saying goodbye to the time of magical creatures

 saying goodbye
to the magic that kissed thy brow
to your rosy cheeked spirit calling out in delight
How I long to see again, wonder in your eyes.
My fair reason filled boy
wont you carry any wonder with you into manhood?
 Oh if I could but pack your suitcase, the incredible things you would take with you.
And that is what I thought I was doing all these years. (filling you up, with carved pumpkins, sparkly trees, painted eggs, bits of fairy wings, and robin's egg shells, of Christmas, of candles, of twinkly lights, and of glowing clouds at sunset.)
Yes I know growing up does mean the setting down of certain childish things
I wouldn't have you standing in a field awaiting the great pumpkin,
or knocking out your grown-up teeth in hopes of cash under your pillow
but you don't need to leave it all behind,
hold onto the magic, the spirit, that flows behind it at the source.
At fourteen you won't express it, but I hope it is alive
in childhood's memory
its wings folded, tucked inside your heart.
so that if (when) you need them
they will awake and flutter within
strong enough to carry you through.

(to lift a heavy heart through hard times.)
for sometimes what seems silly and frivolous, glitter on construction paper,
strands of lights strung round a tree, is merely a trinket, a tangible tie to something much greater, something vast deep and strong. Something you should keep with you, your whole life long.

  This is going to be a long haul.  I don't know why it should feel like such a hard thing to do.  I just starting reading over Echo, yep 2 1/2 pages in, and already I've bolted to come here and whine about it.  I will say this though, I read my initial first page of chapter one, and then the one I rewrote last March, and the March one is better (and I even know why and how it is better!).  So the good news is that while I am terrified to read over my work and attempt to "fix" it, I do have proof already by page one, that I am capable of reading over it and making improvements.

a bit like cleaning one's house top to bottom, reorganizing the contents of drawers and closets, choosing what to keep and what to toss, and deciding where everything goes, and how you want each room to look, and to feel...so many many decisions, and I have never been good at that.  Oh look here I have procrastinated myself out of time (surprise surprise).  Not good.  I must get my son from school and take him to the Ortho.  Well at least I'll take a book.

     I've finished reading, A Dash of Style.  But I do still need to do the exercises that are present at the end of each chapter.  I have found it helpful.  It has given me new ways to think about the writing, about how I express myself.  And I see I have much work to do.  But thank God also that I have a map, some way of guiding myself through it. 

    Just as I am hiding from doing the exercises so too am I hiding from doing the editing.  A task that has long daunted me, and makes me quiver with uncertainty and dread.  But now I know what I am looking for, what I am going to try to change.  And finally I have realized that I can't go through it page by page making it "right".  I'm going to instead look at it for each thing separately.  First I'll go through for content, for story, then I will improve how that breaks down into chapters, and paragraphs.  I will go through it once for action verbs.  Once for the lengths of sentences.  Going on like that. Because when I have gone through trying to fix it sentence by sentence, I never knew what was right or wrong and it all just fell apart.  Instead I will go through strengthening one thing at a time. And only worrying about one thing at a time.

    Sin and Syntax, is next on my reading list.  Mostly I am concerned with sentence structure.
    Currently I am reading, Harry Potter's Bookshelf the great books behind the Hogwarts adventures, by John Granger. And I am really enjoying it.  I feel like I am learning plenty of stuff that will help me in my own writing, but reading it isn't work it's pleasure. 

    So far in my readings for my writing in the past year I've learned how really important it is to make your characters sympathetic.  I know that sounds obvious, but that doesn't mean that one automatically writes in the best way for it.  I have learned that in my tendency to be bright (as in cheerful not intelligent) that I miss opportunities to have readers care about my characters.  I don't sit down, and dwell in the uncomfortable emotions, my tendency is instead to glide above.  And I need to let some pain show through.

   I like having the over-all structure, the story down, but nothing set, nothing fully done, because the books I'm reading tell things that offer me the opportunity to look at the story in a new way.  My tone, my atmosphere is light.  But I've realized with Fountain of Swans how it could be Gothic instead.  How the elements are already there, and it is interesting to look at the same story through this other lens and see if it might be better.  When I was considering changing it to first person (still haven't decided) I was upset because then something that happens to the character will be a mystery for us just like it is for her.  And for some reason I felt like that couldn't be so.  But now from doing this reading, I realize that it would heighten the sympathy and the tension in the story if the reader shares the characters feelings, in not knowing why this thing is happening.  Then the mystery to be solved can be one reader and character share.

   Now I don't know if I will or will not do that (make it Gothic, make it a mystery), as I have said I haven't been working directly on my writing (because I am a wimp) but I love the fact that I am engaged in thinking about the stories in new ways.

    Well October is nearly over.  I know my focus should be on editing Echo.  I do feel like a failure for failing to do so. But I am seriously considering signing up for NaNoWriMo again.  Why?  Because it fosters daily practice.  It promotes bum glue. It helps me to tap into the energy of many moving forward together. My goal isn't to finish.  But Fresh Oranges has long been neglected, and I could hash out parts of that story.  The deal with myself being three hours a day, either I write Oranges, or I edit Echo.  The only way to escape doing one being doing the other.

 

  I don't know why it is so hard for me to write here now.  Time is of course an issue but....more than that, I think it is emotional.  I was very brave (for me) at the Writer's Conference last March, I raised my hand, and I stood my ground.  I also revealed more than I had intended, via a spontaneous writing assignment, and had my other submitted work more harshly ridiculed than I had expected.  All of which has resulted in my being more insecure about my writing, and generally feeling more vulnerable and exposed, which doesn't lend itself well to blogging. 
    I am like a me of the past.  One who has a restless unsettled feeling at night, not of things undone, but of being haunted by foolish things said or written.  Things I know that the people I wrote or said them to are not bothering with thinking about.  But still how easily I can torture myself over it.  I am only 100% safe in things I say to my husband and my son, anything else said to anyone else can be used to make me nervous.
    Actually that is partly now why I am going to strive harder to write here more regularly, and to work on my novel (though I am scared to do so). Because I need not to torture myself over little nothingnessess of thoughts shared.  If I am going to make myself uneasy well it should be over bigger mistakes. Stuff more worthy of the stress I attach to it.
    It is so pitiful to stress so over the mundane, to feel my legs shaking as I attempt to walk down the steep steps of my son's high school, because I raised my hand to ask a question at parent night.  A simple question: if they preferred to have papers printed rather than emailed?  They need to be printed.  Why on earth such an exchange should lead to my shaking, I don't know. I kept my thoughts about it rational, but minutes later my legs wobbled freely in accordance with something outside my conscious thoughts. I do hope I can stop being flustered for no reason; I've allowed myself to become all tilted and windblown in the absence of any storm. It is time I right myself.  And on the occasion when I do find myself all tousled and tossed about, at least let it be from having actually braved to walk through a storm.

Now that Summer is over

this is the song I play when I wake up each morning

s

    Summer is going by so quickly.  I want to settle in and savor every moment of August, but fall keeps nipping at my heels.  There is one month, before I am the mother of a high schooler.  I am always losing time.  Always wishing I could hoard it, storing it up, to spend how and when I choose.  To decide myself the times that seem to extend on forever, and those that go by in a flash. 
    I spent so much time planting this year: new plantings, transplanting, dividing up my plants and putting them in areas previously the domain of weeds.  The digging of holes by the hundreds. Well at least until mid July when tired of it all, I took a pack of zinnia seeds and just wind tossed them over a section of dirt. Perhaps I will see one or two of them. I have very little good to say about matting and mulch, weeds grow in it, and it is a pain to cut through as your plants expand and need more space, and when I need to make new spaces for other plants. 
    It is raining now.   It was so dry here our grass was brown and felt like straw. I have never been so happy to see rain as I have been since July 10th. It was raining that day as we were leaving for vacation, my mother thought I might be upset about the lousy weather.  I was thrilled. It takes me two hours to water the plants around back, and two for out front.  So if God waters the plants twice a week, that saves me 8 hours of standing out in the yard with a hose.  
    I have been surprised that my eye is changing (what I consider to be visually pleasing).  Which is the reason for all the rearranging of flower beds.  Since I have spent little time working directly on my writing, I am hoping this is a sign that things are changing and shifting somewhere deep down within.  That art, to whatever degree it resides in me, is growing, being refined.  I think my mind, my plantings and my writing, have been more chaotic, a toss up or in, of whatever interests me, too much, and with disorganization, favored over the possibility of leaving anything out.  But this year, the plantings looked messy to me.  They lacked impact.  Too many different things.  I wanted rows of a kind.  I wanted the impact of groupings of one color.  I noticed where my scale was off; where things needed to be bigger or smaller. I looked upon the same beds I saw last year and took them in differently.
    I don't even feel like my flower garden happened this year, with so many things being moved, and plunged into transplant shock.  I've been gardening this year for next. I like that about it though, flower gardening is like dreaming, and it involves faith.  I bought four purple salvias for a dollar each two days ago.  Inexpensive because they look a minute or two shy of dead.  But I look at them with hope and possibility, I will plant them, and tend to them.  I expect nothing of them this year, except that that which lies below the soil stay alive now, and sleep nicely dormant over winter, and then happily burst forth like new in Spring. Gardeners dreaming, gardeners faith.
    I do hope when I read my writing, my stories, that there too, I will now see where things look messy.  How I need to change things to create impact, rather than throwing everything that occurs to me in.  There is so much writing work to be done that it scares me.  I only take the smallest steps forward.  Which is sort of stupid as at this rate it will take forever, and just drag the most uncomfortable parts out.  But at least I am taking some steps.  And because of the reading about writing I have been doing, I am noticing more when I pleasure read.  I notice choices being made, when this or that is done for impact.  And now I realize I was never a careful reader.  I don't write well with commas, semi-colons, periods, etc., because I don't take the time to truly read them as written. 
    So, it has not been the big writing summer it was supposed to be, and yes I am disappointed in myself....but.. 

    Brian (the husband) weed-whacked my poppies and several other perennials on the side of the house.  True it wasn't a well established bed, and certainly is less so now. I may have, possibly, called him at work screaming and yelling, and then slipped into violent tears.  Prompting him later to say that he had been concerned that I might actually be losing my mind.  But gardening is partly dreaming of the future.  I planted these from seed three years ago.  The first year I saw nothing.  The second I saw some plants but nothing bloomed (save for one hollyhock, the only hollyhock out of a whole packet of seeds.)  So this year, was going to be THE ONE, the year they bloomed. But then he mindlessly came along and whacked them down to their ankles! Yes, yes, yes, only plants, but I spent three years dreaming into them. And now my hopes for them must be pinned on next year.
    At least by now he knows to stay away from my other beds.  My salmon poppy tucked beside the stone steps is finally safe. He got that one two years running, which is why I can't believe that he so unwittingly massacred these.  By now he should know, leave the fuzzy leaved things that look like weeds alone.  He kept saying, but there weren't any flowers.  Yes, and now there wont be.
    Bygones.  I do have other plants. That is what May is for in my mind, planting.  And Brian can't complain about my buying ones to replace those he chopped.

     The good news of late is that the boy, about to turn 14, has finally decided to take up bike riding.  I really never thought I would see the day when he would ride down the street.  And now we all get to go on family bike rides together.
    The bad news of late, is my writing progress.  There has been none.  I am reading A Dash of Style about punctuation, and that is going well.  Though I am not attempting to employ any of it yet, it makes sense to me.  But the rest of the grammar world is still a foreign language which leaves me feeling confused and stupid. I feel like there is no point in working on my draft to try and make it better when I lack the basic grammatical competence necessary to do so.  So I don't know.  In a week or two I will be done with planting.  And I will have to force myself to sit in a chair, and keep trying different ways to learn.  I hate feeling this stuck.  I hate feeling this unable to communicate.  I hate second guessing every sentence I write, to anyone about anything. But that is where I am.
    It will be okay that I was stuck here for a while, as long as I find my way through.  I could and should end up in a better place because of it.  But I am scared.  Scared that I can't learn, and that I will become so frustrated and full of doubt that I wont be able to write at all.  And because I am afraid of that happening, it's hard to push myself forward to a time when I could reach that conclusion.  I'm going to have to keep a pep talk in my pocket all June. I'm not the sort to keep trying when I fail.  I am the sort to slink quietly away.  But I am still dreaming, in gardening and in writing. Dreaming of the future, of how it could be.  Those poppies wont bloom this year, like me they've been whacked down to their ankles.  But we are all still alive, and we have woven within us a code that wants us to bloom. Something that wants us to strive, to go on, to reach forward to a time of blooming. And no matter how many years it takes those poppies on the side of the house, or me, of trying, of watering, and weeding, being fertilized, then wilting in the hot sun, then rebounding to be chewed on by insects, no matter how many times we get weed-whacked, and go dormant then start to grow again, I am choosing to believe it is in all of our destinies (eventually) to bloom.

(there, pep talk number two of the thirty thousand I will need.)

(oh and I am deleting any comments left in other languages, as I have no idea what they might be saying.) (oh, unless that other language is English grammar speak.)