Month: November 2016

I thought the search would never end, but in some ways I didn’t even know what I was seeking. I was the poster child in a world where you are told you can be anything you want to be. But how do you know what you want to be, and more importantly, who you want to be?            At the end of my attendance at a traditional Catholic high school, there stood three lines for women. You got into the line for nurses if you were scientifically inclined. If you weren’t, you got into the line next to it, which was for teachers. If you couldn’t make up your mind or weren’t motivated, you were relegated to the third line for secretaries.  It was 1967.            BOOM! The world exploded almost immediately after that. Vietnam. Civil Rights. Peace, Love, and Happiness. And so much more. I had been given a second chance to make choices.            And did I ever make choices. Having gotten in the nurse line first, I quickly realized I wasn’t well equipped for a profession for which I have the most profound respect. I just didn’t belong. I had always wanted to be an advocate, a lawyer. So off to law school I trotted, while I worked as a welfare director in a city during the Regan administration. Talk about not belonging.            The lawyer-gig fit better. I practiced family law, where the human skills I learned as a nurse could be combined with deductive reasoning and advocacy. But I didn’t really identify with my fellow lawyers. I certainly didn’t want to play golf with them and steered clear of bar association memberships.            I discovered I enjoyed mediating conflict better than duking it out in court where families are psychologically dismembered by words spoken by lawyers and then swiftly forgotten. In mediation, I found comfort and support in other professionals who agreed there was a better way to disagree. But many mediators come to the field driven by many diverse motivations. I had yet to feel I had found my community.            While a brief stint as a yoga teacher brought me joy, I still didn’t feel as if I had found “my peeps.”            All the while, my inner writer had been gestating. The lawyer gig had revealed how much I love to tell people’s stories. After all, that’s what I did for my clients. I told judges their stories as persuasively as I could, trying to distinguish them from the myriads of other tragedies poured like lagers of misery.            At first I was afraid to admit I was a writer. But then I joined a writing group where I found others afflicted with the same addiction to words and storytelling. Buoyed by connecting with other writers and sharing  the alternating elation and despondence only writers can appreciate punctuate the love of writing, I began joining writer’s organizations and attending writer’s conferences.             How can I describe the relief and jubilation I felt at finally finding my people? Although the initial encounters with other writers are often awkward and stilted because everyone knows writers are short on social graces, what follows usually are conversations,  laughter, and laments on a level resonating with the “who” I finally have found me to be.  I had discovered where I belonged, who my tribe was, and the pleasure of being with my peeps.             

 You know that old expression, “The ayes have it,” don’t you? Actually, it could be a pretty controversial expression this week, given the debate about the popular vote versus the vote of the Electoral College. But I’m talking about the eyes, as in you cannot be grateful enough for good vision, particularly if you are a writer.            Recently I’d noticed that I wasn’t seeing so well, even with my pricey Ralph Lauren faux tortoise-shell frames with navy blue sides. I’d pass exits on the highway and began confusing words. I’d see “promise” as “premise.”            A trip to the eye doctor confirmed that my vision had declined and yes, I was a perfect candidate for cataract surgery. Me and five million other baby boomers. Knowing how pricey new glasses are and that they would likely be good for only a year, I signed the consent form and last week I had the left eye done. The second eye will be done two weeks later.            The procedure is only momentarily painful, worse than the humility I felt at becoming Miss Daisy, driven by my husband everywhere for a day or two. I can’t say I enjoyed the feeling of being herded through a procession of appointments with my fellow AARP members, but I kept reminding myself not to be a curmudgeon and that the goal was to see better.            I warned the students in a law class I teach that I would be a movie star last week, wearing over-sized sunglasses after the surgery to class  under the glare of the fluorescent lights. They chuckled politely, but when one student sweetly suggested the class could send their emails in larger fonts, I experienced a combination of appreciation with suppressed indignation.            The after-effects of the surgery on the first eye have been minimal. I told my husband that I thought highway driving at night might actually be more enjoyable for everyone if they could see the same illuminated angel wings I witnessed in the place of headlights. Someone shared the experience of thinking she was perfectly back to normal in one day until she poured wine between the two glasses she had placed on the counter. A little embarrassing, inconvenient, but no big deal.            The real deal about having cataract surgery is this: You get your eyes back. It is amazing what I am seeing even less than one week later out of that lucky left eye that got to go first. The right eye is jealous, struggling to keep up with the print I can see on labels, the definition of objects, and especially in the words I read and write. I had no idea how much I was struggling.            I also didn’t have enough appreciation for the gift of sight. So here’s a toast to the two little orbs sitting above our nose. Eye, eye!            Have any of you learned to love your eyes the hard way? P.S. Please excuse any typos in the blog this week, but after that, cut me no slack.           

Yesterday my computer ‘glitched’. I’ve had a computer crash before. Twice actually. Both times the machine simply stopped working. It wouldn’t turn on. Game over. One time a technician replaced the mother board, the other time I bought a new one. Both times I accessed my documents from a backup drive and quick as a wink I was back in business. Yesterday was worse. Worse than a complete shutdown. It was heart palpitation bad. Every time I opened a document the content was that of the file opened immediately preceding it. Think about this. Pick a recent file and open it, and while the file name remains correct, the content is from the preceding one. I tried changing the file names, copying the document…. At this point I felt a cold dark panic. I pulled a document from my backup drive…. Same thing happened. I restarted the computer a few times, nothing changed. Imagine: You cannot keep content in a document. It felt like a ghost was in the machine. Watch The Shining, it was that frightening. End result, I turned my computer off and left it. Much, much later I restarted it a final time (okay, I waited until the next morning, today) and miraculously everything is fine. If I didn’t have a witness I wouldn’t believe it myself. (Their response to the problem was maybe you’ll have to retype the document from your hard copy….. ah, but that was the problem. Once the newly typed text is a new document, the next time you open it the content will be from an older document. ARGH!) All we can figure out is that something happened when the power went off yesterday. I think that the files were in the middle of backing up to Dropbox and something got ‘off’ (that’s a technical term). Anyway, back to normal today. What’s your worst computer failure?  

I took a well-deserved break the other evening and went to a movie. I picked Jack Reacher, Never Go Back as my two hours of entertainment. The problem, and one I should have anticipated, was that once I’d seen the movie I needed to read the book. How did it compare, what changes were made (other than the obvious ones…. how tall is Reacher?). Fortunately (deep irony here), when I went to my book shelf there it was – Lee Child’s Never Go Back in hardcover splendor. I have a lot of books that I’ve bought and not had a chance to read, so there is no shame in an unbroken spine. I thought I’d take a peek at the first chapter or so and get a sense of the difference between movie and manuscript, then get back to work on my own manuscript. It takes me around a minute to read one page of a novel. That’s over four hours to read Never Go Back. In one big chunk of time. I’ll skip the obvious, clearly I enjoyed it. What struck me is how much of Reacher is internal. Jack Reacher the quintessential action hero is actually the quintessential cerebral action hero. How does that translate on screen? How do you show Reacher weighing all of his options and trying to get the bad guy to back down unharmed? Reacher is a loner and loners aren’t the most loquacious people. How do you translate that into film without it becoming a silent picture? Anytime I read I feel like I’m taking a personal master class in writing. With Lee Child it is a master class in picking the exact level of detail to incorporate. In an interview he once said that he skips research. He wants to write what will feel familiar to the reader. If the reader expects the gun to be heavy why interrupt their immersion in the story to explain that ‘technically the xyz revolver is lighter than most in the same category.’ Who cares! At that point in the story, with the gun pointed, all the reader should care about it What Happens Next. Child knows this. Maybe a little of his talent and skill will rub off on me as I re-read my own draft, trying to gauge the details needed for my reader to feel the place. Really feel it. I undergo serial reading more often that I’d like to admit. (A real confession here…. a bit embarrassing… I was on a long flight last week and read three Jack Reacher novels in a row. Yep. In a row. It was like eating a whole bag of candy at Halloween. I blame this on e-books which allow instant gratification. I also blame this on the airline. There was not one single good movie to watch.) Back to the point. Reading a clump of books by one author is instructive. If they have a continuing character you see very clearly how they capture that introduction each time. How much description and backstory is enough? How much does it vary? You judge what the author keeps as part of their style and what is unique to the story being told in that particular book. How do these authors keep us coming back? We want familiarity, but not imitation. In Lee Child’s Never Go Back the story was comfortingly expected, yet fresh. Of course, in the end, I have to remember that I read that last Reacher novel when I should have been writing. Maybe Lee Child will offer a few hours of his time to make up for my writing jag? Writing for me, of course. Or maybe I should count the debt paid, since I certainly learned enough from my read to justify those few hours immersed in someone else’s world. Thank you, Mr. Child.