Time’s A’Wastin’

Well. I see that I have done none of the things that I planned to do this past year or two. No essays rewritten and posted (although that is still a plan), no short stories completed and submitted to Kindle (that’ll never happen. Probably).

I’m in another lit class, this time Memoir Writing. This is about the fourth class I’ve taken on writing my memoir (again with Professor K), and I’ve finally come up with a portion of my life that I don’t mind writing about. I’m calling it Following My Nose: A memoir about sex, typing and home ownership. I’m keeping it clean. Any “gray” parts of my life will go with me to my grave. Unless the guys start writing memoirs, of course.

It’s nearly spring and I’m planning another steampunk garden. I don’t know if my gooseberries and hops made it through the winter. It’s been record-breakingly cold around these parts (Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley). My cats are fine, I’m still feeding squirrels, and my dying fruit trees attract lots of birds, which I watch out my window as I type. I’m still working, although I plan to drop one of my clients this summer.

I turned 66 last fall. I haven’t yet recovered from the shock.

Sukebind’s Winding

By which I mean the hops, of course, some of which escaped their pot during the winter and seeded themselves into the ground beside my porch.  They’re unhappy, though, at the lack of trellis for them to entwine themselves about. I wasn’t really thinking ahead when I planted them.  All I wanted was to check out their hoppy scent.

I was thinking ahead when I started seeds of seven (7!) different flowers, including little round red peppers for my Steampunk Garden, but it’s punk this year. The seeds all sprouted … eventually … but the the weather stayed cold and then it turned all lagoony with massive amounts of rain, and when I got them in their outside pots only a few survived, mostly the Love Lies Bleeding, which is my favorite, but still.  I had such plans.  I’ll try again next year.

I don’t know why I’m back here except that the blog has been on my mind. Parrot and Nacrea’s Tears are very little forrarder, although I have added some good stuff to my notes. I think I just like the research and the blinding flashes of brilliance more than the actual slog of writing.

I have squirrels now.  I lured them in during the winter with almonds and peanuts in the shell (no salt), and now I’m a regular stop on their foraging trail.  Lately it’s been too wet to walk across the backyard and hide their nuts. I hide them like Easter eggs.  (Or treasure.)  Yesterday I had a flock of wrens wrangling and creating a ruckus in my dying apple tree. I’ve never seen them in a crowd before. It was exciting. I have three large dying trees (one apple and two mulberries), and more life than ever going on back there. The trees aren’t large enough to damage anything if they fall, but so far they’re just losing a branch or so at a time. I’m letting them go in their own time.

That’s all I’ve got. I’ve been a little depressed over work — focus groups, forsooth. Each group next to the other in a cafeteria, probably with a little tape recorder in the middle of each table, picking up all the laughter and screaming from the rest of the room, and about a third of the discussion they’re meant to record. And somebody thinks they’re going to get a reasonable transcript out of it. To quote an old German man I know, “Stuppids.” I may finish a story about him one time. It’s called “The Interminable Seduction.”

A Grim Beginning

I haven’t posted any of my personal essays yet.  Four of them were too personal.   I’m going to post my favorite one, though, very soon.  It’s called “Creating a Steampunk Garden,” and I actually created one, which was exciting on several levels.

Meanwhile, the last week of Professor K’s essay class coincided with (collided with) the first week of my Coursera course, “Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World.”  I signed up for it because I have an overwhelming desire to be educated in the fullest, most liberal sense of the word.  Sadly, this ambition clashes with my overwhelming desire to rare back in the recliner and read for fun or watch DVDs.  Life is full of hard choices for us wannabe intellectuals.

I read the list of assigned books carefully before I joined up and saw NO mention of Grimm’s fairy tales.  I hate Grimm’s fairy tales, original and bowdlerized, and have since I was a child.  It seemed to me, when I read the list of assigned books, that the first assignment was to read  Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, one of which I love and the other of which I find confusing.  That darn White Knight, always falling off his horse.  What was that all about?!   So I had a pretty bad shock when I saw that the first assignment was actually to read a whole book of Grimm’s fairy tales and report on it; this during the week that I was trying to edit my essays and collect them in a portfolio for Professor K.

The Coursera essay assignment isn’t due until noon today, so I was unpleasantly surprised this morning to receive an email from them, scolding me.  How did they know I hadn’t read the fairy tales and wasn’t intending to submit a concise essay about them?!  Yikes!  But it turns out that they were admonishing me to share my thoughts in the Forum.  What they apparently don’t know is that I have already checked out the Forum.  The first thing I saw was an impertinent question regarding  my religious affiliation.  Why do you want to know, and what are you going to do with the information?, was my gut reaction.  (One can never be too paranoid, in my experience.)

So, okay.  As far as I’m concerned, the class starts with Alice in Wonderland.  I will read the assignment and write my concise essay.  I will share some of my thoughts on the Forum, and see what happens.

Us Bad Kids always redesign the syllabus to suit ourselves.

In and Out of the Sock Drawer

Professor K referred to the sock drawer several times in last Friday’s class, and it makes me laugh so I’m adopting it for my own.  I’ve been pretty disappointed with most of my essays so far — in fact, I deleted two of them after I’d uploaded them, but then they came back in their entirety with Professor K’s comments, so I went ahead and stuck them in the sock drawer with the rest.  Now it’s time to pull my portfolio together and I’ve taken another look and guess what!  The essays aren’t so bad!  They need varying amounts of rewrite, but they’re going to be okay!  Yay!

I wish I could say the same about the cover I designed for my Kindle short story collection.  It was in the sock drawer for at least two weeks and I loved it when I put it there, but this morning?  Not so much.  It seems too pale.  Well, it’s a white ghost on a white background; that could explain some of it!  Also, I made the mistake of reading a critique of Kindle and possibly all other e-readers: Amazon is watching you while you read!  They know when you start, they know when you stop, they know if you make notes on things or share a giggle with your S.O.  They can even take your book away from you any time they want to.  Maybe I paid too much attention to the Red Menace when I was a child during the Cold War, but I find this really creepy.  It’s totally put me off the whole Kindle project.

I’ll just concentrate on the portfolio for now, and get back to Kindle when I’ve forgotten most of the nasty details.  (For the record, some writers and publishers are on board with liking the feedback, but they’re going to have a hard time convincing me.)

My Brain is Stultified

Like the trolls on Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld, my brain shuts down in the heat, and this 100 degree weather is playing havoc with my writing mind.  However, I did finally write drafts of the two assigned essays, one a literary journalism and the other a literary something else, I forget.  My essays both sound like the same kind of essay to me, but so did most of the assigned “professional” essays in the textbook, so I’m not going to let that worry me.

Usually I write like Poe, and have an ending (even if it changes) and a good working title in mind before I start, but this time I wrote like Robert Frost’s “ice melting on a hot stove,” so I have lousy titles and NO endings.  I’m gonna have to rely on the … proofreaders?  Backstabbers?  Ah, feedbackers!  (See what happens to my brain in the heat?)  Anyway, I hope the feedback will help.   I’m in a new group this time, and I happen to know they’re formidable writers.

I didn’t write my weekly post last week; I forget why, but I had an excellent title: “Ghosts and Gimmicks.”  The ghosts were because several in class, including me, had ghosts in their essays, and the gimmicks is what one of the guys in the back row said the professional essays relied on too much, and I agreed with him, except that he thought it was negative and I thought it was positive.  I totally agreed with him that the hettle essay was TOO gimmicky.  I still don’t know what a hettle is, but I really liked her “How I Wrote the Hettle Essay.”

It was the “Searching for Marvin Gardens” essay that really turned me on.  Gimmicky, yes; but so clever and flowed effortlessly between the light and the dark.  Many years ago, for a major news magazine, I transcribed a week’s worth of interviews about what happened to Atlantic City, so I had a real appreciation of the essay.

I should read all these assignments again in October when it’s cooler.  My brain likes October.

One of my new essays is about steampunk flowers, and the original title was “Steampunk Flowers,” but as of this morning I’ve revved it up to “Creating a Steampunk Garden,” which isn’t any great shakes, but at least it’s evolving.  The other essay is about rest cures, and it’s called “Rest Cures,” and when I wrote to Professor K to moan about it he said it sounded “rather drab,” and to “Jazz it up!”  (His punctuation.)

How does “Jazzy Rest Cures!” sound to anybody?

I Fall to Pieces

Okay, I remained disappointed with my first two essays.  I think I was overly influenced by the sad, but otherwise excellent essays in the textbook.  This week’s assignments are a nature essay and a segmented essay.  Nature makes me sad these days, with all the destruction, so I went above and beyond to the super-natural!  Ha!  There’s nothing I like better than playing fast and loose with a writing assignment.

The segmented essay, though, drove me to despair.  Three times I thought I had a concept; three times it fell apart on me.  I finally cheated.  (Well, that’s what I get for sitting in the back of the class!)   I went through our family newsletters, of which I was the chief editor, and picked out various short articles that I thought I could string together.  The ones that worked, but only after I added subtitles and an introduction, were some conversations that I’ve had with men.  I think it’s pretty funny, so I’m happy with it.  Naturally, once the pressure was off, I thought of an original segmented essay that I could have written!  Typewriters!  I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and progressed with technology (electric, IBM Selectric, word processing, Microsoft Word [boo, hiss!]) to my present state of slitty-eyed resentment of any new iteration.   Don’t keep changing things, that’s what I say!  But it’s too late to write it now; I’ve already uploaded my essays.

Meanwhile, realizing that I am too easily influenced by the textbook and the excellent essays written by my classmates, I have decided to start my next two essays without benefit of instruction.  I.e., I have quickly scanned the definition of “literary journalism,” and started writing before I read the assigned examples.  This essay is going to be a lot of fun, incorporating an unwelcome change in my Blue Cross health insurance policy with enlivening examples from literature.  Dorothy Gale of Kansas and Saki come immediately to mind.   And I’m pretty sure I can work in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Meanwhile, I received some excellent advice from Professor K about my Kindle project.  I was bemoaning the lack of oomph in the titles of two of my stories.  One of them, “Sook’s Cake,” I felt would be particularly meaningless to anyone who is not familiar with Truman Capote’s childhood, and I was wondering about changing the title to something like “A Fruitcake on Hallowe’en.”  Professor K immediately wrote back and said, “Make it ‘Hallowe’en Fruitcake,'” and of course that was perfect.   Prepositions only weaken the horror.

The Omen!

Amazing superCATural evidence of direct literary link between Truman Capote and Bonnie Furlong

A Sign! An Omen!

This is the week that I have set aside to begin exploring Kindle publishing, and I think I have received a favorable omen for the enterprise! The window in my bathroom is beside the shower, so I keep it covered with a makeshift curtain (plastic trash bag) to keep the wood from rotting. On Monday I was startled to see six or seven silver-dollar-sized holes in the curtain. From my vantage point, four of the holes spelled out the word “B O O.”  I immediately thought of To Kill A Mockingbird and Boo Radley, which led me to Dill, which led me to Truman Capote, which led me to Capote’s aunt, which led me to fruitcake. My ghost story, “Sook’s Cake,” was inspired by a newspaper article about how young Truman would help his Aunt Sook make her famous fruitcakes, and it is one of the three ghost stories that I am hoping to publish on Kindle!

Well, okay, I’m pretty sure that my cat made the holes when he was running around crazy the other night; I wouldn’t claim that this is a supernatural manifestation. However, I defy anyone to fault my subsequent chain of literary reasoning.

Today I listened to a video of how to upload to Kindle, and it sounds pretty straightforward. Most importantly, it won’t cost me anything. I need to think of a title, design a cover, and write an enticing blurb, but those will be fun to do and give me an opportunity to play with Photoshop.

Ain’t Got that Zing!

I’ve finished my two essays, the 500 word memoir and the personal, and I’m not totally happy with them. I like my stuff to have a kind of zing to it, and I’m not seeing it. They’re not due until tomorrow evening, so I have time to do some more revising. The memoir is about my father and the personal has cats in it. I know, I know, cats are a big no-no in the blogosphere.

I’m supposed to upload the essays to this blog, so I’ll do that after I’ve made any changes based on the workshop comments. I’ll post the essays on a separate “page,” so I’ve got to figure out how to do that. Also, I want to put in a link to a good article on why writers need to tweet, blog, and/or Facebook.  I’m on Twitter, but I’ve been too shy to tweet anything, so I just retweet stuff that I think is interesting.  I have three followers, two of whom are complete strangers. Why are they following me? It freaks me out.

I’m new to this public blogging and I’m only doing it because I want my trilogy, if it’s ever finished and published, to have as wide a potential audience as possible. We’ve got to self-promote these days; the publisher won’t do much. Hardly any champagne book launches anymore. In case anyone’s wondering, the trilogy is a campus caper set in a place very much like Lord Fairfax Community College, only with ghosts. There is a sly (and very brief) allusion to Professor K.

Honors Audit

Just because I’m sitting in the back of the class, getting a free education due to my advancing age, doesn’t mean that I can’t try to over-achieve. I don’t always go for the Honors classes because, let’s face it, they’re a lot of work. But Professor K’s are usually fun. Since I’m not doing this for a grade, I’ve made up my own Honors course. In addition to creating this blog, which is part of the regular Honors assignment, I am going to try to self-publish three short stories on Kindle. I understand it can be done easily, so I hope that’s true.

Self-publishing has become more acceptable these days, although I’m of a generation that believes it’s not published unless it’s a first edition hardback with a four-color dust jacket. Still, I haven’t been able to move two of my three ghost stories (one was published online a few years ago, but I kept the rights). I’m going to package them and see what I can do with them. The two that have not been published (in fact, have been rejected more than once) were written while I was attending some of Professor K’s classes. I’m sure that’s just an  unfortunate coincidence.