G for Goodall

                                                  How I Met Jane Goodall

           In 1974, I worked as a reporter for a small-town daily newspaper and the man I was married to, worked for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City. Zoo stories were easily available for my feature articles. Plus, let’s face it, photos of animals at the zoo need not meet professional standards to attract attention, and attention was my first priority as a reporter. Front page and all that.

          Dr. Roger Fouts was at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute of Primate Studies then. You may be familiar with his work with the chimpanzee Washoe who not only learned to communicate using American Sign Language for the Deaf, but taught a young chimpanzee to also use ASL.

Dr. Fouts arranged for Jane Goodall to speak on campus. It was not well-publicized. People at the zoo were told about it and that’s how I heard about it. Dr. Goodall was not that well-known here then.

I had read her book In the Shadow of Man. And I was very interested in hearing her speak. The book discussed her work with chimpanzees in Tanzania, including the first recorded observations of chimpanzees fashioning and using tools. Observations that led anthropologists to rethink the definition of ‘human.’

There were no more than 50 people there to hear her speak, so I did get to meet her and she signed my paper back copy of her book. She was very quiet to the point of shyness. She wore little make-up and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Not a typical celebrity, at all.

In 2007, she was back in Oklahoma as part of Oklahoma City University’s Distinguished Speakers Series. Maybe because of programs on public television or national geographic, whatever, now the woman was famous. I can’t tell you how many people were there, but the place was packed.

After her presentation, my daughter and I waited in a line snaking back and forth through the gym to get her signature and exchange a few words with her. Of course she didn’t remember me, but she did remember that time she spoke at OU. She thought those people then constituted a ‘crowd.’

She still was very quiet, though more calm than shy, I think. She still wore little make-up and her hair in a ponytail.

 

                                 

F is for First Word

F is for First Word

          “George, dear, do you know what time they’re coming?” She asked over the noise of the vacuum cleaner.

            Without lowering the paper he moved his pipe to the other side of his mouth and lifted his feet.

            She wound up the vacuum cleaner cord. “Would you just put this away for me?”

            He folded his paper and laid it on the end table.

            She straightened the magazines on the coffee table. “Don’t leave that there. Put it in the trash. There’ll be another in the morning.” She plumped the throw pillows. “George, what are you doing?”

            He nodded toward the vacuum cleaner and opened the coat closet.

“No, dear. It goes down the hall.”

A timer went off in the kitchen.

“Dear, would you open this window for me?” She called after him. “The whole house smells of that pipe.”

They passed in the hallway.

“Don’t wear your hat in the house, please.”

He put his hat in the coat closet and raised the window. The cobbler did smell good.

“I don’t know Madge’s new husband very well. Do you think he likes rhubarb and strawberry?” She handed him the waste basket to empty. “Oh, you don’t know, do you? You haven’t met the man yet.”

He took the basket and headed for the garage. He heard dishes clinking. She would be putting the coffee service on the sideboard.

“George,” she called. “When you get through with that, would you see that there’s plenty of room in the drive for them to park?”

He brought the waste basket back in.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, setting the cobbler out to cool. “They’ll be here soon. Don’t you think you should change that jacket? Your new gray cardigan would look nice.”

He examined the now empty bowl of his pipe, picked up his tobacco pouch and lighter, and put them all into the breast pocket of his khaki jacket.

“I think he likes football,” she said. “You might talk about that.”

He went to the coat closet and got his hat.

“George?”

He bent down and kissed the top of her head.

“George, where are you going?”

“Fishing,” he said.

 

E is for Expository Writing

 

E is for Expository Writing

            At which I am very good. Expository is the adjectival form of the word exposition, which is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as a statement or rhetorical discourse intended to give information about or an explanation of  . . . . The very definition of the word can send you to the cereal box in search of something interesting to read.

As a fiction writer expository writing is the bane of my existence. Well, that and clichés. I am not alone in this. Robert Jordan, author of the fantasy series Wheel of Time, writes an exciting story filled with heroes and heroines who must battle against terrifying beasts and stupefyingly evil villains to save the world from the Dark Lord. So exciting that I stay up too late to see what happens next. And this is my second time through these fourteen books. So actually I know what happens next. And I love it.

BUT, it makes me crazy when he describes in detail the manner of dress peculiar to each country in the world every time one of those citizens appears in the story. Or describes in detail the varied forms trollocs come in, and that Ogeir have eyes “the size of tea cups.”

I understand the need to tell readers everything the author knows about his world or his characters or their back stories. But does the reader have the same need. Indeed, do they have the same interest and enthusiasm in all the things the author has researched, imagined, and invented? Even more importantly, is this information necessary for the reader to understand the story?

For example, my character must travel from Oklahoma City to Denver. Nothing in particular happens on the trip to affect the story. The only thing that is important is that three chapters into the story he be in Denver instead of Oklahoma City.

In my research I can discover that he could drive north on I-35 to Salina, Kansas, turn west onto I-70, pass through open prairie, pass by several wind farms, and see a herd of antelope. But I don’t have to share all that with my reader.

I can just say, Exhausted from his eleven hour drive from Oklahoma City, Brad fell asleep at the wheel and ran head-on into a semi.

Done and dusted.

D is for Demons and Daffodils

 

 

                                                              Demons and Daffodils

             I did all the normal things. Grew up. Got married. Had three beautiful babies. Two of them are in the next room. I don’t know where Jeremy is.

            Poor Jeremy. Unlike my generally uneventful life, his life has been filled with drama. Most of it came out of his own head, like Athena. Full-blown but his were not beautiful. I miss him. The little boy he was. And even the young teen he became.

            My memories are clearer today than they have been in a while. Drugs do that to me. They mask most of the pain, but they also blur my mind. I think that must be what they do for him. Maybe he needs the loss of both – the pain and his mind.

            The last time I saw him, he tried to explain. He talked about demons roaring in his head, not like lions, but like monster trucks. I don’t know what that sounds like.

My sounds are little ones like insects, crickets. The doctors have a name for mine. Tinnitus. Most of the time, I can ignore it or cover it with the fan.

Jeremy talked about pain, too. Not physical pain like mine, but the pain in his chest when the demons squeeze his heart until he can’t stand it. And make it hard for him to breathe.

Shae, my daughter, my baby, tried to find him so he could be here. Everyone wanted him here, even my eldest. Teddy’s like his father, a big cheerful man. He takes adversity when it happens, moves through it as best he can, then finds something interesting to jump into next. A new job, a new marriage, sometimes something as simple as a new way to the store when the old road is blocked. In that way he’s more like me.

Ted and Shae are both fixers. If there’s a problem, they can’t rest until they find a solution. I think that’s why this whole experience has been so difficult for them. It’s taken them a long time to accept what’s happening to me. They use words like fight and overcome and survive. For a while it seemed like I spent too much time fighting them. Trying to get them to see that I just simply would not survive this.

I wanted to outlive Jeremy’s demons and wait until he could be here. 

I thought I would wait for the daffodils, but we’ve had a long winter and it snowed yesterday.

My kind husband brought me flowers today. And I’m glad I don’t have to wait anymore.

 

 



C is for Character Development

C is for Character Development

 

If you want to write and write well, no matter the genre, whether memoir, thriller, or a grant proposal, you need skills. I recommend working with a good writing teacher. You can check out my teacher at www.williambernhardt.com. Bill always says, "show don't tell."

 

The following exerpt is from my, as yet, unpublished murder mystery, Murder on Ceres. The story starts out on a colony in low orbit around Ceres, the largest body in the Main Asteroid Belt. The protagonist is a police detective named Rafe. This scene introduces his mother Rose. Lucy is a friend of his wife Terren. Terren is distraught over the death of a very close friend. Charles is Rafe's father.

Door chimes startled Lucy awake. She glanced at the screen and saw Terren’s mother-in-law in the pop-up. Rose Sirocco’s eyes gazed inquiringly up at the door cam. Green eyes like Rafe’s. Two of the few people she knew with green eyes. She liked having someone look up to her, or at least seem to look up to her. Even a much older person. To be fair, at 162 centimeters, they were exactly the same height. Short by Cererian standards.

Her reader slipped to the floor as she got up to answer the door.

“Mrs. Sirocco.”

“Hello, dear. Didn’t Rafe tell you I was coming to sit with Terren?” Rose Sirocco looked her up and down. Probably noting her rumpled appearance.

Lucy finger-combed her straight brown hair. “Yes, ma’am. He did. I must’ve dozed off.” She picked up the fallen reader. “Three chapters deep in the latest Turner thriller. Guess it’s not that thrilling.”

“Oh, keep at it, dear.” Rose set a bright pink bag emblazoned with a crisp letter “S” on the floor. “Though not quite as thrilling as his last book. Still, it’s worth reading.” She put her blue beret and handbag, each also marked with an “S” on the entry table next to Rafe’s chess board.

She centered the white queen on the correct square. “Charles is forever accepting things in lieu of money for his legal services. This was from that woman they thought embezzled from the hospital.” An antique from Earth, the chess set was probably very valuable. “I can’t remember for sure. Maybe it was from that man accused of killing his wife and her lover. A nice man, really. Ah well, it was a good gift for Rafe.”

She straightened the mirror over the table. “Don’t you think this looks so much better here than it did in that tiny little place they used to live in?” She plumped her iron gray curls into shape. The hat had not flattened her hair at all. Like her, those curls would not be restrained.

“Don’t you have reading glasses, dear?” Rose turned to the house controls near the door and brought the lights in the living room up to near full-sun, dialed the room temperature down, and switched off the lights in the garden.

 “I think they’re much easier on your eyes.” She pulled food containers out of the pink bag. “Charles thinks mine are too heavy. They make little dents on my nose, but I think the graphics are so much better than the new ones.”

Lucy didn’t offer her opinion. She didn’t find an opportunity to.

 

B is for Blooms

                              

                        April 2, 2014     B  is for  Blooms

 

      We have two blooms today. Our hibiscus is sitting in the front doorway to catch what ever scrap of sunshine comes her way. Alas, no sunshine today.

       My mother didn't keep hibiscus in the house. In Oklahoma she had hardy hibiscus outside. She did have house plants that lived inside in the winter and outside in the summer.

      Momma was very like her plants. She thrived in the sunshine. Cloudy, winter days were not good for her. Daddy built her a dining area that had a wall of windows facing south. There was a big open yard between the house and the barn with woods all around. She had bird feeders and pans of water for the wild animals sharing her living space. They had chickens and rabbits and dairy goats. And sometimes a couple of pigs or steers. One to sell and one to put in the freezer. And Daddy always had a big vegetable garden.

      She would sit at her table smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and watching her world. And she would think. She wasn't much to talk about what she was thinking, but she wrote. Letters, mostly. This was in the days before facebook and blogging.

       Her sister lived two and a half or three hours away, so they didn't often get to visit. Momma didn't like to talk on the phone but she and Aunt Dorothy visited regularly by mail. Long newsy letters about the animals around them, their children, the weather.

      Both were readers so they knew how to tell a story. They evoked the senses. The way the sunlight glinted off the brilliant yellow of the cottonwood tree in the fall when the world around them was going grey and brown.

      The scent of old fashioned roses, of honeysuckle, and lilies of the valley. The deafening clatter of hail on the metal roof. The taste of English peas right out of the pod while she stood in the garden.

      The shock of a bobcat snatching one of her chickens and leaping the fence with it before she could get to it.

      The humor of a squirrel dropping an ear of corn it had stolen out of the garden. The little thief dropped it on the patio and proceeded to quarrel at the humans because they were sitting on that patio and it was afraid to come down and retrieve the corn.

      I don't know what my mother thought about the questions our culture seems obsessed with -- politics or religion or celebrity foibles. If they interested her, I don't remember her ever saying. But I do remember experiencing the world around us through her, and I learned to pay attention to that world myself.

A is for Antepenultimate

A to Z Blog Challenge -- Day 1 A is for Antepenultimate

 Into the Tunnel

by DragonWolfACe 

My Antepenultimate Re-Write

 

     I thought I was done. I sent my manuscript to my editor. I knew I'd have a re-write when she finished with it. There'd be grammatical errors, errors of continuity, conceptual errors, and errors I didn't even imagine. But I am a writer. I can fix them.

     This was to be my final re-write before sending it to my beta readers. When they finish with it, I might need to polish it a bit, then send it to press. That shouldn't take long. Right? And I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

      At some point I understood that there'd have to be one more re-write before I could send it out. I would read the whole story in its edited form and do whatever re-writing it needs. That light at the end of the tunnel was a bit farther away than I'd thought. But I've been writing it this long, a little longer will make improvements that make it worth doing. So this was my penultimate re-write.

      Penultimate is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as the next to the last.

     Then my editor dropped a bomb, "but you have to add three more scenes including a completely new final scene." But my final scene is perfect. I love my final scene just as it is. And that light is around the curve in the tunnel. And I can't tell how far away.

      "Kill your darlings," she says.

      That tunnel's floor is rutted and the walls are jagged. My way is not smooth or short. Well, damn.

      Words are my life. So, this is my antepenultimate re-write. Antepenultimate is defined as coming before the next to the last.

      Wish me luck.