Nostalgia and ponderings

I don't know why, but I have immense trouble remembering birthdays.  If not for the advent of Facebook, I'd miss birthdays for most of my family and friends - and those not on the internet often get their cards and presents late.  So why is it that I'm nostalgic today, remembering a man I lost 33 years ago, simply because he would have been celebrating his 85th birthday tomorrow?

Maybe it's because Dad was born on a particularly memorable date: 8/28/28.

Maybe it's because I just celebrated my 52nd birthday in May and he passed away just a little over a month before he would have been 52.

Or maybe it's just because my angels come back to haunt me with fair frequency, as I also remembered the birthday of a deceased friend in March and my cousin's birthday in June with no problem.

On days like today, when I grow nostalgic about my childhood with my fun-loving Dad as my male role model, I also ponder the questions I will have to wait to ask him when I pass on myself.

Such as: Was he upset that I stubbornly refused to finish college when I was told by both the head of the English Department and the head of the Theater Department that I couldn't chose a major in English and a minor in Theater because "the two are NOT related"?  (My dream when he was alive was to become an actress, and he had teased me about "being Marilyn Monroe".  After meeting others in the theater department in UMO who felt that ANY show was meant to showcase THEIR talent, and that anyone who wasn't the star of the show needed a good backstabbing to insure that the STAR got all the press, I had opted to go to teaching English and being the Drama Club advisor after school.  Both dreams fell to the wayside when I was told that I could quit college - or waste my money by following only my major and forgetting about anything else I might have interest in doing....)

Another question that I ponder is:  What would he think of my writing?  Would he be proud of me for getting published, as my mom is, or would he tease about my writing being "just bodice rippers"?

I miss Dad, and wish that I could speak to him, just once.  It would make me feel much less concerned about the way I'm living my life if I just knew that I was fulfilling my goal of making him proud of how I turned out.

A little "spam" for lunch today

As of last night, we've finished all the corrections to "The Tiger's Cub", and the next step is the test print.  Once the cost for the printing is confirmed, advance copies can be ordered - and after talking to relatives at a recent wake, I'm looking at probably ordering 75 copies for the first couple of book signings.

I'll update again when I have a cost for those who will have to "save up" for the signed copies - and will be posting where signings are as those are set up.

It's not nice to fool [with] Mother Nature....

When I'm not writing, I like to spend time in my flower garden or paddling around a local lake in my kayak.  Unfortunately, Maine has been very rainy this year, so most of May, June and July, when it's actually warm enough to allow me to spend the time out of doors, I was stuck inside because of foul weather.

With the coming of August, we've started to dry out a little, so I've been doing some much needed weeding.  This comes with some pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises.

On the pleasant side of the spectrum, I've found that the roses that my daughter requested on the side of the garage are growing and thriving, even though I had often been told that the only roses that would grow well in Maine were beach roses.  We have a lovely deep (almost burgundy) tea rose called the "Mr. Lincoln" that is up to my waist.  There is a pink beach rose next to that that is was planted a year after the tea rose that is also getting quite tall.  The third and fourth rose bushes, planted at the same time, are still the smallest, with the peach colored one doing better than the purple rose, but they're also looking healthy.  In the rotting out whiskey barrel under the mail box, I was surprised to find that the Morning Glory that I planted last year has returned, so I gave it some twine to hold onto and encouraged it to start climbing the metal post again.  I was rewarded this morning with big, beautiful new blooms.  And next to the small pond that my husband put in - about the size of a bath tub (which needs to be drained again due to algae growth from all the rain), the lavender I planted two years ago and which I thought had died out last year has come back and is starting to spread a little.  Always a pleasure to see that my efforts are starting to pay off.

But on the not-so-pleasant side, Mother Nature seems to have played a very cruel trick on me in the form of an invasive ant species that I didn't really want to find here in Maine:  fire ants!  Those who live in the southern United States know what I'm referring to, but for those who've never had an encounter with fire ants, let me describe this scenario.

You're outside talking with someone and you're standing quietly.  Unnoticed, tiny red ants start climbing up your legs because, without realizing it, you're standing either on or a little too close to their colony.  When fifty or more have made their way up onto your bare skin, someone does a count down - and ALL of the ants bite into you at the same time!  You suddenly feel like you're on fire, and you dance around and brush them off as fast as you can, but it's too late.  The little demons, who only bite you in order to get a good grip so that they can sting you and inject their venom into you.

I first met these little demons in Florida, and it was part of the reason why I didn't stay there.  I had never come across them in Maine, so when I was happily weeding away and suddenly felt a sting on my elbow, I thought I had a hornet on me - until I saw the little red ant hanging there.  Standing, I found that the sweat pants I was wearing had hundreds of the little demons trying to bite through the cloth, and just like in Florida, I did a little dance, brushing madly at my pant leg, and when I had managed to knock most of them off, ran up onto my porch, stripped off the sweat pants (thankful that the elderly man across the street wasn't there to see me), and went inside to try to locate something to take away the burning sensation.

Suffice to say, as soon as I had treated the burning area, I went out and bought some of the bug poison that I'd purchased many times in Florida to kill off the nests in our yard.  I'm still dealing with the nasty pustules that formed where the biters managed to connect with skin, and I still need to go out to finish the weeding, but I'm sincerely hoping that the poison killed off the little monsters, even if I hate to put poison into my flower garden.....

And naturally, I'm cataloging this experience in the dusty file area in the back corner of my brain, suspecting that this personal experience can be used at some point in a story line.....

(Picturing how Stephen King or Ray Bradbury might use this.  Imagine, if you will, a person who is calmly talking to a neighbor when the ants start to bite, and he is reduced to nothing more than bone in just a few minutes........)

Now, where did I put that stick that I can use to probe the area where I need to weed next to make sure the ants are dead......

"If you don't continue to learn things, you get stupid,"

I got a phone call on Saturday from my mother.  Her aunt, a lovely lady who had lived to the age of 102, passed away.  It was a phone call I had been expecting for a while, yet it still came as a little bit of a surprise, as she was always so "with it" whenever I went to visit her, even though in the most recent years, those visits took place in a nursing home.

A lot of people in nursing homes seem to stagnate.  They get into a rut, just doing the same old things day after day, and they spend a lot of time looking back at their lives, rethinking things they did and shouldn't have done or things they wish they did that they didn't do.  While Aunt Marguerite seemed to remember things about all of her visitors, bringing up things done while we were young and stupid (always brought up with a smile and a laugh, never mean), she also seemed to keep up with the news of what was going on in one's life.  For instance, she and I talked writing, with her taking some of the credit for the talent I seem to have been born with a gleam in her eye.  We talked about her memoir book that she put together, beginning in 2003, when she was 93, and which her daughter and granddaughters "published" for her in 2006, when she noted in the back that she was ready to go whenever God called her....

and she always joked that she would have continued to write her memoirs if she had known she was going to live so long.

My visits with Aunt Marguerite always made me remember another woman I met in my travels on the spaceship we call Earth.  Her name was Mary, and I worked with her at JoAnn Fabrics in Florida.  While she was teaching me the things I needed to know at work, she talked about taking a class on quilt making in her late 60's/early 70's.  It was she who made the comment that I used as the title for this blog, as she felt that the best way to prevent one's mind from stagnating was to continue to learn.  Her firm belief was that schooling should continue throughout one's life, as those graduating college often struck her as thinking that they had learned everything they ever needed to know and then had closed their minds to all else.  She encouraged me to never stop learning and growing, because that was the best way to remain "with it".

While I'll miss my great-aunt and the lively talks we had about writing, I'll never forget the things she taught me throughout the years.  I'll remember Mary and will continue to keep my eyes open, learning something new every day, because I never want to stagnate and "become stupid".

I encourage everyone who sees these blogs to do the same.

I can count the hours I've slept on one hand.....

Insomnia.

 It's not a four letter word, but it's one of those cuss words in my vocabulary - and it seems I'm not the only creative mind to have it.  It seems that most of my favorite authors find themselves having nights when the story doesn't want to stop long enough to let the mind refresh.  The same is true of a lot of the artists I know.

Is insomnia one of the side effects of the wiring that makes creative people different, or is it just a part of the human state that defies explanation?  Are all people closet insomniacs to some degree?

Those are the kind of thoughts that keep running through my head as I sit, the television blaring some form of mindless entertainment in the background that doesn't seem to want to hold my interest, with an alcoholic beverage in hand that I'm hoping is going to eventually shut down my brain functions and allow me to sleep, while I search random things on the internet.

Among last night's searches:

Colonoscopy (because I'm at that age when my doctor's office seems to think I need a screening.  My sister HATED having hers done, so that was the only personal experience I'd heard about.)
 
Tai Chi instruction on You Tube (because my ancient body comes home from my retail job in pain - thus the alcoholic beverage of choice last night in an effort to deaden the aches so that I could find rest)

Random music sampling (I started off with The Gorillaz because I just bought one of their albums, then cruised through rap, country, pop, 80's, and continued on, clicking a selection from the "suggested" list that You Tube does until I started to get bored)

Dog grooming techniques (because my daughter had rescued a little Shih Tzu mix who is currently living with us, and he jumped up for some snuggles.  I noticed that he's developed little matts under his "arm pits" and behind his ears that make the OCD inside me cringe.  "There's GOT to be a way to get rid of those without constantly having to hold him down and trim them out!" thought I.)

Of course, if I hadn't just sent off the latest editing result on "The Tiger's Cub" to the publisher yesterday morning, I may have had another character speaking with me by the time I started the "random search", so I COULD have been writing something - or editing something - or doing anything other than eventually finding myself back at Dylan Griner's Photogenics page (http://www.photogenicsmedia.com/models/men/portfolio/dylangriner/) to look at the model whose face most reminds me of the character I've most recently worked with.  (And here, for those who haven't followed the links to the videos or my Facebook fan page, is what the Chase Benton in my head:)

 

 

So, while I'm sitting here typing this blog, waiting for the sun to dry up some of the dew on the flower garden so that I can pull some grass and weeds that have taken over because of the excessively rainy summer we've had in Maine so that I can maybe tire myself out to the point that I can get some decent sleep tonight, the thought that kept me awake last night keeps coming back again:

 

Is chronic insomnia normal for those whose lives are taken over by characters like Chase Benton, or does everyone have a little closet insomniac tucked somewhere in their brain?

 

Purging a world that appears to often in my vocabulary. I have to work on that...... :)

One of the reasons I recommend having someone else, a person you trust, look at your work before it goes to print, is that they catch things you do without even thinking about it.  According to things that he's written, Stephen King has his wife, Tabitha, go over his work before he sends it to the publisher for consideration.  After having a friend on Facebook go through with the specific purpose of finding my gaffs that I may have missed, she's pointed out that I use one word A LOT.  In fact, I've used that word a lot even in this short paragraph that I'm writing to illustrate the point.

She has pointed out that, whether intentional or unintentional, the word "that" appears A LOT in my work.  A lot of times, there simply isn't another word I can substitute or a different way to phrase what I'm trying to say without getting into another problem that I've noticed myself - I can tend to be VERY wordy.  I've caught myself writing a half-page long paragraph as one long sentence, substituting commas at points when I really should put in a period.  Those paragraphs are usually caught on the first edit and corrected before the rough draft leaves my computer and gets sent off to my publisher.  But this is NOT the time for me to have such a thing pointed out, as final edits are NOT the time to be re-writing a book to cut back on the use of a word like "that".  As far as this book goes, that will have to be that, but I have been alerted and will have to think about my use of the word and see if there are ways to stop myself from using that word so often.

I'll have to watch that in future writing.....

*Looks back at the above post and grins evilly, suspecting the intentional overuse of the word is going to make the point better than anything else I could have done......*

More shameless self-promotion....

I have too much time to think while at work, no matter how busy I might be, because part of my mind is going through the routine of retail work while another part of my mind is otherwise occupied.  As a result, I've posted another book video trailer with a better introduction to the main characters:

http://youtu.be/t8OmSUabg9o

If my models for Chase and Aloriah were to come up with other pictures they'd like me to use, I might do another....

Please release me, let me go....

I have a friend whose blog I follow.  (Thomas Burby's "The Growlery")  His blog was very thought provoking this morning.  Enough so that I thought I would put my own spin on it in the short time I have to blog myself this morning and let you add your own two cents worth to my thoughts....

Tom writes "...you have a duty to the reader to let it go, to allow yourself to see things you've never seen before, to feel things you've never felt before and to go places that, to be honest, no one else ever went before."

I know first hand what it is he's talking about.  Chase Benton, who first entered my world in a dream sequence that I had the summer and fall of 2011, is one of those characters who, even now that his story is written and in the final stages of preparation before release, whispers to me from the darkness I keep trying to commit him to.  When I'm trying to work on something else or have to do the duties that are demanded of me in the real world, I try not to think about him, but when everything else was falling down around me and I needed to leave the real world for a time, I had to let go and allow him to lead me places I've never been before.

Part of how I make my stories come to life, for myself as much as for my faithful readers, is to listen to the characters, then research things to make it easier for me to picture what they're telling me.   During the time that I was struggling with another tale that I had decided needed to be done, telling myself that Chase was only 14 at the time and needed to mature a bit more before I could write a tale about him, I did research on some of the things he had already shown me.  I looked at photographs of the streets in New Orleans.  I studied the streets and where they went.  When he insisted that Cody lived in the Bayou, I looked at photographs of the Louisiana Bayou area.  Every part of the story that that he showed me that I had no experience in was researched.  And when I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with, I let go and let him control me.

Speaking of him like a living person in Facebook posts has my older sister insisting that I need therapy to get over my "mental issues", but she doesn't understand how cathartic it is to just let a character take me over like that.  Chase, and to a lesser degree, Aloriah, have briefly taken over my world, and it feels tremendously invigorating to let them!  The only thing I did in the "creation" of this pair came primarily after the rough draft, when I was getting ready for the first edit.

After Chase had talked himself out and allowed me to put "The End" to the story, I went back into research mode.  I looked at tornados and what to do if you look up and see one coming toward you - like this one:

 

I looked at some of the other details about the story and made some minor corrections to the tale.  But mostly, I refreshed my memory about all the grammar rules and when through my first edit looking for mistakes.

 

Your characters and story lines can take you places you've never been before.  For brief periods of time, especially for stories that have no real basis in fact, you can suspend reality for a time and just go with the flow, encouraging your readers to do the same when the story takes them.  When you do it right, you get a comment like this one from Arline Chase, who reviewed my book and whose full comment appears on the first page once the book goes to print: "Debi Emmons makes it all so real that you look up in surprise to find yourself in your own living room."

 

I hope the writers out there following this blog can learn to let go.  Release yourself from the bonds of the real world and let your characters take you where you need to be in order to write a good story that takes your readers along for the ride.  Worry about such things as grammar and truth when your character has let you go and you're getting ready to edit.  There's a song I used to sing with the church choir that is going through my head:  "Let it be, let it flow, and everywhere you go may the peace of the Lord follow you."

If you let your characters go and let yourself go while writing, peace will indeed follow you.

 

 

 

 

Don't miss seeing the forest for the trees

It's back to the waiting game for "The Tiger's Cub", as there are a couple of corrections that need to be made before the next edit.  While waiting, I'm visiting all the social networks that I've joined, seeking someone willing to assist me, especially as I thought I had done a good job on "Night of the Tiger".  A recent reading when I was camping in the north woods of Maine, when my reading light battery gave out and the only book I had on my IPhone was the Kindle edition of "Night of the Tiger", proved to me that I can tend to miss things by simply being too familiar with the material, no matter how careful I try to be.

So I've been going into discussion groups and reading about who does editing professionally, what to expect for fees, and who is the best person to hire.  (I'm working part time in retail at the moment, barely making bill payments, so most of these professionals are WAY out of my price range.)

I've been spending time in meditation and prayer, trying to get myself in the right frame of mind to be ready to read my work as if I was a total stranger to it.  Unfortunately, Chase and Aloriah are too fresh in my mind, so I'm having a hard time "banishing" these two strong personalities.  While this kind of character makes me feel better in my writer's heart, because they will command the attention of readers and find a place in the reader's heart, it doesn't bode well for me to be able to edit this myself.  I may be missing a tiny, twisting sapling that is sitting in plain sight because I'm too familiar with this trail I'm on, and I really don't want to introduce the jewel that is Chase to the world in a shabby setting.

Having been asked for an update by a Facebook friend, I did a public status report, letting those who have been with me on this long journey know that we're nearing the end of the trail.  I ended by doing a somewhat tongue-in-cheek request for a volunteer to do an edit in exchange for a free signed book.

I hit pay dirt.

The first response was from a dear friend who speaks English as a second language and jokingly responded that he would volunteer, but probably wasn't my best choice for the job.  As we joked back and forth about his grasp of English grammar, another friend's inner grammar Nazi caught several minor gaffs he made.  She volunteered - and has promised to be brutally critical.  She thinks I should be afraid of her "threat", but my writer's heart is dancing.  While I was busily going down the path, looking for professional help, I was ignoring a companion who was making the trip at my side.  I feel confident now that any stunted saplings that still exist in my work will be cut down by my friend.