A Novel Idea

There’s no denying it – today marks the last day of the four-week period I promised an agent an exclusive look at the “full.”  I’ve reminded myself that my email, months ago, noting that she hadn’t yet responded to my original submission prompted a quick reply and apologies.   She then read the manuscript and suggested that if I did a revision, she’d welcome another look.  So I’ll email her a reminder tomorrow with the hope that, once again, she simply hasn’t had the time to read the manuscript. Regardless, I’m freed to send the “full” to others now.

It’s also possible, of course, that she has read the 200-plus pages and is putting off breaking the news that she’s passing on the book.  She’s a kind, gracious woman who surely recognizes the time I’ve invested in a re-do; perhaps she has no idea that I celebrate how much that revision has enriched the work.  I’m grateful for her nudge, whether she agrees to represent this book or not.  I’d just as soon she send a rejection sooner rather than later, if necessary.

Hmmm.  Negate that.   It’s plain old counterproductive to go there – you know, imagining rejection.  Everything I’ve been reading in recent years attests to the power of positive thinking… and imaging… and speaking.  I do believe that thoughts are things… and negative, fear-based ones corrupt the best of outcomes.

Things get a bit more complicated, however, when one chills with friends who happen to be seriously psychic.  A week or so ago I was talking on the phone with one who does this kind of thing for a living.  We were chatting about something fairly inconsequential when mid-sentence, she stopped and said,  “Somebody’s reading your manuscript right now.  Is the agent petite with brown hair?”

“That would be no, and no,” I told her.  “I know she’s a blonde.  And I’m fairly certain she’s tall and lanky.”  (So there.)

This friend was undeterred.  “Well, the woman is definitely petite and brown-haired and she can’t believe she’s been asked to read the whole thing because typically she doesn’t buy into the paranormal as valid or real.  She loves your writing, but she doesn’t want to change her mind about mediumship.”

Swell.  Could be the assistant, I told myself.  She was the reader who only read the first 75 pages, even though another reader, who wrote, “Think Tuck Everlasting and Bless Me, Ultima, with a bit of The Babysitter’s Club and you have [this book]” insisted that one has to finish the book to” get it.”  Could be anybody, really.  Could be this verdict will be reversed by the agent herself, I offered.

This is when my pal, my buddy, my GF, added,  “A guide here is saying you have to keep sending it out.”  (Thanks for that.)

I hung on to the concept of malleable futures.  Any reputable psychic will tell you that there are many ways our wills and others’ can alter an initial vision of what’s to come.  And I wondered aloud if she herself isn’t too invested in an image she has received more than once of two women in California (assistants? agents?  booksellers? grocery clerks?) enthused about the book.

The skeptical reader is surely saying,  “What the….?  You believe in that crap?”

And all I’ll reply at the moment is:  Seeing is believing… and this friend has been successfully prescient enough times – from telling my daughter she’d change jobs and host a radio show in a matter of months at a time when she was immersed in running a company she created for General Mills to… well, trust me, the instances are mind-boggling.  More medium than prophesier, she’d be the first to tell you, however, that she’s not always right.    So stay tuned.  Bottom line:  This A.M., first thing, a doe and her twin fawns ambled by within five feet of me.  That’s really all the soul-stirring happiness I need today.  I hope your day holds a share of such happiness for you, too.

So I’m driving along – you still in the backseat? – on the journey to this novel’s publication, feeling like I’m really making progress.  A lot of miles covered yesterday.  Additional research on a trio of stellar agents to query next, if, by the fast-approaching due date, the agent with the “exclusive” hasn’t responded, or, regrettably, nixes my novel.  I’m feeling grateful for blogs like Casey McCormick’s Literary Rambles, the lodestone for summaries and sources of more in-depth info on agents who handle kid lit.

I’ve finished a synopsis, a standard request of one of the agents, thanking my lucky stars that a special issue of Writer’s Digest called “Get An Agent” called out to me at B & N only days ago.  It’s loaded with tips, including the standard format of the synopsis. (Who knew that each character’s name needs to be in caps when it first appears in this summary?)  Still learning, I took time yesterday to read most of the issue’s features and congratulated myself on how far I’ve come in a year’s time with regard to being “query savvy.”   I already knew what part of my track record’s worth mentioning, how to craft the pitch paragraph, why I must first make a personal connection.

With all the “essentials” in mind, I spent the afternoon crafting three customized query letters, two for agents I’d seen in action at the January SCBWI conference in New York City, resulting in a keener sense of why we’d make a good match.  The third’s another dream agent, whose passion for kid lit equals, if not exceeds, mine.   Conference attendance also opened a door to a senior editor at Little Brown and Company who presented a workshop and gave me the green light to send her my revision.  I printed it toward the end of the day and wrote a cover letter.

All in all, a dream day, I thought, cruising to the post office where I sent those queries winging their way to both coasts.  After a break for supper and a meeting, I decided to run through the special issue again to pick up any tidbit I might have overlooked.  This is when I happened upon the piece I’d missed (or dismissed) on word count basics.  I’ve had a twinge of concern about the elevated word count of the revised book — about 4,000 more words than pre-revision – despite the fact that I cut line after line to improve the pacing.  There were characters to flesh out, a setting to make more vivid.  And immersion in the world of underground hip hop inspired attention to detail, including more content related to each of six lessons the main characters take as aspiring b-girls., all of this supporting the theme.

I let the count be what it was.  Teen readers of advance copies didn’t comment on the length.  Neither did either agency reader.  Besides, I’ve recently plowed through a couple of YA works that are mammoth. Surely, the word count for tween fiction was similar to that for young adult;  my characters are thir-teen, right?  Here, friends, is where the humongous black hole in the road swallowed me up, the pages of my 63,811 word manuscript fluttering far above me.  Here is where I made the horrifying discovery that it’s standard practice to couple tween fiction with higher middle grade rather than YA novel counts, the latter running between 40,00-65,000 words.  My range, it turns out, is 32,000 to 40,000.

Did you hear the primal scream as I plummeted into the abyss  without you?   I suspect not.  It’s a hole so deep that nobody could possibly hear me whimpering “help” in the dark.

Things look better in the morning.   I may have to claw my way up and out, word by word – more than 23,000 of them – but I’m already dusting myself off and looking up.  If somebody asks me to start climbing, I’ll do it.  Such is the madness of the writer’s psyche. Onward and upward.  (Or, in this case, is it upward, then onward?)  Gotta say, this is quite the trip.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness. Aaron Copland

When I read Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard, a middle grade novel that won the Newbery Medal in 2002, the powerful writing transported me to 12^th century Korea.  The characters grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.  I read the last pages in an altered state that any avid reader probably understands, freed from the claims of current time and place, and sensing that something of the divine had touched the work.  There’s a presence in and between the lines, communicating through the writer.

The wonderful Children’s Literature Network here celebrates books and their creators and one evening, members got to meet the author.  After her talk, Linda Sue joined a group of us at our table for dinner.   Tablemates departed, post-dessert, one by one. Finally, only Linda Sue and I remained.  How could I resist the opportunity?

“Were you given A Single Shard?” I said, out of the blue.

And without a moment’s hesitation, she said all she needed to say.  “Yes.”

It was immensely satisfying to have my suspicions confirmed that she had felt the presence of something beyond her that informed the book’s creation.  I don’t mean to suggest that it wasn’t hard work birthing that beautiful story, but, for whatever reason, its light bears the mark of a mysterious collaboration, an unknowable source offering the gift of inspiration to a greater degree than most writers typically experience (including Linda Sue, I suspect).

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, speaks in a recent TED talk of this “genius” that seems to reside outside of us.  It can sometimes feel “downright paranormal,” she insists, but makes “as much sense as anything, in terms of explaining the utterly maddening capriciousness of the creative process.”  Gilbert relates the poet Ruth Stone’s confession that there were times when she was outdoors that she felt and heard poems coming at her with such speed that she’d have to “run like hell” to fetch a pencil “in order to catch them.”  Tom Waits told Gilbert of the time the fragment of a melody presented itself while he was driving on an LA freeway and he addressed the open air –“Excuse me… can you not see that I’m driving?”  This was his acknowledgment of the collaboration between himself and “a strange external thing that was not quite Tom.”

The writer Henry Miller speaks of this presence, too:  “I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room.  Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony.  Nothing doing.”

It’s the visitor I wait and hope for.  It’s the company I want to keep for as long as the muse is willing to stick around and uplift me. Preferably, it’s an extended stay that lifts the work from self-conscious pap to something extra-ordinary, writing that’s inspired.  I agree with Gilbert that the persistent notion since the Renaissance that creativity comes completely from within results in a culture where artistry too often leads to anguish, whether it’s over a success which one fears cannot be repeated or a failure… to gain acclaim, to earn a readership or a living, even to publish, at all.  There is something liberating, yes, in the notion that if I show up and put everything I have into the effort, I’ve done my job.  If I’m lucky, my guide, my daemon, my collaborator will choose not to sleep in… and show up, too.  Next Monday morning would be good… or at your convenience, really.  I’m open to just about anything.

Illustration by David Weisner

When you are born, your work is placed in your heart.

Kahil Gibran

The same week I was putting final touches on the revision of my novel, Garrison Keillor wrote in an op-ed piece:  “… I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.”  Referring to today’s writer, “blogging like crazy” and more inclined to self-publish his or her books, Keillor painted a picture of “18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives.  Average annual earnings:  $1.75.”

Yeah, yeah… a bunch of publishing insiders were quick to challenge this view, suggesting in so many words that Keillor is a misinformed, nostalgic old fart and that book publishing is merely evolving, not disappearing.  But bytes of info that crossed my desk and my screen last week engendered a sense of trepidation as I delivered my manuscript to the P.O.

There was the news item about Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, the fourth best fiction seller of 2009, with two million hardback books in print only 15 months after publication; I was in mid-cheer when, reading on, I discovered that her book garnered 40 rejections before anybody decided to take a chance on it.  Huh?  Forty pros in publishing failed to see its potential?

There was the Facebook post from Michele Young-Stone, friend and author of the widely-praised The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors.  She posted a request for somebody, anybody, to come over and visit the Barnes & Noble where she was sitting alone at her book-signing event.  If nobody showed up to buy an autographed copy of her debut novel, recently cited as one of the top ten, how, I had to wonder, must lesser books and their creators fare?  She also blogged last week about the work-in-progress — specifically, the 1000 pages she herself rejected, the 17 revisions of the subsequent 400-pager, and its recent rejection by her editor (whom Michele, nonetheless, celebrates for having “the balls to tell the truth”).  A long-haul, this business of writing to publish.

Oddly, enough, the war stories keep me going as well as my refusal to think much about this manuscript during the next four weeks when, ideally, the agent will read it.   I have family and friends who reinforce for me the power of intention. The universe is conspiring in my favor, I tell myself, regardless of outcome. Today’s email to me from TUT.com reads, in part: In the end… it’s ALL going to be about… how much you enjoyed your life.

There you have it, I thought.  The act of writing is easily as much the enjoyable part of my life as anything I can think of — more enjoyable, dare I say, than a few of the most primal of pleasures.  Take the act of eating, for example,  I’m not one to ever miss a meal, but a week ago, while tweaking my manuscript, I completely forgot to “do lunch.”  Totally absorbed in the wordplay, I’d have skipped supper, too, if someone hadn’t reminded me to show up for it.

Illustration from Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

The times when the right word or next step in the story eludes me can be downright crazy-making, but at the best of times, for me, putting a pen to paper (or tweaking words on a screen) is the best kind of play.  When, like Harold of Purple Crayon fame, I’m deeply into scribbling forth a world all my own, I become the kid who has to be called in to supper and complies, but only reluctantly.  So why enter the fray by writing to publish?  Why not simply enjoy the writing process itself?

I scribble because, increasingly, I feel it is something I was born to do.  This may be a huge conceit, but I’ll say it, anyway.  I envision readers, too, entering the world I’ve scribbled into being, and, if I’m lucky, reluctantly removing themselves from it only when forced to do so.  My growing sense is that not only is writing something I’m meant to do for pleasure, but that at least some of what I end up scribbling –  that work placed in my heart — is meant to be shared with the world.

I think I did pretty well considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. Steve Martin

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection.  It’s about a process, a journey.  The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives. George Leonard

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write. Gertrude Stein

It’s done.

Again.

The manuscript is on its way to New York City and into a receptive agent’s hands.  Yesterday I delivered it to the post office, assuring myself that this was the right place and the right time to let it go.  After the reconstruction process, especially intense in April, the sole remaining task had been page-by-page “tweaking” of this and that odd phrase, not-quite-right words for the right ones.  I easily could go on “tweaking” forever, but my instinctive feeling and even recent journal entries provided a push to send it off.

In one I wrote:  The novel seems a kind of Everest – my having created a plot, fleshed out characters, completed the revision.  I really believe it is the best I can do at the moment.  And I believe in it.  Dear Tuck is sleeping at my feet –as if he’s still hanging on to see the completion of this project, too…. I’m def ready for the next stage.  Whatever comes.

I’m not as attuned to the proverbial still, small voice as I am to synchronicity — the cosmic nudge that is the equivalent of the Universe’s pat on the back.  It is so-called coincidence that most often provides me with a sign to back off or to proceed. So when there was a snafu at the post office related to packaging and postage, I had second thoughts.  Was this a sign that I should grab the manuscript and run?   The clerk directed me to a corner to fix things.  I did, and then told myself,  “Give it up to the nice man across the counter, Tunie.  Hope for the best.”

Empty-handed, I returned to my car and the opening words of MPR’s mid-morning program about the featured guest.  I thought of a line in one of the first paragraphs of my manuscript, a reference to the only actual person named in the book.  Speaking of a boy who sees those in the community of underground hip hop as world changers, Claire, the main character says, “He’s a big fan of locals like Brother Ali. Changing the world one rap at a time…”

Brother Ali and (b-girl) Alicia Leafgreen

And the guest on the radio show as I drove away?  None other than Brother Ali.  I mean, what were the chances?  I listened with rapt attention as the articulate rapper touched on themes that are central to my own work.  He talked about his own transformative journey.  Mentioned a medium, Echo Bodine.  Revealed his intent in his brand new album, “Us” (which I ordered when I reached home).  It’s about acceptance of diversity, openness to new ways of understanding reality, and empathy for others. He celebrated his own opportunity to become more spiritual, to enrich his soul even as he supports brothers and sisters who don’t have the luxury or inclination yet to do so.   He spoke of  one’s innate spark as both gift and curse (because one fails to honor it at one’s peril).  The interview was a gift (and, as artist and human being, he is, too).   I urge you as well to listen to the June 1 program (Brother Ali’s Quest for Fellowship Through Hip Hop).

I recognize when the Universe is having a little fun with me.  I was a grinning fool by the time the interview ended.  Need a sign, Tunie?  How about this one?  Not so much a promise of things to come as a benediction and a shout-out that this is a milestone on my journey that’s meant to be.

Photo:  Alicia Leafgreen

In his YA novel Feed, M. T. Anderson does an impressive job of circumventing outdated slang by inventing his own.  The story is set in the future, and a dude becomes a unit, jerks become corps, cool is now brag, and major is meg… as in:  Unit!  Did you like see that brag upcar on the feed, meg sweet, going into mal just like thinking about it. I remember being dazzled by the sheer inventiveness of his prose when I first read the book.

A second look reminded me that, as in the preceding example, he dusted off a word the beats used in the 50s.  Anderson’s use of this retro word, like, succeeds, perhaps, because many of his other words are so fresh.  He also mixed in classic slang, including the last word of the book’s very first line: We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

All I can say is thank God for suck.  For cool and coolest.  For the classics freaky and weird.  Not to mention, crush,  though more typical today is crushing on — as in, crushing on a love object.  And dudes, I’m definitely for hanging on to puke, a word coined by none other than Shakespeare (who, by the way, also came up with O hell!).

True, there are some for whom cool is no longer cool, but if a writer uses the word in a novel, teen readers generally will let it pass.   So familiar to all that they hardly qualify any more as slang, such words offend virtually no one.   Obscenities and blasphemies that once were taboo –  and not only in tween and teen lit –  now offend few readers either.  Authors use them in more and more books.  In addition to deciding what texting and hip hop lingo and slang expressions my character naturally chooses and uses, I’ve had to consider what swear words, for her, are the norm.

Comedian George Carlin once riffed on the seven “dirty” words, including shit.  Today, varied forms of  it — shit-all, bullshit, give a shit, surprised and shit, holy shit, oh, shit, shit yo, nobody knows shit – appear so frequently in some YA books that I’m willing to bet that not only in its original organic form, but this other, shit will be with us forever.  It appears twice in my novel… for good reasons.

Just cause used to be the raison d’etre for inserting a swear word in a YA book:  a trauma so great, a shock so profound, an act so dastardly, that it would seem unnatural for an expletive not to escape a character’s lips.  In books like the prize-winning Going Bovine, about a hallucinating dying teen with mad cow disease, and Punkzilla, a novel-in-letters about a vulnerable fourteen-year-old’s intro to the seamiest of life experiences — each boy on the road trip from hell — the string of shocking events almost justifies the page-by-page explicit language.

I say, almost because I’m personally not crazy about wading through an unending stream of obscenities in any book.  I’m not crazy about using a lot of them in my own writing, either.  Turns out I’m in good company, as Will Shakespeare apparently felt as I do.  While all his contemporaries featured cursing in dozens of lines in each of their plays, he did so, according to Bill Bryson in Shakespeare, The World as Stage, only three times in his career.  In fact, one of his characters laments:

Why, what an ass am I!  Ay sure.

This is most brave

That I…

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,

And fall a-cursing like a very drab –   (prostitute)

A scullion!   (the lowest kind of kitchen servant)

Teens once could use curse words to underscore their place as members of a social/age group  distanced and distinguishable from mainstream/grownup/stodgy society.  Peppering speech with an expletive or two provided a fairly benign way to rebel… not to mention an outlet for pent-up anger or frustration (which, from time to time, teens have in spades).  More recently, however, with old taboos in decline, it seems that only racist and sexist terms warrant notice if encountered in the pages of their books. What formerly was considered indecent is now pretty ho-hum, part of most teens’ everyday speech.

A writer using the first-person voice needs to be especially sensitive to that young fictional speaker’s language and reality.  It follows that I’m extremely relieved that my narrator happens to be a suburban thirteen-year-old girl rather than a sixteen-year-old sociopath/runaway or an Amish kid with Tourette Syndrome.   I’m hoping that two holy craps, a couple of shits, a double-damn, and the occasional substitution – frigging,  fricking, freaking — for the original mother of all cuss words, will not only suffice, but ring true.  An editor will, doubtless, have an opinion about this.  Do you?  As always, I welcome fellow writers’ and others’ thoughts!

My time in Santa Fe is a sweet memory and I’m in the home stretch of the revision; at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

One of these days soon I’ll embark on a word-by-word search and excavation of bon mots unlikely to pass a thirteen-year-old’s lips.  The occasional clinker materializes in even the best of tween and teen books.  Found myself circling a few when I read the Printz Award winner, Going Bovine.  (Others may disagree, but I couldn’t buy the teen narrator using a phrase like “baleful eye,” even though, like so many other teenage main characters who tell their own stories, Libby Bray’s Cameron is clearly at the high end of the IQ scale.) Similarly, I’ve already been cutting my own descriptive passages that use metaphors and similes reflecting more years of observation and experience than a tween can claim. The word “pewter,” for example, to describe a certain color and sheen on a lake had to go.  I admit to having the occasional daydream about describing to my heart’s content in the next manuscript which I’ll definitely write in third-person.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned about writing a story from a first-person perspective – in the voice of a present-day thirteen-year-old junior high school female, no less.  But it seemed that in most of the tween and teen novels I was reading (in contrast to middle grade novels), the protagonist told the tale.  Here was evidence of a current preference for more intimacy between the reader and a main character, a style more confessional in nature.  And I’d chosen to highlight a subculture about which most adults have a strong (if not always informed) opinion — that of psychic mediumship.  Let a young person, without preconceived notions, pro or con, tell of her introduction to this world, I decided.   Adding more content about underground hip hop to this revision, I’ve been glad it’s a teen, not an adult story-teller (even one simply in the wings), commenting on this subculture as well.

Turns out the most difficult task in this word search will be deciding which slang words to excise, change, or add.  “Less is more” is the usual dictum when it comes to incorporating the ever-shifting lingo of teens.  Online resources provide current slang by region — increasingly unnecessary in a world where virtually every inventive use of language anywhere receives almost instant exposure.  But the risk in using them is that they will become passé, embarrassingly outré, a second after any appear in the galleys.

I confess I love the phrase, it’s the shizzle – glad that a number of online resources certified that it’s both current and ubiquitous.  The phrase came up, however, during a discussion with a teen who had read my draft.  As diplomatically as possible, she informed me that shizzle is out, and that shiz or shizz is in.  Not long after, I came across yet another incarnation – it’s the shit – in a couple of new books.

Reading Lauren Myracle’s ttyl, a book written entirely in IM (instant messaging) or texting style, I recalled the comment that a woman in our writers group made over a year ago.  Her daughter had told her that no self-respecting teen would be caught dead using LOL (laughing-out-loud) since old codgers on Facebook had appropriated it.  Hence, I don’t use it in my manuscript.  I did use SLAP (sounds-like-a-plan) until several teens had to ask what it meant (once again firsthand knowledge trumping online guidance).

One of the agency readers questioned my use of hip hop terms like fresh and peace out, sending me on a quest for street-savvy info on this lingo.  B-girls in both Minneapolis and New York insisted that fresh is classic and never out of style.  (Dope, however, is the more popular term at the moment; in fact, a spoken word artist emailed to tell me I’m a “dope writer;” his intent not to suggest I wasn’t playing with a full deck, but to pay me the ultimate compliment.)   Now I’ve made sure characters are referencing Old School benedictions like peace and respectfully but ironically using terms like “bust a move” (also including the current preferred prop for executing great moves — killed it or kilt it).

One too many terms that no longer qualify as hip and a story’s cred can topple like a line of dominoes.  Too few and the character can seem clueless.  (A few words about curses and classics in the next post.)

Revising can be slow-going.  Prior to this sojourn in Santa Fe, I’d already tweaked the first chapter too many times to count.  I spent the first week here revising those first pages again and again.  I’ve been slashing what’s extraneous and deleting anything that smacks of duplication.  Transcribing hours of notes from interviews and adding layers to the narrative — especially related to info and insights about underground hip hop culture. Fleshing out characters and being more specific about setting.  Taking seriously every suggestion in readers’ notes from a prospective agent.

It’s the so-called coincidences that keep me going, through the nit-picking and noodling, not to mention periodic nagging doubt.   Every so often the band of guides and angels I’ve dubbed “Team Tunie” delivers experiences of synchronicity just when I need them.  This morning I scribbled a journal entry about what synchronicity means to me: Each incidence of it serves as a kind of signpost, like the road sign one encounters along an unfamiliar back road, not only showing the way but providing reassurance, as in “Yes!  You’re going in the ‘write’ direction… you’re on the right path!” I’m invariably surprised by these signs – my reaction akin to “Ha!  Well I never… look-a here!”

I finished Stephen King’s book, On Writing this morning, before my own work began and not ten pages from the end — these last pages an example of his own revision process – I read the phrase — his fedora with the PRESS tag stuck in the band.  What are the chances that this image, related to a bygone era, would be in my contemporary tween novel, too?  Precisely because it ‘s so unlikely, I’m inclined to view the fluke as a nudge, regarding my own revision, to keep at it.

NYC b-girl Ana Rockafella Garcia recently sent me an email (an afterthought) about a book I should see – the entire content in the words of b-girls themselves. The book arrived in this mailbox with the info I needed at exactly the juncture I needed it.

I’ve been playing with what the exposure to breaking has meant to my main character and two days ago “accidentally” came upon a TED lecture by Robert Gupta about music as medicine. He recounts a meeting with a homeless schizophrenic musician, raving about invisible demons when they met, who transformed before his eyes into an inspired listener once Gupta abandoned words for music that he played on his violin.  Passion for the music provides this paranoid man escape from his burdens.  Teacher, Amy Sackett has similarly described hip hop music’s empowering influence in students’ lives;  she’s spoken to me of the power of community, too.  Gupta also speaks of a community in this troubled man’s life that recognizes his talents and respects him…  a “crew,” if you will, that brings a man back into the fold.  Gupta underscored Amy’s points, the nudge I needed to incorporate the insights.

If that’s not coincidence enough, Gupta ends the presentation by playing a piece of music he loves – one the violinist confesses he shamelessly stole from cellists.  It’s Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, that I play each and every A.M. during a new ritual based on Writing the Mind Alive, something like automatic writing that puts one in flow.  To me, it’s another signpost:  Keep doing what you’re doing.

Almost a year ago Michele Young-Stone and I became FB friends.  She shared info related to surviving a lightning strike as a child to add to research for my own novel.  Yesterday my pre-ordered copy of her debut novel, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, arrived and I’m loving it.  Today she posted this aside to friends who are celebrating its publication:

“Not-so-long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a writer doubting that my novel would ever see the light of day so I made my own book, with tiny printed pages and everything.  Attached to my miniature book was a long string, like a placeholder.  Whenever anyone asked, ‘What’s this supposed to be?’ I joked, ‘The rope I’m going to hang myself with since I‘m never going to be published.’  Like every other writer, I had my share of rejection.  I think it just goes to show:  Never give up.”

Perhaps something in this post is a sign for you to keep doing what you’re doing, to not give up.  A cause for wonder (if you’re paying attention) to prompt your very own “ Well, I never… look-a here!”  I hope so.

For you shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace.  The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.  And the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Isaiah 55:12

The passage above graced a homemade Christmas card of ours years ago when we lived in Denver and it came back to me as we skirted the Rockies, heading south in Colorado en route to New Mexico.  Stunned again by the majesty of these peaks, I recalled the words that proclaim that every last thing in the world is alive, participating in what we co-create on this blue planet.  In a sweet piece of synchronicity, the road trip reunited me with my favorite mountains – the Sangre de Cristos, first encountered years ago when I was doing research for a debut novel and holed up in Del Norte to write some of it.  Here they were again, filling me up.

Sangre de Cristos

The landmarks and byways in the “City Different” are so familiar to me, after decades of repeat visits, that I feel no tension due to opposing impulses to explore what’s out there and to discover what’s in here.  I am contentedly exploring inner space in a cave-like room, furnished with a primitive writing table, my snoozing dog, and a great sound system.  Oh, and angels.  As if to provide reminders daily that there are angels and guides cheering two writers on, the adobe abode we currently call home accomodates painted and carved winged ones in all the rooms.

Angel-in-Residence

I do walk the familiar dirt roads and cobblestone paths along the Acequia after each morning of writing and reflecting. That old benediction– may the road rise up to meet you – seems particularly apt here.  On my treks, I feel a palpable energy rising up and through my feet, as if, as the biblical passage asserts, I am being led forth.  Ignoring to-do lists and writing quotas, I follow where I am led on the winding streets and on paper.

There is so much I love about Santa Fe — the residents’ affection for mongrel dogs and old pickups.  The blue bowl of sky (bluer even than in the one in Colorado, pictured above), the mix of cultures, the creative stew of thinkers and artists.  There are so many folks here who are artists at living.  And don’t get me going on the food.  But most of all, I love the synchronicities, little and big, that are part and parcel of every day. I feel an energy here that is so aligned with my own that such “coincidences” manifest daily.

Neighbor's Pickup & Planter/Extra Pantry

Today, in myriad ways, joy is in my heart and on my mind.  Yesterday I thanked a friend Michelle who, as life coach and blogger, makes it her business to promote joy; told her that an affirmation of hers had inspired me to cite the passage from Isaiah in my very next post.   I begin each morning with a meditation and a lesson from A Course in Miracles.  (Over twenty years ago, I shared with my father, who was dying of cancer, tapes of this course proffered by a friend; my dad got so much out of them that he passed them on to a man sharing his hospital room who was terrified of dying and found peace in the messages, too.  Only months ago, I was touring the new Center for Harmonious Living close to home just as a group studying the course was heading in for a session. I’ve been attending ever since.)  And what did the lesson of the day proclaim?  Light and joy and peace abide within you.

And a Note from the Universe, received this A.M., reads:  One day, Tunie, you’re going to wake up and feel so much joy for your life, exactly as it is, that you wouldn’t trade anything for anything.  And right now, you get to live that bit that you one day won’t trade anything for!  Talk about blessed…

Here’s to the miracle residing in every so-called coincidence.  I’m hoping that whatever unfolds in your life today– you, too, are inspired to go out with joy and be led forth with peace.

When it comes to road trips, I’m really into the end points on the map.  Maybe it’s because I crisscrossed the country so often during my twenties that driving long distances finally lost its appeal for me.  By the time we’d added a kidlet to the mix, to be loaded into and unloaded out of this or that janky car in one or another part of the country, we’d lived in eight abodes in ten years.

And I’m hard pressed to recall any trip when we “traveled light.”  Predictably, my fellow roadie confessed last night that he’s already filled two suitcases to the brim with books and papers he’s sure he’ll need during this writing sabbatical.  His confession emboldened me to show him the extra-large duffel bag with my own stash of supplies. I’m also bringing my printer and Lacie. Besides all the equipment, we’ll add a dog, who is weeks shy of turning eighteen, with the creature comforts Tuck needs to survive this adventure (we hope). Neither of us has gotten around yet to thinking about the wearables or edibles left to pack tomorrow.

Our destination is Santa Fe — one of only a few places on the planet where, unaccountably, but invariably, I feel as if I’m coming home to myself.  My whole self.  We’ll stay almost a month.  I’m jazzed to get there and be about what we’ve set out to do:  to write.

But actual road trips aside, I’m all for loving the journey. On the way home from hip hop dance class on Monday night, I found myself thinking about the old saw that happiness is to be found en route; it’s about the journey; not the destination. I was feeling incredibly happy, having tried toprock (however, ineptly) with all the twenty-somethings in that studio for most of the hour.  Only days earlier, I recorded a two-hour interview with Amirah “Amy” Sackett, whose respect for and knowledge of hip hop’s roots is only exceeded by her talents as teacher and dancer. Despite the fact that I’m charged with the task of cutting and quickening the pace of my first 75 pages, I’m wondering how to add passages about a fictional teacher, inspired as I am by this real one.

At a poppin’ battle (see previous post) and an “All Styles, All Female” battle on Saturday at the Blue Nile, where B-Girl Ti-en-T won top honors, I recognized my good luck in being introduced to this culture.  Filmmaker Jon M. Chu, who founded LXD (Legion of Extraordinary Dancers), expresses a similar enthusiasm in his TED lecture.  He speaks of an opportunity that brought him into a society that’s underground, “a street culture,” he says, “that blew my mind… literally, human beings with super-human strength and abilities.”  Viewing the TED video, I delighted in recognizing styles like “tutting” and “popping,” but three ballerina-like babes, briefly onstage, seemed like mere accessories to a b-boy;  surely Chu has come across b-girls with amazing moves as well.  Encounterng this old gender bias in a presentation about the evolution of dance, not to mention the revolutionary underground hip hop movement, bummed me out, I have to admit, despite the awe-inspiring choreography.  I want the world to know about b-girl power, too.

B-Girl Be

A few months ago, I decided the content of my novel would have to integrate info from first sources, rather than books or YouTube. I had no idea what a “trip” – to use the old hippie term — this part of my journey would turn out to be.  I mean, after my usual meditation this morning, I turned to a break dance hit, b.o.b’s “Nothin’ on You,”  to get the day off to a good start.  And I’ve already promised to introduce so many to the annual B-Girl Be event next fall that I may have to rent a bus!  It’s all been a sweet surprise and I feel so grateful.

I’m recording a manuscript’s journey to publication, with stops along the way at agencies and publishing houses, and, as it turns out, hip hop hot spots.  Does the destination even matter? Well, sure. Obviously, I hope that a book will represent that end point on the map.  But meanwhile, I’m confident that no matter what transpires, I’ll be bringing a newfound passion and my newfound friends the rest of the way with me.