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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| “The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.” Leo Tolstoy Agree or disagree and what do you think Tolstoy meant? This is an interesting quote, and I agree. In realistic fiction especially (we're not talking about fiction in which good and evil are simplified to make things simple--Sauron is evil incarnate, but he's designed that way. If he was complicated, the story would not be a myth) the characters should be realistic. Ignoring the fact that we are talking about something that can't be done (characters are necessarily edited, and so fall short of the real) the fact that we want realistic characters means that the motivations of the characters should also be realistic. And every character should have some angle where looking at them makes them the hero. In other words, people don't set out on a path saying "let me be bad." They come to that through a series of choices--a story line that makes the horrible things they do feel inevitable and justifiable when seen through their eyes. Now, I know that there are real life people who do bad things, sometimes for no reason whatsoever, but we're talking characters. And characters need to have some place where the reader can latch onto, to make them real, to make the things they do more horrible by giving the reader a place where they can empathize with the character. That's why Sauron isn't as scary or real as Saruman. As readers, we want our heroes to be human enough to have flaws. We're not interested in Lancelot the greatest knight who always wins and gets all the ladies. We want him to suffer defeats and unrequited loves and try to be honorable but fall in love with the queen anyway. And we're not interested in unmotivated evil. We want the villain to love his mother and think that his actions are the right ones, justified, even while they get more evil. Whenever we think about a character's motivations and say "well, he did it because he's the bad guy, duh," we're wasting the opportunity to come up with the point of view that says, "The sheriff of Nottingham is overtaxing the people because he grew up poor and gets panic attacks if he doesn't have all the gold" or "Mordred fights Arthur because his mother feels betrayed and ignored, and he loves her." That's what I think Tolstoy meant. A good story balances something that's good in the protagonist's eyes against something that's good in the antagonist's eyes--making it more complicated, interesting . . . compelling . . . than good vs. bad. |
| Write a blog entry about what happened in your life today. Well, starting with the past. Eleven years ago yesterday, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Three years ago today, Rachel's youngest was born. This week in general has been interesting. After a long, drawn out process which involved two weeks worth of airports, my sister Madeline got into town with her children. They've been doing the standby mode USAF flights because her husband is stationed in Germany. So, a week ago last Sunday (the 14th) they got here. And we've been having a good time, mostly involving the kids on Netflix (she has 3--a girl and two boys, 10, 7, and 3--the youngest is amazingly articulate for a 3 year old) and Madeline talking about everything. With everyone. A few shopping trips. It was her oldest's birthday (June is 10 on July 2nd--yes, I know. Confusing. Apparently June is a family name) so Grandma got her a 14 in doll because she wanted to make 14in doll clothes (my Mama knits and crochets). Lots of fun has been had. Sunday (21st), Maddie headed up to her husband's parents house so that they could have time with the grandkids. In the mean time, Rachel (who is 5 months pregnant with twins at this point but handled the trip beautifully) came up for a visit so that cousin time could happen. So, we had one day of peace before Rach and her 4 with additional two guinea pigs overtook the bedroom again. Lot's of fun. Swimming, going to restaurants with play areas, watching the girls (June and Hayley, who is 12) have their first experience with press-on nails (I think they both thought it wasn't worth in) and a birthday party with cake and singing and presents for the other two who have recent birthdays (Two of Rach's--Eddie was 6 at the end of June and got a hot wheels race track and Charles, who's 3 today, got a train with gears that doubles as a pull toy) and a bonus package for June with a crocheted doll dress in a yarn she'd picked out. Lots of fun. But we were talking about today. Today we met for lunch and then brought everyone to Grandma's house to pack Rachel's car and send her home (without a dvd which her 8 year old apparently misplaced under the bed). Maddie and her family stuck around for a while but headed home at about dinner time because they have a pool at Gigi's house. And then, I spend the rest of my evening resting. I might recover soon. Apparently, Madeline is going to start trying to get home tomorrow because there's a potential flight that could get her home. And school starts August 12 in Germany. Of course, if she doesn't make this hop, Joy is coming to town on Saturday to visit and see niece and nephews before they head home (their daddy's on deployment now for the next few months). I just need to sleep more. But I wouldn't trade my day (even though it involved a trip back to the restaurant because June forgot she'd stowed her purse under the booth where her Mama wouldn't see it. sigh. |
| Sometimes, life overflows with complication. Maybe that should be always. I guess I'm fortunate that my recent complications have more to do with happiness than otherwise. A few months ago, my sister and her husband announced they were pregnant. This is Rachel, my sister who lost a baby at five days, who got an infection behind her eye which resulted in a detached retina and loss of vision in her left eye. They have five babies, four living. Hayley, the oldest, was twelve in January. Danny is eight. Caleb, who died, was born third. Eddie was eighteen months old when Rachel went half blind turned six last month. The youngest, Charles, is about to turn three and never knew his mother when she had full vision. Charles was a breech birth delivered in a rush at home (in fact, all but Hayley were born at home)--no major trauma except to her husband's nerves which were shot when he had to catch. So, a big family already. With a lot of trouble in their past. A few weeks ago, they called again to say that they were expecting twins. Both girls. And we were excited, of course. And nervous. There are twins all over a bunch of branches of the family tree. Ed's (Rachel's husband) mother is a twin, my mother's grandmother was a twin, my father's grandfather had twin sisters. So, we know that twins can come with health complications. Major ones. And then, a few days ago, Rachel called. They'd gone in for another ultrasound and determined that while one of the girls was a normal weight and appeared healthy, the other was small and was displaying signs of several potential complications. Signs of the potential for spina bifida. Signs of underdevelopment in kidneys and bladder, signs of lack of movement in legs. They were able to see her brain, but signs of potential fluid on the brain. Of course, there's the chance that the baby will be born healthy, but a greater chance that she will have some developmental issues that will make life difficult for her. And I know that my sister is capable of anything. I know that she is a wonderful parent and would be able to provide a loving environment for any child. And I definitely hope the little girl is born alive because losing Caleb was hard. On everyone in the family but especially Rachel and Ed. I feel sick with worry about her and about my sister and brother-in-law and niece and nephews. And I feel so angry that this is happening. It feels--you know, when you are starting to write a story and you start feeling sadistic because in order for things to work, you have to throw things at your characters until they break? You push them to the edge and give them sorrow and joy and trouble until they ache with it because only then will the story function correctly? Well, I have to tell you, I hate living in a story. It infuriates me that we might lose her even though, in some ways, she's not even real to me, yet. I hate it that there's nothing I can do. I probably won't even be able to go down and help when the twins are born because something about birth makes Rachel hole up in her cave, not letting anyone in to hold the new baby until she's good and ready to put her down. I'm lost. And this is something I can't talk about with my family because I need to be one of the ones who remind Mama that she shouldn't talk about the little one as though she's already dead (Mama is a worrier and she automatically goes to worst case scenario) because she might be fine and the twins are only at about 24 weeks so we have four more months of waiting on the precipice, wondering what is going to happen and if we're all going to fall again and wondering how painful the landing will be. And so I brought this here. sorry. I guess I should really get some sleep because that might stop the insane spirals in my head. |
| Much ado is made about stretching the brain and writing or reading outside our comfort zone. Do you think this is helpful? How much fun is it for you to read and write outside your usual genres or your comfort zone? Any kind of stretching encourages growth. So, I can see that this is a good thing. I read and write a lot in various genres and various levels of comfort. I've written about people who are nothing like me. I've written people dying and mothers and people in fear and lovers . . . in other words, people who live lives that are outside my personal experiences. However, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily out of my comfort zone. I don't need to experience a mother's loss of her child to be able to extrapolate from my own experience as an aunt who lost a nephew and the witness of my sister who lost her son. In fact, in some ways, when we are so close to a tragic happening, it becomes more difficult to maintain the objectivity to write a story about it. Going back to the loss of a child, when it first happened, I wrote essays and poems, but I have been unable to write it as fiction to my personal satisfaction. That's because it feels too close to write well. Does that mean that I avoid the topic in my fiction? Absolutely not. I approach that experience like an accident victim probing the edges of a wound, trying to get close enough to know whether the scab is ready to be peeled away to witness the healing underneath. It may never happen. I may be reduced to writing badly about this topic for the rest of my life. But there are other places and topics that I can go to which are informed and strengthened by that experience as is all my writing. After all, as writers, we bring everything that we are into the words and our characters. So, yes, I feel that it's important to stretch my own boundaries and write close to the edge of being where stories live. And yes, it's fun to do it. Even if it is sometimes painful. |
| “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man,” said Aristotle. Do you agree? What is your advice on the subject? This is an interesting thought. I think it's true to a certain extent. To write well, it's important to be readable--in other words to express ideas in simple, straightforward, common language. As to thinking like the wise--I think the wisdom that is needed to write depends on what is being written. The problem is, I can't think of Aristotle without considering who he was writing to--primarily young wealthy men who wanted to go into Greek politics (yes, I know, a dramatic oversimplification). For his time and people, wisdom involved philosophical and political wisdom as a major componant of what made up good writing. Even the poetics of the time involved tradition--using older legends to teach something and produce a cathartic effect on an audience. Now, I write primarily fiction, and I don't need necessarily to know the same things that Aristotle did, however, I do need wisdom in order to write well. To make a character feel real, I need to know human motivation, both of people who are like me and people who are vastly dissimilar. To write in a time and place, I need to research. I need to know why people do the things they do, why society is set up the way it is, so that when I write, it feels real, even if I'm writing in a fantastic setting. I also write poetry, and there it's also important to be wise. A poem is a single complete thought or image that is meant to change something in the reader, and that requires insight into the scene or the thought and the ability to share the thought with other people. So, yes. I guess I agree with Aristotle. Although I do question the wisdom of people who think they are wise and the commonness of of the ordinary. Those are such loaded terms--well . . . he was a wise man, for his time. |
| "Memories are forget-me-nots gathered along life's ways, pressed close to the heart in a perennial bouquet!" Clara Smith Reber Write about your memories that mean the most to you. I think that the memories that mean the most to me all involve family. There's something remarkable about childhood. When we are very young, we live with our eyes pointed toward home. We focus there, and my home was a good one. I don't remember a time before my next oldest sister was born, but I remember talking with her long into the night and games and stories. My family was my entire world, and when I went outside the home, it was always with the idea that I would come back, because that's where life was. But somewhere in there--I'd guess I was about eight or ten, life changed, and I lived on the outside, and home was a refuge from life. Then, my memories were about the things that happened, and they were all about the outside, the friends that I had, school, books, reading, writing--everything that mattered happened when I was out in the world. |
| Look at your hands. What do they mean to you? What is the meaning or emotion hiding in each line, blemish, wrinkle, scar, or the lack of those things if you have perfect hands? This is an interesting prompt, mostly because it's been a while since I've truly examined my hands. I remember an art class when I was a senior in high school. We were given the assignment to draw our hands. Some people took time and made a large hand (usually a left hand because the right was used to sketch) filled with lines and shading. Me, I took that paper and drew about twenty hands in various sizes, all lefties. I went for quick and impressionistic instead of slow and detailed. So . . . here goes. I don't bite my fingernails any more. I used to. I don't remember why I did or why I stopped, but I was an adult at the time. Right now, I have fingernails clicking against my keyboard as I type. My pinky fingers don't look alike. There's a story behind that. When I was very young (toddler) I accidently shut my finger in my parent's filing cabinet. My left pinky is a bit deformed as a result. In the center of the back of my left hand is a little round scar from the IV they had in me when I was in the ICU. There's two more on the inside of both elbows and another in the middle of my left forearm from where they pushed iron in me a couple of years ago when I was severely anemic. It was black and reminded me of demon blood and took a long time to push. But I felt better with some actual blood in my veins. On my left wrist (and a few random places on my left hand that I can't find any more) are three small scars over the veins where I put my hand through a pane of glass on a door. I was trying to close it at the time. That one took a while to bleed, which means it wasn't arterial, but once it started, I couldn't get it to stop. That was a scary one. But I cleaned up the glass. I was twelve when that happened. I don't paint my nails. I dislike random things catching my eye and drawing my attention. I also don't wear rings. I have a bracelet that I wear sometimes (especially if I'm going to be traveling on my own. It's a med ID that Mama got me. She gets nervous. I don't play an intstrument. My sister has told me in the past that it's a shame I don't play paino because I inherited my grandma's long fingers. They aren't very long, but I can span about an octave easily and can add another third if I stretch. |
| I lost my 20 year old cat today to cancer. I'm heartbroken. She was with me through 2 rounds of cancer, my move to New Jersey and my head injury. We've been through a lot together. The prompt is about losses in your life. This is a difficult thing to think about. I mean, I've had little losses. Losing games or contests--which I don't like to do, by the way. I don't like how it feels to be in competition with someone else. I lost places a lot as a child. We moved. we haven't moved in a while now, but when I was growing up, I lived in twenty-five different apartments and houses in my first twenty-five years in periods of no less than four weeks and no more than eight years. I don't know though. In some ways, that didn't feel like loss because each old friend lost with distance was the opportunity for new people and new friendships. It was change more than anything. But I still wonder about some of my old friends. I wouldn't even know how to look for them, now. I can't think of loss without thinking about death. I've lost all of my grandparents and one nephew. They all were difficult--I remember losing Grandpa by inches as the Alzheimer's took bits of him away for the last few years of his life. I didn't go to his funeral. I was away at college. I went to his wife's funeral ten years later, and that was disturbing. I think I prefer celebrating life rather than viewing a person who is gone and small and so still. Too still. Caleb, my nephew was hardest. We lost him before he had the opportunity to live at all. It hits me hard, especially around his birthday and his death day five days later--both in April. Right now, it's raining and my fingers are way too slow to capture my thoughts, and it's my niece's birthday (she's six today) and she's miles away and I'm not going to be seeing her and I'm feeling lonely for my nieces and nephews. It's difficult being so far away. Pictures of a baby climbing on his feet for the first time aren't the same as being there and laughing with him. I'm feeling that loss most of all, today. |
| “We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too,” says Amy Harmon in What the Wind Knows To what degree do you use your memories in your writing? If you use them, do you think of preserving them or do you use them because they fit your story or poem? All right, this is a complicated question, mostly because I write a lot of things--personal essays, poetry, short stories, other creative non-fiction (besides personal essays) and there are different ways that I use memory in each. First off, for my fiction (short stories--the novel I'm working on) I don't consciously use my memories in them, but my memories inform them. For example, I have never, in fiction, been able to write about my nephew's death. I've written about death and babies and children, and my experiences help make those fictional things feel real, but I've never specifically sat down to write about something that happened to me. I wrote a main character who was going through dementia because I have grandparents who suffered from it. I wrote about a woman who is struggling with an unexpected pregnancy, a woman who gave up a child long ago and now is coming face to face with him as he lies dying. I've never experienced either of these things, but if I hadn't lived my own life, I couldn't have written this. Next, for poetry, I draw from anything that I feel the need to write about in the moment. Sometimes it's my own experiences, sometimes other peoples--mostly it's from observations and emotions. A lot of my poetry doesn't tell a specific story--it may tell a part of the story, an image from a scene, an emotion. The thing about poetry is that I feel it should be focused. It's the most concise form of writing I do, and because of that, it feels like it will morph into some other form of writing if I let the whole of a story or the whole of a memory in. Because of this, I've been able to write poetry that touches on bits and pieces about my nephew's death directly from the first time that it happened, which I can't do in my fiction. For fiction, I require emotional distance from the subject in order to treat it as story, and I don't need that in poetry. Finally, for creative non-fiction--most specifically for personal essays, I always use my own memories. Here's where I put family stories--the remember when so-and-so ate so much that he threw up kind of thing. And this is where I think that Amy Harmon was writing from. When I write an essay about my childhood or my relationships with various people or my nephew's death, I don't have to distance myself in order to make the story work. I need to open up about my emotional journey. After all, I write to be written (by myself, by my family if not by the general public), and a catalog of what Caleb looked like as he lay dying isn't as interesting as how I felt as he lay dying. And so, when I wrote that essay, it was difficult. And it's difficult to read. Because how I felt is in the pages. As for the purpose of writing my own memories, I think I mostly write them because it fits what I need to do at that time. I don't know if that means I am writing to preserve memories. I do know that I kept a journal every day for eighteen months. One night, I wrote in that journal basically that I didn't want to remember that day. I don't remember that day, but I remember writing that. For me, writing reshapes the memory--I make connections that were not necessarily there in the original memory and they become part of how I recall the event (usually it's something I didn't know at the time but learned as someone told me their version). It's like the stories that Mama tells about us. I know some of the Rhyssa stories by heart so that they almost feel like my memories, even though I was only six months or ten months or eighteen months at the time. So, I write a memory because it fits, not because I consciously work to preserve them. Although I have written memoir, which could be considered preservation. I don't know. |
| “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Plato Is Plato right? What do you think of the quote? This is complicated, mostly because I have been single practically my entire life, and I don't feel incomplete for it. That doesn't mean I don't long for someone who would complement my life, but I don't feel like I am lesser for not having found him. But I do think that I have found a song, even without that special someone. So, First statement: inaccurate. My song (as far as I know) is not imcomplete even though another heart has not whispered back. Second statement: accurate. I feel that anyone who wishes to sing will find a song. That doesn't mean that a heart who wants duets will find one, but solos work as well. Third statement: problematic: That's a poetic way of looking at things. Yes, the touch of a lover can make people want to share that love, which is what a poet does. However, romance does not necessarily lead to talent. So, the touch of a lover creates poets, mostly bad poets, and without a lover's touch, some people are poets anyway. I think this series of statements doesn't show a logical progression of ideas as well as some other of Plato's statements do. |
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