Refugee of the Month Club

trapped in the side of the a rental car,
legs too twisted to run...

I told you I had some fun writing news to share, & I do.

Years ago, when I lived in Minnesota, the Rochester Repertory Theater (aka, the Rep) held a series of 10-minute play contests. Each of them had a theme. The first was actually performed at a new Saturn dealership in town & all the plays had to center around cars. The one I wrote (all of the ones I wrote for the contests were chosen & produced) was called "Life, Love & Highway Safety" & one of the main (non-speaking) characters was an inflatable safety man. (Actually, it was a blow-up adult toy & I had to paint a mask to go over his face.) Another time they were set at the Goodhue County Historical Society & I set "An Apple from the Teacher" in their one-room school display. (I attended a one-room school in Montana for elementary school, with one teacher for eight grades & 12 to 25 students in the whole school.) "The Carrie Casanova Memorial Coat Tree" required the use of a coat rack, and had two living characters, plus a ghost, and a narrator. Another had to center around a trunk, and for that I wrote "Refugee of the Month Club," which made me laugh out loud when I reread it a few months ago.

Apparently, the folks at the Rep had the same reaction, because this summer they're doing 10 of their favorite plays from all the competitions & "Refugee of the Month Club" will be one of them. So, if you're going to be in Minnesota, check out TREASURES in TEN July 11 - 12, 17-19, and 24 -26 at the Rochester Repertory Theater (103 7th St NE, Rochester, MN 55906. 507.289.7800) & enjoy the show.

I also found out that "Even Cowgirls Spread the News," a poem I had published in The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, was nominated for a Rhysling Award.

I'm sure I have more to tell you. Thunderstorms. All sorts of classes I took during Asheville Small Business Week, including one on 3D printing. I could etcetera all day, but then I wouldn't get to my day, would I? Grin.

So, catch you on the flip-flop.

Blog alternative:
284. Dust off something you created months or years ago, whether it's a story, a drawing, a recipe, a photo of a particularly beautiful floral arrangement. Enjoy the heck out of it. See what happens then...

Cloudy, with a chance of dishes

Derrick, hugging a tree.

Oh, April. It's one of the cruelest months for blogging, because it's so fun & busy, what with birthdays & all. Plus I've been doing a lot of dishes.

Don't laugh! Derrick has been (slowly) acquiring a house that is in the family & has a clouded title. Now it's mostly sunny, only partly cloudy, & we can start cleaning it up. For a while, it had no water, so a bunch of dirty dishes piled up on the counters & table & I have just about finished washing them. The water hasn't been turned on yet, although we did get the electricity turned on, so we hauled water over & I warmed water in my electric kettle to make effective dishwater. It's been an adventure. I enjoyed every minute of it, except when I splashed a little extra hot water on my hand.

Did some outside, too. Derrick mowed & I raked the lawn. I didn't want to get all the same muscles stiff, so I experimented with form -- just call me "Dances With Rake."

Tomorrow should be very fun, because this week there are a bunch of free classes & I signed up to see one on 3D printing. I'm fascinated by the Santa Claus machines, as they are sometimes called.

It's late-ish & I should go to bed. I mainly just wanted to blog before my birthday.

In the next installment, I'll tell you some more fun writing news.

Blog alternative:
283. Dance with a rake. Or a broom.

0 to 800 in 12 hours--new personal record

half of a whispering chair at NC State
(I'm sure that's not the technical term...)

Made a mud pie! A very lovely one. Decided to whisk it out into the world (Women's World, that is) & see if anyone wanted to take a bite.

But first, time travel. We set the kinda-way-back machine to 1984, the year it was discovered that Big Brother wasn't as bad as had been predicted by George Orwell. (That's more like now. Grin.) More importantly, at least in my universe, 1984 was the year I decided, heck, I can do that, and sold a mini-mystery to Women's World. With the resulting $500, I bought 10 $50 black hills spruce trees, which we planted at the edge of the back yard. They are towering now. I know how tall my career is, as that was my first professional (in terms of pay & also circulation) publication.

I sent them a few more mini-mysteries without further sales, and also a romance. They didn't buy it, but later there was a short-lived romance magazine called Arabella that bought the story I'd written for Women's World, "Hot Dogs and Champagne", (red wine with meat, white wine with chicken and fish, hot dogs with champagne -- everyone knows that, right?) and used it as the cover story for their very first issue, illustrated by Alan Ayers. They did an article on him, since he's one of the premier illustrators for books, especially romance, and showed the photo shoot he'd done to create the painting. It was awesome!

Some years later, when my dad was about to have surgery, I drove to Montana from Asheville in 2 days. I don't recommend driving almost 2000 miles in 2 days, but it's possible. Shortly after I passed Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I needed a cup of coffee and ended up at this place called Buffalo Ridge and discovered that the owner's girlfriend (they were in their 70s or 80s) was Alan Ayers mother. Weird, huh?

But, back to the story of the new story. Guidelines change, but Women's World still publishes a mystery & a romance every week. So, I got the hankering to see my byline there again. About 10:30 or 11 on Wednesday night, I started typing a little romance. Done with the first draft around midnight. The next morning I did a bunch of revising on my little 800 word gem -- err, mudpie; I forgot the terminology -- & it was in an envelope a little after noon. At the post office shortly thereafter. Voila! Mudpie in the mail. I'm not sure when I'll hear, but it was such fun to write I feel as if I've already won. Plus, the new record!

I'll definitely keep you posted.

Blog alternative:
282. Think about something you've been thinking about doing & see how fast you can do it. Clean out a drawer. Write a story. Make that soup you've been hungering for.

Mudpies & wedding cakes

This one is for Cathy, a screen shot from the movie
War Games. She's always looking to see the girl as
driver & the boy as passenger on a motorcycle...

I've been resting on my laurels, & very fine laurels they've been, & still are. Still, all this resting... Makes a girl restless. It's like when you've had a favorite pillow for years & one night you're lying on it & it's gotten a bit thin.

There are several groups of people who might take issue with this even being an issue. The people who've been trying, with no or little success, to publish, or even complete things. The people who have to work damn hard to put food on the table, sometimes at a job they hate, & don't have time to even think about creative crap & the wussies who commit it. The writers & artists who have been steadily--or at least less sporadically than I have been--pushing through the walls of whatever & have no patience with the wussies who don't create.

I will backtrack to last evening & relay what brought this issue to the sizzling hot, on-high front burner.

But first I'll backtrack a little further, into the backstory. Joe D'Agnese & Denise Kiernan wrote a book called The Money Book for Freelancers, Part-Timers, and the Self-Employed: The Only Personal Finance System for People with Not-So-Regular Jobs, & then began a once-a-month gathering called Freelance Fridays, first at Malaprops & then at the Battery Park Champagne Bar & Book Exchange. They eventually stepped aside because it wasn't serving their own lives as well as it was serving the lives & careers of the others who were attending (Yay, Joe & Denise! Way to put yourselves at the centers of your own lives!) but that is where I met them.

They'd done books together & separately, some ghostwriting, etcetera, & Denise spent 7 years researching & writing & revising a book called The Girls of Atomic City, which became a national bestseller & landed her on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, amongst other appearances. It's gone from hardcover to paperback, with another whirlwind book tour beginning & that landed Joe & Denise (& Greta Johnsen, aka Nerdette, the podcast, which I've just begun to listen to & is charming) at Malaprops.

I enjoyed listening to Greta interview Denise & my maybe-a-minute interaction with Denise (not because she wasn't interested in catching up & friendly but because she was busy signing books & such) & I'm looking forward to reading the book (I didn't buy it in hardcover) but the meat & potatoes of the evening was a kick-in-the-pants, man-your-battle-stations conversation with Joe.

That is not the right description at all, because it wasn't in the slightest harsh or militaristic. I'll backtrack again, to what Joe had been doing before this conversation became my great gift: continuing to do his journalistic writing, his ghostwriting, his bread-on-the-table writing. No bestseller, but hey, it was writing. Except, he didn't get into writing to be solely journalistic & non-fiction-y. He wanted to write fiction, especially mysteries. So, he bit the bullet, set ambitious goals around writing & submitting short stories, & achieved them. Not publishing--that's out of his scope--but writing & submitting. Guess what? With the writing & submitting came a bunch of rejections--& some acceptances! Yay, Joe! But really I'm saying Yay, Joe! to the part he had control over, the writing & submitting. I'm happy about the publishing & wish him much more of it & that his goal of having a novel with his name on it is fulfilled, but I'm most excited that he set out on the journey, with or without a pocket handkerchief.

Student-ready/teacher-comes, etcetera. The teachers are all around, you just have to be ready to be a student. I am, having already restlessed about resting on my laurels.

But--this is the scary part; stop reading if you're extra sensitive--I'm afraid. Afraid I've lost the beginning-middle-end knack. Beginning is the easy part. I can begin on anything, anytime. & (she says modestly) my beginnings rock. Rock, I say. Even roll. I have mad skills at beginning. At times in my life I could also middle & end, but my beginnings have ALWAYS been the best. I've got enough beginnings begun to jumpstart the careers of a whole stable of authors (& inventors & artists & designers & engineers...)

Once, my friend Selby said to me that we weren't hungry enough to be successful writers, being (at the time, & I believe she still is) married to guys who made plenty of money & therefore not dependent on our book/story/poem income.

So, Joe, thank you. For feeling your own desires & deciding to go for it. For gumptioning. (Ya gotta love the little red line that shows up under the perfectly good word you just invented.) For taking the advice of Bradbury & Faulkner & all those who came before, making not just art, but an income. The pulp masters couldn't spend 3 months or a year perfecting & polishing a little gem of a story & presenting it on a satin pillow. They wrote it; they slapped it into an envelope; they put the new blank page in the typewriter & their fingers flew. When it came back--if it did--they slapped it in another envelope.

I haven't been doing much enveloping--or e-submitting, as is more frequently the case these days--of stories & poems & novels. Some, though. Especially recently. I lit a fire under one editor & gave her the deadline of my birthday, which she said she could meet. I took a picture book that another editor had reluctantly rejected & sent it to the publisher she recommended I send it to. I've organized my space even better & have even begun to think of the books I have boxed up in storage, & why, & possibly why not.

But I'm not going to whole-hog it on all fronts. I want this to be sustainable, not a recipe for burnout. I don't want to start making wedding cakes. How about mudpies? &  if someone sees art in a mudpie, cool. If not, cool. Next mudpie.

Blog alternative:
281. Make a mudpie. A literal mudpie gets you bonus points, but do some little half-assed thing in the direction of a dream. No wedding cakes allowed!

Asleep at the keyboard

It is the last of February. I've been doing some feng shui-ing in my room, removing a shelf that interfered with smooth entry. It's so much better.

Last weekend we took a trip to Wake Forest & Chapel Hill & Winston Salem. A very lovely experience. I'd tell you more about it if I wasn't about to fall asleep. Definitely beddy-bye time for this chickie. I shall let the robin sing you to sleep, or sing you to wake. Me, I'm set for dreaming.

See you in March.

Blog alternative:
280. Take a look at your space. Is the entry welcoming? What can you do about that?

6 more winks of winter, says southern groundhog

 I just spent a week--or a season--in my pajamas. Hibernating, perhaps. Or changing into an entirely new organism--caterpillar to butterfly--in a cocoon. Maybe it was a cold combined with a series of winter storms, that suddenly just up & fled these Carolina mountains.

No logical explanations. Where is the logic of a week in pajamas? But when one doesn't specifically have to go outside--indeed, can't, for days, because her street hasn't been plowed of its (not quite a foot of) snow--& she does have have a cold & she already got enough groceries to last &...

(Some members of the household, who didn't have colds were more adventurous. Jon & Satori rode a kayak on a steep street in the middle of downtown with some friends. No, I'm not kidding!)

A week in pajamas. It was so delicious. Actually it was a mere 6 days, because Wednesday last I had clothes on & Wednesday this I donned (the same) clothes again. Except Wednesday last I wore my puffy coat & today a hoodie was too warm. Woo hoo. Spring has sprong!

The groundhogs did see their shadows, but here in the southern mountains, that means 6 more winks of winter. Gotcha. Just kidding. No, I mean it. Aw, you know I was joshing you...etcetera. 6 more winks of winter. Unlike in the northlands (47 years in states that border Canada; I think I know what I'm talking about) where it can snow in October & not melt until May. The first year I was here, it was 70 degrees on the first of January. But we do get real snow & real cold. It's a win win. Nothing boring about the weather here.

So, I got some fun things done during the week of the pajamas, including reading a truly dynamite book by the truly dynamite Martha Beck. Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want. I'm going to get my own copy, because she has so many great exercises in it. I also worked on some contests I'm judging & played a little (grin) poker & did some writing & watched some cool videos & movies & lectures, from Jimmy Durante singing Inka Dinka Doo to documentaries on Salvador Dali & Picasso to The Parent Trap starring Hayley Mills to The Making of Yentl. What a strange feast for my brain. What wonders will come out of that percolating, composting, internal spontaneous combustion engine?

So today, it being in the mid-sixties, degree-wise, I walked downtown for milk. I returned some misprinted checkblanks to the bank (apparently they no longer have the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum ones that I've had forever so I took back the boring ones they'd sent me instead & got the wildlife ones) & took pictures of the springtime.

It was odd to hole up during one season & emerge in another. I don't feel like a bear, though, unless it's a very tiny bear that just broke out of a chrysalis & is wondering where the heck these wings came from.

I know that in some latitudes, winter's going to be winking madly at you for a while yet. Don't hate me because I'm southern. Grin.

Blog alternative:
279. Take to your pajamas for a day (or more) & see what you discover.

Simon says, "Cry!"

This is Jefferson & his parents, back in 2004.
 I met them when I was in Peru & I sponsored his education.
He just graduated from high school!
Yay, Jefferson. All the best to you.
If you want to do something similar,
check out Angels of the Amazon

I'm not much of a websurfer, as you might guess if you've read my periodic "why the blog alternative" explanations. HOWEVER, the other day I went nutsoid on youtube, watching video after video in which (mostly young) people surprised & delighted the heck out of the judges on various talent competition shows. (Britain's Got Talent, The X Factor, American Idol, that sort of thing.) OMG! To see a young Indonesian girl in a head scarf do "Grenade" or a goth boy who has never sung in front of ANYONE in his whole life (not even his parents) come out with the most beautiful opera or the girl with her dancing dog. Wow. Just thinking about them now makes me happy. I feel like anyone can do anything. (I did NOT watch the ones where anyone who could NOT do anything humiliated themselves in front of the judges & were completely surprised when Simon reamed them a new one…)

I'm not going to make youtubing a major hobby, or even a minor hobby. I'm glad I did it. Someday -- not soon at all -- I'll dip my toe in again. But it did help make me even more hungry to create, to do the things I do well, to get them out there. I'm not going to try to flaunt my vocal skills to impress anyone -- I'd deserve to have Simon make me cry -- but I'm glad I'd already decided to get some of the novels (one is already almost formatted!) that have been languishing, unread, out there in e-book form.

The Csikszentmihalyi (I spelled it without looking!) book on creativity is interesting. It was first written in 1996, before anyone &/or their dog could publish their own books with great ease, before youtube could get you out there, in front of the millions -- or threes -- of viewers. He talks about gatekeepers being an important part of the creativity factor, outside validation. That is still true, but going viral can be the validation now, as well, the online public rather than just editors or music producers.

So, here's to creativity, to getting it out there, to head-scarfed girls & goth boys. To Susan Boyle. To Ashleigh & Pudsey. To doing what you love until you're great at it -- or to doing what you love whether anyone at all finds any value in it. The true value is in doing what you love. The rest -- making Simon cry, getting kissed by Tulisa, 4 yesses & trip to Las Vegas -- is whipped cream & cherries on top, but the sundae itself is in the joy.

Blog alternative:
278. Take some creative thing you do out for a walk, in public. It doesn't even have to be the thing you do best. (I have a secret -- well, not any more -- fantasy of learning a couple songs on my guitar & heading for a minor street corner with a hat & busking a little. I'm better than some of the people out there doing it…not many of them, but some.)