Merry Christmas

I won't be around much for the next couple of days, but I've got a nice group present for you here, courtesy (again) of The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/dec/17/second-thought-rewriting-al-kennedy

I screwed up the link (as per usual) but if you have the time, please go to Guardian.co.uk and go to the Books blog. It's an Al Kennedy post - a wonderful, thoughtful piece on rewriting, complete with a photograph of an editing-in-progress page from James Joyce's handwritten manuscript for Ulysses. Makes you almost relish the precision act of editing.

Hope you all have wonderful holidays!

Editing Orgasms (No, not that kind)

OK. Hell. I started a sentence six ways from Sunday just now, editing myself, so there ARE some times when editing is simply putting up a false front, right? Instead of saying what you want to actually want to say.

So here goes...yesterday I had a brain orgasm, editing the beginning paragraph to a scene that was workmanlike, acceptable, but no great shakes. It took me a while, I don't know, I kept coming back to it, maybe a couple of hours altogether, to get the words I wanted to, replacing the 'marker' words I had written initially to describe a scene in a way that engendered mood without making it obvious.

Damn, I love it when this happens.

How about you? We all talk about the slog parts, but have you had your important writing brain orgasm lately? (I'd love to say this comes in a daily dose, but for me, it doesn't. Mostly right now, I'm slogging.)

Robin Jr. Rocks. I'm Just Sayin'...

Robin Jr. is in her Illustration BA program, and I had the chance to take a look at a few of the pieces she's done. Thought you all might wanna see them as well.

She drew the one below to illustrate an article on the Roman Catholic Church and its infamous shenanigans...



And she drew this one...



...to accompany an article on the often unhealthy relationship between big business and universities. Not that accepting badly needed monies is bad, per se, but the freedom of thinking, or lack thereof, is a concern, when money's mixed in, whatever the venue or topic at hand.

And, proud mom that I am, I gotta show ya a pic of my baby girl, Robin Jr as she...



is dressed up a bit like her boyfriend, Tom (who I'm gonna be meeting for the first time in December, God love his heart).

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, you all, wherever you are!

I'm still very much up for Skype-fest trying, but can't until my elderly relative has gone home after the holiday.

Nate's Post

Writing is such a fickle thing that I often have a hard time articulating what it is I do or why I do it. If you’re looking for some sage-like wisdom about writing and publication, I’m not the keg to tap, so to speak. A lot of writers seem to have a lot to say about writing—as evidenced in the numerous articles and interviews and books on craft. I, however, do not. I operate according to the old Hemingway dictum: Writers write. When I try to be clever and witty and wise, I usually end up sounding like a dogmatic douche bag. So for this blog post I’m going to try to avoid any douche-baggery and try to keep it simple.

To begin, I’m not one of those people who knew from childhood that I was born to write. I didn’t start writing until late-adolescence when—and this should come as no surprise—I started to become a serious reader. In fact, I tend to agree with TC Boyle when he said in an interview, and I’m paraphrasing: The only reason we’re writers is because we’re not in rock and roll bands.

I mention this with two-fold intent. First, I think it’s of the utmost importance, as writers, to not take ourselves too seriously. I take my writing very seriously, but if I couldn’t laugh at myself and my words, I can’t imagine why I’d continue to do it. One of my pet-peeves is writers who come across as superior and supercilious. If you really want to make a change in the world, volunteer to help in Dafur. Being a writer or an artist does not absolve us from being decent human beings.

Secondly, I think Boyle’s rock star quote speaks to the need to be read. Musicians typically don’t play music in isolation or solely for themselves. They play with an audience in mind. When we write, we write to an imagined audience. If not, you’re journaling, and there’s nothing wrong with journaling; however, if you’re writing with the intent of being read by a larger audience then you’re writing for publication.

A discussion of publication is always dicey because the purists, and most teachers in MFA programs, want you to ignore it and concentrate solely on the craft. And I agree, you need to constantly work toward honing the craft, but at some point, egos factor into things, and let’s face it: we want to be in print.

Listen, I am not a literary superstar or a rising star or even a star of the small presses. I’m a high school teacher, first and foremost, and then a writer. I have been fortunate enough to have three books of poetry published (my latest came out in September from sunnyoutside press and is titled After the Honeymoon), a collection of short fiction—which, honestly, was not ready for publication—and seven or eight chapbooks of poetry and fiction. I say “fortunate” because I am really am lucky to have had these books published by various small presses. I truly believe that publication involves a good deal of luck and timing. Reading is subjective, so any time you have a piece published you made a connection with one or more editors. The best writing is not always the writing that is published: it’s the writing that found its way into the hands of the right editor or struck a chord at a specific time.

In that case, the best advice I can give people aspiring to publish books is, as the MFA programs tell you, first hone your craft, as reader and a writer; make connections with other writers and people in the industry; and finally, develop a tough skin and bombproof belief in what you’re writing and what you have to say.

And, for God’s sake, please don’t take yourself too seriously.

Thanks for listening, folks. If you have any questions, feel free to fire away.

If you’re interested in learning more about my books, you can visit my website:
http://www.nathangraziano.com, or my publisher's website: http://www.sunnyoutside.com.


(Robin here- I will try to get Nate's links to actually, you know, be LINKS, when I get in to the office today...)

So tomorrow, Nate is coming to visit.

A couple of months ago I spotted a piece of flash fiction called Almost Christmas on Night Train that took my breath, it was so good. I read over it a couple of times; then saved the link. It struck me that the story scene the author created was truly a ‘world unto itself’. That it said in a few words what the lives of the people inhabiting the story were all about, and probably always would be, even if, and maybe precisely because, they would never be able to see themselves clearly enough to know that all they were as human beings had been absolutely encapsulated in a few hundred words. Now, I know these are characters in a story, but the transfer potential to what passes for real life – to me, it was a good kind of a telling:

http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/contents/graziano2_fb.php


Several days ago, I was looking around again at the short list of my favorite places to go and read excellent stuff, checked out the author list on Thieves Jargon and saw that Nathan Graziano was on there – the same guy who’d written Almost Christmas.

I read his poem: http://www.thievesjargon.com/workview.php?work=1152

Then, I did something I’m pretty sure I’ve never done before.
I wrote a fan letter. It was easy, because I noticed Thieves Jargon puts author’s emails underneath their names, inviting notes and comments.

Anyway, I didn’t expect much, maybe a simple ‘thanks’; I did mention that if he had time, it would be great if he could talk to my friends about writing and getting published.

I was happily amazed when Nate wrote back and said ‘sure’.

Here’s his blog (he likes baseball, and as you know, I know nothing about sports other than golf, except whether said sport has tight enough pants on its players than I can have myself a good watch, and actually enjoy it – but even though he likes baseball, he’s all right. Kind of reminds me of that Troll guy we all know and love).

http://www.nathangraziano.blogspot.com/

Anyway, Nate is gonna be our guest blogger here tomorrow. He’ll have a post for us comment on and under, so please get your questions ready about whatever – process, publication trials and tribulations, growing as a writer, wherever you are right now with your own questions on ‘what to do next’ or whatever, and pop them to him in the comments of the post that will go up tomorrow.

Nate is doing author tours and readings, so he won’t be around here on the weekend, as he will be traveling, so have at it with the discussion on Wednesday and Thursday, you all!

And thanks again for visiting with us, Nate!

Here's The Blondster's pic at her friend's house with the ...

pictures hung crazy high and spread apart like someone thought they'd trade off cooties if they got too close to each other. The one I mentioned last post.



She's just walked out the front door, happy as hell because she's on the first afternoon of a four day weekend, and going to a Halloween party tomorrow night - the fun kind, you know, like the ones you probably used to attend (or hell, maybe you still do...)

Anyway, Happy Halloween weekend!

Hmmm. I forgot to put these pictures on...

So I screwed up and forgot to pop the Maine pics on. Also a cute picture of The Blondster on homecoming night (taken at one of her friend's houses, a friend whose mom hangs their photos WAY too high, by the way).

I've been doing a lot of working at work and working on writing, so sorry (again) I've been behind on the blog.

Here's The Blondster (aka Mommy's Little Boo Boo Bear): (Woops - I don't have the pic saved yet.)

And on to Maine...

Sand and skies on the way up to Portland.


Wells, Maine has this cafe and it had good lobster rolls for lunch. And beer.


And...a Portland place with a lobster picture on the pub sign.


The craggy rocks of the Maine coastline. I kept blinking. Thought I was in Wales until I noticed the houses were different. Plus, the Welsh version of a rocky coast is breathtaking rather than 'yep, quite nice'.


We took the ferry out into Portland Harbor; had lunch out on Peak's Island.


The little cafe on Peak's Island.

Maine was gorgeous

JB took this picture on his freaking Blackberry.



This is one of those landmark Maine lighthouses - the Portland Head Light. It really was beautiful to see. Saw a lot of other things, and sat in some good bars, too, as we do, and heard stories about moose hunting and summer island people and the horde of Irish that still live in Maine because that's where their ancestors landed. In Portland. Kinda neat, listening to the stories.

I'll pop more on later this week.

Meanwhile, hope you and yours are having a good afternoon, evening, or morning, wherever you are...

I've always liked to go...

and so has JB. We were traveling souls long before we knew each other. Now that we know each other (and okay, that's been a while now), sometimes we travel together sometimes we travel apart. This week we're doing a bit of both, as he's been in Singapore on business (he took the picture below of a restaurant there, where he ate/drank satay and stingrays, or something like that. The people he was meeting with there wanted to take him to a many-starred restaurant, but he wanted to eat where the locals ate on a regular basis. (This may damn well be why sometimes traveling apart is sometimes a good thing for JB's wife, who woulda gone with the many stars. I'm just sayin'...)



Anyway, he's almost home now - actually, after a few hour stopover in Tokyo earlier today, or whenever it was there - and in a few days we are on our way, together, up to Maine. It's a business trip for me, extended for a couple of days so we can look around a bit.

Hope you all are fine where you are!

I haven't been around as much lately...

because I've been really focused on getting finished with what I started three years ago.

Next week, Wilderness House Literary Review is publishing one of my flash fiction pieces. It's coming out in their October volume, so I'm guessing it will be 'there' on October 1st or so. I was surprised last weekend to receive an email from another lit mag, very well-known in the flash fiction world (they hadn't seen the email I sent them, withdrawing this story from their consideration) - telling me they'd be honored to publish the story, telling me I could pick the art that went with it, and a couple of other things. I couldn't accept, of course, but it was damn gratifying.

Then, Tuesday, I heard from the Potomac Journal, and they accepted the last of the three stories I had out there. Their next issue doesn't come out until early 2010, but I don't care. I'm happy as hell that I'm gonna be in it.

Whittling down my words to flash stories is hugely helpful - helps me see what can 'go' as I'm editing down my novel. I wanted to mention that to you all in case you might wanna think about doing the same thing, if you think it might help you, too. I can honestly feel a difference as I read through - I can pick out the extraneous, and that's a good feeling. If you're at all interested, I bet you'll feel it as well! Good luck with your writing, you all!

Where would you go...

if you could move somewhere else? When you close your eyes and envision yourself somewhere else, where is it?

Because JB and I are now asking each other that question.

Here are the criteria:

1. We need to wait until next summmer or so when the youngest of our combined clan goes on to college.

2. We hate the cold. We don't mind if we only see summer and a winter that seems like spring, ever again.

3. We love the water. Especially the ocean.

4. We love pubs and interesting people and hanging out for a laugh and a story here and there.

5. We will need to work - college ain't inexpensive - so we need some English speakers around us, somehow.

6. Our combo plan family are around the East Coast of the U.S., and in Britain, so the trip to both places needs to be easy. (It will be super easy if we stay somewhere in the States besides the DC area - too cold in the winter), but that's not set in stone, as we are fully aware, and in no way lying to ourselves, that we do not have forever to do whatever. We want our move to be gratifying, because 'we are all terminal cases', as Irving said Garp said, and we want to live, finally, the way we want to live, in a place we choose to be rather than in a place we're stuck, family commitments, etc.

Whatcha got? Any ideas?

Miscellany...and pics of Robin Jr.

1. Been in Indiana on a business trip for a couple of days, and got back in a few hours ago. The pace of life is SO very different there, and that's not a bad or a good thing, but only an observation. I stayed at a Hyatt in downtown Indianapolis that had been built in the mid-1970s, which just happened to be the age of the other Hyatt I was in quite a bit, back in the day, for drinks in their excellent (then) bar, in Louisville. I actually had one of those hey baby it's deja vu all over again feelings the whole time I was in that place, and it weirded me out a bit.

2.I wasn't kidding when I said I was drilling down with my writing; started sending out flash pieces in mid-August, and I had results in the form of a story published in the Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette (most of you guys saw this on EE's and thanks for the notes!) which made my freaking day. A couple of days ago, I was told I had another piece accepted, this time for the October issue of the Wilderness House Literary review. I'm relieved this is happening. Relieved may be an odd way to put it, but truly, relieved is how I feel. Like I said a few weeks ago, I'm getting quite serious about this whole process, and I'm working to move it forward. Both of these are direct excerpts from my novel, so yep, I'm happily relieved that total strangers like what I write.

3. Thought you might wanna see some summer 2009 pics of my older baby girl, Robin Jr. (She actually friended me on Facebook. I thought I'd pass out!) Robin Jr. is working on her degree in Illustration, she loves her friends and her lifestyle where she is, and I love that she loves it, since I love her so much.



(RJ's the one in the middle, if ya can't tell....)



(RJ's on the left)



4. I wish August hadn't ended yet.

5. How are you all?

Voice posting free-for-all, starting...now.

I'm really looking forward to hearing you guys talking. It's been a while since we've done this as a group.

Looks like Whirl and EE are up and running. Their links are in the comments.

And me, I did one, too.

After two hours of Googling and wicked-good cursing and white wine drinking...

Guess what guess what guess what???? I FINALLY made my own You-Tube thing! This is big, people. Really big. Anyway, I couldn't figure out how to name it, and I ended up editing as I was reading along, but by damn, I finally did something on my own (mainly because JB is out of town and the Blondster is at a friend's and my netbook has a built-in webcam and isn't old and crappy, but what the hell. I still did it).



Now, how about you all?

Red Stick, Here I Come

I'm flying to Baton Rouge later this morning and will be mainly out of the net for the next two days, conferencing and glad-handing and chatting stuff up, as I do.

Hope you all have a happy Thursday and Friday!

"The Year of Living Dangerously" is coming on TV right now...

and I remember watching this and loving it in the early 80's. It's on Encore Mystery.

I just watched it after not having seen it since it came out. Wow. I loved it all over again, which was a relief, because ya never know about that revisiting stuff.

Speaking of revisiting, I'm revisiting the concept of hiatus again.

Have to, because I'm starting to get behind on editing down my word count, and it's already early August. I'll be editing as well as sending out a couple of stories to everyone and their mama, and visiting you guys.

Toward the end of the month, will it be a good time for us to do something along the lines of what Sylvia came up with before - the mix and match picture thing was great. Maybe there's some other version of that we could have fun with - if you think of something, please say.

See you in a few weeks here, and loads at your places.

Of Timesheets and Where-I'm-Business-Traveling

1-

Every two weeks we receive a super helpful email reminding us it's been...two weeks since the last email, which means we're all about to be paid. So turn in those timesheets, baby. (Everyone in the building has a timesheet. Everyone. Even though 99% of us are salaried, like me.)

And every two weeks there's a Platitude or a Fun Fact just below the "don't forget your timesheets" reminder.

So about a month ago the whole shebang irritated me (maybe I hadn't popped a cold can of Diet Coke open in a while, maybe I was pissed from a conference call I don't know), and I answered the fact with a fact of my own, and 'replied all'. It's now expected of me, and ya know, that's fine.

So here was this morning's teaspoonful of useless knowledge:

FACT: Women blink nearly twice as much as men.


And here was my reply:

BACKGROUND TO THE AFOREMENTIONED FACT: Men have no awareness at all of how many times it is they blink.

If asked to verify a count, they ask their wives for help; they then blink slowly, deliberately, ponderously, making blinking look like a really big, important and ponderous job – so their wives will see how hard they work, doing all of that pseudo-cerebral blinking.

Not that I’m bitter or anything...


2-

I'm about to begin my on-the-job travels. Here's where I'll be going in the next couple of months - Louisiana, Indiana, New Mexico and South Dakota.

Ummmm....yeah. None of you guys are around any of those places, are ya?


I didn't think so. Bummer.

Golf Channel and Poast Toastee Days, and Other Things.

My brain is currently Sponge City with editing and thinking through and waking up at three a.m. or so with thoughts like Oh shit of course...that's where that one sentence I wrote on the pad a couple of months ago fits in....

But it's working, so I'm not fussing, but only saying.

Anyway, a couple of things have been getting me through this...(Whirl-Word-Alert)...rewriting abyss, in no particular order:

1 - Going out with JB and drinking wine at our neighborhood bar(s). We wish they were pubs, and thus better, but they're not, so there ya go.

2 - Sex.

3 - Music. Right now I have Tommy Bolin's Post Toastee on repeat.

4 - The camaraderie of you guys.

5 - Rereading favorite novels at light speed and barely taking them in, just kind of feeling and scanning and flipping the pages, and remembering I love to read, and thinking about why.

6 - Watching shows from Ramsay to History Channel shows to CBS Monday night sitcoms.
And watching...

7 - Golf. Yeah, that's what I said. Golf. I love golf - love watching it, love golf courses, love hearing about golf and watching golfers fight themselves and the courses they're playing to win. I suck at the sport- look like I'm playing mad croquet when I play. Took a bucket full of lessons several years ago and the pro kept saying Your form is good your swing looks good your play will follow or something like that, but no, mad croquet ensued and ensued. But next year, I'm trying again.

Meanwhile, I'm a watcher. And an editor of myself.

How about you all? How do you structure time to skirt around and aid and abet what you're working to do with your writing?

Editing Eye Opener From Hell

Well.

Well well well.

I worked and worked this winter and by late February, I thought I had finally finished my novel, and I do mean, finished it. Done. Finito. Edited and hammered down. It had, after all, been two and a half years, and I'd really worked to a schedule in the last months, and a grid of sorts, notes in order, clipboard of scattered stuff, finally battened down.

Anyway, in June I began rereading, as I have now faced the reality that my word count is too high, which was no biggie in the first four chapters. Most of it was what I wanted it to be. Maybe edited 1K out of those first four, and honed parts, here and there.

BUT. I just finish a re-read of Chapter 6, which I now see is Chapter 5. And while the bulk of it is intact, I have boatloads of notes all over those pages. Virtually rewrote the first two.

It took me four full months to get to the point I could look at this manuscript and really see it and read it, in a more-than-rote way.

How long does it take you guys to get to the place in your heads where you can edit, and not feel pain, or at least be able to see what you're doing?

Orwell vs. Huxley

Robin Jr. sent me this link. SO worth seeing.


href="http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/1736/200905amusingourselvest.png">

Freddie is Stacy...

...and her new link is on the bloglist on the right.

It's a fine site, she's a fine friend, and it's a fine thing, knowing Freddie is Stacy. (Also, someday, we'll be able to say 'we knew her when', when she scores the music for a major motion picture, or a breakout Indie film. Just watch and see. Or listen, really...)

Writing

Some rambles on my way to the point of a private place to write:

Three summers ago I began writing sketches and scenes and making notes about a novel that had been in my head for a while. I'd written a lot in my teens and early twenties, had been told I was good, I floundered with the idea of writing, and life went on.

Several months later, I found Sparky's blog and I hovered and read it, sent in an opening, sent more stuff, and what was the most key for me, began doing the writing exercises. They were great for whittling word count, for finding and honing the point of a scene. And sometimes we could send in a scene from our work. Oftentimes, this gave me the opportunity to sift through notes and actually write the scene that had been murking around inside my thoughts but had never quite made it to paper. Or laptop file. Sparky doesn't know this, but he quite literally helped me write my novel.

And I found you guys. It was, and is, wonderful.

Other excellent things happened along the way, that seemed just fun or just work or just something when they happened, but all came together as a way of spurring on the work...

....Chris had a month long writing exercise a while back, and it helped me focus and write one of the most emotionally difficult chapters in my novel, a climactic chapter two-thirds of the way through, because I didn't wanna let her down and not write. I wrote quickly, almost automatically, to get that done, and it's one of the besy chapters in my novel. (I've sent this out to several lit mags as a stand-alone story, and while it wasn't published, I received several personal motes back along the lines of - it made several cuts - loved the voice, the rhythm - loved almost all of it, really, it just needed... - that kind of thing. The point is, if I'd had the time to hone it to a story and sent it out to more than seven or eight places, I'd have done the deal.)

...Shona had a writing exercise several months later, and it gave me a reason to finish another sketched out and difficult chapter.

...I've read for some of you, and some of you have read for me. The knowledge that someone is waiting for your pages is huge. It's an anchor.

(There are more things to go here, some hopefully helpful to you, but I have to go to work, so I'll add later.)

When I wrote...I have a boatload of pictures and I was gonna put more on, but if I did, and explained them all and how they fit into the woven fiction of the novel I've written, and the ones to come, I might as well just set those suckers up as combo plan picture-books/memoirs, another genre entirely, and make it the truth instead of The Truth, and that would be much too much information, and besides, I think the best fiction lends universality to the concrete, the mundane and the every day, so if I send too many pictures along I think I'd be undermining my writing.

And I've seen things on some of your blogs that are so damn good, I've thought about the words being squandered - not that we ourselves aren't a killer good audience, but still.

I mentioned about being on the fence before and part of what I meant was - I think we're walking along the top of a fence line when we write on our blogs.

I'm going to start a private blog where I place things I may want to use later. Or sooner. A test place, a place to post things so that they feel 'solidified', accomplished - this place won't require comments, it won't require anything unless requested. What I'm saying is, I think we could all do with a place that no one can visit without permission - so we can post things and write and prep and instead of being a distraction from the writing we should be doing - which is - after all - how and why we know each other - it will be the place we can post writing to look over and think over, and, if we want, we can ask for comments - if we don't, we won't ask and won't receive. It's not another layer of work - instead, it's a place to help us focus. A place to practice or try out voice or structure.

Either way, it's a place to put something up and get work done without any way the world can read in, before we're ready.

What do you think?

The Blondster's photo shoot - pics are here

It was happy camper time for mama, seeing these, except for the part where I wondered how in the hell I ever made this child. If you have a minute, please go check the website of this excellent artist, Rachel Reilly, and see some of my baby's pictures from her recent trip to England.


Rachel Reilly's website

P.S. I tried to make this a click-able link, but failed and succeeded. I'm about to email someone to help me fix this....

I'm on the fence...

...about a couple of writing things right now, but one of them does not concern the cathartic Drive-Up-The-Highway Day I had to myself in my hometown last Friday; just me and my camera and a list of places to re-see. (Pictures below.)

I pulled off the interstate in the 'good part of town' to take the first picture - of the last house I owned when I lived in the suburbs of the city.



And it was the first time I ever noticed that this house was only a mile or so from the first full-time job I had - a crap job I fucking hated in a large office building that was part of the 'development' my tony little neighborhood bordered.



The thing is, though, the me that moved into that house in the mid 1990's didn't wanna think about the me that had worked that crap job in the mid 1970's, so I'd shut down vision on that building for close to three years. Shopped at a grocery store almost right across the street. Had a membership at a ‘fitness and swim club’ only one stoplight away. But even with this proximity, I'm not exaggerating when I say that the first time I saw how close my Crap-Job-Life had been to my Nice-House-Life, geographically speaking, was last Friday, when I turned off I-64 onto the exit ramp, and saw the building when I looked over at the outskirts of my former neighborhood. (Recently it's come to my attention that I've had a habit of slicing up my life times into episodes that seem on the surface to be completely unrelated, but knowing something analytically and seeing something starkly laid out on the road in front of me was, as they say, a whole different ball a wax.)

I hadn't put that building on my list of pictures to take, even though it has a minor scene in my first novel. I hadn't put that house in the novel, but I'd promised the Blondster I'd take the picture for her, which was the only reason I even looked right when I drove near that exit. I was going on past, except I couldn't, because I'd promised to take a picture, so that exit ramp scene (of sorts) turned into one of those 'Ha! Made Ya Look!' moments.

From there, I pulled back onto the interstate and drove to the far side of the county, a place where I hid out one summer and turned into someone else.



And then I drove back to the old parts of the backside of downtown where I once had a home with a sad man...




And to a house that hosted endless parties a while back, and to some other houses in that neighborhood that I lived in or halfway lived in, depending on the particular address.



..and to the suburbs close to that area, where I lived when I was a kid, and where I was subject to bouts of mystical thinking that both got me through and kept me unengaged.



It was cathartic, visiting these in one day and on a purposeful timeline; I coulda been my own Greek thingie up on stage…maybe had a walk-on part in one of their plays (a la the Greek version of Pink Floyd, or vice versa).

I have a boatload of pictures and I was gonna put more on, but if I did, and explained them all and how they fit into the woven fiction of the novel I've written, and the ones to come, I might as well just set those suckers up as combo plan picture-books/memoirs, another genre entirely, and make it the truth instead of The Truth, and that would be much too much information, and besides, I think the best fiction lends universality to the concrete, the mundane and the every day, so if I send too many pictures along, I think...

but that's for another day this week.

Googling can be both dangerous and weird.

I proved it to myself today, messing around with ethernet memory keepers, when I found a picture of the now-adult children of a now-deceased man fictionalized in my novel – the man who psychically scooted me up the interstate to the Playboy Club a while back, to try out.

And what’s even weirder – I never met his daughter (she was only eight years younger than I was at the time) (he was almost exactly ten years older than I was at the time, and I was quite literally barely twenty-one), and when the Club hired me but said I couldn’t use my real name, because they already had a Bunny Robin, which name did I want to use, I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say, so I picked the guy’s daughter’s name, even though I’d never seen her. And here I was today, looking her right in the eyes. Her father’s eyes. She looks like her father. He was very handsome. She is very pretty…AND NOW IN HER FORTIES. Mother of God.

And in the picture with her…her younger brother, who will never know how close he came to never being born out there in the West, because his daddy begged me more than once to come out West with him after he left me, high and dry. It was only a few months after he left that the begging phone calls started, and the visits back in town. I won’t go into the wild detail of it, but the begging went on for years, on and off, before, during and between our respective marriages. And this kid, in his mid-twenties now, would never have been born if I’d said yes, I’m on my way…

But the weirdest, weirdest part of all, is that below this picture was a picture of the man himself, older but still quite handsome, with the exact same halfway smartass smile, the same mustache, and a big, big cowboy hat sittin’ on his head.

You know, I hadn’t thought about this guy or much of anything or anyone else I wrote about and turned this way and that to craft a novel from, as the odd combination one just does have when combining the fodder of experience and imagination, but now that I have, finding out this man recently died, when I only remembered him and knew him as young and very much alive, really gave me pause.

Suspension of belief is gonna have to wait, while I go living in the past.

Once upon a time, I changed lifestyles and home addresses with the alacrity of an escape artist. I'm gonna hit the trail again soon, and pay a call on that person I used to be.

Well, really, I'm gonna fill up the car and pack some bags and hit the interstate in a couple of days, The Blondster in tow (well, really, in the passenger seat) and it's gonna be an interesting ride, heading west to a place that isn't really West; since we live on the East Coast, but still, it's a ten hour drive to the 'left' on the map, so there you go.

We're driving to Kentucky for an extra-long holiday weekend and we haven't been there in a while. Wouldn't have a reason to go back at all, except my cousin/close friend and her husband and daughters (who are roughly the same ages as Robin Jr and The Blondster) live there, and it will be wonderful to see them.

One morning while we're there and JB is off golfing, I'm driving up to the city I'm from and taking myself on a tour of places that figure, fictionally speaking, in my novels, and taking pictures. I have a list, so I won't forget where I'm going and why, because I don't know when I'll be back there again. I'll be visiting places in the old parts of town, and looking at houses I haven't seen in so long, it seems to me they can't be altogether real, because memories play tricks, and because I'm not the same person who visited them or lived in them or mourned for the person who lives in them no longer. There are a few places I won't be able to find again; I'm pretty sure about that - places out in the county that I barely knew how to find when I drove to them the first time, because they were off my radar, and really, stayed that way, even when I checked out of other things I was doing and stayed here and there a while.

I expect to come away somewhat surprised, and a little sad, not that the days when I was there (or in the various 'theres', really) are over, but that the days when my life seemed like it would spin on and on world without end, and any given day I'd have another lifetime to switch up and simply go on, are over. Personal infinity is no longer a pretext for my actions; and the way I choose to see this development, it frees me up to stop wasting time and make damn sure I do what I need to do.

Have you all done this? Visited past 'scenes of the crime'?

So in answer to that Troll guy...

...no, the beginning of the post before this one (the one I have yet to finish), doesn't have one small thing to do with Michael Jackson. (Or potentally large thing, cupped in hand.) Nor does it have one small thing to do with the (very recently) late Farrah Fawcett. Does anybody besides me feel sorry for her bad luck, dying the same day Michael Joe Jackson died - thereby firmly placing Farrah, she of the iconic 1970's poster, way over somewhere on a far side stage?

I'm not a fan type of person. Fan as in fanatic. Fan as in living breathing shitting crying and dying over someone else's breath or their body of 'work'.

Picture it:

BLINK.

It's 1980. And there I was, strolling along and doing whatever the hell it was I did in 1980. I can't remember what it was, although me being me, and in my twenties at the time, I was doing something(s), even if they've been clouded over, my powers of selective retention being as strong as they certainly damn well are.

And in to this pleasant picture walks the jangle of a phone, you know, the ones that actually had a ring tone before you had to select 'old timey ring tone' from the ring tone list. Ring ring ring, it rang. And I answered it.

"OH MY GOD OH MY GOD ROBIN ROBIN DID YOU SEE THE NEWS DID YOU SEE THE GODDAMNED NEWS THEY'VE KILLED HIM ROBIN THEY'VE KILLED JOHN! ROBIN ROBIN ROBIN DID YOU HEAR ME THEY'VE KILLED JOHN ROBIN!!!"

It was this big chick I knew, back in the day. Stood a foot taller than I stood, with a big personality to match. Biggest follower of other human beings I've ever met. If there was an award for 'biggest adorer of anyone other than herself", this chick would've won it, hands down, at least five years in a row.

So when she stopped screaming in my ear and took a well-earned fucking breath, just about gasping from the trauma of all her hard work, I stepped in with a word.

"Yeah. I heard on the radio some nut fuck shot John Lennon in Manhattan, and he's dead."

"ROBIN ROBIN THIS IS HUGE THIS IS HORRIBLE DAMMIT ROBIN (I checked out about here, but the screaming went on for a while, about BLAH BLAH BLAH and how could I be so callous and John was a genius and John how could anyone ever replace John...BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH.....and I checked out some more).

Then she took another breath, sucked in some stray saliva, choked a bit, and told me she and Blah and Blah and Blewie were gonna somehow get to New York City, no matter what, because it was really important that we show our respect or pay our respects. Whatever.

I said, Have fun.

She got pissed and said something about what a callous cold idiot blah blah blah...
(I knew she'd been planning on me doing the driving.)

BLINK. It's around Christmas 1998, I think. Late 90's anyway, and I have a different life, which is a damn good thing, because if you've been a functional adult between 1980 and 1998 if you haven't changed or done much, you may as well just check out and get it over with.

Anyway, JB takes me to Paris for a long weekend, and it's a good one. I do remember fussing with some French dude in the nice hotel where we stayed and telling him that a king-sized bed was NOT simply two regular beds shoved together, but other than that, it was a wonderful trip, wandering up and down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, and poking around in other places here and there. And in one of those poking along walks, we came upon a place right in the middle of a crowded road, with flowers left everywhere. We looked around. What the hell? We scooted across and looked around, standing, if I remember this correctly, on the median strip in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. And then, we looked down an opening and saw a road with cars driving like mad in a tunnel below. Ah. They were still laying flowers where Diana had died - or at least hit.

Really? I mean, honestly?

BLINK. 1963. I remember when Kennedy died - barely - because I had just started Catholic school, and the meanest nun there, this old striation-faced hag named Techla, croaked over the intercom and told us we could all go home and be with our parents. We all liked that going home early part, and then I walked in my front door, and saw my father and mother crying, I'm talking sobbing, holding each other on the couch. Grasping. I was devastated - my stomach dropped down to the basement and landed splat and cold on the concrete floor, because when you're little and you see your parents in panic, you know hell has just happened upon you.

This one really was hell; the world felt like it was tipping on it side and it would never right. (Innocence was lost, if it had truly ever been found.)Of course it is true that serious-consequence life-altering deaths do occur; deaths that are meaningful not just to the human being who suffered the loss of his or her life, and to the people who knew them and cared about them, who loved them or hated them, or needed them, or never wanted to see them again - but who actually KNEW them, and not just on a television screen or in Life.

But that doesn't mean that every entertainer or 'personality' that goes needs or deserves a drill-down shock-wave of trauma from society at large. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how many people actively care now - that Helen Hayes is dead. That William Holden choked to death. That Myrna Loy or Joan Crawford are no more. Even Marilyn Monroe, who died young and was pathetic, is fading out except as an icon - which is a fake thing to hold on to, kinda like a talisman you keep for yourself, to anchor your self, to think about..your self.

In short, I'm not soppy.

In long, I have something called A LIFE. I don't toss out my feelings to the four winds. I care about people worth caring about, in my world. And I define what that world is, and I make no apologies that I'm not gonna lay down the dawg because someone who sang some good songs and then came out with Thriller and oh yeah,I remember listening to Thiller that summer I stayed in Germany with my friend that worked for Amex...God that was a good time and I remember I didn't wanna ever fly home was for the past twenty years pathetic and held his own flesh and blood baby outside a window, grinning like a fool, has died.

I do feel for Farrah Fawcett, woman to woman, even though I never knew her. She had a three year battle with a cancer that was eating into her. THAT I have sympathy for; it must have been horrible....and I tried to have my hair cut like hers, back in the 1970's and oh yeah that was the year I fixed my hair that way and they hired me at the Playboy Club my hair never did look exactly like hers because afer all she had hairdressers, but it looked pretty good, annd every guy I knew had that damn poster of hers and oh I wish I was young again...

Hmmmmm. Does it sound like me feeling bad for Farrah is really..me feeling bad for me and thinking about...me?

Yeah. I'd say, honestly, that about says it all.

Suspension of belief...

...and how you deal with that suspension is a huge part of what living means if you're really gonna live, in my opinion. How you decide to work through the absolute fact that, as John Irving would say Garp said, we are all terminal cases.

I've got a boatload I want to write about this, but yesterday turned out to be a long one, and right now I'm about to go driving to work, and I don't want to skip anything, so I'll be back around 6:00 to finish writing. For now all I have time to say is it has to do with people like animals and the living dead and the never alive and what happens when you watch it and you don't play pretend except on purpose.

A patchwork of thinking about what living means..(#2 & #3)...

...and what it doesn't mean. And never has.

Call this a thinking-through rant of sorts. Or a self-induced meme. Or a partridge in a pear tree with only a strange sense of celebration in sight. My thoughts are too scattered to come up with more than mini-diatribes, so here we go...

1. Internet companies google my email and everything else I do, and they let anyone else who pays them in on any of my heretofore private stuff. Look up the purchase of Doubleclick if you don't believe me. I have a cell phone that I signed up for 'do not call' and 'keep unpublished' (and, goddammit, why did I even have to do that shit when I'm paying for that number) and yet I have in the past few days gotten calls from a company that could only have gotten if they were given my number by our new cell phone carrier. And I'm supposed to take this shit? Apparently I'm supposed to just take all this shit lying down, huh? Cookies and bought lists and Facebook that pretends to be a nice helpful place to meet up and find old friends and new friends but in reality is a place to extend personal power all right - power over me by someone other than my self.

All I can say is, Orwell would shit himself in his grave if he woke up long enough to look around. 1984 has come and gone, George honey. Ain't nuthin' private no more. Welcome to the fucking zoo.

2. Coming tomorrow. OK. I'm leaving coming tomorrow on (for ril). Ah, ril, how did ya know, buddy? How did ya know?

3. In the early 1990's I lived in Kansas, about an hour out of Kansas City. Had a hairdresser who had a little shop you entered from a side door in somebody's house in a neighborhood. It looked like a reworked family room, with the fake wood-panelled walls and the orange and brown plaidy furniture still sitting in the back of the room, used as a waiting room for the two-seat beauty shop now inside.

Hey. It was a living, and it saved on rent for the shop. It was a good idea. You did what you had to do to get along out in that neck of the woods.

This lady was nice but always broke. She was nice but was always trying to sell me this kinda-fair-to-partly-cloudy homemade bead earring stuff her sister-in-law or somebody made. She was nice in that every day way that's, well, pretty nice in its place, but not so nice out in the wide open. One day we tried to talk politics, or really, she told me the story of why she would shortly vote for Billy-The-Hey-I-Did-It-Yep-Yanked-Down-My-Tighty-Whities-in-the-back-of-my-old-El-Camino-on-indoor-outdoor-carpeting-in-the-floor-of-that-puppy-hey-I'm from-Arkansas-baby-Clinton. (And being from Kentucky, I'm guessing you should be able to surmise, I've known the type who tried this crap on.)

Anyway, so the hairdresser says to me...I'm votin' for Clinton because he's the only man I ever heard that mentioned hairdressers in a speech.

Good Lord, I remember thinking...The Emperor's new clothes still fit him just fine.

There's a helluva lot more I could say here, but as you're an intelligent lot, I'll leave it alone for now.

4. More coming, tomorrow.

Happy Sunday

Yesterday matched the weather, because it was weird. You know, when some days the weather sucks but you're happy, or the weather is fine fine fine but you're feeling foul, and either way you're watching, it feels like the weather version of cognitive dissonance?

Well, yesterday did match the weather for me. Threat of thunderstorms with occasional breakthrough blue skies, as I drove my visitor back down to the city where she lives. It was a three hour drive down, and a six hour drive back, but I was alone, so mainly, I was fine with the delays and the three mile wait to get through a tunnel under a shipway near the Chesapeake, and a sudden fierce storm on Route 17 in rural Virginia. It was weird, and that fit just fine.

Thought you all might get a grin out of the pictures my visitor decided she wanted copies of (pictures she'd taken from a room she never mentioned she'd been in, looking around. These were the pictures deemed 'pretty enough' to show her friends, back when I (purportedly) looked like her. Apparently I didn't have enough pass-mark pictures to make copies of more than three, so she took copies of two of The Blondster, who apparently, even now, looks just like my 80 year old mother. (The prom picture posted on here before, and a picture of the photo shoot that I didn't put on - the Blondster, in profile.) Talk about fiction fodder, baby.

Anyway, Happy Father's Day to the fathers, Happy Sunday to the others of us. And now, back to editing for me...

This one's a hoot. I was nineteen or twenty - and dating the nice guy standing there next to me (not just when he was standing next to me. I dated him other times as well.) My visitor took this one with her because I reminded her she'd made this white dress, so she wanted people to see how well she sewed. JB was thrilled she chose this photo rather than our wedding photo. Oh yeah.



And this one's a hoot, because we skipped me from age twenty to age forty-one or so. She took this one because she remembers the sun room in the house I owned at the time, and she liked that room, and my hair looked nice back then.



And this one's a hoot, because she chose it because she liked my hair short in this one. Age: mid-forties.



Hey, it could have been even weirder. She actually wanted a picture of me in my wedding dress from my marriage to the girl's biological father instead of this last one. I told her no.

Tough Week

There's a reason there's a literary genre of Southern Gothic, ya know...

I'm sorry I haven't been around much, visiting you guys. I'm also missing out on a good reading I need to be doing, that I can't do, and that's because from the time I arrive home, and I do mean, pull up in my driveway, I have a visitor waiting for me, looking out the window to see when I arrive, talking incessantly, humming to herself, incessantly, when she's not talking, showing me clothes, taking pictures off my shelves if she decides she wants them and putting them in her suitcase and, when I call her on it because I see it's missing, she gets mad; hoarding food in the back of the refrigerator if she found something I bought for her, that she doesn't want to share, showing me more clothes, telling me how she cleaned my microwave out for me (because I am not ever clean enough, apparently - she says this as well, by saving the paper towels she used to clean and saying things like just look at this, Robin) telling me she wants me to make copies of pictures of me that she found when she went through drawers without permission, because she wants to show people back where she lives, when she goes home, that I was pretty when I was young, that I looked like her when I was young...and then she says...I wish you were still pretty, Robin, like you used to be, back when you look liked me. Well, fuck me.

I'm living in a fast-forward version of the way I grew up, guys, and it's pretty hard. This isn't what it sounds like, not exactly. This isn't a relative faultering with age - well, it is, but it isn't. Because what she is, is exactly what she was like when she was younger, but I have to grit my teeth and be kind, because we all get old, and how could I live with myself if I wasn't charitable enough to put up with crap from an old lady every once in a while. Any old lady, but especially this old lady.

I'm tempted to say something dramatic like...if you don't hear from me, you'll know it's because I blew my brains out, but it won't happen.

Oh, good Christ, there she goes again...hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm...fast, staccato-like, in the same way she used to mumble to herself out in the kitchen when I was a kid, carrying on a running conversation with her favorite person...

The real me will be back sometime Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, I've checked the fuck OUT.

Hope your week is better than this.

A surprise of a novel idea walked into my head...

...a couple of days ago. It happened while I was driving, just passing the place you can see in the picture below, which makes sense, because I love to drive, even when I'm driving in to work, and because I have my music going, and no one talking; just me with me.

At stoplights, I jotted down phrases and drew lines to connect them so they made sense later. A couple of things I'd been juggling around for a while came crashing together, and I saw a way to do something with them.

(I swear I need a new laptop with a battery that lasts a while - if I drove up and down the miles along the parkland road that runs along the Potomac near our house, I think I could write this novel in pullover places, and imbue it with immediacy. Or I think I could, anyway.)



Trouble is - I have no idea how it ends - I see the scenes, can just about taste them and smell them, they seem that real. The first sentence of the novel came to me this morning, while I was driving alone again. This is how I wrote the best parts of my first novel. Sentences, sometimes several, walked across my thoughts and I'd write them down, catch hold of them before they left me. But I don't know what's gonna end up happening.

Another trouble is - I already had quite a bit of the opening chapter to what I thought was my next novel written. But this one is stomping on me. And I'm gonna write it in fast-forward over the summer. And it's gonna be a short one.

And the biggest trouble is -I haven't really wrapped up the first novel yet - don't know what's happening with it, should be editing it down right now, but I feel a very strong pull to the new, with sentences walking into my brain fully formed and pissed off if I don't write them down. I think it has to be done while it's forceful and immediate.

So...please tell me - has this ever happened to you?

Photos of The Blondster in a fashion shoot today made me think about...

...when my world was small and I didn't know how to make it bigger for a lot longer than made sense if you happened to be a person on the outside, watching - because it isn't only money that opens worlds, is it? It's what you're taught and what you're told about where your boundary lines are drawn – and if they exist to hold you in – or to keep you safe until they let you go.

If you have what it takes to reach or exceed them; it’s not all about the Horatio Alger crap – smart striving getting you that brass ring you’d been dreaming all about – as far as I can tell, it’s hardly ever about that at all. I’m not saying it never works. I’m saying it works only rarely.

It's all a tangle, wrapped up as it is in what you believe you can do – because you’ve been allowed to believe it. Even when you don’t remember about those boundaries, they’re still out there, existing.

I truly believe this, and I’ve felt them, and they aren’t nice to feel, because they last a lifetime, long after you’ve found out about them, and you know about what they do.Most of the time I was writing my novel, I had to fight a voice I recognized from a long time ago, telling me in a hush whisper sound on repeat… You can’t do this. Who do you think you are, you can’t do this, who do you think you are…And I still feel that way, even though I'm a capable faker.

Freedom of choice, free will; that old playground is a bit of an illusion, when the choices you make are so much determined by your circumstances of birth, and I don’t mean exactly money – I mean, in how you are loved. And I mean by that – in what way you are loved; or not. If you’ve been held close to the vest to fulfill the needs of a parent, of what they want for you so they can have it themselves, in an enclosed environment - or if you’ve been held close and loved but allowed to envision open travel and an open vision of what you can do in the world. You have to be very much cognizant of who you are, and how you ended up that way, to stand on your own when you've been taught not to.

I want my girls to have open choices – to work for what they want, of course, to try and succeed on their own, but to have choices, and not feel that they have to be attached to me to be well, to be all right.

I’ve been thinking about this all day, ever since I received pictures of a photo shoot The Blondster was in today, in England. JB flew over with her a few days ago – they spent time with our wonderful family in Somerset (those of you who’ve met Jan, you know what I mean), and today Ms. Blondster modeled dresses designed in silk and woven precious metals that look so soft, it’s hard to believe the metals aren’t exquisite spun yarns – the gorgeous silks designed by Jan and the woven metals by her daughter, my niece, Rachel.

So, we’ve been working to give the girls this open feeling to where they can go with themselves, and it sure as hell isn’t easy, but Sky Miles sure help, and having a step-dad who's willing to go the extra mile with those puppies, to help Ms. Blondster reach out and grab for some good and different stuff, and to have a family waiting there with open arms and a happy request for help showcasing the gorgeous clothing and jewelry that caught the attention of one of the best fashion photographers in England, who came into Jan and Rachel’s shop one day some weeks ago, saw one of the dresses on a mannequin and said I have to photograph this.

So she did.

Here: http://charltonhouse.com

Here’s a snap Jan took of the shoot-in-progress at one stage:



Damn. I wish I’d been there. But more than that, I’m so, so very happy The Blondster was.

Here's mine. And when your voice posts are ready...

please put a note on here, so we know to come and have a listen.

UPDATE TO UPDATE: (2 more voices up)

Aerin and
Writtenwyrd have added theirs, and the links are in the comments - toward the end of the comment trail. I'll beback to listen when home later - I think this is a first for WW! AND, Aerin has something a bit different going on, so...have at it with these two listens.

FH has hers up, and it's a good one! The link is on the right.
And these are up as well, if you're checking to make sure you've seen them all:

EE (the link is in the comments trail)

And the rest - just go to the links on the right, by name:

freddie
McK
Paca
Pete
Whirl

So that's now ten of us altogether so far for voice posts, and Kiersten has a song up, with a link in the comments trail that leads right to it.

Janey and BT may have posts coming soon, depending on their schedules outside-the-blogs giving them some time...



The Blondster helped me make my YouTube. It worked all right until the last few sentences, and then it stopped, as it were, midstream.

So...here are the last few sentences of what I wrote, in this scene in the middle of my novel. A few of these sentences are on the video, and then it cuts off right before the end.

So, here's the end, so you can finish it when the sound cuts off at just about the end of the first of these last two paragraphs...



...and the growing old out on the coal-filled mountain and the strip mining taking her home away, and her heart giving out with her standing up on a chair, reaching too high, rehanging clean curtains for the retarded cleaning-lady sisters that paid room and board to live upstairs in her Mammy’s house she never wanted to buy but she had to buy because she had no place else she could afford to go.

And I was so glad I’d seen her try and smile at me. Not only my grandmother Willa, but the underneath Willa coming out from her picture right then; the two of us able to say good-bye to one another, and have it touch.

I'm looking forward to hearing yours!

Over the weekend, JB and I went to see...

some of my relatives in Florida. The fun ones. I have a lot of sets, or subsets, really, of blood relatives, but only two actually fun sets. One set is in Florida, and the other is split into two - one in Pennsylvania, and one in Kentucky. OK - that's three. Whatever.

Anyway, the Florida set is three households - two on the coast, one inland. We got together with the two coasties and the inlander, and stayed at a beach condo that belongs to one of them...and we had great views.





JB says hi, by the way. That's him, in the picture:



Aside from great views, we had a good time. Wish I'd remembered to take a picture of this restaurant we liked - if you walk out the back door to the inlet it sits beside, fishing boats are docked back there, and there's a big covered area where they chop up their fresh catch. And a big sign that says "Before you dump the carcass in the ocean, poke out the eyes". (No wonder why I'm the next best thing to vegetarian. I used to have Twilight Zoney nightmares of being caught on a fishhook by some alien race dudes, and fricasseed [spelling?] into a nice, tasty, of course] appetizer.)

They poke out the eyes so the carcass will sink. Lovely.

Good thing I was drinking white wine and laughing my ass off at my cousins.

But anyway, here's the part you wanna know about - the next afternoon, we drove away from the relatives and checked into our hotel, an hour or so away. And we sat around at the pool for a couple of hours, JB and BT and me. (Okay - not grammatically correct, but it rhymes, so run with it, please. I know I am.)

Here's a pic of JB and BT that I took:



And yes, I was still drinking white wine - but they made me drink it in a plastic cup.

And yes, BT really is a sweetheart. A smartass sweetheart, the kind with a sly smile on his face and a good story behind his eyes - the best kind - and just exactly like you'd figure he'd be, which was no surprise, and that was a good, good thing. Like meeting an old friend you hadn't seen in a while, except in this instance, it had been never.

Cool, huh?

So The Blondster, While We Were Out of Town...(and 2 other things)

goes and has herself a big time. And, as you can see from the picture below, she doesn't have that big time with a guy I expected to see standing there with her - although, I have to say, it makes me smile to see them together.

JB and I were at the beach (a trip that's been planned for weeks) for a long weekend - and The Blondster didn't decide until the week before we were leaving, that she was going to the prom. So here she is, in her little black dress:



And yeah, that's right. Mama wasn't there, except in spirit, and via texting-her-ass-off.

Which has its pros and cons. As, for example, when, ten minutes before she was to be picked up, she texted me this little nugget....

" Mom. Being picked up in 10 minutes. Where's my bra?"

She meant her strapless and special bra, not one of the other nine or so numbers. But mama knows this stuff, doesn't she? Oh yeahhhhhh. Even when being texted on the beach.

The Two Other Things

1. Guess what? I met one of you all when we were out of town. It was not a surprise at all, how it worked out, which was a wonderful thing. I'll pop a picture on later this week, after I re-figure how to download pictures. And yes, I drank white wine at a bar again, but this time, I drank white wine alone. I'm sure you'll recognize the pic when you see it!

2. AND - the voice thing is this Wednesday and Thursday. YAY! I've been thinking about which piece to read, and hope you are as well.

Back Monday...

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend, coming up with one of your favorite passages to read next week.

And don't worry, I won't post days and days of stories about this long weekend away.
I promise!

Just a snippet or two, and some pictures of the ocean.

Voices - a group anniversary AND...a link I forgot to put on.

Last June I sent this one out...

Thursday, June 19, 2008
I'm (sort of) reading you a story...

Voices and accents matter. It's not like this is big news. We all know it - and I think it's something I miss with you guys. (Also, I knew 'as if in a dream' that you were just dying to see our front hallway.)

I've seen one of you, spoken to two others of you, and heard one of your voices on a link thing (paca); it was nice to confirm that we're not only ether.

So....here's my voice, reading you the paragraphs I wrote about in 'Edit Me' earlier on. (Just pretend that last year's first YouTube is inserted here.)

This is my first attempt at one of these, so I sound a bit like I'm hollering out from inside a nice cozy tin can. But the only reason I chose YouTubing is because I don't know how to use anything else and get it into the blog (actually, I don't know how to use this either, which is why it sounds louder than I sounded when I was reading it. And Blondster did the whole thing for me on her Mac. If she hadn't been around, there'd be no sound going on, I can tell you.)

If any of you guys know how to embed any other sound things, let me know. And now, it's somebody else's turn...

It's been close to a year since we started; and I think it would be great if we did a group anniversary post for this.

Looks like we were having fun for a good reason, with a long history - reading aloud as a means of deaper communication. I found this article/opinion piece in the New York Times recently about the resonance and the meaning only found when words are spoken:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/opinion/16sat4.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

I'm thinking this week is gonna be a busy one, so how about Wednesday, June 3rd and Thursday, June 4th, we do voice posts as a group, this time with our own writing; a favorite piece, either because of the difficulty in getting the voice there where we wanted it, or because it came out, as it sometimes does, like automatic writing; something that makes the words close to us.

How does that sound?

The first anniversary of my blog... what’s the point?

"This is a work of fiction. A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of the truth."

(Quote on the copyright page of the 2009 Random House Trade Paperback Edition of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.)

The point, to me is and always has been that the truth is fiction, or, fiction is the truth.

From the time I first started reading, once I got past the age of five or so, the 'I can read' sentences time, like See Dick and Jane run. Run Dick run. Run Jane run. Run run run...



I’ve read fiction to go away to find separated places that meant I’d found the truth of life when I found their far countries, and stayed to live down inside their pages and pages. And that's where I found connection.


When Boo Radley shuffled to his feet, light from the living room windows glistened on his forehead. Every move he made was uncertain, as if he were not sure his hands and feet could make proper contact with the things he touched. He coughed his dreadful railing cough, and was so shaken he had to sit down again. His hand searched for his hip pocket, and he pulled out a handkerchief. He coughed into it, then he wiped his forehead.
Having been so accustomed to his absence, I found it incredible that he had been sitting beside me all this time, present. He had not made a sound. ----- from To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee




It seems I've spent most of my lifetime with an inner monologue spinning along inside; speaking and thinking differently than anything I ever did say, or felt permitted to say. Inside the separated places in fiction, I found compatibility; realities often more palpable and more palatable, and more real than whatever current reality I happened to be inhabiting.



It is his extremity that I seemed to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry - much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory. ----
from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

My guess is, most people have this feeling - hence the need for fictions built as temporary buttresses against the world, or as explanations, or as excuses; perhaps finessed accompinaments - written words, film, songs and the theater. Most of all, for me, the form of the novel, holding words on bound pages in my hands, because that is where I am able to do my own world-building, never mind another's picture, or idea of set scene.




He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or the rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. -----
from All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

I guess that's why we're all here together, isn't it, and why we all know each other.

We all love stories - fiction, what passes for non-fiction, and the mixture in-between.

So happy anniversary, you all, and thanks for being around.

And thanks, BT, for helping me figure out how to get this set up in the first place, a year ago tomorrow.

Amazon's Wack-Eloquent Reviews

www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QR3AC2WXWHIT

I actually tried to put a link on here. And I didn't even whine or curse this time, so maybe that gave me good luck. (I'll know when I press publish.)

Anyway, JB told me about a couple of tongue in cheek, funny reviews on Amazon. This one is for Bic pens.

There's another one for T-shirts with wolves on it. The 3 Wolves T-Shirt. Hot hot hot.

It's a hoot:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NZW3IY/ref=s9_sims_gw_s1_p193_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=12F68E2XCFND078ETW1S&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

It might be fun to do this as a group. Converge on an item, showcase our communal splendiferous writing, and have some good grins.

What do you think?

(And hey, apparently, if you order the 3 Wolves T-Shirt, women at Walmart will fawn all over you, baby. I'm just saying.)

P.S. Dammit. I somehow, using voodoo or something, made the first link actually work.
The second link, when I clicked publish and looked so I could see my sudden techno-genius skills a-shining, screwed up. But it's worth a cut and paste, you all.

Or, if you have my code thingie to get on here, please feel free to make this thing a link. Thanks!

Pics tonight...words tomorrow.

Sorry - too sleepy for coherence.

Short version: We had a good and long weekend in Cymru.
Long version: when I'm awake.



Three of our girls, walking to JB's party.


The venue, overlooking the Bristol Channel.


Woods near Castle Combe, in Wiltshire, England, where we stopped on Monday after leaving Wales, on the way to Heathrow.


Our table at The Inn in Castle Combe.


Turns out, the village was the site for the filming of much of Dr. Doolittle (the Rex Harrison version), and many others.


There were lots of reasons why.

I know, I know. Life isn't this perfect. But sometimes, visiting a physically perfect place feels necessary in a very basic way, maybe in order to see for yourself in a large picture way that striving actually works sometimes.

Anyway, more tomorrow.