6S: The Book

It's here.

Tax day cometh, and so does the debut of 6S: THE BOOK. An eclectic anthology of stories told in exactly six sentences by over 100 authors. Including me (!!!!!). I have three micros in volume 1, all excerpts from BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT. Here, the first sentences of each...

>>PHARMING. The small room reeks; yellow urine puddles by the john, streamers of toilet paper and clods of crap circle slowly in the bowl.

>>ANOTHER TECHNICOLOR MOMENT. Blurred, my eyes land on the photo: the two of us at Nantucket harbor, the sunset glowing behind us, a gaudy Mai Tai, while I stare into the camera, serious as the wind whips my hair, but he looks at me, eyes soft, mouth curved in a small smile.

>>HIGH FLYER. My very atoms vibrate: from caffeine, from sleep deprivation, from the constant moving forward.

The online journal runs daily, rain or shine, and features famous folk (Ethan Hawke recently popped in withhis own 6S) as well as those of us who aspire to be. And a lot of writers in my cyber-circle are featured. One of three guarantees in life, along with death and taxes, is that 6S: The Book will be a damn good read.

Birthed by Rob McEvily and available from AMAZON.

Peace, Linda

My Poem Featured on Poetic Asides!!!!!!!!

Scroll below.... see? Monday morning before the garbage truck comes

The prompt was... worry.

Cool! Peace, Linda

Life Happens

And gets in the way at times. Like the past two weeks, work's been whacking me into a flubbery, brain-dead blob of silly putty. Among other things, work keeps pecking at my brain, my heart, pushing me off-kilter.

The day job is a complicated web, one rife with politics and intrigue and behind-the-scenes-deals. Lots of bad behaviors, borderline ones, and as I climb the ladder to the higher echelons of the Ivory Tower, I see more and more stuff I wish I didn't. It keeps me up nights, so I'm tired, too. But I console myself - all this soap-opera-boxing is incredible fodder for PURE, which deals with many of these very not-so-academic issues. So I absorb, like a sponge, try to stay quiet, and scribble madly when I can.

See? Even my prose sucks...

What little writing energy I do have these days is invested into the Poem-A-Day challenge, posted daily at POETIC ASIDES and, for the first week only, HERE.

The challenge is just that - a challenge - far more difficult than I imagined. Think of it as NaPoWriMo - a blitzkrieg of verse. And there's some damn fine stuff being spouted at Poetic Asides, so it gets... intimidating. But everything I post is pretty much a first draft, armatures for further revision and polishing later this year. I am committed to finishing out the month and continuing with my daily Vitamin P.

Of course, I'm (still) readying BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT for various pitches and manuscript reviews and conferences and readings and contests - all that jazz. I'll be in Beantown for The Muse and the Marketplace at the end of this month, then the Washington Independent Writers conference in DC on June 14. 'Tis the beginning of the marketing season, so I'm busy.

My writing buddies have had some notable success the past few days:

>Jimmy the Prince has TWO offers for a publication contract for his brilliant DARK SIDE OF THE SOUL. TWO!!!!! I'm a reader, editor, nudger, friend, and am so very proud of him and his story.

>Kim of Kenai Peninsula placed in the top 5 (out of over 1,100 entries) Writer's Digest 11th Your Story - go Kim! (It was an excerpt from her novel TOWING WATER).

>Chrys from Orcas Island has an excerpt of her memoir MOONCHILD published in SHARK REEF.

>And Kelley has her first 'literary' short forthcoming in GUD.

Keep writing, friends; clearly, you're all doing the amazingly right thing. Peace, Linda

The Asparagus are Up... Celebrate with Poetry

April showers bring May flowers... Lousy poem, wonderful sentiment.

Around the third week in March, I start to scan the earth carefully, looking for signs of upheaval and rebellion. I especially watch the asparagus beds; their arrival is the harbinger of Spring.

On March 29, two days earlier than last year, I spotted the first spear thrusting bravely forth. Two weeks before the first meal - yum. This week, the lilacs have budded, forsythia blazes, the currants have set green knobs, along with the hydrangea, and the plum trees are covered in soft white blooms.

April is National Poetry Month. I am joining a few other intrepid poets at Poetic Asides and will pen (or try to) a new poem or some facsimilie every day. For this first week, I'll post my scribblings here daily (and remember - these ARE first drafts. Very first drafts!).

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APRIL 1 - Newton’s Principia
(or A Young Boy’s Lesson on Gravity)

He flies free beneath shocking blue brilliance,
on cider-tinged air, quills quiver and twist.
Crimson stains white, the world roars its silence;
bodies of mass fall, clenched into tight fists.

(In a rondeau redouble, the first stanza is very important - the next four echo each line in turn, using a proscribed rhyme sequence. Very tricky. But very fun and satisfying.)

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APRIL 2 (Prompt: You are someone else)

The Boss of You

Another interminable day
in the nosebleed section of heaven.
Some omnipotent manager
I, my mignons messing
with my catseye marble.
I whip out that ole white magic,
transform bullets into gumdrops,
quell tidal quakes,
heal old folks aches,
banish traffic snarls,
and let junkies yearn
for something more
than pill-fashioned euphoria.
These miniscule problems
at last retired,
I head down to Molly G's,
throw quarters in the juke,
straddle the stool,
and share a tall
frosted one.

----

APRIL 3 (Prompt: a haiku)

Ceaseless, snow drifts down,
shimmers pure on starless pine -
a choir of silence.

----

APRIL 4 (Prompt: giving thanks)

My Virtual Salon
(Or thanks to Al Gore for inventing the Info Superhighway)

Electrons pulse,
weaving invisible ribbons,
a maypole twisting
all of us together,
we writers,
disparate and desperate
for commune of words.

A miracle, we find each other,
crawling through blogospheric interspace
from our physical centers -
the wilds of Kenai,
Orcas Island, swinging Joisey,
Beantown and Trigger Town,
Carolina on my mind,
Hon City, Geneve
across the pond,
and points in between and beyond -
to arrive here, NOW,
a virtual salon.

(Thank you, dear writing friends, my nudgers and compatriots).

----

APRIL 5 (Prompt: Worries)

Monday morning before the garbage truck comes

and the mockingbird sings,
I lay in the too-warm room,
your breath a steady,
irritating reminder
of nirvanic slumber
that eludes me.

Instead, my head
waltzes, thoughts
baraging my brain
like so much clutter
the whirring truck
will soon pick up -
the library books,
no bread for lunches,

and what's for dinner anyway?
The client meeting,
and calls for freezing rain
to snarl the overlong commute.
Forgotten birthdays
and unpaid bills,

the perfume on his collar
(not mine) slide into static,
white noise to accompany
tomorrow's appointment
with the radiologist.

----

APRIl 6 (Prompt: Chronicle the Day)

On My Father's 70th Birthday

Rain pelts the window.
In the grey-drear of this morn,
the only light the soft blue
emanating from this screen,
the words come slow,
really not at all,
and silently I blame
my nine-year old
padding down the stairs,
too early, to sit beside me,
as he does every morning.

Soon, the others stir,
the day passes in the smudge
of daily chores
that bind us a family
and divert from my inner life:
groceries, then lunch,
and a mystery ride to the country,
the smell of apples and rosemary,
the phone call home before the evening stroll,
the tinny murmur of a movie,
the goodnight story
and the house, at last, stills again.

My son, tucked under flannels,
dreams while I do battle
with words that still come slow,
because the ones I need to write
are too close to let out.

----

APRIL 7 (Prompt: ramble)

Lexington Market, Baltimore

Five days a week I take the metro to work,
never quite knowing what I'll see or hear,
for this is the West side, the quasi-gentrified
parcel of space where smack deals are a norm -
an interesting sociological observation.

Today emanated grey and dreary,
unlike last Thursday, the last day
I went into the office,
and even though that day
the sun blared bright
and, for the first time in what seemed eons,
a spit of warmth cradled the cracked sidewalks,
everything around me screamed desolation:
the toddler wailing as a woman, cussing,
cigarette dangling from her mouth,
dragged him through the intersection;
the sparrow pecking at drying vomit,
a beautiful orange-flecked beige,
spewed under the large urn potted
with petunias; the rat, smashed
flat against the cobblestone of the street,
hapless victim of some larger monster;
and always, the spent needles, the flaccid
condoms, chicken bones and peanut shells,
and the smell of stale urine
following me as I ride the escalator up, up, up.

It wasn't until rounding the corner
of the behemoth building that everything
slowed, relaxed; men and women, most emaciated,
walked in groups of twos and threes,
faces plastered with beautific smiles.

Methadone will make you happy.

Now, the day done, I leave my work behind;
the rain spits down, not heavy enough
to haul out the umbrella but enough
to be a nuisance to my shellacked hair
and Italian leather pumps, and I marvel
at the sudden cleaness of the quiet, empty streets.

Sole

A walk through a forest warmed by the sun.

Sole. I like this Italian word, for isn't the sun a 'soul' of sorts, and the 'sole' thing we yearn for through winter's never-ending bleakness?

An excerpt from my four-stanza haiku Sole to celebrate the advent of Spring.

puny shoots of hope
valorous, thrust and strive through
frozen ash, clay, rock

My soul found some peace today... hope yours did as well. Linda

Idus Martiae

I think of the Ides of March not so much a metaphor for impending doom, but more a time of uncertainty, of shifting tectonic plates. Of blood coursing through veins too fast, too hot.

I watch the earth in our garden crack, the soil heaving upward; I like to think of the repressed plants rebelling against the last of the cold and thrusting upward to the sun. That’s how my heart feels this time of year: yearning, striving, desiring something more, something greater. It’s my time of restlessness, of pacing behind my psychic boundaries like a caged cougar.

Big day for me, the Ides of March. Some 15 years ago, I defended my doctoral dissertaton, a watershed of sorts. Today, when I woke early to write, I wished Ben, the protagonist of Brighter than Bright and Pure, a happy 28th birthday. Then a couple of hours later, my son woke with a fever and a sore, swollen throat that compelled us to rush to the on-call pediatrician, who diagnosed strep (again!). And then, as if our family life is not complex enough, we adopted a four-year old Sheltie mix, a cute red-head named Georgie. It’s been a full day. A wonderful day, despite the unease of change thrumming through me.

Big writing week:
• Icarus Arisen. A poem that’s teased me for over two months. I’m quite happy with it, but threw it in a red manila folder anyway and will revisit it before shopping it around.
• Finding Out. A short non-fiction piece about the conception of my son after years of infertility. A personal milestone for me (both my son and the writing of this piece). Also marinating in the manila folder.
• The damn synopsis. I spent at least 30 hours on this over the last two weeks. But I managed to eke out a half-decent draft for my WritersOnline class and Nudge-Nudge Collective to review.
• Brighter than Bright. Committed to a reading at our Unitarian Universalist church in two weeks. Gulp.
• The Muse and the Marketplace. Booked my flight and hotel for this Boston Grub Street sponsored writing conference in late April and signed up for an agent review of my novel. Great writers: Jonathan Franzen, Anita Shreve, Karl Iagnemma – among others. Pumped is an understatement.

Keep writing… Peace, Linda

Parity - One Step Closer

We'll pay for liver transplants for alcoholics, expensive inhalers for ex-smokers with emphysema, but we don't pay for the treatment of addiction and mental health. THANK YOU House of Representatives for getting us one step closer to providing equal treatment and reimbursement for these conditions. And THANK YOU Paul Wellstone - today, you are my hero... Peace, Linda

Translated: If the Senate and House can compromise, then insurers will HAVE to pay for mental health and addictions treatment. Just like they do the 'real' stuff like diabetes, heart disease, hip fractures, and all that jazz...

Wabi Sabi

Impermanence and imperfection.

I first became familiar with wabi sabi as a potter and sculptor. Clay is a temperamental, mercurial medium, subject to extremes of temperature, application of caustic minerals and elements, the whims of carving instruments and the desires of artisans to literally beat mud into shape. Indeed, a goal of potters working in porcelain is to pull the clay surface so thin it achieves a sublime and ethereal translucence.

Even after many, many years of working in clay, most of my pots and sculptures suffer imperfections: huge, rending cracks, asymmetrical centers, glazes that crawl beyond desired borders. Sometimes, I got lucky - the mistakes turned out beautiful, like the glaze on a recent raku tile that emerged from smoldering ashes a greenish gold rather than a purple metallic. But usually, the mistakes are irreversibly ugly; after all, there is not much you can do to correct a huge crack.

Or is there? Japanese potters celebrate their imperfect pots by stuffing the cracks with gold leaf.

When I read the latest version of BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT, I still see flaws. Not huge gaping holes - these have been fixed, if not with gilt and glue then at least heavy hack-sawing and prose propping. But I'm finding as I rewrite, I fix the blemishes and then, on yet another reread, revert them back to their original imperfect form.

You see, there is beauty in these mistakes.

Wabi sabi - nothng is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished.

What a relief...

Peace, Linda

Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll

The SEX: As noted earlier, I've been struggling a bit with writing a good nookie scene. And since the best way to improve your writing is through reading, I've been, uh, studying sex scenes. A tough assignment indeed. I read through some erotica anthologies, reviewed some old Sandra Brown's, returned to one of my favorite scenes in Niffenberger's THE TIME TRAVELLER'S WIFE ("...[she] thrusts her hips back and forth a couple of times. I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent."), and flipped through a dozen other books.

Nothing satisfied. So it came as a surprise when, on a whim I purchased Anne Proulx's BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (no, I haven't seen the movie) for five bucks at an Indy bookstore in Bethany Beach and was blown away by the sheer beauty and raw sensuality between cowboys Jack and Ennis:

"They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezed the breath out of each other, saying son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together,..."

The DRUGS: I'm looking at voices, too. BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT is fiction, but written in two first-person voices, so where better to learn than from powerful memoirs? This last week I've reread James Frey and Augusten Burroughs, two of my faves, scrutinized their narratives (ever realize how A MILLION LITTLE PIECES reads so fast, in part because everything is left justified? Brilliant.) I just finished Anne Kaysen's GIRL, INTERRUPTED, a kind of comp to mine because she and Ben share a touch of insanity and a stint at the same loony bin (Mclean Psychiatric Hospital). The entire book, really a series of essays, questions that blurred border of crazy and normal. My kind of read, especially her wry observation on psychiatric medications:

"Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium: the therapists' friends. The resident could put us on that stuff too, in an 'acute' situation. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it.

"You're doing so well," the resident would say.

That's because those things knocked the heart out of us."

The ROCK-n-ROLL: Still reveling in Radiohead's latest, IN RAINBOWS. Every few days, a new musical infatuation; this week, it's Jigsaw Falling into Place. With lyrics like "words are a sawed-off shotgun" and "before you're lost between the notes" coupled with fabulous percussion, how can you go wrong? The song reminds me of a scene in my friend Jimmy's novel DARK SIDE OF THE SOUL, where two souls dance on an angel's keyboard. Really.

The WRITING: It's going, it's going. Finally have a first chapter I like. A lot. At last. So much for our mutual sabbatical... though between poems and query letters, I'm writing PURE and LOVE SONG. Maybe just mixing it up is what I needed. Peace, Linda

Betwixt Angst and Comfortably Numb

This thing, not a feeling yet not just a thought, has been running through me like an underground spring, trying to well to the surface. It - whatever it is - has been lurking in my academic life, as well as my writing life. And my personal, too.

It goes something like this: sometimes we feel lousy. Not just a bad hair day kind of lousy, but the kind of nasty where we want to scream, hit people, curl into a tight ball on the floor of a dark closet, cut ourselves with exacto blades, play with long coils of rope, lose ourselves in the comfort of gambling, food, booze, or sex. The dark, dark emotions that dog us like stubborn shadows. And we want them to go away. Now. Because stewing in this maelstrom of negative emotion/feeling/angst/insanity makes us extremely uncomfortable.

But there are pills, you see. Some you can get from your family doc, others you can easily score from a college roomie, a dealer loitering in the Lexington Market parking lot, or a friend's medicine cabinet.

And the question is: do you take the pill?

Fascinating article and discussion on this delicate balance, courtesy of Judith Warner

Existential Angst

What goes up must come down, and my high plummeted, much like the temperature here in wacky weather Baltimore.

It was that second agent rejection that screwed my joy to the wall with eight-inch daggers. Once again, a very pleasant, personalized note with some nice compliments ('intriguing query', 'well-written'). Frankly, this love letter didn't faze me for a couple of days. But then I took that note and the rejection I received Christmas Eve and read them the way I scrutinize tea leaves or tarot cards or short, stubby life lines marching across a palm. Seeking answers. Looking for the 'why'. Because, you see, those agent rejections have code words and phrases, and they can be deciphered. And this is what the morse code tapped out: THIS STORY DOES NOT HAVE THAT NECESSARY ELUSIVE SPARK.

An editor, a rather well-known one who happens to teach the class I'm taking on putting a novel proposal together, confirmed my 'ah-ha'. As did two trusted beta readers, which pretty much paralyzed me. All week. I had me a hoe-down of a pity party. I wallowed in the miserable muck of existential depression, that deepest melancholy when the entire meaning of your existence hinges on your ability to create beauty and meaning.

At the end of three days, I decided to give up on BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT, convinced of the impossibility of plumbing further into my characters' - and my own - psyches. 'Time to move on, kiddo!' I told myself at three in morning. 'Think of it as your practice novel, the one that sits in a dusty trunk waiting for grandchildren to find.' And, worse, I wondered if I was a hack, a wannabe writer, someone forever ill-equipped to tackle important issues with a sacrament of words.

I still wonder...

But like most dark moods, this one passed. The quill called, a pensive siren, and I got bored with my negative, self-imposed drama and decided to not worry about whether this story, which I love SO much, will ever see the light of publication. I decided to let it rest. Marinate for a bit, stew in its juices of emotion and character and words. I know what needs to be done: my characters' voices need to sing off the page, brushing off all vestiges of my pixil strokes. THAT is what the agents and my readers are saying. Dig deep, even deeper than I can imagine, and with soul.

It's the how I am pondering...

So, for now, BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT slumbers. But Ben and Phoebe are persistent folks, so I expect our mutual holiday will be short-lived. And I continue to write - how can I not? This morning, in the dusk of dawn, I penned 670 new words on a blank page, starting story number 3 - LOVE STORY ON THE INNER LOOP: A Novel - inspired by a 'what if' that initially sprouted as a six-sentence ditty.

As Dory, the addled fish in Finding Nemo, sings: keep on writing, writing, writing.

Peace, Linda

PSSSSSSTTTTTTT... and remember: YOU CAN'T RUSH ART.

Bupe - The Cure or the Disease?

Addiction is a tricky business to treat - seems most of the cures cause as many problems as the disease. Methadone, frontline treatment for heroin and other opioid dependence, is a favored substance of abuse across the nation. And now buprenorphine, aka Bupe, is on the rise. Also used to treat that nasty smack habit, bupe is selling on the streets at 2 - 5 bucks a pop, respectable for a pharmaceutical with an opioid antagonist (naltrexone) component that acts as a supposed deterrent to intravenous use.

Problem is, the naltrexone isn't very effective at doing its job. Street use of bupe, primarily to ward off withdrawal from other opioids, is increasingly the opioid of choice for getting high.

What makes bupe different from methadone and other similar treatments? It's the only pharmacologic remedy available from a doc. Yep, trained and licensed office physicians can prescribe bupe for any patient. Dissolved under the tongue, bupe is taken in the privacy of one's home. In other words, no daily trek to a stigma-inducing meth clinic. As a result, thousands more individuals are in treatment. Thousands who might not otherwise have sought help.

Methadone, bupe, and a myriad of other 'treatments' illustrate the difficult conundrum of curing the afflicted without feeding the demand for new and novel substances to snort, huff, swallow, lick, and inject. Wish there was an obvious solution, but short of throwing more dollars to the National Institute for Drug Abuse, providing incentives to Big Pharma to develope non-abusable remedies, and boosting proven prevention strategies, there is no easy fix.

Take on even one of these barefaced solutions? In an election year? Come on...

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On writing... February is off with a bang, who cares whether the damn groundhog saw his shadow? Chrys memoirist extraordinaire, has a fabulous piece on parties, published in (ta-da!) - The Sun. Woo-hoo, Go Girl!!!

Kelley sometimes-they-call-me- has a piece up this week at Flash Me - Bike Riding in Intensive Care.

Jenn Haddock, member of my Cedarhurst Unitarian Universalist writing group, gave birth to her first 6S - all you writers out there will especially resonate.

And yours truly has another ditty in the same - Perfect Day.

Perfect week.

Go forth and conquer this, the longest month of the year... Peace, Linda