Pearl Cold and Old (Still Attending to Life’s Work)

Posted November 27, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: dog, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,

 

Taking Pity on Pearl

My family has reminded me that our dog Pearl is over fifteen.  After doing the calculations, I could see they were right.  This shocked and saddened me.  I had convinced myself, and told others, that she was at least a year or two younger.  (In a similar way, I  have an increasingly hard time remembering, or acting, my own age.  It’s uncomfortable, on all kinds of levels, to feel time pass in one’s bones.  Almost as difficult to see it in others.)

We are celebrating Thanksgiving in Upstate New York, and Pearl is finding it very cold, both inside and out.   (I took pity on her above.)

Even so, she still enjoys the view from the porch.

 

Ah!

 

Though perhaps not as much as the kitchen.

On the Prowl

Some things never change.

 

 

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Black Friday – Blessed By Pines

Posted November 26, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: Christmas
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The day after Thanksgiving.  This, weirdly, has become known as Black Friday.  I can only assume that the reason is that any day spent rushing around stores has a certain bleakness.

The original Black Friday was September 24, 1869, a day that financial panic hit the gold market due to manipulations by robber barons Jay Gould and James Fisk.  (Again, I’m not sure of the connection to post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping.  The fear of gold losing its value over the course of a single day?)

I was lucky enough to spend a lot of the day outdoors.

Above is a video of treetops, blown by wind, not searching out anything but sun; evergreens, yes, but way too tall to worry about Christmas coming.

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Nanowrimo Update – Thanksgiving

Posted November 25, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Nanowrimo Participant At Thanksgiving (And Pearl)

Finally, a free day (well, putting aside chopping, cooking, washing dishes, socializing and trying to get some air!)

What I truly mean is that I am getting down to the wire with my Nanowrimo novel and I should focus today on upping the old word count.

(Nanowrimo, if you are new to this notion, is National Novel Writing Month–a time when would-be novelists/masochists devote themselves to their dream activity.  Sort of.)

The problem is that I suddenly can’t summon the will.

Is it Writers’ Block crashing down? The other side of the ManicD equation?  Simple fatigue?

Is it the fact that I find myself in the middle of a family gathering, with an expectation that I will do something other than work on my computer?

Is the old September NYT crossword at my side really so fascinating?

All of the above is true.

But, oddly, the main cause of my current withdrawal is a kind of success.  As I wrote a couple of days ago, I finally discovered the connection between the disparate characters in my nanowrimo novel, a connection that has some kind of emotional “rightness” (if not, resolution.)

This connection has taken the manuscript (the potential manuscript) to a whole different level.

All of this is good (I guess), but also daunting.   Suddenly, the proposed novel does not feel so much like a what-comes-next game, a free-fall through the unconscious, but a project.  Something that could be worthwhile if I could just devote about a year or more to it.

The coincidence of Thanksgiving brings me to the only helpful response I can come up with:  isn’t the human mind amazing?  All those nooks and crannies where stories, characters,types, lurk.   I readily admit that mine are all stolen–from life, reading, the heard, experienced; only somewhere in this dreamlike process of making one’s self write madly, a mishmash has occurred, a regrouping.

I don’t know if I will have the luck or drive or year (or so) that it will take to actually write the novel that started through this rather random exercise.   It’s another huge leap of faith to think that anyone will read it!   Still, something to be thankful for.

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Thanksgiving – Pleasing the Crowd?

Posted November 24, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: children's illustration, dog, elephants, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , ,

Thanksgiving - you can't please everyone.

Or maybe you can.

Happy Pre-Thanksgiving.

I’m reposting these pictures for the Jingle poetry site.  I’m very thankful to have gotten in touch with Jingle, and all the wonderful poetry sites on the Internet.  It’s so inspiring to be in a community of poets.   Thank you all.

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Nanowrimo Update – The Saving Sidelong Glance – Tips For the Headlong

Posted November 23, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What's Going On There?

Like Pearl, I have great faith in the sidelong glance.

When her legs are working, she uses it mid-charge, mid-frolic.  It’s a feint.  She darts to one side and then another, then absolutely stops, her gaze fixed at an intense angle away, then whoosh, starts up again in what seems (to her, at least) an unanticipated direction.

When the legs are stiff, there’s the more passive sidelong glance.  This one that comes from the apparently resting Pearl, the glance that secretly watches the kitchen, always always always on the look-out for the opening of the fridge door, and then, for that distinctive swoop of cheese.

What I’m talking about here are ideas.  How to get them when novelling, especially when doing headlong unplanned novelling; when in other words, you are stalled.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a bit stuck in my “novel”; the bi-furcated plot refusing to “unfurcate,”  my two sets of characters on separate, unfeeling, trajectories–never, it seemed, would the twain meet.

And then, finally, yesterday having just passed through the old Helmsley building trying to shut out the sounds of UPS’s morphed version of “That’s Amore”, having just congratulated myself on my maturity for not checking my email when walking–I glanced it: the connection–closer than Kevin Bacon–and more importantly, with emotional heft.

I kept walking, not really daring to think–well, of course, I was thinking furiously–like Pearl darting around, but all the time also trying to keep my peripheral mental vision clear.

Sidelong ideas creep over the edges of consciousness unexpectedly,  the “eureka” moment often surprisingly off-point.

Tips:

  1. If you want an idea to swoop down, you have to leave an open runway, that is, a brain that is not actively digitalized.
  2. When I don’t want to just wait for an idea to just swoop down, I find it helpful to think of random images of characters, and especially, dialogue.  Yes, I do go through repeated plot possibilities, but these can have a very arbitrary feel.  I am more successful (or at least excited), when I just let myself hear characters talk.   Amazingly, all kinds of flashes of people and dialogue will arrive, which are somehow “writeable” even if I don’t know yet exactly how they will fit in.
  3. It is also helpful to give characters certain physical and vocal characteristics based on people I know, even if the characters are not really like these people.  (They grow farther and farther away as the story progresses.)
  4. The sidelong doesn’t really like the “headlong” – either the rush of the intensely driven, or the overly-cerebral.   Try to be a little less pragmatic with your characters; let them have a little space, wasted time.  (Don’t tell them you may cut all of that.)

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Nanowrimo Update: Adrift

Posted November 22, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: elephants, Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Adrift

Another  busy work week begins and my Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) novel is seriously adrift.  Fulfilling the word count (50,000) by the end of November will likely be possible.   As any follower of this blog has probably guessed, I’m pretty good at quickly typing words.

Getting the story right, getting A story,is more difficult.

On my last update, I complained about the plot problem of arranging for  “California Girl” (who was not truly from California but has been staying in LA) to meet up with my other crew of characters traveling through Nevada.

Everything was happening too slowly.   The Nevada crew was not getting to LA fast enough to have their crisis there.

The bigger issue is that I haven’t been sure of the connection between the two sets of characters  even as I’ve danced between the two stories, writing them in one manuscript, in typical Gemini indecisiveness.  (Sorry, to you decisive Geminis.)

What to do?  I couldn’t just leave California Girl eating corn dogs on Venice Beach.

After a long walk below a clear sky, it became clear to me that California Girl was just going to have to be in Nevada; and since I couldn’t think of a reason for her to run off there, she’d have to be there all along; be, in other words, “Nevada Girl” right from the start.

(At least, I thought this had become clear.  The sky is a bit cloudy today.)

In the meantime, my Nevada crew has also stalled.   I am at the point of writing endless dialogue, thoughts, internal connections–something that would be Woolfian if I did it better–even as they race to an ambulance!

Maybe it’s a good thing I have to get back to other work today.

If these characters can’t make up their mind where they are or what they are doing, let them just stew for a while!  See if I care!  (Ah….good question.)

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Nanowrimo Update: The Quandary of the Corn Dog

Posted November 21, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: dog, Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Corn Dog?

Agh!  Everything changes.

Especially when you are writing a novel in a month.

Which brings me to being a Gemini (the sign of the twins, twins encapsulated in a single person).  I do not particularly believe in astrology as a means of foretelling the future–at least not since the big stock market crash in 2007 which was totally NOT foreseen by Jonathan Cainer.   Nonetheless, I have always found myself to be an absolute down-to-the-bone Gemini:  quick, shallow, communicative, changeable, inveterately bi-tasking.

The propensity to do two things at once is reflected consistently in my fiction writing.  Almost every manuscript I’ve ever written, whether for children or adults, tends to be told in two voices, the perspective of two characters.  I can’t somehow stick to one track; as a result, I’ve grown to like the kind of interchange that two different points of view, or even stories, provides.

But when you are writing a novel without much of a plan, and with limited imagination, this kind of structure can be a problem.  In my current nanowrimo manuscript, for example, one of my two subplots has become quite a bit more compelling than the other.  I just haven’t quite gotten the gist of the other one yet:  who are these people?  What are they doing with each other?

They started out in a suburban house in Sherman Oaks, California (part of LA).  The swimming pool went green; one decided to leave, the other tied her to a chair.  She has escaped now to a motel in Venice Beach.

But this move to Venice Beach really is too early in terms of the other subplot–that’s the crew traveling through Nevada, troubled by modern art (among other things.)

So what now?  While California girl is in Venice, she has to DO something.  She can’t just sit there awaiting the arrival of characters she’s never even met!  And, btw, I realized today, she is also  going to need a whole different past, and a whole different vocation, a basic remodeling.

So, once more, now what?  Do I just forget about California girl for a while, give up my typical back and forth, and focus on the guys in Nevada?  Do I go back and re-write California girl’s whole first half, move everything forward (or backward)?    This makes a certain sense, but would probably require me to give up whatever unconscious structure has happened in the initial writing.

Alternatively, do I come up with something new and exciting for California Girl to do right now?  At the moment, all I’ve been able to come up with is the eating of corn dogs.

(In case, you don’t know, these are hot dogs on a stick, dipped into corn meal, deep fried.)

Not somehow enough.

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Nanowrimo Update (Pearl Anxious For Computer Credit)

Posted November 20, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Pearl (Not In A Chair) Urging Me Back To Computer

Hey, Guys!   Don’t think just because I’m not posting about it much that I’m not working on my Nanowrimo (National Writing Month) novel.

I am!

The problem is that, during the work week, I find it much easier to write the manuscript by hand.  This is going to be a big problem as the end of the month approaches and I need to upload my 50,000 words onto the Nanowrimo website to get credit.  (Remember–this project is not about writing a novel draft in a month, it’s about getting credit for writing the draft!  What’s the point if you are not some kind of “winner?”)

Whether I’ll get everything typed in time, I have to say that I am enjoying the process.

The novel involves two sub-plots–one of which is unfolding in Nevada right now, the other in Southern California.  The plots are supposed to blend together at some point, but each has gotten more and more delayed and unrelated to the other.  The people traveling in Nevada, for example, seem ready to have their plot’s crisis right there.  The girl in California has already been through a kind of crisis, without even knowledge of her Nevada brethren (who aren’t, of course, actually from Nevada but New York.)

Getting out of Nevada has taken so long that I’m probably going to skip Las Vegas completely.  (This is kind of dumb as Las Vegas and its environs are the only parts of Nevada I have even a vague sense of.)

And Bill, the character that California girl has just ditched, seemingly permanently, is one of the more colorful characters in the book.  (He tied California girl, who is not in fact from California, in a chair, then to a chair.  I won’t say what she did back.)

Hopefully, this weekend, Pearl and I can get back to the computer version.  (Pearl acts like she’s noncompetitive, but it’s really just a pose.)

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Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta On Colbert

Posted November 20, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: news
Tags: , ,

Here’s the link for Stephen Colbert’s interview of Medal of Honor recipient Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta.

Whatever your views of the war in Afghanistan (or of war generally), it is impossible not to be moved by Sergeant Giunta’s earnestness, humility and articulate devotion to his fellow soldiers.  His sweet sincerity and quiet bravery are impressive on their own, but in the midst of the back-biting, self-promotion and pretense of much in the public media, they are especially striking.  The soldier’s sense of his job, his mission, his pride in his training–all of it is simply incredibly interesting (to me at least).  Colbert handles the interview with his typical arch humor but also a very large dose of his particular brand of sensitivity and respect.  Worth watching.

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Pat Downs

Posted November 19, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: 9/11, news, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Uncomfortable, maybe, but truly a nightmare? ( Sorry- the elephant search above is not a true "pat-down" or even "trunk-down.")

Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker, used to the jam of bodies on the subway system, or maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker who was an  an eye witness to the second plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Whatever the reason,  as a New Yorker, I find the consternation about increased airline security, particularly body pat-downs, at best ridiculous, at worst, maddening.

I can understand the worry about the radiation hazards of body scans, but the pat-downs–  Come on, People!

The protest over the patting seems, in part, a sign of the of the over-sexualization of the culture (which tends to fill every touch with innuendo).

Yes, I suppose it’s possible the searches can, and will be, abused.  (Already I find myself backtracking!)  But many are complaining about the concept of any physical search.  (Some of the complaints remind me of a conversation I overheard in Florida just after the ban on taking liquids overseas;  “if Americans can’t take their carry-on on airplanes, the terrorists have won!” )

In many places in the world, these types of searches are routine.  In India, visits to the Taj Majal at night as well as to many museums, and certainly any airplane flight,  involve universal pat downs  – women police officers patting down ladies behind a screen, men patting down men.

Now there’s a thought!  Maybe the answer in this country, given its more sexualized culture, would be to give passengers their choice, gender-wise, of “patter-downer.”

But the part of the controversy that makes me truly upset is the part that places convenience and avoidance of discomfort over concerns of airplane security.   The other day, thinking about this, Patrick J. Brown came to mind, Paddy Brown. (Maybe I thought of him, I realize now, because of the rhyme.).  Brown was an NYPD captain, killed on 9/11.  I did not know him, but several different friends did–one group, because he practiced yoga; another, because he was a martial artist who taught karate to the blind.  All agree that he was a truly remarkable person.  He died because he refused to leave a group of injured people on a high floor of the WTC, waiting with them in the hope of further help.

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