Random Thoughts During The Morning Walk

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I am still in the process of unpacking and getting my new house set up (no kitchen yet, but we’re making progress!), so writing – as in actual chapters of a novel – is on the back burner. I’ve yet to find my notebooks! I’m anticipating a mid-September time frame for return to normalcy.

I’m not much of an athlete (don’t my high school chums know it!), but I have committed to at least ten miles a week of walking/half-assed running.

This is monumental for me. I’ve just moved back to Colorado, where the air is thin and nearly everything is uphill. I’ve just now, after three weeks, started running (if you can call it that) about 25% of my four mile walk. That’s downhill, of course. Are you kidding? It’ll be a few months before I graduate to uphill running.

When I walk, I only carry the cell phone so it can track my statistics. I don’t take calls, I don’t text, I don’t listen to music, or the witty repartee of podcasts. (I might take a photo or two, that’s it.) That’s because in addition to being nearly uphill to everywhere, the roads are twisty, the sidewalks are sparse, and the lawns are full of wildlife. I have to keep my wits about me just to stay alive.

Plus, I’d rather just walk/run in silence, or only with the noise of the natural world in the background.

So in the quiet, I can hear the chimes of the Shrine of the Sun. I can watch the magpies fighting each other for road kill. I can smell the piney aftermath of the hail storm of the century. I can peek at my neighbors’ houses, which are all mega-gorgeous. (We have the smallest, plainest house in the best neighborhood, what a coup!) Most of all, I can think!

So here are my random thoughts, along with random photos:

  1. I can spot a texter-and-driver from a half mile away. There’s that nearly imperceptible sway from the center of the lane. If they’re aiming at me, I’m heading for the grass.
  2. People are nice here! They say “good morning” or wave. You don’t want to speak or wave to pedestrians in Michigan, but in Colorado, do as the natives do.
  3. You must really watch out for wildlife. Bunnies abound. Deer too. Today a doe and her fawn came at me full bore down the street. This startled me, so I stopped. Then she stopped. (The fawn kept going, until it stopped too.) What do you do? You can’t shoo away a wild animal that weighs more than you do! Especially a mother-wild-animal. That would be suicide. So I waited a bit. A minute later, she crossed the street to continue on (obviously she had somewhere to go – in a hurry), and then the fawn followed. I continued on.
  4. The best time for outdoor exercise of any type in the summer is before 9 a.m. That’s because it gets brutally hot at 9:01 a.m.
  5. It’s really beautiful here. Not just pretty, but beautiful. I’d nearly forgotten.
  6. It occurs to me that a lot of things I have written about Colorado are true, even though I haven’t lived here since 1974. Perhaps a person’s memory is truer than you would think. Maybe slices of life are buried under decades of events rushing past you. Maybe I should think of some other places I’ve been, write about them, and revisit them?
  7. I’ve shaved off 11 minutes of time since I’ve gotten here. How can that be? Some days (especially the days about two weeks ago), I’d start out and think I was going to die. (Dude. That uphill mile.) I would plot out how to make a 9-11 call with my cell phone number still in Michigan. But it’s easier now. No 9-11 unless a mountain lion jumps out of a driveway.
  8. I find I miss my characters and wonder where my notebooks are. (I found my external hard drive (YAY!) but the nuts and bolts are in notebooks.
  9. Finally, there’s that chill in the air, so slight, but it’s telling me that fall is coming soon. I’d better find my long pants before it gets here.
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A New Chapter

Posted by Joanne Huspek

If you are reading this, know that I am on the road between here and there (or there and where I will be), and I will be disconnected for a few days. That’s because my husband, son, and I will be caravan-ning our way across the country to what I hope will be my forever home.

This is the new chapter of a new story (or maybe a new chapter of a continuing story, who knows?), in a place and time where life will be somewhat carefree and full of time for editing.

Or it may be more of the same, of scraping the edges for bits of time for my art, or waking up in the middle of the night (as I did last night) and fretting about what was left unaccomplished. Let’s face it folks, I’m not getting any younger, and time is limited.

So I’m sitting here in my nearly empty, almost echoing house waiting for the last donation place to come by and scoop up the remains of my leftover life. Try as I may, it was difficult to shed my possessions, and I’m not sure I was all that successful. Earlier this week, we said goodbye to a 16′ container crammed with stuff we haven’t used in months (hint: maybe that stuff we could have lived without).

I bought so many UHaul boxes, I was featured on the UHaul Instagram account. I feel personally connected to the nice young man who collected my money for what I’m sure is hundreds of pounds of cardboard and bubble wrap. He must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Wednesday morning, the piano movers came and took the Steinway baby grand. (I highly recommend Modern Piano Movers. They moved my son’s upright from Michigan to San Francisco – professional all the way. It’s all they do, move pianos.) It will be a few weeks before I hear my husband stumbling over Chopin.

I packed up the rest of my wire and jewels the next day and put the (massive) stack of bins near the back door. Next came the paints and canvases and brushes. I pulled out a few markers and pencils for my backpack and put the rest away. My hands feel weirdly empty and uneasy.

We get another rental truck Saturday and will load up what remains, and will close on the sale of the house Monday. Then it’s off to the open road right after. We’re heading west.

I haven’t gotten much editing done in these last few months. I’ve been busy not only packing, but selling stuff, throwing away stuff, donating stuff, and giving away stuff. But my mind is always plotting away. I have notebooks and my Hobonichi to keep track of new ideas. As soon as we get the office set up in the new house, I can begin the process of putting it all together.

Yay! Just in time for NaNoWriMo! 🙂

There’s something bittersweet about closing the old chapter. There were ups and downs back there, mostly ups. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made here, my daughter (as problematic as she is), and my granddog babies. I’ve spent 14 years loving this house – after all, this house was the catalyst for writing Finding Cadence. It features prominently in the story. (I recently picked up a copy and read a few pages. Even though I believe this to be my best work so far, I can see how far I’ve come in story telling.)

But there’s something exciting about beginning a new chapter too. I’m a pantser writer, and I start each chapter without very little plan, allowing my characters to take me away. Sometimes the landscapes are mundane and boring, but sometimes I find myself coming to places I’d never thought I’d wander into.

Here’s hoping my new chapter in life leads me to the unexpected and the exciting.

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This Writer Decides to De-Socialize (For Now)

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I used to be highly enamored of the Internet.

What a great place, right? Finding old friends, making new friends, staying current with the world. Learning so many new things. The Internet of twenty years ago was full of bright, shiny stuff. I know I felt like a kid at the carnival with a hundred dollar bill (which, back when I was a kid would have been too much money to spend in one day).

At one point in my life, the Internet and my friends on it dominated my entire day. If I got up at a certain time and logged on to a certain site, I could be assured of finding certain people with whom I could commiserate and share. This was clockwork, people. And if I had insomnia and went back to those sites, a different set of people would be on. We would tease each other and ask questions both deep (what is the meaning of life?) and mundane (so you think your snowstorm will hit here tonight?). We would share the secrets in our heads. Those people would set off something in my brain which compelled me to create. It was intoxicating. It was positive. It was as close to Nirvana as anyone is going to get on earth. It was a love affair of epic proportions, that cut into the time I needed for the rest of my life.

Ah, but nothing stays the same.

Lately, and by this I mean the past few years, I’ve seen the ugly side of the Internet. I might be the only one with this opinion, but I can’t stand it anymore. I love words; I love ideas. I love talking and sharing. I especially love seeing the other side. I love to puzzle things out to a solution (much as I despise math and the word “calculation” causes palpitations).

Now, though, the civility has flown the coop. Miss Manners must be spinning in her grave. Red hot emotions cause people to act, say, and type the kind of sentences one wouldn’t yell in a crowded movie theater. It’s not just the potty mouth language that upsets me, it’s the artful twisting of the vocabulary that is not meant to inform, but to inflame. (Shame on you, news media, which we should not now regard as “news” but as commentary and editorial.) If you don’t agree, you get screamed at. People will gang up on you in a tidal wave of indignation. You’ll get boycotted and lose your job. (Not just celebrities, either. I have a story that will curl your hair, but for later…) You can threaten harm and puncture hearts by mere keystrokes. It’s insanity.

I’m all for the freedom of speech, but I’m also for respect. I’m not a Pollyanna, but I crave positive vibes. I will listen to your side, to any side, but don’t refer to me or my friends as stupid, and especially don’t deride me or them behind my back – and on the pettiest of reasons, because we don’t agree. Because while the Internet is vast and you might be good at hiding your words, and I’m no computer bad ass, I can still stumble upon your opinions and if I look just a little harder, can find the rest of you.

And so I’ve been turning off the negativity. So I’ve been weeding the patch, so to speak, on my social media platforms, even though I really don’t want to. Because some of the chief offenders happened to be some of my biggest pals from 15-20 years ago. Finally this spring, after the sale of the business and getting the house ready to sell, I just turned off nearly completely. I started working with my hands (most satisfying), painting and drawing, and writing in a journal and in my many notebooks (because I can’t trust myself near my laptop with WiFi, not yet). I can’t change the world, but I can make my little piece of it relatively happy and without a trace of random hatefulness.

This is a short term measure. Just when I start feeling good about myself and humankind, I’ll hit up Twitter or Facebook for a hot minute, which causes me to retreat in haste and chastise myself for being so naive. Nothing OUT THERE has changed for the better. After my short term disgust, I’ll sit back and wonder about my friends who wrap themselves in half-truths and hate. How did they get this way?

Ugh. This is the part of the Internet I truly despise.

People. Don’t do this unless you want to stay sane. Step away from the screen. Go outside. It’s sunny where I am, but even if it’s not, there’s always something to see. Keep your righteousness, but go out there and find something. Find love. Find fulfillment. Find something real.

And so I will be out there, in the Real Life world, looking at Real Life things, like the roses blooming at the driveway gate, or the smile on that adorable baby’s face, or the amazing color of the sky this afternoon. I guess I’ll peek in every once and again, because for all of its pitfalls, you can’t find better information than online. Plus, you know. I’m an addict.

🙂

I might change my mind at some point. We are all entitled to change our minds.

And I’ll keep writing, because right now it’s one of the few things that’s keeping me positive.

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Currently Adding Depth

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I’m currently editing/revising my first draft of last year’s NaNoWriMo. As any writer who has participated in this WordFest can tell you, spewing the words is one thing, making a meal out of word salad is another altogether.

Personally, my one bad habit is making everyone sound the same – like ME. This is a terrible habit, one you want to shed or change or eviscerate before your story reaches anyone else’s eyes. But, it’s a habit that makes sense. We write from our own experiences, viewing the world from our own lenses. It can’t be helped. My voice is opinionated, yet even, smart and sassy, but not necessarily mean. Unfortunately, human nature dictates that someone’s got to be the bad guy. Someone has to bear the burden of tragedy. Someone has to hide despicable secrets.

Three chapters in and I’ve noticed all of my characters are sounding alike. (They ARE sibs, but still… There’s a giant age gap between oldest and youngest, meaning these are different people by virtue of being in different generations.) I’ve decided it’s time to shake that baby up but good.

The second run-through in a NaNo project is for adding a bit more color, purpose, or to throw shade here and there. AND to get the first draft to the point to where it’s interesting and makes sense. I’m not there yet, because in the first pre-draft writing, I didn’t want to make the angry sib a complete asshole. (Because I’m writing as if looking in a mirror – I’m not a perfect person, I’m often harsh, but at the end of the day, I AM NOT a complete asshole.) After careful consideration, I’ve decided she’s the one who has too much baggage to unload. She’s the one with the unbreakable mean streak. She can’t be reasoned with – at least, not in this particular story. She’ll end up swimming in her bile while the other sibs find redemption or answers or closure.

It’s difficult for me to take on the persona of an unreachable, unchangeable person, one who is mean. Fortunately I have many models from Real Life to study and use as adaptations to my angry sib.

Plain Jane writing is like driving along the Redwood Forest (pictured above) at 60 mph without once getting out of the car. Yeah, they’re trees, yeah, they’re beautiful, yeah, they’re tall. Better writing is parking the car, taking a walk, and realizing that every tree, every path, every sky is different.

So now I’m off to take a walk in my head.

Happy writing~

🙂

 

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Bad Writing, Good Writing, and Great Writing

Posted by Joanne Huspek

This will be an ever so brief blog post. I had planned on a meatier offering, until yesterday’s ice storm, which left us without electricity, thereby throwing a major monkey wrench into my planned activity. (Cleaning, decluttering, painting, and creating.) Say what you will, electricity is not just a modern convenience, it’s a modern necessity. After taking several long trips to charge my iPhone in the car, I thought, “Wait a minute! I have a house for sale!” Which has electricity! So I am sitting in this nearly vacant, “for sale” house charging up my devices. (This also makes for a great warming hut!)

Lately I’ve been playing with the idea of bad writing, good writing, and GREAT writing as a writing exercise. I know, I know. I always (usually) try to do my best at my writing. Sometimes the muse is unwilling, or likely on a trip to Cancun, which is where I wish I were today. (Spring? What’s that?)

Bad Writing

This week I thought I would mix it up a little and PURPOSEFULLY engage in bad writing. No story line, terrible grammar, very little arc, and throw in every broken rule I could think of. I limited myself to one handwritten page. (I didn’t want to make this a habit.)

I don’t know if it was successful (I’m not showing any of this to anyone), but it felt oddly freeing. Like I would imagine it would feel to shoplift a lipstick from Walgreen’s. (Believe me, I have no previous experience. These lips and lipstick are not a combination.) I immediately went from my intentionally bad writing to editing a few pages of my manuscript. Wow. What a feeling.

Good Writing

My next exercise was to take awful writing and turn it into good writing.

To do this, take a known quantity, like a New York Times bestselling author (with questionable skills but a massive following). Take a random paragraph or page and rework the words from terrible (or even mediocre) and turn it into something better. Tighten up the sentences. Remove the adverbs. Take out the dangly participles. Think of better adjectives.

I won’t reveal here which writer and which paragraph I chose, but you may be able to squeeze it out of me at a cocktail party. 🙂

Great Writing

If you cannot produce great writing, at least concentrate on someone else’s great writing.

This weekend (before power outage), I decided to deep clean my kitchen. Don’t laugh, I’ve been chipping away at this for weeks. There’s mystery food, and then there’s MY mystery food, some of which are school age now, but let’s not get into that.

As I clean, I turn on YouTube and listen to the hits of the 1970’s. GREAT music, and the lyrics are poetic. I’d almost forgotten how poetic until I loaded up early Emmylou Harris.

“Pancho and Lefty” (written by Townes Van Zandt) was not one of my favorite tunes on this album, but damned if this guy couldn’t turn a phrase.

Take the first four lines:

Living on the road my friend,
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron,
And your breath as hard as kerosene

How evocative are those words? Listen to the rest of the song. He takes very few words and paints a picture so vivid, you are there.

Of course, then I fell into the black hole of great lyrics. Think early Neil Young (Like a Hurricane), Gram Parsons (Grievous Angel), and anything Bob Dylan. And that’s just a fingernail scrape across the surface. Listening to great oldies is motivational for me.

And then the neighborhood transformer blew up – or a tree fell on it…oh well.

OK, time’s up. Back to the frozen house. Stay warm, peeps, and keep writing.

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Finds in the Library

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Here I am again, minimally writing and editing because I am majorly cleaning and decluttering. It’s still winter in the tundra (as far as I can tell, BRR…) but as soon as the temps warm up enough, the plants are going outside and we are once again listing this house. Hopefully it will sell this spring, because as of late summer, I’m on my way to my retirement home in Colorado.

The longer I live, the more I realize I don’t need half the stuff I have. That also pertains to my accumulation of books. There are some books that are near and dear to my heart: ALL the Khalil Gibran, my T. Greenwood, Michelle Richmond, and Laura Kasischke collections, my art books, the Bible, and of course, the writing books. I’ve so far lugged six boxes of books to the Goodwill. Some are books from my To-Read mountain (I’ve got one of those on Kindle too). If I haven’t read it in two or three years, I’ll probably never read it. Others I’ve read but will probably never read again. Someone else should enjoy beachy romances, political discourse, and textbooks. I even gave away my entire collection of cookbooks, which was a massive one for sure. Now with the Internet, people pull up recipes online. You don’t need pretty books to take up space, and perhaps become covered in oil and flour dusting as you make something crazy like a duck in cherry sauce. Besides, I’m a competent cook these days and can’t remember the last time I cracked open a cookbook.

My latest modus operandi is to leave books in my wake after I’ve read them, especially when traveling. I leave them in motel rooms, airplanes, restaurants, and in my father’s house. One: books are heavy and I’m old. My suitcases start out heavy and end up infinitely lighter. (Except after the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I usually bulk up.) Two: read it, don’t need to read it again (unless you are one of my favs listed above). Let someone else enjoy the power and entertainment of words.

Decluttering a house means you’ll always find something you thought didn’t exist anymore, like the handmade cards my kids gave me for my birthday or the letter my grandma Della wrote to me in 1975. (Amazing. Her handwriting and my dad’s are almost identical.) I’ve also found many printed edits from my own work. Interesting to read what the editor(s) had to say, what words of encouragement they offered, or the oft wielded cattle prod to poke me out of my mistakes. I wrote so badly back then, it’s embarrassing! (I’m keeping Grandma’s letter, but the edits have been shredded and recycled.)

I opened a Donald Maass workbook and was immediately taken back to the first self-edit of my first book. I was sitting in his workshop at the San Francisco Writers Conference, where we did an exercise making our main character suffer, and suffer some more. And more. I was so enraptured with the process that I made her suffer to the point of intolerability. (Is that a word? Spell check says no.) The second draft was so painful to read my editors hated it, even my beta readers couldn’t stomach it. Even now as a finished product with many of the hardships removed, some people find the first part of the book trying, depending on what the reader’s own psyche can handle.

These days I understand what the intent of this exercise was. I’m still keeping the book. 🙂

When we moved into this house fourteen years ago, I probably had twelve boxes of books. Each of my kids probably had a half dozen boxes of their own. (We also had massive bookshelves, long since garage saled-away.) When I leave here, I’ll probably have four or five boxes of books, just enough to fit into to built-ins in my new house.

I love books, I really do, but what you’ll find in my library after the purge will be the true gems, the jewels I will never give away.

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The Laws of Distraction

Posted by Joanne Huspek

So, I’ve officially retired from my Day Job as of the end of January. You would think that this would leave me with scads of opportunities and hu-mongo blocks of time with which to edit my ever growing files of first drafts I have floating in my external hard drive, right?

Wrong.

The longer I live, the more I see that things are still difficult. Time still gets sucked out of the days (and weeks and years). Life doesn’t ease up once the kids are grown (in many ways, dealing with adult children is so much more difficult than managing the Terrible Twos or Threes). It takes a thousand times more effort to disengage from the working life than it does beginning the working life. Add to that the fact you are now in your 60s (gasp!) and your brain and body doesn’t want to cooperate the way it used to forty years ago, and well…you see where I’m going.

Oh, to be a teenager again…

I know what the problem is, and that is D-I-S-T-R-A-C-T-I-O-N. Not that I think distraction is age related (as in my age in years – after all, children are VERY distract-able) but is AGE related, as in the times we are living in. Here are a few things that cause me to be distracted, and how I deal with it.

1. The Internet is a HUGE distraction. It always is, it always will be. It’s difficult to limit when you’re a writer, because most writers use electronic devices to create (as opposed to manual typewriters, pen and paper, and Fred Flintstone’s chisel and hammer) and those devices are more often than not connected to the Internet. I’m weaning away from Facebook and Twitter, but I must admit that I’ve got a world-class addiction to Words with Friends and my play list is at maximum peeps.

My solution? Obviously. Cut. It. Out. Buy a timer or use the one on your phone. Set a limit, and when the alarm sounds, close out the browser and step away for a moment before resuming your place in the scene.

A second solution would be to use a computer not tied to the Internet for writing only. (I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.) I have an old laptop that I’m not using specifically for that purpose. It’s so old, it’s not wireless! My wifi is so new, it doesn’t have cables! Can we say perfect match?

2. Your life is a distraction. Carve out writing time and stick to it. I don’t care if it’s a page a day. (In my case, I have pledged to at least write one page in my Hobonichi, which sometimes proves to be 250 words depending on how large my handwriting is that day. Anything more is gravy.) It can be as little as 100 words. I’m not the task master, YOU are. Set a reasonable goal. Lofty goals are for angels.

My solution for external noise (dogs, cats, loud children, the rest of your family, TV noises, etc.) is to MOVE. Move away from the distraction, to somewhere you know there won’t be any. I’m lucky/unlucky in that I’m living in a large 4-bedroom house, of which we use one bedroom and the kitchen/family room. I sometimes don’t walk into a spare bedroom for months. No one has sat on my formal living room furniture in like…forever. (Christmas 2007?) I’ve got a nice futon in my son’s old room which is comfortable and with south-facing windows – just perfect. Plus it’s at the far end of wherever the action is in the house.

If your house is small or the family is large, go somewhere else. I’m not a fan of coffee houses though many writers are – it’s too easy for me to get distracted by people watching. I’ve grabbed my laptop/notebook and headed to a parking lot, at the beach, a park, etc. (Upside is that there will likely be NO WIFI at the beach.)

3. Your health may be a distraction. This is why it is so important to take care of your physical self. Case in point: I spent six weeks in January/February sick as a dog. Truly incapacitated by some sort of germ that eventually caused me to have an ear infection. (I know, right? How old am I? Four?) I normally carry on despite illness and will drag my sorry butt around to do whatever needs to be done, but in this case I spent two full days in bed, unable to move. No writing, no jewelry making (missed jewelry classes!), no housework, nothing, nada, nyet. I made myself five pots of chicken soup in six weeks.

Do yourself a favor. Eat right. Take care of yourself. Exercise. Repeat.

4. People are a distraction. Don’t let them be. Give yourself permission to say no.  (You ask them to do you a favor, they’ll probably say no to you.) Don’t let yourself be sucked down a vortex of drama and angst. Save that for your pages. You have committed yourself to writing, a real job, a real artistic effort. Complete your minimum allowance (perhaps more) and then turn your attention to that person who seems to be draining you of energy. Be friendly but firm.

Distractions are daunting, and even if you give in to them, keep telling yourself, “Writing coming up next” or “I could sure use this in my backstory” or “YOU ARE A WRITER! This distraction is only temporary!”

Believe it, do it, make it so.

So excuse me now, I must practice what I preach.

🙂

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