A Modest Proposal

Many, many things are wrong in my life right now.

But today is a good day.

We should have a Marriage Day holiday, with parades and picnics and love story movie marathons (focusing on forbidden love stories of all sorts, with happy endings), commemorating June 12, 1967, the day of the Loving vs. Virginia decision that struck down anti-miscegenation laws, and June 26, 2015, the day "same-sex marriage" became just "marriage."

Hmm, a series of historical romances about the human cost of nonsensical laws, there's an idea...

Happy Harvest Festival

The historical myth behind Thanksgiving is problematic in a number of ways, and it's been a rough week so it's hard to be thankful; but the basic idea of a harvest festival in combination with a day to count your blessings is sound, so - Merry Thanksgiving, y'all.

Merry New Year!

No resolutions for me. It's been a weird year and there's no reason to expect 2014 to get less so. But weird is a relative term. If I can get my discipline more or less back where it belongs I'll be happy. But I won't rule out being happy under other circumstances, either, because if you make happiness conditional you probably won't ever get to enjoy it.

Always remember, when you feel as if every word you write is a boulder pushed up a hill, that when the work is done and you read it over, you won't be able to distinguish those words from the ones that spilled out of you effortlessly; except that the effortless ones will probably contain more typos. So don't sweat it and get on about your business.

Tomorrow is our Annual New Year's Board Game Extravaganza! So I may have a gaming hangover Thursday. See you round.

November 29: A Great Day for Literature

Today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott.

And C.S. Lewis.

And Madeleine L'Engle.

It is a good day to read!

Thankful as an Intransitive Adjective

For various reasons, we won't be having the Big Meal till Sunday with the gaming group, but that's fine. Damon has today and Friday off and we're going to hunker down (by local standards it's very cold) and stay off the road, except I have to go deal with some cats whose people are out of town, poor things.

My reverend Mom once asked me who or what, as an agnostic, I feel grateful to when I take time to be thankful; but I'm not feeling thanks as a transitive verb in these cases. I'm looking at my life, and taking note of the ways in which it is in fact pretty decent. When an individual is responsible for some good thing I wish to give credit where it's due; but I can also feel glad about circumstances. And by the way, some of the things I'm glad about, I did for myself. So there's that. Nothing wrong with being thankful to yourself for making the right call.

I'm thankful I have freedom to make choices and live with the consequences.

I'm thankful I live in Texas, where we all feel cold when it gets into the 50s. (Despite the political craziness; no place is perfect and it's my responsibility to provide as much political sanity as I can.)

I'm thankful that my biggest immediate complaint is that my videocard died and I can't play my favorite computer game till the new one arrives. On the scale of crosses to bear, that's a highly desirable level of discontent!

Damon is congested and didn't sleep well, but he's fully mobile, has fat reserves, and hasn't had acute anything in months. By his standards, he's healthy. And after the year from hell, when none of that was true, I am grateful every year that he's alive.

I'm thankful that I have control of my own time.

I'm thankful for the local independent bookstore, the only place I would ever consider shopping on Black Friday if I had a reason to shop, which I don't.

I'm thankful that my health crap is controllable with fairly simple lifestyle limitations and medications. If I have to miss out on stuff, well, then, I have to. It beats being too dizzy to walk.

I'm thankful for pharmacies that are open on holidays.

I'm thankful for my cats. Because cats.

I'm thankful for my friends. Because friends.

I'm thankful for books, both the ones I write and the ones I read. Because books!

And I'm thankful that I am once again the person certain people call when in need; because being that person means not being in need myself.

Intransitive Thanks

Since I am agnostic, I have been asked what, when I am thankful, I am thankful to.

It strikes me as unnecessary for "thank" at the Harvest Festival level to be a transitive verb. I know when I'm well off and I appreciate it. Money is tight, but we (and by we I mean Damon) are successfully juggling our financial needs. We're not in perfect health but we're both alive and much, much more well than we have been. Our back porch work is completed without major disasters. We have plenty to eat. It rained twice this week. Damon and I both made work progress this week, though neither of us made as much as we wanted to.

We can be happy if we let ourselves be.

Merry Thanksgiving, y'all.

Idea Garage Sale: New Year's Cat

I slept badly New Year's Eve. I always do. The local firework ordinance isn't enforced even when you call in a complaint - the switchboard gets overwhelmed - and the local fireworkers start setting them off way before dark. Despite knowing this, we carelessly did not catch Thai and put her inside before we left for our New Year's Eve game, and by the time we got home she had thoroughly hidden herself. I called her every 20 minutes, walking all around the house and back to the property line with the flashlight. She must have known I was looking for her, and furthermore, not being stupid, that once I had her she'd be safe from the Awful Noises, but I went to bed at 1 in the morning without having caught her. She was waiting at the front door when I came downstairs. When we returned from getting groceries she met us at the run, mewing anxiously, obviously relieved that we had come back before Awful Noises started again.

Probably she spent all of New Year's Eve curled up tight in the least accessible area of our crawl space, too terrified to move; but it doesn't take a professional to think of other things she might have been doing and reasons she might not have come to me.

She might have taken refuge with the raccoon, possum, skunk, and squirrels that make use of our property, one big mammalian nest of normal mutual indifference taking refuge against the common threat of the Awful Noises. Probably not the mice, though. They would have just burrowed deeper into the compost heap.

A kind neighbor with whom she spends part of her time when she's out of the house anyway may have taken her in, perhaps when Bad Children tried to torment her by tying firecrackers to her tail. (I've never seen anyone tie anything to a cat's tail, but it seems to have been shockingly prevalent during earlier epochs.)

She might have been taking part in the annual protective hunt undertaken by cats worldwide to track down and slay the monsters that enter the new year through the crack in time at midnight.

She might have gone on a spiritual journey with the ghosts of previous cats who died on this property, notably the late Bast, Eric, and Margo who used to be part of our household; but also any of a succession of Compost Cats who treated our yard as prime real estate - Thai's mother Squeaker, Margo's second-in-command Minion, Thai's old friend Hunter, and so on. I'm not sure what kind of spiritual journey a cat would need and she seems just the same as before, though.

Anyway, this is the sort of idea that we run across all the time in the children's literature business. Retirees with pets and/or grandchildren are particularly prone to them. Something happens in real life to the pet or grandchild with an unknown or intriguing component, and the retiree thinks "That would make a good children's book." So they go around talking about the idea, perhaps write it a bit, but have a hard time developing it and get distracted by peripheral things, like worrying about how to publish it and whether they'd have to provide the illustrations, before they even finish the first draft.

And sometimes they're dabbling and never go anywhere, and sometimes they produce a book, which may be anywhere in the vast spectrum from "A vanity publisher would charge extra to produce this" to "National Book Award contender," because it's hard to start a writing career from scratch late in life, but the people who do it well are often the best of the best, as they bring a lifetime of experience and good work habits to it.

So what do you do if you're not a writer, and you've had an idea like this, and you don't feel a need to be a National Book Award contender but wish to avoid paying extra to vanity presses? How do you know if the idea is good enough to proceed with?

You don't; because the idea is neither good nor bad till you execute it. I thought "Dystopian future with gladitorial games" was a horrible idea, and then I read The Hunger Games, and I still think so, but Suzanne Collins overcame the lameness of the idea with strong characters, relentless suspense, and a strong underpinning of topical relevance that never turned into overt moralizing.

The way you find out if it's good enough is, you write it. Don't worry about the publishing process yet. That's like worrying about how to get funding for a Channel swim while you're mastering the dead man's float. Look at the idea. Think about what you want to do with it besides showcase the superior qualities of your pet or grandchild, teaching children kindness to animals, or venting your anger at local enforcement of firework ordinances. What are the most intriguing things about the concept? How will you go about characterizing the cat: Do you give her a voice? If not, how do you convey her interior states and motivations and character arc, if any? Is the cat the real protagonist, the one who does the interesting things? Do interesting things actually happen, or are you only eager to invoke a mood or image?

Doodle with it. Play with it. Read it aloud to the cat. Relax with it, but work at it. Understand that, because people have ideas like this all the time, if you want to take up anybody else's time with it, you better do wonderful things with it; but if you're doing it for yourself, you only have to please yourself.

And you'll have a good writing year.

Happy Dr. King Day

We don't get the day off and the parade through the East Side till Monday, but today is Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday. I have a friend, M, who shares this birthday with him.

He used to not like the connection because he didn't like Dr. King. His dad was a little, um, strange, no, not in the way you're thinking, but explaining would be futile as well as privacy-invading. All you need to know is that when I first knew him M had a lot of strong opinions that he though were well-founded that weren't. I told him he should be thrilled about it and bought him a biography for his birthday. He thought the biography a little too reverent but the facts in it reconciled him to sharing his birthday with a Great American. IMHO, the Greatest American of the 20th century.

One of his life stories is how the first time he voted he got up out of a fever bed to vote for George Wallace. During this last election, he not only voted for Obama, but he kept talking about getting a t-shirt that read "Obama: Because it's about F------ time." And that's America, folks!

It's also what we in the fiction business call a character arc, but he doesn't see it that way. He'll explain to you in tedious detail how his behavior has been consistent and logical throughout and that he's exactly the same person now he was the day he voted for Wallace. There sure wasn't any dramatic moment of revelation or plot-like series of transformative events between those two points in time.

Life is messy and unstructured and not obliged to make any logical sense. That's one of the things we want fiction for.

Come to that, it's why we like holidays. They provide a satisfying illusion of narrative structure for the year.

Anyway, peace out, y'all, and have a good day!

Rereading A Christmas Carol - again

So yesterday I was feeling way too crappy to make decisions about where to send the two remaining books that need to go back into the mail (the demon lover story and the fluffy daydream romance that is so off-brand I don't know why I wrote it, much less why I believe in it so strongly), and today I'm overcaffeinating and had to bus downtown to take my husband the pills he forgot and I still have to make the pecan pie for the Christmas Eve dinner our best friend's new girlfriend is hostessing; and the cats don't want me to type; I've put on Melissa Etheridge's Christmas album; and I'm going to talk about Dickens.

I don't do Christmas, but I read A Christmas Carol every year about this time, and have pretty much done so since I was nine. It was among the first books I ever bought for myself, sixty cents from My Weekly Reader Book Club, when I was nine. I'm sure I was nine, although the handwritten address inside did not become ours till I was ten; I don't think I started putting my name and address in books till then, probably because I didn't start carrying them around with me till then. I associate the book with the classroom where I picked it up, the fourth-grade classroom in Maryland, winter of 1970; and this printing is dated October 1970, in confirmation. I didn't read that copy this year, though. My husband got me the Time-Life facsimile set of the Christmas books a few years ago, with the original illustrations. It's much sturdier, and I can still see my old purchase through the pages as I turn them.

One of the reasons to have these established media traditions - Christmas Carol in December, "Alice's Restaurant" at Thanksgiving, 1776 for Independence Day - is the way it puts us in touch with our old selves, layering one on top of the other, with the raw, half-comprehending perceptions of the original nine-year-old showing through the layers of age as I came to understand the text better and better. Although I now have less anachronistic images to call on, I like flashing back to my initial formulation of the Ghost of Christmas Present as a hippy, based on his long hair, bare feet and chest, and his greeting to Scrooge: "Come in and know me better, man." I still hear those words in that half-stoned hippy drawl, the holly wreath askew on his head, sizing up square, selfish, uptight Scrooge with genial skepticism that he can be reformed but game to give it a shot. I was a pretty square, uptight nine-year-old myself, but I wanted to be good, wanted to reform without knowing what was wrong, and I could tell the secret was in this book.

Much that confused me once, that I accepted on faith, I now have the facts and background to comprehend. I still don't know the story of St. Dunstan and the Evil Spirit, but I know that lobsters phosphoresce when they spoil (Marley's face in the knocker has a "dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark celler"). I know that most people in Victorian London didn't have ovens in their homes and had to pay for the baker to cook anything they couldn't accomplish on an open hearth, hence the Cratchits fetching the goose from the bakeshop; and the conversation Scrooge and Christmas Present have about people wanting to close the bakeshops on Sundays in his name refers to an early movement for what we in our day call "blue laws," requiring businesses to close on Sundays to keep the Sabbath "holy." I still can't quite picture the hearse going up the stairs broadwise. A lot of reading of 19th century literature finally resulted in my realizing that Scrooge's nephew's wife is sitting out the Blindman's Bluff game because she's pregnant, but I can't convince other people who aren't as well versed in Victorian delicacy. Never mind, I know it now, as surely as I know that Marley was dead, to begin with.

The virtues of Dickens's style are out of fashion, but oh, how I love his rolling, generous, liesurely, abundant sentences in this book; and how I loved them when I was nine, how they drew me into a sensuous bath of words! Nine-year-olds are supposed to have short attention spans and are assumed to have no appreciation for the tactile joys of style, but I did. Words lodged in my brain and became part of it: "Oh, he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" "I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere!" "The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" "O God, to hear the insect on the leaf pronounce upon the too much life among its hungry brothers in the dust!"

And images, piled up in my head like the oranges and apples in the fruit stands where Christmas Present took Scrooge, scattering drops from his torch as profligately as Dickens uses adjectives. Those half-closed shops, the onions like fat Spanish friars; the bleak moors around the house where the old man leads his family in old, old songs; the horny-handed lighthouse keepers and storm-tossed sailors; Mrs. Cratchit and her daughters brave with ribbons; Tucker chasing the plump sister; the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, its kind hand trembling, dwindling into a bedpost; the Ghost of Christmas Past with its lighted belt accurately forecasting the visual effects Christmas lights decades before they existed; the Christmas turkey that never could have stood upon its legs without snapping them off like sticks of sealing wax; and, emerging disturbing and scary from under Christmas Present's festive robes, the boy Ignorance and the girl, Want.

I'm an agnostic. I stopped doing Christmas years ago. The whole business of presents stresses me out - I don't really like getting them, except when they are a surprise, a free and open indication that someone was thinking of me and saw something I might like, and I resent feeling that I have to buy them - and though I like decorating and baking and caroling and so on, as part of a group, no one else around me seems to, at least not enough to want to do them with me. I hate Christmas displays in stores and I hate the monotonous repetition of the same Christmas songs over and over on the radio; but I like to play the local college station, KSYM, when all the student DJs have gone home and some hardworking soul put together about 48 hours of Christmas music with no repeats, gospel choirs and Gene Autry, Cheech and Chong, obscure groups singing about Christmas on West Mistletoe (two blocks over from me! Yay!) and how Muhammed Ali taught the singer the meaning of Christmas. Celebration is good. And A Christmas Carol is wonderful.

A few years ago a friend of mine read it for the first time and e-mailed me about it, a little blown away, saying that it wasn't about Christmas at all, but about living your life. And that's exactly so. Scrooge, and Marley before him, aren't living. They have their heads down in their business, have let it eat their lives, and their crime is not so much being greedy as being miserable. They have lost their way as social animals.

We speak and act as if alienation were a modern invention. It's not. Christmas was commercialized long ago and the "old-fashioned Christsmas" of Dickens was never the norm. If it had been, he wouldn't have felt impelled to write the story.

Read it. Enjoy it. Get your head out of your troubles and enjoy yourself and others. If your own heart laughs, that will be quite enough for you.

Merry Christmas.