poem in one shot

 

It’s dark today. And wet.
But the greens and roses glow like living ghosts
refusing to give in.
The day is brooding and nostalgic,
Makes me think of springs to come and so many
that are imprinted like film negatives, carried with me,
For all my days, gathering wrinkled currents.

The wet lovely petals shining on the pavement
Of Commonwealth Avenue;
The sense of hope of the road before me
And all that was to come has come.
Some of it has gone, but so little, really.

I am full, my heart sings to the ghosts of hope
And it springs eternal,
The roses, the new green leaves glow.

accidents will happen

Apologies to Elvis Costello as I give a brief update, since I really shouldn’t be sitting up at the computer:

Much has been going on here in the land of mayhem, and then a car accident, and I was hurt, no blood, no bones, but I hurt ten days later. A lot. Working on some things, and I start physical therapy on Monday.

While I was trying to heal and rest and being on meds, Mr. Cynic similarly got into another accident within days of mine. So now we have two totaled vehicles.

Working on figuring out everything, moving forward, while trying not to move, but the mayhem continues, and so must I. But I shouldn’t quite yet.

I can laugh about some of this, but it hurts. But the good news is I can laugh.

Writing is currently on hold, except I decided to toss the sermon I was working on for months and had several drafts. That’s right, chucking it completely. After the two car accidents, I found “the piercing arrow” that is discussed in writing circles. Now I have about two weeks to get it right. It’s okay, most of my better work has been produced under the pressure of a deadline. It’s epiphanous.

As Samuel Beckett said,

I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

 

 

 

 

 

the not fun part of being a writer

Dear Literary Agents,

You want to read and shop my middle grade novel to publishers. It is brilliant! Trust me.

Please contact me in the comment section below.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Writer.

(I am not jaded at all, why do you ask?)

((I hope this reads as funny as it does in my head. Starting to feel a bit loopy in researching agents.))

not exactly quiet

I know I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog lately.

The obvious place to start is with my grief over the loss of our dear sweet Lucy. It was so sudden, I think I’ve only begun to process it. I am not in a complete fog, walking through molasses and crying at the drop of a hat now. I think it piggybacked our autumn loss of Babette, which was within a week of the loss of my mother’s last living sister, and I couldn’t make it to the funeral. I lost a couple weeks of normal, quieter in some ways. In the meantime, we have been busier than usual in others.

Wrestling season ended for Captain Comic, but not before the number of hours spent in gyms across the Bay Rivers District increased exponentially.

I am proud of him for trying hard, and always being game for a tough 1st season in the sport. Next year, maybe he’ll win a match from time to time.

Mr Cynic and I have been traveling to colleges and auditions for their music departments and Scholars Competitions, etc. and to have a look around. That has been a couple of adventures in traveling to Boston and to western Virginia.  That has been a bit of roller coaster of pressure, comic mayhem, not so comic mayhem, seeing good friends and my niece, sleeping on sofas, floors,  random beds and hotel rooms. We crossed many bridges, literally and figuratively.

In the meantime, he has been involved in the Bay Rivers District Choir, and auditioned and won a spot in the All-Virginia Choir! The performance for that is the same weekend as his birthday in Richmond, at the end of April.

Toots is forever Toots, and a spark in our lives, and she apparently has a preschool boyfriend. I told her teacher on Valentine’s Day, that when I asked her who she loves after writing the family valentines, she answered, “D—?” sheepishly, knowing she should have said at least one family member in the context of the conversation. It was adorable. She also has been wanting to invite him over for sleepovers for a couple of months now.  The teacher cracked up and then told me she is always trying to get them to sit with other friends or at recess to play with other friends, but the two of them are stuck like glue everyday. I asked Toots at one point what she likes about D– so much and she answered, “because he is kind.” I couldn’t be happier, honestly, that she has found a best friend who is kind regardless of gender.

She has also been getting into trouble a lot at home, but she is approaching five, seeking independence or when we are preoccupied, seeking attention by plugging the sink, flooding the bathroom and soaking herself from head to toe. Or by poking the bear: Captain Comic, by doing the exact things she knows will trigger a negative response from him. Kazoos and pennywhistles she earns for good behavior in preschool are a big tool of torture for the noise sensitive Aspie.

But she is still our girl and how could we ever stay mad at this:

One day, I will remember to hold this smartphone horizontally while recording…

Meanwhile, in the writing department, I have started sending out queries to agents, and the rejections have started coming in. At least I’m starting at the top:

bursting

Creativity is running rampant around here.

I got sick over the end of last week, and it laid me out pretty thoroughly on Saturday. My family was kind enough to cater to me in bed while I watched back episodes of Dr. Who on the Tablet.

But then, yesterday morning, I got down to business and cranked out

- composed over several hours with infinite interruptions because it was a day off from school and Captain Comic had to ask me a gazillion questions like, “Who do you think would win in a fight, Batman or Goku?” or tell me his next movie or comic idea, which was a new one about every minute and a half -

a query letter and sent the first ten pages to the first agent on my list. Today I plan to send it out to two more. Tomorrow and Thursday another each and that is where I will leave it for a little while.

I was invited to send this poem to a newsletter where a bunch of friends will see it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Captain Comic drew this up for his coach (see #4 in this post) to approve before making a poster.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mr. Cynic has loaded his next professionally produced song.

This song was his productive response to his brother being bullied at school last year. Considering some of the lyrics, I am really glad he has music for a creative outlet. I remember well his reaction when he found out what was going on before it was resolved. Mr. Cynic looks like a pretty cool cucumber most of the time, but he is extremely passionate about any kind of injustice, and this was brother.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don’t talk much about Honey’s work, but he designs staging and a bunch of his designs are currently being built around New Orleans in preparation for events surrounding the Superbowl.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toots is always bursting with creativity. She sings little ditties about everything. When asked if she made that up, or what’s that from? She responds, “I wrote it.”  She has worlds of imaginary characters she walks around the house acting out costumed scenarios with and she loves to draw and paint and dance around the house. She plays architect with anything she finds that she can put on top of something else in interesting ways, like Jenga blocks. Oh, to be four and a half years old again.

I couldn’t be happier about what my family is up to these days.

 

good news

1. Yesterday I completed the fourth draft of my manuscript! I am going to start submitting query letters to agents this week.

2. I wasn’t going to have any of my readers go over it again, but I had one late offer for a fresh eye to it recently, and after thinking I shouldn’t, I went ahead and sent it to him. He is someone whose opinion re: writing is one I value, especially one for humor and action elements. I suppose I wanted to be certain those elements were present after so much reworking over so long a time. I’m nervous, but it will be good to hear what he has to say about it. To paraphrase, I basically asked him to tell me if it was crap or not. I am not up for another draft at this point.

3. Captain Comic did not wrestle in last night’s home tournament, but he did last a good long time supporting his team in a loud gym, and he did a good job assisting setting up. Ear plugs helped.

4. One of the coaches asked him to draw up a poster concept of a wrestler hugging a cactus. He did two versions as soon as he got home. Both were good. He is an excellent artist with a lot of humor inherent in his work.

5.  While at the tournament, I was talking with another parent who suggested I contact the other closest high school in case a paraprofessional position opens up. His sister works in the special ed department there and he said he’d put a good word in for me.

6. I did. There is a little more to this story, but I have a good feeling about it and some things are best left to happen organically rather than discuss so much.

7. Mr. Cynic had a quick turnaround from his application to Berklee College of Music, his first choice, and his audition is in 10 days!

8. In the meantime, we all have colds, and it seems like it has been raining for eternity. The colds aren’t too bad, and the rain should help restore the water table from the recent summer droughts, and it hasn’t been a monsoon to flood, as how it usually seems to occur in recent years. But it sure would be nice if Mr. Sun would peak out from a cloud once in a while.

Things are moving right along for many in our family, and it feels good. The past few years, even with all the mayhem, has felt rather stagnant, and it’s nice to feel like progress can happen.

 

white throated sparrow

Jets fly overhead, blasting us with noise,
Rumbling our bones, and we tune that out, too.

But a birdsong, a flit, an unseasonal aah!
So tiny, so inconsequential
to starting the car and rushing about,
I cannot let it go.

Lately, I have tried, but an unfamiliar bird,
white stripe by his eye has crossed my path so many times,
as if to say, hello! I am here!
Don’t you want to know me?
So much so, that yes, yes I do.

In this age of instant gratification, I go searching on the internet,
And wish I knew where my ornithology book was,
wish I had to hunt through the library for Audubon’s giant tome,
lug the tome to a table and flip the illustrated pages,
smell the musty age of pages,
just to slow down a bit more because
don’t we need this?

Don’t we need to be wrong and curious,
don’t we need to stop, light up,
don’t we need to let go of this rubberband life
and be present for an hour, a minute, a day?

We live too much for our slow DNA souls
and a bird needs us to wink
And say hello, because he is singing
the universe’s song in our backyards.

We need to feel the breeze,
even in winter, blow through our hair,
not because we create a wake of it behind us,
but because we must live in it now
to know the world goes on without us.
We are not so important as a white throated sparrow.

I must stop, hear his cheery, melancholy
Old Sam Peabody, Peabody.
Old Sam Peabody, Peabody.

Because to take this moment,
this reminder to live,
to know joy and love in a birdsong, a flit,
is everything.

the next big thing

An old friend who is also a writer and small publisher asked me to answer some questions about what my Next Big Thing is.

Thanks, Cherie Noel of Tales from the Writing Cave (psa: adult content) for thinking of me and giving me another way hold myself accountable. I need a lot of accountability to keep me going.

Following is a little ten question self- interview re: my latest work in progress. She is doing the same on her blog and rounding up several other authors to do the same and link to the other blogs. Go check hers out!

10 questions about my WIP:

What is the working title of your book?

I started this project in Nanowrimo this year on a whim, and the working title is Nanowrimo 2012. Really clues a reader in, doesn’t it?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I think I have spent a lot of my writing fiction striving to make stories that are incredibly realistic with an imaginative twist, rather than bursting at the seams with imagination like so many fantastical stories that I love to read, or the stuff that just goes on in my head, which is pretty out there. So for this project, I decided to have fun leaping around in fairy tale  land and bringing it into a modern context. What would happen if a couple of 7th graders came across the stuff of their imagination and fears in the real world?
What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy for middle readers to young adult target audience.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Twelve year old best friends, Clementine and George open a book one week before Halloween, coincidentally, Clementine’s thirteenth birthday, and strange things begin to happen.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

No idea as of yet.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Don’t know yet, still in the beginning stages…

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Something vaguely Neil Gaimanesque, like Coraline or Stardust, or The Neverending Story in reverse. Kind of. Many tales exist where kids go into a book for adventures, but this is the book coming out and wreaking havoc on their world, and constant changes according to who is ‘reading’ it.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

A lot of reading since I began to read. I’ve always loved otherworldly tales.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It’s a coming of age story, where the kids in the town can ‘see’ the weird things happening, but the adults can’t, except for the destructive results. I am going to weave some kind of apocalyptic ending with children against the monsters of their imaginations in a huge battle of good against evil. It’s going to be terribly important that the imaginary world is returned to the magic book before midnight on Halloween, and before Clementine is completely thirteen, since she won’t be able to to see the imaginary beings, etc anymore when the clock strikes twelve.

Also, it explores a completely platonic best friendship between a boy and a girl. I always had friends who were boys and that seems to be a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp.

Who would you have play (what actor/actress) your characters in a movie?

The fun thing about my characters’ age is some of the actors I am thinking of are already too old, so it would have to be the next up and coming spunky girl to play Clementine, and George could possibly be played by Rico Rodriguez, or another newcomer. Rico may be getting a little old for the role, too.

Fellow Writers, please add a comment below posting a link your Next Big Thing and I will happily point the way to you blog in a future post. If you can point the way to some of your writer friends as well, that is part of the package deal here. Please link back to me when you post, so that we can promote each other. First handful to comment will be part of the my links post. Thanks for playing! Let’s keep it going.

not quite nanowrimo

This was the third time -or the fourth?- I attempted Nanowrimo and had similar results, but this year I did not stress about it.

I’m not a big fan of the win or lose aspect of it. I will take that the number of words I wrote earlier in the month was a darn good number of words, and an excellent and imaginative new story start with a lot of possibility.

My reality is: I have three kids going in three different directions, at three high needs stages of their childhoods. Well, Captain Comic is always high needs, a given, and my presence is needed daily at his wrestling practices to keep him focused.

Toots is in an afternoon session of preschool, which seriously cuts into my writing mojo, as she and I have the house to ourselves most mornings…a prime time writing time for me if i did not have divided focus on her- some writers are night writers, some are early morning writers. I find my most productive writing time falls after I take care of setting up the minutiae of the day and when a regular school day ends, approximately 9am-3pm. so when I drop her off at 12:25pm, and can run errands alone, I fill the rest of that time pretty easily without much writing.

Mr. Cynic’s senior year first semester is full of college application stress (though he has already been been accepted to one!) and finally taking care of getting his driver’s license. He has a job and a music studio mentorship that happens up the highway in Williamsburg. He is now officially licensed, but I do not feel he is ready to drive that jaunt alone just yet. I feel better about him driving within a two mile radius to the house. I know, that is inverse reasoning when most accidents occur within a five mile radius of driver residences. But I’m his mother: if he’s going to be involved in a wreck, I’d rather it be close to home. Give me a few weeks of riding up the highway with him, and I might change my mind.

And then there are my other writing projects. So, I started off Nano pretty well, taking it easy on myself, so that I wouldn’t cause writer’s block out of word count pressure. I was really excited about freeing up my imagination after spending the last few years in pretty solid edit mode for my longest term project. I am really happy about what came out and where I may go with it.

Then life happened, as it always does, between this time of year’s onset of colds and flu, and the usual doctor’s appointments, etc…then Thanksgiving, etc, then I really felt like moving back to edit the old project. Then I got another great idea, and wrote a first draft of a sermon to give at my UU Fellowship.

So, I may not have ‘won’ Nano – but I sure didn’t lose. I have edited a little further toward the end of my first children’s novel, I have a great new next novel to work on, which makes at least two viable projects that have arrived because of Nano. And I wrote in a completely new genre that has a deadline presentation in the spring.

I call that a win. Maybe an incomplete one, but the bottom line is I wrote more this month that I did in the prior few, and got some writing mojo back.

My writing group hasn’t been meeting as consistently on Tuesday mornings twice a month since this summer. One of the two meetings per month was moved to evening, a precious time for my family, a time where I am mentally and physically crashing, and up the road in Williamsburg, so I have thus far bowed out. I’ve missed seeing my group regularly, partly because it held me accountable to set aside at least a couple of days of several hours per month to focus strictly on writing and do so in good company.

The two of us in the group who are most local to each other have made a commitment to each other -and to our writing- to meet every Tuesday morning, barring appointments for her aged parent and the mayhem we both have with our teens and Toots.

And that is a win, indeed. I wrote for five hours straight yesterday and barely got out of my chair. Quite an accomplishment for yours truly,  Ms. Highly Distractible.

 

nanowrimo

Shucks, I have neglected posting pics and telling stories from Halloween adventures, etc, but….

I swore I was never going to do it again.

I swore this is process is not conducive to how I write.

I have tried this little challenge twice before and only driven myself crazy while mayhem increased ten-fold around here with household epidemics of flu and colds and viruses galore.

I swore I learned my lesson and would never do it again under any circumstances.

 (click to to join)

 

 

Yet, after professing much cheerleaderness to many friends who are participating, I got a waft of its heady perfume and became transfixed. On Day 2.

So I am a few thousand words behind, swore I will just use it to play, but in playing, I think I really do have something worth pursuing, and it’s another children’s novel.

What is wrong with me?!

Well, nothing really, I was bogged down in the edits of my ongoing manuscript, and I craved a little more creative freedom.

I am using it to get back in the habit of daily writing, of exercising my imagination, and I do not care if I make the 1667 words per day that nano made me insane with before.

Now the only thing driving me crazy is that I can only focus on the joy of this new little story in bits and pieces throughout my days of Continuous Interruptus.  And a little guilt that I am not wholly focused on the old project to finish its Draft 4.

But it’s not a lot of guilt. I feel like this is going to free up my brain a little bit so that when I do focus on the other project, I can be more creative where I’ve been stuck for so long.

Besides, I usually only give those edits a few hours once or twice a week at most lately even before Nanowrimo.

Why not add to the mayhem? At least this time, it’s for me.