Declaration of Me

I'm in a dangerous mood today. Since I don't have anyplace suitable (i.e., private enough) for dancing like a lunatic and screaming at the top of my lungs...

I’m alone here
in this room
with the music
in my head
and my feet
move silent
to the beat
of the drum
that I hear
in my head
in my room
while I’m alone.

I've always been alone. I remember in seventh grade, my English teacher gave me a compliment--or at least, I interpreted it as a complement at the time. I wrote a half page story and she said it contained a novel's worth of buried fury. So I decided then that I was going to be a writer. Thirty years later I find myself with an obsession that has me by the throat and won't let go.

It echoes in the lonely silences
an endless twisting rhyme that rules my world.
Not only sound, but color, rhythm, light,
it dances through my day and dreams my night.

I wake and free the rhythm and the rhyme
to twist the dance into a human form.
The story shapes itself--I have no part--
and dreams escape the boundaries of time.

I sleep and shape the color and the light,
then form a dream into reality.
The painting moves my hand--it is not planned--
a lonely dance of medium and life.

The art creates itself with paint or ink,
with quiet promises it leads me on.
The end of life, the last of this creation
shall be my final epitaph in stone.

The obsession has never moderated, nor do I want it to. I've always been a writer. But sometimes there's an edge, a hint of something else beyond "just" a writer. Possibility. And I have to dance, or sing, or just sit and fidget because the joy of being fills me to overflowing and I just...can't...

Living consists of
a constant awareness
of the simple things--
breath, sunlight, wind, blood

But then there are the quiet moments, when I sit and listen. I was taught (not told, taught) to be inconspicuous, not to put myself forward or speak my thoughts. And so we have at the last a declaration of me. Take it as you will, because once these things are out of my mind they're out of my hands as well.

Duck and hide,
Don't draw attention
To the beauty you
See inside yourself.

That's boasting.

Duck and cringe,
Waiting to be attacked
For daring to change
The unchangeable.

That's rebellion.

Stand and wait,
Because boasting
Is the beginning
Of rebellion, and
Rebellion has
its own ends.

That's a given.

Long ago and far away

When I was about fifteen, or maybe ten, I realized that my stories were made up entirely of lists. I had passive characters who wandered through life making lists of what they would do if they weren't passive wimps. Grocery lists, runaway lists, name lists, dream lists.

Actually I think it must have been closer to ten. So I fixed it. I stopped making lists, and started actually having my characters do something. Anything. It was an uphill battle. Then a few years later (I'd conquered my mountain of lists) I realized something else.

All my stories were description. Descriptions of places, descriptions of people and things and descriptions of what my characters should be doing but weren't. I had mastered the art of description to the point where my stories were nothing else.

At that point, I made a mistake. In hindsight I can call it a mistake, but at the time I was simply correcting the problem I found. I was writing too much description, therefore I should write less description.

At that point, my process of writing was much like a movie. The story flowed past my mind's eye and I wrote down what I saw. That being the case, the best way to use less description was to stop visualizing, right?

So I practiced until the words flowed from my fingers to the page without once passing through a visual check. To the point that I stopped seeing the real world. To the point that now, my characters have been described as "placeholders in a shadow world" and I need to do a complete description edit before I even think of publishing. Even at that, most of my readers want more description than I'm giving them.

It occurred to me last week that I need to learn to visualize again. When I was doing the description edit of Without A Voice I struggled to visualize so I could get the details right. I think it worked, but then I dropped the idea. I never internalized it.

If I can visualize what's happening while I write, I might eventually be able to bypass the description edit completely. At this point it's a line by line fight, and one of the hardest edits. The emotion edit is the other, but that's a blog post for another time.

It's an uphill battle, but I'm determined to win.

Good intentions

I downloaded a marketing course a few days ago. I've been reading through the course materials, checking e-mails, checking facebook, and I realized that I haven't done any writing this week. A couple words on Monday.

Part of it is because I'm working on a story and I have no idea where it's going. Well, I never have any idea where it's going, but for some reason this one is resistant to pantsing. So I try to write and just sit there staring at the screen, which is neither comfortable nor useful.

But mostly it's just because social media has sneaked up on me again.

I usually check it in the morning, before I begin writing. I try to leave it alone for the rest of the day. But you know, it's a geometrical progression. The more "friends" I have the more people I have to check, and the more people I have to look at, and laugh with, the more things I like, the longer it takes.

So, the Facebook sucking is over. I'm on a Facebook fast for the next week.

See you next Monday!

Rants about Writing

I had a number of posts all ready to go, and in trying to decide which to actually use (the rest will go into some limbo where they dig at my back-brain and whisper threats) I started something else entirely.

I found a copy of Ayn Rand's "writing classes." I figured why not? So I started reading it.

It seems (according this self-proclaimed "master") that there is only one way to write--hers. Her way or the highway, and anyone objecting is an idiot. Or a religious zealot, which is a rant for another day. Although she's got a lot of good information, it really irritates me when another author (successful or not) states that my way is by definition wrong.

Supposedly, her own books are the only books out there worth reading. She has some faint praise for a few of the classics, but mostly contempt.

According to Ayn Rand, if you don't consciously think about and plan every word of every sentence of every paragraph you're not a writer. You're just slapping some garbage together and you might get lucky. If you can't point out why you used a particular word, it shouldn't be there. Sure, I know why I used it. Scarlet wasn't the right color, red is too bland and magenta too formal. So I ended up with crimson. And don't get me started on "the."

Everyone is different. Everyone thinks differently, no artist ever paints exactly the same way. No writer ever writes exactly the same way. And somehow, in spite of not being Rand-clones, millions of authors have managed to pump out millions of books that are very well done, even if they're not brilliant by her narrow definition.

I DON'T WRITE THAT WAY, and honestly I hope I never get to the point where I'm dissecting every single word before I allow myself to write it. Spontaneity might be a bad word in Ayn Rand's vocabulary, but not in mine.

And I still manage to write well.

So there!

Versatile Blogger

Jeff Hargett of Strands of Pattern gave me the Versatile Blogger award!



With this award there are a few things that I need to do:

Thank and link back to the person who sent me the award.
Write 7 random facts about myself.
Nominate 7 other bloggers for the award.

So here goes.

1 I quit my job nine months ago to focus on my writing
2 I write, I dance, I write some more
3 I have 28 Niece-phews. Nessies? Whatever
4 I talk to my plants
5 I'm interested in everything
6 The first science fiction book I ever read was The Forgotten Door
7 I make my own soap

And seven people who I'm going to blind-side with this:

Taffy Lovell
Alice Beesley
Mette Harrison
J A Bennett
Jack Flacco
Julie Wright
T Z Wallace

Fairy Tale: The Special Tree

Good morning!

Yes, I'm well aware that you might not be reading this in the morning, but it's morning somewhere or we're all in serious trouble. I'll discuss that some other time.

I'm sitting here in the shade, with my computer on my lap, reading my fairy tales.

I like doing fairy tale retellings (after all, a fairy tale is just a mini-plot) but the existing fairy tales don't always say what I want to say. So I write my own. I've thought about doing them as picture books, but as I learned last week (from a picture book author that we interviewed for writingsnippets.com) most picture books aren't any longer than 500 words.

I thought my fairy tales might be a little long, but I didn't know they were that long! Apparently 2000 words is too long for a picture book. Very sad. I may cry.

So I'll just enjoy them myself, and continue to write new ones for my niece-phews (nessies?).

Most times the stories I write from them come out looking as much like the original fairy tales as a cross between a tarantula and a penguin in a fun-house mirror.

Sometimes I write the fairy tale after the fact, but even then they seldom have any relationship to the story they're modeled after. I particularly like the Princess and the Dragon, but The Storyteller was fun to write. In reality they're all fun to write, but neither of those has been used in a novel. Yet.