Month: March 2017

So Far Beyond

Today, I believe, is the twelfth day of March, 2017. I hope my calendar is correct but sometimes I lose track of time out here. Days are full of possiblies, or possibilities. Are we going the right way? Are we lost? Will we survive? Will anyone ever know what happened to us? Will anyone care?

Possibly.

Possibly yes, possibly no. We don’t spend much time discussing these, at least not with vocal voices. I spend time discussing this in my head as I slowly cover new terrain. I think, no one else has probably been here before, before correcting myself, no, others have been here. They just left without a mark.

I correct that, too. They left a mark. I can’t see their mark. I don’t know where to look. I may have just stepped over it, a realization that makes me pause to take in the surroundings.

It remains unstable underfoot, made worse from overnight dew slicking down every surface. Frost and ice hides in some shadows. At least sunshine is showing early today, promising us the chance of warmth and light, and a day without slogging through rain.

I feel alone out here. Given the right place and moment, I can look back and see how far I’ve come. Other times, I’m just lost in the landscape’s details.

Sometimes my thoughts distract me. Songs of my youth entertain me and become backdrop to meandering questions about where I’d lived and who I’ve known. Corollary questions emerge about what happened to those people and what they became like after they grew up, assuming they reached adulthood, maturity, and aren’t dead. So many things can kill us. We are fragile. A few degrees warmer or colder can be dangerous for food, water and air. Then, others will kill us with guns, knives and other means to address their woes, fears and angers. Yes, we’re fragile. I wonder, too, what they thought of me, and if they ever look me up or try to find me. I’ve tried to find a few of them. From that I’ve learned, we are a large population and many of us share the same names. To find more information, someone always wants paid.

Sometimes the sounds of others out here like me impinge upon my awareness. We’re all out in space that’s new to us but others have often already been here. It’s tricky, messy and confusing. Shambolic. Yeah, I’ve already walked around those tracks. Time to move on.

Move on from what and to what are constant nags.

I took up this life. This is on me. There are no others to blame except those who encouraged me. “You can do it,” they told me. Maybe they were wrong. It’s time like this that I wonder if perhaps there are millions of Fates up there, spinning out the lines of our lives as we respond to their threads and wait for them to cut us free.

Enough of this. Time to go write like crazy, at least one more time. That’s the only way I’ll ever get out of here.

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A Pick-Me-Up

It’s an odd expression, a pick-me-up. Slang, it’s an expression for anything that raises our spirits. It used to be that it was about tonics or drinks but it’s moved beyond that.

For me, a pick-me-up can be an inspirational story, its use today. While going through the inbox and surfing blogs last night, I encountered a 2016 article about famous rejections.

I love famous rejections. Like many struggling writers, I look for those tales of famous writers and novels being rejected only to find publication and vindication. This post featured five famous that I already knew. Still, it was fun reading and a nice pick-me-up. After those five, a list of fifty more famous, successful rejected novels was posted.

Need a pick-me-up for your writing day? Check out Michael David Wilson’s column, ‘5 Famous Bestsellers That were Rejected (And 50 More).

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Cattipping

Cattipping, contrary to popular mis-use of the word, does not involve tipping cats over.

Cattipping (verb): feline behavior of casually and indiscriminately knocking objects over or off shelves, tables and other surfaces. These objects are usually decorative, office materials such as pens and pencils, and pills and vitamins (either in or out of containers), but may also include hairbrushes, tweezers, fingernail clippers, glasses of water, eye-glasses, and buttons.

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Today’s Theme Music

I awoke with this song stuck in my head. It wasn’t the song I had in mind for today.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ in the 1960s. The ‘Fifth Dimension’ had a hit with it around 1970.

The 1960s and 1970s was a great era of music. We had surfer music, blues, R&B, folk, psychedelic, country and western, and the British Invasion all being blasted from our AM radios. Many of the acts appeared on television and music shows, like ‘American Bandstand’ with Dick Clark, or ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. 

Oddly, the song is connected to a time of transition for me. That gives me pause as I wonder why the song is stuck in my brain today. My family lived in the Pittsburgh, PA, area, having moved to that area in the late 1950s. We had lived in a brick duplex in Wilkinsburg. My aunt and her family lived next door to us in a like duplex. Her son, my cousin, was my age. We were best friends for a long time.

His family moved to a new housing development in Penn Hills in the 1960s. We also moved there a few weeks later. I ended up living about two blocks from him.

Meanwhile, though, my other friends remained in Wilkinsburg. I made it a habit to return to visit them. I usually rode my bike the miles between the two locations. Then my bike was stolen and I walked.

But my friends changed. I no longer felt a part of them and moved on. That’s why it’s interesting this song is stuck in my head this morning. Between my dream and my writing and this song, I wonder what conference is going on in my subconscious mind.

Here’s Marilyn McCoo and the Fifth Dimension, performing ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ on Soul Train.

 

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A Laugher

One of last night’s dream makes me laugh whenever I think of it.

I was working. I can’t say the nature of the work. Seemed like I was conducting inventory. Whatever I was doing, I was busy, happy and fulfilled. A manager came by. He wasn’t someone I knew from my life but he was known by the dream me.

Dream manager told me they — the rest of the office or work place — were leaving. I was fine with that. While they were gone, they were expecting two people to arrive: Major Record and a garbled, unintelligible name.

Sure, got it. Understood.

The manager left and came back. Still waiting for Major Record and the other, whose name he screwed up. Although I can’t remember the other name, I corrected it in the dream for him.

A little later: Major Record arrived, along with X. X was another name. I asked about the original second name. That’s who arrived, was the reply. They came by another way. They’ll be coming this way.

The manager had continuously screwed up the second name until it became a joke. Meanwhile, the Major Record we’d been awaiting had already arrived.

Waking, I keep laughing about that. I’m waiting for Major Record, but he’s already arrived. And I just kept working, doing the same thing, the entire time.

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The Writing Bucket

I’ve been receiving a number of queries about when the next novel is coming out. So – updates.

  1. Alas, I’m not working on the next mystery in the Lessons with Savanna series. That would be the third novel in the set, ‘Personal Lessons with Savanna’. Continuing the story begun in ‘Life Lessons with Savanna’ and extended in ‘Road Lessons with Savanna’, Studs is being framed for murder in Texas. I promise to update the Facebook page this week. Thanks for being fans.
  2. I’m looking forward to working on ‘Personal Lessons with Savanna’. Between recovering memories, coping with creeping insanity and being framed for murder, so much is going on with Studs. It’s the sort of developing character and story that excites writers. A third of the novel was completed before the great computer breakdown of 2016 forced me to send the Envy back to HP for repairs, living without my machine for three weeks.
  3. Work continues on ‘Long Summer’. I’ve been  writing the first draft for eight months. I’m not certain when it will be done. I’m hopeful it’ll be soon but, I’m a writer. As a writer, I’m always hopeful, optimistic, pessimistic, doubtful, depressed and exuberant. It’s a fun soup to dwell in.
  4. ‘Long Summer’  is very challenging to think through and write. While involving time shifting via a modified Alcubierre Drive (which involves, as well, exotic new materials and a whole other set of theories), it’s about the concept of now. Keeping that in mind as the parallel story lines twine together via the major characters and their alt existences causes me to pause and probe, asking myself, “Wait, which of the alts is this?” It’s imperative that each alt’s story is kept true and coherent. As I’m not a very coherent writer, you can imagine the babble in my head.
  5. All of that time shifting involves just the Humans, the ones known as Earth Humans, with the ones known only as Humans (from Aition) far less directly involved. Besides them, though, are the other intelligent life forms and their customs and civilizations. The story centers around a few of the Sabard and Travail, but the Monad’s plots and intentions drive much of the surface tension and action – or so it appears….
  6. ‘Long Summer’ has become so big as a Word manuscript that Word turned off several functions, like spell check and auto-correct. To counter that, I broke the novel up into its parts as manuscripts. It reduces my ability to move back and forth through scenes, parts and chapters, and demands that more documents be opened simultaneously, but I’ve recovered those Word functions. Overall, I consider that a win.
  7. I want to finish ‘Long Summer’ not only so that I can move on with writing ‘Personal Lessons with Savanna’, but because I need ‘Everything In Black And White’  copy-edited and published, along with ‘Spider City’, ‘Fix Everything’, and ‘Peerless’.  Besides them, new ideas have filled the writing bucket. There’s still that coffee shop musical percolating in my mind. I still want to do more with the Stellar Queen and the Magellan.
  8. Besides all this writing, my personal reading keeps falling behind. A friend dropped me an email yesterday. He finished reading the third novel in the Ferrante’s Neapolitan series and raved about it. Having read the first two, I want to read the third. Dozens of books besides it reside on my bookcases, night stand and other places, waiting for my attention.
  9. Meanwhile, I’m moving forward with paperback publication of the four published novels, so those of you bugging and encouraging me to do this, you win. I will do it. Soon. Really. I promise. I’m not crossing my fingers, either.
  10. But, I decided as well to have the covers for the Lessons with Savanna series redone. Time, energy and focus is necessary for that to happen, so bear with me.

Okay, with that out of the way, time to write like crazy, at least one more time. Back to the Wrinkle, Brett and Philea.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is one of many that suffered from mondegreens. ‘Alive and Kicking’ by Simple Minds came out in 1985. Stationed at Shaw AFB in SC after returning from Okinawa, I was assigned to the 1701 MOBSS.

I lived in Columbia, about twenty-nine miles away, and a straight shot down the highway. The MOB in our unit designation was short for mobility. We went on temporary duty to other locations regularly. Sometimes I drove to those locations, such as Eglin AFB in Florida. Between that and my daily commute between Columbia and Shaw, I listened to a bit of radio.

When the song came out, I swore they were sometimes singing, “I like the chicken.” Naturally, that’s what I walked around singing. Still do when I stream the song in my head.

Here they are. From 1985, Simple Minds with ‘Alive and Kicking’. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqpBB2uhRSM

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Catitor

Catitor (noun) feline visitor, including strays and neighborhood cats, to a house.

Example of use: Pepper is a regular catitor to our front porch.

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Coupdepaw

A coupdepaw takes place when a cat successfully steals something from under your nose without you noticing it.

Sweet Crystal, a Bombay Black with us decades ago, was a master of the coupdepaw. One Sunday morning in Columbia, SC, found us reading the newspaper on the floor while enjoying powdered sugar mini-doughnuts. With paper sections spread out on the floor, we had a plate of the doughnuts between us.

The doughnuts disappeared amazingly fast. Beginning to accuse each other of eating all the doughnuts, we looked behind us. There was sweet Crystal, innocently looking on, velvety black paws and face covered with white powdered sugar.

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Opening Doors

“Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.”
― Pablo Picasso

This quote was on Ed Lehming’s blog post, ‘The Breach’, today. The quote’s truth stormed me about other endeavors besides painting. I’d been thinking about this last night without Picasso’s quote, so I love the serendipity. I’d been thinking about how I will have been working on something, struggling to learn, understand or achieve, and then suddenly, everything lines up like a solved Rubik’s Cube. I’d done it many times in my life, facing the need to learn something and then struggling until it happens.

rubix_cube

Writing fiction is probably the greatest stretch for me. This struggle to learn happens with different elements with fiction writing. Writing is thought of as simple by many. What’s there to do but write words and tell a story?

Writers, editors and good readers understand that’s a simplistic summary. Fiction writing requires learning multiple pieces that are often taken for granted because most people only see the finished work. We know better. Sometimes the lessons learned about pacing, characters, story-telling, voice and everything else needs learned anew when writing the next project. Contemplating that, I believe that each novel or story in progress has a moment when a door opens, and the scene being worked becomes a stepping stone to other things.

It doesn’t come easily. The challenge remains to muster the focus, apply the time and energy, and accept the patience needed for me to reach the door, find and open it. These elements of focus, time, energy and acceptance are typically thought of on a conscious level. I think they work better on a subconscious level. I let the needs seep down in. Walk away. Do other things.

Eventually, the focus, time, and energy finds the path to the door. That’s a glorious exciting epiphany when the door is suddenly there. Another challenge arises then to open it and see what’s on the other side.

Within this process is the beauty of acceptance, of letting it work, of being strong and bold enough to believe it will work. It takes time. This time and patience is invaluable coin. When it works and the door opens and I step through, I create a positive loop of knowing I can face problems and challenges, and overcome them. That feeds me confidence to try again, and again and again, and to keep going. More, though, my journey becomes richer, more joyful and satisfying.

It really is a beautiful process, these exercises in imagination and creativity called writing.

Yes, I know, it’s a messy post, all over the place. I’m exploring territory. Writing helps me map the terrain.

To all, have a good writing day.

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