The Empire State Building, shirts with sailboats, opera houses

Into the sea of pink and red, I'd like to introduce a tall grey building, the Empire State Building, as described by a poet. (Who else can make a building romantic?)

Superbly Situated
by Robert Hershon

...

just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness

i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes

i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them

but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being in the right place at the right time—come take your seat

...



[frankfurt opera house by tinyfroglet]

[Flight Landing -- Layered
by Tony George]

[Take a seat by Old Sarge
All pictures found on Flikr, Creative Commons]

Not swoon-inducing, but I find it very real and sweet.

Poetry Friday hosted by Big A little a this week.

So write already!

This last post focuses on those suggestions from Barbara Samuel that have to do with the actual writing. She says:

A novel in progress is as delicate as an embryo, and it is your job to protect it from any environment that might harm it. Protect it from too much judgment or feedback, from other people, but also from yourself.

and

Your job is not to judge... only to serve each one as it arrives,

Protect it as I would an embryo.

Serve it as a guest.

When I view my work this way, courtesy and respect enter the picture, and I am no longer at liberty to be harsh and demeaning. I am not sure why, when I considered my writing just as an extension of me, it was okay to be nasty. But I am going to be mindful of my work being not just a part of me, but its own entity as well. Just like my children, whom I recognize and respect as beings separate from me.

To those of you who have indulged my process of de-funking, thank you. Your encouragement is a lifeline. I'd like to report that I started writing again this morning. I am back on the wagon and practicing my new attitude.

I wish you: beautiful relationships with all your words.

Don't Take it Too Seriously

Don't take it too seriously.

The last piece of advice from Barbara Samuel's blog post on reclaiming the joy of writing seems to counter the it's-a-difficult-and-huge-task-this-writing-business-and-you-gotta-take-it-seriously-or-else-you'd-never-succeed vibe about getting published and read.

Yet we've all known people (ourselves?) who take themselves and their jobs/passions so seriously that we feel as if life itself is being sucked away.

I am serious about writing. I know about hard work and perseverance. What I need is exactly this advice, so that in the midst of the teeth-grtting sessions of revisions, or hair-pulling moments of not getting the emotion just right, I can breathe and remember that there is more to life than just my writing.

(Please don't tell me that if I think there is more to life than writing, then writing must not be that important to me and therefore I should just get out and do something else and leave writing to those who either write or die. Please. )

I wish you: silly faces.

[Winner of the Silly Face Contest by Linda Hartman at Creative Commons]

Reclaiming

When a writer loses joy in writing, the answer is almost always that he/she has moved from internal prompts to external considerations.

This is what Barbara Samuel says over at Writer Unboxed. The post is well worth reading and contains excellent suggestions on how writers can recharge and reclaim that inner joy in the process, free from the demon of external demands.

I'll highlight two today. The first:

Read

The evening when I first realized I was in serious trouble took place about ten days ago, when I didn't feel like reading. I stood next to my bed, stared at the precariously high pile of books, and did not want to read a single one.

(Collective gasp of horror from my fellow bookworms.)

That really shook me up and made me decide I had to do something about it. How could I not want to read? How is that even conceivable?

Part of the reason is I've been a good newbie author, trying to understand the market and reading all the latest successful books available, figuring what works, what doesn't, and how I can improve mine.

But I haven't done the other kind of reading, the kind that engages me and lingers long after I'm finished, in a long time. Reading has gone from a joy to a chore.

This ties in well with Barbara's other suggestion, which is to

Fill the Well

She refers to the process of collecting fresh new details about the world, about taking notes when riding a train or going to the movies. I would like to expand that to include anything else that fills the well, not just for our writing, but of our being:

• read books we love, not the ones we should
• exercise
• converse with people we care about
• converse with people we respect
• cuddle with our children/pets
• eat
  

I've gone out running three times this weekend, two of those times with my children. I went to Zumba classes. I sorted and organized my closet (believe it or not, that was a well-filling activity for me.) I cooked several different meals that were either healthy or usually reserved for special occasions or those that required more than the usual amount of creativity. Ran errands as if they were fun events.

Still haven't written much, except here at the blog. But I think this is going to get better.

Wishing you lots of lovely books and filled-to-overflowing wells.

Snap! Snap!

What's that obnoxious snapping sound?

My desperate attempts to snap out of a writing-funk I've been in for the last couple of weeks. It's either February or the cumulative effect of reading all the Publishing-Is-Dead articles and blog posts (including this one Publishers Weekly) that have rendered me unable to garner the necessary energy to keep writing.

What's the point of writing, publishers won't take chances on new authors. Write because you have to; if you have anything else you'd rather do, go do that. Publishing was hard to begin with, now with the economy heading south, it's just gotten a hundred times harder. Write what you love. I can't be blind to market forces. You can only write what speaks to you, anything else will come off inauthentic and publishers and readers alike will smell it a mile away.

And of course, not writing brings with it the low-level but constant restlessness and something-isn't-quite-right-ness.

Vicious cycle.

What do I have to come back to? What can I control? Not the state of the economy or the publishing industry, the taste of readers and health of bookstores, decisions of agents and editors. The only thing I can do is

Write the best book I can.

As advice goes, this is glib, flippant, and cliche, but unfortunately true.

I have to ignore the loaded word "best", ignore the bad news, and just go back to writing. Where do I find the motivation that brings energy and hope?

Write. Read. Live.

Poetry Friday

It's weird and affirming all at once when experiences or habits you thought were unique to you and somehow not to be disclosed are described by others. No experience is replicated in total, of course, but this poem by Phillip Booth is strangely familiar. Here are excerpts:

Adding it Up

by Philip Booth

My mind’s eye opens before

the light gets up.
...

I give some

passing thought to the point

that if I hadn’t turned poet

I might well be some other

sort of accountant.
...

I seesaw on the old cliff, trying

to balance things out: job,

wife, children, myself.
...

My mind’s eye opens before

my body is ready for its

first duty

The rest of the poem is here.

Wild Rose Reader is hosting Poetry Friday Roundup this week.

Dream Teams part 2

This is my second apology: I was going to write a post the follows Dream Teams part 1 the following day, but did not realize it would be a lot harder to write than I'd thought. I have the second part now, and I hope it sparks some thoughts in you. As usual, feel free to comment when you do.

I wasn't particularly fond of jazz until I met an aficionado who became my husband. I've listened to a whole lot of different jazz styles now and the thing that intrigues me most is the process of improvisation, which is at the heart of jazz. I want to be a fly on the wall during rehearsals, to see how decisions are made and to witness the interchanges among musicians.

I got that wish come true partially, while watching a DVD of the recording sessions by McCoy Tyner, for an album he created with such guitars greats as John Schofield and Bill Frisell. (And drummer Jack DiJonette: how cool is he?)

These musicians don't plan everything out, they talk in short hand, and they trust that their fellow musicians would respond. How they end up with their music is still a mystery to me, but I was drawn to how they worked together.

In the bonus feature of Across the Universe, a movie based on Beatles songs, the director talks about the movie-making process as being fluid and dependent on the actors' responses. She has an initial idea, and she tosses it out and everyone fleshes it out and experiments with it. Some of the results I am not sure about, but a couple of them turned out to be very moving, at a guttural level. I don't think a carefully scripted, well-rehearsed scene could evoke the same reaction.

Whether the players are musicians or martial arts practitioners or movie makers, when a group of them, who are passionate about an idea, have the experiences and skills to try them out, and who respond to the energy created by their fellow creators: BOOM!

[Hello Fire 1 by doozzle at Creatvie Commons]

My life as a writer is lived mostly in solitude and I like it just fine. Sometimes, though, I do miss the intense conversations I used to have with fellow piano pedagogy geeks when we taught at our little white building in Kingston, NJ, conversations that left me exhilarated and hyper-alive.

But even though I work in solitude, I don't live in a vacuum. And like most writers, what I write, fiction or non, is based on real experiences, reactions to people and events, and life and truth and beauty as I perceive them. People who are intentional about living and have passions and dreams are usually willing to share them when the moment is right. I just have to learn to recognize those moments.

Thank you, Shrinking Violets

I have two apologies to make. First, I neglected to mention in my review of The 39 Clues: Maze of Bones, that the book was a gift from Shrinking Violets Promotions, as part of their Twelve Days of Christmas: Introvert Style giveaway. Thank you, Robin and Mary!

Here is the latest on their generosity: they, together with a few other writers, are offering a scholarship for a SCBWI member to attend the August 2009 conference in LA.

Details:

To apply for the 2009 scholarship, submit a 250-word, double-spaced essay describing what you hope to accomplish by attending this year's summer conference. Send your essay to: fairygodsistersink@yahoo.com

The application deadline is April 15th, 2009. The winner will be notified May 15th, 2009.

fAiRy gOdSiStErS, iNk. is a small, benevolent squadron of Santa Barbara children's book authors who believe in the magic of passing forward lucky breaks, bounty, and beneficence, as so many have done for us. We are: Thalia Chaltas, Mary Hershey, Valerie Hobbs, Robin LaFevers and Lee Wardlaw.

If you would like to share some fairy dust of your own to help send a writer to the 2009 Summer Conference, FGI welcomes your donations!

For more information about the grant and/or making a donation, please visit the FGI website (which will be up and running any day now! We promise!) at http://www.fairygodsistersink.com