Deer in Veggie Garden, Jailbird Dog, A Gusher, and Other Tales of Real Life

Posted by Joanne Huspek

If there is one thing I can say about my life, it’s that it’s never boring.

Take last week’s Real Life agenda, for example. (Please, puh-leeze take last week…) We are gearing up for the summer (which officially began yesterday on the West Coast of Michigan), it was payroll week, and my daughter is home. That alone is enough chaos for anyone to stay on top of.

Add to that my (feeble) attempts at writing, because as we all know, I have all the time in the world to waste (NOT!). I did manage to get the first seven chapters of the current WIP out to my critique group, which was amazing. I did some homework in my Jeremy Shipp class (yay! me!). I got my reading list on this blog partially updated (someday I will link all the books to their author web sites, not today though).  I even wrote in my brand-new eco-system notebook (I doubt I’ll be going back to Moleskine).

But then Real Life rears its ugly head.

I knew the week would be bad when a torrent of water ended up in my basement. This wasn’t ordinary back up; this was far more serious, judging from the sodden ceiling tiles that gave way under the pressure of gallons of water, right into my tumbler and steel shot. Verdict: Broken waste pipe from the second floor bathroom. Bad news: at least $2,000, and that was just the plumber’s estimate. There’s dry wall after that.

But that wasn’t too God-awful; after all, we have two other bathrooms, one in the basement where the flood occurred, the other our master bath. However, after five days of sharing our bathroom with my daughter and no return call from the plumber, I’m about ready to pull what little hair I have left out of my head. And run away from home.

As I was about to start doing P90X one day last week, I glance out of my bedroom window and catch sight of a deer in my backyard. No, really, a deer. A huge one. Now, I know this is Michigan and most people think it’s populated with transplanted hillbillies (it is), so far into Nature, and we are so backward that of course we have deer, but I live in a rather bustling suburb. A major eight-lane thoroughfare is just yards from my driveway. The infamous 8 Mile Road (meaning gritty, industrial Detroit) is just three miles away. And our backyard is fenced. AND it was about 4:30 in the afternoon. This is Motown, people. Deer do not appear on a regular basis, sit down in the middle of my yard, and take a snooze. EVER.

My daughter and blind Boston terrier chased it around the yard (after we all got photographic evidence), until it came to a low fence and gracefully bounded over and wandered to the neighbors yard. A group of chatting moms pushing strollers were right across the street, and they missed it.

Wildlife is the bane of my guerilla urban garden, and most of my friends know I have a distaste bordering on blind hatred toward all critters who would deign to eat from my veggies when I have neighbors who throw the squirrels and other scavengers old Krispy Kremes. Now I have to worry about huge deer.

It does explain what happened to my pears the last few years though…

To top off my week, my dog, the fabulous Princess Grace, ended up in the slammer on Friday night. She’s had a field day the last couple of weeks, chasing rabbits around the house (as well as the other miscreants), and Friday night, as my husband let her out to do her pre-bedtime duty, she disappeared.

(Right here is where I should insert – dammit, I told him to keep her on leash, because even though she’s a great dog, she is dumber than a box of rocks and is deaf and doesn’t listen well – but I won’t. Don’t think I wasn’t thinking it though…)

He looked around, he called, I called (I scream – like a pterodactyl, my children allege – so she can usually hear me from a block away). He drove around. He drove around all night, going up one street, then another, until he had prowled most of Royal Oak, part of Berkley, and all of Huntington Woods. I kept getting up and looking at the back door to see if she had suddenly appeared. (She might be a world traveler, but she knows where the kibble is.) Nothing.

My husband was despondent, and I was thinking of worst case scenarios, like her being dog-napped, hit by a car, or just left us because we weren’t nice enough.

Yesterday – at a decent hour – I started calling the local pounds. I hit the jackpot on Call #2: Grace was at the Huntington Woods police station. It appears they picked her up while she was trying to traverse those eight lanes of traffic I spoke about above. She made it to the median without becoming road kill, which is when she was nabbed and incarcerated. According to a police woman, “We got her before she successfully committed suicide on Woodward.” Poor dog spent the night in a cold cage with no blankies to roll herself into a doggie burrito with. (Bostons need their blankies, even when it’s 100 degrees outside.)

She was delirious to see me, and the first thing I did was get her a dog tag with her name and our phone numbers on it. (OH! Because I forgot to add, the hubs had her outside with NO COLLAR on as well.)

I’m thinking anything that happens this week will be a piece of cupcake compared to last week.

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“I Suck!” and Other Naggy Negatives

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Wow, what a busy last couple of weeks!

First a trip to Colorado for my brother-in-law’s memorial and interment at Ft. Logan National Cemetery in Denver. This might have been a quick trip back to see the old home town, except for one thing: a tornado hit Dallas last Tuesday which caused my plane to circle for what seemed like hours (turns out it had been) until we were forced to land in Austin, thankfully before we ran out jet fuel. There we parked on the tarmac for an hour – along with a dozen other diverted planes – before it was determined that we were going nowhere fast. After the deplaning of thousands of zombie travelers, the trip to a local Holiday Inn (loved that hour and a half of rest), and many phone calls to American Airlines, I surmised that I would not be flying out of Austin any time soon. In fact, not until SATURDAY of last week, meaning I would miss the services and get into Colorado Springs with just enough time to return to Detroit.

Thirteen hours and an immensely sore butt later, and after renting a car and driving through the panhandle of Texas (one big-ass state, to be sure), I arrived at my final destination only 24 hours late. Unfortunately, my bags were still in transit.

I have learned three things on this trip: 1. West Texas is beautiful – even with the preponderance of armadillo road kill, which is why I’m writing it into my next tome, 2. it’s good to be nice and keep your cool, and 3. I can finish reading a book and a half in six hours on a plane.

Usually, my trips out of town are a gold mine for writing, but this time, I could only jot down a few things in my trusty (manually operated) notebook. After the Trip from Hell, the final service at Ft. Logan (which I made by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, and with my own clothes that arrived in CoS at 6 a.m.), and my sister’s sadness, I found I couldn’t write anything.

It’s not that I had a lack of information or inspiration. I was just plain B-E-A-T. I couldn’t even answer email. So I took a day to trim the bonsai tree located at my mother’s grave, which after 18 years of my neglect had morphed into the juniper who ate a headstone. It was relaxing to sit in the sun, listen to the traffic on I-25, to snip and trim, and now the Thing looks more like a bonsai.

But back to “I SUCK!” I found myself kicking and yelling (at myself) for my total lack of motivation. Yes, I have stories in my head yearning to be set free. Yes, I have something I’m shopping around and more than a few things I’m working on which languish in various states of disrepair. But to actually unpack my laptop and start moving in the right direction? I couldn’t. I was too exhausted/frustrated/sad.

But wait! There’s more! After the last email rejection letter (yesterday),

 

Although I thought your partial was well-written, it didn’t ring as perfectly right for our list as I’d hoped and for the moment we need fiction that sounds exactly right for us in order to be able to sell it as well as we all would like.

I was ready to throw in the the towel and hang out my “I SUCK” shingle. Life is hard enough without having rejection pummel your inbox every couple of weeks. I mean really…what am I doing? Wasting my time? Do you know how many talented writers there are out there? I am but a teeny-tiny wannabe with big honking flaws. I started late in life (for everything, job, marriage, kids, hobbies, you name it). When Real Writers talk about story arcs and character development, I rush to Barnes and Noble to find a reference book that can explain the concept, and even then I’m lost.

Well, after my pity party (yes, I know it was a pity party), I emailed (hurriedly) Mr. Ed for help. (He did. What a stellar guy!) This morning I read this, and began to feel better.

I even wrote over 500 words on my West Texas character.

I even finished this blog post!

The thing about “sucking” is that such a negative frame of mind lasts only a moment with most positive people, and I like to think of myself as being more positive than negative. This temporary self-doubt goes for people other than writers. I can remember my son thinking the same thing about himself, and he’s a very talented pianist. And while it would be ultra-fabuloso to be picked up by an agent, and maybe even have my work published (using the pulp material of your local forest), it’s more important to write because you have a passion to put your words together to make a story, and to make the story intriguing enough to read.

Perhaps I should seek to be read, not to be published.

At any case, I am back on the bus, and the wheels are going ’round and ’round.

🙂

Posted in editing, music, violin, writing, women, life, NaNoWriMo, people, rewriting, womens literature, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A Word about Words and the End of the World

Posted by Joanne Huspek

According to some, this Saturday marks the “End of the World.”

Personally, I’ve lived through several “ends” — including 1999, Y2K, and others — and so far the world has not ceased to exist…yet. I’ll give you the update on Sunday, should we make it past the Apocalypse and the After-Rapture Party.

This “End of the World” stuff causes me to re-evaluate what material things I would like to keep, in case the “end” isn’t total annihilation and just the “end” of the world as we know it.

For example, my friends (who realize I’m super kooky) know I have six months worth of food stashed in my basement, along with extra propane tanks, and those quaint antiques called matches. I will also be able to brew coffee with a French press. (I also have a lifetime’s worth of light bulbs – incandescent, not CFL – and a stockpile of paper and pens and pencils.) Hey, I might be nuts, but I’m gonna be a prepared nut.

Let us say the end was truly near (I’m holding out hope for 2012 and a quick pick up from John Cusack a la movie of the same name); what would I take with me if I could only take one thing.

I have narrowed it down…

My sole possession into the End would have to be a pocket dictionary. If I had room for two items, the second would be Roget’s Thesaurus (pocket version). And for Number Three? A Japanese/English dictionary.

Let’s face it; we can live without a lot of things — TV, clothes, pretty shoes, steak and lobster, fancy jewels, and even my computer and internet — but I cannot live without words.

As a child, the dictionary was the first book I read. The second was the entire encyclopedia (1958 version), one volume at a time. (For those of you Gen X, Y or Z-ers, those books were what we used for reference back in the day.) Okay, even my own kids don’t believe I read the dictionary and encyclopedia, but I did.

Why? Besides the fact that there were only three (3!) channels on TV, like many wannabe upscale homes in middle America at the time, these were the only books in the house. We couldn’t afford to buy books, and the trip to the library was made only once a week. In order to fill the void, I would open the dictionary to “Q” and start reading and memorizing.

(Perhaps this is what made me a Colorado state championship speller back in 7th grade…or maybe I was just lucky.)

Even now, I will occasionally find a dictionary and open to a random page. This Sunday at the Flea Market, I located a fine pocket dictionary from the 1950’s, leather-bound with pages so fine and transparent that they nearly melted in my fingertips. And I sat there and turned pages for a very long time, wondering if I should ask the vendor how much.

Back then “gay” meant happy, and “queer” meant strange, and there were no definitions for “internet,” “blu-ray,” or “flash drive.”

I love rarely seen words, like ‘pettifog,’ ‘intuit,’ and ‘insouciant.’ On days when I feel I’ve suffered media overload, I’ll curl up in my favorite comfy chair with dictionaries of all sorts, muse about word origins, and plant the seed in my brain about using my new-found old words.

It’s all you can do in this modern age, on the apex of the End of the World.

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The Elvis Costello Method of Novel Writing

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, but it was also Sunday, and since my children are half a country away – therefore, unlikely to surprise me with a visit, laden with Godiva and flowers – I decided it was time to clean the house. (Shock and amazement! I never clean! Well…rarely.) My daughter returned to San Francisco in January and I’ve been putting off her bedroom until we got the plants out (south facing room, this is where they winter). The plants were sprung and are basking in the sun on my deck. Besides, my daughter is threatening to return home for the summer, so I figured it was time to change the sheets.

I house clean best by music, so I popped in Elvis Costello’s Best Of. What a freaking genius! especially early Elvis. The man has a way with words, to be sure. Every Day I Write the Book is one of my favorites, and was popular right around the time I met my husband. (1983 – yes, I am older than Methuselah. I also owned glasses that big.)

Here’s the original video, which is also quite humorous considering the Prince Charles/Princess Diana reference.

The acoustic version is also quite nice.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard this song. The references to writing a novel are dead on:

Chapter One we didn’t really get along
Chapter Two I think I fell in love with you
You said you’d stand by me in the middle of Chapter Three
But you were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and Six.

Applying the Elvis Costello Method of Writing, I should be in the trenches EVERY day, not just when the Muse hits me (or not). You can’t hone the craft of writing if you only apply yourself every once in a while. I am thinking of writing DARLINGS FOR CLEMENTINE after this verse. And of course, since I was so horrible at dialog when I first started this journey into storytelling (and pacing, and purple prose), I should start writing “the way you walk, the way you talk and try to kiss me and laugh” – in four or five paragraphs. 🙂

My hope is to eventually own the film rights and be working on the sequel. With Clementine, I have two prequels in various states of disrepair.

I was amazed to learn that Elvis Costello wrote this song in ten minutes. TEN MINUTES. Which gives hope to lightning striking with precision every once in a while, the stars aligning in perfection, and the exact combo of MegaMillions numbers in my hand.

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A Break from the Break in the Clouds

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Wednesday began a temporary break in the clouds, one that has somehow persisted until this morning. Among my other titles and duties, I am a guerrilla urban gardener, meaning I would rather water things I can eat than I would water grass. It is almost Mother’s Day, and as of Wednesday, I had very little in the ground. By this time last year, all the tomatoes were in, everything mulched, and I was sitting on the deck with a glass of wine in hand. This year my gardening duties have been curtailed by daily precipitation. I cannot garden in the wet, and I sure as heck am not going out in the cold and wet.

During the brief respite of sun and blue sky, I decided to get busy. Who knows, it could snow tomorrow. This is Michigan; anything can happen. While I was mowing my front yard and planting potatoes, I nearly missed that I had placed as a finalist in an online contest. That’s right, I entered a 25 word or less pitch contest, and was one of three who placed! But I wouldn’t have known but for reading my email.

My writing is many things, but being succinct is not one of those virtues I have picked up in my many years on this planet. (Okay… I’m looking over this sentence with serious slashing in the back of my head, but I’m leaving it just to make a point.) I find it difficult to summarize my work in a paragraph or two, and to cut it down to 50 words is 1. heartbreaking and 2. grueling. It can be done (and has been done) but perfect pitches (some say, or anything else I try to do) are so, so, SO hard for me.

I thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell with this contest, but what the hey? You don’t know until you try.

To break down my 96K novel into 25 words? I’m amazed I could accomplish it within the prescribed time, and flabbergasted that my meager offering was one out of 50 (FIFTY!) that managed to catch the eye of the Mystery Agent.

Soo… The synopsis is sent, the first 30 pages, and my fingers are crossed yet again.

And now I see there is another break in the clouds, so I’m off to the nursery to purchase seedlings. Have a great Mother’s Day.

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Storms in Your Brain Are Helpful When Shared

Posted by Joanne Huspek

For those of you who have been following me (or not), I’ve been laboring over my first novel. First it was to eliminate those pesky adverbs. Then I had to cut down the usage of “family” from ten thousand times in 510 pages to a couple dozen times. Then it was to cut down the 510 pages and 175K words into something more manageable – and palatable – like 100K words.

Now I’m into changing parts two and three. Developmental changes, oy vay.

Part one isn’t so bad. It’s horrible for my character, and probably still too purple-prosey and too long, but it’s one helluva lot better than the original. Now, however, I have to take my main character and somehow have to dig her out of her quicksand.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’ve been reading various novels for inspiration, one a weekend, and trying to gain some insight as to the process of weaving stories and subplots into my own story.

This was easier to do in a novel like Virtually Yours. There I had seven people who were tied together in friendship, all over the country but with individual stories paralleling the main plot. It took a little plotting, and I may be wrong, but I found the process of laying out the book much easier in that case.

When you have a first-person novel like Finding Cadence, it’s different. You are working in one voice, one point of view. It can be done, but revealing the underlying threads is a much more difficult task. This book isn’t so much about situations, it’s about the inside(s) of the heads of the people involved.

This is where brainstorming really helps. My critique group was quite helpful. They were awed by the first part, but the first couple of chapters of the second part were too depressing, the MC becoming so much of a drag that they began not to like her anymore. I don’t need assistance with grammar; I need a major shift in plot.

I’ve seen it done on Twitter. I follow a writer who posts her plots as though she’s talking out loud. Some people respond, too! It’s interesting to watch.

Other writers – especially those who don’t know you very well, or even those who do – are extremely helpful, and not just for the technical expertise. Even if you don’t give them the actual novel to consume, because let’s face it, we’re all busy – writing, of course! – you can kick around different scenarios with fellow writers. “What if this happens? What would be the reaction?”

Brainstorming is necessary. We as artists are too close to our work, and the perspective of fresh eyes is always a positive thing. You just can’t use the excuse “But this happened in real life!” It might have, but honestly, real life is rather boring.

And so yesterday afternoon, in between planting potatoes and waiting for the appliance repairman to fix my half-working cook top, I decided to email Mr. Ed and run my problem by him. He’s a nice guy and I warned him I was looking for free advice. My Cadence needs a turning point, an ‘ah-ha’ moment, something that will get her off her duff to begin making positive steps toward growth. Her story needs strong threads interwoven so that she will rise victorious and become likeable.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I can tell you this: the exchange was invigorating! It made me think, and gave me the ambition to forge ahead. Forging is good. I, like Cadence, was stuck in a quagmire.

Time to escape.

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I’m BAAAcck! I’m Back in the Saddle Again

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Ebbs and tides. This is life, and this is the writing life.

They say once you know how to ride a bicycle, you can always get on one and ride away into the sunset. I’m not sure I want to try it on my bicycle, which hasn’t been out of the garage since 2004 when we moved here, but such a plan certainly works with words.

Last night, my dog, the fabulous Princess Grace, was having severe gastro disturbances resulting in a very messy house. Coincidentally, my protag, Ashe, finds the family dog Jim Bob in a similar physical state after he (the hound) devours a dinner of honey buns AND barbecue sauce. Ashe has a fastidious brother to clean up the mess; I had the hubby.

During this fiasco, I was struck by an amazing solution to my first chapter problem.

I’m going to write it like my final chapter! Which, for those of you who haven’t read the book (since I want a few people to actually buy the book), is a series of email sent by my characters which wraps up the loose ends and suggests other plots and twists for the sequel(s).

My first chapter of yore contained a chat room exchange which many (including a great number of agents) found too confusing to read. This was done in order to introduce the characters to the world, but instead resulted in being a lot of noise which did very little to advance the story. I’m going to give it a good stab, but I think visually and psychically, this might be the way to go.

So… dear friends, I am technically back in the saddle again. Once I dust off this major change, I might rant about the economy.

Now for your listening enjoyment, let me include the following:

Gene Autry, for my gentler readers.

And Steven Tyler, who rocked then and rocks now.

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