The WordSpider

A year and a half ago, I began attending the monthly meetings of the Kitsap Peninsula chapter of the Romance Writers of America ( http://penrwa.org/index.html)  at the suggestion of Jennifer Conner, a romance novelist and an e-book publisher (http://www.bookstogonow.com ).  She also runs an online column featuring more local writers.( http://www.examiner.com/writing-careers-in-seattle/jennifer-conner ) 

 The group was congenial and supportive, the meetings stimulating, and I soon found myself trying my hand at a steamy paranormal romance.  The Vanth—a tale of a young American tattoo artist, an Etruscan warrior hurled forward in time, and a lovely but implacable female demon who pursues him—seemed to write itself, so quickly did it progress, and I had a complete first draft in less than two months!  That was last February.

Although I made a few tentative approaches to agents, the instant rejections neither surprised nor dismayed me.  I knew the novel was not truly ready to be read by an agent or editor.  It had major weaknesses and I couldn’t figure out what to do about them.  I’d heard some great presentations in the PENRWA meetings, I’d been to workshops, I’d read books on how to structure a successful novel, and it wasn’t hard to come up with ideas about how to fix my story’s problems.  But all those possible solutions felt too contrived, gimmick-y.  The characters by then had become real people to me, and I just couldn’t move them around like puppets to suit the demands of a formulaic plot.  Then new projects arose, and my life distracted me from a tight focus on my writing, as life will sometimes do, and I forgot about the book.

Last week I picked it up and saw instantly how I could ratchet up both the suspense and the sexual tension, in ways that grow naturally out of the story and the characters, and are not the least bit gimmick-y. 

How can this be so easy now when it was so hard a year ago?

One reason, of course, is that my writing keeps improving as long as I keep writing (almost every day – let’s be real here).  I have a better eye for structure and balance and tension in the plot than I used to have, and I’m still learning new plotting techniques, as opposed to gimmicks: not the same thing at all!

But another reason, probably the most important, is that I let it wait.  In those two months when the story erupted from my brain, I stayed up too late writing, night after night, and rushed back to the computer as soon as I woke up, 500 words before breakfast.  Even when I was not writing, I lived in the middle of the story:  I walked again in memory in the Italian hill town ofTarquinia, where the action takes place; I saw, smelled and tasted the wonderful food; I dreamed of the characters; I was a shadow third in their lovemaking.  Getting some distance on all that was like trying to see the thematic patterns in my own life as an historian might:  an overview was simply not possible. 

Now it is.  And now making changes, large and small, to the plot does not feel like interfering with the characters’ lives: it feels like correcting the mistakes I made in my understanding of their story, first time around.

 This is certainly not new advice, to let a book wait and come back to it with fresh insights.  I always thought it made perfect sense; it was advice I had just never happened to take.  This is only my third novel, after all.  I spent seven long years working and reworking the second, the “serious” novel; then I wrote this one; and since then I’ve been writing and editing short stories.  Now I know it’s more than just good advice:  it’s a rush!  It’s a thrill.  It’s fun.

 So now I am revising The Vanth, probably not at the same feverish pace as the first draft, but still as an absorbing occupation.  For the next several months I will be posting every other week on this blog, rather than every week, and my posts may largely concern specific challenges I meet in the course of revision:  whatever I can learn from others about the process, and what I learn for myself by doing it.

Happy New Year!

 As I write this, I am feeling both proud and humble—and pleasantly fatigued, and smugly virtuous as well.  Today I took part in the Bremerton YMCA’s Resolution Walk/Run.

I am proud of my out-of-shape, overweight, sixty-something self for staying the five kilometer course (just over three miles) at a fairly brisk walk, and humble about being the very last straggler on that course.  (Others returned later than me, but they had gone much further.)  Uphill and down the course ran, along quiet Sunday morning streets, in perfect weather, crisp and dry and partly sunny—I don’t think I could have done this in icy rain.  It was hard work for me all the same, especially the steep hills, but I kept on going.  Eventually I hit my stride and then dogged endurance gave way to enjoyment. 

When I reached the halfway point, at Viewcrest Drive, I stopped to rest, drink from my water bottle, and admire the vista of water and land, distant city and still more distant mountains.  I picked myself a sprig of long-needled pine as a little trophy.  (After four decades in Washington, I love cedars like a native Northwesterner, but I was born and raised among pine woods, and the scent of pinesap in winter still carries me straight back to my earliest memories of joy.)

my victory bouquet

I turned to complete the second half and was immediately passed at a fast jog by a woman at least ten years older than me:  another humbling moment.   But I was still feeling good about being outdoors bright and early, moving well in my body, and taking part in a community celebration of renewal and commitment to good health, and so although I was humbled, I was not ashamed.   I went on walking, picked up another little pine branch along the way, and then a branch of red berries:  my victory bouquet.

Yes, that woman is older and thinner and faster than I am.   But one thing I’ve learned to avoid, as a person and especially as an artist, is the toxic folly of measuring myself against others.  There’s no point in comparing apples to oranges, aardvarks to orangutans.  Nor is there much point in comparing me, for good or ill, to Mother Teresa, Queen Elizabeth, Jon-Benét Ramsey or Ellen DeGeneres, Sarah Palin or Tina Fey.  The one trait I share with all the above is our gender.  With the trim and speedy lady of the pink jacket and the slightly rigid-looking gray curls who passed me this morning, I have this much in common:  we are both alive, both over sixty years old, and both care about staying healthy and active.  The reasons why she is—apparently—in so much better physical shape than I am will probably never be known to either of us.

What matters to me today is that I made the effort, at my own pace, and by doing so, I found my joy:  that place where work and pleasure meet and become one.

And so it is with my writing.  I have not done much lately, for many of the same reasons that my weight has slid back up the last few months:  a complex work schedule made more complicated by illness followed by holidays.  I accept responsibility:  these are explanations, not excuses.  I must do better if I want anyone—myself included —to take my writing seriously, and I will.  I will keep working steadily and I will pace myself.

Call that my New Year’s Resolution.

This blog helps keep me honest:  I have to write something every week.  (The one time I “cheated” by publishing my unfinished story Joy here, at least I had been working all week on that story.) 

An odd thing I’ve discovered about myself is that my natural rhythm is one of stops and starts.  A “steady” pace for me essentially means a fairly regular alternation of periods of intense work with periods of lying fallow.  Accepting that about myself has made it much easier for me to tell the difference between lying fallow and just being lazy—of which I am quite as capable as the next writer.  Having a better sense of when I can and should burst into intensely creative activity and when I just have to grit my teeth and plod along keeps me from despair.  Those times when I am apparently accomplishing nothing, I’ve learned to recognize as periods of building up my strength and skills, preparing myself for frenetic activity later.

My next big venture— this is a New Year’s Resolution as well—will be a mystery novel set in Kitsap County.  That’s all I’m going to say about it now; it’s far too young a project to be exposed to the harsh elements.   Thanks to my readers’ comments for the inspiration and encouragement.

 Another resolution:  I will take part in National Novel Writing Month in November.  Last year was the first time I seriously considered it, and I was struck ill before I could make more than a gesture at beginning.  By the time I was well enough to write, I had lost too many days for someone who also has a day job.  But this year I’m determined to make it happen.  I’ve been told it’s not considered cheating to plan out in advance the characters, location, and even a rough sense of the arc of the plot, so long as the actual writing of the tale begins in November.

 Lately I’ve reached the realization that although I don’t have an actual career as a writer, I have composed and distributed plenty of writing in my time, I have been paid for some of it, journalism mainly; much more of my work I consider public service, unpaid but often widely read:  letters and longer opinion pieces in local newspapers; meditations and rituals for my  spiritual circle, the Church of the Holy Girlfriends; academic essays at Seattle Central Community College and The Evergreen State College; messages of peace and justice for the flyers handed out at Women in Black silent peace vigils in Seattle.  That last I haven’t done in some time, but I did it every week for several years.  It was an interesting artform, requiring me to be concise, dramatic, factual and emotional, and above all, quickly legible on a half sheet of paper.  (Oh such manoevering with fonts and margins!)  So, all told, I have done quite a lot of writing, and one way or another I’ve seen a lot of it published; I just don’t often get paid for it. 

In my mid-sixties I am starting to face the possibility that I may never write a really good novel.  The one I spent seven years writing now looks to me, with a couple years’ distance, like an uneven mess:  lots of good parts, but they don’t hang together well.  A sympathetic friend tells me I am probably being unnecessarily harsh to myself and my novel.  Maybe I’m just hypercritical—it would not be the first time—but my biggest criticism of the novel as it stands now is that it (or I) can’t decide whether it’s literary or pop fiction.  I’m not sure whether the heroine’s light-hearted, rather comic romance belongs in the same book with the drugs, despair and suicide of her ex-husband.  My only defense against charges of improbability is that such disparate events have occurred in close proximity in my life and in the lives of my friends.

But I still keep writing, and I still keep hoping, clinging to the example of the English novelist Mary Wesley, who saw her first book into print at age 72, and has gone on to write several more.

As for reading:  lately I’ve been comforting myself with classic British mysteries.  I love Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series and Jo Bannister’s Castlemere books, but at present I feel that I have read them to death, like a dog worrying a stuffed animal into a grubby rag.  On the other hand, I’ve managed to leave Dorothy Sayers’ books alone long enough to be able to reread them with pleasure, even the earliest and most aggressively frivolous of the lot, Whose Body?  I’ve also been enjoying Dorothy Simpson’s Luke Thanet books, another small town police procedural series with heart, humor and insight.

Maybe I should be writing a mystery…

For anyone unfamiliar with guided meditations, I’ll start with a brief explanation of this practice.  Spoken or read aloud in a soft voice, slowly, with many pauses for personal reflection, they may induce a receptive condition, almost a trance state, that sets the mind free from external stimuli while providing a sense of direction that helps the listeners find their way to private insights. 

 A guided meditation may be composed in advance, as mine are, or delivered extemporaneously by skilled practitioners such as my late friend the Reverend Peggy Nomura.  Peggy’s long battle with cancer ended a few years ago, but until very near that end she continued to bring her spiritual strength and creative energy to healing the wounded spirits of others, as well as making exquisite art.  A book of Peggy’s watercolors from the final months of her life is available from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-House-Pilgrimage-artists-journey/dp/145150005X/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324190403&sr=1-8

 As I mentioned last week, this Winter Solstice meditation was inspired by my sister’s courage in acknowledging her sadness in a season when we all seem to be required to be cheerful.  The end of the “journey” on which I hope to guide my listeners tomorrow is a face-to-face meeting with our own sorrows.  By accepting and embracing our sorrows, we may heighten our awareness of others’  griefa, and deepen our compassion toward others by means of the compassion we show ourselves. 

Many guided meditation sessions begin by talking participants through deep breathing and/or relaxation exercises to calm the body before setting the spirit free for a brief journey.  I usually write mine out instead of making them up as I go along, but in the interests of preserving you all from boredom, I have not included that section here.  If you want to see it, however, please email me:  alisonjeanash@gmail.com

A Guided Meditation for Winter Solstice

Close your eyes and become aware of your breath.  Gently, gradually, encourage your breathing to become deeper, feeling each new breath fill your chest and belly, then releasing the breath slowly and steadily.

 You are walking at dusk, alone, in a dark forest.  There is no moon and you go slowly, for the pale stones of your path are barely visible in the glimmering light of the cold stars above. And you may go slowly also because you are tired and worried, and your heart is heavy with old sorrows.  You know that in the new year that lies ahead, there will be new challenges, new perils, new uncertainties and new griefs to face.  And even if you are contented with your own life now, you cannot help knowing that many others are not so fortunate.

At this time of year it is very easy to be sad.  The longest night of the year is coming, the eve of Winter Solstice.  Our days are short and often gray, the sun hidden behind dark clouds.  Not far away from these dark woods people scurry to and fro in a blaze of colored lights, bent under a heavy burden of their own and others’ expectations, struggling to keep up traditions that may be no more than dry husks now, long empty of the meaning they once held.  How much of true joy is there in the frantic buying and selling, in all the anxious bustle of this season? 

Yet even when you turn away from that busyness and remind yourself that this is the season when we celebrate the rebirth of the Light and the birth of a child who grew up to spend his life bringing the good news of love and forgiveness, you may still be sad.  For in our lives or in the lives of many of our sisters and brothers around the world, love, forgiveness, stability and peace may be in short supply.  Yet the season seems to demand that we be joyful, and to a sorrowful heart that demand itself is a burden, another invitation to despair.

You keep walking, and gradually the bleak beauty of the winter woods begins to soothe your heart.  The crisp air, spiced with the odors of cedar and fir, refreshes you; the dimness is restful to your tired eyes; the path under your feet is level, easy to follow.  There is no sound but your slow footfalls and faint rustlings as forest creatures settle into their nests.

Now through a gap in the dark trunks of the trees that line your path, you catch a glimpse of a light in the distance.  It appears very small and weak, and it vanishes with the next bend in the path, but soon it re-appears, and it grows ever larger and brighter as you draw near to it.

After a few more bends in the path you see that the light comes from fire, a small fire in a stone firepit in the center of a clearing.  And as you come closer, you see someone standing beside the fire, someone wrapped in a long dark cloak.  You feel a tiny thrill of fear at the idea of meeting a stranger at night in the woods, and you go very quietly now, but you also feel a faint sense of anticipation.

Now you come to the edge of the clearing and hesitate, but the cloaked figure turns from the fire to look at you and you see that her face is twin to your own.  She looks at you with a grave but kindly expression, and beckons to you to draw near to the fire.

You walk into the clearing and come to stand beside her, warming your cold hands and gazing into the flames.  You do not speak, and neither does she.  But after a moment she puts out her hand to gently touch your shoulder.  You turn to her and at the sight of the compassion in her face, you begin to weep.

She puts her strong arms around you and she murmurs into your ear. “Go ahead and weep, my sister.  Here and now it is safe to lay down the burden of forced cheerfulness and let yourself be sad.  Let yourself give up the weary struggle to hold your head above the bitter tide of sorrow.  Let it wash over you now, yes, even over your head.  Acknowledge all your griefs and hurts of the year past and of many years past.  Mourn for your dead,  Honor your dead friends and your vanished hopes.  Give in completely to your pain.”

“You have nothing to fear from the Darkness,” she tells you, “for she is our mother and she is the mother of the Light.  Surrender now to the dark, my sister; lay your weary head on my shoulder and let your healing tears flow.  Forget all your duties and burdens for a while, for nothing is required of you in this time and place but to wait and to rest and to grieve.  The light cannot be reborn until the darkness is complete.” 

So she holds you as you mourn, as you tell over the litany of all your losses and griefs and defeats, as you show her the scars and the half-healed wounds of old battles, as you tell her all your fears for the future, even the most secret and humiliating fears that you have never told anyone, that you have hardly acknowledged to yourself.  Take as long as you need for this telling.

And when the Darkness is complete and you are at peace with it, open your eyes and light your candle.  Then, if you wish, write in your journal whatever you want to keep of this experience.

This week I’ve been working on “Joy.”  I got some helpful comments from readers, and besides, just the act of putting the story out there seemed to help get me unstuck.  Even though I’m still not quite sure where it’s going, I have more idea than I did, and I’m working happily on moving the story forward a step at a time as I crane my neck to see what’s around the next bend.

Joy in any form is a good thing to work on right now, because I tell you frankly, I am feeling depressed.  No, not severely depressed, probably not even what they call “clinically depressed”—which basically means that if I went in for counseling I would be offered a prescription.  But it’s just not a happy time of year for many people, and this year I am one of those people. 

Jesse Bernstein hated Christmas, though he did appreciate the surreal aspect of the holiday as celebrated in Southern California:  the seasonal eruption of reindeer and snowmen among the palm trees, and so on.  He grew up a poor Jew in East Los Angeles, but his hatred of Christmas had nothing to do with religion.  In his teens he spent several consecutive Christmases in mental hospitals or prisons, until the holiday was firmly associated with some of the worst times he’d been through:  the alternate boredom and terror, rage and shame that formed the daily life of a gimpy boy confined to an institution full of violent adults. 

 The stories he spun about those times were often bleakly humorous.  Little did the nice church ladies know, he told me, just why the inmates thanked them so fervently for their holiday gifts of toiletries:  after-shave was drunk for its alcohol content, providing a brief and coveted sense of escape.  As soon as the ladies left the hall, every man chugged his horrid liquor quickly, before a stronger man could wrest it from him  Jesse could make a good story out of anything, of course; it was his gift and his salvation.

 Thinking about my mother at Christmas depresses me  too.  Nearly twelve years after her death, my memories of our shared Christmases make me want to laugh, cringe and weep, often simultaneously.  Ten years ago, in a futile attempt to untangle some of those emotions, I wrote a piece I called “Her One-Woman Show” because that’s how I came to see her annual response to Christmas:  an elaborate theatrical production that took weeks of preparation and involved hundreds of props.  To pull off this performance, an attempt to recreate the Christmases of her small town New England childhood in the 1930s, required more effort from her children than we were always willing to give.  But what she asked of us was only a fraction of the exhausting labors she demanded of herself.  The whole production was backbreaking and, to me and possibly to her, increasingly heartbreaking.

 My youngest sister is depressed too.  She recently confided in me that Christmas since our mother’s death has been almost unbearably sad for her, and that she’s tired of putting on her own smaller scale production and pretending to enjoy it.  This year she plans to do the bare minimum—a tree only because her daughter, home from college, wants one, and no other dinner guests but her widowed father-in-law—and just allow herself to be sad.

 I think she’s wise.  Her decision helped me reach mine—one with which my husband, bless him, entirely concurs:  we will stay home on Christmas this year, just the two of us.  We did buy a Christmas tree today, because grandchildren are coming to visit next weekend—and also because colored lights indoors cheer me up in these short days and long dark evenings. 

 We have gifts for the grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and goodie packs for each household consisting of foodstuffs (purchased, not baked) and (surprise!) thrift store books, and on the day before Christmas we will play St Nick and drop off our packages at the homes of all our kin, his and mine, within reach.   As this drive will involve four counties, I feel that we will have done our part to celebrate family unity!