Today I depart into the land of Family Reunion. 30 people, 1 house, most of the people are children. I love my family. I love seeing my family. But there will be a serious lack of places to retreat into introvertedness. Anyway I’ll be offline for the duration.
My sister nancyfulda is a slush reader for Baen and she has lots of good thoughts on writing. Today she has some good thoughts on writing in first person. (http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com/83225.html?view=170009#t170009) I commented to her entry and I’m posting my comment here for my own reference.
Telling a story in first person has the power to draw a reader into the story, because theoretically the reader is sitting next to the teller and hearing the story. Because of that I often spend a great deal of time wondering when the narrator is telling the story. Who am I supposed to be? Is the narrator an old man telling a story of his youth with me as one of his grandkids? Is the narrator a young man telling what happened last week and I’m one of his friends? Those two different situations will radically change the narration of the same story. It should also change the voice of the story. If the narrator is 14 he should not be using the vocabulary of a college graduate. If the narrator is 60 he shouldn’t be using the teenage street slang of today. It may be that none of that information actually makes it into the story, but the writer needs to know it or there will be inconsistencies that will bug the reader.
Also first person removes the fear that the protagonist will fail to survive a life/death situation. After all, he’s here to tell the tale. Unless of course we’re all dead and the narrator is telling this in the afterlife. I’ve seen that done enjoyably.
First person narrators often give brief glimpses into the future. It is a tool that can be handled to amazing effect, but more often isn’t. As a reader I don’t want to end a touching scene by being told that then next time I see this person she will die. The narrator just ruined the suspense and the natural unfolding of the story.
First person narration has a powerful set of tools. Unfortunately powerful tools used incorrectly just make a mess.
Last month I used ljbook.com to create a pdf file of all my 2004 entries. I then used Lulu.com to turn that pdf into a printed book. Today that book arrived. I love it. It is beautiful. There is something truly magic about having my very own words printed in a real book. I’m so pleased with the result that I’m planning to do the same thing to all of my 2005 entries and in January I’ll do the same for 2006. I love having these hardbound copies for me and for my kids. I may even get some copies for family members.
Creating this livejournal book was the first in many steps toward publishing and selling a book of my writing. I needed to see how publishing through Lulu worked. I’m very happy with the result. The next step on the learning curve is for me to create files in Word and translate them into pdf. This is stuff that I need to know so that my projects are not stymied by waiting on someone else.
My currently planned writing/publishing projects:
The book of stories for and by my kids (Won’t be selling this one)
A compilation book of the best of my LJ entries adapted into an essay format. (under consideration, If I do it, I’ll sell it.)
A book of my fiction writing (This one will be for sale.)
There are 6 houses on our cul de sac. In the space of 6 months 4 of those houses have new families in them. In the 8 years we’ve been here only 1 of the houses was sold, and now it’s like we’re getting a whole new neighborhood. Part of me is glad because the people who are moving in are families with children the right ages to play with my kids. Part of me is sad because I have been blessed with good neighbors and I will miss them. Also Howard’s brother just moved to town from California. I’m glad to have more family close by and even gladder for Patches to be able to play with his same-age cousin. So I expect the next few months will be filled with lots more visiting as I’m making friends with these new neighbors and I’m reconnecting with relatives. The turnover has been very good to Gleek and Patches who have both acquired friends. In a month it will be sad for Kiki and Link because they’ll lose a best friend whom they’ve known for most of their lives.
Change is good. Change is bad. Mostly Change is just different.
Well, today was my first experience with having a child “run away.”
Patches was tired and needed a nap. This meant that I needed to lie in bed with him and read him a story or two for him to be settled. It only takes about 5 minutes, but they must be quiet and peaceful minutes. Having Gleek in the room interferes with the process because she talks and then requires coaxing to leave. The coaxing almost always reminds Patches that he doesn’t really want to take a nap and I’m back to square one. Today Gleek did not want to have to wait out of the room while I settled Patches. I tried coaxing. I tried offering movies, stories, or computer games. I tried getting firm. Finally I picked her up, put her outside the room and locked the door. Gleek was outraged at this. She howled. She pounded on the door. Finally she announced “I’m Moving!” and all went quiet. I finished reading to Patches. Fortunately today’s stories were short rather than the epic length Dr. Seuss story he usually demands. Then I departed the room with mission accomplished.
Now I had a new problem. Gleek had obviously hidden herself away somewhere. I hadn’t heard the front door, so I thought she was still in the house. I don’t like “hiding from mommy” behaviors, so I knew I needed to craft my response carefully. Most of Gleeks misbehaviors are based in a desire for attention. I considered going to read a book and thus denying her the attention. I knew she would emerge on her own with a different attention seeking behavior. Unfortunately I was not certain she was in the house. It was possible that I’d missed hearing the front door. Leaving The House Without Telling Me is a major infraction of our rules and required different handling than merely Hiding From Mom. I needed to know which I was dealing with. I searched the house. I looked in all the hidey-corners. I called her name. Silence. Gleek is capable of silence, but the house felt truly empty rather than sneaky.
Gleek was plenty mad enough to deliberately break rules, so I considered her leaving the house as pretty likely. This provided me with a quandry. I couldn’t easily go and search for her. Patches was sleeping and I couldn’t leave him alone. Besides I wasn’t sure where to look for her. Would she go to a friend’s house to play? Would she find an outdoor corner and hide? Would she sit on a street corner? This was a new behavior and I didn’t know what shape it would take. Fortunately just as I was beginning to dither, I looked out the front window and saw Gleek on her way home. I had one minute to decide how I was going to react to her reappearance. Asking before leaving the house is a safety rule and I needed to reinforce the importance of it. I also needed to assure Gleek of her value and my love for her since it was an exclusionary event that set this incident off in the first place. I decided that anger had no place in the upcoming conversation. She walked in the door and I scooped her off her feet into a hug. “Where were you?!” I asked in a worried tone. “I looked all over the house and I couldn’t find you and I was scared.” Gleek was a little startled at this, I think she expected an angry confrontation. She and I had a snuggle and talked it all over. Will she ever do it again? I don’t know. Probably. What kids do once, they’re likely to do again. I just know I need to handle it carefully now so that when she’s capable of truly running away, she no longer wants to.
So I guess I’m pretty machiavellian. I consciously craft my responses to behaviors to encourage the ones I like and discourage the ones I don’t. I suppose it is pretty manipulative. I used to be furious at my Dad for the manipulations that he used when I was a teen. I’d be furious because I could see them and they still worked. Now I am a parent and I’m the manipulative one. But I have a whole different view of it. It is my job to teach these little people how to be good, kind, honest, hard working people. It is my job to keep them safe. There are a multitude of tools I can use to achieve those ends; manipulation, anger, scolding, punishing, force, violence, coaxing, bribing…you get the idea. I try to use the right tool for the right job. But more than anything else if I can consciously act rather than merely reacting, then I think I do alright. It may be machiavellian, but it beats screaming and door slamming.
Last night I dreamed of my Grandpa. He died 7 years ago when Link was a baby. Kiki is the only one of my kids who has any memory of him. She calls him “Grandpa lying down” because She was there the day they brought him home from the hospital on a back board. He was unable to walk from the ambulance to his bed in the house. By the time he died, he’d been bedridden for 5 years and the Grandpa I’d loved was long gone. Howard never got to meet the vibrant, interesting person he was. Howard only met a sick old man too tired to do much talking. I wish my kids had someone like my Grandpa. Grandpa was a tinkerer. He had a huge garage that he’d built himself. It was full of air compressors and table mount vice grips and soddering irons and radio tubes. It was so full of those things that there was only a narrow walkway through them to the workbench. I still remember the smell of that place. It was a strange mix of concrete, grease, and metal. I was only allowed in occasionally and only if Grandpa was with me because there were too many dangerous tools and machines lying around in there.
Grandpa fixed everything. He always had a project and he always involved his grandkids when we were around. With Grandpa I straightened bicycle spokes, sawed through lumber by hand, formed table legs on a lathe, soddered circuit boards, and any number of other things. Obviously Grandpa had no antiquated ideas about “girls work” and “boys work” we all did stuff with Grandpa. He called me his “Gal” with his southern accent mellowed by years of living in California. He’d sit me on his lap and tickle me with his “billy-goat beard” and tell me tall tales about hunting for bears. Grandma would scold him for telling such tall tales, but we all loved them. I wish I could remember the tales, but I can’t. All I can remember is that I loved them and listened to them with a wide-eyed wonder, not sure if I should believe them or not. Grandpa’s hands were never clean, no matter how often he washed them. The grease and dirt was ground in so thoroughly it wouldn’t come off. Those hands were hard and calloused. The hands of a man who tinkered and worked all day every day.
Grandpa was always skinny. The fact that he was missing about half of his teeth might have had something to do with it. Grandma always had to adjust her southern cooking so that there were foods Grandpa could eat. As an adult I wonder why he never got dentures or implants, but he never did. He just grinned his grin full of holes. Grandpa was also deaf in one ear. I think he was hard of hearing in the other one as well. We always had to speak loud and clear so that Grandpa could hear us. He had a succession of hearing aids, including some that he made himself. He didn’t like them much though. He was always taking them out and losing them. It was only years later that we figured out that perhaps some of the “losing” was on purpose so he could pretend not to hear Grandma when the mood struck him. He seemed to like the hearing aids he made for himself better even though they were invariably bulky. He even rigged a hand held speaker to the TV so that he could hold it up to his ear. That way everyone could have comfortable volume levels.
One summer he had all of us kids help him haul rocks to clear the ground for a huge garden. He planted and created sprinkling systems so that the plants would live. We’d come for visits and help with the harvesting. The garden seemed to get bigger every year. Especially the strawberry patch. We loved the strawberry patch. The grasshoppers also loved the strawberry patch. One of our favorite pasttimes was catching jars full of grasshoppers. They came in a startling array of varieties. Grandpa didn’t like the grasshoppers. He was happy that we caught them. Less happy when we released them back into the wild on the other end of the yard. It seemed so far away to us, but I’m sure they were back in the strawberries in less than an hour. An acre just isn’t that far to a grasshopper. Grandpa also arranged sprinklers for Grandma’s flowers and the small patch of lawn. Grandpa tinkered and planted in the garden for years. It seemed like he was always shifting rocks and making it bigger. Then the garden stopped getting bigger. Then the garden began shrinking. The shrinking of the garden was the first sign that Grandpa was beginning to wear out, although we didn’t know it at the time.
In my dream he was the Grandpa of my childhood. He was all the things I’ve told and more that I’m unable to describe. I woke missing him so much that I wanted to cry.
Sometimes my children surprise me delightfully. This morning Kiki decided she wanted to play with Polly Pockets. Since all the Pollys now belong to Gleek, this meant that Kiki and Gleek played together happily all morning long. Let me repeat that for emphasis. Gleek and Kiki spent ALL MORNING shut together in their room without any squabbles at all. I kept close tabs to make sure it stayed that way, but I didn’t need to really. It was wonderful. It was so wonderful that I folded Kiki’s laundry for her (a chore she hates) as a way to thank her for being so nice. Around lunchtime I carefully separated the two because I wanted them to carry away happy memories of the morning.
It worked out well, because at about that time Gleek’s friends started showing up at the door. Within 20 minutes Gleek had acquired three friends to play with. She held court up in her room completely happy to be surrounded by people. Kiki was happy too. She pulled out the art project that she has been working on and kept me company while I worked in the kitchen. Two of Gleeks friends had arrived shepherded by older brothers who wanted to play with Link, so he had company too. Patches played solo for awhile before joining the party in Gleeks room.
The best part for me was that they were all so happily occupied that I was on call even less than usual. While they were all playing I used our very dusty ice cream maker to make frozen yogurt. It’s yummy, but it was lots of work and more expensive than buying ice cream. I’m starting to wonder if I should bother to continue to give cupboard space to the ice cream maker. Whether or not I keep the ice cream maker, it was really nice to be relaxed enough that I was interested in experimental cooking rather than survival cooking.
A couple of days ago I went to the library. Among the books I brought home was The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. I picked it up on a whim because I’d heard of it somewhere before and because it has “mermaid” in the title. I began reading and I have to say that I am very impressed with the power of Ms. Kidd’s prose. She really knows how to create images. Unfortunately the image I was seeing framed was that of a woman with a wonderful life, a beautiful house, and an amazing husband who was disatisfied and didn’t know why. Judging from the cover flap this woman does not confront the “why” until she has torn her life apart with adultery. I didn’t want to read that kind of pain. I flipped to the last chapter where I discovered that she returns to her husband and they rebuild their life together. The protagonist makes clear that the love is different than before, but that she is better able to love because she is her own person rather than an annex of her husband. I can agree with that last bit, but there are so many better ways to find yourself than to damage everyone around you. Particularly when what you are destroying is part of how you want to redefine yourself.
I won’t be reading the middle section of The Mermaid Chair. The first chapter and the epilogue tell me enough story that I feel no need to slog through the painful middle.
Finding out I was a finalist in the Blogging for Books contest made my whole day into a bright and cheerful place. Finding out that I didn’t place in the top three sucked all the life out of yesterday. I wept my tears and today I get to the “moving on” part of the experience. Being a writer means having rejections to weep over.
I want today to be very different from yesterday. I was very task oriented yesterday. Today I want to be more experience oriented. I made a good start by getting outside to garden first thing. Being outdoors is good for me. Then I took our digital camera and followed Patches around the house taking pictures of him. I plan to use these pictures in a personalized story just for him. It will be the story of How Patches Went On A Picnic. He loved being the star of a photo shoot and obligingly posed for all of the story parts.
I’m writing stories for all my kids this summer. The kids are writing stories too. They’re very excited about it since my mother volunteered to buy one story per week for $5. They all have plans for what they’re going to spend the money buying. At the end of the summer I’m going to take the stories I wrote and the best stories the kids wrote, format them into a pdf, and have them bound into a book at Lulu.com. This kind of thing will be great for the kids and will make a great gift for grandparents for christmas.
I knew that the Blogging for Books results would be posted this morning, but I was too busy to check until around 2 pm. That’s when I found out I didn’t place. I was exhausted from the morning. I hadn’t eaten lunch. And my head was still full of Things To Do. My first reaction was “oh well.” For about 20 minutes I honestly believed that I didn’t much care. But all the life had gone out of my day and eventually I realized that I do care. I care very much. I wanted recognition for something that was completely mine. I know I do stuff all day long. I know I do important stuff. Not just important, but critical. All day every day I do stuff. Most of it is for other people. Most of it is invisible. And most of it goes completely unnoticed. Or at least unremarked. I wanted to do something remarkable. I wanted recognition for an accomplishment.
I didn’t get all that I wanted. I need to be content with the measure of success that I’ve achieved. I was a finalist and now I get to try harder.