Back in the Saddle?

I'm having a rare night at home. Relatives are staying with Mother and I'm joyously sitting in my big green chair and (glory of glories) writing. Of course, I should be finishing up the grading of the 1200 writing assessments, but time at home is so unusual, well, you know.

I once asked the question, "Are you a writer if no one reads your work?" Tonight I had an epiphany. The answer is a resounding, "Yes." My great moment came when I felt the need to rush to my keyboard and pound out a few words. I am a writer, whether a good one or a bad one. I need to spend time weaving intricate plot lines just like I need to breathe. That must mean that I AM a writer, no matter how many doubts I've had in the past.

Time away from the thing you love does make the heart grow fonder, at least in my case. The absence of writing made me irritable. A psychological study of that long ago case of the railroad spike that somehow ended up in a man's head said that the spike made him irritable, so I guess he and I have something in common. Not being able to write gave me the same symptoms. Go figure.

Although this particular blog has been touted by some, it's sort of fallen by the wayside. That is, it has fallen by the wayside since I've been unable to update frequently. I choose to believe the sparing entries are the cause rather than think my muse has slipped away and I've become uninteresting and boring. The multiple visitors that I once enjoyed with each entry have found other blogs to visit and I seldom get many hits these days. This doesn't stop me, however. I write. I write on this blog and a couple more. I comment on the blogs of friends and ,sometimes, strangers. I am a writer, whether I have the means to write or not. Undaunted by disinterest, I keep on plugging...writing away, commenting on the joy of the written word.

Alas, poor Yorik.

I've been spending my downtime working. Not writing, unfortunately, but grading 1200 papers for the university writing assessment. Although tedious, I've found what the students have to say about writing very interesting. For example, almost all of the papers I've read so far say something to the effect that writing would be fun if there weren't so many "rules." I suppose that's true. If we never had to stop to insert a comma or indent a paragraph, if we could just keep going and ignore spelling and mechanics, everyone would enjoy writing. Alas, we cannot. We cannot ignore the basic rules of composition.



When I'm teaching, I try to explain that the rules of grammar are in place for a purpose. I use this analogy:

You've been invited to the party of the year and you've been given written directions: turn right at the second stop light, left onto Elm, go the the third stop sign, make a left onto Bird's Eye Ave, and the party's at the third house on the right. You put on your best duds, jump into the car and start out. Suddenly, you realize that there are no stop lights, no street signs. How do you find the party? You're hopelessly lost with no way to find the party of the year.

I tell them that grammar and mechanics are like those roadsigns. They help the reader interpret the writer's work. Without those rules of grammar, no one would understand anything that's ever been written.

There are rules, some can be broken by the wants/desires of the agenting and publishing community like that "single space between sentences" thing that's all the rage. Cormac McCarthy seldom if ever uses quotation marks during dialogue (but then he's Cormac McCarthy). The comma preceding a conjunction in a compound sentence is now dust on the publishing house floor. BUT (big but) most of us still cling to the rules, those grammatical roadsigns we so desperately need. To write, the would-be author must not only be good at spinning that fascinating yarn. He/she must be good at the craft of writing, the rules, the mechanics.

Well, there's my two-cents worth, but then again, I'm an English teacher by avocation. Those rules of grammar work and they've provided me with one more semester of work as a member of adjunct faculty.

Hello Again!

It's been quite a while since I had time to post. My mother's injury requires that she have care 24/7, and for the most part, that's me. As for writing, it's in my head mostly. I seldom have time to spend concocting a storyline or adding to the WIP.

As for the novel that's with my betas, still no word. I don't know whether they've just given up on me, it's so bad they can't find the words, or if they haven't even opened the file. That's the way it goes. Abscence, my friends, does not make the heart grow fonder. All I have to work with when it comes to edits is the new crit partner. She rocks, btw. She has given me a few suggestions as to how I might better develop some characters and she's pointed out a few grammar gaffs. If and when I get time, I'll work on those elements, all the while hoping that the Dawg Pack is chewing on my latest offering.

I may write something about my recent experience with my mother. I'm not sure whether it will be a short or a novel length story. I've been mulling over lots of things. For example, when my late husband and father were involved in hospice care, one of the nurses told me a story, a story that corroborated an experience I'd had with both. My conversation with that nurse has sparked many a sigh and many long periods of deep thought. Now and again, it still pops to the forefront of my brain, and for some reason, I think my hind brain is formulating something, a book or maybe just an essay on the event. Whatever is happening back there in the recesses has been bubbling up lately, maybe because I am once more a caretaker and maybe because it's almost completed percolating. Who knows?

At this point, I'm just so tired I can't think straight. Ever been there?

Life Rears Its Ugly Head

A little less than two weeks ago, I received that phone call, the one you never want to receive. My eighty-two-year-old mother had fallen from her front porch and broken her back. Not just her back, but both bones in her left arm and her left thumb. Needless to say, I dropped everything and went to her side.

It's funny how things work out. We become so involved in our own lives that we often forget how many lives are entwined with ours. Our parents. Our children. Our friends. We laugh and say we don't like people. We chuckle at the 'idiots' on the road, but we forget that we're on the road and we are people, too. John Donne once proclaimed that "no man is an island." I've never been more certain that Donne is correct.

Before I knew God had ordained that I be a writer, I knew I was a daughter. I looked into my mother's hazel eyes, asking for comfort or guidance. Now, I'm her comfort. Life is truly a circle.

As Justice of the Peace, I've performed thousands of wedding ceremonies. In each ceremony, I raise the wedding rings and note that they are in the form of a circle with no ending and no beginning. I smile and say, "This circle, the symbol of commitment, stands as a reminder that love has no end." That's the way it is with a parent. They shed their love like nourishing rain, hoping to water the healthy emotional growth of a child. Now, it's my turn, I suppose. Now, I can return the favor of love my mother granted me over the years.

As she lays trapped inside the back and neck brace, I can show her what I have become. Although I wish it had happened in a less painful way, I have the opportunity to let her see what that nourishing flood of love she offered during my life has sparked. I have the opportunity to be kind and loving, to be supportive and encouraging. I hope I'm woman enough to catch hold of the opportunity.

Mother's recovery will be long and painful, but in the end, the doctors say she will recover but not without scars. The active life she once enjoyed will be hindered by chronic back pain. Her garden and yard work, the things she most enjoys during warm weather, are completely gone from this summer and possibly from the few summers she has left on this earth. I ask my readers for their prayers and, for those who do not pray to send good thoughts our way.

My life is temporarily on hold. I have little time to write, but in not writing, I have ample time to think about what family relationships should be: the continuation of emotional nourishment. My mother's fall is a learning experience, and I pray that I can take advantage of this new opportunity for education.

Once more into the Breach

Okay. The new WIP is not working for me. I write. I delete. I write, and then I delete what I've written. I just can't seem to get where I want to go from where I am. What does that mean?

It could mean that I'm too close, that I've included too much of me and not enough of my characters. I'm not letting them live, letting them become their own creatures. It could mean that I'm completely off track, that the world I've created isn't capable of carrying the storyline. It could mean that I'm writing crap and don't realize it. Anything's possible.

Solution? Oh, yeah. There's always a solution. Trunk it. Wait a few weeks and go at it once again. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. What will I do in between, you ask. Well...since I had to open the trunk, I noticed a fully formed being lying right there in the bottom. The first book. The one that prompted an agent to suggest some changes. What changes? (my secret.)

What I'm going to do is start from scratch, change the POV, pump up the back story and make the plot a true tale of discovery. Vague, you say? Yes, maybe, but I can't stop writing. The creative muscle atrophies if you don't exercise it, just like any other muscle in the body. The more you exercise that creativity, the stronger it becomes. That's just how it works.

I'm not a quitter. Never have been. I've fought my way through three marriages: a philanderer, a batterer, and a psychologist (my best move. I got better at picking partners as time went on.) I've fought through the death of my youngest child. I fought to finish my education even when I became what the university calls a "non-traditional" student, and now, I teach at that same university. I fought to become a poet, and I've become a pretty damn good poet, if I do say so myself. (Read some of my stuff on Raphael's Village, then you decide.)

I won't quit, even though the current WIP has beaten me for the moment. When I finish my rewrite of the first book, whether it sparks a flame in an agent's eye or not, I'll open my trunk again. That's the way it works. I'll keep flexing my creative muscle until it's strong enough to lift that soon-to-become-my agent right out of his/her socks! (I also keep believing. Faith takes you a long way.)

Waiting

A member of my writing group tells a long-winded story about a jackass and his master trudging through the desert. She keeps repeating the same lines over and over as a test of her listener's ability to wait for the punch line. Even the most polite member of her audience finally gets itchy and tries to hurry her toward the finish, and of course, that listener IS the punchline when he or she has the repeated line pointed toward him/her: "Patience, Jackass, patience."

I try. I really try to be patient, to wait humbly and silently for the group to finish their individual read through of novel number two. I work on other projects, read, or considering the season, garden. So far, I've planted ten oak trees (mostly because they were gifts from the forest service), two dozen Impatience, an Astrbilis, three Azaleas, twelve tomatoes, an equal number of pepper plants, four rows of beans (Blue Lake to be precise), and six rows of potatoes. I've read four short stories, all rather lengthy, and now I'm starting on a Stephen J. Cannell mystery (I won the book in a poetry contest. First place). Tomorrow? I'm dying my hair red....again.

See....patience isn't easy even when your brain keeps telling you it's all part of the process. Some time ago, I blogged about how the writer is very much like the hero in Shawshank Redemption, how we've all got our little rock hammer pounding against that concrete wall. I thought myself very wise when I wrote that, and now, I have to return to my words over and over again in order to reaffirm my own advice.

Only one pack of cigarettes remains in my carton, a carton that I promised myself would be the last. I'm sweating. After I plant the rest of my Impatience tomorrow and dye my hair, I'm sure I'll head off to the tobacco store to get the next "last" carton.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, is immune from worry. Although 'worry' is totally non-productive and, to the best of my knowledge, has never resulted in one, single accomplishment, we all do it. I worry about people who claim they never worry. I worry about the length of my dog's toe nails. I worry about the cat, the garden, the grandchildren, my truck. Now, I worry about that 120,000 or so words of mine that rest in the hands of my writing group.

The late Rita Riddle, my friend and fellow poet, once confided that she worried, too. She said that her poems were like her children and submitting one of them was like putting her five-year-old on the school bus for the first day of kindergarten. She knew what she had when she put the child on the bus, but she never knew what she'd have when the child got off the bus at the end of the day. Editors edit, and so do members of a writing group. It's all about trust. I trust my group, and I must trust that they will all operate in my best interests. They haven't failed me so far, so I've got the hair dye waiting in the bathroom and the shovel and gardening can are already by the flower bed.

It's been a while, a long while since I was here. I tell my students that if life were a highway and each living individual was traveling down that highway, eighty-five percent of us would be in the passenger seat, letting someone else drive our vehicle. When we're unwell (if that's a word), invariably, someone or something else slips into the drivers seat of our life-vehicle. For a few weeks, I'm afraid I joined the statistics and moved over to my passenger seat. I didn't like it there, so I bumped the driver and took control again. So far...it's working out all right.

Last night, I returned to the third novel. As always, I read what I had written earlier, performed some surgical incisions, removed a bump here and a scar there, and I think I might have something. I added another 500 or so words (Hey, I didn't start until like 10:00 PM, so don't fault me on word count), and I'm liking where it's going.

Problem? Of course, there's a problem. Research. I hate research, viewing it as a sort of cross between that proverbial sharp stick in the eye and constipation. I know what I want my main character to do, but I have to find out if it's really possible for someone to do that particular deed.

"But this is fiction," you say.

"Yep! This is fiction, but whatever the task you want your characters to perform, it must be possible. Without some measure of reality, the whole book might die of spontaneous combustion."

"Hey, don't give me that. What about that old 'suspension of disbelief' thing? If you're such a good writer, why can't you make the reader BELIEVE the impossible is possible," you scoff smugly.

It's true. Every writer must spin the tale in such a way that the reader believes that the consumption of mercury actually can create a mutant, twelve foot monster that eats babies for breakfast; however, the good writer must throw in just enough truth about genetic mutations, the long-term effects of mercury, and how and in what quantities mercury might be ingested in order to create the illusion that he/she knows what the hell they're talking about. Most people know it isn't nice to eat mercury, that it causes some pretty severe birth defects, so the writer must take that info and expand on it to build a bridge between reality and what might be possible. Research, therefore, is an essential part of any novelist's work.

Snake bites, for instance. In my first novel, I needed to have a character die from a snake bite. Through my research into how that might happen, I discovered I had the wrong snake. In the eastern US, we have a snake called a 'copperhead.' It's a beautiful creature but one to be avoided at all times. Copperhead's have short fuses, often attacking before they're really threatened, and I'd always heard they were deadly. Not so, or so says my research. Copperhead venom won't kill an adult, but it can make you wish you were dead, offering up a variety of symptoms which, although painful, do not usually result in death. I discovered that I needed an eastern diamondback, a purveyor of hemo-toxin. When left unfettered by anti-venom, the hemo-toxin races through the bloodstream of a victim and slowly dissolves internal organs, causing swelling, internal bleeding often characterized by large blood pools forming just beneath the dermis, delirium and then, you guessed it, death. Research. Without it, anyone who really knew anything about snakes would have thrown my novel into the fireplace, laughing heartily about my misinformed presentation.

I don't know why the word 'research' conjures up so many demons in the back of a writer's (or really anyone's) mind. We do research everyday without ever including the word in conversation. We look up phone numbers. We check recipes. We study the winning lottery numbers for previous weeks as we fill in the dots on our tickets, hoping we're choosing the numbers most frequently called. We research names for our unborn children. We research prospective colleges and universities. We ask questions about the new neighbors.

Researching the possibilities is just as important as writing the novel. Don't write about Paris if you've never been there. Lots of people have been to Paris, and they will recognize false information resulting in market loss, defined in this case as lost readers. As a would-be published writer, I can't afford to lose readers. I need everyone who can read to pick up my novel and 'ooh' and 'ahh' over the darned thing.

Well, that's it. I've put it off long enough. I need to find out how a hacker can hack, develop a cult following, and not be readily caught by the powers that be. Wish me luck!