Rose-Tinted Aviators & Grass More Chartreuse

Is it such a terrible thing to look through rose-tinted lenses? Is it worse to want to leave them on always?

Do they just show us the greener grass on the other side and leave us dismally drooling?

Maybe. So what? But most people aren’t pulling in so much moola, dough, green ones, that they can fulfill all their dreams. Should that stop us seeing pink? or green?

Where would we be without dreams? Not sleep dreams–personally I can do without those; mine are such screwed up messes I sometimes wish I could stay up all night and get something constructive done instead. No—daydreams, three wishes, if-only’s. Those dreams. Bucket list dreams.

Hope is a quintessential core quality of human beings. Most humans require a belief system of some sort, even if it’s only faith in a singular friend and no one else. This is built into our DNA, our psyche. It’s built into our liver, our toenails, our ear lobes!

Here’s an example. I live in southern Manitoba, Canada. Beautiful summer–but way too short. This winter lasted from end of October to May. May! I’m a summer girl, a Leo, and they’re from Africa–no winter. Every year winter disturbs me more. Which, yes, explains me being disturbed )

In 2001 The Hub (hubby ) and I received a holiday in Australia. Every winter  since, I can bear it less. But I spray my glasses with rose tinted dye and think of Aussie-land. I dream of living there one day. Roasting  in the heat and enjoying it.

I fill my rose-tinted brain with lists of what I should take, what to leave behind, to sell or give on. What to make a big pile out of and burn before we go. Like my parkas and mitts and winter boots. I can even warm myself on this bonfire glowing pink through my glasses. Course when I think of leaving my older kids behind, reality hits. No. Can. Do.

Still, it’s fun while it lasts. And it fazes out the boring, the blah and the brrrr.

Rose tinted lenses, I can do that.

It’s optimism. It’s cup half full, not half empty.

It’s the power of positive thinking.

It doesn’t create monetary miracles, or instant tangible transformations. But that belief system theorem,

Maybe—

What if?—

A girl can dream—

that gets, nourished and that can make the difference between losing it and staying (moderately) sane. It’s a proven fact that dreams and hopes can lift one’s spirits.

As parents, teachers, care-givers one of the worst ways to mess with a child’s head is to remove their rose-tinted glasses. You may as well dress them in stripes and chain them in a cell now.

If the Wright Brothers’ goggles (real aviator glasses!) didn’t have rose-tinted lenses we’d be building a bridge across the ocean—oops that’s me with the rose tints on now. Sorry. Actually, not.

There’s enough mess in the big world, sometimes even in our own small worlds. Sometimes we have to dream and ignore the ugly for a while. But I say, if the grass looks more green on the other side, it’s not wrong to dream about it. Check it out if you can.

On the other side of my fence I see a trip to Italy with my cousin, France and Barcelona with The Hub, England with my dear friend and sister-in-law. I see my books in print, a whole row of them. I see me establishing an earthy, eclectic kids bookstore, with rooms for writers groups and readings.

Go boil your movie screen 3-D glasses.

Bring on the tinted aviators in rose, fuchsia, pink, or coral.

For the grass on the other side,  hmm, maybe chartreuse?

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Book & Author Quips & Quotes: Cornelia Funke

Author of the famous Inkspell trilogy, as well as The Thief Lord. Not your run of the mill fantasy here.

 

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”

“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.”

“Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: ‘Things are this way. You can’t change it’ – don’t believe a word.”

“Why do grown-ups think it’s easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don’t they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?”

“So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin

“Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth…all those glorious words.”

“Stories never really end… even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”

“But after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story.”

-Cornelia Funke

Wemless, Weltering, Wieldable Words

Wemless (a.) having no wem, or blemish; spotless.
Weltering (a.) a rolling, tossing, or tumbling about,  as if by the sea, waves, or wind
Wield (v.) to use effectively; handle or employ actively.

Have you ever heard a word that stops you cold. A word such that you stop listening to the rest of your friend’s sentence, or you stop reading your book right there to savour the word, its flavour and nuance? You have to ponder it, relish it,  rolling it around your tongue and your brain.

Maybe it’s just a writer thing.

I was listening to a lecture and when the speaker used “Ragnarok” in a sentence, the rest of her speech faded to black, as my little grey cells got busy processing the word. Ragnarok. I’d otherwise heard it only in connection with Role Playing Games, but she made it sound concrete. I politely waited until I got home to google it. (Truth–I didn’t want to pay roaming fees to do it there.)

So—Ragnarok, in Norse mythology, was the predestined death of certain gods such as Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, and Loki, in a great battle. Only tw0 humans survived, hidden in a sacred tree called Yggdrasil (also a  fantabulous word). When they emerged, they repopulated the Earth.

Tintagel Castle ruins

This one I don’t recall where I heard it but it’s awesome. Tintagel. It just stirs my creative juices until I’m salivating so no one wants to stand down wind of me. Where were we before Google?

Turns out, Tintagel is a village and small island in Cornwall, UK, with the ruins of one Tintagel Castle associated with the legends surrounding King Arthur.

Speaking of castles, and tunnels, I love the word “cairn.” So Celtic, so caverny, so castley sounding.

I  long ago marvelled how the word “laugh“ looks just like what it is. And how “wisp” sounds just like what it means. Never mind all this bung about a rose by any other name, etc, blah, blah…

Words are fun, provocative, dangerous. Here’s a few more great words:

• eyeball
• Ipswich (p.s. No one else dare use this word. It now belongs to a character in one of my manuscripts.)
• caterwaul
• Piccadilly
• pilfer
• persnickety
• inkberry
• Inniskillin (I’m claiming this one too. I just don’t know what for yet!)
• filipendulous
• opus
• Snollygoster
• Withershins
• curonious

Kids play with words the minute their non-skid mark sneakers hit the playground at school, teasing and insulting with words coined and created just to suit that situation they’re in.

As writers, if we’re ever going to break into print we know every word has to count. We can’t write about “that thing in the corner of the room-space-thingy where I am kinda half-sitting, half not on a puffy, fat blob, um well like that square tin can box with the lid up and a guy-doll on a busted spring-thing is hanging out of.” We’ve got to be concise, so specific word choices matter.

We can say the neighbour is way too fussy and particular about his lawn. Or we can call him persnickety and be done with it. And the word persnickety slips us a mental image of a crochety (!) old man without us describing his appearance at all.

Heck if we’re gonna be writers let’s have fun with it. Go out and buy word-of-the-day toilet paper if you need to.

(But sometimes…wouldn’t it be quicker to say “fear of the number 13″ than “triskaidekaphobia?”)

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*What are some of your favourite words, or names?

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Book & Author Quips & Quotes: J.K. Rowling

I discovered the 1st two Harry Potter books in the library, before the sensation began to hit the book world. Now I own all the books—in two languages. They’re on my “keepers shelf.”

 

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.”

“I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.”

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”

”To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”

“I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“Why are you worrying about YOU-KNOW-WHO, when you should be worrying about YOU-NO-POO? The constipation sensation that’s gripping the nation!”

“I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there.”

“Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have.”

“I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed – or worse, expelled. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.”

“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”

J.K. Rowling

Liebster Award Excitee (if that’s a word)

No Monday Blues around here yesterday. Imagine my surprise when I opened my email and found a new comment to my blog, awaiting moderation. “I have nominated you for a Liebster Award.”  Well I didn’t know what the heck that was, but I was still thrilled. The word Award, is usually good right. I heartily thank you, “Atrager” (“Ginger Spice“). So apparently it’s an award passed on by bloggers to newer blogs worth reading, with less than 300 followers. Recipients of the Liebster Award must:

1. List 11 random facts about yourself.
2. Answer the questions that were asked of you (by the blogger that nominated you).
3. Nominate 11 other blogs for the Liebster Blog Award and link to their blogs.
4. Notify the bloggers of their award.
5. Ask the award winners 11 questions to answer once they accept the award.

11  Facts About Me:

1. I am freakishly in love with RED. Not the burgundy or pink tinged red, but the warm deep bright red that sometimes has a hint of orange. Vibrant. Yummy. Warm. Like Poppies.
2. I am a writer, currently torturing 2 manuscripts with revision.
3. I detest winter, and every winter I increase the number of time I say, “Why do I live in this frigid country????” (South Manitoba, Canada)
4. I can draw and paint and craft. I can even build bedrooms in basements, better than whoever built our house.
5. My teenage love of horses has never left me.
6. I love rocks and minerals and semi precious stones better than polished gems.
7. I am a sucker for Saint Bernard dogs, which I grew up with.
8. I detest the city. I prefer  the privacy of the country where you can skinny-dip in your pool at midnight. Or run around the yard in your pajamas at noon singing “A spoon full of sugar” and nobody cares.
9. I love the smell of rain, freshly mowed grass, new wood and leather.
10. I hate crowds and small spaces.
11. I have a dream of sometime getting to Italy–Venice, to Paris, Stonehenge, Ireland, Scotland, Barcelona. I want to visit Parham House in West Sussex, England to see in real life the place I have based my first 2 novels on. I want to drink of its essence the better to portray it than just off photos on the internet.

Answers to Questions Posed by “Atrager- Get Excited and Make Things“:

• What’s the last song you listened to?–
  • Shakira’s “Gitana” (Gypsy)
• Why did you start your blog?—
  • To have a place to share casual writing and writing tips. Also to begin creating that online persona every current day writer needs.
• Chocolate or Vanilla?—
  • CHOCOLATE hands down every time.
• What’s your favorite place that you’ve traveled to? —
  • Australia, Mate.

• Advice for other bloggers?—
  • Try to get into a regular blogging routine, and you’ll find suddenly you see blog-worthy material wherever you go. And have fun with it, this is your baby. Express yourself creatively.
• Never have I ever _________—
  • Let go of my common sense just to keep in with the crowd or the latest fad. Stupidity catches up with you.
• Do you always match your socks?—
  • I’m afraid so. At my age mismatched is no longer self-expression, it is considered “Crazy-bag-lady” style
• What’s one quote you really like? Inspirational or otherwise.—
  • By James A Michener: “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
• What do you want to be remembered by?—
  • An original creative not afraid to sail her own boat, and even build it if necessary (preferably). A loving, caring person, going the extra mile to make others comfortable, physically and emotionally.
• Do you believe in love?—
  • Most certainly. A favourite author of mine put it very well, ” We are at our own personal best when we love someone more than ourselves.”
• When was the last time you called someone on the phone (not texted?) –-
  • Yesterday.

11 Questions for My Nominees

1. How old do you feel?
2. What’s you favourite time of day?
3. What do you like to do on long weekend’s?
4. Do you like to spend time outdoors?
5. When you read a book, do you peek at the last few pages to see how it turns out?
6. If you are a writer, do you like to write longhand–with pen and paper– or immediately on your computer?
7. Are you an animal over, or you detest them?
8. Favourite dessert?
9. Ideal job?
10. Do you eat out a lot?
11. Top 3 things you would do if you won a million dollars?

And Finally, my nominees! Hope you’ll all accept the award and pass it on.

1. Vast Imaginations — a Community of Children’s Writers
2. Alice A Kemp — Writer/Editor/Sarcasm Expert
3. More Than One Page
4. t h i n g s + f l e s h — lyrical essays on songwriting + other mysteries
5. This Crazy Writer — Creativity is not a hobby. It is a way of life.
6. Hope Cook — I write. Obsessively.
7. What I Learned While Writing a Novel
8. The Nouveau Write — A Beginning Writer’s Angst Over Writing
9. Lucky Seekers Love Lattes
10. Helen Jameson — Scribble Girl
11. Musings of a Narcissist

The Importance of Writing Exercises

David Alexander’s art puts it beautifully:

If you diligently read articles or books on writing there is one point on which they are all untied.

To improve your writing, write every day.

Do I hear whining? I don’t know what to write about.

Yes, I had that question too. I don’t lead a very exciting life so dismiss the whole what-I-did-today theme. No journals for me. No “Today I landed in Venice, where I will spend a thrilling week partaking in Carnivale.” But then that doesn’t require imagination. So I grasped at straws. On Google. And discovered they make straws  in the hundreds of thousands. We make them.

Writing prompts. Writing exercises. They’re all over the world wide spiderwebs.I don’t like to read off my monitor, so I printed a bunch out and popped them in a binder. You can open a book, choose a random line, and fly with that. And not just text.  Google image searches are a sparkling diamond mine of thought provoking images to work with.

In my writing group, we do a ten minute writing prompt at some point. I haul out a few prompts, we start the timer and—Silence—imagination at work. We just write anything that pops into our heads, the good, the bad, or the atrocious. The fiery, the funny, the futile. It doesn’t matter.

The game is to free-write unhindered by our inner editor and  let the right brain  soar to places unknown. It is practice— practice letting our creative side, even if you don’t think you have one, get precedence over that logical, everything has to make sense, no nonsense left brain. We needy Lefty when we outline and edit, but without Righty there’d never be Story.

Still think free-writing is useless?

Just recently one of our group members polished up one of these free writes, and won grand prize in a short story contest.

And me? Going over some of my free writes, I pulled one out. Let’s see if this will take me a bit further.  Well, 65 000 words later, I am revising my first manuscript, have finished first draft on a sequel and have notes for a third.

And I made a very important discovery when I started daily free-writes. That right brain, or the Muse, begins to fill in details, clues, solutions for story that don’t surface when we rationally, punctilliously outline. The more free reign you give your other half, the more efficiently right and left work together.

It’s like  (insert googly eyes here) —Magic.

Here’s my page of prompts and exercises to start you off. 

 http://dragonflydithers.wordpress.com/diverse-debris/

And here’s a link to weekly prompts I contribute to my group’s blog:

 http://vastimaginations.wordpress.com/category/imagine-it-prompts/

So—no excuses. Attack your keyboard, or flourish your pen!

Book & Author Quips & Quotes: Lemony Snicket

Or Daniel Handler, whatever you like to call him.The mastermind behind The Series of Unfortunate Events. A master of tongue-in-cheek, and all sorts of other blather.

“If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt bn pasdlgk hasdfasdf.”

“It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”

“There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”

“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”

“Temper tantrums, however fun they may be to throw, rarely solve whatever problem is causing them.”

“They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”

“Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.”

“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”

“All these things are miracles. It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do.”

“Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s nonsense.”

“Sometimes, even the best of plans will occur to you when it is too late.”

-Lemony Snicket