Alma Alexander

Well we writers are often asked were we get our ideas. So I thought I’d look around and see what caught my mind’s eye right now, and this just goes to show, EVERYthing is grist to the mill…

***
It’s Fall again, but this year it kind of snuck up on me. I don’t know if it’s just that this summer has been really bizarre (we kind of had our October in late July and early August, to the point that there was a snarky widget floating around the Internet which said something like, “Searching for Pacific Northwest Summer/Error/Season Not Found”) or if I’ve been doing other things and had my head down and no time left to look for the first turning leaves – but hello, all of a sudden we have… autumn. The leaves which I failed to notice changing are starting to litter the back deck; today has been one long drawn out mess of wind and rain with no end in sight, the first windstorm event of the season has ALREADY knocked out power to parts of the neighbourhood that I live in, from 8AM yesterday to something like 1:30 AM this morning which is a substantial power outage – and we haven’t hit OCTOBER yet. It’s been a long cranky summer, and autumn promises to deliver more of the same.

And yet… I can’t help it. I LOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR. When the sun does come out it’s crisp and cool, and everything turns golden, and apples are out, and the sky is that perfect peculiar shade of autumn blue which doesn’t really happen at any other time of year because it simply doesn’t have the red-and-gold backdroup of the fall foliage to set itself up against and preen in its cerulean glory. People start complaining that the days are shorter – well, yeah, they start getting that way, and that means that the twilight comes earlier and the lights go on, and everything turns into a scene from some strange suburban fairy tale with the golden gleams coming from windows and outside house lights reflecting off damp driveways, and the quiet sense of things starting to feel drowsy, ready to close their eyes and dream their way through winter that is coming. I don’t mean I am particularly enamoured of Halloween decorations coming out in mid-September, but that isn’t AUTUMN, that is pure naked commerce, and I refuse to let it spoilt anything at all.

So. Even today, then. I’m sitting here looking out over a wild wood, swaying in the wind, with rain lashing into the trees. And it’s Fall. And I’m weirdly happy.

***

The other day I had to go to a gathering of local writers and give a talk on stuff – the State of The Industry and All LIke That. I don’t really get that much of a chance to play dress-up, so I dug out a pair of heels which I wear pretty rarely – not that I wear heels very often because they tend to make my feet hurt in both the long- and the short-term (I wore pretty high heels to a friend’s wedding just over a year ago – the friend in question is Jewish – if you’ve never danced the Hava Nagila in high heels I would advise that you don’t try – it took me a fortnight to get feeling back in my toes…). But these particular high heeled shoes were a special case. I remember that I bought them at a heavy sale for some RIDICULOUS price, they were (for whatever reason) being practically given away, but they’re Italian shoes, they’re really rather beautiful, and they are (more importantly) well-balanced, so that it doesn’t FEEL like I’m standing for hours with a pair of chopsticks stuck into my heels. And I wear them for special occasions, and so – well – out they came.

I discovered that something was wrong fairly quickly because I kept on getting caught on the carpet, like a cat with too-long claws. I’d take a step and either the heel would be caught so solidly that it almost pulled the shoe off my foot or else the carpet tried to follow my shoe as I lifted my foot off the ground. Upon examination, it turned out that there was a sort of small nail in the heel of the shoe and on both the shoes it had come out of the heel itself or the heel had worn sufficiently down for it to protrude to the point that it became a carpet hook. So, no problem, I packed up the shoes and I took them to a shore repair place to get the matter attended to.

The shoe repair person took one look and barked, “How OLD are those things?”

Reader, it would appear that I now own a pair of Obsolete Shoes. Because lo, the heels are not DONE that way any longer and have not been done that way for some time, and it would take something pretty special to fix the thing so that it would be wearable again. I would have thought it was a matter of pulling out the old nail, chainging the heel pad, and putting in a new nail to hold it so that it was flush with the heel surface – but what do I know, and apparently it is more complicated than that.

I don’t know how to feel about that, really. Those shoes are vintage 1980′s, it isn’t as though they had dragged their heels (heh) around since before the war. But if my shoes are that old, that obsolete, that throw-away-able, jeez louise, how old and throw-away-able am *I*? What happens when some nail in my own carcass comes loose and some doctor looks at me and barks, “How OLD is this body?”

That wasn’t the first time I had this brush with “mortality” – a decade or more ago a visiting young child who was being given a tour of my family’s home with his parents was introduced to my teddy bear, the one which had been given to me on my first birthday on which occasion he was bigger than ME. I still have him, threadbare and belowved, the old-fashioned kind fo bear with the articulated limbs and the solid sawdust fileld body and buttons for eyes, and the only place you can now see his original brave golden colour is on the remnants of fur behind his folded ears. In any event, the kid was told that the bear and I kind of shared a birthday, after a fashion – since his was counted from the day that he came to live with me. And that the bear would be turning thirty six years old on his next birthday.

The child turned round and horrified eyes on me and spluttered, “How… how old are YOU?”

I still have that bear, as it happens, and in a couple of years’ time it will be turning fifty years old.  That’s a grand old age for an old teddy bear to reach. I may have to throw him a party.

He’s still here with me… but I suppose everything has its hour.

I’m gonna miss those obsolete old shoes. I am, really. It isn’t that I wore them all that often, but they were a pretty pair of dress shoes that I thought I could always count on, and now… well… they’re not there any more. Unless a miracle happens and I find some old-time cobbler who still has a supply of old-fashioned heel nails at hand to fix a pair of old and loved shoes which I am so very very loath to lose…

***

Hey, go take a gander at some of the Amazon reviews that have accreted to the “Midnight at Spanish Gardens” book here. Some more reviews are coming in soon (I know because the reviewers have been emailing me to tell me to keep an eye out for them) but those that are already on the Amazon site are from readers… and I’d love more… so if you are hankering for something new to read on your Kindle (or, well, visit Snashwords for other e-reader types – and the book is also available electronically through B&N) go pick up a copy and leave me word of what you thought. I’ll be here, waiting. And if you’re wondering what else I’ve been up to of late, check out the Alexander Triads (the first two – “Once upon a fairy tale” and “Cat tales” – are available both on Amazon and on Smashwords. They would LOVE a nice review from a friendly reader, too…

***

Happy reading. Happy Fall. See you next month.

Muggers are a fairly common occurrence in my life. And I kind of welcome them when they come, despite the drama and the inconvenience they bring in their wake.

No, I am not talking about the guy with the gun in a dark alley, desperate for what meager pickings he might glean from you in the shadows. No, I am not talking about the snub-nosed man-eater crocodiles of India. I am talking about the stories that sneak out of the woodwork when you aren’t looking and, well, MUG you – they sit there between you and the screen (which bears traces of your having tried to do something quite different) and leer at you and whisper, “Me. Me. Write ME. Everything else can wait.”

When people ask writers where they get their ideas, these ideas are often not mentioned or given short shrift – and perhaps that’s because they are impossible to transfer a knowledge of to somebody who’s never been a victim of one. Mugger stories are triggered by the most incredibly unbelievable things, a stray word, a phrase out of context, a line of song lyrics only barely paid attention to, a glimpse of a creature vanishing into the woods, a set of tracks on new snow, someone (jokingly) asking a silly “what if” that pushes an unexpected avalanche of thoughts down quite a different slope than the original question-poser might have intended. What they generally have in common is that the moment of inspiration is a subliminal flash, that some connection gets made instantly and generates a large electric spark, that they are IMPOSSIBLE to forget or lay aside once they have appeared, and they tend to be written very quickly, leaving trails of fire behind them as they accelerate away. And they will quite often be the best things you will ever write, which is so cruelly unfair to all the other things which you have put oodles of thought and planning into and which fade into insignificance while these comets of inspiration streak across your sky.

One of my mugger stories turned up when an anthology editor posted a note on his blog that one of his keynote authors had had to drop out because of unavoidable reasons and he was chewing his fingernails – there was a set of ideas he needed to have conveyed in a keystone story, and he listed them, and lo, the mugger stalked out of the night and parked on my shoulder and began whispering into my ear. I wrote that story in less than two hours, sent it in to the beleaugured editor immediately, and had confirmation of a sale less than 24 hours after that. It made my head spin, it did. That just happened again, recently, with another anthology which I had originally had no interest or inspiration to submit to – but something that an editor said struck something THIS time and the spark was there without my quite knowing how it had appeared, and yes, here we are, another mugger, written and sold in the space of a handful of days.

To any muggers waiting for me in the year to come – hi there. I’m looking forward to meeting you

…I am thinking of honey.

More to the point, of harvesting the honey.

My grandfather used to keep bees; so did my great-uncle. That was a thing that the two brothers had in common – the basic activity – but the way they went about it was very different. Great-uncle had a bee-keeper’s gloves – I cannot be certain now, it was too many years ago, but I think he may even have had a proper beekeeper’s hat. Grandpa… had nothing. Grandpa would open the lid of the hive, roll up his sleeves, reach in bare-handed and haul out the honeycombs – and the bees would swarm on him and around him, crawl on him, hum, be wary, but never ever ever sting him. They’d sting my DAD, who was just standing there kibbitzing at one time without being anywhere near the hive at all but he got half a face that looked like an over-inflated basketball for his pains while Grandpa calmly put the honeycombs back into the hive, put the lid back on, and let the bees get back to business.

I’ve never seen it done but I’ve heard of beekeepers who were able to stick their entire arm up to the shoulder into a swarm of bees hanging from some tree, grab hold of the queen, and transport the entire swarm safely to a new home without losing a member of the community or getting one sting for his pains.

Then there are the African bees, whom we had the, um, pleasure to make the acquaintance of during our sojourn in Swaziland many years ago. We never did find out where they were based – all we knew was that for a really painful period of time we had to stop up every orifice in our house (we stuffed cardboard boxes up the fireplace to stop them coming in there), and going out of the house for any reason became a race between us and the bees who would attack anything that moved. They disappeared, eventually, as mysteriously as they showed, but they caused our then-gardener to yelp “Madam! Bees” and then, in full and mystified sight of my mother and myself, take off at an Olympic sprinter’s pace and clear a six-foot fence with daylight to spare in order to get away from the angry hive of swarming bee-shaped velociraptors intent on his hide.

Writing can be like that, sometimes.

Often you just work the hives with all the required paraphernalia (and yet you STILL get stung sometimes. They’ll find their way through, the little so-and-so’s). Sometimes, and for rare individuals always and they know no other way, you simply *know what to do* and for those watching you doing it you’re performing miracles – hauling vast beeswarms off of trees or stealing honey without the bees being upset about any of it. And sometimes you’ll get attacked and driven away no matter what you do, simply because you’re THERE and you don’t ought to be.

Bees are ideas. They’re stories. They’re words. Handle them right and they’ll come up with honey. Push them, dismiss their presence or their message, treat them wrong, and they’ll turn on you. And sometimes they’ll just turn on you for no discernible reason at all and sting until you run screaming from the field with your arms protectively around your face crying out, “I give up! I give up! I’m going now!”

I’ve been having trouble with a troublesome swarm lately. My arm feels a little warm, inside that swarm, and I believe that means that I’ve been stung several times. But I also think I have the queen held between my respectful fingers now, and that all shall yet be well.

Excuse me while I tiptoe away and try and settle this particular recalcitrant swarm into that brand new hive I have had waiting for them for so long. And then I’ll go put salve on my stings, go have a glass of champagne, and wait for the honey.

If you’re the sort of writer beekeeper who does likewise with your life and career, I wish your bees a safe home and a good harvest to come.

Happy new year.

When I was young, we travelled on European trains.

They were old-world trains. They had compartments (think Hogwarts train). You wandered down a corridor, peering into the glassed-in compartments, seeking space; sometimes the grey utilitarian institutional pleated curtains were drawn, blocking your eye, and those compartments you passed quietly by; other times you’d catch the eye of some solitary occupant, and there would be a lift of an eyebrow, a minute nod, and you would push aside the door (they were more often than not often wooden, too, back then – no squealing metal in here, just the velvet rush of wood on wood in its groove) and lift your small square suitcase – no wheels! – up onto the rack, and sit down. You might strike up a conversation with the stranger. You might not, simply sitting there staring out of the grimy windows at the passing scenery, your chin cupped in your hand. There’s a photo of me somewhere, doing just that, a child with her elbow on the narrow windowsill, her eyes distant and unfocused, seeing who knows what. The seats were upholstered couches – at least in the classes that we travelled in – with ramrod stiff backs – no such namby pambyness as reclining seats here. You sat up, with your back straight, like a gentleman or a lady should.

People would take packed lunches – boxes or baskets of carefully wrapped cold chicken, or salami, or sandwiches, and sometimes a piece of apple cake or an actual apple for dessert. Good wholesome food, cooked at home by mothers and grandmothers, lovingly packed, gluttonously consumed when you got hungry. There would be a conductor with a peaked hat and sometimes a salt-and-pepper moustache and round glasses – or was there only one of those, and he went around all the European trains, a super-conductor (heh) who existed only in hyper-relativity space, like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. He’d come in with a punch attached to his belt with a silver chain, and punch a hole in your ticket, and tip his cap to you, and walk out again. And you would go back to the scenery, or perhaps playing a game of cards on the back of a suitcase fetched down from the rack for this purpose, or a book.

And night would fall outside, like a curtain, and things would fade away into the darkness. You’d see just lights passing by, like fireflies, enigmatic human habitations flickering like distant suns in some unknown galaxy, just as mysterious and far away as those stars in the heavens. Sometimes the moon would be full, and there would be a spill of old-gold or bone-white light on the landscape, casting eerie shadows. And then you’d pull into tiny little stations you often never even knew the name of – but they were home, for somebody, because you could see people getting off the train, or hugging those left behind on the platform as they climbed in. And then there would be a shout – that bespectacled conductor, hanging off the steps of one of the carriages – and the train would begin to move again, slowly, jerkily, leaving the flickering lights of the tiny station and the lives it harboured behind in the night. (There was a perfectly wonderful story about an Eastern European football team who was travelling by train into the heart of Europe for a match, and they had delegated one of their number to keep an eye on what stations they were stopping at – but every time the train stopped the poor sap would look out the window and announce they were stopped at Station Ausgang (which, of course, means “Exit” in German) until someone else woke up to the unlikely fact that they had just passed their sixth Ausgang in a row and while it might be conceivable that there might be several places with the same name it was probably not going to be six places strung out one after another on the same railway line… by which stage, of course, they were way past their intended destination, and the game they were supposed to be on their way to play had receded into history…)

If we travelled by night, we took a sleeping car. The private compartments would have attendants who would come by and politely turn the couches into sleeping bunks; somebody would always have to climb the velvet rope ladder and tuck themselves into the top bunk, just underneath the ceiling, where you couldn’t sit up without braining yourself – but I tended to be tucked into the lower bunk, with my ear against the soft lullaby of the wheels on the track, something that lulled me to sleep on many a night. Quiet, melodic, rhythmical, occasionally skipping a beat as the train passed a place where rail lines met, or a siding turned off, or a switch waited to let us through – ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-tat-tat-DAM, ta-da-ta-dam… And I slept, and I dreamed, and stories came crowding like night butterflies with midnight-black wings spangled with stars.

Those days, I suspect, are long gone, even in Europe, in these modern times. Trains today look more like the Amtrak trains that crisscross America – and THEY look rather more like an airliner cabin than the trains that rumbled through my childhood, and what’s more are proud of that. Brochures show lines of seats in an open compartment, just like in an airplane. People don’t really do the kind of thing that they used to – it’s kind of difficult, and not a little embarrassing, to be seen unpacking a lunch of cold chicken and apple pie out there in the open where anyone might look and judge and scorn. You go to the buffet car instead and you buy coffee in cardboard cups too hot to hold, and those tiny single-serving pizzaz which you KNOW are bad for you for a half-dozen good reasons, or sandwiches industrially wrapped in cling-wrap (turkey and mayo, chicken and pesto, roast beef… oh, sorry, we’re out of roast beef…), or large chewy chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies which leave you still hungry moments after you’ve finished crumbling them with your sticky fingers. People are more likely to sit there with earbuds in their ears and nodding to music only they can hear – taking isolation and insulation where they can, in the absence of the privacy of those compartments – or, worse, talking loudly on the ubiquitous cellphones that everyone seems to be carting around these days. Cranky babies or toddlers in the train car? Too bad, the parents are going the same place you are, you’re all going to be sharing this car for the next five or six hours, and the kid probably won’t be quiet for more than thirty minutes of that as (s)he falls into an exhausted nap to replenish their energies for the next bout of cranky they’re about to generously share with you. Sleeping cars are available, but all too often priced out of anyone sane’s budget – so you sleep sitting up, knees cramped against the back of the seat in front of you just like in the worst airplanes of your nightmares. Sleep, if you can; if there are no people bickering in the seat behind you, or there is nobody who’s imbibed a little too much and has lost his off-switch and doesn’t even realise how loud and obnoxious they’re being, or somebody who’s started to hum annoyingly with whatever’s playing on his iPod without even realising that they’re doing it.

But outside the land still passes by, in sunlight or under the moon, with rain leaving streaks of water on the windows or with nothing left to look at but the reflection against the outside darkness of the pallid overhead lights in the cabin or (if they’ve dimmed those) the occasional glitter of someone’s overhead reading light somewhere behind you.

When I travelled to Japan a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, a long sinuous double-headed white snake of a thing, pointed at both ends, whooshing along at hundreds of miles an hour. You barely have time to look at anything out of the window, there – you glimpse something and whoosh, you’re past, and its way over there behind you. I was in Tokyo as a typhoon came roaring down the throat of the city, and the trains were stilled until the storm passed, but there were shots of them on the news, hunkered down and gleaming wet in their berths in the rain looking like a nest of sleeping dragons; once they were released again and we went to board ours, it was an entire cultural experience. They ran like clockwork – they remained in any given station a precise number of seconds, and the doors would open at a predetermined moment, and close after the requisite number of seconds had ticked by, and it was your responsibility to be on or off that train in that period of time. The trains did not wait for the tardy. There was a confectionery seller in the shape of a young Japanese woman in a frilly apron and kitten-heeled shoes and her glossy black hair tied back in a huge Minnie Mouse ribbon – she would push her cart into the train car, bow politely to the passengers at large, serve those who indicated that they wanted something, and then, on the way out, would turn and bow respectfully to the oblivious backs of the seats facing away from her, a bow which no passenger would notice or see unless they were specifically looking (as I had been) before pushing her cart into the the next train car to repeat the procedure. The signs by the doors, where we waited to disembark, at the ready, knowing the short stops in the stations, were a precious mess of entertaining translations – my favourite was the English version of the sign underneath the emergency brake – “If you pull this you will be inquired by the crew”.

Sometimes I miss trains. I left an uncounted number of sunglasses on European trains, I left books behind (by accident or design) in my wake. I picked up the debris of meals, both homemade and purchased on board. I dreamed many a dream, asleep in my lower berth listening to the train sing to me.

I learned of land, and of sky, and of light, and of motion, and of people.

Stories. Stories, everywhere. Lost, in a train of thought.

Oh, please. It’s October. There’s “gravestones” in every suburban garden. The spiderweb/ghoul/pumpkin/candy/spookycreakynoises day is almost upon us, and the dead are about to rub their eyes and wonder if it’s time to wake up, after all.

Graves are a natural, given the time of year.

We have a cemetery not too far from us – some ten miles or so down the road. It’s one of the most obnoxiously CHEERFUL cemeteries I’ve ever seen – in spring, its main gate is awash in nodding daffodils and scarlet tulips and the cherry trees within the cemetery itself burst into bright extravagant bloom, and when October rolls around the trees around the perimeter and along the alleys within the cemetery itself turn all sorts of wonderful colours from burnished lemon yellow through bright orange bronze into deep russet reds. It might sound rather morbid to say so, but it’s a joy to take a walk in this area in the fall, actually, especially on one of those crackling cool autumnal sunshine days when the sky is an unbelievable blue and all the hues of fall pop against it just crying out to be photographed. I”ve done just that, many times. The place is nothing if not photogenic.

It also contains plenty of fascinating stuff in and amongst the graves themselves. There are a whole bunch of gravestones in there which are no more than a plaque – often moss-overgrown, when it comes to the older ones – set into the sward with simply the word “Mother” incised into it. Now, that’s all very well, but dear God in Heaven, *was that all that she was*? Who was this mysterious “mother” sleeping in the ground here? Might she also have been someone’s daughter, sweetheart, lover, wife? When was she born? When did she die? Was she a doting grandmother when she passed from the mortal sphere, or was she a new mother with babes in swaddling clothes left behind her in the world? There’s a STORY here, an untold one, and it bugs the storyteller in me something terrible. Inquiring minds want to know, as it were, first and foremost my own. Of course, given that there are no details whatsoever might also imply that I am free to make up my own version of this poor woman’s life. That could work…

There are other stones.

Poignant ones, which you pass by and you read the inscriptions and you find yourself tearing up. You pass by the stone marker, all askew now, and you take a closer look at the dates of birth and death… and you realise that the human life which this stone commemorates lasted less than a year, that the small body lying underneath this green grass and the soft autumn leaves was a babe in arms, that someone somewhere loved this baby enough to raise her this memorial. You wander pass a stone which gives only a name, a couple of dates, and a single incised line of two words: “Only sleeping”. There’s a stone – for a woman who was born in the late 1800s and died in 1934 – which has a balloon attached to it, which says “happy birthday” (someone’s optimistic. or someone loved this woman very very very much).

Then you get the amusing ones. There’s a stone in our cemetery which says that he who lies underneath it rejoiced in the name of “M__ Person” (I’ll redact the names. They may be dead but Halloween’s coming. I don’t want them after me) – as in, what else would be lying here? A beloved horse?… Then there’s a family monument, all marble and fake stone torches alongside the great slab, which bears a family name which begins with “Fuss” (no kidding). There’s a stone which trumpets that underneath it lies a “Distinguished Author, Scholar, and Renaissance Man of the 20th Century” – followed by a three-line-long quote by the great man himself which, um, doesn’t really add much to the equation – it says that man alone of all creatures can determine the fate of his species. The fact that it kind of leads inexorably to a graveside is, um, ironic. There’s a REALLY disconcerting one where a small cherub standing by the graveside blowing a horn is, um, holding the horn up in the required position but is minus a head bearing a mouth with which to produce a sound on said horn. Headless cherubim blowing the Last Post are kind of… interesting…. as and of themselves.

The thing is, for a certain small subset of people a graveyard is where a story ENDS. For those of us who come after, wandering the paths in golden fall sunshine and glancing at the graves, it’s where stories BEGIN. There are so many stories here. So many. Grave matters, to be explored, extrapolated, discussed, woven into tales.

Really old European cemeteries are even more interesting – the kind where the stones themselves have been worn away by time until all you can say with certainty that the buried one died sometime in the 1600s, for instance. And then there are other stories, like Greyfriars Bobby, for instance. I still think that it was churlish to refuse to bury the faithful dog with his master on the grounds that he was an unbaptised cur. They could have sprinlked holy water on the mutt and muttered something baptismal, if that was what it took. PLease don’t stand there and tell me that dogs have no souls and don’t go to heaven – because if that’s true then I don’t want to go there either. So there. All the holy rollers can have it all to themselves, without the joy of a wagging tail or a prodigious purr to leaven the long days of Eternity. There’s only so much angelic singing that you can do before you’ll probably wish you were dead all over again.

I suppose this particular meandering discourse might fall under the general heading of “where do you get your ideas”. Sometimes, other people bury them for you, and you can read just enough of a hint on a listing ancient grave marker they left behind to finish the story in your own inimitable way.

Happy Halloween. Don’t let the ghouls get you.

“Here there be dragons”. Words written on maps in ancient times, to indicate places where no humans had been, which were unknown, unexplored, dangerous, magical. The places where real magic might really dwell.

“Here there be dragons”. I’ve chosen the fantasy genre because of that very thing. It’s freeing to me to know that even if I don’t, personally, know the lay of the land in the places where the dragons lurk – well – neither does anyone else, and therefore I am free to create my own geography, my own history, my own world.

I’ve always loved the worldbuilding aspect of the fantasy genre, the part where I get to go wading out into the dark unknown with nothing but a tiny flashlight in my hand and it is by that light alone, MY light, the light that I choose to shine and the spot I choose to illumine, that determines what anybody else who might be following me is likely to see, understand, remember.

All the worlds are a blank page before a writer’s eyes fall upon them.

But I cannot seem to get that dictum to stick with stuff that is supposed to take place in the “real” world, our world, the mundane everyday days that we all inhabit routinely. For some reason I can write lush, rich, penetrating prose about characters who can never exist – who live only inside my own head, who cope with dragons or their equivalent on a daily basis – but present me with a cast of characters who are living realistic, mundane lives in the common shared reality with the potential reader, and I freeze.

Read more…

When first you decide to take up the life of the pen, you set foot upon a magic road. Somewhere on that road, eventually, you come up on a crossroads, and the signposts point you deeper into the writing life, or away.

You’d think that if you had already made your decision, the choice would be simple. But no – it is not as straightforward as it seems. If you turn away, we have nothing further to talk about. But if you choose the Writer’s Path, you have to realise one thing. This is not a straight road. This is not a “tame lion”.

So. You choose the road to writerhood.

Or you THINK you do.

But several odd things happen once you veer in that direction. The thing you love – the thing you thought you could do so well and so easily – the thing that you hold to be the most precious gift of your life – uh – yeah – that. The thing about writing is that it has to be a choice that cuts both ways. You choose writing, but unless it chooses you back there is nowhere to go from here.

A friend recently took a sabbatical from his working life, one year to see if this writing lark was something that he could do. Not too long ago he wrote,

One of my goals with this sabbatical is to determine whether writing is the passion I’m supposed to be following. I didn’t expect the answer to come within two months of my time off.

Looks like writing isn’t for me.

I’ve found that I struggle far too hard against myself to get the words out on the screen. There’s something inside me that fights and resists the whole process. It’s that clenched, horrible feeling that what I’m doing just isn’t right — not in an editorial sense, but in a spiritually-exhausting sense. For now (because I can always take another go) I think I’m not meant to be writing.

My response to him was to give it a little more time, not to give up on something that he loves and that he thought would give him pleasure and reward. But there’s the choosing, right there. Here is someone who CHOSE writing – and who thinks, rightly or wrongly at this point, that writing did not choose him back. It was just not something that he enjoyed any more. At the point where a joy becomes a chore, it’s just too damned hard to keep going.

But who said it was easy? Who said it was supposed to be?

I have lived by the Word, by the Pen, for a decade now. There were times that the stories flowed, bubbled, flooded out of me – things that had to be written, had to be said, things that told themselves. Things that took me by the throat and bullied me fiercely until I gave them shape and form. And then there were the other things – the ones that stalled, that stared back at me from the computer screen, the ones that left me teetering on brinks of cliffs with no visible way down or over. The things I hung on to with grim determination, the things I had to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. I know exactly what my friend means when he said what he said –

I’ve found that I struggle far too hard against myself to get the words out on the screen. There’s something inside me that fights and resists the whole process. It’s that clenched, horrible feeling that what I’m doing just isn’t right — not in an editorial sense, but in a spiritually-exhausting sense.

I’ve been there. I’ve fought that inner monster. There are battlefields still bloody within me that testify to those wars.

And then I picked myself up, washed off the blood, stared wryly at new scars, and staggered back onto the road again.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a personal thing. Something that makes my friend look at the writing life and choose the other road at the crossroads might be the very same thing that makes me stubbornly determined to go on, no matter what – it’s a personal thing, a personal choice, and only you can decide which voices clamouring for your attention you are willing to listen to, Because… well… this is not the last time you will come to this crossroads.

The Writer’s Path is a loop, you see. It comes back to the crossroads again and again. It might switch nature or direction as you choose it over and over, it might well take you to places that you never expected to be – but it’s still a road that somehow manages to return to the crossroads, bring you back here, and then shimmer invitingly before you once more with a whisper – Are you sure? This time, are you sure? Do you have the strength? Do you have the faith?

Because that is the only thing that will let you travel this road.

Faith.

The belief that somehow, somewhere, there IS a final destination.

The road is deceptive, and without faith it’s easy to flounder and fail. There are times that a writer plodding along will look up and see mountains. And beyond them, there is nothing but more mountains. And after a while the most deathless of devotions, the most heartfelt adoration, the most obstinate determination, they all flounder against that final rock wall that doesn’t seem to have a path around it and you are just too tired to climb. So you fall to your knees in front of it, exhausted, and you whisper, “Enough.” And somehow… it melts away. And you’re back at the crossroads. And you look at the signs again, and sigh, and turn away from the Writer’s Path and take the other road – the road that doesn’t loop or meander, that leads straight out of here – into a whole other set of traps and fancies, to be sure, but they are no longer the Writer’s Path or its problems. And you can do this. Many people have.

You can, if you aren’t completely defeated, try and look for a road around and struggle with the circumstances at the base of the cliff for a while. Often this will seem to give you an option, an “out”, but it frequently detours into marshes or into deserts or into the cold inhospitable vacuum of interstellar space. You are always free to say “Enough”, and you’re back at the crossroads again – but it depends on how much punishment you’re willing to endure.

Or… you still have a bit of grit left. You reach up, dig your fingers into invisible hand holds, fit your body against unforgiving stone, and you climb – because it is the only thing that you can do. And one of three things can happen here. You are unequal to the task, and you fail, and you fall, and you’re back at the crossroads and you bow your head and surrender. Or you prevail and climb to the top, but once you get there all you can see is more mountains to climb, more cliffs, more high peaks, more snows on Caradhras to drive you into Moria – and you can surrender here, and turn back and yes, you’re back at the crossroads again,

Or you get to the top and pause to catch your breath… and you see the Writer’s Path unwinding in front of you, leading down into a pleasant valley, and the name of the valley is Hope, and the name of the village you step into is Strength, and the name of the drink they offer you at the door of the inn is called Joy.

Even though you quickly realise that – although you now know this place is here and you can return to it any time you choose, even if only in memory or dream – the Writer’s Path does not end here. It goes on, beyond, somewhere ELSE, somewhere new. Perhaps there are more cliffs to be climbed, ahead. Perhaps you’ll find yourself back at the crossroads, yet again.

But the secret of the strength to choose the Path over and over, against all odds, is simply this. Through the shadows, through the agony, through the blood and sweat and tears and the pain, you must keep the faith. When all other voices fall silent there is that one, the last, the quiet one which will not be denied.

I am a writer. My blood flows through a writer’s veins. My mind is full of a writer’s dreams. My heart beats for the word and for the things that it means. My joy is the elixir of having written. I am a writer. I believe.

And after that… trust the faith to take you home.

I stepped out of my house the other day on my way to an appointment, and fumbled for a moment to ferret out the key that belonged to my own front door so I could lock up behind me. Getting into my car, I had to drop that key and get another – the one that fit into the ignition, turned it on, enabled me to move the vehicle – and myself in it – so that I could go to the place where I needed to be. On the way there, I stopped at the mail facility and shuffled my key ring searching for yet another key – that of the mail box.

I have the keys to two homes on my keyring, the keys to two separate post office boxes, the car key – and several other things.

There is a small powerful flashlight; a USB drive that does duty as a MedicAlert bracelet warning those who need to know of my medical allergies in case something should happen to me; a bunch of discount store cards for various food stores, a pet store, a general store based in my state – things I routinely tender to cashiers at those places and which get me a few bucks off my purchases. There are a couple of separate keyrings hanging on my main ring, commemorating events or places important to me, reaching back to my cultural heritage and ethnic background, things that would instantly identify me as who and what I am should someone in the know discover me incapacitated or unable to speak but with the key ring on me.

That’s my life there, all gathered together in one bunch of keys and accessories. My keyring serves as a better window into my lifestyle, personality, history and responsibilities than any government-issue ID.

And it struck me that my keyring is a potent symbol of my coming of age, of being an adult human being living in a society that is at a certain level of civilization – because only adults get to have keys that open real locks, that open doors into levels of responsibility and duty that you just don’t have when you’re six and you’re happily waving around a fake keyring containing three or four brightly coloured rubber keys the size of your forearm which are merely a promise of things to come – you get REAL keys when you “grow up”. It is no accident that when you turn 21 – come “of age” – you are handed… a key.

My thoughts turned to writing, as they always do.

What do keys mean in the coming-of-age of a writer? What would the keys of my keyring symbolise in terms of my own writerly identity?

Well, let’s list them.

- Common-or-garden house keys. I own a home. I have an interest in another household whose keys I am entitled to carry. I am a responsible adult who has a life writ in brick and mortar and wood and rooftile and bookshelves and plumbing and utilities bills that get sent to this address, and an Internet connection. All of these things live behind a front door which I can close against the world, and am entitled to lock as a protection against invasion by uninvited strangers. Writerly translation – I live in many worlds, and those worlds need to be constructed in a manner that makes them self-consistent and ‘real’ in the minds of someone else, someone just visiting, the reader who gets to know these worlds cursorily and in passing. I am, in effect, creating a secondary world to which I carry a key – and I am responsible for that world and all that lives in it – and I am also responsible for handing out pass-keys to those who wish to visit, the readers whom I am inviting in. Behind a locked door whereof I am guardian live characters and places which exist nowhere else except in my own mind. One definitely has to grow into this responsibility – the worlds that we create while our writerly training wheels are still on often have doors that do not lock, because we are yet to be trusted with the keys to our kingdoms – and what lies behind these “training” doors are universes where things have not yet shaken down to a safe and consistent level of interaction, and, well, you don’t want people accidentally locking themselves out. Or in. You have to reach a certain level of profficiency and professionalism in order to be trusted with a key. You have to “grow up” as a writer.

- Mail box keys. Communication with the outside world – this is where everything comes to me, letters from friends or fans, bills, junk mail, catalogues, petitions, voting ballots, mysterious packages. You do not get bills unless you are at least theoretically able to be responsible for paying them – it’s another dimension of that “adulthood” thing. Writerly translation – I communicate with readers, both indirectly (the story itself) and directly (when readers write to me with questions or comments). This interaction is not possible unless you share your words with others. You can write for yourself and hide your secret diaries under your mattress where nobody will see them until they come for your cold, dead body – and that is fine, and if you count the definition of “writer” as “one who writes” you may count yourself as one, but if you do this then you are not a public writer, you have not “come of age” as a writer. It is certainly permissible to never want another human eye to light on something you’ve put down on paper, for whatever good and solid reason you might have for that – but if all you’re writing for is catharsis you might as well write the stuff and then go out back to the barbeque and burn it when you’re done. If you write to be read then you need to learn to communicate. If ONE reader tells you that something you have written is unclear or obtuse or confusing, you are permitted to regard that as one person’s opinion and basically ignore it if you so choose. If THREE people tell you these things, you might do well to consider the fact that you are failing at communicating something to other people, and that the fault may well lie within yourself, and take a cold hard look at what you’ve written. And see how you can make it clearer, cleaner, more comprehensible. This is also a sign of writerly maturity, of “coming of age”, and there are some writers who never get here, some writers who declare that everything that they have written is a “work of art” and therefore not to be messed with and if you don’t get it then it’s you who’s the fool, not them, not ever them. If you don’t get past this, if you never gain the ability to receive constructive criticism and to take relevant and considered action on what you’ve been told, you’ll never quite get the key to that mailbox. People aren’t going to communicate with you if you aren’t commuincating with them.

- Car Keys. These turn on your wheels. Without these, you aren’t going anywhere except on foot, or by bicycle, or by bus. On foot is lovely when you’re taking a walk but not so pleasant when you’re struggling home with bags full of groceries. By bicycle is great when you’re taking a pleasure ride but not so much when you have to be somewhere by a certain time and it’s raining and the cars on the road whiz past you and soak you with dirty puddle water or drive you off the road, or a dog chases you down a street, and you arrive where you need to be in an unlovely irritable mood, hot and sweaty, and with a bad case of helmet hair. By bus is terrific and very environmentally responsible – but bus lines don’t run everywhere, you have to work to other people’s timetables, you often need to add that “on foot” phase at either end of the bus ride to get to where you REALLY want to go, and often you have to spend frustrating, dull, unproductive and uncomfortable hours waiting for those buses in bus shelters without a roof in the drizzle. Writerly translation – you aren’t allowed to get an official driver’s licence until you are so many years old. Any younger, andyou can’t reach the pedals properly, or you need to have a learner’s permit and someone else who knows what they’re doing accompanying you when you wish to drive someplace. You are also convinced that you are immortal, and are more likely to take stupid risks with what is essentially a large and massive missile which can HURT people. In other words, you have to be THIS TALL to ride – you have to grow up, become responsible, learn about the craft of driving, know how to get out of a skid or how to drive in a storm. In like wise, you get handed the keys to your own career as a writer when you learn to “drive” by yourself – when you make responsible decisions, when you have a good idea about where you’re going and have a notion about how to get there, when you know the limits on speed or the kind of road that you’re geared to travel on writing-wise. You’re also in a position to appreciate the writing maxim that E.L Doctorow put into the lexicon of writerly quotations – he said that writing is like driving cross-country at night. You can only see a tiny bit of the road that’s revealed by your headlights, and the rest of it is in darkness and you cannot see it at all – but you can make the entire journey that way, simply by trusting what you can see right in front of you, illuminated by your writerly headlights. You need to have a writerly car key, for that.

- Store discount cards. I have four on my keyring. One is to a generic supermarket, one to an organic food place, one to a pet store, one is a general purpose store which sells everything from books to luggage to frozen pizza to bras. Together, they paint a certain picture of the person who carries them. I shop in a generic supermarket when I have to, in the organic place when I can; I am owned by pets; I occasionally have a need to go into a place that sells EVERYTHING and trust to serendipity. Writerly translation – what “stores” does your imagination shop at? The “cards” that you carry define you as a writer. They will define the things that will go into your stories. They will sketch out in your own mind, without your having written one word, what KIND of words you are going to write. Do you carry a fantasy store card (elves, fairies, dragons, wings…)? Or a science fiction store card (spaceships, FTL, aliens, other worlds turning around strange suns…)? Or a mystery store card (private investigators, murders, whodunnits, weapons, scams, rainy nights in unfamiliar streets of strange cities…)? Or a romance store card (roses, champagne, sunset rendez-vous on a seaside balcony, walks on the beach in the moonlight, kisses, the pain of unrequired love…)? Or a mainstream lit store card (angst, dysfunctional families or troubled marriages, juggling everyday living and career…)? Or… what’s on YOUR card…?

- Small flashlight. Same principle as the car headlights, here – I have to see where I’m going, or where the keyhole is when I’m trying to fumble house keys in the dark. Writerly translation – should be obvious. There are times you need to shine a focused light on something, Make sure your batteries are working.

- Medic Alert attachment. I am deathly allergic to at least one kind of drug, mildly allergic to others. I have info on my USB stick about who my doctor is, what my allergies are, what kind of well-meaning medical intervention I may not survive. Writerly translation – what are the sins that you cannot survive as a writer? Do you have a crutch phrase or a soap-box idea neither of which you can let go of but which are beginning to define you? What drives you nuts with OTHER writers? What are the unforgivable writerly sins in YOUR “medic alert” file?

- Sundry attachments. I have two. Two keyrings that dangle from my main keyring which are medallion-like objects bearing writing in a language which my current country of residence will not understand – but which those from the land where I was born would understand instantly. One is a commemoration of an ancient battle iconic to my tribe, to my people. The other is a memento of a special place, a monastery where an aunt of mine made a pilgrimage and sent me a keyring to keep close so that I too might receive a blessing from it. Other people have danglies that are different – a rabbit foot for luck, a silver charm, a Darwin fish, something their child made for them – you just start paying attention to people’s keys and you’ll see all sorts of things there. Writerly translation – who are you? Who WERE you? What changed you? What is it that you bring to the writer’s table – what are the things that are meaningful to you, that ONLY you could bring to that table and do justice to? What defines you – as a person, as a writer?

So. I’m all growed up now. I get my own keys, my own keyring, a whole life to live, a whole writer’s world to play in.

What’s on YOUR keyring…?

I have an extremely annoying man in my life.

He is extremely valuable, He is my writing consultant and plot bunny wrangler, my first-pass editor, my licenced weaselword hunter (you know, things like “seem” and “apparently” when I am perfectly firm and clear in my meaning and intent…), my line-editor for the final submission draft of the MS. He is, in short, an extremely important part of my writing process… and he happens to be my husband, which is nice because he has to do all these things for free (or at least because he loves me).

But annoying…? Yes, he is that. Tiresomely so.

If there is a scene I’ve shied from writing but which needs to be there, he demands it.

if there is a scene I have written and am in love with but which needs to be cut, he demands that, too.

He will read a rough first-draft of a chapter, and frequently his comment on the margin will be a red line bracketing a paragraph, sometimes several pages, and the word “FIX”. He knows better than to tell me how. He tells me there’s a problem, he tells me to go away and look at it again, to make it BETTER.

And I whine copiously – don’t WANT to write that scene, don’t WANT to cut that one, HOW do I make it better? – but what he does for me is not mollycoddling or spoonfeeding. That “FIX” that drives me demented actually shows something quite different – it shows a deep respect for my work, for me as a writer – an immense vote of confidence in what he sees to be my abilities. What he is telling me is simply that he – as a reader, as an editor – sees a problem in certain passages. He cannot tell me how to make it better because it is my work and my vision. But he is completely confident in his knowledge that I am able to do that, that i CAN make it better, that I have the “better” in me and that I owe myself, my story, my potential readers down the line, nothing less than that “better”. Nothing less than the best that I can deliver.

And that  imperial “FIX” spurs me into action. I will complain bitterly about the nebolsity of that comment – “Fix HOW?!? Do WHAT?!?” – but then I will go away and I will re-read the problematic passage, and i’ll prune, and reshape, and rewrite, and discard or add, and reframe, and deepen, and widen, and focus, and gain insight, and often have my characters trot out ideas that I had no clue that they had before I started to pay attention. And I’ve been in this game long enough, now, to know improvement when I see it, to viscerally feel that I have made something more than what it was once I re-read the finished version – and I have done it all with nothing more than that red-pen “FIX” in the margin driving me on, higher, deeper, into beauty and power and danger and vision. I could not, in the long run, tell you exactly HOW I made it better. But i sank my hands into my words up to my elbows and kneaded and got worf-flour on my nose and in my hair and even choked on some of it as it flew up and accidentally got swallowed or inhaled the wrong way. I worked at it. I worried at it. I melded with it until the stigma of that red “FIX” fades away and I can honestly say that I cannot do any better.

And then I’ll kick it back upstairs and ask for a second opinion.

And yes, there have been times it’s been handed back to me with a shake of the head. Not good enough. There’s BETTER in you. “FIX.”

And I scream, I can’t, I’ve done all I can, this is it… and then I’ll take it away and stare at it some more. ANd I’ll find something that niggles. And I WILL make it better.

And this time he’ll take it and read it and smile and nod.

He knew that I was able to reach that point. He knows that I CAN. He believes in me, that much.

He’s an annoying man. But without him, I would be diminished.

Yes, I CAN. Yes, you can too. Is there a tough passage you’re not sure about? Write a large red “FIX” next to it in the margin. And then read it again. And again. Until the words change phase in your hands and you realise that you’re holding water in your cupped palms instead of trying to paw uselessly at clouds of vapour, or you feel the burn of ice on your skin.

Make it concrete. Make it real, Make it live.

Make it better.

FIX.

Language and communication comes in many shapes and forms.

It is entirely possible to use the written word as a laser pointer, not the ultimate destination – and allow the thing you are writing ABOUT, or pointing AT, to carry the story forward rather than scintillating verbal pyrotechnics by themselves.

A case in point is the language of flowers – because they mean different things to different people, cultural norms attach different contexts (or none at all) to individual kinds of flowers, certain scents might bring some very specific memories to your mind.

Case #1 in my own Flower Story Book occurred some, oh, ten or so years ago – the first time that the man who was subsequently to become my husband and I actually met face-to-face after a long time of being friends in cyberspace and spending hours talking to one another in email or ICQ. The meatspace meeting went just fine and we liked each other a lot in person, as much as, if not more, than we had liked one another’s cyber-persona. And then, as he was getting ready to leave the city where we had both travelled to in other to effect this meeting and go home, I turned up to say goodbye for the nonce… bearing a yellow rose.

Now, to me that was just a pleasant gesture – and yellow roses are my absolute favourite amongst the rose family (red – unless truly spectacular – are too cliché, white are pretty but have no real personality, pink are wishy washy, everything else is unnatural). So I picked a yellow rose for no other reason except that I liked it.

My New England-bred man grew up in a context where a yellow rose meant something quite specific – FRIENDSHIP. What I was telling him was simply, “Travel safe, it was great to have met you, I like you, see you around in cyberspace, and oh yeah, I LIKE you, so here’s a flower which should make you remember me with pleasure”. What he heard, via the medium of the yellow rose, was something quite different: “Yes, I like you, but this will never go anywhere at all beyond friendship. So back off and don’t take it any further than it has already come.”

We only found out about this particular misunderstanding MONTHS later. We didn’t get married until YEARS later. If I had known about what yellow roses meant in his world I would probably have picked something else to give him as a parting present. If he had known what a yellow rose meant to me, he would have saved himself a lot of heartache.

See? Instant story. Not a word exchanged. There are languages and stories where you least expect them; you have to learn to recognise and understand them.

All the other cases in my Flower Story Book have to do with my deeply beloved Grandmother.

I remember, very many years ago when I was just a little girl, Grandma and I went together to a mountain called Zlatibor (if you HAVE to have it translated it means something like “golden pine”). I don’t remember the circumstances of this trip, why we were there, why the two of us were there as opposed to any other cast of characters. I do recall running, running, running through mountain meadows in the sunlight, followed by her walking sedately behind me and smiling – and gathering up lots and lots and lots and LOTS of wild daffodils. We carried armfuls of them down the mountain with us. We carried them home with us on the bus. We filled vases and washbasins and kitchen sinks with these things – the house was yellow with them, glowing with them, and they carried with them the memory of mountain sunlight and the sunshine of Grandma’s smile. Years later, when she died, I wrote a poem for her that said goodbye. It was the daffodils that came back to me then, came into the poem. I said, in the last line, that I hoped that there were daffodils beside the road, wherever she had gone. And that if she saw them she would remember me.

The same Grandmother used to give me flowers for my birthday every year – and every year it was a bouquet of red gladioli. I associate red gladioli with my birthday and with July and with my Gran to this day. If I am back in my home town in remotely the right season, every time I return to her grave I take her a bouquet of red gladioli – because she always, always, had them for me. It feels like she is still here and real and alive – in my heart she is, she always will be – but when I sit on her gravestone and see her name and the dates of birth and death etched into the marble and the cold hard fact that she is no longer of this earth is staring me in the face – well – I lift my eyes and look on the long stalks of red gladioli and I feel her hand touch mine once again, just like before. We were special, she and I – and those flowers, they mean something to her and to me. They say, hello, I am here, I have not forgotten, I will never forget. I love you.

She had a garden, Grandma, where hundreds of hyacinths bloomed every spring. The place was solid with the scent of them, and it is a smell I associate very strongly with her – and when I planted my own garden, here in my home, I planted hyacinths in the front flower bed, in her memory – and every spring I am reminded of those springs long past when I was six or seven years old and the hyacinths where hers. But there’s an odd story attached to the hyacinths and to Grandma.

She was years dead by the time I got my first real research job in a whirring, sterile, polished, very sophisticated laboratory at the University of Cape Town – NOT a place that was very conducive to flights of fancy or to haunting presences, this was the place where facts lived, just the facts, ma’am, thank you, and if it wasn’t empirically provable it had no place there.

And yet, there I was one day, walking briskly through the corridors empty of anything other than those facts… and smelling hyacinths. VERY strongly. Hyacinths that could not possibly have been there – it was a LAB, for heaven’s sake, and such things were frowned on, and anyway it was July and it was the Southern Hemisphere and it was mid-WINTER. And yet I could smell them, and smell them quite clearly. There was no doubt about that. I wandered into individual laboratories, asking if anybody had hyacinths in there, meeting mystified glances and puzzled shakes of the head – I’m sure my colleagues must have thought I was losing my mind.

And then I realised that it wasn’t just July. It was July 5^th. My birthday.

And that my Grandmother had merely come to smooth down my unruly curls and smile that smile that lit up a mountain once upon a time and wish me happy birthday.

And the tears came to my eyes and I looked up and I said thank you. And the hyacinths faded gently away.

Here, writer, if writer you be. Have a flower. You tell me what it is, and what it means to you.