings in the movie were cages of people (or taverns, but that's not to the point) being held. If I thought that this was some kind of metaphor for the way people are hemmed in by civilization rather than growing up free and muscular in the wild, it might be interesting. As set dressing, it was boring. The cities themselves were rarely interesting or evocative. Most of the action seemed to take place in dark, undistinguished caves. Again, unevocative. This is world riddled with sorcery and myth and one matte painting of a skull cave should not be the extent of the wonder and/or horror portrayed.

The flat tone extended to the female monk. What kind of monks sit around having the equivalent of slumber party visions? What is the purpose of becoming a monk? Why didn't this character have any spark at all? Random sidekick/love interest--ding! The dialogue between them often sounded as if they were in different movies.

When a familiar character misses his or her chance at the movies, the books remain. Movies can reopen the wonder of the characters, though, and they are one thing that I can share with my husband, whose tastes and mine diverge rapidly despite beginning in similar genres. I hate having to suffer through crap and then hear him say, yeah, I enjoyed it because I wasn't expecting anything. We should expect something. I expect to be entertained.

Perhaps tomorrow will be pleasant (I'll swear off the news for the weekend) and we can all move on from Conan The Deafening.

The Legend of Our Legend Precedes Us

2011-09-08T05:41:00.000-07:00

The AMC theater in Deerbrook has, like the mall itself, little shine left for adult eyes. Their sound system is painfully overpowered and last night blasted our viewing of Conan into shards of boredom and pain.

Perhaps my reaction to the movie was influenced by the theater. It was a standard beginning--special child acting special--and had for me no emotional heft (save for the birth scene). Is this a flesh and blood character or a mythic hero? The voiceover hints at myth but the scenes are so plainly shot that no aura of myth adheres.

Why not make of this opening sequence a series of tales told about the birth of this "Conan" who is harrying the slavers and minor despots around Cimmeria (or Land X, whatever). Are these stories real? We as the audience
don't need to know. Instead of bloody "realism," we could have jumped in to the "quest that made his name known across the world" or some such thing.

In this way, the thrust of the story wouldn't be on avenging his father--that's a single story that's fine, but doesn't put you on the path to future glory (and sequels)--it would be on giving energy to a mythic character that would carry us forward into his story and leave us wanting to see more.

This is the problem/challenge for so many recent superhero movies. Becoming a hero doesn't necessarily make for an interesting story and 50 stories of "special kids becoming special" is just dull. Did we have to see how Indiana Jones got through his thesis while battling for treasure before we understood his character? Heck no! Did the first Batman films slavishly insist on showing us the story of Batman's transformation from the beginning? Again, no. The Hulk (the second movie) didn't waste too much time on this either.

When you make me wait to see Conan as an adult and you give him only one purpose in life (looking for his father's killer) and then solve that arc, you kill the story. I don't need to know how he became a barbarian and neither does anyone else who paid to see the movie. The poster sums it up: Conan is a barbarian. There will be sword fighting in this movie. What else do you need? Oh, yeah. Why we should care.

There were a few flashes in the movie of wonder and myth, but they didn't come until well after the halfway point. These are the elements that could expand the story from a character's quest to something larger. At the end, I didn't wonder where he was going next (maybe why he was leaving--what's left for him to do at this point?). The story ended.

The truncated story is a shame because epic fantasy can make for a fun movie and the actor who played Conan was fun to watch. It's too bad that his director/scriptwriter/etc. didn't give him a whole movie.

Heroes in Exile

2011-08-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

For some time now, I've been trying to plow through a stack of unread books, lamenting both my changing tastes and my inability to resist stacking up paperbacks at Half Price. I tried to stack things I really wanted to read beneath things I "should" read and ended up just cherry-picking the stacks.

This has brought me both stomach-churning treats and a desire to mention the Hero's Journey. As in, I am too old to be taking the standard hero's journey and I'm not really interested in reading 8 million books about young people who are discovering their own special edges and coming home to be the incredibly brilliant cog in a now-familiar wheel. I just can't get all that worked up about the girl from the far village who goes to the magic university/great palace/sparkly vampire ball.

Let me stop to say that it's mostly fantasy that seems to be deserting me. Mystery novels are still fun. Modern gothic chick lit is still creepy and heartwarming (Reese's Peanut Butter Cup reading!!) Fantasy, though...it's either gruesome or YA or as familiar as my favorite trails in the Arboretum. Which is the problem--my tastes are provincial.

The best stuff isn't familiar until you're finished. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes, for example. I wanted, oh how I wanted an explanation for what was going on throughout the novel. For the author to let her protagonist off the hook. To be able to understand on what kind of freaky moral judgments her universe was based. Her protagonist was alive, the side characters were alive, and after I finished I was alive to the judgment calls and assumptions around me. I wanted the woman at the heart of the novel to be okay.

After I finished Zoo City, I picked up an anthology of short stories and my reader's high was smacked right off. Here was something that was "the best" of some previous year and it was recycling some familiar images and handing out a tidy moral--you adults, get the heck out of fantasy! It's a kid's game! Find a random kid, pass it on!

What the heck? Was I supposed to turn this anthology in to the nearest daycare center? Apologize for wanting to stick with a genre I've enjoyed? At moments like these, I remember the cover of my dad's Tolkien books. Bilbo riding a barrel toward Laketown, drifting with his head up and waiting for the next turn of the water. Even though that first book was more of a children's story, Frodo's story was not. He didn't bring fire back to his village, marry the most bodacious Took, and populate Bag End with Frodolings. Instead, his journey is one of exile.

Perhaps that is the hero journey that most appeals right now. For whatever reason, I have come to a place where the idea of setting out and not coming back or not coming back to the same place makes sense, to where the idea of hero is confused with the idea of excised pathogen.

This gives me hope. For if I am to be exiled from fantasy itself, there is perhaps a more miraculous story that is waiting to be discovered.

A Montalban Moment

2011-08-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

He was eating breakfast in a booth when I arrived, straw cowboy hat, sunglasses, and string tie hanging centered in the V of his open shirt. He got up to toss some trash, stood and laughed with another table, shirt open in the approved Wrath of Khan-era Montalban manner. I'm staring at his chest, which is rude. I'm thinking about temptation and the white-suit-era Montalban. Thinking about the devil in Texas.

These images all tumble together because watching Fantasy Island was pretty much forbidden back in the day, except at Grandma's. As a kid, I would conk out on her giant bed as each week's assortment of wishes were fulfilled. Much of it flew over my head, but not the image of a sardonic Latin angel walking his latest guest through the realization that you don't really want what you want.

An odd lesson to absorb, yet one perfectly consonant with the idea of not being successful, just being...suburban. I'm reminded of the lawyer wife from The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul--the one who just wanted everything "nice." She died for that. And maybe for blackmailing the gods to get it.

So I'm having a nice breakfast and I'm enjoying this laptop and I'm thinking about whether I should just noodle around some more or get down to business and whether it's a good idea to lead with an image of this guy's chest and why I have this instant need to link a cheerful tanned gentleman with the darkness when it's just the heat outside and the brass sky at 10 am and the slow broil against the window.

I'm still wondering what I wished for. Whether it really was "nice."

Strays

2011-08-25T12:06:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the best anecdotes begin with a dog...or with barbecue...or with just the slight tug of your attention away from the hum of the everyday. This one begins with a giant bag of barbecue takeout that we brought home in the dark in June. Must have been pretty late for it to have been full dark in June, so let's say sometime after 9 pm.

As we were walking in the door, something flashed through the yard, a square-jawed, dark face that looked bigger than in was coming in fast from the slight rise by the neighbor's fence. With the food secured via deft footwork, we found a thin short-haired border collie zipping around, looking for food.

She was friendly but unclaimed. One of the boys down the street said her picture was taped to a lightpost near a convenience store and, after determining she was friendly (and hungry) and not in the least afraid of the car, we drove around the neighborhood to find her family.

There are lots of pages advertising lost and found dogs around us, spaniels and labs and little fluffy Yorkies, etc. We visited the convenience store for the first time and poked around the shreds of a dozen fliers looking for hers. We asked neighbors and the man in the convenience store. We found no matches.

The next day we toured the vets around the neighborhood. She had no chip and none of the vets or patrons recognized her. By now, her method of huddling her back against your legs or your side and flopping back against you, her backwards canine hug, was already nestling her into the family.

When she received a clean bill of health and was accepted by a rescue agency for adoption, we brought her temporary pen out into the den with Merlin & Varda and started our own small pack. We named her Angel, giving her the kind of pet name that we never seem to give our own dogs.

She stayed with us for three months and recalibrated our interaction with our two fuzzy ones. Reminded of our first dog, the nimble American Eskimo we'd lost two years ago, I finally started to give up some of the sorrow that had frozen my interaction with Merlin & Varda. The three of us zoned on the couch in the hot afternoons. Angel is a tennis ball fiend, so we played catch when we could.

Then the dominance games started and the formerly housebroken troika started having to be walked separately. It was frustrating and I lost it. Instead of coming up with good ideas (like shifting their feeding schedule to the cooler morning or evening), I wanted the situation "fixed." To my husband's credit, he let me weather a bout of bad advice relating to the dogs by visiting my parents.

At this point, Angel found her adoptive family. We scheduled a time for them to pick her up and then we waited. The day they picked her up, we tried to have her out and give her all the hugs we possibly could. My husband was sad--he had considered her part of the family and I was worried about Merlin and Varda. You can't explain things to them.

So far, the dogs seem fine. Angel is friendly and was happy to be heading out with her new family. Merlin and Varda are curious and sniffy and have spent a good part of the day curled up with me.

I find myself sad at odd moments--feeding the dogs and only getting food for two of them--and at others trying to make this into a narrative that teaches me something, anything to keep Angel as close to my heart as possible.

Having three dogs was difficult. They needed more attention than I could give them during the day and the drought made trying to get them exercised separately its own special hell. I didn't want to admit that I was overwhelmed and I didn't search for ways to manage the issue, I just wanted it resolved--I wanted Angel to find her own family.

She was a gift and a lesson and a reminder, a bit of forgiveness in the grief of losing Wynn at a time when I didn't realize I needed it. She was not a stray dog. She was on the road

that goes ever on, down from the door where it began.

More Steps

2011-08-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

It begins this morning on FM1960. There are many, many empty storefronts, small shopping plazas with different fronts and colors. This one has a poured concrete overhang, the bulbous front pressed with dozens of stone chips and the walls around the dark windows light columns of grey or beige brick. The 80’s are drowsing here, the great dark windows like aviator shades blank to your perusal and the overhang heavy above. If a fuschia sylph pushed out of one of the doors, insect bright, insect fragile--black lace gloves grasping at her own conversation, you might have heard Tina Turner following after.

Instead, the entire place passes in seconds and the street shows another empty face. There are few people out in the brutal heat of late morning. Mad Max is laughing at us, whispering taunts in a digital stream that breaks across the internet ocean; a dry, dry day at our fingertips.

If we slip from the morning to the early evening, we find the blank shapes of thundershowers in the distance and the bloom of the heat lingering in the car, despite the all-the-way up a/c. After a brief stop, we bring food to the parking lot of quiet four-story building and eat in a parking space under a tree, the sun diffused over the dash. A few breaths might center us here, but we don’t really want to be here, so we turn up the radio and listen to the bad news of the day.

Money and drought share an image of a closed and broken spigot. They keep talking and the fries and chicken fingers lose their savor. We have been warned not to come late to the door, to risk only a quarter of an hour past six and so we hurry in at 6:05 pm.
Most of the offices are quiet but few are dark at this hour. At the end of the hallway, right beside a glass exit, is the door to the stairwell. Stepping in, you see another glass door immediately to your left. You can exit either from the public or the private side, but one is tempted to think that you would come out in entirely different landscapes.

The stairs themselves begin under a low ceiling and the straight rise to the second floor brings you past this drop ceiling to stairwell straight to the fan at the ceiling. It is dark in here. The bulbs are on as required, but the light is not bright.

By the time we reach the second floor, the public building and the outside are hidden from our sight.

Still, we are climbing to the fourth floor. We do, only to find the stairs continue. At first, the fan, open to the day, distracts us. Then we see a missing ceiling tile and a dark space revealed. Sunlight comes from some opening and blinds us to the coils and giant transistors we seem to see.

It’s the opening to a box of dreams, to a box of steampunk magic, to a box that only an engineer would hold.

Here we are in the stairwell. There is a door and a place to be. There is no maintenance person standing in the dim of the stairwell, the top of his building open to our eyes. We can’t see the leaves that are falling in the mid-August haze. There is no sound of children outside, beyond the rusty fan that has not yet begun to turn.
It has not been stopped for us.

And yet . . . it is stopped. The ceiling has exposed the brilliance of the sun’s evening fingers lying against the mechanism and the deep blue of the sky above the fan. There are more steps.

The Impossible Shot

2011-08-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

Lately I've tried to be more of a "consider the reader" writer and less of a crazy fantasy snob. It probably has something to do with the awful, awful book I recently finished that flew across the room at least twice before landing, ruffled and much maligned, in the stack of read books on the top of the bookshelf.

Masquerading as a mystery story, this stupid mishmash of a cozy instead came across as the author's lame sermon on tolerance and supporting your friends and not denying your own uniqueness in favor of your own overblown sense of propriety. The main character was a doormat who was apparently cute when angry ('cause the men like 'em spunky and yet in their place) and possessed of a mysterious "empathy" that allowed her to sense...emotions? Ghosts? Who cares?

Despite being a MYSTERY, the main character didn't solve anything. Instead, the murderer murderously attacked her and spilled the impossible-to-solve plot (because all clues had been erased or completely ignored by those prejudiced but hot cops) just so the book could end.

This poor book was horrible. It made me angry. I've read drafts better than this tripe.

After finishing it and to clear the palate, I decide to take a break from plots and books and the like and clean the front room. (Anger has its uses.) To keep my blood pressure in line, I put in an old kd lang cd and was soothed by songs shuffling calmly from the dusty speakers.

Then came the song about growing up in Ontario. For some reason, the images bled across the living room like the watercolor illustrations in the books I used to read at my grandparents' house--the little Indian children growing up in the desert, the biographies of the pioneers, the fantastic Water Babies--and flashed into the fields outside of Port Arthur that passed by the windows of their great tan Buick as we traveled to visit cousins or other relatives. Wherever those memories live in my body, they were sieved up and served to me by the song about a place that I've never been.

The songwriter, the singer didn't aim at opening up my memories of summer trips; yet the song did just that. It made an impossible shot, threading the present roadblocks straight into the heart of the past.

While the tone deaf battering of the mystery story doesn't relate to my experience of the song at all, I find myself at once jealous of the song and fearful that I am instead the tone deaf author caterwauling against the silence.

Drowning Eyes Draft

2011-08-08T12:56:00.001-07:00

Even if the water level is low, the water isn’t clear enough to reveal the creature that casts the dark shadows by the bank. It might be fish turning beneath the water; instead these sleek dark bodies are Jenny Willow’s hands and her hair, tangling beneath the water like a mare’s nest from a nightmare, sharp and quick and hungry.

I swerve around the sandbank, pulling myself through a warm trill of water, digging my fingers into the gummy sand and keeping an eye on Jenny Willow. If she doesn’t leave, I will pull myself back to my own pool. Pegmell might be lying, I might have been made foolish by living further away from the Borders.

Here where Cypress Creek bends past the Pale Queen’s lands there are hungry Jennies along her borders, sometimes visible out of the corner of your eyes as you walk through the park. Jenny Willow’s [twisting] shadows thrust up in to the small tree leaning over the water. She pulls herself up and then dangles from her hands, flinging herself toward a sharp cut in the bank. Her thin form stretches like a splash and then she’s gone.

I slip along the sand, the green water blank around me. Despite a pool close to the river, I am hungry enough to eat a frog. Pegmell brought a brief respite from the hunger in the granite gnaw-rocks with which she lured us past the border. Mine fell beside me like a fat frog and I had caught it and tossed it away from water before my fingers registered the solid texture. Frogs bring out the vicious in the Jenny; they are the family we are forced to keep.

I pulled myself from the water, lifting the veil from my eyes and letting them gleam over the bank. Our flesh is more than our skin, of course. The water itself is part of our flesh, an inside-out pulse. I am both naked and flayed in the heat.

The smell of her and her rock had already disturbed my pool, however. She might as well have tossed in a basket of frogs. My stomach rumbled. We never eat our leaping brethren; it’s like chewing on a bit of your own skin. They remind me of our true prey, though. People are rare in this water, rarer at night and early morning, when my eyes are clear and bright enough to lure them close to the water.

***

Pegmell came up the dying branches of Cypress Creek for those of us who might be suffering from the lack of water. I can follow her scent on this rock. The idea of something that is too secret to be spoken through the dragonfly whispers and yet is urgent enough to risk throwing rocks at your cohorts intrigues me.

Her meeting is well inside the Pale Queen’s borders, in a shallow milky cataract of a pool edged with iris and mined with turtles. I can feel the eyes of the snakes and others following me from the leaf litter and the branches. Open space is best for her business.

I keep my calves in the water so that I am less naked than I feel. It is not my pond and the pulse of the dyed water faint. It tastes like the pipes from which it came. The other Jennies are pulled up around Pegmell, leaning against the iris swords.

Until Peg speaks, her azure eyes dominate the tan and green mottle of her skin. The deep brown of her lips merely underline those eyes. Drowning eyes.

“Did you know that these are what Arthur took, what he was offered by the first Jenny, the Queen of the pond. A sword green and sharp. No one comes for our swords or our help anymore,” Pegmell begins.

Pegmell is still smiling at us. Her mouth tugs her eyes just beyond the edge of her face and I wonder if she has learned to taste us dry, as she has learned to breath and speak abovewater. My own tongue twists and I bite down, leaning over the water.

“I imagine that she lived in the robes of a princess, that she was perhaps the sister of the man on the bank. She gave power to her brother and he lost the way, the way every way has been lost to us. We are more frog than man, and more viper than frog.” Her lips curl above her teeth.

I blink and find myself pushing down into the water. The others move closer to her. She glances my way and I am careful to keep my mouth above water. I want a name and I think that I could be less solitary. Sharp teeth pin my mouth closed. The iris swords bend to my fingers and the tips point for a minute toward Peg. Am I less alone here?

Jenny Bog shake a dragonfly from her shoulder. There will be no tales today. Jenny Cypress catches it with her tongue and swallows whatever tales it had. I lick the stone that Peg gave me--each of us is holding a bit of the limestone.

None of us are blooming and Peg’s skin is dry. Her arms curl around her knees and her toes grasp the concrete edge. Every thin flap of skin has been abraded away. Each digit is separate. I find myself sliding closer, like the turtles that bump against me and crawl over the small of my back toward the sun. My skin aches at the sight of hers.

Pegmell’s voice throbs softly over us. “The dwarves remember the same things, the way that their work was taken. Always for compensation...but it became hordes and rumors and handiwork became...unheimlich. When I found one of them standing at the edge of an old cenote, I almost pulled him into the water.”

“Tell us what becomes of our places when we leave?” Jenny Cypress asks.
“You won’t care. These are places that you wait, like a chrysalis for tadpoles. You will have other places with others of us. There are no bad stories of the homes which you will find.” Pegmell stopped.

“With dwarves?” Jenny Silver Maple asks?

“There are other creatures that you will meet. There are homes that come with the gnawing stones and others that come with a few bones. You can abandon the prejudices of kept creatures.” Pegmell spoke to those who lived in the park, not to those of us who were further away.

“Not all of us are protected by the Lady,” I murmured.

“There is no protection here. Are you protected by staying the same? By believing that you are capable only of drowning and eating the world from which you’ve come? You had mothers who were not part of the park, not behind the border that your fathers hid behind. There is no court here that will give you more than a sentence of eternal hunger.”

“We can find our mothers?” Jenny Bog stood, revealing the tangles of skin still clinging to her waist. She was still shedding into her form.

“I’m offering a chance to make a home for yourself. I’ve seen the King’s Riders pause when he saw us at the side of the dwarf Robert. They saw that we were the same kind of honor, the same fealty was offered to Robert as the King expects. We are no longer Jennies or kelpies or dark promises. We are capable of it. What we want from our heritage we will take.” Pegmell kept us deep in her gaze.

A braver creature might have chosen to take what she implied was there, but my character had coldness and treachery as well. Limestone sparked against my tongue but I was thinking of clouds of blood drifting through the water, tasting the human dissolved in the water, the way it should be. Child of lies, if not violence, I was the daughter of a frog prince and a human woman. I was the pearl who survived.

***

Smoke doesn’t frighten me the way it does the others. My pool is ringed by cigarettes and the smoke above the waves soothes me. Here in the horns of the Pale Woman in the wind that is for a moment her hair and then air again, the crazy sparks of lightning bugs struck from her bone, from her fingers, light the page longer than their mother, the lightning bolt.

After cracking the spine of the notebook, I’m ready to put down the confession, to ask for a pool in the Woman’s protection, to betray Pegmell’s silence.

I have little hope for this. Pegmell asked no permission to break the bonds of the court, gave no gifts to our people for taking us from our pools.

She was released by the dwarf so many years ago, she’s seen the hidden and the mud and the places were even the humans dive naked back into the water without giving in to her hunger. How could she remember the reflexes of custom and propitiation? Remembering them, would she count it wise to act on them?

My stomach rolls with the idea of people jumping freely into the water. I am licking my own fingers, Pegmell’s rock has been gnawed into a dry powder and a worry stone that rolls between my fingers like a lost thought.

A scream leaps up behind me. The Woman turns, her white skin shining in the rain. A slim dragon slides backwards down the slick limbs, catching at thin vines and a shallow canopy.

It sprawls before us, eyes whirling. “Mushrooms rise!” it growls and then laughs. Smoke curls from its nose and a gathering of wet frogs and spiraling caterpillars and draggled moths converge on the curling breaths.

She, the Queen who has imprisoned me in her own horns to ride out the this thunderstorm, she takes a deep breath and presses her roots deeper into the sweet soil. We sway with the breaking of the deadly drought.

The princes, the frogs, leap and glisten. I lean over and cast the notebook into the maw of the dragon. Horns catch the delicate skin fronds as I slip down, jumping toward the smoke and darkness.

I land on the startled snout and run, letting the harsh forest pull the water from me.

A Trail to What?

2011-08-01T18:17:00.000-07:00

The Pumpkin King & I were discussing book trailers this evening before dinner and I was wondering what I would do if most of the bookstores around us (at least the ones offering new books) closed. There are other, more important issues that surround this; however, we ended up talking about how we pick our books. In my case, this is a genre issue.

Specifically, we were discussing how fantasy book covers and book trailers either attracted or repelled us. I'm a big believer in the "uncanny valley" and I tend to reject out of hand any animation or cover that looks like it was pulled artlessly from a figure drawing program. If the art design is absent, I'll assume editing and revision are also absent.

When it comes to book trailers, I'm ambivalent. First of all, I hate the notion that a book is just a wordy proposal for a movie. Book trailers seem to play into this, thereby reducing the imaginative content of the book itself to a few familiar scenes (fraught glances, mood-lit woods, etc.) rather than with the voice of the book itself. On the other hand, I've seen interesting ones--although they do prime me for the idea that the book itself is incomplete without the attendent video production.

To me, the attraction of good cover design (and, presumably, book trailers) is that it underscores the ideas that are present in the book. The opportunity to develop and play with the fantastic is missed when tropes and advertising merge to become cheap stand-ins for a developed story or image of the book.

Hashbrowns & Waffles

2011-07-31T08:38:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, our car ended up in the shop for one of those "I can't replicate your issue" problems and the Pumpkin King & I ended up walking to the Waffle House for breakfast while it sat in the shop for several hours.

It takes significantly longer to walk to the Waffle House on foot than it does to flash by on FM1960 going 50 mph. Our last a/c break had been in the PetsMart maybe 20 minutes ago and we were no longer charmed by the sidewalks upon which no one walked or the alternation between wildernesses of grasslands and empty concrete temples. We were radiating sunlight our skin could no longer contain.

The Waffle House had a/c & iced tea and waffles and hashbrowns and, as verified by a trip in the car this morning, they were great. Wonderful crunchy flatop hashbrowns and thin sweet waffles. At the time of the Great Carless Hike, we were given a spot at the counter. Already numb from the walk, we watched the waitresses like bees at every cup and plate and countertop. The walk back was not unpleasant because the break was good and the sun at our backs.

And now, between the deli yesterday and waffles today, I'm thinking about formica countertops and Angel food cake, about the way my Aunt Lois and my grandmother and my Aunt Ruby and my mom all had those moments of cooking for an extended family and how much I miss that, how much I mourn for the kids to whom I won't be passing those physical connections.

Without somewhere for these memories to go, without any more links, I'm holding the end of a broken chain. I can wrap it around this blog like a broken necklace around my wrist, but I can't fix it.

Still Gassing On

2011-07-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

You knew it would last about a day, right? At least, the part about having anything to say, not the part about being glad to miss the drama that was the Writer's Bitchfest. I'm taking the villainous inspiration and running from that particular haunt.

I was caught by a post regarding the humanities on the From Austin to A&M blog. The idea that one "settles" for an English degree is somewhat odd to me--I was a passionate reader when I decided to major in English and I remain one to this day. Having the chance to study stories and the way they fit into a culture was a great boon to someone who doesn't travel much (claustrophobia is not a travel-friendly condition. I regret not continuing along in my degree path, but I don't regret studying something in which I was interested, nor do I feel that I was "forced" to study it because I was female.Instead, I remember the way my dad spent the night before my wedding talking to all my friends who were pre-med. I will remember the clear impression that left--that I just wasn't all that interesting if I wasn't a science major and still less if I married before advancing beyond my bachelor's degree.

As a writer on the bleeding edge of my 40s, I feel that if I stayed in my degree program, I would have the professional contacts that might have made the business end of writing less opaque, if not easier. Not that it matters, because if I'd had had my choice, I would have been a librarian. In my case, it was the school and not the specific degree program that turned out to be a challenge.

Not Looking for Group

2011-07-12T15:36:00.001-07:00

For several years, I've been trying to find a writer's group that will allow both critiquing and socializing such that you come out with the feeling that you've been vigorously shaken and put to rights at the end of the meeting.

There have been periods in which the various groups I've had the privilege to belong to have been that elusive beast--when the balance between work and chatter was spot on and we trusted each other well enough to give and receive thorough comments.

My challenge is that I progress slowly and don't trust myself so I remain an active participant after the groups have suffered what seems to be the inevitable decline into gossipy circles of writers who move at my same lackadaisical pace.

I'm not looking for another group. If the hoped-for sale hasn't happened by now, it's because I'm not going to dredge up enough internal motivation for it to happen.

I don't, as it turns out, really have anything to say.

A Lack Thereof

2011-07-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

I am not a scientist and medical descriptions are, for me, narrow switchback trails straight to nausea. Today, however, I was caught up in a story on NPR about regrowing a trachea for a man whose own trachea was blocked by a malignant tumor.

The story itself was like 70's scifi and involved laser-cut plastic molds of the man's own laser-scanned trachea and stem cells from his hip growing like expanding bubbles blown by various hormones, etc. until a new, presumably functional, trachea was ready for implantation.

It was insanely wondrous in a prosaic, I've-seen-this-movie-before fashion.

That reaction worries me. Am I too jaded with images and too uneducated, too uncurious, to field a sense of wonder for this?

I've felt, smelled, and hear many, many machines working in labs doing things that I can't imagine. Part of me suddenly feels that if I'd been more attuned to the physical sciences, I would be a better writer, with a greater capacity for imagination and wonder because I would have a greater understanding of what happens in the heart of the opaque functionality.

The Hordes

2011-07-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

Three dogs, especially when one of them is capable of levitation (tiggers & Border Collies are made of springs!), are a horde of dogs. I have a horde of dogs living in the house right now.

Fortunately, all of them are house-trained & friendly and we will soon be lighting our torches and rampaging in unison. Except perhaps the Peskie. After spending the afternoon in the middle of them on the couch, my patience is pillaged and yet I don't really have anything to say on the blog.

This is compounded by the distraction provided by the catepillars eating my moonflower vine. They are a separate horde entirely. Have you ever seen a catepillar eat? At first, it's like watching a nature film and you wonder who sped up the file. Then you realize that it actually did just eat that entire leaf, stem, and partial stem in just a few seconds. I only put up with this in the hope it will form a chrysalis on the now nude vine and I'll get to see a giant moth in my very own backyard!!

That should be worth a short story or two, right? After the dogs and I conduct a bacon raid. Bacon!!

These Are My People?

2011-06-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I attended a local sci-fi convention. We were able to catch a few interesting panels and hear a few of our favorite Texas authors give some depressing but clear insights into the genre & current publishing trends. The dark news and general emptiness of the convention dissolved most of my enthusiasm into a bare remembrance of being in college.

Repeatedly, panelists would remind attendees that we "among our people" and should be enjoying the chance to relax among others who would understand our quirks and carrying out the complex conversations missing from everyday interactions.

In fact, this particular convention is one of the least friendly and conversational places I attend. This year, the hotel didn't bother to put out chairs for conversation areas in the main halls and the attendance was already sparse (presumably another economic victim). I don't think one person said anything to me that wasn't trying to entice cash from me or was employed by the hotel.

These are my people? I am barely educated compared to the majority of the attendees and writers (who tend toward scientist/professor/grad student types) and found that I was becoming increasingly put off by the end of the weekend.

It was at this point that I realized that these were NOT my people. These were his people. I was finally over the daydream of being a writer, of being interested in fantasy or science fiction, or wanting to spend one more second taking notes on subjects that are no longer required.

The Squeaking Drives Me Crazy

2011-06-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

I’m rubbing the ashes from my fingers, or perhaps the dust of the shelf in front of me. Someone has designed a careless cover for this book but I bend the soft covers and think it might give me time.

Once upon a time, a singer in a white suit—Eddie Rabbit? Michael Jackson? Elvis?—sang a ballad that gave a fading prom its magic gateway; gave a wedding its dissolved proprieties; gave a story its backbone.

It was a sturdier backbone than elf bones. These are the soft fungus of the forest, bleached and eternal, creeping beneath the bones of men to live again, dissolving in sugar lumps on the lips of small children. Elf bones crept through the story like nerves, but the song held the story upright, a supple ballad of emotions that carried the essence of time and the force of life in the bend of a glissando.

When it was sung by the man in white, the vital incarnation gleamed around him, a blue nimbus of stage lights burning in the bright spotlight. The blue clung to the notes, the low ones soaking in the lighter fluid that floated his voice.

The story that used such a spine burned as well. The book hid a thousand snapshots of the people who read it, just beneath the text. Fairy tales crept through the memories, devouring life but linking a narrative and notion.

Critics roasted their opprobrium in the flames, watching the simple skeleton smile and dance beneath the words. Empty, they said. Wrong headed, they said.

But the story smiled. Whatever we have against showing our bones, against watching our veins jump, the story had no such self-consciousness and it burned them with the flame of a particular eternal now.

Eventually, someone was humming the song and thought of the story. It belonged to a parent and showed an odd reflection of the parent, a distortion—a person not yet a parent, neither aspect completely understandable apart from the other. Blue ballpoint in the margins. The flames cast strange images on the cave of the family. It burned the edges of the child’s imagination until the sugary elf bones melted into hard bright lollipops. The child feasted on them in quiet moments on the edge of crowds, always a child on those anonymous shores.

The story died down to embers. It was studied, and then acclaimed. People took possession of it. The singer died, and then the writer. A flame caught from a tribute special and branded the culture with symbolism that was taken into the academy and further studied.

The song was recorded again by a woman in a white suit, the distaff and the universal, and a book trailer was made. This I watched years later on the faceless recommendation of the web and felt something flicker in my memory. A foxfire remnant of bygone nows chased me into the mire of myself. Skeleton days shivered around me. Are the bones of the plot grinning, even now?

The song is the spine of the book. The text is the flesh of the story. It smiles at me, reaches one finger toward the tinder of my imagination.

Scary Smart

2011-06-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

Writing? Ha! My backyard is a dust bowl, we've been hosting a temporary dog we've named Angel, and Varda is stress shedding dust puppies.

Angel is a scary smart border collie who is both friendly and probably smarter than the rest of us in the house. We've decided that Merlin would make an excellent Pinky to her Brain, so we're keeping everyone as separate as possible. Merlin already has perfected the art of leading Varda astray (and narcing her out when she takes the bait). If the three of them get together, it won't be a pack, it will be a gang. Possibly with the kind of skills that get made into shows on the USA network (the one with the "characters welcome" tagline).

They were three dogs in an average suburban house, but they had the skills to be so much more. Angel planned the operations, Merlin had both charm and sneakiness, and Varda was the muscle. No pet store, shelter, or counter was secure enough, until they were recruited by The Government for Various Patriotic Purposes. Coming this fall.

Hopefully, Angel's family will find us soon. Before, you know, The Government.

Zombie Post #3

2011-05-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

Urrrr. Paaaaages. More Paaaaaages.

Just finished Martinez's Chasing the Moon, which read like the best kind of literary mix tape to date. It left me thinking of tempera paint & jello, as monsters popped from puppetry, bookcover graffiti, and darker places and the entire edifice sank through layers of reference and memory like the apartment tower in which the main character lives. So...thick lines and primary hopes & fears coupled with squirmy humor? Just loved it. :)

Meanwhile, I'm fighting a battle between my urge to be rude, my desire to give in to despair, and my addiction to drowning both in cascades of Frappucinos. So far, the caffeine is winning, by a sip. More group nonsense. Hopefully, that will be all be resolved after Thursday, especially if rudeness wins (I'm kinda pulling for it).

Reviews

2011-05-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

Kurban Said's Ali and Nino sat on the shelf for a while. Other books came in, were devoured, and stacked for adding to our miniscule library. It was, I confess, added to the shelf because of its smoochy/swoony reviews and the fact that I was reading a biography of the author, never having heard of the book itself until I had begun the biography.

Since I am past the "smoochy/swoony" stage of my own life, I was cautious but hopeful. The story began in Baku prior to WWI and followed Ali, a young Muslim of high estate as he fell in love in with Nino, a Georgian princess who attended the nearby girl's school. The love story is both about the relationship between the two and about Ali's love for Baku and the careful balance that both made it possible and that bit into his own identity.

Was it a beautiful love story? I don't know. That part of the story and the alien culture to which both Ali and Nino belonged made it difficult for me to find my way into the story. Ali tells the story, sometimes obliquely, in terms of generalizations of temperment and culture with which it was challenging for me to empathize. Nino feels like a culture unto herself at times rather than a person.

Despite these places were I slipped over the surface without sinking into the heart of the story, Ali's elegy for a place that used to be reasonable, safe, and welcoming proved to be the love story that I found most compelling. Without Baku, there could be no successful relationship with Nino and therefore, no place for Ali.

By the end, it was a heartbreaking indictment of the constant struggle for these places in which we can exist, coexist, and flourish.

Urrrrrrr

2011-05-24T03:52:00.000-07:00

This blog is dead, really, officially dead--therefore, you are reading a zombie blog. It's not yet six in the morning, but the sky is shifting and the windows are blank spaces anymore and the dogs are squeaking about their first morning trip to the backyard.

I've come back to the zombie blog because I've been mindlessly consuming pages. First, yesterday afternoon, then yesterday evening, then at 2 pm when I woke up from a bad dream and realized I had to finished the book and from then until now. It's almost six am and the windows are sapphire and the book is lying beside me on the desk, the front flap quivering in the a/c.

At first, I thought I might contrast the way this book didn't have the same lingering chill of another one only I didn't know what it had instead. Now I do. Urgency. It was four, then five, and now almost six and my eyes hurt and they are watering but the book is done; it is just as exhausted as I am and we are both tense with the tear through the words.

I am frequently guilty of reading as if I were at McDonald's, shoving word after word behind my eyes and into my brain. I like stories that weave images like delicate and intricate line drawings, but I am not always patient enough to appreciate them. There are books everywhere. So I have come back to my undead blog to accuse myself of literary gluttony (and physical as well--there were the chips and pie that fueled several hours of reading) and to say that despite that, I am struck still by the unexpected book that is vibrating from my chest like an arrow.

I'm glad that I picked up The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, glad that I will have it embedded in my brain as I waver between sleep and waking today, glad that it was there when I woke from a nightmare and laid a hand on the nightstand. As it is now after six, I'm going to the dogs and then we are all going to the backyard.

Nothing and Nobody

2011-05-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

Today is the end of Moon Pools and Mermaids. A writer should be honest and I am a liar--easily frosting the sharp words with baroque description and swallowing them whole. I smother stories.

If I had been courageous, there was a time when I could have either corrected this habit or weaned myself from the idea of writing. Throwing myself into the ring with other writers in college or fighting submission battles on my own would have been the wise choice and the strong one.

Instead, the idea floated on a stream of dithering until the first writer's group. Since then, it's been easy to work for the group, to make their submission deadline, to take their criticism and praise. I've read the suggested books, listened to the lectures, and attended meetings. Writing "for real"--for publication--slid to the side like scenery through a train window; the idea of moving into a published state was a great daydream while I moved through another draft or another short story.

Two years ago, I lost my job and then my dogs, and then--because it wasn't yet a great country song deep in the heart of Texas--I left the first writer's group. Ever since, I've felt something scraping my insides thinner and thinner. You could almost see it pressing against the flesh, preparing the hide for a different purpose.

What will I do now that I'm not a writer?

Swallow the dizzy meringue descriptions until the lies burn them light and I float over the afternoon, the thin skin finally finding a purpose.

In the Backyard

2011-04-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

The zinnias, most of them, have their second leaves and their stems are straight enough in the mounded dirt to grow without flopping. One of the dogs has beheaded a sprouted sunflower, and the stem and first and second set of leaves have deflated against the dark soil, like a label on the ground for the remaining sunflower. Ants are gathering like an infection beneath the pots and in the garden since the rain remains an icon for tomorrow or the day after that or, perhaps, the weekend.

Faster than anything, the heat is growing. Our fans jutter the air above the dogs and the dim interior feels like something shaded but not quite covered, despite the a/c.

Even the stories wilt.

Wrong, We Have Wrongness

2011-04-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

This is why I still read: Mr. Keen's The Cult of the Amateur fleshed out the job loss and economic wreckage caused by "free" media. That bad feeling in the back of my mind when I had to admit to Mom that I get most of my news from the internet is both real and sensible guilt.

On the other hand...radio and television were "free" media long before file downloading. Have we as a society just moved to the next information pipeline and prefer it to resemble radio/tv more than we prefer it to resemble books/newspapers?

I struggle with the ideas that Mr. Keen presented, primarily in that I see the problem but not how I can effectively act toward a solution. The pipeline referenced earlier carries a tremendous flow of potential disaster over me, including environmental collapse and continued war along the same fault lines.

At the same time, I find myself horrified by the idea that you can improve literature by breaking it down and remixing it. How is a fortune-cookie Shakespearean misquote improved by being translated by a someone who didn't understand the original in the first place and illustrated by stolen clip art?

Monkey #54329, Reporting for Duty

2011-04-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

Not that he would care, for I am in no wise a credentialed expert licensed to form such a judgment, but I do agree with Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. I would rather read well-edited books than unedited ones and receive information from a vetted source if I'm basing my vote or my finances or my health on it.

I also enjoy reading a gossipy, fun blog or one that shares opinion that, living in the conservative heart of Texas, I'm not likely to encounter that often in real life. So...am I turning to non-experts for information in these cases or indulging in the internet equivalent of a coffee klatsch? I would argue that these are substitute social encounters rather than information-gathering forays.

I have a real dictionary in my desk that I use when I write (although I use an online one for writing e-mails to go with SpellCheck); however, unlike my parents, I don't own a multi-volume encyclopedia. After reading The Cult of the Amateur, I will probably eschew Wikipedia in the future. I understand and agree with the need to financially support and intellectually support the continued production of researched, well-written information--whether that be electronically or physical books, disks, etc.

I find myself irritated by the book, nonetheless. I can find the same kind of nonsense on my local radio stations, venues such as The History Channel, in the bookstore, and in my own family. Is bad information any less dangerous in those venues? Any less pervasive?

Are blogs, Facebook, etc., about expertise or conversation?

Guaranteed

2011-04-04T12:52:00.001-07:00

I recently finished Erin Kellison's Shadow Bound which tempted me to take it home because of the fact that the publisher considered it a "guaranteed read" and was willing to refund the purchase price (according to their arcane and limited set of conditions) if the reader didn't like the story. The deadline for refund had passed, but I was more interested in the idea of the guarantee than the guarantee itself.

I am a willing victim of marketing.

Was the story good? Well, yeah. I stayed up late to finish it, slamming the last few chapters into my brain as my eyes fought to take "just a brief break" as midnight came and went. There was tension, an overwhelming sense that the ending would be bleak, jumping jacks of hope that it wouldn't, viscious kicks to hope's groin, and so forth as the pages resolutely keep flipping down toward the resolution.

In the end, however, I felt that author's idea for the story might be more interesting than the formula that shaped the published narrative. The go-go-go plot, flipping sometimes through high-energy bedroom routines, just didn't give me much time to get a purchase on the characters or the structure of the world. It was as if someone had helpfully cut out all that distracting and tantalizing scent just so the blooms would be more showy. I wanted more time with the mythology, more time to run my hands over the joinery that connected the magic to the mundane. In particular, I wanted more time with a main character who developed both through her own strength and the press of circumstance. Perhaps a main character who more fully owned the story.

I'm undecided on whether to get the second book in the series. It looks like that book might delve a little deeper into interesting areas; however, I feel the template has already been set by this first taste. The guarantee was solid, I did enjoy the book. I would have liked more story, though.

Still Stinging

2011-04-01T08:40:00.001-07:00

I finished the Elegies last night and opened my e-mail this morning to find that my goals are too complex and that I need to lighten up. Apparently, immersing myself in the question of what I'm doing and how I'm doing it only leads to confusing blog posts and grim e-mails.

Fair enough. I kept reading lines out loud to see if they sounded as overwrought as they felt while reading. It was easy to lose perspective because the essays tended toward a depressing vision of a future in which we are plugged into the hive and unable to separate ourselves from the group, when the impulses propagate through entire societies like a craving for sugar runs through my own limbs right about this time of day. Where will the organization come from in the hive? Where will the thoughts and impulse control come from?

As I send this out, into the spreading void of the hive, it seems more or less as if I'm talking to myself; I'm thinking via keyboard, mediating my own thoughts into grammatical structures and then into typeface and then into the blankness of the untraveled interwebs. Have I lost a sense of interiority then? Have I divided my thinking into public and private just as I've accustomed myself to the idea that cameras are everywhere and the public sphere begins just outside the front door and even in the house, depending on the images released in various social networks.

It seems odd to me that stories would vanish as the constructed self vanishes--who are these people who used to expect that they would be able to escape, what was the panopticon like when it was an invisible diety rather than a humming machine?

How much longer can they last, these stories?

Ashes to Ashes

2011-03-31T17:29:00.000-07:00

Today I've divided my reading between Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies and Lee Smith's The Last Girls. The latter is getting me through sessions on the exercise bike and is proving increasingly difficult to leave on the bike stand at the end of the ride. I'm not sure where the characters are heading, but the slow excavation of who they are and what they've become is the perfect accompaniment to an activity that used to be my own way of running around with friends and family (on a bike that wasn't stuck in place, of course).

The Last Girls is the kind of book that inspires me to hunt down how-to-write authors and beat them thoroughly about the wrists. It's not deathless prose, but then, neither am I. It's a good read and follows its own path to being that. I may not be sunk as deeply in it as I would be if I could read outside without chasing dogs away from the verbena, but I'm still in it far enough to look forward to getting back on the bike the next day.

The Elegies takes me straight into sadness. Reading the essays in this book makes me feel like I'm drowning in an ever-expanding puddle as soon as I boot up the computer and click on one of my favorite blogs. Mr. Birkerts caused me to realize today that after graduating with a degree in English, what I'd gotten out of the books I'd read is more of a thank-goodness-I-live-in-age-with-plumbing-and-women's-rights and not an iota of empathy for the human condition. What the heck happened?

I'm foundering. I used to love to read and I've read widely (if not classically); I've read enough to want to give some of those words back, to write myself into the narrative. Was it reading for number or reading for depth? If I haven't been reading well, then I've been...what? Skimming like a stone over a lake that is soon to swallow me?

Since I've never finished it, I've decided to try reading Ivanhoe aloud over the next several days--mostly to slow myself down and consider every word. Years ago, I promised myself that I'd read Dante's Paradisio if I ever made it to graduate school. I didn't. Instead of paradise, then, a verbal tour of a faux medieval forest at a walking pace.

Steam Vents and Vitriol

2011-03-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

I have a blog, and I'm not afraid to use it. At least, I'm not afraid to use it to vent.

Here is where I lose my nerve. Exactly as I do when I'm writing, I suddenly start to consider how something will sound to a critic who speaks like my mother. Will it be nice? Is it really the smartest thing I could have said? And then, like magic, the story or the rant disappears into the ether. The tension remains. Not today.

I decided several years ago to give my writing a serious place in my life and I joined a writer's group. It went well for several years and then was hydra'd (split into two), hijacked, and is now defunct. I was fortunate to find another group that focussed on critiquing and continued to work and submit (we'll skip over the success ratio).

Then, the second group ran into a shoal of non-participation. That's neither suprising nor threatening, until the participating membership dwindles down far enough that one or two people missing a meeting derails the meeting. This is where we seem to be, with some members arguing for a fee schedule, some for a change of venue, and some for a combination of other solutions. I'm adamantly opposed to some of these options and may be stuck unable to "compromise"--that is, to preserve a dysfunctional system because some people don't want change.

Have I given myself enough time to verify that writing is no longer for me? Have I tried and therefore can stop without regret? Is the group worth fighting for if the membership has changed?

Just Another Excuse

2011-02-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

I seem to be looking for reasons to not write. As I became caught up in giving comments for a group member who turned out to be more focused on the message, the act of writing itself started to make me angry. Today I discovered a book on how our entertainment culture is a flashing neon Joe's-Bread-and-Circus sign of the crumbling of America. I bought the book.

Instead of contributing to viable socio-politcal discourse, I can let my novel shrivel rather than become part of the distracting of America. There must be barricades around here somewhere...singing Frenchmen...no? The anger won't dissipate in sarcasm, of course. There is something uncomfortable about having someone else's ideas colonize your head, thinking about someone else's project with the same impotent irritation with which you view the political games being played. When there is a similar pretense of input, irony gilds the needle.

I dislike didactic fiction. Stories about certain topics will remain, at best, unread and unloved, if not actively anathematized. Careless gender classification (e.g., women's fiction) is the same as stereotyping. When do I lose my gender because of what I read (or think)?

Most often, it's not my job to bring these topics up; however, as part of a writer's group, they do come up. It is rarer still to encounter a political discussion that leaves me hanging over the side of the desk, vomitting ambition and story ideas and any hope for the future. Perhaps I'm allergic to fervor.

Stuck with Frito in Trotter's Field

2011-02-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

I gave that first draft permission to suck, provided it was finished. I let the conflict off on the theory that I could backfill that in later. Then I gave myself permission to have a bit of time off from the draft, then a little more.

Suddenly, I'm staring at a draft with vanishing characters, double-named characters, misplaced conflicts, language that rises to self-parodying heights, yet more avoidance of conflict, and, finally, an ending that consists of a full stop without a resolution. Draft itself seems a rather formal designation for this shaggy mess of a fantasy that stole its setting from someone's sci-fi bedroom, all flashing lights and fake planets printed on cheap sheets.

A tiny voice is emanating from the draft. "Fix me...fix me," it squeaks. I could put it back in the drawer. No one has to know. There isn't anyone looking for this draft. No price is set for its redemption.

If it was fixed, if it was released...what would it say? Is it a forgiveable, much less a worthy, action to put something into the pool of ideas that has not much to say to the good of humankind? What if by some mischance it contains a bad idea that I don't recognize and that propagates forward?

I'm in a plywood headspace, a not-yet-finished place. Work is lurking around my ankles.

Recovering, Part II

2011-02-15T15:16:00.000-08:00

Yet again, I'm back at the keyboard after a bout with something that pretends to be a cold but which I'm sure is working on moving up to flu or bronchitis. It could have been getting out in the cold (unusually so for Texas) or for going on a dusting binge in between getting out in the icy weather; however, it resulted in a relapse that I think I'm finally shaking off.

I've finished Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth (TRtMe) and am working through another book on fantasy literature and trying to coddle my brain back into writing mode. TRtMe was fascinating in the specific linguistic discoveries and speculations that according to the author form the basis of the development of The Lord of the Rings and other Tolkien works. I came to this book through the Tolkien Professor podcast and am alternately grateful and jealous that students have the opportunity to take classes on these subjects.

In the filing that I finished recently there were entirely too many papers left over from my own university days and I was embarrassed to see in them the marks of the bored and uninterested student that I was at the time. Doubtless, I would not have benefitted from interesting classes when my brain was caught between the parental "study to get a paying job" and the personal "study so that you can get paid to work at something that interests you." As it turns out, neither came to pass.

Which doesn't bring us neatly up to date, but at least brings the maundering to an end. It's the cold, I'm sorry. More accurately, it's the lingering cold that won't move out of my lungs for love or money. At least it has brought my fussing with drafts to a end for now. I don't have any opinions at this point, just a childish craving for McDonald's. At some point, I'll have to wean myself from my need for fries. Perhaps after opinion starts to reassert itself and I manage to get a few more pages done.

The Yogurt Lies Bleeding

2011-02-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

The tiles are covered with yogurt gore, the remains of strawberry preserves and a few white smears where the spoon bounced to a stop. I caught the plate before it could fall to the ground and shatter, which is enough excitement for my recovering lungs. This past week I've been sleepwalking from the couch to the futon as I tried to sleep my way through a chest cold while watching endless hours of Hercule Poirot.

Today I am both vertical (yea!!!) and ready to speculate on whether I'm becoming too intemperate in my desire to rip first drafts to shreds or whether it's simply rude to ask for a critique of a first draft in the first place. In such a debate, of course, I would be condemning myself as much as anyone else, for I am certainly guilty of submitting ill-advised drafts for comment.

In these cases, I have found myself at a deadline point with something that I could have withheld and submitted later but found myself unable to resist trolling for comments and giving myself permission to further delay working on my draft while "waiting for comments." Instead of thinking of the time that my group would be wasting on doing for my draft what I should have done myself and of the violence that might be done to my story by letting a committee have a crack at revising it, I opted for the easy way to revision. Let someone else do the thinking.

My writing suffers every time I let this happen. For one thing, it gives me a wealth of similar comments that amount to the fact that I undertell a story in the beginning. I leave too much of it in my head and don't transfer enough of the logic to the page. This is good to know, but it is something that I might have discovered on my own as I worked through the drafts on my own. I also could have become more familiar with my own voice as I worked through the draft stages, rather than becoming familiar with other peoples' preferences for my work.

Early draft submittals are a shortcut to feedback that breaks down the author's own thoughts on how a story should go and may do violence to character development and story development. If a first draft is presented and the feedback is appropriate to the draft stage, the author may be tempted to stop working on an idea or redirect a story in ways that he or she may not have intended or wanted and may thus lose something of the drive and random creative energy that makes first drafts so exciting for the writer. If the writer doesn't maintain enthusiasm through the first draft, how will he or she maintain it throughout the difficult process of revision?

Revisions and multiple drafts can be a challenge. Understanding that drafts are necessary and that change may happen to the story as a result is a learning process that many writers have to go through. It has been difficult for me to get here and I've had some excellent example of hardworking writers from whom I could learn by observing their drafts. Early drafts and first drafts are the writer's imagination covered in muck cheerfully making castles in the sand. Later drafts are perhaps tree houses more suitable to welcoming other people to see the sturdiness of the writer's creation.

And if you wrote up your last D&D campaign...stick it your memory book and wait 20 years.

I Stab at the Heart of Your Draft, But Only Injure My Thigh

2011-01-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been priviledged to be able to watch a few novel drafts take shape in my writer's group. This is a fascinating prospect. Narratives shift and carve new tracks and characters separate from their creators and voices find their proper key and something that was a draft yesterday becomes a novel and I become a reader first and a commenter second. Amazing and then very, very cool.

However, to quote Practical Magic, "with the sweets, come the sours." I have a firm set of assumptions, beliefs, and graveyards that I whistle past as a person. When I am looking at pacing and characterization and the few grammar/style things I know, I sometimes run across something that shoves me from my comfort zone. I am uncomfortable and it feels "wrong." Although this is not a value judgment (i.e., it would be better if this moved quicker), my reaction is similiar enough that I find myself marking sentences and making suggestions to "fix" the discomfort.

It becomes more challenging when I'm faced with a novel that tends toward a conclusion that runs counter to my beliefs. How do I modify my responses so that I am looking only at the shape of the story and not at its content? There is about this a chill of academic remove that I have not yet had to develop. More than remove, however, there is the understanding of uncomfortable plots and themes such that they lose their discomfort.

The separation between the passion of one writer and reader and that of a different writer and reader is as difficult for me as that of separating myself as an intimate participant in my story from myself as a objective editor of that same story.

This is a skill that I could have mastered had I stayed in college. I should have stayed.

To the Book Cave!

2011-01-26T14:20:00.001-08:00

There are plenty of January tasks to ignore, so I've been curled by the window plowing through the Christmas drifts of books. Yea!

First from the pile was Kelly Gay's The Darkest Edge of Dawn. This I had actually picked up to while away the evenings waiting to pick up my husband. That worked not at all, since I started it in the car, continued while eating dinner, watching tv, and "sleeping." Books, the previous incarnation of iRudeness. I was surprised by the forcefulness of the plot, since I had felt that the first book had suffered from the author's willingness to run her character through the wringer to the extent that I started to have Dresden flashbacks. This story is leaner and caught my attention like a snare, pulling me through the plot in a single arc and leaving me dangling and waiting for the next book.

The next book was one that I'd been saving, since I assumed that it would have the same glue-me-to-the-reading-window effect and, of course, it did. This was Seanan McGuire's latest October Daye novel, An Artificial Night. Ms. McGuire tells the best adult campfire stories, by which I mean stories that are not "quest for maturity" fairy tales, rather they are about heroism that doesn't drop away when the single monster of adolescence is slain. Mixed metaphor salad, fresh for y'all. :) An Artificial Night was excellent. The way that fairy and human and horror and wonder combined to make a nightmare quest for October captivated me, as did the way that my expectations are confounded--one has to pay attention, because this isn't a rote rhyme one can recite just because one has read the first stanza.

The last book (in the recently finished stack) was Minister Faust's The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. There should be a flashing sign inserted here with flashing smiley faces and exclamation points. This was a funny book and I enjoyed it thoroughly. There was grimness and horror, but I was so much in love with the main characters that I just held my breath and read through it. Hamza and Ye (the Coyote Kings) told a vivid tale (as did all the other POV characters, of which there were several) and I found myself rather unsubtly pushing this book on my husband pretty much from the beginning. Psst, buddy....*snicker, snicker*...wanna read a line? This is a quest tale as a sci-fi road movie complete with quotable lines and awesome characters that you will think about in odd moments in the future.

So far, the post-holiday book stack has been a tasty pyramid of goodies. There are a few books on Tolkien that promise to be more pedantic reads and one by Michael Moorcock on epic fantasy (clash of the titans ON MY NIGHTSTAND! Bwa ha ha ha!) that promises to make me feel yet more illiterate and poorly read. At some point, I will finish The Worm Ouroboros. Really. I will. On my list. There, in tiny print, bottom of page 10. Tolkien will guilt me into it.

Hope y'all have a cozy January!

Fred's Guide to Fine Dining, Lake Jackson Style

2011-01-11T20:04:00.000-08:00

This afternoon my mom was mentioning her bemusement at finding that her novel (featuring sidekick Fred, the ever-lunching) was proving more popular than she'd expected just as I was skimming an article from Book View Cafe's Brewing Fine Fiction. The happy accident of Mom's finding enthusiastic readers for a small self-published novel (especially one titled I Hate Art) just makes me grin and it took away some of the inertia that sets in when I read "how to" books--even good ones.

Fighting the overwhelming feeling that the ship has left the harbor, at least in terms of my writing career, has become a full-time endeavor. I think about writing and then I decide to read or skim Facebook or file stuff. Except for Facebook, the other two give me a slight sense of accomplishment that I'm not getting from writing. Brewing Fine Fiction is a fine and funny book, but many of the articles presuppose a level of craft to which I have not yet come.

Mom's news broke up my fusty mood with the sharp insight that she earned a victory from finishing. She has a book and she has readers who enjoy it. She did it without workshopping her ideas to death and with a steely eye toward grammatical revisions. She took it seriously without taking herself seriously. Her book is funny. My mom is awesome.

I'm not my mom. But...I am going to finish my novel Triskelion this spring. I'm working on some of the maps and artwork now (because nothing says mighty fantastic adventure like stick people leaping wavy lines). I'm going to keep my favorite character from I Hate Art--Fred the Ever-Lunching--in mind. If the writing gets tough, I'll be hunting up German food or a good delicatessen chicken salad and watching the world go by while I write it down.

Because What Else Would Lee Majors Be Doing Christmas Eve?

2010-12-25T02:59:00.000-08:00

There's a Christmas elf by my keyboard with her Christmas pup and there are trees throughout the house...with the candles burning it smells like winter and mint and chocolate and something sweet but not quite identifiable. I notice it mostly in the morning, when nothing is yet lit; however, the smell lingers from yesterday with all the notes intact save for that of the ash of the wick.

I had been ticking off Christmas chores like mad until yesterday morning, when I happened to turn on the tv to a cartoon channel. It was a little weird to grab a bit of Christmas peace in front of the tv--but there was the madcap race to experience the season and the little cartoon kids always succeeded. Better yet, the cartoons weren't something that I had on my list. They were just fun.

Which brings us to last night and our yearly tussle over opening a gift on Christmas Eve. We opened one gift in my family on Christmas Eve and it was usually because we didn't see both maternal and paternal families on Christmas Day. The Pumpkin King's family opened everything Christmas Eve. Since our kids are the four-footed kind without a jot of overwhelming CHRISTMAS!!! eagerness, we celebrate everything on Christmas Day, together. Except for the Pumpkin King's insistence on getting started early. :)

Needless to say, the merriment of the morning had worn off by the time that he thought about presents. Just before we got started, he decided that we needed hot chocolate and I reached for the remote, wondering what kind of Christmas treats I could find. We watched an old Rankin-Bass Santamation movie and then I found the subject of this post. There was Lee Majors on Christmas Eve rescuing Dolly Parton and a passel of orphans! Because...as Scrooged fans know, what else would Lee Majors be doing on Christmas?!

We laughed. And then we watched the movie. Because what else would we be doing on Christmas Eve, save celebrating family in-jokes and traditions while the Christmas decorations flicker and wink?

Merry Christmas!

Call for YA Novels

2010-12-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

I'm building my 2011 reading list and I'd like to add a few titles for my reviews at Supernatural Fairy Tales. Once a month SFT reviews books, usually titles aimed a young adult audience (although not usually children's books), that have some relation either to the supernatural or to fairy tales. This year, we'd like to concentrate on small press or independent works by YA authors.

We're looking for recommendations for authors whom you've enjoyed who may have a work out or coming out in 2011. We welcome suggestions from authors and from readers. In order to schedule review times for the months of February-May, we'll need to receive suggestions fairly quickly. Suggestions can either be listed in the comments to this blog or submitted directly to SFT.

In order to be considered for review, any books suggested will have to be available at some point during 2011 (or very early 2012 for books reviewed later in the year). Books should be available to the general public.

Book reviews will include the opinion of the reviewer, a link to a site where the book may be purchased, and a copy of the cover art (if available). Reviews may be posted to SFT and Goodreads and Amazon (if appropriate).

If you have any questions about book reviews, please feel free to contact me directly or send a question through SFT's review site.

Happy holidays!

Tiny Moments

2010-12-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

^pause for chocolate^

The mint chocolate candle is more seductive than I antcipated. It has been devastating for the holiday bowl of Kisses in the kitchen and a warm counterweight to the cloudy cold front that is settling overhead. I am tempted to spend the entire afternoon curled on the couch under blankets and dogs and read the three novels that are tagging after me this week.

I could turn on the tree lights and drift into the company of trolls, fairies, and the PIs who keep them on the straight and narrow.

This I will do; first, however, I'd like to share some thoughts on a video that I watched yesterday. I've been following A. Lee Martinez's blog since this year's Apollocon and he recently posted a video introduction to his lastest novel. When I clicked the link, I anticipated a semi-slick book trailer. Instead, he'd uploaded a 9 minute introduction to his work and his book that consisted of his just talking to the mike, against a white wall.

Instead of a cute reminder of a book that I'd enjoyed, there was a video that reminded me that books are just as handmade as anything I'd recently seen at the Renaissance Festival; that they could grow in the same places, the same rooms, as those I remembered from being a kid. It's hard to explain how the two connect--they cross on a bridge that consists of what I remember of being an imaginative child daydreaming in my own white-walled room and what I can see of an author telling the story of telling the story without the kind of ad-type visual shortcuts that I find easy to dismiss.

To have a few minutes to appreciate and think about the craft of writing, when the rules and how-to books are silent, is a welcome break in a season of looking for those tiny moments of awe. And what better way to prolong the moment than by returning to the couch and the stack of novels?

Propagation of Difference

2010-12-06T17:41:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving ambushed me, but I think I'm recovered. Finished the NaNovel and am looking forward to editing it (don't ask me why, I'm just ready to rip the text to pieces). Haven't read much, but the nightstand is moulting novels so I should be catching up on that soon.

Meanwhile...the difference. A few days ago I received an e-mail that, as these things may, struck me as less friendly than it could have been. A few angry hours later and I'd updated some lists that needed updating and found myself once again grieving over the events of the past year and a half. It sucks...but things have changed. I'm not going to find another office job and start attending my old writer's group. Our two oldest dogs aren't going to run around in the backyard and then come in to snooze on the carpet. Things have changed.

Until yesterday it wasn't a profound change, because until yesterday these weren't changes that I allowed to move into the past. I'm still dreaming about my old job. Invariably, I'm trying to get things done knowing that I won't get paid or knowing that I'm skipping out on another job to finish "just one more thing" in the old one. I would dream that I was sneaking into offices that should have been closed just to finish paperwork. My brain wouldn't let it be over and I could feel myself tucking in my head like a turtle as I kept shuffling that damn useless paperwork. Then someone struck a match to my frustration and changes had to be made.

I don't know yet whether this means no more nightmares, but it does mean that I'm now aware that I can't just pick up where I left off. I can be a writer, but I can't hide out in a group of other writers and pretend. I can imagine not being a writer. I can think about working again without carrying around the burden of unfinished business.

Tiny Dogs and Symphonies

2010-11-18T12:11:00.000-08:00

Mom's papillion is curled up so that he can take advantage of the warmth from the laptop and my lap at the same time. He's been twitching throughout Ride of the Valkyries and jumping up every time he thinks he hears the squirrel land on the sunscreen over the porch.

Despite that, he's managed to snooze a good part of the afternoon right here while I work on non-NaNo projects and try not to snooze while the laptop is precariously balanced between one leg and the arm of the chair. It's one of the few times I'm grateful to not be thin--my body provides proper spacing for all the denizens of the chair and we are quite cozy, thank you.

What I am not doing this week is reading much more than one of Mom's collection of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels. He has a discursive narrative style and is a chatty and allusive protagonist; however, I fear that he suffers in my own devotion to Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey. There is, moreover, nothing that compares to scratching the tummy of a heavy-lidded pup who is anxiously awaiting the arrival of the nephew from school. Every heavy truck that passes makes him stare at the back door.

This was not the week that I should have planned to get the entiret of my novel finished, particularly since I am so amenable to the least distraction down here. Just being able to walk out of the house and to lunch or to the center of an older town not yet redone for tourists is a pleasure. There are architects and lawyers and hair salons and quilt stores and sandwich shops and a pool hall and buildings in the footprint of the 40's, low with wide covers for people who are on foot. Such a gracious design completely absent in the blank facade of a big box store.

So I am not storing up words but I am storing up the feel of a day's hike, the difference between grass and concrete underfoot, and the way it feels to come to the end of the block on which you grew up and sense that you are leaving the bubble of familiar space and are, perforce, encountering something new.

Harp music seems to work best on the pup.

Mall Trek

2010-11-15T12:24:00.000-08:00

My mom's dog has retired to his bed and the cloud bank that built while I was out has crept close enough to make the hallway and room giving off this one a black blankness, save for the window and the shiny bronze magnolia leaves visible through it. YouTube on this laptop doesn't sound much better than the Walkman I had in high school.

Earlier it seemed like it was going to be a nice enough day for a ramble over the concrete paths to the local mall and I set out with the intent to pick up a sweater against chillier days later this week. When I was younger, the mall was the place to daydream--either about who you could be (it was the 80's--i was loud and tacky) or what would you be when LJ was firmly behind you. There wasn't much on that side of town, just the mall and a couple of parks.

Now, the mall sits across the street from Wal-mart and languishes. It happened to the center of town and it spreads outward, a slow silence and irrelevance. At one point, the low lights, empty storefronts and carpet meant that I passed through a section in silence, living an undreamed emptiness. After the cold front storms the coast, I'll take myself through the old center of town and see what I can of the places that I remember.

I do remember that I like the clouds and the way the sky opens over the flatness, without quite washing us away.

The Deal Is...

2010-11-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started a scene that I hoped to use to sop up several of the 50k that I'm supposed to be writing as part of my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel. Before I was well started, doubts started hammering in. Then I stopped writing and the fetters fell away.

We all know what we're supposed to do with doubts. Ignore them, lock them up, throw them out; do anything with them other than pay attention. I wanted to do that and just keep going. I was planning on getting t-shirt at the end of November and there are badges, too (for those of you don't know, I've been a badgeaholic since Girl Scouts). I've done this for several years now and there is NOTHING ELSE GOING ON IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW. This should be easy.

It was easier, as it turns out, to listen to the doubts. To finally hear the criticisms from my current and former writing groups about my lack of clarity and emotion, to hear the Pumpkin King's concerns about the general lack of interest that my plot inspires, and, finally, to hear the reality underneath all of those writing manuals. Writing well is difficult and it requires skill and attention and drive.

The deal is that I'm lazy. That working for nothing (on the miniscule chance that I'll ever be published) no longer inspires me. My characters don't speak to me and the plots don't unspool like a movie in my head. Pushing myself toward publication and revision just left me frustrated.

I like to read. That should be enough.

Monday Morning, Quiet

2010-11-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

There are always so many little things to be done that the pressure of them builds like a storm front while I'm at the keyboard. November, with it's novel frenzies and holidays, is the nicest time to light the candles and open the windows, but the hardest month in which to take a break.

I'm reading my typical stack of things this month, including an old Andre Norton nove (Quag Keep), but not making as much progress as I'd hoped. I started the month with a complete rejection of the fantastic--who wants to go into the forests that have been so thoroughly mapped in the past? And yet, the parks they have become are comfortable.

Part of me would like to eschew a month of novel writing for a month of trying out the tasks I set before my characters. What would it take to walk from the Gulf Coast to Houston on foot? How long would it take? A caravan of novelists hiking through Texas would be a blast. Perhaps at the end of a month, there would be something left over to write about without the hollow feeling that's following me this year.

Fantastic October

2010-11-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

While putting off the inevitable typing that breaks the Novel away from perfect conception and into rough physical text, I'm working with my photos from RenFest and Halloween to recharge my 'fantasy batteries.'

This time of year in our part of Texas when the days don't beat down your doors and windows and stalk you through the den and into the cool holt of the library.

Instead, they lure you into the familiar sand of parks and festivals, until part of them is ground into you, mingling the dust of the page with that of the ditch and byway and the trips made thereon. We were in the Arboretum yesterday when I sat down on a bench over an empty streambed and let my feet hang over the edge. I was looking for some of the hidden things we'd seen the day before at the fair, the creeping things that were underneath the tangles or the slow things that were paused in the sun. We found a row of turtles along a bench, stretching and shoving each other off stiffly to float among the pine cones in the shady water a few feet from our bench.

There were no leaf falls the way we'd been getting them, the stiff breezes that cleared out the first of this year's falling leaves with an brief interlude that lacked only a fiddle to set us all twirling.

It was the opposite at the festival--fewer leaves falling, but plenty of music to set people spinning. Then it was Halloween and we were lighting candles and plugging in pumpkins and handing out chocolate. Everything grinning and flickering--a holiday of shadows and scurrying and cautious laughter.

With the passing of October, Fall continues to feint at us. A formal edge glints along the coming seasons and the novel curls deeper in its burrow, safe for a few more hours from the clatter than will scare it forth.

Untrodden Territory

2010-10-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

Although it's 90 degrees outside, Halloween is this weekend and I've been looking for something spooky to read. Yesterday, I happened upon an inexpensive paperback of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and a few shorter stories. After a hurried phone call to my favorite Pumpkin King (Is Lovecraft gory? Scary? Will I ever sleep again?), I picked it up along with a new Esther Friesner collection (Fangs for the Mammaries--suburban vamps of indeterminate sparkle-itude) to take the edge off should it prove too frightening.

Sadly, it's more familiar than frightening. Standing on bleak plains and looking out into darkness matches up with my experience of being out of work for going on two years and feeling the thunder of countless hours of bad news shuddering from the screen in front of me. So...yeah. More depressing than scary.

Perhaps this is something that I should have read earlier. Despite the utter restlessness with which I find myself approaching the text, the slow pace eventually calms me and then something chilly sighs beneath the words. Despite the raw places these stories poke, I'm entranced by their mystery.

NaNo Countdown

2010-10-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

So...what's up with you? I've been speeding through partial books lately, not really finishing anything and distracting myself with reunion depression, Ren Fest merriment, and Halloween decorations. Most recently, I've been gearing up for NaNoWriMo, during which I plan to draft my first YA novel.

Since I'm going to be doing NaNo, my other novel draft is going to be on hold. I'm drafting three chapters this week and then putting it aside to answer the profound fantasy question "How did the gold get in the rat?" You may have encountered this phenomenon yourself. Giant rats roaming the countryside of Questland, just strong enough to give your adventurer a bit of treasure and a bit of experience before he or she roams away from the village and into the wilds. How did all that coinage get in those rats and is it the reason they're so large, slow, and mean?

If that doesn't sound like a YA story that's because it didn't start out to be one. However, the character who seems to be the voice of the novel was younger than I at first imagined. While I'm a fan of adult fantasy (meaning that not written about teens, typically), this seemed like a good time to take a break and try out a different voice. I'm surrounded by excellent YA writers and have had the good fortune to meet others at our local convention and, while I'm not on their level, they are inspiring as writers and they seem to have fun with their characters.

The great thing about NaNo is that it gives me a chance to not take myself that seriously--this is basically a writing footrace and you're encouraged to have a good time while banging out 50,000 words during the month of November.

Since I've been lackadaisical this month, my Halloween post will be all about RenFest--with pictures! Meanwhile, back to the serious draft.

An Old Time in the Hot City

2010-10-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

This morning we ended up in Old Town Spring, which is a created remainder of an old rail-road town just north of Houston. It's full of antiques and food and quirk, just as you might imagine. We were looking for chocolate, but we've been blessed with a cool front this weekend and we both realized as we got out of the car that it would be nicer to poke around than to go directly for the chocolate.

His first priority was coffee and we ended up in one of the larger buildings not far from the beginning of the shops. The floor was wood, the windows lit narrow shelves of ceramics pressed into tight aisles. Everything smelled of coffee and the breeze pressed us further in. As I wedged myself carefully into the aisles, my mind leapt back to Brownwood and my Aunt Lois' house. Scent memory and place memory swept the table clean and threw laced images over the solid present. The wooden floor shifted and I was balanced in the past and present for a few seconds.

Since then I've been thinking of the surfaces below my feet. Wondering whether the concrete underlying the carpet is porous to the place or whether it's too hard to take impressions. I have since I was young wanted to live in a museum, in a place that is caked in poured concrete and glass and I wonder if I wanted to leave no impression on my surroundings, to live somewhere that I would leave with as little impression as a tourist leaves a museum. That can be accomplished without living in a concrete house--there is no impression that can be left on time itself that I know of.

Part of the dearth of book-related posts lately is that I've been reading about how to read and fussing with writing and with finding the purpose to gear up for submissions and continue lengthier drafts. There is something deadly sometimes about reading about why someone else reads and what he or she finds important. It can make books and lines seem inert as you struggle to conform your reading to theirs. Another reader's opinion by necessity forces yours to slide off unless they are similar enough to yours to allow you to substitute your impressions for theirs and their insight for your own.

My mind was starting to feel rigid and today, for a few minutes, it was permeable. Permeable and bouncy like the wood beneath me--the way a good novel should be, allowing the reader to slip into the cracks, snag on the ideas, and ultimately polish the words with use and thought.

Cafe Society of One, or Draft Avoidance

2010-09-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

I have, for this afternoon, been given the respite of the cafe without either deadline or meeting. There is sadness around me, as if the idea of literature is weeping within me. A woman at a table to my left is having to find a new home for a pair of cats, which will be separated. She is repairing the effects of the conversation.

The radio has slipped to the wacka-blast skitter that tells me a 70's tv drama is about to crash into my table. A studly cop, a mysterious host, and a superhero slink into my imagination. Somehow, the Spanish spoken at the table diagonal to the left fits this mood.

Against the emptiness, the tilting table with my decorative beverage and clear plastic pen scrapes the tiles of a future that brakes and stops at a present that passes it, until table, pen, and page are part of the past--spacetime dips further backward and I'm leaning against the pressure of a single direction.

Perhaps this episode suffers from the heavy insomnia tossed over my shoulders. Cold tea pools beneath a restless breath and my veins twitch on the beat of this music. Without the old metaphors, what would I have left?

At the information desk, a woman asks for something with the triangular face of an alien, narrow eyes seamed into her cheeks. The instant I wonder how you would read the proper distance on her countenance, how blank netlog conversations are the preparation for words alone marking meaning, I have abandoned the draft beneath me. It becomes a napkin upon which I'll catch the overflow of the afternoon.

One Hundred, Because That is the Word that Comes To Mind

2010-09-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

I sit and watch the tables fill and think of the minutes and the keystrokes and the beats per minute and the small ink letters that keep spilling from the pen.

A dirge slow marches from the back corner of the coffee shop, thumping past the empty seats. No one slouches in the door or whispers in the corner. Bees lurking in the lines hum the closer I come to the marred pages. I tumble backwards through the pages until I impact the story which I've not thought of since this began.

Reading an article and comments on the web, I feel an unsteadiness, the words blown hot and sharp over the Styrofoam blocks to which we cling, the draggled birds floating on the dirty river at Babylon's gates. We argue over the trash, the last use of the emptiness, already unpacked of ideas.

I've seem them in the lots, the grackles and the crows. Screams and bright eyes, bitterness that shrinks my mouth to a beak and shrills my speech. Picking over the empty Sunday afternoon, the only camaraderie in the baristas in their quiet show behind the low bar.

Blue vortexes of touch-speech dissolve conversations beyond the bar skirt, a diffuse silent chatter. The machines hiss, plates click, and mean and women toss their jargon and civility to each other, a salve of speech in the miasma of an afternoon so numb that only Dali could have painted it. Silhouettes order coffee.

Sharp thorns on the words tangle my attention and I sink into the overgrown, chasing the shadows that sound like music running fleet between the weeds.

There's a Female POV in this Soup!!

2010-09-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, my spouse and I were running errands and knocking around plots. Our tastes are only similar in that we can both find stuff to read under the same broad label in the bookstore; however, we're both familiar with the tropes and commonalities of that section.

As I was describing a short story to him, he began to frown. By the end of the summary I was worried--his expression had closed in a frown, locking out the majority of the explanation. When I asked where the plot had gotten of track, I received a tense shrug. I just don't like stuff like that, your protagonists are talking about shopping and there's a mall and it's just women's stuff.

I will admit to a sudden desire to slap him. Women's stuff? Which he doesn't have to read because, you know, he's not a woman? Because a different perspective would, I don't know, break his brain? As I seethed--silently--beside him, I tried to find the outlines of his assumptions under the arguments. I believe that it's a case of assuming neutrality to a male POV and making the female POV of necessity only relevant to women, although I can't quite credit this. I could have cast the plot entirely with male protagonists in a quasi-medieval setting and it would have seemed like a standard be-careful-in-your-dealings-with-fair-folk plot...not a particularly gender-specific theme.

On the other hand, his opinion is valid. If he doesn't think he would relate to the plot as described, I should give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't care much for the armageddon-type plots he favors, either...although I don't see it as a gender issue (ew, boy stories...) so much as a plot preference. If he'd couched it in those terms, which I had been expecting, it wouldn't have been a big deal. It's the dissmissal itself that was irritating. Did the plot even register?

At the end of the day I decided to ignore it (relatively speaking), to assume that it has more to do with his tendency to class reading as pure enjoyment along with TV and video games. We'll still knock around plots. I'm just going to knock them a little harder next time.

Stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck

2010-09-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

I finished E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime over the weekend. It was a great read, albeit one that embedded a few splinters to the conscience as one read it. Hopefully the library has a few of his other novels so that I can see what he makes of other topics.

I've begun The Age of Innocence; however, I am doubting that I will finish it before the books are due back at the library. The mannered pace is something that requires more patience than I'm likely to bring to it, unfortunately. Would propriety throttle my interest delicately, should the time limit not run out or would sympathy and then, perhaps, empathy twine through the reading? Why don't I empathize with these kind of characters? What makes Jane Austen and the Brontes as opaque to me as tinted glass?

There is a reading list growing in my head based on this reading, one that includes Babbitt and a few other books that I managed to avoid in high school and college. In a way, these are fortunate ommissions in that these can be discovered now, when time and experience have perhaps made their stories more understandable and less dead letters suitable for dissection into plot and theme and essay.

As might have been detected from the title and the reading list, I am still mired in POV issues. There is a growing need to focus on the world-building, to attach the created world to this with thin fibers that may detach easily in the telling yet draw one back toward the end so that we are left by the side of the same road that we stood on in the beginning. IMHO, this that started as a simple justification for a short story that was roundly dismissed as being only worthwhile if it could be perfected has become one of those things that has grown to swallow worlds in its expansion and yet is, as any draft, an evanescent, vanishing project just as likely to pop into nothing as to coalesce into a book. There is no perfection that I can bring to it, only a simple management of air to keep it aloft.

Pass Me a Weider's

2010-09-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

I am stuck at the point where the pixels meet the LCD. The past few days have been a struggle with point of view while trying not to funnel the frustration of difficult drafts into pointless arguments about stereotyping, censorship, or Chick Lit. These are related issues--classification for control and protection and depending on a similarity of POV--but they aren't germane to the tangle of the drafts before me.

Instead, I find myself thinking of the Garrett novels by Glen Cook. Garrett is the voice in my head when I think about successful first person narration. He's the archetypal met-in-a-bar-and-told-this-unbelievable-but-true-anecdote and that is what I consider the epitome of this kind of narration. First person, to me, is about beguiling strangers, or telling truths just a nanosecond before the opportunity is gone forever, or explaining yourself when caught in a moment of reflection or imminent arrest. It's about having a story that has to be shared right then in it's entirety and that couldn't be told by anyone else but the person telling it.

At this moment, I don't have one of those characters or those voices yapping away at me, wondering when I'm going to stop fooling around on this blog and start listening to the story again.

Then I begin to worry that if I don't hear the characters that clearly, it won't matter which POV I choose because I won't be able to tell the story adequately. In real life, I'm not a catch-your-elbow-in-a-bar-and-chat kind of person. As a writer, I'd rather open a door and let you wonder around at a remove from the characters so that you have a chance to be in the world for a little while and not just in the story. I don't attach a value to one method over the other (or to POV itself); however, I do realize that part of the art is working with the vernacular and habits of the time. Yep, the pretension meter just jumped into the red. Sorry. Guess it's time for that Weider's and then some real work, right?

Library Day

2010-09-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

The smell almost drove me away before I had finished. Sweet glue, dust, and use thickened the air that was barely thinned by a air conditioner hidden in some other corner; the scent was stronger than air anyway, and thrust the years back in a copse of shadowed wings that kept me balanced in crouch over my toes beside the lower shelves. Someone was leading the toddlers in a simple song in one of the back rooms but the entire library listened.

It's not that large of a library, yet it makes me feel small and awkward, as if I was much younger and not yet capable of dealing with all the choice and randomness. Except for some of the more familiar books, it feels more like it belongs in the tourist haven of Old Town Spring (remember books? remember libraries?) and there is a charmless practicality that draws one in and reinvests reading with purpose. Some of my earliest memories are of a library with a concrete floor, a fountain in the front, and grey steel shelves with same smell. The sidewalk in front of that dead storefront is unremarkable, but the shelves and the pale wood and the crinkle of books--the smell of them and feel of them--in this place carries me swiftly into elementary school, the Lake Jackson Public Library, and the Houston Public Library off Westheimer near the apartments where we used to live.

But the choice is small and I'm pressed to find something that I want to read. None of the books on my Amazon list are here, although there is a good gardening and cooking section to which I will be returning.

I'm not interested in ranting about what a library is or isn't, what it could be and what it's not--these topics are all tied into the idea that civic space and civic life are attenuating to the extent that people work longer hours, anesthetize themselves with entertainment, and then find politics (the engine of civic infrastructure) just another smorgasbord of opinion, entertainment, and team-building. Rant-y enough? Perhaps the idea that catches me is that the section in which I find myself looking is suffering the same shrinkage as it is in bookstores and I wonder if in perusing it I, like Alice, will shrink down to navigate its wonders.

Impossible Immortality or Why I Hate Spiderman

2010-09-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

I have not always hated Spiderman. There were the ('70s? '80s?) live-action show and the cartoon (with Iceman & Firestar) that I enjoyed--I liked the idea of superheroism as a combination of job and collegial experience--something like being a fireman and living where you worked. Spiderman's sarcastic but effective code was fun to watch and I absorbed backstory, etc. exclusively through tv. Some years later, I married an ardent Spiderman fan. Not dress-like-Spiderman ardent, more like read-every-comic-book-see-every-movie ardent. Someone to whom Spiderman the character remained a potent emotional touchstone. Despite the movies' dreariness my spouse enjoyed them. Fair enough. He read the comics and watched the movies and was happy.

Then the story in the comics changed and I had to listen to fits of anger at the writers and at the editorial idiocies that took a storyline my spouse had enjoyed and basically said "whoops, didn't mean to do that, here's the new story." He's mad enough to give up something that he's enjoyed for a very long time and, bizarrely, I'm angry on his behalf. This is one of those continuity breaks that sheared him from the experience and, as such, puts him in the position of waste-binning one of the few pleasures he's held to since childhood. The problem is that there is a impossibile immortality that trails serialized character--the need to continue is fastened on to the need to change.

There is no immortality of experience for Spiderman that will continue to track the way a novel or epic or other similar narrative might. He isn't going to get old, he isn't going to have a final victory or defeat. He's just going to keep changing and leaving his former fans behind just as they leave him behind, in the detritus of an imaginary life while other kids pick up sheets and action figures and video games and move into the ruts of the story for a while. He could be cancelled in mid-arc. He could be rewritten in a thousand ways. I hate that this break chips away at other sadnesses in my husband's life and while I look forward to no more sarcastic, dreary, dull movies or convoluted discussions about storylines I fear that this may also make my husband feel just as abandoned on the dustbin as I've been feeling after losing my job. It's a crappy thing to do to a fan.

I hate Spiderman.

Somewhere to Go

2010-09-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

From a sales table at a B&N on one or the other end of Houston I had found a copy of The Best American Essays 2009. Essays are something that I try to be wary of, like park trails with which I'm unfamiliar or neighborhoods that I've never before visited. Although trod or read by others, the possibility of danger (especially that of sudden shock to the view or the self-conception) turns me to safer paths.

As it turns out, the danger in this collection was that it would light the restlessness that I usually tamp down. We 'don't travel because of the dogs'--it's been a good excuse for the entirety of a marriage that covers the fact that we're not that flexible and our patience for each other's company is mediated by the minor absences of home, such as reading or watching tv.

For years I missed traveling with a ferocity that expressed itself in withdrawal. Then I grew accustomed to a circumspect prospect. Then I lost my job, the second car died, and the prospect withered to the precincts of the house. Frustration flared, but it died just as quickly with a sarcastic Haven't we been through this before?

So the book of essays, slim and yellow, turned out to be like a single tile in the puzzle of the way through Oz. I find myself thinking that I could be in New York City in a few days and spend just a few hours walking in brick and mortar canyons. Perhaps I could point the car toward Florida and an ocean that's not the color of mud. Each essay, each little slice of somewhere else, is like a tasting menu of the ideas that grow in other places, a non-locavore feast of language soaked in the specificity of a single vineyard, a call to find somewhere to go and something new to think.

To which the response will be, ever and always, that the restraints of thought are not territorial but psychological.

Just One More Page

2010-09-10T15:16:00.001-07:00

Last night I fell into The Changeling Sea and didn't return until the last word, the last slow smile. I'm always looking for great fantasy that turns on the sea and this short book by Patricia McKillip worked a wonder in between the covers. One of the emotions that I appreciate from fantasy is that coming to the end of a book can seem like you're coming to the end of a vacation--you've been through new and emotional experiences and you're coming home to the familiar with the taste of the foreign still salted over your lips. In these austere times, a few hours of vacation in the dead of the night is greatly appreciated.

The book did remind me, however, that I'm moving away from the current fantasy stories and relying more and more upon discovering those that have come and gone without benefit of a tonal 'new urbanization.'

I did find another McKillip book that I'm looking forward to--her The Riddle-Master of Hed is now in the stack beside the bed, as is David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. I'm hoping to read this second book while I'm finishing Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Lost in between several planets and time periods, I hope to arrive home some time after the cool weather has settled in to stay and the pumpkins are decorating the vines.

Which reminds me--vines need to have something upon which to grow and I need to find my vine supports. Just as soon as I finish this chapter.

Loose the Hounds!

2010-09-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Varda and Merlin are chewing each other into sopping pieces of fluff in their mutual joy at having the run of the house again. At some point, I'm going to have to put Varda's food back were she can get it, since I think her anxiety diet is over. I could get back to work, too, save for the overwhelming perspectives poured over me while I read Alone With All That Could Happen. My brain is resisting absorbing the ideas; it is thick as a heavy dough and just as set in place, steamed to the plate upon which it's been slapped.

One dog slips behind me and pants for a few minutes, letting the tile bleed away her heat and I tilt my head back into the wrist rest wedged against the back of the chair. It pounds with the overcast day, the thrum of the fan, and the gasp of the dog. Absence mops up a stray motion. The dog slips away and finds her packmate already reestablishing trails and perches.

My in-law's dog is middle-aged but already slow and quiet, like Wynn and Baron where just a little more than a year and a half ago. Varda and Merlin are argumentative and quick to fasten onto ledges and corners, quick to ravel stray blankets and slick areas in the carpet, quick to snap and shout. I'm falling back into the slow ruts of an older dog, ignoring the tussle of the two behind me. They've been up all weekend, blind to the waves of in-laws and siblings who have slept on the couch and talked at the tv.

We've--the three of us--slept on the floor longer than we planned while intentions built like Hermine's waters in the ditches beside the roadways. Sleep, like heat, drains and pulls them away from us and we come to rest back at normal, back at the pile of couch and page and dog, away from the pens and keyboards and restless motion of work.

Still Working on the Key to Great Literature

2010-09-07T07:37:00.001-07:00

It's a been a rainy weekend (near miss by a defunct but still wet tropical storm) and that means plenty of time to sit around and read Alone With All That Could Happen and continue my quest for improving the unwieldy and ridiculous stack of plot from my last NaNo outing. AWATCH is a beautiful and clear exposition of what forms good writing. This is no breathless guide to marching up a bestseller list; instead, one finds friendly essays on topics such as point of view that flense the technical bulk away from a precise guide to how each topic builds meaning and layer into a work.

I take notes and try to block out the sound of the tv and the tidal pull of the kitchen--having guests seems to draw every dish and measuring glass out of the cabinets every other day or so. For a little while, I remember that writing has always been in opposition to the expectations that lace themselves around me. Even though many of them have fallen loose lately, it doesn't take much to tighten them back up.

Something to Fall Over Me

2010-09-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

The in-laws are down this weekend and that's a good thing. It means that I can cook for more than two people and actually spend time with a human being during dinner (instead of the TV) AND while washing up. It also means going out to those places that we'd ordinarily talk about but not get around to (oddly enough, this includes the liquor store for holiday supplies)--places that include the local used bookstore. Which we're supposed to be avoiding because of the precarious nature of the stacks of books already tottering around the house.

After Blue Lab I was in the mood for some outrageously bad fantasy. Something that I could yell out while reading. I guess it's the equivalent to wanting to watch MST3K. Something so bad that it comes out the other side and becomes some kind of altiverse classic. I went so far as to make a list of the books published by the same publishing house, titles which include Chauvinisto and The Esper Transfer.

I didn't find any of those but I did come away with a few books that might be good reading. We'll see over the next few days. Meanwhile, I'm working my way through a stack of how-to-write books that I found while straightening up the front room prior to decorating for Halloween. Instead of working on the novel, my brain is trying to absorb the key to all literature. This is a quest, people, and I will forge that key!

Bwa ha ha ha! Paths will become a real novel! It will not grow dust bunny ears and lurk in a cabinet. The plot will not be so ridiculous that only whales could swallow it!

The Internet is Kong for People

2010-09-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Merlin and Varda are bored. Lately, it's been either too hot or too wet for us to spend much time outside and the plethora of mushrooms makes a circuit of the yard a yelling, running irritation for all of us. The answer for them is a plastic toy roughly in the shape of a snowman with a hole in which treats can be stuffed. Sometimes the treat is accessible with effort, sometimes it becomes permanently wedged in the toy, causing much barking over who gets to carry it around and shake it at me in hopes of getting other, more accessible, treats added to the center compartment.

Usually these toys are sold under the name Kong. I'm coming to feel that the internet is fulfilling the same function for me--I sit here and poke around, hoping to come across something interesting or useful or entertaining. Too often, I'll keep poking, even if treats aren't forthcoming. It wouldn't be a bad thing, except that I'm not 'bored' in the sense of having nothing to do. I'm 'bored' in the sense of 'overwhelmed by all the stuff I should be doing such that the brain goes "gaacck" and refuses to function.' Stressed to boredom. Which is perfect for distractions, because you are motivated to displace your attention rather than just at a natural lull in your activities (suitable for a nap or a walk or a game of Don't Eat the Mushrooms).

Reading requires attention, the feeling of deadlines slipping by vitiates attention through banking a certain amount of distress at the thought of deadlines, and voila, one spends two hours clicking through all the links occasioned by one phone call from one's mother. Still stressed but thoroughly distracted, one is full of the random 'treats' of random info.

This post is a salt-free snack.

And the Summer Rolls On

2010-09-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Finished Marjorie Hart's Summer at Tiffany this afternoon. I spent a considerable amount of time while reading the book wishing that my grandmother had been more forthcoming when we were younger before realizing that I was probably not a patient listener at that time. Sometimes, you just don't know when you should be paying attention. After having read Mrs. Hart's memoir, I find my interest in the Roaring '20's sparked and I'm looking for a good book on that decade and perhaps another one on the history of Tiffany--her enthusiasm poured through the text like sunshine.

I still have a stack of books that I'd hoped to finish this summer and I should turn away from any additional reviews, etc. that might add to the list. Right now, Kraken is on my nightstand, as is The Worm Ouroubourous and I'm trying to ignore my desire to pick up Franzen's Freedom. Right now, reading is slipping between me and writing. I think my brain is rebelling against months of sitting at home hoping the 'jobless recovery' will eventually transmute into 'various employment opportunities.'

Meanwhile, I'm going to dive back into Kraken and hope that it's just the chill needed to counter this last month or so of summer heat.

Thumbs Firmly Jammed in the Meh Position

2010-08-31T13:02:00.000-07:00

For the first time in quite a while, I've finished a book that I can't honestly decide whether I like or not. The book itself (Blue Lab, by J.A. Jones) reads somewhat like a second-round novel draft you should have brought to your writer's group earlier. The voice is there, the pacing is almost there, and the logic is...well...interesting.

I picked this up because I'm working on a similar mix of tech & fantasy in one of my drafts and I was curious about how the author had handled it in this instance. The main POV character was a child born a few generations after the (factual, in this case) King Arthur, living in a small village and trying to survive the open secret that he is the bastard grandson of the monarch who has fallen from vying with the High King to the bandit lord of this village. Myths in this story are covers for alien visitation, words are alien because aliens apparent prefer 'gre'at n'umb'ers o'f a'postro'phes. Evolution, thy deity is Extra Keystroke. Aliens who have artifically long lives apparently aren't able to reason their way to the potential downside of their decision (although apparently their biological systems can), but super-powered mutant children can help with this. Earth was once a vacation spot and is now a laboratory--this was one of my favorite conceits.

By the end I was hooked and firmly on the side of the good characters, but this was mostly because I was reading around the alien parts of the story (excising the mechanical parts from the cyborg genre?) and focusing on the fantastic. It was fascinating to find areas where the author had left in artifacts of previous edit rounds (creatures referred to that had never been mentioned, references to scenes that weren't in the book), but these weren't frequent enough to interfere with the story. My first urge is toward sarcasm...but there are emotional hooks that catch at you as you're hurtling past. It wasn't a bad book. It was a sad book--an unfinished tale.

Writing Seasons

2010-08-28T08:06:00.001-07:00

We're finally starting to feel fall slipping in under the heat pallisades summer has thrown up around this part of Texas. With the change of season, I'm finding my imagination shifting onto different paths. I've always been the kind of writer who picks up some things easier in cool weather, with the lead-in to the winter holidays being a good time for me to outline and come up with new ideas and summer being a good time to slog through revisions (long days, extra incentive to stay inside, hurricane season preparations goading me to straighten stuff up).

This fall, I don't think I'm going to be able to focus on new things, however. I've been piling up a set of drafts that are just hanging out and I need to give them the attention they deserve. Imagination will just have to content itself it with finding something to do with all the paper and scrapbook stuff in the front room. Oh, and figuring how I'm going to get all the Halloween decorating done this week, before my in-laws arrive (I thought they'd enjoy seeing the house all dressed up--we'll see). Maybe the heat will hold on long enough for me to get everything done.

Meanwhile, I'm picking up and reading the first bits of a handful of books. My attention has swung toward the physical spaces around me and the interior spaces offered during reading is too cramped. I think I'm reaching the end of my memoir fascination, but I have two more to go before I exhaust my teeny reading list. There is a tendency toward the twee and precious that is clogging the text of the last two, something about looking back on parts of life that neither author seems to want to integrate into their current life. Perhaps they'll seem more welcoming after a day stuffing chrysanthemums into pots and beds.

Reading Vacation

2010-08-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize how much I needed something fun to read until a few days ago, when were cruising through B&N and poking through the shrinking F/SF section. Soon, the closest B&N will be a giant plastic playland with a caffeinated oasis for bored parents and people taking their laptops out for an afternoon. There is only so much one family of avid (yet broke) readers can do for a bookstore.

That day, we ended up with a stack that included Nicole Peeler's Tracking the Tempest, which happens to be the second book in her Jane True series. I don't remember seeing the first one and that B&N likes to stock only the most recent book ('cause ya wouldn't come back and by the first in a series if ya missed it, would ya?), so I picked up the second. It looked both amusing and as if it wouldn't take itself too seriously. As it turned out, both things were true.

It kept me laughing, resulting in my husband continually asking me what I was reading. I just ignored him and kept going. :) The story is an interesting mix of Boston, English/Scotch/Irish folklore, froth and...my favorite--selkies!!! Yea!! Jane's voice was pitched at that perfect sardonic tone that hits the serious and the silly sweet spots at each twist of the roller-coaster plot. There is an interesting physicality to the characters whom Jane encounters and a good visual rendering of the magical elements (even if at times the characters seemed to moving around in little glass display cases).

I read the book in just a day and a half and am now stuck waiting for the third one to come out in January. Looking forward to scooting out and picking that up for a cozy bit of winter reading. Oh, and tracking down the first one. Now to go find out what just crashed and which dog is guilty...

Other People's Navels

2010-08-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

I am awash in a reading list of blogs, most of which function (as this one does) as a draft of life that might have once gone into a letter or a phone call (or lecture...). My online reading habits then bleed over into my book list and I wind up with a stack of memoirs and essays interspersed among the other books. Recently, I've begun to feel that every other book I pick up is some kind of memoir.

This is good in the sense that I've been wandering through the entire bookstore or library instead of concentrating on the genre section and trying to encourage family members to embark on writing down pieces of their lives. It's been less good in that I've come to feel this is partially because we don't have kids and I feel sometimes like the old house on a cul-de-sac that was nice for a while and is now withering inward from the lawn to the shabby porch to the increasingly closed off rooms inside. The one that renters make temporarily their own and then move on.

On balance, am I appreciating the flash of perspective that I get from another person's story or am I borrowing the emotional trappings of the success and diligence and courage of others? Since reading is my one go-to source of comfort as well as a favorite way to spend time, what I read signifies where and who I am at particular moments in time. It shows what I'm willing to explore and what I don't let in. Right now, I just want to make sure I'm letting the right narratives in.

The Shape of Memory and Experience

2010-08-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

When asked earlier today what I remembered about a trip to Canada that my family had taken when I was a child, it was surprising to the person asking me that I couldn't remember the order of hotels and the specific order of the travels, which seems to me something that I would have had no control over and therefore no proper awareness of (other than we stopped here, we stopped there)--I have an episodic memory of arriving at hotels, of embarrassing meals and disappointing Northern swimming pools, the giant ground wasp in North Carolina, and the feeling of ennui upon climbing out of the van at another grassy battlefield filled with wall-sized posters of historical battlefield minutia.

The pool in Pennsylvania became the basis for a short story that I'm still struggling with--the story is a bifurcated narrative of what travel was like and what it meant to live anonymously on a vacation with my head in a book, daydreaming or reading. What it meant to confront the fear that accompanies the unforeseen exhaustion of one's parents and the weird embarrassments adults visit on their offspring.

Niagara, in contrast, was all sun and thunder and food and castles. I don't remember the maps, though...or the specific hotels (although I remember the false fire alarms and the unfamiliar formality). I remember the son of the friend of the family who made some kind of living off making fake musket balls for tourists.

It wasn't, in other words, a continuous trip for me, the way they are now. Now, I drive and plan and am aware of the shape of the road and the links between places. Perhaps this is a good analogy for some of the challenges that I have with fiction--I perceive it in episodes rather than in coherent journeys. Nonlinear.

For whatever reason, this is a good reminder to stop sitting around pretending to work and to actually get down to work, before another narrative dissolves into a piecemeal memory of that story that I was going to write.

Memoirs

2010-08-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

Now that we're down to one car, I tend to spend more time in the bookstore each week while acting as chauffeur. This means that I've long since abandoned being a one-section reader and have been remembering interests that have lain dormant since I had access to a good library. While this doesn't give me much grist for the blog (since I tend to end up reading lots of first chapters and not much else), it did bring up a wish the other day that's been getting stronger.

While thumbing through the biography section looking for Frederick Pohl's memoir (still looking, will find it eventually), I found a book about a job at Tiffany's in the 1940s. I skimmed it and thought about picking it up. Although it looks like an interesting read, it made me think of my grandmother and the trip she made to Texas with my mom (by herself), coming from a life in Pennsylvania that my mom has always missed to be near her family and friends. My mother's father passed away when she was a little girl and that perhaps is the root of her preference for the north (although there is nothing to explain her Anglophilia save for a library card that runs high to English mysteries).

There is a story in my family that stopped and another one that started and I'm part of the new storyline. Why this has been running through my head, I don't know. I am looking forward to reading about Tiffany's in the 40's and thinking about how the questions of heritage will find their way into what I'm writing. I'll let you know how the book turns out. :)

Harrow My Heart

2010-08-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

I was skimming my blog bar when I finally slowed down enough to read the latest entry in Clarkesworld Magazine. A few minutes later I was numb and by the end...I realized the numbness was the anasthetic that prepared me for having something slipped in close to the heart. I think this entry might be one of those touchstone pieces that one reads every so now again just to savor it.

The writer part of me wants to go dancing on the slippery edge of a volcano after reading it--what could possibly be left to say?--and the reader part of me wants to stand on a street corner handing it out and insisting that passers-by read it. The writer part is a little vain and a little bereft with the cascading ending of a series of formerly productive writer's groups and could use a little (non-burning) mountaintop time to regroup.

The reader just wants to read more good stuff. To that end, it looks like another 'not this time' for Ivanhoe. There are good books crammed on my shelves, some of which will hopefully lift me as high as Ms. Valente's piece and some of which will joing Ivanhoe and his fellow characters under the bed, growling out a reminder of their half-read state. Back to the shelves!

The Muddy Stream

2010-08-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

Well, Ivanhoe is not going so well. There are two introductions before the main body of the text begins, not to mention the long essay at the beginning telling me all that I was afraid to ask about the text as literature. There is a sentence in the second prefatory section that remarks that the writer hopes the 'modern reader' will not be '...much trammelled by the repulsive dryness of mere antiquity,' and yet, I find myself so trammelled before the first page of the first chapter is over.

There are places were the text seems to cast itself away from the scene (when describing the forest at the beginning, for instance) and many other places in which it muffles scenes like a winter blanket. I find myself stopping at the same places to admire the view and skimming the same areas that bogged me down previously.

At this point, I wonder if there is any sense in trying to force myself through something that I don't care for--there is only so much time available and there are other books that could be read, ones that would move much quicker because they are more in sync with my (sloppy? brisk?) reading habits.

What I want from this, however, is a sense of what a novel can be. Ivanhoe is a popular book that has been called into service (if you believe the introduction) by people over and over again for the way Scott pictures the knights and the society and the love story. Even if this was never his intention, he built a part of the theatrical structure upon which modern fantasy is based, not to mention the Renaissance Festival circuit that is my post-school celebration of the coming of Fall. There has to be something in here.

The Book Under the Bed

2010-08-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

Do you have a book under the bed, one of those lurking tomes that just doesn't get read, despite intentions to the contrary? I have two come to mind, growling in a murk of guilt and purple prose. Technically, I suppose that could make for a lovely twilight landscape or a bountiful autumn feast(gold leaves, purple grapes). At the very least, both of them will make for an autumn festival of blogging as I attempt to finish both E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe between now and the end of September. If I have time, I'll add in John Crowley's Little, Big.

What stops me in the first two books, earlier and earlier in each attempt, is the language. It doesn't flow for me in the way that it seems to for others. I was thinking about this in the bookstore a few days ago and I decided that I've reached the point in my life when I have different 'ports' available. Essentially, there are few "firsts" left for books (especially if I'm reading genre books in a narrow subcategory) and there are few "bests" left for them either. Not to mention that I'm older and looking for a different kind of escape in the novels I read. Whether this means that I'm looking for older protagonists or a particular authorial voice, I've found that the particular moments for some books has passed me by.

I think that I picked up Little, Big too early. It was something that I wasn't ready to embrace when I first picked it up and now it's become that book that I've carried around for at least a decade without finishing. There is a momentum of failure that I'm overwhelmed by when I look at the cover.

Reading them this year would be overcoming a challenge and it would give me an interesting point of reference for where I am in my life--what it is about these books that speaks to me or doesn't? Can I drag them out from under the bed (to make room, doubtless, for others) and add them to the shelf?

All Hail Saint Cleese

2010-08-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

I thought today's post would end up being more gratuitous YA bashing. Then I looked at my bookshelves and thought about what I'd been reading lately. There is a good sprinkling of YA or younger protagonists and I'm not complaining about the stack of reading beside Varda's Window of the Suspicous Neighbors (at least she isn't barking at the more familiar people outside).

For the most part, these are books that I think I'll enjoy (except for the lurking Ivanhoe, which I may finish but will never appreciate). My challenge is that my tastes crystallized in the early 80's, too early for Manga, and in an Anglophile household in which British mystery fiction was considered superior readng material. There is a certain cast of snark, a certain literary tic, a certain cast of characters who are part of my literary pantheon.

While there are little altars to Sayers and small engravings of Christie beneath the stained glass windows bearing the image of John Cleese and Tom Baker in this pantheon's temple, there are no chapbooks featuring Jane Austen. There is a giant hanging tapestry of Neil Gaiman.

What I struggle with is that given these interests and influences (aside from taking myself too seriously) is that they give me an anarchistic take on the idea of rules for texts. Or I'm making this up because today my brain isn't capable of cogent argument given the fact that finishing the novel draft left me in the bottom of a well, hungover from the emotional bender of a painful last chapter. Today, I need a literary chapel and a quiet place to rest.

To Everything It's Season

2010-08-02T12:58:00.001-07:00

As I'm weighing the victory that is the finished draft of my novel and the irritation that is the fact that it looks like I'll be losing another writer's group, I feel like running screaming through the house. Not unlike Merlin, who is barking his frustration at Varda, who has snagged the 'good' bone.

Merlin is taking a break to stare into the fan, fur blowing Fabio-like behind him and then he's whining at Varda's shoulder. This combination of melodrama (which is probably not on Merlin's mind as he gets his nose as close to the fan as he can) and begging for attention is hideously familiar. I mean, it's not the end of the world if you have to switch groups because of a disconnect with the leadership or because of a conflict with meeting times--it happens to other people in other groups all the freaking time.

I'm going to miss having a physical, in-person writing group, though. I like to talk plot points and theme and the difficulty of even recognizing POV (I tend to blow past it & multiple POVs just don't usually bother me). I won't miss the YA explosion, which is starting to feel like 'blah, blah, blah' bellowed from a Charlie-Brown's-Teacher megaphone in the intonations of Miley Cyrus. Tired. Of. It.

The question before me is whether this is the end of the season of depending on group commentary or the end of the season of sending anything out for publication at all?

One Degree is Not Enough

2010-07-29T13:39:00.001-07:00

As I've been running away from reading fantasy lately just as fast as I can, my shelf recently held both Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman and Susan Gubar's and Sandra M. Gilbert's The Madwoman in the Attic.

For some reason, reading both of these at the same time has raised a good deal of mental static. I find that my empathy with two men involved in making the Oxford English Dictionary is reduced, perhaps because I'm having a hard time shaking the modern judgmental attitude that Madwoman feeds so well. While I suspect that both books intend to engage the reader's emotions, it bothers me that my response is primarily emotional, and that it remains a relatively rigid one.

It's not just reading a critique of privilege that in some sense undercuts the empathy that I possess for men who enjoy that privilege--I have inherited a kind of idea of Oxford as a secular heaven and reading about it and the dictionary it produced is a little like shaking coals on the head of the lapsed English major in me. Perhaps I didn't let myself fully give in to the fascination of the story? Perhaps the real story for me isn't the relationship but the dictionary itself?

There were a few suggestions in the back of Mr. Winchester's book that I think I might try to track down--something to give me an excuse to go poke around in a library for a change, rather than bookstore. As soon as I finish Madwoman, which is starting to give me a righteous headache.

Pressboard and Oil Paint

2010-07-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I finished Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story; something that I'd picked up on a lark and come back to after suffering from a surfeit of Roger Whitakker videos and, as you may recall, being high on nostalgia and rain.

The book floated congenially on this mix, being a memoir that was gentle and humorous. I was surprised to find that it seemed to fit like a puzzle piece in the evolution of reading that began with a book of my dad's when I was young: an old farm picture book with glossy auburn bulls and dark brown horses and flecked chickens all painted on a perfect day beneath a clear wash. It wasn't something that was familiar to me--I was a suburban kid--but it would have been familiar to my grandfather and my dad (and to my husband, had I known him then), but it was full of the kind of images that came out of the books that I was reading at the time. Later on, it would be superseded by biographies of Sacagawea, a series of Anne of Green Gables books, a series of Wizard of Oz books, and Little House on the Prairie. Then To Kill a Mockingbird. Books that had (no disrespect intended) a certain perspective on dust and the ways in which people moved through it. The things that cling to a life well-lived.

This book falls along that continuum. I appreciated the way in which the appreciation of others' competencies ran through the book. I've been in that place where a brother-in-law knows enough to get me out of a repair jam and I don't think I handled it with quite the humor or the appreciation that Perry did (although I'm thinking that there will be lots of cookies & pies the next time my in-laws come down) and I loved the way in which he told about his garden and his community and brought a generous grace to those around him.

And, you have to love a book that causes you to read long stretches to your husband in the evening. Peaceful snickers and woofling puppies seem the apotheosis of that pressboard and paint book, even if we're living in suburbs and the sleekest critter around is the dog.

A Hint of LJ

2010-07-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

It has been a mucky and humid summer, the kind during which you are likely to be wading through your lawn in the morning (at least in terms of water clinging to the grass gone wild) and in which the dogs tend to wait at the edge of the patio until they are bribed out into the dampness, the rain, or the mud. Perhaps there is something in the rain that continues to pile in from the coast that contains a hint of Lake Jackson; the water perhaps is filling up the gutters and soaking into the yard to carry the memories deep into the land upon which I now live.

The ties to childhood were laced tight last night as I reread Winnie the Pooh, which had come free with a reading program (iBook?) that my husband had downloaded. The book was complete with illustrations, same as the book that I'd had on my shelf. Pooh floated up to the bees as a muddy bear rain cloud and snuck tastes of honey that extended down to the sides of the honeypot. I hadn't read it in years and the sentences were thick on my tongue, tasting of an earlier iteration of English. The narrator gently prodded Christopher Robin into the tales of the Hundred Acre Wood and walked all of the animals through their lives in the 'wild.' It is the kind of tale for which the word "lovely" is intended, the kind of word that trails its silken approval over the words like a bow on a basket.

It's not just children's books that are causing me to think that something has taken root in my brain and started to prompt me to change my reading--yesterday I found myself in B&N, in the Fiction & Literature section, reaching for a book on the top shelf and thinking that I was reaching for the stars themselves. The idea of reaching into the firmament, into the foundation of my own speech and thought, was strong. There is something of a different life and perspective that certain books offer that I find myself missing, almost a chemical imbalance, that I'm seeking to set right.

Perhaps it's that in spending so much time writing the novel I've come to have the awful feeling of talking to myself in a closed room. I need to listen to other voices and I need to find my way back to the opened senses that I had the first time I encountered genre literature, the first time I read Tolkein or Anthony or Anderson or Dickson (Yo Ho Hoka!) and give my voice a rest. Or at least a break.

How Nostalgic the Days

2010-07-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

When I was very young (second grade? First grade?), my parents brought home an album by Roger Whittaker. While skimming YouTube yesterday, I came across some of the songs from that album and received an object lesson in having grown older.

One of the songs in particular swirled a bitter bit of nostalgia through those days—I hated it at the time because I couldn’t incorporate the emotion and it was depressing. Today, the song plays without effect. The melodrama is just another restatement of a cliché that I feel that I’ve heard a thousand times and I’ve done that kind of putting off until an impossible tomorrow.

This doesn’t mean that I’m no longer nostalgic, just that I learned it early and have to look further afield for it these days. As everything seems to be sliding into the novel these days (the casserole of the imagination) this may find its way in as well. What did I have to look back on at six or seven? Did it change how I watched the days going by to know that they were shorter than they felt?

Today the music and the shades need to be brighter and more menacing, but I’m still in a sleepy haze of yesterday.

Rain and Reading

2010-07-19T07:47:00.000-07:00

Did I say this week was going to be about organization? The weather is not cooperating with that particular idea--more rainy days better suited to reading in a bright corner than shuffling paperwork. Not to mention the dogs who are now mucky with chasing through our decidely slow-to-drain yard. I don't think they care for water, but they can't avoid the puddles and Merlin's short enough so that the grass touches his belly.

If the week is as good as reading as the weekend was, I'll have a good dent in my stacks by Friday. I finished both Home from the Shore (Gordon R. Dickson) and Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars (Leigh Brackett) over the weekend and both were good reads. I'd never read any Brackett before and it's been some time since I read anything featuring an adventuring barbarian such as Stark, but I was hooked. This book is actually a compilation to two shorter novellas (and possibly a reprint from an original separate publication?) and despite the stories' short length, they took the reader across the breadth of the landcape of a colonized Mars and in flashbacks to the Mercury of Stark's childhood. Both stories seemed to deal with the ennervations of immortality and the inevitable moral rot that sets it as people grapple with extended lifetimes as well as with the almost always fatal lure of power over others. They were most enjoyable for the time spent with Stark, however. Instead of dwelling on bloody action or sex as seems popular now, both novellas kept the focus on Stark's drive to prevail over circumstance and incorporate his dual nature of 'barbarian/beast' and 'civilized man.' Time spent with him thinking and doing, rather than wallowing or lusting.

The paperback copy of Home from the Shore reminded me a little of a YA novel (possibly because of the illustrations). I loved the descriptions of the underwater dwellings and the acknowledgment of the intelligence of the dolphins and whales and the idea of humans choosing separate evolutionary paths and then having to learn to understand those differences. I haven't yet read the sequel to this book and I'm hoping that we have it somewhere around here, since this apparently feeds right into that storyline. Because of this, it ends as you would expected a cliffhanger to end, with dangling plots that encourage you to go forth and find the next installment.

Not only were both of these books quick and good reads for a long weekend, but they helped me to see where my novel was a little threadbare, places where I hadn't taken the plot seriously or thought through the conflicts that would come from certain decisions. Lately I've found that shorter novels and short story collections are giving me more scope for reading because I'm not committed for the same length of time that huge series or standalone novels require and I can focus on and finish them in the spaces that are available to me. Hope y'all are finding good things to read as well!

Evening Thunderstorms

2010-07-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

It only took a week of doubt about the computer to give me an excuse to let my writing schedule slip by several days. While my brain stalled in idle, two more ideas (one short, one...novel-length?) shook out and I think I'm going to have to work them in addition to trying to get at least 50K on the novel I'm avoiding. The computer issues have also made me rethink my laissez-faire attitude toward storage.

Then the rains came. The thunderstorms this evening left the dusk yellow, like the light after a hurricane, and that compounds the idea of getting my files in order. Every summer I spend a few days wondering how much of my 'essential' paperwork I could pack in the case of a hurricane (more likely in this area, post-hurricane-power-outage) evac. Usually it just amounts to an idea that I need to have better organized paperwork and a few hurricane-themed short stories (not unlike the dwarves & dragons one I'm working on now). The computer meltdown really took me by surprise, though--it' wouldn't be hard for a storm to do the same.

This means that the next several weeks are going to be about getting those hardcopy drafts filed, getting the ones that need it committed to electronic files and then saved off to DVD, and then perhaps one working copy here and everything else in storage. Since Organized Brain spends lots of time daydreaming during repetitive tasks, this could be a productive time for the novel and a good way to catch up on the writing I've been avoiding lately.

Meanwhile, the thunder's growling softly in the distance and my brain is tending to favor real dreams over text. Zzzzzzzz.

Back and Forth

2010-07-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

With the demise of one pc, I'm back in Baron's old room, at my old pc, experiencing a bit of deja vu as Varda and Merlin reenact eternal canine dramas and the light coming from the window at my left highlights a familiar side of my face. I should miss being in the new computer room, with the new chair and the turquoise walls and the less demanding sunlight hitting the protected side of the house; however, I like the shaky old desk, the room that I don't have to share (except with the dogs) and the memory of our retriever laying across around my toes as I work.

It's difficult to fight against the idea that the tide has gone from the house, that with the one-year anniversary of me being laid off and the death of the new pc, I'm being dragged into the past and left to float in the detritus of things that have been.

This past weekend, however, I picked up The Madwoman in the Attic and I'm deep in the difficult prose parsing the idea that contained within our literary imagination are images of women wholly embodied by male writers with which female writers grapple and put forth in there own fiction. There are passages that crumble into apprehensible bits only after treading over them several times, dropping one down the rabbit hole of theory and history. Each section gives me a new way of looking at the sections of the novel and a new piece of armor against the idea that I should let the tide carry me out and forget about ever getting back to shore.

Even though I find myself washed back into the old computer room, it's not the same place that it was. It's waiting its turn to be painted and straightened and made over into something new. I'm not the angel who will attend to this, clearly (else it would have already been done), but I might use the in-between to grow the novel into new spaces.

Nom Nom Nom Oh, Was that Your File?

2010-07-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

After having been so careful to ensure that all the writing made it over to the new pc, it seems a little rich that said pc should have crashed. One hesitates even to bring up the fact that one is now waiting on both the novel draft being rescued and the resuscitation of the pc with one's spouse, who has spent many unsuccessful hours trying to diagnose the failure. I just walk past the computer room, look at the stuff spread all over the floor, and sigh. The dust in the room might as well be gunpowder.

Fortunately, backups exist for most of the stuff. I'm not even going to bemoan anything that might be lost, because I knew the risks of a single-point-of-failure file storage. I think the next several days are going to be devoted to back-up planning and arguing with the pc people about the meaning of 'defective' and the amelioration of such.

Perhaps it's a good day for coffee and short stories by hand?

Hey, That's My Story!

2010-07-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been exchanging drafts and comments with an online circle of writers who are the remnants of various in-person writer's groups to which I used to belong. I'm glad there are still people with whom I can exchange drafts, since I enjoy reading drafts and I like the accountability of doing my revisions semi-publically (years of temp work has addicted me to external feedback).

One of the things that I don't like about exchanging comments is that there isn't as much possibility for discussion regarding the comments. What this means is that there is a greater possibility of misinterpretation/offense, which acts against the effectiveness of receiving comments. It usually stings to hear that there are potential challenges with your scenes, characters, and plot and everyone needs space for reaction to that; however, it's sometimes easier to take in a setting where everyone is receiving feedback and you're with friends rather than receiving paragraphs of "change this, change that" from someone whom you haven't seen in a while.

Maybe it's just that I've been a little sloppy with my comments lately, forgetting to indicate the places where I particulary enjoyed the text or becoming hooked on certain plot twists of my own that don't tell the story the actual author wants to tell. That's another thing that it's easier to do online--give opinions that veer into rewrite territory instead of indicating where you feel the narrative loses your interest or becomes too complex to follow. I think I'm being a little too stingy with acknowledging the good and too eager to jump with both feet on the stuff I don't prefer. I've been hijacking the plot and trying to steer it on a different course.

That I'm trying to redirect other plots probably means that I'm not doing enough revising on my own and that I'm once again letting comments (and blog entries) substitute for revision. Drat my devious brain!

Dark Chocolate, Bad Men, and Canvas

2010-07-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

For a change, it's raining. My back door seems to be growing something and the sunflowers are either shaggy or brown and I'm glad the reading room faces the front lawn. Actually, the chair doesn't directly face the window, so I'm curled up against one of the exterior walls and listening to the house hum.

My brain is just as soggy as the lawn, so I've been spending the morning reading one of the Frazetta books. Teeny biographical paragraphs cower beside giant color prints. I can look at the pictures and seep into the grey and brown shadows lurking in the corners just as I'm doing. When there's an odd bark or flash, I can peer through the edge of the glass.

There are rarely sights as transfixing as those in the book.

I'm trying to get through Red Planet Noir, but I need to be hiding from the sun to enjoy that kind of fiction. It's like dark chocolate on days like today, you can just handle one corner before the heaviness gets to you.

Stay On Target

2010-07-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

Last week's break has me still skating on the crumbling edges of various projects. For some reason, the more it rains, the more tempting the TV has been. Now the that the dogs are starting to show a little nervousness around the louder thunderclaps, the couch and a pile of pre-fuzzied blankets are kinda tempting too.

Soon, I'll have the best of both worlds when my Netflix 70's cheesefest arrives. (Thanks to John Scalzi's AMC column) the three of us can play MST3K all day the next time it rains!) I'm hoping that all the movies are better than the groan of despair that my husband let out when I handed him the list (a slightly different one than that in the column--blood & guts is NOT my cup-o-tea). I don't have to take my movies seriously to enjoy them. And I have a weakness for Olivia Newton-John movies.

At some point it will stop raining, my mom will stop telling me about "tropical masses out in the Gulf," and I will switch from "vacation/evacuation" mode. Meanwhile, I'm still working on the 250-word-a-day plan and daydreaming about how much glitter, disco, and gold fabric I can stuff in the first draft.

Dog Days of Literature

2010-07-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

I was treating myself to the last few shorts in the Oxford American this morning when I came across one about the writer burying her dog. Oooof. I force marched through the entire piece, stiffling the tears or smearing them on the back of my arms.

As it turns out, I was unsuccessful in hiding the outburst from the dogs. Almost before I had a chance to defend myself, dogs were pawing my shoulders and trying to lick my cheeks and eyes. They're still young enough to have that anxious do-something response and there's not much better than a warm pile of concerned canine to chase away a chill of sorrow or winter.

I think this afternoon I'll stick with the Martian noir that I've been enjoying. The dogs love hardboiled dialogue combined with a flung squeaker toy. Gives them a chance to bark back.

Submission Weekend

2010-07-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

Since it was a holiday and we were pretty much rained in until last night (yea!! backyard fireworks!!), this past weekend was a submission weekend. These typically start on the heels of rejection or two and come up about 3 months or so after the last batch of submissions. I open up the spreadsheet, mark off the rejections and look to see what hasn't been sent out lately, open the poem files, and scan through to see how they look.

The first part is the easy part. One or two or five will catch my eye and then I'm off to Duotrope to find them potential homes. Inevitably, there's editing done. Lines shifted, new endings added, words shifted, titles changed. Then it's off to compare and contrast what I have with what's already out there. This is the part where the self-image and the reality meet with a thump. I'll get over myself eventually and some poems will end up being submitted. Three months later, as the rejections start to trickle in, it will start over.

I'm glad I had this weekend. Since Apollocon was angstier than anticipated (aren't I too old for that?), I felt as if the boost I was hoping for didn't get me quite over the fence. It's good to take a minute and appreciate the chance to speak and be heard.

All is Fuzziness

2010-07-02T05:50:00.000-07:00

Today is a good day for things done indoors. It's been raining off and on for the past few days as bands of rain cast off from Alex way down in Mexico skim through the yard and over the house. The dogs are bored. They are also suspiciously fluffy. Shedding in response to the stress of staying inside?

Neither dog likes to be brushed. Hugs, treats, tussles over chew toys, all of these things are considered appropriate displays of affection; however, the brush (even accompanied by treats) is something to be chewed into submission whenever it appears.

I happen to feel the same way about revision. Chewing the page into submission is often tempting, as is pretending it's not as fluffy a mess as I know it to be. Maybe if I don't take it seriously and put it back the drawer and just start over...but then another shaggy manuscript ends up sitting on my monitor, panting cheerfully and covering the plot with stray bits of nonsense.

Because I'm the master of procrastination, the dogs are the ones who get the attention this morning. Varda hooks her paws around my wrist, hooks her neck against mine, and tries to wait out the brushing. Then she tries to eat the brush. The brush is prickly--inedible unless you attack it at the handle. Where my fingers are.

We amass a stack of fur. Slick otter girl that she is, Varda gets away and inhales a handful of fur. A few minutes later, Merlin will be attempting to eat his way through the stack until he's lifted up, hind paws dangling, to be brushed like a head of fox hair on a wiggly elf.

Once they're brushed, my chastened metaphors for neat manuscripts loll against the wall and stare at me, sharing a respite from rainy day restlessness. All around us, however, the fuzziness remains.

Vitamin R

2010-06-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

Rejection, thou sting of utmost fiery prickliness, that landeth directly upon the bum of our ego and causeth us to jump from the chair and forswear further endeavor, because of thee, my ego shall not sit for a week.

Which pretty much sums it up. Although each depersonalized "not-what-we-need-at-this-time-thanks-for-submitting" makes me feel like the editor/reader/person-behind-the-curtain is damning the U.S. education for giving me a diploma and a degree, I'm trying to look at these instead as something that gooses me for another round of revisions and another five submissions.

So the drafts continue to grow and mutate and get sent out the door. They're mostly going to come back to me and I'll mostly never know why. I'll try to patch it up and send it back out the door. Sometimes I'll do so with humor, sometimes vengefully. I'll continue to take massive doses of Vitamin R.

Despite the bruises, my ego tends to respond to the idea of "This story chose you; you are the one to tell it, however well or poorly." Fight for your story, fight!

HenchBiffery

2010-06-28T08:19:00.001-07:00

Why yes, I have been spending copious amounts of time reading the "Maggie Quinn: Girl vs. Evil" series. The best way back into a love of the fantastic is connecting with the kid who loved it in the first place, and Maggie's adventures certainly do that. In addition to short-circuiting the been-there-done-that circuit in my brain and connecting directly to the girls-gone-questing circuit (a crucial but little-used part of the entertainment-goes-here neural net), the stories don't mess around with the idea of good vs. evil.

We're all aware that part of the attraction of fantasy is the idea that there is a point to being brave--that there is a victory to be had over the forces of darkness and grimness and evil and wrong. It's something that it's sometimes cool to subvert in terms of making "monsters" into heroes and borrowing more plot devices from horror and the literature of the grotesque. Humor should come with an edge burnt black and the idea that laughing at the hopelessness is the ONLY candle in the dark.

Or maybe it's just me. One of the last things that my defunct writer's groups left me with was the idea that I wasn't willing to mess my characters up enough. There are rules for these things, about how to torture and mangle and exhaust your characters just to the point where all the reader feels is the pounding of the blows, like a thunderstorm on the windshield. Then, when the rain slows, you're so relieved that it feels like sunshine.

So the concept of opposing forces is something that can seem missing. It's as if chaos fielded an entire team and the other side only fielded one player and a stadium full of impotent but hopeful fans. Yeah, I recognize that feeling. It's the way that it feels to watch the news, to skim through certain times in history, to let laziness win on the days it sometimes does. But it's not--and this is crucial--not why I pick up a book. If the laziness won, I wouldn't be holding that book.

The laziness pretty much carried the weekend. It kept me in my seat and hurrying away from talking to authors and panellists at the convention this weekend. Apparently, the aftereffects are still there, because this was intended to be a lighter post. I found a new series that I absolutely love and I'm gratefully reading it as fast as I can. I'm really excited about it. But I've been playing on the wrong side and it's going to take a bit to recover.

Is It Today Yet?

2010-06-26T18:57:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to go to the convention this weekend, but I didn't know why until we were already there and I was watching people mill around prior to the first panels of the morning. It turns out, being at Apollocon this year is all about what I've lost--there was the panel where the moderator talked ceaselessly about his dog that had passed on (almost lost it in that one) and no one seemed capable of addressing the actual topic; there was the panel about writing that focussed on "it's who you know--network;" and then my husband grousing that he'd rather be on a panel than listening to them.

Yep. Let's talk about Wynn and Baron being gone for a year now, me being out of work and cut off from humanity for a year, and my writing going nowhere during that "freebie" year. Although I had a good time in places (and acted like a dork in others, but we're not discussing my foolishness in the face of favorite authors), I never resolved the painful/pleasant into a coherent day.

Fortunately for me, I was able to go book shopping. I picked up several small press/self-published books that will be mentioned as I read them--by name, unless I throw them across the room. I talked to a few of the authors and found it interesting to see how people approached sending their texty litters out to good homes. Several books were written or marketed by couples, which seems both baffling (my spouse and I are on opposite ends of most reading/writing spectra) and cozy.

On the way home I pulled Rosemary Clement-Moore's Prom Dates from Hell from the bag-o-books. Score!! It was basically "giggle, snarf, can-i-please-please-read-you-this passage" until we got home. The story thus far is both funny and chilling. I was particularly creeped out by her description of the "extreme-weather drill" and the way she makes you feel the imbalance of the power relationships leaning into your awareness while the plot continues to fizz and spark. This book makes me regret I don't have a niece or daughter with whom to share it.

We'll see how tomorrow goes and whether I can sneak any more books into the reading satchel. After all, I'm going finish at least one of them tonight. Yea, reading!!

By This Strange Path

2010-06-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

I'm well into The Professor and The Madman. It turned out to be a great find and a fascinating story. I'm amazed by the lives that the two protagonists led up to their collaboration on the OED and I find myself wondering if the internet is leading back around to the kind of part-time scholarship that characterized Professor's Murray's life. The sections on Dr. Minor's life are heartbreaking. The book is about creating systems from chaos and "fixing" the flexible language and both men's lives seem to reflect that as well.

Finding a narrative to fling myself into was a welcome change. I threw the book I was reading yesterday across the room. Twice. It wasn't that it was bad, which would have been just irritating. The narrative was manipulative and without grace, which meant that you could see the gears wheezing even as it twisted your emotions. Bleh. Double Bleh. In fact, I think it rates a Triple Bleh.

Perhaps fantasy narratives just don't mesh with my reading preferences anymore. I remember when I first realized that enough pop had bled into country and enough years had stapled themselves to my hide that I was actually enjoying CMT more than the radio. Welcome to middle age, sweetheart. Twang! Since I'm not sure whether it's just no longer part of the subset of literature that I enjoy or if it's just not a great book, I should leave it alone.

I guess I'm just worried that I'll be a grump at the convention this weekend if my interests have changed. Not that it will matter to anyone but my husband, who will have to deal with me; however, I'd prefer not to turn into a fidgetting irritant as soon as someone says "wizard" or "starship." Guess we'll just have to see. Bwa ha ha ha!

Emotion Leads to Shopping

2010-06-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

The book I'm currently reading could be described as a pastiche and possibly as the kind of talking-down-to-the-kiddos YA that encourages blank looks and sarcastic thoughts. I feel a saccharine smile forming in my head, an animated smiley sun that narrates even the darker parts of the book, until the voice of the-narrator-that-could-have-been breaks through. At those points, I can focus on the story and not my reaction to the story. It seemed like a good idea when I found it, in a stack with its siblings on a rack tended by the writer. The writer assured me that not-just-kids would find the book fun to read.

Have you ever found yourself distracted by the book that the one you're reading could have been? I'm determined to finish this book because of that narrator-that-could-have-been. It could be that once the story gets going, that voice will stay for longer than a sentence or two. Meanwhile, I find myself once again at a B&N, eavesdropping and drafting a short story based on the picture of a wizard and too many nights of science-based TV. And continuing to read, as furtively as possible, the fluffy pastiche.

Which leads me to the sale table and a stack of books that I'm hoping will go unnoticed on the table at home until they're safely read and secreted on the bookshelves. What does despair of the fantastic lead to? One book on current scientific theories about the universe (too much math for me, but there are pictures), one book about the OED, and one book about a guy's love affair with his truck.

Books that are set firmly in this universe and that turn away from the siren call of the imaginary, the Celtic, and the wizardly. I was hoping to pick up some new books this weekend, but I think I'll just focus on taking notes and trying to avoid taking home any more cute but untrained strays.

Remember That Guy?

2010-06-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

A name in a newspaper catches my mother's eye and she asks me if I remember those kids who used to live down the street from us, in that green house, the one that never sold and was rented for years. What was their last name?

Here's what I remember: It was a grey day, cold enough so that my first thought was to play inside. The doorbell rings and it's this little kid named Steven, whom I've never met before. He tells us his parents have sent him down the street to see if that girl who lives here would like to play. I get bundled out the door and, I suppose, we play. I don't remember what we did. I remember his face (freckles, dark brown hair) and that I wasn't used to kids coming to the door. I might not have been in school yet.

While my mom remembers, sort of, a family with a slew of kids who would run crazily around the neighborhood, I remember a single instance of one kid coming to the door. Oddly enough, I remember snatches of things from the house we lived in before we moved to that street where my parents still live. I had friends, we went to church, a duck barfed on our driveway, wasps invaded my green plastic playhouse.

Then we moved. Dad joked about how long it took that house to be built and how they better carpet over people if they couldn't work fast enough. I expected to find lumpy remnants of electricians when we moved in. My parents sent me to Port Arthur so that they could move without me irritating the bejesus out of them. That fall or that winter, or maybe the next fall or winter, Steven came knocking at the door and brought with him hints of school and the establishing memory of living in Lake Jackson and going out the door, down the driveway, and into the life of the neighborhood.

I remember that guy. His name was Steven.

Tuesday Afternoon

2010-06-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

There is supposed to be a meeting tonight; however, the writer's group is taking a summer vacation so it'll be a quiet night in Frappucinoland. I can sit in a corner and transcribe the kind of wildlife that shuffles through the shelves. I can string the plastic words together along the rubber phrases, snap my observations against my wrist, and see how closely they match.

They probably won't and there will be plenty of give in their phrasing. I'm not a close observer in terms of structure. I'm distracted by color and motion. One of the things I admire in the novels that I read is the way that others can bring multiple characters together in story lines that seem to come from the characters' own proclivities. Even when a story like Divine Misfortune threatens to turn on a joke or meander through a scene, you can feel the way the characters are shaping each piece. The structure is there and lets the plot flash and spark without burning down or dragging.

Wish I could do that, you know?

Except that then I wouldn't get to enjoy it at the end. When I slip beneath the surface of a novel, I sometimes want to bring a piece of what I found back up with me. Writing is just remnant of something that I brought up from an old story, a trick of speaking learned in a sunken city. Reading is the glass that sometimes shows up the city itself.

Down the Road

2010-06-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Wiz caught me this afternoon and pinned me in front of the TV. Dorothy's dress and the painted playground of the skating munchkins started talking to me about what I'd expected to be when I grew up, where I thought I'd go, and the odd double-image of adulthood that I've carried for so many years. In one eye, there is the image of the writer and the doer, in the other eye, there is the fog of family. For me, New York is an image and a talisman, a place that is an unreal as Oz but as potent. It is the talisman of the clear-sighted eye. In this view, the lands of adulthood have always been childless for me. One had companions and one had, either before or behind one, the City.

The talisman of the foggy eye would be the expectations that fell on me through my family that I gathered and made an umbrella of. The fear of unknown places, the desire to shirk because "nice girls didn't..." They didn't do anything except hit their meaningless marks. Clean the same furniture over and over and over. Make the grades and get the degree that "doesn't pay anything." This talisman is the voice in my head that says "stop" or "quit." This is the voice of the wizard.

As you can probably tell, The Wizard of Oz is one of those stories that swirls around in my head, popping up every so often in my own writing. I haven't read the books in years; however, I did read all of them as a young child and found the secret cities and giant poppies and slender crowns forming one innocent edge of the Surburbia of Wonder.

Since today has been one of those days when I've been fighting the wizard, it was nice to also get a chance to remember what I was aiming for in the first place.

Oh, and I did finish Divine Misfortune, so that will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

Good words and great days,
Chrissa