Well, fearless leader of the writing seminar and published multiple times in multiple languages author, Jake Lamar, asked me if I was already published and was surprised when I said no. He had a few technical adjustment suggestions and corrections, which I have memorised. Other than that, very positive. The take home message is GO FOR IT.
There are two more sessions. I am thinking of trying to write a short story from one of my antique store photos for the next (last?) one. I’ll need to get started tomorrow with an outline because I will be at the hospital four days this week for a thyrogen scan process. It will be a good way to keep the worry about results at bay, but I know that I can’t write in a waiting room. I wish I could, but they’d interrupt me for the injections and scans and I’d just end up resenting them. Am hoping that the nausea from the injections won’t be too bad. If worse comes to worse, I’ll keep a barf bucket at my feet at home while I write.
I already have a plan for a project after the seminar, which is good because I was a little worried about what I’d do after June. It will probably be a book of short stories rather than a novel. Hope I can get one published somewhere!
Filed under: writing
Scrapped the first exercise for being too autobiographical and I’m glad I did! Having a lot of fun with a person I’m making up. I wish he lived next-door to me instead of the main character in the story. Well, maybe not. He’s having a super loud party. But he’s not the kind of guy that you get mad at for having a super loud party. You think you’re going over to ask him to turn the stereo down, but he hands you a beer and the next thing you know you’re dancing with him and all his friends. Also it’s his birthday and there was just an earthquake. Even though this guy has a little bit of guys I used to work with in Venice Beach, he’s also this totally new person.
Writing fiction is fun.
Another great meeting of the writing seminar gang.
Theme for the next exercise is: Au milieu de la nuit. In the middle of the night.
I wrote it in less than two hours just after the session.
How? It’s pretty much autobiographical.
Do I feel like I’m cheating? Yes.
Do I have a colonoscopy this week? Yes.
At least I wrote it entirely in French. That way, I feel less like a cheater.
So there.
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Typing up my story, I started to feel very uncomfortable with how autobiographical it is, so I made the narrator a student surgeon. I’m not super pleased with this one. But again, I wrote it directly in French. So. At least there’s that.
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Meh. Way too autobiographical even with the narrator being a surgeon. Started writing something else more fictional. Feels much better.
Out of the basement and under a skylight! That was exciting. It was also exciting that there were only 16 people *including* Jake and the librarian who sometimes reads for shy writers. Good discussion and some great writing!
Our mission, which I’ve already accepted, is a dialogue or a focus on dialogue between two characters. It must begin with ‘Attends!’
Just sat down with no real clear idea in my head and have ended up with a talking Siamese cat who is making an unrepeatable offer to some schmo cutting through the Cour des Petites Ecuries.
I still have no idea what the offer is. I’ll sleep on it. Can’t make it too Master and Margarita after all. This cat does not work for Satan. Just so you know.
But this will be my second ever short story written directly in French! Super exciting! One more and I level up! w00t!
I hope I have distracted a few francophone people out there and only two days after hoping to fulfil such a purpose. Monday evening, on my return from the Sempé exhibit at the Paris Mayor’s Office, I found an e-mail from the Bobigny cultural centre asking my permission to post a PDF of the first short story I ever wrote directly in French, Maddie! I said, ‘Oui, tout à fait! Ce serait génial!’*
They chose it to represent the seminar I am in at the local library (led by Jake Lamar). It is up for all the francophone world to read here.
If any non-francophones want the English version, give me a sign!
This may not seem like a big deal, and it probably isn’t, but I’m pretty pleased to have been selected among all the stories written this season. And it *is* free exposure. I wouldn’t recommend working for free to journalists, but in the ‘OMG, who cares?’ world of fiction publishing, it could be a little boost. We shall see. Would have been better if I had my website up, but hey…one of the writers in the last seminar has a book published now and I don’t think she was Little Miss Self-Marketing during the seminar. You just never can tell!
*Yes, totally. That would be great!
Here we go again. Showing some serious symptoms of colon cancer, according to my doctor. My dad has had a brief (thankfully) battle with it. Given the paternal antecedent and the two times I have ingested iodine 131 to kill off the thyroid cancer, which one doctor thinks I got from the radiation used to treat the head/neck cancer I had as a teenager, the symptoms must be checked out.
It’s definitely not nothing. It’s something. There is very real, disgusting evidence of something. Just hoping the something is benign and easy to treat.
This could send me into a tailspin, but I have fiction — my own and other people’s — to get me through the storm.
I wrote something on Facebook recently about hoping that something I write may help someone work through the pain of this world. By this I meant to forget the crap for awhile in order to deal with it better later. Through my cancers, reading books has helped me leave the crap behind for awhile, stop any pity parties by thinking of (and worrying about) others, reduce dependence on pain killers and laugh (truly helpful medicine, the last one). Distraction has an important function. You can’t have focus without it. Sometimes you just need a break from life. I want to give people that break. Maybe I will be able to do so on a large scale, if I’m lucky.
I don’t think I could fight if I didn’t have books. And books have helped me through every truly low/scary point in my life. Even when my radiation treatment (the first external one at age 18) made me so tired I couldn’t stand for more than five minutes at a time and couldn’t hold a book for long without tiring, I had the memories of books I had read and been read. All the best stories leave us better off for having heard or read them. I may never write any ‘worthwhile’ Booker or Pulitzer winning fiction. I won’t ever teach anyone anything new about our condition as a writer. I probably won’t even ever get published. But I do hope that someone enjoys a story I’ve written enough to have been swept away by it a bit. That it gave them a quick break from the monotony and the various fears we all have. That it stays with them as a little thing they enjoyed to remember when they have a crappy day or a series of them. The way I think of Lamb by Christopher Moore or anything by Douglas Adams and laugh out loud in the waiting room, in a hospital bed, in my own bed so tired I can barely move. I hope I can do that for someone someday. I want to make distraction my trade.
Filed under: writing
The words aren’t coming! Going to try to hunker down and write tomorrow in between making up hours for work and a tea and cakey thing with my in-laws for Grandmother’s Day. Today I cleaned and reorganised my kitchen rather than write this short story. That is some serious procrastination/avoidance. Our kitchen is bigger than many I’ve seen in the Parisian region. We once had five people in it all at the same time: two were making cocktails, one was making fried chicken and two were dancing. All that to say that the spring cleaning/reorganisation was quite a task and it really needed to be done, but now it is. Done. Even the vases squeak to the touch. Now what?
When I have a little guidance — even a noun! — BLAMMO! Story. Jake released us into the wilds of our minds two weeks ago. And I feel like I dropped my machete in the undergrowth right after the session and vines immediately covered it up.
I have a vague idea that involves a setting (Hamilton Hall at Liverpool Street station) and an event (thinking a fight is starting, but it’s just roughhousing). I kind of feel like this event is the gun on the wall. So I guess the theme is violence. And hey wait! I’ve got it! I know exactly what I am going to do now! Thank goodness for this blog that four people read!
Maybe this shows what sitting down and thinking about/nattering on about a problem can achieve. I just needed to sit down two seconds and think, What Would Anton Chekhov Do?
Hasn’t even been written yet, but I have a setting. Hamilton Hall at Liverpool Street Station. Something good is bound to come out of that.
My reading at the seminar went well. I didn’t stumble too much with the French, which is good since the words are mine and were written directly in French. Glad I didn’t block up. All positive feedback. I was hoping for some negative because, as long as it isn’t spiteful, it’s helpful. When comments started going, everyone was talking at once, people were trying to figure out the main character. Why did she do this? What made her this way? I got a comparison to Hitchcock, to Rosemary’s Baby. Pretty damn pleased, I have to say. When it came time for negative comments, our seminar clown made a word play joke. So not even really negative. I wasn’t allowed to say anything so I mimed hitting a baDOOM-TCHiiii on a drum kit. It was pretty wild to share my fiction with 30 near-strangers and not have any negative feedback, though. A first for me. Of course, since I am F.I.N.E., it won’t go to my head.
Yes, I just made an Aerosmith reference. I will probably never win a Booker or a Pulitzer just because of that. That is, if I ever get published.
A month to the next session. No theme. Thinking I’ll try something based in London since I’ll be there next week. Knowing me, I’ll have an idea for something Booker Prize-ish and end up writing about the ghosts of British rock stars.
So in the end, exercise 3 was NOT the Le Guin/Roddenberry thing I was thinking of. Instead, it’s a revenge story with a slight nod to the community theme. Excerpt:
I volunteered for the watch because my livingroom window faced the bank on the corner. The lighting was better outside the bank and we wanted to be sure to catch her in the act. For years our neighbourhood has suffered from her generosity. The legend was that a woman who lived in the neighbourhood had some issues with the mayor of the 10th arrondissement. Some said it was over taxes. Others heard that a former mayor left her for another woman decades before and she had decided to punish every mayor since then. Whatever the problem was, her mode of revenge was unusual.
Tomorrow I read my first short story written directly in French out loud to a bunch of people I barely know. Nervous!
Writing fiction is still helping me deal with some frightening stuff like a brain scan (it was clean — except for all that brain matter). I really am not sure what I would do without the writing. Or my brain.
