I’m getting a good readership on this blog, thank you very much, and perhaps it doesn’t matter if I know to whom I’m speaking. However, I know I am talking to you. YOU. THE PERSON READING THIS RIGHT NOW. 

 

Out of the entire world of human beings, we landed on the same page. Isn’t that something?!

 

Wow, I just inspired myself.

 

 

A few minutes ago, I moved a smaller box my husband had labeled “Sharp things” from a larger box, looking for my Seagate external drive that took an excursion on its own somewhere between moving my desk from the living room, to my new office in the Wayback (An external building behind the house.) There beneath the small box was not my Seagate drive but my old coffee warmer hot spot. Ah ha. Now I have warm coffee—but still no external computer device.

 

The Universe works in mysterious ways.

 

I’ll give that drive time to reappear. In the meantime, Steven King in Steven King/On Writing admonished me to eliminate cliche’d similes, metaphors, and images. “He ran like a madman. She was pretty as a summer day, the guy was a hot ticket, Bob fought like a tiger.” 

 

I better check my manuscript to see if I dropped any such chestnuts. 

 

King says we are lazy to use them, and we haven’t done enough reading.

 

“Hey, King, there are only so many hours in a day.” 

 

You know what? All this attempting to write well, is like the Circus performer spinning plates atop poles.

 

And among my notes, I found this: “We observe what is, instead of creating what we want to see.”

 

“Reality is so compelling,” I had written, “It has so much momentum going it’s hard to stop or change its direction.

 

 “How do you feel? That’s the test. When you are resonating with the good, you feel good. When you focus on the dire, the dangerous, the sick, you feel down, depressed, complaining, or just off kilter.”

 

 

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.)

 

 

 

Avocados

  I tasted my first avocado after I was grown, married, and had graduated from college.

When I encountered a sugar-cube sized piece of avocado in a salad, I thought I have bitten into a raw fish. But when I discovered guacamole, the avocado world opened its doors and played celestial music. 

 Now we wrap raw fish and avocado in a pillow of rice, tie it up with seaweed and call it a delicacy.

 See how times change. 

 When I began reading Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones (My new one, the 30th year edition), she told about tasting her first avocado in the 1960s. With that, she gave us permission to write about such things. 

To become a writer, you write. You put pen to page and begin and keep on keeping on. 

If writing about avocados will do it for you, write about avocados.

When William Cowper (1700) was stuck with nothing to write, Lady Austin told him he had no subject and suggested he write about his sofa. His sofa poem turned into an epic poem, including all manner of furniture.  As it turned out, Cowper changed the direction of poetry by writing about everyday life.

I was drawn to Cowper when I read this: "To find the medium asks some share of wit, and therefore 'tis a mark fools never hit."

 I figured that man had a handle on life (1731 –1800). I found that he was the most popular poet of his day and a forerunner of Romantic poetry. He was also a hymnist, "God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform." How many times have you heard that? Cowper translated the Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek into English blank verse.

See what neat things you learn when writing with a little curiosity.

When Cowper was six-years-old, his mother died giving birth to his brother. This grieved little Cowper bitterly. To add insult to injury, his father sent him to boarding school, where he was bullied. He and his brother, who he was close to, were the only two of nine children that survived infancy. Cowper fell in love with his cousin, but because of their close genetic ties, his uncle forbids the marriage.

Cowper fell into depression and madness for a time and was tenderly cared for by a lady friend to whom he became engaged but never married.  He recovered his sanity only to have another bout, later on, believing that God wanted him to sacrifice himself.

Well crap. Old religion doing a number on a person again.  He doubted God but wrote hymns. Pool fellow. I heard he never entered a church again, but what if he had learned that God doesn't have an ego problem? Why would a supreme being care if you believed in him or not? Would a loving God demand sacrifice? Nada.

If Cowper knew this, would it have made a difference in his mental health? What if our purpose is to live in joy? I guess that was a concept unheard of in those times. And living by other's rules can screw up many an innocent soul.

Cowper's life was the sort they tell writers to write of, "Throw rocks at your hero," they say.

But make the ending satisfying.

And whether you agree or not, a happy ending is more satisfying than a sad or ambiguous one. 

Ar-TISTS sometimes take pleasure in sad endings, but often that doesn't work. Sad endings rarely become blockbusters. (The English Patient might be an exception.)

 Would we have remembered Luke Skywalker if we found he had failed Jeti training and didn't destroy the Death Star?

Words of the wise say that the beginning of your book will cause people to read it. The ending will win you fans.

 You can write for fun or self-examination. You can journal, write morning pages, or go wild and make up stories.

And why more readers read non-fiction than fiction is beyond me, for much can be learned from fiction. A skilled writer can weave self-improvement into the story, so it is almost impossible to know you are getting it.

Here I am praising fiction but writing non-fiction. There is room for both. Besides, we are into How-tos, wanting answers, and looking for data, so it is logical that non-fiction would gain the highest readership.

Natalie Goldberg was one of the first writing instructors to tell her students that writing is a therapeutic endeavor. 

When we moved from Temecula, California to Eugene, Oregon—or rather back to Oregon, my husband packed up the Prius with his shop equipment and moved to Oregon to begin a new job.

That left the packing and shipping for my daughter and me to complete. I chose U-Haul Pods. We thought six pods would do it. However, at the last minute, as the sweet girl fork-lift driver was loading pods onto a mammoth truck, the scale on the fork-lift told her some Pods were over-weight. We found that paper-filled boxes were heavier in one Pod than another that contained an airplane engine. Yep, we were shipping an airplane engine that was so heavy daughter threatened to roll it down the hill instead of packing it into a Pod. However, the two of us hefted and rolled it onto the bottom shelf of a rolling cart and pushed the cart into a container.

Bottom line: as we were scrambling to pull out boxes, one removed box contained my favorite books on writing. We had determined that rather than order another Pod, we would donate more to Good Will or Salvation Army.

My books on writing kept getting shuffled aside. We had already loaded the pickup truck bed to the brim and tarped it. The U-Haul trailer we were pulling behind it was full.  (Remember our faithful Pickup truck that went to Hawaii and back? It had carried those 19 loads of household belongings from the Mattson sea-going container to the house, then back again.) that truck was moving us again. I looked into the pickup’s cab—no room.

We were carrying the driver, me, a passenger, my daughter, and Peaches, our little poodle, would be on the bench seat between us. Daughter's three-year-old son, my grandson, would be in the backseat alongside a 150-pound Newfoundland dog. Oh, yes, and we had two cats and no room for a box of books.

No room for cat carriers either. Nina and I put harnesses on the cats, so we could clip them inside when we wanted to leave the truck for whatever reason. So, I dropped them into the truck to sift into whatever spaces they could find.

And we took off.

My books were left for a scheduled Good Will pick up at the house, where they would go to another writer—who is probably rich and famous by now.

[From Chapter 4 for Grab a Pen and Kick-Ass by jewell d with permission from the author.]

Available on Amazon.com for $1.99.

https://www.amazon.com/Grab-Pen-Kick-Ass-jewell-d-ebook/dp/B08V4ZNL2X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Grab+a+Pen+and+Kick-Ass&qid=1612048475&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Thanks for giving it a look-see. 

Joyce, aka jewell d