scribbling

Rain, Rain, Go Away

No Telling


It’s a good thing The Perfect Grandson is so young, because he doesn’t know enough about the Easter Bunny and egg hunting anticipation to be disappointed this morning. Big storms are moving in and it looks like Easter is indoors today. The neighbor lady’s wind chimes are swinging fast right now and that’s never a good sign. Cross your fingers that it clears up by mid afternoon for at least one muddy hunt.

Next year, we’ll require perfect sunshine, a thousand colored eggs, and an Easter Bunny who hides goodies in the yard at dark-thirty to beat the boy to the hunt. This year, he’s sleeping in unaware.

Oh. And a big thank you to the mysterious E. Bunny who dropped off the touch-and-feel duckling book in our mailbox yesterday. I know who you are…

NOTE: If you’re into Peeps, the boys over at Poor Richard’s Almanac left a trail to this plethora of peepness.

Dangerous Water

No Telling


These Somali pirates aren’t the ones from Treasure Island or even from the old swashbucklers I watched on Saturday afternoons. Remember those old films? The Black Swan was my favorite and I wanted so badly to be sassy Maureen O’Hara loving/hating Tyrone Powers.

These Somali pirates have satellite phones and rocket launchers. They stand to make a fortune hijacking merchant ships. Millions of dollars, in fact. And it doesn’t seem to take a whole lot of them to overthrow a big merchant ship, either. Pirates have been taking ships off the coast of Somalia for so long and with such success that they’ve become cocky about it. Now they have an American captain hostage in what appears to be a toddler’s tub toy surrounded by U.S. naval ships. It’s a hell of a mess and will certainly get messier as the hours pass. These pirates are accustomed to getting what they ask for.

These Somali pirates don’t always choose the big ships. A recent and tragic story involved a French couple, their three year-old son, and two friends. Florent Tanit, father of the little boy, lost his life during the rescue of their yacht. There’s been a little talk here and there about the sailing adventure this family attempted, and the blog they kept that ends just as the Somali pirates took their boat. I found the blog here, although you’ll need to remember your old college French to read it. The pictures are enough anyway.

Pirates aside, I can’t event talk about a man who would put his wife and toddler in such danger. I’ll leave that alone. He can’t fix it now.

While I hope the U.S. Navy /orange plastic tub-toy standoff turns out well, it looks like it may be the beginning of a much larger problem. Black Hawk Down is a terrible memory, and I don’t know how provoked we need to be to go back to Somalia again. This isn’t a costume swashbuckler or kid’s novel, and no one out there is Tyrone Powers.

Captain Richard Phillips, I’m rattling the beads for you.

UPDATE: Captain Phillips has been freed!

Take Care of Your Knees, Whippersnappers

No Telling

You only have two, and it has been my experience recently that while you can get by with one good one for a while, two good knees are preferable. Trust me on this.

All those foolish things you did when young and vigorous? Well, they’re going to come back and haunt you when you’re older and less springy. There’s no talking to the idiocy of youth, however, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have listened two seconds had someone warned me. We’re all bullet-proof and immortal until we reach our forties, and little can be done to stop that train.

I had my knee surgery on Friday, and there’s more to such a thing than I’d imagined. On paper, it sounds cut and dried, but I didn’t have my scope on paper. I had it in the hospital like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, it seems I tend to wake up once put down. This happened once before during a carpal tunnel surgery, but that’s a funny story and involves me – in medias res – illuminating the surgeon on the finer points of correct procedure. I woke up in recovery to a gaggle of laughing nurses and other amused onlookers.

Luckily, I don’t remember much about waking up during Friday’s knee surgery. It appears I woke more than once, however, and they really put the anaesthesia to me. The result was a tricky 48 hours of scoline pain. I don’t wish that on my worst enemy. It’s right up there with labor pain, except everywhere – I couldn’t get out of a chair or even hold a pen.

All that’s over now and soon I expect to be better than new. Better than before all that damage I did back in my late teens and early twenties, anyway, when I was limber and bullet-proof.

Seven Things I’ll Miss About Spring Break

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1. See picture above.

2. Lounging around in unattractive sweats all day.

3. Reading whatever I want, whenever I want.

4. Leisurely coffee in the morning from a pot I made myself.

5. Unhurried, inspired scribbling at odd hours.

6. Extended, guiltless Ebay searching.

7. Snuggling up on the couch, watching the Backyardigans with that boy in the picture.

Geezers on Twitter

No Telling
Yep, I finally did it. I’m Twittering. I’m not doing it well, but I’m slinging tweets here and there all the same. This isn’t throw-down, addictive twittering, though, because 1) I still refuse to text and so have limited A-B-C skills with a cell phone, and 2) I can’t answer the “What are you doing?” question with anything interesting. Really, who cares that I graded papers and whined about Daylight Savings Time last night? Nobody.

And most people I know aren’t twittering. None of my friends, anyway, who might actually commiserate on the grading thing. My family’s generational/technological divide makes twittering any of them a complete waste of time. My daughter and all her Gen Y buddies are still living and dying on Facebook, and my parents (bless their hearts) still call to tell me they’ve sent an email. Maybe my sister – in all her Gen X splendor – is a twitterer. I’ll send her an email today to find out, because that’s how we Gen Jonesers roll. I do all my twittering on a laptop anyway.

My colleagues? Forget about it. There’s no way a whole department of writing professors can can keep it to 140 characters. Ever.

Other folks leave fascinating tweets and I’m following a few of them. Some leave must-read links and information randomly throughout the day, but there have been a few addicts who, while they initially seemed interesting, have turned out to be even more dull than I am. It’s a mystery to me why someone with a thousand “followers” thinks we care what kind of coffee they just bought or what time they plan to call it a night. Life’s too short to waste it reading inane shit like that.

I suspect I just haven’t found my Twitter-Voice yet. I’ll get to work on that and tell you how it goes, although you could probably follow me on Twitter and find out for yourself. I don’t recommend it, really. Until I figure out my basic rhetorical strategy, it’s pointless anyway.

The Retro Future’s a Nice Place, But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There

No Telling

It’s 2009 and I’m feeling like an old gal now. I grew up with 2001, A Space Odyssey, 1984, the Jetsons, and the traveling Bell Telephone House of the Future. The first two still give me the willies if I think about them long enough, but my experiences with Saturday morning cartoons and the mobile House of the Future imprinted me at an early age. These would be the real day to day future. Everyone would be flying around in bubbled triangles without seat belts and using punch cards to order food our own kitchens. Mom would still be at home and her job would be infinitely easier with the help of Rosie the Robot doing all the grunt work. We’d all have picture-phones in the kitchen, a bevy of mysteriously hidden cooking implements, and switchboards full of labeled buttons to run the whole house.

Why, there might even be a color TV in every home. Hung on the wall. Like a sofa painting. Can you imagine.

I remember walking through the Bell House of the Future as it sat parked in the Kroger parking lot. I marveled at the slickness, the plastic, the fabulous array of buttons making things disappear and reappear. My mother didn’t seem nearly as impressed. She took one look at that kitchen and shook her bubble-flip hair-do and we left. I suspect she saw what I didn’t. The house of the future still required cleaning and most of it looked like something she’d have to do. A house full of gadgets to make a woman’s life easier, but it was still her life and her work.

In 1966 we could never have imagined the world as it is now. Fast food, breast implants, ten year-olds with cell phones, Smoke-Free restaurants, computers you can hold in two outstretched hands, women with careers on purpose, seat belts and airbags, more than four TV channels, a black president. What?

No, there’s no Rosie the Robot cleaning my house while I’m at work. I still own a broom and a mop and use them both, though not nearly as much as my mother did. There’s no bread-winning man coming home from the office expecting a clean house and a hot dinner either, but that’s another post for another day.

With the exception of all that flying around on invisible air highways, we’ve surpassed the Jetsons and the House of the Future. That 1984 business is a tad too close for comfort, but we haven’t yet been blown to cinders by The Bomb. There’s that.

Headgames for Editing

No Telling

What have I gotten myself into. That’s not a question, it’s what I continually say aloud to myself between sips of coffee and staring hopelessly at the computer screen.
I wrote over 50,000 words of my Chesaleen story and did it in 28 days. NaNoWriMo was an incredible writing experience for me that alternately ate up my brains and opened possibility. Wouldn’t trade those 28 days for anything. At the end of the ride, though, there’s this pile of words that needs serious revision. Serious. Re-vision.
Step One: Since I wrote the entire thing in unconnected, nonlinear pieces, the first order of business was order. Cutting and pasting the whole mess was interesting and I’m still not quite sure that’s how it should be. Doesn’t matter. The beginning is at the beginning and the end is somewhere near the last of it. In between are some Very Big Holes. Good enough for now. I also made some big cuts of scenes too dreadful to read and left notes to myself in the empty spaces.
I’ve honestly never revised anything longer than twenty or thirty double-spaced pages in my life. And those were papers written years ago for my MA in English. Scholarly business. My creative output tends toward the brief – poetry, flash fiction, short creative nonfiction, blog posts, that kind of thing. I know how to edit a moment, what I’m drowning in right now is editing/chopping/revising/developing a whole series of interconnected moments. It’s a “can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of thing, only more so.
The best advice I’ve found so far was on the National Novel Writing Month website itself. One piece of advice is to sit down and write a 5-7 page synopsis of the novel before doing anything else. The objective here is to nail down the plot tightly so there’s no wallowing in sentences (trees) without first finding the damn forest on the map. Good advice. No one can ache and writhe over a few words or a line quite like a poet, and that’s just wasted energy on a project like this. Plenty of time for that later, after the culling of superfluous scenes and plot confusions.
Step Two: What is the book about? That’s a loaded question and I had to answer it in the synopsis. I thought this would focus things a bit, but instead it amplified the size of Very Big Holes I’ve left willy-nilly all over the story. This is good and bad, I suspect, because I keep opening the synopsis and staring at it, zombie-like, drinking more coffee and hoping for lightning or brilliance or sixty muses dancing on the head of a pin to release what needs releasing onto the pages. That’s not going to happen, though. I’m making peace with that right now and it’s going to take some time.
Step Three: Find some music. I know this sounds like a great way to put off the whole rewrite just a little longer – and it is a delightful procrastination – but without all those dancing muses and electricity and such, I need a little something to put my head where it belongs. In other words, I want to make sure my forest is still filled with loblolly pines instead of wandering off and becoming redwoods. This is not a redwood story. It matters. So here is my playlist thus far. I have to say it helps me slide quickly into the deer woods. If it doesn’t show up like to should, just click on “pop-out player.”

That’s where I am right now. A map and some music and more early-morning hours. With Christmas Break, I’ve got a little free time. All I need now is absolution.

Are These Shoes Too Much for a Blogiversary?

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I’m not really sure how to celebrate a blogiversary. It’s a little like emailing the office that it’s your birthday – something I’m sure Emily Post finds a little tacky. There’s also no cake unless you make it yourself. I’m really better with traditional celebrations, and much better if the party is for someone else. Ultimately, that may be the whole point of the blogiversary, patting yourself on the back for keeping up with it, and thanking all the guests who stumbled in to eat ice cream.

I started this blog to make myself write something every single day for a real audience. My little black notebook just wasn’t making much headway, and since I loathe sending my writing out for publication (lists, envelopes, records, bleh) it looked like instant publication was infinitely more relaxing.

Now, there’s publishing and there’s Publishing – Capital P Publishing is becoming a tad old school, what with all the academic fiery hoops and Gate Keepers and the year or so lag time while editors are busy filling up their own envelopes and their own record-keeping system for what they’ve sent out and what’s not made it back. It’s a lot like those dressing-room mirrors at Dillard’s – if you stand in just the right place you can see yourself posing at yourself, a thousand times over. And they all make you feel fat.

My lower-case ‘p’ publishing on this blog has been a lot more fun. I scribble out a little something, hit the ‘post’ button, and there it is – Out There. The blog world is completely democratic and wholly Ben Franklinesque. We are all of us self-made. The blogging process occasionally spits in the eye of academia, and I find that entertaining as well.

Examples? Well, how about Stuff White People Like. That guy is traveling all over working the book circuit now after his bulls-eye hit. Nothing like a book deal six months after goofing around on a free blog. And how about Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds? She’s got between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors a month. She’s also working on her MFA so she can be a writer – HA! I suspect that gal will be staring down the barrel of much more than a few pubs in obscure literary magazines. And soon.

Bless their gifted hearts. I love stories where talent and technology win.

So I thank the handful of you who check this thing every once in a while. It’s been a blast writing for you and a even more fun to find a new comment or two. I love ‘meeting’ everyone on here and it’s always like Christmas when I check the blogs for your latest scribbling. It’s the equivalent of those afternoon backyard get-togethers my mother and her friends used to have in the sixties. We trade stories, wipe jelly off of the kids, play a hand of bridge, and we’re all still home for dinner. Just the thought of it makes me want to wear clam-diggers and tease my hair.

Let’s keep doing this. It’s free, it’s fun, and we all seem to live in the same neighborhood.

Note on the Fridge to Moleskine

No Telling

Oh, dear. For the past couple of months I’ve been frantic for more Extra Large Ruled Cahier Moleskine notebooks, and you appear to have ceased production. Can’t find them anywhere – not even the sad Kraft paperbag covered ones.

This simply won’t do. I’ve a special fondness for these notebooks – EXACTLY these notebooks – and it frightens me a little that I may never see another one. Sure, I know you make scads of other sizes and strange gridded things, but my level of desperation for the lovely lined beauties has made me look elsewhere for scribble notebooks.

Elsewhere, I tell you. And it’s not a pretty experiment.

Ladies – you know what it’s like when you’ve got to find a new lipstick, hairspray, shampoo, whatever? We buy and buy brand upon brand, always finding something that’s almost right, but never quite what we’re looking for. Countertops and make-up cases groan under the weight of unused products. Same with the Moleskine.

Apica, chemistry notebooks, cute composition books, expensive leather journals from miscellaneous book stores – they’re all functional and in their own ways a delight, but they’re not the Moleskine’s that slip perfectly into my purse, the ones with the flexible black covers, the ones with the perfect line spacing on exquisite paper.

Please let us know soon the true fate of these XL lined cahiers, because scribbling should be near-perfect tactile experience, and I’m sitting here with almost-but-not-quite notebooks.

Thank you so,

Monda
UPDATE: I wrote a pleading email to Moleskine and received this heart-stopping response…
“Thank you for contacting Customer Care. We appreciate your inquiry. However,both the XL Ruled Journals and the XL Squared Journals have been discontinued by the manufacturer. The only XL Journals we have are Plain. We do offer both the Ruled and Squared Journals in both the Cahier Line and theTraditional Moleskine Notebooks in both Pocket and Large sizes. Please let us know if you have additional questions, or if we can assist insome other way.
Moleskines.com Customer Care

Toll-Free: 1-800-808-7714″
Sweet. Jesus. Say it aint so, Moleskine….