Happy Blogiversary!

Happy Birthday Leftbrainwrite!

Exactly one year ago, I entered the wild, woolly cyberworld of blogging. My friend and fellow writer CHRYS BUCKLEY had returned from a conference two weeks before, pumped up about blogging and somehow convinced me to join the fray.

We've come a long way, my little baby.

--64 posts
--A few HONORS along the way
--Some guest blogging for SARAH MOFFETT and MOONRAT
--Musings on mental health and substance abuse and creativity, on balancing the personal and the professional
--POETRY
--My travails writing, including the ups at GRUB STREET and SIX SENTENCES, as well as the downs of doubting

But most of all, I met YOU. Fellow writers, readers, editors, bloggers, publishers. Friends. And some of our cyber connections have led to face-to-face encounters of the most blessed kind.

Thank you for journeyng with me. Thank you for stopping in and sharing your thoughts and ideas and worries and joys. Enjoy the virtual chocolate and champagne. And here's to another year...

THE WRITING... I'm gonna be scarce for a couple of weeks. In part because of vacation. But mostly because I need to write. If you check out the PURE-O-METER, you'll see that steady and upward arcing word count on PURE has fizzled. I have a good excuse - I'm working on BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT. Yeah, I know - I Promised it was done.

But I'm rewriting BTB to editorial order. Okay? Thought you'd understand.

Peace, Linda

Friends

A friend, a good friend and fellow writer (you may know her as Twizzle or Cibo or Kelley or thong woman), has a son with a little-known disease - cavernous angioma. Most people think of angiomas as the purply raspberry marks on skin, but actually these little clusters of vessels can occur anywhere, including in the brainstem and spinal cord.

Twizzle can tell you all about how this disease has affected her life, her family, her child - and she will - HERE.

Then, exercise your political will and write your politicians to increase funding

Read about it HERE at the Angioma Alliance. Follow the links and do your do-good for the week. I faxed in my letter - took all of about 15 minutes (shorter if you're not a compulsive writer and editor like moi!). DO IT!!!! PLEASE!!!!

Kelley thanks you, I thank you.

Another friend... Tonight I said good-bye to my friend Elizabeth. She turned 98 a month ago today, and was admitted into hospice this afternoon. When I held her hands, they were cool, so she will travel soon to the other side. I will miss her kindness, her readiness to share chocolate with my children when we visited, her generosity of spirit. When she moved from her little apartment to a nursing home, she had a yardsale and I bought many of her scarves. Tomorrow, I will wear one and hold her close...


Peace, Linda

NB: Elizabeth died in her sleep Friday night July 25 about 7 pm. She died during a short window of time in which no one was with her. People had been by her side constantly, though I am not sure she always realized it, for three days. Dying is such a private act, I can only wonder - was she waiting to be alone?

She is missed...

Flying the Coop...

Our baby robins flew the coop yesterday.

We watched the mother make her nest, pulling twigs and string and dried grasses to the Asian pear tree by our deck. Two cerulean eggs soon appeared. We watched them anxiously, scaring the mother every time we opened the screen door to peer into her household. Peeking tommies, we.

One hatched, a fluff ball; the second hatched two days later. We had worried it was a 'bad egg'. Mom fed them bugs and worms, regurgitating them into their mouths. Mornings, when I crept downstairs I could hear the family chirping "feed me! feed me!"

And today, gone.

Our own two kiddos will be gone this Saturday, a birthday party and sleepover. My husband and I have never been in the house without BOTH our children. Not in 9 years. We have so craved a few hours alone, but I suspect we will wander about aimlessly Saturday night, worrying and feeling bereft without their giggles and whining and arguments and cuddling.

On mental health... read HERE to find out what it is like for Ben, my protagonist in BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT, to live with bipolar disorder. A wonderful piece by the NYT. Scroll down and click on the link to hear the actual stories, then return to read the comments. These stories will amaze and move.

On creativity... this dude's got it right...
"You practice an art to make your soul grow, not to make money or to become famous. And this would include singing in the shower or dancing to the radio or also drawing a caricature of your best friend, or whatever—all this makes your soul grow. And you meet a person who's done that, whether successfully or not, and you sense a larger soul." Vonnegut

Peace, Linda

Creativity... touchstone of the soul

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” Joseph Chilton Pearce


Saturday was our annual Open Garden, where my husband struts his passion - his beautiful daylilies, all 200 or so varieties, plus the ones he's hybridized (imagine - flower nookie!). I have my little patch of earth as well, mostly herbs and vegetables - the practical stuff.

A gorgeous summer day, one full of good discussion, fantastic food (pesto and shrimp pizza, strawberry-rhubarb pie, lots of salads, and local cantaloupe), and capped off with a plant swap.

Sunday I strutted my stuff, wandering into my husband's usual territory - I gave a summer service at our Unitarian Universalist church (hubbers is the minister). I love the lay-laid summer services, so casual with chairs arranged in an ellipse, folks in shorts and sandals, and lots of discussion afterwards. My sermon was titled "Creativity, the touchstone of our soul, but why do we fear it so?"

A subject too near to my heart.

I've been pondering this issue of creativity, this wondrous river and its tangled tributaries and diversions. Such waters I've tasted - what a blessing to be human, to be able to parse words and sentences into prose.

Marketing my work has forced me to acknowledge the difference between the process and the product of writing. I've come to realize that no matter what the publishing outcome of BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT, the most salient part of that book was the journey made to realize the story, both the inner journey made in imagining the lives of my characters and their world, and the outer journey made in the realization of my creative self.

And so it will be for every other poem or story or novel that falls from my fingers to grace once empty pages.

Creativity is a divine gift. My job as a human is to honor that gift. And one way for me to continue creating is to embrace a corollary to Pearce's truth: “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being perfect.”

Very wabi sabi. Very well... perfect.

WHAT I'M READING: INTUITION by Allegra Goodman. She uses a roving third-person POV which I find disconcerting at times, sinking the reader into different heads within a single scene. She achieves this almost seamlessly, but not so well as Updike. But Updike is God, or as close as writer mortals come.

For a true poetic treat, read these five by Adam Fieled in the latest issue of OTOLITHS. Rarely do I read, then reread, a poem and sigh each time. These are poems I wish I'd written, especially When you bit... and Sheet Covered.

THE WRITING: Writing and pre-writing on PURE clipping along at a steady pace. Struggling with a kernal of a poem call THE GOD PARTICLE and contemplating a few flashes which are, well, flashes in my pan.

It's been tough writing, tough sorting through all this... stuff. It's like running at breakneck speed for a great distance, then suddenly stumbling. I've been falling into my writing, the process of it, and I guess it's something one must do to get to the other side.

Keep creating. Always. peace, Linda

Synchronicity

Some call it serendipity.

In one week... one query rejection, three poetry submission rejections, one weird crit from a contest, and three politically charged days at my ivory garret where the techtonic plates of change rended so rapidly I was stranded in tears by Wednesday afternoon...

I was paralyzed. The writing suffered, my head and heart constipated from all this anxious stuff. For the first time in over two years, writing wasn't fun.

All this left me questioning... Why do I work? Why do I write? Why do I even bother to TRY to CREATE? It was like the WWF in my head - EVIL EDITOR faces off with CRAZY CREATOR. The whole leftbrain/rightbrain struggle. In other words, an existential crisis of sorts, further fueled by exhaustion, grant proposal deadlines, and hormones.

But then, all this nasty karma suddenly counterweighted by a poet friend who reminded me of the subjectivity of reading. Then, a sudden request to present a sermon next Sunday on Creativity. Ughh... as if I don't have enough to do. Quick research on the topic made me aware of several resources to explore. Then, a friend, unaware of both the upcoming sermon and my predicament of the soul, gifted me with one of those resources - THE ARTIST'S WAY - in which the first chapter miraculously states:

"TO LIVE A CREATIVE LIFE, WE MUST LOSE OUR FEAR OF BEING WRONG." (Joseph Chilton Pearce).

"Block" undone. 6700 words written this weekend. Sermon sketched out. Blog posted. Idea for poem scraped on paper. I will venture again into the wild, woolly world of marketing... soon. First, need to continue stoking that confidence, you know, the manifesting stuff.

Name your fear; it becomes your ally.

Synchronicity.

Peace, Linda

Poly-Blessings...

Yesterday my son turned nine; today, my daughter becomes six.

Double blessings on the cusp of the half-year.

Time seems to fly so fast these days. I remember the ultrasound that showed my son at eleven weeks, a white bipoled bean. A miracle; the reproductive specialist had deemed him a blighted ovum and told me I would miscarry. He was wrong, thank goddess.

My children are becoming the beautiful little people I'd always dreamed, with facile minds and lithe bodies. I so admire them, am so proud of the courageous way they tackle their daily challenges...

Another blessing came in the mail over the weekend. A FRIEND took the time and trouble to send me a special book, one with a unique history and a special autograph. Thank you.

Other blessings... the four nests in our backyard yielded twittering chicks (catbirds, robins, wrens); the currants and blueberries require daily picking; the Asian pears and white peaches are ripening; a bounty of fantabulous writing and non-writing friends; my summer gift to myself. Which is - read. Two weeks of four amazing books:

>>The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. Buy it. Read it. Laugh, cry, then read it again. It will be the best book you'll read all summer, perhaps all year.

>>Tweak by Nic Sheffe and Beautiful Boy by his father David Sheffe. Together, these two books tell the heart-rending father and son accounts of addiction. If you've ever abused drugs or known anyone who has, you must read these books. If you are a parent, you must read these books. Powerful stuff, and blog forthcoming. BUT, first I must recover...

>>Bless the Beasts and Children, which I blogged about HERE over at Moonrat's digs.

The writing... I wrote 1200 words on PURE this weekend. It felt good to just... write. This second story has been coming out kicking and screaming, in large part because my evil friend, the self-doubting editor, has lurked over my shoulder. Brighter than Bright was written in innocence, with complete naivete; I did not know what the hell I was doing. Now, though, I know too much: showing versus telling, the perils of first person, passive voice, story arc, tension building, and the near impossibility of getting an agent and (sigh) getting published. So I am trying to place less emphasis on the writer part of the equation, and focus instead on the words and the joy of stringing them together.

The marketing... ugh. Need I say more?

Just remember: "That which you manifest is before you."

Peace, Linda

Celebrate Reading!

Dear Moonrat, Prolific Goddess of EDITORIAL ASS, is celebrating reading this June with guest bloggers sharing books important to them. Check out your reading stacks from the past, and compare. My To-Be-Read pile has morphed this past month, with some bloggers definitely convincing me to try books I didn’t think I’d ever savor.

Today is my turn to pontificate, so check out my pick HERE. And read the rest of the series – you’ll be glad you did.

(Thank you, Moonrat, for this fabu opportunity. Now, get writing – you’ve less than 5 days to meet your July 1 deadline

Beyond BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT

I took a few days off from the day job, the night job, everything, and fled with my family to the Shenandoah Mountains.

Beautiful.

Skyline Drive is a mere 2.5 hours away, an easy jaunt even with two young children. All weekend long, as we sat drinking vino al fresco whllst looking down 3000 feet, hubby and I kept asking each other: why haven't we escaped before?

We hiked. We ate. We drank. We played. I didn't write. Not a word. I barely read, just 10 pages or so of INTUITION, and the Garth Stein interview in POETS & WRITERS (I heart Garth and his new book).

But I thunked. A lot. it's easy to mentally doodle when all you physically need to concentrate on is putting one foot ahead of the other.

I made some decisions. To write PURE before LOVE SONG ON THE INNER LOOP. It just excites me more. I've elucidated the structure (non-linear in time), the POV (third), the narrator (one). This morning, I wrote the one-sentence plot, motivated in part by this post and THIS by Nathan Bransford. PURE's premise has been present all along, the motivating force: academic mores run amok.

I also decided to spend much of the summer in 'pre-writing' mode. Doing the research (deriving the scientific experiment), interviewing medical students and residents, bench science pre- and post-docs for the poop on moving up the academic food-chain, and fleshing out my wacky cast of characters. Everything is... gelling. At last.

And I am reading. Oodles.

>INTUITION by Allegra Goodman (again, this time for her structure, which is unusual)

>MOO U by Jane Smiley is on ILL order from the library

>DEPRESSION AND BIPOLAR DISORDER. Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology by Stephen Stahl. Gotta get the neuroscience down and concoct a believable scientific endeavor.

>Several highly clinical Ivory Tower treatises on transgenic mouse models for bipolar disorder, mitochondrial abnormalities, and glutamate deficiencies.

>I also made a decision to spend ALL my new book dollars on small press offerings, so I'm already into GONE AND BACK AGAIN (by Jonathon Scott Fuqua, fellow Baltimorean and YA author, though this is his first adult novel) and EVERYONE'S PRETTY (Lydia Millet), put out by SOFT SKULL PRESS

Stuff got unstuck in the mountains. Maybe I should go away more often... Keep writing. Peace, Linda

Hey, Six Sentences in the NYT!

Rules for Writers, The Fine Art of Racing, and What Have You...

Lots of schlepping this blistering week between Baltimore and DC for two professional meetings: AcademyHealth, the national health services research assocaiton, and the Washington Independent Writers, the largest writing organization in the US. We changed our name - American Independent writers - to reflect our size and our geographically diverse membership.

FABULOUS session by thriller author JOHN GILSTRAP (Nathan's Run; Six Minutes to Freedom) and lit/fantasy author KEITH DONOHUE (The Stolen Child) on Working to Write, Working AND Writing? That is, the difficult decision to chuck the day job to write full-time, a temptation most of us harbor. Donohue closed with this:

RULES FOR LIVING THE DREAM

1/ Be born rich (Ha!)
2/ Marry money (Double ha!)
3/ Be a poet, be a recluse, or be a priest (I'm married to a minister, so my life's busier than ever)
4/ Teach (Yes. I do this. But it has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with drugs)
5/ Develop an elegant variation of OCD (Does hypomania count? With an extra dash of anxiety thrown in for good measure?)
6/ Create up problems for protagonist and story (Actually, it's the other way around - they make problems for me)
7/ Write every day (THIS I do. But it's only because I become an insufferable bitty otherwise)
8/ Get a dog (We had one, but she peed all over the place and had agorophobia, so we decided to get a bonsai plant instead)
9/ Don't have kids (Does Sears take 'em back after 90 days?)
10/ Use time wisely (Goddess knows I try...)

And here, just for fun... what book are you?

You're Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try
anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent
some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in.
This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's
time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in
ferries.



Take the very cool Book Quiz
at Blue Pyramid.

and find out...

Hmmm... then check out the shenanigans of friends and fellow writers TWIZZLE and MAGS on their quest to meet GARTH STEIN in Cambridge. More than politely listening to Garth merely read about that fabulous dog Enzo, their adventure involves Fire Trucks, Bar Stools in Lynn, and Mucho Vino. Perhaps too mucho vino... with Garth partially in tow.

Happy writing, happy reading... Peace, Linda

BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT - Finito

The world stops. A whorl of white surrounds us, feathers suspend in air, kicked up to the shocking blue. A whistle shrills--

...

(2 years, 5 months, 4 days
447 pages
121,713 words
Countless sleepless nights)

...

Somewhere, distant firecrackers explode, bells peal from a church steeple. A new year. My heart falls into step with hers, slower now. Less tentative. I fall again towards the constant white, and a small, unformed thought – no, a feeling - drifts up from somewhere deep, a place still faraway but no longer secret and hidden, and coalesces.

This feels good. This feels right.


THE END



Uh, I'm done. Really. I promise.

Thank you, everyone... you know who you are... I could not have done this without you.

Peace, Linda




P.S. CURRENTLY SEEKING REPRESENTATION.

Hon, have a dime?

Still writing hard... those last 20 pages of BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT are wupping me. Big time. But I found some inconsistencies that required rearranging of scenes and the attendant rewriting. Sigh... missed my self-imposed deadline, but I'm almost there. Really. I can taste being done, that sweet flavor flirting with my tastebuds, my heart and soul. My head. But I'd rather do it right now than right later...

Meanwhile, another poem makes the Poetic Asides hit parade... Hon, have a dime?. The prompt was 'snooping' on a convo. This was lunch at the Lexington Market. Scroll down and enjoy.

Peace, Linda