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Overheard This Week

140474989A poignant plea caught my ear as I visited Victoria’s new indoor market last week. Two women were bent over a plate of tacos and guacamole with corn chips. One of the women was marshmallow pale and her eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. She sighed, flipped a nubby brown scarf over her shoulder, leaned across the table and said:  ‘Can’t we just talk about shoes?’

No surprise there I guess. Wilma and Betty were big on shoe talk back in the Flintstone era. But this week the plea hit me with the force of a Louboutin to the solar plexus. Sometimes we want to set the serious stuff aside. That woman certainly did. Right now, I do too.

I’ll admit it: I’m drawn to the dark stuff. My books inevitably end up being a mix of light and dark. Life isn’t all sunshine and I don’t think it pays to pretend it is. But these last few weeks the happenings have been grim:  hundreds of thousands of people killed or impacted by typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The impact is being felt in my city where many residents are worried sick about loved ones overseas.  On a national scale, the mayor of our largest city has been embroiled in a Molotov cocktail of addiction, out-of-control rage and alleged ties to organized crime with widespread calls for his resignation.   On a personal level, a dear family friend died a couple of days ago and a step aunt is facing her last days too.  Needless to say, the nightly talk around our dinner table has been as heavy as braised short ribs and sweet potato mash, though not nearly as satisfying.

I guess that’s why I found myself repeating the plea from those anonymous women the other night: can’t we just talk about shoes?

Or maybe coffee beans? Okay, maybe not coffee because Teen Freud is sure to point out how child labor and exploitation is rampant in the cultivation of coffee in Colombia and Guatemala. Then how about we talk about the cute new puppy next door and how it falls on its bum every time it walks up the (basically negligible) hill between our houses?  No, Teen Freud, they did not get it from a puppy mill. Yes, Teen Freud, it is a pure bred Bichon Frise; yes, we are aware that there are many abandoned, mistreated and mixed breed dogs in the world.

As a matter of fact, I’m painfully aware of all of it. I read the papers (or those that are left).  I surf the ‘net (too much sometimes).  I talk about it and think about it and live it. We all do.  Our first two dogs were rescues from an abandoned litter.  I’ve witnessed (up close and way too personal) the devastating effects of addiction.  I’ve grieved more than one loss.

We all have. That’s why sometimes we need a few minutes to forget about it. That’s why sometimes we just want to talk about shoes. flowers-shoes-by-scherer-gonsales-spring2009-red

 

 

Transitions: Make Them Powerful, Not Harsh

152537949Here in the Pacific Northwest, it feels like we’ve gone from summer to winter in the space of a week. One day we were sitting by the pond enjoying 16 degree sunshine and two days later we were inside by the fire as a fierce windstorm brought plummeting temperatures, hail and a power outage. The transition was harsh.

Though the weather has stabilized to more fall-like norms, I’ve been thinking about transitions lately. I’m in the middle of revising a YA novel due out next year. As part of the process, I’m making sure the transitions from scene to scene, location to location, and from one point in time to another, are seamless.  But it occurred to me as I worked that if you want to get technical, novels themselves are one big transition. At least most of them are.

Transition, by definition, is the process or period of changing from one state or condition to another. In my novel, The Art of Getting Stared At, the teen protagonist must come to terms with a disease called alopecia areata and the subsequent loss of all her hair.  In the process, Sloane learns about judgement – the way she judges herself and others – and she changes significantly.  She literally transitions from one state of being (both externally and internally) to another.  While the editor was pleased with the way the story flowed, she felt Sloane’s journey from discovering the disease to accepting it – and accepting a particular truth about her own character – should have one big exclamation point somewhere. In other words, she wanted a recognizable point in the story where the character makes that leap, that transition, to realizing she isn’t who she thought she was.

I do have that. It’s a big, black moment kind of scene, and I quite like it. But since I’m more of a gradual girl myself (I don’t like going from summer to winter in a week) I built up to it. And in the process something was lost. So now I’m back in the story, refining and revising so the transition is seamless but the point of no return is clearly recognizable. I don’t want a harsh transition. I don’t like power outages, plummeting temperatures or hail and my character doesn’t either. I’m trying for powerful instead.

Wish me luck. And please pass the cocoa. It’s cold in here.

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For the Love of Books

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” Jorge Luis Borges

downloadI’m with Jorge. Only in my case, it’ll be a library with Michelin quality food and table service. To those who know me, this is no surprise. My first word was cookie and my second was book; my priorities haven’t shifted since I slept in a crib.

I adore books. And, when I had kids, I assumed they’d share my passion. How could they not?  I’m of the ‘children are made readers on the laps of their parents’ school. I also figured they’d share my love of food and have the easy-going disposition of their father.

Well, one out of three isn’t bad. We all do love to eat.

My daughter was captivated by books when very young. My son, not so much. For a long time, Zach only read books about fire trucks. Then came books about dinosaurs, sea creatures and cops, and only if I pushed him to sit down with me. But a story? Even a short one? Forgetaboutit. Zach had no time for a fictional world.

Until the summer of his fifth birthday.  We were spending a week at the beach. Taking a bag of books (this was a few years before e books) was de rigueur. Having reached the end of the cops cycle, I didn’t know what to take for Zach.

My husband did. He went out and bought a couple of Pokemon comic type books. One didn’t even have a story – just a creature per page, in bright detail, with the names spelled normally and phonetically. The second was an actual story, but heavy on the kid-friendly graphics. We gave the first book to Zach on the drive, hoping the pictures would hold his interest until we arrived.

They held his interest and more. By the end of that week, Zach was reading. As happy as that made me, I was more thrilled by the shift in his attitude. He was interested in stories. And he wanted more.

Mostly, for what seemed like years, he wanted more Pokemon. At the same time, my daughter went through a Babysitter’s Club book phase. When you’re a recognized writer checking armloads of Babysitter’s Club and Pokemon out of the library on a weekly basis, you’re awarded strange looks. Criticism also came from teachers and well-meaning friends who were appalled that I’d let my children read ‘such trash.’

For a while, I thought they were right. I went back to encouraging the kids to read books I deemed ‘appropriate.’ That worked about as well as getting them to clean their rooms. In other words, it didn’t.

Then my husband told me why he bought those Pokemon books in the first place. When he was a kid, his parents allowed only the classics in the house. In high school, more classics. For some kids that might have worked, but it didn’t for him. It was only years later, when he stumbled across an Isaac Asimov novel, that his love of reading began.

His words woke me up. Love. Of reading. I’d forgotten the very thing I wanted most for my kids. I wanted them to have a lifelong passion for books, to experience the joy that reading brings.

I set aside some snobbisms and grew up that day. My kids have grown up too. They no longer wear diapers, spit food, read Pokemon or the Babysitter’s Club. Right now Zach’s on a Paulo Coelho kick. My daughter has three books on the go, including a literary thriller that’s keeping her awake at night.

Raising one child who was born loving books and another who had to be led to them, taught me a few things. I learned that ultimately reading itself is what counts. That reading for pleasure may be as important as reading for information. That fire trucks and little boys go together, that Pokemon and the Babysitter’s Club eventually fade, but that the love of a good story, whatever form it takes, endures.

Now please pass the cookies. My book is waiting.

 

 

 

 

Peach Perfect . . . Oh Wait, Not Exactly

The last thing you want in a book is a perfect protagonist, or one with a perfect life. It doesn’t make for an interesting story.  I get my writing kicks out of complicating the lives of my characters, throwing one damn thing after another at them. But I like my life to be as smooth and as sweet as a latte.  It never is, of course (is anybody’s?).  This, however, seems to be my Season of the Unwelcome.

The peaches are feeling my pain.  They’re stressed this year. Diseased or blighted or suffering from the peach flu, I don’t know what it is, but they aren’t happy.  They’re mottled in some spots, tough in others, certainly not at their dripping-juice-down-your-arm best.

Now here’s the thing. I have expectations. And as Mr. Petrol Head keeps reminding me, I should know better (he apparently mastered the rather remarkable skill of going through life without expectations back in the crib).   If I’ve learned one thing from publishing – from life itself – it’s that expectations bite you in the butt.

 

I thought I’d beaten back this particular character flaw, especially where my garden is concerned.  Out there, I like to think of myself as sanguine (the word has such a nice ring to it, don’t you think?).  Some years the peach tree sets a good crop and some years it doesn’t.   The same goes for my apples and pears and raspberries and figs and just about anything else I grow.  Some years the bees and the weather and the Gods are kind and the harvest is good. When it isn’t, I tell myself there’s always the following year.

Except (and there’s always an except and I’m pretty sure the word except and the word expectation are related).  Except, I like to eat the food I grow. (I also like to sell every book I write which is another blog where the word sanguine may or may not appear).  But as far as the garden is concerned, I feel as if we have a deal of sorts. I will do the work and step back and let Nature do the rest. If – when – the plants produce, the unspoken rule is the results shall be edible.

This year the peaches are not. At least not as a whole, and not in the way I like my peaches – for breakfast or after lunch or late in the afternoon, peeled with a delicate little knife I bought years back at a flea market. I like my peaches minutes from the tree, fragrant, plain and real.

Not possible this year. Maybe, I decided, the peach tree was trying to tell me something. Maybe it was saying that into every life a little peach pie must fall.  That in the Season of the Unwelcome, a little sweet can be soothing. Even for those of us who aren’t dessert people, who rarely indulge, who are so task oriented that they would never consider peeling and slicing and baking peaches into a pie to only pamper themselves. Especially for them, the peach tree seemed to be saying.  Especially for them. And so I went into the kitchen where I peeled and sliced and diced, and turned a basket of perfectly imperfect peaches into a deliciously imperfect peach pie.

Thanks peach tree, for giving me the most unexpected and welcome gift of summer.

Pride Gets Me Every Time

strawberriesandpeonies 002The strawberries are great this year. My patch is lush and green . . . and crowded with berries. Berries that drip sweet juice down your chin when you bite into them; the kind that stain your fingers red.  Berries that entice me outside early in morning, while I’m still in my housecoat, to pick for breakfast.

“You must be very proud,” my neighbor called over the fence one morning last week when she saw me bent over the patch.

Her comment made me uncomfortable (and that morning I was dressed so it wasn’t my clothing that made me squirm). It was the word pride. It gets me every time.

Inevitably when I have a book published, someone will say the same thing: ‘you must be very proud.’  And inevitably I cringe.

Pride, according to Oxford, is a feeling of pleasure from one’s own achievements.

I get a lot of pleasure from the strawberries in the garden, from my garden itself. I get a huge amount of pleasure from the books and articles I write too. I’m totally on board with pleasure.

But pride in my own achievements? That sounds a lot like taking ownership. And there’s the catch. In my heart of hearts I truly don’t believe I do anything creative on my own. I can’t will those strawberries into form or make the peonies bloom (though I can and did rescue a pile of long-neglected peony plants and I babied them for a long time before they bloomed again).  So I can plant and dig and weed and hope, but something larger than me is in control.

For me it’s the same with writing. I can plot story landscapes and string words together; I can revise and polish, and polish some more. But there’s something much larger than me at play in the creation of a story. I’m not talking about all the people I depend on for help along the way, although those critique partners and editors, cover designers and marketers play a vital role as well. I’m talking about that unseen something many of us creative types tap into when we sit down to work. Call it the Muse or your Inner Voice or the Girls in the Basement. Call it the Kid Who Refuses to Grow Up. Whatever. All I know is that it exists, and it exists independent of me. On a good day, I touch it. On a great day, I’m part of it.

And whether I’m growing strawberries, babying peonies or writing books that makes me feel humble rather than proud.

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Weekly Eavesdropping Turns up a Winner

140474989My favorite overheard piece of conversation this week: The problem was I couldn’t get past his nostrils.

I’m not making this up. That’s what person one said to person two. The two people in question probably didn’t know I was eavesdropping. If they did, I doubt they would have cared. What kind of nostrils did he have, you ask?

The better question is who said this anyway?

What if it was a doctor trying to explain to a parent why he couldn’t get past the nostril to get at the piece of Lego jammed into their son’s nasal passage? Or a zoo maintenance guy explaining to his boss why he hadn’t treated the giraffe’s ear infection yet? Or a casting director telling the producer why he passed on the guy who nailed the reading but chose the guy having a bad hair day instead?

But no. It wasn’t anything quite so dramatic. It was – you guessed it – two women rehashing the details of last night’s date over a cup of coffee. She couldn’t get past his nostrils. She wasn’t going out with him again, end of story.

I guess they were . . . you know . . . seriously bad nostrils. Or else she’s seriously picky. But as her friend told her, “you can’t judge all guys by their noses.” And then she suggested, “You need to get out there and try harder.”

She might want to get on that. Good men can be hard to find. Especially when you’re eighty-five. 6174881770_1745778aac

Pink Confetti and Revisions

imageproxy.jpgcherrytreesNature often inspires me and it’s not unusual for me to find parallels between the natural world and the world of publishing.

I thought about this last week. I was in Vancouver and the ornamental cherry trees were at their best – froths of brilliant pink against the blue sky (yes, it was sunny and that’s a rarity in Vancouver in spring). Those blooms don’t last long, even with sunshine. In fact, some had already dropped, carpeting the streets in swaths of pink confetti. But before they drop, they put on a dizzying, pull-out-all-the-stops dance that takes your breath away. And then Mother Nature, aided by wind and time, comes along and encourages those blooms to drop so the trees can leaf out for another summer. And those trees will provide places for bird’s nests, and shade for picnics, and branches for kids to climb.

Those cherry blossoms are a lot like the ideal first draft – over exuberant, wild and a little uncontrollable. And beautiful. Stunningly so. But then we need to come along and let the pink confetti fall. We need to let go of words, sometimes entire passages, possibly even characters. It’s hard. We’re usually a little in love with those words and those characters. We see their beauty. Almost always. But in order for our manuscript to leaf out and become a reasonably good book that actually holds someone’s attention, we need to play Mother Nature. And sometimes Mother Nature can be brutal. We need to remember that too. But she is inevitably wise . . . inevitably in tune with the natural order of things.

So when it comes time to edit my next first draft, I’ll try hard to let the pink confetti fall. After all, spring rolls around every year without fail. And without fail, there is always another book to write. 2553927251_b113bbf06d.jpgcherrycarpet

You Know You’re a Writer When . . .

TwoishI wasn’t that odd as a child, not really, although if you ask my father he’d probably disagree. I was sensitive to my surroundings (especially to the undercurrents of conversations and what wasn’t being said); I was prone to storytelling (others referred to this as exaggeration); and I had three special (imaginary-to-everyone-else) friends. I played with them, had conversations (and arguments) with them and I ate meals with them too. Sometimes, if my father was out, my mother would set three extra plates. I guess she knew I was a writer-in-the-making.

How do you know you’re a writer? You know you’re a writer when –

You had imaginary friends as a child only they were real to you.

You are prone to wild imaginings that can literally make your heart race.

Conflict makes you smile.

You don’t get non-readers.

You laugh out loud at conversations in your head.

Some of the letters on your keyboard are worn off.

You have pens in every room of your house, including the bathroom and beside your bed.

A song on the radio sparks a story idea.

You stare at random people and memorize their quirks.

You can predict the conflict or turning points in movies, and your family has made you promise to keep quiet until it’s over.

You get excited by Scrivener.

Eavesdropping is second nature.

You love bookstores (but hate them if they don’t carry your books).

You live in a constant state of ‘what now?’ closely followed by ‘what if?’

Twist is not a cinnamon stick.

You have scribbled an idea, a word, or a piece of dialogue on a restaurant napkin, boarding pass, old envelope, school newsletter, or empty toilet roll.

You find those odd bits of paper – sometimes indecipherable – in pockets, wallets, purses, drawers, stuffed between the pages of a book, and you save them.

Pacing is a concept not an activity.

You found it easier to write when you first started.

You have missed a turn, an exit ramp or possibly a plane because you were so absorbed in your story.

You weren’t comfortable as a journalist because you always wanted to change the end of the story.

Proofreading is automatic.

Character is not about your personal ethics.

A hero must be flawed. But sexy as hell.

You gather ideas, thoughts, bits of trivia and snatches of dialogue like black pants gather lint.

You visit a cemetery and take notes.

People you barely know ask you to read their book, their article, their life story. Or ask you to write it.

You have a weird combination of insecurity and confidence.

Finishing the scene is more important than answering the phone.

The Muse is an intimate.

You will read anything.

Patience . . . Persistence . . . Timing

147791082This heron has been visiting my pond lately. The fish don’t like it; they hide. At least I hope they do. But the heron always returns. He comes by several times a week, flapping his huge wings before settling onto a rock. Serenely he waits (I always think of him as a male) for the opportunity to catch dinner.

Herons are smart that way. They’re persistent and patient, and they have a lot of fortitude. If the fishing isn’t good the first time, they’ll try again. And again. It’s a good lesson for me as I force myself to ignore the enticing call of the spring garden and settle instead at my desk, day after day, writing and rewriting. Surviving in this crazy business of publishing requires a lot of patience and persistence, along with some luck and timing too.

A friend of mine, Lea Tassie, wrote a short story a few years back featuring a heron. It’s called Fishing Expedition and it’s available as part of her short story collection Harvest. Here’s the link: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/5284

I think of Lea’s story just about every time my heron comes to call.