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Daily Hotsheet: |
April 28, 1999
Quote of the day, courtesy of heathen #2...."If there's actor & actress, and host & hostess, would it be butler and butt-less?"
When do I write?
I'm not a morning person. My family would tell you it's more accurate to say I'm not a person in the morning.Never have been, never will be, to their great amusement.
The first two novels I committed happened between 10 pm and 2 am. Each took me about 6 months. Then my youngest started first grade and I tried to join the ranks of the daytime writers. That's when Real Writers <TM> write, right? Well, it doesn't work that way for me. Writing in the morning, in a word, sucks. In 3 words, it sucks dead canaries. It took me a year to commit novel #3 on that schedule. Tony is now in 3rd grade, and I'm still trying to make the adjustment. But the trade-off is going to bed when my husband does, so it's worth it.
From the diversion department:
Want to escape reality for a minute or two? Check out the bridgecam of the Grand Princess cruise ship and imagine yourself in the Caribbean.
April 24, 1999
Heathens Galore! This is Julie's OM team, taken at the state competition last weekend. She's the one in the blue sarong. Click on the pic to see the full-sized image.Thanks to everyone for the congrats and well-wishes on my sale. It's been a great week.
In other matters:
Congrats to Vera on her story reprints! Sam/Manny, I read your journal and enjoy it.April 22, 1999
ohmygod....
ohmygod....
ohmygod....A SALE!
Last night I found out I've made my first sale; The Lost Boys to Kurt Roth for Quantum SF! If this champagne hangover wasn't so real, I'd wonder if I dreamed it all! As soon as I got the word, Kerwin went out for my favorite bottle of Cook's and we popped the cork (which is now signed and dated and added to my collection) in the living room while the kids kept running down the stairs to find out why Mom was laughing like an idiot. What a night!
There's no story I'd rather have as my first than this one. Lost Boys is very near to my heart -- it's an odd little piece about Mama, Elvis and Dennis Rodman ... I don't know how else to describe it. I remember all the times friends told me to write from the heart and trust that someone will hear it -- they were right. That's really what means so much to me about this sale: I didn't write this one with a market in mind, or for any other reason than the joy of putting it to paper. I just hope readers will care about it a fraction as much as I do.
Now off to break the news to my mom, who was the inspiration for it!
(I wrote the following entry yesterday, but didn't get it uploaded.)
April 21, 1999
I enjoyed and agreed with Stephen Leigh's definition of Writer. Like him I've been a musician, since it was my sole source of income for a few years. (Not a lot, but I did live on it.) I have to smile, though, because he left a wonderful loophole for unemployed (aside-from-at-home) mothers. Writing is indeed my livelihood and only source of personal income. That income just happens to be zilch.April 19, 1999
If you haven't yet read Neile Graham's April 18th entry on becoming invisible, please do so now. Wonderful piece!Yesterday I went for my eye exam; and came out with a prescription for bifocals. Considering that just a week ago was my 39th birthday, it's lousy timing. Maybe I was closer than I thought with my theory that as we age, parts fall off?
Kerwin has a bunch of new pictures up on his woodturning page.
April 18, 1999
Congratulations to Jenn, John and Toby on their acceptances to Clarion East! Also to Kurt, Jon and Linda for their recent sales!
I'm home from an exhausting Odyssey of the Mind weekend. Yesterday was the state competition in Wenatchee, WA, a 3 hour drive from here. It was the culmination of the most hectic week in recent memory (ok, so my short-term mem. is a little fried from too much habitual hectic), with Meredith on a Division II team (for which Julia is the assistant coach) and Julia being added to a Division III team on Thursday, just days before State, for a whole bunch of emergency reasons I won't go into here.
The final results? Meredith's team took SECOND IN STATE in their problem/division! What an accomplishment for a first year team composed of 5th and 6th graders, competing in the Jr. High bracket! And Julia's took FIRST, advancing to the World competition in Knoxville, TN on May 26! At World, they will compete with the winners from the other 49 states, plus finalists from 40 other countries.
Pictures coming as soon as they're developed and scanned. Consider yourselves warned.
April 16, 1999
Happy (belated) 90th birthday, Eudora Welty!For those unfamiliar with Eudora Welty's work, start with The Optimist's Daughter, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. It's even better than the email program named in her honor.
April 13, 1999
Johnzo lives!Holocaust Remembrance Day
Since childhood I've had a recurring dream. Aside from the usual falling, discovering you're naked in public, and waking up on the last day of the term and realizing you haven't been to a class in six months, we all have our own nightmare zones. For as long as I can remember, mine has been Nazis. Dragging my little brother and sister through burned out buildings and filthy alleys, trying to hide them from the soldiers with sirens ringing in my ears ... with no refuge or help as bystanders look away. As I've gotten older, the images are now more often of my children than my siblings. In the last several weeks, I've had the dream every night.No, I'm not Jewish. But I don't need to be to understand and to feel it as my own. If I could, I'd wish this dream on every member of Congress as they contemplate increased funding for Kosovo. Yes, I know they you can't win a war in the Balkans. That they've been fighting for centuries. That it's not our problem.
But if we don't stop it, who will?
April 11, 1999
(Photo: flowers sent by my parents and my sister) My accomplishment for the weekend: I survived my birthday. Each one gets a little harder, and this was number 39. It seems appropriate that the year 2000 and the age of 40 will come in together. It's tempting to set goals around years and ages, and 2000/40 is doubly significant. "I will sell something before I turn 40." "I will publish something in this millennium." Unfortunately, short of vanity press or self publishing, my control over that is limited. So I'm going to avoid that as much as I do ... birthdays.
Music recommendations: soundtrack to Prince Of Egypt (particularly Deliver Us and Heaven's Eyes), John Mellencamp's John Mellencamp from Columbia (note to Kurt: <hint>I'd love to hear a cover of Your Life Is Now /<hint>), Jon Bon Jovi's Destination Anywhere and Anonymous 4's 11,000 Virgins.
Last night we saw The Matrix. Kerwin loved it. I ... appreciated the concept and would have loved to have read it as a book. I can't say I connected with the movie, though; I couldn't, because of a phenomenon that's driving me nuts these days. The old "if a little is good, then X100 is a lot better" thing pushed until it hits sensory overload. It's the sound level. The climax of Matrix was so loud that it shuts down my brain, particularly combined with rapid fire flashing images in a neo film noir/post-appocylpse "darkness of despair" cinematic style. Maybe it's my age (?), but I can't assimilate it. Overwhelming sound, dimly light scenes and scatter-gun images adds up to nothing for me. Literally. When we left the theater, I had to ask Kerwin what happened in the final 2 minutes, because nothing registered for me. I just "shut down" in response to the noise and all my senses blanked. Sadly for me, I'm seeing this trend most films these days. Am I the only one who reacts like this? My only choice seems to be waiting for video. *sigh*
April 9, 1999
April 7, 1999
Situation approaching normal ....Nana, my grandmother, had one arm and one breast, their counterparts having been amputated when I was two years old. One of Nana's shopping center friends was a nice old gent whose left arm was a nifty set of pinchers. Aunt Annie (no relation, aside from neighborhood family) had no legs. Since these were the only "old people" I knew, it didn't upset me in the least. It was all perfectly normal to my five-year-old mind. People age and their limbs falling off.
When I was a senior in high school, I was called to the guidance office to view my "permanent record" as a newly passed law allowed. There, in bold script, one of my early teachers had written "Pathological fear of the elderly. Needs to cripple them??" Attached was a family drawing I'd done in early grade school. Mom, Dad, Patty, and Nana. With one arm.
Obviously, what was normal to me wasn't to her.
The characters we create are the same way. Like me, they have their own "normal," based largely on their early--even preverbal--experiences. And like my teacher, other characters (as well as the reader) are going to view them from their perception of normal. Large or small, there's going to be a gap between those perceptions and it's the author's job to convey it; even exploit it.
Difference is not necessarily pathology, although it may appear that way. World building, whether in genre, lit or mainstream, is more than the words characters use, more their tools technology or magic. It's finding that character's normal, apart even from that of his/her culture, and wearing it like a second skin so that you can write it inside out.
I'm working on a story now that is equal parts joy and pain to write, and finding this woman's normal is critical. So I continue pondering.
April 3, 1999
A husband with a God complex ....
Kerwin as Jesus in the Maunday Thursday presentation. (View the large image here.)
April 2, 1999
You can't know where you're going if you don't remember where you've been....As I read Kurt Roth's journal entry this morning, I nodded along like Cheech and Chong's window doggy. He spoke gut truth, about reconnecting with our past to be able to write in the present. As he says, the need to immerse oneself in the old images isn't about remembering what it looks like, but what it feels like. Letting the present slip away to loose the demons we work so hard to cage the rest of the time. Acknowledging who were were, as well as who we are.
Last summer I was struggling with depression, feeling old and out of place, relegated to the role of someone's mom or wife, not making any headway with my writing "career", and feeling the need to reinvent myself. My hair has been working its way white since my early 20's, and I'd been fighting the Age Monster for a decade with do-it-yourself dye that never quite matched, so when my hairdresser asked if I'd like to be a "model" for a highlights/color class the salon had coming up, I agreed. I showed up at the appointed time for guinea pig duty, and sat in a chair surrounded by a dozen stylists and one terminally perky product rep. They held up their little color samples and test charts, and came to a consensus that was I "green", whatever that means, and hauled out an artist's pallet of green goop, yellow goop, blue goop, and orange goop. After enclosing my head in something the size of a zip lock baggie, they painted my hair, lock by lock. Twenty minutes later, the stylist rinsed it out and they all gathered round.
I was blonde.
The shock lasted long enough to keep me mute as I nodded my thanks and accepted their compliments about how young it made me look, then stumbled out the door to my car. The numbness hung on long enough for me to drive home, survive the heathens' giggles, and Kerwin's delight. (Instant suspicion -- has he really wanted a blonde all these years?) The shock broke the following morning when I woke up and didn't recognize myself in the mirror. I cried. I'd gotten exactly what I thought I wanted. Yes, I looked younger. But not a younger me; a younger someone else, someone I didn't know at all.
Growing up in northwest Iowa amidst the descendants of Swedes, Germans and Dutch, blonde wasn't exotic--it was "normal." Even my sister was blonde, with green eyes. My husband, who grew up in a house six blocks away, was blonde. All the cousins I saw daily were varied shades of blonde and red. Even my mom, who gave me these genes, had light brown hair to go with her deep olive skin. She often joked about how easy it was to find me at school productions and activities; all she had to do was look for the one black head among the sea of paleness. I hated being different, yet in a perverse way, I loved it, too, because I resembled my beloved grandmother.
Nana, Katie Wiese, was a renegade in a time when women couldn't even vote; an artist who painted nudes and lush religious scenes in which Jesus had dark hair, a large nose and sorrowful black eyes. She taught me to sew doll clothes and bake bread and told me stories of weaving a playhouse in the middle of Dakota prairie grass. She painted the insides of her cupboards red, read a page in the dictionary every night, and listened to her "Beautiful Music" in the middle of the night. When cancer resulted in the amputation of her right arm at the shoulder, she taught herself to do everything--including paint--left handed. She defied all the odds the doctors laid before her, because she never gave up. Never. When I bleached my hair, it felt as if I'd bleached out the last piece of her in me.
I'd become an impostor.
Hair is a small thing, barely worthy of mention, if it hadn't registered in my mind as the final step in 15 years of suburban assimilation. Since moving away from my family to a completely different world, I'd changed a lot of things about myself, some of them so tiny that they'd passed without notice. The way I spoke, the food I ate, the friends I made, finally even the way I thought. No wonder I couldn't write; there wasn't enough of "me" left to go into it!
So like Kurt, I needed to reconnect to the person I used to be and rewalk some old paths, wrong turns and all, to reorient myself to the places and people who made me what I am. And to show me where I'm going. Much of that I've done here, in these journal pages, with my meandering memories of people, places and feelings. Thanks for sharing the journey with me.
Past months: March, 1999
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