We are not yet in that Promised Land. Let us keep trying, hoping, loving, and acting.
Jan 212013
Jan 172013
Anyone under 30 is starting to meld together in a group of “awww, they’re so young”.
I found this out the other day while dropping the Princess off at school.
ME: *notices strange man watching kids* Who’s that? He doesn’t belong here.
PRINCESS: That’s a security guard, Mum.
ME: Really? He’s awful young. He looks like a nice boy.
PRINCESS: He’s your age.
Me: He can’t be. He has no gray.
PRINCESS: Neither do you. Yet.
ME: …
I feel like one of those signs at the grocer’s–We card anyone who appears under 45! This is, incidentally, part of why I don’t date. Either you’re my age and presumably already have a marriage and/or a divorce, or you’re Too Young For Me. (There’s also the part where I don’t have time, because I gotta write to feed the mortgage and the kids, and if I’m not doing that I’m cleaning or baking or some damn other thing.)
Anyway.
I’m also thinking about fairy tales a lot lately. Mostly because Nameless is due out in a few months, and I’m revising the second in that series as well as deciding what aspects of another fairy tale I want for the third. The tales grow and mutate over time, and digging to find their bones–as well as which bones you choose to unearth, and which you choose to leave in the mouldering–says a lot about one’s deep assumptions or internalized sort-of-truths, both personally and culturally. It’s no secret a lot of fairy tales are gruesome, and that even more of them highlight problematic family relations. Others talk about the use and misuse of power, the charged field of human sexuality, and so on, so forth.
I don’t have a particular point to this ramble, I’m just turning over different stories inside my head, examining them to see what makes them tick. Getting under the hood and seeing what makes it go, what I can poke and prod to make run smoother, what I can update and what’s best left in place. Some of what you leave is just a matter of preferences, or personal choice, or blind chance. Maybe every writer starts messing with fairy tales at least once in their writing life, just out of fascination and curiousity.
The other thing on my mind this day is getting Odd Trundles taken in to get his nails cut. He won’t let me do it, and he’s grown to the point where I can’t judo him anymore without all sorts of stress on both our parts. The groomer can do it quickly and humanely, and we’ll all be happier.
But I suspect Odd won’t like it one little bit, and I’m almost afraid of the story I’ll have to tell afterward.
Over and out…
photo by:
zoethustra
Jan 142013
A light dusting of snow this morning, which meant: all the drivers on the way to the Little Prince’s school were bloody insane, Miss B did not get to go on the morning run with me (I am concerned for her paws), Odd Trundles is Extremely Needy (any change is BAD, and means we must stay close to Mum AT ALL TIMES, even when Mum is in the shower), I have a slight but persistent sinus headache (running helped, I guess), and I’m drinking tons upon tons of genmaicha to keep warm.
I acquired the taste for genmaicha before my divorce, and it’s odd how much the taste takes me back. Not in a bad way. It reminds me of the good bits before things fell apart. So it’s nice, but it’s also a creator of small internal shiftings. Relaxing enough to let those things fall where they will is one of the very good things about being an adult, and it’s why I wouldn’t be younger again if you paid me. The further I am from the helplessness of my childhood and the terror of my adolescence, the more I can lay both to rest and let the broken pieces inside me have the space and air they need to bring themselves together in a new pattern.
Sometimes things don’t heal, but you can glue them together in a different way and encourage them to hold.
And so I go onward, now that the dogs are both snoring next to me in the office and I can see squirrels (not Napoleon, thank heavens) running in bare branches outside my window, vanishing into the cedar hedge’s thick green shelter. The sky is that gray infinite you only see when snow comes, but it isn’t the iron of a deep fall. It’s more the haze of tiny stinging snowflakes. Living in Wyoming, as I did for a while, I kept wishing there were different words for “snow”. Then I read Smilla’s Sense of Snow, which remains one of my very favourite books ever, and found out there are. (But not in English. It’s like living in the Pacific Northwest and trying to find words in English for the thousand different types of rain.) I should probably read Smilla again, the prose is so sharp and spare and she is such a well-written female character, it’s almost unreal. After I finish today’s work, maybe I’ll treat myself.
But first, another pot of tea, another small smile at the spaces inside me, full of air and light now, so that the jagged edges in the deep dark can breathe.
Over and out.
Dec 192012
The Little Prince’s report card came home with him yesterday. After we went over it and I hugged him, he happily buzzed away to do whatever it is a ten-year-old boy does to usher in the freedom of Winter Break. (I.e., he headed for his video games as fast as his legs could carry him.)
Me? I sat at the table and cried.
I could hear all those voices from my childhood, screaming in the dark, cobwebbed halls I don’t often visit. The ones I only open up long enough to verify yep, still nasty, still horrible and let a bit of the steam leak out so they don’t explode.
*An A? Just an A? Why isn’t it an A+?
*You’re lazy, you’ll never amount to anything.
*You’re supposed to be a lawyer/doctor! I couldn’t be one, so you have to! Don’t disappoint me!
*That artsy shit will never put food on the table.
*Head in the clouds. You’re lazy and worthless. What are you good for?
*You’ll never make it out in the real world. And you’re not pretty enough to marry.
*Artist? Ha. You can’t even wash dishes right.
Anything that even vaguely smacked of art, or of pleasure, or of culture, or even of happiness, was frowned upon, if not actively beaten into the ground. My love of books was ridiculed, and the books themselves were torn in half, taken away, spat on. My journals were read (except the ones I hid at school, thank you, Madame P, you saved my life) and I was punished for what I dared to write. No grade was ever good enough. Nothing was ever perfect enough.
On my son’s report card: “*Little Prince’s name* has become quite a writer! He often chooses to write during his daily free time. He has three stories he is actively working on, and many more inside his head. It’s great to see him loving writing and reading so much!”
The Princess draws anime and manga characters. She’s not quite the voracious reader I was at her age, but she’s actively writing stories and books (including one massive multigenerational could-be-a-huge-ass-manga-series tome that I suspect outweighs War and Peace by now); art supplies are her fondest wish this Yule. “I might not make a living at it,” she says, “but anything’s possible. Hard work can do things! Also, I could be an astronomer.”
They are not afraid to dream, to breathe, to do, to be.
I cried for the child I was, and I cried for joy that my children do not know the suffocation of having their voices stifled. Neither of them can imagine a book being torn, slaps and kicks, being belittled or silenced at home. I am glad beyond words that it’s unthinkable for them. It doesn’t change what I endured, nothing can.
But it gives me hope and strength beyond measure.
If you are reading this, no matter who you are, I have something to tell you: you do not have to be silent. You have a voice, your own voice, and what you can say with it is something nobody else can ever say. It is unique, it is marvelous, and it is all yours. It makes the world a richer place. It can lead you out of darkness and stop the cycle of abuse; it can help you share the happiest life and upbringing as well. You don’t have to write with it–paint, sing, dance, make papier-mache molds of priapic elephants, specialize in Belgian pastries, whatever wonderful thing that makes joy bubble all through you.
During the Winter Solstice when the bright half of the year is reborn, when the planet starts its tilt back toward summer and the nights become a little shorter, when the dreidel spins or the Mars Rover grants us more data about our amazing universe, it never hurts to remind you that even if things are bad now, you will sooner or later have a chance to let your voice free. Keep believing, keep it safe and close inside you if you have to, a coal of resistance.
If you need permission, if you need encouragement, if you need someone to tell you it’s okay, well, consider yourself told, consider permission given, consider this encouragement from the very floor of my being. It is never too late to begin unloosing your marvelous voice, in whatever fashion. You have something to give the world. Write it. Play it. Dance it. Sing it. Keep doing it. Keep writing, keep going, keep doing.
One day it may save someone. And that someone might not be you.
Crossposted to the Deadline Dames, where there are giveaways, sneak peeks, and tons of fun. Check us out!
Dec 122012
Roll out of bed, jam the trainers on, get kids up, dogs need to go out and get fed. Lunch for the Prince, coffee to jump-start me, the Princess needs a ride to school because she’s overslept (again). Come back and start another chorus in the song of motherhood: are your teeth brushed yet? Is your hair brushed yet? How about now? Where are your shoes? Are your teeth brushed? No? Well, go brush them. And your hair. Where’s your coat? Your homework? Yes, I like that hairstyle, now go brush it… And all with the dogs underfoot, grunting and panting their happiness that the house is awake and the kibble has been dispensed.
Somehow, each morning, everything gets sorted out just in the nick. Kids, dogs, bread dough: they all take time, and they all turn out well far more frequently than you’d think.
There’s a passage near the end of Stephen King’s IT, where the Turtle tells Bill Denborough (oh, authorial self-insertion much? But I forgive you, King, for Ben Hanscom’s sake) to be brave, be true and to stand, and the eleven-year-old starts laughing, because he’s noticed, even at that tender age, that things do work out well a ridiculous amount of the time. Every time I read the passage I smile, because it just…the force of the realization clicks home. Maybe it’s because I’m in a relatively privileged part of the globe; still, it’s always amazing. Most of the strangers I see are occasionally boorish or irritating, but not actively murderous. I am, for example, always amazed that there aren’t more car accidents and road rage in school parking lots, what with all the refusing to wait and cooperate a small proportion of the parents do. It’s easy to just see the jerkwads who are behaving badly.
But that means one overlooks the rest of us, who wait and take turns. Who stop for the crosswalks and bring the grocery cart to the return, who let the guy with just two items step into line in front of them with their heavily-laden cart because they’re going to take a while. Who return a wallet to the lost and found with all its cash inside, who find a woman’s bank card at the dog park and ask until they find its owner. Who make merging into a crowded freeway a little less problematic by obeying the unspoken rules of first you then me then you then me. The mothers who grab a toddler heading in front of a car even when it’s not their own kid, and the patient people who slow down in Costco to let the old, hunched-frail lady whose grandson is helping her shop shuffle along at her own pace since she’s earned that much. The vast mass of us who generally wait our turn, no matter how irritated we get.
Humanity is, yes, nasty brutish and short-tempered. We’re filling our planet with crap and killing each other in unprecedented numbers. But there’s also a great mass of us who try to be well-mannered, who endure, who pick up the bricks and sweep up after the shelling and try to feed our loved ones and struggle along without being asshats. Those are the people who don’t make the news, but if humanity is moving forward at all, they’re the sleigh dogs providing a great deal of the pull. And on this fragile, heartbreakingly beautiful little blue dot, things have been working out, not just every morning but since the first dawning…
…a ridiculous amount of the time.
photo by:
Tambako the Jaguar
Dec 102012
I dislike this time of year intensely. There’s the idea that you can be a jackass for three-hundred-and-sixty-four, and then make some sort of gesture and have it all be forgiven. Plus there’s the rampant BUYBUYBUY that starts the instant Halloween ends, and the financial stress that makes parents explode at their kids in stores–I’ve seen it over and over again, and I hate it. There’s also the anxiety from my childhood–any Holiday Event was an unmarked minefield, with disaster-shrapnel only a matter of time.
And yet.
There are my kids, who are delighted with any sort of ornament or present, no matter how small. (“Jeez, Mum,” the Princess told me this year. “I mean, I’ve got everything.”) There is the sigh of relief that I am in a completely new place where memories of the times when I was trying to clean up financial messes from the ex aren’t crowding every room-corner. There are the dogs, who don’t care what time of year it is as long as there’s kibble and belly-skritches. There’s my sisters, beaming because they have some time off and can visit. There’s the satisfaction of cooking good things and watching the people I love eat and laugh.
And for a few years now, there’s been a moment when the kids are in bed on the Eve and I take a deep breath and realize there will be no screaming or broken things, no blood, no hideous surprises I’ll have to pay for. That things have, in fact, become steadily better. That I’ve climbed, step by step and reach by reach, up out of a hole so deep and black I never thought I’d see even thin winter sunlight again. There is also the moment when I expect to feel a sick thump of worry, disappointment, and fear…and it doesn’t come. I freeze, looking for the trap, and I cannot see it. Instead, there is only peace. Fragile and frightening as any new thing, but still…peace. I like it.
All that is good.
But I’m still not setting foot inside a store until after New Year’s if I can help it.
photo by:
starshaped
Nov 282012
Writing is a lot like feeding children.
One of the best things I ever found on the Internet was the Fat Nutritionist. While enduring the breakup of my marriage, I lost a ton of weight, and I lost even more after the divorce. (I knew why, too. I wasn’t miserable and trying to cover the misery with food anymore.) When I stumbled across Michelle’s site, it was like getting a love letter from that difficult land called Eating Stuff, and vindication in words I could understand that I really wasn’t broken about food at all.
One of the things she talked about is Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility. In short, the principle is this: I am responsible for getting a variety of healthy food on the table and teaching my kids not to fling food at each other (much) when they sit down to eat. (Well, at home that rule’s a teensy bit flexible. At a restaurant, not so much.) I do the cooking and try to get a variety of pretty healthy things to the table at regular times. The kids are in charge of whether to eat and how much. They’ll eat as much as they need, and they’ll grow into the bodies that are right for them. The best way to avoid giving them food complexes (I have a rather large one, if you haven’t guessed) is to have this division of responsibility clear.
It’s very close to things I felt but could never quite articulate about the kind of parent I want to be: loving and letting these amazing human beings find their own amazing selves while being kept safe, supported, and taught how not to get run over crossing the street. Most of all, I did not want the Princess to reach her teenage years and get a huge goddamn complex about her body and food. There’s already enough cultural/social pressure there, I didn’t want to add to it the way my own issues got started: you would be such a pretty girl if you lost some weight, now eat everything on your plate because we worked hard to get you this food! (Note: the people who repeated this over and over again may have meant well. But given their other behaviours, I don’t think so.)
And this also articulates something about writing I have felt for a long time. You have to learn to lay the table and let go.
The list of things an author doesn’t have control over is long and daunting. Covers. Reviews. Whether a reader “gets it.” Distribution patterns, plenty of marketing decisions, what people say on Twitter or on Goodreads or in hate-filled (or well-meaning but boorish) emails or letters sent right to you. Even if you self-publish, you don’t have the control you might want over covers, or marketing (time and financial constraints) or editing (again, time and financial constraints, or just sheer inexperience) or reviews, or or or…
What do you have control over?
Not much. Making the effort to meet your deadlines. Taking charge of your own career, taking the time to read and follow submissions guidelines. Deciding which hill you want to die on when an editor wants you to make a certain revision and you disagree, and putting on your big girl (or big boy) knickers and realizing that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, your editor is right. (That last time, though, that’s the hill.) Other factors can impinge on your ability to do these things, though a lot less than you think if you are rightfully determined.
The only thing that is entirely within your compass, the thing that you have 100% control over, the thing that is all yours, is writing the best story you can. Doing the work to sharpen your craft, to do your research, to consistently make your writing time a priority[*], to keep improving, to not punk out or look away when a story gets difficult, to go right for the jugular and be vulnerable on the page, is your responsibility. This is the thing you control right down to the molecular level. To the goddamn quantum level, really.
Lay the table with the meal that is your best effort. And then let go of it. Someone loves it? Cool. Walk away. Someone hates it? Cool. Walk away. Someone markets it wrong? Walk away. It doesn’t get distributed as much as it could due to outside factors? Walk away. Cover is horrid? Walk away. Any one of a million other goddamn things? Walk the fuck away.
Walk yourself right back to the words, honey. To the keyboard, typewriter, journal, pad of paper, whatever. Get started on the next one. Get started on learning more, crafting better, not punking out. Leave the meal on the table for them to throw at each other, and get back to work. This is the thing you’ve got the control over, let it take up the majority of your time and don’t eat your stomach lining up with the things that you can’t control as much as you’d like.
This will not only help save your stomach lining (and quite possibly what little sanity you have, which I make no estimation of since I am of the opinion that it’s always questionable when one is making a living from writing anyway) but it will free up your energies for getting the next meal on the table. In more ways than one.
Over and out.
[*] Yes, this is code for “do it every day.” But my Faithful Readers know that.
Crossposted to the Deadline Dames, where there is a ton of other useful advice. And sneaky peeks!
photo by:
Dirigentens
Sep 262012
Let’s talk, dear chickadees. Pull up a chair, light ‘em if you got em, pour yourself another bevvie.
Let’s talk about pain.
I really, really love this video of Jason Mraz singing “A Beautiful Mess.” My writing partner commented that he opens himself completely to both audience and song during this particular rendition, and it’s a moment of absolute amazement. Imagine being that vulnerable, opening your beating heart to an auditorium full of people. You don’t have to imagine, though. You already know. Every human being knows.
Life is suffering, Buddha had that goddamn right. We are perishable, fragile beings in a world full of accident and sharp edges–and not just physically, either. Pain is unavoidable. We fight it, of course. (I mean, sheesh. *cue Captain Obvious* Pain hurts, you know?) And we do not fight just pain. We back away from the idea of pain as well. We back away from a risk, real or otherwise.
Inherent in every performance, every piece of art–because a painting or a book is a performance just like a song–is the risk of rejection and failure. You could just say that “failure” is merely rejection; a negative judgment on a piece of art feels pretty goddamn personal when you’ve wrenched said art out of the bleeding depths of you. My ex-husband (no, this isn’t one of THOSE stories) once, just after I’d been published and was learning the horror of Amazon reviews firsthand (and oh, how I long sometimes for those innocent days when that was the deepest pit of iniquity to be found!), gave me a crooked smile and said, “Oh, Lili. You know what Samson would do? He’d moitalize the motherfuckers with the jawbone of a critic.”
…there was a reason I stayed married to him for so long, I guess. Maybe you just had to be there. Anyway.
Pain hurts. Pain nasty. Pain bad.
Pain…universal.
The advantage you have, when making art, is this universality. The willingness to stare your own pain in the face, to reach into its rawness and bring it forth (in your work, not on social media, but that’s–say it with me–another blog post), to transform it into something that another person can gaze into the mirror of and recognize…that, my darlings, is the hat trick. The jolt of recognition is what we hunger for when we hunger for art.
What other things are universal? Anger, certainly. Pleasure, yes. Laughter, oh yes. But the fear of rejection is exponentially bigger and doused with napalm when it’s our own agony on display. To bare yourself at your most vulnerable and to be laughed at–it’s a nightmare, isn’t it? (I could go with a metaphor about sex here, but I won’t. I have some couth. OKAY, FINE, THERE’S NOT ENOUGH SPACE. STOP LAUGHING.)
To create is to over and over again show the holes and cracks and flaws in your own heart. To stand there on a stage and sing, hoping to connect, but never quite sure that you will. There is always the fear that the audience will laugh and boo you off the stage–or worse, simply stare, shrug with boredom, and turn away. Our capacity for pain is matched only by our hunger for connection, the shock of recognition that gives us fleeting glimpses of the truth. What truth?
This I hold to be truth: we are born alone and die alone, but in between we have moments–always too short, always too few–where we can connect. We can share that static-electricity spark. It is a shining defense against the dark. To light a candle is to cast a shadow, yes–but is it better to grope in the blackness alone your whole life?
I do not think so. My point (and I do have one) is this: yes, it hurts. Life hurts, art hurts, the whole goddamn thing hurts. Do not look away. Feel the fear of opening yourself, sure. Feel the temptation to look away. It tells you where the juiciest part of the art is, the place you must not shy from. Yes, it’s terrifying. But do not let that fear rule you. Don’t let the fact that it hurts sway you. Do not look away.
Get up on that stage and sing. Dance in the cobra’s jaws. Invite your reader into the secret, bleeding-raw, embarrassing chambers. Tear your flesh open and show your heart. This is what art is.
What a beautiful mess…this is…
Indeed.
Crossposted to the Deadline Dames, where we have giveaways, pie, and knives dripping with demon blood! Just kidding. There’s no pie…
photo by:
armin_vogel
Jul 172012
I have been practicing forbearance as an art form lately. Really, if someone would have told me that adulthood was comprised of being calm and polite until one had a grip on the situation’s short hairs, then pulling hard while smiling sweetly, I would have been even more eager to get here.
I mean, I was eager for “childhood” and adolescence to be done anyway. To me, being a child/teen was being helpless, at the daily mercy of chaotic, unpredictable, and hurtful forces. Adulthood is the same, really, except having my own car keys and bank account gives me the illusion of being in control. As long as I have that illusion, I’m chilly. The perception of having some sort of say in one’s own life works absolute wonders, much as Frankl posits that finding some meaning in even the most horrific conditions can save a psyche. (Or, if not “save,” at least keep it from disintegrating completely.)
Anyway, I’m on the home stretch of a Major Life Change, and almost able to speak about it publicly. There will be hilarious blog posts in the future, I’m sure. But for right now, I’m exhausted and finally feeling like I have some sort of control over a situation, and it relieves a great deal of pressure. I’ve been using writing as a decompression during this whole thing, and struggling with the fact that one must have mental and emotional energy in order to write.
At different times in my life, writing has been confessor, framework, best friend, jealous mistress, lifeboat, parent, faithful lover, teacher, outlet, defense, weapon, and a million other things. The bare act of putting the words down, that mundane sorcery we take for granted, has been pretty much all things to me. The worst bit about the stress I’ve been under is some days, the words have to be chipped out of my cranium with a battle axe. Groping for a word, struggling to find any word at all, is one of my personal versions of hell. As the stress has receded, it’s gotten better–but the habit of sitting each day and refusing to leave until the words come, however molasses-slowly or blood-painfully, has been the only thing keeping me nailed to the chair so I at least get some of them out. This is why I harp so endlessly on the subject of discipline–if I hadn’t had that habit, God alone knows how painfully lost I might have been. It actually makes me shudder.
Anyway. Time to do, again. Hey, on a completely unrelated note, learn some new things about rabies! *shudders once more*
Over and out.
Jun 182012
I find rollercoasters relaxing.
It’s the moment when you’re strapped in and the thing starts moving, before it even chugs up the big initial hill. A lot of people think the point of no return is at the top of that first hill before the plunge. It’s not. It’s the moment the straps and bar are clicked into place. From then, it’s useless to do anything but relax and settle in for the ride.
Once it’s all moving, the great bitch-goddesses of Chance and Physics are in charge. They don’t care that I’m fleshly and fragile, they are concerned with much weightier matters, so to speak. It’s like finishing a book–once one has the dominos set up (which is 90% or more of the problem) all it takes is a single flick of a finger; then you’re not in charge anymore. Preparation and physics are in charge, and they couldn’t care less what you think.
I am on this tangent this morning for a number of reasons–being caught in an emotional congame between two people and struggling free of it, Major Life Changes afoot, blah de blah blah. It’s kind of sobering to realize that I’ve been struggling after the point of no return. I think it’s because I’ve effectively lowered my tolerance for stress since the divorce. You know the old saw: you have as much stress as you can tolerate, and if you want to lower stress, lower that tolerance. I didn’t realize it had been done so effectively. Bully for me, yes, but also, oh my God, I’ve been fighting Physics and Chance, and I have about as much chance against them as a a flyswatter has against a machine gun. Sure, you can sharpen the handle, but it’s not going to do much good.
So it’s time for me to take a deep breath and sink back into the seat, look at the scenery, and marvel at the sudden dips and swerves. It’s all good. The frazzle along my nerves will go down, and things will arrange themselves the way they’re meant to.
Take your tickets, step up, take a look around. We’re all on a rollercoaster, one way or another. Might as well enjoy it, because if catastrophic failure happens and the whole thing comes tumbling down, it won’t matter anyway.
I suspect that is not as comforting as I meant it to be…