Hanging With Cliff

Remember CliffsNotes? Yeah, those black and yellow striped pamphlets that provided study guides for school subjects and literature.

Well I stumbled on their official website while looking for an online glossary for Shakespeare. Found that and so much more. I've been hanging out on the site for hours.

Shakespeare is an integral part of my Fruit of the Spirit story world. My character, Estelle Starr, is a Shakespearean stage actress who has memorized every part of every play. She is also quite eccentric (some might say touched in the head) as she speaks only Shakespeare. I don't mean that she speaks in Elizabethan English, I mean that even off stage she speaks only lines from Shakespeare. Though she can range among the sonnets and other poems, it is mostly from the plays.

There is another character in the FOS story world who speaks only KJV Holy Bible. He was once a preacher who was excommunicated after a shocking incident for which he was innocent of all wrong doing. His name is Inny aka Innocence and he is the husband of Faye aka Faith who is the POV protagonist of the first novel in the planned series of novels. In the two stories from the novel which I posted for Friday Snippets last summer and fall, there were several scenes in which either Estelle Starr or Inny appeared but only one which included both of them.

Those two stories, though they can stand alone as longish short stories, are intended also as chapters one and three of the novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For. The story for chapter two remains unwritten largely because it is the story in which Inny and Estelle are introduced to each other and enter into dialog. Though I was delighted by the idea at the time I first conceived it, at some point I lost confidence in it and became intimidated. It didn't help that I lost all my notes about that scene in our 2001 move. But I can't blame that entirely since those notes had been sitting in my files for over six years before that.

When I first started working on these stories I had never heard of the Internet. I used concordances for the KJV Bible and Shakespeare. At the time I had access to the Shakespeare collection at SOSC (now SOU) in Ashland, Oregon. In case you don't know what a concordance is, it is a reference book in which every instance of every word in the referenced book(s) is indexed. Thus I can begin with a concept of the intent of their communication and look up the words that may or must be included and in that way find phrases, whole verses or monologues that can convey their meaning. (To see how it is worked out in scenes, you can find the stories through the FOS portal. Yikes! I've not updated that post as promised for quite awhile. I've posted snippets from other FOS novels in progress that need to be included there. The best scene to demonstrate the concept is probably the one mentioned above in which Estelle and Inny both participate: Part Seven of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes)

It was the discovery of a searchable Complete Works of Shakespeare online in 1997 that enabled me to finish Rag Doll Babies and start collecting promising quotes for planned scenes in other chapters. But it also spoiled me for after loosing access to the Shakespeare concordance in 1987 I'd had to resort to reading the plays and collecting the promising quotes the hard way. I had finished the first story, Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities, that way but I had purposely limited myself to Macbeth for the quotes because that play reflected the theme I wanted to emphasize.

Well recently I have decided to add a new strand of scenes to Of Cats. After I had mapped out the second chapter, Strange Attractors, and discovered that it needed to alternate between NOW and THEN just as Rag Dolls did, I decided to make that the format for all of the chapters. Besides, I was unhappy that so many very significant characters did not show up until well into chapter three and adding the THEN strand to Of Cats would give the opportunity to introduce them. It seemed appropriate then that that strand of scenes should be Faye, Julia and Wilma overseeing a high school production of Macbeth in which Cassie and Fancy perform and Briana, Fancy's daughter, debuts as a toddler and Mae Bea, Fancy's mother, in charge of costumes and Inny in charge of props and lights.

In preparation for writing that addition to Of Cats, I've set out to review Macbeth which will include rereading it of course but also watching several stage productions on DVD which I have access to through the library system. (Love Your Local Libraries!) With Ashland being home to the Shakespeare Festival and SOU's serious Shakespeare collection, it behooves even the public library system to have significant Shakespeare material available.

Which is lucky for me because I have no clue how a Shakespeare play is produced. I've never seen one in person. So I've got to research all aspects of it from costumes to props to what kinds of directions and advice Faye, Wilma and Julia would likely be giving the student actors. And since one of the trademarks of the three women's relationships is a certain amount of banter that shades into bickering, I need to familiarize myself with some of the controversies regarding the proper way(s) to produce Macbeth.

Though I have acquired several library books to aid me in this, I was please to discover that the CliffsNotes on Macbeth include an essay about the historical and contemporary issues surrounding the staging of Macbeth.

Faye's story, The Substance of Things Hoped For, is the novel I targeted at the first of the year for a sustained effort to complete a draft this year. Because of the research still necessary and several plot holes in the latter half not to mention the need to resort to searchable databases of Shakespeare and KJV every time Inny and Estelle enter a scene, I am beginning to think even sustained effort won't be enough. This was the project I designated for the Sven III aka 70 Days of Sweat Challenge too but I've not added anything but notes since it began at the first of the month. Because of that, I've missed several check-ins.

The Friday before last when I posted a snippet about a teen runaway, I remembered that I had foreshadowed her appearance in Faye's story in the same scene I linked above (part seven of Rag Doll Babies). She is the shadow that faded into the woods when Cassie stopped to give Estelle a lift. This past Friday I wrote a new scene for Crystal's story, Home Is Where the Horror Is. Since the story is set in an Oceanside, California motel much like the one Ed and I lived in for a time when he was stationed at Camp Pendleton, I anticipate little need for research which makes working with the story much less complex. I am planning to write another scene for this Friday's snippet.

If I'm to continue posting snippets and participating in Sven III, I suspect I'm going to have to start ranging over the whole of the FOS story world stories again. There are many that are much less complex than Substance.

Well, another post has gotten away with me. I began this with the intent of a quickie about a neat reference resource for readers, researchers and Shakespeare lovers. I had said all I set out to say by the end of the third paragraph. That was hours and hours ago. Before midnight! and it is now 7:30 Wednesday morning!

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Sunday Serenity #46

This Sunday, like today, is going to be dedicated to reading. I started Sue Monk Kidd's novel, The Mermaid Chair, this afternoon and am enthralled. I'm a hundred pages in. It is the first fiction I've read since Sven III began last Saturday even though I had declared my intention to make sure this time that working on my own stories did not push out all other stories.

Many writers testify to what I have also learned: that reading fiction is a necessary part of the care and feeding of the muse. So, in response to the frustration of the past week's work with my WIP, I decided to spend the weekend reading a novel while giving Ed have unfettered access to the laptop which is a major source of serenity for him.

If I finish the novel, I will probably return to Kidd's memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which I've been meandering my way through since early December. Both are library books. I think I'm on my third check-out of this one and it is due again Thursday. As is The Mermaid's Chair which I've had checked out a least once before. At least a year ago because it was before the library closure last April.

The memoir deals with Kidd's experience of awakening spiritually and finding the patriarchal straight jacket imposed upon the Christian tradition she had dedicated her life heart and soul to was suddenly intolerable. She chronicles her years long quest to integrate honor of the feminine into her relationship to the sacred. Many of the themes of the memoir underpin the novel.

I am grateful to Bonnie Jacobs for directing me to The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. She thought it might be helpful to me because of my own experience of having jettisoned many of the doctrines of my own faith tradition while struggling to find a foothold on life as I redefined faith itself.

Join us in a moment of serenity.

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Sweat Dreams

How to make slugs sweat.



It's been a long day. My play date with my WIP was rough and tumble, hair tangled in the swing chains, face planted in the puddle at the foot of the slide, butt bruised by the teeter-totter seat as a dozen plus characters jump on and off the other side in mid-ride.

I'm ready for sweet dreams. But I'm sure the sweat will find me even there:



~note how the poster of that video spelled its title :)

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Sunday Serenity #45

There are two things I've featured in a Sunday Serenity before, things that relax me by taking me out of myself: getting lost in a story and getting lost in puzzle solving. It occurred to me today, this first day of Sven III, that story writing combines the two. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how to present that concept in a less boring way than a boring paragraph like this, when I stumbled onto this instructional video that seems to demonstrate the connection between story and puzzle. At least in an indirect way. I almost didn't click on the link because I thought it would be satire. Novel Writing Made Easy. There are times when that sentence would elicit the mad woman's cackle from me. But then, much as I love story writing and can confess that it is a source of serenity for me at times, there are those other times when it is about as serene as wrestling an octopus in a hurricane.

Join us for a moment of serenity.

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Sweat! But Don't Sweat it.

That's my motto for Sven III which begins in a few hours.

This time around I am working at folding story writing into the rest of my life. I want to maintain the disciplines of organization of mind, body, environment, files and time that I have been practicing since January 1st.

I want to continue to enjoy the stories made by others on the same days that I work on my own. By which I mean read fiction and watch movies or TV series.

I want to continue reading Non-fiction and doing the research that relates to stories in the works whether the one I'm focusing on for Sven III or another. It is especially the research for my NaNo novel, Spring Fever, that I do not want to let go of.

And there are three more things that I meant to have folded into my routines by now: some form of regular exercise; a return to the creative pleasure of fine needlework; and a return to working regularly (if not every day) on the side bar for Joystory and the design and construction and content for my other web sites, Joywrite, Joyread and a third which I conceived of a year ago and worked on in a burst of enthusiasm for about a month before getting distracted by another enthusiasm.

It is that propensity to be consumed by an enthusiasm for a brief though intense time only to turn away to another intense enthusiasm while seldom following through to completion on any of them that I am hoping to address this time around.

It has to do with my tendency to hyper-focus on things and my difficulty in changing mental gears. It seems I am always either resisting the call to an enthusiasm for fear of it taking over my life or chastising myself for the chaos the rest of my life devolves into whenever I have surrendered to the enthusiasm.

The most productive times in my life have been when I was in thrall to an enthusiasm. But the joy in the accomplishment is always muted by guilt and shame for the projects and responsibilities neglected in the meanwhile and later by more guilt and shame for having not remained faithful to the project born in that enthusiasm.

One of the disciplines I've recently implemented in service to the chaos control project, is the mental one of noticing an issue that may need addressing while maintaining an emotional detachment. This may be related to the mindfulness practices of various spiritual traditions. I've adopted it for the purpose of identifying by making conscious the mental clutter at the root of my anxieties. The most energy sapping of that mental clutter is the incessant shame and guilt chatter that whisper-shouts through my days and nights.

So for this round of Sven my focus will be on finding a balance that allows serial enthusiasms (including the latest enthusiasm of staving off chaos); that approaches the story work with a sense of playful expectation instead of slavish dread of the word-count whip. I want to sweat like a child playing a game of tag as I chase my characters across the luminous landscape of their stories.

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Storytime

I'm still working on getting the pictures of the two libraries prepared for a TT. I ran into some difficulties with the pictures of the old temporary building because I had apparently not noticed that the auto focus setting had been moved to manual. Probably while carrying the camera in my pocket. So the brightness is off on all of them and I have to play with brightness, contrast, sharpness and color to get them to look more like normal. I think the pictures of the new building are fine since I made sure auto focus was set. But I haven't downloaded them off the camera yet. So my plan now is to post the TT as soon as I can tomorrow but instead of thirteen pairs of then and now post only the thirteen pictures of the temporary building and save the new building pictures for next week.

One of my motives for scaling back the plan of posting thirteen sets of then and now pictures is that I'm actually going to get to go to the library again tomorrow. Less than twelve hours from now as I'm writing this. I haven't been for over ten days. The last time was the grand opening party on Saturday the 9th. On that day I was so snap happy with the camera and the crowd and confusion was so overwhelming I couldn't really get a sense of what an everyday experience at the new library was going to be like. I have been looking forward to going again but that virus just keeps having other ideas. I haven't yet felt up to making the round trip walk which is now more than a quarter of a mile longer. Ed has tomorrow off and is going to drive us in his Dad's car.

So what I want to do with my time right now is read a novel and watch a couple of DVD. The DVDs were due yesterday but Ed didn't want to make the trip just to return them. It would cost more in gas than the fine for a couple of days. But if we're going to have a fine I mights as well make an effort to watch them.

One of the DVD is only an hour not counting the extra features which I usually try to look at. It is a History Channel Documentary called Secrets of the Koran. I just watched another in the series a few days ago called Secrets of the Kabalah and it was quite interesting. The other DVD is the movie Sumertime staring a very young Katherine Hepburn.

The novel I started this morning and am anxious to get back to is Bee Season by Myla Goldberg and ironically the Kabalah figures in the story. I saw the movie based on this book last December while visiting my Mom. I found it in the Longview library when my sister took me for a visit and then checked out a huge pile of books and media for me. The DVD had caught my eye because I had had the novel checked out several times in the past two or three years and never got around to reading it. Ed read it one of those times he'd finished the last of his own stack and had to raid mine for something. He told me then that he was sure I would love it and that it dealt with many of the things I'm interested in like consciousness, mysticism, parent-child relationships, family dynamics, communication, words, mental illness, memory and learning among other things. All that and a good story about a little girl who wins spelling bees.

Speaking of reading novels and watching movies. I read a whole novel in just over a day Tuesday. I would have finished it before midnight last night if I hadn't stopped to work on last night's post with just under sixty pages left. It was a short novel. I'm not sure how long in normal format as I had a large print copy and it was 280 some pages. It was On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and it was extraordinary. The story of a newly wed couple on the night of their honeymoon in 1962. Both virgins and both with unrealistic expectations of the coming encounter. It is an exploration of the way any of us can misread another's meaning in their attempts at communication and how even the words unspoken and the gestures not made have as powerful a consequence as any enacted.

Reading such exquisitely wrought stories is an inspiration for a writer. I somehow got it into my head over twenty years ago that I couldn't be reading fiction on the days I was writing my own stories. That was a misunderstanding and misapplication of the insight of my tendency to mimic the voice and sentence structures of what ever writer I'd been reading. I thought that meant I had to abstain from reading stories while I was writing my own. But cutting off the reading of stories dampens the flow of inspiration. Besides, the best advice from fiction writers is that you must write everyday or as close to every day as possible. The logical conclusion if both principles are applied is that I would have to stop reading fiction altogether. Not acceptable. Lately I have come to understand that the lesson I should have taken off that insight was to just acknowledge the fact and then trust myself to be able to find and apply my own voice and iron out inconsistencies on later drafts.

Thus I am intent during this third round of 70 Days of Sweat to give engagement with stories wrought by others through reading and movies an equal priority to engaging with my own stories--as close to daily as possible.

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He's Baaaaack!

Sven is back. The 70 Days of Sweat Writing Challenge commences round 3 on March 1st. Are you ready to sweat?

I've been waiting for this. The first two rounds were great motivation and combined with NaNo they taught me several profound things about what works for me and what doesn't.

Focusing on word count tends to dry up the words while engaging creatively with the story, its world and characters daily guarantees the words will come. It's that daily part that's tricky. But it is the key.

For round three, my goal is to sweat. Sweat plenty. But not sweat it. It's that which is the real challenge for me. I am too easily engaged in the wrong battle, blasting my psyche with recriminations, guilt, and shame. So instead I'm going to make a daily engagement with the story--solemn yet playful. I'm returning to the Fruits of the Spirit story world I was working with in round one. Depending on how I slice or splice them, I've got six to ten novels in progress whose story arcs are interwoven and whose POV characters walk in and out of each others stories as supporting cast across a 70 year timeline.

I spent the first weeks of round one roaming among all of these re-engaging with the characters and the files after a six year hiatus; tweaking existing scenes, adding new ones and notes for more, creating a story world time line and roster in a single file and so forth. During the second half of that round I began to focus on one particular POV character, her story arc and the novel which carries it because I identified this character's story and especially its time line as the anchor for all the others.

It seems like something more than coincidence that it turned out to be Faye's story that would serve this way. For Jubilee Faith Gardner nee Fairchild carries as POV character the novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For, whose theme is Faith.

By the end of the first round I had mapped out huge swathes of Faye's story and her novel's structure and added new scenes to the existing 20K. I was actually beginning to see a possibility that three more months working at the same intensity would be enough to ensure a completed draft of Faye's novel. I was tempted to not do NaNo so I could try to bring that draft across the finish line by the end of 2007.

But the story idea I had for my NaNo novel was too alluring and the hope that the new-found discipline and the lessons learned from Sven I would help me finally--on a fourth try!--win my first NaNo badge. So I switched to the new novel, Spring Fever, and I did earn the badge. And just as I suspected, the long break from Faye's story made it difficult to re-engage. I just started working with Faye's files again last week. Dabbling would be a more accurate term.

I have not been idle since the end of Sven II though. I have sweated plenty. Just not so much in word count. Though it was all in honor of the work and the dream. For the entire month of January I was engaged in a major do-over of our room--cleaning, sorting, tossing and organizing. My writing environment is now much more conducive to productivity and creativity. February has been about organizing my files both virtual and paper and organizing my time and prioritizing tasks. And the whole time since the end of NaNo I've been re-organizing and making over my mind and spirit. All of this was motivated by my commitment to the vision of myself as a story teller.

The last two weeks I've been engaged in battle with a bug. I'm hoping that is now won and I will be in fine shape for sweating by March 1st.

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Say Goodbye To the Sweaty Guy

Or at least Adieu for a few.

70 Days of Sweat

Yes, master.

Sven Round II is done. But a Round III is in the works so stay tuned.

Goodbye isn't quite the right word since there will be another round nor do I intend to take the sweaty guy off my sidebar for the hiatus because that is my link to the links of all the other participants. There is a lot of good writing going on out there. I had to severely limit my surfing to and reading of it during this round so I hope to catch up with some of it in the next few weeks.

They are telling us at 70 Days of Sweat site to check back on February 1st for news about Round III.

As for my Sven Round II outcome? I missed the 70K mark by 5-7K but I still feel like a success. When I first chose to get involved with Sven last July, I consciously chose not to get hung up on word count as the primary measure of accomplishment. For me it was about instilling work habits and making room for story making in my routines.

I’m looking forward to round 3 but I’m not going to wait for it to continue working with my stories.

BIG BIG Thanks to all the sponsors for their efforts and time and the same to all the participants for being part of it and adding to that sense of community and a shared commitment and caring. It so helps to know you are not alone and that what you want is not outrageous or weird or irrelevant to ‘real’ life.

(Yes, if you've been over to read the goodbye post and its comments you saw some of those last paragraphs there. I cribbed it off there. You aren't having a weird de ja vu.)

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Back In the Sauna With Sven

I took a longer hiatus from the 70 Days of Sweat Challenge than I intended after I crossed the NaNo finish line. I still owe Sven 20K. Actually come to think of it my NaNo project, Spring Fever topped the 50K by over 1K so...

Anyway NaNo was followed by a two week trip out of town and then frantic preparations for Christmas. I tried to get back to writing the week between Christmas and New Years but I was too distracted by the chaos in my writing environment. So when my in-laws left town on New Years afternoon for a planned week long vacation on the coast, I began the long dreamed of project of deep cleaning our room which I covered here in some detail. I had anticipated it would take three days but it took six.

But now I've got a new workstation which I am anxious to test drive and I intend to treat the last nine days of 70 Days Round II as seriously as I treated the last nine days of NaNo. I started writing again this afternoon. I've not looked at word count yet. It is too soon. Besides I am not doing this for word count. I'm not even doing it for Sven. I am doing it for story.

And maybe in no small measure for my sanity. The unintended hiatus since November 30 was the longest, in fact three times longer than any break I've taken since July 8 when I signed on to the first round of 70 Days. To say I missed it is to miss say it. It would be truer to say that in the weeks I was not writing my stories I was missing myself.

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I Just Might Make It: NaNo & Sven Progress Report

I'm sitting at 37511 words for my NaNo and 70 Day round two project. To earn my NaNo win I must maintain a pace of about 2500 words per day for five more days. By several times surpassing the 3200 word daily quota that earlier lack of progress had subjected me to by last Wednesday, I've managed to make the next five days a bit more manageable. But I must say, I'm feeling fragile and frangible right now. I'm exhausted and I've overused my hands and eyes since Wednesday after the breakthrough I made last Tuesday. I've clocked in over 15K since last Sunday just on my NaNo novel, Spring Fever. That doesn't count the blog posts, commenting on other blogs, emails, IM, and note-taking and journaling unrelated to the NaNo or Sven projects.

I'm posting this progress report tonight instead of my poem for Monday Poetry Train. I'm still hoping to post the poem sometime tomorrow, I'm just too tired and distracted tonight and my hands are about to go on strike. I'm producing a typo for for about every eight to ten keystrokes.

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Making a Mash Of It

Having seen several 70 Days and NaNo participants displaying celebrity pics on their blogs as representations and inspirations for their heroes and heroines, I decided to give it a try when I was having trouble visualizing my hero, Graham.

I really had no idea who in famedom might fit the vague image I did have. I saw him as tall, lanky, slightly stoop-shouldered, thick dark hair shading to gray at the temples, a bit bashful, stern professor but capable of humor and tenderness. I knew he was of Italian and Jewish heritage and fifty give or take four years.

Not many remembered icons floated through my mind before I hit on Alan Alda. By the time I'd read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Alda I was fairly sure I'd found my guy. He was of Italian heritage. From there I went to alanalda.com where I found his personal photo album and when I saw this picture I knew I would find nothing better if I spent a week looking. Sorry, but I can't post that pic here as I don't want to infringe on copyright or anything. So please follow the link, it's worth it. Remember, my Graham is a Literature Prof.

While I was on Alda's site, I went exploring and found a link to an article by Alda with a title that was hard to resist. I'm glad I didn't. In, Learning To Write With a Sledgehammer, Alda talks of how he learned the value of knocking the excrescences out of his manuscripts and of those moments when you make a breakthrough and have the urge to get up and dance.

On first reading, I passed over the sledgehammer reference, thinking it only a post NaNo, post 70 Days, editing consideration. But I glommed onto the reference to those moments which inspire a celebratory dance, for I've had a one of them and it was exquisitely sweet. I haven't had any yet with Spring Fever though I came close in the week before NaNo started when the plot concept first began to gell and I began to believe I had story worth telling.

But Alda's reference reminded me of the time that I did get up out of my chair and dance about the room over one of my stories. It was the moment I typed the last word of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes nearly ten years ago. It wasn't even the end of the novel. Just the end of a chapter in the intended novel. But it had been an intricately plotted 16,000+ word 'short' story that was intended to serve as a chapter and to be able to stand alone--as all the chapters in my novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For, are intended to do. I was ecstatic when I finished it and literally could not contain my self. I wasn't even alone in the room at the time.

Requiring each chapter to be able to both stand alone as a short story and serve to advance the plot of a novel does, of course, add an extra complexity to the construction of that novel which made it that much harder to keep a 1K a day pace with it during the first round of 70 Days this past summer. That and the fact it is tangled up with the similarly complex plots of six to eight other novels. This was why I had chosen to run with a fresh story for NaNo. One that was not entangled with the Fruits of the Spirit story world nor restricted by a complex structure. For the first two weeks I worked with Spring Fever, I was confident I was writing a fairly straightforward love story. But by the end of the first week of NaNo I knew different.

My decision to structure the novel around 22 chapters based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot was exciting when I hit on it. As was the decision to alternate POV among three equally weighted characters. But these restrictions were the source of the constriction of word flow in the second week. I was, and am, still thrilled with those choices but after about four days of zero word count following those first six or so of exceeding expectations, I began to panic and I really haven't stopped. Though I got the words to flow again, intermittently, the fun had gone out of it.

All of this was on my mind and apparently Alda's talk about taking a sledgehammer to his manuscripts began to work on me unawares as I put together my virtual scrapbook of Graham-conjuring images. I tried to remember when was the last time I had junked a huge chunk of one of my manuscripts. And I couldn't. I don't think it is faulty memory. I'm fairly sure I've never done it. I've thrown out words in the hundreds but never in the thousands. I've deleted sentences and paragraphs or severely reconstructed them but never whole scenes or chapters or sections of a novel. This is mostly because I am such a miser with the words until I am fairly certain of what I need a scene for. In other words, most of the story is contained in my head like a scene in a snow globe that shifts like scenes on the silver screen--like watching a movie in 3D while holding it cupped in your hand.

Ah, I thought, a bit pleased with myself to be sure, I've never had to take a sledgehammer to excrescences in my stories because I never put them in. But before the thought was complete, I recognized what a conceit it was. What was it Alda said he had danced for joy over?

I was dancing because, after hours of rewriting one of the scenes, I had finally solved it and had crashed through to something I knew would work.

Which meant that something he had tried had not been working. Something he had written had not been working!

So, I thought, what happens when something I'm working on stops working? I stop working on it. Indefinitely. As long as a decade in the case of several of the stories in my Fruits of the Spirit story world.

The thing that isn't working for Spring Fever right now is my insistence on trying to hold 22 themed chapters, 3 POV characters, a 30 odd year time line in my head while refusing to commit to writing scenes that aren't perfectly envisioned and locked into place on the three story arcs. No wonder I am feeling half crazed. I don't dare stop thinking about the story for one second. Not even in my sleep. Because if I do? I might drop the snow globe and shatter the story.

That is simply not working. And most especially for a NaNo project or a 70 Days of Sweat project. I have to start writing some of this down even if it is not in a form that will make the final cut. Even if I have to break all the rules of good form to do so. I need to infodump folks. I need to write long passages of description of people, places and things that aren't, for now, broken up by dialog and plot advancing narrative. I need to experiment with scene concepts, writing it one way and then a second and a third until I feel that certain click when something snaps into place. And I need for those words to count toward NaNo and 70 Days even if they sometimes feel more like note taking then story writing. Because that restriction, added to my natural perfectionism served to strangle my word flow as thoroughly as a garrote.

I'm so far behind now, at just past 20K, there is little hope that I will earn my NaNo win icon. But little is still not no. And besides, regardless if I can keep the new 3K per day pace for the next ten days, I still need to keep the 1K per day pace through mid January for Sven.

My goal now is to have 40-50K and several excrescences to take the sledgehammer to by midnight November 30th. And then for the final six weeks of 70 Days to add another 20-30K, possibly split between Spring Fever and The Substance of Things Hoped For. To do this, I need to remember Alda's words:

Hemingway said that writing is architecture, not interior decoration. I was learning that, even with all the rewriting, it wasn't renovations, either.

Now I was taking a sledgehammer to the foundation itself; redesigning it time after time from scratch, lopping off clever little inventions that caught your eye but gave you nothing of substance to build on.

After all that, when I would finally crash through to something that worked, I would feel -- and every writer must feel something like this -- a thrill, a rush of joy, a desire to dance around the room.

I still feel it. And, once in a while, I still dance.

I need to remember that the victory dance is the reaction to a breakthrough after struggling with something that isn't working, which means there has to be something there to struggle with; something more substantial than concepts and daydreams no matter how vividly envisioned; something written down even though it might be an excrescence fit only for smashing with the sledgehammer.

I need to remember and be sustained by the memory of my one victory dance resurrected by Alda's story, to hold it like a promise in a snow globe, a promissory note guaranteeing an abundance of victory dances, measured this time in months instead of decades.

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When Discipline Becomes Abuse

I woke from a dream this morning that has haunted me all day.

In the dream, I had taken a job as a live-in babysitter or nanny. It seems there was more than one child but I only saw one. It was a toddler about 18 months. A boy. The child's mother and I were visiting affably as he played nearby. Then the mother left the room and the boy became a little manic. Not destructive or aggressive but silly and playful and he made a mess with the objects of his play, using them in ways they were not intended.

When the mother returned, I pointed this out to her, barely able to contain my amusement and my sense of wonder at the creativity of such young child; a baby really. But the mother was not amused. She grabbed up something long and flexible which I understood was a belt and she took the toddler by his arm and began swinging that belt across his bare legs.

I was shocked and dismayed. I had to leave the room. When I came back, I told the mother this wasn't going to work and she needed to take me home. Except that I'd forgotten this was home since I was a live-in child care provider. But before I remembered that, I had packed my things in her car (which looked very much like the Mustang I drove while still living in my parents home) But we got in the car anyway. She in the driver's seat after handing a bundle wrapped in a quilt.

We drove around for a bit but I was unable to give her directions to my 'home' so she pulled over and made me get out and tossed my belongings out with me and drove off, calling back to me, "It's all yours."

It was then I realized that I was still holding the quilt-wrapped bundle and knew that inside was the broken, bloody body of that baby which had not stirred the entire time I'd been holding him.

Some of you may of read one of the few posts in which I talk about how my break with the fundamentalist sect I was raised in was triggered by witnessing a baby being disciplined. I must admit here that recent events had caused me to reflect on that once again. So that might have had something to do with the conjuring of those images at this time and the emotional power they held. But based on a repeated pattern over decades, I've found that the appearance of infants and small children in my dreams nearly always reflects a current creative project or creativity itself.

It is not hard to see this as a warning from my psyche that I'm once again sweating the small stuff with the 70 Days of Sweat and upcoming NaNoWriMo challenges. Just like last July and the last three attempts at NaNo, I've put too much emphasis on rules and expectations and measurements of success that tend to beat the silly, the playful and the messiness out of the process and of course this kills both the creativity and the joy.

Umm pun unintended but probably relevant anyway.

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Conundrum

I've been tying my thoughts in knots ever since I signed up for 70 Days of Sweat round 2 a week ago. Right up until then I'd been blithely assuring myself that I could do both 70 Days and NaNoWriMo concurrently. I desperately want to continue working on my Fruits of the Spirit story world. Most especially I want to keep working with Faye's portion of the story. By the end of round 1 I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel for Faye's story. Not so much in terms of word count but in having the time line of events and the most important of the plot elements worked out and a fairly comprehensive but flexible list of the must-have scenes. Thus, it was conceivable that another seventy days of intensive work on Faye's story could find me with a completed rough draft at the end.

But NaNoWriMo puts a whole new twist on things. Because that requires starting with a brand new novel concept on November 1st and pumping out 50,000 words in thirty days. That is 1666.66 words per day. This would be my fourth attempt if I decide to do it. My first attempt garnered me around 6000 words, my second 12,000 and my third 25,000. See the pattern there? I did on November 30 last year. I realized that if I doubled that month's output the following year, I would finally earn my completion graphic to display in my sidebar.

Thus the thought of backing out of NaNo this year, even for the very good cause of staying with a story that is progressing well and has me in its grip, was dismaying. I am so emotionally invested in making the attempt one more time it is hard to let go of the dream. But if I wanted to commit to NaNo, I had to choose a virgin story and time was running out. I had two options: stay within the Fruits of the Spirit story world, picking one of the other POV characters whom I had not written any scenes for but had mapped out their story arc; or step outside the story world into something completely new.

The problem with the first choice was that even though I have bowed to the necessity of breaking what was intended as a single novel down into several, the story arcs of each novel are intricately intertwined with those of several others. Which is why I still find myself bouncing from one POV character to another, working out details in their time lines, motives, likely perceptions whenever they appear as a supporting actor in another's POV scene.

One of the reasons I struggled so hard to make word count quota during the first round of 70 Days was because I was saving back three of the POV stories as potential NaNo projects. Julia's story is nearly bursting at the seams for example. As Faye's twin sister, her story is the most entwined with Faye's. All my work with Faye's story arc over the summer advanced Julia's but I refrained from writing any scenes in order to preserve its eligibility for NaNo. And now I seriously question the possibility of maintaining the 1666.66 page per day pace with Julia's story.

But, if I give up NaNo, I could easily maintain the 700-1000 page per day pace of 70 Days if I started writing scenes for Julia's story and the two or three others I was holding back on just in case I wanted them for NaNo.

Or I could set aside Faye, Julia and all the rest of Fruits' characters for the month of November and return to them in December after spending thirty days playing in a brand new story world. But what story? Wasn't it already too late to plot out a novel by November 1st considering that starting on Monday I was already committed to start sweating for Sven?

This was my conundrum as it stood Friday morning, the deadline I'd set myself to make the decision because that was when my niece was arriving to spend a three day weekend here at her grandparent's house while her grandparents and parents are out of town. I knew I wouldn't be able to do much serious work during her visit as we have a month's worth of serious catching up to do about what we have been reading and writing and thinking since the last time we talked. And the minute she leaves for school Monday morning I have to start sweating for Sven.

I hadn't met my deadline. So this evening, I started trying to explain my dilemma to her. Believe me, it was not this organized when I described it to her. I rambled on for four hours. Of course I let her talk too. She can ask some very perceptive questions for a thirteen year old. And make very valid points based on insights she gets as she listens to me. She has the same love of story as I do and already has good instincts for what makes a good story work.

As I began to talk about the story ideas for a possible NaNo attempt, she began to ask questions like: Why did she do that? How did he feel about it? What happens next?

At one point I realized we had stayed with one story for quite awhile and were both getting quite animated about it. Not long after that I 'saw' the story arc complete like a rainbow against blue velvet with most of the major plot and motive elements for the first half in place. And I knew this story was ready to go. Except that it was completely dependent on my memory of a conversation. I hadn't been taking notes.

When my niece tired and got ready for bed I headed for my laptop. I itched to start writing down the story elements we had just gone over. But I hadn't posted yet. I had started this post before our conversation began and had been intending to post about this conundrum ever since last Friday. I decided to go ahead and write this post as planned and hope that my niece can help me put the pieces of that story back together, talking me through it again while I take notes. After we've both had a good sleep.

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Challenged

I just signed up for round two of 70 Days of Sweat. The following is the comment I left there which delineates my commitment:

I'm in again. I will be working with the same story world as last time. The work I did during round one helped me figure out that it was most definitely not a single novel. But the story arcs of several of the characters are so entwined they keep wandering in and out of each other's stories so I need the freedom to roam among them which NaNo doesn't give.

I am still planning to participate in NaNo concurrently with 70 Days if I can settle on a story arc for which I've not yet done any substantial scene work but is (or can be) thoroughly prepped by 11/1. Which is the rub, if I stay inside the same story world. Because of of the work I did for round one and the last three NaNoWriMo few of the potential stand-alone novels qualify on both points.

My main goal is to add something of value to this story world every day. Sometimes that will be narrative or dialog that can be quantified by word count. Not always. Though I would like my average to be 700 wpd. As for a completed rough-draft--that depends on what I do for NaNo. I could conceivably complete one of the novels already in progress by Jan 15 if I didn't have to commit 50K to a brand new project.

I was going to elaborate but I'm wore out. I will at least clarify that I am referring to my Fruits of the Spirit story world. And that the novel for which I see a glimmer of light at the end of a very long tunnel is the one I worked hardest on for round one of 70 Days and the one that I've been posting excerpts from for Friday Snippets. Faye's story AKA The Substance of Things Hoped For.

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Oh, Happy Day!

I hope getting excited and starting to celebrate at the hearing of good news isn't like the groom seeing the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony. But I've been feeling like dancing a jig all week since I heard this news. And also like pretending that I hadn't heard it so that I wouldn't get too excited. Because it is still just a maybe.

A pretty solid probably. But still just a maybe.

And it is really ironic because it was just a week or so ago that I finally got around to putting that pic at the top of my side bar with the red circle and slash over a pile of books and the caption shaming Southern Oregon because the libraries are still closed and here the school year has started up again.

Then last weekend, there was this article in our local paper. They may have got it figured out and all fifteen branches may be open by sometime in November.

Running at half the hours with half the staff. But open.

Just in time for my birthday!

***********
I decided to go with this for my post tonight as I could knock it off quicker than I could prepare my Friday Snippet. Watch for my snippet--part 7 of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes--sometime around noon Pacific Coast time.

I'm still not used to this new schedule my body seems to have settled into since I started getting well after that two week illness. Well, my body is apparently used to it But my expectations and ambitions haven't adjusted. I keep making plans that have to be put off because I tire out between eight and nine each evening where I was used to thinking of those hours between 9pm and 2am as my most productive of the day.

Not only have I been sleeping nights. But I've been sleeping one to two hours longer than I used to. And there hasn't been a single wake-a-thon of 20-36 hours--often my most productive times of all.

*************
Speaking of happy days. Today was the end of the first 70 Days of Sweat round. I just remembered that I still need to go check in.

I didn't make my goal in word count 60-70K. I think I'm somewhere between 40-50K, depending on what gets counted. But I still feel that I accomplished something way more important. I established an enduring habit because I spent quality time with my story world every single day since July 8 and unlike with NaNoWriMo the last three years, I have no anticipation of heaving a big sigh and setting it all aside for weeks or months.

I may ease up a bit but I can't imagine going even one full day without doing something related to it. I will probably get real focused on character sketches, outlines, notes, scene concepts, time lines etc. between now and the start of round two. I also need to decide which of the three or four stories that still qualify I want to dedicate to NaNoWriMo and get completely immersed in dreaming it by the last week of October.

It is going to be hard to tear myself away from the characters in Faye's story though. So I'm not going to. Any new material I add to Faye's story during November will count as sweat for Sven. Besides, since most of the POV characters of the other six or seven novels based in Faye's story world have at least a walk-on if not a serious supporting actor role in her story, any work on Faye's story is like priming the pump for any of the others.

See? How wrapped up I am in it? That's what the Sweating for Sven challenge did for me. Even if there wasn't going to be a second round I'm not about to abandon Faye and her world again just because the challenge ended. It has become its own reason for being a part of my days.

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Monday Poetry Train #17

Maternity-x by Livan Castro
art print for sale at art.com

The Woman Who Swallowed a Baby

Her belly parts the air ahead,
A balloon of hope before,
The blunt prow of a schooner,
Parting the waters of desire--
Her right of passage, proof of
Prowess, rank, fertility.

Within, swaddled in dreams,
Conjured by her craving--by
The years of swallowed sighs,
Bubbled syrup, candied tears, fire-
Baked sweets, ice-churned creams and
Oft chewed remorse--her child curls

She walks serene. Her hand, held
In the gathered folds of her dress,
Finger thrums, secret caresses
Upon the drum-taught surface
Of this vessel of longing with
A furtive, murmured blessing.

She broods, chews her lips as memories
Intrude of blame and desperate shame,
Many moons with scarlet stains
When waning hope, just containing
Hiccups of regurgitated
Guilt re-swallowed, was harpooned.

She lifts her chin, with firm resolve,
Refusing to re-member that dread
And thereby to keep it fed.
For, as certain as blood is red,
She will have her labor day,
Delivering of herself pure joy.

#######

This poem did not begin as a poem but rather an attempt to write a character sketch several years ago for a female protagonist who experiences pseudocyesis one of the contributing factors of which is aerophagia. I'm going to be mean and make you Google those two words yourself. All you need to see is the search pages to get the drift. But, try reading the poem first to see what you make of it before you know what it is alluding to.

My attempt at writing the story stalled I believe because I had not gained enough distance from a personal experience to create a wholly fictional character and plot. That has been resolved and the story has been folded into my Fruits of the Spirit story world as one of the (so far) eight novels projected. This is the story world my Friday Snippets stories are from. And the story world I've been working on for the 70 Days of Sweat challenge. This is one of the stories still eligible to be designated as my NaNoWriMo project this year as I've written no narrative or dialog or other scene like material; only sketches, notes and outlines.

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Better Not Best

Still on the shaky side. Been feeling pretty wretched (drop the w) since late Saturday. The worst was over by the wee hours of Monday but it left me weak and weary and contending with the blurred vision which is often a side-effect of illness for me.

It hasn't been all bad. I've watched sixteen episodes of Gilmore Girls on DVD since Saturday. Have started season three now. This thanks to my niece who began loaning her sets to me months ago, handing over the last of the available ones--season six--several weeks ago. I never started watching it while it was in production but I am so hooked now.

Then an email from a Friday Snippet participant containing a PDF of his entire manuscript for me to read and provide feedback. I was already confident the story was destined to be published someday just based on the half-dozen snippets I read over the last couple of months. I am no less confident after reading the first 70 pages. It has completely taken my mind off of Harry Potter and having to wait for my chance to read Deathly Hollows. It is that good.

As if that wasn't enough goodness for one day, the box of goodies I won in the 70 Days of Sweat Sunday check-in drawing two weeks ago, arrived in the mail. Alison Kent was the sponsor that week and she really surprised me. I was expecting one or two paper packs. That would have been waaaay cool. But there were four novels and three how-to for writers. 7 in all. I was intending to list them all here but I've run out of steam.

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This and That

My mind and heart are elsewhere. And other duties call. So I am going to ramble about some of if for a few minutes and then get on with it.

I had to stop reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with Harry and Headmaster Dumbledore on the edge of a cliff above the sea about to climb down into a cave whose entrance is aswirl with seawater.

I was reading outside and lost the light just after eight. I haven't picked it up again because I suspect I won't want to put it down until the last page forces me to and, as I indicated above, I have duties.

One of which was to get a post started before midnight so the timestamp will at least count it for Friday. This might seem silly but I have managed to post every day since April 9, the day I returned the last library book. That commitment is highly symbolic for me and I know that failing to keep it would add a dozen lashes to my psyche's self-flagellation whip. Lashes with wicked hooks and shards of glass embedded in them at that.

The duty with the next highest priority is the dinner dishes still soaking in the sink. It was too hot after dinner. Sweat in the eyes and other threats to breakable dishes make it prudent to wait.

I also have return visits to make for Friday Snippets and TT.

And then there is the sweating for Sven which I have neglected since that excellent session Wednesday morning due in part to the wretched events of the latter half of the day. All of which was the subject of my TT. I am really anticipating getting back to my story world as I left off at a point where I still had plenty to say and stopped only because fatigue and eye-strain forced me to.

Tomorrow is Race Day Saturday. For Ed and his folks it is the highlight of their week when they attend dirt track races. It is often the highlight of my week too, at least since the closure of the libraries and the loss of my library Friday. This is my day to be home alone for eight to ten hours. The only racing I do is between the bedroom and the washer though. It is my day to do my chores with complete freedom of movement around the house. No worries about bumping into someone in the hall or using an appliance just when it is needed by someone else. And I can take as long as I want with my shower and shampoo.

Funny to think that chore day is the highlight of my week. But I think it is about that autonomy I have mentioned several times recently. Fending for myself at mealtime is huge also. Fixing what I want and eating when I want or not eating if that suits me. My anxiety level plummets on Race Day Saturday. I think there is only about six more race weekends though. I'm already dreading those long winter months with neither Race Day Saturday nor Library Friday to look forward to.

There is also the possibility of keeping both the laptop and the PC humming with projects from mid afternoon til as late as eight Sunday morning, though I haven't done that since I started 70 Days of Sweat.

So I am off to get those dishes washed. Which will give me a couple of guilt-free hours to finish Half-Blood Prince while sitting in front of the fan. After that? Well I'm keeping the plan loose because that is one of the joys of race day Saturdays. The ability to go with the flow, to be impulsive, to do what suits me for most of a whole day.

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Thursday Thirteen #47

Thirteen Things About My Wretched Wednesday

1. It didn't start wretched if you count the hours between midnight and 1PM during which I had a very good--exceptionally good session--first spending several hours creating my second official post on my new Wordpress site and then visiting the recipients of the award I was passing on. You could say I was riding a bit high during those hours. I ran into a few snags as I fumbled my way around a new platform but each time I solved the problem I felt a little tingle of pleasure. I do not handle change well at all so I expected to be anxious and I was. But the fun associated with receiving the award and anticipating visiting the ones I was tagging in return to alert them of the award and at the same time of Joystory's move kept me motivated. Scroll down to the post below to see a crummy facsimile of the post I'd created.
   
2. In fact, I was so motivated that I was still riding a high when I finished making the rounds. I seriously considered starting a draft of my TT immediately. The prospect of having my TT ready to go before noon on Wednesday was rather appealing. Because of the time constraints on use of the PC, I've been encouraging Ed to use my laptop for his TT on Wednesdays from whenever he gets home between three and five to whenever he is ready to give it up. Which means that since I seldom have mine ready to go by early afternoon, I seldom get it posted before late night. So it was really tempting to go ahead and use the energy of that high to at least get started on it and if possible have it ready to go in draft so that I could use Thursday evening to start my visiting rounds.
3. But I bowed to Sven instead. I wondered what might happen if I applied that energy to my story world instead. I made a deal with myself to give Sven at least one hour of sweat before moving on to the TT post. And that hour went so well I didn't want to stop. It turned into seven. Yes, I said 7. Now most of that wasn't directly applied to writing narrative and dialog which can be counted toward the 70 Days of Sweat challenge but some of it was. I guestimate 1500 to 3000 words. It is hard to do an exact word count on two counts. One has to do with deciding what qualifies as actual story versus ramblings and musing about the story, characters, plot, theme, motives, descriptions of people and places etc etc. AKA notes. Stuff that will make it into actual drafts of scenes is all mixed in with the other stuff because it tends to come spontaneously while I am musing in a rambling fashion. The second has to do with the application I am using which allows me to have up to fifty topic windows open at once. It allows me to tally words for individual windows or a selection of windows. So I can see the words accumulate. It is just not possible to keep perfect track of each day's new words. I can barely keep track of which all topic windows I visited let alone what I might have added or subtracted from them. One of these days I intend to do a post about this ap with screen shots to illustrate what I am talking about.
4. I reluctantly quit working at one. I knew I had to get a few hours of sleep in before dinner if I wanted to get my TT up by midnight. I was very reluctant to quit though as the pattern has been for every excellent session like that to be followed by a day or two of struggle both with pulling my head and heart out of the swamp where sleep takes me and strings of events difficult to cope with, which are probably more to do with the swampy head than bad luck but which feels at the time like life is just taking delight in sucker-punching me.
5. And sure enough if it didn't happen again. I swear, if there was any way to get away with it, I would swear off sleep like a bad habit. Waking again--and by that I mean, fully conscious and engaged in life--might take anywhere from an hour to twelve or more hours. In the meantime I am down fifty IQ points and so physically klutzy I'm not safe to be in my own company. Add to this 95% plus visual impairment, over 50% hearing deficit and moderate to severe joint pain. Sometimes, like just recently, it can be weeks before I get back to a state of mind I can call truly awake and with it.
6. Actually though, today was one of the good days in the sense that it only took me a couple hours to pull out of the swamp and start to feel mentally and physically energetic. That was most likely because I only slept a bit under three hours and it wasn't really deep and continuous. I was thinking/dreaming my story world, the neighbors were talking and clanking (working on a car?) right outside my window and the sun was too bright. Ed woke me up when he got home about three-thirty but I went back to sleep for another hour or so though I kept waking up enough to be cognizant that he had not taken off with the laptop. I was tempted to get back to work but I didn't want to get started only to have him come ask for it. So I daydreamed and dozed off and on until just before five when he brought me my coffee which is also when he told me he was too beat and was waiting until after dinner to do his TT. But by then it was too close to dinner to start on anything.
7. So I spent that time reading news online while watching/listening to news on the TV. Probably not the best waking up activity. In the forty minutes before I was called to the table I heard or read stuff about the trapped and dead miners in Utah, the downed helicopter and dead soldiers in Iraq, the path of Hurricane Dean, the floods in the Ohio River Valley, the earthquake aftermath in Peru, the Katrina victims still suffering, the rising suicide rate among our soldiers, campaign gobbledygook, and a woman named Joy who had dropped a spoon while stirring something on the stove and bent to pick it up just as her house exploded around her, which probably saved her life but...
   ...which got me to thinking that I would have rather not have survived it. Not if it meant starting over again with nothing. I've told the story here before about losing the contents of our apartment/house twice during our marriage so I won't go into it again. But that is one of the reasons why watching news about disasters that destroy peoples homes is so distressing for me. I don't have to imagine too hard to know what it must feel like. Our losses were due to combinations of personal and macroeconomic mismanagement but the stuff was gone all the same. You can say it is just stuff and stuff is replaceable but sitting here six years after the second such loss still living with my in-laws, still being called to the table most evenings like any teenager I see that stuff as symbolizing an autonomy that is much harder to regain than accumulation of new stuff or replacement stuff. Which is what I see as the most egregious suffering inflicted on the Katrina victims who are still essentially homeless two years later!!!
   
8. So this was what was on my mind when I was called to the table. I sat and ate in silence, probably resembling nothing so much as a sulky teen. I noticed that conversation around me was more subdued than usual as was everybody's appetite and struggled not to think it was my fault somehow. Then I realized my father-in-law was wincing repeatedly and a glance at his arm where the ping pong ball sized growth had been removed last Monday, revealed a dressing oozing with blood and fluids. He had just gotten the staples removed yesterday and everything had been fine. It wasn't until his folks left the table that Ed told me what happened.
9. His Dad had driven over to his Mother's house where his sister has been house sitting since Grandma died in June. She had taken on the care of Grandma's elderly dog Spot and had called to say Spot was refusing to stand up this morning. So Ed's Dad, who wasn't supposed to be using that arm yet, had driven over and as he got out of the car he bumped his arm on the door and broke open the incision. Meanwhile, a trip to the vet with Spot revealed extensive cancer in her hip. So they had to put her to sleep today. Another grief whammy for the family. I had a hard time finishing what was on my plate after Ed told me. I might not have wanted to eat at all if I had know before I came to the table. While Ed was filling me in, his folks left to go after supplies to redress his Dad's arm. As I began clearing the table, Ed went after the laptop and brought it out to the front porch where he prefers to work. (Because he is free to smoke out there is the main reason. But whatever.) Meanwhile, as I cleared the table and washed the dishes, I began planning a memorial post for Spot. I had lots of memories from all the time I spent sitting with Grandma over the last two years. I had a general plan and felt good about it by the time I was done in the kitchen. So as my summer habit has been when the weather permits, I took a book, an iced-coffee and our cat Merlin out to the back yard. Merlin ate grass and rose petals while I sat and read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince until I lost the light about eight. Gads but wasn't it just last week, I had enough light until after nine? I guess it must have been more like a month.
   
10. Anyway. Ed's practice has been to join me out there for a chat before he goes to bed and then help me and Merlin across the dark yard, but on Wednesday's sometimes he doesn't get finished with his TT before Merlin or I loose patience. Such was tonight. Merlin began pestering me to go in twenty minutes or so before I was ready. He kept climbing my bare legs, meowing incessantly and grabbing at my hand on the arm of the chair which sometimes was holding my tumbler. I'm sure he was hearing the ice but I didn't want to fish one out and suck the coffee off before giving it to him while holding a book that didn't belong to me. Forget about putting the book down. About the time I was loosing the light, he grabbed at the bookmark and managed to sling it far enough away I had to stand up to retrieve it. He took off towards the back porch at such a clip that when the leash ran out he about did a backwards flip. I gave in. As I was hooking Merlin back up in the bedroom, Ed was returning with the laptop. He said he would meet me in the back yard after I got it plugged back in since he had something to tell me. I didn't like the tone I was hearing in his voice. Ominous is not an exaggeration.
    
11. I wasn't imagining it. He hadn't been working on his TT all that time. He had been trying to fix a problem he had created for me. He had discovered that my new site had been suspended for four days because he had forgotten to insert a piece of code in the footer. There had been no warning. Personally I think that sounds like abysmal customer service even for the free level. Let me clarify that Wordpress is not to blame here but the host site which I am being careful not to name in this rant for fear of Teeing them off while they are holding my content hostage. Ed has been signing up for and testing free host services for nearly a year, trying to find one that will accommodate the plans we have: that will give him access to PHP and CGI and other webmaster goodies; that has above 90% percent up time; good customer service; allows multiple accounts from the same IP; has plenty of room to grow for several months in terms of both storage and bandwidth; and all of this at the free level which is all we can afford. See, this isn't just about moving Joystory. It is about finding a place where I can host all four of my thematically related sites and weave them together into a single entity: Joystory, Joywrite, Joyread and that one I'm being secretive about though I've mentioned it obliquely like this a few times. That last one is the one with the potential to get huge fairly fast once it is up and running. Ed estimates 100,000 visitors per month within 3 to 6 months. Which causes us to pin our hope on it helping us regain that autonomy I mentioned above. To think of having that shut down without warning when a simple robot email could have issued a reminder. Ed was teed by the guy in the site forum he dealt with who sounded a bit like Snape to me. Unforgiving. Just, You had seven days the rules are what they are. Seven days might seem like plenty of time for someone who spends fourteen hours per day on this or has a team of techies to do their bidding, but for someone with a day job and other restrictions on access to the net, seven days can mean as little as seven man-hours. So this was a blow.
12. Yes, it is probably just a temporary setback but its timing really gave my paranoia pucker power. (For the kiss of a Dementor for all you HP fans.) That whole fundamentalist training which maintains that such setbacks are God's way of punishing rebellion just wakes up and snarls every time stuff like this happens. Then there was the issue that I hadn't really wanted to make the move until after 70 Days of Sweat was over September 20. But Ed had been so pleased with himself for what he had put together for me, I hated to dampen his mood by being my usual timid change-resistant, she-who-gets-wet-one- skin-cell-at-a-time. So I took the plunge Monday night and posted the announcement on both blogs. And now this. Just what I had been afraid of when Ed started talking about moving Joystory. Which was a good part about my anxiety issues. But, I had watched him putting up and abandoning a number of his own blogs and websites as he 'researched' the parameters of hosting. I knew how his initial enthusiasm blazed only to flame out without warning. I did not want to subject my audience, myself or my content to that instability. And sure enough if Ed isn't unhappy enough to be unsure if he wants to invest any more loyalty to this site. I think it is only his knowledge of my aversion to change that keeps him from outright saying, I'm outta here.
    
13. So I cried a bit and ranted a bit and then we stood in the dark yard and hugged for a bit before heading back in the house where I proceeded to redo (sort of) the awards post from Tuesday night (see below) and then got started on this TT which was supposed to be an easy, short, recounting of this day's woes. Ha. When have I ever done short. But the woes weren't finished with me yet. When I pasted the TT code into Blogger, the blue background of the table I have used every week for nearly a year now was missing in sections. Blogger was rewriting the code after I switched over to compose and changing the tags to ones I couldn't decipher. I tried for an hour to get it to work and finally decided that now was as good a time as any to abandon the blue table as I had been contemplating ever since I started working with Gimp and began to imagine what cool TT headers I could create. Well I haven't time to create one this week but I might as well take this opportunity to ditch the table. I fished out the code for the header graphic and the official TT code below and started typing.
    

That was five hours ago. If you think this is long you should have seen it before I cut about half of it out. Give me another two hours and I could edit it down by half again. But what's the point really. Besides it just goes to show what I was talking about in point #3. See I have no trouble at all generating 5000 words per day. I just have trouble judging the relevance of it. What counts as genuine story narrative and what is just rambling musings, wild tangents, and idea jottings. This isn't as rough as it gets but it is rough enough I am reluctant to post it which is why I am still typing....


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Friday Snippets 5

Some orientation before we proceed to the story snippet. This is the beginning of a new story from the same story world and with the same POV character as Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities, the one that finished last week. This is the story world which I am working with for the 70 Days of Sweat challenge but these two stories are not from the new material as it will be awhile before any of that is polished enough to share. This story is going to take eleven weeks to dole out and even then some of the snippets will be longish for a blog post. In its entirety it is about 16K

There are more than half a dozen projected novels in this story world. Each one focused on a theme implied by the name of its POV character. This story like Of Cats belongs to Faye aka Jubilee Faith Gardner nee Fairchild. Of Cats is slated to have position one in Faith's novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For. Making Rag Doll Babies is slated for position three. The events in Of Cats occurred in late summer around the time of Back-to-School sales. The unfinished story slated for position two, Strange Attractors, which I have been focused on almost exclusively for the last two weeks of the Sweat challenge, takes place in September around Labor Day of the same year.

Making Rag Doll Babies takes place on a single day in mid October of that year. Or at least one strand of it does. A second strand takes place a bit under ten years earlier. These strands are delivered in alternate sections that end in cliff hangers. The opening section, and thus all odd numbered sections, take place in what I consider the 'now' of Faith's novel. Next week's section and all even numbered ones thereafter take place on a single day about a decade earlier.

Strange Attractors has fallen into the same pattern, with its 'past' strand taking place over a several month period about 12-15 years before. Another of the Faith stories is pulling in that direction as well. Thus I am seriously considering applying the same organization to Of Cats and even have a story in mind for it that sorta needs telling before Making Rag Doll Babies. A story that involves Cassie and her best friend Fancy and that long ago class room of Faye's alluded to in Of Cats. The story of a high-school production of Macbeth. OK. Well, only those of you who were with me last week will get that the significance of that.

Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes

1.

Faye sits at the piano with her eyes closed, music flowing from her fingers to flood the room with the notes of her impromptu fugue. The multi-paned, double doors of the Music Room were thrown open to the enclosed garden where autumn leaves danced with the fitful breezes, heralding the arrival of a season-change. A brindled kitten, alert to every sound and motion, chased and tumbled among them. A video camera on a tripod was directed at this scene its red recording light glowing in the twilight gloom. At the concert grand in the corner Faye played, needing no sheet music for this music was of her own making, composed to accompany the swirling and swaying of the breeze-flung leaves.

A breathless voice broke in upon her and her hands fell to the keyboard as if suddenly remembering gravity. She winced as the dissonant chord reverberated up her arm with the sensation of a toothache.

"I knew if I followed the music I would find you."

Faye swiveled to face the voice, putting hands to breeze-tossed curls. "You gave me a start, child." she said.

"I’m sorry for that, Miss Faye. I did ring the doorbell out front but I suppose it blended right in with your music. I need to trouble you for a big favor." The figure in the doorway was a confluence of shadow silhouetted against the luminous post-sundown sky.

"Hmmm." Faye went to the camera and switched it off. She had to stand on tip-toe to do so. Her shape in the nebulous light suggested that of a chubby child. But when she spoke, her voice betrayed the years of training it had incurred in its mellifluous yet deliberate intonation. "Is this request made in your official capacity?" She bent to turn on a lamp that sat on a low table flanked by wing-backed chairs. She sat in one and patted the seat of the other. "Come. Sit Ask." She smoothed her gray linen skirt over her knees, fluffed the ruffles of her pink blouse, and then bent to pick up the kitten now nuzzling her ankles and brought it up before her eyes where it promptly reached out with extended claws and pulled her spectacles off her face. "Ai! You’re a feisty one you are." Faye planted a kiss on the kitten’s nose and set it in her lap, where she distracted it from the pearly buttons on her blouse by massaging its belly as she looked expectantly at her visitor.

"Unofficial." Cassandra Cosgrove sat hesitantly on the edge of the seat as if poised for sudden flight. "As you can see I’m not in uniform." She gestured at her jogging suit. "But I go on duty in an hour. If not for that and the fact I’m biking to work tonight, I would handle this myself." She held her shoulders squared as though she were at attention, braced by the straps of a backpack. Her long black hair was plaited close to her head in preparation for the State Trooper’s cap that would soon sit there. The effect was far from severe though, for it was impossible to hide its lustrous abundance in a braid. Faye marveled at the play of light upon it, wondering as always how a thing so dark could be so luminous. Silence stretched taut between them. In the reticence of Cassie and the tenacity of Faith Gardner’s patience were echoes of a decade-gone classroom. She would not plead or prompt Cassie to go on.

Cassie closed her eyes against Faye’s calm scrutiny, drew in a deep breath and plunged in. "You know Briana Morgan. Mae Bea Morgan’s granddaughter." It was not a question.

"Briana." Faye breathes the name, fanning a flame of memories like images flickering on cavern walls, echoes of voices reverberating. A voice. Briana’s….

****************************************************************

Next week we meet Briana. In two weeks, the scene above continues and we meet..... Nope. Not telling. That would spoil the surprise. But I can tell you that Wilma and Julia will be back.

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