Untangling Tales

I considered taking a picture, or listing titles, but then I figured I’d rather be reading than promoting.   So here I am, emerging for a breath of air before I decide how (or where) to dive back in.

I’ve been revisiting my how of homeschooling (never the why or whether to) and that is what prompted my latest stack of acquisitions (never mind that more than half were actually storytelling books I want to explore and see about connecting them to my children…)

But the last day and a half I’ve been feeling a bit as I did when I was 19 and listened to Jane Eyre for the first time.  I remember thinking, I really like this story then freezing mentally and wondering, Is that okay?  Who do I ask?  Who do I go to? (Today I’s probably ask whom…)

That led to an interesting time of introspection where I realized my main survival mechanism through high school was to filter everything I was learning through outside sources, because I didn’t particularly trust my teachers.  Which meant I also didn’t trust myself.

You see, if I trusted myself I would have been running everything through my own filters.  But I had learned very well that teaching most teenagers seem to miss, and that is Your perceptions are not the final word on reality.  And I’m not knocking this, much, but it did leave me with some catching up to do.

~ ~ ~

That said, I have been taking notes as I read, and I’m finding myself falling into a student mindset that is only vaguely familiar and teasingly enticing.  I appreciate the organization of thought I’m seeing in these books, and while I’m waiting to embrace even the things I like, I have certainly gleaned a bucket of new things to think on.

(more…)

This was one of my favorite concepts from the book No Plot?  No Problem!

The idea is to make two lists, one of the things you love to find in your novel reading, the other things you absolutely hate.

As I recall, he pointed out that we tend to think in terms of the yuck stuff being good for us, and when we feel that what we’re doing is not ________ enough we reach into the yuck pile and act as though that can fill in the blank for us.

How true any of that is can be saved for some indeterminate point in the future.  What I want to do is share the lists I started before I began writing my Lindorm story

(Is anyone else surprised my dislikes is shorter than my likes?)

How do your likes/dislikes line up? If you make a set of your own lists, leave a comment with a link– I’d love to read it.

A snippet from a crazy dream this morning.  I spotted all sorts of references to my past, but will spare you all by jumping to the funny part.

Toward the end, when I’m scrambling to get on the same page (literally) as everyone else in the meeting:

I’m about to curl up under all those condemning eyes (how dare she think she’s worthy to be among us when she can’t even find the same page?!) and beg the person next to me to show me his page or help me locate mine.

He flipped over my set of pages and I recognized the words were a very accurate match, but the format was redone in “landscape” rather than portrait and written in pencil.

While I was still puzzling over this and insisting the meeting could move on, Yes I can follow along now, the leader pulled the papers out of my hand and after looking at them asked, horrified, “What church do you go to?”

And I knew with that dream certainty we all have that someone had to hand-write my packet because we couldn’t afford a printer.

The absurdity struck me even in my dream and I tried to correct him but was laughing too hard to speak.

Can you think of a worse church-volunteer position?  I honestly can’t:

Come quick Mary!  Another e-mail just came in– we need to get a hard copy to the pastor right away!

All of this is even more ridiculous considering we don’t have any kind of church office/equipment or hours anyway.

I (currently) have only one 1st-person POV scene.  And that’s just not right.  So I’ve been considering my options.

1. Change it to a close 3rd (to match the rest)
2. Change Tyko’s close-3rd POV to 1st person (bearing in mind he is… well, the short description is he’s an “unreliable narrator” as well as inarticulate.  He’s a good observer but he acts on what he observes rather than thinking on it.  Not a useful narrator, either.)

So I lean toward #1, but in rewriting the scene it seems to lose something.

(more…)

With three 4-year-olds from other households present I’ve been feeling touchy about what to do for our read-aloud.

“What about Snow White?” asked one of the girls, holding up the story illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

Now, I happen to think this is a very smart book.  It allows the girl to be 7  when she’s driven away, but shows her growing old enough to marry by the time the prince finds her.  Very clever illustrations.  But the story is true to the Grimm original, with the asking for the heart to eat, and dancing to death in hot iron shoes.

I read around those parts in the beginning, and actually haven’t read it for some time now, since Natasha is able to read along with me.

“I think it might be too scary for some of the younger kids,” I said dismissively.

“But it has a good ending!” Melody protested.

Another excerpt from where I’ve been working lately.

This one takes place in the fitting room, where Linnea, the Lindorm‘s Bride-to-be has been fussed over for hours.  She, of course, has to wonder if her wedding dress will also be her shroud, until a mysterious old woman comes to her while she (Linnea) is alone.

When the queen and Prince Torbjorn return to the room, the king and Hjalmar (special forces) captains are with them.   The captain Tykone is a friend of Linnea’s from childhood and tried to protect her from being offered to the monster.  Rickard, the other captain, has reasons to think less of Linnea.

As mentioned before, Sarsé is this kingdom’s female title of respect and/or rank.  The prince has just told Linnea to say exactly what she means, despite his mother’s objection.

(more…)

So many comedies (and couples) are build on the premise that “opposites attract” and all its derivatives.

While that may be useful for awkward comedic situations (and any number of marriages) I tend to agree with Neil Clark Warren

in this thing (not, for example, his “distancing himself” from Focus on the Family or starting a gay-compatible eHarmony):

In his book Finding the Love of Your Life (originally published by Focus on the Family) he asserts that similarities are money in the bank (of marital harmony) while differences are drains on the account.

Basically, the more similarities you have, the less you have to fight about.  Warren included in that book a very specific list of 50 areas of “helpful marriage similarities” where, essentially, similarity or agreement would simplify your life together.

In May of 2000, when Jay and I, in our different ways, were considering this marriage thing a possibility, I brought the list on one of our rambling drives and we began to work our way through it.

At this point I knew Jay wanted to get married, but I didn’t know what God wanted, and I didn’t know what I wanted.  So having a list was useful to me: something concrete and definable.

Knowing Jay wanted to marry, and knowing he knew me and my reliance on… well, outside confirmation, you could call it, I completely did not trust him.

Not that I believed he would lie– I already knew him to be one of the most deeply honest and open people I’d met– but I didn’t trust that his innate flexibility wouldn’t mold his answers to be more… compatible than fully accurate.

It was a Monday night when we worked our way through the first half of the list, me making him answer first, because I didn’t want my answers to influence him.  Before we’d made it through the first dozen I felt life a simpering “yes-man” because I was agreeing with all of his answers.

~ ~ ~

What I learned that night (and the next, before accepting his proposal Wednesday) greatly set my heart as ease.

When I first “noticed” Jay, my mind made a mental list of the dividing line of differences between us (the biggest I can remember at this moment being the type of movies he would see that I wouldn’t– mainly for the violence).  It was literally a “deal-maker” to see in list form–to recognize– the amount of significant similarities we shared.

If you want to see the whole list you should pick up the book, but I wanted to share the majors as Warren lists them.

First though, as Warren points out, no one thing breaks a relationship on its own; it is about debts vs. credits.

That being said, there are some similarities that are especially important:

• Intelligence (not the same thing as education)
  • How smart doesn’t matter, but closeness in level does (feeling markedly superior to your partner is not something I consider healthy)
• Values
  • What’s important to you: morally, relationally, in how you spend your time
• Intimacy (of the non-sexual kind)
  • Are you equally capable/open?
• Expectations about roles
  • Do you both know who’s going to make dinner?  Change the oil?  (Please change your own; it’s so simple and will save you some serious money)

You can see these are all things that could create frustration and discomfort when “nothing” was really wrong in your world.   Add in the normal stressors of life (and/or a kid or two) and you’re starting to feel like the ant under a magnifying glass).

When he listed the differences that cause the most problems I found myself nodding like a puppet– Most of us have heard of these  being elements in the divorces we’ve been forced to observe:

• Personal habits
  • e.g. hygiene, clutter-bug/neat-nick
• Use of Money
• Verbal skills/interest in being verbal
• Energy level
  • this last item was one I hadn’t considered before, though I’d heard the others.  But (especially having been married over eight years, now) I heartily concur.

Warren’s final observation is that flexibility can smooth over a great many differences; and “love covers a multitude of sins.”

To me the neat thing in all this was learning (the first time I read this book– before I even knew Jay, I believe) that there were things I could do before I was married to significantly reduce the amount of conflict in my married life.

For a (largely) non-confrontational type like me, that was great news!

And it has been a great life.   I think of my grandparents and marvel that (Lord willing) I still have many times the years we’ve already spent.

Conflict and snappy comebacks are great for books and sitcoms, but in my own nest what I enjoy most is simple peace.

We would do this during NaNoWriMo and it was effective but I never really tried it on my own.  But it works.

Sunday afternoon Natasha kept begging me to come play dolls with her, so I set my timer for ten minutes and told her I’d come when it went off.

Knowing I’ve only got a few minutes to cram as much creativity into as possible really worked for me.

And while I’m on the topic of “You already have the truth within you” I’m having to remind myself about the whole “box up your editor” advice.  Being in the awkward place of simultaneously creating and editing (yes, I know this is horrible, I don’t currently know an alternative that won’t increase my work later) I’m having to remind myself about letting go of perfect on this new material.

~ ~ ~

It makes me think of a line that horrified my sensibilities when I first heard it:

“Cs get degrees.”

The guy who shared this bit of wisdom with me was pointing out that no one cares that you killed yourself maintaining a 4.0 once you’re holding that piece of paper.  At least for the field he was interested in.

It makes me think of conversations I’ve had, or interviews I’ve read, where another writer will boast that he gets it “right” (or so close to right) the first time that revision is virtually unnecessary.

Here I see the finished piece of writing in the role of the degree.

No one cares how few drafts it took to bring the piece to this level of quality.  They look– consciously or not– at what it is, not what it is for only x-drafts.

And that (mostly) eliminates my sense of competitiveness.

Sure, being quick helps (especially when you’re blogging and want to get your thoughts down quickly so they quit cluttering your brain while you’re trying to write fiction…) but speed is so far from my primary goal as a growing writer that I don’t want to be tricked into releasing something too soon.

We just finished a survey of doctrines in Sunday School, wrapping up with a couple weeks on Eschatology, the study/doctrine of “end times.”

Wanting to pick my parents’ brains when they came to lunch that afternoon, I began by introducing the context and saying,”there’s two things I don’t understand–”

“You’re doing better than me,” Mom answered.

I’ve made it 18 days into this new year, and not bought a single book (for myself…) but I’m being reminded by a bunch of my blog reading that one of my jobs as a writer is not only to read, but to read the current works in my genre.

My reading list is distinctly skewed to the older— at least, I’ve got books that go back as far as 30 years.  And I’m old-fashioned (or is it snobbish?) enough to like it that way.

So I’m redacting my reading page to make it less-obvious I’m limiting myself (if this is my only web-presence, I don’t need to make it that plain– unless they search and find this post ).

And I’m changing my mind about resisting the siren song of the library’s new acquirements  (is that a word?).  Not sure how I’ll keep up with it, but I’m still determined to alternate writing and reading times: wanting to be sure I balance input and output to keep some perspective on my own work.

If that came out confusing, I’m trying to say that I will use the awesome library I have to pay for anyway to get a hold of the current important books.  There.  I can work toward my goals and do my duty at the same time.