Hei Matau

In the spirit of surfing, and of my interest in all things Polynesian, I recently bought a Maori (New Zealand Polynesian) fish hook necklace. It is made of bone ("Human?" someone asked in horror, which made me laugh, and also made me realize that, vegetarian though I am, I didn't actually give a shit if it were human). According to the seller, the carving

signifies abundance and plenty, strength and determination. A good luck charm for catching good luck and positive energy, and safe journey over water.

It just seemed like a really nice necklace for a chick who digs water, and surfing, and Polynesia. I might even have to come up with a haiku...

Sad, Sad, Sad...

The happiest day of the year is when I arrive in New England to see my sister, her husband, and my nephew and niece. The second happiest day of the year is when I fill my pool.

The saddest day of the year is when I have to leave New England. The second saddest is when I empty my pool.

Today is the second saddest day of the year.

Other people's problems

People like to tell me things. I am not exaggerating when I say that perfect strangers have come up to me and started telling me intimate details of their lives. I've thought that maybe I should go into counseling, because I obviously look like I care. Sometimes I do, but mostly I don't. I do find other people and their problems interesting though. I guess that's why I got that useless degree in Psychology way back when, because I wanted to study people. When it came down to actually working with people and their problems, I found myself wishing that I could be a carpenter or something simple like that, where at the end of the day you could actually see some progress.

So when I start wallowing in my own self-pity (oh, I'm so tired because my son with CF kept me up coughing in the middle of the night...), I think of other people's problems, and I don't feel so bad. Because everyone I know has got them, and I wouldn't trade with any of them. Now, if I knew someone who had the problem of having too much money and not knowing what to do with it, I would be willing to trade problems with them.

One day, when I was feeling particularly tired, a friend of mine sent me a link to a blog, which I have since lost, by this young woman who works a full-time job, has an infant, AND she herself has CF (Cystic Fibrosis). I thought, damn, it's hard enough to take care of yourself when you have an infant, let alone working full-time, then top that with this life-threatening illness...argh. I really wished at that moment that I had the problem of too much money, I would have sent her a boatload.

Then there are the people who you think have it made, but when you really get to know them, you see that they too have problems that you would not want. So what the hell am I getting at? Not really sure. Just wanted to share a thought, since I have been so busy lately and haven't contributed much to our ongoing online conversation.

I have been soooo busy, and soooo tired, but I've been having a great time too. Sure, I've got some serious problems. My son has this serious life-threatening illness. My husband works two random part-time jobs and we never know when or how much money we will have. I don't have a job at all. So I work full-time at being the best mother, wife, and household manager that I can be, and sometimes I still come up short. But I also get to go for long runs in the mountains with my incredibly fit husband with whom I am still in love after 14 years.

So, that's life. We all have problems. We need to be compassionate with others because you never know what kind of shit they are dealing with. And be thankful for those days when the problems are small, or at least manageable, and you get a quiet moment to sit and write or walk outside on a beautiful day. Which is what I plan to do today.

a relatively mild and somewhat thoughtful rant

I am terribly sick of reading shit by published writers who have obviously stolen my fucking ideas. And of discovering that plot devices I have used are as common as flies on feces. And of having to consider and reconsider the title of the book.

Over the last few days, I've been reading Angelology, by Danielle Trussoni. The first twenty pages sucked me in, then the quality of the writing and the pace made me suspect that the senior editors had polished up those first twenty pages and quit, handing the rest of it down to the interns. Maybe they figured that once a reader is hooked, she won't put a book down. Fuckers are right, too, at least in my case.

The book is a fictional interpretation of angels, fallen and otherwise, and how they interact with the human world. Published this year. So I have to read it, to stay current and know what to rip off and what I can't, what works in terms of theory and application and what doesn't.

Parts of Angelology made me cackle, and not in a way that Trussoni would appreciate.* At the same time, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief that her take on fallen angels and the Nephilim (their progeny) digresses from mine in several major ways. Also she's hooking her concepts into a big good versus evil/end of the world kind of thing, whereas I just want to write a good love story.

That's another thing that distances me from this novel – it lacks the emotional depth that, for me, translates into the ephemeral quality of soul, of heart. And there are great passions described in this novel, human and “Nephilistic,” but they are described, not evoked. There's a ton of telling and not showing. I kinda thought that wasn't a good thing? Then again, I don't think emotional involvement is what she's going for; this is trying to be a thriller more than anything else. But hell, if I'm not going to get emotionally involved, I'd just as soon read Wikipedia.

Angelology is well-researched, much more so than my paltry efforts, and very imaginative. But the narrative devices, not to mention the names, strike me as more than a little contrived, and I don't really give a shit about any of the characters, not even the ones I want to like. This is uncharacteristic for me. Could be me, could be the writing. Either way, I'll be glad when it's over. Which doesn't really recommend it much.

I didn't mean for this a book review. I was supposed to segue very smoothly into a mention of one of the writer's blurbs on the back cover, you know, where other writers gush about the book in hopes that you'll trust them enough to give it a shot.

Four quotes down is a blurb by Raymond Khoury, author of The Last Templar and Sanctuary.

Goddamn it. Another one. William Faulkner published his potboiler Sanctuary in 1931. Way different from mine, but there it is. Then there's the TV show, which is straight-up sci-fi and has not exactly made enormous waves, critically speaking, but it's been renewed for a third season so apparently it doesn't entirely suck, which is entirely beside the point anyway. Khoury's thriller is actually called The Sanctuary, and I'm actually tempted to read it if only because I can't distill the idea of it into three or four words.

The main problem, as I see it, is Nora Roberts. You may have heard of her. Her Sanctuary is a romance, but, happily, not a paranormal one. There's a town called Sanctuary that's featured in the book, is all, and I haven't read it to find out how meaningful the word is.

It is profoundly meaningful to me. I had some godawful title picked out years ago, thinking, well, this sucks ass but it'll do for now and surely something better will strike me eventually. I can't remember when Sanctuary popped into my head, but as soon as it did, it stuck fast.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the word is so flexible. In one sense, it means safety, a place of refuge. The other sense is a consecrated place of worship. For my story, it works on both these levels, because there's such a strong religious background to the thing. You can hardly escape it if you're writing about an angel and a witch, and I have no desire to. It works in the other sense, too. My MCs come to find sanctuary with each other, realizing that physical walls can't keep you safe any more than they can define a place of worship. Only love does that.

And ain't that just the cheesiest shit you ever heard? Fucking A.

But damn it, there's no other word that says safety and worship at the same time. I've looked. Extensively. And I've toyed with other cheesy titles, more traditionally romantic, that are so wretched I can't bring myself to repeat them to anyone, let along on a public blog.

Also, I had the names of the next two books picked out, both of which are single words beginning with S. Sanctuary, Serenity, Salvation. I mean, shit, how much simpler can it be, right?

But there are other things to worry about at the moment. For example, the soon-to-be-published fantasist in the critical writing group has mentioned in a crit for another person that using a random homeless person or bum as a plot device is almost a cliché. So, fuck, there's another scene that will need tweaking. Not a big deal, really, it's making me flex my muscles, imaginationally speaking (new word, you like it?).

Then there's the mention of a John Travolta movie called Michael, where the angel smells like cookies to a particular woman. One of my critters mentioned that a while back, too, so I'm having to work in a slightly different direction to keep that original.

Individually, these aren't hard to manage. What worries me is that there are more that I'm missing.

And sometimes I just have to throw up my hands and say, well, fuck, there are reasons for the cliches and they're called goddamned archetypes, you know? Scary things are underground, in basements, dungeons, caves, and catacombs. New York City is a backdrop for so many stories because it's bursting at the seams with them – anything you can possibly imagine has happened in New York City, and probably a lot of shit you can't, or would prefer not to. Homeless people make good stand-in characters because they're so far out of the norm you can make them do anything and it doesn't necessarily have to make sense immediately. Pull in a homeless person, a bum, a lunatic, and you immediately tap into the idea of the fringes of sanity and society, the absence of rules, the absence of safety. The element of chaos, in other words. And deathbed revelations happen because people often try to tie up their loose ends before they die. There's a reason we cherish last words.

Maybe it's not just cliché – maybe it's commonality, a language of story that we all understand. I don't know. Whatever.

It's not slowing me down, it's not messing with my motivation or making me doubt the work or the writing, it's just annoying. That's all.

Hope this post finds you both well, and looking forward to Halloween, even though some evil fucker scheduled it on a school night.

~Andi

*I am basing this on the sometimes pretentious writing, not to mention the author photograph on the inside back jacket. Maybe she does have a sense of humor – but if so, it doesn't show in this book.

Superfly (Ball)

I'm a bitch in the fall -- October, anyway. You might have gotten a sense of that from my last post, but I'm actually deadly serious. The baseball postseason renders me useless, foul, and heinously cold to those who love me. I don't care. I mean, I don't care that I'm like that, and I don't care about you.

I don't know what that says about me. Normally I not only consider myself highly empathetic, I pride myself on that quality. The baseball playoffs send all that sensitive crap out the window. For one month, I don't give a shit. I just want to soak up all the baseball I can before winter arrives and there's no baseball and there's no swimming and I'd rather just hibernate, but no one gives me that fucking choice, now, do they?

I've said as much about the playoffs and about October, here and elsewhere. Andi astutely noted that I can also be useless during the major tennis tournaments but, trust me, it's not the same. I'm kinda sorta out-of-touch during the Grand Slams. Baseball? I'm another person.

I've made that absence plain over the years. Once, my BF told me we were hosting a party during a playoff night. I told him he could either reschedule or understand that I would not talk or mingle or even cook during the game. He didn't reschedule. I didn't acknowledge anyone's presence until the game was over.

Another time, the constant ringing of the phone drove me mad. So I recorded a new message for my voicemail. "Hi, this is Kelly. You didn't really think I'd answer the phone during baseball playoffs? Leave a message and I'll get back to you in November."

So...I don't know if I have a point. But that's how it is.

writing on the wall

Last night Aeryn and I went to our local library to see a two-woman play called We Can Do It, about notable female figures in American history. It was a little heavy-handed at times, but it had its moments, especially in their portrayal of Susan B. Anthony, who did a lot of pissed-off hopping around and bitching that her amendment extending voting rights to women didn’t pass until forty-two years after her death. Elizabeth Cady Stanton replied, rather archly, “Yes, but you were the only woman to ever be on American currency. I got a stamp.”

Then there was the dialogue between contemporaries Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross, and Elizabeth Van Lew, who was a spy for the Union during the Civil War. The take on Van Lew was very funny – she did a lot of slinking about onstage and saying mysteriously, “I might be… or I might not!” Clara Barton was an effective straight man to Van Lew’s outrageousness.*

During the play, the actors pointed out the quotes written on the walls of the set – from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the aforementioned Clara Barton to Eleanor Roosevelt. And towards the end, they started talking about what their own contributions to the world would be.

Specifically, one asked, “What will you write on the wall?”

A chill crept up my back.

The other looked at her partner with wide eyes and said, “Uh. Er. That’s a huge question. I have no idea!” Which I thought was a damned honest answer.

The first actor said, “Well, you don’t have to answer now, do you? Many of these women didn’t come into their own until later in life, after they’d lived and learned and experienced so much in the world.” She went on to note that Clara Barton founded the Red Cross when she was sixty. Sojourner Truth delivered the “Ain’t I A Woman” speech when she was fifty-four. And Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish Little House on the Prairie until she was sixty-five years old.

See, I don’t want to cover the wall. I just want a little square inch that shows people transcending what they believe to be their essential dichotomies and differences, through couragelovetrustcompassionhonestyimagination. You know, that shit.

And I want to raise my daughter so that she uses her extraordinary emotional intelligence and charisma to make the world a better place. To write her own message on the wall.

I’ll be forty in December. The point was obvious, even to me: It’s not too late to write on the wall. It never is.

Help!

I haven't written anything since last spring. Seriously, I can't think of anything, other than blog entries. It all stopped around the same time - my dog got shot, my hard-drive crashed, then the kids were out of school for the summer. It all added up to no writing for me.

I work really hard at being a good parent, so much so that I ignore my own needs. And I'm talking about basic needs like sleep and food, forget about my creative needs. But let's not forget about them. They are important. I need to remember, and to focus.

But when it comes to writing, I really feel like I need a new project. I want a big project, something I can really sink my metaphorical teeth into, but I need help forming a plan. How does one write a novel? What do I want to write about? I need an idea, a plot, some characters. I need to come up with a few good characters and put them in a room together, let them talk it out.

See, I'm really fucking lost here. For a little while today I considered going back to one of my old projects but I get stuck. I don't want to be stuck there, I want to go out into new places, explore new ideas. Or at least put new ideas into the old places.

It seems so cliche to me, but I keep going back to New England in my mind, the way that so many writers tend to write about the place where they grew up. I want to write about the crisp fall air and the brilliant leaves and halloween and the scary movies of the early 80s...I want to write about sneaking out at night and creepy old New England houses...the unsolved serial murders of teenage girls in the town next door...

I just don't know where to begin.

Bittersweet October

It rained tonight, the first real rain in nearly a month, and reminded me again that October is so fucking bittersweet. Not like bittersweet chocolate, an awful lie (that shit is mostly just sweet), but truly bittersweet, in a way that can close your throat with joy and tears at the same time.

Why must you do this to me, October? Let me count the ways...

Summer is over. Oh, it's still been pretty warm here, eighties and even ninety in the past week or so. But a chill creeps into the late night air and I know winter is around the corner. There is no exuberant display of autumn leaves, unlike my childhood home. It always looks the same in southern New Mexico. It's gorgeous desert. But there's not even that payoff. Fuck you, non-existent leaves.

The pool must be drained. I always put this off at least two weeks past a reasonable point. There's no way I'm going swimming again. But the water looks so lovely and inviting, shimmering under the brilliant sun. I mourn its absence even while it's still there. Don't leave me cold and dry!

Baseball -- the post-season -- so exciting! The White Sox didn't make it this year, but any baseball is good baseball. But after the World Series...nothing until spring training in March. Oh, fuck you, baseball, why must you go away every year and leave me all alone?

Halloween, my favorite holiday since I was old enough to grasp the concept. What could be more delightful than to cuddle in an old (or new) York Beach sweatshirt after the sun goes down and fall into the seductively evil embrace of a Christopher Lee Hammer films marathon? I love you, C-Lee Dracula!

Oh, October, my own secret abusive boyfriend. Fuck you, October. I love you so much.