More Bloody Days and Other Craziness

trying to relax this way

Here is what I know today.

First, I need wound care. This surgical incision–still bleeding after two weeks–isn’t healing properly. I’m looking forward to getting that out of the way.

After this wound clears up, my future holds a few more medical adventures.

I’ll be tested for Marfan Syndrome. I’ve been suspected before of having this, but now I’ll be properly tested. My mother died at 45 of an aortic aneurysm, and I’m 44. So. Seems I should have my heart checked. If I do test positive, my son will have to be tested as well. That’s the most worrisome thing of this whole mess. And we will both have a lifetime of echocardiograms.

And I’ve got this stage one invasive cancer that apparently is fairly common in women over 60. Women my age aren’t supposed to have it. Because of my, ahem, unusually dense breasts, regular mammograms won’t detect future cancerous growths. I’ve got a lot of MRIs to add to this lifetime.

More immediately, I’ll be having five to six weeks of daily radiation. I’m sure some of you out there have experienced that. I’ll find out what that’s like.

With luck and penny-pinching, we’ll be able to afford all this.

On one of the medical forms I filled out this morning, there was a question about my activities. I wrote that I taught and that I wrote. The oncologist asked me what I wrote. I told her I had a novel coming out this year. She asked me a bit about it and said congratulations. A little while later, she was speaking about my case in a dictaphone type thing, and she said, “The patient is a teacher and a novelist.”

My heart did a little squee. The oncologist said I’m a novelist!

It must be true.

Funny how so many of us–maybe not you though–need to hear someone else say it to make it feel true.

Where does writing begin?

the front of a card made by my mom–a self-portrait

We all have a story why we write or make art or create whatever it is we create. How far back does the story go?

Does my story go back to the first book I fell in love with? (Watership Down) Does it go back to my mother’s love of books? My grandmother’s love of books?

Does it have anything to do with books at all?

Does it go back to rarely being listen to and hardly ever believed?
Does it go back to my dad making up stories about the world around us?
Does it go back to my DNA coming together in just the right way?

Is a writer’s brain wired differently? Or does writing rewire the brain?

Does it go back to trying to remember something I forgot or back to trying to forget what I don’t want to remember? If you retell a story often enough, do you forget which version is true?

How true is your memory anyway?

How did you come to love books? (If you’re reading this I can’t help but think you love books. Am I wrong?)

It can’t be simply because you grew up surrounded by books. If you did. Some people discover books away from their home. They don’t grow up in a house filled with books, and yet they become writers.

I grew up in my father’s house. He had few books. he couldn’t read well. He had a Bible, a few Time/Life books, a dictionary, and a copy of Huck Finn. That was it.

My mother didn’t have many books in her apartment because she had no money for books and moved all the time. But she was always reading library and cheap used paperbacks that she’d sell. Grandmother didn’t have many books because she didn’t like the dust. She hated to dust. She didn’t buy many things because they’d have to be dusted. But she read library books all the time, took me with her, and if a librarian wouldn’t let me check out a book, my grandmother would check the book out for me.

I have hundreds of books. We have so many book cases and still I don’t have enough room for my books. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of them. I don’t notice the dust.

But shelves of books alone won’t make you a writer.

What makes you a writer?

Is that the best you can do?

In high school I spent one year on the yearbook staff. I started the class really excited, and I ended the class hoping never to speak of it again. When my mother saw the section I’d worked on–the advertising section, which I hated but did work hard on–she said, “That doesn’t look very good. That’s the best you can do?”

Or maybe she said, “That’s terrible.”

It’s hard to remember exactly because what I remember best was the pain that went through my chest. My mother wasn’t a mother of false praise.

The ads weren’t good though. I’d struggled with designing the ads. My relationship with the teacher was a disaster since I realized I wasn’t pretty enough to warrant his attention.

Maybe that wasn’t the problem. But I knew the popular boys and girls invited him to their parties and that sometimes he went.

You probably don’t need to be told I wasn’t ever invited to these parties. But I didn’t want to go to their parties. I wanted my mother to tell me I’d done a great job, that I had talent, that I should be an artist when I grew up.

She said (and this I remember), “I wouldn’t show that work to anyone if I were you.”

Twenty-five years later and I still haven’t.

So, last night I sent my “final” draft of my novel to my publisher. (Final until I get edits backs, that is.) All I have to do is wait for her to read the rewrites and tell me what she thinks.

It’s funny how something said to you years ago can stay lodged in your brain for decades. I wouldn’t show that work to anyone.

And here’s me trying to send my novel out for the world to see. (Although, the world isn’t going to see it. A tiny group of friends and some random strangers.)

We’ll see how it goes.

The Past–there’s always more of it.

me a very long time ago

A couple years ago I took to writing small bits of memoir in this space. I didn’t set out to. Those life stories just fell into place–though I’d never had a desire to write a memoir. It was a writing memoir, every story connecting to the writing.

I stopped. Maybe I was repeating myself. Maybe I didn’t have anything interesting left to tell. But I want to revisit those stories and see if their meanings have changed.

I listened to a story on memory research. The researchers concluded that the more you think about a memory, the less accurate it becomes. The only way to have an accurate memory is not to think about the memory.

I sense a paradox.

Or is a conundrum?

You know if you handle something too much, it wears away. Why should memory be any different?

Do you ever find yourself in an argument with someone about what happened int he past? You’re certain you are correct, aren’t you? Sometimes though, just once in a blue moon, I notice something in the memory is out of place. Something has fallen into the memory that shouldn’t have. And I wonder–how did that get there?

Like a memory I have of my mother angry and throwing silverware into a cardboard box. I believed this memory for a long time until I realized that the silverware had never been kept in that particular drawer–even though the memory is quite clear. Well, I would’ve three or four then. And it is a small detail. Perhaps is doesn’t matter.

How accurate do you think your memories are?

The Feminine in the Sky

A smart and talented woman I know wrote this book: The Coming of the Feminine Christ. (Which due to some technical difficulties, I’ve had to unlink to.)

at a church in London

This is not a review; I haven’t read the book yet. And this is not about your religion; I don’t need to know (and let’s not ruin a lovely relationship).

When I was a kid, my mother had a black tee-shirt that read in white script, “God is coming, and she is pissed.” My mother wore this in the 70s in our small hometown.

If she got any grief for it, she never said. (She was used to grief from people anyway.)

But my eight-year-old mind was stunned by that pronoun. She.

Not long after that I found a button in the bowling alley parking lot. It had been run over, but I could still read it. “A woman’s place is every place.” I pinned that button to my purse–my purse that held red rocks and barbies.

Sometimes I ask writing students to imagine how their lives would be different if they’d been born the opposite sex. My female students rarely have trouble with this. <My male students generally look horrified, make a joke about not being gay, and write either they'd go shopping and get married or that their lives wouldn't be different at all.

Sometimes I ask writing students to imagine a favorite character in fiction–and switch that character's gender. What if Harry Potter were Harriet? What if Batman were a woman–and I don't mean Batgirl. What if in Titanic you gave Leo Kate’s role and gave Kate Leo’s? What if James Bond were a woman?

(I’ve also asked them to change a famous character’s race or religion. Once I asked the students to imagine Edward from Twilight as Muslim…oh the expressions.)

Niamh Clune‘s book is not a game or a simple writing exercise. The book expresses a profound belief and way of seeing the world.

What are books about but seeing the world in a new way? (My mother used to say, “If you’re strong in your beliefs, you can always handle encountering someone else’s.”)

I’m looking forward to reading Niamh’s book. Maybe you would too.

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And for folks on Facebook, there is this.

String Theory Childhood

Have you heard the theory that there are countless parallel universes, that at particular moments in your life when one decision was made, another universe began with another you who lived the choice you didn’t make.

dad

What moment in your childhood would change where you are now? Of course, perhaps it the small forgotten decision that made all the difference. You’re alive because you took an extra minute to tie your shoe and so you weren’t on your bike in the intersection when the truck ran the stop sign. But those moments you can never know.

When I look back I think about the day when I was in the 6th grade and my dad chose to believe his wife, my step-mother, instead of me. Perhaps I wouldn’t have gone to live with my mother. If hadn’t gone to live with my mother, she wouldn’t have needed to move. If she’d hadn’t have moved, we wouldn’t have ended up living with her boyfriend. I’d be telling a different story today.

What happened though was that my father said, “I don’t understand why you’d say that. She works hard to make our home nice. I want you to try harder. She’s had a hard life, and she only wants what’s best.”

In the string theory, not only is there a world where I stayed with my father, there is also a world where he and his second wife never got together at all. I like to think a me is out there who experienced a tranquil childhood.

That me probably wouldn’t be a writer.

When I decided to live with my mother, I needed to lie. I left for my summer visitation, and on the way out the door, I kissed my dad’s cheek. “See you in two weeks,” I said.

But in two weeks my dad didn’t see me. He didn’t see me for almost a year because the judge wouldn’t allow it. Maybe there’s a universe where the judge told me to return to my dad and step-mother. I don’t want to know that universe.

Our universe though remains the only one we have access to. It doesn’t do much good to tell a child in trouble–you’re okay in another universe.

Believe your child. When they’re older, they’ll remember the person who believed.

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This is part of a blog hop–Self as Child. Plum Tree works to promote children’s art and stories (please submit!).

Other writers participating: Tonia at Passionfind, C.C.Cole, Deb Hockenberry, and more to come.

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On a side note–I’m writing very short stories for Story-a-Day May! Stories are here. Are you writing?

Maybe You Can Blame Your Parents

Your parents may bequeath you many things… like brown eyes, a house, a fiery personality, an obsession for antiques.

My parents have not left me any of those particulars.

One thing about writing a separate story every day is that you notice what your repeat. In fact, I think I’m repeating that idea. Was that in an earlier post? Maybe. But this time I want to focus on a particular type of character of issue that keeps appearing in my stories. What you think of someone who kept writing stories about bankers? Or construction workers? Or nuns?

Literature students do this all the time, right? They look at a writer’s collection of works and they notice threads, themes, motifs…like bullfighters and rich men who throw too many parties. Next thing you know, you’ve got a thesis.

I noticed a lot of my stories have prostitutes in them.

Why the blue blazes is that?

Of course, marginal characters, people who live on the edge of society, who skirt danger, who make terrible choices, they are more interesting to write about. Sure. But I don’t write about homeless people much.

Sex sells. There is that. But I’m not sure I’ve ever written anything with a market in mind. And I’m not really writing stories like that even if there are prostitutes in them.

When I was 14, I was traveling alone on a plane for the first time. At the Houston airport my mother decided before sending me on my way to give me advice about how to stay out of harm’s way. Almost 30 years later and I can still remember the chairs we were sitting in when she explained to me how certain types of men and women trap girls into lives of prostitution. I’ll spare you the details. But not only did she give a deep fear of strangers, but she very likely if inadvertently ruined years of dating.

What character keeps appearing in your stories? Why is that do you think?

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And so I’ve got part of story number 23 posted. Make of it what you will.

Maybe There Are Ghosts

You may believe in ghosts.

I’ve never seen one. My mother thought she might have seen one–although not on the night she spent in the cemetery. Maybe this is why I’m interested in graveyards. My mother spent the night in one, and how many people can say that about their mother?

Now my mother dead, and maybe she’s a ghost. If so she hasn’t visited me. Her ashes were scattered over a lake in our hometown. Perhaps ashes can’t make ghosts.

Anyway. I’m writing stories about ghosts and graveyards for Story-a-Day. Today’s excerpt is at the imaginary lake.

What do you think about ghosts?

Everyone’s Past

I have finished my rough draft of this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, and I started with the first three chapters and notes my mother wrote before she died. The story is about a relationship she had. A couple years ago I made contact with this man from her past and he wrote me a letter about their relationship. It is odd to try and look back on what I experienced and piece together with what my mother and what he told me. These stories do no match up–but that is real life not a novel. I’m trying to make a novel.

So, here is a tiny piece of the letter he wrote me about two years ago. That would be 2008, and I lived with him and my mother from 1981 to 1982 when I was 12 to 13 years old. I took out a few specific references because I am not truly comfortable sharing other people’s words. But to clarify, this fellow taught a college class on death and dying. It was very popular. He was very popular. And anyway, Mom titled her novel The Death Man, so perhaps that gives you an idea of her thoughts when she started her novel. So. Here is what he wrote about finding out about my mother’s death and the years since.

I cried and cried then, and I often do now. About 13 years ago, doing some research for my NDE group that I have in the ——- area (you remember I was the death & dying guy in ——–), I came across a young woman who claimed to be a medium. I’ve seen these people before, and have been absolutely amazed by them. So, I checked her out. Little did I know that she would tell me all about your mother, and that she would “speak for” your mother who was there in the room. I won’t go into all the protocol I use to check veracity, but I can tell you it was as real as I am. But just to be sure, I sent some of the top ——- scientists to her and a top trial attorney to her. They all came back as amazed as I was. ——- (the medium) and I are now very close friends, and she knows when she can talk to me “for” your mother and when it would just floor me with emotion. But she assures me your mother is with me much of the time, and that we will be together again.

Fifty-thousand words and am not sure what this novel I’ve written from all this is really about.

A Letter from the Death Man

my mother photographed by her boyfriend

A lot of time here has been spent on letters from my mother. Well, here is a portion of a letter to her from her ex-boyfriend, the fellow her novel, The Death Man, is based on (and the novel I am trying to finish).

I wish I could have been around for your graduation. I would have invited myself to Tampa to take you out to dinner. Your determination is only one facet of the marvelous character I see in you. I can’t tell you how much I value and appreciate (within myself–I just don’t talk to other people much anymore) the fact that you and I had the relationship that we had for so long.

Not so foreboding, is it?