Inspiration Monday: Mutually Inclusive

Books Again, Decatur, GA. As far as I know, books are regular price but hair costs extra.

Sometimes things seem so black-and-white separate, there is no reason to consider that they could ever go together.

Maybe we should.

I'm not saying we should go and put bologna on an Oreo or anything--I like those in black and white just fine, but sometimes its a good idea to challenge all of those little fences in our brains and see if the things they're keeping apart really need to be kept apart.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently attended an audiobook launch that the author was unofficially calling a "bookless booksigning." I thought it was clever and it caught my attention because that is a thing that seems impossibly impossible, but she made it possible anyway (and it was awesome).

Earlier that same day, I had an interesting conversation with one of my formerly homeless clients. We were on our way back from an appointment that happened to be in one of the ritzier areas of town. While we drove along, she stared out at the expensive houses, each one big enough to practically envelop her entire apartment complex and fronted by fresh-combed lawns the size of parks.

She shook her head. "A lot of these rich folks don't know how bad they got it," she said.

This woman had been homeless for the better part of a decade, slipping in and out of shelters when she could, going without regular meals or medical care, and refusing all friendships because, as she once told me, the surest thing she ever learned was that people can't hurt you if you don't let them close enough to get at you. 

"Tell me how the rich folks have it bad," I said. It wasn't a question because I wasn't asking. I already believed her.

"Those poor rich folks don't know nothing," she said. "If something bad ever came along, they couldn't survive it. They ain't ready for it. They think that everything is all okay, but they really don't know what they don't know."

"Some of them do," I said. "Some of them worked their way up just like you're doing. Some of them know."

"Well, they ain't the poor ones," she said.

She went on to tell me about her grievances with the "wealthy poor." 

"There are two kinds of poor folks," she said, happy to be educating me so that I would know what I don't know. "There's the poor folks like me that worked hard all their lives and then had it all taken away from them and spend every day trying to get back up on their feet. Then there's the wealthy poor. Those people are the ones who could do better but won't. They're the ones that take up all the help from the people who really need it. They give the rest of the poor people a bad name so that nobody gets the help they need."

From this woman who spent long years feeling that anger was her only currency and that her voice was as pointless as another hot breeze in summer, came truth as sharp as citrus tang. Having money doesn't make you rich and not having it doesn't make you poor.

She might not have an income yet, but she's not poor, not with sharp eyes like those.

She had it right. In the end, no matter what your bank balance says and no matter where you sleep, we are all just scuffed-up, soft-bellied human beings.

Now you know. 

Inspiration Monday: The Bumps and the Bruises

I've never met a bruise that didn't earn its keep.

Well, they don't feel that way at the time, but most medicines need time to work and most lessons have to swish around in our heads for a while before we will relent to learn them.

I am a clumsy person. I know, hard to believe, but it is so, so true. I trip over shadows, and even a deep thought is heavy enough to tip me off my balance. I run into tables so often that I'm looking into purchasing inflatable furniture. It is fair to say that I have earned more than my fair share of bumps and bruises throughout my life, and yet I have appreciation for every one of them.

What can we learn from a bruise?

I learned that I should not pick up boxes bigger than me.

First, we learn that coming into contact with a thing  suddenly and with force hurts and leaves a mark that hurts long after you've walked away.

This is a True Thing (and True Things are rarely only literal).

How many times in your life did something come along and get in your way at the exactly wrong time? Maybe you didn't even see it before you slammed into it, and it was not so much the pain that shook you all over like a plucked string, but more the shock of it. Maybe it made you angry. It makes me angry. I don't like those kind of surprises. Maybe you belt out a few words too salty for church. Maybe you do what I do and scrunch up your nose and bite your lip to keep them inside where you can repeat them over and over without drawing attention to yourself.

Second, we learn that there is a weird, sick allure to poking a bruise every so often, just to see if it still hurts. It always does, but after a while, we check it out again, just to see. Just to see.

It is a weird facet of human behavior that we abhor pain, and yet we are drawn to it in its various forms just to make sure that we can still feel it. Sometimes I really like it when I'm numb. Things that usually get me unraveled roll off my back like candle wax. Then, after a while, I start to wonder why. I start to miss feeling things and that's when I start looking for the emotional bruise. It is there, every single time. I poke it and prod it a bit and get it good and sore. It is how I know there is damage there and that I have to work around it. It is unpleasant, but sometimes it takes a drop of pain to remind me that being alive and living are two different things, and living is always far superior.

Third, bruises heal. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes there are even scars, but eventually you will look down and that sore spot will only be the memory of a sore spot. Sometimes, even that memory will fade itself away, too.

I have a bruise on my shin right now that I earned back in December of last year. I took a tumble down a flight of stairs trying to get some distance between myself and a grabby fellow in a bad neighborhood when I was assisting a client with a move. I sprained my ankle as well, but it healed fairly quickly compared to this darn bruise. It has been sitting there in all its green-purple smugness for almost half a year, but it is fading slowly. Too slowly to suit me, but it is doing what it is supposed to do and healing itself even though I can't see the progress it has made from day to day. Eventually, I will look down and it will be gone.

I'm not saying I'll remember this bruise forever, and its healing isn't going to change my life--well, it will be a lot easier to shave my legs, but still. It was a part of my person for a long time, long enough that if you were to meet me for the first time, I could legitimately introduce myself thusly: "Hi, I'm Marisa and I have an ugly bruise on my leg that won't go away."

Eventually, it will be, "Hi, I'm Marisa and I used to have an ugly bruise on my leg that wouldn't go away. Well, it wouldn't until it did, but still, it was weird. I promise! It was thiiiiiiiis big!"

Given enough time, I'll get tired of people crooking their eyebrows at me when I try to tell them about my stupid everlasting bruise, and I'll stop telling it. Then I'll forget about it altogether.

What I won't forget is what I learned that night. There is a special kind of panic when you are in a neighborhood at night where you know aren't welcome and there is a person touching your body who should not be and you are two flights of stairs from your car--and then you go down with your ankle twisted behind you and your leg slams against the chewed-up concrete and steel. You aren't sure if you are going to be able to walk when you get up, but you know that you are going walk anyway and nobody is going to stop you. That is exactly what I did. I hopped up and hoofed it to my car like nothing had happened and I drove a good ten miles on that sprained ankle before I stopped to lick my wounds.

I don't need the bruise to remind me anymore. I don't need the pain to keep me taught. I got the message, and I still have the message. The pain goes away, the message stays. That bruise paid for itself up front and in full.

Are there bruises in your own life that taught you something you needed to learn? Did they heal fast or slow? How about your characters? Give them a few bumps and bruises. It will make them human like the rest of us. Give them something to take home with them after the action and it is guaranteed that they will be changed.

Strange Bookfellows

Why hello, there! Blog? Is that you? It's so good to see you! My, you've changed. Have you lost some weight? Probably, because there's been NO ONE TO POST ON YOU TO KEEP YOU PLUMP AND HEALTHY!

Consider me shamed. Now, to fatten you up with some empty calories.

I have had a full week with plenty of ups and downs. It has been a little heavier on the downs, but I persevere. I persevere, and I write. Those are my two best tricks.

On the writing front, I've been working on my novel a bit. "Working" here means "staring at the text and sorting through countless notebooks looking for that scene I just know that I already wrote that would be absolutely perfect for this transition, but apparently either evaporated or was a figment of my imagination." The latter is likely because, after all, even the stuff I have written is still nothing but written-down imagination figments. That's all fiction really is anyway, right?

Since trolling through my notebooks only affords me so much quality procrastination even on my super-limited schedule, I've also been thinking about who I'm actually writing this novel for anyway. The obvious answer is, "myself." That is the truth in many, many ways that could get all metaphysical and sappy if I was to expound on it, but it is also a limited answer. Once this beast is finished, I want to get it published with all of the want my big, bursting, wanting heart can want with all its want. That means I am really writing it for anyone and everyone and no one all at the same time.

I am under no illusion that any amount of publishing of my work will ever net me the kind of walking-around money that the Stephenie Meyers and J.K. Rowlings of the world have, and I'll probably never win a Pulitzer unless it is for something to do with rambling blog entries or government social-service grant activity sheets. I just want my book to be published because then it will exist.

Sure, it exists now. It exists on my hard drive, in countless notebooks and on napkins, in my writing buddies' inboxes, and as several reams of printed manuscript. It just doesn't exist in a way that makes it separate from me enough that it can belong to another person. It isn't final. I don't care how many times I print it or email it or read it or tap-dance on top of it, I'm going to see some little something that doesn't sit just right with me, and out comes my ruthless red pen. This phase is maddening for me because it seems never to end, but I've begun to think of it as a period of gestation. Once my novel finally grows itself a proper pair of lungs and gets its heart beating with a regular cadence, then it can join the rest of the world on the outside of my mind.

Lately, I've been thinking about what kind of market my book will be born into. The publishing world is in a state of flux. People are reading differently on a number of levels these days. The rise of e-readers and instant downloads has made it tough for bookstores to keep afloat, which hurts my story-sweetened old bookseller's heart. That said, in addition to a mountain of hard-copy books that will someday probably fall on me and kill me, I also have an e-reader.

E-readers brought with them a convenience and anonymity that have ushered in a new zeitgeist of popular novel. Self-publishing is easier than ever, and many talented authors are choosing that route only to be picked up after the fact by traditional publishers. Readers are worrying less about what their friends would say if they caught them reading that book and making their real reading interests known by what rockets up the e-book bestseller lists.

I'm noticing more and more ironic juxtapositions in book marketing:

I realize that alphabetical order was, is, and always will be the almighty dictator of shelf position, but the choice of face-out display speaks for itself. Sorry, James Joyce. Ulysses just doesn't have enough sex-appeal to catch the modern reader's eye. (No offense to Valerie Joyner. I'm sure her book is perfectly wonderful, it just struck me as a product placement which would baffle Joyce if he were to wander through a Barnes & Noble.)

It's almost like people aren't sure what they want--something to speak to their inner desires, or their outer ones. Maybe they can't tell which ones are which. Either way, Wal-Mart makes it easy to grab an inspirational paperback to take to the church retreat and a steamy Harlequin for the drive up to the location:

In this schizophrenic market, there are a lot of opportunities for writers to wedge their little fingers in the cracks and pull open a book-sized hole for themselves if they're willing to give it a shot. It's heartening in many ways, because pubs are having to look at a lot of factors they once ignored and readers are paying attention to writers they would never have had access to just a few years ago.

All any of this rambling really means is that I'm still writing my book in my own head and that it is a patriot without a country at this point. It takes me full circle and I remember that at least it has me, and I can always just write for myself.

Then someday, when I put my foot down and make the time, when I stop doubting, when I stop procrastinating, my book will exist. Here's hoping there will be someone other than myself waiting to read it.