Write Early, Write Often…Write Something!

Teresa Fannin, reader, writer, gardener, chocolate fan & tea drinker

Category: Art & Craft (Page 11 of 17)

Friday

11/15/2013 /

It’s the end of the week. I like endings. I like beginnings and, truth be told, I like middles too.  Much like chocolate, lol, dark, milk, you name it, I like it.  Today I feel the need to clear my desk and my head and focus. I’m into a nonfiction subject that doesn’t translate well to popular, or children. It’s academic, it’s elitist, and it’s very specialized. Not only that the underlying subject isn’t all that popular.

Wow! So why am I doing this? Why have I spend time and money visiting sites, both virtually and physically? Why have I spend time and money reading directly about the subject and indirectly about that which few remember and when they do it is more because of a trivia game rather than the importance of the subject?

The answer is that there are more people than I probably even know who are totally invested in this subject. And, the fact that two posters [that have to do with the nonfiction subject] I purchased back in the 70’s from an artist who was a Immaculate Heart of Mary nun, from Mary of the Bushes, as my mother used to say…[sorry, inside joke, the school is in Scranton PA, Marywood College] who became internationally famous for painting a couple of gas tanks off the route 93, right there near the Dorchester waterfront, have stayed with me for all these years. They’ve hung on my wall, my real wall, in my study, in my den, wherever I wanted to be reminded of what it meant to not only have a social conscience, but to have the power to act on that consciousness. It is about being reminded of what it means to have a belief tattooed on your spine, be of your essence, be of such importance to you that to not believe it would be a black hole, a never-ending darkness. My own Catholic and catholic faith is that way for me. In many ways, this subject is of the same ilk, the catholic with a small ‘c’, a word I have always cherished as much as I hold dear the faith with the capital ‘C’. So, back to it!

Murder We Write

08/11/2013 /

Today, just five minutes from my house, which was a first, I went to the 3rd annual SinC networking luncheon, put on by the Murder We Write, SinC, Triad Chapter.

I first joined Sisters in Crime back in 2005, I think. It was fun to buy a book like The Book of book of poisonsdummies forensicsPoisons, or Forensics for Dummies, especially when they arrived at the house in a brown box and my husband opened them.

“Do you have anything you want to tell me?” he’d ask.

“No,” I would reply. “Why?”

And, it was also cool to be on the Guppies List and find out I could go to Dr. Lyle’s website and ask a question [if you exactly follow his rules] about the way a person would die and what would they do and he’d answer. Very cool.

I’ve been the Triad Chapter secretary for years, managing the website for Murder We Write. We sabotageare fortunate to have Chris Roerden in our chapter. In her second book Don’t Sabotage Your Submission, I’m on page 56 in Clue #3 [chapter] Bloody Backstory. Even though my mystery is not published, AND, even though that actual scene is out of the book, well, the one with Mom in a tree is gone. The dead body, arm and leg alongside the playhouse is still there.  I’ve learned a lot. About writing a mystery. About self-publishing. About critiques. About murder and mayhem.

I’ve learned about cosy mysteries, romantic thrillers, police procedurals, true crime. And I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with writers who are sure of their need to write, sure of their enjoyment of a good mystery and willing to spend time, monthly,  in discussions about all that makes writing interesting. Yes, for the most part, say 99%, it is about adults, but still. Writing is writing. Technique may differ, the audience may be harder, more challenging and more difficulty to engage [yes, yes, I am talking about children versus adult, and the children are more exacting––besides most adult mysteries are at an middle school reading level anyway]. It is another place to be a writer.

And, for me, that’s what really really counts. A place to call myself a writer.

 

june

07/01/2013 /

I lose June every year and it makes me sad. It’s when we start the registration for the 2013 logo for FBfall conference and one thing leads to another and WHOOSH! the month is gone, with nothing to show for it, but pixels on a computer screen. This year I was a bit more productive. In addition to beta testing a new website,  I applied for a work in progress grant, completed a non-fiction book proposal for a publisher and wrote the first chapter of a YA coming-of-age novel. Not bad. Not bad at all.

The June of the station wagon packed with summer shorts, sweat shirts and swim suits, tents, sleeping bags, beach towels, camp stoves, lanterns, coolers, is the one I can’t get back. We were two families, the Hannicks and the Burketts, of all girls. Moms and daughters taking off for vacation, fathers to follow on the weekends. We would leave directly from school, uniforms, shoes and shirts carefully packed up and put in a special bag not to be seen for three months. A couple of hours drive north of the San Ferenando Valley and we were there, Carpenteria. Twelve miles south of Santa Barbara. Mrs. Colburn’s restaurant with THE most amazing lemon chiffon pies.

June Gloom they call it now, cool, foggy, damp. We camped right on the beach, supposedly the ‘safest in the  world’, the deep didn’t start until about a mile out. You could body surf those waves forever. Sitting on the picnic table, gritty with sand in every crevice of my body, I think I was happiest. Nothing called me but the now.

We use a lot of clichés now. They are posted all over Facebook, clever sayings, adages. We go way beyond the Farmer’s Almanac or Ben Franklin or even Shakespeare [although Will did memorialize pithy sayings with a bit of panache] Back then, we used the thumbnail comment with considerable caution, today, not so much. Memories almost demand the succinct, but no. Because each memory is different. It’s all about Point of View.

June. Run everywhere. Hair out-of-control curly. Fingers water-wrinkled. Skin sun-pinked painful. Food grilled. Parents relaxed. No getting up time. No going to bed time. Fourteen books every two weeks from the Burbank Public Library returned early. Summer.

grown

05/03/2013 /

Grown. Growing up. Some have it difficult, maybe not enough food, or not a stable home, maybe an insane parent or guardian, maybe there’s a war going on outside your door. I get that, and not for the first time think that if we have to be licensed for cars, and guns and maybe even to vote, we should be licensed to have kids. Maybe pass a test or take a course, or something so that when a child is brought into the world they are loved and cared for, treasured for the future they promise and to, somehow, make good on that promise. I’m also talking about the angst, the Catcher In The Rye angst, the disaffected, totally egocentric angst. Did I not have it, or, was I not allowed to have it, which seems all the more likely. Not that my parents were strict, they were and they weren’t, but I was brought up in a stiff upper lip and stand tall, be tall kind of world.

I’m writing about a girl, her brothers and a stranger. First off, I didn’t have brothers, just sisters, two very alike sisters, and I was the odd one out. Sometimes more odd. But, siblings are siblings. Are girls more wicked than boys? I have no idea, but I know that the stereotype is not what I want to write. I wonder how much I knew about my sisters. I look at them now, what they are as adults. It’s a strange world out there. I’ve said before, I was an unconscious person, more interested in plot, setting and voice than character. Strange when I write that, because in the history I studied, it was the main characters on stage; Elizabeth I, Charlemagne,  St. Thomas More, that fascinated me the most, that I couldn’t get enough of those characters that actually made a difference in the world.

Ha! An epiphany and maybe a help. It’s not the character that fascinates me, it’s the relationship the character had with the world. Elizabeth defining her age, much like her successor Victoria. Or Charlemagne defining what it meant to rule an empire. How a Twyla Tharp changed the world of dance, or Ayn Rand changed our view, maybe, of corporations and communism.

Hmm…I’m going to have to think about this. So, maybe it’s not that growing up is tough. It’s that growing up is a constant in the world.

 

 

voices

04/17/2013 /

It was a couple of years back, at the wrap-up party for the SCBWI LA conference. I was sitting at a table, poolside, with a couple of other RA’s when Richard Peck came up and asked if he could sit with us and eat his dinner. Natch, we said yes, rather enthusiastically. I mean, come on, Richard Peck! A refined, gracious, and gentle man. He told us about his new book, about a girl who texts with her friends, when she’s supposed to be driving. She dies. Not a new story. But what Richard said was interesting. He said that the girl’s voice had been in his head for months. He kept hearing her and then he started to see the action, like a play on a stage, and that when he knew he had to write it down, make a story, make a book.

I’ve had this person living in the back of my brain for a couple of years now. She’s not the main character. It’s taken me two years to find the main character, maybe even characters. As a matter of fact, I don’t start with character, I start with idea, plot, a happening. It takes me a long time to get to character. I suspect that has more to do with the way I was brought up, and the stories I read as a kid, than it does with writing. I didn’t read LOTR for Aragon, or Frodo, or even Bilbo. I read it for the grand adventure they took on. I read it for the fact that I truly believe that good will always win. Always. I read it because I think good always looks outnumbered.

Maybe that’s the reason I read a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and I suppose that is the reason I continue to read fairy tales. Not not the Grimm, although I do like the TV show, Grimm. The Grimm fairy tales are more about morality and the twist. I read to find the good that wins. And, with this new voice in my head, I’m thinking that good may win, but it may not be a happy ending!

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