Category: Art & Craft (Page 16 of 17)

We are in the final week. The Christmas Cards are DONE! Moving onto the baking today. Looking over recipes, making a list of ingredients.  Yeah! It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. The girls are coming home. Only for TWO days! Christmas Eve and Christmas Day…but it certainly is better than not having them at all. And, we have son-in-laws. My mother would have loved that part. We were three girls, but my mom loved having the boys visit. I think I often wondered if she would have preferred boys…but no matter, we were loved and cherished, instructed and educated, chided and punished until we were able to go out into the world and see it for ourselves. And I think, in some ways, I terrified my mom!

And so I think about story. My stories and they roll around in the back of my head with each and every recipe I pick up and think about making. They fall into my lap when I look at the ornaments on the tree and remember how they came to sit so prominently in our lives. They kick me upside the head when I see the all the Santa’s on the mantle and I remember this friend or that one, some still with us, some not, and I offer a Christmas prayer, and hold close the story.

So. Yes. I am seriously writing….

…seven days. Bayley and Dan arrive.  Meghan & Greg, Emma and Amelia arrive. The house will get small. Six Adults. Five dogs. Crowded. Lived in. In many ways we are so neat and tidy. Okay! I’m neat and tidy. Not that Tom’s not, but….I really want to work on my MG mystery. And. I am. But. Well, I am. But I think I’m over-thinking. Which is a strange way to put it, but something we all say. I can’t get there from here, so I’m over thinking the solution. I can’t figure out this problem so I must be over thinking it. Strange how we use words. And what we want them to say. Can it be true that something can be thought too much? I don’t think so. So rather than over thinking, maybe it is pushing the story, probably to a place the story does not want to go.

I believe in story. I think now that is why I so so good at history.  The story of all of us, yet just some of us. The good in us and the bad in us. And, has been said, ‘memory is tyrannical’ so the story can  grow, diminish, change intention, direction, become more and less than what the truth was, or is. And then there is the favorite question of the college cafeteria table, what is truth?

It’s like this whole brouhaha over the greeting for this time of year. If we are not intending for every single person to have the exact same belief system, then a happy positive greeting, regardless of the words, given with a happy smile, and sincerely imparted is about the best greeting you can get. Any time of year! Sometimes, tho, I wonder, what we would be doing if we were not celebrating Christmas! Would we be celebrating Saturnalia, the winter solstice, like the Romans? If we were Celts we would have celebrated Samhaim on November 1. But if you look up how and what peoples celebrate this time of year there is a very common thread. The possibility of rebirth. Of light from the darkness.

And, quite frankly, that may be the best idea for me yet. Rebirth. I was pushing my story instead of letting it find the light. Okay, trundling off to write more. Oh. And. Merry Christmas!

there is no such thing as writing the perfect sentence, perfectly, the first time. At least I find it difficult to think that someone could. ‘Course, there’s that whole thing about monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare, but then that would be a perfect sentence that has already been written, wouldn’t it?

We have tried as a critique group to be more than just a collection of writers who look at other writing and comment. We’ve become a support group, a therapy group, and most importantly, friends. Best friends! Two years ago we took an entire year to go through Ursula Le Guin’s book, Steering The Craft. It was an amazing activity. One exercise every month, giving us a window on writing the narrative, giving life to the story. Debbie started a story in an exercise and now it’s a book.

A while back, Sandra suggested the Great Course book, Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft.  We all agreed. Taught, well, lectured by Brooks Landon PhD, Director of the General Education Literature Program, University of Iowa, the course is a 24 lecture series about sentences. Syntactical strategies. Propositional context. A thing in motion.

We each have the DVD of the lectures and the Course Guidebook.

The first lecture was about a Sequence of Words. I like words. I love to roll them around in my mouth. Put various emphasis on various syllables. Listen to them in sentences. And, as much as I like words I am always fascinated by the way we use words to describe. Ever watch a show on cheer-leading? You may just think of the splits, or the pyramid. But no. There’s the Arabian, the cradle, the front-drop, the layout, the sponge toss. You get the idea, a whole language unto itself.

Dr. Landon speaks about sentences the same way. Sentences, he writes, are shaped by context and purpose, and there are an infinite number of them. Good. I’d hate to think I’m using a re-tread sentences. But, I suppose, it’s possible. Cumulative sentences. Loose syntax. Periodic syntax. Elegant versus Effective. Rhetorical versus grammatical. Base clauses and modifying/subordinate clauses. And where do you put them? Should the base clause be first, middle or last? And, what is sentence a supposed to be doing, right there in the middle of that paragraph! Yes! That one!

Today we are working on Propositions and Meaning. As I finished my exercise over the last week I need to add, I am as fascinated by  the sentences and language used to describe sentences and the language as I am by the information I am getting. What I’m waiting for is where does style come into this? It is just another name for the elusive voice?  

Okay, I may never get to Page Eight. The longer I stay away the more I think that it was tedious. And. Do I really want to re-tune my ears to the British murmur? No. I’m not deleting it, but it may be a while until I’m in the mood again.

Meanwhile, on FB there was a posting about early-onset of Alzheimer’s, Terry Pratchett [well, really, Sir Terry] and Assisted Suicide. Sad. But when you read his story, for him, I guess, it makes sense. It doesn’t say he’s going to do it, only that he’s making plans. Sad, again. His books are genius. But then, I don’t know what I’d do if I was facing such a loss when I had been so accomplished. Not because of the money, more because of the challenge, the pursuit, the culmination of the story. He is one example of the amazing variety of the brain left to it’s own devices. I sort of like that.

I started reading Discworld when they came from the UK to the States. I think I got the first one through the book club. The Colour of Magic and all the books thereafter were of wonder, fun, a brief look at our society and how stupid we sometimes were. My daughter got involved in them while in high school.  The English teachers at her very preppy private school were terribly unimpressed. I thought that sad too, here was was Jonathan Swift of our century. A true satirist who struck out at the absurdities of everyday.  I’ve always been a Sci-fi, fantasy fan. Mysteries too, but it’s going to that world far far away that makes you see. Isn’t that why Star Trek was so successful? Because in a different century, out among the stars, with different groups of people and different societies we could fully see the stupidities and inanities of our own lives?  So Piers Anthony, Jack Williamson, Julian May, Frederick Pohl, Harry Harrison, Herbert, Heinlein, Clark, not to mention Tolkien, Asimov, Peake, and so many more have been amazing to have and to read.

And. To the current crop of fantasy, sci-fi, magical realism, paranormal, speculative fiction, is different. It’s so much more personal. It’s not so much about how the world is and how we change it, but how it affects me and changes me. I’m still trying to deal with that.

…and no, I haven’t finished Page Eight. I’ll get to it. It’s not going anywhere. It’s on the DVR. Wonderful invention, like a hard drive. Saves any program you want. Sigh. I find myself deleting most. What was that statement in the early ’60’s , TV’s Wasteland. Anyway. I wasted the other night watching Cancel Christmas. A too predictable, gonna-have-a-happy-ending-in-two-hours-if-it kills-us-all movie. The acting was okay. It’s the premise that’s pathetic. There is the irascible, crotchety, worse than Scrooge person who changes his heart at the end or the family that comes together after a parent died or left or just overcomes tragedy to see the true joy of the Christmas season. Very Hallmark.

And, thanks to cable, we have a Hallmark Channel. So very Hallmark all the time. And I just don’t get it. Is that what people want? The happy endings?  I love the Sisters Grimm books by Michael Buckley. I’ve read the first eight, I think there’s more, but am on to other stuff. In the new television series Once Upon A Time we’re transported back and forth between the world of fairy tale, although not the fairy tales we know and love. They’re a bit more skewed to the evil that exists around us. 

The premise, that the big bad witch of Snow White fame, wants to end all happy endings. And there is the plucky young woman who is going to, one can only hope, bring the big bad witch to a big bad end. Emma. I like that Emma is very now. Present. And edgy. I can’t find any Grimm story or folklore that shows that Snow had a child. Although, there probably is one somewhere. Or some very creative writer decided to invent the daughter as a device to create, eventually, the big bad end. And in Once Upon A Time the catalyst for the denouement is Emma’s own child. The one she gave up at age 18. Because Emma is not in any way at all expecting a happy ending.

Glad this isn’t on the Hallmark Channel. They’d have so messed it up.