Book Patrol, Reading Lamps & Misc Distractions

I just discovered a truffle of a blog called Book Patrol and have been lost in it for a couple of hours. I was supposedly researching something for tonight's post and took a major detour that landed me here. When I came up for air a few minutes ago and saw the time and tried to yank my attention back to the original project but kept feeling the pull back to Book Patrol, I thought, Well why not post about it?

The proprietor of Book Patrol is Michael Lieberman. In the words of his profile:

Book Patrol is where I share my passion for book culture. Book Patrol also appears on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's website and has had posts/reviews that have appeared on Reuters.com, usatoday.com and numerous other media related websites throughout the country. I have been active in the Seattle bookselling community since 1991 and have co-owned Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers since 1992. I have served on the Board of the Friends of the Seattle Public Library and the Book Club of Washington. I currently serve on the Board of Governors of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) where I am also the president of the Pacific Northwest Chapter . I am also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

He not only knows his stuff, he presents it in a fun, interesting, eye-catching and thought-provoking manner. The topics are as often quirky as they are contemplative or informative. He discusses book selling, libraries, reading lamps, book binding, literary giants, e-books and other digital age impacts on book dissemination, free speech, publishing, rare books...

The post I landed on off a Google Image search for reading lamps qualifies as quirky:


It's a reading lamp.

Get it?

It is a lamp for reading.

And the lamp is reading.

ROFLOL

OK, so maybe I'm too easily amused. Not to mention too easily distracted. But can I help if if some distractions are as irresistible as chocolate?

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Introducing A New Earth

Just like last week and the week before, I'm having trouble switching my mind off what has occupied it all day in order to post about something else. This is the third Monday I've participate in the Oprah and Eckhart Tolle webinar about Tolle's book A New Earth. Each time I spent several hours preparing by reviewing the chapter to be discussed. I don't know if I can keep coming up with something fresh to day about it for seven more Monday's but tonight I'm bowing to the inevitable one more time.

But I'm really too tired to organize my thoughts to write about it so I'm posting three YouTube vids. The first is a short trailer posted by Oprah.com:



The second, also posted by Oprah, is a clip of the discussion with the audience after the show the day Oprah announced the new book club selection and the planned ten week live web event:



The third is the first nine or so minutes of the first class and it was posted to YouTube by a fan. The entire ninety minute class each week will be available for download or streaming view on Oprah.com on the Tuesday afternoon following the live event.



I'm posting this opening clip partly to show a bit of the flavor of the event. But also there is an interesting comment he makes near the end of it about the process of writing both The Power of Now and A New Earth which I think is applicable for any writing task. It is about making the writing time/space available and honoring it each day whether the words are flowing easily or not. And something about being available for the thing that is trying to be born through you. Those are both mangled paraphrases from memory after one viewing of the clip a couple hours ago.

I haven't seen the video of the first class yet as I was among the thousands who, due to technical difficulties at their end and mine, saw nothing but a black screen that first week. I have listened to it on Oprah and Friends XM radio but haven't got around to watching the archived video yet.

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Monday Poetry Train #37

This week I wish to introduce you to the verse-novels of Ellen Hopkins which my then 13 year old niece introduced me to last summer. Who could have predicted that long stories in verse format would become huge best sellers in our time? And among young adults at that.

Each of the stories deal candidly with real life and death issues teens and young adults confront in our modern culture:

crank and its sequel Glass with drug addiction.


burned with domestic violence and intolerance.


impulse with suicidal despair and the impulse to self-harm.

identical, due for release this August, is about a father's twisted obsession with one of his twin daughters --according to a blurb on Ellen Hopkins' homepage.


What I find fascinating is the way Hopkins weaves dozens of one or two page poems that in many cases can stand alone into an intricately plotted, emotionally cathartic and psychologically complex story. The poems are sometimes rhyming and sometimes free verse and often carved out of space as well as molded with words as Hopkins uses placement of whitespace around lines and verses to indicate mood, theme or pace.

I can't in good conscience reproduce any here to illustrate exactly what I mean. But the links to the graphics above take you to the page on Ellen Hopkins' site for that book where there is an excerpt. All that is except the last one which hasn't been released yet and I've linked that to Hopkins' homepage.

And I've just followed a link off Hopkins' homepage to Simon and Schuster where there are more excerpts. I'm going to drop the one for burned here. I strongly encourage a visit to one or more of these as my description just can't do justice to the effect of seeing the shapes of the poems on the page and feeling the shapes of the words on the tongue or experiencing the frolicking of the images in the mind.

Dare we hope the groundswell of interest in Ellen Hopkins' verse-novels will continue and the youth making them bestsellers today will continue to demand more long story-poems thus creating a climate in which poets who can tell stories can hope to compete on an even field with novelists and screenplay writers? Or that the generation cutting its literary teeth on these verse-novels will produce a Chaucer, a Dante, a Milton or a Shakespeare for the 21st century?

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Sunday Serenity #47

One of my favorite serenity inducing pastimes is to walk on the paved path next to Bear Creek just outside the perimeter of our trailer park. The following pictures were taken near the beginning of March.


This is Bear Creek, looking north, taken from the Fern Valley Rd bridge 50 yards or so east of the entrance to our trailer park. To the left just out of this shot is the ramp down to the paved path for walkers, joggers, runners, bikers, hikers, rollerbladers that follows Bear Creek from Ashland 20 mi south to Grants Pass about 20 mi north. Ummm. I'm grossly estimating that mileage. As I'm not a driver, I don't keep track. And Bear Creek can't run up hill so the path must get along without Bear Creek for a spell at that end.

There were duck swimming in this shot, riding the little rill in the approximate center. I had to zoom to 200% to find them though. I haven't learned how to take a picture with the zoom feature yet. The other side of the creek is an RV park and to the other side of it a strip mall which is next to the I5 freeway.

A stretch of the path, looking back the way we came. Bear Creek is on the left and our trailer park on the right.

See the woodpecker holes?

A smaller creek running into Bear Creek and between two mobile home parks. Ours to the left and a more upscale one to the right. We usually turn around and head back at this point as we've walked over half a mile from the front door.

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Guilty Pleasures

I'm feeling a lot like I did as a teen when I was supposed to be doing my homework but couldn't put down the latest story I was engrossed in. Usually a novel back then but these days not necessarily since I've discovered the power of story to be as gripping in a variety of other formats.

This week the 'homework' was daily posting here and work for the 70 Days challenge. I am my own task master so there is nothing but my own stern mental chastisement standing behind that guilty frisson, that cold shiver that hunches my shoulders around my ears as I sneak a peak over my shoulder.

Yesterday I went to the library and after pulling a bunch of books off the shelves until my arms trembled with their weight, I went to sit in the chair by the hearth with that stack in my lap; ostensibly to winnow them down since I already had a stack of similar size of requested items from other branches. I quickly put two of those books with the to go stack but then something happened when I applied my quick pre-read protocol on the next book--cover, inside cover, title page, table of contents, first paragraph followed by dipping in at random at several places as I riffle the pages.

Apparently I didn't stop after the first paragraph and move onto the page riffling for some time later I was brought to awareness of the stack of books still on my lap when they started to slip. And discovered I was thirty pages into the novel I had been vetting.

Needless to say that one went home with me. And I returned to it almost as soon as I'd gotten back in our room. Instead of preparing the bibliography slips for all the first timers in the bag, I just rummaged in it until I found the book I'd begun and started reading and didn't quit until I was called to the table at six. Then as soon as I was done with the dishes I went right back to it, only forcing myself to set it aside at 10 PM in order to get my Friday Snippet prepared. It was after 2AM by the time I'd posted both the snippet and the update to the TT describing my purpose or interest in all the library items I'd listed there. In spite of knowing that sleep was a wiser course, I picked up the novel again and didn't put it down until I finished it at 4:30 AM.

The story that held me in its grip? The Gift by Richard Paul Evans.

This afternoon, I set out to get that bib slip chore done but before I started pulling the books out of the bag, I needed to prepare the shelf which I'd left in a mess when I pulled out the ones going back yesterday. I decided I needed to refresh my memory on which books were coming due next week so I could set priorities. I pulled all the library books onto the bed with me and then logged onto my library patron account online. I quickly separated out the ones coming due next week. And as it happens they are all due on Thursday again. The following week there are items due on both Monday and Thursday.

At first I was able to stay on task and then it happened again. Except in this case it wasn't a novel. It was a book that I'd checked out before and forgotten to mark on its bib slip the page number I'd left off on. I picked it up and started thumbing through, reading lines at the top of pages, moving on as soon as I recognized them. Or at least that is how it started. At some point I stopped moving on. I got caught up in re-reading and once again found myself lost in a story and reluctant to move on to designated tasks. The bag of books from yesterday's library haul is still unpacked. All I've got to show for this day is a hundred odd page advance of a bookmark.

The story that has me in its grip tonight? Poltergeist: A Study in Destructive Haunting by Colin Wilson.

Wilson was one of the authors I discovered early in my quest to learn to think for myself. I found his first two books, Outsider and Religion and the Rebel in the early nineties and was completely drawn in by the way his mind worked as it came across in those books, because it was so similar to the way mine worked. Not necessarily in the conclusions he comes to but in the way he ranges all over the realm of accumulated knowledge and theory to collect support for his thesis instead of staying inside the confines of a discipline. He has since written some eighty books and has garnered a rep for tackling controversial topics and for applying startling new perspectives to old puzzles.

I discovered Wilson's interest in the paranormal only after I'd read those two books that established him in my mind as a philosopher and deep and meticulous thinker. I wonder sometimes what opinion I would have formed if I had first discovered him through Poltergeist or (another of the books due next Thursday) Alien Dawn?

These topics are among my guilty pleasures ever since I discovered ghost stories around age eight or nine and Star Trek around age 10. Such stories were considered sacreligious at best and dangerously evil at worst by the religious culture I was raised in. And they are held in contempt and derision by the scholarly circles I began shifting my identity to in the late eighties.

I just can't help it. Such stories of mysterious otherness are as irresistible as chocolate or potato chips for me. Guilty pleasures. I wonder sometimes if the guilt part is actually part of the pleasure.

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Friday Snippets 35

Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite
by Salvador Dali
print for sale at art.com

When Home Is Where the Horror Is
by Joy Renee

Crystal woke slowly, the soporific sound of an overworked heater blowing its hot breath into an already over warm room encroached upon the warm, lulling dream of floating gently in a heated pool. She sank slowly into consciousness, her open eyes trying to focus on the pale wavy shapes gliding by them. With a lethargic sleep-logged arm she pushed back perspiration-damp sheets.

Motel room. The word’s fog-horned inside her head. I’m in a motel room. But who…? She searched frantically for a name, a face, for the person she had shared this room with last night. For it was certain sure she had not paid for it. She sat up loggily, breathing deep as if coming up for air. She pushed herself to her feet and with swim-like motions she padded towards the bathroom pushing a path through the dense air with her left hand, reaching out for things to hang onto with her right: a chair, the wall, the heater. Turn it off! She gasped for breath as the hot air buffeted her face then sighed deeply when it stopped.

Crystal aimed her body at the bathroom once again and upon reaching the approximate location of its door, dove through it.

Hung over. Again. What was it last night? Just booze? She couldn’t remember.

The odors that assaulted her as she entered the bathroom almost knocked her back out the door. Vomit. Urine. Beer.

It must have been some party. If only she could remember it. Damn if you’re not thinking like a bad novel, she admonished her reflection in the mirror. Damn if you don’t look like you belong in one. Crystal attempted a mischievous grin at the image in the mirror but the apparition only sneered back. "Girl you look older than your mother." she hissed at it.

She turned on the cold water tap in the basin anticipating the feel of cool water splashed on her hot face, but the liquid that gushed out of the faucet was tepid. We got us another scorcher brewing out there, she thought screwing up her face in disgust. She leaned over the basin in hopes that it would get cooler as the water from the buried pipes began to reach her. It did. A bit. But no one would ever mistake it for glacier run-off.

Crystal sighed heavily as she placed the stopper in the drain and began splashing it on her face and even on her grimy t-shirt, drenching it so that it was plastered to her chest and belly, almost chilly in its effect. The figure revealed by the wet t-shirt belied the ravaged appearance of her face. It was the figure of a girl just barely entered into pubescence, with just a suggestion of breasts above the corrugation of her rib-cage.

When the water was deep enough she dunked her whole head into it and held it under while she very slowly let out her breath. And then a few beats longer as her lungs screamed for relief. When she finally lifter her head she had to gulp frantically for air for several moments before she could duck under once again. She repeated the ritual several times in the next few minutes until she began to feel better, almost invigorated by the shock and the hyperventilation. Although her head still pounded fiercely she could almost think now. And it was time to start thinking.

The one thing Crystal had learned well in the last few weeks was that the nights came on fast, rushing towards her like a tsunami from the first moment she opened her eyes in the morning. The days were filled with the frantic search for a secure place to spend the nights which were then lost in the oblivion of exhausted, sometimes drunken or drugged sleep, the morning returning irresistibly as on the undertow of the retreating wave.

Hunger too was a force to be reckoned with but its insistent, primal cry for her attention was often drowned out by the need to feel safe during the dark-flooded hours. The aimless wandering of the streets in daylight was accomplished with the daring and arrogance born of anger which, ferocious as it was, could not sustain her through the night.

She had not been prepared for the terror she had experienced the first time she had not found shelter before dark. It had not occurred to her that it could actually be worse than the terror she had felt each night of her life since age five, laying in her bed waiting--waiting to see if this night would be one of those times when he chose to visit her. The actual physical reality of locked doors and windows, the security of the four walls of her room, which had closed out the night if not him, had seemed insignificant in comparison to the fear which had flooded her each night, to the inundation of whispers that swallowed her will on those nights.

The memory of her room at home loomed large every night now, a temptation to return which she had to strenuously resist for she knew it to be illusory sanctuary. If night on the streets held its own terror at least it was a terror which she had some power over, which responded to acts of will on her part. Decisions made and followed through on and consequences following upon them naturally, diluted the terror of being totally alone and vulnerable to barely guessed at dangers. She could not, she would not go back now.

Surfacing a final time Crystal appraised her reflection once more. Better. But now, with her tangled hair plastered to her skull and the remnants of yesterday’s make-up and last night’s drugged sleep cleansed from her face she almost resembled the fifteen year old who had left home a month ago. Except for a certain set to the mouth and a certain cast to the eyes that expressed a weary cynicism, it was the same face that had appeared in last summer’s family photos taken around the backyard pool.

She tried to run her fingers through her snarled hair but it was no use. The tangles were dense, impenetrable. Probably not even a comb would help much. It was going to take hours of patient work, unweaving strand by strand and undoing knot by knot. Only her mother had ever had the patience for that. Nostalgic tears mingled with the water streaming down her face for all those hundreds of hours over the years that she had sat at her mother’s feet watching TV, as those gentle hands worked to undo the damage of an afternoon of rough and tumble play; never complaining, never admonishing for that had been part of the pact that she had made with her seven-year-old daughter.

Crystal could still remember that day as vividly as if it had happened last week. Tearfully impatient after an interminable half-hour of working with her tangled baby-fine hair, she had been about to chop a fist-sized snarl out with the scissors when her mother had walked in. there had ensued an angry quarrel between mother and daughter which Crystal had won with a child’s simple logic. "I don’t want to take care of it anymore. Anyway it’s your hair, not mine because you’re the one who wants it long, not me." So they had made the pact. If Crystal would promise not to cut her hair before she was sixteen, her mother would care for it as if it were her own.

There were six months to go on that pact but it began to seem inevitable that she would have to break it. She hadn’t the patience or time to care for it properly and looking like this it was becoming a liability. For that was the second thing she had learned well. Appearance and attitude were a currency on the streets. In the last couple of weeks as she put less and less effort into looking pretty and acting confident the places she spent the night and the people she spent them with became proportionately sleazier.

This place was the worst yet. She doubted they could get much worse than this. The mildew-stained grout in the shower gave off a stultifying odor and the sight of it made her skin crawl. The ceiling seemed to have erupted in a rusty rash and the wall behind the toilet was leprous with moisture-swollen blisters of paint and plaster.

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This was the beginning of a story I started to write while in my mid twenties. Half a lifetime ago. I still remember the story I meant to tell. The character Crystal was inspired by a young girl I saw hanging out with Marines on weekend passes in the Oceanside, CA motel Ed and I were living in shortly after we were married; where I did housework and laundry in exchange for our room. She had baby-fine hair that was long and hopelessly tangled and she looked no older than my own 14 year old sister. Memory of her haunted me as I contemplated what could have led her to prefer the kind of nights and days I witnessed glimpses of rather than the home she must have run away from.

My own sheltered life previous to those months living in that motel had not given me much for my imagination to work with. Those months were a crash course in the coarseness, desperation and depravity many lives are lived in. I was wakened to the knowledge that my sheltered childhood and loving home was not necessarily the most common. "Crystal" still haunts me. She would be in her forties now. If she survived that year, that is.

>>>>>>>>
And that's my last snippet unless I find something in the messy NaNo or sweaty Sven files that I can clean up. That is a big IF. Those files are in worse shape than Crystal's hair.

Several have asked in comments what the books I listed in my TT yesterday were for. I guess the easiest way to answer that is to update the TT. The short answer is that much of it was research for stories.

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Thursday Thirteen #77

Updated to add comments about my interest in each item due to popular demand.

Last week I posted pictures of our new library building. A year ago my blog posts were preoccupied by the impending closure of our entire county library system for lack of funds. Since today I am preoccupied by the slew of items I must return to the library tomorrow which I'm not finished with I'm just going to list 13 of them for this week's TT.

And while I'm at it, remind you to: Love Your Local Library.

Thirteen Items Due Today That I'm Not Finished With Yet

1. Title : The voices of time; a cooperative survey of man's views of time as expressed by the sciences and by the humanities
Author : Fraser, J. T. (Julius Thomas), 1923-
Publisher, Date : New York, G. Braziller [1966]
Description : xxv, 710 p.
My Interest: research for my novel Spring Fever in which time and seasons are major themes.

2. Title : Man and time
Author : Priestley, J. B. (John Boynton), 1894-
Publisher, Date : [New York] Crescent Books [c1964]
Description : 319 p.
My Interest: research for my novel Spring Fever

3. Title : Being and time.
Author : Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.
Publisher, Date : New York, Harper 1962
Description : 589 p.
My Interest: research for my novel Spring Fever. Or at least that is why I sent for it but it's way deeper than I was prepared for. It is formal philosophy which I was wading through one paragraph at a time at the rate of three or four pages per hour. I don't know how much use it is actually going to be for the novel background but I find the concepts fascinating. When I get them. I've long had an interest in the metaphysical side of philosophy.

4. Title : The holotropic mind : the three levels of human consciousness and how they shape our lives
Author : Grof, Stanislav, 1931-
Publisher, Date : San Francisco, CA : HarperSanFrancisco a division of Harper/Collins, c1993.
Description : xi, 240 p.
My Interest: a personal interest in just what consciousness is. I've been reading on this topic for over twenty years.

5. Title : Everyday grace : having hope, finding forgiveness, and making miracles
Author : Williamson, Marianne, 1952-
Publisher, Date : New York : Riverhead Books, 2002.
Description : 252 p.
My Interest: related to my spiritual quest.

6. Title : The fabric of the cosmos : space, time, and the texture of reality
Author : Greene, B. (Brian), 1963-
Publisher, Date : New York : A.A. Knopf, 2004.
Description : xii, 569 p.
My Interest: my interest in cosmology is as strong though older than my interest in consciousness. The theories that fascinate me the most are those that seem to indicate that cosmology and consciousness are as tightly intertwined as space and time or energy and mater.

7. Title : The gift of change : spiritual guidance for a radically new life
Author : Williamson, Marianne, 1952-
Publisher, Date : San Francisco : HarperSanFrancisco, c2004.
Description : x, 257 p.
My Interest: re my spiritual quest.

8. Title : The dance of the dissident daughter : a woman's journey from Christian tradition to the sacred feminine
Author : Kidd, Sue Monk.
Publisher, Date : [San Francisco, Calif.] : HarperSanFrancisco, c2002.
Description : xii, 238 p.
My Interest: re my spiritual quest and research for my Fruits of the Spirit story world. Like myself and several of my FOS characters, Sue Monk Kidd and David James Duncan (#9) came out of fundamentalist churches and reinvented their relationship to the sacred.

9. Title : God laughs & plays : churchless sermons in response to the preachments of the fundamentalist right
Author : Duncan, David James.
Publisher, Date : Great Barrington, Mass. : Triad Institute, c2006.
Description : 231 p.
My Interest: see #8. Duncan's novel, The River Why was a huge help to me while I was in the midst of my own self-extracting from the fundamentalist mindset I was raised in.

10. Title : The weather makers : how man is changing the climate and what it means for life on Earth
Author : Flannery, Tim F. (Tim Fridtjof), 1956-
Publisher, Date : New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, c2005.
Description : xv, 357 p.
My Interest: to be informed on one of the most important issues facing our generation and impacting local, national and global policy, politics and lifestyles.

11. Title : The great turning : from empire to Earth community
Author : Korten, David C.
Publisher, Date : San Francisco, CA : Berrett-Koehler ; Bloomfield, CT : Kumarian Press, c2006.
Description : xi, 402 p.
My Interest: Korten has been one of my goto guy's for economic insight ever since I began a formal study of economics in 2001 after Ed lost his dot.com job. There is nothing like loosing a job and becoming homeless to get you interested in economics. (Yeah, my response to crisis and catastrophe is often to go to the library. I continued to use the library in Sunnyvale while we lived on the streets of the Silicon Valley for two weeks in August of 2001. Sometimes I was pulling a wheeled backpack full of books and other times Ed was wearing it while I pulled the luggage cart with our cats Gremlyn and Merlin in their crates.)

Korton caught my attention at first because his name was the same as the family-run music and appliance store in my home town of Longview, Washington where my clarinet was bought as I entered 6th grade and a few years later I bought my LP of William Shatner's The Transformed Man. I was even more intrigued to discover he was a son of the family and had grown up in Longview and then chose a life in government service instead of returning to work in the family business. He worked for decades in agencies trying to implement the policies of the World Bank and IMF in third-world countries until he lost confidence in their long-term effectiveness. He is co-founder and chair of Positive Futures Network which publishes the quarterly magazine Yes!

12. Title: War and peace [videorecording (DVD)]
3 videodiscs (403 min.)
Originally produced in 1967 by Mosfilm. Sergei Bondarchu director
1968 Oscar Win for Best Foreign Language Film
My Interest: I loved Tolstoy so much that I studied Russian in college for two years solely in hopes of learning to read Anna Karena and War and Peace in Russian. I was excited to discover this in our library system but just couldn't seem to find a seven hour block of time in which to watch it. Next time I send for it I won't try to find the time to watch it all at once.

13. Title: The Mahabharata [videorecording (DVD)]
2 videodiscs (325 min.)
Peter Brook wrote screenplay and directed this adaptation of the play by Jean-Claude Carrière.
Originally released as a motion picture in 1989
My Interest: the Mahabharata is part of the Hindu mythology which contains some of the oldest stories with deep roots in both western and eastern cultures. Mention of it has popped up in several areas of my research including comparative mythology, comparative religion, psychology, archetype studies, history and more. Again, I tried to find a block of time big enough to watch it all at once. Just isn't reasonable for anything much longer than two hours.




Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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Storymind

I discovered the Storymind site a couple weeks ago and have spent considerable time exploring the hundreds of pages of free articles on the theory of story behind the creation of the story development software Storyweaver and Dramatica.

Storyweaver was created by Melanie Anne Phillips who is also co-creator with Chris Huntley of the theory behind Dramatica. Both are are predicated on the idea that stories are

a model of the problem solving processes of the human mind. Characters, plot, theme, and genre are different families of thought that go on in the mind, made tangible, so the audience can watch the inner workings of their own minds to learn how best to solve different kinds of problems.

I find their theory fascinating because it fits with the notion I've had for some time that there is something about story that is as rooted in the deep structure of the human mind as language itself.

I can't vouch for the software as I've not tried them out. I find the screen shots intriguing and the video demos I found on YouTube tempt me to download the demo versions for a closer look. Storyweaver is potentially in my price range in the near term but Dramatica not so much.

Here is a video demo of Storyweaver put together and posted by a user of the product..
Here is a video demo of Dramatica put togehter and posted by seller of the product.

And here is Melanie Anne Phillips herself, describing the story mind concept in one of the many free excerpts from her 20 hour video course on writing using the Dramatica theory.

Below I am embedding a blooper reel from the video course. Not because it contains anything of substance about Storymind, Storyweaver, Dramatica or story writing theory but because there is a gorgeous cat who steals the show--and something else. Reminds me of the way some of my characters act in my stories.

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Splashed By Joy

This picture was taken of me in the spring of 1995 at Seaside, Oregon. I had just been splashed by a hip-high sneaker wave. One of those extra large, extra fast waves that seem to come out of nowhere. I had been walking on the wet sand at the edge of most of the waves; highest reach. It was an incoming tide. I had been dabbling my toes in the edges of the waves where the water barely covered the top of my toes. Then suddenly there was this wave that hit me at hip level and just about knocked me down. It splashed me in the face. I remember this moment of surprise that became almost exaltation and then laughing out loud with a spontaneity that was/is quite untypical for me. It was in that moment of laughter this picture was taken.

I am posting this picture today because I've been contemplating again lately the irony of having been named Joy and then having struggled from at least age four with anxiety and depression and volatile mood-swings. Somehow I don't think it is coincidence. And even if it was, at some point in my mid teens I invested significance in it, made it into a kind of quest before I knew what that term meant. And ever since then my life has appeared to have a central theme related to the access to joy.

Awareness of that theme is included in the title of my blog. It might seem like nothing but a playful pun but at the time I came up with it I was aware of and gave equal meaning to both these senses: Joystory= the story of the life of this woman named 'Joy' and Joystory=the story of one woman's quest to attain a stable consciousness of joy.

I like to imagine that someday it will be possible to say, and to the fullest extent of both those senses, "I am Joy."

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These thoughts were stimulated by today's musings and readings in Eckart Tolle's book A New Earth and the Eckart/Oprah webinar that I participated in this evening. I had some insights aka 'aha moments' that I'm still mulling.

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Monday Poetry Train #36

Creating Poetry
by John Drury

I just checked this out of the library again for the first time in over two years. I first discovered it on the Phoenix branch library shelves in 2002 or 2003. I was excited about it then but so must have been many others in our area because I was seldom able to renew it at the end of three weeks.

Since it was a book that belonged to the Phoenix branch I never bothered to order it as I just watched for it to show up on the shelf again. I hadn't spotted it for a long while and wondered if it had gotten lost or something. I finally saw it again the day of the Phoenix branch library grand opening for the new building and I realized it had probably gone into storage when we moved out of the old building into the tiny temp building. There were probably other copies in the system which was one of the criteria the librarian used to decide which books stayed and which ones went on ice.

I remember seeing it on the shelf the last day the old building was open and chose not to check it out because I already had such a large haul that day--the day the Phoenix branch closed for two weeks for the move into a temporary building. (And if I thought that was cause for panic, what do you think it was like when I learned the entire county system was closing indefinitely for lack of funding and no stockpiling allowed? Can you believe that was a year ago the clock was ticking down on me?)

For a look at what excites me, here is a glimpse at the table of contents. It is inspiration, induction, and education for the would be poet. I'm hoping it will also be stimulation of new poems to post here as it is chock full of exercises that have passed muster for others. See, poem writing kinda snuck up on me. I never planned on writing poems. The ones I've written just sorta happened to me like waking up or blushing. Now I'm hoping to see if I can learn to make poems happen on purpose like making the bed or brushing my teeth.

I had just ordered a bunch of books on poetry writing and poetry appreciation about the time I learned the libraries were closing indefinitely as I had planned to make 2007 the year that I would make a formal study of poetry writing and reading. I put that project on hold in favor of trying to wrap up several more already in process. Now I'm returning to it.

If you are interested in more of the saga of the Southern Oregon Library Closures click on the label below. It was a local story that made national news and I was even interviewed by a SF Chronicle reporter.

There is nothing like temporarily loosing something you love and depend on to make you really appreciate it.

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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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A Bedtime Story

This Madonna video really speaks to me tonight. Have you ever just felt like giving up on words? That must sound bizarre coming form a confessed wordaholic, writer and avid reader but there are times when it just seems like the words are getting in the way. Or worse, smothering the luminous heart of the story.

"To sleep. Perchance to dream."

Yes, it's bedtime.

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Friday Snippets 34

Beach on the Oregon coast.
Photo credit: Eugene Davis, my Father-in-law.

The following is a flash-fiction piece I wrote for a blog sponsored contest that never happened due to too few submissions. I chose the Reggie character from last week's Making Determinations, a story I'd conceived over twenty years ago and continues to haunt me. I knew I couldn't tell the whole story inside 1000 words so I attempted to turn one planned scene into a stand alone story. The scene was chosen to fit the given theme of the contest: A New Beginning. Thus there are missing scenes between last week's snippet and this one but the events here occur the morning after.

The stranger Reggie meets on the beach today is a major character in the FOS story world known as Mama Cat. She has only been mentioned in passing in the FOS snippets I've posted so far because she has been off stage. But I've had big plans for her for a long time, including possibly carrying her own weight as primary POV in a novel either alone or in tandem with another character of equal stature whose them complements hers. All of the major and many of the minor FOS characters carry a theme indicated by their names. Such as Faye (Jubilee Faith Fairchild Gardner), her husband Inny (Innocence Workman Garner), his sister Wilma Grace Gardner and Faye's twin Julia Love Fairchild. Mama Cat is a nickname of course and I've been keeping her true name under my hat for now as it would be a major spoiler to Faye's story to reveal it yet.

Sometimes I wonder if that is ever going to matter. It has been a rough week working with my FOS story world for the 70 Days challenge. I am fighting the demons that urge me to feel like a fraud and a failure. I know this is temporary and that perseverance will see me to the next incline on the path. But meanwhile.... sigh.

I posted this once before after the contest was canceled. I think it was approximately a year ago but I'm too lazy to hunt down the link.

Kinking the Bucket
by Joy Renee

The sky was beginning to lighten when Reggie pulled around a long curve and caught her first glimpse of the sea. She spotted a bench facing the ocean at the side of the road and pulled onto the gravel cut-out that provided parking space. As soon as she opened her car door, she regretted that she had left in such a rush the previous evening. She had no jacket and still wore the same tank top she’d worn in the sweltering packing sheds yesterday. Memories of that heat made the chill morning breeze off the water more refreshing than unpleasant and the chance to see, unobstructed, the view that had beckoned her across the coastal range was enough to draw her out of the car to brave the shivery gusts that whipped her hair about her face.

Only the prospect of a sunrise over the water would make this more perfect. It had been the thought of a Pacific Coast sunset that made her turn her steering wheel towards the west last evening. But there had been no hope of reaching here in time. She was determined, instead to watch the changing color of the sky and water and the early morning flocking of the sea birds as the sun rose behind her back. Could there be a better place for contemplating than a bench on the edge of the world as dawn scribbled the sky with the colors of hope and peace?

And she was determined to figure things out if she had to sit here until the sun set as well. She could not go back until she knew what to do.

Reggie hugged her arms and rubbed them to generate heat. She might have to retreat to the car after all. There was no color in sky or landscape yet so sunrise was a solid half-hour off. The shadows among the dunes and rocks were still fathomless. Her eye snagged on a light near by. Not a football field’s length away. A campfire. Probably some local teens had partied all night. But minutes later she smelled brewing coffee. How many teens knew how to brew coffee over a campfire or had the foresight to bring the equipment to a Friday night keg party? Not her two. For sure.

"Brrrrrrrr!" Reggie finally sang out and jumped to her feet to jog in place, hoping to force her muscles to heat themselves. This just might work she thought after three minutes or so. Yet it was not conducive to a peaceful reassessment of her options. She looked toward the horizon and was startled to see movement of shadow on shadow just yards away.

"Yoo-hoo." A voice emanating from a blob of dark gray sliding against charcoal.

Reggie blinked her eyes trying to make sense of what approached across the sand, wondering if she was still asleep in the car at the rest-stop and dreaming this apparition.

"Yoo-hoo." Now accompanied by sounds of heavy breathing. "I have hot coffee. And a sweater."

Reggie was as surprised at her own impulse to trust this as a gift called up from the earth in response to her need as she was by the sight of a very large woman pushing a baby buggy. She was moving toward it before she fully realized she had decided to. And then the woman abandoned the buggy and moved to meet her, holding open a voluminous sweater in which she enfolded Reggie before pulling her inside her heavy cloak. "Honey! Whatever possessed you?"

Reggie laughed as much to quell the urge to cry like a child against her mother’s breast as in amusement. "It was over 100 degrees when I left home."

"Come sit by my fire. I’ll make hot cereal." They were already moving in tandem toward the buggy before Reggie nodded. The woman pulled a thermos from the buggy and poured a steaming stream into a mug saying, "Call me Mama Cat."

Minutes later Reggie was settling on a driftwood log in front of the fire. Mama Cat removed her cloak and slung it over Reggie’s back before pulling a handful of squirming fur out of the buggy. There was enough light now to identify this as two barely weaned kittens. "These guys’ll keep you warm. Oats or wheat?"

Neither spoke again until their cereal bowls were on the ground for the kittens now numbering four. "If my own kids would eat out of the same bowl like that, I probably would have slept in my own bed last night."

Mama Cat’s silence invited her to continue. "After I kicked the bucket, I thought I better get away to think what to do."

"Yes." Mama Cat chuckled. "Kicking the bucket does tend to make room for new beginnings."

"I passed out twice from the heat yesterday. Once while waiting on the pizza as I held the KFC bucket. Jay prefers pizza and Rae fried chicken. Then again in the driveway at home. The kids were standing over me calling, ‘Mom! Mom! Where’s dinner?’ Must have been pure rage gave me strength to stand up and reach into the car. First for the pizza which I launched like a Frisbee, then…" She closed her eyes against the sight of seagulls flying against a clear blue sky and saw again the arc of the KFC bucket she had drop-kicked into the neighbor’s yard.

"How old are they?"

"Jay’s nineteen. I got him a job in the sheds. He quit at noon on his first payday. I smelled pot on him that night. Rae’s sixteen and dating Jay’s friend behind my back."

"Have you ever seen a mother cat defend her kittens?" At Reggie’s nod Mama Cat continued. "Have you ever watched a mother cat wean her kittens?" Another nod. "Then you know what to do."

Reggie sighed. "I know."

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Thursday Thirteen #76

Thirteen (plus) Pictures of Our Brand New Library

1. View of the front. Can you see the balloons? This was the grand opening party on February 9th.

2. Strollers, wagons, bicycles, scooters and skateboards parked by the front doors. The little red wagon is parked under the drop boxes. There are now separate ones for books and audio/visual media.









3. The front door. Can you see the reflection of the photographer? I almost didn't recognize myself as it slimed me down by over fifty pounds.

This pic was taken last week hence the absence of the stroller and wagon under the drop boxes.







4. In the foyer the day of the grand opening. The greeters table for signing the guest book isn't there on regular days.

There are entrances to meeting rooms to either side of that large bulletin board. I think it is two separate rooms but it is possible they can be opened up into one large one. I haven't been inside them yet.





5. The door to the meeting room just to the left of the doors into the main room of the library.

I had a picture of the doors into the library but I must have forgot to prepare it for posting.









6. Just inside the doors to the main room. These are the shelves where requests are held. They keep the fronts and spines of the items obscured by setting them spine down to protect patron's privacy. There is a slip of paper with your name sticking out and items are shelve alphabetically by the patron's last name.

These are the shelves where most of my library business is conducted as I send for materials from the other 14 branches just about weekly.



7. This is the Friend's of the Library shelf where donated items and items the library system is finished with are sold. I only got half of the shelf in the shot because I was trying to make the sculpture of the word 'Friends' and the price sign readable. You see one and a half three shelf sections and there are four total.

8. This is the self-checkout computer. I love using it but it won't let you unless you have zero fines even though the library policy is to allow you to accumulate $10 in fines before your check-out privileges are suspended.

I try really hard but with juggling so many items and so many due dates I am bound to slip up. So I may not get to use this very often.





9. The checkout desk. Taken the day of the grand opening. The crowd is not typical.

10. The office. I took this through a window and you can see the checkout desk through the other set of windows. I am amazed how it turned out as I remember thinking it probably would be full of flash glare and reflections.

11. The next three pics are from the children's area.

Book worm.

Dragon puppet with a book displayed by it titled How to Train Your Dragon.

12. The lounge area with fireplace. It is right next to the magazine and newspaper racks which I somehow forgot to get shots of both times I took the camera.










A close up of that row of books on the mantle. It is a bronze sculpture!












13. Off to the left of the lounge chairs is the Young Adult collection and the Teen Computer table. There are two computers on the table and room for two more on the other side. Or two more teens. :) I had more shots of this area but I had to make some tough choices. Even so I wasn't able to keep it to 13 as you can see.

There were also two more computer stations--one for children and one for adults--over in front of the checkout counter which I also left out.

To orient you, panning to the right would aim the camera into the office windows and then the checkout station.

Ummm. Wonder if that was planned?


To the left of the fireplace is the entrance to the study room where students can work in silence or groups working together on projects can talk without disturbing other patrons.

14. The right side of the adult stacks just to the left of the study room. That is Ed's elbow sticking out back there.

15. The right side of the stacks with reading and study tables by the windows looking out on the grove and the veranda where I hear they are planning to have chairs when the weather improves.

16. The catalog computer where you can browse the entire system and put your order in for books from any of the 15 branches.

The desk I'm hoping to claim on the days I take my laptop as there is a plug-in nearby. Only problem is I may not be able to see the screen with so much sunlight.

I don't know why that is as I've seen other laptop screens that were readable outdoors or near windows but the only way I can use mine outside is to put it inside a box and my head with it. Takes all the pleasure out out of being outdoors with it in the first place.

Now that was a bit off topic. But, oh well.

Just had to get that shot of the plug in and then just had to include it here in spite of going waaaaaaay past 13. Speaks to how excited I am that there might be someplace other than this cramped room or the living room in the wee hours where I can work.









Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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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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Awakening

It's time I start making my spiritual quest as much a part of Joystory as my writing and reading. That was what I implied I would be doing in both my profile and the sub-heading here. And yet I've kept avoiding the topic.

I identified the reasons as two-fold. First, the experiences are very personal and my practice (if you can even call it that) has been hit-and-miss at best. Second, fear of scorn and condemnation from two fronts--the skeptics of all things unverifiable by scientific investigation via the five senses and the physical and mathematical tools created to enhance them; and the doctrinal fundamentalists of the Christian tradition I was raised in--which would of course include family and other members of the particular sect I was raised in along with the various Christian watchdog groups with a mission to war(n) against all thing 'New Age'.

But my reluctance to talk about anything related to this quest here has often made it difficult to prepare my daily posts because on the days when the most significant activity or thought or experience has been impacted by this I have to yank my focus away long enough to think up something 'safe' to blog about. This has become even more of an issue since the first of the year and the beginning of the big Creative Change project I engaged in with my sister-friend Jamie in which the two of us are committed to making the changes for physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health and identify and work toward our big dreams and goals and to encouraging each other and holding ourselves accountable to each other for following through on our intentions.

Creative Change was the impetus for the big de-clutter and organize project I began on Jan 1st and though I posted about that frequently I kept the spiritual aspects of the experience either muted or entirely out of it. For example, though I think I mentioned that I spent those first five days of the big room do-over tuned to Oprah and Friends XM radio I did not confess that I'd committed to doing the daily exercises of A Course In Miracles with Marianne Williamson and have stayed with it. This is the fourth time I started working with ACIM since 1993 when I first encountered Marianne's book, A Return To Love, but the longest I've stayed with it. I bought the ACIM book shortly after reading A Return to Love and somehow it survived the journey between then and now. I still have it though as I've mentioned here before the majority of my personal library was either sold or left behind in the Silicon Valley in 2001.

A month ago , when Oprah announced the new book club selection, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, and announced the planned ten week webinar course, I expressed an interest and Ed bought the book for me a week later. I have been reading it but have never mentioned it here. This evening was the first class in the webinar. I was so committed to this that I excused myself from joining the family for dinner at 6PM. I may be 50 years old but it is still difficult to opt out of coming to the table for a meal prepared for you; especially by a mother or mother-in-law.

I ended up spending the first hour of the webinar in total frustration because I was not getting the streaming video. Then Ed, who had returned from dinner and was watching news while I was staring at a black flash screen, put the TV back on Oprah and Friends Radio in preparation for turning off the TV and lo and behold they were broadcasting the webinar there. I wonder if that was a sudden decision due to the technical difficulties because I heard no announcement on either Oprah.com, the Oprah show or Oprah and Friends Radio over the last several weeks that such a thing was planned.

So it was nearly 8PM by the time I got to the table and I had to warm up my dinner and eat alone. I had gotten over hungry and a headache was nagging but I thought eating would fix that. It didn't. By the time I was done eating it was more than nagging and by the time I finished cleaning up the kitchen it was raging. I opened blogger to begin my post and the act of trying to think of something to post about that had nothing to do with what was really on my mind made me nauseated. I had to lay down. I didn't even close the laptop lid.

I woke up at 3:30 seemingly headache free and started staring at the blank post on the blogger WYSIWYG. As I contemplated options for topics to blog the headache started nagging again. I realized that what I was doing seriously lacked integrity which is one of the major themes of my Creative Change project as well as my spiritual quest--the two are essentially one and the same in my mind. I also realized that my efforts to stay committed to these episodic attempts to change my life over the past fifteen years have been continuously sabotaged by my efforts to keep them compartmentalized from my interactions with most of the people in my life--there are few in my circle of friends and family who would not be either, skeptical, scornful, disinterested or dismayed by these topics and especially so by knowledge of my interest in them.

I myself have been by turns skeptical, scornful, disinterested and dismayed. But I can no longer continue to deny that which is awakening within me.

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Monday Poetry Train #35

print for sale at art.com

This week I'm sharing this link to a dandy little Rhyme finder: RhymeZone.

You type in the word you want rhymes for and it presents you with the results. It is much more than a rhyme finder though. It will also define your word, spell check it, give you antonyms or synonyms or homophones. It will find similar sounding words or words with the same consonants in the same order; both of which help with alliteration. It will also find the word in Shakespeare, in famous quotes, or search for images related to the word.

This is the kind of word play that stimulates word flow for me.

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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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