Crossing the line
The nature of my current WIP has me thinking about the nature of morality. However varied people’s moral stances may be, most of us have one, bordered by the lines we believe we would not cross. Some of those lines seem absolute, like the belief, say, that we wouldn’t – couldn’t – kill someone. We take wedding vows believing wholeheartedly that breaking them would be crossing the line. Some areas of the line are a bit more fuzzy: maybe we’ll tell a little white lie to spare someone’s feelings, but “real” lies leap over to the wrong side. But the thing about the lines we wouldn’t cross is that we always seem to imagine them as lines in the sand. Been to a beach lately? The tide comes in and washes away lines just as well as it does castles, the wind shifts and blows dry sand around, and, sometimes, we smooth over our own efforts with a sand-covered foot and start all over again. Lines are as easily erased as created, in sand and in life. How many men conscripted to the trenches of WWI – or any other war – would have said they could kill when they were home with their families going to school every day? How many parents ever believed they could shoplift before their children’s hunger pushed them to do it? And how many people grew up, fell in love, and got married believing they’d ever be able to have an affair? That last one is important in my WIP, which is what got me thinking about the changeable nature of certain so-called absolutes in the first place. It seems to me that the impermanent nature of lines in the sand isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We change, our beliefs in what’s right and wrong shifts, even if only slightly, with changes in our circumstances, age, and wisdom. But it has me wondering: is there anything unchangingly absolute, black-and-white and permanent in us? Is there anything we wouldn’t do, given sufficient motivation? I don’t know. But I do know the questions have given my main character a whole lot to think about. And that makes for a great writing day. Share...
Under the Surface
In honour of my dear friend Pam, whose recent post about her husband’s special mug was one of my favourites on her brilliant blog, below is a picture of my new giant tea mug. I spotted it on the first day of our summer vacation this year, and couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I went back to buy it. I’m not a particular fan of the character pictured on it; it was the message that caught my attention. Like most writers, I’m an avid people watcher. I love speculating about what’s really going on with that couple at the airport or that woman scowling into her cell phone at the grocery store. It’s not about judgement, but simple human interest. What’s there under the surface? What’s her story? What’s his? Is it what it appears to be or something completely different? The speculations aren’t personal to the people involved, because I don’t know anything about them, truthfully, but the questions feed my writing, inspire scenes or whole plot points or even spark the birth of a new novel idea. And people are just plain interesting to me. But of course, the most interesting ones, the ones that have become the most important to me, are the ones who let me see – and let me be – the dashing hero behind the grumpy façade or the goofy friend behind the shy exterior. I’m lucky to have a few of those people in my life, and I’m abundantly grateful for them. Hope you have a few, too. Share...
Sunday fun
My daughter’s favourite thing to do on weekend mornings is, well, nothing. After a busy week at school, the lure of TV, toys, and time to play makes her tough to drag out of the house sometimes. But it’s a beautiful day today, and I think we were all in the mood to do something. When I asked her what she wanted to do today, expecting to hear the usual pitch for free time, the first thing out of her mouth was “Go bowling?” Not quite what I expected *g*, but it’s something we haven’t done in ages, so what the hell. Off we went to our local bowling alley, where we dutifully donned our rented shoes. I’m a terrible bowler, but I ignore that reality and just have fun. We cheer for each other, jump up and down when we actually do well, and generally make fools of ourselves for a couple of hours. It was great. And taking the time to do it made it seem much easier to come home and get back to work, somehow. Share...
Shortlist… check
After much discussion and deliberation, we finished the shortlists for the fiction and non-fiction sections of the writing contest at the SiWC, the two categories for which I volunteer as a reader. Now karen, the conference – and contest! – coordinator gets the very pleasant job of notifying the people whose stories have been shortlisted. Congrats to all of them. Reading for the contest is a fascinating professional development exercise for me every year. There’s nothing quite like reading a mind-numbing number of stories back-to-back to highlight what works and what doesn’t, and the task never fails to motivate my own writing. What works? – Consistency. Consistent voice. Consistently good use of language. Consistent verb tense. Consistent mood and tone. – Plausibility. I don’t care how bizarre the world of your story may be; if you make me believe it’s real, I’ll go with you. (see also: consistency) – Coming full-circle by creating an ending that works with the flow of the story. – Meeting the guidelines. Keep your word count within the published upper AND LOWER limits. There’s $1000 prize for the first place winners of our contest, so it’s well worth putting pen to paper for next year. Share...
Generosity
Seems like I’m encountering generosity all over the place at the moment. My dentist is crowding and re-working his day tomorrow so that I can get some necessary work started and finished before I leave for the conference. I think it’s probably cutting into his lunch hour to do it for me, and I didn’t ask him to. In fact, I told him he really didn’t need to do that, but he insisted. The BC government cut annual PAC grants in half at the last moment, long after we’d already earmarked the anticipated funds to pay the rest of the bill for our brand new playground addition at my daughter’s school. I put out the word to all the parents in our school, and within a week, almost half the families chipped in from their own pockets at the most expensive time of the school year in a tough economy. We were stuck and they didn’t hesitate. Pretty amazing. My mum’s on a cruise this week. One of the ladies at her dinner table is older and in need of a little extra help. The waiter and maitre d’ go beyond expectations every single night to make sure she gets a meal she can manage and even to cut up her food for her with no judgement, no hesitation, just matter-of-fact helpfulness. I don’t care if they are working for tips; that kind of generous service is above and beyond what anyone would expect. Have you seen generosity around you lately? Tell me about it in the comments. Share...
Ch-ch-ch-changes
The other day, my good friend and fellow writer kcdyer said she thinks this is the time of the biggest changes in the publishing industry since the introduction of the printing press. She’s probably right. Minutes before she said it, we’d filled out release forms for a podcast (and who’d even heard of such a thing a few years ago?) we were doing to talk about the Surrey International Writers Conference. On the form, there was space to fill in all our contact information, including email, Facebook, Twitter, and our own websites. Last time I filled out any sort of release, they asked for my phone number. I used to think my great grandmother had seen more change in her lifetime than most of us could hope to. She lived from 1887-1987. Think about that. Pretty much every technology we take entirely for granted these days was developed or came into common use in her lifetime: electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, TV, flight, cars, computers… the list is much longer than those few examples and pretty hard to beat. But even if our own lists look less impressive on the surface than hers does, twenty-two years after her death, we already live in a world that would seem awfully different to her. Thin airmail envelopes with letters penned on both sides of the paper to save the weight with, if you were lucky, a tiny, grainy black-and-white photo enclosed, which you’d pore over, eager for even that much of a look at relatives you may never set eyes on again have given way to emails and Skype, where grandparents can look at brand new grandbabies smiling at them from half a world away, live on their screens. When I was a kid, video calling belonged to the Jetsons and Star Trek. Now it’s real. And the changes keep on coming. Wonder what the next 22 years will bring? In my own life, all that connectivity has changed my path more than once. I met my husband on a local BBS before anyone had heard of the internet, dialing up on a 300 baud modem to chat with local teens. Meeting in person meant describing clothing or carrying something specific to be recognised, since there was no way to exchange photos back then. In the years since, I’ve met some of my closest friends online, and not one of them lives in my neighbourhood. I’ve had the best free education on writing available by participating in the Compuserve Books and Writers forum, and it was there that I found out about the Surrey conference, the best of its kind in North America, which happens to take place less than an hour away from my house. Next month, I’ll be there again, spending in-person time with some of the friends I keep in touch with online. And after that, I’ll be starting a new job, coordinating that same conference I would never have heard of without the internet. So, with all that in mind, I figured it was time to start filling in some of the blanks on that release form. First up, this blog. Maybe Twitter next. We’ll see. Kathy Share...
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