In a discussion with my sister-friend Jamie several months ago, I was ragging on myself and refusing to see what Jamie saw as positives instead of just further proof of my failures and deficiencies. I kept insisting that what was done did not outweigh what was undone and even so it wasn't done right or wasn't done quickly enough or wasn't done often enough or wasn't done on time or wasn't done with a good attitude etc etc etc.
Jamie asked me whose voice was I hearing in my head when I took these thoughts to heart. I said primarily my Mom's from childhood but also my Dad's, my brother's and my sister's and of course my husband's and my mother-in-law's. Then she told me that another close friend of hers had a similar problem and she had found it helpful to name her haranguer so she could talk back to her. I promised I would think about that and see if I could come up with a name meaningful to me.
After several days of contemplation I had zeroed in on the finger shaken at my face as was my Mom's practice. And although her tone was much different it put me in mind of the Stella Mudd character from the classic Star Trek series. My mom never yelled let alone screeched like Stella nor did she name-call. She barely raised her voice. But her words dripped with shame and disappointment. Here are some of her favorite phrases that still haunt me today:
Shame on you
Mama's so disappointed
How could you be so _______?
Why can't Mama depend on you?
Why can't you be more _____?
When are you going to _____?
How do you expect to ______ when you can't even ______?
Are you ever going to finish that?
Do I always have to remind you?
No, no not that way, here let me show you (as she takes the tool out of my hands)
That was nice but next time don't you think you could try______?
How many times do I have to say _______?
But don't you think a better way would be ______?
But don't you think _______? (constantly on every topic under the sun and for which the only acceptable answer was 'yes' even if that was a lie)
Recently Jamie and I were talking about how it was working out for me talking back to Stella or telling her to shut up. I was having minimal success and would often find myself experiencing waves of guilt and shame afterwards. Jamie was insistent that i needed to get cross with her, defiant, even violent. "Punch her out" she suggested. Treat her like the bully she is. But I am, by nature and training, very averse to violence and have never found that the response to a bully needs to be becoming a bully. So I let it percolate for a bit and it wasn't long before I came up with a tactic that fit my personality and values.
I can't remember the source but not long ago I heard someone refer to the Southern Lady's FU and demonstrated with a honey-toned "Bless your heart" Now that could work If I could get that refined tone of faux sincerity down. And since one of my superpowers is story I was soon developing related lines along with gestures. I see them as mini-movies in my head.
"Bless your heart." I say when Stella starts harping. And if she doesn't hush immediately I reach out and smooth her hair back and say. "Don't fash yourself dear." Or, "Hush now dear, you are overwrought." Then if she is especially persistent I hold out a cup of hot chamomile tea saying, "There, there dear, I do believe someone needs a nap." Or I will reach out and lay the back of my hand on her forehead and say, "Are you fevered dear? How about a nice little chill pill?"
I've only been trying this for a bit under two weeks now but it does seem to be helping.
I wish I'd found it in time to help me thru the dark month of September that contained the death anniversaries of my dad, my husband and my MIL along with Ed's birthday and the second anniversary of the fire in Southern Oregon that burned out the trailer park we had lived in for over a decade near Phoenix.
I just watched the last episode of Voyager which concludes my marathon rewatching of every Star Trek episode of every series since early September.
It started out as prep for NaNoWriMo because my coming of age YA novel character was a fanatical fan of all things Star Trek and the concept for the story was that whatever dilemma or crisis was thrown at this teen girl a solution or insight could be found in one or more of the Star Trek episodes or Movies.
Since my character was a young girl she would be consciously or unconsciously finding role models among the Star Trek women so for the first time ever I consciously focused on the women characters throughout my marathon.
Oddly enough I feel as though I've just been through my own coming of age story arc. Or at least the first half or so of it since I don't yet feel I've reached a resolution.
I'm astounded by how strongly I've been impacted by the experience. I'm still processing it. Much of it is not at a level where verbalization is possible but I began feeling a strong sense of a shift in my own psyche about half-way through November--right around my birthday--and I'm sure I'm never going to be the same.
In my story synopsis on NaNo I said my character would be channeling the Star Trek women. Now that has become my own aspiration.
As part of the prep for my NaNo novel last September, I started streaming Star Trek episodes on Netflix and Amazon. I started with Enterprise as I wanted to watch in the order of the story's timeline. I'm now in the last half of the final season of Voyager.
The point was to prime my consciousness with as much of the info as possible as well as with the immediacy of immersion so that I could begin to think with my character's mind. She was a dedicated obsessive fan(atical), teen who know all the episodes of all the series, including the animated, as well as all the movies by heart. Even some of the novels. She was a walking encyclopedia of Star Trek trivia, hung out in online fan forums, played Star Trek RPG, wrote fan-fic and wore costumes she made to school.
I intended to make this post mostly about that and about the experience of rewatching all of those episodes while writing a character who was an over-the-top exaggeration of me as a teen.
Except that all I had was the three seasons of the original Star Trek reruns at the whim of syndication and a mom who thot ST was sacrilegious , a mail-order fan-club offering only a few black and white autographed photos with one way, one time communication for $$ and the James Blish short stories based on the episodes. While Nova Jayne Travers can stream at her whim all 5 series (or 6 counting the animated one) and a dozen movies, the World Wide Web, conventions, comic books, RPG games, interactive fan-fic, and fanclubs with video chat, and social media where actors, writers, directors, and producers actually interact with the fans.
Because I'd set out to watch with an eye to the stories' influence on the pyche of a young girl, I paid close attention (for the first time oddly) to all of the female characters throughout.
I planed to go into that here a bit too so I headed over to YouTube to look for some clips that showcased the women but I ran into this one instead and decided to save all of that serious sociological contemplation for a later post when there are more light bulbs on in my brain and instead to pose some questions:
Do you have any writer tics with the potential to annoy your readers?
Could you trust yourself to spot them?
Do you ever spot them in other author's works?
If so, is your annoyance ever enough to spoil the story?
Enough to make you give up on the story? On the author?
My answers:
I'm not sure. I'll have to keep an eye and ear out when I start rereading my stuff again. Tho it has been pointed out to me by more than one reader that I overuse punctuation which I suppose would qualify as a tic.
Not with confidence.
Yes
Sometimes
Not so far. That I'm aware of. At least not with stories and authors that have won my heart. But it is possible it played a role in stories or authors I gave up on early. I will have to start paying attention to what turns me away from them from now on and not always assume it is my own inadequacies as a reader when I can't finish a story or when I turn away from a second helping of a new author.
I know I would never give up on Star Trek. Though I now wish I'd watched the final 12 episodes of Voyager before encountering this vid. It is occasionally breaking me out of the dreamstate stories put me into. A couple of times I had to pause until I could get a grip. That's probably because by the midpoint of this vid I could not keep from snorting and giggling and seeing the clips in situ only an hour or two later triggered the same reaction. I'm hoping that a good night's sleep will fix that.
But going forward I will never, ever, ever be able to use the phrase, some kind of or any of its variations or permutations in my writing or conversation with a straight face.
Not sure that I ever did anyway because my high school typing teacher had a fanatical distaste of the phrase kind of and did a pretty good job of breaking us of it use.
I started watching reruns of Star Trek Enterprise on Netflix last week and by the time I heard the titles song the third time I was beginning to own it--the sentiment of it.
Since then I've seldom let the show continue without playing the titles a second time and often three or four times. Now the song plays itself in my head all day and I'm starting to feel it viscerally.
I've come to identify with it to such a degree I've taken it on as my personal anthem.
Since I've found several YouTube versions I probably won't feel the need to replay them at the beginning of every episode.
Star Trek Enterprise was the only Star Trek series I never got to see all the episodes. In fact I have seen less than half of them. They were always changing up the schedule without warning--switching from Saturday night to Friday night, switching from the 7pm slot to 4, 6, 8, or 9pm or even 1am--usually to accommodate a sport show.
Star Trek began weaving itself into my psyche at age 9 becoming second only to the Bible and tied with Shakespeare in impact to my sense of story. From age 11 through my late teens I was a rabid fan of the Classic Star Trek--Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scottie, Sulu, Uhara, Checkov--and recognized even before age 13 that a great many of the episodes were parables.
I realized recently that it had been years since I'd seen classic Star Trek episodes and began to long for them and thought it was about time I take advantage of their availability on Netflix but once I signed in and saw Enterprise and remembered I'd missed so many episodes when they aired, I decided that it was fitting to watch the prequel to the classic Star Trek first.
Watching Star Trek now is an exercise in tracing my relationship to story back to its roots. I wish to re-encounter as an adult and as a writer all the stories that enthralled me as a youth.
It's also homage to the first stories I wrote that weren't children's picture books or chapter books--Star Trek fan fic. Though I didn't know that's what it was called and it was long before the Internet so I didn't know anyone else did it and only a handful of my sixth grade classmates ever saw any of the pages.
Read more...
This post on TED by Nilofer Merchant discusses how we're about to bring the Star Trek world to life. We're thirty years out Merchant thinks.
As exciting as the technological inventions that mimic what was once the far-fetched tech on the classic Star Trek--communicators (smartphones), universal language translators, video chatting, replicators (3D printing), using light to diagnose medical conditions etc--these aren't the focus of Merchant's prediction.
She is more interested in the ways the new forms of communicating provided by technology are creating new ways for people to form purposeful associations that have the power to make effective and lasting change that once required the involvement of huge organizations or governments. Both notorious for lumbering zig-zags toward goals they are as actively resisting as they are pursuing.
The notable characteristics of these groups forming for a purpose are their tendency to celebrate diversity, see the potential of those with different abilities, champion creativity over conformity, value individual and community well being over material wealth, and the ability to envision even the far-fetched and make it so.
This was the heart of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe and his vision for our future. Though I couldn't have articulated that at age eleven that was the heart of my fascination with Star Trek from the classic 1960s series and through each movie and series that followed.
It was 46 years ago tonight that the first regular season episode of the original Star Trek aired. The web was awash with image and audio in its honor and I was inundated with nostalgia.
I saw my first episode at age 9 while it was still airing but that was the one and only episode I saw before it went into syndication. That had been a special occasion, staying up past my bedtime and watching a show that my parents were not quite comfortable with because friends of the family visiting from out of town had a daughter 4 years older than me who was already a fan and half freaking because she was going to miss an episode.
Our TV was black and white vacuum tube with rabbit ears that took forever to warm up and the best picture was still often fuzzed and the audio crackly. Sometimes to keep a steady picture someone would have to stand beside the TV and hold the rabbit ears and watch the image in the mirror across the room.
I don't remember anything about the episode that night. What I do remember clearly was the intensity of this girl's anticipation and enjoyment and because she was already one of my role models its no surprise that I took notice and never once took any note of the cultural assumptions around me that this science fiction show was for guys not girls.
It wasn't for another two years when the show went into syndication and started showing up in afternoon time slots between 4 and 6 PM that I was reintroduced and by then I understood more of the science that was being extrapolated on. But I have to confess that it wasn't the science nor the social justice commentary nor the stories themselves that drew me in and kept me hooked at first.
It was Captain Kirk. I had crushed on Kirk so hard it makes me blush even today to remember.
Meanwhile though those stories were working their magic on me and by the time I was 14 I was in it for the stories at least as much as for the Captain and by then I'd seen many episodes many, many, many times. When I was 12 I started writing fan fiction. Though I did not know that was what it was. That was my first experience with stories I'd written circulating among my peers of both genders and receiving positive feedback.
The only previous experience of sharing my stories with peers had been a serial story about a girl my age whose parents took in twin foster babies on her 11th birthday. A story that was only received well by a couple of girls in my class who also soon tired of the endless inventory of baby paraphernalia and baby antics and the monotonous routine of child care and housework involved that I'd fixated on. That story had no plot as it had been primarily a riff on a wish fulfillment dream I'd had around my 11th birthday.
The Star Trek fan fic that I wrote between the ages of 12 and 15 though did begin to take notice of plot. So you could say that I cut my storytelling teeth on Star Trek.
I stopped writing those fan fics around age 15 after hearing enough adults telling me I was wasting my time since I would never be able to publish them and might possibly even get in trouble for sharing my manuscripts since every thing about Star Trek was copyrighted. By then I had started to move on to another genre that I also love to this day--the coming of age YA story. I began half a dozen of those between the ages of 14 and 20.
Remembering those stories now brings a wave of sadness over the loss during one of our moves in the first decade of my marriage of all of my juvenillia.
Thanks to Google for remembering and bringing it to all of our attentions with their funky interactive doodle on their search page. It was a bit like a cartoon and a bit like a video game.
Now I'm wondering why I've yet to start streaming the classic Star Trek episodes on Netflix tho they have been available for over a year now.
1. I had such a crush on Star Trek's Captain Kirk from age 11 through 16 guys my own age would not even register on my radar. Or should I say tricorder? I spent my allowance to join the William Shatner Fan Club just to get the photos and one life sized poster of Kirk on the transporter.
2. I also bought his much lampooned record The Transformed Man and listened to it over and over until my family begged for mercy. Whatever you want to say about The Transformed Man, I fell in love with Shakespeare due to his readings of Hamlet, King Henry the V and Romeo and Juliet on that record. I still had that LP when I got married and until I lost it in a move in 87. About ten years later my sister-friend Jamie got me a CD of it and I still have it.
3. By the time I was 13 I was equally enthralled by all things Star Trek. (and continue to be) I spent babysitting money on the paperback books that adapted the episodes into short story format until I'd collected the whole set. I wrote Star Trek stories all through Jr. High and High school. This was before anyone was publishing novels based on the Star Trek universe. I even bought and put together a plastic model of the Enterprise.
I once had a dream that I was piloting the Enterprise through space and then brought it in for a landing on our driveway and right on into the carport. I think this had something to do with the fact that I was learning to drive and the sense I had that my Dad's Buick Electra was as big as a spaceship. Which also may have had much to do with why:
4. I didn't get my driver's license until I was almost twenty
5. Then the first year I had it, I was in two accidents nine days apart. They both involved peripheral vision issues so I suspect the RP had played a role but in the first one a huge RV was parked on the corner to my left at the intersection I was stopped at and it blocked view of the nearest lane and in the second one a new pair of heels got caught at the base of the accelerator pedal so that my foot continued to press the accelerator even as I was shifting my foot toward the brake causing me to accelerate through a four way stop. In the second one I was alone in the car but in the first one I was driving my 13 year old sister to a doctor's appointment.
That poor 65 Mustang. The first accident took out the driver's side rear fender. The second one took out the front bumper, grill, hood and radiator. I was still paying off the repairs when I got married in 1978.
I didn't learn that I had inherited my Mother's RP aka Tunnel Vision until 1987 the year I turned 30. But I had stopped driving by the time I was 24. This may have had as much to do with the fact that the cars we had in the eighties were stick shift and I'd never learned how to drive stick shift. Ed tried to teach me how on the logging roads in the hills above the Rogue Valley around 1985 I think and I did learn to handle shifting into the low gears but I never got comfortable enough to go take the driving test again.
6. I've been such a night owl all my life. As child I waited for my parents to go to bed and then turned on my bedside high-intensity gooseneck lamp and bent its neck down til the bulb was only an inch above the plastic mat it sat on. I would read by that sliver of light for hours. Once I fell asleep without turning off the lamp and my Mom, who had just happened to get up and thought to check on my sister and I, found it like that with a scorch mark forming. She woke me up and showed me how close I'd come to setting our bed on fire.
That cured me of abusing high intensity lamps but it didn't cure me of being a night owl. Throughout my teens I would often find myself still awake an hour before my Mom was due to call me for school so I would just stay awake--until bedtime the next night. Throughout my twenties and thirties I would often stay awake for 48-72 hours. I would get some of my most productive and creative writing done during those marathon sessions. These days 24-36 hours is common and 48 occasional.
7. All through 7th, 8th and 9th grades, whenever the weather was dry enough, I would race the school buses down the hill. Because the bus had to stay on the road that looped around the hill and I could take a trail that cut straight down the hill, I could often be at my back door before the bus pulled to a stop in the high-school parking lot behind our house. And that was even if the bus caught up with me and passed me near the bottom because it then had to go around the block and compete with dozens of other buses to reach its drop off spot.
Now this may not sound so weird if you are picturing a modern middle school girl running home from school. But I wasn't allowed to wear pants to school. Other kids were wearing them by then but my parents wouldn't allow it. So I was in a dress and school shoes. And always carrying at least five books and a big fat binder in one arm and my clarinet by the other hand. And usually my coat as well unless I had its hood tie tied around my neck with the rest of the bright yellow nylon coat flapping behind me.
I hated riding the bus that much. It was the noise and the jostling mostly but it was also the anxiety over the possibility of being harassed by the kids as had been common through grade school.
This running paid off in eighth grade when I wowed my PE teacher and the whole girl's gym class by beating the school's girl's record for the 440 by 9 seconds. It was just a regular everyday PE class and I was clueless that anything out of the ordinary was going on until I rounded the last curve and could suddenly hear the rising chorus of "Go, Joy! Go Joy!" I learned later that the teacher had told the class that if I kept the pace I was going to beat the record.
She later told me that she had never seen a girl my age run the 440 like that. She said that I ran it full out like a sprint just like the Olympic runners. She said that I had the potential to be an Olympic competitor if I had the right training. When I told my parents that night they smiled much the same way they smiled when my baby sister pronounced 'fur' as 'foo'.
I should probably make this number eight: Of all the things I used to do and don't anymore I miss running the most. I would like to run again. If I could find a safe place for a legally blind person to run. If I could get healthy enough again which means lowering my blood pressure enough that heart attack or stroke wasn't likely to be the finish line.
.jpg)
