A friend encouraged me to sign up for the A-Z Challenge, for which you blog every week day but Sunday during the month of April. Using one letter a day, in alphabetical order, you blog about something that begins with that letter. An interesting challenge and an encouragement to write. Turns out I was number 864 to sign up – two years ago the number was only in double digits! I get to visit each of the blog sites of the others who signed up, and hopefully will find some blogs that I would like to follow. So it’s a way to build up a readership. My scientist background came roaring to the forefront in deciding on the theme for the A-Z: I chose the sense of smell as my theme. Two of the senses that are physiologically linked are taste and smell. Of the two, the sense of smell is the oldest evolutionarily and also the most potent in terms of evoking memories. So my A-Z blog will be about what are for me, evocative smells. Stay tuned – the first will be A is for Anise. 0 0
We’re having another dreary day of cold rain. We’ve had so many of them that my husband commented, “It’s like winter in Cleveland.” Not to deprecate Cleveland, but we lived there for five years, and the winters were pretty depressing. Having to curtail my activities because of another shoulder replacement, except for an occasional trip out for Pain and Torture (PT), has reduced my world to four rooms: bedroom (to sleep), office (to write), kitchen (to grab what’s available to eat; I’m not cooking) and family room (to watch revolting news and yet another death on Downton Abbey). Oh and of course the bathroom, but I don’t spend much time there unless I’m reading a good book. I check my email twice a day and have been working hard on finishing up my interview notes on applicants I interview for UNC’s School of Medicine. Beyond that I’m waiting on returns from CreateSpace, where my first book is being massaged into something hopefully intriguing for Kindle. All of which has left me in a singularly uncreative frame of mind. So I’m now going through the critiques for all of the chapters on the new book (nine so far) that have come from my two critique groups. This has just added to my mental malaise because I‘ve missed three meetings of one group because I don’t have a way to get there. Driving is still a couple of weeks away. So right now I’m channeling Annie and mentally humming The Sun Will Be Out Tomorrow. Crap, another year until Downton Abbey returns. 0 0
I’ve been given lots of advice lately about self-publishing, especially once I told my friends I’m too old to work and wait through finding an agent, who then finds a publisher, who then may want me to re-write my book (yet again). After all, Death in a Red Canvas Chair was something that started out on a bucket list! We all come with expiration dates, but we just don’t know when, so I’m off and running. With input from some members of my Early Birds critique group, I decided to go with CreateSpace. And I have to say it’s been a learning experience, but the people I’ve interacted with at the company have been professional and warm. I first decided to try to do the book on my own (free of charge). I looked at the selections of standard covers and found only one in which my cover photo would fit. It actually I thought it looked pretty nice but it got a few yucks from my friends. Then I uploaded my book into a standard format and got back something which, after two days of attempting to reformat into something professional, I decided was a little beyond my limited digital skills. I want this first book to be as professional-looking as possible, especially since it was a two plus year labor of love. And maybe that’s the way this is supposed to work: I signed up for editorial help with the cover and the internal formatting, both fairly reasonably priced. So far my experience in working with one of their design teams has been great, even when I uploaded the wrong version of the book. Okay, I was tired and not paying attention to which version I picked of the many that are scattered in my documents. All the others have now been deleted. So I’ll let you know how the rest of the journey develops. For now, it’s going to be 6-8 weeks, and they promised that the next time would be easier…… 0 0
With apologies to Brittany Spears: I just had another shoulder replacement. This is the consequence of my competitiveness – competitive swimming, tennis, field hockey, basketball – that lasted long after a normal person would have put some of these activities aside, mainly because I wanted to get better at each sport. But there is a genetic aspect as well. I remember thinking how sad it was that my parents were both crippled with arthritis when they were in their 70s. I never even considered it would be my fate, too. Double whammy. But modern medicine came along just in time to help me out. I’ll be back in the pool in a couple of months and will pick up a tennis racket for the first time in years this summer. Can’t wait. So how does this relate to my writing? Well, it’s the competitiveness. Not with my fellow writers but with myself this time. I need to write to get better at it. Need to submit my writing for critiques to get better at it. Need to submit pieces for publication to get better at it. Sitting back and hoping your writing will get noticed won’t do it. You need to compete. The publishing world is a morass: lots of writers, too few agents, too few publishing houses and too few editors who decide what the public wants to read. So I’m going to self-publish. Can’t wait. I’m too competitive. 0 0
Below is an excerpt from a newsletter written by a Canadian plein air painter – Robert Genn. He writes two letters a week and sends it to a vast subscriber list, among them a friend of mine who is a plein air painter and lives in California. She finds people who talk constantly about their art in progress with me-me-me syndrome very annoying, and she found this letter right on topic. It also introduced me to a new concept: humblebragging. “Now that everyone’s blabbing, tweeting and Facebooking minor and major glories, there’s a new way to deliver your stuff. It’s called humblebragging. This is where you lace your accomplishments with enough humility to get your stuff across and yet soften the blow to others. After all, it’s not nice to let people think your life is better than theirs. ‘That crummy painting I struggled with and almost threw out got sold to Lindsay Lohan.’ You get the idea?” As an artist, Genn doesn’t believe in any of this stuff. He’s worried about what bragging does to art learning and art quality. “This is just another reason why I try to talk about you, not me. Oh dear, that sounded a bit like humblebragging. Here’s the rub: If you transpose your doing thing to a talking thing, you might just be changing the dynamics of your doing thing. And if you decide to add a shot of humility, especially false humility, that might just screw things up even further. We are our words. We are what we say. What we speak, we become.” “We all know of artists who constantly need to verbalize their weaknesses and failures. Is the lousy self-esteem they project because their work is actually lousy, or is their work lousy because they’re always saying how lousy it is?” While I agree with a lot of what Genn wrote in his newsletter, writers are artists who paint with words, and thus people who write, especially ones who find critique groups helpful to improving their writing, need to talk about their work in order to get feedback and to get across their ideas. We just have to try not to be humblebraggers. Genns definition (taken from Jen Doll, a blogger): “The humblebrag is a way to brag while also seeming humble. It’s a subtle brag, a brag with a wink and a nod, the inside joke of bragging.” Examples from Genn’s letter: “Full humblebragging baloney often comes with the well regarded institution of the Artist’s Statement: ‘My folks were very poor. I was born in an old paper bag in the middle of Highway 401.’ Truly noble heights are attained when artists write about themselves in the third person: ‘As a child Joe Bloggs was always interested in mud puddles, hence his current fascination with marine subjects.’ ‘Mary Pinnacle’s father was an undertaker–she grew up surrounded by flowers.’” Hmm, this concept could make for some interesting writing. 0 0
I’ve been walking back and forth in my pool to keep my body going while my little red blood cells regenerate after my recent shoulder surgery. They actually made an appearance right on schedule: fourth week, lots more energy. Since walking is not so great at raising the heart rate, I decided to jog. Good choice – 30 or so traverses pushing against the water and moving as fast as I can had me panting. Which made me think about resistance. What came to mind is the 1 lb weight my Dad put on the end of my tennis racket when I was seven or eight. He was a damned fine tennis player (New England singles champion, played at Wimbledon), and I think he was hoping for another champion in his family. I complained loud and long at the extra weight, and my arm could barely hit a forehand, but he said my arm muscles would develop quickly against the resistance. And he was right. When the weight came off the next year, I had a zinger of a forehand and backhand. Which made me think about writing. I’ve run in to resistance this year. Resistance at finishing the final editing of my first book, resistance after the first two chapters of my second. I had parents who drummed into me that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I tried, and if I ran into resistance, I just had to buckle down and work harder. I took it to heart, and it helped my academic career. Writing, not so much until just lately. When I flagged with the book rewrite, I took time off and wrote a story about lobsters. It was a breeze. I was reinvigorated. I finished the book rewrite. A sense of accomplishment and on to the new book and the next chapter. Now I am bogged down in querying editors about the first book, but no matter, I’m flying with the second. Soon I’ll be pushing on with querying. So resistance in writing, at least for me, seems to be a signal to try something new and creative for a while, get back the old enthusiasm and push forward. Feels like the weight is off my racket. 0 0
Yes, you read that right. I’ve been walking in my pool. After my shoulder joint was rudely removed by a damned fine surgeon and replaced with a titanium replica that promises to outlast the rest of my body, I was told no swimming until the incision’s completely healed. Bummer. In addition, the machinations of the surgeon left me pretty anemic. The thought of becoming a couch potato in a pool of blubber was not appealing, so I’ve taken to walking in the pool. Traversing the shallow end 50 or 60 times is absolutely mind-numbing, but it has the advantage of being close to home should I start to fade. This type of exercise has left me to my imagination and observation. One of the things I’ve seen in the pool every day is a bird feather. The adult wing feathers have a gray base and the loveliest pink-red tips, clearly from one of the cardinals living in the bushes near the house. We feed them in the winter time, and to get to the food, the male meanly shoves aside any female on the tray. By spring, however, he has more urgent things on his mind and will delicately choose a seed to feed his mate. Males of every species are clearly driven by their hormones! Each year a pair nest in the tree outside our family room window and raise a raucous brood which doesn’t want to leave. But being territorial, by the time fall rolls around Mom and Dad have asserted themselves and we are back to one pair. They apparently like to bathe in our pool, despite the fact that we have provided them with a fantastic bird bath. Occasionally, one or the other sheds a downy breast feather, totally pink, that floats gracefully on the water’s surface. I do love seeing that fluff. I also use these walks to remove leaves from the pool, which are slowly taking over its surface. I enjoy watching a sere and folded leaf land on the water and sail across the pool, pushed by the wind like a ship of state. Makes me think of the Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria, Mayflower, Golden Hind, Trinidad and Santiago, ships that flew before the wind carrying explorers across the oceans and around the world. But mostly I just scoop them up with a net, while walking mindlessly back and forth. 0 0
Hello readers! Chapters 3-5 have now been added. Read on as Rhe delves deeper into the mystery of the body found on the soccer field. Enjoy! Read Chapter 3 now! 0 0
Autumn is here. I can tell from the spider webs. Going out onto our back deck each morning is now an adventure because their silky nets have been spun overnight and hang from our sun umbrellas. Spider silk is mainly composed of a protein similar to that in insect silk, the kind that the Japanese have for years used to make silk cloth. It’s similar in tensile strength to nylon but is much more elastic, so it can stretch much further before breaking or losing shape. Which is why it stretches when it catches you. Definitely a biological wonder. I don’t mind running into the webs, but I do worry about is having the spider actually on me. I respect spiders, largely because they help reduce the insect population, but North Carolina is also home to both the brown recluse and the black widow, both of which deserve a wide berth. Our pool seems to be a spider attractant. I have never seen so many different species as I’ve seen while swimming this year, from tiny almost transparent ones to huge black and yellow garden spiders 2-3 inches across. No matter the size, shape or color, they all have the same eight legs. No, spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs and are on the spider menu. The webs are a marvel of engineering and design and I think everyone should take the time to admire the work and try to avoid running into them, if possible. In the last few days I’ve seen the egg balls in the center of the webs, the mother’s promise of a new generation. Autumn is definitely here. 0 0
I don’t know how many people reading this have written something, anything, that requires rewrites. I am personally on my fourth or fifth (and hopefully the last) of Sudden Death and am finding the work very hard going. Sort of like slogging through mud. My beta readers did a fantastic job finding errors, crumbs misplaced in the story line or even not developed sufficiently, and things left out. While this has led to the inevitable chapter by chapter fixin’, it has also led to backtracking and more rewriting. Slogging. I find myself wanting to write something, anything, for fun. To create, not recreate. Trying to stay on task is a constant effort. I’d love to know how other people handle this. What tricks do you use to keep yourself interested and excited about the rewrite? Solutions, anyone? 0 0
