Memorial
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
7Dec06 Thursday 6:07am

Well it's today. My mother passed away 10 years ago today. I've lit some candles in her honour.

My mother would be 64 years old. Still very young. Still younger than most of my friends parents. My mother would love the Internet and digital cameras and itunes.

My mother had a grade 6 education having been kicked out of school for hitting a kid in the head with an ink bottle after he'd called her a nigger. When she got home and told her father he'd beat her for being a trouble maker and only after he'd beat her got the whole story and went back to the school to tell off the teacher who'd sided with the boy. My mother who won all the singing contests and wanted to be a Country singer. Her first contest , she'd lost, because she was too shy and kept looking down at the stage. Her father beat that shyness out of her. His answer to everything was a beating. My mother who didn't have a belly button because she was born sickly and all the operations she'd had as a baby left without one. She was a sickly baby and cried a lot and her mother couldn't take it so she gave my mother to her father who was married to someone else. Yeah my mother had stories for sure. It's any wonder that I like to write.

My mother was a charismatic person and made friends with every one including my step father's ex wife. She could go to a store twice and end up having the salespeople loving her so much that they'd give her merchandise for free. I don't have those qualities or patience. She honestly believed that there was good in every one and if you gave someone enough chances he'd become that good person that she could picture in her mind's eye. She would let anyone in her house, people that weren't particularly nice to her, women that were after her man. I had no patience for it. "It's your house mom, you don't have to be nice to people like that in your own house," I'd say.
"You'll understand when you're older," she'd tell me. That has yet to happen.

My mother was a runner, living most of her adult life incognito, after we ran from my father who was a violent alcoholic. She endured violence and pain and humiliation and she still managed to wake up each morning with a smile on her face. Some of our best laughs were the first thing in the morning. She was superstitious, believing such things like, "If you laugh all day, you'll cry all night" and "everything comes in threes."

She was zany and would change the words to sweet songs into sex songs. One of my favorite past times. Our big thing was to come up with a song that matched the words that one of us just spoke and if we couldn't we'd make up a song.

With my mother, I went to night clubs at 13 years old. I hung out with adults. We smoked joints and played frisbee on the Mountain.
We had drink nights at home, just the two of us, where we listened to music and tried all kinds of wines and even did tequila shots. We were the envy of all mothers. She was the first person that knew when I was ready to have my first sexual experience with my boyfriend of 4 years. She was the first person that I told what I was thinking.

My mother made so many mistakes in life and endured so many failures and believed and loved and loved some more. She picked the runt of the litter every single time. She rescued strays (animals and humans). She was allergic to everything in her house (cats, dogs, birds, carpeting) and refused to give them up or get the shots. She survived with bottles of Otrivin strategically placed around the house. She was a music lover and we always had the latest music and a state of the art music system despite my step father's complaints that spending money on music was frivolous. She'd sneak the new records in the house when he wasn't looking. She was a plant fanatic and had exotic plants from all over the world. Plants that she'd have to soak in water for 24 hours and all sorts of craziness. She couldn't walk past a plant store without staying in there for at least an hour. That's me with book stores.

She had a grade 6 education and was the smartest person I knew. My step father mocked her for her lack of University degree and she had self esteem issues and yet when ever he needed to understand something, it was my mother he asked for the explanation. I knew because of my mother that you can educate yourself without school. She absorbed everything and when she decided she wanted to know how to do something she'd immerse herself in the books and she'd learn how to do it. a Grade 6 education! I have yet to meet anyone that I feel was as smart as my mother.

She knew people from all walks of life, from drug dealers, pimps, bank robbers, doctors, club owners and right on up and she never judged anyone for who they decided to be and what they decided to do.

Yeah she was my mommy, my sister, my best friend. She was the person I fought with the most and the person I turned to to cry and the person I told everything and the person I'd give my youth to if it were possible. She was the person that I'd kill for and the person I protected, much to my Step dad's fear. There will never be another person whose death will be harder on me than losing my mother.

Ten years is a long time for so many things like being at a job or studying and yet such a short time for mourning the death of my mother. Alice Patricia Norville... Pisces Horse.


EY

Little bit of Everything
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Wednesday 6:56pm 6Dec06
I'm doing a little bit of everything tonight. Don't want to focus on one thing in particular and I want to see what one thing will make me want to focus... if that makes sense. So I've set my timer for 15 minute intervals and am focusing on one item for the allotted time and then moving on to the next thing.

I came across this article today, Designing Your Writing Career, and asked what writer would I want to model? Well AM Homes of course. I love her style and bravery and seriousness and humour.

I looked her up on the Internet and here are a few links on info about her and her books...

Powells.com
Barcelona Review
Barnes and Noble

I got turned on to AM Homes when she published a short story called, a Real Doll, about a boy that is having a relationship with his sister's Barbie Doll. Yup! I knew I had to read it and I've been reading her work ever since. She scares the shit out of me and inspires my imagination.

In my writer's notebook she wrote, "Shelley -- Keep Going!"

My 15 minutes are up!

EY

It only took 8 years
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Monday 10:55pm
Had an action packed evening. Went to my first channeling and it was interesting and inspiring enough to make me want to attend again.

Wasn't going to go to the staff party because I'm no longer staff but feeling clear minded and awake, I thought, what the heck? Saw some blasts from the past that were super affectionate, heard many a confession about my sexual affect on a few men. Which amused me.

Saw the man whose name I do not mention, even in hushed tones, because his power has been so strong. He did a couple things that he used to always do, like hang on my every word. Why is it still that we end up standing beside each other, a part of a larger conversation, a connection even though it's no longer allowed given our situations. But I was okay. I'm finally over him and that is why I was meant to be there to be able to look at his face and not feel any kind of pull that can set my heart off in to that down ward spiral that leaves me in that numbing pain and makes me go in to hiding from the male possibilities that surround me now. Phew! I'm finally over him. It only took 8 years.

Even during the lift that he gave me that wasn't to be all the way to my house. I thought if you can drop me this far you might as well drive me home and no sooner did I think it he asked, should I drive her home? Like he could still read my mind. Then a block away from my house he said, "it's around here."
Yeah dude, it's a block away.
I said good night, nice to see you and I meant it. I crossed the street and turned my key without looking back. I didn't need to. My heart has moved on and so has my life. And it only took me 8 years but I'm finally here. I'm finally here. I'm finally here.

EY

Writing Practice - Ray Bradbury
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Sunday 3Dec06 4:18pm

As you all know I've been focusing on writing practice as of late. Bought all those new books that basically tell you to make a daily practice of writing. Although I've been pretty good about blogging daily it's been getting too journal-ly again. Which is what happens when too much is going on in my life and I don't have the time to sit down and find things to add here or talk about.

When my blog had her little nightmare the other night I happened upon my page that tells me how many people are coming across this blog and it's been close to a hundred people a day. It made me realize that I probably should stop the navel gazing and add some sort of substance every once in awhile anyway. Thanks for stopping by, by the way! It's strange because I honestly believe that there's only about 4 people reading and then when I see stuff like that ... "Oh yeah there are people out there!"

Let me just remind you that the writer's life is indeed boring as hell and most of us, me in particular, are pretty neurotic and flip flop between sure footed confidence and that maniacal indecision and low self-esteem. ha ha. What do they say? The fine line between creativity and madness? Yes sirree!

Any way, after my book purchases of last weekend, I came home and pulled off my numerous book shelves other books that were in keeping with the books I bought. I think, still, one of my favorite books is Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury. He really lives writing practice...

In The Joy of Writing, Page 7, he writes:
here is my formula.
what do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate?
Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. The follow him as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

In How to Keep and Feed a Muse, Page 45, he writes:
The muse must have shape. You will write a thousand words a day for ten or twenty years in order to try to give it shape... By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read... By training yourself in writing, by repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the muse.

I love this book because Ray Bradbury so clearly loves writing. That's who you want to mentor you even if it's just through his printed words. Enough with people telling us that you can't get rich off writing. Enough with people telling us that we may never be published. Neither of those things makes us a writer. A writer writes because she has to, because there are thoughts and things and incidences and behaviours that she wants to figure out and creating a character to live through it is the way that we process it.

Like Aries and Leo whom I mentioned yesterday, the real question is, What would possess her to sleep with the love of Maxine's life? What kind of thoughts would she have in her head that would make it okay for her? Is it really only about sex? I want to know the answers because it's not something I would ever do but I don't want to look at them as one dimensional people and just chalk it up to sex. I want to find a way to understand them and like them both even though in real life I would side with Maxine's heart break. At least I think I would, until I've figured out a whole story with the knowledge that all of us have good and bad aspects/qualities. And on the flip side, with no guarantees in life, what if Leo is the person that Aries could love for the rest of her life? And vice versa? What if you had to break someone's heart in the most devastating of ways to have your one chance at true happiness? Could you do it? That's why I write.

There are enough people out there who are going to question your passions and tell you that your dreams are futile, because they love you, because they're jealous, because they gave up on their dreams, because they want you to face reality. Fuck reality. The reality is that one of us could be the next JK Rowling or Dan Brown and no one can predict who that will be. NO ONE!

EY

Hope Dashed
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Sunday 3Dec06 3:57pm

Was hoping that I would have a writer's outing today but my hopes were dashed. Went to the Animecon at the Metro Convention Centre and it was beyond lame although packed with people dressed up as their favorite characters. Not knowing anything about anime and hadn't thought to look it up on the internet, should have.

Okay so it's Asian animation but there was nothing there. A small room filled with childish paraphernalia and nothing I wanted to take home. Oh well it got me out of the house and down to the Front to return the camera my friend lent me, oh yeah and got me walking. My feet are calling me names, swearing actually.

I've had an idea for a graphic novel for at least a couple years that I'm not totally ready to work on. The comicon is in February maybe that will be more up my alley.

I forgot how many layers I need to wear with the lack of hair. I was freezing most of the time that I was out. Back to wearing two hats again. It's been a few years.

Oh well, waiting for my lamb chop to cook and doing a little writing.

EY