Writing in Concert

I found this on one of the blogs I am currently following: there is not much room in my head for reading much material, and a blog is usually just long enough without sending me into a panic over time.

Dacre Stoker, nephew of Bram Stoker, has written an authorized sequel. He and his writing partner have developed an interesting partnering technique described in the National Post article referenced. I couldn't do it myself - I am not very good at partnered writing. I tried with one on-line friend - it was fun, but we lost interest. A plan, like Stoker and his partner had, would have helped avoid that.

I know two other people presently working on their first novel after co-writing several fanfic pieces. I think it is a great exercise - I look forward to seeing whether it ALSO produces an interesting and compelling story.

Computer time =/= Wasted time

I spend a lot of time, when I can, reading on the computer. I read blogs, look up information, search YouTube for choirs singing music I might want to use. I correspond with other people interested in the television shows, bands, and writers I like, and have made some very strong and I hope lasting connections with people around the world through my varied interests.

Why do people assume that time spent in front of the computer is wasted time? I do read books - when we moved we sold or gave away close to a thousand books, and moved nearly twice that (twice now in a year). I buy books, borrow them from the library, trade them, and give them away. I love books. I want to write them, to edit them, to watch them being birthed.

I also read them online, on the computer, and as soon as it is more readily available and cheaper (any time now in Canada), I will probably read them on a handheld device - my iPod, Blackberry, or an e-reader, so I can carry hundreds of titles at once in my bag. Why do so many people roll their eyes and snicker at the idea of words being so 'demeaned'? A couple of years ago, Norwegian TV put out a hilarious spot called Medieval Helpdesk introducing the 'beek'. It illustrates with humour and grace the constant issue of change - how can one keep up, even get ahead, and not lose the core, the essential nature, of what is being changed?

I love books - the smell of old paper, the feel of leather-bound covers. I think the hand-crafted illuminated books of the early Medieval times are some of the purest forms of art known to Western Civilization. Handmade paper, brightly coloured card stock, rich inks and metallic embossing powder: stationary stores fill me with a sensory glee - I can spend hours in even such a utilitarian place as an Office Depot or Staples.

But it is words I revere - words and ideas, the challenges, the images, the concepts they force into my head. It is words that I remember, that I will keep with me under any circumstance fate may throw at me. Should everything I own be swept away by tide and time, the words I have read - the way they have changed me - the resonance they have set within me - that cannot change. Even in the worst case - brain damage or disease which steals all the words from my head - the effect of those words on how I have lived my life and affected others cannot die. Painted on parchment, incised in sand, typeset in moveable type, or produced in pixels: words will wind their way through authors to readers to auditors to the world in new and fascinating ways as long as there are people with something to say and someone to say it to. Technology - from quill to stylus - is only the medium; the message will continue on.

Re-Inventing the "Real"

Who do you say I am?

Every few months, it seems, I face the shocking truth that I am not the same person I was a few years ago, a few months ago - hell, a few minutes ago. I'm not talking here about the fascinating creepiness of the much quoted factoid that a person's skin is regenerated every seven years, although that is a thought that frequently keeps me up at night sweeping the floor of the discarded bits of myself. I am talking about the ever-lasting fascination I have with identify: the way who I am and what I do changes depending on the place I do it, and the name I use.

My mother named me within hours of my birth, but before I even came home from hospital, she had re-named me with the nickname my family uses. She says now she did it to give me a choice, and that has been borne out in my life. The trouble is not choice, but consistency - I have never been good at giving the right name in proper context, and by now, nearing my fifties, I am hopelessly confused - my 'professional' name is commonly used by people I consider intimate friends, but met on-line or through work, while my 'family' name is used by many I would prefer not to be acquainted with at all.

And the name is just one aspect of the problem. For 15 years, I taught a skill I now am paid to perform. I was a director; now I am back to being a performer under someone else's direction. I stopped writing nearly a year ago this month, and yet I have more to say than ever, and am more confident in my ability to say it well. I keep turning in a new direction, then turning back to look longingly at where I was: unhappy and frustrated as I was there.

I may never find the person I want to be, may never decide on one single persona to fill for the rest of my life. My history, my varied interest, my very name(s) argue against such integration of all the things that compel and intrigue me. I am like a fractured mirror: there are too many people in my life that are given one small reflection of me for me to ever pull it all together into one portrait. Some of that was protection, some fear, some simply circumstance. I cannot, and perhaps would not change any part of me to make a different whole.

But I find the process of disintegration and reformation sometimes exhausting. It cannot be a coincidence that these periods come on the heels of concerns about physical and mental health, about profession and money and family. I know these dark days - these questioning, troubling times - usually pass by like the storm presently dumping a month's worth of rain over the next two days. Beware of the floods, and know that the waters will recede.

And I will be a new person, washed clean by the storm.

Again.

On my way Home

I am sitting at the Quebec city airport, surrounded by glass and the cacophony of a hundred voices in conversation. After six days in French Canada, my ear is attuned to the rhythm of French, so much so that an English voice stands out. My poor mind struggles to keep up, catching a phrase here or a word there, snatching a hint of meaning before losing the thread.

After a few days of being around French-speaking people, my ear does not tune in better. It actually seems to get worse, as exhausted as my poor legs are after walking up and down hills in Vieux Quebec for the past six days. Strangely enough, my eye seems to be better focused; I find after a few days I can read and understand French almost as easily as I did in the days when French was not so much a foreign language as an exotic one - one I used only in special circumstances.

My children are bilingual. They are comfortable in both French and English, although French is mostly restricted to the world of academia and profanity (they are kids, after all). I bought them books, in French (although translations, this time, from English authors they already know). They will roll their eyes, and thank me with a long-suffering tone, I know. But there is a difference in the intention of words when you heard them in a different language. And I want them to remember that, because it is important.

Today I was reading a sign, which talked about le dommage done to a building after a fire in the 1970s. I remembered my French lessons: C'est dommage (That's too bad). But in the first instance, damage is intense; in the second, it is merely a polite saying. I am sorry in English becomes Je sui desolé in French. How much worse does desolated sound, compared to merely sorry?

Je suis desolé que my langue Français est pauvre. I speak baby talk in French, laced with numerous errors and English interjections. Even when I work a phrase painstakingly out in my head, I stumble and trip over the pronunciation (not helped by my ever-so-snotty children). One day, I tell myself, I will learn to converse in French.

A la futur. Peut-être.

On knees and pictures and yes, plans

We have had a week! Record temperatures pushed me to my tolerance level - no hothouse flower me. I am a temperate zone kind of person, and I prefer not to sweat. Ever.

After a few days at the beach with some of my family, man and I drove into the interior to visit a surgeon. Training for a marathon and then a triathlon finally paid off for him - the surgeon confirmed he needed knee surgery. On Friday.

So we returned home to send some kids off on an adventure up north then drove back (3.5 hours each way) and put him under. The surgery was fast, and his recovery has been steady, but none of this had been planned - I would have said I had too much else to do. But a cancellation meant a possible three month wait became a three day wait - not something to pass up in any system.

Next week, the big birthday bash - my sing-a-long movie is all ready, and my presentation is nearly done. It should be a fun time - I am looking forward to seeing everyone, meeting the newest baby in the family, and just enjoying the people I grew up with - many of whom are still pretty great people, even if they no longer play "Let's pretend..." with me.

Then my man and I are going on our first ever vacation sans kids. Quebec City for a week of sights and strolls and laughing at each other's French (without being mocked unmercifully by my bilingual children). I am looking forward to it enormously, and hope that everything goes as planned.

Spent the day with unplanned repairs going on around me - a new house for us doesn't in any way translate into a new house. Dryer stopped worked two weeks after we moved in, microwave stopped working before we even got here, lights clamped together to keep them from falling apart - old houses are pretty, but impractical. Luckily, handymen can be efficient, friendly, and skilled - what a difference a day makes.

Kids and I went through two boxes of pictures to the music of the hammer and drill - ten thousand pictures of first born. A measly handful of the youngest. Sigh. (More) Proof that we don't love him. So hard to be 13.

Plans for tomorrow: finish presentation and make sure it will fit on a disc. Clean kitchen and hang out laundry (hope for dry, windy weather). Pick blackberries. Find a project for daughter eagerly waiting to get back to school.

Yeah. I should be able to handle that.

The harvest begins

This past month, I have accomplished the following things:

• Moved (again), giving me the opportunity to once again face all the things I no longer need, all the hobbies I no longer do, all the passions I no longer follow, and to choose, once again, the most important things in my life to pack up and carry with me (a few blocks down the road this time, rather than several hundred kilometres)
• Applied for seven jobs, and got one
• Learned how to use iMovie
• Prepared a presentation for my mother's 75th birthday and realized once again how little photographic evidence there is of me
• Turned 48 (see previous post)
• Made plans
• Worried about plans
• Changed plans
• Made new plans

It has been a hard month. And the worst/best news is also the best/worst - I have a new part time job. I applied because... well, because it was a job and I have been under-employed for nearly a year and my employment insurance is about to run out.

But I would be lying if I said that I felt good about it - it is a job that sits on the fence between deadly boring and deeply engrossing (have to see where that falls out); it is in an area of town that makes me very nervous; and it is not a job that uses my gifts, merely my skills.

Yes, that might change. No, I don't actually expect it to.

When being interviewed, I was asked where I see myself in 5 years. I hate that question. I never have any plans that go further than a week if I can help it. No matter what plans I have ever made, someone else has always changed them. When you are in a family of six, four of whom are young enough to look to you for every kind of support, there is little point in making plans. I have a friend who asks me to commit to events happening three or four weeks ahead - I always feel sick when I agree. I never know what is going to happen, but I am always sure that my plans, at the end of the day, are the ones which will have to adjust.

That sounds whiny (and it is), but at the same time, it is reality, I think, for many of us. When a child needs the family to pull together, the family pulls together. When a partner needs more time or more support, that happens. When the whole family is affected, there has to be one person who pays attention to that. In my family, I am the one whose plans come at the bottom of a long list. Practicality, finances, time, and priorities: all have an effect.

So here I sit, at that place in my life I could never have planned for because I never really expected to be here. And the only thing I can think about is, "What will I wear tomorrow when it is supposed to be even hotter than today?"

Because that's as much planning as I can manage.

Re-thinking the face of evil

I watched an episode of CSI:New York last week. No big newsflash there - the show has been one of my obsessions for a few years now.

Last week was the Yahrzeit episode, about people selling off Holocaust items. Starring Ed Asner, it was, as expected, by turns touching and shocking, action-packed and introspective.

Ed Asner never fails to deliver, and he has this character down pat: the concentration camp survivor who wishes to simply move on and forget the past, surrounded by a society which wishes to commemorate it.

And yet, in a really stunning reversal, his character is revealed in the last few moments to be nothing like the persona he has played for a lifetime. Without spoiling the details, I will say that the moment Asner looks up at Detective Mac Taylor (whose father was an American soldier liberating concentrations camps) and speaks in German is a chilling one: one that resonates long after the final credits have run.

And that moment made me think today (while doing a fairly repetitive task) about evil.

Perhaps what is most shocking, still, about the Holocaust is the banality, the every-day ordinariness of it. I know that people will protest that term. It was an incalculable horror, unimaginable in its scope and execution. More than 6 million people put to death is a number we can hardly grasp the edges of, much less the whole.

But the people who perpetuated most of that horror did it, at least originally, ONE PERSON AT A TIME. It wasn't until late in the Third Reich that mass gassings were performed. Most of the atrocities - the beatings, rapes, starvations, petty cruelties, de-humanizing and degrading actions - were performed against individuals by individuals.

Hitler had a grand plan, but the bureaucrats, officers, and soldiers who herded Jews, gypsies, gays, and the 'mentally deficient' out of their homes and onto the trains looked each one in the eye, pointed them towards life or death, and choose to act in horrific inhuman ways. Neighbours, co-workers, even family members picked and chose: betrayed this one and not that, reported suspicious activity knowing the possible consequences, sold out people who worked and lived and taught and learned beside them every day.

It may be some kind of excuse: "We didn't know what was being done." But they knew people disappeared in the middle of the night and never came back. They knew houses were torn down, possessions were trucked out. They knew men with guns walked down the street and left sorrow and fear behind them.

And they did nothing.

Sometimes, evil is the sum total of all that nothing.

47 years old, hmmm?

No matter what you think about Idol-type pseudo-reality shows (does anyone actually believe Simon is not warned about contestants to watch by the producers who preview all comers?), Susan Boyle made the world stop and listen for nearly 3 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deRF9oEbRso

If you haven't seen this moment, or at least heard about it, you must have been eschewing all forms of media for the past few weeks.

All the obvious things have been said - about her looks, about her situation, about what she should and should not do next, about how the world judges cruelly and quickly...

Blah, blah, blah.

None of this is news. There are great artists all over the world who are never discovered, never have the opportunity to step out into the limelight, and never even begin to realize their potential. Some people get that one tiny break, and are able to ride it to stardom. Others snatch at the chance, and fall spectacularly short of their goals. Time will tell where Susan Boyle fits into that huge continuum of talent.

But what struck me to the heart was her age.

My father died at 47. One month before he turned 48.

This year, my brother and my husband turned 49.

This year, I turn 48.

I am not a believer in numerology or mystical significance. But this year has been one of great turmoil. Mostly good. But the ground does not thank the plow for breaking into it and tearing it to pieces, even if that makes it more fertile and complete.

This year - my 47th - has been a great plowing year.

I used to say that I spent the first 25 years of my adult life planting roses, and harvesting vegetables. There is nothing wrong with vegetables - they are more practical and useful than mere flowers. But I mourned the loss of the roses I had planned, could see in my mind's garden.

This year we have pulled up roots and transplanted our family. We have fertilized, weeded, and watered. I wonder what the harvest of my 48th year will look like?

Like Susan Boyle, I am standing on stage, joking with the disbelieving audience, and opening my mouth to sing.

I dreamed a dream. And planted a rose garden. (And mixed a metaphor or 12).

Stay tuned for the harvest.