To Think On Peace

When I think of peace

I think of water

Of smooth surfaces

Of oceanic depths

Of cleansing

Of quenching 

Of succor

Of need

(Of tears of drowning)

Peace like water

Is contorted stillness

An ocean holds so much

Life and death within 

The waves are the rhythm 

The breathing of its heart

The cadence of the souls

That reside inside 

There are constant changes

Occurring to and through

Any body of water

As with all things

Yet unlike land

When storms pass

The water 

Is as it was

And unlike fire

None can stifle

The power 

Of its flow

And unlike air

It is seen and heard

More than effect

Of its passing

Is that the essence

Of peace?

To truly live

A life of peace

Is it not to live

A life apart

But instead to live

A life connected

Feeling all the things

That happen to and through

Always changing 

With every squall

But remaining true 

To who you are

(To who I am for who you were)

These things in life

Will wash through me

Will wash over me

Changing me within

Without destroying 

Who I am

A frog sitting

On the surface 

Of a placid pond

Water so clear

The frog begins 

To call its call

Sing its song

Creating vibration

Rippling out

Through water

In the shape 

Of the frog

Each ripple 

Reflecting the other

Connecting the frog

To the water

When the song

Falls silent

The frog and pond

Are as they were

Yet they have changed

I have changed

The world has changed

Around and through us 

I want to be the water

And the frog

And the vibration

And the stillness

I want to be the trees

Mirrored in the pond

The clouds overhead

And the space between

Peace

Is all these things

I want to be 

Peace

A Look Back on Writing in 2019 & 2020 Goals for Writing

Even though 2019 was a rough year, one thing I did really well was making sure I had time to write and I wrote. I did not write every day, but I definitely wrote several times every week. I had been trying that "treat it as a job" approach for over a year, but it wasn't working for me. It sucked all the passion out of writing and I felt guilty if I didn't write during the times I had set aside due to a migraine or whatever. So I decided to try the "I Will Write Every Week" approach. Basically, writing became my place to relax and unwind. I was still writing down times to write in my planner, but it wasn't a, "YOU MUST DO THIS OR YOU FAIL AS A WRITER" type mentality. It was more, "hey, look at all this time you have to write! I know there's a lot going on, but once you get done with the stuff you HAVE to do, look at this fun thing you GET to do." Just a shift in perception and it made all the difference. It also helped that I had/have my writing groups and open mics as deadlines keeping me accountable. This is what I succeeded at this past year:

• Wrote every week
• Wrote every day for November & surpassed the 50,000 word mark for NaNoWriMo
• Sent out one Short Story (It got rejected, but with some pointers on how to fix the story so I'm seeing that as a win)
• Set up and started a Grief Journaling Workshop at the Library
• Continued with the Writers' Word Feast
• Visited an open mic I wasn't running
• Ran The No Shush Salon open mic
• Finished my memoir & gathered readers

Here are my writing goals for 2020:

• Send my memoir to my readers (Edit: DONE)
• Continue writing every week
• Send out writing for publication at least once a month
• Visit other (not run by me) writing groups
• Visit other (not run by me) open mics
• After getting back feedback from readers about my memoir (March 1), Edit it
• Figure out what direction I want to go with my memoir & go there

The Year My Sister Became a Swan

*** I am poking at a speculative memoir. This is part one of a chapters. ***

I stand at the threshold of my parents’ house. I have been here before. Don’t open the door, my mind whispers. If I don’t open the door, I will never know. The bliss of ignorance. But the knob has already turned. The door falls open. My father is there. It begins again.

My father, a stout man with black hair and serious eyes, chokes out, “there has been an accident.” Accident… If it had been anyone but him, I would think it an April Fools joke. But coming from him, the word hangs thick in the air, echoing and reverberating. “Accident, accident, accident…” I want to breathe fire on the word, incinerate it, eradicate it from my life, from being true, from the new reality of what my family will become.

The year was 1995. Joy, a high school Spanish teacher, was in Costa Rica as one of the chaperones for her school's International Club. They had taken the group white water rafting on the last day… THE LAST DAY. And it was beautiful. But rafts collided, sending everyone into the swirling chaos of the rapids. All around were sounds of shouting and water breaking on rocks and animals in the jungle. The adrenaline of the calamity that was going on making it impossible to know anything.

What we do know:  A man drowned, he died.

Joy might've dove back in. Joy, who was a very good swimmer, might've been pulled under by the drowning man. But we will never know for sure.

We also know they found her body floating, face down. They pulled her out. She was dead. Too long in the water. But they revived her. A miracle! (The miracle she could have used, was not drowning in the first place.) An ambulance bouncing over rough terrain. She survived, survived, survived...

Joy, in a coma; Joy, out of the coma. I was not there. Her voice changed; she changed; she was not the Joy I knew. She became other. The accident caused her to transform.

“You have to be the big sister,” she said to me in a moment of clarity, before her transformation was complete. I watched as her neck arched and stretched and feathers sprout all over her body. She squawked as wings blossomed where arms had been. Her legs thinned, her feet flattened and spread out. She became awkward and unsteady on land. Her words were barely intelligible as they poured forth from her beak. “They need you, you’re the oldest now. You have to take care of them.”

But I didn’t know how. I was too busy wallowing; too busy avoiding. My parents turned to paper. I only saw my younger sisters when I would squint. They were so far away. My eyes went black, unseeing. My sisters changed too. One became a veil of darkness and silence. The other was a smile so tight she cracked at the edges. And Joy had become a swan.

Feathers landed on everything. Everything.

The care and feeding of the swan fell to my mother. She rarely asked for help though we knew she needed it. I did not offer. She did her best, but there are no manuals on how to care for your swan daughter. Feed, shelter… but what happens when she flies into a rage? What happens when the swan who was your oldest daughter attacks your youngest daughter? What do you do when the whole family is covered in bruises? How do you explain the feathers everywhere; the beak marks; the three feet of water in the basement?

The water in the basement...

The basement flood broke me and my mom. Sewage water drowned my belongs; my writing. It destroyed much of what had been saved of Joy before her accident; before her transformation into a swan. We cried. My mother and I held each other and we cried. The swan swam.

My father, the engineer, focused on fixing things. He could not fix his daughter who was now a swan, his daughter with blackened eyes, his daughter who had become a dark room, or his daughter who’s smile shattered inside her heart. But he could gather people to empty and clean the basement. He could fix the basement.

It began again… I went back to the basement. It was fixed, but the same. Nightmares waited there. I opened my eyes, no longer unseeing, but everything was faded. I tried to help my mother with my swan sister; gathering feathers; cleaning; trying to understand her.

But my swan sister swam further away.

On Feeling Like an Impostor

I am not a well published writer. I've had one short story published recently, a few pieces published years back, & lots of lovely rejection letters to attest to my continuing to submit my writing. Outside of the possible publications, I have several short stories that just need a bit of polish before I send them out, other short stories that are bare bones, a novel that is "finished" but getting a massive overhaul, another "finished" novel that is set aside, three other novel starts, two barely formed novel ideas that I have jotted down notes and have done a bit of research on, a cluster of memoir vignettes, and article ideas (like this one) that I want to work on when I have time.

I feel like I have been a writer my whole life. I was “writing” stories before I could write. As soon as I could form sentences, my mom told me that I was making up stories. When I was a bit more cohesive with my ideas, I would dictate these stories to my mom and she would write them down for me.* (They were terrible, but she was very tolerant.) Even though I have dyslexia, writing was a huge goal of mine so, after a lot of struggle and with a mom who would not tolerate a teacher calling me slow and stupid and even though we moved to Venezuela in the middle of all that**, I learned to write.

All of this, despite my lack of published work, says in my mind that yes, I am a writer.

And yet…  And yet recently at my writers’ group I had someone say that I wasn’t a “real” writer; that I wasn’t serious about my writing. For a couple of days, I believed them. The evidence? I have goals other than writing, I don’t have a consistent writing schedule***, and I don’t support myself with my writing.

There was another writer there who writes every morning for 2 hours, supports themself with their writing, and their entire life is about their writing. They didn’t agree with the person who said I wasn’t a real writer, but they didn’t dispute them either. I, on the other hand, got very defensive.

After a couple of days of self doubt I thought, why do I care what this other person has to say? By their own admission, they have never been published and rarely write. Upon reflection, I believe that they were trying to find common ground with me and didn’t realize how hurtful their words were. But, let’s be honest, it’s not about them, it’s about me. I doubt myself as a writer. Therefore, if anyone says anything that reflects that doubt, no matter how deeply I’ve buried it, it comes rising to the surface like some monolith of my personal insecurity. I feel like an imposter.

I wish, at this point, I could say, “and this is how I destroyed my feelings of being an imposter.” But I can’t… because I still feel like an impostor… sort of. I write because I’m a writer, and it doesn’t matter if I’m published or not. Kafka was never published in his lifetime. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 44 (my current age) when she became a columnist and didn’t publish her first novel until she was 64, and the Marquis de Sade was 47 when he published his very controversial novel Justine. The list goes on and on… Here’s a article about 10 Great Literary Late Bloomers and here’s the website dedicated to Late Bloomers called Bloom. This should make me feel better, right?

But then my thoughts spiral into, maybe I’m just a really crappy writer. Who am I to be giving other writers advice? How do I dare to run a writing group and an open mic? I wonder why I even bother writing since all the great things have already

Self-doubt sucks. So, dear reader, I pose this question to you: What do you do when self-doubt comes creeping around?

  

*All of the stories that my mom transcribed for me, along with about two thirds of my earlier writing, was lost in the basement flood of 1995. That was a terrible year.

**I have started writing about that. So meta!

***I’ve never been good at the, “get up first thing and write every day”, philosophy since I am not at all a morning person.

Morning Musings #3: Writing Problem

My biggest problem when it comes to writing* is that I have TOO MANY things that I want to work on. 

Example: I NEED to finish editing The Peculiar Predicament of Poppets, but the story "Transmissions from Mars" keeps telling me things I don't want to forget and once I jot those ideas down, I want to work on that. Then there's the super political, very dark and highly satirical "Nobody's Property" story that I want to write about an extreme feminist group called Vagina Denta taking over the White House. On top of that, as I get stories ready to send off, I keep needing to edit those too... 

I've been told that it's a good problem to have and I agree. I'm glad that I never have to struggle for ideas. I am blessed, I am privileged, I am prolific. But sometimes, I'd really like to control the flow. (Did this suddenly become a feminine products commercial?)

*aside from that not getting published thing. But as long as I'm sending my writing out, that's not on me.

Writing Woes & NaNoWriMo

I have three novels and lots of short stories to work on, but my head and my heart hasn't really been in my writing these last several months. I know part of it is because I have a lot going on - a promotion, two jobs, working on two HUGE events along with my regular ones, housemates moving out, a pretty steady flow of foster kittens, getting ready to launch cemeteryguardians.com for it's second year, and just the regular business of living. But also, I've been feeling a draw to work on my nonfiction... to tell the story of my life... to write about my sisters... a memoir about my family... to write about Joy's brain injury... to write about how that one event completely changed my family. This is something I have been trying to write for twenty years, ever since her accident first happened. But almost three years ago my mother died and she has always been my best fact checker whenever I've written about our lives. Also, writing about something so true and personal is really hard and draining. I fear using what my family has gone through for my writing. I worry about not being true to what happened. Memory is faulty, and I have a brain that likes to embellish and fictionalize. I know that writing is cathartic, but I fear that sharing my life with strangers will not be fair to the people who share my life.

About seven months after my mom died, H is for Hawk came out. This memoir by Helen Macdonald was about her father dying suddenly, something I related to on a very personal level. But it was also about how she threw herself into training her hawk and secluded herself from the rest of the world. This experience is very different from mine, though I do tend to throw myself into whatever I'm doing, I've never had the luxury of time or money to step away from my life. But the emotion, or attempts to side-step emotion, in the story were very familiar. It helped me. It also made me think that if my writing could possibly help someone else, I should write my story.

So my plan is that in November, I will work on my memoir for NaNoWriMo. Over the first week of November, I am visiting one of my dearest friends in Rode Island and since she is an amazing author, I'm certain we will have time to write. I don't know if it will stay a memoir, and that's okay. All I know is that I need to write my life.

Progress Report on The Peculiar Predicament of Poppets (Plus, blatant pandering with pup & cat pics)

Today I had the day OFF! Well, not entirely. I'm house-sitting for Phoebe, this beautiful pup:

Adorable Phoebe!

Also, I had to stop by the shelter to get more cat food for Björk, the pregnant lady cat I'm fostering. She is VERY preggo and eating constantly. She's super sweet too! Here she is enjoying head scritches:

"Keep scratching, human!"

Anyhow, between walking and playing with Phoebe and visiting our cat boys and preggo kitty, I took myself out writing. I feel like I made a LOT of progress on my novel, The Peculiar Predicament of Poppets. Here's where things stand:

• My novel is now over 40,000 words, more than halfway through. (I thought I'd be revising all the things by now, but I've been slowly making my way through each chapter and they insist on getting revised before I move on.)
• I KNOW how the novel is going to end! (I just gotta get there now...)
• I fixed some character glitches.
• I got rid of a few characters that weren't fitting.
• I discovered things about some of my characters.
• I love you, google maps, for having "walk" & "bike" options so I can figure out how long it would take my one character to walk / pull a cart across state lines and how long it will take another character to reach her destination on a runaway horse in 1871.
• As of now, there will be 30 chapters in 2 parts. I have 16 chapters fully written and the rest have at least a spark of what they're about.
• I sketched out the layout of a scene to give me a better idea of movement. I haven't done that since I was writing stage plays. It was good. I need to do more if that!

Thoughts About Process

Inspired by a conversation with my bestie, a visual artist:

I rarely write one story at a time. Currently, I have two novels I'm actively working on, two other novels sitting on the back burners in my mind, and about a dozen short stories I'm in the process of editing, finishing, or sending out. This is my problem... this has always been my problem. Not writer's block, writer's blockage. Too many ideas trying to be born at the same time. It's messy, counter productive, and frustrating. I'm great at starting things. I suck at finishing them. This is why I really like short stories. I can sometimes get all the way through a short story while I get distracted when working through a novel. But, to be honest, this also happens with about half of my short stories too. That's why I have so many story starts.
Once I tried just focusing on one story and setting all other stories aside. I forced myself to complete the story. It was terrible, but finished. The next story I worked on I tried to do that again, but then an idea for another story kept demanding my attention so I gave in and worked on that too. It took more time, but it felt natural to work that way. So when thoughts about one of my novels kept saying, "hello! Pay attention to me!" I was attentive.
My main goal right now is to finish all the story starts I have. Will I start other stories in the interim? Possibly. But if I can just get one story finished, edited, and sent out each week (month?), I will be happy.

February 2015 - Writing Check-in & a New Motto

Writing this month has gone much slower than I had hoped. It's all due to adjusting to the new job, a dog/housesitting gig and getting sick. But I have two stories and a poem pending acceptance and I've made a bit of headway on the Peculiar Predicament of Poppets novel. It's heading in a strange direction and might end up with a poem attached to it after all. (Since it began its life as a poem, this delights me.)

I've also decided to treat my writing time as if I'm on a date with Writing, a very alluring lover. This is different than my treat-it-as-a-job approach which I'm also still doing. But it is interesting. One major difference: If I look something up then get distracted by something else that might relate to what I'm working on, I feel guilty about wandering away from Writing whereas when it was more of a job thing, I felt defensive about NEEDING to do whatever it was for my job. It's all about perspective, right?

Maybe my new writing motto should be, 

"schedule writing like a job, honor Writing like a lover."

My 2015 Writing Goals

I'm starting strong with a new job at a second library.
Hey j9, let's keep this trend of goal achieving going into this New Year!

• Polish the 10 Short Stories I already finished and send them off.
• It's just January & I've already sent off four stories!!! Yay!
• One was rejected, but it's already out to another publication.
• TWO have homes!!! (Details TBA)

• Edit the 10 stories that need major rewrites & send them off.

• Finish & send out the rest of my Yultide stories / doodles (This is what I did for gifties this year. I got my immediate family and a few friend's done, but so many left to do. Should I change the name to Springtime Stories if it takes me too long?)

• Finish the background work for the e-zine I'm putting together by May, go live with it by August.

• Sort through my Yuletide stories, my Tiny Terrible Tales & my Drabble Dreams & pull the ones that I want to grow (This is a Summer goal.)

• Finish rewriting The Peculiar Predicament of Poppets  (PPP) as a novel. (This story has been a poem, switched POV countless times and just keeps growing.) 

• Self-publish PPP by November. 

• Work on the Innosphere (This is the new title of the novel I wrote & got feedback on. It's changed A LOT... for the better... I hope!)

• Pull together my short story collections. 

• Decide which ones need a publisher & which are to be self-published.

It's gonna be a lot of work, but I'm excited about this new year!

Meta: Posting on Posting

So my plans to update twice a week has been an abominable FAIL!!! Then, the longer I went without posting, the harder it was to kick myself in to posting again. (Stupid loop of stupidity!)


BUT!!! That's not to say that I have not been writing... I HAVE!!! Here, let me catch you up on all the things I have been doing in my writerly life:

• I dubbed 2013 "The Year of Rejection"! (I was going to post about that closer to Jan. 1st...)
• I FINISHED my story, "High Priestess of Roadkill" AND sent it off to be published!
• It was rejected, but there were some helpful comments that came with that rejection
• I have sent it to two friends for critique
• I am working on two new stories:
• "Why I HATE Dragons!" (working title)
• The Birth of Squid Shoes: A Cautionary Tale
• I have started research on a Secret Project... (Oooooooooo!)
• After working on a map and timelines for Tech Forsaken (maybe working title?), my Jurispherian novel, I have set it aside. I got lots of very helpful critiques from my friends, but I was getting waaaaaaay too bogged down and need some time away from it. I plan to pick it back up again in March.

I have also, sadly, hit a glitch in the "and now I must purchase a computer" department of my life. This is partially due to finances, partially due to indecision and partially due to the demands of the "Secret Project... (Oooooooooo!)"

I'm also going to give myself a specific day of the week to post to this blog. So since today is Monday, that is the day it will be! (I thought this through quite a lot... can't you tell?)

Postings every Monday! Aaaaaaaaand GO!!!

Deadlines, Accountability & How Social Networking has Helped Me with My Writing

I tend to write better when up against a deadline. It's something I've been trying to fight (and failing) for several years now. Finally, with mounting evidence that I'd get stuff done for school 'cause I HAD to or for a project where others were counting on me, I gave in to this being a part of my nature as a writer.
I started giving myself arbitrary deadlines. I would even research deadline schedules of places where I wanted to submit my work and use that as my deadline. This helped... a little. But it didn't quite do the trick. If I was coming up to a self-imposed deadline and I wasn't done or didn't FEEL like working on the piece, I would simply move the deadline. After all, it was just me, right?

But that was the problem. By themselves, the deadlines were too malleable.

So I looked at the other factor that played into me getting collaborative projects or school work done. ACCOUNTABILITY... A small part of me crossed her arms, pushed out her bottom lip and stomped her wee foot. (It was a little part of me.) She screeched about how NOBODY should have to check in on her 'cause she's an adult, dammit! (Funny how the side of me that claims adulthood with such defiance, is the very side that throws a childish temper tantrum.) A quieter voice asked, but who would want the burden of being accountable for our deadlines? This was a conundrum...

I had / have no desire to be a burden on anyone. But then I thought about the ways I could spread the accountability. It isn't about someone hounding me, but about me believing that my failing to finish affects more than myself.

Here are the places where I am accountable along with a few that I'd like to use:

• A Writers Group would be good, but I'm between groups right now. (I have an open invitation to a newish one, but it meets at a really bad time for me.) I LOVED when I was part of the Chicago Writers' Coven!!! Perhaps I'll gather a faction of that and get it started again. 

•  Open Mics kick my booty into getting things to a sharable place! I attend two pretty regularly: 

• Top Shelf Books Open Mic - meets on the second Thursday of the month  
• The Tamale Hut Cafe Reading Series - meets the third Saturday of the month

Even though they each have their issues, Top Shelf is far and the Tamale Hut isn't at an optimal time work-wise for me, since they meet once a month it usually works out. (There are a few others that I'd like to attend, but they are far AND at not so great times for me. I can rarely do that combination. Oh well... I do what I can.)

• Then there's Facebook... I've found that it helps if I post my writing plans. I've been advised that a Twitter account can have a similar effect. (I'm holding off on getting one of those for when I'm less dependent on the hours of the Libraries and the availability of their computers.) When I post about my plans, I get lots of encouragement and friends who are eager to see how my writing is going. 

• This blog is to be another accountability tool. In my sidebar, I've listed the writing I'm currently working on and what my deadline is. I plan to keep this list current and to add where I'm submitting as well.

•  The final accountability for me is teaching. I've just recently started doing workshops again and I get so much out of them! I'm going to work on doing more.