Tag: books

I’ve Been Outed

My deepest, darkest shortcomings have been outed yet again by someone sharper and more insightful than me.

To be fair, I did submit one short story to a competition in the past year.

It did bupkis in the contest but the editor/readers did say good things about my submission. It did encourage me to submit to other contests.

That’s something, I guess.

“I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work.

According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything.

He doesn’t want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn’t want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection.

He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it.

In another five or ten years, he will probably start using another excuse like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.”

He should just enter his writing for an award, and if he gets rejected, so be it.

If he did, he might grow, or discover that he should pursue something different.

Either way, he would be able to move on.

That is what changing your current lifestyle is about.

He won’t get anywhere by not submitting anything.”

Ichiro Kishimi

(Book: The Courage to Be Disliked [ad] https://amzn.to/4aAyXmO)

Work Party

After today, I can say emphatically what a work party isn’t.

No cake, no candles and definitely no balloons.

Slog work. But fun and useful and productive slog work.

Guest bedrooms are dressed and settled. Mostly.

Paintings were hung. Cabinets were arrayed with my husbands’ blue china and other pretty things. His hand-woven Iranian carpets were laid down in various rooms.

The oak display cabinet was filled with my husband’s airplanes. I won’t call them models (though that is what they are) as I don’t want to suggest they are child’s toys.

They are models of the planes he flew as a pilot, both in the military and as a commercial airline pilot. They mean a lot to him. He doesn’t fly any more these days.

Today was a day of consolidation and integration. Me and my work party made strides in pulling together the collective remnants of two lives lived separately until only recently.

These strides are both a physical and emotional milestone for me.

It has been hard for me to make a “home” and make it stick. I moved around a lot when I was younger under the delusion that by changing spaces I could ditch my demons.

It took a long time to learn that didn’t work so well. I have owned houses and heaven knows, I tried to turn them into HOMES. But it has always been difficult for me to land and stick.

Not an abnormal reaction given a perpetually unstable childhood. So the quiet satisfaction of putting a house together that aligns with my vision is unfamiliar. Pleasant but unfamiliar.

So with the willing hands of two ladies from my church and the equally willing effort of two good friends we tackled a chores list that was a page and a half long. We got through almost all of it.

Things I’d hoped would happen – like my husband’s planes proudly on display – were accomplished. Gratifying.

I see how much my decorating taste has been influenced by my Asian travels. And by long days sitting in leather and oak soaked libraries surrounded by books. And Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.

Alistair Cooke would be perfectly comfortable and at home in my current living room.

Friends visit from the frigid North next week. I’m almost ready. I look forward to their company.

I am equally enjoying getting ready for their visit.

I am finally pulling my living environment together. It has taken awhile for me to settle in to the process of home-making.

It has more creative elements to it than I had imagined. Can we talk about the process of choosing wall colors? I went navy blue on one room. I middling mango in the other.

If I could only convey to you completely how risque and out of character these bold color choices were for me. And how well they work!

I didn’t really appreciate the whole house decorating process much before now. Certainly not as much as I do now. I was more of a dabbling dilettante. But I’m changing.

I’m just learning to appreciate a lot of things that were either foreign to me or out of reach when I was younger.

I may even doing some baking in anticipation of their visit. Nothing says loving like something from the oven, I’ve heard.

Holding a successful work party with friends and fellows was not something I expected.

And I certainly didn’t expect to enjoy it quite so much.

Keep living, keep learning.

Disconnecting to Connect

It is mighty hard to escape the internet. For me anyway. I am a bona fide, non-apologetic, drank-the-Kool-Aid “interweb” junkie.

So when I am forced to forgo internet access, I get spleeny. Like someone has taken away my favorite toy.

I find compensation since I have to. Without electronic entertainment, I have to devise my own. Without the illusion of connection to “everywhere, everything, all at once,” some familiar old friends come into play.

Imagination for example. I sit in my living room devising scenarios about how to alter it, improve it, change it more to my liking, or, most aptly put, make it more like me and my taste.

Much as I experience when sitting down to write this daily blog, disconnection from external stimulants allows me the luxury of enjoying my own internal dictates. My own thoughts.

I love to read, for example. I am thrilled by the right books and happily transported to worlds other than my own, filled with characters facing challenges I never hope to encounter.

Reading deepens my compassion for the human condition without the messy and distracting emotional work involved in real-life people dramas. To that end, reading is also finite. People dramas – as we who are raised in less-than-ideal families know – can last indefinitely. Or they can repeat predictably and tiresomely for years.

In good books, the protagonists are forced to deal with whatever situation it is that they were flung into. What would be the point of the book otherwise? For those who well know the classic, if now formulaic, Hero’s Journey, there is an identifiable story throughline in these books.

The hero is born and separated by the fates from all that is familiar. S/he prepares for and meets challenges. S/he is close to being completely undone by the magnitude of the challenges but s/he perseveres. S/he emerges, in the end, changed and triumphant by the growth experiences s/he has had.

So the current challenge this “hero” (i.e. me, if we rightfully assume we are the heroes of our own journeys), is battling a dead internet. Fortunately, like other heroes, I am forced to draw upon previously untapped internal resources to rise to the occasion and surmount the problem.

I have prepared this blog in MS Word. I will soon head out looking for alternate internet sources: the library, Starbucks, or most reliably, McDonald’s. All the while riding the telephone and Xfinity gods for a quick and speedy resolution to this grievous inconvenience.

Which, if I’m honest, isn’t all that inconvenient. I am rather enjoying the disconnection and downtime away from the incessant demands of the internet, email, and plowing through unwanted sales pitches.

Maybe I won’t dog those nice people at Xfinity too fiercely, after all. Maybe this temporary disconnection is a blessing in disguise. Heading over to my reading chair to see what might suit me to fill in the deliciously disconnected mental space.   

Dear Abby

From the Facebook Wisdom of Life Community

This query from an overwhelmed Mom popped up on this Facebook group I belong to. My answer to this writer’s call for help generated positive feedback on that site. I thought it might be worth sharing. (The inquiry is anonymous so I am fairly sure I haven’t breached any ethical boundaries.)

Not so long ago, I could have written a similarly themed post. On the other side of those dark days now, I wanted to share insights with her that helped me. Healing deep emotional damage is a marathon, not a sprint.

In my answer, I borrow shamelessly from the advice column stylings of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. They were sisters who doled out daily nuggets of hope in “advice” columns published back in the middle to late 20th century in newspapers across North America.

*********************************************************************************

Writer: I am suffering from severe treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. I am in the middle of tapering off Valium and having an extremely hard time getting off of it. I’m in a loveless relationship for 20 years with four kids. I have no job or career and nothing to call my own except for being a mom. I’m scared, lost, and have no support system. My dad died in September and I was disowned by my mom and family so I only have one sister left. I’ve spent my life caring for others and not being cared for myself. I’m in a deep dark hole with no way out. Nowhere to turn. Can’t sleep. Can barely function. And very moody. My only time to myself is when the kids are in school but soon they will be home all summer and I don’t think I can handle it with the way I feel. I just need someone to love and support me. And I don’t have that. How do I navigate my way through this?

Answer from Margot Brewer: I have been where you are (but with two kids). Identifying your misery is a healthy start. That may sound contradictory but it isn’t. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. You have to start learning to love yourself and truly believe you are worthy of love. You have lived without love in your marriage for a long time. When you have a long history of want, it is hard to conceive of another way of being. You have a lot of healing to do. Losing your Dad and your family are massive losses that need to be acknowledged and grieved. I lived through that, including the estrangement from the family. Be ever so gentle and compassionate with yourself. Look around your life and decide what you can and cannot control. Find something in your world every day to be grateful for. Make a gratitude jar. This may seem flaky. I get that. Do it anyway. And start taking extra special care of yourself every day. Carve out space in your downtime to do things that make you happy. Music, books, nature, gardening. Anything that gives you even slivers of joy and gets you outside yourself. It is a long road to get out from underneath the weight of your life but you can by holding on to the belief it can change. I still take some medication for occasional relief but it is only part of my self-care routine, not all of it. Thank you for your post. I hope you find the strength and belief in yourself to feel better. It may take a while but the journey is worth it. Take good care of yourself.

The Book Thief

Last night, I watched the movie The Book Thief for the first time. As an unrepentant film junkie, I don’t know how this gem escaped my notice. Talk about resonance.

Liesl, a young German girl, finds herself at the beginning of World War II about to be separated from her birth mother and grieving the very recent death of her little brother.

It turns out she has been given up for adoption to another German family who needs the labor. At school, Liesl’s illiteracy is revealed and she suffers the humiliation of her classmates. All around her, Nazis are pushing forward with their evil agenda.

The film reproduces the horror of Kristallnacht: “(German: “Crystal Night”), also called the Night of Broken Glass or November Pogroms, [refers to] the night of November 9–10, 1938, when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and property.

The name Kristallnacht refers ironically to the litter of broken glass left in the streets after these pogroms.”  https://www.britannica.com/event/Kristallnacht

It was chilling to see the deliberate destruction of people’s homes and businesses and the abuse heaped upon Jewish Germans. As we all know now, it got much, much worse.

Equally chilling was the scene where books were heaped in a huge pile in the middle of the town square and ignited in a sickening symbol of cultural and intellectual annihilation. Liesl begins a subversive journey to not only learn to read but to write.

To do so, she must stoop to theft and subterfuge on several levels that include hiding the fact that a beloved Jewish neighbor is now a refugee living in the basement. The evil and inflicted agony and base stupidity of Nazism oozes from every scene.

Not without significant losses and heartache, Liesl prevails and survives the war when many of her loved ones don’t. She grows up, marries, has children and grandchildren, and, as her legacy, leaves a lifetime of books she has written.

It is a beautiful story of survival, the triumph of love over evil, and a demonstration of the power of books and stories to help preserve our humanity. It stupefies me that promoting humanity as a fundamental value is still so threatening to some who have more materialistic and baser beliefs about what really matters in life. Without others, we ain’t much.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day. It was a day of significance for me this year least of which was that it was a day for pulling practical jokes.

The NaNoWriMo Challenge began yesterday. The entire month of April is to be devoted to producing a 50,000-word draft manuscript by the last day of the month. For a person who thrives on deadlines, that’s a pretty strong incentive.

It was also the beginning of a 30-day blog writing challenge that comes around annually every quarter: https://30dayblogchallenge.com/start-challenge/

I have been writing this blog for 21 days. What’s another 30? Yet another carrot at the end of a stick. I celebrate the expanding community of writers and writing that I am finding online.

As a learning junkie, every like or comment on my blog or a new bit of information that comes my way is like salt on my supper table.

The problem is, I like to repeat, there is too much information out there. So, just like salt, I must be mindful of how much to ingest.

I am determined to tease out the insights gleaned from all this information. I’m finding guideposts for my own life, my writing process, and perhaps, occasionally, an insight or two that may resonate in readers’ lives as well. High ambition.