Are You Guys’ Writers?

 Are you guys’ writers?

I know you are readers, for you are here. Thank you. I appreciate you immensely.

I am encouraging reading and writing. Don’t let either go away. Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books, you just have to get people not to read them.”

Don’t do that. Keep on reading. Keep on writing. Both are good for that beautiful brain of yours.

“In times of crisis,” I read this morning in the Epoch Times: “it’s easy for your mind to feel bombarded—notifications, headlines, endless scrolling. It feels like information overload, but science shows it’s worse: shallow, fragmented content actually changes your brain, training it for distraction.”

I know that extended, focused reading is good for the brain. A study published in Neuroscience News shows that consistent cognitive engagement such as reading can even delay cognitive decline by years.

“What you feed your brain defines how it performs. Shallow content trains distraction. Deep, quality reading trains focus and insight.”

We need to delve into something of substance once in a while, immerse ourselves. Perhaps I should write longer blogs. But people have little time, so they want to get through information quickly. I suggest you use your precious leisure time to read a book. Savor it. Devour it.  And after that, write out your feelings, frustrations, blessings. Your life has meaning; it deserves your attention.

I was so excited yesterday after completing Suzanne Redfearn's novel Where Butterflies Wander, especially after she explained in the author’s comments following the book how she came to write it and how it morphed along the way. It fell in step with a discussion I had with my grandson the night before on what a theme is, a plot, should you write the ending first, those sorts of things. As she was writing her novel, she found an article in a magazine about a man in a cabin, squatting on someone’s land, and used that idea in her book. It gave her story backbone she said. And it gave her an ending. I wanted to tell somebody, but it was met with crickets, and I realized, once again, that discovery gives its gift to the one who finds it. Plus, you must jump on an idea while it’s hot; otherwise, it flies away with the wild ducks.

 It seemed pertinent that the two books I completed in the morning, that is not normal for me, were by the same author, Suzanne Redfearn. In April I mentioned Walking the Camino, and now I am talking about Where the Butterflies Wander.

When my girls were starting school, and I was reading about alternative education, I came upon the book, Education and Ecstasy. The author asked if we had ever, in our 12,16 or 18 years of schooling, had a teacher who believed learning was ecstasy. That’s the way learning ought to be, but mine wasn’t during those early years.  (That book is on Amazon; by George B Leonard, I just looked it up. Yep, printed in the 60s. That sounds right.)

That book just popped into my mind. That’s the way the brain works, and the way I wrote my memoir, like a mountain stream that splashes against rocks, beavers dam it up, the water breaks free, logs fall into it, but I trust the river knows where it is going and will take us there with it. (To the Source.)

It may sound ludicrous to say I’m writing a memoir, I'm not illustrious. I’ve never been to Mars. I’m not a celebrity, had a near-death experience, or chewed off my arm stuck on a mountain. However, I trust Natalie Goldberg when she said everybody ought to write a memoir, and it doesn’t have to be your life story. It can be any moment. It can be for those moments that take your breath away.

I wanted to visit my little girl self again, the one who could jump rope and run, and fearlessly jump onto a horse’s bare back. I wanted to visit my father again, who left for the Second World War, but I didn’t see him again until 38 years later.

I wished my ancestors had been more expressive. That way I would know how my grandmother responded when her 16-year-old daughter informed her that she was pregnant.

They had their thoughts and the right to privacy, but then those thoughts and feelings died with them.

I’m up to 70,000 words.

  

I agree that these are tough times, so was the war. However, then we didn’t have a society built on fear. We didn’t have a would-be dictator. We believed that our President was pulling with us. We still believed in democracy.

Now, there are many Americans who ought to be ashamed of themselves.

 

A moment of Reprieve:

Let us be as gentle and loving as this Momma Goat protecting her baby at the Lane county Fair in Eugene, Oregon. 

 

 

This is The Work

 

 

“Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”—Vincent  Van Gogh

 

 “Put your ass where your heart wants to be and don’t ask anything else of yourself.”—Steven Pressfield.

 

He says he doesn’t worry about how many words he will write, about punctuation, or anything. He knows that if he sits for his allotted time per day (his is about 3 hours), in six months, he will have a book. In a year, two books. 

 

Cool! It helps that he has some writing skills at his disposal. 

 

True, I could probably write a book in six months, but from my experience, then it will take 6 years of rewriting and editing, and proofreading. Then does anyone what to read it? (Diabolical laughter.)  

 

Maybe I need an attitude adjustment.

 

This morning, as I often do, I opened a book on writing as an oracle. I open the book to a random page, read a couple of paragraphs, and it sets me up for the day. Read an entire book on writing in one sitting, and your brain will go out to lunch, leaving you behind to starve. No, I take that back, read the entire book, then keep it around for a refresher.

 

This morning it was Steven King/On Writing:.

 

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill.” (Oh, goodie.) “One of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot.”

 

I don’t know what sensory experience. I want you guys to gain from reading this. It is non-fiction, which some successful writers say ought to be crafted as though it’s fiction. I’m simply talking. You are sitting in front of your computer. I am in front of mine. I use an external keyboard, for I simply cannot type on the computer’s keyboard--it drives me nuts. Maybe it’s because I learned to type on a typewriter. I like keys that pack a punch. And I have raised my screen to about eye level, as my Chiropractor suggested, so my back is straight. Whoops, I just straightened up. 

 

I sit in front of a window, my favorite spot for writing. I like to look up and see the green trees, the birdies flipping about, and if I raise up a bit, I can see my four chickens as they are in the backyard now. The area where they used to be behind the Wayback gave ample opportunity for the marauding raccoon to use them for snacks.

 

Safe house

 

The pink dogwood tree I see out my window is replacing flowers with leaves. I really praise that ancient tree for recovering from its extreme cut-back. See how we can recover even if we are ancient. Remember how in Hawaii, I sat at my desk by the window and watched the Morning Goddess slowly meticulously adjust the morning sunlight until it totally enlivened the acre of green between me and the Tiki room. Oh, maybe you weren’t reading me at that time—it’s been ten years. (Really? It seems like last week.) 

 

And now, I open Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, a book I read when?? In 1986?! I don’t know; that’s when her book came out. Since I left the book behind in California, I rebought it in Oregon. The following is from the 30th Anniversary Edition.

 

“If you capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don’t only listen to the person speaking to you across the table but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming through the windows.” (Color has a sound?) “The deeper you can listen, the better you will write the truth about the way things are… Jack Kerouac, in his list of prose essentials, said, ‘If you can capture the way things are, that’s all the poetry you will ever need.’”

 

I wonder how this meshes with my reading Joe Despensia’s book, Be Your Own Placebo, where I learned that the brain has “Plasticity, that is it re-invents itself according to what you experience and learn.

 

Isn’t that great? We aren’t “stuck” in anything.

 

My movie/book suggestions:

Watch the movie Operation Mincemeat, about a fantastic clandestine operation during WWII.

Book: David Michie’s The Dali Lama’s Cat; Awaken the Kitten Within.

 

“As kittens, all it takes is a windblown feather, an unexpected delicacy, or the alluring rush of water, and instantly we are caught up in it. Wonderment. Enchantment. Being fully absorbed in the here and now.”

 

Is it possible to recover the unaffected zest for life?

You Know Better Than That

 

"Books are old-fashioned," my eight-year-old grandson told me this morning.

 

That hurt my heart.

 

Remember #Ray Bradbury's book #Fahrenheit 451, where the fireman burned books, and how the people memorized one book to keep it alive.

Michael Burnett told a similar story at the #National Achiever's Congress in Portland, Oregon.

 

When #Nelson Mandela was in prison," he said, the prisoners had to do hard labor, and that was to break up sandstone rocks. Sunlight on sandstone creates quite a glare, and it is hard on the eyes. Mandela asked the guard if they could have sunglasses to shield their eyes.

 

You know the answer. "No."

 

Later on, when they had nothing to do in their cell, Mandela asked the guard if they could have books to read.

 

"You aren't here to have sunglasses and books," he said. The answer was, "No."

 

So the prisoners devised a plan. They would have a one-on-one, each sharing what they knew with one other, and thus when each prisoner was, at last, released from prison, each was smarter than when they entered it.

 

We are all living books filled with experiences, insights, and garnered wisdom. If we shared it, just think where we would be. I guess that's what the Internet is, but I still want books.

 

We have this extraordinary ability to create beauty, love, and learn. But, come to think of it, animals do too. However, with our two-million-year-old brains—evolutionarily speaking—we are, instead, on the watch for danger.

 

There are fears all around us, internal and external. We hang back, afraid to go for our dreams, afraid to go into uncharted territory, afraid to speak up, and fearful of our shadows. We often think we aren't good enough, loved enough, or intelligent enough.

You know better than that.

 

If you agree, laugh out loud. If not, keep quiet.

 

High five,

Joyce

 

P.S.

"Someday, in the distant future, our grand-children's grand-children will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge." PLATO'S DOCTRINE, 909 Relics of Greek Philosophy. 

 

Refurbish/ Make Better

While walking down a street in Huntington, Long Island, Billy Joel stumbled upon an old piano set out on the street to be thrown away.

Ever “The Piano Man,” Joel stands at the piano and pounds out a rag-time tune. 

 Man, that piano SANG!

To the untrained eye, that instrument was useless.

But “The Piano Man” knew better.

He said it was perfectly good—just needed a new finish and a tuning to come back to life.

 

 

I’m using Joel’s philosophy on a couple of my books, taking old worn-out content and giving it new life. 

 

Right now, though, I need to take a walk to stretch out my legs, but I was so anxious to tell you what I just completed that I’m writing first. 

 

After you’ve gone through clean-up the books and then placing them on Kindle, it’s time for cheers, not that it is so hard, but glitches happen, and formatting gets thrust into the wrong places. And for some reason (you know computers have a mind of their own), I ended up with hyphens in my words where they didn’t belong--remember-brance, exot-ic, set-tled. What the heck?

 

Do you do this? You and the computer get cross-wired. The computer, its programs, whatever it is, changes your formatting, as well as your font type and size, and my dear computer won until 2 A. M. this morning.

 

I won at 4 P.M. this afternoon.

 

Woohoo. 

 

I thought perhaps you could relate.

 

You can cry on my shoulder. I’m here.

 

A new romance book will be coming out, all new and fresh and happening in Italy. The working title is Where Destiny Leads.

 

If you are a writer, here is the book for you: Grab a Pen and Kick Ass by jewell d. (Me) If you don’t think I’m so hot, read the books I list within the book, They’re hot! They’re the best.

 

Click on the image of your choice:

 

 

If you like a romance book, check out The Girl on the Pier. The Girl on the Pier is a painting, not the heroine, but there is a hero and a heroine, and a love story, and a world-wide search, and a mystery. Why in the world were there two paintings with the same title? And why would a customer offer an exorbitant sum for one of them? And ha, I got Africa is there, and Paris--makes me drool.

 

Both are available on Amazon.com. IF you have Kindle Unlimited, they are free.
 

I’m off for my walk, and I’m grabbing Husband Dear and dragging him along.

See ya,

Jo

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the science of reading, was worried—as perhaps you have worried—that she might be losing the knack for sustained, deep reading. 

 

She still buys books. "But more and more I read in them rather than being whisked away by them," she wrote.

 

Wolf told herself that it wasn't the style of her reading that had changed, only the amount of time she could set aside for it. 

 

So, she decided to set up an experiment on herself.

 

She decided to set a time every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman. It was Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi. (Hesse received a Nobel Price in Literature in 1945.) It was precisely the sort of demanding text she once loved.

 

The experiment went yuck!

 

She hated the book. She hated the whole so-called experiment. She had to force herself to wrangle the novel's "unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me." 

 

The book's narrative was intolerably slow. She said she had "changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration." 

 

She had lost the "cognitive patience" that once sustained her in reading such books as Magister Ludi. 

 

She blamed the internet. 

 

Remember how English teachers admonished us to "develop our paragraphs?" Now, most all paragraphs need to be about two sentences long. In fact, large blocks of text soon lose their reader.

 

And now I read that the GPT-3 equipment they are installing in cell phone prompts will give our phones the quality everyone pretends to but does not actually want in a lover — the ability to finish your thoughts.

 Have you ever written a message where the damn messenger writer decides what your next word ought to be? For crying out loud, now it wants to write for us. 

 

The GPT-3, instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, as our messaging appts do, would produce several paragraphs in whatever style it intuited from your prompt. 

 

If you prompted it Once upon a time, it would produce a fairy tale. If you typed two lines in iambic pentameter, it would write a sonnet. If you wrote something vaguely literary like We gathered to see the ship and all its splendor, like pilgrims at an altar, it would continue in this vein: 

 

If you wrote a news headline, it would write an article on that topic, complete with fake facts, fake statistics, and fake quotes by fake sources, good enough that human readers could rarely guess that it was authored by a machine.

 

OMG, is this true?

 

But then I come upon this quote by Geralyn Broder Murray. He greatly anticipated the arrival of a new bookstore in her neighborhood: Good News!

 

 "And, for all the traumas bookstores have faced, they don't appear to be going anywhere, which to me means there is hope for everything and everyone."

 

Remember when bookstores started having coffee shops in their facility? 

 

I was in heaven.

 

I miss bookstores. Oh, we still have Barnes and Noble in town, for which I am grateful. However, when I read Geralyn Murray's thrill at having an independent bookstore move into her neighborhood, I was taken back to how I felt walking into a bookstore—all that adventure, all that knowledge, all ability to spin yarns. We used to have a wonderful Metaphysical bookstore in town that had a sign, "You want a book about what?"

 

"So, writes Murry, "the next time I feel the world crashing down around me," I know exactly where to seek refuge: through the doors of my very own neighborhood bookstore, where the beauty and promise we all have within us is waiting to be picked up, purchased, and brought home in the form of a book — reminding me that all is not lost. Far from it."--Geralyn Broder Murray Sep 22, 2021. 

 

We used to frequent Libraries when we were kids. (And remember Ray Bradbury said he educated himself by reading from one side of the library to the other. And then, look what a writer he became. And he reveled in it. "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ― Ray Bradbury)

 

But think of a bookstore and how thrilled you were with your new purchase. You couldn't wait to get into it. You would carry your book home, and it would be yours. And you wouldn't have to pay any Library late fees.

 

And then when the coffee shops arrived, well imagine, you could choose a book from the shelf, sit at a table and gently peruse the book—careful to keep it pristine, no coffee drips or anything.

 

In the days of bookstores, I would plunk down twenty-five bucks on a book and think nothing of it. Now I'm used to the $2.99 prices of Kindle, and even with my own book, The Frog's Song, I feel it's overpriced, but it is what the publisher demands. (Hey, they have to make money; otherwise, they will not stay in business. Which was the reason bookstores closed.)

 

I read on my Kindle. I order books online, but there is nothing like the thrill of walking into a bookstore where the air zings with the excitement. It's a feeling not present in a library.

 

Oh, I take that back—some libraries. I went into the Oregon State Library in Corvallis, Oregon, once to research the horse's brain and was overcome with their beautiful building--windows along one side, floor to ceiling, lots of light, a small food court, and a restroom. I could live there.

 

After reading Ms. Murray, I thought of the first book read to me by my mother, Anne of Green Gables. And in the second grade, there was a special reading time where we put our heads on our desks, and the Sister-nun read Heidi. That was the best time of being in the second grade. In the middle of the year, I had entered a Catholic School, a new kid, and was thrust into academia--was embarrassed when asked to read aloud and stammered over my words. And you had to stand beside your desk. Horrors.

 

Before that, what I remember from the first grade and half of the second was that we played, and I was a darling because I could draw. In Catholic School, I made a special friend, a non-Catholic who was there because her mother, a doctor, thought it was the best school. 

 

The point I'm getting to is this, those first books we read as children are etched into our soul. Perhaps they help form who we are. How I loved The Black Stallion series. I have read many books since, but none are as special as those first reads. 

 

See ya. I'm going to have a glass of wine and pick up my current novel. (I just completed: Where the Forest Meets the Stars by Glendy Vanderah. I loved it. A little girl, found by a field biologist, says she is from the stars.)

 

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." --Ray Bradbury

 

Do you have any comments, feedback, gripes, or suggestions on improving my service? (Yeah, Joyce, open a Bookstore—in my dreams.)