Archive for July, 2012

Leon Fishbone

Friday, July 20th, 2012

Leon Fishbone was scared.

He was shaking in his scales as the butcher picked him out of the tank of water where he had resided for the last month.

Previously he lived amongst the other Salmon on the coast, until one day a net swooped down and caught him along with many of his friends.

All that remained of them, after years of living near the bottom of the ocean, was an upsweep of sand that eventually settled into a newborn hill.

Leon always knew there was a chance he might get caught, but on the morning of the first cold day in October it gave him shutter when the net dragged him up to the top of the water then threw him along with his buddies into a big hole of an even bigger ship.

Each fish weighed at least five pounds and the pressure with one of them on top of the other resulted in the demise of some.

Leon felt fortunate to have survived the holocaust and flapped his fins in the glass tank he finally released into.

But soon enough he decided that this was the end for him, because he had heard tell of what happened to most of the Salmon he had arrived with.

He overheard it from the fisherman on the boat he’d been captured, but chose not to believe it until he listened to a conversation, through the glass wall between himself and the butchers in the market.

The word was out that they would be taken away and exploited in the fish market as they froze their fins off waiting to be purchased by one of the big supermarket chains.

From there they would be cut up and sold to the highest bidder.

Yes that wasLeon’s fear and on a cold November morning at the pier it became reality and it was the end for him.

Because, after all, he was really and always would be part of the food chain.

Where am I?

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

            When I flipped the page in my “Funny Signs” calendar to June, I was greeted with a photograph of an authentic highway sign (white letters on a green background) next to a mismatched grouping of six rural mailboxes. A dirt road with a few trees appeared in the background. The sign says, “NOWHERE/TOWN LIMITS.” Interesting, I thought. Welcome to Nowhere.

            A few days later the calendar picture captured my grandson’s attention. “Does that sign say No Where or does it say Now Here?” he asked. Surprised, I responded, “Well, I guess it could be either one.”

            Throughout the following week, I thought about the implications of Richard’s question. We really do get to choose how we interpret anything we encounter if life. We can choose to say, “I have arrived No Where,” or we can proclaim, “I am Now Here!”

            My choice is clear. I am now here. I am now participating in life. Life is good here – wherever I am.

Mountain fires and writing with fire

Friday, July 6th, 2012

When the wind rode my laptop screen as if it were a sail, pushing my years of work across the table and onto the cement ground, I panicked.

Had I saved my latest work on my flashdrive? What if I lost a few pages, a few poems or a short story?

This was before theHighPark fire struck northernLarimerCounty, smothering the air in my hometown with the smells of a campfire gone wrong. From a lightning strike, thousands of burning acres. Evacuees. Lost homes. Harmed wildlife. A story that is becoming too large to imagine, at least from the outside.

I am writing about fire, a project I started in January nearly six months before my environment became engulfed in the smell, the texture (ashes drop like gray snowflakes), the sight (the smoke rises off the mountain as if from a chimney) and the taste and sound of burning .

My character in “Dropping Colors,” has lost her home in an apartment fire and is on the quest to find her lost things. A few of theHighParkevacuees had the chance to grab their essentials and most important personal things. Kate Letts, my character, does not get that chance and becomes reflective about the meaning of stuff.

Writing is about stuff, about loss and gain and about fire and the flame that lets the words burn. That burn will be revealed in my six-month review of blogging about 52: A Year of Writing Basics, Beliefs and Beauty.

Here’s the stuff, or what is essential to writing: Plot, Setting, Character, Dialogue, Voice, Pacing, Flashbacks, Scenes, Arc, Storytelling. The elements of fiction that are the pieces of wood in a fire.

The match is that initial idea for a character identity, an outline for a story or a snippet of something seen or overheard with the unanswered What If?

Strike the match to that pile of wood symbolizing the writer’s blank page. The spark is the inspiration, motivation, creativity and imagination that ignite the initial idea into flow.

Flow is the opposite of writer’s block, which is the state of mind when words refuse to come.

Flow is losing track of time, place and whatever evokes the senses and getting lost in the telling of the story. For me, it’s almost like reading, because I am not in complete control, though I am conscious, at least somewhat, that I am writing.

To stoke the fire to last until the next writing session, find a good stopping point in the middle of a scene or a chapter or an idea. That way the flame can be picked up to continue the writing burn.

Stoking the fire is keeping to a writing schedule. It is discipline. It is putting time into the craft and art of storytelling.

To keep on writing, there needs to be goals, a belief in the self and the knowledge that this is a rough draft. Just as the main character has to face her flaws, fears and limitations and overcome them to get what she wants, the writer has to work through the same things.

That’s what passion is, doing this thing you love without ever giving up. Despite heartbreak. Despite being told your work is ashes. Despite not having a home for your words.

Writing is Catching Fire, Running with the Wind and Being Wild with all the elements of fiction, so that what results is a thing of beauty. From fire comes a myriad of colors that cannot be washed away. It becomes part of the text, so that the readers lose track of their own settings, identities and stories of their lives.

Recycling for Writers: or, New Life for Old Words

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer once said that the waste basket is the writer’s best friend. But these are more enlightened times, and writers these days don’t throw unnecessary words away; we recycle them. A block of text that might be superfluous in one novel might just be the seed that germinates and grows into another.

Several years ago, when preparing a workshop on writing the historical novel, I wrote a scene, hoping to show attendees how historical detail could be incorporated into a scene without creating an “information dump.” The scene I wrote showed a man on his deathbed, dividing his estate between his two sons. One son would inherit his title and estate; the other son, who was illegitimate, could not legally inherit the title or the entailed property, and so was bequeathed a certain amount of money instead. The purpose of the scene was to show how I could give readers a working knowledge of British inheritance law without interrupting the flow of the story.

I liked that scene enough that I kept it long after the writer’s conference was over, thinking I might expand it into a novel—part regency romance, part “buddy story” as the two half-brothers were forced to work together after the old man died. That book was never written, but years later, that scene provided the “bones” for the Kirkbride family in my work in progress, a third John Pickett mystery with the working title Family Plot.

As for that regency romance/buddy story, who knows? I may still write it someday. After all, I’ve already got the first scene written.