Random Acts of Kindness

There's one thing I've long been convinced of (and many different restaurant jobs didn't hurt) -- that the likelihood of someone complaining when something goes wrong is fucking exponentially greater than of anyone saying a simple thank-you. I try to remember that at all times. Kind human contact matters, whether it's between best friends or between a grocery store clerk and customer.

So tonight I enjoyed a nice evening out with our friend John and his younger daughter Sue. Sue and I were having a grand old time at the IHOP -- they didn't have place-mats to color, but the waitress kindly brought us some blank paper and a Sharpie. So after we finished our meals, Sue and I wrote some poems for fun, and one of them was a brief haiku to leave the waitress alongside her tip. It was silly and shallow, but well intentioned.


IHOP Haiku

Hash browns, pancakes, eggs --
lovely servers and good food --
dinner at IHOP.


We each signed our name (Sue added a flower, and I scrawled a peace sign). The waitress seemed really surprised when she came to pick up the empty dishes that I had carefully stacked into a tower. "This is for me?" she asked, and tucked the haiku into her pocket. When she returned, she was beaming. "Which of you is Kelly and which is Sue? Thank you so much. I feel like a person tonight."

Yeah, she really said that.

Yeah. Like all it took to give someone a nice moment was something as small as that. I don't know if most people would find a haiku so cool. But I know I'm going to try it again.

Sandy Floors

Every so often, I'll catch a glimpse of something that sets off a powerful wave of nostalgia, a sense of longing so acute that I actually feel bereft. It's not any one specific thing, but it's always some sort of visual image that calls to mind the 1970s, or New England, or both.

"Take me back there!" I want to scream, though I know it would be useless.

I'm not transported to one particular memory, but to a jumble of impressions. Summer by the shore (probably Maine; possibly Rhode Island). The breeze sings gently; the air warms my skin, but sun and salt tighten it, deliciously. People are everywhere on the beach, a blur of bright colors and red skin and oversized sunglasses.

Then I cross the road, asphalt burning the soles of my feet, and run inside a rented cottage. It's cheap and barely furnished, but it's only one block from the beach. The curtains are ancient checked gingham. Cool and dark here; the floors are covered with a fine layer of sand, pleasantly gritty underfoot.

I am tired even though it is only afternoon, and I am just a child. The cold New England waters buoy you up and then sap your strength. I climb into a creaky old twin bed, easing onto stiff cotton sheets, and shut my eyes. I can swim again later, I know. More sun, salt, sand. I drift away in a cocoon of quiet joy. Summer...

Who wouldn't want to go back?

The Violet Hour

Let's put the "high" in "High Elevations" for a change. I got up very, very early this morning -- not the violet hour, but murky, cranky, and exciting all at once. Just past five a.m., I jumped out of bed to watch the two men's tennis semifinals at Roland Garros. In the first match, my pick won, and I felt happiness, relief, and a sudden exhaustion brought on by too many late nights in the past two weeks.

Waiting for the second match, I wandered over the Internet to Slate magazine and found a delightful little gem of an article called "The greatness of gin," by Troy Patterson. He covers a number of cocktail books, focusing mostly on my own favorite liquor. Amongst the bon mots, one about the cocktail hour and martinis, by Bernard DeVoto, stood out:

This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. But it would not be a martini if we should see him.

Apparently DeVoto liked more vermouth in his mix than I do. But anyway, reading those words, I felt magically transported. What a lovely and accurate description of twilight...and martinis. And unicorns, probably.

Here's to the violet hour, wherever you are, and whatever you drink!

What matters most

Months ago Kiki posted a question about why we write. One of my responses had to do with the love of research, learning, and discovery. Ten-plus years ago, when I began Sanctuary, research consisted of bullshitting my way through a scene and focusing on the romance. Now, research means raiding the Internet for all the information I can lay my hands on, making phone calls to three different people for their expert opinion, and quite possibly annoying the fuck out of my husband by asking him stupid questions before he's had his second cup of coffee. I'm a morning person. He is not.

Today I have been learning about what it's like to be with and take care of someone you love who is dying. (Not personally.) Caring.com doesn't cut it here. I stumbled across a blog, which linked to another blog, which linked to another one, and on and on... I have had a glut of heartache tonight, and more information and personal experience than I know what to do with.

Today I have learned about MRIs, brain scans, chemotherapy side effects, seizures, memory loss, and blindness.

Today I have learned that I am an extremely lucky woman. I knew this already, because every time we sit down to dinner together, Brian says grace (believe it or not), I close my eyes and take a deep breath, filling myself easily with gratitude for the gifts I have been given. It feels so good I don't want to breathe out; I don't want the moment to end. But when it does, I open my eyes and see my family on either side of me, the myriad shades of green on the trees that surround our house, the soft beauty of the kitchen table my father made for us, and I feel twice-blessed, blessed that I have these gifts, and blessed that I am cognizant and coherent enough to appreciate them.

I have shitty days. I have mood swings, and some days I am so insanely self-centered that I think these things actually matter in the Grand Scheme. They don't. They're bullshit.

What matters most to me right now, at this moment, 12:53 AM, May 15th, is respect, compassion, gratitude, and love.

It's late, I'm maudlin, and I'm off to bed before I contradict myself and become a not-so-morning person in seven hours or so.

Sorry to have missed you this evening. Hope to check in with you soon.

~Andi

high anxiety

A friend told me this morning that she had been experiencing some high anxiety lately - her son is about to do end-of-grade testing for the first time, her older son just graduated from college, and she's right at her own midterm for the class in some kind of human resource management thingamajig. I thought of the Mel Brooks movie and immediately wished I hadn't - other than marrying Anne Bancroft, I really think Mel Brooks should have stayed out of the movies altogether; at least I wouldn't be stuck sharing a house with my husband's copy of Blazing Saddles.

I digress.

What she meant was that she was experiencing a high level of anxiety. I originally thought of vertigo. But as my day has progressed, I'm beginning to think that sometimes there's not much of a difference.

Tonight I feel like I'm scrabbling for any kind of grip on the edge of a crumbling cliff - desperate, shaky, weak, and at the very beginning of a freefall, that half a second when your stomach realizes it's about to drop, and drop for a very long time. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. And I hate heights. It makes me impatient, angry, mean. It's supposed to have to do with my menstrual cycles, but tonight it's triggered by something else.

I've done as much as I can with the first three chapters. I'll put a finishing touch on the first scene, maybe run a spell-check, put it off as long as I can, then I'm sending the first chapter out for critiquing to an online critical writing group - a group of writers who do not know me and have no emotional investment in this book at all.

I'm scared shitless. And at the same time, I know that once I do this, once I just post the thing and have done with it, I'll be able to move on, because I'm frankly sick as hell of the first three everfucking chapters.

Plus maybe I'll be a little less of a cunt to my family. They don't deserve this.

~Andi

Open Road

I've been thinking about the open road. Not a particular one -- just the thought in general. I wrote a post for the Daily Revolution last year, about the benefits of travelling in general, and crazy American places to visit in particular. It's been weighing on my mind recently.

How can you live one place forever? I don't know. It's not my experience. I know a lot of people, my boyfriend included, who have done just that. Okay, so in his example, that's not technically true. He moved across his state for college, then moved to a few other places for grad school and a job. But then he got his permanent job, and here we are. However, before college, he lived in maybe two or three houses max, in the same metro area.

Me? I don't even know if I can come up with an accurate count of where I lived pre-college (and during and post? Florida, Indiana, Florida again, New Mexico, Tennessee, New Mexico again, California, New Mexico yet again...). I think...Eliot and York, Maine; Somersworth and Rochester, NH; Gaithersburg and Mt. Airy, Maryland; York, Maine again; Gallup, New Mexico (two houses); York again; Enfield and Canaan, New Hampshire...the list is so long. A minimum of 13 houses in 18 years.

I know there's been a lot of research into how this kind of moving affects kids. I'm sure most of it is significant and affecting. Whatever the fuck. I liked it. A lot.

You know -- I don't know where I'm really going with this. Except I've been in my current house, and town, for coming up on nine years now. I find that incredible. Unbelievable. Impossible. It's a good place for us. But I look at the highway, any highway, and I can't comprehend that this is the end of the road. There is no end of the road, for me. I want to see those mileage signs forever.

How does it end?

It's not supposed to...

Solace

Last weekend my dog died. It was a traumatic experience and I don't really feel like talking about it anymore right now, but an interesting thing happened to me because of it. I found myself comforted, surprisingly, by something I've never really had much interest in: Baseball.

Immediately after leaving my euthanized, gunshot dog at the emergency vet clinic, I had to rush the boys to opening day of Little League. The weather, which had been warm and sunny, turned cold, cloudy, and windy. Eventually it started blowing rain around too. But all of us parents huddled around to watch our kids play.

Tom is doing little league for the first time this year, playing t-ball, and he's loving it. It's a great way to learn the game. And it is a friggin' riot to watch. I found myself comforted by the distraction of the game, the sudden shift in focus, the pure entertainment value of watching a bunch of 5 and 6 year olds learn the rules of the game.

Then this afternoon, as I was starting to feel mopey while hanging out at home without my dog, the boys invited me to some batting practice. We used big bouncy balls and a foam bat, a great way to get used to hitting without having to focus on that tiny little ball. As I watched my 6 year old show my 4 year old how to hold the bat, I had to smile. It was a beautiful thing.

persevere

so i'm writing this pain in the ass scene that has to do with my villain, and i've been working on the damned thing for days now and getting nowhere. tonight i finally figure out what the action of the scene needs to be, which is great, progress. i get to where the action actually happens. again, progress.

then the coffee wears off and so does the goddamned inspiration, such as it is. i'm tired. brian's already in bed and i know i'm not going anywhere with this tonight; i've already missed my self-set deadline, what the fuck difference does another night make at this point?

i alt-tab to another window, i don't even know what i'm looking at anymore. then i remember my desktop wallpaper, which is a silly cartoon image of two characters from a movie-that-shall-remain-nameless with very determined looks on their faces. and i think, it's 11:30. i can do another half an hour. even if it doesn't go anywhere, i can do another half an hour.

so i alt-tab back to the file. and i keep writing. and i make yet another discovery about my villain that fits quite nicely into the assignment we had about our villains a month or two ago, and another piece of the puzzle slides into place.

this is why i stay up an extra half an hour. no, the writing's not perfect by any means; i'll tighten it up later when i'm fresh. but there's a beginning and an ending and by God it's the first three chapters. hallelujia.

~andi

p.s. i got new running shoes today and they KICK ASS.

Desert Rain

view from my breezeway, in the rain

creosote in bloom

cactus in bloom

agave in bloom

Surprises can be so very, very nice. When I went to bed last night, I knew that there was supposed to be a slight chance of rain on Friday. When I woke up, though, it was raining already! It was the typical sort of rain we get here, other than monsoon thunderstorms -- a light, intermittent rain that somehow manages to soak the hard, dusty earth and release the pungent scent of creosote.

Most of my main characters over the last few years love rain. It's not something I do on purpose, particularly -- it's more that I can't imagine a protagonist who doesn't have that love. This is probably a terrible failure of imagination for a writer. But I don't give a fuck.

rain -- Rain -- RAIN!

Treasure Hunt

I'm not at a point where I can do this, but since the two of you are doing so much fun work bouncing ideas around, I thought maybe you would find this exercise interesting. It's from, of course, Writing Begins with the Breath (Hering).

Design a treasure hunt for your characters. Start with an object that has significant meaning to the character. Allow the character to focus on that object, describing it, holding it, imagining where it came from or how it came to be in his or her possession. Then, follow the object where it leads. Let the object, say, a socket wrench, spring you forward to a Rand McNally map of Nebraska. Let the map bounce you into a laundry room off a two-lane road in the Rockies. Keep going. Let object spring to object. Be specific in your descriptions. Enjoy the process. Let curiosity be your guide.

Both of your stories have travel as a starting point (or at least a very important theme) - so this could be a neat way to explore possibilities.

********

Based on both of your responses to my last post, I'm planning to send something out within a month. There's a small agency in NYC that will look at stuff as long as it's "in a mature stage of development" as long as you send in three complete chapters. I have my doubts about their effectiveness given their authors and publications, but it's worth a look. At the same time, there's an arts and music festival coming up over mother's day weekend in Black Mountain (www.theleaf.com) that is a very convenient deadline, plus there's no way I'm going to do a damned thing while I'm there except maybe catch up on my journal. So I'm pushing to get three chapters to readers at the earliest possible opportunity. Thanks to wise comments by my friends, my husband, and the plot monkeys, these three chapters are significantly different than what I started with. Which is fine; it's better. A lot better - or at least, it feels that way to me.

Wonder of wonders, I'm actually keeping up with the schedule. And I love it - the act of writing is so much more joyful than it was before I just accepted that there were some things that didn't belong in the story and ought to just go. Letting go has been a wonderful - if at times very painful - process.

So I hope to catch up with you both this weekend, hopefully? Until then, happy writing, happy imagining, happy running, happy baseball, happy everything, whatever you choose to do.

~Andi

Research Mania

I'm in a position kind of like Lori. I've had some interesting thoughts about where to take Valerie in her new life in Florida, but the words aren't getting set down yet because I went research-crazy (fuck the Internet! love the Internet!).

I was thinking about Valerie living in her uncle J's old trailer, and while I had fun describing it initially, I can't see her staying there permanently. I think it will be a struggle for her to let it go, in all likelihood, but she'll go eventually. Where? That's when the Internet possessed me. I decided that her little tiny town would have a row of shotgun cottages, and she will buy and perhaps renovate one of them. This led me on a delicious wild goose chase through history and floorplans and all sorts of dreamy ideas.

The upshot is that I didn't actually write anything down. None of these events would happen naturally in chapter two. But at the least, I feel like I have more pieces of the puzzle now, and that's a step in the right direction.

Life is a journey, not a destination

And goals give you something to look forward to. Is it really all about acheiving these goals at all? OK, so maybe that gives you a hint of how I did this week. It took me until Wednesday to get around to pulling out the stuff I wanted to look at, then I got sucked into it for the next couple of days. So, by Friday I had written one paragraph and had some idea of what I want to do, but really haven't acheived much that can be shown on paper.

Still, I feel good about it. There is definitely a story there, and I am looking forward to telling it, and sharing it with you. Now it's just a matter of putting it all together, one scene at a time. I started a list of scenes that I want to write, and started writing one, but I get caught up in questions like: where exactly should it begin, and where should it end? What should I name the characters?

As I said before, I want to write this story based on actual events, but at the same time call it a work of fiction. One reason for this is that everyone has their own unique perspective, and time and distance can warp memories into convenient fictions of their own accord. Of course I don't remember actual scenes exactly as they happened, and I want the freedom to make things fit together in a coherant way, as they don't always do in real life.

So I struggle with myself a little bit. I'll be writing a scene and a little voice in my head says, "that's not how it happened." And I have to stop and tell that voice to shut up, I'm the one writing this thing. One thing that is tough for me is names. I've decided to rename everyone, even though if any of the actual people involved read they thing, they will know immediately who they are and who most of the other people are. And it's sometimes hard for me to come up with names.

I also feel that I need to simplify things a bit for the story's sake, and that means eliminating some people / situations that were really important parts of my life at the time, but not really important parts of this particular story that I'm trying to tell. And it's really hard for me to cut these people out of my story, because they are not just made-up characters.

So those are some of the issues that I am struggling with. I look forward to talking to you about these issues and others soon.

Cheers

Lori

friday update

Here we are, another week gone and dear Christ, how did it go so fast? Mine's been a total blur and next week's going to be crazier.

I think, oh, hey, I've got a week to write this scene, not a problem, and then all of a sudden it's Wednesday and since I went to bed early on Tuesday there's really no choice but to stay up and write. And that's just fine with me. Kind of enjoying this deadline thing, actually; it's keeping the momentum going nicely. Too bad I can't manage to give much of a shit about them at work.

I did manage to finish the third scene, only to realize that the last bit of it needs a whole section to itself, which I started last night and am planning to finish in the next few hours.

How'd you do?

~Andi

bang head here

You know what?

I am either really screwed or at the cutting edge. I'm thinking screwed.

God, it would be so fucking easy to just give up.

Friday

I'd like to start working on my Valerie novel again (no title, but you two both have copies). I'll try to come up with five pages, ideally a chapter, by Friday afternoon.

Goal for Friday?

OK, so I have a new (old) idea that I want to explore more and see what it can turn into. I need to look back through some old pictures and journals. This is part of what I need to do for Friday. I also would like to come up with a brief synopsis of the story, a sort of outline, and I think I can commit to writing 5 pages of a start by then too. Today was a total loss - in terms of this project - because I was so busy with errands, mom stuff, etc.

Andi's goal, w/e 4/16

I just went through the latest synopsis and broke it down by scenes, and by projected (ok, sort of projected) dates of completion. If I can meet the deadlines (approximately), I should be able to finish the rewrite by Thanksgiving. And here I was thinking I'd be done by the Fourth of July. Fat fucking chance.

So I finish the rewrite, I revise, I submit to readers like yourselves and some other willing and not-so-willing victims, I continue to revise, and then by Easter of next year I start querying agents.

That's fair, right? I think a year is reasonable and realistic, especially if the rewrite is the primary goal to get done before the end of November. Which will take a lot of pressure off over Christmas. Please feel free to tell me I'm out of my mind if you think so, even though I quite possibly may tell you I think you're full of shit. *wink, grin*

As for this week, I'll be writing the third scene. Goal is to be done with it by Friday.

Thank you for both understanding how important this is to me. I really super appreciate it. I'm going to haul my ass to bed now and thank God that I didn't drink coffee tonight, because it's wrecking the hell out of my nerves. (Don't I sound like my mother? Terrifying.)

~Andi

Desert Spring

Spring has come to the desert -- these pictures are from around my house.

on the way home today

cherry tree weeps pink
by sleek dark chocolate filly
on new emerald grass

OPENING NIGHT!

It's Opening Night, baby! The 2010 baseball season is here and I'm quivering in anticipation. There's nothing like the early days of spring; the season stretches out, six delicious months, and at this point in time, anything is possible. The White Sox could win the pennant! They could be World Series champs! I could end up partying like it's 2005!

Even better, tomorrow is Opening Day. Of course they arranged that just for me. How could you think otherwise? So tomorrow I plan on having a very excellent martini while I bask in the glow of my team's first game.

Fuck. I'm so excited, I can't even come up with a haiku for this shit. It's like floating in an aromatic glow of fresh-cut grass, a whiff of cold beer, and the sound of the ball smacking into a leather glove or cracking off a swift bat.

WOO HOO!