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Posts from the ‘Cathy’ Category

Sep 22

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Cathy: Goldberg Gratitude

 

In my original post on this website, I blogged a tiny reference to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Now, I know if you’re a writer, you’ve most likely read this, and if you haven’t, I more than recommend it. This book changed my life as a writer. You must read it. I believe it is a great book, even if your Art lies in any other genre. The sole purpose of this book is to put your creativity to work as a spiritual practice. Really the book has many purposes, but for me, this is the most important aspect.

I remember, as a kid, someone recommended I pick up the Bible and flip it open any time I needed spiritual guidance, or daily as a spiritual practice because, whatever snippet you read will guide you for the day and be exactly what you need. Now, to some, I will sound sacrilegious in saying: I’ve discovered that I can flip open virtually any book and find what my spirit is looking for at the time I read a bit of any writing. But it is especially true for this book. A dear friend insisted I read it nearly ten years ago, thrust it at me as a gift over eight years ago, and I’ve been flipping it open nearly every day since then. Thank you, Joe Gallo. I may not always have followed the guidance I received from Goldberg, but with her nearly daily reminders I have lived with at least the feeling that I am a writer. I am a person who marks up books when I find something particularly meaningful. I underline passages, dog-ear pages, write exclamation points and notes in margins. I gave up doing so in Bones because the whole darn book would be underlined, margin noted, covered in exclamation points and every page would be double turned at the corners.

There are certain passages I read repeatedly, unintentionally, because, these are the passages I need the most. Recently, I discovered a passage I hadn’t read in a while that I felt was appropriate with recent posts — especially Bethany’s — and comments — Charlotte’s on the Monday Page — and what I especially need to hear for myself of late as I commit so fully to writing my manuscript as I’ve never done before. I am still full of self doubts and guilt for family and income, but I keep telling myself, I have to write if I am to call myself a writer. Here are the words that jumped off the page at me:

…I had a year and a half off to just write. I never could find a rhythm that worked longer than four or five days. I tried writing from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon. That worked and then it didn’t. I tried two to six. That was good for a while. Then, whenever I wanted to write. That was okay, on and off. Each week I varied my schedule. I had the opportunity to try all times of the day and night. Nothing ever became perfect. The important thing was never to give up the relationship with writing, no matter how many different tactics I may have tried….Think of writing as though it were breathing. Just because you have to plant a garden or take the subway…you don’t stop inhaling and exhaling. That’s how basic writing is, too.

I never can find a daily rhythm that works for me. But getting into regular practice lately has shown me that my most inspired times seem to be Tuesdays and Sundays. Why? Beats the hell out of me. Having said that, this past Tuesday was spent staring at my open manuscript document, so even that elongated rhythm isn’t full proof. I’ll just put it down to my love of jazz, of syncopation. Heck, I can’t sing the ABC song straight in 4/4 time, and Baby C doesn’t want to hear it that way either, when I try. But I am writing as I breathe. It’s with me when I walk the dog, when I drive S to tae kwan do, when I ask K to unload the dishwasher, when I’m nursing Baby C, when I’m thinking it’s been ages since Honey and I have had time to ourselves, and when I am yelling for the TV be to turned off for the umpteenth time in a day.

Then, in the same chapter, Natalie Goldberg reminds me:

I know…working with my tired, resistant brain is the deepest I’ll get on the earth. Not the joy or ecstasy I feel sometimes…but the nitty gritty of my everyday life and standing in it and continuing to write is what breaks my heart open so deeply to a tenderness and softness toward myself and from that, a glowing compassion for all that is around me….So, it is very deep to be a writer. It is the deepest thing I know. And I think, if not this, nothing — it will be my way in the world for the rest of my life. I have to remember this again and again.”

And I have to remember this again and again, too. I know it sounds ridiculous on some level. I know we all make fun of people who walk around saying, in an unbearably pretentious tone, “I am an Artist!” There are plays, movies, all kinds of Art that warn of this particular pretense, which frankly, makes me cringe. Then I ask, why does it make me cringe so? Is it because I am at heart an artist who feels I am not serving my Art? When I am not serving my Art, I am not serving my spirit. When I am not serving my spirit, I am not living well for myself, my family, humanity or the planet. Then yes, I sound ridiculous, too. But doesn’t the Truth often sound absurd? Okay, so now that I’m out on this limb of ridicule, I might as well walk the walk, and not just talk the talk.

Shutting up now, so I can write. But one last mallet over the head: if you haven’t read this book, read it. If you have read it and it’s been a while, read it now, especially if you’re struggling to squeeze your art into your life. Every morning I pick it up, I get a little thrill, a little aha!, a little fire under my butt to write, to create, to look at the world in which I live a little more closely, from a skewed angle, and to write.

Sep 18

10 Comments

Cathy: Moving along

I have committed significant time each day to work on my young reader novel. Thank you for many of your posts and conversations to motivate me to do such a thing for myself and my book. A very real sacrifice is involved for our family, the fact that I have no steady income. So, I’m dropping a big networking hint: any of you with connections to a youth-focused publisher or agent, please float hints of my progress their way, or their info my way! When the manuscript is nearly complete, I will need to shop it, fairly desperately. I am lousy at marketing. Let me sit in a corner and write all day long, but show it to someone who might put it in production? Yikes! I’m a little over a third into what I hope to accomplish in page count. It is a fun (I hope) nerd overcoming bully story with a science twist a la astronomy with some sub-focus on family and friendships. How’s that for a synopsis without giving anything away?

Last week, I got through some dialogue. Dialogue is easier for me to imagine than to actually write. I hear it well in my head, but how do the characters sound on the page? All like me or the narrator? I hope not. So, it’s slow going, besides all the interruptions. But the good news for this week is, knock on wood, neither of the boys are sick — each stayed home from school a day last week, two different ones, of course. I have no appointments for any of us. The cat and dog have both been deflea-ed, finally, at the vet. Bad news is I planned a picnic at my house on Saturday for my Asperger’s group that I don’t foresee doing much prep for as it is a potluck, but I do need to move a dirt pile, reorganize the desk again, hopefully get through some of my albatross box of papers to be filed, and flea bomb the backyard. That’s right, nature girl is going to intentionally poison the planet. Good news is I am going to write THE SCENE this week. If I’m lucky, THE OTHER SCENE, too. These two scenes are at the heart of the book, upon what everything after depends. They should also advance me to the halfway point. Woo-hoo!

I just finished re-reading an old favorite book that didn’t help my frame of mind for writing a youth novel, but I enjoyed it anyway — Alice Walker’s In the Temple of My Familiar. My next step to move my writing along in the vein of a youth novel is to re-read some Jerry Spinelli, Sharon Creech, and other authors for the age group, whose work I love and whose style is very conversational and very much from the point of view of an eleven- or twelve-year-old. I think that will help my dialogue problem a lot. I should grab some Carl Hiaasen and Gary Paulson, too. A dog figures prominently in the story, and Paulson writes Dog really well. I mention these authors because I believe a lot of the best writing out there now by contemporaries is for the youth market. Go check out the Newbery Medal winners. They are a great lot.

Enjoy! I didn’t know what I was missing until a few years ago, so I really do recommend a trip to your local library youth room. The reads are so quick, too! If you want a really good cry, you must check out Sharon Creech’s The Wanderer or Love That Dog. I’m no crier and I absolutely blubbered my way through those, out loud, in front of a class of fifth graders. If you like disturbing (Lisa D and Christa), check out Spinelli’s The Wringer. I read that four years ago and it still haunts me.

Happy writing, painting, puzzling, knitting, etc this week!

Sep 9

5 Comments

Cathy: Pleasant surprises

 

As I write this, it is Sunday evening. This morning I made another rare go of getting myself, one son and the baby off to church. This will not be a religious blog, I swear. One reason it is tough for me to attend church regularly is my son S’s autism. He’s high-functioning, most likely Asperger’s, but as is often the case, his diagnosis is a general one, and the fight for a specific one is exhausting and expensive. His behavior in public places can be very disruptive, especially when the expectation of quiet and stillness reigns, such as church. So, this morning, I went, I warned, and I will attempt to take him next week. If you didn’t notice, my tone is very dry here, as it often is when discussing S, who brings more spontaneous joy, and more challenges, headaches and avoidance of many social situations than any kid I’ve ever known, and I’ve known a lot more than most people. We have a small circle of friends, it is very small, and mostly where we used to live. If he is not directly responsible for this, he is indirectly, as challenges with him are probably my most visited topic of conversation. I love him dearly. It’s a tough kind of love.

So I came home, and he was still sitting in front of the TV, Honey was bemoaning that he wouldn’t listen when asked to turn it off, S and K almost immediately got into a back and forth, which escalates his voice in pitch and volume to a decimal level unlike any other human utterance. Oh boy. I’m not feeling great about him today. There have been many challenges all week with the transition back to school, and I hate to say it, but I’m kind of ‘over it’ already. K’s friend came over, and I basically forced them to include S, just so I wouldn’t hear another screech and have to deal with it. I will add now, I am incredibly sleep deprived from exclusively nursing Baby C until the six month mark (three weeks from now), when I will jump for joy when she eats her first cereal, because it won’t be me.

The guys wandered out of K’s room a while later quite noisily, and I’d just nursed Baby C to nap. I kicked them out to fresh air. K and friend exited the front door, S the back, left to wander the backyard on his own. I began to dread what would happen next, assuming he would come back in whining that K and friend wouldn’t let him play with them. Instead, he came in announcing I needed to get rid of the caterpillars all over my garden. I was only half-listening, which, I hate to say is often the case because he says everything with such urgency. So he repeated it several times until his message got through and he had my full attention. “They look like monarch caterpillars! I’m throwing dirt on them so they’ll go away. They have these orange things they stick out when I throw it at them.”

“Please leave the caterpillars alone. They aren’t hurting anything, you don’t need to torment them with dirt.”

“But MO-om, they’re eating up your garden! Get some pesticide!”

“Did you say monarchs?! Show me!”

He lead me out to the garden, and there they were: six monarch caterpillars all over my nearly leafless carrot stems.

Now, you may be asking what all this has to do with creativity. One: my son inspired me out of my funk and to love him a little more once again. And two: It’s monarch chrysalis season! Is there anything more inspiring than that?

I really hope they stay to build, transform and emerge with their wet wings flapping right there on my naked little carrot stems. I am so happy to sacrifice those carrots, even if I’ve worked very hard on my little vegetable garden, which has been largely decimated by rabbits through the hole in the fence, squash bug invasions, and other critters this year. If they do stay, I will gladly share more pictures with, hopefully, some spinning, some butterfly brewing stillness, some wet wings flapping and flying away dry, royal, orange and black. I wonder if the storm that turned out to be not much of a storm blew them in?

Sep 4

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Cathy: School days, school days, dear old….

Woe is me...first day of fourth grade

Woe is me...first day of fourth grade

I’m going to sound hypocritical here, but I’m humming the old tune as I practically push my boys out the door on their first day of school. I know I bemoaned their being out of the house when they were away at their father’s this summer, but this is different. They will be home by 2:45 and 3:45, respectively. So, I get to hum a little old fashioned tune if I want to.

September through October has always been my favorite time of year. It was even better over a lifetime in New England, because the weather matched the sense of the year for me. The breeze’s coolness crisped the air. It may seem backwards as the leaves are falling — a sense of death and inward withdrawal should be the prevailing sentiment; but for me, this time of year always represented a chance to start anew and the promise of rebirth. This is the beginning of Mother Nature’s gestation. This time last year was when I retreated to bedrest in my gestation of Baby C, who was born this past spring. I have two April babies out of three and it was those two pregnancies that put me to bed for the winter, for similar complications. So I feel a special kinship with Mother Nature as she folds into herself for her cycle of creation.

This is my golden time for creative endeavors. Almost every new project has come at this time of year. My ideas start hopping, and popping like my mother’s old percolator on the counter, and my rice krispies when it was my first day of fourth grade. Now it is my son S’s first day of fourth grade. But his sense is more of a woe is me. Here’s the picture to prove it. But I believe deep down he loves school as much as I did and denied it, as much as his eighth-grade brother K does the same. I know with his social difficulties because of his autism, that a school day is much more difficult for him than for most. The early days are the hardest because of the transition. However, he was outside to meet the bus twenty minutes before it was due to arrive. That says something, don’t you think?

Anyway, I am taking the precious time they are in school and while Baby C naps, to really commit to knocking out this manuscript. I started this project in the fall of 2004, it’s about time. I’ve yet to let it go as so many others, so I really should finish what I started. This one feels like a baby, too. So it’s time I start growing and feeding it well: give it a daily dose of work and play. It’s time for me to get back to the excitement of the first day of school, start fresh while the ideas are hopping. Since I’m in Southeastern Virginia now, I’ll metaphorically kick up a pile of leaves, since I won’t see real ones until a bit closer to Thanksgiving. Wish me luck!

Aug 28

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Cathy: More on multi-tasking moms

Baby C has a new trick. When she is nursing herself to sleep as I type, she now kicks my one typing hand over to where she can hang onto it with a foot and a hand. Now I can’t type at all. But is that really such a bad thing? After all, I should be using this precious time to bond with my little infant, right? But I really want to answer that email/add to the manuscript/compose a blog. So maybe she’ll grow up with an unnatural attachment to PCs. Apparently I have developed one, is that so bad?

Today (Tuesday as I write this to be posted later) is my son S’s tenth birthday. I wrapped his presents, while considering that I am missing half the cake ingredients, our bank accounts are drained from last week’s travels—gas alone was unmentionable—and honey gets paid tomorrow. I had K go out to the van to get the play yard (really, baby holding pen, let’s call a spade a spade). However, two sides refuse to go rigid for us. We tried everything—quite comically. So I put her in it anyway, and just wrapped away, on the floor right next to the pending crisis of collapse, while on the phone with a possible new client; and frantically waving S around to the front door so he can’t see what I’m wrapping by coming in through the slider in the office. Why am I trying so hard to hide these from him now, when he already found them? Because I can, I must. Maybe he didn’t see everything.

My mother-in-law just came back from her morning exercise. She has agreed to go to store for confectioner’s sugar and butter. Phew, one thing down. I don’t have to go to the grocery store and risk overdrawing my humble account. There will be chocolate frosting for the cake. And butter in the cake itself. Now, I just have to make both; switch the laundry from baby C’s pee accident on my bed this a.m., where she thoroughly soaked through every layer from comforter to the mattress pad; make that bed after two rounds each for two loads in the dryer because the sheets and comforter and mattress pad always twist up in knots around themselves and don’t dry on the first round. And there are still the two baskets of yesterday’s clothes unfolded, wrinkling for first week of school.

In the meantime, I’m still thinking about what I’m going to charge this woman for a curriculum consultation for her home-schooled child with special needs; trying to consider lunch and dinner options from what’s in pantry without over–pasta-ing the day, and it’s already 11:49; and I’m pinned nursing again, typing and fending off kicks, while also staring at the box of baby hand-me-downs taking up precious space waiting to be wrapped and sent off to friends expecting a girl any minute now, several states away. K has disappeared behind his locked bedroom door for the fourteenth time today already, completely sealing himself off with his MP3, so I can’t holler up to ask him for help again. S is wandering the house, humming and wanting a little attention and something to do. He wants to ‘sacrifice popcorn’ to the dog, because it’s fun to line up popped kernels on the couch and watch her lick up the row one by one with her long, fast, curly tongue.

I won’t even mention that box of papers that still need to be organized. Oops, too late! Now, baby C is asleep on me, I pray I can put her down without her waking up in the collapsing pen, so I can get started on that cake. Now what’s all that nonsense about scheduling and prioritizing, again?

Aug 21

5 Comments

Cathy: The boys are back in town

My two sons, K and S have been away at their father’s for a solid month. This is the longest I’ve been away from them since, to be honest, FOREVER. I spent most of that time gardening, enjoying baby C and long relaxed walks with the dog, reading or writing by the lake, and sitting in front of my pc writing in my manuscript and ok, I admit it, surfing the web. Without having to constantly break up spats or redirect from tv, videos, video games, I was free to be lazy. I was good at it, too. If I absolutely didn’t have to get out of my chair, I didn’t. If the only interruptions I had were baby interruptions, that’s less than a third of the interruptions I usually have. It sure was quiet around here, too. Even my mother-in-law began to think it was too quiet. My boys make a lot of noise, especially S. An old friend of mine referred to him a number of years ago as ‘the wall of noise’ and she promptly stopped hanging out with us. I guess she didn’t want her kids to learn any new tricks.

Anyway. I missed them terribly, and I got used to the quiet. I wrote, and I enjoyed the freedom to do so. I almost felt like the post-collegiate promise of a writer I felt, well, post-collegiately.

The Coley Clan

The Coley Clan

We spent this weekend visiting my family in Connecticut, showing off the baby, getting grandparents and uncles and cousins time in with the boys, and we all had a great time once the boys were back in my domain. Here’s the whole Coley Clan. My parents, my two brothers and their gangs, and us.

Now we’re home. The house is turned upside down from paint job. All the furniture is in the garage, all the gewgaws, too. The walls and ceiling are beautiful, but boy do we have a lot of work. It’s like moving in all over again. Just two years ago, we moved twice. Once, into the area, then three months later, we moved into this house, and moved my mother-in-law into the house, too. Moving furniture and setting everything up again is not my idea of fun. Not this week, after Friday and Monday were spent, for about 12 hours average each, in the van.

Now we’re home, and the boys were so good while we stayed at my brother’s house. One of the first things that happened here was The Scream From Upstairs. The one that happens several times a day when K won’t let S into his room for some brother time or a lego raid. The one where S is just going to die if K won’t let him in. The one which if I’m being a good mom, I haul my butt out of my chair and go play field manager, break it up, find out how we can best go from here, resolve the conflict and redirect. The one which if I’m being a bad mom, or I’m nursing, I holler up the stairs for quiet, and when they come down, each pleading their case before me re: who started it, whose fault it is, etc, and I say, I don’t care, get away from me, if you can’t work it out, go to your rooms. And they stomp away whining a chorus of ‘it’s not fair’.

Then this afternoon, it took us awhile but we got out the door and went out to the neighborhood pool. I didn’t bring baby C there the whole time they were gone. She loves the water. The boys do, too. After all, they all take after their mother. Boy did we have fun, and it was relaxing. I didn’t write. Until now. Thank goodness baby C slept after the pool. By the way, S came over about six times to interrupt while I wrote this. K did so twice. Or was it three times? I’m so glad they’re home.

Aug 14

10 Comments

Cathy: Prior complaints

love me

Love me, love my mess! And Jen Johnson's Baby Friendly Beads, too! Know how I'm always saying paper org on the Monday Page? Check out the box behind me.

After my prior complaints of not feeling like I am writing enough and my excuses-disguised-as-reasons blogs, I took a couple of pages from Christa Miller’s comments and Suzanne Kamata’s Breakfast interview. I squeezed in a little writing in my novel this week. Granted, it was a little, and I hope a little more today. Baby C was post-nursing soundly sleeping on my lap, and my back was achingly curved toward the keyboard, but I wrote. Exactly as I am doing now.

When Suzanne mentioned that her most creatively productive time of her life came after she had her twins who came bundled up with lots besides being twins, I realized I had to get moving. When Christa said:

I think it’s very limiting to say one “can’t” write a novel in stolen minutes outside tap class. Every time someone says I “can’t” I say, “Oh yeah??” OK, so maybe you can’t WRITE A NOVEL that way… but you can draft scenes. You can outline. You can brainstorm characters. All of it counts.

I drank from her dare-me spirit. Somewhere this week I began to feel if I don’t write now, when will I? Baby C will be graduating from high school when I’m 60 years old. Do I start taking myself seriously about the writing and publishing then? Will I even be around that long? I’ve learned to live in the now so much, especially because of and from aspie S, that I put off an entire lifetime of predictions and goals or the working toward them until I have “me” time. Well, guess what. My boys have been out of town for over three weeks, and what have I done? Not nearly what I thought. The time slipped away from me with so much openness about it. I’m such a procrastinating dreamer. Well if I think about it, isn’t that writing, too?

So I hunkered down. I remembered a movie I love in which Stanley Tucci’s character befriends a ‘great writer’ played by Ian Holm. It’s called Joe Gould’s Secret. If you haven’t seen the movie, my apologies but here’s the spoiler: his secret was he never wrote the book he talked about for years, decades. He died incomplete.

I don’t want to die incomplete. I want to finish this youth novel. I want to finish other projects: a couple of screenplays, another novel, organize a lifetime of poems into submissions and slim volumes. I don’t want all to be said of me at my funeral is that I was a devoted mother. Oh, I want that, too, but I have so much more to say now and I don’t want to take my time for granted anymore. Ok, it’s time to get back to the book. Please, Baby C, stay asleep just a little while longer.

Aug 7

2 Comments

Cathy: My rose bushes

After all these years, I finally figured it out. My creativity works in cycles of gathering times and output times. Last couple of weeks was a wonderful output time. I made significant progress on my youth novel, I blogged, wrote an essay for the weekly contest, and more. My garden even produced a bunch of good eats. This week, I’m darned if I’ve written anything worth mentioning, my tomatoes are still green and the squash bugs have eaten my squash plants from the inside out, rendering the squash garden an ugly open squashy graveyard.

I feel like my rose bushes. Honestly, they look pretty spindly most of the time, but if I let them do their thing in their own time, I pull out of the driveway, down the side street, around the side of my house to a sudden bursting of big deep fuscia blooms, so fragrant I can smell them from the road. Or the vining trellis is covered in mini white blooms, like marshmallows or little gobs of snow in June. Sometimes I feel like I have nothing to say. At other times, the writing pours out so fast and furious, I can’t stop to keep myself from drowning in it. I am so excited and anxious during those few days that it can be overwhelming. Then it stops, just like the blooms fall off the bush.

But then, while the bush may look dead, and I may look like I’m doing nothing, I know those flowers are gathering nutrients from the roots. I know my writing is gathering momentum again. And right now, I think I just may write the next bit in a couple of days from now. I can’t force it, just like I can’t make my rose bushes be covered in blooms constantly, either. Right now, we’re both feeding from deep within.

Jul 28

7 Comments

Cathy: Confession time

treeMy big goal for while my boys are visiting at their dad’s for a month is to work regularly on my youth novel. I moved it from the back burner to the front, I turned on the burner, I even stirred the pot a little. Instead of bringing it to the heady steaming boil, and really adding some spices, I turned the burner to low, and have been simmering instead.

What’s that old saying about the road to Hell? Ah yes, my road looks like this from The Monday Page last week:

this week’s goals: paper org, 2 contests, 1 blog, review and work on novel. at least 1 chapter, per 3 days. 5-10 pages each, kid novel, less ambitious than harry potter. more like a jerry spinelli or sharon creech. complete 2 by end of week. is this unrealistic with nursing baby and mil sitting in office with me?

So I re-read, check. I revised minute typos and grammar, check. I got caught up on storyline, check. Then I stared at one new paragraph about waking up on Thanksgiving morning for about 5 days straight. I bopped around the internet with the excuse that I was looking at how other creative moms squeezed in their stuff around family. I took the dog and baby C for lots of walks. I did bits and pieces of Wreck This Journal. I let myself get peeved about something about some of the time my boys are spending with their father and stewed that for about a day and a half. I took photographs on my walks. See evidence here. I even had some lovely scheduling advice from Miranda on The Monday Page, to help me with my goal. In the end, one paragraph does not exactly equal two five-ten page chapters. Then I remembered:

Baby steps. It’s been a long time since I worked on a large project. It’s been a long time since I actively thought about this particular project. I believe in an earlier blog, I mentioned admitting to myself that my creative production is a very difficult thing to schedule. It happens in its own time, no matter how hard I try to be a good doobie and write my lists, write my intentions and schedule down, what comes out seems to have its own pace and nothing I can do can force it otherwise.

Now the good part is that I have re-read it. I am swimming in the dream of what these characters are doing next. Through this website and the blogs by many of the creative women on this website, I am maintaining an open channel to my creative nature. I have a lot of thanks to give for that. Thank you. Now, let’s see how progress goes this week. I meditatively breathe out the fact that I did not meet expectations, which were after all, only mine. I breathe in the chance to do it again.

And I did complete two contest entries and this blog. My freelance business cards arrived, too. So there. Now, I’ll turn up that burner again. Maybe I’ll even write the serving of the Thanksgiving turkey this week.

Jul 17

6 Comments

Cathy: Art is play

I know that Keri Smith’s Wreck this Journal has already been recommended on this site, but I feel compelled to endorse it as well. What a fantastic reminder that art is not perfection, as museums and literary and music critics would like us to think. I have a lifetime struggle with the idea that what I’m working on has to be perfect. This is probably my greatest obstacle to completing my myriad larger projects.

Upon reading Miranda’s blog entry, the Cecil Vortex interview, and going to Keri’s blogs, I received a wonderful kick in the head, and promptly ordered the book from Amazon.com. The excitement ran through me like electricity when I opened the mailbox to find a neat cardboard box. I ripped it open, flipped through the book, reading this page then that randomly, and began following instructions. Each page may advertise itself as a place for destruction, but really they are invitations to play. And really, isn’t that what all art is? It shouldn’t feel like going to the office.

And that is what happened for me at some point in working on my youth novel. In the beginning, I was all excited, the ideas were popping, I sang and made silly sounds while typing. As I approached page 40, something of the play part went out and I found myself trying to make plot lines work. I asked how am I going to get from here…to there. I knew where I wanted it to go, but not how to get there and something in the writing process died — the creative part. So I shelved it without really meaning to and without ever letting it go in the back of my mind. Then life hit with the proverbial load of poo. Oh, it was all good, and troubling, and hard and fun, but it was a lot of distraction from the writing. Then I felt it was a chore to get back to it.

Well, now, with Wreck in hand, and back in a playful spirit of my own, not for baby or big boys, I am excited again about writing what ultimately is, I hope, going to be a fun book for 9-12 year olds to read. I have relocated a couple of versions of the manuscript with notes and outlines, and the USB version, too. I’m ready to sing, dance my fingers on the keyboard, make leaps and bounds, and play with the writing. Wish me luck and joy! And don’t be afraid to play and let your art/work be imperfect, too. Color outside the lines and see what comes of it.

Jul 8

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Cathy: Writer’s Stone Soup

Last week was a challenging one creatively since we had house guests, a big 4th party, lots of extraneous appointments, lots of back pain to heal and lots of sleep deprivation to go along with it all – thanks to baby C’s night nursing. After a recent burst of creativity, it was a bit of a let down for me, but I am aware that my creativity has a tendency to cycle like that. I think one of my major challenges in creativity is the fact that even if I try to schedule or plot myself or my writing, it ain’t gonna happen that way. My best laid plans often go to waste. The best response for me in that event, is to take a deep breath, exhale, and not give myself another reason to live in the land of stress and guilt. Sometimes, the worst thing I can do is sit down and “try” to write.

However, I still felt creative, because I stayed in touch with writing by – you guessed it – reading. When I don’t read on a regular basis, something besides all the articles on autism, aspergers, etc. every week, my brain starts to atrophy. I get really grumpy, too, and that’s bad for everyone around me. I think if I stay in touch with imagination by reading fiction or poetry, I can hear the voices in the back of my head rise to the surface. Instead of just picking up the cereal box in the cabinet, I am narrating the beginning of something that may never hit the page, but at least I’m having fun thinking, “As she removed the cereal box from the cupboard, she looked again at his body where it lay on the kitchen floor. Waiting for the police to arrive, she poured the corn flakes into the bowl then read the ingredients list slowly before looking once again, at the growing blossom of red around his head.”

Now, to be honest, most of these thoughts never make it to paper. If they do, I edit and re-edit and scribble it out and try it again, half a dozen times. These thoughts do not rise to the surface to make it even this far, unless I am enthralled in someone else’s writing. Right now, I am re-reading for the several-ith time Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which Lisa Damian would recommend right along with me, I’m sure. Anyway, because I am so excited by his writing, I find myself almost in competition with it. Now, I rarely write thrillers of any kind, but I love his language so much, that the thriller aspect of this book leaks out of my head as I entertain myself by swimming in the collective writer’s soup from which we all drink. If we just realize it and know that about each other and ourselves, even when it feels a little plagiaristic, I think we might all end up writing a little better or a little more often. If I can have fun wandering in my head in between moments of engaged writing, it leads me down better paths toward doing so in the moments when I am hit with inspiration like a truck and actually write.

Jun 26

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Cathy: Mothering & creativity put to test

After dropping 9.75-year-old S off at taekwondo camp, I got 13-year-old K into a salon to get the cockeyed layers fixed in his long hair. Warning to other moms: if your son wants long hair, stop taking him to the barber shop, take him to the salon at a few more dollars. Barbers don’t know how to deal with long hair. He’s still pretty, even after haircut. 😉 That’s what I was trying to fix. You know how baby boomers’ parents complained their hippie boys looked like girls? Well, mine really does. Mind you, it took 2 weeks to convince him, after I blurted out at last barber visit, “either grow it for Locks of Love over the summer or chop it off now.” Evidently, that was not my best parenting moment. Thank goodness, baby C slept through this morning’s ordeal after the talk down. I swear K gets suicidal over a haircut. Anyway, mission accomplished, his hair is more skater than girlie now.

I should have eaten more breakfast: by the time we got home, I had a blood sugar crash and nearly passed out. Had the shakes while heating up frozen burritos for a protein boost lunch. Earlier, I took K out to Starbucks (how I wish there were non chain cafes here). We had some good conversation, finally, over coffeecake. As a breakfast, not great, but I really need to make special separate time with him from S on a more regular basis. We had a very interesting discussion about OPEC, supply and demand vs spec issues; and world economies, particularly the rise of a middle class in India and China and how that’s affecting the oil prices, and the fact that the Middle East’s oil supply won’t last forever, as well as oil drilling’s destruction of the Delta in Gulf of Mexico as a contribution to Katrina damages, etc. He’s really a neat guy. If he weren’t so shy about public speaking, I can totally see him run for president. He sure has strong opinions about the one that “ruined his childhood.”

I pass along evidence that they don’t stay little forever. Sigh. Oh wait, thank goodness!

So, the creativity came to play in the above: 1. finding the words and approach to talk him into neatening the mane with scissors. 2. discussion of world economics with intelligent and concerned young citizen on less than 3 hours of consecutive sleep from nursing baby C last night.

Oh, and 3. the inspiration to find the words again, to write down everything that happened for this blog. Hey, it may not be great literature, but it’s a start, and keeps me dipping into the writing well. Besides, finding the right or best words is my business, whether writing them or speaking them. It is especially important, as a parent, to find them, since each kid we have has their own best mode of communication, and we have to be available to their way, not always ours alone. K has always been like speaking with another adult, even when he was 2. With his brother S, I have to be very particular about how I say what needs to be conveyed, and with their sister, baby C, there’s a whole lot of pattycake going on.

Whether I am conscious of it happening or not at the time, I can see how my creative side is more active than I may initially have been aware.

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