laughing in the dark

Real, for-true life has been getting in the way of my writing, twittering and blogging.  It’s been just awful.  Ask my dog.

Freckles and I did get to attend a nifty writing workshop thrown by Dan Schwabauer–author, speaker, writing coach extraordinaire.  We spent an afternoon looking at elements of story, as illustrated through the silver screen.

Cool, huh?

One of the movies Dan used for his examples was Life is Beautiful. The one about the father who convinces his little boy that the Nazi concentration camp they’re in is really an elaborate contest.  And the winner gets a tank.

Dan showed us clips that made the other workshop participants laugh.

I. Could. Not. Stand. It.

Because here is what I know about humor:

The funniest people on the planet are intimately acquainted with pain.

Humor is an endorphin-delivery system.

And also a weapon.

If you only know me from the hilarity *cough* which I spew in my articles, blogs and twitter, you’ll be surprised to learn that I write rather dark YA.  Oh, there’s  funny.  Because the best funny grows out of the dark.

I’ve been kind of startled by some of the stuff I’ve been able to scrounge out of myself for my WIP.   Maybe even been a little afraid of it.

How ridiculous!

Where did I think all my knee-slappers came from?

sing for your supper

Uf.

We have returned from the Valley of Pigflu.

Hope you are well too. Though what I’m writing about today makes me a little heart-sick.

Seems nursery rhymes are dying out. The London Telegraph reports that modern parents find them old-fashioned and uneducational.  Harumph.

I sensed the first stirrings of this 20 years ago, when Boywonder was young enough for playdates.  When the living/rumpus room was a wreck and blocks had gone from stackable objects to missiles, I would settle the boys down on the couch for a book or two.  Out would come good ol’ Mother Goose.  Boywonder could recite the rhymes with me–and Visitor?  Never heard ‘em before.

Child abuse!

Nursery rhymes were a huge part of my childhood.  Song lyrics.  Games.  Books.  What an easy transition from memorized poems to reading those poems on the page.

Rhythm and rhyme.  Babies learn motor coordination in poems like Pat a Cake and This Little Piggy.  Surely nursery rhymes pattern young brains to appreciate Ode on a Grecian Urn and Leaves of Grass later in life. Listen to the rhythm:

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes.

I don’t know about you, but that nursery rhyme makes me feel like setting a 2-year-old on my knee and bouncing her around while she giggles.  And don’t forget to pinch her little fingers and toes at the appropriate parts.

I could always pull several dozen nursery rhymes out of my skull at the drop of a hat.  When Bottled Lightning was four, she and I had a nursery rhyme-off at the car repair shop.  Now that I think about it, that’s damn weird.  But, hey.  That’s how we roll.

My nursery rhyme roots go back to my grandmother, who was born in 1885.  She grew up educated, but very poor.  Eventually, she became a leading member of the DAR and a well-known genealogist.  At that time, it was a woman’s only way out of obscurity.  Her grandmother recited the rhymes to her, and I will recite them to my grandchildren.  Imagine.  The very same poems, entertaining seven generations.

I can’t end this post without adding my favorite nursery rhyme of all time.  I don’t know why, but this is it:

Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea,

With silver buckles on his knee:

He’ll come back and marry me,

Pretty Bobby Shaftoe!

Bobby Shaftoe’s fat and fair,

Combing down his yellow hair;

He’s my love for evermore,

Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.

Tell me your favorite nursery rhymes.  Come on, guys.  Don’t let me down!

living with the wild

Yesterday, as I made the first post-Homecoming

school lunch, I cast my bleary eyes out the back window.

A hawk.

Perched on our wood fence.

Now, we live in an urban neighborhood.  I have seen a hawk attack the pigeons that roost in our eaves once before, but it’s not an everyday occurrence.  As I watched, peanut butter-laden knife in mid-air, the hawk swooped down onto our rock wall and plucked a mouse from one of the crevices.  He then flew up to our neighbor’s chimney and proceeded to–um–dine.

Fascinating.

Last week I drove down a busy boulevard that I drive every day, at least twice a day.  There was a hairy dead carcass on the side of the road.  Gosh.  Someone’s pet.  What a shame–only it wasn’t dog or cat…

It was a badger!

I had to circle around and drive by again to make sure.  Yep, a badger.  I’d recognize that death snarl anywhere.

Freckles McYoungest regularly sees a fox at a certain golf course she plays.  Every once in a while, a deer will crash around the midtown shopping district, having followed the creek into town.  Big Bopper claims he saw a coyote trot down our street about ten years ago.  We tease him about it, but he’s a hunter, knows what a coyote looks like.

I am forced to believe him.

I love when The Wild bleeds into my life.  I want to remember that not everything is ordered, codified, regulated.  Hawks and coyotes live on instinct, adapt to circumstance and opportunity.  I want to live like The Wild.

We are warned that we can’t.  That unless we are tamed, we will be amoral.

When I was in junior high I read Lord of the Flies over and over again.  A tremendously well-written book.  But now that I’m an adult, I think it is, philosophically, baloney.  Golding’s view is that without the threat of authority, humans become vicious and demented.  Even Ralph, who tries to keep a semblance of society on the island, does it for the approval of the adults who will eventually find them.

What a lousy view of children, teens, and the whole human race.  Of course, now that we know the truth about Mr. Golding and his teen years, we understand where his ideas come from.

To be Wild is to be creative, adaptive, free.  That doesn’t mean without morals.

I feel like eating a mouse.

one frickin’ line!

Oh, Coyote, we meet again.

You have taught me many life lessons, you little son of a…gun.  This time you came disguised as Chapter 24 of my WIP.  Started out at 600 words.

Ended up with 2000.

How did it happen?  Gather ‘round children, let this Storyteller amaze you with her song…

Once there was a young and beautiful writer.

But this story is about a somewhat older and it’s-what’s-on-the-inside-that-counts-writer.

Now this writer had a fabulous story to tell.  She loved every bit, every nuance that flowed from her stubby fingers onto her dusty laptop keyboard.  Even that obnoxious chapter nine, which she had threatened to send to the orphanage.  But one day…

One horrible, odious, no good day…

She ran into chapter 24.

Chapter 24 was meant to be a filler.  A toss-off.  A mere sprinkle on the cupcake of  our heroine-writer’s opus.  It only needed a last line.  One pithy little bon mot to transition us into chapter 25, where all Hello-Kitty was going to break loose.  One stinkin’ sentence.  How hard is that?  Turns out—virtually impossible.  Our writer-lady futzed with that line for 2 days.

Nothing.

So our auteur decided to back up one paragraph.  Get a running start.  Invert subject and predicate.  Move the characters around.  Roll play.  Hypnotize herself.  Drop acid.

(Okay, maybe not the last one.)

Empty.

Only thing to do?  Back up some more.  Another paragraph.  Another beat.  The entire scene.  And once the scene was longer and more satisfying, well, it outweighed the rest of the chapter, didn’t it?

Two days and a complete rewrite later, the perfect final sentence for chapter 24 practically wrote itself.

That’s how you work, don’t you, Coyote?  You make us learn things the hard way, you sorry sack of…

Writer-lady-woman-girl learned the hard way…

IF YOU CAN’T COME UP WITH A SATISFYING LAST LINE FOR YOU CHAPTER, IT MAY BE A WARNING SIGN THAT YOU HAVE NOT EXECUTED YOUR STORY ARC PROPERLY.

* Disclaimer: Length of time spent suffering has been greatly exaggerated for your reading pleasure.

recession-proofing kids

Huh.

I had no idea that I’ve been raising recession-proof kids for the past 25 years.  And it’s been so effortless.  I’ve done it with four simple words:

“We can’t afford it.”

Gotta tell ya, I’m pretty tired of all these hand-wringing articles advising parents how to break it to their little darlings that they can’t have every whim that crosses their little pea-brains.  Tell me the truth–did you get everything you wanted when you were growing up?  Neither did I.  Somehow, we survived.

The whole notion of petted, privileged children is a new one.  In the past children worked for their keep.  They had to pull their weight, and the chores they were in charge of could often mean the difference between eating and starving.

Which you’d think would be too much responsibility for a kid to deal with.  Should have made him a nervous wreck.  But in fact, kids that have such chores turn out to have higher self-esteem, more competence, self-discipline, etc.

Oh, irony.  By giving our kids everything, we took away so much more.

get filled with glee

Gleeeee.

My new One True Love.

In case you are one of the poor unfortunate souls that hasn’t seen this new series on Fox, let me sum up the premise:

High School Outcasts, Against All Odds, strive to Make Something of themselves in Show Choir.

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve seen that Glee is a popular favorite of kidlit editors, agents and authors.

Duh.

I think a prerequisite to being creative is suffering.  And I suspect most people who work in kidlit suffered in their growing-up years.  Some problems might have been as mundane as a crummy nickname in third grade, but other issues involved terrible home lives.  Abuse.  Neglect.  Or not fitting into the mold–anywhere.

Writing kidlit can be heavy lifting, sometimes.  But, like Glee…

details, details

I don’t think I’ll ever write a 100,000 word manuscript.

First of all, my attention span isn’t that long.  Also, I have been known to search for just the “right word” for 45 minutes.  You don’t pound out 100K words doing that.  But the biggest reason is…

I’m just not that into detail.

I can’t spend three pages setting a scene.  Which makes me a perfect kidlit writer, of course.  Only adult market writers can get away with crap like that.  The one thing that would bore me more than reading such a thing is writing it.

And I don’t want to describe what my characters look like down to the last wart on Aunt Junie May’s left pinkie toe.  Sorry.  Most of the time, I won’t even tell you what color their hair is.  Or their eyes.  Not unless it’s important to the characterization or the story.

And the house might be “needing paint”  or it might come “from family money”, but I’m not going to furnish the blueprints and color swatches.

Because if you’re reading my story, I’m going to make you work.

When you pick up my book, you and I enter into an agreement.  I will do my best to entertain you, and you will do your darnedest to be entertained.  I ply my craft, you apply your imagination.

You, the reader, get to create too.

And that, my fellow writers, is the reason that there will always be books.

for real

For me, the hardest part of being a writer is pouring emotion into the manuscript.  I’m not a wallower by nature.  But a writer has to empathize with her character, remember a time when she felt rage or infatuation or hope.  Then she has to dissect that memory, tease out telling nuances.

It’s hell.

But it makes for compelling story.

And oh, how I’ve cringed at critique group as my heart-gristle is laid bare for all to see.  Did they think that I felt such feelings?  That I entertained such thoughts? The mortification!

Over time I have toughened up.  A novel is a work of fiction, after all, and I’m the only one who can tell where the fantasy begins and the reality ends.    So when my critique mates say,  “That’s powerful,”  I take it as a compliment to my writing skills and leave it at that.

Or I used to.  Because something happened at critique last week that made me rethink this whole “getting published” thing:

The girl next to me cried.

My first reaction was, “What’s the matter with NAME REDACTED?”

Second reaction was, “Is she crying because of what I wrote?”

Then I thought, “You don’t have to cry, NAME REDACTED, this isn’t real.  I made it all up.” But that’s only partly true.  The characters may be invented, as well as the thrilling plot they are involved in, but the emotions are all genuine.  Culled from my own experience–painful to admit. I don’t care how a writer tries to play it off.  Anything I write about, I have experienced in some form.  Sure, I don’t have to be a murderer to write about one, but I have to have been angry some time in my life to be able to write about rage. And I have to be willing to unmask authentic emotion and invite the reader in to share it.

Becoming a writer has turned out to be a lot more than learning craft and making the right connections.  It’s been the willingness to be  bald-faced before the world.

I never knew how brave I’d have to be, to be a writer.

excuses, excuses

Poor little blog.  Mama still loves you.

It’s just that’s she’s been so busy.  First of all, it’s been summer.

Which means crafts.

And gardening.

Golfing with our favorite pro.

And then there’s that unhealthy familial relationship we’ve had to take care of.

A vacation thrown in there.

And angst!  Don’t forget the angst!

But most of all writing.

I am going to be more faithful.  Things are totally under control now.

I promise.

road trip!!!

Two of my writing buddies and I are going on a magical mystery tour, (without the LSD), in a VW bus, (more like a Buick), to Iowa, (well, really upper Missouri, but close), to meet with other SCBWIan sorts and…write!

It’s a write-in, man, a HAPPENIN’!  With possible cow birthing.

We are going to write, eat, play games, (all sorts), write and eat.

DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THAT?

Let me put it this way:

NO.

This is my first writers’ retreat.  But it has occurred to me that it dang well better not be my last.  Sure, it would be great to have a facilitated retreat at a spa with Famous Literary Figure, but there’s no reason that a satisfying retreat can’t be had by friendly sorts who gather at a farm, cottage or revival tent with good intentions.

I’ll let you know how it goes.  Oooo, hope at least one calf decides to make its appearance this weekend.

Better pack my camera.