Lee Bittly and Deeb

The personal languages of families are such an interesting study. The kids who call grandma Omie, a diminutization of German Oma, for grandmother – or those who use nanna or gramps or mum, mom, dada, baba. Much of it is cultural, as those are – and then there are the baby-names, often those given by baby in trying to pronounce a name.

Phrases are the thing that begin to get really evocative. My family was filled with idioms I never even contemplated when I was small; “put that down the little red lane” meant “eat/drink it” – and I was eighteen or so before I actually quantified the little red lane as my esophagus. It’s a little bit odd, but it was ours. “Applesauce” was, as it is in other families, a way to ask for affection. My paternal grandfather always said to us, “Give me a little bit of that ole applesauce!” and dad said it too sometimes.

“Fine as frog hair” was another of those unexamined concepts; it tended to be used to mean fine as in dandy, and so the application of the fineness of a frog’s theoretical pelt again didn’t occur to me during childhood.

My dad liked to cultivate in his children an exotic menu, too. Sauteed Hummingbird Tongues was a favorite – somehow resembling the more ordinary treat of boxed macaroni and cheese (again, not until later did I think about the actual hollow, tubular tongues of the wee birds) – and braised rhinoscerous tusk might be any number of cuts of meat instead.

My friends, he amusingly forgot and reassigned names for – Henrietta, Bertha, and so on; I believe the occasional little boy in our house would be Aloysius or Agamemnon, or perhaps even Jehosephat on an especially populous day. Apparently our feminine juvenile company was less mythical/Biblical, but Aloysius, I find on Wikipedia, not only is a derivative of that ultimately Clovis-derived name, Lewis, but also the first name of Mr. Snuffalupagus, whom I had no idea owned his own given name. I’m pleased it is that one.

The paternal men were not the only commanders of language in my home; mom had this habit of saying “I reckon” which again meant nothing to me as a kid, and the number of times I asked her through childhood what “Iya rekkin” means is best unexamined, as it gives away a certain slowness on my part. Her mother, whom I never called Granny till I got a bit older (she was grammaw and my paternal grandmother was grandMA; a fine shading of my infantile understanding of identity), I identify most with “oh my LAAAAAAANDS”, a highly handy expletive she used a lot for either astonishment or to try to seem as if she were being shocked. It was good for glee, too. And my grammaw was good at glee. (Better, perhaps, than she was at shock …)

When granny came to see my house for the first time, she walked around the outside, and in the front yard she stook and looked up at its somewhat tall façade, the little group of family having taken ten or fifteen minutes just to get this far in the tour. She peered at me with a wonderful smile and said to me in her gorgeously, lovingly rough voice, “Now, Di-AAANNNE. How many men are you going to have, to keep up a house like this!?”

I miss my grammaw so much. She was with us 94 years, outliving even my father (to her great sadness), and healthy for *generations* of that life. When I was small, she was “soft grandma”. My paternal grandmother was, in my very smallest childhood, slightly-scary grandma. She had darker, cotton soft hair; and she later became grandma-a-few-blocks-away, who put up with visits from me and our family dog with a marvelously forbearing primness. She made sweet rolls my dad and I once walked through snow to share with her, hot, and then brought her and them home to share with the rest of the family.

I made those sweet rolls once. Only once.

It was the last Father’s Day I had a living dad to celebrate.

So many of my family are gone, and I hold tight to my mom and stepfather, with whom I live in the same town. My brother and nieces and their mom are in a different world, but I still tread strangely close to the swamps we grew up beside. All I’d have to do is go right when I leave work, instead of left … to visit the MOTHER earth – the clay and the farm of our mom’s family line, the long-gone house where she was born and the aunt still living there, not so far away.

My dad’s line would be in the other direction, but again; not so far. Major-ville; the creek where my dad’s sister retired to a beautiful home, and those waters of Virginia which run in my blood and in my ink, even as the love poem my applesauce grandfather wrote to my soft-haired grandmother, not only about her, but about their rivers. I have that poem, in his hand, on a perilously delicate piece of paper onto which he copied that old poem years later, and which itself now is very old. He broke an engagement with another girl; impetuously in love with my grandma, his Potomac Maid, he married her instead.

Granddaddy was born in 1895. His younger brother, (1897 I believe, maybe 1898) lived to within weeks of New Year’s, 2000. He almost lived in three centuries singlehandedly, my great-uncle. They both were fine looking men, and my uncle was contracting and building until he was eighty or so; when he broke a foot, the doctor said, “you can keep working but you can’t go on rooftops anymore” and my uncle said, “heck with it then, I’m retiring.” He had to have his food put in a blender in the end, but he said it tasted the same.

His wife regaled us at an anniversary banquet, “I could not have found a betta mayun than (Great Uncle) May-jah. I could have found a PRETTIER mayun. But I could not have found a betta mayun.” Then she told the story of his intimidating the boy who once chanced to tease and be mean to his daughter.

My knowledge of my family’s history is in some ways very strange, and in every way woefully incomplete, filled with lacunae and even misinformation I’ve gotten wrong or only half comprehended or remembered.

On the other side, my grammaw and her sister. Grammaw and one of my great aunts had a habit of looking alarmingly alike, yet JUST dissimilar enough to confuse and confound me as a child. I only half-knew what wasn’t my grammaw sometimes, but I also felt an instinctive … welcome. You could hug a great-aunt even if you were a little kid half confused why grandma was in different skin – and they’d only be happy to hug you back.

My own mom has two sisters, and a brother too, and the only family similarity between all four of them is my uncle’s, to my granddaddy.

Ahh, my maternal granddaddy.

He was a big man – not in girth so much as in presence. He had an enormity and laconic charisma that made him a fascinating figure, even as I was half in awe of him when I was little. He called grammaw Lou. When he became ill, now and then he’d ask her for a “big bowl of cream” (ice cream). He used to put us on the high, metal seat and let us “drive” his tractor. I wish I had known him better.

He and grammaw had two chihuahuas, and she a third after he died; Penny-dawg (yes, Penelope had her name when I first met her, but it was this tiny echo of grandma's beloved pet that *kept* that name for her when she came home at last). He used to call small things lee-bittly old things; I don't know that he said this of their pets, but Tinkerbell and Taffy were certainly lee-bittly old things.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s before I got much past that awe, and even in his illlness he was imposing. Granny took care of him the rest of his life, with a little help, and that seemed such a long time to me, then. But her widowhood was much, much longer; and she had a friend to keep company with. I never actually met Granny’s Ernie. But I am so glad she had him.

Granny’s smile was as strong as the roughness of her voice, vivid as its twang, indelible, incandescent.

So much of my family is gone; my father and all his siblings, my grandparents; I miss them, and sometimes it's hard to really comprehend the extent of absence. That there can be no talks, no hugs; defunct circuits on the family grapevine; no new news. No more.

I miss my uncle's pontifications and his style. I miss the way my aunt reacted when I beat her at Scrabble, her laugh and her great susceptibility to humor. I miss dad's voice; gruff and low and soft, not sharp, around the edges. The way he held on when he hugged, and the immensity not only of his love but of his brilliant, curious, nimble and generous mind. I miss grandma's cooking and having her for a neighbor, and the power of her personality, and grammaw's house and all the times shared in it.

I miss my grandfathers, with less memory, but not less love.


What have I left behind for others' memories ... my older niece and her friends, using me as a jungle gym and swinging from my hair, or playing with it by turns. The perennially (pathetically) late Christmas packages, the hit-and-miss games. The pets and the eyeball-smackingly bright mantel (... the hole in the wall ...), the walks to the park in my neighborhood, and the walks and SANDWICHES when I've gone to visit them. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Phineas and Ferb - or the time when she stayed the night that Elder and I watched Viking Apocalypse and Suchet as Poirot.

The first time I ever held both of them. The way we marveled at Younger's red, red hair and how her babyhood thousand-mile stare looked like her late grandfather. Her monster-baby growl. Elder's meticulous care and organization, her incredible art, her dancing hula for her grandparents in their family room. The time she said, of her granddaddy being sick, "I wish some people didn't have to be really sick, but that instead we could all be just a LITTLE sick" - dividing the burden, sharing it and bearing it ... perhaps the wisest philosophy there is. Her way with words ("There's lots of darks out tonight") and her little sister's, too; Lee Bittly has been a writer since before she had her letters. The way she gave our whole family the affectionate nickname we call my stepfather. The way she was instantly, undisguisedly jealous in a flash when she found out I am a writer too; *her* thing, *her* need and talent.


I miss them, too.

Good thing I'll get to go see them this summer.

Lord, Have Mercy and Heal

For this city, for every city and community, and for those who live in them, let us pray.
Lord, have mercy.

Defend us, deliver us, and in thy compassion protect us, O Lord, by thy grace.
Lord, have mercy.

For all the departed, let us pray.
Lord, have mercy.

For deliverance from all danger, violence, oppression, and degradation, let us pray.
Lord, have mercy.

Collection

If I have learned nothing else from my regular blog rounds, it is that The Duchess of Richmond's ball is worthy of our attention this week; here, at one post from Two Nerdy History Girls, and then an excerpt from Burke at Waterloo, at Tom Williams' blog, Writing about Writing. As famous balls go, there is perhaps some irony in this piece of history taking precedence over the very last link you will see below ...

Ahem.

My fellow Reiders may be the best-informed target audience for this point in today's collection post, but anyone who clicks will get the point. Because Colin Smith's latest post has a photo at the top which keeps not-completely-failing to remind me a little of Brian Schwartz - whom I hope will not find the comparison insulting; it is not meant to be. :) This has been making my usual blog rounds double-take-stuf for a few days now, so I had to share it and spread the deja vu.

American Duchess takes a look at the question: to silk, or not to silk? In defense of faux silks - and a trip to Colonial Williamsburg.

Jeff Sypeck is taking an interesting look at the de-scholarization of our times; something I've looked at recently myself, but his post is much more specific, concrete, is SOURCED, and far more intelligent than (snarky) mine!

[I]ntentions still matter: there’s more pleasure and solace in writing and art when you believe what you’re doing is true.

When random conversations with your mother become fruitful: last week, I heard something on NPR on my way home from work, and I thought "that is NEAT, I want to blog about that" - and, of course, promptly forgot what the heck the story was. Welp, thanks to mom, we can now have our first Trek reference here in some time now. Ladies and germs, I give you: The SOLAR SAIL! (And - count 'em: three, three, THREE stories for your edification!) Which is so much like a certain DS9 episode I can't contain my geekly glee. (For those as obsessed as I - this is the one where Sisko brings on the beard AND just about the first bromantic scene between O'Brien and Bashir. "Hammock time!")

Clovis may be lying fallow at my house, but (with inevitable thanks once again to The History Blog) the Merovingians' world is alive in archaeology. Take a look at a wine-jug the like of which might have graced his table (though found in Denmark, actually). Mmm, turntable pottery! Dig it! Link comes complete with a pic of an actual archaeologist in an actual archaeologist's hat. Bonus.

The HB takes us also on a tour of preserved tattoos - an article not for the squeamish, though the only really surprising picture included is the full-frontal one at the very bottom, of a fella wearing nothing but his ink. To me, the taxonomy of tattoos - or "speaking scars" which is a pretty evocative subset of the kind - is extremely interesting. There's even one (19th century!) that looks a tad like Bettie Page. Huh!

The Week That Tech Ate

Time seems to be my theme lately.

Every now and then, time makes itself apparent – in surprising ways, such as seeing a kid you once knew, suddenly grown up and with kids of their own – in happy ways, such as realizing the vacation you planned a while ago is getting closer – in annoying ways, such as … well, maybe almost anything, depending upon how your day is going.

These days, of course, we’ve traded in watched pots for loading websites, but it’s still remarkable how true it can be that certain moments somehow feel like “never” on a completely different scale. This is not merely a matter of patience, Grasshopper, but one of philosophy and expectation, personality, stress – almost anything you like.

My week last week was spent on tech issues. One afternoon, I came home after lunch, hoping to work and make a few calls to pay bills without bugging my cube mates – and ended up instead in a morass of stubbornness and desperation, when my VPN (the virtual private network) would not work so I could network in online. I sunk myself into troubleshooting, and hardly realized I had not done a lick of work until I bobbed my head up out of the rabbit hole and realized hours were gone with no net result.

It took several days, but that issue was resolved – even as, inevitably, others arose (some of my own, some I worked to shepherd along for my coworkers).

It can be the same with research (of any kind, of course; but indeed I mean “for a novel”). I had to learn to discipline myself long ago – sticking to looking at what I might need or use, without plumbing any given subject to its depths nor following interesting tangents beyond my limited needs.

At the same time, though, reading beyond the requirements is still a good habit to cultivate. The old advice to writers, to READ, includes not just the exposure to style, but also the lifetime exercise of knowledge and breadth. And so, even leisure reading (I like that better than the phrase writers and agents sometimes use, “reading for pleasure”) has taken on a kind of discipline; I find myself applying knowledge or asking questions, and then sharing them here, or finding places they fit perfectly within my work. Sharing here is especially gratifying when I see people are actually interested, and for me – even if the themes most repeated; costume, archaeology, innovation; don’t seem obviously connected to my writing – it’s all of a piece, and all feeds the same ends.


Time has been bending and distenting of late. I think summer makes our mental clocks more limber; the longer hours of light fool and confuse us.

And, it will hardly seem but days from now ... the days will turn around again and constrict on us.

Summer has been a time of power and autonomy for me, and the creative work has been energizing. How's it treating you so far?

Dirty, Dirty Bidniss

I’ve been reading Janet Reid’s archives – less for education at this point than for sheer entertainment, to be honest. But this post got me thinking. (It is very short, and yes, you have to read it for the post you’re now looking at to make worthwhile sense.)

I’ve encountered agents and editors online and IRL who struck me as … let us say, not self aware. It is not the world’s deepest challenge to find publishing professionals saying things with all the facile and vacuous brightness (and, indeed, the very words) of a stock character in a Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Discussing art and creativity as business translates, and agents have become a trope, be they authors’ or actors’ pit-bull/chihuahua advocates.

More often than evil, the implications tend to go for comedy. Nakedly driven by business concerns, or sometimes almost (… almost …) adorably by dreams, real life Tweets and interviews and so on make clear the expectations and motivations behind “I’m looking for THE NEXT SUCH-AND-SUCH BESTSELLER” or (cringe) the old “this-meets-that” uber-shallow Hollywood pitchery. Expectations and motivations that other stock character, the long-suffering writer, endures to their emotional travail.

It is to sigh.

The point relating to Janet’s post is: I can comprehend the idea of someone who has long worked in publishing getting sneery about the industry and the people in it. Exposed, more than I ever have been, to these dynamics, sooner or later those enamored of their own integrity may feel themselves in need of feeling “better than that.”

Authors, by the way, do this too. Some of them out loud, or in print. Some of them do it in query letters; why else would so many agents have to explain on blogs and in interviews, “When you say ‘all the books being published now are trash’, THAT IS INSULTING” … ? We think my genre is better than your genre – or, more tellingly, my genre is more IMPORTANT than yours is – or reader categories – or other particular writers. And I don’t pretend I haven’t don this, though I have tried to be nonspecific when moaning about querying or reading or what have you.

But most of us learn to keep certain thoughts to ourselves, or at least not to name names – and we all move along.



Which is where Janet’s old post above comes in.

The thing about moving along is, in publishing and in life and in Hollywood and at any job in the world, what it usually means is, dealing with the people we find annoying or inferior, getting it over with, and then dealing with OTHER people.

Because: there are other people in publishing. There are always other people than the annoying ones. Always.

It is no more reasonable to consider “all agents” as possessing any one property than it is to paint every member of any particular gender, race, political party, or age group as a single, monolithic whole – homogeneous, and uniformly good or bad, or rich with nougaty goodness, or perhaps a little too salty with my high blood pressure, so I’d better hold off.

When I was actively querying (and I am still toying with research here and there, though nothing’s been sent of late), I queried GOOD agents. People for whom I have respect.

If I want to participate in this industry, I *need* to respect it.

The idea of considering it a dirty thing on the face of it, but “a necessary evil” is not merely bewildering to me, it’s confounding. To consider my work as product in no way demeans it, to me – if selling art was good enough for Michelangelo, it's good enough for me. As hellaciously painful as it’s been to watch my first borne (I’ll spell it that way rather than literally indicating labor and delivery in the biological sense) possibly fail, it doesn’t tell me I’ve written a bad novel nor that those who recognize they can’t sell it are the bottom-feeding minions of Be’elzebub. It tells me they’re being realistic about business.

It also tells me about the importance of how I populate my stories, and a whole raft of other privilege- and diversity-centric stuff I’ve blogged about already, but those are other posts.

Not one single agent in the world has done one thing to stand in my way. None could nor would stop me if I chose to get The Ax and the Vase out into the world; self-publishing is a perfectly cromulent piece of this business. I feel that *I* do not make a good prospective self-publisher, because the kind of sweat equity I long to invest in this work is different, and I frankly fear my competence to serve my novels without the partnership and network of traditional publishing.

But that doesn’t make traditional publishing my obstacle.

Only I can be that, for myself, and … I kind of prefer not to do that.

My faith in magic ain’t what it used to be (if it ever was), and my expectations have never been that Hilary Mantel oughtta WORRY when I hit the market. But nothing in the years I’ve been learning, and writing, and continually working on all the fronts necessary to my goals …

… nothing has ever persuaded me I don’t deserve this, nor that I won’t get it. It could have happened already, if my resources were greater than they are.

Just not if I had more Magical Literary Beans to get my creative beanstalk to the stratosphere.

Right now, I’m all I’ve got. I joke a lot about my wee and paltry little brain, but we all know I think plenty highly of myself.

I also know, perhaps the one magic I do have in my life, is the great good fortune to find people I respect and am grateful for to work with. Just yesterday, I was struck (hardly for the first time) by the realization that I have a job which is the envy of others doing similar work. Someone said to me, basically, I work with the best people because I am the best myself.

Not something I came by easily, nor early.


Even if I sign with someone unexpected, when it does come, or an agent I thought of as a long-shot/”eh, why not ping ‘em” prospect when I first researched them: when I do have one, my agent will be The Best.

Just as my Penelope is The Best Dog.

And just as there’s nothing OSUM-er than Gossamer.



If I have faith in myself, and in my work – how could I not have faith in the person who chooses (and whom I choose) to advocate it? The agent, the editor who snaps at it, and those who share acquisition decisions, and acquire it?

Yes, yes. It’s all business, and there is a part of the publishing business that concerns itself less with Literary Exquisiteness (or my personal, precious darlings) than with profit.

Hell, it ain’t insurance. And I worked in that industry for YEARS.



So tell me again how PUBLISHING is a bunch of awful little beasts … ?

Today I Got a Letter ...

... from my University creative writing professor. He's the sole connection I still have to my alma mater - and, while we didn't have a deep mentoring relationship, the stuff of which coming-of-age novels are made, his classes were excellent. And he remembers me, too, which is flattering.

Until he retired two years ago, we were in consistent, if sporadic, touch every couple of years, starting maybe ten years or so after I graduated. But this was the first time in a long time, perhaps owing to email changes along with emeritus-ness.

The letter wasn't just for me; it touches on a professorship in his and his wife's name, and came on University stationery. But he added a substantial note that was just for me - and, again and still, it's kind of wonderful to be remembered.

Even more, he reminded me of something I could hardly have forgotten. He used a story of mine in his classes for about twenty-five years.

I haven't seen the thing myself in that long. The characters are hazily relevant memories, but the course of the tale escapes me, apart from the two main details I remember the professor's commenting on long ago.

The story is the first piece I ever wrote in first person from a male point of view, and I recalled that during the very earliest stages of working on The Ax and the Vase, when I was grappling with that POV and leaving myself open to the possibility of changing that. It's also well before any attempt I ever made to write historical.

On the one hand, I'd love to reach out to my prof and see if I could get another copy of the story. Back then, we typed onto ditto forms, and the English department secretary probably had to make the copies - or the prof himself did. Ahhh, purple ditto sheets. You literally *had* to be there, kids. Mimeographs gave our schools a very subtle and particular perfume for decades before digitality.


It's a curious thing, knowing my most embryonic work has been read by hundreds of students for all these years. It's hard to really feel that, to know it. Belief is a trick; while I accept the literal (har) facts, conception of doesn't really follow. I can hardly conceive of twenty year olds at all anymore, never mind relate to what I was as one myself, or - failing to remember the work very well - what effect anything I wrote back then could possibly have in all the ensuing years, an entire generation away now, since I put it down.

Image: Google image search
Labeled for re-use

I wonder whether any of you has a nimbler imagination than mine ...

And who's still in touch with a former teacher ... ?

Unrecognition

This is one of those things I read, and cannot remember when I wrote it, cannot recall why, or what inspired it. But I love it ...

The only sensation in her was of absorption. The heat; the hard, sure heat under her. The leather of her new red shoes, leather tanned soft as fruit skin, holding her foot, wrapped all the way around it, to her ankle, where it was loose and gentle. The sound of the grasses, whispering. Soft as voices, safer than words, asking nothing of her but to hear them.

Soft as fruit skin? Where I came up with that, I have no idea; still I can feel it.

I hated my own red leather shoes. Is it that, that has me writing about a queer little girl, loving nothing more ... ?

Collection

Moe Ferrara at BookEnds Literary Agency asked such a good question on their blog, I want to ask it here too. Have you ever met your literary hero?

Here was my answer ...

Donald Harington was an American author not wildly well known, but he's been compared to Chaucer, and I was privileged to converse with him electronically a year or two before his death. He told me he was working on a novel featuring one of his past characters (his novels often centered on a fictional Ozark town called Stay More, and picked up facets from one another), Latha Bourne.
It was not until after he died I read "Enduring", the novel he told me about, and it still brings up the little hairs along the back of my neck. As if his work hadn't power enough, that launched my experience of reading that book to a new level, and it felt joyous and intimate and meant so much to me.
Another of my favorite writers was Roger Ebert. I didn't tend to agree with his assessments of movies, but LOVED his manner of expression. I was able to exchange a few emails with him as well some years ago. He was an incredibly thoughtful (in the sense of intellectual openness and willingness to consider unaccustomed points of view) and generous man, and very kind. I still sometimes go back and read his reviews or his blog.
Much more recently, I met Hugh Howey, at the James River Writers Conference last October. He was sitting on his own and I chatted with him for a few minutes - not about my writing nor even his, but just the event and the people and the food or whatever. He could not have been more charming and pleasant.

The History Blog brings us two very different stories worth the click ...

First: three-hundred year old tea preserved by (whom else?) the Brits. In a museum. Because, of course!

Then: 98-year-old blackboards in Oklahoma - "frozen in time, if not in place." Incredible! I only wish I could get the video to play.

Okay, now your turn. Tell me about your heroes!

Collection

Louisa Young at The History Girls has a short, lovely post about The Called One. Worth a click if only to discover the heartbreaking irony. "I will not leave you comfortless."

The History Blog looks at the Rijksmuseum's 400 year retrospective fashion plate exhibition and the birth of modern fashion magazines. "Historical fashion porn of the highest quality" ... well, what a recommendation! Ahem.

"Hi, lady ... Lady! Lady!" ... The occasional fear of being a woman.Welcome to it, Caitlyn.

On whether anachronism can be constructive in historical fiction/drama. I'm not necessarily persuaded - but thre are some interesting points here.

Dropping Science

We talked about science and morality as if the two were the same thing.
--Geoff Ryman, WAS

It's a funny thing, reading Was right after reading H. G. Wells' Marriage. The quote above comes from a long internal monologue from a character who is thinking about a period pretty darn close to that of Marriage, and echoes some of the aspirational philosophy of Wells' work.

Through the early decades of the twentieth century, science and discovery fed an American identity filled with pride in innovation . Certainly, this has its problems in itself, but undeniably it co-opted study and basic science into an support for applied science that was core to the hurtling progress of our nineteeth and twentieth centuries, and is such a part of what the nation is, for good and ill. We gained a reputation as plastic people, perhaps - but we also burgeoned with domestic productivity which later we became ashamed of and sold away, and have not yet quite rebuilt - even as we fear and revile those to whom we gave up manufacture and labor economically.

Image: Wikipedia

A year or so ago, I wrote a post about my dad and his religious faith, and the consternation I've always felt, that people imagine scientists are by definition godless. I took that post down because it was too personal, but I'll echo it now with this observation - when I came to him as a kid, upset because the good little southern Christians in my class taunted me that my father couldn't believe in G-d because he was a scientist ... dad told me that his faith was the very reason he studied the workings of the world. When I was little, he said it in simple terms; but we had that conversation all my life, and his curiosity and spiritual wonder were never far apart. He enacted it in more than his profession; he was engaged by how everything worked - history, cars, carpentry, our minds and hearts, even politics.

My experience with the "godless" kids began in the nineteen-seventies. But there has been a shift in the national psyche since then, especially strong in the eighties and nineties, and bringing us to a place where the idea topping this post is inconceivable to too many people. Born of the same kinds of folk who raised my old tormenters, and of those tormenters themselves, now busily teaching their children the same biases and fears. The Reagan years pushed off this shift, and the increasing primacy of faith and fear politically has confirmed its power.

Now we talk about science and morality as if they are antagonistic properties. We are short on kids wanting to enter the sciences, and treat those who do as curiosities - perhaps to be admired, and we know we need them, but still the adults in research and even development are subject to skepticism and a perception as odd, if not outright dangerous.

Research and science are constant sources of cultural anxiety, and I'm not going to say that is without good reason. But human innovation has always brought with it ethical questions, and those are insufficient reason to simply shut down our attempts to eff the ineffable.


We've gone from inheriting the wind to breaking it.

To the Nines II

Diane Vallere has a GREAT post at BookEnds' blog, on dressing for a conference - and The Pitch ...

I had some thoughts on this once, too, in my misspent youth.

Watched Pots, Orthopteran

When we’re five, the world seems to move at a snail’s pace, and when we’re ten times that (give or take), we often comment about how fast the years seem to go.

Lately, I’ve been getting an itch (other than the eczema). People talk about how SLOW traditional publishing is. It is a perennial theme, especially amongst us pre-published folk who yearn to control the experience of trying to get there by dint of “UNDERSTANDING” it in almost tortuous detail.

Nobody ever seems to think TP (hee hee) moves speedily, even those of us who have to stop between breathy astonishments every month that it has already gotten to be this month to take a bit of Metamucil.


I look around at “most writers” and think – good Lord, y’all are writing novels in the space of under a year, or getting published before age forty – and you think this is slow? Well, my LANDS!

If I were querying, (or if I ever do again), it’s probably cruddy self-admission, but any amount of reading at this blog is going to make it plain to any agent in the world – it took me a decade to write The Ax and the Vase, and the damned thing isn’t even out with anyone anymore. It’s “lying fallow” (a far nicer fantasy to hold onto than “I trunked the bastard”) and unlikely to see publication soon, and perhaps ever.

Ten years.

I queried it too early, squandered the first half of my forties, queried it still-too-early-but-less-egregiously-so again, kicked its ass, got it into shape, queried the four agents left on the planet not already pestered with the thing, and moved on to the WIP.

Research isn’t even remotely complete, and that’s months on now from realizing I had to let go of Ax. I don’t expect the WIP to take ten years again, but this novel won’t be written in months, either (hence letting go of Ax being so difficult).

Traditional publishing isn’t slow, it’s just that we are impatient. We’ve also had our attention spans reset – clipped ever slenderer – time and time again just in the last sixty years, and it’s more and more difficult to understand outcomes that cannot be had instantaneously.

I am old (Father William), and here is the irony – I rather savor the slowness of my education and prospects as an author. I do want to get there, but I’m not upset it’s not a shorter road, nor wishing my life away to get to publication, as if it is the only finish line worth reaching. Even with all the difficulties, there is some reassurance that anything left in this world travels at a pace deliberate rather than precipitate. All goals will come and go soon enough; met or not.

What I’m saying is …

Patience, Grasshopper.

Or, to jam on Janet Jackson

 

 

“I promise, it’ll be worth the wait.”

What Comes Before Alpha?

Not long ago, I found myself intrigued by another writer’s thoughts on reading others’ works, and we got into an exchange, and he shared his MS with me. I wanted to share my own in return, but AX has been done to death (sigh!) and the WIP is so early, everything I “write” is literally sketchy. To call it a draft is perhaps even a misnomer, because right now the only non-research work on the novel is telling MYSELF the story.

I threw what passes for a first chapter or so his way, and got very quick feedback, in detail.

The most interesting part of this is that he took it seriously enough TO critique it. To me, this “writing” is strictly throwaway; if it’s draft at all, it’s still only first draft, and that means nothing of it will exist after revision, perhaps not even after a first pass at it. The scene itself, I think is probably where the book does begin, but I’ve been wrong before (and then wrong again) – and I know how early I am in the progress; I know enough to know JUST how much I don’t know right now. Any statement I make about the WIP is bound to become idiotic in a year’s time, in two years’ time (deliver us all from its taking a decade again, but even so my work isn’t the sort of thing that moves like NaNo) (and now somebody needs to record that as a Weird Al style parody of Moves Like Jagger).

This is why anything I write about the WIP is conceptual, rather than particular.

So it was actually a remarkable pleasure to get feedback like it was real writing. It provides something I didn’t really have with AX, and it also opens up doors – and poses questions.

The first of which is, if a beta reader is like a beta tester, making sure a product/novel is ready for RELEASE, and an alpha reader is the one who gets the fun of cleaning the butterknife … what comes even before alpha? I mean, I haven’t even bought a knife for this dragon, y’all, and it’s no time to go bandying at the beast while she’s still sleeping and I’m miles away in a little quiet glen.

Or something like that.



Feedback is that thing writers savor and sicken from; we can indulge too much and get indigestion, and we hate it and love it in equal measure, even simultaneously. Yet it is always – always – generous of anyone to GIVE a writer feedback. To fail in gratitude for any reader is foolish; even critique we don’t take on is an effort made on our behalf.

Feedback isn’t self-gratification. It is always a gift.

Even if the gift doesn’t fit, they took the time to give it. Even that one person in your crit group who always seems not to “get” your groove, if they speak to your work, the ONLY reason for that is “to make it better” (that their idea of “better” may involve invariably pretty people getting it on, or Must. Have. Werewolves. or whatever their particular thing, is beside the point). When you ask for it – and you get it – feedback is never anything but the result of someone thinking of your work.

That’s a hell of a big deal, really.

I lost Mr. X for a reader when he disagreed with other feedback I was taking, massive cuts to AX when he thought “there was good stuff in there.” And the thing is, he was right, there was good writing. It just wasn’t good writing that served the ultimate goal, which was telling the right parts of the story. He couldn’t take the waste; he was more attached to my darlings than I was. Except that: it wasn’t. Words can be very, very pretty indeed, and even exciting – and still have no use as one part of a whole. This is why the call it killing the darlings, of course. You don’t just kill off the ugly and the useless and the weak, you have to take the scimitar (or the butterknife …) to GOOD WORK, if it doesn’t honestly contribute to the greater structure.

There are many, many beautiful pieces of art and furniture and so on I admire and might even love to have, but not all the beauty in the world will actually fit inside my house.

This is what drafts are for.

And so I have a lot of pretty “writing” right now, which has earned the irritating scare quotes I know are probably giving some of you a case of the hives, and which will not be a part of the final MS. I’ll know it happened. I may even let it continue to exist electronically, for when I finally do get published, establish myself as a literary light, and the Ivy Leage university library of nobody’s dreams someday needs to curate my body of work for posterity.

(Or, y’know, just because I am vain.)

The pretty things don’t live any less because I don’t put them in a glass display case and preserve them at all costs.

Some pretty words are … just exercise.



But it’s always nicer to have an exercise partner, and to remember that writing *is* exactly that. That it is a limbering, a means to some kind of fitness, and that doing it with others takes away some of the fear and the anguish and can be motivating and just more fun.

I found out not long ago one of my dearest friends, TEO (The Elfin One), harbors regret that she never helped me when I asked her to beta read AX.

Now, I certainly complained about that blasted butterknife and no backup. And obviously that revision was not a good one; once That Certain Agent gave me an R&R, and good feedback, it got somewhere. But merely surviving the dragon wasn’t enough for that MS, not that first time.

But that someone would regret not being there with me? That she would apologize after all this time, and re-up for service on the WIP. That it would even be an emotional matter … ?

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me.



Like so much about writing, it hardly ever occurs to us as is doin’ it, that there’s anyone else in the world who’ll ever really, truly SEE, read, hear, be there in and with and for it. I still never have gotten the hang of being able to really feel it when anyone has my work. The idea is literally inconceivable, at least for my wee and paltry little brain.

And so empirical evidence there is someone stalking in the world I am still learning how to build … it’s curious, and one of those shocking surprises as an author.

This work exists. And it’s garnered an opinion, it’s sparked a thought.

Amazing. And I’m always glad, too, if that thought isn’t “yawn” or “what-the … !???”

Breathless

I went to a new doctor not long ago, and the immediate result is that I’m collecting a whole new raft of doctors. Most likely, I expect this is an indication I chose well in the new guy, but of course the whole thing comes with a raft of administrivia and the inevitable fear doctors strike into many of us.

Like a lot of little kids, I was afraid of Going to the Doctor, because the extreme ritual of it all, the rigidity of my mother’s discipline leading up to the visit, and the smell of alcohol were in no way really reduced by the presence of the biggest fish aquarium I’d ever seen in my life, and I really never got to go nose-up to the tank anyway (mom, that) and get out of my head by contemplating the undulating peace and beauty in that water.

Once the sheer unknowable-ness and mystery went out of the experience, I “outgrew the fear” and got over it, and an increasing understanding of the medical likelihoods of my family lines became, over time, a bit of a dulled litany that went from not meaning anything because as a healthy child those things didn’t touch me to not having any meaning because, frankly, in my family (on the maternal side, anyway), illness and decrepitization are something of a cottage industry, if not an obsession.

Okay, they’re an obsession.

When  I was a liddle-LIDDLE kid, as we used to say, my cousin/best friend and I used to get into competitions whenever we saw each other: “My mother had NURSE’S TRAINING.” “MY mother FINISHED nurse’s training.” We were steeped in medical expectations and the fact that injury yielded that pinnacle experience of life: attention. Doing anything that resulted in getting a band-aid was great stuff; and the time we were walking barefoot and I stepped on a bee (the only time I’ve ever been stung by one, unless we count the time I mowed over the yellowjacket nest and half of them flew up my pants) was epic attention time for me. I believe I was actually jealous of that other cousin, whose foot got caught in the spokes of the bicycle when he was riding on the back.

Yeah.

Once adulthood undoubtedly got its way and had me all independent and working for a living and surviving that experience, I began to consider myself generally too busy, and too healthy, for doctor visits. And I have also been surrounded by those who actually “need” to go to them, which makes me sad. Of my two oldest friends, one has had a chronic, incurable disease since we were like twenty-five, and she’s endured multiple surgeries to remove significant portions of herself in treatment thereof. The other came upon difficulties much more recently, but very profoundly, now enduring a laundry list of exotic and also incurable conditions, as well as some hearing loss, rheumatoid arthritis, the odd blood clot or mini stroke – oh, and the supposedly-rare disease which killed not only my father and my grandmother, but has got hold of her and someone else in my family by now.


So it has come to be that recently, aged forty-seven, not having been unaware that I seem hardly ever to be in a doctor’s office as often as … well, ANYONE I know, I had to put a face on it, and admit, I hate doctors.

I had one several years back who, knowing my father died of lung disease, prescribed me a really good migraine medicine, which I loved and refilled … until the time it came from the pharmacy with the giant yellow label that said MAY CAUSE SEVERE BREATHING PROBLEMS on it. Where that label had been previously, I have no idea, but I can tell you this: I did endure horiffic sleep apnea every damned time after I got rid of a migraine.

So … that explained THAT problem. (*)

This doctor also (knowing about the migraine thing, y’see) decided it’d be a nice idea to force me to wear a giant, bright-blue, traffic-stoppingly-huge heart monitor in front of everyone 24/7 (as if that is not humiliating and therefore high-blood-pressure-inducing) because I had high BP once in her office. The fact that I explained to her I HAD a migraine that day, and had also had a fight with Mr. X, already living some 4000 miles away by then and therefore extra-stressy to fight with, between time differences and so on, made no odds to her. Into a BP monitor I must go, all context and stress notwithstanding.

I’ve had a hideous case of White Coat Syndrome ever since then, that stressed me out so much. My dad had the same problem, and I never thought I would (ask any phlebotomist who’s taken my whole blood or platelet donations over the past THIRTY years now). But no matter how I try to overcome it, a DOCTOR’S office BP test is invariably going to come off badly. Gosh dammit.

That doc  pulled the same heart monitor trick on my sister in law, too. It stressed my very young NIECE out, that stunt – imagine how conducive that was to S-I-L’s BP coming off well.

I never went to her again.

The one I replaced her with was indifferent in the extreme, which meant I thought he was a great fit on the rare occasion I ever bothered to go see him.

But last time I did bother, he shrugged off a very real patient concern I had, and decided to make a flip remark to go with the (literal, thanks) shrug.



And so we have a new doctor.

He’s treating my eczema by sending me to my mom’s dermatologist, whom I know she loves (this may or may not bode well for my loving the doctor herself, but at least I have something to do about the incresingly ugly situation on my arms).

And he’s responding to the fact that I have a history of sleep apnea (*) and my father and grandmother both died of (non smoking-related) lung disease by sending me to a pulmonologist.

This, for me, is a bit of an added area of White Coat Syndrome, because, though I count myself whole and healthy and have so much to be grateful for when I look at the health of so many around me, I actually do have significant trouble breathing sometimes. It began about a year or two after dad died, and also about the time Mr. X went so far away. It’s been a stable problem, and not associated with other symptoms – and I had a sleep study done once which was inconclusive of anything scary – and I have a deviated septum (the only useful thing that first doc ever told me, not that she ever DID anything about it) – and eczema is actually associated with breathing issues – and I’m only forty-seven – and this visit, as New Doc is kind enough to say, is just to establish the baseline (… “just in case” being left unsaid …).

In case the theme of “and’s” above is not clear, with all these years of not going to doctors like I’m a crank about the whole thing, I’ve been able to sustain the narrative that “there’s nothing wrong, really” (i.e., I am not dying of lung disease).

But you know. It’s no less uncomfortable, not being able to breathe, folks. It’s always embarrassing.

And … the sleep apnea.


It doesn’t happen every night; only several times a year, sometimes with long stretches of not at all. Sometimes with weeks-long stretches of every night, though.

I know enough to know this much. My apnea is autonomic, not mechanical. My BRAIN stops the breathing, not my body; not my weight and conformation.

I’ve had this problem since I was a liddle-LIDDLE kid.

I can remember, from an extremely early age, the nightmares. Nightmares from childhood can be particularly vivid; memorable even into adulthood.

Nightmares that could kill you – that literally stop your breathing – and that you never outgrow, though you outgrow all the other nightmares …


Yeah, those are doozies.

*

The nightmare is that I’m at the pool. It’s the same friendly pool I knew all my childhood, often, though I’ve been under other water in the odd dream over the years.

I’m at the pool and underwater, my hand over my face, and – miracle! – there is the tiniest bubble of air inside my hand.

This is all I have to breathe.

I have to conserve it.

So I have to breathe really. Really. Shallow.

And then my brain gets the idea. I can’t breathe at all.

And so I don’t.

And I stop for what seems like must be a pretty long time. Not just a few seconds.

I stop for so long my body’s repressed state stills. Becomes almost perfect.

Until I am unable to hold on any longer. And I explode into consciousness. Gasping. Clawing at the air, the air that is not just a tiny little bubble I am holding in my hand, but wide and open and free, unsupressed by water, all mine, all mine. And I need it all.



So. Yeah. I got a new doctor, and almost instantly had three.

Vacation this year was a lot more fun to set up.

Oo-waw

Today was a good day.

In addition to buying a couple rugs for the house on an outing with my mon on Saturday, and some much needed sneakers and other shoes on an outing with Cute Shoes (of course!) and her son on Sunday, there was a great deal to get done this weekend. So taking four days of it worked out nicely. I went to a new doctor and cleaned house on Friday, and on Monday I stayed in alone and did some email and computer housekeeping, as well as a LOT of cooking.

Just in time for the holiday, I had received a bill for property tax on the car I’d sold almost exactly a year ago. *Sigh* Dealing with the County and DMV come in at the top of exactly nobody’s favorite things, so I’ll admit that’s the two-sided task I didn’t get done before the holiday was over. (Oh, and I couldn’t install my printer on my dumbstupidiot stupid dumb Dell, because Dell and/or Windows 8 apparently do not believe that printers should be printers, ohhh no – they have to be integrated online, so don’t even try to just do a device install, because: Windows account logins! And Tigers! And Bears! Oh my!)

So last night, I dug up the appropriate paperwork to show I traded The Godforsaken Car in just a bit over one year ago now, and today I scanned the pages at work and emailed them to myself at home.

Weirdly, it appears the County will take an email of these copies – and they mention no further hoops to jump through, apart from the gentle reminder I must make sure DMV knocks The GC off my list. Again: *sigh*

What’s fascinating to me is … I fully anticipated a chaming lunch hour (and then some) wrangling on the phone, but took a shot and did a little getting online just to see.

And had DMV wrapped up in about five minutes.

!!!!

I even re-upped my registration for two years. Easy as pie.

The DMV website was so easy to use, I was left with the anticlimactic feeling it could NOT have been that simple, and surely I didn’t actually do a thing. You know that feeling, when because you manage something online, some corner of your brain maintains suspicion nothing’s actually done? Perhaps a feeling held mainly by those of us of A Certain Age … (?)

On top of all this, last night, in and cooling off after a good walk with Pen-Pen, I got a truly unexpected message, via the contact form on this blog. I mean – who uses the contact form on a blog?

A neighbor had found my debit card on the street; it had fallen out of my pocket, and I had no idea. YOIKS! So she reached out the only way she could find – and bless her for it. I picked it up safe and sound after work today.

It was a good day.
I didn’t even hafta use my A. K.



Annnnnnnd - yeah, here's a geriatric white chick using Ice Cube in a post like THIS one. I know. I do, I know. But you know - this song has always made me groove. Consider the privilege-apologetic caveat entered. And just dig the oo-waa-o.

Collection

It's all History Blog all the time for today, but quite a variety of linky interesting-ness to share ...

Let's kick off with Robert Cornelius, perpetrator of the first daguerreotype self-portrait. And then left dabbling in photography to look into alternative fuels for his family's lamp business. Strangely, pig lard did not take off, at least not long enough for pigs-flying jokes. (I had a crush on a guy named Bob Cornelius freshman year of college - so extra oddness points here for me, because this Cornelius is cute in a very modern way.)

Conveniently dovetailing with my recent reading of H. G. Wells, here we have the sale of the illustrations for the 1897 edition of War of the Worlds almost, but not quite, drawn by a guy called Henry the Dead. All images at the link are worth a click and closer peering. I'd pinch one here, but honestly I'm never clear on the HB what the public domain status of the images is, so just GO! Neato-spedito!

Inevitably, I'm a TCM lover as it is, but a summer full of noir ... is a summer I can get into. Yaaay!

And finally - as if the world needed ANY more examples of the fully OSUM splendiferosity that is George Takei brings to his masses the Japanese American History: NOT For Sale campaign. Historical education *and* preservation from the guy who literally piloted us into the future half a century ago. He's done rather a lot more than that, and almost all of it is fanfooogootastic. More neato spedito, y'all.

OMG - Like a Woman

You have to know you have got. a. lush. case. when watching a RuPaul's Drag Race clip show gets you choked up because you just love Latrice Royale THAT. much.

Peculiarities

It’s a boring old truism that one of the jobs of a writer is to spend some level of mind-time, *all* the time, on finely observing people, the world, and experience and quantifying these things for themselves so they can eventually steal these considerations, then cannibalize and synthesize them within stories.

It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.

THAT is awfully good writing.

Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.

Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.


All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.

I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.

Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.

No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.


***


For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)

I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?

How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?

The Thing About Reading

… specifically, the thing about reading multiple works by one author – is that, unless they’re exceptionally good, you learn their go-to strategies. If you’re smart and/or fortunate, you begin to feel your own. It’s not always repetition of words per se, but this is certainly a matter of the linguistic patterns on which we depend.

I have some suspicion that my tendency toward overwrought clauses and loquatiousness comes from some fear of simplistic repetitiveness (and very definitely from a family full of Impressive Speakers – for good or ill), but I also have decreasing illusions about the patterns I do have. Some readers go bananas dealing with my parentheticals or dash interruptions … I pretend to try to keep ellipses to a minimum, but know all too well I use them more than most writers ever would.

An acquaintance online once identified my “voice” unerringly by dint of recognizing my tendency to overuse the word “just.” Ever since, I’ve been overly aware of its presence whenever I type it; yet it’s hardly alone in calling me out. I have an extreme problem with “actually” which, even aware of the problem, I have not reformed. Adverbs generally, one of those tools of our language so many publishing professionals would love to see banned and which therefore I defend and adore like the contrarian I am, are a pretty easy identifier. Too many writers use them in pointless ways; and none of us needs the padding. Yet they are a limber and lively part of our tongue, and it would be a great pity to kill them off wholesale thanks to those who use them poorly.

Ahem.

There’s one writer whose mass of termonological tics render every character’s voice identical, no matter their setting, mood, education, or demographics. The tics transcend character voice and insert an all too literal authorial voice which, because it spans dialogue, exposition, action, and all elemenets of novel upon novel upon novel upon novel, is distracting; unwelcome. It’s cumbersome and even maddening. Yet, because I’m a stubborn ass, I won’t put down a given novel – but will edit it in pen.

This is justified both by the fact that some works are re-run reads for me, and I want to be able to read one, ever, without having to mentally correct it all over again, tiny mental rants bursting forth over and over on every page spread. Oh, and by my smug-assed presumption that (hopefully …) it makes ME a better writer.

Learning from someone else’s mistakes.


I’m not as prescriptivist as I once was, and indeed have come to love the quivering weirdness of the written word, as it synthesizes the spoken, or thought, or comveys a story in simple ways, or dresses up in beautiful words and parades around making a magnificent spectacle of itself. If it does this by breaking rules, or breaking what people THINK are rules, all the better.

Still.

If it does this encumbered: writing sucks. If it’s shackled to an author’s own preconceptions or prejudices, ignorance (writing creatively, without research, is wonderfully valid, but writing in wilful blindness is not; see also, the geological unlikelihood of William Golding’s island for Lord of the Flies, on which we are nonetheless stranded and harrowed and broken down … versus any tale populated by lazily caricatured Mary Sues, none of which I will name for charity’s and safety’s sake) … it’s going to enchain an audience, rather than enfold and transport them.

And so it is, having just finished a cycle of reruns I will not repeat for years yet, I choose to finally spew a bit about the patterns____ repetitions thrust through my suffering wee and paltry little brain of late:

• Beginning. Every. Other. Sentence. With the word AND. It’s not a rule I give a crud about, but please quit flogging me with *unneccesary* and’s, and interminable riffs of this.
• Peppering single sentences with and, and, and; and and—and and. Paragraph-long sentences formed with these.
• “And then,”
• “Of course”
• “Suddenly” and "Immediately"
  (If there is any better way to slow the pace than constant repetition of these two descriptors: I don't want to learn it.)
• “Utterly”
• “Now”
• “That”
• “Which”
• “In sum”
• "Slowly”
  (Even I, adverbial defender that I am, can hardly identify an instance in the entire literary world where this is honestly a necessary descriptor; and, even if it’s important to specify, there are so many more interesting words than this one.)
• Stating the rules of the world even as deep as the END of a novel, by which point we really know these rules, authorial voice, we really really do and would beg you to stop explaining.
• Doing this even in the briefest of unnecessary clauses. You’re treating your audience like idiots. Seriously, stop it.
• Describing characters’ extreme attractiveness at every possible moment of a scene. Extra bonus points OFF if you insist upon detailing every point of an ensemble in doing this. Every time.
• All the characters are attractive. Even the extras. EVERYONE is attractive, and beauty equals goodness – even if the goodness is merely angst-ridden, terminally melodramatic evil. Hooray for pretty!
• Describing by fancy maker, pattern of drapery/upholstery fabric, age and theme of bric-a-brac, country-of-origin of rugs, ostentatiously tasteful paint color, and at all times most-expensive-possible materials comprising every possible corner of a room in which one single scene should take place in five minutes, but which I have to read about for six pages, because – these characters are conspicuously well off, get it? THIS IS WORLD-BUILDING, GET IT? (This author, not incidentally, happens to be obscenely wealthy, and I could give a hang less how they choose to (clearly) decorate their own personal home. Get on with it. This is not story.)
• Describing by artist or composer, and with exhaustive critical opinion, every overwrought piece of music with which the author has mentally scored, scene by scene, every single instant of a novel. I don’t give an aching damn what you were listening to while you wrote this, and once you’ve done this eighteen times in a single novel, I know you are just showing off how much you think you know about music, and it’s just as boring as when that one guy does it in a bar so he can prove how he is too good to hang out in bars and is really a wildly overeducated, intelligent, super sensitive snob I knew I didn’t liike in the first place and now find completely insufferable in the second place.
• Constant. Racist. Descriptions. CONSTANT. If anyone appears anywhere in any of these works, who is not whiter than a sheet of modern copy paper, they are: dumb, superstitious, and *strictly* present as accessories to the white people’s stories.
• No, seriously.
• The actual, explicit worship of the very words “white” or “pale” are impossible to ignore. And this is not a 19th century novelist whose attitudes can be glossed over. I mean, this writer makes The Ax and the Vase look progressive, and Ax doesn’t even contain diversity.

Oh my, that felt good – if unseemly.

I may even be able to read one of these books ever again.



Just not within the next decade … or two. Actually. ()—and and and and. BOOP!


(Please feel free to initiate drinking games making fun of MY myriad tics and pretentions. All I ask is you comment and tell me about them, so we can all have fun. Cheers!)

Precipice

The WIP is at that sweet spot stage where I’m giddy as a schoolgirl getting to know it, shyly gazing at its characters and treading a little deeper into its world and generally having quite a crush on it … and *just* beginning to formulate more acute interests in it, which will direct research for a while.

This stage, of course, has curtailed my usual blog reading and writing, but I suspect a general wellbeing ensues, without readers gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair with less of my blather to consume. Russia and Ukraine, for their parts, are certainly barfing all over my stats; still getting hundreds of bots every day cruising in here, so at least there *are* hits showing up – even if most of them happen to be horsefeathers.


It’s an interesting time for a writer, this period of a new work – and a downright entangling time for me.

On the one hand, I’ve had this novel in mind since very very early indeed in the going with The Ax and the Vase; it came up during research for that, and the captivation I had for the subject has never diminished. Indeed, through the querying periods for Ax, it wasn’t rare I wished that could all be over with, I’d be agented and be able to get on with this work.

It hasn’t worked out quite thus, but on with the WIP I am in any case.

When we meet someone who excites us romantically, there are phases of being, and if a relationship ensues, changes come fast and furious. It’s all very exciting, even as it’s giddy in some ways that remind us of our vulnerability.

It’s hard, that is to say, to read Janet’s blog (and commenting community – such as I can these days) about How Long It Takes to write a novel, and not think both, “I’m working so much faster than I did on the first one” and “Yeah, but faster than a decade is still hardly market-speedy.” Hard not to be excited—and, at the same time, remember my experience with Ax.

I’m a confident cuss. But that has done its damage, and as much as I know this book is different (in good and publication-necessary ways), there absolutely IS some temptation to stick with the liberty and freedom of just never becoming a published author (nartist/freedom links).


But back to “that stage” …

I was once told by an ex, “I am quakingly aware of my capacity to fall in love with you.”

That’s where I am right now. I’ve been swept off my feet. I’ve had the second look, more deeply apprasing prospects with my new crush. I’ve started to figure out the fit, and some of the surprises too. The unexpected things are happening – both binding me more tightly to the work, and blindsiding me with expectation-bending surprises that change the prospects entirely.

This WIP – born of Ax though it indubitably is – has never been a sequel, never even been tightly tied to The Ax and the Vase.

And yet, the extent to which it is turning out to be unalike is still a breathtaking vista.

I knew the fundamentals would be not merely different, but outright foreign (figuratively … literally) to Ax. One was first-person from a single POV, told by the possibly unreliable narrator of His Own Glorious Destiny. One was an overwhelmingly male story. Story of power, story of success, story of a bunch of men in the late-antique North. Story of the building of a nation.

Myth, really.

Ax is a ripping yarn, and its central facets are those I’ve come to fear are in fact its stumbling blocks as a debut property.

So – a novel in omniscient voice, a novel featuring more women’s voices than men’s – a novel in which slaves (decidedly marginalized, in Ax) play integral roles … a novel of riots and terrors and unrest and failures …

I knew it would be another proposition.

What didn’t I know … ?

I honestly didn’t know how far I might shift from the character who first enticed me, whose story I thought I needed to tell.

I knew the POV would become more flexible, even inclusive.

I didn’t know just how much #WeNeedDiverseBooks would get into my blood, and amplify characters I didn’t really realize the novel was about.



Its’ been many years since I first sketched what still is the opening scene of the WIP. I couldn’t resist it; needed to get one little yaya out, needed to let that breath exhale – and, indeed, it was about all there was to any kind of draft *writing* (as opposed to research, which cropped up as I was researching Ax itself), until this year.

What is interesting is that, in writing that first scene (a Grand Guignol setpiece of a labor and delivery) – I researched and chose a name … and included a fictional character. There was a face, even back then, on a figure who didn’t necessarily need to exist so early on.

And she is becoming so much more than a supporting character.

I know her hair, I think I have heard her voice (no, seriously – on TV – I heard someone speaking with her timbre).

She’s not alone in surprising me; or perhaps bringing to the fore things I might hardly have suspected, but had somewhere in my wee and paltry little brain.

And that’s the thing. It’s in my brain; even if, to me, it seems external, almost mystical – the idea is mine, if only by right of conquest.

More ideas will show themselves, particularly as I get into more research – little surprises about the way the world worked, the food my characters ate, the color and pomp and dust around them.


And so: exciting times. Even as they’re indubitably weird times.

New Release!

The recent lull around these blog parts, while I’ve been working on the WIP and generally losing myself in the extreme bliss and satisfaction (hee) that is my enviable life, has seen a shortage of me yipping around, pointing out neat archaeological things and geeky historical clothes (or writing screds about same) … and also a shortage of my linking to neato books you can buy.

And, at this 200th anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo, I have been noticeably short on links to the many articles and posts looking into the events leading thereto.

AND, I’ve been remiss in ushering you, dear readers, toward wonderful literature touching on this subject.

It is with apologies for the lax housekeeping here that I offer up forthwith the wonderful news that Tom Williams’ latest, “Burke at Waterloo” is available now! Yes, even on the west side of The Pond. Take a peek (the Look Inside function is available) and see if it’s not worth a full read. Like me, he has hopes of ever having to work in the insurance industry again; and making a dream come true by reading a book means bonuses all ‘round!


Some time soon, I’ll be back with my usual gritching about historical terminology or gooping about my best-pets-in-the-history-of-ever, or perhaps a shoe style I’m drooling over or something about my dad sure to make you laugh and cry. And definitely stay tuned for the bit about the squirrels, because that is going to be epic.

For now: hooray for reading!

Things I Need to Accomplish Tonight ...

• Trim my hair
• Update my incoming mail server
• Sort mail
• Order heartworm pills
• Glue a couple pair of shoes with loose bits
• Call my mom - hopefully share a crossword puzzle
• Catch RuPaul's Drag Race at 9:00

Things I have accomplished: trimming my hair. Woot.

I think I'll go for the heartworm pills next.  YUM.

Joy!

... of JUMPING!!!

Puppy Smell

The cocka-poo we adopted when I was in middle school, I used to call Mufferstinker. Sidney was my Stinky Tuscadero (though someone once told me, when she was like eight, that she smelled like a puppy; and it was true, most of her life). I always used to tell her, "I like your stink" because - I did.


Penelope came inside from a morning playing in her yard. She smells like sunshine. The soft metallic scent of her blood, warm from playing, and her breath. The grass.

Through winter, Pen really has little odor. Carolina Dogs are very clean, and she doesn't have the sebaceous musk Siddy always had.

For those of us who love our dogs for themselves, who need the heartbeat near us, who appreciate they're animals, who appreciate the excuse to remember we are animals ourselves ... puppy funk isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a warm, seasonal scent right now: summer is coming! It's homey, in a way. It's part of her, part of being a dog-lover; I know there are some who consider it unpleasant or a sign of dirtiness (my *home* does not smell like dog; even her bed isn't a stinky spot).

For me, puppy-stink is one of the silly, secret privileges of the baby girl I am blessed to care for.

I like her stink, too. She gots good stink.


(For his part, Gossamer smells like honey bread baking. It's amazing.)

Collection

The Arrant Pedant on whether we can empirically "prove" grammar. "Just because something is doesn't mean it ought to be." An excellent rule for life in general, kids. (This is one of those times I wish my dad were here, so we could talk about this interesting article. He'd have liked the AP, I think. But I hope I'll be dead before new-kulur replaces the proper pronunciation of nuclear.)

NatGeo takes a look at the unexpected brain science behind London cabbies' "The Knowledge" test. Turns out? Intensive learning changes your brain. Neat!

Fellow Reider Brian Schwartz has a great post on not letting a phone run you. I'm late to link it, but love it!

Jeff Sypeck's poetry inspired by the gargoyles of the National Cathedral itself has inspired music. How cool must THAT be!?

The IMPORTANCE of Costume

One of the things about the clothes we wear, even people who aren’t obsessed with fashion or looks, is that for most of us, some events or feelings actually imprint themselves upon what we are wearing at the moment something happens. How many men do you know who have a “lucky” pair of shoes or shirt or the like? How many women wear some particular outfit because it was what they wore when they got a particular job or met someone or just had a great day the first time they took it out, and it still makes them feel like a million?

I am not even sure where its box is right now, and will never so much as fit an arm in the thing again; but my wedding dress is one of those artifacts of my life I’ve never found a way to “give up” … Not least because giving it to any relative of mine would bring with it the knowledge that I was a rotten bride and my marriage broke up, but also because I’m not close “like that” with any of my cousins, and my nieces don’t appear to be stacking up (ahem) to the same build I had (chest-less), and my style in 1993 probably isn’t to either of their tastes anyway. But that dress was made for me – literally built ONTO me, over the course of a day – by a friend I still consider deeply dear to my heart. It is a thing of gorgeousness, and its fate – preserved in a box, never to see the light of day – seems largely inescapable. Who would wear it? I can’t bear to cut it into crafts projects. It is the only garment in my life I ever expect to be one-and-done, so to speak; worn only one time and literally never again.

But even lesser things have their psychic cachet. I can tell you exactly what I wore to work on the first day of my last job; one, because Cute Shoes remarked on it to me as the first clue I had some style. And two: because it was the dress I was wearing when I was laid off, on a gorgeous day in spring, from the previous job – and that dress deserved better than that. It got it; I had hated previous-job anyway, and been looking for months before I won the layoff lotto at an employer that “never” did that. Except that one time.

Today, I wore a dress with an odd mix of emotional ghosts attached. It’s a tasteful number in beige and white, just longer than the knees, sleeveless but conservative, an empire waist with a tie, and a little pattern from there up. It made as good a choice as possible, during the heat of an August day, when I had to go to traffic court: and found myself served with a half-million dollar lawsuit.

The lawsuit is over, and at about the moment that happened, last year, I purchased my Prius – getting rid of a *car* freighted with too much emotional weight – and somehow this dress, the thing covering me at the moment I experienced the greatest horror and cowering fear in all my life, does not bring with it the latter emotional recall, but only its own light color and comfortable wear. Yet I can’t wear the thing without knowing its history.

I color that history now with gratitude – because that ordeal IS over, and I am intact. And it feels GOOD to know that, to remember the fear, to have that in the past. And the dress looks nice, its lightness speaks of spring and of summer, its conservative and flattering lines give me a power-boost at work, and the memory of the people who have said it is a nice dress feels good too. Even my MOM liked this dress. It’s a good dress.

And memory is good, and keeping myself honest, and being grateful – these are all important.

Some days, it can feel important just to look slick. Looking slick in comfort: bonus points.

But memory is always there. Of the important things – and the less-so. The day you were wearing the comfy jeans you like, walking alone on an autumn day, kicking leaves. The boots you had on once when you almost slipped on ice, and didn’t – whether they really saved you or not, you’ll always think of them as Good Boots, and you’ll have them repaired if you can, rather than tossing ‘em and buying new when the leather stresses or the laces go or a grommet on an eyelet comes loose. We can develop actual gratitude even for clothes, if the serve us well.

This is why the disposable clothing industry is sad (even aside from its implications for our natural resources).


I have a little jersey jacket. They’re wonderful, little light cardigans that can stretch a sleveless top’s seasonal functionality, or take us from chilly morning to warm afternoon with no changing or little fuss.

This one, I happened to buy the last time I saw Mr. X.

I’d arrived in the town where we were meeting, and it was early afternoon, and I didn’t “need” to check in immediately, so before I got to my hotel, I stopped at a Ross Dress for Less, and bought a couple things. A long blue sundress with beading around the neck; this little taupe cardi with a bit of a peplum and a nice drape.


The thing about jersey – particularly lightweight jersey – it’s a very flat fabric. If it develops a hole or even a run, there is little that can be done. And what heroic measures would even the best seamstress take with a $12 garment already three years old?

This little jacket is great, I use it all the time, through three-quarters of the year. It’s flattering, goes with many things, and stretches any number of outfits’ utility and versatility.

And it has a little hole in the back, in the peplum, in a broad stretch of fabric that wouldn’t lend well to mending even if I had the skills. A patch would be bulky and unsightly – and, indeed, any bulk over a weak spot could actually create weak spots in its own perimeter. This fabric is THIN.

And the jacket has had three years already – in a variety of garment generally manufactured to last six months or less. This is actually part of the design/making of disposable clothes. They’re meant to be ditched. Not fixed. Just replaced. There’s another cardigan jacket out there just as good; there are fifty; a hundred. This is meant to be tossed, replaced by new.


This is something I wore three YEARS ago, when last I saw the man who ruined me for all the other ones. When last I saw the friend in this world who knows me better than even my oldest. When last I saw his laughter, heard it, MADE it. He’s touched those sleeves, put his arms around the back of this jacket. Felt how soft it is, even as I have a hundred times since, without him.



There’s really no way, even with the finest needle, to pick that hole and pull it back together. It’s small, but it is a hole. It can’t really be fixed.

And yet. And yet. I resist throwing the thing away. It keeps me JUST warm enough, it looks good in front still.

If only I didn’t know it had this flaw. This unfixable, and un-hide-able, flaw.

Research, RuPaul, and Affectation

When I was twelve or so, I first ran across the term “affectation” as a somewhat pejorative description of a girl putting on linguistic or gestural airs to Act a Certain way. As my reading widened, the term came to apply to affecting habits by men or women, with a little less insult freighting the description, but still generally seeming to indicate artificial behavior as a negative. “She affected a girlish lisp but seemed no younger for it” or “He affected to carry a walking stick” were the broad-stroked outlines of affectation.

Many of us today, especially Americans today, despise affectation – and yet, for all my own history of Valspeak and its signature (incredibly irritating) rising inflection, as a crotchety old lady, I find younger women and girls now no less affected, and just as irritating. The current iteration, in spoken language, favors either wildly raspy voices or nasal and juvenile sounding voices which remain immature in sound and vocabulary well past the sell-by date on “I’m a liddle gurl” pretension. This was plenty common in my own generation, and earlier in the twentieth century, but as a prejudiced old bat, it FEELS like it’s worse now, and “women today have lost all concept of the allure of a lower and modulated voice.”

My generation, of course, entertains the delusional affectation that we’re not getting old, rendering the concept of ageing gracefully all but risible (and I include myself). Every generation has its elaborate fictional lifelong scripts they live by, destinies shaped by prevailing assumptions, and those shaped by rebellion against them too.


Anyway. So affectation is considerably awful, in this day and age. Its reflection of artificial values, and empty aspirations *blah blah blah blah and so on*, pathetic pop culture, distended market interest in body image, consumer *blather blather blather ad nauseum* and … you get the point.

Behavior other than the authentic = bad.



But. Has any one of us ever in life met an ‘authentic’ person? Honest, sure. Even trustworthy. But almost every human for something north of six THOUSAND years now has been subject to some influence or other that has little to do with the natural world. Civilization – and animal behavior – are incompatible and always have been, and what people have ever succumbed to unfettered expression with their words, behaviors, and bodies, have ALWAYS been punished for it, even as we view artificiality with suspicion.

So most of us agree: crapping in public is Not Done. But eating is acceptable. And yet you can’t have one without the other. Looked at for more than five minutes, the standards we’ve cemented over the millennia begin to appear arbitrary, even as we can’t imagine (quite) letting go of them.


We judge the affectation of, say, a monarch so rarefied that for them to scratch their knee is unthinkable, as almost embarrasingly inhuman. Ironically: unworthy, by dint of the very centuries’ sanctioning of overweening position and antiquated political systems. Embarrassing.

And so, we snort, we wipe our noses, we move on with life, glad we’re not stuck in royal protocol … yet ever-fantasizing about silly constructs like “fairy tales” and obessing over Kate Middleton’s dresses.


Affectation is awful. And *aspirational*.



It’s difficult to even comprehend the idea of a world in which touching the ear is offensive, or speaking above the most rigidly-learned modulation. To imagine trying to live without sneezing, yawning, sighing in boredom – unthinkable. Who trains themselves out of these simple things? How can it even be done?

There are few of us living today who can stop and imagine living without the presumption that human feeling is universal. The presumption that a living, feeling person will act in X way given Y to endure, or suffer, or enjoy, is unfathomably deep in us, and yet a moment’s study betrays how wrong modern assumptions can be. Even the concept of individuality is not fundamental.


And it’s the job of a historical fiction author to convey, even in compromised terms, worlds like this. Minds without modern expectations. Relationships, communities, homes, and landscapes not framed by Norman Rockwell or even Titian or Picasso. To completely reframe character within different contexts.



This is where RuPaul comes in.

Here’s a guy who’s made quite a career in affectation, and people only love him for it. He has stated pointblank more than once, wearing a dress really isn’t his favorite thing in the world. Yet few of us – men or women – do it a whole lot “better” (modern presumptions firmly in place). The transformation of which he’s capable, and for which he’s made megabucks, is arresting.

And completely affected. You knew that would be coming, so it’s out of the way. Done.


The year I was so sick I missed New Year’s, I stayed home for days on my couch, so dizzy I could not read nor walk nor focus on anything closer to me that at least ten feet away, and I watched TV. Specifically, RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix (sadly, they don’t carry the show anymore). At first, I thought it would be light and funny and get my mind off the illness – with pretty colors and things to look at I wouldn’t have to contemplate in any depth.

I’ve seen every single season, and most of them several times over, thanks to the magic of cable TV’s perpetual reruns. It never gets old (and the editing is the most hilarious on TV).

Image: Wikipedia

RuPaul presides over this show, decidedly NOT taped in HD, and filtered on top of that – and so sits in the shining, golden haze of her wigs, cool, alluring, and utterly remote. Topping seven feet no doubt in those shoes, airbrushed to imaginary, unattainable perfection, she is packaged and presented as a goddess of transformations, and the dozens of minions over the past several years are a panoply of breathtaking talents, all offering up to her their charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent (one of the show’s million catch phrases – and it spells a word, y’all).

RuPaul HIMself appears at least once every episode decidedly out of drag, and each one ends with a judging, a ceremonial in which SHE makes a new appearance each week, magnificent and made-up, glittering and … “perfect” … There is a runway walk to showcase the week’s eye-popping dress and wig and makeup, then a few minutes’ marvelously Hollywood-fake-nice emceeing where she introduces the judges du jour, and then she takes her seat at the center of the panel and rules with an iron fist, a tongue in cheek, and the most eerily polished personal deportment this side of a royal court, seriously. Even on the rare occasion she takes a queen to task for something, the flare-up presented has the sheen of protocol, the fairy-tale monarch enacting the off-with-their-heads archness that does not so much as crack the heavily shellacked shell of the persona; indeed, only adds to the …

Affectation.

The more I watch RuPaul, the less I see the human, the private life, the man for whom this is decidedly a living, and for whom life is lived on a farm with a longtime partner, a private life beautifully and blankly unavailable to millions of viewers. It’s a work of art, and it’s kind of magnificent, thinking about all the unseen-ness or not.

As Marilyn Monroe was a persona worn, perhaps almost to excess, by a woman with intelligence and agency of her own, and deep vulnerabilities she actually used to fuel the machine of a career centered on affectation … so is RuPaul the product of the collective gaze, more than the real reflection of a man making a hell of a living looking like few women in the world can even aspire to.

(My apologies for the preceding sentence; this blog is largely unedited, and certainly not beta-read.)

Over the past couple of weeks, watching Rusie Q in her magisterial grandness, the very carriage of her head a lesson in imperiousness and royal dignity, the more I am thinking of the rarefied nature of affectation, and how IMPORTANT it is for certain characters. How it informs an entire existence – where animal humanity is locked away and hidden – where protocol’s demands are met, and with aplomb, but life as lived is a separate thing; and not, perhaps, a greater one.


Writing a world in which no voice should ever be raised, where bells are not rung to get attention, in which religious and court demands come above all things, the example of RuPaul in drag is perhaps hardly obvious, and yet I am inspired by the vision, by the transformative nature of the demands of the Supermodel of the World’s role. Watching the performance, the work, the absolute dedication is instructive, even if I will never directly use an ounce of it. The very angle of that sculpted chin is evocative. And that is enough.



Creative artists, writers, and those we work with, are fond of saying you never know where inspiration lies.

It’s impossible to convey in toto just how random, and true, that really is.