Steel Drums - Jump up
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 4Aug06 5:42am

It's Caribana weekend. Time to jump up. Weather wise they are promising cooler days without the stifling fry an egg on pavement heat.

All I know is that I need to hear some steel drums. I love the steel drums. Since my first Caribana in Montreal, there is something about the steel drums that cause my uninhibited ass shaking. When I hear the steel drums I feel the call of my ancestors. If I could just get into that zone, that trance, I could make contact and receive the stories, I could be transported to another time, the beginning perhaps. I could sit at the feet of a griot and learn my true history. I could sit at the feet of a griot learning the stories of many yesterdays and continue with the stories of today. I am a storyteller. In my history, storytellers have value. They chronicle our history through memory.

Drums, so primal, the beat of our hearts, our power, sends messages from one village to the next, my deep century spanning memory.

EY

Progress Log
Mood:  lazy
Now Playing: 112
Topic: WC - Progress Log
Thursday 3Aug06 5:33pm

Nulla dies sine linea - Pliny
"Never a day without a line."

As I did the dishes this morning I was thinking about how balanced my morning had been. I did my daily piece for this blog albeit a rather short piece. I worked on my novel White Wishes. I got all the things on my to do list done. I thought about starting a journal of my progress specifically what I do when things work out the way I want to. A bible, if you will, of what to replicate when things aren't exactly going to plan.

Which brought me back to Henriette Anne Klauser, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain (Breakthrough techniques for people who write).

Exercise 3 - Your Own Progress Log. Page 23
- Date your entries (include the time).
- Record information
- use rapid writing (write fast without thinking about it too much) to record what is happening to you so far. Where do you see yourself in your writing, and where would you like to be?
- Other things to include - stories that will come to you about how you learned to write - the good stories and the more painful ones about, how your writing was received, how it was rewarded, or what happened when it did not please the person in authority.

My story that came to me this morning was that my mother used to post my brother's drawings all over the house. As soon as you came up the stairs into our house you were assaulted by the beauty of his drawings. He was a superior artist, that's why I gave up on drawing.

As soon as anyone came to our house the comments went on and on about how talented my brother was. Then the looks in my direction that I felt said, "Too bad you didn't get any talent."

My poems couldn't be posted around the house like art work. My mother didn't think to mention, "Shelley writes poetry."
I was undiscovered, unrecognized, invisible. It used to bug the shit out of me. The value in what I did wasn't as translatable or as in your face as that beautiful art work.
I haven't thought about that in such a long time.

Sometimes I feel that I hold myself back with my writing. I don't do enough work. I haven't done enough work. It's like I need to unearth all those subliminal messages that made me feel like I was wasting my time. Find the genesis of that inner critic and kill it dead once and for all. If I can't kill it work through it. One of the blogs I read has writer interviews and in them the question is always asked about a writer's self doubts. I don't think I've ever read an interview where the writer didn't have self doubts.

I almost have to be the delusional American Idol contestant that causes the judges ears to bleed with the caterwauling he or she tries to pass for singing. The contestant will inevitably say, "I can sing. You don't know what you're talking about," when Simon Cowell says something like, "That is the worst noise I've ever heard in all 18 seasons."

"You don't know what you're talking about Simon!"

Perhaps I need to name my inner critic Simon and make that my new mantra, "You don't know what you're talking about Simon."

EY

Haunted
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
4:05am Thursday 3Aug06

Something banged and woke me up this morning. It was the bang that woke me up regularly through my childhood. It was the bang that inevitably started my mother's screams. It was the bang of domestic violence. I knew I couldn't go back to sleep sneaking my usual couple extra winks.
It's time to get up. It's time to exorcise my haunted mind. It's time to complete that novel.

What haunts your character? What won't let your character sleep?

EY

Writer News
Topic: Writers in the News
Don't kill Harry Potter, authors urge Rowling
By Claudia Parsons Tue Aug 1, 1:14 PM ET

Article Link

Two of America's top authors, John Irving and Stephen King, made a plea to J.K. Rowling on Tuesday not to kill the fictional boy wizard Harry Potter in the final book of the series, but Rowling made no promises.

"My fingers are crossed for Harry," Irving said at a joint news conference before a charity reading by the three writers at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

The author of "The World According to Garp" and a string of other bestsellers said he and King felt like "warm-up bands" for Rowling, who is working on the seventh and last book in the Harry Potter series, and who has said two characters will die.

King, who shot to fame in 1974 with "Carrie," said he had confidence that Rowling would be "fair" to her hero.

"I don't want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls," King said in a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's effort to kill off the character of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Pressure from fans eventually led Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes, who was found in a later story to have survived.

Rowling, a Briton whose books have sold 300 million copies worldwide according to her publishers, said she was well into the process of writing the final book.

"I feel quite liberated," she said.

"I can resolve the story now and it's fun in a way it wasn't before because finally I've reached my resolution, and I think some people will loathe it and some people will love it, but that's how it should be."

"We're working toward the end I always planned but a couple of characters I expected to survive have died and one character got a reprieve," she said, declining to elaborate.

Asked about the wisdom of killing off fictional characters, Rowling said she didn't enjoy killing the major character who died in book six -- for the sake of those who haven't read it yet she avoided naming the victim -- but she said the conventions of the genre demanded the hero go on alone.

"I understand why an author would kill a character from the point of view of not allowing others to continue writing after the original author is dead," she added, leaving the door open to the worst fears of some fans -- that Harry could die.

King recalled that when he had a character kick a dog to death in his novel "Dead Zone" he received more letters of complaint than ever, to his surprise.

"You want to be nice and say 'I'm sorry you didn't like that,' but I'm thinking to myself number one, he was a dog not a person, and number two, the dog wasn't even real," he said.

"I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people get very, very involved," King said.

Rowling noted that Irving had killed off many more characters than she had.

"When fans accuse me of sadism, which doesn't happen that often, I feel I'm toughening them up to go on and read John and Stephen's books," she said. "I think they've got to be toughened up somehow. It's a cruel literary world out there."

The Wind is like a hair dryer
Mood:  bright
Now Playing: Canadian Radio
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
5:20am Wednesday 2Aug06

Even with getting up at 4am, I still feel like there is so much more to do and I'm not quite in line with all I want to accomplish.
With working out and writing and making a good healthy lunch for work and reading my morning prayers and wishing I could do a little bit more of each of those categories it's hard not to become self absorbed. Balance, it's always about balance.

There have been constant reports on Fidel Castro and his brother taking over Cuba while he recoups. Cuba will be very interesting in the coming years. What kind of impact will Fidel's eventual death have on Cuba? I don't know nearly enough about Cuban history and Che Guevara and how Castro ultimately became the leader. A friend of mine mentioned that she had watched on the Fifth Estate (possibly?) that Cuba has self sustaining organic farmers that breed certain types of bugs that kill the bugs that destroy crops. These farmers actually make more money in Cuba than doctors. Which I found interesting because of course every where else in the world farmers don't make any kind of substantial money. Will the next government care about that?

I don't have any clear focused questions that can, will,could be asked about Cuba because my knowledge is limited. But it will no doubt garner a lot of material for writers who are interested.

The children abducted by the Ontario pedophile, Peter Whitmore were rescued. As we hear more and more stories of children abducted and rescued, for our time, it may be something writers cover more in their fiction. A character's child that is recovering from that type of ordeal. A back story of a main character who was abducted as a child.

How do you help a child who has been in the newspapers as missing when you finally get that child back? How does his or her classmates treat him when they see him again? What type of questions is he asked? Things will never be the same, how does he find some sense of normalcy after that ordeal?

Humidex, smog advisories, the wind that feels like a hair dryer, I'm packing my bathing suit to go for a swim after work.

Note to self: I had nothing much to talk about when I woke up this morning and responded to what I heard on the radio.


EY