Dropping Off

Yes, many of my blogmates are dropping off. I hesitate to email them in fear, you know? I'd rather they stay vibrant in my mind's eye.

I will officially change the name of my blog on my birthday, next Wednesday, where to my shock (and astonishment) I cross the bridge of eighty turns around the sun.

I am astonished because I lived for many years with a cigarette hanging from my mouth and a drink of rum and coke solidly in my fist. Both abandoned in humility and defeat nearly forty years ago - now that deserves an exclamation mark, what! Nick of time should be my mantra.

I hesitate to write here now and again as I feel I have nothing to talk about. There's always a lot, of course, but I am conscious of being one of those old drones who goes on about nothing at all.

I am busy (I use "busy" when busy is a full day because of One. Solitary. Task) formatting and editing the anthology which has been ongoing for four years now, my writing workshops sadly interrupted by Covid. Writing workshops, face to face, are, to me, essential elements of writing. They are stimulating, encouraging and inspiring and most of all, massively improving to the individual writing process.  

But we are ready to roll now, the formatting has taken ten days due to the different platforms my writers were on and other issues like paragraphs tossed aside, fonts all over the place, spacing random, unessential capitalization, exclamation marks spattered like mud and, well, you get the picture.

I close with this photo I took a few days ago from the front of my building, which shows the lake on the right and the ocean on the left. Yes, I live in paradise and I need to remind myself of this when I whinge and whine.

Pleasantville, St. John's, Newfoundland.

and this gave me pause and then a huge laugh.

Frivolity

 A minor impatient rebellion by a few of my writers in my writing workshop yesterday. Demands to see their finished pieces published already. I took the requisite 24 hours before responding as my initial internal reactive one would have curled the hair on anyone's head. 

So I managed the reasonable, reasoned one a few minutes ago. Still calling them idiots but couched very prettily in one of those passive aggressive apologies. "I thought I had taken the time to explain the process in detail, I am so sorry if that wasn't the case."  (Note to readers: you see how imperfect I am.)

I read the rag of our local newspaper (on line) today, I don't do it often as it makes me grit my teeth. But I idly looked at my horoscope and it said:

So yes on the horoscope theme, I just finished "A Spool of Blue Thread" which was book club reading for this month. I see it has mixed reviews. I love Anne Tyler so admit to a bias. I would give it 5/5. It reads with extraordinary intimacy into a family. The secrets, the unspoken, the unresolved.

I've also nearly finished all the episodes of Season 5 of The Crown which, much like Downtown Abbey, one can't quite take seriously. The cars and frocks and sumptuous dinners and palatial residences and backbiting can't be beaten for their sheer entertainment value and re-creation. It must have cost a fortune to produce.

Setbacks

(I thought you'd like to see the beautiful city where I live)

Some setbacks health wise which have upset me.

So there.

I was too complacent perhaps with how my abysmal health for the past two years had turned around and allowed me to walk without George my stick, and Wally my wheelchair used for longer stretches. Does the Catholic guilt ever leave me, I ask myself, all those instructions from the Holy Nuns about not being proud, which covered a multitude of missteps, never taking pleasure in anything or God would turn around and smite you before snatching it away. Vanity. Victory. Holy God is in charge and will always knock you down a peg or two.

So last week was one of those weeks where every single doctor (three) visit had gloom and doom written all over it.

Finally, on Thursday, I sat in my car and hauled out the pity pot and sat on it for about 30 minutes in the backside of a parking lot which seemed appropriate rather than an ocean visit. What else can one do (unless you're lying to yourself).

Daughter and Niece cheered me up. I am so grateful for them both in my life. I haven't shared with friends, I feel quite on the verge of tears, and only with one dear blog friend directly. I am, as they say, processing. 

I will write more of this when I can.

Meanwhile the Writing Workshop keeps me busy and engaged and quite out of myself which is excellent. Niece has planned a mango curry dinner for me tomorrow night and Daughter is taking the day off next Friday and coming in to have lunch and a bit of Solstice shopping (we do books only).

Life is as life is. Acceptance and a carrying on spirit is needed.

We all have unexpected downers, don't we? 

(Another shot of St. John's - we are right on the Atlantic ocean)

Oh Me Nerves

So the anthology is off to a friend for formatting. A virtual friend in California whom I met through an online writers' group. Da Webz: she is amazing. VF has since become a well established author in the sci-fi genre while raising four daughters under the age of 7. And helps out fellow authors with her expertise.

I like the cover which features my office and an old fashioned lamp and a photo of my parents which seemed to fit. I wanted to show modern technology in conjunction with the old fashioned timbre of some of the stories/memoirs/poems within it. The photo is meant to be blurry with clear text. Not sure whether it works or not even though I am enamoured of it.

I've never taken on such a humungous, soul destroying, exhausting task in my life. It ripped about a year out of my life between rewrites and revisions and formatting, repaginations, four levels of editing and banging my head off my own keyboard. I would never do it again. Sympathy and compassion (except from other writers) was in short supply along with the challenge of the writers' impatience to see the book in print.

I think it will sell well locally as it truly is a type of compendium I'd see in the old days. Bits of everything.

A few of my own and Daughter's pieces are in it. One writer pulled a piece that was her best: afraid of relatives' judgements. A lovely piece, sadly never to see the light of day. Her substitute piece never made the final cut as it was so inferior.

It's done now and I can move on to my languishing 3 novels and the CBC Short Story Contest.

Freedom.

Getting Excited

We have an anthology coming out. We are in the final stages before the print/e -run. I can't believe it. My writing workshop series' harvest. The work, the work m'dears. Agony. Words become meaningless after stroking and stroking the sentences and paragraphs. Especially when in the depths of grief and despair as I have been. I never want to edit others' work again. Intense. Unless it's just one author or one book or one story. Not this enormous compendium of multiple and varied writing styles.

Many local authors including Daughter and I are featured. Many interesting memoirs and stories of times past around this gorgeous bay of ours. Some contemporary - one of Daughter's is about Brooklyn, NY. One of mine is a Cork city story.

I'm very proud of the bunch of them, so much talent previously unexplored. We're having fun planning multiple launches. We thought: background live music, samples of readings, food. We figure if all our families bought 50 each we'd have a best-seller. *Snort*. One family of one writer has ordered over 100 and will probably want more. I can't even imagine that kind of family love!

I'm into the last week of stroking here with a final pre-publishing meeting next week.

It's amazing. I'm amazed.

And thrilled beyond belief to see this baby take flight.

30 Days - Day 25

I glossed over a day. I never manage to sneak that by you so I'm confessing it up front.

It was Week 9 of the Writers' Workshops series yesterday and we are winding up what we think will be an anthology.

Life was pretty full during the week past, all good stuff, I've removed the word "busy" from my vocabulary, I have lost all rights to use it due to my serious overusage in my past lives.

I had a brainwave about writing an essay on finding this beautiful island and making the magic happen of moving here. And of course why I continue to stay here so I will work on that and maybe interview others like me who've Come From Away and now call Newfoundland home.

Now I'm off for a nap, with a hug and a kiss to the memory of my mother -pictured above with yours truly. Yeah, I had massive hair.

30 Days - Day 13

.

Life is very full, I have no complaints though. I'm performing tomorrow morning with the read-through of the mystery dinner theatre and then in the afternoon I'm conducting the seventh in the eight writers' workshops I've put together.

Today I met with some friends for coffee and chat and that was good. One of them pumped up my tire which has a slow leak, I was grateful. I was nervous with it. I am replacing these winter tires soon so don't want to spend money in the meantime on just one tire. Budgetary restraints.

I'm not very good at car upkeep and ongoing maintenance, I often feel my head's in the clouds with writerly thoughts. Other stuff is so mundane.

The warp speed of my weeks now stun me in their race through my life.

"My gawd," said a younger male co-worker the other day, "I only wish that I'll have half your energy when I'm your age."

Good, I thought, maybe it's the chia seeds

Ah sure, 'tis nothing.

As promised here's my latest creation which dragged me through some pretty painful times recovering from that fall on the ice.

It came to me that if there's some tiny bit of creativity nesting inside us at all, it has the capacity to sustain us through some bleak, sad or depressing times. Gives us a pair of wings to help us limp over a challenge.

I am conducting one of those dream classes at the moment where I am talking writing, critiquing and distributing assignments to a class of 12. A series of 10 two hour workshops. Many have never written before, some have. But it is the enthusiasm and delight I am confronted with every single week or via emails in between that truly hearten me.

And all of this reinforces yet again, the power of passion to transform even the most timid amongst us.

Ah sure, 'tis nothing.

And yet, it's everything.

Rattled

(My dark side loves this picture, that is all)

It was a friend who pointed out to me that my fall had more serious effects than I was acknowledging and she reminded me to be more gentle and not to attempt so much.

I've always been wary of being one of the medical broadcast people, you know the ones, you meet them and you get chapter and verse of every single doctor visit, ache, pain, diagnosis, prognosis for the last 2 years. I'm not talking serious stuff here, just the ongoing physical setbacks in everyone's life. It's the ad nauseum reports I'm talking.

So I've kept shtum. But, yeah there have been skeletal challenges. So yeah, I am respecting my newfound - and hopefully temporary - limitations a wee bit more.

Which got me to thinking:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

And I expect the feelings can be marvellous or downright awful when you think about it.

I try not to revisit a deep, hurtful family shunning. And clichés don't help: you know the ones "move beyond it," "their loss," blah-blah. Fine and dandy until it happens to you. The pain is always throbbing away in the background.

I focus on lovely stuff right now:

The unexpected success of a writers' workshop I'm conducting.
The thoughtful link a dear blog friend provided for a free publishing critique which had a cap of 1000 participants. I just made it under the wire.
A dinner invitation for tomorrow.
Today - a day I've put aside just for me to do with what I will. Finish the knitting project - photo soon - finalize Session 2 of the workshop, some baking, making yogurt, and staring off into space for as long as I want.