THE SINGULAR ‘THEY,’ ‘THEIR,’ and ‘THEMSELVES.’

The singular ‘they’ is commonly used to refer to a person whose gender is irrelevant or unknown—for example, “The participant indicated their preferences.”

Or, “If your child is thinking about a gap year, they can get good advice from this website.”

And, “A researcher has to be completely Uobjective in their findings.”

Why am I bringing up this topic? Because I’m reading Jasper Fforde, that’s why. He is a never-ending fount of perplexing and intoxicating forms of writing.

I’m reading ‘Early Riser.’ It has just been reviewed by all sorts of people who do that for a living, and wouldn’t that be a wonderful job? So, I’m going to give only a little background and not review it. I want to bring up the fact that I’m two-thirds of the way through Fforde’s phantasmagorical winter ( a winter that has as much, or more, import as the protagonist), and I’m still not sure of the sex (I said sex, not gender) of the protagonist, Charlie Worthing. Charlie is a novice Winter Consul whose job is to protect the hibernators, the vast majority of the population, and make sure various off-the-grid groups do not steal from the Pantry during the winter months. Consul’s various weapons include Bambis and Thumpers, technically non-lethal unless used at close range. They, the consuls, Charlie included, are all damaged in some way, but in the winter landscape of Sector Twelve, they are accepted for what they are.

Fforde never ever uses a gender descriptive pronoun for Charlie. I said gender this time, not sex and that’s maybe because I am getting a little confused. Fforde’s not confused. He’s doing this on purpose to confuse me. I believe I found a clue to Charlie’s, uh, disposition on page 87 but subsequently, while reading various reviews, I see that the reviewers either didn’t pick up on that clue, and you know they skim, or ignored it and proceeded to give Charlie a nomenclature.

Were they correct in their willy-nilly choice of Charlie’s state since the author, as of two-thirds of the way through the book, chose NOT to disclose it? And, why is Jasper Fforde doing this? Well, that’s a silly question. Why does he do anything no one else has thought of doing?

So, I keep reading.

The severe winters that are afflicting Wales, and all the surrounding environs as far as we know, are another of the author’s little digs that I find amusing considering we’re all going to melt, apparently, from heat in a dozen years or so.

Do, someone else, read the book and let me know what you think.

We’re going to Crime Bake again this year, my writing group and I, and I’m looking forward to it.

Walter Mosley is the guest speaker, and I’m a fan of his Fearless Jones crime stories. Not because of Fearless, who is indeed fearless, but because of his sidekick, and the series protagonist, Paris Minton. Paris is a bookstore owning wimp. I don’t own the bookstore part, but I do own ‘wimp’ and can feel his fear when, through no fault of his own, Paris is led down the garden path into danger time after time. When will he learn? Poor guy.

I love driving down to the conference with my writing group buds, rooming with them and at the end of the day comparing notes. We’ve made some friends over the years and will try to find them in the crowd. Maybe they’ll find us; we’re definitely loud and numerous.

The conference has a way of revitalizing that old, lagging muse hidden away somewhere in the brain. I think it’s the brain. Maybe it’s the heart. What’s definite is that it is hidden and needs to get out and breathe some fresh air. Stretch. Do some deep knee bends and then come and tell me that we’re ready for a new project.

‘From Where You Dream,’ by Robert Olen Butler is one of my more recent reads. In fact, I’m rereading it. I’m intrigued by the sub-conscious-centeredness of his muse and the way he accesses it. His inspiration, he says, and maybe mine (?), is indeed hidden away in the place where dreams come from. That place you cannot reach while awake. Oh! So how ya gonna access it then? You know how fast dreams disappear the minute you wake.

Actually, I did retain a snippet of a dream yesterday morning when the alarm woke me from a sound sleep. Two men were delivering an empty fish tank to my house, and I, lounging in my lawn chair watching, pretended to be asleep. Does that mean I’m in denial? The last thing we had in a fish tank the size of the one they carried to the door was a 17-year-old African clawed frog my son had raised from a tadpole. A homeschool project that went on forever.

Denial or not, that snippet is still fresh. Why aren’t the useful, as in grist-for-the-mill type dreams remembered? Maybe if I set my alarm to wake me every hour, I’d have a higher percentage of memories.

Robert Olen Butler describes his dream state, how he gets there, and how he utilizes it to keep his words flowing. It’s a fascinating concept, and maybe it could work for me. It would be nice if it did since I’m not a plotter and my pantsing skills, such as they are, need a few good, swift kicks to get the juices flowing. I’m counting on the conference to help. Figuratively speaking.

If you were to occasionally send out a bit of writing as an entry into a competition or a submission to a magazine or a book proposal to an agent you’re bound to wind up being spurned more often than not. Ergo, being between rejections is commonplace. Not good, but average for a writer. Submitting your writing is an awful lot like kissing frogs.

Being between rejections is the same as being between projects. They overlap. They follow one another like hunter and prey. Like a horse and carriage, horse and carriage, horse and carriage, circling around you till you have no idea which came first. It’s a whirlwind occupation for the hardy who can’t wait for the big payoff. It’s staying on the carousel til the ring, how, you’ll never know, gets caught up in your fist and it’s a hallelujah moment.

I’m very recently post-rejection but that won’t stop me from going after the next ring or frog that looks like it might have my name on it. Might. Some rings are definitely out of my range and/or interest, thank goodness, otherwise, I’d never get anything done.

I want that ring. Is that enough to actually win one? Wanting? I don’t think so. Wanting a cottage in the Calanques doesn’t mean I’m going to get it. There are other things, things that could be within my grasp, to want, and I’m going after them. The time between projects and rejection will narrow and become a blur, the Hallelujah moment and the daily grind will melt together, and the desire and the failure will become one . . .

Really? That’s a little too zen for me. I’ll try that again;

. . .desire and failure will take their appropriate places in the vast scheme of things. And I’m going to try and equalize them as much as possible.

PLAYING IN MUD

We’re in the dog days of summer, when that mysterious star, Sirius, rises somewhere on the horizon.
Take a hike, Sirius.

Most everyone feels sluggish and irritable during these sticky mid-summer days. There are some, I hear, who come alive while sweating but as for me, I’m looking forward to the crisp days of autumn, even though those crisp days herald the cold of winter.

So, I was tending toward feeling heavy, hot and brain dead one late afternoon when I came home from a challenging couple of hours playing Mah Jongg. I found my son making a giant mud puddle in the backyard. My backyard is big enough that a swamp of mud the proportions of a grave site would not be readily seen, but I wasn’t ticked but rather intrigued; what the heck? I said to myself.

“What the heck, Whitt? You’ll have all the warthogs and hippos here by morning, wallowing, trying to get cool.”

He had a lot of sound equipment hovering near the muck which I hadn’t noticed at first. My son is not five years old, the typical period of a muddler, he’s going on thirty-five, a reasonable age for a film-maker. He’s a man of few words. “Did you win?” he asked.

“I did pretty well, considering the heat. What’s up?”

He showed me a list of sounds he needed for his film: a cartwheel rolling through muck, boots walking through sucky mud. Sounds of water; water being drunk, being splashed,  drifting through my fingers, splashing from a basin, and being poured from a pitcher into various metal containers, and etc.

I became a trekker through mud. I became the gofer, looking through my kitchen for all the different vessels that made water not taste better but sound better. I became a Gunga Din and manned the hose when the mud was not viscose enough, stopped the flow when the mud overflowed its banks. I gulped water and sipped water, sloshed it and stirred it. I pushed start and stop buttons when Whitt became too mud encrusted to touch his equipment, and I listened through headphones to mucky, yucky sucky sounds inaudible to the naked ear.

It was fun. I forgot the heat.

Then, while he made a fire in the pit to record the crackling sounds, I made us some dinner.

Being a filmmaker is a lot like being a five year old. It’s infectious, too.

This was in my inbox this morning, from one cousin, by way of another. High excitement indeed!

“In case you are not current in world news, here is the unbelievable scoop. The Tour de France is going to go through Roudouallec on Wednesday. No, they are not lost. They will be on the route Lorient/Quimper for stage 5. From what has been described to me they will come from the south (Guiscriff) on the road past Kerzellec. Then enter the Bourg of Roudouallec, make a left and then make the turn on the route to St Goazec still going north. After a short while, they will turn south towards Coray and then onto Quimper.

I imagine that crowds will be coming into Roudouallec from the surrounding towns and create the biggest excitement since the US Army rolled through in 1944.”
Roudouallec? Where’s that?

Roudouallec is in Brittany, France. It’s on the Armorican peninsula immediately before Finisterre, or Land’s End, the furthest west that you can be in France

So, what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that Roudouallec is my family homestead. My father was born there in 1909, the youngest of ten children. Half of his siblings eventually came to the United States because of the deprivations of WW1 on the little farming community. Two of my father’s brothers had been gassed in that war. Nothing was the same again for those who lived there, farmers for the most part.

My father was born in a stone, mud-floored house. To lay a mud floor was considered an art back then, only done by specialized craftsmen.    He came to this country when he was 17, following in the footsteps of older siblings. Throngs of Bretons came to NYC to work in the hotel industry and for Michelin Tire in New Jersey. Roudouallec and many other small towns lost large percentages of their populations. The old folks held their neighborhoods together by sheer willpower.

My father died in 2002 at the age of 93. Two years later my daughter and I took his ashes back to Roudouallec to be buried in the family vault. It was my first trip to the old country, as he had liked to call it. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t need to spell my maiden name, LeGuillou, for strangers. That was surreal enough, but even stranger was the feeling that I belonged in this one street village overshadowed by the ancient church, only a few years away from the twice-daily cow parade through the center of town. I’m sorry I missed that but, hey, can’t stop progress.

Tomorrow, instead of taking refuge from cows in the shallow doorways and side streets of Roudouallec, tourists will be watching from windows and roofs as bicyclists streak down the narrow mile-long main drag that extends from a most excellent creperie at one end to my cousin Mimi’s house at the other. This will undoubtedly be the biggest excitement since 1944.

I know that my cousins will be watching from the front yard of Mimi’s home, the first house in Roudouallec after you leave Finisterre.

I’d like to be there too.

I will be watching coverage online.

GARBAGE

Or, as they say, not, in France, Gharrbahggge. They don’t call it that, but they do put it into a poubelle, which sounds so much more beautiful than a garbage can, or trash can, or even circular file.

While I was working my way through Sleep School, aka, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for my insomnia, I whiled away many evenings reading mysteries, watching movies, TV mystery series, doing Sudoku puzzles, playing scrabble, indulging in long phone calls with people on the west coast, all in a seemingly never-ending struggle to stay awake until my appointed bedtime. Bedtime was at midnight but has moved slowly and incrementally up to a more reasonable 11PM. Now I’m aiming at 10:45. Not bad. I’ll still have time to read.

In the mysteries I entertained myself with, past and present, written or filmed, it dawned on me that the detective (professional, or the more entertaining amateur) might have to search through dumpsters, landfills, dumps, and sweet sounding poubelles to find clues. On the way to finding clues, there was a lot of yuck. Sometimes the yuck was a clue. Yuck.

Amateurs braved the garbage themselves unless they were independently wealthy and had an assistant to do it for them. They probably won’t have that assistant for long. Professionals had a string of underlings who aspired to reach the top rung in the ladder of detection and therefore dared not give up. They were given Hazmat suits. Lucky them.

I considered my own personal poubelle at the side of my desk this morning and wondered what clues it would yield to the inquiring mind. At the moment I’d wondered I had just tossed in a chocolate wrapper. It was exceedingly good chocolate, and I would recommend it to anyone who asks. In the same receptacle is a potato chip bag. Also a good quality chip.

What would those items tell a snoop?

However, the bulk of the trash is folded, smashed, wrinkled and torn up paper; my attempts at writing. They are the critiqued pages of my stories, handed back to me in good faith by my faithful companions. The notations had been gone over, the comments were read and may be applied.

There is nothing physically yucky in there, no need to suit up. I try to keep it all burnable.

But what would it tell someone who thought I had committed some heinous crime?

The crime indeed would not lie in my choice of snack. My taste in chocolate is impeccable. Quality over quantity every time.

But what about the paper? Quantity over quality?

Ah, there might lie the crime.

I Told Myself That I wouldn’t Write About This. . . but, here I am, about to bore my gentle readers to tears over my tale of woe, and seeming success.

Anyone out there with insomnia? You might be the only ones who won’t be put to sleep by this post.

Almost one month ago, after decades of dealing with insomnia, I went for a sleep consultation at a nearby hospital. The doctor called my condition ‘Pure Insomnia,’ though I’m not at all sure about its purity. She said I was a poor candidate for spending the night hooked up to various things because I’d never fall asleep. I didn’t have sleep apnea because I didn’t sleep. She suggested Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

CBT. Of course, I was familiar with the term, but not the actual practice. It was torture for the first few days. Waterboarding looked like a fun way to pass the time.

How hard could it be to change a life-long habit? Hard. Maybe the first few days for a heroin addict, or an alcoholic, to go without their substance of choice might be more painful, but my experience was undoubtedly similar to physical and mental withdrawal. My end-of-the-day reward, my life-long habit of reading in bed, was about to be ripped from my life. I would not be permitted to snuggle up to a book in the comfort of my memory foam mattress and the nurturing love of my pillow. For three hours, 9 PM to midnight, I paced the floor outside the door of my bedroom, not allowed to enter lest I fall into temptation, and bed. I struggled mightily, not knowing what to do.

I carried on like this for a few nights until my husband suggested a movie. That passed some time. Knitting helped. But for some reason reading outside of my bed at night never felt right.

As I said, that was one month ago. I’m doing better now.

I don’t think that reading in bed caused my condition. After all, I’ve read in bed since I could, and that was early. I was the flashlight-under-the-blanket type of kid, unable to get up in the mornings because of the adventurous life I led before dawn. But, when insomnia began because of some cruel twist of fate, the reading habit exacerbated it. I’d lie in bed for hours after lights out waiting for sleep that never showed up. I’d lie in bed in the mornings hoping to catch some z’s and couldn’t. I’d lie in bed for ten hours to get 3 hours of sleep.

What the CBT did, through forced sleep deprivation (amusingly called Sleep Restriction Therapy), was to limit the time I could be in bed. An amount of sleep time was determined using hard, cold calculations, and a predetermined rising time set. For me, it was midnight to bed, and 6 AM to rise. Yes, 6 AM even if I didn’t sleep! Well, if I could sleep for the whole 6 hours, I would have twice as much sleep as I was getting, so I leapt at the proposal.

The first few nights, even after strenuous pacing, and pulling out my hair, I slept as usual. Lousy. Then the forced sleep deprivation took hold, and I slept almost the whole 6 hours.

No napping was allowed.

No lying in bed if I wasn’t sleeping.

No breaks, like sleeping in on the weekends. I was in the army now, my hand behind the plow.

CBT is not for the weak. But it is for the determined.

If, after every seven days, my actual sleeping time increased I’d be permitted to add 15 minutes to my allotted time. You have no idea how I look forward to that little reward. Like a prisoner in solitary who watches for the hand with the tin plate at the door slot, I looked forward to the hands of the clock moving toward my new bedtime. At the end of this week, I can hit the sack at 11 PM.

Still no books in bed, but I’m getting used to reading sprawled out on the sofa, fighting off sleep till I’m allowed to close my eyes in the sanctity of the bedroom.

Now, I don’t want to wake you if you’ve fallen asleep reading this, but I’m done.

It might be spring if you just planted a couple of pansy six-packs in outdoor planters and then had to bring them in the house because the temperature would be dropping below freezing.

It might be spring if you had the back door open for the noonday sun to warm the house but you still wanted something hot for lunch.

And it might be spring if, while you were heating up said lunch, the cat who had been soaking up rays on the back deck came streaking through the house warning you that there was something outside and that something was a cute, rumply, cuddly, year-old black bear with his nose twitching away at the door in eager anticipation of a home cooked meal such as Mom might have taught him to enjoy.

I shut the door on his cute little nose, and he never batted an eye.

He was awfully cute with his mussy fur coat decorated with twigs and bits of leaves. I watched from the windows as he walked around the house investigating empty planters, glass globes hanging from the naked branches of hydrangeas and lilacs, and turning over with his thumbless hands and huge claws items of suspected gustatory interest.

That was two days ago. The cat hasn’t come out of hiding except to snatch a bite to eat now and then. The sight of bears does that to him. And as adorable as that little tyke of a bear was I also hope he doesn’t come back.

It’s spring when the days are warm and dry, and you want to be out in the yard doing things rather than hunkering down by the wood stove. But hunkering, I think, is more conducive to thinking great thoughts than is basking in the sun. Should I be glad that I live in the north country where summer is literally only 12 weeks long? Would the other 40 weeks give me enough time to write great American flash fiction? Forget the novel. Can anyone in more torrid zones (south of New Hampshire) think clearly enough to imagine great things when they had all those temperate months to bask? I suppose if anyone south of New Hampshire read this post they could accuse me of being a latitudinalist, and they might be correct.

Being anything ‘ist, or phobic these days is bound to get you in trouble. Am I an ursidist, or maybe even ursaphobic if I prefer that cute little feral creatures not wander through my yard when big mama might be close behind? My cat is. And my pansies are exothermistophobes, but then they are pansies; they don’t want to be left out in the cold. Who can blame them?

I’m not sure where this post is going, but I’m going to sit in the sun before it freezes, which it will again tonight. It might be spring in the day, but at night it’s another story.

PULL UP OUR SOCKS?

That’s what Heidi urged us to do when our blogging was going down the tubes. I looked up the expression and found this:

Socks didn’t always have an elastic band around the top. Our great-grandparents used to wear garters to keep them up. In days gone by, schoolboys in shorts could regularly be seen with socks drooping around their ankles and were told to smarten themselves by pulling their socks up.

Poor kids. Try rolling a hoop down the street with lengths of knitted tubing fluttering around your feet. A definite dog attractor. There are other sock expressions found and explained on the internet, but I won’t go into them here. Some are fun and suitable for a writer to utilize.

So, here we are, pulling up our socks.

Heidi went at it with a vengeance (see two posts ago), with her medieval manuscripts post, and Karen followed with her short story woes. I feel for her; I’m in the same boat, struggling with word counts that don’t allow for character expansion or descriptions out the wazoo. Wazoo is a fascinating word. Thank goodness that it has gone beyond its original meaning and is now acceptable in family settings and good clean writing. At least I think it has. If I use it, if I’ve even heard its new meaning, it generally indicates it’s been in usage for ages. Like, pull up your socks.

My short story woes are slightly different than Karen’s. I enjoy ripping the clothes off my overdressed stories till they are clad only in the basics. Just a tad more than a birthday suit, the suit in which your story was dressed when it first occurred to you. No one wants to see that. Still, I need to have a complete story within the confines of competition requirements, one that sounds right for the word count, neither sparse or wordy, There’s a great word in Yiddish; ungapatchka. It means too much. I love it. Don’t bother looking it up; it’s not there. It’s a word that just is. I don’t think there’s an opposite, an antonym, or maybe I haven’t heard it yet.

I added a program to my computer (drum roll here), that’s been helping me with my writing. It’s called Grammarly. There is no part of my brain that can deal with grammar and punctuation. This program spots all my errors and, with my permission, will correct them for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to memorize Strunk and White’s Elements of Style to no avail. This program is the cat’s pajamas. Probably Dr. Denton’s with the socks attached.

So now I’m whizzing through my short stories like mad, not because I have this program but because all the competitions I want to enter are due at the end of this month. Grammarly is a real blessing to those who have a phobia to usage.

I’ve gotten four stories out already (these were pre-written stories; nobody is that good), whereas I (my critique mates, actually) would still be struggling with the grammar in the first one or two. I’ve spared them unnecessary anguish when their own troubles already besiege them.

You see how well I’ve pulled my socks up, Heidi?

CLUCKS, MEOWS, ARFS, TRUMPETINGS AND SOME CHITTERING

This afternoon I framed the invitation to my daughter’s wedding in one of those two sided plastic frames that stand on their own, the two sides opposite each other. On the facing side I placed a picture of her when she was about 8 or 9. In the picture she’s sitting on the kitchen floor, her three chickens vying for her attention and all three sitting in her lap, an overturned bowl of chicken food nearby. She was a chicken lover, and the funny thing is that given three chickens now she’d do the same thing. She had names for her chickens which I can’t remember, but she would. She’ll never forget them.

She’d like time to write someday and I bet that her stories will include chickens.

My novel. I like the sound of that. I even like the story though no one else seems to. Outside of my group anyway. My novel has a cat. We weren’t around chickens a lot, growing up in Queens, but we always had cats and I remember each and every one. Cats in stories always add coziness to a cozy, make a thriller more thrilling and a fantasy more bizarre. I don’t know why but a cat has all the potential of an extra character with paranormal abilities even if they are just being themselves.

My fictional cat, Woodrow, does nothing but eat and sleep. He does sniff out the antagonist in one scene but the humans are not perceptive enough to recognize his odd behavior as significant. They give him food which shuts him up. He’s ordinary. But, as a cat he has the potential to deliver ALL that cats are known for: sneakiness, faithfulness, ruthlessness, bravery, devotion and otherworldliness. Woodrow just doesn’t deliver any of that. Maybe (sardonic laughter) in the sequel.

Could a chicken add as much to a story? Can anyone remember a story they’ve read where the protagonist is bound up in a relationship with their chicken?

Dogs figure largely in novels and no denying they are fun, but they don’t have the cache of a cat. Try thinking of what dogs symbolize and they’ll fall flat and short of a cat. In fact they are usually the fall guy in a book with a cat AND a dog. They bite and growl. If your story needs that, throw in a dog or two.

Elephants. They’re like large cats. Mysterious. You never know what they’re thinking. I loved the ending of Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. A cat would do that. Or get the elephant to do it for him. They have the same mindset. The trouble with elephants is their size; far too big for anything but a circus or the African veldt.

Parrots. They think like cats and elephants. And they add color. Suspense, too, if you’ve ever been around one. They’ll rip into you if you’re not careful. And they’ll talk and spill the beans if someone is killed in their presence. But only if they liked the victim. They can come in handy for that special story.

Monkeys are underused. They could deliver some intrigue as in, I wonder what the monkey over the mantelpiece is going to do, and when. Like the proverbial gun they’re way too obvious, however. They stand out like a sore thumb in a typical setting. Cats patrol the floors, just under the radar, always on the alert, as invisible as the old family retainer who waits. Monkeys are not subtle.

I’m waiting for the chicken story. And I’m looking forward to the big day.