Month: March 2010

You can’t make a plowhorse out of a cat!

The problem is not a failure to communicate.

The trouble is that I am sort of like THIS girl:

(Albeit an old, fat version. But still with good hair, knock on wood.)

But what this family expects, wants, and needs is THIS girl:

Tote that bale! Push that plow! Dig, dig, dig that dirt! (And it’s not dirt. It’s clay soil full of old, tough roots.)

*sigh*

We planted quite a number of nice things today, though. Everyone else voted against lantana, but I sneaked a few of the “Dallas Red” ones in.

I want an aquarium. We used to have four, but then . . . well, bad things happened. I saw a large (30 gallon or so) aquarium sitting out front of someone’s house by the mailbox, and I just knew . . . bad things happened ONE TOO MANY TIMES to her tank, and she said, “Damn if I’m gonna do this again and have everyone crying all the time over the toilet during fish memorial services,” and she just pulled the plug and put it out for anyone who was game. I wasn’t QUITE game enough to get hers. I’d like a big one, sort of like this.

Ya THINK?

It’s not QUITE over. . . .

Now that 11:25 has passed by, Dallas time, I can officially say that I’m halfway to 102. *sob* But everyone played nice today, and we did that picnic-of-sorts. The weather behaved. We returned home to plant almost $90 of flowers and patio stuff. And then the weatherman predicted snow flurries for next week! But I also got a backup hard drive and an iTunes card and Barnes and Noble gift card. We have an angel food cake here that I’m admiring, wondering how much effect it would have on my blood sugar. Oh, well, comes but once a year.

I even got a couple of birthday cards and e-cards. If we all had episodes of crankiness . . . well, you would, too, if you had to plant all those flowers in DIRT. That turns to mud. Yuck! Geraniums, pincushion flower, horsetail, mint, kale, strawberries in a strawberry jar . . . and we re-potted a number of things that overwintered well, including two passion flower vines. “Organic” soil can be stinky.

Hope you had a great day!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! (“Lá ‘le Phádraig shona daoibh!”)

It has come to my attention that I have maintained journal silence for nine days! So . . . catching up:

17th: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Hope it was green and leprechaun-laced!
16th: Happy Jerry Lewis’s Birthday! “Hey, laaaddddeee!”
15th: Happy New CD-ROM Burner Day!
14th: Happy Planting 15 Ajugas Day!

And tomorrow . . . Your Correspondent turns *mumble* years old. How depressing. I demand a picnic. With cake.

I’ll be making the picnic and dragging the reluctant family along. Tra-la!

CRAFT: Beginnings (Fiction)

DISCLAIMER: This is only one of many ways to construct tribal lays.

DISCLAIMER2: I may not know what I’m doing, but at least I know why I’m doing it. (Analysis takes place after the writing; I’m not consciously thinking, “Now let’s set the scene . . . now let’s tell them who is the parent.”)

Here’s how I would explain why I did what I did in the opening paragraphs of the short story “Clownshoes.” Original text of paragraph is interspersed with bracketed explanations. Those of you who hate parentheses and asides should scroll down to the next entry–nothing to see here.

My brother and I are begging Mom to let us wait in the car. [Sets the tone. Viewpoint character is young enough that “Mom” still runs the show. We get the feeling there is a reason for this reluctance to get out of the car. Default “suburban street” setting is probably being assumed by most readers.]

“Come on, just this once,” Tyler says. [Ah, this is the brother.]

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She adjusts her striped Afro wig and honks her round red rubber nose. “Besides, I need you for my bits.” [OMG, she is dressed as a . . . clown?]

“Your bits, Ma’am?” he says in his Elvis voice. Making a face, he tosses his backpack across his shoulder into the back seat, where it skims my knees. [This tells you that Ty is kind of a drama king and class clown who likes to act out and can do voices. He is also the dominant sibling over the viewpoint character. Backpack tells you they just came from, school, maybe?]

“Watch it.” I kick the olive green pack onto the floor on top of his matching jacket. He’s into Army surplus for some stupid reason. Probably all about turning thirteen and Becoming A Real Man, big whoop. There’s an up-side to being eleven and still sane without the hormone rush. [Ha! I sneaked in their ages. Note that we still don’t know if the POV character is another boy. . . .]

“CheyAnne,” Mom says to me in the rear view mirror. Typical. She always comes after ME for stuff that’s HIS fault. “You two have to be there for the card tricks, and if I need to choose someone from the audience.” She glares at me as if I was the one who’d mocked her. “This gig pays our bills, so why not relax and enjoy it.” [Aha! CheyAnne is a girl with a weird hippie-style name. This indicates the mother is one of Those Types. Also, the eternal fencing battle between mother and teenage daughter has already begun. We also now understand that she’s a clown who does parties for children, not a circus or carnival employee.]

“And think of England.” Tyler makes his voice a quavering Julia Child. He ought to be a voice actor. [Just underlining how Tyler feels about the dang parties and that he will fight being a part of them. At the end, spoiler alert, he defends his mom when an older kid mocks the idea of being a clown. So that’s not exactly a character CHANGE, but it reveals a deeper layer behind the character.]

Mom ignores that, and we all slam out of the Kia. Tyler heads around to help me drag her trunk out of the hatchback. This is a birthday party, so she’ll be using the full arsenal of tricks, sleight of hand, and slapstick idiocy the likes of which Jerry Lewis would be embarrassed to resort to. [Now we’ve got the suspicions confirmed–it’s a kiddie party, and middle schoolers are totally NOT into this stuff. Oy! A Kia means they aren’t exactly rich, to some people. It’s almost a clown car . . . to snobs, anyway.]

SO! Instead of being a random bunch of typing that I did just to irritate you, you now see that there was method to the madness. Does it work? I don’t know. But I wanted to show that there should be reasons for what you are writing in your opening, beyond just “hook them.” There should be some way for readers to clue in pretty quickly about the age and gender of the narrator and of the other characters, and about the setting they’re in. I know Ursula LeGuin or somebody important like that said to start 100 miles underground on the day before the end of the world and DON’T TELL THEM, but I think we DO need some kind of hook to hang things on or we will be too disoriented to continue reading. I also like to put in a couple of the characters’ important quirks, by implication or just by stating them. For example, Tyler has a voice talent for mocking, and the mom is convinced that her kids should participate happily in the “shows.” These will be important later on.

This is a literary story in the sense that it’s not a fast-paced genre thing, and the plot is not the main reason to read it. You probably will want to write genre stories, because you have some hope of selling those. (*grin*)

You won’t necessarily do things this way. But it’s one way to do things.

Why not shift into neutral, Toyota victims?

Here’s something that has been bugging me big-time since the original problems with Toyotas that have sticking accelerators. (Back when they lied and said it was floor mats, I wondered why all Toy-owners wouldn’t just rip out those floor mats–not the carpet, but the added-on floor mats–immediately!)

When I was in Driver’s Ed, our instructor told us (and I remember this quite vividly) that if the car ever ran away with us, and the brake wasn’t enough to stop the car, there was a simple solution. “Turn the ignition off!” yelled one kid. That was my thinking, as well. “No,” said the owl, “because then you lose the power brakes and more importantly the power STEERING boost, and do you want to try to steer this thing that has power steering without the vacuum pump on? It’s much tougher than steering a car with a wheel that isn’t power steering.” We tried it and found he was hootin’ the truth.

“So,” said our wise owl, “what you do is shift the transmission from Drive into Neutral. NOT into Reverse! Not anywhere else but just into Neutral!”

“Can you DO that?”

“Yes! See where you can go from D to 1 or 2 for climbing hills?” (This was still true in the 1970s and 1980s; I don’t know if automatic transmission cars still even have “2” and “1” gears on the shifter. I should go look before I post, but bah. I’m wingin’ it. Do you think that gets me into trouble very often??)

“Yeah. So you can shift into neutral? Like just BOOM, even though there’s only the automatic clutch?” Our eyes lit up. “That means the power won’t be TRANSMITTED using the transmission from the engine to the drive shaft and wheels. So it won’t be engaged!”

“Exactly. Then you’ll have a car that’s just going ZOOM without adding to your speed. Okay, BUT. You still have the momentum and you’re still rolling. Now you brake, and if that’s not enough, use the emergency brake. Sure, that’s going to ruin the hand brake, but who cares if it saves you and/or the pedestrians and vehicles you’re going to otherwise crash into?”

I agree. Even if this ruins the transmission, I would argue that this is better than being in a runaway car that won’t stop until it hits something that will probably NOT be a haystack (which is what the Scooby-Doo kids always used to hit in order to stop . . . but there just aren’t any convenient haystacks in suburbia. Or anywhere. Not any more.)

Anyone out there know if this is still a viable idea? CAN you shift into “N” from “D” at any time while an automatic transmission car is rolling? Mama is arguing with me that you can’t do that and that CNN told her so. Of course, if you are driving a stick (manual transmission, which used to be called “standard”), this won’t apply, and you can just stomp the clutch and rip down into any other gear you like, such as neutral. But the automatic transmissions of today may be much more fussy.

If you hear an awful grinding noise and the transmission falls out of your Toyota onto the blacktop when you try this as an experiment, don’t blame me. As my Dad always said, “Piece of Japanese junk! 3@!%$^%!!” (But remember, he served in WWII. Radio/radar operator landed on Leyte, standing up to his knees in typhoon waters, learning to drive in a Jeep. He never really forgave the Japanese for WWII.) Also, who cares if you ruin a car that is trying to kill you? But maybe that’s just me.

Some thoughts about art and the reasons not to do it

I’m quoting piano instructor Kevin Guess here, out of context. He was talking about philosophical stuff on the piano players’ forum. I think it applies just in general, so I’m sharing it.

“Marketing is for those who want to reach people with whom they don’t and won’t have a lasting relationship. That is why the worst products are usually the most heavily advertised.”–Kevin Guess

“Nothing can survive unless it can find a niche. Those things seeking a niche can’t control the environment in which they seek it. We live in a business/technology/politics-dominated world. To business & politics, the value anything has is SOLELY its usefulness in making a deal or shaping a deal in favor of the one doing the making or the shaping. To these people, art has no intrinsic value. To technology, art is something to be quantified and objectified. All three of these pursuits are purely exploitative. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing has any intrinsic value.”–also Kevin Guess

If that isn’t depressing enough. . . .

I don’t know whether I’ll find my niche or not. Sure, there IS an audience for my work. Contest judges (especially in literary contests) like to give it awards. A dear friend said last night, “We’ve talked about your voice and style before. You’re not a Stephenie Meyer writer, but a Bas Bleu–and that’s all right.” I suppose she banged the hammer right on the mosquito; I’ve never aimed to click with the majority, but with those who like to read what I like to read. That minority is still kicking, for now, although I don’t know whether I will be able to reach them.

I simply CANNOT SEE the things that most readers see as repetition and boring detail in my work. It must be part of my essential voice. I’d been hoping that it was just a couple of instances in the newer stuff, but no. Yes, I would LIKE to learn how to recognize these passages, even if I ultimately decide to keep them instead of taking them out. But I don’t believe I have it in me. There’s some kind of mental block.

Several people have taken time out of their own workday to point out examples. This should have been very helpful, but the sad part is that after they point out these parts I can see that you could tighten it up a bit, sure, and that doesn’t bug me, but I can’t go on and do the rest of the homework. You know, like when you follow the teacher’s working out on the board of the math problem, but when you look at the problems in the book, you cannot imitate her and use her algorithm no matter how much you believed you could. I can’t see why these passages irritate readers or would pull them out of the story, although it is obviously happening. What’s worse is that they then say, “there’s a lot more just like that, just look,” and I CANNOT SEE IT.

Here I am turning 51 on March 18th (oh God there has been some mistake in the numbering of years, because I cannot be that old) and am just now finding out that the one thing I thought I could do (and that my teachers all through school, including college, including college creative writing graduate courses, thought I could do well) has turned to junk. Perhaps it always was junk.

I’ve finally had to acknowledge that. It’s very tough to internalize. I have tried and tried to “fix” it, without much success. (I generally just end up with DIFFERENT asides replacing the originals.) It’s kind of sad that I’m so goddamn stupid that I always just breezed along believing that there were just different tastes and so forth, and that I was basically not a bad writer. I can certainly see how a depressive type might really go into the Black Dog pit with something like this. (Not a cry for help: I’m way too selfish to go down there–just ask my family, who loves to tell me how selfish I am for taking piano lessons and insisting on a few moments to myself now and then instead of constantly waiting on them. Selfish types like to continue to hang around, if only to afflict others and whine.) But I’ll never be able to believe that “snow” means the same thing as “silent, secret, cleansing snow.” Or that “a democratic government should survive” means exactly the same as and is a better phrasing than “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” (No, I don’t claim that my little scribblings compare to these eloquent examples–they’re merely examples of when the trope has worked for the readership. It doesn’t, not any more.)

No wonder I wanted to go back to the piano with a teacher who serves as a trained judge and arbiter of taste. [You’re probably thinking that “teacher” covers it well enough, aren’t you? But not all teachers serve as judges or know what the consensus is. Some are there to encourage you, raise your self-esteem, make you feel good and have fun, but don’t mind much if you never improve. Their sanity is more important to them than dogging a student who simply cannot “get it.” That’s fine, but not what I’m after.] When you play Mozart, the “rules” are that you have to play the correct notes in the correct rhythm, and you have to have the proper articulation–play legato where he wants legato, staccato where he wants staccato–and dynamics, and then you get a little wiggle room as far as interpretation like rubato, “breathing” at the end of a phrase, a bit of emphasis here and there. If you can do this instead of “pounding it out” or jerking through the score like a weed-eater through a cornfield, then you’re doing it right. And we can show you how to improve. There are objective ways to evaluate your performance, rubrics to use that say, “This performance is what we expect.” It may not be transcendent or definitive, but it’s correct, and Mr. Mozart is not sitting on his Heavenly cloud and wincing.

When I play K. 545 now, it sounds like Mozart, at least. At first it didn’t. I had to learn the notes and get used to trilling against an Alberti bass, and get up to speed. But I knew what I needed to do, saw the target, and I got there. I don’t mean that I have the piece “down.” I haven’t yet brought it up to performance level. As far as “mastering” it, that would take a lifetime. The best I can hope for is to gain some insight and be able to bring something new to it so that when I do play it for myself, I don’t shame myself.

I used to think that when I wrote, I didn’t shame myself. It is tough to admit that I’ve been wrong. It’s like the year I spent after college trying to get a particular group of people to like me: it amused the hell out of them, and I should’ve caught on WAY SOONER that it was simply not to be, and that I could never measure up. Not because I didn’t try, and not because I didn’t try to follow the advice that a couple of well-meaning InCrowd types gave me. Because I didn’t have it in me. I still don’t.

Japanese product recalls–when will it end??!

PIANO RECALL!

Yamaha has recalled 20,000 pianos due to a problem with the pedal sticking, causing pianists to play faster than they normally would, resulting in a dangerous number of accidentals. The sticky pedal also makes it harder for pianists to come to a full stop at the end of a piece, making it extremely risky for audiences.

Yamaha spokesman Rilly Redonkulus insisted that the company has not been covering up its problems. “Those amateur piano players are mostly at fault,” he claimed in a media interview. “They shouldn’t even be pedaling. Especially in Baroque music!”

At first they tried to blame this on errant carpeting under pianos, but after a long scuffle with Monsanto, it was shown that carpeting has no effect on piano pedals except to keep heels from bruising. The company will make repairs in the order that pianos are received.

What’s next! Be careful out there.

Flash Fiction–talk about acting out of character

Here’s a weird little flash fiction thingie I was playing with last week. I have not polished it or even revised/re-read it very much, but I thought it would be amusing to post.

I tried this partly as an exercise in economy. I’ve been mulling over the various critiques I’ve had over the years/months that have said, “You repeat yourself all the time,” because as far as I know, I don’t do that . . . at least not that I notice. Sometimes in an early draft, I suppose, because I’ve forgotten that I mentioned it earlier. Or if I’m doing a running joke. But to hear some critique groups talk, you’d think I restate things constantly, and I simply do not see it. They never give specific examples, assuming that I’m doing it on purpose, I suppose. But then again, I haven’t heard that in a while. Of course, I haven’t posted excerpts to critters or other groups in a long time. . . .

The point, however, is that in flash fic, you don’t even have time to set the scene. So much has to be assumed about what your reader already knows and will assume. It was a neat exercise, at least.

~~The Powers of Pink~~

A pink tentacle poked out of the linoleum between Kerry’s red Mary Janes.

Her knees jerked involuntarily up as she shrieked. Heads swiveled all up and down the rows of folding chairs. Shrieks rarely disrupted the monthly meeting of the Society Against Naming Daughters Jennifer.

The speaker glared. “*IS* there something you would like to share with us, Ms. . . .”–she glanced down at the seating chart apparently taped on the lectern–Hays?”

“Sorry,” Kerry gulped. She glanced back down at the threatened feet. The floor had normalized.

She was hallucinating. The doctor’s office had warned her against going off that sleeping pill cold turkey, but she’d run out and couldn’t afford another refill just to taper off.

She’d barely returned to trying to concentrate on the speech about how confusing it is when everyone in your class is named Jennifer when a cold suction cup plopped on her inner ankle.

The tentacle was back. Kerry felt it snaking its way up her calf until it slapped the back of her knee. She emitted an involuntary “EEEK!”

Again the speaker grasped her pince-nez and glared out into the audience. “Yes, MIZ Hays?”

“Gout,” Kerry choked out. She managed to stand up as everyone turned around to stare. This society dedicated to preventing parents from naming their daughters Jennifer did not cotton to troublemakers and rabble-rousing. Before she knew where she’d be going, Kerry had shaken the pink pseudopod off her leg and was excuse-me-ing into the aisle.

She fled to the ladies, because that seemed to be where people went when they were freaked out or at loose ends. “If you were a pink tentacle poking up through the floor,” she said to her reflection, “what is it YOU would be needing?”

She waited a moment, and sure enough here came the tentacle. It poked through the floor and groped a bit until it found her leg. It spiraled around and seemed contented. It wasn’t all that slimy-feeling, actually.

It seemed best to take a Biblically inspired approach. “Who or what are you, and what do you want with me?”

The answer came inside her head, as a Pee-Wee Herman vocalization. It didn’t seem that weird. “We need pods.”

“Pods??” She briefly considered a Star Trek interpretation, and then a storage-building riff, before landing on the answer. “Oh . . . like iPods?”

“If that is what you call them.” The voice sounded pleased. “We know you have them and we need them. Our sensors have found them in this room.”

In people’s purses, no doubt.

Kerry paused. She wished she could think of a good alternative, but what exactly could she do? She couldn’t exactly report this to . . . who? The tentacle would just slither up, take a few gadgets, and leave–fine. She figured those women had insurance and could manage to replace the players. “Yes, I’m sure it’ll be no problem. Have at it.”

The tentacle released her, and she crept quietly back into the meeting room and stood in the back row to watch.

Tentacles sneaked tentatively up through the floor at various spots (though no one else noticed, as they were bickering about the derivation of “Jennifer” from “Guinevere”), but instead of grabbing the iPods and iPhones to pull back to their dimension or underground or wherever (she should’ve asked, shouldn’t she) the creatures flowed into them.

Kerry freaked a little. Silently she mouthed, “Oops. My bad. Hadn’t thought of that. Hello?” But the tentacles didn’t seem to hear her.

Ultimately, it would be all right. They’d probably get along well with the ladies. Sneaky types were compatible.

She couldn’t wait until somebody’s phone rang.

~~~

Pathetic, I know. Whatever. It’s not ABOUT anything, but then most flash fiction isn’t. And I’m sure I could delete this word or that word, and so forth. Just thought I’d sneak it in here, because it amused me when I was writing it.