The Premios Dardo Award, Part II

This week I'd like to share five more blogs I feel are deserving of the Premios Dardo (Top Dart) award:

http://www.thebonediggers.blogspot.com/

http://www.soulmurmurs.blogspot.com/

http://www.saradobie.wordpress.com/

http://www.aheartonawire.blogspot.com/

http://www.wordmedley.com/

Winners: to collect your award, please copy and paste the award onto your blog and follow the rules as stated in my 5/31/09 posting.

Blog readers: Please check out these wonderful blogs! I have been delighted to discover such heartfelt sites and it's my hope that you will be just as inspired as I have been reading them.

Tip of the day: Take the time to check out and bookmark a few new blogs every week on a variety of topics. There is some amazing information out there just waiting to be read and passed on. Best of all, blogs are great resources for researching story ideas; character professions, hobbies, and backgrounds; and getting to know some fascinating writers!

Write in France!

In my 5/23/09 posting on "revisions" I mentioned that I had invited friends to travel to France. Today I’m extending that invitation to my blog readers.

During the week of September 26 to October 3, 2009, my friend Nita Hughes, author of two acclaimed historical novels, Past Recall and The Cathar Legacy (see http://www.catharlegacy.com/) is leading a workshop and tour to an area in the south of France known as the Pays de Cathare. In her brochure about the trip, Nita describes the Pays de Cathare as: “a mystical and magical land full of ancient castles and bastide towns which 800 years ago were home to a fascinating people knows as the bonshommes (the “good men”). These enlightened Christians were later called Cathars, and were tragically massacred during the Albigensian Crusades in the 13th century. In the records of the Inquisition it is written that the Cathars possessed a treasure described as ‘…so powerful as to transform the world.’”

As your guide, Nita shares her years of research writing her books about the Cathars. On the trip you will have the opportunity to explore the Cathar connection to the Templars, Rennes le Chateau, and the legends regarding Jesus and Mary Magdalene. At the same time, bring along your journal, sketchbook, WIP--this is also a chance to write, dream, and create in an atmosphere like no other.

To download the full brochure and to learn more about cost and deposit details (yes, there is still time to register!), please visit: http://www.nitahughes.com/ and follow the “Montfaucon” link.

I met Nita through my writer’s group back in Carrollton, Georgia. Since then we’ve both moved to completely different parts of the country, but staying in touch with Nita’s exciting life and writing has always been inspiring. Altogether she has three books in print; the most recent, Safe Haven, is a romantic thriller set in the Philippines. Nita is a wonderful writer, with a special gift for bringing her characters and settings to life. Her high-tension storytelling combined with fascinating metaphysical and historical information is particularly impressive.

The other day I asked Nita a few questions:
Q. When did you first decide to become a writer?
A. I always loved to write since age 4, holding a pencil. And to speak-- communicating, stirring passions and prompting thought via words seemed miraculous.

Q. How did you become interested in the Cathars?
A. Cathar interest hit me out of the blue, literally, as I sat in the corner on a stool in a Melbourne bookstore, perusing books to buy. A book fell above me, landing in my lap, and opened to Cathars. Never heard of them and from that moment felt duty bound to bring them back to life.

Q. Do you have a writing schedule and if so, what is it?
A. 3 hours-between breakfast and lunch.

Q. What is your favorite book?
A. Many, but loved Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (heavy on passions and magic realism).

Q. Any writing advice to share?
A. Write from your passion(s) –whether fiction or non-fiction.

Tip of the Day: Nita’s advice is invaluable. Are you writing from your passion? Quite often the real source of writer’s block is apathy toward your subject matter—trying too hard to fit into a genre or writing style you think is “popular” or “salable,” but not you. Sit down and brainstorm all the things that excite you—then choose one to write about.

The Premios Dardo Award

Many thanks to http://www.thewritertoday.com/ who sent me the Premios Dardo (Top Dart) Award on Friday: "this award acknowledges the values that every blogger shows in his or her effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values everyday."

I feel truly honored for several reasons. First, The Writer Today is a fantastic blog, one of my favorites and full of great information. I recommend it to any writer at any stage of his or her career, so please go visit and have a great time.

My second reason is that I still feel so new to blogging. For a long time I resisted even having a blog. I was worried I wouldn't know what to write or be able to maintain it very well. Now, I can't imagine not having my blog. I appreciate so much my readers, their comments both on and off site, and the opportunity to share my thoughts and writing.

Lastly, the award is just plain fun. And as I've always said in my writing classes (and to continue the theme of my last blog post), if you're not having fun with you're writing--something is wrong!

Starting today and over the next few weeks, I will be passing the award along to 15 other blogs that have inspired me.

Rules for the Premios Dardo Award
1. Accept and post the award on your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received it.
3. Pass the award to 15 other blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.
4. Let them know they've been chosen for this award.

Today's recipients of the Premios Dardo Award:

http://www.mariannepowers.blogspot.com/
http://www.sarahgarrigues.blogspot.com/
http://www.murdertrail.blogspot.com/
http://www.moodmovie.blogspot.com/
http://www.smileatmile20.blogspot.com/

Keep checking in for future recipients!

Tip of the Day: Recognize your writing with a special award from yourself. List all the good things you know your writing achieves and has to offer.

Revising Revisions

The last few weeks have been consumed with revision work as I get ready to publish my next book, Better Than Perfect, due out this summer. The title alone should give you a clue as to where my head has been! And like my main character, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Haddon, I’ve had to realize perfection is, at least in the real world, an impossible goal. Especially when you spend 24/7 in pursuit of it, which is why when I pulled the card “Just for Fun” from my Inner Outings, Adventures in Journal Writing deck, I knew something had to give.

Because I’ve always tended to believe in accepting what the universe hands us, I put the manuscript away and decided my holiday weekend would begin on Tuesday; a good decision. These are some of the things I’ve done with my “just for fun” time:

1. Played with http://www.polyvore.com/ all the live long day! It was wonderful. I’ve added a link on my sidebar so you can check out some of the sets I’ve put together there.
2. Went to my book club for the first time in three months. Another good decision!
3. Checked out the next book for the club right away: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I read it as a teenager. The best kind of "school's-out" reading.
4. Started writing a screenplay for no good reason.
5. Visited an art exhibit featuring two of my friends’ artwork. I nearly missed it from being “so busy.”
6. Bought some gourmet treats to take home from the foreign specialty food store downstairs from the art gallery.
7. Signed up for a collage class next month.
8. Planted a flower garden beside my patio.
9. Invited friends to go to France this autumn! (Yes, really! Check out http://www.nitahughes.com/ for more info.)
10. Went to another friend's celebration of her daughter’s high school graduation.
11. Played with http://www.polyvore/ lots more.

I feel great: rested, relaxed, and creative. This afternoon I’m going to draw with the pencils I bought in Germany. And there’s been a very real advantage to this mini-vacation. Suddenly, after months and months of agonizing over “just the right words,” the entire back copy “blurb” for my book popped into my mind, complete and ready-to-go. What a relief!

Tip of the day: Take a break—and that’s an order!

The Art of Letting Go

For the last few months my writer’s group and I have been using an insightful little kit entitled, Inner Outings, Adventures in Journal Writing, by Charlene Geiss and Claudia Jessup. This is a boxed package that includes 33 beautifully illustrated cards, each with a single word or phrase such as, “Doorways,” or “Just for Fun" along with a companion book loaded with creative ideas on how to use each card for the maximum journaling benefits.

Because there is no “right” way to use the cards, I decided to shuffle the entire deck and then keep the cards upside down in their box. Every two weeks I draw a fresh card from the top and that becomes my “theme” until the next time. I keep my selected card beside my computer so I can use it to journal, write poetry, or maybe use it in a scene to fit my current WIP. Sometimes I even follow the suggestions in the book!

This week I got the card: “Letting go.” I thought it would be interesting to pair the idea with a famous work of art. My choice was a painting titled, "The Saltonstall Family," and my method was once again freewriting. This is what I shared with my group:

I first came across this painting in 1979, my first visit to the Tate Gallery in London. I was enchanted by it from the start: so much red and white. It never made me think of “death.” Instead, I saw a woman newly delivered of her last child, saying to her husband, “I’ll be fine,” while her mother has private thoughts about this whole upwardly-mobile family.

For years after I told myself the story of these people: the wife was concerned the children weren’t eating right and were getting into mischief while she was in bed recovering from the birth. Her mother was her best friend and lived with the family. The mother thought the husband a little too demanding: All those children! Leave my daughter alone for heaven’s sake! But the wife loved the husband, loved the children, was touchingly grateful for the life they all led.

Now it turns out I had it all wrong. According to new research, this is a portrait of death. New theories insist the woman is dead, and the child and woman to the right of the painting are recent additions to the family. Sir Richard Saltonstall is holding the hand of his deceased wife, while Wife Number Two gloats and displays her rather surprised and perplexed infant.

Saltonstall can’t let go. His children from the dead woman cling to their father and each other. The dead woman looks up at them with longing and what I can only describe as patience. To me she looks exceptionally worn out; perhaps she did die in childbirth, hence the way she will not acknowledge the usurper and her healthy baby.

The records say Saltonstall eventually was one of the early American colonizers along with John Winthrop. There is no mention of the first wife accompanying him, because by that time she was dead. In reality I suppose he had to let go of everything dear to him: his lands, his country, his comfort, his sense of the tried and true. I couldn’t follow the story of where this picture was discovered or even the “truth” of its perceived meaning and history. Something tells me these theories are wrong. I don’t believe the strong woman on the right in her Madonna-like pose is his wife at all. She is too stern, too separate. She would never have allowed such an unflattering or divisive portrait to hang on the manor walls, forever proclaiming her an outsider.

And yet, whoever she is, she is to me in conspiracy with the white-faced woman on the bed. She too, has agreed to wear white and to pass the red vitality of life onto the next generation. The children, the bed hangings, the baby’s bunting are steeped in red. The women wear white for purity, for mourning, for sacrifice; red dye was expensive, it cost a large fortune for all those millions upon millions of cochineal beetles crushed for a single drop of colorant. Only Sir Saltonstall defies the convention of red and white, and like any male bird in full plumage, sports the human equivalent of feathers in his elegant blue stockings and a gilt-embroidered coat. In his pyramid of a black hat, he is the top of the hierarchy; if he opens his hands, he lets go of the whole charade.

What has always fascinated me most about this picture is the modern and honest complexity of the caught expressions: the children are bright but resigned. “Parents,” they seem to say. The wife on the bed is perhaps saying, “Don’t let Johnnie eat too much jam and he has a geography lesson at four.” And Saltonstall simply seems annoyed that his wife isn’t up and about running the household like clockwork. Of all the faces, the one I love best is the baby. “See?” he seems to say. “We’re all crazy here! How’d I get born into this family?” His little face seems wise beyond his few brief days or minutes on earth. “We’re all the same, me and you,” he says to me. “We may be four hundred years apart, but nothing ever changes.”

Which is why I have decided to not let go of my private interpretation of this painting. Whether new research in the future will prove me right or even further from the “truth” of its origins and meaning, I need the mythology I have created from this group. I need to think there were families that had thoughts and emotions and routines and changes of fortune no different from those of today. There is a security in this picture I crave and admire and I do not want to let it go. After nearly thirty years, I cannot change the story because the story found its way into my sense of self and did its alchemical work to change me. One year after I saw it, I decided to become a writer.

All that from a single card! Inner Outings is a great package—highly recommended!

Tip of the Day: Pair a writing prompt with your favorite work of art. Freewrite and see what happens.

Freewriting: Requires No Lessons

Last Sunday my writer’s group tried something we hadn’t done for a long time: freewrite together. Because I keep files of “word prompts” and pictures for freewriting at home, it was easy for me to bring both to the group. Just before I left home I chose two at random: the phrase: “Requires no lessons” that I paired with a photograph of a hand holding up to the sunlight a honeycomb shaped like a Grecian urn.

We gave ourselves exactly thirty minutes to write in silence. Afterwards we read our writing aloud and as always when we try this, I was stunned by what we accomplished in such a short time.

Other than with group members, I don’t usually share my unedited, unpolished, and very repetitive writing, but today I want to take a risk and include you in the group. The following is what I wrote raw, ignoring my ice coffee and using my favorite fountain pen:

This much I know about bees: The bees require no lessons on honey-making. It’s just something they do like breathing or swallowing. They are raised from the larvae stage by grown, adult worker bees who buzz and hum over the bee nursery, feeding them pollen, fanning them with their wings, singing them bee lullabies for all I know. The tiny bees mature in their wax cells, growing in golden light, their entire world a place the color of honey; their early lives are bathed in sweetness. They dream unaware of the harsh battles their queen endured to bring them to life. The queen is their mother and she is aeons apart from them in her uniqueness, her special status as royalty. When they emerge full-grown, they are made of honey, it is in their bee blood, it is in every cell of their bodies. The first thing they do upon seeing daylight is to fly outward, away from the hive to collect the ingredients to make more honey. Freed from the responsibilities and trauma of queen-hood, they simply fly out of the hive and return to the hive, making honey, raising more young in their own turn and time. There is no question of “how” or “why.” They live the ultimate bee-ingness of bee-ness. The only thing that is ever asked of them is a willingness to defend the hive, to sting an intruder and to mysteriously accept that to attack and defend is to die. The stinger, once used, pulls from their bodies and leaves an irreparable, incurable wound.

Once, and only once, I was stung as a child by a bee. I was about eleven and I was in the backyard of our house in the California San Fernando valley. My parents had purchased the house because it was the only one on the street with mature trees still on the property. The housing development had been carved from farmland, the old farmer and his wife still lived in the original farm house that backed onto our yard. Perhaps that’s why the elms and mulberries, the figs and apricots had been left intact. In a shift from open plowed fields they had been the survivors of a sale that may have made the farmers a small fortune but was also the beginning of why the San Fernando valley today is an expensive, over-crowded and uncomfortable place to live. The last trees were however in our yard alone, and their blossoms, I am sure, attracted the bees. I was never afraid of them, never was one to go , “Oh, bee—help!” and I would never dream of hurting one. Yet the day I stepped on a bee and it stung my toe, I can still remember the excruciating pain and the horrible sight of the bee separating from its stinger; the bee dying slowly, the stinger lodged in my toe, the bee throbbing and finally quieting, the bee dying and my terrible guilt and my terrible pain. I don’t know how long it lasted. I pulled the stinger from my foot; my mother made a paste of baking soda, her cure for everything. When it was over she went back to her book and I hopped one-legged to the darkened living room where the drapes were gold silk and the entire room was the same color as the honey I imagined the bee producing and the same color as the pollen I remembered coating its furry legs. The entire episode seemed yellow to me. The sting was not as severe as I would have thought it could be. I suppose I quickly forgot it, read a book of my own, was forever more careful walking through summer grass in bare feet. What did I learn that day except that life was arranged strangely, that bees could die simply for drawing their swords in self-defense?

It required no lessons to observe that life went on in my house no different from the day before: my one-year-old brother crawled and chewed his way through the house; my mother hid in her room and read library books; my father demanded ironed socks; and the gold drapes gave the impression the house was bathed in honey. If only that had been true. If only we were born without stingers, and if only we had the kind that could only be used once.

Pain requires no lessons; kindness rarely comes naturally. The bees manufacture honey and we manufacture problems more complicated than the multiple cells of the hive. For a long time I have wondered what is the difference between humans and animals, humans and insects, humans and anything else at all. And this I think is the difference: we require lessons, we cannot make honey on our own. We are too smart, too dumb, too helpless to do anything but learn, again and again and again until we come up with honey and still we ask: “Where the hell did that come from?”

Thought for the day: What in your writing “requires no lessons”?

In My Dreams I Write in Paris (but I Really Went to Frankfurt...)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this image of me writing in the perfect Parisian café: outdoors on a little street fragrant with coffee and budding chestnut trees. I even know what I’m wearing: a tan linen skirt, leather sandals, an orange silk top and a straw hat. My journal is brown leather and I’m using a smooth-flowing fountain pen just like I do in real life. Whatever I’m writing, it’s profound. Serious. Deep. It’s writing-that-matters. Better yet—it’s already contracted to be a best seller! As I write I see a group of little boys playing soccer nearby. The ball rolls close to my table. I smile, unconcerned at the interruption. I toss the ball back; I sip the coffee I just ordered. It’s a warm, sunny day and the words are unstoppable. I breathe in the image, feel it, believe it. So how come I still ended up in Frankfurt?

In my day-job I work with my husband, Dave Storey, and his company that makes his patented line of guitar picks. And every year, the world’s largest music trades show is held in Frankfurt, Germany. So well-prepared with lots of warm clothes, throat lozenges (you do a lot of screaming over the noise at music trade shows), and for some crazy reason my latest manuscript (I thought I would be bored and would have all this extra time to write. Talk about dreams…), I dutifully followed my husband through acres and acres of booths displaying everything from the latest in electric guitars to the hot new trends in accordions and xylophones. (Yes, my hearing is still bad. Very bad.) By the end of the week, totally exhausted from covering what felt like thousands of miles of pavement and stairs; bored with my de rigueur and funereal wardrobe of ubiquitous black clothing; and a little overwhelmed by the starkness of a big industrial city poised between winter and spring, I wondered why on earth I ever thought travel was a desirable occupation.

Maybe it’s because I actually had a good time. Despite the non-stop meetings and hurried rush to get to all our appointments with distributors, there were wonderful moments I’ll never forget, such as stopping at the exquisite Faber-Castell pen store and buying a set of pastel pencils, and later going to an orchid show at the Botanical Gardens the Sunday before we flew home.

Now, two weeks later, recovering from airplane flu and finally figuring out which manuscript is going to take precedence for the rest of the year (not the one I took with me), I’m writing again not in Paris or Frankfurt, but in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I wear jeans and turtlenecks, my coffee is homemade. I do have the fountain pen, but find I’m using it mainly to journal; my Alphasmart is much better suited for the manuscript that isn’t exactly profound, but makes me excited enough to want to follow my new set of characters deep into my much-needed sleeping hours. And the pastel pencils are wonderful; I can’t wait for the weather to be warm enough so I can take them sketching in the park. And if that isn’t enough, I can always pretend I’m in Paris wearing my straw hat. The imagination has no borders—why should I?

Tip of the day: Where do you wish you were writing right now? Envision your “perfect” writing environment and see what happens. No matter where you are, you can always bring an element or two of that perfect place into your current writing nook.