Photo-Me & my Dad

Here is a picture of my father and I. I am unsure of whether the picture was taken at my grandparents' house in Amherst or at my parents' house in Wooster. The picture was with my grandmother's slides so it's likely at my grandparents' house.

I had never seen a picture of myself as an infant. The story went that my parents didn't have enough money when I was born to be able to afford baby pictures but that my grandmother likely had pictures in the form of slides. So this summer, I broke down and purchased a $700 negative/slide scanner and began going through my grandmother's hundreds of slides.

And, lo and behold, look who I found! Me!

You may notice that I appear to be sucking not my thumb but my middle two fingers. This is something I remember doing up until I was about four (maybe a little older.) Like biting my fingernails and chewing my hair, I just eventually stopped doing it. But I think it's funny that I obviously did it from the time I was very small.

Who da thunk it? Pinky wonders...

(I'm going to try to keep my entries short because I know how I tend to skip super long ones...)

Flaming

I flamed someone today.

And I'm not particularly proud of it.

The worse part about it is that I did it on someone else's blog where I shouldn't have. And I'm very sorry about that.

Everyone has people who rub them the wrong way and this woman just seems to do it for me.

(Come to think of it, I have been running into more of them as I get older... I wonder why that is. Is it that I do not suffer fools as easily as I used to or that I'm just becoming more of the misanthrope I was born to be?)
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I will fully admit that my family is basically lower class. My dad was a construction laborer and my mom trained as a beautician but never worked at it after she got married, she was a stay-at-home mom. All four of us kids went to college but neither of them did. My mother's father was a farmer and a machinist and my dad's dad was a tug boat captain, a tattoo artist, a reformed alcoholic and a gambler. Can you say white trash?

We lived in a small town and didn't have a lot of things other kids had because my parents didn't believe in credit cards. We never got an allowance and we started working at things like paper routes and baby sitting as soon as we hit about 11 or 12 for our own money. We got by but always I knew there were others that had it better, had more, and I wanted that too.

I was jealous of my cousins whose dad worked at the college and who got to do things there. My one cousin who was my age got to be in plays there and became a Singing Angel. (Considering I can't carry a tune in a bucket, that shouldn't have made me jealous but it was the opportunity I guess.)

And I knew that there were things I didn't understand because of my disability and still don't understand--like philosophy and some poetry and even some fiction. I could probably read Camus' The Stranger 18 times and still not get it. I just reread a short story by James Joyce posted on a friend's website and didn't get it. Comprehension is still a problem.
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Why did I just go into all that?

Because it all leads into why I flamed this woman.

You see, I knew who she was. I knew that she is a retired Spanish professor and that she comes from a scholarly family and that her husband was a chair at Oberlin and her children went to prestigious schools and that she can be quite arrogant about her background. I believe the word I used when I apologized to my friend whose blog it was is sanctimonious.

Basically, to me it appears as if she has/had all the advantages I never did... or her kids did. And she treated me as though I was as dumb as a box of rocks. I was thrown back into being that poor white trash kid who couldn't read and didn't understand and would spend the rest of her life working retail. (Maybe I collect books to prove to myself I'm not dumb any more.)

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I had written a comment about a short piece by Eliot about a man who was embarrassed by a woman he was with who was laughing too loud. The piece was called Hysteria. My comment which was prompted by the book I had just read that had the lamentable title of Scandalous Lovers but was actually a really excellent historical novel set in 1880's England talked about the lunacy laws at the time where men could put their womenfolk in an asylum for things like hysteria (I was thinking of laughing hysterically in this case) and the women could never get out--end of story.

Now our esteemed Spanish prof (with whom I have had both bad and good experiences while at work at the college) corrected me rather pedantically that hysteria comes from the womb--don't you know hysterectomy? Ah-duh! Yes, I know that. It was given an essentially female name but today the word doesn't apply just to women and disorders of the womb as it didn't back then.

There had earlier been discussions about how people will understand what you write and maybe this was just such a case. But she had gone from being coy in a comment before to being snotty here and I'd had enough. I'd come really close to true flaming before with her but this time I just let it rip.

Maybe I should have overlooked it because I know she is old. We had this discussion about my brother-in-law's mother this past weekend but my brother-in-law's new wife who is a lawyer put it rather succinctly: she's an adult, she should know better.

And so should I.

So Pinky is sorry for that, at least... I admit when I've screwed up...

Photo-Jane and Jer and I

Here is a photo from about mid-1967. The baby is my brother Jerald and the girl holding the baby is my older sister Jane. I am the one on the left. The white thing around my neck is a diaper that has been converted into a sling for my broken left arm.

My sister Karen and I had been over at the neighbor girl's house playing the Three Stooges on the top of her picnic table and I fell off, hitting my arm on a pine tree root, breaking the outside forearm bone near the wrist.

At the time my mother was in Amherst Hospital having her severely diseased gallbladder removed and my dad made the mistake of telling me that she was just down the hall when he took me to the hospital for X-rays. Of course, I wanted to go see her and wasn't allowed. I do recall going to stand outside the hospital and waving to her from the sidewalk while she looked out the window. Vastly different from today.

So Pinky says...

Photo

I'm going to try to post at least a couple photos a week. Some will be of me and some will be of places I've been or the like. I have a negative and slide scanner and I'd like to put it to good use. I have old negatives from my England trip as well as photos from college and farther back that I'd like to scan on the regular scanner and put into the record as well, before they are lost to time.

This is a photo of an Olan Mills picture my mom has in the upstairs hallway of their house. I remember these dresses. In the picture to the left Jane is wearing one just like it which she would grow out of and I would grow into.

Friendship

I don't think I make a very good friend. In fact I think I make a pretty horrible one.

But then I don't think I ever learned how to be one. I learned how to be a sister and that was about it and a sister doesn't necessarily need to be a friend; she just has to be a sister because that's a relationship that's not going to go away. (Though I have heard and seen ones that have and it boggles my mind.)

I just today send a long email to a woman I consider a friend, apologizing for getting nasty with her. (I am also sort of her supervisor at work but she only works in the evenings and I am only there one night a week so we only ever really work together 4 hours a week. I am the only full-time person so I am the titular "supervisor" although everyone does what they are assigned to do.) I asked her to do some data entry for me and, because of the new store configuration, I could hear that she was chatting with an off-work employee rather than working, and I came out, mad as hell and sarcastic, saying it would be nice if she could yak and work at the same time.

Now maybe that's not what she was pissed off at me about and maybe she wasn't pissed off at me at all--I'm really good at reading into situations things that aren't going on at all, it's what makes me a good writer but a lousy interpersonal communicator.

So who knows? But this isn't the first time I've been short with her or with other people and it's not the first time I've had to apologize.

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The older I get the more I think I was simply born a misanthrope. Maybe the career testing I took when I first got to college was right, maybe I would have done better as a fire spotter for the forest service, living in a remote tree house, searching the skyline of mountain peaks for plumes of smoke--all by myself!

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I don't think I really had a close girl friend until I was in junior high. You know someone you passed notes to and shared secrets with and talked about boys with. I was in seventh heaven that this girl was my friend. My older sister has a best friend and they did all kinds of things together and I thought that this was how Ruth and I would be.

But things fell apart at some point. I didn't want to smoke and I didn't want to defy my parents and go out with her and the guys she hung out with. So she "dumped" me and I was as heartbroken as if we had been lovers.

I had always considered myself unlovable as a person--family didn't count, I somehow knew in my heart that they had to love you, at least that's the way it was in my family--and so this just reinforced my lack of self-esteem even more.

This came along at about the same time as all the other issues that coalesced into what I'm now calling my nervous breakdown. Another brick added to the wall that eventually crumbled down and buried me. (Sorry, Pink Floyd, but I borrowed your metaphor.)

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I got through high school without any close girl friends, knowing that I would get out of that place of torture and go onto someplace far away where I could reinvent myself. And I did.

At Dayton, I made friends and had close girl friends and housemates that I still talk to occasionally. But I also had another spectacular girlfriend break-up.

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(Please note that none of these were ever sexual in nature. I'm way too rabid for a cock to care at all about getting into a cunt! But I firmly believe that you can love someone of your own sex as strongly as you can love someone of the opposite sex without sexual love being involved. Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of love with someone of the opposite sex without a cock getting in the way but that's a subject for another blog!)

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Sue wasn't my roommate to start with freshman year but we became fast friends toward the end of first semester and definitely into second semester. She was very charismatic and I think her original roommate hated her friendship with me because I was taking her place in Sue's affections. We went home for the summer planning to live with different roommates sophomore year but right next door to one another in the dorm. And we wrote each other back and forth twice a week it seemed (this was back when snail mail was the only way we had to communicate.) Her old roommate was moving to TX to live with her fiance.

Over the summer Sue worked for Kodak (she was from Rochester NY, the home of Eastman Kodak) and met an older guy. When she came back to school, she discovered that this guy was a nut case and he began a campaign to try to get her to come back home by threatening to commit suicide.

At some point, her roommate and I switched rooms so I was living with her and things just kept going down hill. He called the suicide line to say that she was going to commit suicide and we had everyone under the sun all over our room. She drank too much one night (and we smoked some pot) and I had to take her to the emergency room because it looked as if she was vomiting blood when it was really only sloe gin, and I had to pretend I wasn't drunk off my ass and stoned out of my mind and talk coherent to the dean of students.

It was a total screwed up mess. She was and I was and this guy was.

She finally ditches him and things settle down a little. We finished up the semester and went home for Christmas. When we came back, Sue told me that she met this other guy at a bar over Xmas that she really liked. I'm a little surprised but I say, what the heck, she's in Dayton OH and he's in Rochester NY and as long as no one is calling suicide lines, I'm cool.

And things would have been cool, except that she wanted him to come down for a Valentine's dance in February and she wanted to rent a car, she wanted me to rent a car. (Because I want to win friends, I can be talked into just about anything.) So I rent a car. She asks me if I won't also sleep on the floor of one of the other girl's room so she and her guy can have our dorm room to themselves. Sure, okay, it's an adventure, I say.

That is until I am driving us all back from having pizza the day after the dance and total the rental car by running up the back end of a city bus. City bus 1-rental car 0.

I have a broken leg. The girl in the front seat, Cheryl, has a broken wrist. Sue and Al have scraped up shins but are unhurt. I have to call the rental company about the car and call my parents and tell them what happened. (My mother had told me not to rent the car!)

And all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed.

I told Sue this and she went ballistic. She lost it. You would have thought I had betrayed her in the worst way. She vowed she would never speak to me again.

And she didn't.

We lived together in the same room from the middle of February until the end of April and barely said two words to each other. I felt as if someone had struck me through with a sword or a lance and I didn't yet have the sense to fall over dead.

I told her that I thought it was too soon after the break-up and turmoil with the other guy to fall for this one and that I was just thinking of her but she told me I was meddling in her life and to mind my own business and she didn't need someone in her life that was trying to lead it for her. So she vacated my life, figuratively if not literally.

I saw her once after that. She came back to Dayton for her first roommate's wedding. Joan and I had gone on to become good friends, roomed together in the house we lived in off campus junior year and pledged a sorority together. We weren't terribly close but then I wasn't terribly close with anyone after that.

When I saw Sue and Al at Joan's wedding, we said hi basically and avoided one another. As far as I know they are still married but I could be wrong. As far as I know they has two sons but that was a long time ago. She wanted to be a special ed teacher. I wonder if she ever did it.

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Since then, I've had women friends, some closer than others. One I've had a very long time and only recently have seemed to had some sort of falling out. I'm not sure what exactly that was about really. We've known each other for over 20 years and have been through some good times and bad on both our parts so I'm sure that each of us can reach the other.

I have made several old friends as well, my parents' age, who have moved away and that I wish were closer.

And then there are my work friends like the one I first mentioned--people I started out working with but who have definitely become more than co-workers.

I have always felt that part of friendship has been doing things. I'm a worker bee, not a socializer.

I would rather help someone do something than sit around and chat on the phone. I don't mind talking so maybe what I need is a bluetooth headset so I can talk and do at the same time. But I also don't talk a lot of the phone (or call people) because I feel like I'm taking up their time. Surely they have more important things to do than talk to me and I always feel unaccountably (and unjustifiably) hurt when a phone call gets cut short because it's just reinforcing that notion that I'm not worth talking to.

(Do I need a therapist or what?) ;)

But anyway, this is my story of my friendships such as it is. Sad really, but I guess the point of remembering is to learn from your past mistakes, right?

That's what Pinky thinks...

Forget Me Not

That's the title of my NaNoWriMo novel. I changed it from Dance with a Dragon. Changed the entire story back to the one I had originally planned and began writing on the 10th, right after my last blog.

It was an interesting process actually. The scene I wrote first was actually the first "touch" of the hero and heroine--a scene that would end up about a third of the way into the story. In the course of writing the actual beginning of the story, I have them meet briefly in passing so he can see her condition--they haven't met in 17 years--and she can be jogged out of her static state of amnesia.

Here is the story premise--it's a fantasy where magic is accepted, reluctantly by some and studied by others as a science.

A man has been in prison for 17 years, placed there on the testimony of his wife who he thinks betrayed him to their mad leader's secret police. Now he's out of prison, he's come to find her and exact revenge.

Except when he finds her, he discovers that she was tortured and bespelled to betray the secrets of the conspirators who were planning to overthrow the country's leader. And she is still under the spell of her tormentor because she can't remember a thing about him or her life from the time she left her hometown until she returned to it. And if she tried to remember or hears about it, she gets violently ill.

So now he has to decide: does he still want revenge on her? Does he want revenge on the ones who really betrayed them? And what does he want to do about his wife? Everyone thinks he's dead. Should he stay that way? If he helps her to remember the past, will she want him back? Will he want her back?

All questions that need to be answered in 50,ooo words.

Last night, or rather early this morning, I got through 11,000 of them! And that was in just a week.

The point of NaNoWriMo is to get people to write and to keep the writing.

I would say this has been a resounding success once I was about to get myself motivated enough to actually do it. And I'm glad I did. I just need to find a way to continue it beyond November.

I was excited to see on Robin Owens website that she also writes out of order as I did which is not something I've ever thought of doing before. I guess I thought because I read a novel from beginning to end (usually, sometimes I cheat and read the end after about 50 or so pages to see if it's worth going on!), they should be written that way. But they don't have to be.

It's been pretty linear since then but I may just jump ahead again to another pivotal scene and work up to that as I did with this one.

the one thing that did disappoint me to find out on her website was that she and one of her commenters use more than one piece of writing for their word count for the month. The commenter is using short stories! I guess that's okay but I think it defeats the purpose. I know that if I collected all the writing I do between journaling and posting on the web and articles and such, I'd have over 50K of words by now for the month but that's not the point. The point is that I've worked on a single piece of work, a single story for an extended period of time and not stopped.

Oh, well. To each their own I guess. I don't know this woman. And for Robin, she has more than demonstrated on her blog that she has the discipline to write daily or nearly daily and hit her word count, so the month's exercise is just really a fun thing for her.

I'm the one that needs the help.

Well, Pinky shall just have to help herself.

Travel photos

I thought I'd add pictures from some of my travels. In 2004 I traveled to Europe with my younger sister and we went to Germany, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, and back to Germany.






I usually take a ton of pictures of scenery and architecture and not many of myself. I did get one of myself overlooking Neuschwanstein Castle. It was cold and snowing and we are on a bridge high over a gorge and I had fallen for the second time on the trip and re-sprained my ankle so it was and adventure to say the least but I has a great great time and would love to go back!















My aunt took this picture in Ireland. This is our second full day there and we are on a bus tour of Connemara (western Ireland). I'm kind of glad the picture isn't closer because I look a little obscene with my tongue out like that.











Karen is taking a picture with her back to the camera. The yellow flowering bush is called gorse and we were there at just the right time to see it everywhere. We started in western Ireland because this is where our ancestors came from.

















Here's a better picture taken shortly thereafter. The land was very barren and rocky and not very green but then it was still April. It wasn't until we got farther east (where the English settled) that the land was better. Here was what they called "beyond the pale."































This was in Dublin at the very end of the trip. We had walked from our hotel to this famous pub (once) owned by a distant relative of ours (Nesbitt has since sold out of the business.) Karen had heard that they would stand you a drink if you could prove you were a Nesbit or at least give you a souvenir shot glass or something but it wasn't true. By that point, she was in a snit at everyone anyway and walked back to the hotel on her own after taking our picture. Oh, well. You really get to know someone when you travel with them.



I have also been to England but that was before the days of digital cameras so I will have to see if I can dig out the photos for scanning. But as I mentioned above, I'm pretty camera shy so there may not be many of me around to be scanned. Perhaps more in the future.



I'd like to do some childhood pictures next though. Those are from slides and are already in the computer. More fun!



At least Pinky thinks so!

wyrd but not...

I have been trying to find a word to describe this concept I have come to believe in but can't seem to locate the word. I thought that the old English word "wyrd" might do it but it's not right because that's more about time than it is about what I'm thinking of, which is people.

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Wyrd is a lot like karma in that it's about about how past events affect the future, but wyrd is seen in relation to the three Germanic goddesses of life and death (time), the Norns, who have control of such things. Wyrd can also be about how the future can affect the past but is all about being unstoppable--fated.

Karma stretches across lifetimes and states that the actions, good or evil one does in one lifetime will affect what happens in the next. My understanding, albeit a bastardized oversimplified Western one, says that if you're a really bad human is in this life a la Hitler, you're going to come back as a louse in the next one. And if you're really good, you're going to go up the scale of consciousness until you hit nirvana and never have to be reborn again. Whether that is totally correct, I'm not at all sure but that's what I've been lead to believe.

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No, what I'm thinking of is maybe closer to the idea of soul mate but not in the sexual/romantic sense. I'm talking about the people we encounter in our lives and what they come to mean to us.

This is what I think:

1. There is such a thing as reincarnation and that certain souls are born again and again with one another because they must learn various lessons from each other.

2. Not every soul lives every life with a kindred soul and that in different lives, the souls may take different roles with one another. Lovers, parent to child, enemies, neighbors, friends, co-workers, mere acquaintances.

3. Sometimes, souls recognize one another from life to life. Not that I could go up to you and say, "Hey, remember me from the gold rush or the Battle of Gettysburg or the building of the pyramids at Giza."* But that I could meet you and feel a connection--or a repulsion.

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What made me think of this was reading a friend's blog about his adopted father's birthday. His mother wrote that his father fell in love with him (they first saw one another when my friend was 18 months old) the first time he saw him and never thought of him as anything but his son, regardless of his bloodline.

That to me is that kind of connection.

I felt that kind of loving connection when I met my friend. I've felt that connection when I've met other people too. I've always felt a very deep connection to my niece and nephew. I've felt it for my closest friends and my family. (I felt it for friends and lovers who have broken my heart as well; I must have broken theirs in another life.)

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And I've felt the opposite too. It's a hard thing to say because I don't want to admit that I could so thoroughly and immediately dislike someone, but I felt that way about a guy I was in graduate school with.

At first, I thought it was simply jealousy. He was from the East Coast and has gone to Yale and had the arrogant asshole act down perfect. The professor in our research methods class loved him and our writing workshop instructor thought he walked on water. He had had several well-known literary critics at Yale as professors including Harold Bloom. I thought our RM prof would have an orgasm right there in class. And he was a classic suck-up, always posturing and praising the profs and making little inside comments. ICK! I supposed that's how things works at a hyper-competitive place like Yale but, come on, this was Cleveland State.

But then something odd happened.

We went over a variety of different poetry in the class and the prof often had us read aloud. He asked Hugh to read a section of Beowulf (probably because he he knew Mr. Yale would have had Anglo-Saxon as a class there....)

Hugh read the lines aloud and, while I could not really understand it per se, I knew somehow that his accent was wrong. He was reading it with a German accent. It was too guttural, too harsh.

And it frightened me--practically scared the shit out of me!!

What the hell was going on?

Why did I want to dive under the table?

Why was I sure something awful was going to happen to me?

And he was going to do it?

Goosebumps rolled up my arms and back. Muscles tensed all over my body and my eyes teared up.

Was it the words? Was it the accent? Was it him?

I'd listened to Beowulf before, translated it, read it. There shouldn't have been anything about the story to frighten me. I wasn't that familiar with German. Didn't really care for the language really but didn't necessarily hate it. But I certainly didn't like his voice or seeing him speak something that sounded like it.

The class ended and I left as quickly as I could. Not sure at all at what had happened but sure intuitively that it had something to do with why I felt as I did (and do) about him.

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He finished grad school long before I did. He was there for two years on an assistantship. I was going part time, one or two classes at a time while working full time and quit after four years out of sheer exhaustion and overwork.

He went on to publish a novel or two. The first one was called Everything's Impressive and was, of course, set at Yale. I have a signed copy that I had another student get for me. I think it was supposed to be another Bright Lights, Big City or Less Than Zero but it never got off the ground. (And I never read it to know if it was any good.)

I did, however, read the back cover bio. And found I should have been ashamed of myself for making stereotypical assumptions. I assumed because he went to Yale, he came from a wealthy East Coast family--his family name is Kennedy after all--but he came from a poorer background than I did--was a scholarship student and probably acted so arrogant as a shield to hide his insecurities (or I'm just giving him some humanity because of my own guilt at disliking him so still.)

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But none of what I know of his current life circumstances explains the instant dislike or the "weird" experience during the Beowulf recitation?

Our word weird is derived from the old English word wyrd although the meaning of weird has wandered away from the meaning of wyrd. But there is something inexplicable about both of them just as there is about that instant attraction and revulsion we feel sometimes for a person.

Pinky knows you've felt it too... admit it.



* Seems everyone I ever met who believes in reincarnation and was willing to ramble on about it was sure they had once been Egyptian royalty. Hell, if I was ever Egyptian I was probably one of the slaves squished between the stone blocks of the pyramids!

Hunger and Thirst

I am only going to write a short entry today because I have to get ready to go for another medical test. Ugh...

This time it is an upper endoscopy or EGD. I've had one before. The gastroentrologist sticks a scope down your throat and looks at your esophagus, stomach and small intestine. Last time the GE found that I had GERD, a hiatal hernia, and bile reflux (the bile which belongs in the small intestine was seeping up through the lower stomach sphincter and into the stomach--not good!)

This new GE that did the colonoscopy for the ischemic colitis I don't think believed any of that so he wants to see for himself and treat me for it. He was also unhappy with one of the meds that my family doctor had me on, felt that I shouldn't be taking it, and so I think wants to prove that I shouldn't be taking it.

Whatever...

So I am currently fasting from food and drink since last night when I went to bed.

That was actually quite early for me--about 10 pm--because I was exhausted from work. I was there until about 6 o'clock which put me home too late to really nap so I just sat on the sofa like a zombie with a massive headache. I've been having the headaches almost daily now for the last week and a half and been so so tired. And I wonder why I can't write and can barely even read...

Well, I said I wouldn't drone on and on, so I won't.

I just want to go back to bed. After I drink about a gallon of water and eat about six eggs a half a loaf of toast and a pound of bacon. I'm not usually hungry but I think it's just knowing that I CAN'T eat that makes me want to!

Pinky out!

NaNoWriMo finds a title!

I am trying again this year to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. So far, the results have been dismal, but I have been unsettled at best.

I thought I had a storyline with characters, setting, and plot up and running--until October 29th when I totally lost interest in the story and decided there was no way I could carry the dead weight of it over that many words, over that many hours of work, over that many days. I had everything but no title.

Panic set in very soon after...

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I have wanted to be a novelist since I actually wrote down my first story when I was in fifth grade.

I had been making up stories for years before that; we all had as children. All children do, I think, just as all children draw pictures and make play-do figures and sing songs they make up the very moment they open their mouth. But they forget they can do all those things as they grow up or are told they can't or aren't good enough or develop inferiority complexes because they can't write like Charles Dickens (who'd want to?) or they can't paint like Leonardo daVinci (that would be kind of cool!) or they can't do any of the other creative endeavors children love and adults think they can't possibly do any more...

Some of us never learn that about creative things. We know we can write stories; we are compelled to write stories or poems or plays or lyrics. We are compelled to paint or sculpt or carve or chisel or weave or weld. We have to sing or act or stand on street corners and shout out our words or go crazy. So we do our thing.

I'm like that.

But I doubt too and I worry that I'm not good enough and I'm afraid that I'll be laughed at.

A lot of creative people get laughed at, it seems, because they don't conform. I got laughed at because I was shy and because I was smart and because I couldn't read at first in elementary school and then when I could read in junior high and high school, I read things that other people in my school didn't ... War and Peace, Ben Hur, Andersonville, Johnny Got His Gun, 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, The Bell Jar, Siddhartha, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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When I first started writing down story ideas, it was usually just lists of characters and descriptions of settings and plot outlines. I wish I could say that I wrote every story that I wrote up characters for but that's not at all true. I've had thousands of ideas and only a very minuscule output of actual stories.

I could say that I'm a perfectionist and that would be partly true.

I could say that I'm incredibly undisciplined and, dare I admit it--lazy, and manage to find everything else to do beside writing, and it would be partly true.

But honestly I am subconsciously afraid to write them because then that would ultimately lead to the expectation of submitting them for publication which would surely lead to rejection.

(And who wants something so incredibly personal and heartfelt to be rejected? Even if it's by someone who probably spent all of a minute scanning it before stuffing a form rejection in the SASE you sent along.)

I know it's all about believing in yourself, but sometimes it's really hard when all you can hear echoing in your head is the laughter and snide remarks of all the ugly people who've ever belittled you in your life. They may not have even been laughing at you about your writing, they may have been laughing about you having toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe but that hyena laugh is still there...

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I know. I sound like a lunatic and there are ongoing discussions about the relative sanity of creative individuals. I am inclined to think that all of humankind is insane so I don't like to single out just the creative for the distinction of depressed or bipolar or schizoid or whatever.

I think we notice the creative individuals who have mental issues because they tend to talk about their issues--a lot!

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But back to the problem of my 50K of words for November.

I have files of story ideas.

I have the story I worked on last year and never finished. (I didn't realize last year, my first year of participating, that the idea was to finish an entire story in 50K words. I was about 3/4ths of the way through my story at 50K.)

I have several other worlds I've created for stories over the last two years.

The first story I wrote was a fairy tale/fantasy about a princess named Germaine who had to disguise herself as a boy to reclaim her kingdom. And, over the years, I have tended toward the fantasy and science fiction genres although I wrote contemporary literary fiction in grad school and was working in historical literary fiction for my thesis before I drifted away from it.

My three most often reread authors have been J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jane Austen. (I would use that as the best gauge for favorite author.) That should give some idea of what I like.

So I looked at those worlds and characters and stories and found that most were too developed.

Too developed?

Yep, I have gotten so far into the creation of the worlds and multiple story lines that it would have taken me a week to get back up to speed with the governments and religions and creatures of the worlds. Too involved to start over with them.

50K is a relatively short novel so I needed a smaller idea for the story.

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I found a folder with three pages in it. A list of names and two pages of an story line. That's kind of rare because I don't always write out a story line like that and sometimes have to extrapolate the plot from the descriptions of the characters. (I always think I'll remember everything about the plot because it's so fresh at that moment but I inevitably forget.)

And I had a title. Dance with a Dragon.

A title can be a good jumping off point. A great cliff from which to throw yourself.

Ray Bradbury once said: First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.

This is what a title is like for me.

How does one dance with a dragon? Why would one want to? What would it accomplish? Is it a metaphor for something else--the dance? The dragon?

Oh! Oh! Oh! It's practically orgasmic when things start to click like that, when whatever it is that's inside you that lives to make up something new rises up to break the surface of the water of creation and looks around and smiles at the world...

... is it the dragon?

Pinky thinks it must be!

(Too bad I can't count this in my 50K worth of words!)

End of the World as We Know It

I've always had a weakness for science fiction movies and books as well as old horror movies. But most of all, I've always been drawn to apocalyptic fiction and movies... end of the world stuff.

Tonight TNT has on Independence Day with Will Smith, Bill Pullman, and Jeff Goldblum. Classic alien invasion movie where the humans win in the end but only after almost getting wiped out altogether. Randy Quaid, abducted by the aliens, sacrifices himself in the end to destroy the ship that would destroy area 51 and Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum must fly the alien spaceship from Roswell to the mother ship to deliver the computer virus that will bring down the defensive shields that will allow the humans to defeat the aliens and only escape at the very last minute before the mother ship gets blown to smithereens in true spectacular sf special effects tradition.

Gotta love it!

My interest in all things apocalyptic, I think, goes back to the being born on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. That happened in 1945 and I was born 16 years later but that was also at the height of the cold war and the middle of all the nuclear testing. I don't know that I actually made the connection between Hiroshima and my birthday until into my teens but do know that I had also by that time already been reading dystopian literature like 1984 and Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. There was also an underlying understanding of the threat of nuclear war and the threat of communism.

And there was a certain anxiety underlying my childhood from watching the news. I remember watching the Vietnam War on the national television news. Mostly remember watching helicopters landing, blowing tall grasses around while soldiers jumped out and ran, rifles held out. Did they show many wounded soldiers being brought to helicopters on stretchers? Or is that just video I saw later that I am superimposing on the past? I doubt they (being the government) would have allowed such footage during WWII (if there had been TV) but I don't think they had as much control over the media during Vietnam so it would certainly have been possible.

What would draw anyone to stories about the end of the world? What would draw anyone to horror stories? I can only come up with catharsis. You come out the other side alive. You the reader and (usually) you the narrator of the story. Life may be forever changed but it is still life.

In most cases, you have been tested against something horrible. In the end of the world scenario it's usually communal. (When I say end of the world, I don't necessarily mean the total destruction of a planet but it could be so, but in which case someone must also escape--by the skin of their teeth! But that something so catastrophic happens--whether man-made or natural--that entire societies are left in the balance.) But horror can be much more individual and even internal. A mystery or a suspense/thriller is similar in some ways in that something has happened to disrupt the social order and balance must be returned. In a thriller, it may be that only one or two people know of the disruption and must get others to acknowledge it or must hide it all together and solve it themselves. In a mystery, it's usually about justice but not always.

No doubt humankind has thought about the end of the world for as long as they have been aware of a world that could end. The authors of every holy book certainly have. No doubt the people who lived through the black death thought about it!

And me... Weird I know. But that's me, Pinky...