To Be… Impactful

It is so damned easy to go for the cute, trite, and tidy.  I did it again in my haste to catch up with the gang on 100 Days.  My brain ran away and took all the fun with it last weekend.  Oh, I could think, read, write, but it was all conscripted to academic bullshit.  As so often happens during the semester, my creative side went off in a snit. Completely shut down.  Had a tantrum and ran off to hide; or play with the butterflies, whatever it does.

It’s got to be a remnant of my spoiled days, though I don’t ever remember holding my breath and getting anything because of it.  I recall the whooping I got with the wooden spoon–though my brother points out that the reason I remember is because it only happened the one time–and the trips to friends’ houses who had while I had not.  I had “summer friends” too that hung out at my house because of our pool.  I guess it went both ways, then.

It seems only one way these days:  in.  In go the statistics, the formulae, the prescience, pedagogy and pedantic, and I so want it all to be over.  I wonder if it’s possible to get Senioritis early?  I’m seriously getting too old for this, and I’m tired of other people telling me what I need to learn.  They have a stake in my education only so far as it takes their reputation, which as soon as I’m certified, will be several notches lower if I can help it in any way.  If their knowledge was that good, so would our schools be.

But to being impactful:  I am constantly amazed by my fellow writers (and artists, and photogs) and their ability to find the one right thing that resounds either emotionally or intellectually.  I had planned on writing an eerie piece about a spooky little girl and her radical thoughts of death and our treatment of it, and she ended up holding hands and dripping saccharine on Grandpa’s grave.  I took the neat way to the ending instead of following the smoke behind the wall.  Did I write my piece?  Yes.  Did it suck?  Well, no, it’s actually nice.  But if I wanted nice I’d be working for American Greetings.  I want to be (yikes, almost said literary!) relevant, different… impactful.

Miscellania

The dog goes in Tuesday to have his torn ACL removed, screws placed into his leg bones (could look up their proper names if I cared to), and a clamp onto those to hold the whole apparatus together.  Then he gets a facelift–leg lift?–by having the ends of his skin overlapped and sewed more tightly together to keep his kneecap from meeting his ankle.  All this for a dog I don’t even like.  He’s grumpy, barks at everyone, including us, is constantly underfoot, and has more allergies than anyone I ever met.  But there’s this:

Mickey

So who am I to argue with what needs doing?  I do, and that is all.

Also found out that I, thankfully, do not have arthritis.  I have two thumbs, and one of them is my boon companion, my go-to guy.  He rides the space bar to make sense of my thoughts, holds the toothbrush to give me that million-wattage smile, opens doors, bills, and bottles, would take me to California if I felt like going there, and is generally and specifically indispensable.  The other one is just a foot soldier with a side car.  I’d get along better without a leg than without my right-hand man.

Starting roughly after the birth of my daughter, I noticed pens weren’t as easy to use as they had once been.  With the flood of hip-widening chemicals that had bathed my system, I thought this would soon pass.  Like baldness or fallen arches, though, this symptom stayed and progressed.  More writing was done on the computer (80 wpm, baby!), more bottles opened with assistance or cheating, more careful printing replacing what had once been passable if not pretty script.

But then pain was introduced this spring.  Nothing that couldn’t be ignored, but subtle, consciousness-tapping twinges that were polite and unobtrusive.  For the most part.  For the least part, I faced the advent of retraining my foot soldier to take over the command.  Not an easy thing after strict and faithful right-handedness for forty years.

Luckily a wise sage named Pillsbury discerned my troubles and set about to cure me.  My thumb has a condition called “Trigger” (after the mechanism, not the horse) which has created a callus at the base of my flexor tendon.  Getting this, right?  One shot of cortizone to grease the works, and I’m good to go.  Soon, I hope.  Cures are always worse than the sickness at first.  If my time signature is working, you’ll notice it’s an unorthodox hour to be writing.  My thumb is voicing its displeasure over being treated so rudely today at the doc’s.  Ice and a little keyboard workout are helping.  So will time.

Me=1, Age=0.  One for the little guy, my thumb.  And one for Mickey, the lummox.

For the Love of a Word…

…a language was born.  For the love of a language, a reader was born.  For the love of reading a writer was born.  For the love of writing a word was born.

There are some times when my fascination with the English language threatens to overwhelm my senses with awe and amazement.  I have lived long enough to have studied other languages and forgotten them again.  They were rote, formulaic, unresponsive to me, a non-native speaker.  There was something a little too systematic about the way they were conjugated and truncated, present-tensed or situated in front, rear, or middle.  There simply wasn’t any fun in them.  I studied Latin the way genealogists study the family tree, to see just where they came from.  I have a book called, “The History of Words”, that I pull out and read like a Harlequin romance.  My kids don’t bring their friends home during these spells.

Tonight I made up some words:  unsatisfiable–unable to be satisfied.  There may be another better one around, but that was the one I needed in the spot I had for it.  Here’s another:  epiphananimous–the universal epiphany that occurs to us all at some point during our lives.  How else would you say it?!

Tribelet is another:  a small tribe, usually limited to 3. Follow the blog pics and you’ll know what I mean.  It all came about from passing a trio of young boys on the sidewalk.  They walked like eighteen, but measured eight.  Hence the moniker, “tribelet of hoodlums”.  It was so much fun to say I kept it forever.

I love writing because I love words.  I love the way they feel at the tips of my fingers.  I adore the way they tickle my brain and roll off my tongue.  Here’s some good ones:

…the imminent death of twenty thousand men / that for a fantasy and trick of fame / go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot / whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, / which is not tomb enough and continent / to hide the slain?  O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Hamlet, 4.5.60-66

That is a flower in July, that is the perfection of symmetrical petals of sounds and vowels and the strains of excess emotion underlying it all.  That is brain-sex to a logophile.  I love this stuff.

Writing Crutches

I haven’t been a steady enough writer in a while to need a Method.  When I write academic papers, I read everything, take copious notes, memorize the questions, and then take two or three (or ten) naps until I realize how to proceed.  I’m most lazy when it really matters.  I used to call it procrastination, but I’ve since accepted it as my manner of working.

Fiction writing is another beast altogether.  When it’s there, it’s there, and there is no need for sleep, food, bathroom breaks, or conversation.  People have learned to stay upstairs when the furious clacking of the keyboard awakens them at 3 in the morning.  The world I’ve fallen into will release me in its due course, and I’m heartbroken if something tears me away prematurely.  I shy away from that type of all-consuming writing, because I have too many other obligations that must be managed, and without enough devotion I am cranky and morose.

This summer’s writing for the 100 Days Project has necessitated some form of organization (woe, teeth gnashing, breast beating).  I am not an Organizer.  People who are annoy me with their fastidiousness and compulsion.  I stack.  I pile.  My house is ruled by vagueness and an idea of where things are.  Everyone else who lives here accepts this, or imitates it until they get yelled at and told to clean up their messes.

This is how I am keeping track of one hundred separate people:

100 Sticky Notes

100 Index

I’ll be very happy to see everyone on day 57, because that’s a personal milestone:  I get to flip the card and start a brand new page of people!

I wonder how prolific writers keep track of their characters and plots, if they have little Rolodexes (Rolodices?) of their people and towns, their priests and housewives.  Steve E. had a good idea here.  Stephen King loves to steal from his works and drop familiar people into new situations.  The first few times I ran across this it seemed like cheating, until I saw how well the old characters meshed with the new story.  There is more than one story to my life, why not theirs?

The sticky notes are to keep track of names used, because I have some favorite ones.  Sarah and Bill keep appearing, for some reason.  Others are too private.  Catherine and Ron will most likely not become characters (you’re safe, Mom and Dad!)  Likewise Phil is already taken

Some of my names are situation-specific, little Easter eggs that most likely haven’t been noticed by anyone but me.  Alethea means, “truth”; Kumani means, “devotion”; Jamal, “likely to die soon after birth”.  Can’t understand why anyone knowing this would actually use it as a name, but it fit well in his story.

Don’t know how I’m going to fit another 49 stickies on the folder I’m using.  Maybe I’ll upgrade to a poster board, and make it look like I’ve worked really hard at being an organized, dedicated, efficient writer.  Thank God for computers!  And thanks also to everyone on the Project for such inspiration and fun.

Happy Half-versary?

Let’s see–tomorrow I will be halfway through my character renditions as part of the 100 Days Project that I elbowed my way into.  What else would I celebrate at 50 days?

–if I had been dieting and exercising for 50 days, I’d be at least 15 pounds lighter

–if I cleaned a room every day, after 50 I’d have cleaned my whole house 10 times

–if I had a newborn, after 50 days it would technically be an “infant” instead

–at a mile a day, I’d be in Massachusetts.  10 a day would put me in Virginia.

–fifty books = Ray Bradbury or Stephen King with no repeats

–$100 worth of iced hazelnut  coffees; $150 worth of Blizzards (now you know where the 15 pounds came from!)

–10 weeks worth of school:  Labor Day to almost Thanksgiving

Wow.  What fun.