Inspiration Monday: Glass Half Full

I consider myself an optimist.

Some days test my limits to their last little optimistic droplets, but on the whole I can usually convince myself that in some small way or another, the glass is still half full.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I don't get horribly greedy with my half-full glass, hugging it tight to my chest and giving angry eyes to anyone who dares try to suck it dry.

Today was one of those days.

It was one of those, "I was put in traction and it was the best part of my day," days.

I'm not kidding, and the traction didn't even go right, so you know I mean it.

In case you didn't know (like I didn't before today), a traction setup is comprised of a weird table that reminds me of something a magician might use for easy disposal of person-chunks after the sawing-in-half trick, two thick belt thingies that look halfway between my dog's seatbelt harness and a medieval torture device, and a machine with a sole purpose to pull a person's lower portions away from their upper portions.

I'm generally fond of my lower portions being attached to my upper portions, so I was EXTREMELY NERVOUS when my physical therapist strapped me into the thing. She pulled and pulled on the straps with her whole body weight. "Can you breathe?" she asked. I said yes, and that gave her the cue to pull even tighter. "If you can breathe, it isn't tight enough!" she said with a perky smile and gave them another good tug. Then, just in case, she got Husband to give them a few more tugs for good measure.

Satisfied that even a superhero couldn't have pulled those straps any tighter, she turned on the rack...er...traction machine.

Let's just say that I know what the pair of jeans in the Levi's logo felt.

Rrrrrrrrrip!

Until I slipped out of the straps, that is.

It was my fault. I was breathing all along and I liked doing it so much, I didn't tell her.

Instead of squeezing the marrow out of my rib cage, the upper straps went slipping right on up and over my torso, catching on my arms and slipping up and up until I had to raise my arms over my head and the strap ended up over my mouth.

It was ridiculous. And hilarious. Despite how absolutely stupid I felt, it was still stretching my spine like it was supposed to, so I stayed the course. My PT, who is actually extremely competent and so nice I don't even threaten to kill her off in a novel when she pokes at all my hurt places, stood by the door to keep anyone from seeing how ridiculous I must have looked. She made sure everything was stretching me correctly (and safely) and asked me over and over if I was comfortable, which just made me laugh.

It is hard to laugh in traction, but it is possible, even with a strap covering half your face. "Yes, I'm fine," I tried to say, though it probably came out a little more like, "Yssmmffnnnn," roughly translated.

"I'm glad you have a good attitude," she said, finally allowing herself a laugh. It spread around the room until all the tension left was in my spine where it belonged.

Until she said that, I hadn't actually thought I did. Until then, I probably hadn't, truthfully. I realized then that a good attitude is a choice, and that I had chosen to laugh when I could have complained, chosen to be easy when I could have been hard. I still got my back stretched out (I'm probably taller now, and skinnier I hope), I can now write very accurately about characters tortured on the rack, and I learned something about purposeful optimism I can save in my pocket for later.

Optimism and pessimism are not polar opposites, they're points on a continuum called Reality. It doesn't matter who you are or where your set-point is on that continuum, it is your Reality. We are all "Realists" from where we sit. Sometimes all it takes to see the good in things is making up your mind that you can and you will. It will surprise you how readily good can appear if you just let go of the reasons not to see it.

If you're a writer, take this to the page, inside and outside. Give your characters a point of view and a purpose--if their glasses are half full, figure out why and test their limits. If their glasses are half empty, figure out why and test their limits. Then, take a look at yourself. See how your own glass is filled, then....figure out why and test your limits.

In the end, maybe it doesn't have to be about half-full and half-empty glasses anyway. Maybe we can withdraw from that debate and change the whole glass system. Take what's left in your glass, whether it be half full or half empty, and pour it into another, smaller glass. Then it is full and there are no two ways about it.

Play Nice and Keep It Above the Belt

I do not like most of my work while I'm working on it. I pick on it, I sneer at it, I hurt its feelings. I tell it that it is ugly and that I do not like the way it is shaping up, no siree, and that it better straighten up and fly right or I am going to be forced to give up writing altogether and take up basket weaving. The world has enough crappy novels, but not near enough artful baskets. Or so I tell myself and my poor, beaten-down writing.

I've learned that when I get like this, it means two things:

1. I'm a normal writer. Apparently this happens to everyone, and you'll never know how happy I was when I realized that Margaret Mitchell was probably ready to throw Scarlett over a banister a time or two, that J.K. Rowling probably has a few napkins covered in scribbles about Harry Potter getting a broomstick up the nose, and for a fact Stephenie Meyer wrote a faux version of Breaking Dawn for a friend called Breaking Down in which all her main characters died hilariously.

2. Normal writers need breaks. This is true of everyone and everything, and as much as I want to sit and poke my novel sore, it won't get written any faster or any better than if I walk away for a while and come back another day when it is more old friend than pushy house-guest. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all. If not fonder, at least tolerant.

If I'm hating on my work, then I can't pour any love into it. Good work needs to have the creator's enthusiasm weaved into every fiber. It deserves it. I deserve it. If no one in the world ever reads a word I write, the least I can do is love having written it. I can love it for existing, for the time we spent together. If I can do that, I'll always be proud of my work, lumps and all.

Today, that's what I'm working on. I'm trying to stop punching my work (and myself) in the face long enough to enjoy the fact that I am an artist and I am creating art. Anything much past that takes away from its simple truth, and it is in simple truths that we find the most happiness.

Write on, writers. Create and be fruitful in your art. It is what we were made for.

Inspiration Monday: Rainy Days and Mondays

It is raining. Actually, there is a creepy storm system overhead that looks like something from a made-for-TV-movie with lots of worried folks glaring at the sky and making grave statements about their various and sundry plot points before the inevitable bad CGI storm comes and wreaks havoc with all their well laid plans. (But never their hair or makeup. Never.)

There's always something about a good thunderstorm that wakes up something electric inside of me, maybe my own little jar of lightning, and makes me want to sink my teeth into a good book, a fierce nap, or to write like a mad-person. Maybe it's my introversion. During a thunderstorm, I don't have to look for excuses to stay quiet and be at home. Nobody asks where I am or what I'm doing--I'm at home of course, being quiet. There's a thunderstorm, for crying out loud. I'm where I belong, where everyone belongs.

Having a storm going on somehow removes the variables of life. You can't really go for a jog, not unless you want the neighbors staring out their windows and clicking their tongues at you. "Not enough sense to come out of the rain," they'd say, with a solemn headshake. "Poor, sad thing." The same goes for dog walking, bike riding, speed walking, and any other rain-sense requiring activity. But reading and writing? They're famous rainy day/night activities. It makes for a good setting, too. After all, where would the canon of literature be without the good old stand-by, "It was a dark and stormy night"?

It is an ever-fertile scenario, having a set of characters run inside by a storm. Some of them are probably like me, they head straight for a blanket and a bookshelf. Some of them are frustrated joggers, dog-walkers, bike-riders, and speed-walkers. A ruined outdoor barbecue, some streaked mascara, a leaky roof, a creepy drawing room with a raven tapping at the chamber door--one of these scenarios has got to get the creative juices flowing, and what better to do when it is raining both inside and outside your head?

Give a little thought to what a dark and stormy night means to you. Is it an opportunity to slow down, or is it a prison sentence? Would a little thunder and lightning spruce up your story and add a little color? Maybe you just want to be a rebel and walk your dog anyway, literally or figuratively. Either way, take your very own midnight dreary and let it turn you inside out.

Life Marches On and So Do I

After a really fun couple of weeks with a seriously aching back (read: not fun at all), I am on the mend. Kinda.

Even though I'm on desk duty at work, my doctor advised me that I could stave off a relapse by lying on my back with my legs propped up on a chair. Let's just say that I've ended up a few times lately with this as my view:

This end up.

At one point, my boss plopped down in the floor beside me, held up a stack of reports over both our faces, and we managed to have a meeting down there. Don't knock it. I'll bet her back felt better, too.

I have been going to physical therapy for a week now, and it has been an interesting experience. By interesting, I mean painful, mostly, but also rewarding.

One day while I was working on my "sit-stands" (which is exactly what you think it is, 10 reps, 2 sets, and yes, you can do it wrong--trust me), I scanned the room desperately, starving for anything to look at that would tear my mind away from the images of dull steak knives sawing me in half with every sit and every stand. I finally lit on one of the stretching tables where a therapist was working diligently with a determined-looking older man and his new artificial leg.

Suddenly, my sit-stands were a little less tedious. A bit. My PT, way too sweet for all my grumpy growliness, ushered me through my own paces and stretched me out like a stubborn piece of stale taffy. Eventually, she tucked me into a room with a heating pad, strung me up to an electrical thingy (yes, that's a technical term...or a brand name...or it should be) that basically electrocutes you a tiny, tingly bit, and then flipped off the lights so I could relax.

But I didn't. Not really. I thought about the man with the missing leg. I thought about him being my age, when he had two good legs. I wondered if he had appreciated them. I wondered if he wanted to go back in time to when he was four, when he scraped that knee and it bled real blood and pain. Would he tell himself to look close at that knee and that blood and cherish it because he might not always have the privilege? Would he go back to when he was a young man, in his twenties maybe, when he spent all his time on those legs, walking, running, dancing, kicking off the covers in the middle of the night? Did he ever think that there would come a time when he couldn't? Maybe he had played football, a kicker with a golden toe. Maybe he didn't and wished he did, cursing his own leg, which might have had a birthmark just like his father's, and never knowing that he would regret it with all his heart while he lay on a table to stretch a brand new leg that couldn't even bleed.

We were the last ones to leave in the evening, my husband, the nice PT, and me. I was stiff and sore when I hauled up off the table and waddled my way to the door. Just when I felt a self-pitying grumble well up in me, I glanced back to the table where the man had been. He was gone, finished for the day, probably eating his dinner and living his life, laughing to his loved ones about the ignorant people he caught pitying him, he who had two perfectly good legs as far as he and anyone who counted was concerned.

So I didn't pity him. Instead I respected him.

It's a funny thing about respect. It earns you so much more than pity. I did feel sorry for the man who didn't have what I have, what I got for free and didn't earn or especially deserve, but if I stopped there on that thought, it would have been pity. So I didn't.

I thought about what he did in the short time I watched him that I could do, too. He worked hard. He took advantage of opportunity. He went about the business of living his different-shaped life, and he made it look easy.

I could do those things, even with a messed up back. Maybe even better because of it. Anything, even pain, can be a gift if you sit still and get over yourself long enough to unwrap it.

Book Review: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

Brief Synopsis: The Slocumb family is no stranger to a vengeful God. Ginny "Big" Slocumb fetched up pregnant with her headstrong daughter, "Little" Liza, at the age of fifteen and was promptly booted out of her Southern Baptist home to fend for herself. Another fifteen years later, Liza showed up pregnant herself and left home shortly after the baby's birth, only to show back up on her mother's doorstep two hard-lived years later. Now her daughter, Mosey, is fifteen, and the Slocumbs are dead in the middle of another "trouble year." Liza, at a too-close-to-home thirty years old, has suffered a stroke that they chalk up to her rough past and methamphetamine use. Mosey is shrugging around in her skin, trying to figure out if she's sharing it with a sex-maniac who could take over any minute and repeat Slocumb history. When Big has Liza's favorite willow tree pulled up by the roots to make room for a therapeutic swimming pool, a box of tiny bones rips out what seams are left holding all of their lives together.

Published: 2012

Format read: Hardcover, until Husband caught me reading my signed first edition and made me buy the e-book to finish. Meanie.

Comparison: It is hard to compare this book directly to any other book because I haven't read anything else quite like it. Joshilyn Jackson's writing is whip-smart and tangy a la Haven Kimmel, but there's depth there, too. In this book, especially with Liza, she yet again shows off her unique skill in capturing the tangled-up complexity of the human spirit held in bondage that I've only seen done half as well in A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. In this work and all her others, she writes about poverty with a truthful, almost journalistic eye which reminds me of John Steinbeck. Her voice is so very different, but the heart is the same. She tells the worst of it like it is without pointing a single, judgmental fingernail. It is just how Steinbeck used the hard-luck Joads not only to break our hearts in The Grapes of Wrath, but to underline the tenacity of the human spirit, the universal worth of mankind, and hope which keeps right on springing up, even from nothing but salted earth. She does that so well that it squeezes my heart to pieces and I can taste sweat and dirt on my tongue.

Review: I have been a devoted fan of Joshilyn Jackson's work since I first read gods in Alabama as an ARC (Advance Readers Copy) when I was a wide-eyed, story-starved bookseller. I got the book off the freebie shelf in the back room of the store where it was mixed in with a pile of this and that. I picked it for the simple reason that it was the only book on that particular shelf that didn't have a black and white spine. Dumb way to pick a book, I know, but it worked out for me. I read that book in one voracious setting and have been an advocate for Ms. Jackson's books ever since. I've read everything she has put out to the public, including her wonderful blog, Faster Than Kudzu, and so should you.

If Joshilyn Jackson has a mid-life crisis and gives up fiction writing to spend the rest of her life writing the backs of cereal boxes, I will throw out all my Honey Nut Cheerios and read on.

So should you.

What I'm saying is that her books are good. Very.

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty does not disappoint. It has the same salty southern women running down its spine, this time three generations deep. The POV shifts between the characters, with Big and Mosey in first person (a feat in itself given the gap in their ages and personalities), and third person limited for Liza. In all of them, Jackson manages to keep in her signature playful style without sacrificing the individual voices of the characters. I have yet to figure out how she does it, turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns and basically batting around syntax like a cat with a ball of yarn, and somehow it makes things more clear. Maybe that's why her work feels so heartfelt. She says things the way we mean them, not the way we're told to say them.

I will admit that I had some trouble with this one when I started reading it. It was Liza. Right off the bat, we're told that she was a hellion from the womb, yet when we first meet her, she is a raisin-soft shadow of her former self. I had trouble picturing her young. My age. It was too wrong, too wasteful and unfair. Reading her chapters was hard going. I couldn't be in her head like I could be in Big's and Mosey's. I had to work my way in from a distance. Like Mosey and Big interpreting her "Mosey-baby" noise, or her "yes" and "no" signals, there was a tendency for me to throw my hands up and say it was too hard, too sad to look at her with her scrambled eggs trailing down the bad side of her face. I was feeling what Big and Mosey must have felt, and the frustration was almost unbearable.

Having read all of Ms. Jackson's work, I should have known better.

She does not write weak characters.

Ever.

Even when they're broken. Even when they think they're used up and spent. Even when they're captive in their own bodies. Even when she lets you pity them, it will only be for a flash, because she does not write weak characters.

Ever.

Eventually, Liza's chapters became my favorites. There was so much complexity to her character, this woman who did all the things we're told makes someone "bad" but she is so very, very good, so truly herself even when she is lost inside of her own broken body. A firecracker forced underwater is no less a firecracker at its core.

The book weaves in and out of their three lives, and eventually you come to see that there is far less truthful communication between the characters who can talk to each other than there is with poor damaged Liza. Big is tormented by loss and responsibility, and bursting with love for her family--and for what her family should be. Mosey is such an engaging character, wise for her years, but not so much that she's not a believable fifteen-year-old. She and her best friend Roger have a great, three-dimensional relationship that earns Roger his place as the Encyclopedia Brown clue-finder to assist with furthering the plot. There is enough mystery and puzzle-solving to keep the pages turning, but as I went, I realized that I wasn't just reading for the answers like the back of a crossword puzzle book (as I'm apt to do with many mysteries/thrillers. I'm looking at you, Dan Brown). I cared about the answers because I cared about the characters and all their jagged pieces. I wanted them to fit together, somehow, so that they could finally be whole.

That's the mark of a good literary fiction novel--you don't just want to know what happens/happened, you just want to know. Anything. Everything.

I would also throw in a mention that I wish more men would pick up books like this one. Yes, the cover is feminine, it has "pretty" in the title, and it doesn't just have a woman protagonist, it has THREE of them. However, I think if more men read books like this one, they would understand women so much more--what maternal instinct looks like from the inside, how fiercely we can love, how fiercely we can fight, and not to count us out, not even in what looks like the end of days. Strong women are not to be feared or reviled or ignored, but should be seen for their truth. We are allies, and when necessary, warriors.

"You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you." --A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, by Joshilyn Jackson.

Captive Audience

Yesterday, while I was at the laundromat with one of my most vulnerable clients and everything she owns that could possibly fit into a washing machine, my back flipped me the bird and went on strike. No really, I could actually hear its little overworked cusses bumping up my spine to my ears as I lost all strength to my lower body and excruciating pain ripped me into tiny little pieces.

If your back has never gone out, do not let it.

Do NOT.

Not even if you are really curious.

Not even if you are writing a really important novel about someone whose back goes out.

Do NOT.

I didn't want to freak out my client--this is an easy thing to do and usually requires hours to undo--so I just played it nonchalant. I leaned my elbow on a triple-load washer that was almost my height and tried to pretend that I was still breathing. I sneaked a call to my supervisor and she came in like Social Work Superwoman and took over with my client and drove her home. Husband then arrived to take me home. Getting in the car was difficult.

(The italics mean that it was OH SO PAINFUL THAT I LOST MY RELIGION IN THAT PARKING LOT. ALL OF IT.)

Getting out of the car was worse, but I did not have anymore religion to lose, so I just yelled a lot. I'm sure the neighborhood association thinks my husband is a horrible murderer. (Horrible because he's not good at it because I am still intermittently yelling for someone to hurry up and finish killing me when I move the wrong way.)

Last night, Husband left the TV on for me since I was forced to sleep on the couch. I was in a lot of pain and woke up in the middle of the night to find this blaring proudly:

 Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II.

No. Too sleepy and groggy and uncomfortable even to laugh at Godzilla. I looked around for the remote--which I spotted across the room where I had no hope of getting to it.

I was stuck. I watched Godzilla tromp his way through Kyoto while Rodan received a life-force boost from a chorus of children singing a magical song they heard emanating from a prehistoric plant. Meanwhile, this hatched from an egg that glows red like a giant mood ring when it is grouchy:

No, that's not Barney with a skin condition. That is Baby Godzilla. Yes, that's a proper name because that is what they named him. Or her.

Because of Baby Godzilla, they were able to glean that they weren't able to defeat Godzilla because Godzillas have extra brains. In their HIPS.

Right about then, when they started plotting to shoot out poor Godzilla's extra hip-brains to paralyze him, I started feeling some kinship with the old boy. I mean, he can't help it that he has big feet and Kyoto was in his way. They have his Baby Godzilla, for crying out loud. He's just looking for his kid. Or something. Either way, they shouldn't give him lower back pain. It's INHUMANE.

But they did. And then Rodan came into the picture and zapped Godzilla with his special child-song powers and made his hips better and he went off into the sunset with Baby Godzilla to smash cities another day.

I dozed off somewhere in there and woke up this morning still dreaming of Barney smashing Japanese landmarks. I thought that surely, SURELY this movie was a dream because if it had been real, I would not have watched it. Then I moved and yelled and hurt and remembered.

Where's Rodan when you need him?

Anyway, since I've been splayed out on the couch, I have realized that being a captive audience has its perks. I will no longer think anything my imagination conjures is too bizarre because Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II makes anything I come up with look positively sobering (and I have an in-progress novel involving mind-controlling towels. Seriously). I have gotten some quality time with the animals:

Also, I have no excuses not to read and write. A lot. I'm going to make the best of this.

And when I can't, when I have to make that inevitable excruciating walk to the bathroom, pay no attention to the screeching and groaning. It's just Godzilla tromping through the Memphis suburbs, minding her own business.

Inspiration Monday: Don't Judge Me

I just got back from an office supply store. I went in for one single thing, but it is school supply season and even though I do not have school or kids or any need of supplies, these are dangerous times for writing/drawing/paper-gluing types like myself.

I picked up my one-single-harmless-thing-I-went-in-for, and I headed toward the register. Then I turned around. I couldn't go into an office supply store and not go down the paper aisle. Not in school supply season. That would be UNNATURAL.

So I did. I meandered up and down, looking at the sale tags and chewing my lip. I have plenty of paper. I even make my own notebooks. See?

I have plenty of paper. I couldn't. I shouldn't.

I did.

Don't judge me.

I scuttled up to the register with my nose scrunched up and to the side like a defensive bunny wearing its "don't judge me" face. I tossed down the I'm-not-telling-you-how-big pile of these under my arm:

Composition notebooks, $1.00 each. What I hoped no one saw was that I dove into a display as tall as me to find these particular special ones. Yes, they were on the bottom, and yes, I was thrilled when I found them, and no, I didn't need them.

Don't judge me.

The cashier picked up the notebooks. "You must like these," she said glancing at my pile.

"Yes," I said and hurried through my wallet looking for my debit card. She was judging me. I could feel it. She didn't understand.

"Hmm," she said. "Do you mind telling me why?"

Judging. She was. I knew it.

"Well, I'm a writer. Er...at least, I write a lot. These ones are made in Brazil. They have the best paper, especially for fountain pens. These are the college ruled ones, and you almost never find them."

"Oh!" she said and flipped through them. "That's so funny--you're a writer, too! I'm in school for creative writing, and I am always looking for good paper I can afford. I'm going to have to get a pile of these myself!"

She hadn't been judging. I had.

We chatted a few minutes more about fiction writing and screenplay formatting and yes, where the last stash of the good notebooks were. I'm not selfish.

How many times have you missed out on making a connection with someone because you thought you could read minds? (Hint: You can't.) What about your characters? What makes them scrunch up their noses and hurry through their purses?

We all have quirks and foibles and idiosyncrasies, and most people are just a smidgen sensitive about them. Sprinkle some on your fiction and you'll be surprised at how many people can relate.