A Miserable Week

It was a misery specific to me alone, and I could have suffered that way except for good friends and good books. The books had more endurance, friends would cluck, cluck and duck out after finding me, the drama queen, unendurable.

I had a toothache. There’s probably no one who is a stranger to toothache, and if there is, then harken unto my words and stop eating desserts. Or go back and be born with exceptionally strong teeth. There’s nothing like a toothache to reform a dessert-aholic or to to make him wish for a better genetic profile. Even if the reformation and all the wishing in the world are only temporary.

So, at the apex of the pain, I had an extraction. I’m not even going to talk about that, it’s too fresh. It was yesterday.

Good books were what pulled me through this ordeal. They will sit with you for however long it takes for the pain medication to kick in, even longer if you like. They uncomplainingly drop from your hands and onto the floor when, in a weakened condition or during a brief snooze, your fevered fingers lose their grip. Name one acquaintance who would stand for that.

I’ll tell you who stood me in good stead during this prolonged, painful ordeal. It was Jasper Fforde.

Oh, good grief. Is she going to babble on about him again? Every other blog post it’s Jasper Fforde this, or Jasper Fforde that. The man doesn’t even know how to spell his own name!

Yes, I am going to babble on about J.Ff., and here, from two erudite researchers, are comments on the double Ff (ff):

I’d heard the “ff” was from an old calligraphic way of writing a capital “F” — it only looked like a doubled lower case letter. But folks (or is it “ffolkes”?) misinterpreted it, and over time it became “ff”. (scratch1300)

I think scratch1300 is on the right track. From Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable] [quote] Double F (Ff, or ff) as an initial in a few personal names, as Ffoulkes, ffench, etc., is a mistaken use in print of the medieval or Old English capital F as it appears written in engrossed leases, etc. In script the old capital F looked very much like two small f’s entwined. (bibliophage)

That’s all I’m going to say on that subject, except maybe I’ll use that spelling on occasion when I’ve got a character who needs an uplift.

How fast we mortals forget our resolves. My husband just came home and was about to eat the last piece of rum cake, but I beat him to it.

IS IT TOO EARLY FOR SPRING CLEANING?

I cleaned out the bathroom closet yesterday, and after, kept opening the door to admire my handiwork. I told my husband and my son to check it out, both of them said it looked the same.

I cleared off my desk on the weekend. Now that was some task. No one could say it looked the same after I had hauled off a stuffed to the gills hefty trash bag of STUFF. But no one noticed. Sigh.

Usually I clear off my desk between stories. I think maybe I neglected to do that the last time or two, because this mess was the worst I’d ever seen. The boxes of Christmas cards only indicated that I was three months late. The chapters from my novel that I’d last worked on in October was another indication that I’d been remiss in tidying up. But, what about the open chessboard with sticky notes indicating strategic moves that I’d been using as reference. . .to a story I hadn’t touched in a year!

Things were in a bad way. My desk was my brain’s Portrait of Dorian Gray. I couldn’t think.  Though seemingly calm and collected on the outside, my mind wasn’t able to move through the muck that surrounded me.

I got to work. I was brutal. Maybe I shouldn’t have tossed so liberally, maybe there was something vital in all those papers I burnt. Maybe. I’ll never know. They’re burnt, like bridges, behind me. But I second guess, and move on.

My desk is a ten foot counter top, on a balcony that overlooks my living room. I overlook the other way, at a short wall and the ceiling which slants up over my head. No window. Stuff tacked randomly in front of my face. It’s a place of work. It was, before the weekend, a piece of work, the ten feet narrowed down to two feet around my laptop. Now I can breath. I can move on from the short story that I will, today or tomorrow, send in to a contest, and go back to that novel of last October. Or something else. Who knows. I’m moving on. My brain, like my desk, is a now a tabula rasa. Some might agree with that in a literal way concerning my brain, but by chucking out all the crap from my desk, I’ve freed my mind up for the next great writing endeavor. Whatever that may happen to be.

It’s not too early for Spring cleaning.

MAH JONGG, HEADACHES AND TIME TRAVEL

Mah Jongg has nothing to do with writing, unless one writes a story about the game. It’s a lot of fun to play. Writing can be fun too, but I’ll get to why sometimes it isn’t in just a minute.

On Saturday I finished the fourth of four Mah Jongg classes at the Haverhill Library, the same library where that illustrious group, the Thursday Night Writes, meets each week to critique the heck out of one another. Criticism can be fun when you are on the dishing out end, but this past Thursday I was on the receiving end. It wasn’t too, too bad. If you can keep an open and disengaged mind the bad stuff can just float over your head while you write down the criticisms. It seems the major problem in my current story is getting the hang of time travel.

In the film Back to the Future, and in one of the Harry Potter stories, why can one person appear in a time and place both as the present existence of himself and as a future or past existence, yet I’m not allowed do it in my story? Is it such a big deal to stretch and break the bonds of believability? This is why writing sometimes is not fun, when one just can not grasp why one’s critique group cannot grasp the concept!

But, back to Mah Jongg. This was the first time I’ve taught the game to a group. And to a large group of ten, only one of whom had actually  touched a Mah Jongg tile before, and yet no one threw anything at me. That, in itself, was both rewarding, and remarkable. It can be frustrating when you don’t know the game. Even when you do know the game. When you are just learning the rules sometimes you just can not grasp the concept of why the game is played that way. Grasping new concepts, slippery concepts like time travel and Mah Jongg, make your head hurt. Several times during the class on Saturday I heard someone say they had a headache.

Figuring out my time travel issue will probably give me a headache at some point this week. If anyone can give me a definitive explanation of time travel, in simple terms that a lay person can understand, I’d be most thankful.

THE END

For the past year I’ve been keeping a sort of journal. It’s not a journal about myself. Perish the thought someone would actually choose that to read out all the things I’ve written. Really. Perish.

This journal is about endings. How to wrap up a story in the best possible way, with the best possible choice of words, and the best finale to the great work one has just finished. In this journal I write down the title and author, and just a bit of the opening lines to jog my memory as to which book this is, because it’s been so long since I read it. Then I dart to the end, to the author’s nugget summation, the wrap-up, and I write down the closing paragraph, or maybe just a few sentences. Some authors take pages for their closing. Some, just a few words.

The March/April issue of Writer’s Digest has a great article all the way back on p.40, by Jacquelyn Mitchard. It’s entitled, “Goodbye to All That,” and it’s all about endings. Charles Dickens could take pages to finalize his novels. Charlotte Bronte took but four words at the end of Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Most everything else ever written lies somewhere betwixt the two.

One of Ms. Mitchard’s comments was about the late David Foster Wallace. DFW admitted that his masterwork, Infinite Jest, just simply “stopped” rather than truly ending. A post-millennial trend, he suggested.

Well, isn’t that just great. I want a book to end. I want to know when it ends, and I want a great ending.

I’ve mentioned Infinite Jest in a previous post. It has no plot, no real main character, no story arc, no cohesion even unto itself. And it’s 1,445 pages long! I knew what I was getting myself into when I began it, so it’s my own fault. I’m on page 400 something, and thank goodness the last 400-500 pages are footnotes, and I can pass on those. And, strange as it seems, I have enjoyed DFW’s style, if not subject matter. But now I find that there’s no way of even knowing when to stop reading! It’s a bit much, really.

Perhaps, if I’m lucky, DFW wrote those timeless words at the point where his story just stops:

THE END

PRIMARY DAY

It was Primary Day for First In The Nation New Hampshire yesterday. The line-up of candidates on the ballots was extensive, to say the least. It reminded me of cereal aisles at grocery stores. So many brands to choose from, so many boxes, so many facadic advertising ploys reaching out into the aisles to grab at unsuspecting consumers. So much empty caloric sugar inside each box, and wheat that has been stripped of all it’s nutrients and replaced with refortified man-made ingredients. Tons of preservatives to make sure that the contents have a long shelf life, maybe as long as the shelf itself. And don’t forget that the cereal is boxed by weight, not by the contents which may have settled.

All sorts of shapes, flat, round, round with holes in them, chunky, colored pastelly or natural. A cereal for each and every member of the masses.

That’s what we had to choose from on Tuesday. A candidate for every palate. But very few that actually had any nutritional content.

I hate talking about politics, I get nowhere. I hate thinking about politics, but I did cast my vote.

Back in the seventies and eighties people discussed pre-,post-and a-millennialism. You got nowhere when you were sucked into one of those arguments. Now you get nowhere if you discuss global warming, aka climate change. Of course there’s climate change, there always has been, and always will be climate change.

As a matter of fact we have always had cereal, politics, and a knowledge that this world is not going to last forever though I’m not sure which actually came first. It’s probably a close tie. I think taxation fits in there nicely, too.

This following quiz might not be as much fun as Heidi’s quiz a few weeks ago, but what the heck. Go for it.

Arrange the items below in the order in which you think they happened/will happen in time. To keep this a writers blog I’ve thrown in some books.

Politics

The end of the world

The Bible

Cereal

Pride and prejudice (the sins)

Taxation

Jasper Fforde’s next Thursday Next in his series.

My cosy mystery

Pride and Prejudice (the book)

Climate change

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Do let me know what you think.

N H W P

Three of us from our Thursday night writing group have signed up to attend the 2016 New Hampshire Writer’s Project, an event that will take place exactly three months from today.

Why? What’s the rush? It’s New Hampshire’s largest literary conference for one. For another, if you dally the sessions you want will be filled. And even if it is a two hour drive away from our little boony town, it’s still closer than a long long drive to an airport, a flight, and a subway or taxi or bus ride still further and arriving exhausted and out of sorts.

I would have done just that to attend the Icelandic Writer’s Conference also taking place in April, but it was too darn expensive.

I would have done just that if Jasper Fforde was at the end of the journey, but his speaking engagements are as elusive as Thursday Next’s father’s appearances.

Anyway, I got the two dozen or so conference offerings narrowed down to four and registered this morning. Something to cross off my list today, right before taking down the Christmas tree. Sigh. It’s so much fun putting it up, and so sad taking it down. I could never deal with the sight of much beloved trees littering front yards the day after Christmas. But, even if you don’t agree with my tree ethics I did cross off both items today.

For my first session I’m taking a class called ‘IN THE MIDDLE’ because I happen to be working on a middle grade short story right now. That I’ll have to be finished with the story way before the conference is of no import, really.

Second session is ‘SIGHT ON SCENE’. Sounds good. I like good scenes. I want to make mine better.

Lunch. That was as hard to decide on as the sessions but I finally went with a garden salad with yummy things on top. Also included with lunch is the opportunity to sit at a table with like-genre-minded people. I chose Fantasy. Who knows who I’ll end up eating with. Hope it’s Jasper Fforde.

Third session is about the sentence. See comment on session two, please.

Fourth and last. Short Stories. Ahh. Sounds great.

Busy day. There’s a lot going to happen in all our lives in the next three months, but the day after the conference I’ll be glad that that happened.

See you there?


If you can read this OUT LOUD you have a strong mind. And better than that: Alzheimer’s is a long long, way down the road before it ever gets anywhere near you.

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If you can raed this, you have a sgtrane mnid, too.
I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh?

GET OUT OF THE HOUSE

It’s not so much exercise that we need in the winter to keep us going, but light. Natural light.

Studies show (and I won’t belabor you with links and names of studies here, those you can easily Google yourself) that sleep improves with natural light. Thinking improves with light. Creative abilities improve with light. Your health improves with light. Everything improves. It’s a win-win situation getting  natural/sun light every day.

I go through a definitive slump in the winter. Poor sleep, less writing oomph, less able to think through a problem. The works.

However, El Nino, the rainy weather blessing for California and the benign winter weather blessing for us here in the Northeast, is passing through. There is dim sunlight evanescing beyond the cloud cover this morning, and I am fighting an almost sleepless night’s inertia to hie myself out into the great outdoors and get some of it. Will it work? I don’t know, but I’m going to try. The outdoors here is great, and in the absence of the usual cold and snow this couch potato should take advantage of it, at least in the name of scientific experimentation.

After walking a couple miles I had definitely worked up an appetite but, I wondered, had the sunlight, trapped as it was behind that lone cloud, been strong enough to permeate into the melatonin producing area of my brain? That’s a good question. I’ll let you know if I sleep any better tonight.

In addition to the fresh air, sunshine, and exercise, I noticed that my brain was twinkling awake. It was telling me about things that should go into my stories. About a contest I was interested in entering, about a change I needed to make in my novel. I took deep breaths of mid-December air that had been mollified by the El Nino winds that perchance blew everyone some good, and thought, wow, this is heady stuff.

This nina is going to take advantage of El Nino’s sojourn in the cold climate of New England and get out of the house more. There’s too much to lose not to.

A SETBACK

When I last wrote for Thursday Night Writes I was drawing to the close of the third major revision of my mystery. Now I’m in a major slump of a setback.

What happened? Too many things. Too many hurdles to leap, too many plot changes, too many revisions that could take me all the way back to the beginning of my novel.

Last year about this time I took an on-line course with Paul Harding, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Tinkers. He said that when we stop writing on a scene, a dialog, or the whole book, it’s because it’s hard, and it has become work.

My cozy has always been, if nothing else, fun. Now, with everything I need to do to push it forward, it has become work. I’m starting to sound like Maynard G. Krebs from the old Dobie Gillis show. I know that must date me, but if you don’t recognize the name Maynard G. Krebs, you might have heard of Gilligan’s Island. When Maynard grew up, he became Gilligan, but while he was still Maynard he would cringe at the mere mention of the word ‘work’. As Gilligan, however, he always did his share, or more, of the work he and his fellow cast-aways had to do to survive on their deserted island.

The holidays are coming to my rescue, giving me all the excuses I need NOT TO WORK ON THE BOOK RIGHT NOW. And that’s fine, it happens every year. My thoughts turn to turkey dinners and then on to Christmas and knitting for various lucky people.

However this year my hiatus from writing is because I’m cringing at word work, not because it’s time to shift gears to holiday mode. And therein lies my moral dilemma. I don’t like the idea that I’m a lily-livered, weak-kneed, coward when it comes to re-arranging a few words on a page, a few lines of a scene, a few pages in a chapter, a few chapters in the WHOLE BOOK!

If by January I have not succeeded in getting back into the story then I’ll have to seek professional help. But I know I can do it. It’s grow up time for me and Maynard, and when the holidays are over I’ll welcome getting back to work with a renewed vigor. I hope.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.