A Renaissance writer (and reader)

I'm not sure what the focus of my writing was when I started this blog. I don't have a single focus, so it's hard to know who's my audience when I share these posts.

So just know, I write. And I read.

I read mostly very old stuff, since I'm rarely impressed with more modern fare, ironically enough.

I write science fiction short stories,
articles about being married and Mormon (LDS) with the hubby,
working on finishing the next two books in my trilogy (don't we all need a trilogy in our portfolio?), family stories,
and I'm starting in on screenplays since my daughter is going to filmmaking school, and I've never NOT been able to help her with her homework.


If you're into any of those things too, what I write may not bore you to pieces, and you're welcome to read some of all of my daily/weekly behind-the-scenes ramblings.

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I finally got around to recording my story yesterday, after a quick helpful technical tutorial from the 15-year-old on how to use Audacity. And I ALMOST made it all the way through with no mistakes...so utterly pleased with myself. I have to re-record the last sentence and figure out how to cut and paste it in, and then it's ready to send to AntipodeanSF for their October issue. Oooroo!

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My husband and I get involved sometimes with local service projects sometimes through our church. This week we helped a sister (we do that in our church...the whole brother/sister thing) who needs to move to a retirement home and divest herself (painfully) of years of mementos, since it won't all fit where she's going.

We pulled everything out of her backyard shed, and helped her sort what to keep and what to sell, careful to avoid the spiders and mice and other larger creatures that had no doubt set up house in this rustic little outdoor shelter.

One box we opened contained a sheer miracle and pirate treasure, all at the same time - an entire set of the Harvard Classics, all 50 volumes!

My oldest son and I nearly salivated on the box.

It smelled of mildew and a tiny, tiny bit of mouse urine on the outside cardboard. A few mouse droppings and spiderwebs in the box, and some dust on the covers. Otherwise, the books were perfectly preserved.

I asked her about them, and she said they'd sat on her shelves for 40 years, and out in the shed for nine years. She'd never read them beyond the first book.

"Do you want them?" she said.

Do I want them??? Shiver me timbers!!!

**

So, after we got them home, I found that ammonia wipes largely took care of the smell without damaging the covers, and I'm starting in on the first volume.

When I read, it's not a sponge kind of thing. It's a conversation I have with someone who often no longer exists in this world, and some writers I really resonate with, while others I gratefully leave behind.

The first volume starts off with  Ben Franklin's Autobiography.  I'm only on the first two pages so far, and I practically feel re-parented. His sayings and his stories make me wish he'd been my father.

My own father always had this thing about making sure I wasn't vain, and he would accuse me of vanity whenever I showed him a catalog of pretty clothes or asked for something. To be fair, we were dead broke when I was little, and he did that to try and save money, but the way he did it mentally screwed me over for decades afterwards.

This one paragraph from Ben Franklin set me completely to rights, just this morning, in talking about why he decided to write an autobiography in the first place:

 "...And lastly, (I may as well confess it, since my denial of it will be believed by nobody), perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own vanity.

Indeed, I scarce ever heard or saw the words 'Without vanity I may say, etc.' but some vain thing immediately followed.

Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they may have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action;

And therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life."

Coolest. guy. ever. :-)

The Never-Ending Carrot and Stick - Chasing my Ancestors

My father has been dead now for...what? Almost two months now?

So much has happened in those two months.

The entire trajectory of my life changed. Everything I knew about myself and my history has been altered or accentuated.

Who knew something I thought would have little to no impact could hit with the force of a neutron bomb in my life? Everything looks the same, but inside feels very different.

My hubby's super-intense summer class is over, and I'm thinking of returning to school myself.

To study history.

About five years ago, I took a course that was supposed to tell me my strengths. My four greatest strengths turned out to be connection, input, learning, and intellection. All introverted strengths - no extrovert strengths at all.

At the time, I felt very depressed about that. Living as a massive introvert in a world made for extroverts makes me feel like I should get a special parking space or something.

But still, over time, I've come to appreciate these strengths more and more...my love for learning, my search for connections, my appreciation for a good discussion of concepts, and I can't get enough of any of these things.

And it all circles back to my family.

Tolkien made up his universe - I have one ready-made in my own family, and so many missing stories to research and investigate.

The gay uncle who ran a parking garage in New Jersey - what was gay life in 1950s New Jersey like?

The great-great-grandfather who died mysteriously - were there a lot of missing persons in Illinois?

The aunt who was strangled to death by her husband - what happened to him?

Was my great-grandfather actually related to the founder of Harvard somehow - even peripherally?

The great-great-grandmother who, as a widow, traveled to Wyoming from a privileged upbringing to live out the rest of her life in the wilderness? What other stories of women alone in the West are out there?

The albums from a certain torch singer left behind by my grandmother after she died - who was this lady, and why did my grandmother like her so much? Where were the similarities?

The indentured servant who somehow escaped most of the terrible things that happened to indentured servants - how did he do it?

I could literally spend the rest of my life chasing down these stories - and what better way to do it than on the government's dime?

If I get my Ph.D. and get grants to write historical books, or teach online classes about history in college (remember, I'm super-introverted!) or learn languages and prowl libraries and databases for more information...wearing books on my head like a maniac...til I've got a Silmarillion of my own...

Bliss!

Now there's a project worth undertaking - I have it! I have my special purpose!

Now...to figure out this college application...

Procrastination and Priorities

I still have not recorded my story yet.

I suppose it could be a technical issue - my kids have far surpassed me in the mastery of this mysterious box with the glowing screen. And that's even AFTER having taken college classes in networking (which I barely survived) and A+.

I'm lucky to remember my password from day to day, really.

So it's time to tune up the pressure and git 'er done!

There's a time when procrastination is good - when the story needs more time to 'cook' in the brain, so it comes out in the best way.

Other times, procrastination makes the writer a little crazy, accomplishing everything BUT what you're supposed to be writing. The dishes are done - the garden is weeded - the family is happy - and you are miserable because what you really want to work on isn't getting done.

Crazy, I know. But that's how it goes.

So here's a video as a personal reminder...

Back to the Scottish Gypsies with Me! :-)

As a gift to myself when I graduated from high school, I brazenly took a week off work at my new job, with my new credit card, and traveled to England and Scotland.

In my heart, I had a feeling it might be the only travelling I would get to do, so I wanted to make sure it happened.

I was totally alone, riding trains and going from town to town, not even sure how I would feed myself. It was great good fortune that I survived and made it home, really.

One morning I woke up in a hostel in Kyle of Loch Alsh in Scotland, and wandered out early to sit on a pebbly beach and watch the clouds roll over the mountains and across the water as the sun came up. A moment I've revisited often in my mind over the years.

 

That moment came with a feeling of recognition I never could explain - a strong feeling of deja vu and comfort in my surroundings that seemed strange at the time.

So I've always felt that my ancestry came from Scotland, even though I never knew for sure.

Yesterday, I knew for sure.

One of the items I retrieved from my mother's house after the death of my father was a book of genealogy, about my Grandmother Lora Stockwell's line.

And in very dense, historical and factual terms, it laid out how William Stockwell Sr. travelled to Massachusetts as a teenager (probably) to become an indentured servant in America. His grandfather was born somewhere in Scotland around 1603.

It must have been some kind of poverty that made him want to leave. I know, that morning I watched Scottish clouds roll over Scottish mountainsides, that it would have taken threat of death for me to leave that beautiful place.

So the roots are firmly there, and now I'm looking up Scottish songs from that era, which turn out to be largely Gypsy songs. (which explains my preference of Halloween costumes for the past 40 years)...

Wish I knew where in Scotland they were from, but that's another mystery to solve in later days.

Happy Death-Day to my Father, and to Poppa Ray

My father died almost a month ago at this point, and in my rational mind I'm fine.

But my subconscious squeezed memories out of my eyes at random moments, and I still can't figure out why.

Ray Bradbury died five years ago today. Ray Bradbury was my Poppa...one of many. Someone who was always there, and suddenly not.

It was one of those moments I remember, like 9/11 or Kennedy's assassination (and I remember the former, but I'm not so old that I remember the latter).

I was sitting in my silent office, when my co-worker Alex broke the silence with the awful announcement. "Oh look - Ray Bradbury died."

My own silence broke as well. "What?"

I found the obituary in the newspaper. Then I went back to one of my favorite videos on YouTube, because I already missed the sound of his voice.

I took on his challenge, and I'm still in the middle of it today. Not as prolific a writer as he.

This blog at BrainPickings is like a posthumous birthday party to my Poppa Bradbury, and is not to be missed.

Particularly the poem Neil Gaiman wrote to him for his 91st birthday.

Still Here...Tending My Garden

I haven't blogged this week, and there's a perfectly good reason why.

I had nothing to say.

Sometimes that's the only reason, and it's a good one. Why take up bandwidth just to hear yourself chatter on, after all?

You see, there's three cycles to writing, kind of like gardening.

There's the gathering cycle, where I read widely and gather tools and ideas.

There's the planting cycle, where you put the idea into the earth - maybe two or more ideas together - and then you watch what grows from it.

Then there's the harvesting cycle, where you pluck and share, if there's anything worth sharing

Some ideas die.

Some ideas grow into something that's cute and entertaining, like the story I did that's about to be published here in October.

Some ideas grow into a Jack-in-the-beanstock vine that take you, the house, and the entire neighborhood with it, like this one.

And there there's others that are somewhere in-between...still waiting for their turn for the light.

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Right now, I'm in a sort of gathering phase, where I've turned my house inside-out, and now I'm facing a stuffed closet with so many papers in it that used to mean something, but they've sat in that closet so long that I can't actually remember what they meant, and they're falling on me.

Not to mention emails back from 2007 with missing stories captured within, and two large duffel bags and several smaller bags that nearly broke my whole family's backs getting them from my mother's house in Maryland to mine in Texas, with stories from lives connected to mine swirling inside, waiting to get out and get converted into some kind of digital format I can actually work with...

So you see...nothing really to say.

Gathering...

From Writing to Speaking

This week I'm supposed to do a spoken version of my story that was accepted to the Antipodean SF website, which is going to come out in their October issue.

This thing (reading aloud) is not my forte.

It's not like I've never done this before. Heaven knows I've read enough bedtime stories to kids, and I actually did do a reading of another short story on YouTube years ago, just to try it out. I just don't feel like I'm terribly good at it. So there's a little mental block there for me.

I decided to listen to the podcast they do, to see how other authors read their stories.

And I found out they do a sort of radio show, that's really on the radio. They paint a lovely little romantic word picture of it on their website:

"The AntipodeanSF Radio Show is broadcast in the Nambucca Valley, on the Mid North Coast of NSW every Saturday evening at 8:30pm EAST, on community radio, 2NVR, 105.9FM."

So I had to take a quick Google Maps trip.

It's a small spot in Australia, on the beach facing out towards New Zealand. I clicked along Pacific Highway, and stopped for a moment to dangle my legs off the pier in Pelican Park and pulled in for a moment at the Nambucca Motel, with its painted brick and its signature cactus with a sombrero on it.

I tried to imagine the entire population of the Nambucca Valley (all 6,222 of them, or even if only 3% show up, that's still a good 186 people!), seated around their radios on a Saturday night at 8:30 in October...

Listening to me, reading out my story.

I'm in awe.

Neil Gaiman gave some advice to another author once, when she asked about reading aloud - "Pretend you're someone who can do it, and then just do what they would do."

Works for me. Tomorrow I'm going to pretend I know what I'm doing, and do it...I hope...