A Writer Afoot » Random Beauties

The process

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:14:47 +0000

Since November, I’ve been writing a serial novel for a blog, The OtherLand Chronicles, which I’ve written about here several times. After two months, I have some observations.

I began on November 1, for NaNoWriMo, a lark. Or so I thought. The truth is, this story has been rattling around in my head for more than three years, gathering bits and pieces to itself. Every so often, it came to me with a new shiny something, like a child who wants to play, and I would say, “Oh, that really is clever, but I don’t really have time right now to do anything with it. Hang on to it, okay?” The book-child wold nod and amble away, admiring her little treasure.

Over and over and over this happened, until I realized that I had a LOT of material. Like an entire world and backstory and a story arc long enough for a trilogy. It was all born from my walks in the parkways around Briargate, and that’s a lot of walking. Every day, year in, year out, me and my dog and the story brewing.

Any writer knows that sooner or later, that work has to be done. It will force its way into your schedule no matter what else you’ve got going on, and it will make itself so very attractive that you will have no choice. You’ll be seduced.

I was seduced. Now I find myself writing an entire book in public, which is not the most comfortable thing in the world. It forces me to find more time to write than I usually would, and for the first time in years, I’m really a hermit. I don’t want to go anywhere. I have work to do. So much work, all of it so different, and so much fun in its own ways.

I also discovered that as much as I’d like to do a “serial draft” where I don’t change anything, that was just not possible. I had to go back and do some revisions for the sake of the story. I had to rewrite a couple of scenes pretty substantially and move a couple of them around, and until I did it, the book stubbornly wasn’t going to let me move forward.

But here’s the thing: this is my play project, so I get to make the rules. My promise to the readers of the material is that I will finish. I will not quit until I have a complete story. Turns out my promise to the story is that I have to serve it first. Which is always the way.

For the record, I am having a blast. This is as entertaining as anything I’ve done.

If you haven’t been reading along and wish to begin, start at the beginning.

If you have been reading, I finally got new material up after the long Christmas break. Start at Chapter Eleven, Scene 4

Adulthood and my personal commandments

Barbara Samuel — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:20:00 +0000

I am pretty sure I’ve talked about Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project before. The book is upbeat, illuminating, and surprisingly practical. One of the steps I love most is her approach to creating a map of living. Each of us have a different set of goals, a dharma and purpose unlike that of anyone else. It’s helpful to put that down in writing.

These are my 12 personal commandments, which are connected to the secrets of adulthood. I used Rubin’s list as a model, but adapted them to me and my reality. Maybe you have a list of your own you’d like to share.

1. Be Barbara
This is taken directly from Rubin. It reminds me to be ME, not some idealized version of me. Or as my old Unity minister used to say, “I am God expressing as….Barbara.” Which is an exhilarating thought, really.

2. I am 100% responsible for my own happiness

Never as easy as I think it will be. For example, when I am driving and some rude driver cuts me off, how can I be happy? But I can, as my friend Heather does, tell myself another story about the action. Maybe that person has a sick child or is rushing to the beside of his best friend.

This also counts when I am irritated with some aspect of daily life or a person in my life….100% means all the time. The weird thing is, this particular secret carries a huge amount of relief.

3. If I look good, I feel good.
This doesn’t mean trying to be botoxed and skinny. It is to remind me that while it’s okay to wear yoga pants and my hair in a scrunchy while I’m working, I feel 10x better if I get my hair cut on time and wear only clothes I really love. It means putting on the nicer shirt and taking the time to do my hair before CR comes home. Little stuff, that’s all. (And this probably makes me sound like a slob, which would be impossible for a daughter of my mother.)

4. An Uncluttered Environment Leads to an Uncluttered Mind
Simple. I don’t have to have sparkling clean floors, but need to reduce visual clutter as much as possible.

5. Exercise always helps
I need daily walks and fresh air and lots of hard, physical exercise. I am grouchy without it. If I’m cranky or overwhelmed or tired, I almost always need to get outside or go swimming or go work out. The deeper the grumpiness, the more I need to do.

6. Sleep Gives You A Clear Head

I am a morning person. Like, obnoxiously so. I like to wake up early and get going on the day. That means I’m genuinely tired and ready to quit by 8 or 9. Because I grew up with vampires, I sometimes feel sheepish about this and will often try to stay up until 11, like other people. All this does is make me tired. Going to bed with a good book at 9 is a great choice for me.

7. Overindulging Always Has A Price
Just what it says. Too much sugar or wine, too many video games, too many cookies…and I don’t feel great.

8. Work and Meeting Goals Makes Me Happy
I am lucky enough to adore the work I do. Sometimes, however, I can procrastinate myself into a corner and then I have to work too hard to be able to enjoy the process. Much much better to set reasonable goals and show up every day to get the work done. I feel so much better this way.

9. Tracking My Progress Is An Effective Tool for Conscious Living
I am a born diarist, and seeing my day to day habits in black and white makes me aware of what habits and actions actually form the basis of my life. That allows me to be accountable and to make changes if I so desire.

10. Celebrating others makes me feel happy
Everyone likes to be noticed, honored, get presents and cards.

11. Meditation is my way of listening to God
I like meditation, but I am surprised how often I’ll say to myself, “I don’t have time this morning.” Making time makes a difference.

12. I am always practicing to be an elder
Our society revers youth, not elders, but we need our elders to guide and help lead. To be the Wise Woman I hope to be one day, I have to learn what that means, and how to embrace it. That means listening to my elders instead of dismissing them. It means seeking instruction and guidance. It means practicing awareness of what I say and how I say it and how that influences others.

How about you? Can you think of some things you’d put on your list?

Writing in Buena Vista

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:34:41 +0000

This morning, I’m sitting at Bongo Billy’s coffee shop in Buena Vista, looking straight at Mt Princeton, which is one of the most gorgeous 14ers in a state packed with them. I’ve just posted the pages I wrote early this morning in my cabin overlooking Cottonwood Creek. Had to come to town to get a wifi signal. Doing it made me feel a bit of a city-slicker, but when you fall in love with a story, it goes with you. It’s one of the great things about being a writer.

I am madly in love with Bartholomew and Alia and the world they are revealing to me. I love having the the little deadline every few days so I can write some pages, and stick with it, but I also love that I’m writing it for me. I always write for myself, of course, but the artistic freedom in doing whatever I want for pure, total fun is rejuvenating in a way I hadn’t expected.

Now I’m off to soak in the hot springs and put together a vision board for the new year.

If you want to follow along, go to http://theotherlandchronicles.com/2011/12/chapter-9-scene-2/

In the meantime, hope you are all having a day as fine as mine.

Ready, set….READ!

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:02:20 +0000

Ambling around the internet this morning, I found this challenge from Book Chick City:

Since I’m often setting goals like “go to the gym seven hundred times a week,” the idea of reading a hundred books of FICTION in a year sounds like a dream. I bet you read that much most of the time anyway. I know I do.

It seems a ~~luxurious delight~~ worthy challenge for our insanely readerly selves. I signed up. Maybe you’ll want to join me. Click the icon.

Also, speaking of reading: The OtherLand Chronicles, the serial urban fantasy/YA/? I started for NaNoWriMo, is still in progress. Just started Chapter Nine this morning. Posting M-W-F through December. Having so much fun it’s just sinful. ;)

To start at the beginning, go here: http://theotherlandchronicles.com/2011/10/starthere/

Photo of the day

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:12:23 +0000

The Lipstick Chronicles

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:00:12 +0000

I have been in hiding, deep in my cave, finishing the new book, THE GARDEN OF HAPPY ENDINGS, which will be coming your way next May. I finally mailed a second pass back to my editor on Monday, which felt like delivering a very large, overdue baby. It’s alive and well.

Some readers here know that I post twice a month at The Lipstick Chronicles, with a group of very entertaining and interesting women writers. I am posting there the first and third Friday of every month, and here are the opening paragraphs of the most recent three. Stop by!

Ian and the Blue Gill

Three women, ranging in age from senior to ancient, are settled in a half circle at the end of the dock. The chairs have been dragged down to the pond from the main house, metal lawn chairs with green and white woven seats. My young son and I sit on the wooden slats of the dock. A little while ago, there were some bigger boys, young teenagers in baggy shorts and skinny chests, daring each other to swim in the murky water with snapping turtles and water snakes, but they’re gone now.

The old women wear cotton skirts and sensible shoes and soft cotton hats to protect their good complexions. Gnarled fingers fix bait. Fishing lines trail lazily in the water of the small pond. The air
is thick and still, so hot I find it hard to breathe, and my son’s pale cheeks are flushed. We are Colorado natives, and this is the countryside of the border between Missouri and Illinois.

I’d rather be almost anywhere else.

I hate fishing. I hate humidity. I hate the heat. Before we arrived, I’d been excited about this gathering with my husband’s family, but the reality is daunting. It’s hard to understand some of their deep south accents, and I don’t understand references to times and people I don’t know. And maybe they’re notpatronizing me, the much-younger, blond wife of an older African-American man, but all the usual in-law negotiations seem particularly exaggerated.

The Ghost in the Garden

Have you ever lived with a ghost? I have. In fact, I’m pretty sure she wanted me to save her house.

My eldest son was in kindergarten when I first saw this house. It was a narrow, two story brick, with a bay window on the top floor, and deep porch. It was well over a hundred years old, and looked it—the yard was bare dirt, baked by the southwestern sun to absolute sterility, the paint on the old wood was peeling. There was a crack in the brick over one window. It was empty. Abandoned.

But every day, as I passed by with my son’s five-year-old hand in mine, the house caught my eye. A pair of windows faced east, illuminating a staircase with a beautiful old banister, and spilling sunshine into the open front rooms. The light was so inviting, so peaceful, that often I would pause on the way back home and peer in the windows to see what else I could see. That inviting upstairs bedroom with the bay window. The enormous front windows overlooking the street, arched and ancient, the glass thin and wavery. One of them had a tiny bb hole in it. The kitchen was horrific—a single bank of cupboards made of tin, covered with wood-grain contact paper.

How to be a Perfect Mother In Law

My son was married on April 7. This means that I am a new mother-in-law. I have to forget everything I knew about mothering, and adopt a new approach.

This is not the simple transition I imagined it would be. For one thing, the son who got married is my mama’s boy, a child so devoted to me as a baby that I called him my joey. He was two weeks late emerging from the womb, and then I carried him on my hip for the next ten months because he wouldn’t allow anyone else to so much as change a sock. He’d howl piteously even if it was his father.

He’s grown into a strapping man who towers over me and has tattoos all over his arms and shoulders
(including, natch, one for “Mom” (please note the quill)). His bride is a serious, level-headed Air Force sergeant who looks at him with enough love in her eyes to make any mother happy. He’s an exuberant character, and worships the ground she walks on. I liked her immediately and have only grown to love her more
over time.

The Passions of Your Life

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:38:13 +0000

One of the things I always tell voice students is that we are all stuck with certain themes and ideas and motifs that will show up in our work. As I’ve been going through backlist titles to get them ready for sale as ebooks, I’m struck by how much of my writing voice was there, even in the earliest books.

In the book I am finishing for Bantam, The Garden of Happy Endings (out in May 2012), there is food and a good, smart dog, and a woman who has some issues with the Church. There is a pilgrimage that starts the whole tumble of events in the book, and a garden that provides a center of healing.

I recently reread A Winter Ballad, a medieval historical romance that was originally published in 1993 (and is now available again in e-book form) . There is a woman who is at war with the Catholic Church, and a dog who has been a loyal companion to a knight, and the book culminates with a pilgrimage across France, to Avignon and beyond. The main character is a healer who knows all the medicinal plants in the garden. (There is also a cat named Esmerelda, which astonished me…that my cat, who only died in January, had been in my life THAT long!)

In virtually every novel I have written, in any genre, some major scenes will take place in a kitchen. There will be scenes written around food, the preparation of food, the feeding of people. There will be dogs and/or cats, because it’s completely impossible to imagine having a life without the companionship of pets. There are hints of the mysterious and the miraculous in them, too, and always a strong love story. I am in love with England and Spain and walking and dogs and good food and the possibilities of faith and hope. Those things all show up in my books, and have from the beginning.

Can you identify themes in your own life? Things you love that run through your work?

NEWS: The wonderful Sharon Schlicht and I are working on two collections of Girls in the Basement essays on the writing life, with a goal of releasing them by August 15th. The first is The Care and Feeding of the Girls in the Basement, an upbeat guide to the writing life; the second is the GITB Year of Celebration. Stay tuned!

First sprout

Barbara Samuel — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 15:49:52 +0000

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:57:02 +0000

Looking at the world

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:46:54 +0000

Seems as if I’ve been posting tiny tidbits on Facebook and Twitter, as well as a score of posts for blogs elsewhere. I will be joining Lipstick Chronicles, and will be posting every other Friday starting in February. In the meantime, I’ve posted there a couple of times thus far. And for writers, of course, I am still posting blogs to Writer Unboxed the 4th Wednesday of every month.

To get myself back to the regular practice of blogging here, a process I genuinely enjoy, I’m going to use this blog as a little writer’s notebook through the month of January. I’ll post whatever I notice about the world on my daily journey through it. This is from a day or two ago, but it is the thing that made me want to begin.

On Wednesday, I had a pedicure at a shop I do not usually frequent. It was staffed by only two, very very young Vietnamese kids, she not more than twenty, he only a little more than that. She did not appear to speak English much at all, though he was quite enthusiastic and a good salesman. He was my pedicurist. Friendly, but not too chatty, and I was reading a book on my iPhone, so I didn’t really want to talk very much. After awhile, I noticed that his left thumb was small and wasted and didn’t move. It didn’t seem to hinder him. I went back to reading. A little later, I noticed that his forearm had a thick, old scar down the top, elbow to hand. It went all the way through, as if a sword had sliced through it. He moved his hand well enough, so much so that it did take that much time to notice the scar and the immovable thumb. My writer brain wanted to know what he’d done to it, and I find myself writing scenarios. I wondered how old he was. It must have been quite a dramatic scene. It must have done something to the tendons. I wondered how his mother felt when it happened, how afraid she must have been.

He fetched hot towels and said, “Feels good, right?” and I nodded. I went back to reading.