rocks

What do you do when the rock that holds you above the water

only has room for you? 

Sorry child, you're all grown up - 

no room on the rock.

But look, I can reach out - 

I can throw small rocks

your way.

Build your own castle with them.

Just not here.

You can't stand here.

---

Written for the imaginary garden with real toads.
This has been a Flash Fiction 55. 

family: I love you

From my handfasting with Archer.
We were lucky to have Zoya Greene do the photography for us.
As you can tell, she's amazing.

This summer I went to two weddings.
One of them was my own.
The other was my cousin's.
Both of them were wonderful.

Yes, my mother's husband literally ruined (for me, my husband, and my son) the family reunion-type events that were to follow the cousin's wedding, by throwing a temper tantrum about my style of hospitality. I and my small family of three were excluded from further festivities. But he's my mother's husband, her rock, so I'm focusing on what I've learned from the experience: I'm ready for my family to start acting like the people I believed they were when I was a child. And, they are not ready. And finally: I still love them. So I'll take my lessons and move on.

I'm not really, completely moved on yet, but I'm working on it.
I have to. If I don't move forward, the depression will kill me.
And my small family isn't ready for me to go yet.

This is me, moving on.
With my small family.
And yes, with my mother.
I don't know, yet, what the mechanics of ignoring her husband's existence will look like.
But I'm giving it my best shot.

Because if I were to pay attention
- especially to his power over my place in my big family -
the depression might kill me.
And I still have work to do.
A child to raise.
A child who will always find sanctuary with me, regardless of any other human being in the world.

Moving on.
Always, moving on. 

[book review] Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Dinty W. Moore's Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals is not really an advice book. Nor is it really about love or cannibals, although there is advice in there to be gleaned, and he does mention both love and cannibals. He also talks a lot about Michel de Montaigne, an essayist Dinty seems to admire. It's really a string of confessions about writing and living as a writer, and it's really very funny. It's also quite short, and the high ratio of illustrations mean you're turning pages rather more rapidly than usual.

The book has an index, which I only mention because it helped me just now, when I couldn't remember how to spell Michel de Montaigne, but I'm not sure why it's there, except as a joke. Maybe it's a joke. 

More on this later. 

[book review] Viper Wine

"Venetia Stanley was the great beauty of her day, so dazzling she inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting. But now she is married, the adoration to which she has become accustomed has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby—explorer, diplomat, philosopher, alchemist— refuses to prepare a beauty tonic for her, insisting on her continued perfection.

Venetia, growing desperate, secretly engages an apothecary to sell her “viper wine”—a strange potion said to bolster the blood and invigorate the skin.  The results are instant, glorious, and addictive, and soon the ladies of the court of Charles I are looking unnaturally youthful. But there is a terrible price to be paid, as science clashes with magic, puritans rebel against the decadent monarchy, and England slides into civil war.

Based on real events and written with anachronistic verve, Viper Wine is an intoxicating brew of love, longing and vanity, where the 17th and 21st centuries mix and mingle in the most enchanting and mind-bending ways."

This book has the potential to address the ways vanity and the exultation of youth corrupt the human mind and rot our social structures from inside the individuals. - 12 May 2015



Clearly, it took me a loooooong time to get through halfway through this book.
I'm still not done with it, really. I've written my review based on what I've read so far, and I feel free now to read it at a more leisurely pace.

More leisurely than taking two months to read 200 75 pages? Yes.

I haven't been able to read much this summer, and this book takes more energy than I've had anyway. It's not for the lighthearted.

You may have noticed that I haven't written much either.

I took a hiatus from my computer.

I'm probably back. Mostly.

~~~

My review of Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre follows:

My first thought, after reading the description of the book, was that Viper Wine had the potential to make a powerful statement about the social and psychological damage done by the beauty standard. The false value of aesthetic beauty, the judgment of worth by beauty, the patriarchal grading of women by their relative beauty, the competition that arises and demands unnatural measures to achieve "beauty" - all of these damage ourselves and our society, and this book could show us how.

 I looked at the table of contents. The chapter titles sounded like short stories ("A Discourse Between Brothers") or poems ("Moonbeams Are Cold and Moist"). The include modern pop culture references ("Fame" and "Yellow Submarine"). Together, they hinted at a poetic, ornate, satirically flowery style of writing. They were right.

 There is a prologue, and Epilogue, and 38 chapters. There are about 400 pages of text. Large pages. There is also a Bibliography (selected), and a list of illustrations. This surprised me. I mean, yeah, it says it's based on real events, but that phrase gets tossed about quite a lot with very little research to back it up. Not so in this case. Perhaps it's because this novel, this fictionalization, was written by a journalist. But frankly, calling Hermione Eyre (surely that's a pen name?) a journalist after reading any of this book at all, feels so incomplete as to be false. This woman is an Author. She has crafted what is perhaps a masterpiece.

 I took a peek at the author photo on the back flap, curious about the face that made Viper Wine. The woman in the photo challenges the viewer and does not seem above leaping out of the photo for a fist fight - if only to place bets on the winner.

 I wondered, before beginning the journey that has been Reading The Book, whether there could be a connection between the ornate writing style and the theme of social beauty concepts, especially in the damage those concepts do; is the writing style another layer of satire? Now that I'm halfway into the book, I feel it must be intentional. Whatever the case, it works.

 Seriously, don't let the ornate style turn you away before giving this book a try. It isn't over the top, and somehow it manages to not be pretentious. The story is woven by its prose. Every thread is important. Every word addresses the characters in the most human terms and stabs at the modern feminist's foes. The text describes the patriarchy without subscribing to it. If nothing else, this story is a feminist victory.

In the end, I ranked this book at four stars instead of five only because it is not broadly accessible; the average reader will have difficulty with some of the style devices - both the overall ornateness and the insertion of radio static (no really; I don't know how else to describe it), which is original and interesting, but hard to 'get' at first. 

(I ranked the back cover copy fairly low because books that only list their praise on the back annoy me. Give me a reason to open it, not sound bites.)

my happy poem

On our last day of Writing Class, actually called Freewrite I, we were asked to respond to one of two prompts:

"A recipe for happiness"

or

"When I rule the world..."

It just so happened that the table we sat around was strewn with rubber stamps and colored pencils and ink pads. They were preparations for a later activity, but I'm not one for waiting, when there are colors to be used.


Here's what I came up with.

~~~



Happiness is
perfect stamps
of soaring butterflies
and leafy bent old trees;

Happiness is a smiling sun
shining
on a rubber block

that I
can stamp all over your mopey face -
there'll be none of that
when I rule the world.










~~~

Shared with the real toads. Check out their imaginary gardens for much awesomeness!

illumination

by Rowena Morrill, via

Tall candle's flame
Stilled by the child's hand;
Stories life in smoke:
   each twist of tragedy,
   each curl of comedy,
   each faded resolution,
is time's caress
on the child's cheek,
but those young eyes
pierce blankly
in stout dissolution.




~~~
The image is of a painting by Rowena Morrill, and was the writing prompt; the poem is my response.

About the painting: on the art card that served as my writing prompt, it was named "Candlelight Visions," and it looked as it does in the image above. I did a google search for the painting (so that I could link it in this post, giving credit and all) and found that it is a book cover for "Ghosts I Have Been," by Richard Peck. 

the General's pen

The sleek black enamel was long worn from the grip. Finger-burnished brass from underneath showed the hand's once-hidden habits. The high ungrasped end, where the enamel remained unscathed, reflected a heavy-jowled face in miniature. Squinting, the face could discern its own features. Grey squirreled eyebrows nearly hid the black eyes; That frown seemed deeper, more terminal than before.
A small bell rang in the hall. The office's double doors parted with a thin complaint.
Business, he thought, was ever at hand. He laid the pen down and stood to receive his guest.
The man who entered - the man who must be the renowned Colonel "Got'em" Archer, recently retired - was not what he had expected. This man was more slender than square, more bold than built. No matter. It'd all be sorted out soon enough.
"Colonel Abraham Archer, yes?" He felt the slightest tremble in his hand as he extended it, and prayed the Colonel wouldn't notice. The tension around the other man's eyes didn't lessen, but he grasped the proffered hand.
"I'm retired," the Colonel said, "as you are surely aware. Young Peter here must have heard that from someone. His invitation was from you, yes? It was most intriguing."
Peter sulked behind the Colonel, looking more the cur at being named.
Setting aside his irritation with his recalcitrant son, the man with the pen replied, "Of course, but you never lose your stripes." He waved Peter toward the liquor cabinet and hoped the boy wouldn't embarrass him further. He should have sent someone Raul to fetch their guest. "So, Colonel Archer, I am General - retired, if you will - Rodney DeWitt, Mayor of Asylum, and I would like to personally welcome you to our city."



~~~
The above passage is a rework of a piece I've never been happy with. It's from When Stones Sing, my currently-mostly-dormant novel. A lot has changed. I wrote this from a different perspective originally, not intending to ever give the Mayor his own voice in the story. Hell, I was barely aware of who the Mayor was when I first wrote this scene. (Which was, obviously, one of my issues with writing it that first time. I didn't know who I was dealing with.)

This began as a response to a prompt, in the writing class I'm taking. The instructor had laid a few dozen items out in the middle of our communal table and said: pick an item and write a story about it. I don't know what it was about the pen in front of me that made me think of this conversation between Archer and the Mayor. I didn't know that's where the pen was taking me until I heard the small bell ring, and I suddenly pictured the same ancient doors I'd seen Archer walk through when I first wrote this scene. This entire reworking of this scene was written without a single glance back at the original. I'm pretty amazed at the similarity, now that I've looked (literall, just now) back at the original.

Incidentally, that nickname - "Got'em" - is subject to change. In fact, just consider it a place holder for something much more awesome.