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The horror of yesterday's events in Newtown, Connecticut cuts through me to the core. That was the exact sort of class where I could be reading my books to a bunch of wide eyed five year olds, full of wonder about the world. It is the sort of place where you could feel safe, cozy and innocent. The idea that five year olds would ever have to think of kindergarten as a place of death and mayhem is unfathomable. Yes, the problem is the guns and lack of gun control. It's deeper and more pervasive. We inhabit a place we cannot legislate, a culture desensitized by gratuitous violence. At the movies a few weeks ago, I was bothered by the string of coming attractions of nameless movies marked by blood, gore and body counts. Where were the stories? Children are sitting in front of the TV and computer screens shooting for sport. Guns and guts are the scorekeepers. There is a disconnection from the horror. How did we arrive at this place? How did scary fall off the cliff into this abyss of terror?
Getting a gun should be harder than getting a driver's license and violence should not be entertainment.
This morning I c
ame across a beautiful oddity in a patch of soil where I’ve planted begonias and await the bloom of ranunculus to brighten a winter day in Southern California. Tucked in between two plants, I noticed what looked like a simple carved wooden flower. It had 5 “petals” and a ball like center. When I bent down to pick it up, I realized it was a mushroom, one I could have never even imagined existed. I googled “flower like mushroom" and found it was called an Earth Star.
The name was as magical as the sturdy little flower I held in my hand. I learned the Blackfoot Indians believed it really was a star that had fallen to earth during supernatural events. Curious to see if there were more, I went outside again and discovered another one, not as perfect as the first. The center ball had a little hole on top. I gently squeezed the bulb and a puff of dust, spore dust, emerged like a tiny volcano.
Today reminded me of my favorite quotes from E.B.White – “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” Small miracles can emerge when you tend your garden. Unexpected wonder can appear in one’s own backyard. Pay attention. It is all there, right under your nose.
NaNoWriMo is a few days away. I have participated before but found myself in a muddle of words halfway through and never finished the story I started, stalled with the mid book blues. I just read a wonderful essay by Steven Johnson with the same title as this post
https://medium.com/the-writers-room/8ee301a21ef1 My compulsive love of editing, tweaking every paragraph, every fifteen minutes has made me my own worst enemy. Next month I am going to shoot the editor, stifle that mistress of correction until November 30th and write, write, write. Maybe I will find that I should stick to picture books where I can pick at every word until the few hundred I've written make a perfect text. The longer books I've began have led me to dead ends and maybe now I've found the answer why. You can't move forward if you keep looking back.
A few weeks ago when my computer died, the purchase of a new one as well as the latest version of Word, provided me with the opportunity to revisit abandoned manuscripts. With fresh eyes, many of them didn't look too bad. I wondered why I had given up on so many texts that now seemed to have potential. Writing short books is long hard work that requires fearless slashing and burning of beloved lines until the story seems just right. Some days the frustration is insurmountable.
Several years ago, during a very wet winter season, the drains in our back yard deck surrounding the pool became clogged with roots. You are probably wondering about the relationship between a clogged drain and writer's block. When the pool overflowed, the water had no place to go creating a potentially disastrous situation. Between storms, I called a plumber to remedy the situation. He worked for an hour to no avail. He knocked on the door to ask if I wanted to spend another 40 dollars for him to continue working as he was making no progress. I said, "Yes." Fifteen minutes later, he broke through the blockage and the water flowed freely through the pipes into the street. When I am working, I often spend an hour without the desired result. I want to rip my work to shreds, press delete but I don't. I think about the plumber with another fifteen minutes, another forty bucks and I continue to scribble or type away.
All aboard! Enjoy Brad Mendelson's wonderful reading of
THE GOODNIGHT TRAIN.
I just had a good little kick in the pants. I sat down to read and finish STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST by Austin Kleon. It was just what I needed on a day like today when I was questioning a crazy new idea I have for a book. It made me remember why I started to write picture books. I wanted to create the book I couldn't find, write the book I wanted to read aloud. Often the clutter of life clouds what you have always known all along. STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST was a gentle nudge filled with good ideas to help make a creative life even more creative. Thanks, Austin Kleon for making some helpful magic out of that mess of index cards.
A tweet led me to the seed of this entry, a quote entitled READ ALOUD by George V. Higgins:
"You can get what you need to write (as opposed to what you need to make a big nuisance of yourself at cocktail parties) by shutting yourself in a room by yourself for twenty minutes a day and reading aloud from E.B. White's CHARLOTTE'S WEB, and going on from that to other works of skill, until you begin to see, by hearing how much the choice and arrangement of the words contribute to the impact of the story, even when no sound is uttered in its reading."
I have recently become a fan of audio books, especially for long drives alone or when I find an acclaimed work that for some reason or another I can't finish in book form. I am a big time E.B. White fan so rather than listen to myself read aloud, I decided to revisit CHARLOTTE'S WEB on a CD from the library. Within a few minutes, I was in a "faux" 21st century state of shock. Fern had a doughnut for breakfast and Avery brought a gun, an air rifle, on the school bus! I can't imagine an editor today allowing this scenario to pass for publication. Avery would have been sent to Juvie, after his school was put on lock down for bringing an unconcealed weapon to school. Mrs. Arable's parenting skills would have been brought into question for feeding her children doughnuts for breakfast even though a baby pig had disrupted the normal routine. Still there is an innocence to this situation viewed as "incorrect" in our current cultural climate. I had reread this book in the past ten years but somehow this scene slipped by me. Hearing the words magnified them, made me pause in way I hadn't with book in lap.
In spite of the false summer that leaves an errant bloom amid dying leaves, January is the time to prune roses in Southern California. I have always been tentative about slashing the throny branches to the bone, leaving a gray skeleton to sit in the slant of the winter light. Last year I learned to be merciless and my prune led to a multiflorous spring filled with more rosebuds than I could have ever imagined. My timidity reminded me of editing my own writing, slashing that beautiful sentence hurts as much as beheading a hardy rose. Yesterday as I wielded my pruning shears, I found a shoot of a bush that must have been eight feet long trailing up a nearby orange tree. Like a rambling paragraph that does not move my story along, it had to cut despite the possibility that a flower or two might appear in a few months.
This morning I found one of my favorite on line reviews of The Goodnight Train. A mother wrote that the book turned her 21 month year old son into "a cuddle muffin!" The magic of words, 273 to be precise. So many lines were thrown to the side of tracks as I wrote this book. Maybe if they stayed the cuddle muffin would have turned into a squirm bucket, annoyed by the author's self indulgence of a pretty turn of phrase. Like rose bushes, all growing stories long or short need to be pruned.
As I toss the days of the past year up like confetti, certain times and events land with sparkling clarity. Waking up to the vista of Lake Louise. The calving of the Edith Clavell glacier. My hands hurting from applause at the end of The Book of Mormon. Knowing last January that our dinner at Pacific's Edge would be the best one of the year. Singing Broadway show tunes at Marie's Crisis. Learning The Goodnight Train kept chugging along. Hearing that Adam proudly announced he never read my blog. The bounty of wonderful books. The writer's workshop in the house with the concert hall. A snowy Memorial Day weekend at Fallen Leaf Lake. Making red velvet cookies that actually tasted good. Lunches at True Food Kitchen. The yoga retreat at Casa Maria. Seeing a finished book is in reach. Finding a character I love. The inspiration of The Beautiful Outcasts class. The unborn picture books on my white board. The serendipity of finding a diapered toddler reading B is For Bulldozer on YouTube. Winning the $200 Grand Prize for answering a Yoga Journal survey a few hours after I donated my school visit fee. Conversations with Dudley.
As 2012 dawns, hope floats for the prospect of the coming year. I will continue to make my lists with the full knowledge that everything will done...eventually. My real chore is to chip away at the multi tasking chaos in my life, ignoring the time eating trivia that keeps my goals at bay. Here's to another year of good health, adventures and the wonder of words!
Before I read Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, I considered my slowness to move forward with any project was a flaw of my contemplative nature. The family joke is that I get everything done - eventually. Now I realize a turtle's pace is not a bad thing and many of the greatest inventions did not come about from a light bulb over the head but a hunch that comes in and out of one's mind over time. I have been creating a middle grade character for the past few years, writing vignettes about this person in search of a plot for her life between the covers of a book. For a while I felt like I was going no where fast. This past week the churning of this little person, her flaws and her idiosyncrocies have turned into a plan, a plot for a real story. I am finally ready to hold my nose and dive deep into the pool of overwriting chapters, tackling the heartache of a murky middle and the victory of a last sentence. Stay tuned.
Four years ago I started a picture book text about a fire fighting plane. My close brushes with Southern California fires was the seed for this idea. When flames threaten your home, an airplane dropping water or fire retardant becomes a hero in the true sense of the word. Every cliche about the bravery of firemen becomes a fact when you watch these men put their lives in harm's way to save families and their homes. After our last neighborhood incident, I was inspired to try to write about the fire fighting planes with the same spirit I brought to B IS FOR BULLDOZER and THE GOODNIGHT TRAIN. Easier said than done.
My original story has undergone countless revisions. When I thought it was polished enough to send off to editors, I had no takers. After a while , I had a sneaking suspicion the subject was alien to the urbane New Yorkers who were hopefully reading the story. Seasonal fires were not in their repertoire of experience. Discouraged and on to other work, I put my text to rest. Yesterday as I watched the news of a fire approaching homes in an LA canyon, I saw the intrepid yellow plane drop water from the nearby ocean on a hillside above a neighborhood. The story of Scoopy, formerly Rain the Fireplane, had been sleeping in Word for nearly two years. I opened the text to look at it with fresh eyes and spent last night tweaking the words. This morning I slashed the word count. I do not know what will happen with this story but I savor the joy of rereading my work with the courage to select and hit delete.
After I finished Rules of Civility By Amor Towles, I did something that I only did once before with Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish. I went back to the beginning and started to read the book again. I needed to see how the author "did it," how he structured the story. It was delicious to read the preface once more for hints of the story to come. How do you string a connection between George Washington's rules of behavior and the snappy repartee of Depression Era Long Island swells? How does a man write from a woman's point of view and have it sound so right. This is a story that plumbs truth and deception in black and white 1938, a polished world of satin dresses and glossy hair. The author's visual capture of the time goes beyond setting. It saturates a world I only know from movies and my parent's stories, an age I imagine was defined by a certain sense of comportment. Yet despite this stylized setting Rules of Civility tugs at the heart with a timeless tale about love and choice. For me, the bar has been raised to impossible heights for the rest of 2011's books.
For the past week or so, I have been on a rampage, urgent to clear my space and drawers of the accumulation of stuff that piles up over the years from neglect or the once good intention that I would need or want "it" someday. Via a friend of a friend on facebook, I learned my cleaning frenzy may be attributable to a combination of: Mercury retrograde (reviewing your past), Uranus retrograde (revolution!), Neptune retrograde (dissolving illusions so that you can see more clearly) being supercharged by this August Full Moon! If that explains it, I have certainly been under the spell.
Yesterday in my office, I found a notebook filled with scribblings from a class on parenting, that mysterious process that brings educated human adults much angst. Part of the curriculum was to make a list of five things that you wanted. Some 17 years ago I wanted Adam to grow up healthy and get a great education, to be creative again, to invest my money wisely, to go on more vacations and to get in great shape. Mired in toddler hood, these were all things I desired that seemed to be missing in my life. Nearly two decades later, I can check off each of these things with confidence. Adam is well and at Stanford. My money has grown despite the roller coaster ride of the past few years. We've taken countless wonderful vacations. Being creative and being in "great" shape is relative but I definitely feel healthier both mentally and physically. I am glad I saved that black spiral notebook. It was an unexpected marker, a reminder of how far I have come
Sometimes a serendipitous click leads to a torrent of unexpected wonder. Here is my happy accident of the day:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/08/08/letters-to-the-children-of-troy/ It is a collection of letters written in 1971 from writers, actors, musicians, politicians, artists of the day to the children of Troy, Michigan on the importance of libraries and reading. Take some time and treat yourself to browsing through the original correspondence:
http://troylibrary.info/letterstothechildrenoftroy .
Here is one of my favorite letters:
A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclope
Very rarely does a book make me want to stand up and clap hard, until my hands hurt like they did after the finale of The Book of Mormon. Gary D. Schmidt's Okay for Now is one of those once in a blue moon reads. I read a lot, probably over 50 books a year. Although my Kindle hides most of my selections, on any given day there are probably five books on my nightstand and a few on the floor next to my bed. Many books make me laugh but few fewer make me cry. Okay for Now brought tears to my eyes twice, maybe three times. Every emotion swept through me as read through the trials and tribulations of a year in the life of Doug Swieteck. I sort of hate that this book has to be categorized as a children's book. It is a story for former children of all ages who will find some touchstone of their past in the pages. Okay for Now is okay forever!!!
And speaking of standing ovations, I have to give one to us - for me and my husband, Mark for coming through 25 years of marriage which we celebrate today. If anyone told me my future that sunset on a boat in Marina Del Rey, I'd never believe it could be true. As everything is more than okay for now, here's to everyday miracles and another magical 25.
This wonderful quote from Anne Bernays is the best case for 'butt in seat' I've read in a long time:
"If the writer's engine is persistence, then the writer's fuel is the imagination; unlike real fuel, we have an endless supply of it and it costs nothing. Imagination is there in all of us, just waiting to be released."
One of my secret dreams is to be a nature photographer, one of those people who gets up at dawn to catch the magic of a new day and sits at sunset to watch the evening close it's eyes. It is one of those yearnings on the very back of my back burner. In the meantime I am having fun with Hipstamatic, my iPhone app, filled with virtual vintage film and a questionable gap between what I see and what finally appears on the screen. Photography fascinates me with the world the viewfinder finds, forcing you to look, really see what's in front of you. I am slow to frame my pictures. I like to discover what I have never seen before like the graphic reflection in the coffee table in the photo above. Exploring the commonplace with diligence brings a new dimension to the surface. It's not the camera but the eye of the user.
When Adam was 3 or 4, I gave him a throwaway camera to attempt to teach him how to take pictures. At first, it was click, click at everything, cutting off heads, boring pictures of driveways and passing cars until he brought the camera to preschool. He took pictures of his classmates. All the children had an innocent sense of self usually never captured by adults. I grasp for words to accurately describe their expressions when they posed for each other. I continued to encourage Adam to take photos and thousands later, I think he has developed a pretty good eye.
Keep an eye for more photos as I continue to be mesmerized by the possibilities of stretching my vision with the surprises of KodotXGrizzled film, a Buckhorst H1 Lens and the flash of a Dreampop.
After the electronic carnage of two of my picture books, which were reproduced for the Kindle without my or the illustrator's approval, I have become a cynic about children's ebooks which seem to lean more towards games than literature. Then today through the random miracle of Twitter, I came upon a transcendent wonder by William Joyce called
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. It's not a book, game or a movie but a love story to what lives among the pages of our beloved tales. Books become alive in a way I have never seen depicted on paper. I hope this book will raise the bar for a standard of excellence. It's the first app that brought tears to my eyes.
If you want to get a taste of what I mean, check out this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ncx0CYTWtU
I love to clean my office when my creative energy is low. I am calmed and settled by bringing order to disorder, clearing the air for my muses to come out to play. A week or so ago I printed out worksheets called Platform Brainstorm & Inventory: Website or Blog. I came across these via a link to a link and saved them for that day when I decide to discover my social network brand slash persona. Yet it seems to be counter productive to blog about this but I am bothered by the narcissistic limiting notion of quantifying oneself by hits and answering questions about installing analytics. Do I really need to be re-purposed, like I didn't have one before my alter ego emerged on the internet? Do I need to try MailChimp for free!! I already have a pet.
I am all for purposeful marketing, targeting potential buyers and readers. It's the limiting self aggrandizement that makes me cringe. I am of the build it and they will come school putting the fate of any of my work in the hands of the universe. I would rather be surprised by the wonder of the "Charlie" video (see below) than working at hoping something like that might happen. Maybe I am naive but I refuse to brand myself in a narrow tube and create a skewed personality to please and attract an audience. I am a person of many facets and cannot be defined by a tag line or a brand. I would rather spend my time working than publish my word count as no one will care.
I am often asked by children at school and library visits, if I am famous. I tell them "no" as I have never heard of myself. Until I have, the need for and the effort of building a platform escapes me.
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