Christmas celebration

Christmas holds a special place in my heart. It's a time of joy and celebration, of connecting with people who matter, of building traditions and memories, and of reflection. Most of all, It is a time of hope.

For this Christmas, I'd like to share a few poems of hope.



First, a short poem by Raymond A. Foss:

A Kernel of Hope

Lives
Deep inside
Protected
Against the pain
The struggle

Grows
When tended
Memories ignite
Nurture
Reward

Fades
When tested
Hurt
Discarded
For graven choices

Echoes
In the dark
Against the shadows
In my heart

(You can read more about Raymond A. Foss.)

And two by Emily Dickinson

Had I Presumed to Hope

Had I presumed to hope --
The loss had been to Me
A Value -- for the Greatness' Sake --
As Giants -- gone away --

Had I presumed to gain
A Favor so remote --
The failure but confirm the Grace
In further Infinite --

'Tis failure -- not of Hope --
But Confident Despair --
Advancing on Celestial Lists --
With faint -- Terrestial power --

'Tis Honor -- though I die --
For That no Man obtain
Till He be justified by Death --
This -- is the Second Gain --

Hope is the thing with Feathers


Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

[Christmas Star (for wise men and others) by Nick Owen, The Christmas Robin by law_keven. Both found on Creative Commons.]

Bailout for Writers

I'm (obviously) not the only one who calls for a bailout of the publishing industry and writers. Two other writers, Paul Greenberg in the New York Times and Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker both presented their bailout plans.

Andy Borowitz presents a compelling case of how far reaching the consequences of him not given a handout: the whole economy can collapse! All these affected families!

Paul sees that:

the workspace for writers seems to get more crowded by the day as refugees from other professions take cover behind what they hope will be the respectability of the writing life.

From his perch on the writing stool, he contemplates what Graham Greene asked:

“Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled."

Save the writers!

How fun is that?

What do 10 men singing "12 days of Christmas" a capella and teams of pastry chefs creating outlandish cakes in six hours have in common?

They are both delightful and awe-inspiring to watch. We marvel at the mastery and the apparent ease these artists have as they execute something most of us know we may never be able to do. We also experience an underlying nervousness: at these high level of difficulties, so many things can go wrong. We hope the singers stay in tune with one another and nobody will suddenly have a coughing fit. We sit at the edge of the seat as we watch each team lift their 150 lb cake from the working surface to the judging table, hoping the precarious and gravity-defying creation won't topple.

There is no doubt in anybody's mind that these are talented folks. But even the most talented person will not get anywhere without motivation, desire, proper training, practice, tenacity and perseverance. Today, I pay tribute to these qualities and remind myself that talent is not something I have any say about. Even passion and desire are not of my doing. Motivation, training, practice, persevere: these will have to be my focus if I want to achieve any level of excellence.

What can go wrong? I have the recipe.

Two foodie friends gave me a cookbook when they saw us at Thanksgiving, a cookbook from a bakery in Paris. They'd been there recently and knew I loved pastry.

Since this is Christmas time and all, the recipe for chestnut and chocolate tart leaped off the page and pleaded to be made. The directions didn't look too bad, the ingredient list not that long, and the taste of chestnut and dark chocolate in a buttery pastry case taunted me from the moment I saw the recipe.

The recipe calls for a standard pie pan or "some smaller tart pans" with no mention of the dimensions of these smaller pans. That alone should have alerted me to the possibility that this cookbook falls in the "cook till done' category, cookbooks that trust the cook to have enough experience and to have acquired helpful instincts so that details are not necessary.

Yet, I continued, trying to call up as much of my baking experiences as I could to decipher some of the instructions. I am more a cook than a baker; my instincts for cooking have been nurtured since I was nine while baking is something I came to much later. Till today, I am still not terribly confident if the dough I'm kneading is of the right consistency, or whether I have over/under worked it.




I set aside a couple of hours for the recipe, but the combination of my not-enough baking experiences and the fact that this is a new recipe made sure I took close to four. The tarts turned out well, I think, although the chocolate cream is too thin and I had to substitute almond paste for chestnut paste because I couldn't find chestnut paste anywhere in town.

How this applies to writing is easy to see. Just because we have a "recipe"--include the ingredients of strong characters, real conflicts and tangible setting, mix and heat using concrete nouns and active verbs--that has worked for other people hundreds of times doesn't mean I can make it work for me, at least not right away. And even when the results are decent, they're still far from excellent. My tarts tasted fine, but they look ed amateurish. Anyone can tell, at one glance, that they had been make by someone who was new to this.

I have to make many more tarts (like this gentleman here) before my tarts will even approach excellence.










I'm back to my keyboard to knead.

(Rose Bakery by roboppy, kneading brioche dough by yarnivore, Michael, Brick Street Bakery by fortinbras from Creative Commons.)

Twenty years of unexpectedness

This week, my husband and I celebrated twenty years of marriage. In our wedding picture. We look bright and hopeful, as newlyweds tend to, and I remember feeling that way as well. We dreamed big, but our life together gave us experiences much bigger than we could imagine. Some of those have been the very ones I'd secretly hoped we'd never have to experience. Yet through them came complexity and richness that gave our life meaning and depth.

As this poem by Arthur Conan Doyle writes in his poem, Retrospect

All that we ever dreamed, dear wife,
Seems drab and common by the truth,

To the unexpected. And to loyal and courageous companions!

Poetry Friday Roundup at Author Amok this week.

What do your scales look like?

When I was in college, my roommate, a wonderful violinist who'd chosen med school, commented that she was surprised I didn't practice scales every day.

Scales are important, they train our fingers to play passages that appear over and over again in repertoire, they are great warm ups, and most important of all, they teach our arms and bodies how to move across the keyboard. So why wasn't I practicing my scales every day, even though as a music major, I was putting in anything from 4 to 10 hours a day?

Because I had already spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours devoted to this one technique in my earlier years of playing the instrument. The scales had already been ingrained in my mind, my ears, my muscles. Till today. I have forgotten most of what I've learned in geography or physics or anthropology but tell me to play a F# major scale and I won't even hesitate. These babies have drilled themselves into the nucleus of every cell.

Also, laziness. (Hey, I was in college, I was allowed to be a slacker every once in a while.)

When I started teaching, I had to decide which school of thought I subscribed to when it came to teaching scales. One school says pianists need to have as many of the standard figuration of piano playing--scales, arpeggios, chords, Alberti Bass, trills, etc--in their fingers so that when they encounter them in real repertoire, they won't need to struggle but can instead focus on the musical elements.

The second school of thought considers the hours practicing scales wasted because students should spend time on real music, instead of just the technical aspect. Students will learn scales soon enough when they start playing Mozart Sonatas.

I chose #1 although I tried as best as I could to relate particular technical exercises to real music so that the younger students, especially, could see the point of these exercises.

My question is, now that I'm a writer, what is the equivalent of practicing scales? Free writing? Journaling? Writing sentences and labeling parts: subject, verb, object?

So, my fellow writers, do you practice scales everyday? If so, what do your scales look like?

On a more upbeat note

To counter the negative vibes of my last post, I'd like to get back to the conclusion I had arrived at before getting sidetracked, and that is:

despite all the bad news and the mounting difficulties in getting published, as a writer, I will continue to write. And improve and learn and grow and live.

One of the things that helps me hone my writing is to read a lot; to compare and figure out what works and what doesn't. There is subjectivity involved, obviously, but great writing, in the end, will stand out.

The super-generous agent, Nathan Bransford, ran a contest recently, in which he invites writers to submit their first paragraphs. From the 1000+ entries, he selected 6 finalists and readers voted their favorites.

These posts offer an immense resource. First, we get to read the first paragraphs of so many writers. Second, we get to hear different people's opinions (ignore the snarks) of the chosen paragraphs. Third, we get to see the ones who stand out and why.

I haven't yet read through all the entries. But having read just the ones I have, I can understand a little better what agents and editors mean when they discuss the queries and submission they receive.

So there you go, a bit of a silver lining.

Here's one way

To get published in this age of shrinking publishing houses and disappearing advances: take up a trade--you only need to be as good as this guy


--and get yourself 15 minutes of fame. Or become a famous pooch, or a career celebrity by continually doing outrageous things in public.

Most of you have read the op-ed piece in the New York Times by Timothy Egan, Typing Without a Clue. If not, here it is.