Failure to Launch Flash Fiction

     Ok, here's a good example of me screwing up. Something I do with alarming regularity. I wanted to enter this writing contest; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105660765. Liked the concept, wouldn't take too much time, had an idea about the photo right away, and of course, I'm a big fan of NPR. So I got the story written in plenty of time ... but failed to get it submitted before the end of the month deadline. I will just offer it up to all of you now. Please critique at will. This was an ekphrastic exercise, so you have to take a peek at the link to see the photo I was responding to.

In Peace

     He liked this spot. It was rather peaceful sitting near the iron grate where the warm air could reach him as he sprawled on the edge of the sidewalk trying to stay out of people's way. His head lolled side to side as if he might find a comfortable spot in the concrete wall just under the plate glass window of the coffee shop, and he was both comforted and tortured by the smells from the shop that made his stomach come alive. Some days he could get so relaxed here that he could remember, way back, before the drugs, before he went to Iraq, way back to when he'd been a different man. When he had a family and a home. He closed his eyes, and tried to return to that time, and his favorite thought of all, to remember his little sister, and how she had always looked up to him. His foot fell to the side as his happy little recollection softened into a dream, and a little spittle escaped the corner of his mouth and meandered into his messy beard.
     A woman inside the coffee shop, on the opposite side of the wall he lay against, could no longer control her disgust. The skinny latte and scone she had ordered could not be called inexpensive, and she fully expected to enjoy them and her magazine in peace, without having to watch some filthy vagrant wasting away outside the window. She got up and demanded the barista notify a manager immediately.
     "Something needs to be done to clean up the scenery on the street for all of the patrons," she implored. With her finger pointing outside in an angry salute, she seethed, "That is not the America that my brother went to war for," thinking of the beautiful young soldier she hadn't seen in ten years.

Golly Lolly, I love adverbs so very much

     Almost any word ending in -ly is an adverb. They modify/describe verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They "want" to be verbs but aren't. Poor little things.
     Peruse these gorgeous examples:
abruptly; wickedly; lightly; delicately; wittingly; endlessly; eternally; vibrantly; firmly; fruitfully; wearily; smartly; fervently; vainly; financially; willfully; widely; importantly; cheerfully; weirdly; delicately; wrongfully; wholeheartedly; delightfully.
      My most recent writing workshop was a lot like an intervention. Picture me, perched so uncomfortably in the hot seat while the assembled group of well intentioned so-and-so's lavished me with honest appraisals of the toll my words had taken on them. The consensus seemed to be that I am, indeed, an addict, an adverb addict.
     Like any self protecting user, with my own needs and pleasures put first, I both deny and justify my habit. Adamantly.
      Adverbs are lovely. Terribly important. Almost always useful. How can I ever get along without them? How?
      Adverbs can tell four things: Manner (How was it done?), Place, Time, and Degree.


•'John smiled uneasily.' Uneasily shows the manner of how John smiled.


•'I eat dinner here'. Adverbs of place are often confused with nouns. 'Here' tells where he eats dinner.


•'I watered the plant yesterday'. Again, be careful not to confuse adverbs of time with nouns. 'Yesterday' tells when he watered the plant.


•'He is very mean'. 'Very' tells the degree of his meanness.
 
      I feel very uneasy about the dislike for adverbs shown there. When I was a kid our English teachers taught us that adverbs made our writing more intersting. Even on Saturday mornings my cartoons were interjected with this little diddy that I can still sing;
     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wnT8iiR8w
     Now my writing teachers say adverbs make my writing less interesting. That I need to rehabilitate myself. Repent and reform. Golly, giving up things I love makes me cranky. Very cranky.
 
   

Writing tips from The Guardian

     On Saturday The Guardian published a lengthy article with a great many authors giving their tips to all of us wannabees about howtobee. It is so lengthy I decided to pick my one favorite to share with you. That proved to be rather difficult, but I chose Margaret Atwood since I am a fan, and her tips made me smile. Some of them I actually do!

Margaret Atwood
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

But then I couldn't resist including the words of Roddy Doyle, his advice so sensible;


Roddy Doyle
1 Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph ­–
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.
6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".
7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.
8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.
10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

Then I just couldn't exclude Helen Dunmore's advice, her closing words as eloquent a reason to write as I have ever heard, and what I want to remember.

Helen Dunmore


1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.
2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
3 Read Keats's letters.
4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
5 Learn poems by heart.
6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
9 Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".

We could go on like this all day, but if we are reading all of their tips about writing, we're not getting much writing done... If you do want the full text it's at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

Until She Spoke ...

          It is worrisome to me that Tiger Woods has more staying power (and I don't mean that in the good way) than the devestation in Haiti. At least it appears that way in the mainstream news which is unfortunately what keeps issues in the minds of many Americans. Maybe Tiger should take a couple boat loads of his bucks to Haiti and show us what it really means to make nice.
       Anyway, in honor of Haiti and Black History Month I read this poem at a public reading last night. It was written by Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, somewhere around 1892. I also read a poem of Haiti that I wrote, and one each by Felix Morriseau Leroy and Patrick Sylvain, two Haitian poets I've been studying. Performing at a local event called BeatNite with improvised musical accompaniment by a large band to an appreciative audience is a writer's delight. To be able to share stuff like this makes it really meaningful to me.

Until She Spoke

Until she spoke, no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.
Until she spoke, no Christian nation had given to the world an organized effort to abolish slavery.
Until she spoke, the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks,
greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, ploughed in peace
the south Atlantic, painting the sea with the Negro's blood.
Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Chrstian nations of the world,
and our land of liberty and light included.
Men made fortunes by this infernal traffic, and were esteemed as good Christians,
and the standing types and representations of the Savior of the World.
Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit dumb.
Slave traders lived and slave traders died.
Funeral sermons were preached over them, and of them it was said
that they died in the triumphs of the Christian faith and went to heaven
among the just.

Isn't it wonderful what words can do?

Speaking of Love, from Greece to Lotusland

Sharing another blog today - I just loved everything about this post from The Poetry Foundation blog. See what you think. As a bonus it includes a link to hear the spoken word performance at the opening ceremonies of the winter olympics, with an interesting bit of backstory. Speaking of Love, from Greece to Lotusland

Purple Prose

      In honor of Saint Valentine's Day I thought I'd blog about purple prose. I am studying it (the phrase is new to me) mostly because I think I need to. I am pretty sure that I have a tendency towards the purple in my writing. I suspect that purple is the mark of an amateur.
     Purple prose is a term of literary criticism that is attributed to Horace. That's going back quite a while! Basically it means that the writing is over-the-top. Horace was saying that it (a poem) was overly ornate and ostentatious, using language to draw attention to itself. That means it is a cheap and manipulative device used by a writer to try to control, rather than earn, a specific response from the reader. Romance writing is most often accused of being purple, but I have even heard Cormac McCarthy's work described as being overdone which surprised me. Obviously, there is a market for purple prose, if that's the kind of writing you want to do. Either way, it does seem it is something that we all must attend to, but how...?
     In surveying the scads of sites on the web offering writing advice (I welcome your advice) I've come up with this basic bottom line;
it is all about revising, re-reading your work (probabaly silently and aloud) and noticing which phrases impress you. There will be shades of purple in all first drafts, and that is fine. But when proofing a draft, notice where sentences are doing little gymnastic feats. If they impress you, they are probably more about you, then the story. It's one of your darlings, and most likely you need to kill it.
     We should all pick a story right now to read and revise. Have a bloody Saint Valentine's Day massacre! How many darlings can you kill? One sweet suggestion I came across was to save all of you dead darlings in a folder where you can visit them and love them for ever and ever. That can make the sword mightier than the pen.

Heading into the storm ...

for this lecture. Dr. Gawande has had lots of short stories in The New Yorker that you can find on the web if you enjoy his writing. If you have any interest in health care you almost certainly would. I am quite intrigued with his latest book, and probably won't be able to resist picking up a copy today. I read a couple of reviews of it yesterday that were quite impressive.
http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2009-10/images/news/gawande.jpg

First Loves ....

A charming writing prompt; first loves. What would you say? What would I say? Here is what the always charming Billy Collins had to say;
http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/first_loves/first_loves_billy_collins/

For Nikki G. (and me)

    I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a writer. I mean really be a writer. Especially during that period of perhaps infinite time beween when you declare you are a writer and the rest of the world concedes that it is true. There is a transitional period, a hazing of sorts, where one dabbles. Like a swimmer from the city. You've come to the lake, you like the scenery, you have on your suit, you want to go in, you've been planning to do this for a long time, you know inside of you somewhere is the instinctual skill to at least keep yourself from drowning if you were to dive in, and you even have the gumption to feel that, if the circumstances were just so, you could traverse these waters with the grace of the little minnows therein. But, for quite awhile you stand ashore. You dabble. Sticking your toes in. Checking out the effect of your little experimental ripples. Looking around to see if you can  enter the waters unobserved. That was me.
      I finally took the dive in just recently. Decided I didn't need to wait for the rest of the world. That led me to thinking about what kind of writer I want to be. What is the shape or form of a mature woman writer. One that I would care to be.
     Last night I got my answer. I went to see/ hear Nikki Giovanni speak at my alma mater, UNH as part of an annual celebration for Reverend King. No quiet, low key poetry reading of soft and soothing verse. Giovanni is a truth teller first and foremost. I have always been that. What I have lacked, and what Giovanni does not, is the kahunas to share her truth, to state it unequivocally, unashamedly, and without hesitation or back pedalling. When she slammed President Obama last night I was a bit stunned and saddened, but also impressed. It took courage. To be a real truth teller takes great courage.

     For Nikki G. (and me)
     Cowards crowd the shore,
     may even look tough
     kicking sand on each other
     flexing perfect forms,
     writers jump in
     sink or swim.

Here is a link to Goivanni's website, and a view of a reading similar to what I heard last night.

http://nikki-giovanni.com/trainridesqt.shtml
   

My newspaper column;

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20100203-LIFE-2030303

ATribute from Paper Cuts

     I've read a lot of tributes to JD Salinger over the last few days. I think this is the one that I liked best. In part, because I have the feeling that he would have liked it.
www.papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/farewell-jd-salinger/

Book-end Bummers

     Could have written a fairly decent recap of a productive week. I really did get a lot of work done. But I guess I got a little side-lined by my two big fat (actually they were quite brief so I'm exaggerating for effect) rejection letters. They are a matched set. Identical. Form rejection notes. I've gotten plenty of these in the past, and usually they don't really bother me. But the one from Yankee that was about an adaptation of my research paper on Peyton Place was tough to take. I had written that article especially for that magazine, worked so very hard on it, and thought it had a decent chance of being accepted.    Bummer.
     I am going to send it on elsewhere though.
     And here we go again ...

Another New Start

Began a new class last night. A writing workshop. I have a strong inkling that I'm going to love it as much as I did the last one. Driving to Cambridge can be a drag, but being there is exhilirating. I've been working on my first writing assignment most of the day. I'm unsure that I'm beginnning it well. I think I'll post the opening pararaph and see if my readers might share their thoughts;

I hate to say I was naïve. I hate to say I was uninformed. But maybe I was. Still, when you come out on the other side of any traumatizing life event, you can be either proud or ashamed of the way you rode it out. I tell this story with pride. Not the natural pride of a mother for her baby, or a bride for her gallant groom, or even for me - an individual woman with an individual story to tell. I tell it with the pride of millions of mothers who have given birth, alone and frightened, without comforts, kindnesses, or competent assistance, and have done so willingly, to be a part, a small simple part, of the primal surge forward that is procreation.

Aint I A Writer?: Sunday Confession

Aint I A Writer?: Sunday Confession

Sunday Confession

Well, I'm pleased as punch to say I don't have to confess to being a lackluster slacker this week. It was a wonderful week to be a writer! I got much more done than usual, and am not likely to repeat what I can list off now. The really big news is that I had a meeting with a potential publisher where I submitted not one, but three manuscripts! What you need to understand is that all of those had been in the works for years, I just happened to finish up with them now. One of them, a children's book with photographs that I took, I have been working on for seven years. He didn't say how long before I will hear anything and so far I haven't heard from him. I also sent off a query letter to a national magazine but haven't heard anything about that either. I did finish rewriting my research paper to submit to Yankee Magazine, and will be sending it out this coming week. For some reason, I became unstuck with it, as I had been complaining about last week, and was able to finish it up rather easily. I read two of my poems at public venues, and listened to many other poets read theirs. Lastly, I interviewed the subject of my next column, though haven't gotten it written yet. And now I am going to start working on a poem for Haiti. I invite you to join me in this worthwhile writing exercise; http://www.poets4haiti.blogspot.com/.

Peering in on Peer Support

Tonight I am going to spend an hour or two in my local independent bookstore listening to some of my fellow poets (and friends) read their work. We are all published together in a recently released anthology of poetry called The 2010 Poets' Guide to New Hampshire: More Places, More Poets, edited by John-Michael Albert (2009, by The Poetry Society of New Hampshire). I think these little diversions, while they may serve as distractions, are actually very important to the work of a writer; sharing your work, listening to other writers share theirs, checking out new books, and supporting your local independent book seller in all that they do. Each in its own, immeasureable way, has contributed to my growth as a writer of both poetry and prose in countless ways. There is of course a balance that must be found. How many diversions can one career support? Through practice I think I am finally starting to get good at finding that balance. Tonight I actually don't want to go out. Im tired from a hard workout this morning, it's a stormy cold winter mess outside, and of course I have a ton of work to do here, but I will go anyway. It's a simple Golden Rule thing, we have to support each other, or none of us stand tall.

Early Confession

I feel like I got a lot done this week, and have been working very hard, but didn't actually get any writing done at all, except for blogging. Does this count? I did though, get some other big stuff accomplished. I got both of the blogs networked, (whatever that means, I'm not quite sure yet). I outlined a new novel (yes, I know the other one isn't done yet) that I am immensely excited about, and have the basics of where I want to go with it already worked out. Have been doing a lot of research for it to flesh out the outline. It's going to require a lot more research (historical fiction), but it definitely has legs. Not all ideas do. This one survived the week of hard-core wrestling standing strong. Now the big question is; do I abandon the old unfinished story I've been toiling with for a couple of years? Set it aside for now? Toss it in the fire where perhaps it belongs?
Also got some work done preparing manuscripts to send to a potential publisher next week. That has actually been in the works for a hell of a long time, and should be going out next week.
But right now I'm shutting shop down ~ going away for the long weekend. Really do hope rest and relaxation is involved, but am also going to be doing something I've never done before, and am not likely to ever do again, so I'm probably going to write about it...obliged to you for hearing me.

A word cloud I created about things I love

Sunday Morning Confession

     Well, I wanted to write this blog, in part, so that I would be held accountable as a self employed writer, and I know that requires a regular honest appraisal of my accomplishments, or lack thereof. I'm thinking that a weekly confession should suffice. Self flagellation to follow.
     I guess it is rather apparent that much of my time and energy in the last week was devoted to establishing my blogs. (The other is t2fish.blogspot.com.) I'm fine with that. I think it should require a lot of work at the beginning, that it won't be so time consuming in the future, and I'm pretty happy with the way it is going. I am actually enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would, but I really do love all aspects of being a writer.
     Other than that, didn't get much done. Let's see; ... I got my grade report back from my first graduate class at Harvard Extension School (after an agonizing wait), and spent a lot of time reviewing the report (I got an A) and the 20 page paper I had written. I am currently reworking the paper to submit to Yankee magazine, but didn't get far, feeling a little stuck with that right now. I have done a lot of networking this week, not all of it of this nature. I've had a couple of conversations with a woman in a neighboring town who wants me to write something of a historical nature which I am interested in doing, and another with an artist/ friend who I've asked to work with me on a broadside I want to do of one of my poems. Both of those projects are still in the planning stages. My column came out on Wednesday and I always spend a couple of hours following up with it when it does. And this week was the monthly Portsmouth Poetry Hoot where I read a poem, and whenever I do that, I spend a fair amount of time revising the poem both before and after the reading. I consider the two hours I spend there listening to other poets important to my development as a writer too. Last night I attended a memoir reader's theatre salon given by Susan Poulin (a popular Maine blogger) whose current work with hospice is of interest to me and my Prickly Pear Poetry Project so that was part work / part pleasure.
     And I consider reading an important part of my career too, and it can be very difficult to find time to read, at least for me. This week I've been trying to get a head start on my next class as the reading requirement looks relatively heavy, and the first book is Freud's case history of Dora, which I am finding predictably frustrating (kind of infuriating really) to get through.
     In retrospect, it seems like a fair amount of work, and on the other hand I got in a lot more exercize this week. .. can I get any credit for that?

A Poem

Just found out that my Christmas poem was published on another blog, (along with a photo of me my son took a couple years ago), so am posting it here too;
http://poetryandpoetsinrags.blogspot.com/2009/12/great-regulars-by-tammi-j-truax.

I write a column

called Tea for Two for my hometown newspaper appearing monthy since Oct. 2005. In it I tell the life story of a local citizen of long standing, incorporating their views of how our region has changed over the course of their lives whenever possible. I have always believed that we can learn so much by listening to our elders and try to share that with my column. It also reflects my love for local history. There is an archive at Seacoast online.
Here is the latest;
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20100106-LIFE-1060303
Obliged to you for hearing me.

A Bit of Backstory

      Writing is my second career, but I think it may have always been my calling. I remember declaring that I was going to write about a female Sherlock Holmes at about age eight. I didn't do it. Instead I began internalizing reasons not to write. I resisted, sometimes fought it, for I was living my life (both personally and professionally) to please other people more than myself. My first career was working with young children and families, but even within that field I was always most drawn to reading, writing and publishing, for children, and I specialized in children's and family literacy. Children's literature is still a passion of mine.
     A few years back, during what I call my midlife shakedown, I decided I wasn't going to live my life for others anymore, that I needed to start being more authentic. (In my defense I'd like to say that my shakedown wasn't just about turning 40, but also marked by brain surgery for me, the sudden death of my husband, his mom, and mine, and a move to a new town, but you'll have to come back to read about those things).
     So suddenly, I was writing. At first in the closet. At first way in the back of the closet. The transition has not been an easy one for me. I struggle as much with the craft as with the identity. The lack of a steady income seems to invite the lack of acceptance from others. I have made a fair amount of progress in the few years that I've been calling myself a writer, but I know I have some distance to cover still. This blog will be about me finding my way.  Like an industrious little ant on a great big beautiful peony ~ I'm not quite sure what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I just know that I must do it, that I need to do it, and maybe, just maybe, the big fat flower needs me to do it.
     And it smells good. It seems this is where I'm supposed to be.