Two little girls, two naked savages living in their own wild world, with their dog, named Dog.

One little girl, born in 1927, tormented by the voices in her head and the fear that people will find out about them and lock her up.

Another little girl, born in 1948, uprooted again and again until she has no friends but books, no homeland but her own mind.

One little girl grows up into a charismatic and needy and volatile woman who can't live without applause.

One little girl grows up sullen and solitary, with no social graces. Her mother relies on her and calls her "Sister."  

They are never exactly girls at the same time, though the teenager often feels like the mother of a teenager, her mother.

One woman starts calling herself old, too soon.

One woman grows weary and resentful at being so constantly needed.

One woman dies. 

One woman writes about her mother.

Then the two little wild girls arrive, from somewhere. Can they get to know each other, love each other, forgive each other?

Two Little Girls: a daughter's journey to acceptance, compassion and healing

forthcoming.... once I find a publisher.

But after 20 years, the book is finished. 

 Today I received an enormous compliment ~ and a reminder that once things are out there on the web, they do not go away.

A woman from a Unitarian church emailed me to say she'd run across a Winter Solstice meditation I had published nine years ago on a previous blog, and asked permission to use some of the imagery in a church play she is writing. Of course, I said. I'm honored.

Here's the link. A Meditation for Winter Solstice     

            

                                                                                                                                                            

Using what I have - and getting paid for it

The Sunlight Press  

The Sunlight Press recently published my essay on my writing practice as patchwork "Using What I Have"

The Sunlight Press is a lovely online daily journal of literature and art, truly a ray of sunshine in my inbox.  I am proud & grateful to have my work published there. They even paid me.

Check it out!

Pandemic Patchwork

Having several high-risk factors (age, diabetes, damaged respiratory system), I should not expose myself to any chance of getting the virus - and to tell the truth, as a writer, with a strong natural antisocial streak, I have been perfectly happy to stay home. I go out only to stroll around my neighborhood and nearby parks, camera in hand, wearing a mask and gloves (for touching handrails of walk-sign buttons) and keeping my distance. Seeing it through my camera lens has made me more and more fond of the small maritime city where I've lived for thirteen years, with its views of mountains and water in several directions.

Confession: I do not live alone. I'm by no means sure I'd be so contented if I did. My heart goes out to friends who do live alone and previously led active social lives. My husband and my sister take great care of me, and save me from having to shop.
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However, they go out to work, both of them, heroically, in retail. My sister is under so much stress from serving the not-always-grateful public that she hides in her bedroom most of the time she's home, emerging only for meals and for reruns of Star Trek  and The Office.

I have all the time and solitude in the world for writing now, right?  Right? So I'm getting my big book finished.... Right?

Wrong.

Somehow, to my surprise, I do not seem to be very productive, and I hear this (via the press, social media, and Zoom chats) from many other writers and artists of all varieties. There's something almost stifling about a lack of structure to my days.

There's also the distraction factor. My chosen distractions are, naturally, useful and important: I sew masks - increasingly, as I run out of large pieces of suitable fabric, patchwork masks - and I bake bread. When I announced on Facebook that I was running out of yeast, a woman I barely know except on Facebook brought me a jar of her sourdough starter, wearing mask and gloves, and now I try new varieties of sourdough bread every few days, from cinnamon raisin to black rye to pizza.

But one cannot live by bread alone, no matter how tasty. Thanks to my online writing critique group and our daily "Pen-demics" (pandemic writings), I've found myself writing poems. They may not be very good, and they are almost as much a distraction from my big book as the raisin bread, but they're writing all the same. In a time when it's easy to be lazy and unfocused, they use and stretch my writing muscles.

Even better - well, no, not better, but still, a good thing - I am making the effort to submit pieces to literary magazines. Not the big important ones (not expecting Granta or Ploughshares to publish my work any time soon), but a lot of smaller journals, some online, some print. Along with all the thanks-but-no-thanks, or nothing at all, in response, I've gotten one acceptance so far, and if I keep it up, I believe I'll get more.

My darkly comic (to me) short story "After the Funeral" has just appeared in online literary magazine  Every Day Fiction .  They classify it as "horror" which I find startling but amusing.  Hope you'll check it out.

Accessibility matters.

Accessibility matters. I said that in a post a few years back, and oh! am I living it now!

I've queried at least two dozen agents in the last two years, and never got so much as "I'd like to see more" nibble. I've applied for grants. I've requested people I see as belonging to my target audience to read some of the book - and I've been forced to conclude that the first part of the book as it stood was just too offputting, even though I'm certain that they would love the story - or more accurately, the linked parallel stories - once they got into it.

Instead of giving my potential readers an easy way into my book, I've been presenting them with a great big heavy old door,  above a far-too-high doorstep, and with a padlock holding it shut, and no key for the lock. It's needlessly ornate, and it's unfriendly.

In other words, it's inaccessible.


Where I have been piling up explanations, I should be offering narrative so enthralling that readers cannot help being drawn in, wanting to know what happens next. The explanations, all the hows and the whys, I now see, must come later - when the reader is more likely to want them.

The beginning of the book, my doorway, should open straight into light and air and movement.

The story should run free into this open space. It should fly, and draw the reader's eyes after it.

The unexplained aspects of the narratives, both the realistic and the fantastical, the gaps in the readers' knowledge, unnoticed at first, will gradually become intriguing. Readers will find themselves becoming curious, trying to fill in those gaps, striving to piece together the scraps of information I've offered.

Then and only then, when the reader has begun to develop an appetite for the hows and whys, is it time for me to give them.

So that's what I'm working on now.

in the throes of my magnum opus

Hello, dear readers.

It has been a while, hasn't it?  I've been away wandering, up strange and beautiful roads, exploring the notion of my own death.

When I was lonely, unhappy, or fearful as a child in North Carolina, Virginia, and later Indiana, I often dreamed of alpine meadows in bloom.

I did not consciously remember that I had ever seen such a place, but when I was four, I lived for one year in Oregon. It was a halcyon time of love and hope, contentment and peace, a brief era that was followed by years of grief, anger, and instability.

When I saw the North Cascades again fifteen years later, and recognized my dream landscape, I realized that in my subconscious mind those meadow had come to symbolize paradise.

So, I mentioned Death. In the earliest hours of Friday the 13th, 2015, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. In April of last year, two thirds of my right lung was removed. Since then, there is no sign of any recurrence of cancer, and I am hopeful that there will be none. I quit smoking myself more than twenty-five years ago; most of the damage, I believe, was done in my childhood. But a diagnosis of cancer, followed by a major surgical intervention, does lead one to thoughts of mortality.

Two Little Girls is my life's work. As I went under the anaesthetic last spring, I thought, If I die without finishing that book, I will feel really stupid!

So there have been no romance stories, no new pop fiction from me, and thus no online publishing, since my last Christmas story. There might be some new stories soon, though, because my vision  of Two Little Girls is clear now, though there's still a helluva lot of work to do, and I believe I can afford the more frivolous work as a break now and then.

Being accessible vs. "selling out"

Besides writing pop fiction (sweet romance, magical romance, and ~ my latest foray into something new ~ spicy sci-fi romance!) I've been at work for more than a decade on a big, sprawling cross-genre work that takes an oblique look at the nature of the mother-daughter bond by examining my late mother's life and our relationship through biography, memoir, and fantasy.

In a recent email conversation with another writer, who's working on a series of mysteries that incorporate magical realism, we talked about making our work understandable. She said, "I am on the precipice currently" about making the novel "more reader friendly/sellable, or something I am proud of as different and unsellable."  In response to some critique she'd received, she'd "tried simplicity [but] I didn't like it."  She still runs into passages she'd rewritten for this purpose, she said, and I got the impression that they strike a false note for her. She concluded, "I know there is a compromise somewhere..."

This poem about Older Women by local poet
Afrose Ahmed seems to fit here.

This is something I've struggled with too. I believe that there is a compromise possible, and one that's ultimately necessary unless one is not just writing for oneself. 

Accessibility matters.

It's too easy for us literary writers to get on our high horses and equate salable with selling out. Frankly, I see no virtue in being deliberately unsalable. We are not nihilistic youths who glory in the incomprehensibility of their wails of adolescent angst. We're mature women, women of the world in the best sense, whose writing flows from the well of our rich and deep experience of life. 

Writing something in a deliberately different way because that's the best way you see to tell your story?  I'm with you there one hundred percent - as long as it's also accessible to your intelligent readers. Every good book is ultimately a partnership between writer and reader. If you are writing something unusual, in content or in format or both, you want readers who are willing to try something new, and also willing to maybe work harder than usual to understand what they're reading. Those readers are worthy of your respect.

Accessibility has little to do with being sellable, and nothing to do with being publishable (anyone can publish anything these days). It's about communication. If my purpose in writing a book is to communicate something of my vision to others, then I do my best to make sure that those others I want to reach can follow what I am telling them. I don't oversimplify; I don't dumb anything down, but I try always to remember that the reader does not have the same insight into my vision that I have.  It's my job to convey the vision to the reader's understanding.

This is where critique is vital. Whenever I have to explain what I've written to my critique partners, then at least some of my other readers are bound to be confused by it too ~ and I won't be on hand to explain it to them. 

So it's up to me to do everything I can, short of oversimplifying, to avoid confusion. Sometimes it's just a question of tweaking the word order, or of making new word choices, but it's very hard work! Writing a romance story is a stroll in the park compared to that labor.