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The death of the sun

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better chimney pots

“Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”
Chapter One, Bleak House,Charles Dickens.

Written for profit? For an audience? For fame? Maybe. But I think you can see and feel his love for and enjoyment of writing in every word. You can open his book anywhere and find sentences like this one.

I know, we can’t all write like a Dickens (I can’t), but isn’t this the underlying goal? To try to?

And it’s a murder mystery, not a lofty book on social justice. One reviewer said of the main character, “Bucket can claim to be the first detective proper in English fiction…with his fat forefinger, his false bonhommie, his omniscience and his indifference to everything other than solving the crime.”

Dickens was one of eight children, raised in poverty, with little formal education.

“Two coyotes looking for afterbirths…”

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“Two coyotes looking for afterbirths trotted through a pasture to the east, moving through fluid grass, the sun backlighting their fur in such a way that they appeared to have silver linings.”–from Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Proulx, in That Old Ace in the Hole.
coyote-stalk-by-wildphotons

When people argue about writing for pleasure or writing for profit or writing for the audience, I think about sentences like that. People writing to capture truth, to lay it out to see if it moves you the way it moved them. To see if it leaves you vulnerable.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAYQjB0&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhoundwelfare.wordpress.com%2Ftag%2Fcoyote-population%2F&ei=avsiVcm9B8PyoASNtoG4CA&psig=AFQjCNH-uTAryliKPWfkhHZL23QbdNOL8A&ust=1428441631301951

We want to know.

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uluru-at-sunset

Taller than the Eiffel Tower, in a flat, desert area in the center of Australia. Eight miles around. More than 600 million years old.

uluru-anangu

Sacred places–unknown forces are at work to activate space with spirit. They hold things we want to know. Some of us believe we are meant to know. Some of us have a passion to know.

Photos:
image: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/02/49/5d/53/uluru-at-sunset.jpg
artwork: http://sites.coloradocollege.edu/indigenoustraditions/files/2011/11/uluru-anangu.jpg

Magna Carta–what?

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A_Chronicle_of_England_-_Page_226_-_John_Signs_the_Great_CharterThis year marks the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, the closest document England has to a constitution. They’re one of three countries without a written constitution, along with New Zealand and Israel. Our constitution is based in part on the Magna Carta.
Why?
It was created out of real protest, not by politicians.

Demonstration against G8 Summit in Le Havre

It was the first time protesters spoke truth to power and had a real impact–they would no longer be ruled at the whim of the King, a tradition in place for as long as anyone could remember.
It is the origin of the legal concept of our right to due process of law for people and property.
It’s still used–Darcus Howe, an outstanding Civil Rights leader in England, in the case of the Mangrove Nine, 1971, used Magna Carta as his defense.

Jay Z Magna Carta Holy Grail cover

One historian said recently–it has survived by magic rather than its words. What it carries is hope. And that’s how people have used it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/15/belfast-g8-protests_n_3446781.html

Amma hugs–I’ve had three. Why?

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Amma
“Amma will embrace all these people tonight.”

‘My daughter, my daughter, my daughter,’ she says over and over in my ear.

I’m lost in the lap of something so much bigger than I am, and I rest there. All I can see is the folds of her white robe as I’m overwhelmed with the permeating scent of roses, which are everywhere. And then I’m falling out of the hug, as her attendants pull me back to put the next person in, pressing rose petals and strangely, a Hershey’s kiss into my hand.

I was charged with the energy of that hug for days after, hearing her words in my ear–‘My daughter, my daughter, my daughter.’

Once a year Amma, India’s hugging saint, comes to town. She arrives at a large hotel in Albuquerque that can accommodate the thousands who come for a hug, as crazy as that might sound. When you arrive, you remove your shoes, are organized into groups, given your hug number, fed and are presented with all kinds of memorabilia to buy, from photographs to clothes. While you wait for your group to be called, you listen to Indian music, are strewn with rose petals, watch multiple large-screen videos of Amma’s good works around the world, and look at everyone else who has come.

It all moves along smoothly. She and her team are experts at this–after all, she’s hugged more than 30 million people world wide, royalty and celebrities included.

When your group is called, you join a double line of people, in chairs, gradually moving forward, like musical chairs. Up ahead, Amma is dressed all in white, sitting on a sort of low throne, hugging people, one after another—families with babies, the old, the infirm, young people, people speaking different languages. When you’re finally next in line, her attendants move you to your knees a few feet from her, asking you what language you speak.

You’re sort of dropped into a tight group of front line attendants, dressed in yellow robes, who are plunging people into Amma’s lap and then dragging them out, in a claustrophobic frenzy. You’re in a feel-good, out-of-body daze as you’re pulled out.

At first I thought that wonderful feeling was from her, from what she has. After the third hug, I began to believe that we generate it together. She calls it forth, and what I feel is my soul answering.

Photo: Erode, Tamil Nadu, Monday, January 12, 2015

2014 in review–What was I thinking?

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I have no idea what I was thinking. Now I can see that honestly following the course of my book, from my hands out into the world, garnered a few people’s interest. That, along with the tarantula migration I  witnessed. That goes without saying, of course, since who wouldn’t be interested in a tarantula migration?

Anyway, food for thought for the coming year. Here’s to everybody having a great one!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 520 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 9 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Are you selling out when you sell yourself? Sure!

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You can’t let it change you.  Then it’s not selling out.  But is that even possible?  Nowadays, if you’re a writer, you’re in sales.  We just used to think someone else would be doing it for us.

The other day, the 21 year old technical whiz who works with me and I produced the first draft of a video for youtube.  The publisher will either edit it and put it up or send us back to the drawing board.  Their marketing person said two minutes, don’t read, talk about the book, but don’t give it away.  Right now, we’re at five minutes and six seconds.  And we’ve got lots of out-takes.  A couple of times we got to laughing and almost couldn’t stop. The techie/director took care of lighting, sound, time, setting, wardrobe, hair frizzies, script management, feedback, production design, and more.  I supplied the script and showed up.  That was a lot!

I think the truth is my apprehension, at core, comes from the fact that I’m still getting to know the book.  I wrote it and moved on to the next one.  Now I look at it and try to remember.  I’m surprised and unsettled by the comments of others who’ve recently read it.  They’ve seen something I didn’t know was there and been moved by it.  The book is clearly a thing unto itself.

I will say, as I go back into Jumping, looking for things to quote or things for readings, I find a lot I remember and still like.  Maybe that’s because I know the book wasn’t written just by me.  Go, little book!

 

 

I’m in my own words now.

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Last night, someone close to me who is reading Jumping said to me that so far Chapter 12 is his favorite, the most beautifully written.

It’s a description of one of the main characters–Miles, Duncan Robert’s uncle and a fellow jumper–and I’d thrown it in at the request of my editor, who wanted more background on Miles to explain the later anti-war stance he takes into the Void, into an epic battle scene.

I wrote that chapter straight as it came to me, not questioning it, not needing to edit it.  My editor didn’t touch it, either.

Now I see my words differently, because of what my friend said.

I’m in my own words now, not someone else’s. I haven’t been reading much since I’ve been writing.  I don’t think I was supposed to be reading, so I could steep in my own words for a change, after a lifetime of reading–since I was a child and won contests for reading the most books. I’d never let go of the words of others as the way, not seeing the power of my own words to set a life by.

No matter what happens to Jumping out there in the world, I see myself and my words differently.

I hope readers keep talking to me.

 

Like Jumping on Goodreads–or not

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Goodreads-badge-add-plus

The largest site for readers and book recommendations.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21543939-jumping?ac=1

It’s a really humbling proposition to see your book go up among a sea of other books and wonder about its ability to swim.  Was I a good teacher?  Anne Lamott says if it’s good enough, it’ll make it.  Now, rather than wondering if you’re in the smaller group of people who will actually finish a book and find a publisher, you’re back in a large group of writers who’ve all accomplished what you’ve accomplished.  So, you try to provide water wings, life preservers, and even cpr to keep this vessel holding what you believe is the best of you moving forward.  The further I extend this swimming metaphor, the harder it is to abandon it!

You’ll have to join Goodreads to recommend, review, or rate the book.  I’ve been a member for a while because I like sites that bring readers and books together.  Also, it’s an easy way to know what’s out there and what’s good, based on reader opinions.  And I like that you can ask any author (like Anne Lamott and many other famous ones) questions, and they answer.  I just agreed to answer questions, too.  So, use your own judgement.

 

People are getting their books–whoa!

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Sometimes I forget how and where and why I even wrote this book–after all, I wrote it more than two years ago and have written a few more since then–and now it’s out there.  Actually, that was the first question of the Examiner interviewer–how did I come to write it.

I said I wrote it for two reasons: (1) I took a creative writing class at Inprint, a great writing program in Houston.  There were eleven of us in the class, an engineer, a physicist, a lawyer, a teacher, a student, etc.  What inspired me is that they always wanted me to read first, to see what happened next.  I wrote the intro to the book in that class, but I didn’t know it.  (2) Every psychic I’ve seen, and that would be about a half dozen in the past decade, generally done with a group for fun, would ask me where my book was. Not that psychics necessarily have a corner on the truth, but by the time the sixth one asks you, you begin to wonder.

Ultimately, writing is such a private act, there’s still something shocking about it going public, even when you know it’s coming.  I wrote it every night after work is the how.  Generally in my second-floor Albuquerque apartment (corner of Broadway and Coal) is the where, staring out the window at downtown whenever I paused in my typing.  The real answer to why is that it came and it kept coming, every time I sat down to write and sometimes in between.  It still comes.  I keep a notebook with me, to catch it.

Now I feel as if I’m in that dream where you’re standing naked in front of a clothed crowd, no where to run, no where to hide.  Even though this must have always been the goal, I’m still a little freaked out to have achieved it.  I guess I’ve jumped.