Improper Poll: Under the Umbrella

A couple of days ago, LindaO’Connell at Write from the Heart wrote about bumbershoots, or umbrellas. This made me smile, and not just because of the fun word. Whenever I think of umbrellas, I think of my mother and the way she was always trying to foist one off onto me.

When I was younger, I loathed umbrellas. They were clunky, dorky things that only nerds carried. They were second only to the rubbers we used to have to wear to protect our shoes from getting wet. Whenever a boy would pick me up for a date and it was raining out, I would rush out the door as fast as possible thanks to absolute terror that my rather naïve mother might caution me to be sure and take rubbers. She never did, thank heavens, but she sometimes called after me to take an umbrella.

Even when I was an adult, my mother persisted in giving me umbrellas, often disguised as gifts. I thanked her and stashed them away—usually under my car seat. It was only after she died that I noticed the way they sometimes came rolling out from under my seat when it was raining, and this time, instead of feeling annoyed at those incessant umbrellas, I smiled.

When my daughter went to France, and later off to college, I presented her with an umbrella. I could tell by the look on her face that it would never get used, but as her mother, I felt an obligation to pass along the tradition, not unlike passing a torch.

A few years ago, I started actually using the umbrellas. I am not cool, and I no longer care. In fact, the rejection of coolness is at the heart of the matter on a literal level as well. It’s not that I care so much about looking like a drowned rat when I go someplace, but I hate being damp and cold.

Funny it’s only now that I really get the message: I will shield you. I’ve got you covered. These days, umbrellas make me smile.

How did your mother manage to humiliate you?

Tagged

Like the blue light special, the big toe in the morgue, the slow wildebeest in the herd… I’ve been tagged! Thanks so much to Sioux of Sioux’s Page for thinking I am worthy of tagging. Or maybe the reasoning was that I’ve been blogging so seldom lately, I’d possibly miss it? HA! Nice try, Sioux, but no such luck! I will now attempt to answer the interview questions, just like a sleek starlet being interviewed by Conan O’Brien. Only I’m not sleek. Or a starlet. And instead of wearing a little sparkly dress, I am wearing workout shorts whose only workout is seat stretches, along with my beloved Sketchers sandals that look like the orthopedic devices they give you after foot surgery.

What are you working on right now?

Am trying to come up with something for Chicken Soup’s Overcoming Challenges book. But I do have a book started that I would classify as dystopian fiction for young adults.

How does it differ from other works in this genre?

My goal for the book is to appease all of my inner critics at once: the human being critic, the woman one, the mother, the teacher, the reader and the writer. For example, if you were to ask me if I liked the Twilight saga, I would tell you that, as a human being, I always look for themes with a little more depth. As a woman, specifically one who has dealt with people with destructive control issues, I was unhappy to see some of the unhealthier elements of the relationship between Edward and Bella romanticized even though I definitely saw the seductive appeal of the love story itself. As a mother, I was grateful for the theme of self-control. As a teacher, I was thrilled that it got so many children to read. As a reader, I had some mixed feelings but found the conflict and a lot of the plot elements appealing. As a writer, I was impressed that author Stepheny Meyer created a story that was irrefutably compelling and entertaining to a wide range of ages, not to mention successful.  

So one thing I hope to bring to the table is my ability to approach a YA book from all of these perspectives. The thing that makes me want to run away from the table, however, is how hard it is to please all of the inner critics sitting around that same table arguing with each other, like Maxine and her dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving dinner. And let’s face it: until I have a finished book, it’s all just talk, none of this matters in the slightest, and nobody eats that Thanksgiving dinner.

Why do you write what you do?

Interesting question, especially for a Writin’ Ho like me who’s loved just about every kind of writing at one point or another. That’s why I’m Spongebob one day and Squidward the next, and Mr. Krabs the day after that. As a kid, I wrote nothing but poetry and fiction because the stories of my life hadn’t been written yet. The more I’ve lived, the more that weight of real, concrete life has pulled me into nonfiction. Now that I’m old enough to have lots of experiences to write about, creative nonfiction has been a natural choice, and it seems like there’s a decent market for it. Plus those stories mean something to me because they are true. They’re who I am. But the fact is, I am also someone who knows young people, and I know what they read. Trying to write fiction again is fun, even though that works against me in ways. It feels enough like playing that I have to fight guilt along with everything else.

What is the hardest part about writing?

Getting all of those critical multiple selves to work together well enough to actually finish something before they kill each other off and take the work with them.

Now I’m supposed to tag three people, but I don’t know anyone who participates in this type of thing who hasn’t already been tagged. And I don’t want to tag anyone who doesn’t want to play, because that’s just like being the cootie kid who goes around poking people. So, if you want this, TAG, YOU’RE IT!

     

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann

Trying Toads

I’ve been trying to challenge myself more, writing wise, and it just so happens that  Imaginary Garden with Real Toads provided some pretty compelling inspiration in the artwork of Kathryn Dyche Dechairo.

For L

Broken heart, broken vase

Broken vow, ripped lace

Broken promise, broken face

Mending done, shield in place.

  

It doesn’t matter what they are unhappy about, you will get the blame. If they treat their children badly and cause their children to become angry, you will be blamed. If they loose their job, have car trouble or just can’t seem to catch a break, you will be blamed. You may go months at a time without seeing them or talking to them, but you can bet that if something goes wrong, you will be blamed. ~Cathy Meyer, About Toxic Ex Spouses

Torture by Shopping

I’ve been trying to find a dress for an event. Although I’m not much of a shopper, dress shopping has never been as bad as, say, swimsuit shopping. Or even finding the perfect pair of jeans. In fact, it used to rank almost on the “sort of funnish” end of the shopping scale. Used to.

Now it ranks somewhere down around getting a mammogram, except for that time I had the really bad tech who made me scream ow ow ow oh dear God stop stop stop NOOOO it won’t go any flatter because she obviously went to the mammogram school where the manual had been poorly translated from another language. Whereas in English, the manual reads, “Flatten to a pancake,” this woman’s manual said “Flatten to a crepe,” or maybe “Flatten to the thickness of a bubblegum bubble right before it bursts.” Because I seriously thought it might.

So dress shopping is now only slightly better than that and something I only resort to when absolutely mandatory. This time, though, I had two problems. At Store #1, where I usually have the best luck, there were large groups of teens looking for homecoming dresses. That was fine with me, though why they were shopping in MY area when they had their own is beyond me. Still, their ebullient personalities made me smile. That is, until I heard one of the girls crammed into the dressing room right next to mine whisper, “There’s no room in here—I’m going to find another room. Is there someone in the one next door, do you think?”

Her friend told her there was. Since I had by now figured she was referring to my room, and I was in almost the most serious state of undress achievable in a dressing room and with no time to struggle into something, I tried to make some noise—like clunking hangers around and clearing my throat.

It didn’t matter. I knew she would climb up and peek over. Knew it. I knew it because deep down, I knew that little teenaged girl. We all do. She was the girl your mother thought was a bad influence, the fun one in the crowd when she wasn’t embarrassing you, the one who probably should have been on A.D.D. meds even long before A.D.D. meds were invented. By this time I was shuffling and clunking and coughing like mad, but she was the kind of girl who pays absolutely no attention to such things. I had my back to her, but I could tell she’d peeked by the snorting and snickering and giggling that took place for a good five minutes. Thank heavens the mirror was on her side and I was facing away, because for all I know, I could have been her teacher.

At Store #2, I was blessedly alone. The only problem was, some of those dresses have a high spandex content and are surprisingly hard to get off. A couple of times I was so zipped up, tangled, or otherwise ensnared that panic set in. I was like a wild animal in a trap with fur flying. Claustrophobia hit and I struggled and perspired and hot flashed, then tried to calm myself down—which is not easy to do when you’re bent over with your arms pinned over your head, and your head partially stuck in an armhole—to think about how to escape from there. Chew my way out? It seemed like a distinct possibility when I’d think of the alternative—calling on the sales force to help extract me like a farmer trying to birth a hefty breach calf.

At Store #3, they had mirrors that reflect your backside, so I got a glimpse of what the climbing girl saw. Oh, horrors. I truly had no idea. I still feel so stricken, I’m not sure I can ever recover as long as that view is burned into my brain.

In the end, I walked out with a dress only because I’d realized nothing was going to look super cute, but I could, in fact, wear one that still managed to perform some optical illusions and hide that horrifying view that the teenaged girl saw. And as for the girl, I also decided the sight itself was suitable punishment, however cruel and unusual.

Lord Grantham: “They say there’s a wild man in all of us.”

Lady Violet: “Maybe, but if only he would stay inside.”

            ~Downton Abbey

Improper Poll: The Point of No Returning

I’ve spent much of the weekend revising a dog story with a toasty-warm cat curled up in my lap. The cat thing loses a great deal of its charm when the outside temperatures have long surpassed warm toast and are hovering much closer to sizzling bacon grease as they've been in the past few days. Still, I only had the heart to move that cuddly kitty a few times. He certainly didn’t take the hint when I fanned us with exuberance. Anyway. All this revising reminded me of something.

Years ago, I was talking to an artist, and she told me the hardest thing for her was knowing when she was done with a painting. I understood what she meant. For me, writing is even worse. When I write, I must reach The Point of No Returning before I submit something, or it’s torture. And by Point of No Returning, I don’t mean the point where it’s impossible to turn back. I have to get to a point where I’ve returned to the story so many times, I can’t think of a single thing left to do to it and am therefore no longer compelled to keep returning.

Maybe it’s a sickness, but I return again and again because I keep finding misplaced modifiers, poor word choices, trite phrasing and even missing words. How could I not have noticed these things the first, second, and twelfth times I read the piece? I think it’s because writing is always an interplay between emotion and logic, between what we want to say and how we want to say it. If spoken language is sound that is symbolic of our thoughts, then writing is physical symbols that represent the audible ones. In other words, each written word is a symbol of a symbol. That’s tricky stuff. For me, it’s too easy to go deaf to the sound of my own writing voice, I think because I have to keep one part of my brain quiet while the other does its thing, because the two don’t always play well together. Is it just me? Am I making excuses? Maybe. I only know that I constantly must rap on the knuckles of the part of my brain that has to remember writing rules while shoving another part out the window to go romp in the rule-breaking land of creativity. It’s an ongoing war in which the sides continuously shush each other.

The worst thing is I’ve learned from experience is that if I submit something too soon, and if it still manages to get accepted, I will quite possibly hate it for all eternity if it didn’t reach the Point of No Returning. Or if I later think of a better way to have made a point.

Twice now, I ‘ve done something that is probably taboo in the writing world. When an editor has sent me edits, I’ve asked if I could add a couple more. They were tiny—nothing that would change a word count—but I felt if I didn’t do them, I couldn’t be at ease with the piece. Fortunately both times the editors were gracious about it.

Am I a hopeless neurotic? Do you revise compulsively? And when do you know a piece is finished?

I’d also like to welcome a relatively new blog follower, Theresa Sanders. Theresa is a local writer and a dear friend who inspires me as both because she writes as she lives, with her own brand of gentle, yet sophisticated, grace. Thank you for joining, Teri!