We were traveling west this evening, first down FM 1960 to pick up comics, then further on the same road until it became Hwy 6 to find a burger. It wasn't until we passed under the freeway that signaled the road's name change and the conversation shifted from where to eat to whether dinner should be the final stop before the great turn and the homeward drive that I noticed it.
Trying to determine whether a new bookstore was in the same place--and possibly a reincarnation of--a store we'd visited just post-college, during the first iteration of Magic, for gaming paraphernalia, we began talking about the first house.
We didn't have it for very long. It was in a small neighborhood just off Hwy 6 and down from a tiny mall that felt like a pin in the outer boundary of the city. Beyond the mall it could be all cattle and two-lane, dwindling until caught by the spur of another expanding town. I had one cool season to enjoy the second-story window ledges, an elbow and a glass of tea balanced on them while I read on the floor in a pile of pillows or laundry.
We locked ourselves out on the patio on New Year's Eve Y2K because we weren't yet familiar with the way the aluminum bar fell just so. One of the women I worked with recommended a Mexican restaurant down the highway and we went for the pickled carrots and the double height ceilings and the food.
Once, we came home from visiting my in laws up I45 past Buffalo, exiting 1960 and taking the long road home. We must have hit this section at a similar time in the evening, with a car full of sleepy dogs, and I know that we usually came to the gaming store in the evenings after work. Tonight the sun is sinking but far enough from the horizon to blear through the windshield. If we keep going west, I imagine we can get to the house, get back to Wynn and Baron as they were then, when our backyard was large enough to run through and pears fell into the back corner.
Driving west on the broad, pale road is tracing backward toward the last time that forward motion felt like progress. I miss the house I barely got to know and the dogs who knew so many other places, even this house so much further north and east.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Specificity
Last night's meeting showed me once again that although I'm smart enough to understand that I tend toward obscure prose, I'm not quite smart enough to identify obscure prose during revisions. Thus, this morning's stroll kept bringing me back to the topic of specificity. I'm sorry this gadget doesn't support uploading pics, but the ones this morning weren't necessarily good; rather they were about the fine details in the weeds bordering the woodland trail.
There are gorgeous, showy delphiniums and poppies in the curated beds in pastel and deep purple shades. Along the woodland trail, though, there are the tiny salmon flowers that I used to love in elementary school. These are plants that reward being low to the ground and grows in the shadow of trees and in the semi-mowed grass of playgrounds. It's a detail that might have been lost in the clover and dandelions but wasn't because it was previously familiar to me.
Similarly, details build a story by letting the reader borrow familiarity with situations and emotions they might not otherwise have.
I tend to mistake pretty details for important ones.While the delphinium beds are pretty, the salmon weeds trigger a personal reverie. I remember a spring afternoon on the playground listening to Tammy list all the items she'll bring to gym locker when we go to the junior high next year and have a formal gym class. She ticks off deodorant, hairbrush, etc. She's leaning against a tree, the rest of in a circle around her. For a few minutes, she's an expert on transitioning from kid to teen. Tammy's ordinary playground aggressiveness is now a social strength as we think about reverting to the bottom of the totem pole. It's also the last year that I see her, since I believe she moved that summer. By the next year, my focus was on the post-lunch cliques rather than the weeds that survived their feet. Thinking about growing up in Lake Jackson also reminds me of that initial drive to write.
Back to the draft, therefore, and the missing details and the unnecessary filigree.
There are gorgeous, showy delphiniums and poppies in the curated beds in pastel and deep purple shades. Along the woodland trail, though, there are the tiny salmon flowers that I used to love in elementary school. These are plants that reward being low to the ground and grows in the shadow of trees and in the semi-mowed grass of playgrounds. It's a detail that might have been lost in the clover and dandelions but wasn't because it was previously familiar to me.
Similarly, details build a story by letting the reader borrow familiarity with situations and emotions they might not otherwise have.
I tend to mistake pretty details for important ones.While the delphinium beds are pretty, the salmon weeds trigger a personal reverie. I remember a spring afternoon on the playground listening to Tammy list all the items she'll bring to gym locker when we go to the junior high next year and have a formal gym class. She ticks off deodorant, hairbrush, etc. She's leaning against a tree, the rest of in a circle around her. For a few minutes, she's an expert on transitioning from kid to teen. Tammy's ordinary playground aggressiveness is now a social strength as we think about reverting to the bottom of the totem pole. It's also the last year that I see her, since I believe she moved that summer. By the next year, my focus was on the post-lunch cliques rather than the weeds that survived their feet. Thinking about growing up in Lake Jackson also reminds me of that initial drive to write.
Back to the draft, therefore, and the missing details and the unnecessary filigree.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Angst and Good Taste
Last Friday, I asked my husband to read a draft, which turned into a massive argument regarding the epithet "angsty" and whether it's possible to critique fiction in a genre you neither respect nor care for. It was a fun discussion.
--digression: Varda just popped up on the chair to give me a kiss on the forehead. Trying to determine if she's trying to play or barf up the twigs she ate earlier.--
Okay, angst. Not sure why that particular word lodged in my consciousness and is functioning like a Pong paddle (ancient reference alert) in blocking revisions. To me, "angst" is what I'm supposed to grow out of in my writing, it's self-aggrandizing melodrama. If my characters are angsty, they are annoying. If my plots are angsty, they substitute fake emotion for authentic.
When the backpedalling began (isn't lit fic basically all angst?), I was already re-evaluating what I was trying to accomplish. It seems sometimes that I am like the bug in the Phantom Tollboth who swam through the Sea of Knowledge without taking on a single drop. Critiques are difficult to take on and I'm not great at it. Not unlike this post, I'm tempted at times to deconstruct the critique while taking all the negativity on board.
I didn't want to hear the word or see the broad outlines of how I construct a story. I tend to start with an image and emotional impulse rather than a plot, a distinct voice, or a miniature movie. My characters rarely begin life in motion. Perhaps I'm just as stuck as they are?
--digression: Varda just popped up on the chair to give me a kiss on the forehead. Trying to determine if she's trying to play or barf up the twigs she ate earlier.--
Okay, angst. Not sure why that particular word lodged in my consciousness and is functioning like a Pong paddle (ancient reference alert) in blocking revisions. To me, "angst" is what I'm supposed to grow out of in my writing, it's self-aggrandizing melodrama. If my characters are angsty, they are annoying. If my plots are angsty, they substitute fake emotion for authentic.
When the backpedalling began (isn't lit fic basically all angst?), I was already re-evaluating what I was trying to accomplish. It seems sometimes that I am like the bug in the Phantom Tollboth who swam through the Sea of Knowledge without taking on a single drop. Critiques are difficult to take on and I'm not great at it. Not unlike this post, I'm tempted at times to deconstruct the critique while taking all the negativity on board.
I didn't want to hear the word or see the broad outlines of how I construct a story. I tend to start with an image and emotional impulse rather than a plot, a distinct voice, or a miniature movie. My characters rarely begin life in motion. Perhaps I'm just as stuck as they are?
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Sunday in the Park, No George, Several Tiny Dragons
After spending yesterday working in the backyard beds, I was eager to visit a more complete garden and so headed to Mercer first thing this morning. In addition to flowers and quiet and squirrels, the arboretum is where I get a chance to poke around in my "story brain" without feeling pressure to commit perfection to paper; it is a place where writing and play and make-believe are kissing cousins.
This began earlier than usual this morning, with a beige bra strewn in the middle of one of the roads that curve through the neighborhood and a great black dog with a feathered coat and an odd bend to the back legs--skinwalker out for a morning jog? With her family, perhaps...there was a man jogging with a stroller just around the next corner. Urban fantasy isn't really my genre, but the imagination takes what it can from the morning, stealing not just scenes but, if one is lucky, the pull of the wind and the sense that you are in the same vigorous current that pushes the clouds, the imperative motion of spring
The arboretum itself more high fantasy. As frustrated as I get with my writing, there are always new nuances hiding in the delphiniums and poppies and azaleas, in the lizards rustling beneath the greenery, in my trying to walk silently so as not to scare the frogs until they've been thoroughly photographed, and in my own inevitable paranoia about spiderwebs in my hair, frog squeaks as they leap underwater, and deer. (Which I love to see from a car window or behind a fence but not perked and staring on the same path on which I'm walking.) Fear and the wonder are fairy tale elements well mined from the morning.
I was taking pics of amaryllis when I saw with pollen sacs the color of Cheetos trying for another few grains from a highrise stalk of yellow flowers. In another section of the garden a specimen yaupon tree leaned toward the path, trunk the color of old, smooth concrete. The way the trunk flattened in the middle and swelled at each side as it bent--two trunks that had merged, maybe--reminded me of the curbs I used to take on my bike when I was younger. There is a Yaupon Street in the town where I grew up. The bee and the bicycle are going in different directions, feeding divergent storylines.
There are so many beginnings that exist in the arboretum and I am sometimes surprised to find how much of it has colonized my writing. Then again, it is a pleasant place to wander.
This began earlier than usual this morning, with a beige bra strewn in the middle of one of the roads that curve through the neighborhood and a great black dog with a feathered coat and an odd bend to the back legs--skinwalker out for a morning jog? With her family, perhaps...there was a man jogging with a stroller just around the next corner. Urban fantasy isn't really my genre, but the imagination takes what it can from the morning, stealing not just scenes but, if one is lucky, the pull of the wind and the sense that you are in the same vigorous current that pushes the clouds, the imperative motion of spring
The arboretum itself more high fantasy. As frustrated as I get with my writing, there are always new nuances hiding in the delphiniums and poppies and azaleas, in the lizards rustling beneath the greenery, in my trying to walk silently so as not to scare the frogs until they've been thoroughly photographed, and in my own inevitable paranoia about spiderwebs in my hair, frog squeaks as they leap underwater, and deer. (Which I love to see from a car window or behind a fence but not perked and staring on the same path on which I'm walking.) Fear and the wonder are fairy tale elements well mined from the morning.
I was taking pics of amaryllis when I saw with pollen sacs the color of Cheetos trying for another few grains from a highrise stalk of yellow flowers. In another section of the garden a specimen yaupon tree leaned toward the path, trunk the color of old, smooth concrete. The way the trunk flattened in the middle and swelled at each side as it bent--two trunks that had merged, maybe--reminded me of the curbs I used to take on my bike when I was younger. There is a Yaupon Street in the town where I grew up. The bee and the bicycle are going in different directions, feeding divergent storylines.
There are so many beginnings that exist in the arboretum and I am sometimes surprised to find how much of it has colonized my writing. Then again, it is a pleasant place to wander.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Fairy Season
Spring has overtaken the garden while I have been clinging to my desk, fighting whatever fear or anger buffets me via the Internet. Creeping out from under last year's pots are this year's pansies, which are also peering up from the I repaired crack in the patio, carelessly broken and patched by the cheap builder from whom we purchased the house. Their slipshoddery has worn into a narrow rivulet of purple and yellow faces and one vine that is reaching up for the table like a toddler morning glory determined to ramble like it's mother through any patio fixture it can reach.
Instead of putting out needing plants, i've been discovering volunteer snapdragons hiding under the bushes in the front yard. Some of the stems grew along the ground until a thumb-stalk of pink flowers bloomed. When I knelt down for a closer look, the foot tall stalk blooming beneath the dark branches of a nearby bush was revealed. A dragon in its lair, for all the sugary pink.
This morning, the new crop of morning glories, the first to have reseeded, are blooming in among last year's dead zinnia stalks. We've had a cathedral of white morning glories and towers tufted with pink; however, each of these gave us a season and withered without remembering itself among the beds and lawn the way the purple has done this year.
It is this insistence on the part of the pink and purple remnants of yesterday's beds to slip into the rest of the yard and peer out from cover and patio that chimes with fairy footstep sneaking away from the devastation the winter and I have made of the beds.
Instead of putting out needing plants, i've been discovering volunteer snapdragons hiding under the bushes in the front yard. Some of the stems grew along the ground until a thumb-stalk of pink flowers bloomed. When I knelt down for a closer look, the foot tall stalk blooming beneath the dark branches of a nearby bush was revealed. A dragon in its lair, for all the sugary pink.
This morning, the new crop of morning glories, the first to have reseeded, are blooming in among last year's dead zinnia stalks. We've had a cathedral of white morning glories and towers tufted with pink; however, each of these gave us a season and withered without remembering itself among the beds and lawn the way the purple has done this year.
It is this insistence on the part of the pink and purple remnants of yesterday's beds to slip into the rest of the yard and peer out from cover and patio that chimes with fairy footstep sneaking away from the devastation the winter and I have made of the beds.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Awake
Since the clouds are strewn silver and white from horizon to horizon, today's arboretum walk is apparently about flight--the shift of bird sillouhettes from pine to pine in the drought-thinned thicket, the drift of seeds delicate with fine, false feathers, and the shift of thought from drowsy to reminiscent to remorseful. Any alliterative embellishments are unfortunate leftovers from last night's Gloom, a card game of morbid mayhem that allows one to indulge one's Gorey/PBS Mystery dark side upon a tableful of one's friends. Perhaps that should have made this morning a grey whisper of crows; however, it is not.
Grey taffeta mockingbirds with black and white hems are slipping through the undergrowth and a fidget of tiny brown birds are zipping away from the azalea hill into the trees on the creek bank as I walk through a slow rainfall. Wondering if these large palm fronds would be effective umbrellas, I step under one and look up. Not making it underneath the tight base of the frond, I get a raindrop in the eye. The sharp fringes are not so much effective.
Following the palms through to the prehistoric section, I see that more cycads, etc. are being planted. This means that the frog pond area is under construction and I'm detoured over to the fairy tale pond, where I find a nice, large frog sitting with his face above the water as the rain continues to ring the water like a visible tone from an invisible bell. At the edge, someone has been cleaning up the lower branches of a tree that I don't recognize, save for the Froudian baby goblin frowning from just above the mulch.
The contrast of the flying birds and the falling rain runs like a bar of music through me and I find myself in a very Mumford & Sons mood as the rain drops strike faster and the birds call ever louder. A jangle of grey and a glissando of water and the begging of my own brain to be braver and hardier and less distracted push me to wake up, although I don't feel--standing in the park, in the daylight, shoes on my feet--as if I've been sleeping.
Grey taffeta mockingbirds with black and white hems are slipping through the undergrowth and a fidget of tiny brown birds are zipping away from the azalea hill into the trees on the creek bank as I walk through a slow rainfall. Wondering if these large palm fronds would be effective umbrellas, I step under one and look up. Not making it underneath the tight base of the frond, I get a raindrop in the eye. The sharp fringes are not so much effective.
Following the palms through to the prehistoric section, I see that more cycads, etc. are being planted. This means that the frog pond area is under construction and I'm detoured over to the fairy tale pond, where I find a nice, large frog sitting with his face above the water as the rain continues to ring the water like a visible tone from an invisible bell. At the edge, someone has been cleaning up the lower branches of a tree that I don't recognize, save for the Froudian baby goblin frowning from just above the mulch.
The contrast of the flying birds and the falling rain runs like a bar of music through me and I find myself in a very Mumford & Sons mood as the rain drops strike faster and the birds call ever louder. A jangle of grey and a glissando of water and the begging of my own brain to be braver and hardier and less distracted push me to wake up, although I don't feel--standing in the park, in the daylight, shoes on my feet--as if I've been sleeping.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Mercer by Morning
It's not my hundred-acre wood; yet it makes a good stand-in in this suburban wasteland of green anoles and mockingbirds and cats and dogs and grass like a weathered welcome mat all around. Instead of reminding me of poetry, of which I know very little to heart, the garden reminds of specificities and ephemera from my own history.
My mother grew azaleas in the back of the house when I was little, when my bedroom formed the back wall and had a window on the backyard. Azaleas don't seem to care much for the clay soil but they do like blue Miracle-Gro dissolved like plant Kool-aid and sprayed on them in season. It wasn't until a few years ago that we traveled to her home town for a funeral and Dad drove us around their old neighborhood that I realized that azaleas looooove Port Arthur. They were not what I took away from vacations to my grandparents, however. Those were Pink Lady bubblegum slushies, green tomatoes off the vine with salt, soda in small glass bottles, tuna-noodle salad (today's lunch) and a gothic sense of family dynamics. Azalea season at Mercer reminds me to call Mom instead of long for family vacations.
The ephemera arrives as we move beyond the azalea banks and come to the velvet petunias, whose purple and cream streaks remind me of fruit and cream lifesavers and make me hungry for fake grape--the flavor of a bank lollipop, rough and sugary from the plastic, or the smell of a scented sticker ripe from the roll. This is the reason that I have "wine" candles in my bedroom. Purple grape is one of my favorite flavors/scents and it wraps around the back of my tongue while I'm looking at the petunias. I wonder what flavors hummingbirds find at the throats of the flowers at which they drink.
There isn't a concession stand in the arboretum. If you're on this side of the trail system, you're not supposed to be eating or drinking anything. The sun is warm and thoughts of grape slushies are making me too thirsty to linger, even among the red & white camellias. Instead, I head to the frog pond.
The tiny frogs in this dark plastic pond the size of a large bathtub are relaxing to observe, provided you don't startle them all into splashing into the water before you realize they are there. I've been practicing quiet approaches for days now just to stand at the edge and stare at them as they float with their eyes and nose above the surface of the water. Although I'm not a fan of the heat, the frogs are making me long for pool weather and the ability to float just like that while on vacation in LJ. Just relaxing into stillness to try to get a good photo lets me relax and ignore everything else going on around us. Part of me is worried about snakes (there are lots of yummy frogs not three feet from me), but I'm hoping it's too cold for them yet. Float, breathe, float, breathe. Watch the ripples to guess where the others are hiding. Lift the camera, focus on the eyeballs focused on you, click. Breathe.
After a bit, the hammering of the woodpeckers and the calls of the cardinals slips into focus and the trees and bushes are busy with birds. The day loses interest in you and moves on, while you float your camera to your eyes and breathe.
My mother grew azaleas in the back of the house when I was little, when my bedroom formed the back wall and had a window on the backyard. Azaleas don't seem to care much for the clay soil but they do like blue Miracle-Gro dissolved like plant Kool-aid and sprayed on them in season. It wasn't until a few years ago that we traveled to her home town for a funeral and Dad drove us around their old neighborhood that I realized that azaleas looooove Port Arthur. They were not what I took away from vacations to my grandparents, however. Those were Pink Lady bubblegum slushies, green tomatoes off the vine with salt, soda in small glass bottles, tuna-noodle salad (today's lunch) and a gothic sense of family dynamics. Azalea season at Mercer reminds me to call Mom instead of long for family vacations.
The ephemera arrives as we move beyond the azalea banks and come to the velvet petunias, whose purple and cream streaks remind me of fruit and cream lifesavers and make me hungry for fake grape--the flavor of a bank lollipop, rough and sugary from the plastic, or the smell of a scented sticker ripe from the roll. This is the reason that I have "wine" candles in my bedroom. Purple grape is one of my favorite flavors/scents and it wraps around the back of my tongue while I'm looking at the petunias. I wonder what flavors hummingbirds find at the throats of the flowers at which they drink.
There isn't a concession stand in the arboretum. If you're on this side of the trail system, you're not supposed to be eating or drinking anything. The sun is warm and thoughts of grape slushies are making me too thirsty to linger, even among the red & white camellias. Instead, I head to the frog pond.
The tiny frogs in this dark plastic pond the size of a large bathtub are relaxing to observe, provided you don't startle them all into splashing into the water before you realize they are there. I've been practicing quiet approaches for days now just to stand at the edge and stare at them as they float with their eyes and nose above the surface of the water. Although I'm not a fan of the heat, the frogs are making me long for pool weather and the ability to float just like that while on vacation in LJ. Just relaxing into stillness to try to get a good photo lets me relax and ignore everything else going on around us. Part of me is worried about snakes (there are lots of yummy frogs not three feet from me), but I'm hoping it's too cold for them yet. Float, breathe, float, breathe. Watch the ripples to guess where the others are hiding. Lift the camera, focus on the eyeballs focused on you, click. Breathe.
After a bit, the hammering of the woodpeckers and the calls of the cardinals slips into focus and the trees and bushes are busy with birds. The day loses interest in you and moves on, while you float your camera to your eyes and breathe.
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