New Hampshire - Who Knew?

It's a perfect early autumn late afternoon. Clear skies. This is the Laconia Public Library. It's just gorgeous.

"You do look, my son, in a moved sort...

...As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind."

                                William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

"When I look back now...

...on what happened I see mainly fragments, flashes, a momentary phantasmagoria in which everyone focused on some different aspect and nobody at all saw the whole."
                               - Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted, p. 203

"In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet...

...in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven."

                             Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, p. 169

"From these many books I am reading...

...at random, I absorb a quantity of ideas and impressions which are in constant fermentation. Every moment of dreaming adds color to imaginings. For hours, some days, I sit and ask myself, what do I want to write, what am I fit to write?
     The pure novel does not seem free enough. I have a feverish desire to invent a form for myself, to follow my inclinations, my impulses, to give free play to the queerness within me. For I repress my queerness. There is a fund of respectability in me, a sort of puritan literary conscience which looks suspiciously on the dancing flames."

   The Early Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Three (1923-1927), hardcover, p.143

"At a certain time of night...

there's no longer any noise around the house. With the low tide so far away from the room all you can hear is the regular beat of the surf, without any echo. While this respite lasts there's no barking of dogs or rattle of trucks. It's after the last walkers go by, just before daylight, that the hours become void of substance, mere empty spaces, sands of pure transience..."
                           
                                     Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair, p. 103-4

"She reached the square...

...and wandered through the chaos, her movements synchronizing themselves to the rhythms of mystical Gnawa music as she dodged motorbikes and acrobats. Billows of grilled-meat smoke gusted thick as houses on fire, teenage boys whispered 'hashish,' and costumed water-sellers clamored 'Photo! Photo!' At a distance, she spotted the hunchback shape of Izil among the henna artists and street dentists."

                           Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone 
                           from Chapter 13, The Graverobber

"It was quite late in the year and...

...the cold was just beginning to bite when Brida received a phone call from Wicca.
     'We're going to meet in the wood in two days' time, on the night of the new moon, just before dark,' was all she said.
     Brida spent those two days thinking about that meeting. She performed the usual rituals and danced to the sound of the world. 'I wish I could dance to some music,' she thought, but she was becoming used to moving her body according to that strange vibration, which she could hear better at night or in certain silent places. Wicca had told her that when she danced to the sound of the world, her soul would feel more comfortable in her body and there would be a lessening of tension. Brida began to notice how people walking down the street didn't seem to know what to do with their hands or how to move their hips or shoulders. She felt like telling them that the world was playing a tune and if they danced a little to that music, and simply allowed their body to move illogically for a few minutes a day, they would feel much better."
                                
                                                        Paulo Coelho, Brida, p.100-101

Caliban: "I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;

...And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts,
Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset. I'll bring thee
To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?

Stephano: I prithee now, lead the way without any more talking. - Trinculo, the King and all our company else being drowned, we will inherit here. - Here, bear my bottle. - Fellow Trinculo, we'll fill him by and by again."

                               William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II Scene 2

"Knowing that Gypsies...

...had been persecuted for at least a thousand years, there was no way Sapphire was going to hang out a shingle announcing that she was a Gypsy. Not now that 'romania,' the carefully guarded Gypsy way of life, language, spiritualism, separatism, and law, was preserved and intact. In the U.S., blending in - becoming invisible - was the best means of keeping 'romania' alive."

                        Suzann Kale, A Gypsy on Tenth Avenue, p. 161-162 

"She showed him where she worked...

...It was a doorless cell lined with books, a cell in a hive that was itself a cell in the huge hive that clung by walls and pillars and towers of stone to the immense, steep cliff rising straight out of the sea. The palace of the rulers of Raine had grown from a seedling through the centuries. Long ago, it had been little more than a fortress on the edge of the world... Through the centuries, the palace had become a small country itself, existing between sea and air, burrowed deep into the cliffs, piled above the earth ... 
     The library was a city carved into the cliffs beneath the palace. Parts of it were so old that scrolls and manuscripts got lost for entire reigns and were discovered again in the next...
     He examined her tiny space, a shallow cave so full of shelves that her table barely fit among the books, and she had to sit with her stool in the hallway. He looked at work she had done, the fat jars of ink colored variously and stamped with her initial, her carefully sharpened nubs. Finally, reassured, he unrolled his manuscript again. ..."
  
                                 Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn, p. 6-7  

"I am thinking back to the time...

...when for the four of us the known world hardly existed; days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical. ... A tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible - that we should be. Justine would say that we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human - the gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars. ..."

                     Lawrence Durrell, Justine, p. 18-19 (from The Alexandria Quartet)

The power failing,...

...the tennis balls long since dead, the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm. 
         Imperfect memories. 
         Time yet for a hundred indecisions. 
         A hundred visions and revisions."

                                         Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted, p.226

"Some people are little Chernobyls,...

...shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out."

                                         Tana French, The Likeness, p.9

"By the end of my stint in Murder I could feel it coming: felt the high sing of madness in the air, the city hunching and twitching like a rabid dog building towards the rampage."

                                          Ibid, p.12

"...over excited toddlers tumbling along like big sweet bumblebees..."

                                          Ibid, p. 445

"This girl..."

...she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got."

                                               Tana French, The Likeness, p. 386

"...the most important thing about these four: just how close they were. The phone videos hadn't been able to catch the power of it.... It was like a shimmer in the air between them, like glittering web-fine threads tossed back and forth and in and out until every movement or word reverberated through the whole group: Rafe passing Abby her smokes almost before she glanced around for them, Daniel turning with this hands out ready to take the steak dish in the same second that Justin brought it through the door, sentences flicked onto each other like playing cards with never a fraction of a pause. Rob and I used to be like that: seamless."

                                                Ibid, p. 112

"The house had the effortlessly off-kilter feel of something out of a storybook - I kept expecting to fall down a secret staircase, or come out of a room into a completely new corridor that only existed on alternate Mondays. I worked fast: I couldn't make myself slow down, couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere in the attic a huge clock was counting down, great handfuls of seconds tumbling away."

                                                   Ibid, p. 127

She talks, just to please him.

...    She says she stays in the town in the summer. She lives not far away, in the university town where she was born. She's a provincial.
     She's very fond of the sea, and especially this part of the coast. She hasn't got a place of her own here. She lives in a hotel. She prefers that; it's better, in the summer. From the point of view of housekeeping, breakfast, lovers.
     He starts to listen. He's the sort of man who listens to everything he's told with equal passion. You can't make out why."

                                        Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair, p. 43

"A basement shopping mall...

...will connect Xanadu with Valhalla and Nirvana. It is still a gloomy underpass, lit by roadworker lamps and strewn with tarpaulins, tiles, wood planking, sheet glass, and a prematurely delivered army of boutique dummies huddled naked in misty polyethylene. Morino is ahead, a megaphone in one hand. Mama-san walks behind me, and the horn players bring up the rear. Somewhere above my head in the real world, Ai Imajo is playing Mozart....Down here is chilly and damp. I sneeze. My throat feels tight. Finally we climb to the surface on a dead escalator."

                                                     David Mitchell, Number 9 Dream, p. 178

"There is an aura of intriguing mystery about...

...this woman of Calcutta. No one is quite sure what she does with her time. She seldom entertains, especially here in her official residence overlooking the Ganges, which dates back to the time of the East India company. Nevertheless, it is presumed that she must do something. Was it only after eliminating every other possible alternative that it was decided that she was a great reader? Yes. What else could she be doing, shut up in her private apartments, during the hours between tennis and her evening drive. Crates of books, addressed to her, have been known to arrive from France."
               
                                                         Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul, p.71

Review: Josh Weil's "In the Hills"

Just start this short story from The Sun (April 2013, page 17 ff), and you'll be hooked. Weil explores the nature of heartbreak in, I dare say, a delightful way. 

Structurally it's quite brilliant, blending story, poetry, memoir, and play. He uses almost all the "persons" - first, second, third, and all their plurals! And through all this structure-play comes an intimate and authentic story of a man and how his life was shaped by the breakup with his wife. 

It was a joy to read, and I'll be looking for more works by Josh Weil.

Hearing Voices?

Zen writer and practitioner Cheri Huber advises us to ignore the constant talking in our heads. Since most of the chatter seems to be negative, and so much of it is repetitive, her suggestion makes sense. Here is  what she says in her blog:

http://cherispracticeblog.blogspot.com/

Two Hats

Can't wear both at the same time. The first is the creative process hat. The second is the editor hat. Both are part of the process, but I must remember to wear them at different times. 

Suzann Kale

"Collision" on PBS Masterpiece Theatre

Not only did I have to watch all 5 episodes in one sitting, but I also dreamt about COLLISION  for a few nights after! Plus, it altered the way I'm writing my novel. And I might add, it changed my life. Written by Anthony Horowitz and Michael A. Walker, Collision is a 5-episode mini-series, available on Netflix. From the beginning I was hooked --- but little did I know that by the end I would be totally blown away. And I'm not going to tell the ending, because that would be a spoiler. But I will say that the show intrigues and entertains on many levels. And it's about fate. And how the universe might or might not work. 

Suzann Kale

Surrendering to the Characters

And another reason I was having writer's block: I wanted the novel to go a certain way, and the characters simply wouldn't comply.

I know that sounds cliche and goopy. But ...

My problem is that I hate for my characters to have problems. Like my pets, I want my novel's characters to have wonderful lives free of opposition, embarrassment, and negativity.

So, oops. No plot.

And in fact, as I ponder my book in quiet moments, I see clearly that not only do my two main characters have huge problems, but they want me to write about these issues in detail because they want these problems resolved. 

Also I found out that Sylvie, my main character, did not want to do first person. So I'm back to regular third person with her. Why? Because I can get a lot more information in. In this particular story, I found that Sylvie telling her own story was too limited.

I also was plagued with the small town in which my two characters live. They don't really like living there. So...why are they still there? In order to answer that question I had to realize the enormous issues each one faced, that brought them to that town and kept them there. 

Very general, I know. But it feels good now. Going to the computer to write no longer feels like an extended torture session. Now it feels rich and deep. Nevermind that the story isn't going the way I had originally planned. It's going to go the way the characters go, because that's the only way it's going to get written.

Suzann Kale

Writer's Block Isn't Always What It Seems

Even going through a recent dry period, where daily writing turned out such horrible drivel that it put me in a tailspin - something else was going on. After a few months of absolutely dreadful writing, I realized that I needed to either take a break, or give up on it completely. Yes, first drafts are supposed to need repair, but this was to the extreme.

So I took a break, and just went to work and organized drawers and did laundry. But here's what happened: During that break time, stuff kept coming to me. Good stuff. I had to carry a notebook and pen with me at all times, including in the car, near the shower, in bed with me at night and to the supermarket. Because the stuff that was coming to me was rich and authentic. Whether or not it ended up in the novel, I had to capture it.

This notebook has filled up and amazingly, I'm now ready to go back to the writing. I don't have to force it now because I loosened my grip on the process.

Upon re-reading what I wrote before this break, I see that it was flippant.It wasn't grounded.

After taking this break, the whole novel has changed. The plot, characters, and setting are the same - but the voice has matured. And the narrative has deepened. The pacing of the book has evened out.

I have something to go on. I kind of know what I'm going to do now.

Yes, most of the time writer's block needs to be dealt with by simply not allowing it to exist. But sometimes, you have to know when to break the rules. And letting myself leave the keyboard for a few months, writing down dreams and fragments as they occurred, has healed this novel.

Suzann Kale

I Love My Apps

Especially Goodreads and of course Blogger. Also my weather app.

Just doing it.

...no matter what. That's the only way this novel is going to get done. There's no waiting for inspiration, no waiting to be in a creative mood. And for me right now, no waiting to devise a better plot!

A lot of this first draft writing is just doing it. For having been working on this book for over a year now so far, surely I have enough backstory. Yes of course there's a plot, but it's thin. I have faith that day by day, page by page, chapter by chapter, it will develop the way it should. And then I can go back and edit.

The predicament of journaling

I kept journals for most of my life, and then at one point I threw them all out. Hundreds of hand-written and typed journals. I had already mined them for material - mostly scenes, places, descriptions, bits of dialogue, ideas, and one-liners - for my novel Midnight Tequila. The novel was what I needed to say, to remember. Yes the novel is fiction, and it's totally not autobiographical - but that's what I need to keep. Not the journals. 

I kept a voice and music journal, too, for many years. Separate from the other journals. That was more technical, so after mining that for ideas for my singing technique book, Vocal Vibrance, I did keep them. Although I don't see why I'd ever need them.

For A Gypsy on Tenth Avenue, my notebooks were specific: research on Romany history, a huge section on the language, all kinds of reviews and references to sociology books. That I'm keeping.

But now I'm working on a new novel, and the whole thing has taken on a different twist. It seems that now it's either the novel OR a journal. Time is precious. What do I want to do? So I'm keeping a journal, but it's completely made up of ideas for the novel. Overheard dialog that had to be preserved. The way a small town feels at 5 am in November in the Emergency Room parking lot. Stuff I think of while driving (I pull over all the time to write notes and journal entries.). 

Sometimes I feel the loss of my regular, personal, day to day journal. But I plan to channel that energy into the book. 

Suzann Kale

The New York Times

A hot cup of Starbuck's latte, a butter croissant, and The New York Times. 

Read through the Times cover to cover, except for the sports, and actually felt better about the world. The Times is so rational sometimes. 

I work at the hospital, on the switchboard, handling incoming codes, and dispatching ambulances. I love my life.

Suzann Kale