Soundtrack for Gaia's Hands

Every time I write a book, I put together a playlist (or as us old-timers call it, a mixtape). I try to capture the book's moods in a list of music that plays for between half and hour and an hour.

The style of the playlist varies by the moods and general tone of the book. Voyageurs, a time-travel mystery of sorts, goes from a late 1880's German wind ensemble place to Indigo Girls and Hoobastank. The energy of Kat Pleskovich and Ian Akimoto's Buddhist calm exchange importance on the mixtape.

Gaia's Hands, on the other hand, is a mystical exploration of permaculture, love, and the greening of the earth. The soundtrack is funneled through Jeanne Beaumont's experience of having been young in the 70's and introduced to a wide range of music. Here's that playlist:

Voices -- Cheap Trick
Brass in Pocket -- Pretenders
Big Yellow Taxi -- Joni Mitchell
Doctor My Eyes -- Jackson Brown
Ancient Forest -- Clannad
The Host of Seraphim -- Dead Can Dance
The Book I Read -- Talking Heads
For What it's Worth -- Buffalo Springfield
Mother Earth (Provides for Me) -- Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

I would love it if you could share playlists with me and the reason you use the playlists!

Today's the beginning

It's February 28, and my Kindle Scout campaign is up and running! I myself am at the National Preparedness Institute, which is not nearly as impressive as it sounds. I'm setting up for moulage as you read this, possibly. This link should be live now:

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/250Q7OJ0R0F8W

But here's the story again according to Kindle Scout (2018):

• A book is a new, never-before-published work of 50,000 words or more that you'd like to see published. In my case, the book is called Gaia's Hands.
• An author is the person who has written and submitted a book to Kindle Scout. That would be me, Lauren Leach-Steffens, also the author of this blog.
• Readers (that means all of you) scout the site and nominate books they want to see published.
• Nominations are how readers show support for a book. Readers can nominate up to three books at a time. This is what I'm asking you to do.
• A campaign is a 30-day scouting period during which readers nominate books to be published. Mine is from February 28-March 30.
• The Kindle Scout team makes the final call on which books are published by Kindle Press. This will depend largely on how many nominations. This is what scares me, because it sounds like a popularity contest and I've never been popular.
• Kindle Press publishes the books discovered through Kindle Scout. This is my goal -- not for the $1500 cash advance, or royalties. I want to be read and enjoyed and maybe make people think. (Although I could get a new computer with the royalties, one that can handle graphics so I can map my landscapes using SketchUp without bombing the computer)

Elegy for the Bookstop

To say that the Bookstop was a coffeehouse may be embellishing the place, for the Bookstop had started as a used bookstore owned by a retired English professor, and had lost most of its books and gained its antiques under new owners Mike and Sheila. But it retained its name.

This was the Bookstop in its heyday. The awning was designed by the owner's son.

The Bookstop did sell coffee -- decent coffee roasted by PT's in Topeka. They sold espresso drinks, brought to an art form by dreadlocked Sharla, barista and cappuccino artist. They also sold homemade cookies and cinnamon rolls, and of a Saturday (as the old-timers say here), they sold a breakfast entreé.

Saturday morning breakfast. Are you hungry yet?

I used to go to the Bookstop every morning at seven AM in the morning (as the old-timers say here) as I walked to work, walking poles in hand and a heavy computer backpack on my back. What kept me coming back every day was not the chaotic jumble of antique booths that took up two-thirds of the score, nor the shabby chic of the walls, not even the coffee (although it was very good). It was the people.

In the morning, I could count on an eclectic group of people -- Spencer, a retired lawyer and Marine, sometimes with wife Jennifer; Rod, a cagey old man with a strange sense of humor; Mark, an economics professor I sometimes talked shop with; the retired SeaBee whose language hadn't gotten any less salty after the war; the weathered cook with his crooked teeth; the Hagemans, enjoying their retirement; mild-mannered Tom; and of course, Mike and the baristas, who were usually witty as well as great at their jobs.

The regulars would talk. Spencer would drill me on my opinions on economics and politics; Mark would rarely interject from his perusal of Wall Street Journal. Sometimes Mike and Spencer would goad me into bawdy talk (which is one of my secret talents). Rod would laugh in that awkward bark of his, and Jennifer would mockingly scold Spencer. 

The Bookstop died after a protracted illness. It started by injuries from a fire in August 2011, when a tenant in the building next door set his apartment ablaze, and the rumor was that the fire resulted from his habit of relaxing with a joint or two. Although the Bookstop itself wasn't affected by the fire, it suffered from some water damage. Just as Mike's crews were starting to mop up the water, the demolition crew next door dropped a wrecking ball through the ceiling of the coffeehouse, and a torrential downpour caused much more water damage. The final insult was when the insurance companies -- those of the building next door and of the demolition company -- couldn't settle with Mike in time to resurrect the business.

The fatal injury

For a while, a few of us regulars still drank coffee in the ruins of the Bookstop. This was a casual arrangement, word of mouth; Spencer unlocked the door in the morning, he and Jennifer kept the coffee flowing. We got the coffee for free. The back portion of the building was closed off with tarps to keep us from danger. The front area was cluttered with tools and coated with plaster dust. Sometimes Mike would show up. It was, in its own way, our wake, and it would not last for long. 

One morning, the door was locked. And it never opened again.

I heard that the Bookstop building, sad and weathered, without its distinctive awning, was finally closed. I don't know what will be done with the building now, but it could never be as shabbily welcoming as the Bookstop was.

Rest in Peace, Bookstop. Thank you for being a faithful friend.

My Kindle Scout Campaign -- asking a BIG favor

I have been accepted for a Kindle Scout campaign which will go live on February 28, while I'm off at Atlantic Hope doing moulage for a humanitarian exercise ("Atlantica -- You'll have a riot here")

Just in case you didn't know who Gaia is. 

This link will be available from February 28, 2018 12:00 AM EST through March 30, 2018 12:00 AM EDT:
Kindle Scout Campaign for Gaia's Hands

The basics are:

Readers scout the site and nominate books they want to see published.

Nominations are how readers show support for a book. Readers can nominate up to three books at a time.

A campaign is a 30-day scouting period during which readers nominate books to be published.

The Kindle Scout team makes the final call on which books are published by Kindle Press.

Kindle Press publishes the books discovered through Kindle Scout.

I hate begging my readers for nominations,  because it seems overly needy of me, but this is how Kindle Scout works. So I will not beg -- I will only ask that you consider nominating me when this goes live!

Another (Moulage) Gig in my Future

When I talk about "gigs", I'm not talking about music (I play Irish bodhran, but not well), comedy (my comedy career is restricted to teaching), or acting (my theatre career began and ended in high school). I'm talking about my other creative outlet, moulage.

Moulage is, as I may have said before, casualty simulation -- or as I like to say it, gorifying people. Injuries are rendered by a combination of theatre makeup materials, homemade makeup, props, fake glass, sticks and pipes for impalements, and lots of skill and imagination.

This is done for the benefit of training community emergency response team (CERT) members, first responders, nurses, and humanitarian aid workers. I also provide my skills to high school safety docudramas, active shooter training, and creating zombies (although I'm not nearly as good at the latter as is my friend Rod Zirkle.)

I am entirely self-taught. I was recruited for moulage crew as an assistant in Missouri Hope (one of the CHSE exercises below) in 2013. I dithered around a lot, and the next year I was recruited as the moulage coordinator for Missouri Hope. With absolutely no real training, I studied injury pictures and makeup and that DVD from Simulaids where they practice all the techniques on a straight-faced student.

This gig is a big one -- a major humanitarian service training program in Florida. You can learn a little about Atlantic Hope and the Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education (CHSE) here.  I will spend three days sleeping on the floor, eating beans and rice and bad coffee, and modeling burns for free (but I love it!) I will be trying to report from the field Wednesday-Monday.

Here's an example of my work from last year's Atlantic Hope:

Building up a burn. 

Finished product. Beneath the skin, we're all pinkish. This is not meant to be a profound statement.

I'm a perfectionist. If I had to do this again, I would not put the black at the outside, because it doesn't look like soot, but third-degree burn (which it isn't if it's at the outer edge. I would slather it in thick gelatin around the edges and over the pink parts to give it a more three-dimensional look and maybe build up some blisters with gelatin. 

I'll be honest -- I think I keep getting gigs because nobody's found anyone else locally who claims to do moulage. I think I have about six gigs a year. Let's see: Missouri Hope, New York Hope, Atlantic Hope, CERT training in the spring, the prison simulation and night training for the Emergency and Disaster Management students, and the high school docudrama. I guess that's seven. I sometimes also do moulage for the Emergency Medical Responder testing, nurses' training, and the active shooter training on campus.

It's a lot of fun and I feel appreciated when I do this. I lead a crew of about 4-6 people (including my husband), I create better and better works through learning and studying moulage, and my time goes toward the greater good. It's a largely anonymous job -- you'll never see pictures of me in any of the CHSE promotionals, and I'm subsumed as a member of the "moulage crew". But when people compliment the moulage, I know that I've contributed my skills in moulage and teaching to the rest of the crew.

One step forward -- Kindle Scout

I have taken an intermediary step between agents and self-publishing for one of my books -- I have submitted my book details to Kindle Scout, and this is what should happen:

1. In 1-2 days, I should hear whether they've approved the book for eligibility
2. Then they submit it to a "campaign" where I see how many upvotes I get. 
3. At the end, if the book gets enough votes, it gets published.

The best book cover free editing software can buy.

Why this process? Because it's vetted. Self-publishing otherwise seems like throwing the book on the sea and hoping it floats. If it comes to that, I don't know if I can do it. I don't dream of being a NYT bestselling author. I dream of someone reading my book and liking it.

Face it, though, I'm afraid of rejection again. I'm confident that I write well, but wonder if my ideas are publishable or whether I can stand up to a popular vote. I've never been popular, after all.

The book may be too gentle for people who read things like "The Meth Chronicles" and vampire stories. I'm a flower child at heart. I believe in the Peaceable Kingdom and the strength of small groups to change the world. I love people in both the general and specific sense. 

I'm not going to beg you to support me on Kindle Scout if I get that far. But I want you to think about it, because it's my dream. And please, please, any support you can give me (preferably something that reaches my eyes or ears) would make me feel better about the process.

Considering self-publishing

I'd like some feedback from my readers:  Would you read my e-book? Click the comment link below and comment. You can stay anonymous so you can honestly say, "I wouldn't read your book. I don't even know why I'm reading your blog except that I'm your long-lost great grandma and I'm so proud of you!"

I'm actually considering self-publishing for the first time, even though my books will probably languish there without anyone reading them except my friends (and I have few close friends who will go out of their way to read my work). Why?

1. Because I need some sense of closure.*
2. Because I can't make an intelligent decision of whether to continue writing unless I get feedback**
3. Because I can't change the world, even a little, with them on my cloud drive.
4. Because, although agents appear to disdain self-publishing, I imagine they disdain my queries, so I'm not behind.
5. TWO HUNDRED REJECTIONS.
6. Because, in a fairy tale, I might get discovered in e-book.
7. Because I believe in what Quakers call leadings***.

The book I would self-publish would be Gaia's Hands, a prequel to my Mythos series. It doesn't touch on that series directly -- no Archetypes -- but involves the origin of the modern Garden of Eden, and the influence of Gaia, the Earth-soul. It also involves two unlikely protagonists -- a professor of plant biology and her much younger poet suitor -- and a seemingly sentient bean stalk. If you squint closely, you'll recognize the terrain as Central Illinois, my childhood home. (Aunt Peggy, Carla, and others who read a previous draft -- this has been edited and rewritten extensively.

* Books on one's cloud drive don't feel like finished works.

** Again, why I keep hoping people will comment.

*** (Sorry to get minority religious here). Quakers don't necessarily believe everything happens for a reason, so we're not going to tell you God needed a little angel when your kid dies. However, they strongly believe God tells us to pursue something, and when we get that feeling, we seek clearness committees of our peers to sound out our leading. I never had a clearness committee on my leading to write, which may be the problem. I haven't been able to suss out a meaning myself, because of my bad luck in getting an agent/getting published.

A poem about a hard truth

Attention is the Currency in the Marketplace of Ideas

Young white girls’ stories get told
When they disappear from the jogging path;
Young black girls just disappear.
Massacred teens’ stories get told
Until shouted down by rich white men.
The mentally ill are known only by their rampages,
and black men only by their records.
Black women are not heard, even in numbers.

Attention is the currency in the marketplace of ideas,
But its distribution is skewed.

Finding my Characters Again

I haven't written much in a while. I find I'm barely writing more than a sentence at a time in either of my works in progress for at least a month. This is what depression and medication reactions (Today's vocabulary word: Parasthesia) and rejections do to my motivation. No muses either. But I'm not going to whine about that.

I'm going to try to write today, though, because there's not much else to do. A minor ice storm has packed a punch beyond its reputation, making roads slick enough that several semis and a MODOT (Missouri Department of Transportation) truck went into ditches. I wanted to go to Kansas City River Market to pick up some unusual Asian vegetables and see if I could find a Keiffer Lime tree, and to see if Planters had some intriguing plant stuff. It's not happening today.

I think what I need to do is get introduced to my characters again.

In Prodigies, my main character is Grace Silverstein, a teenage mixed-heritage (black/Jewish) viola prodigy with a gift for influencing the emotions of her audiences. She's been in residential music schools all her life and has had very little contact with her family before they died in a plane crash. She tends to be sardonic, probably as a cover for the very real loneliness she has faced all her life. She is currently on the run from shadowy forces that call themselves Second World Renaissance. They want to use Grace for her talent -- or kill her if she will not cooperate.

Ichirou, another teen prodigy, has become her ally in their escapes. Ichirou, from Japan, is a former hikikomori, or recluse, which he entered into at a very young age.  Through the residential program Renesansu, he has developed skills and resilience, but he is still a soft-spoken introvert. He has the unusual talent of evoking states of comfort, threat, compliance, and others through computer graphics. He is also on the run from Second World Renaissance.

Ayana, Ichirou's former teacher and "rental sister", has aided Ichirou and Grace escape the repeated attempts by Second World Renaissance to capture them. She has keen strategies to help them evade, but she seems to be keeping a secret about why she's involved.  Her demeanor is proper, as if she is still Ichirou's schoolteacher, but hints of strong emotion sometimes leak through. She apparently has no unusual talents, but can speak several languages. She has never spoken of her past.

Greg, a mysterious man of mercurial mood and many disguises, appears to be an ally of Ayana's, although it's not clear how they met. He has rescued Grace and Ichirou from several scrapes, often unbeknownst to them. He hides many secrets, including his involvement with the group and a talent that causes him much grief.


I will leave the main character and one or two of the other characters for Hearts are Mountains later on. But I'm feeling better about writing today. And I'll have plenty of time.

Flawed Characters

I'm thinking of the DC vs Marvel universe movie franchises, specifically two characters that are green: The Hulk (Marvel) vs. The Green Lantern (DC).

According to The Hulk's origin story, Bruce Banner is a mild-mannered physicist who gets clobbered by gamma rays, and turns into a huge, green creature of the ID when he gets angry. As such, he's a great superhero if one keeps him from smashing innocent bystanders and buildings. Bruce loathes his alter-ego, and this conflict adds depth and feelings of compassion toward his character.

The Green Lantern is a feckless dudebro who finds a lantern and a ring that link him to a network of intergalactic peacekeepers and superpowers. Readers are left wondering if a feckless dudebro should be allowed superpowers. Worse, though, is that we are left with the Hero's Journey of a privileged male getting more privilege.

One of these is the more interesting character, and it's not the dudebro.

We want our characters, especially our heroes, to have flaws that get in the way of their quest.

Dan Brown's books (Inferno, etc.) feature a protagonist named Robert Langdon, who seems at times childishly helpless in his books, which is an intriguing flaw. He comes off as almost on the autism spectrum -- focused on cryptology and solving puzzles, a bit clueless about people, led by the hand at times. However, Brown glosses over this with female characters who fall in love with him at the same time they want to mother him*, so there are no consequences of his flaw to him.  In addition, everyone thinks he's this cultured, articulate genius

Bella Swan in the Twilight series has an almost minuscule flaw -- she's clumsy. Unless she walks through mountains and upon tightropes without a net and almost falls while returning the Treasure of the Incas to the Incas, this flaw won't affect her meaningfully.  This is part of why Bella is discounted as being a Mary Sue, a perfect character designed as wish fulfillment for the author**.

Examples of good character flaws? In mystery, J.D. Robb created Eve Dallas, a horrifically abused child who grew up to be a good cop, but regularly struggles with nightmares about her past, difficulties in fathoming the rules of relationships, and being triggered by events from her professional life. Any character in Lord of the Rings (with the exception of Merry and Pippin) have baggage -- Boromir is so focused on saving his country he is blinded to evil; Aragorn really, really wants to be king; Galadriel is tempted by power, Frodo struggles mightily with the Ring; Eowyn has a painful crush on Aragorn, who marries Arwen in a pragmatic marriage.***

We love reading character flaws, because imperfect characters becoming heroes give us the reassurance that we too, with all of our character flaws, can become heroes.




**************

* I wish other people considered unrealistic, but there is this charge laid upon American women to "change" their husbands, who don't want to be changed. And who can blame either for this dynamic?

** The second reason is because female authors are routinely denigrated as writing Mary Sue characters, with the critics not noting that near-perfect characters like James T. Kirk (classic Star trek) and the aforementioned Robert Langdon are Marty Stus, the male equivalent of Mary Sue.

*** The movies portrayed Aragorn and Arwen as a love match. The book is much more pragmatic about that marriage. I wish the movie had followed the book in this case, because the triangle would have much more poignancy.

Reclaiming my Balance

Serotonin, dopamine, ephinephrine, norephinephrine.

It's amazing how thoroughly our bodies listen to those neurotransmitters, and they in turn shape our reality. Early humans developed these neurotransmitters -- and resulting feelings -- as an inducement to seek out beneficial things (like food and sex) and avoid or attack harmful things (avoid tigers, attack neighbors trying to steal their land). A sense of sadness from loss spurred them to seek out others for commiseration and healing.

In mood disorders, these feelings come up without any trigger -- anger without a target, elation without a reason, sadness without actual loss. Anger leads to frustrating arguments and rants, elation leads to expansive affect (expression of mood) and a sense of being involved in bigger things, and deep, bottomless sadness leads to hopelessness.

The community can't understand the strength and depth of these feelings, so they shy away from the person with a mood disorder. We get the label "crazy" because these feelings, and the compulsive effort to try to express them to our and fix things, don't make sense to those around us.

So, I've been depressed, as I've mentioned before. Depression isn't a matter of "cheer up", "just get over it," or "why don't you volunteer?" When I'm depressed, my vision narrows to a pinprick where I'm alone in the room and will always be alone and I will die in that room. Yes, I know that sounds dramatic, but I'll write the more subtle poetic version someday.

My excellent pdoc (psychiatrist) put me on a drug called Latuda, which was working for a few days. But now I'm showing signs of lability of emotions -- which is a nice way of saying my emotions are all over the place. To understand this, imagine all your emotions and states of being -- fear, confusion, sadness, hopelessness, eudaimonia (grounded happiness) -- as channels on a television. Someone else has the remote and they hit the buttons randomly. I literally have gone from "I have nothing left in life" to "Hey, did you know dahlias are edible?" in a span of 4 minutes.

I've been having other symptoms -- and of course, the physical symptoms get more attention, because emotional symptoms are nebulous, not easily understood, and -- "just get over it".

It could be the Latuda or the high thyroid; we don't know yet. It could be something else -- but I doubt it's my heart despite wearing a Holter monitor overnight.

I hate being in this situation. I avoid people because I'm afraid they think I'm "crazy". I second-guess every interaction I have. I struggle between writing honestly and feeling like a circus sideshow.

I hope I'm not losing you over this, dear readers.

Disillusionment with the Internet

My friends, this is why I wish I knew who read this blog:

Late last week, I got a barrage of 10-12 hits from Russia in a very short period of time, from a domain I discovered was a hotbed of bot activity. That means instead of a reader, Russia was data mining.

Two days ago, I hooked my account to Google+, and three things happened:
1) A foreign acquaintance had linked to me at one point, but unsubscribed as soon as I linked back to him;
2) I got a flurry of US hits all at once, which suggested a US bot;
3) Three people with almost identical profiles (Canadian or French, lots of inspirational posters, and then all sorts of ads for questionable loans, smart drugs, and a sugar daddy service.  They had the same ads.

I'm an idealist. I'd like to believe that person from France isn't trying to sell me modafinil. I'd like to believe that my Canadian audience is following me instead of using a borrowed personality to try to suck me into a scam. I'd like to believe that there's a Russian teen out there who wants to understand writing better, and someone from Portugal who finds my writing interesting.

I'd like to believe I'm not setting myself up for more spam.
*****

I'm an optimist, I understand. I would like to believe that all of you are reading and getting something out of this blog, and that it's helping me not only improve my writing skills but helping me make connections, real and caring connections.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm deluding myself.

The Writer and Happily Ever After

We love happily-ever-after stories:

We want the good guys to win -- although in reality, the good guys don't always win and sometimes it's hard to spot the good guys. And often we pick books to read in which the good guys look like us.

We want the world saved, but we're aware that that same world may need saving again the next year, or even the next week. Isn't this the gist of superhero comics?

We want the protagonist to fall in love. We assume they never break up, no matter how ludicrous their matching is. Opposites attract, sure, but that's opposites in experience, not morals and values.

We assume the end of the book is the end of the story. It's comforting, because it's not real life. Perhaps it's an escape from real life.

I will argue that happily-ever-after is a bad thing in real life. Why? First, because we couldn't stand that in real life. It is human nature to move forward, and moving forward always concerns a sense of loss -- loss of innocence, loss of friends, loss of the secure past, sometimes loss of life. The poignancy of age and mortality season our lives with a deeper meaning.

Second, total stagnation would make us uneasy. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates how frustrated people get with the same thing over and over again. Scenarios where nothing changes are the material of  Twilight Zone. Stagnation is the "uncanny valley" of life -- it resembles life, but it's not really life.

I love Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. I literally cannot bring myself to read the series any more after the stories of abuse her daughter revealed, but Darkover was one of my writing influences.  However, in her series, she had a talent of making happily-ever-after stories end badly in the sequel, often offstage. The renegade telepaths of the Forbidden Tower are mentioned in future books as having been killed by fanatics. The heroic Regis Hastur becomes a paranoid, prematurely aged man in later years. This became part of the intrigue of the series, because those deaths set up new plot lines and character development.

When we writers don't write series fiction (duologies, trilogies etc), the happy ending stands without need for update. In series fiction, we have the opportunity to make our world richer by continuing character strands in positive or negative ways.

In real life, we keep striving, and there are many endings in our lives, but many beginnings as well, until the ultimate end.

Writing about the moment.

Good morning, dear friends!

I feel like I'm fresh out of ideas today. I just got another rejection email, it's freezing rain out there and I still have to go to work, and I'm wearing one of those technological reminders of mortality around my neck -- a Holter monitor. (Don't worry about that last point -- we've already found the problem with the little pitty-pat-cha-cha of my heartbeat, and it's easily fixable with a med tweak. They're just making sure that's all there is.)

It's a good day to be down. Not depressed, just down. The desire to wrap myself in the coccoon of my blankets (rather than throw my clothes on over the monitor, put on makeup, and trudge down and up a flight of stairs with my computer backpack) is almost overwhelming. Almost. After all, life is out there, not under my blankets, and the adult thing to do is make the best of it.

Girly-Girl is sitting on the arm of the couch next to me, purring. She's my editor.

My editor is falling asleep on the job.

It's definitely dark (and rainy) out here at 7:30 AM. I've had a Messenger chat with my favorite nature interpreter about aquascape and pond design. The rain hits the window like buckshot. I discuss the sorry state of American politics with Richard.

I check the seedlings downstairs in my grow room -- the only evidence that there will someday be spring. The tomatoes and peppers and eggplant stretch and grow in their bigger fiber pots; the perilla seedlings perk up, the first of the miner's lettuce seems to be sprouting.

Someday there will be spring. Someday I will find an agent, someday I will feel healthy enough to work out, someday I will accept aging gracefully.

But for now, I sit in a warm room lit by the glow of candles, next to my cat. I can live with that.

PS: Oh, No, I've Said Too Much

Sometimes, I post something of the "honest, raw, and vulnerable" variety (such as the last note) and I later wonder, "Should I have not said that?"

• Should I have not admitted that I'm old?
• Should I have not admitted that I have bipolar 2?
• Should I have not admitted crushes, or magical thinking about crushes?
• Should I have not have put in yesterday's very political post?
• Should I have not expressed my feelings about being rejected by agents?
• Should I have not talked about the times I've been depressed, etcetera?

And every time I ask myself those questions, I come up with the same answers: I have to be who I am. Who I am is fanciful, open, articulate. Maybe I'm doing a lot of navel-gazing, but I don't know how to not be me. I do me, and I hope it gives someone something else to think about. I hope it helps someone else fall in love with my world. I hope it helps someone else fall in love with my writing.


Postscript: Apparently I have said too much for one person. I'm sorry about that. 

Real-Life Fairy Tale

Nobody thinks they're going to get old.

I didn't either. People in my family age gracefully, but I assumed I would age so gracefully that I'd still look 35 when I looked in the mirror in later years. I don't. I look every second of my 54 years and then some when I look into the mirror -- the skin under my eyes is translucent and thin and bears a network of fine wrinkles. I have traces of laugh lines. My hair -- everything I didn't like about my hair at age 20 still applies today, only with 50% gray.  Bizarrely, my face has more character than it did when I was younger: I look at pictures of myself now, and I look less vague and more -- I don't know -- striking?

Portrait of the writer as an old woman.

My mother, my role model for all things feminine, hated getting older. Like me, she looked striking as an older woman. Like me, she grimaced when she looked in the mirror.

Like me, she maintained a fairy tale in her mind. In this fairy tale, a young, beautiful man would tell her she was beautiful, and she would be beautiful. There would magically be no repercussions from this on her marriage. In her bouts of compulsive shopping, she picked outfits she thought would make her more beautiful to this mysterious man.

Apparently, I take after my mother here too, except for the clothes shopping.

I occasionally develop crushes on beautiful young men (I am susceptible to beautiful young men). They have to seem like nice, honest men, who would not hit on me or string me along to make fun of me. It can't develop into anything more than a friendship. They have to be believable if they tell me I'm beautiful. It helps if they're in another country. The more hopeless the situation, the better.

I can't ask them if they think I'm beautiful, because that breaks the magic spell, the alchemy that happens when the person I find most beautiful thinks I'm beautiful.

My fairy tale: Someone sends me an anonymous message telling me I'm beautiful, and I have to figure out who it is. Or an non-anonymous message, but they write it with heart. Or someone shows up to my coffee hours on campus*  Notice that I didn't say flowers. I need words, because I have trouble interpreting anything else.  I need meaning so I can intuit meaning. Flowers will scare me away if they're florist-types.  Courtly tokens are welcome. Locks of hair?** In other words, an unsolicited message*** with honesty, simplicity, effort. Something transgressive -- not in terms of boundaries, but in proclaiming that feelings are important and don't have to result in harm.

In other words, I have set a nearly impossible quest, just like the set of instructions in the song "Scarborough Hill" (Tell her to make me a cambric shirt /Without no seams nor fine needle work). It's seemingly doable, except for the part where it violates human nature -- middle-aged women are not considered beautiful, beautiful men have suspicious girlfriends, nobody makes an impact on the Internet, people just don't do that. 

But it's a fairy tale, a magic quest. And maybe those still have a purpose in life.




* If you are a student, don't tell me you think I'm beautiful. Just don't go there.

** Cut the hair at the bottom of the hairline at the nape of the neck. Cut the whole lock, no wider than half the width of the pinky. Secure one end with string or a small rubber band. Mail to my home address.

*** Some of you might be asking about my husband at this time. Richard is a delightful lot of things, the love of my life, but romantic is not one of those. First of all, Richard is one of the most pragmatic people I've ever met. He's in his head most of the time; he's the "I married you, didn't I?" sort. He does housework to show me he loves me.  He brought me a lemon tree from Hy-Vee for Valentines' Day, which shows he knows me better than anyone. But the only time he tells me I'm beautiful is when he's reminded to. That's just who he is. He's a lot like my father.

Mental Illness and the Gun Question

To those whose only solution to school shootings is to prevent the mentally ill from getting guns:

Let's forget for a moment that we often don't find a shooter is "Mentally ill" until they've killed 15 people.

Let's forget that the mentally ill can get guns from other people if they want them.

The fact is, you want me to be a second-class citizen.
You see, I'm mentally ill. I have bipolar 2, which means sometimes I'm a bit hypomanic (even with my meds) and sometimes I'm very depressed. I am the person you picture when you think of the mentally ill, even though if you met me on the street you wouldn't know.

How would you make me a second-class citizen?

Think about how the government could keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. A voluntary admission that one was mentally ill? How could that be enforced? Some people will lie. Some people don't know they're mentally ill. Some people believe that their mental health status is not the business of the government, and they are correct. According to HIPPA (the health insurance patient protection act), the government is not allowed private health information except for research, with the patient's name kept seperate for confidentiality. This information would also be accessible to gun shops, whose owners have no interest in keeping private health information private.

This has nothing to do with gun ownership and everything to do with violating the rights of the mentally ill.

Let's go one step further, because we know people could lie on that form. Let's make mental health status mandatory reporting, such that doctors have to report their mentally ill patients for a national registry. The very nature of a mandatory national registry should evoke the specter of other groups who have been singled out and registered -- such as Jewish individuals in Germany in WW2.

As for detection and treatment -- in the country as it is now, there is a shortage of treatment for the severely mentally ill and those without health insurance. Recent budget cuts by Trump have decimated what had been available. The current state of mental health treatment -- inpatient and outpatient -- ranges from excellent and expensive to frighteningly lackadaisical.

And what if the person doesn't believe they're mentally ill? If school shooters are mentally ill, why don't we make outreach available to those people who show clearly identified warning signs -- white supremacists, domestic abusers, heavily armed teens -- before they strike?

Because it's easy to stigmatize the mentally ill. Everyone else is doing it.

Hi! Help me understand!

I would like to know who my readers are! Don't worry; it's a very short (five minute or less) survey.

I can see where you might not want to tell me who you are if, say, you were my secret admirer or you were a foreign operative who's investigating my blogs for coded information (I'm talking to you, Russia Bot!) so I will not ask your names. Like all reader surveys, no harm is expected from taking this survey.

The survey can be found here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WSVXHGR

Thank you!

PS:

Orange sherbet

melts in my hands

when I try to make it

into a sandwich

or chicken stew.

I am hungry

and all you can give me

is orange sherbet.

No, not 'happily ever after'!

A question I asked the other day in my Positive Psychology class: If there was a machine you could hook up to that would give you a medication that would keep you happy all the time, would you?

Almost all my students answered no. When I asked why, they said things like "Would you know you were happy if you were never sad?" "Would you be able to detect a threat?" "Wouldn't you get bored?" One student said, "I think what you're describing is called 'heroin'."

All good points.  The type of happiness we can seek on demand, the type of happiness the machine dispenses, is called "hedonic happiness". It makes us happy in bursts, much like heroin sends the taker into short-term bliss. Hedonic happiness is short-term and can become addictive. Things like compulsive shopping and other addictions (including the aforementioned heroin) result from a perfect storm of complications in life, including the compulsion to self-medicate with happiness. Who wouldn't be tempted if their life started to spiral out of control?

I have two characters in two different books, Allan Chang and Ichirou Shimizu, who both fight the lure of perpetual hedonic happiness. Is it a coincidence that both are Asian? That might be just because I think Asian men are underrepresented in literature and demoted as sidekicks or comic relief. It could also be because I think Asian men are cute, as evidenced bythis photo:

This is my husband, Richard Leach-Steffens, and I. He's your typical Asian-German mix, brought to you by living in the USA.

It's interesting, however, that Asian cultures emphasize balance and harmony, because the hedonic treadmill (represented by heroin for Allan and by a fantasy world for Ichirou) is counter to the values of an Asian society. Yet that harmony is broken for both -- Ichirou by a hidden talent and the pressures of being young in contemporary Japan (see hikikomori), Allan by an abusive family situation.  I set up the balance/imbalance dichotomy accidentally, but I love the results.

This is the kind of stuff I mean when I say I put the things I know into my books. I don't want someone well-balanced with no difficulties to be the addict, because research shows that happy rats don't do smack, but the stressed-out ones do. And people don't escape if where they're at is just fine. (I'm not talking about the later stages of addiction, when the behavior becomes the life -- just why some people can take drugs and quit, and others can't.)

By the way, I wouldn't hook up to the happy machine either. Being at the same level of happiness all the time doesn't make for good writing.

PS: Be Careful What You Say

Every now and then I hear a line which comes off -- well, differently -- than the writer intended it. It might be because I'm a little off-kilter, and I'm usually the only one snickering when it happens. Some examples and my reactions:

1. My favorite local band twenty years ago, going for dark imagery: "Night falls around here." As opposed to other places, where night doesn't fall.
2. Lyrics to a song called Lost Boy: "As the smile fell from your face"  And clattered to the floor?
3. Dave Barry (a wonderful humor author) tipped me off to this one: "'I am'... I said/To no one there/And no one heard at all/Not even the chair" Which sounds profound until you realize the man is talking to a chair. And expecting it to reply.
4. Carolyn Jewel, I love you, but you named a romantic character "Durian". Like the immensely stinky, spiky fruit that smells like old sweat socks.
5. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets -- Honestly. You named the main character Valerian, which is an herbal medicine that induces sleep. And smells like old sweat socks. I love my romantic characters smelling like old sweat socks. No I don't.

I wish I could say I was immune, but one of my first short stories had someone's smile falling from their face. A professional presentation I gave as a grad student began with "The average American is getting older." Glad I could impress you with my profundity.