The Light of the Season

This glass bulb, filled with milkweed silk, was given to me by a 79-year-old at the senior center where I work.  Just goes to show we're never to old to capture beauty.

For as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed sitting in a room with the only light coming from the branches of a Christmas tree.  There's something about the glow that conjures up a connection to families that read together by candlelight, or popped popcorn over an open fire. 

This year, we have three trees.  The real one, in our family kitchen area, is strung with sentimental, homemade ornaments.  A "designer" tree filled with white and gold, glass and angels stands in front of the window in the living room.  My husband has decorated a tree downstairs, in the "man cave," with snowman lights and ornaments made during our daughter's classroom art projects. No matter what room I'm in, the light of a Christmas tree offers a warmth that seeps inside of me and makes me bubble up with a feeling of well being, of appreciation and gratitude.

I'm taking the rest of the year off folks.  Wishing you all joy and warmth and a season filled with Christmas tree light.

Church of the Jetty, 2014

Sunday I woke early to a rising sun, turned to my husband and proposed a morning trip in the dinghy out to the harbor jetty.  “Church first,” he said, so I settled in for a few more minutes. When I opened my eyes again, the sky in the west hung low and white, the kind of ceiling that tells you there could be fog over the water.  We scrambled up anyway and drove to church, were I sat through the sermon with my fingers crossed.  It seemed frivolous to pray about the weather, so I simply hoped, grinning once we exited the building to find the sun had powered through.  As is our tradition, we procured the requisite bagels and coffee, and, arriving at the harbor to a freshening breeze, convinced ourselves there would be time for our  trip before the weather changed.  My husband navigated while I balanced two cups of coffee, so facing the stern, I observed full-bodied cumulonimbus clouds mounted on top of each other in the northwest sky.  From the southwest, a blanket of heather-gray inched forward, blocking what was left of the sun.  Between, a thin strip of blue seemed to negotiate.

In spite of the threat, we anchored the boat and step-hopped to the tip of the jetty, where we took a seat,  unwrapped our bagels from their butcher paper packages, and commenced our breakfast.  In front of us, eight white sails ran before the wind in an attempt to beat the weather for an early Sunday race.  Before long we heard the bleat of an air horn and far in the distance toy sails scurried across the mouth of the harbor.  Campers from the barrier beach behind us chatted as they paddled around the jetty back to shore, their overloaded canoes leaning with sleeping bags and folded tents.  A lone lobster boat chuffed through the water on its way to pull traps, a life-jacketed kayaker bobbing on his wake.  Seabirds, ever present background music, carked and screed, peeped and called in concert with  the clanking of halyards from nearby sailboats.  

Often on these trips, after we swig the dregs of our coffee, we walk on the mud flats or hike on the beach, but this time, as we crumpled up our bagel wrappers, goose bumps forecast what was to come. So, we picked our way back over the granite boulders to our little boat, knowing this day would not be for gardening, blueberry picking or sailing, and sure enough before we'd tied up the boat, raindrops spattered our glasses. 

It didn’t matter though. 

Our visit to the harbor was long enough to give thanks for the day, the summer, the sound of the sea, and the sky.

  

 

IWSG April and Inspiration

This is my April contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's  Insecure Writers' Support Group.  To link to more posts about writers helping other writers, click here.

I feel like I’m the only person in the Blogosphere not incorporating this IWSG post with the letter B in the A-Z challenge.  Best wishes to all of you intrepid folks participating.  As for me, well,  I’m in a “resting stage” with my current project and conventional wisdom dictates I get busy with something new.  To date, I haven’t come up with anything noteworthy, but I know from experience, inspiration comes from weird places.

Take my, first ever, get to the end of a first draft and stop novel.  It started as a result of a “scene storming” exercise.  I wrote a few hundred words, and then just for giggles decided to see if I could keep going until I got to the end.  Turns out I could.  I just didn’t know how to fix the mess afterwards.  This is how that one started:

By the time the real estate broker’s car came to a full stop by the “For Sale” sign in front of 52 South Main Street, Shelby Richmond had mentally unpacked her boxes, made the beds and scrubbed the kitchen floor. 

The second book I wrote…this one gets full credit because I revised it seventeen times, wrote a synopsis, a query letter and submitted it to agents, started with a sentence that rolled through my mind one night, during that fog point between awake and asleep.  I forced myself to get up and write it on a scrap of paper—which I stuck by my computer, until the story it related to took shape in my brain months later.  That one started like this:

The queen of the 1974 Tarrant County Honeydew Festival abdicated the throne forty-eight hours after her coronation. 

The third project—the one I’m currently resting, was triggered by an illustration accompanying an essay in Yankee Magazine about a damaged apple tree.  

Marnie St. Marie knew she hadn’t taken a drink for three weeks, but when she saw the boy in her ailing apple tree, she wondered.

So today, I sit, sniffing out inspiration like a dog.  Where will it come from?  A story on the news? Action I see on the street?  A picture? A tweet?  I don’t know.  But I woke up this morning with this blurb rolling around in my head.

By the time Winnie Parker reached the derelict Walker estate, the rock she’d been kicking the whole way felt like an old friend.  Which is why, when it took an odd bounce and scuttled under the wrought-iron gate, she had to reach in to retrieve it.

Hmm.  I think I’ll chew on that for a while.  

Where does your inspiration come from?

Doing it Write

This is February's installment of Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group.  To read more posts in this monthly blog hop through which writers help other writers, click here.

Last week, in the freelance-writing side of my life, a finance professional contacted me to revise a resume.  Sigh.  For those who don’t know me, a long time ago I worked as an HR/recruitment manager.  If you stacked all the resumes I read over the course of my career and plopped a stepladder on the pile, you could touch the moon.  (Trust me I understand, really, what agents go through.) 

 

Now, writing resumes provides bread and butter for me, and while I’m grateful for the work, it’s not what you’d call inspiring.  Besides, when the job came in, I was in a funk.  I’d picked up my current WIP after a two-month break and realized the first chapter resembled a pile you’d find steaming in a farmer’s paddock.  It didn’t help that the day I was scheduled to conduct a phone interview with the resume client, my cold evolved into a hacking, up from the knees cough, and I felt, well… pretty much like I'd waded through the pile mentioned above.  As I picked up the phone, I pictured Darrin Stevens, the ad executive on the old show Bewitched, tap dancing in his quest to come up with the right tag line for his ad agency boss.  All my grandiose dreams of writing a successful novel, and instead, like Darrin, I was writing buzz words for a resume. 

 

But when I made the call, the client, an analytical, accounting-oriented consultant, tripped over words in her enthusiasm and her voice bubbled as she described her accomplishments.  My job was to represent her zeal and successes on two pages of paper and suddenly, my mission seemed more important.  Her passion reminded me that all successful writing has one goal in common, to elicit a favorable response.  Her resume needs to hook a hiring professional, the same way my first chapter needs to hook a reader.   Page by page, no matter what the product, every single word and sentence matters.  

A week later the cold lingers and I'm chopping my first chapter to bits.  But I wrote a good resume.  And that reminded me that all writing has value, as long as it's my best.

Hey, guess what?  Eight hours after I posted this, I realized Middle Passages is five years old today.  Happy birthday to my blog, which has been my writing guru, and at points, my salvation! Thanks to all of you for keeping me going!

Life Lessons

This is January’s contribution to Alex Cavanaugh’s Insecure Writers Support Group.  To read more participants, read here.

Over the last month, life delivered challenges.  So much so, at times I thought, "I really can’t write now.  I’m too preoccupied."  Once or twice I gave into it and perused blogs during my regular writing time, but all that did was add to the storm-surge inside of me, by making me feel worse for not writing.  Not helpful. The next time that temptation settled over me, I shrugged it off.  Instead, I sat down in front of the thing I sent out to sixteen agents last winter (one full read, seven no-thanks and the rest dead-air) to incorporate lessons I learned during my Grub Street writing classes last year. 

Two weeks later, I’m two-thirds the way through, not revising as much as fixing my writing.  Between a long manuscript rest and objective feedback from a professional in regard to my foibles, there is a lot of cutting going on.  And while I’m working on it, real life blurs in the background.  I’m not sure where the effort will lead for this particular manuscript.  But, whatever.  Doing this thing I love gives me a reprieve, from well, things I don’t love.  When I’m writing, I’m working to conjure up the most conflict, the right rhythm, the strongest images. And I can’t do that if I’m dwelling on other stuff. 

I don’t spend a lot of conscious time wondering if I’ll be published, though it’s a background hope, a quiet brook running at the heart of me.  But these last few weeks have delivered proof that even if I never attain that goal, writing is my salvation.  It gets me through.  And then I move on.


If you are interested in a little more educational reading, here's a link to a great article from Writer's Digest: Important Writing Lessons from First Time Novelists.