Going Inkless

How do you feel about colouring within the lines?  What about thinking outside the box?  What about stopping at a red light?  Waiting your turn?  Seizing an opportunity? It's complicated.  Chances are, you're some kind of mix between following the rules and going your own way.  Don't worry.  I'm no psychologist, but I think that's probably healthier than either extreme.  Still, these distinctions and the conflicts that arise when individuals disagree on the approach to any given situation can cause all kinds of trouble. For any society to function, there must be rules, and they must be obeyed.  Since prehistoric times, people have grouped together for protection and to combine their skills and strength.  It's just easier to survive when you don't have to do everything on your own.  But actions like hogging all of the mammoth meat or bludgeoning Grog because you want to steal his wife have a way of eroding the foundation of trust...

Well, we've finally done it.  After years of writing, editing, rewriting, soliciting agents, researching self-publishing, and formatting our book to suit the publisher, the novel my husband and I started together is available in paperback form.  Along the way, I've had to learn a lot of new things. I built a website, and I switched to an entirely new word processing program.  I've converted all sorts of files and studied advice on working with digital images to get the right results in the final print.  In the story, we've had to adjust some of our original ideas, and the book that's published now is a little different than the early manuscripts we distributed to friends and family for review.  But I think, all in all, it's a stronger piece. And it's fatter, too.  I honestly didn't realize how thick it would get when we converted it from standard letter sized pages to a 6 x 9 trade paperback book.  Still, it was a very satisfying feeling to hold the ...

Writing is, by its basic nature, a solitary activity.  There's only enough room for one at the keyboard or the notebook page.  To write, you're taking things out of your head and transferring them to paper.  Nobody is going to do that better than you because only you have the front row seat to that show.  You can try to get someone else to share your vision.  That's pretty much the point of writing.  But no matter how good you are at describing your ideas, the succeeding versions will always be just a little different.  It's just the way it is, and it's not a bad thing.  I've commented before on the nature of art being a collaboration between artist and audience.  Half the magic is in what your reader brings to the experience.  Still, to draw this back to my original point, nobody else is as close to the source of your story as you; so you write alone. At the same time, writing's basic nature is social.  Yes, authors are often ste...

     Some stories come to you out of nowhere, demanding to be committed to paper.  Some characters just drop in on you like unexpected house guests and take up residence in your skull until you agree to tell their tale.  I think that every writer has probably experienced this kind of inspiration.  It's what moves many to embrace the calling.  Later, at times when the writer sits down to consciously create something, it can be maddeningly frustrating that similar inspiration isn't on the same timetable.      But those flashes of ideas aren't really from nowhere.  Although the concepts may seem new to you, they are really the product of your own brain working without your conscious direction.  It's a feat of ordinary magic that your mind takes in disparate elements from your life and your environment, mixes them together and presents you with something you didn't even realize you were thinking about.  We all do this, write...

     I think every blogger has written the sorry-I-haven't-written-lately post, in some fashion at least.  I've done it before.  I'll do it again.  I'm kind-of doing it now.      When you commit to writing a blog, there's a certain expectation of regular offerings that breeds a certain guilt when those are not forthcoming.  I could make up a lot of chatter, a quick and mindless post of nothing. Still, I'd rather say something with these posts than merely fill a page.  So at times like these, it may get a little quiet.  Right now, there are big changes happening as I had hinted in my previous post.      For one thing, I will be leaving the job I have loved for the last 12 years in order to start a new position at the library.  There will be new things to learn and new working hours.  But even before that, there is all the business of extracting myself from the department I headed, the one where I hav...

     There is buried treasure in my house.  It lies in cardboard boxes and plastic bags deep within the basement, deposited there when I moved in nearly 20 years ago and layered over with newer boxes and bags.  The contents of these containers vary, sometimes notes or photographs, sometimes old letters or artifacts from my childhood- the kinds of things you don't just throw away.  As a collection, it's nowhere near complete.  There was more than enough chaos in my life before I came to rest here to ensure that pieces were lost along the way.  You may not be able to throw these sacred relics away, but you have to be prepared to accept that they will drift out of reach of their own accord.  And I have been prepared for that fact of life for some time now.  Long ago, I had resolved myself to the loss of my daughter's baby picture, the one taken at the hospital when she was only hours old.  It was only a thing, just a paper image of a m...

     Writing tends to be a solitary activity.  We may be able to perform it in crowded places if we're lucky enough to have the focus while riding the train or sitting in some common space.  When you come down to it, though, the actual act of stitching the words together into meaningful patterns is all done alone in your head.  With that basic fact established, I will also say that writing is more social than most other things you do alone.  For one thing, writers of fiction tend to walk around with all sorts of people in their heads.  Even when we are alone, our minds are often working in social ways.  But the aspect I wanted to examine in this post was the camaraderie among those who practice this solitary art.      While it could be said that authors are in competition with each other, you rarely see them behave as if they were.  There is a realistic limit on how many books may be published in the world, and...

     In the time between the last post and this one, I've been back and forth on what its subject should be.  One day, I'll think a particular topic is important to speak on, but before I can start putting words on the page, life comes along and distracts me.  Things happen that draw me away from my intention to write, or else my mind is drawn to another topic of equal importance.  New ideas or interests occur to me, and they too are shuffled to the bottom of a list that includes more pressing ways to eat up my day.  At the end of it, or rather at the point where I can see breathing room to actually put a post together, I'm faced with all sorts of possibilities.  There are half a dozen things I might expound on, some merely interesting and frivolous, some with weight and purpose, and some I know would have been perfect if only I remembered what they were.  Where to start?  and What to leave behind?      Those two questio...

Cielle is not the name my mother gave me, at least not directly.  What's more, nobody calls me by that name when speaking to me, and it's not even my outgrown childhood nickname.  It does link back to those times, however.  My sisters and I were all given names that start with "C", and since our last names were all the same, the only difference in our initials came with the middle names.  When we needed them for property marking or to distinguish our scores for a game, we were always C.A, C.L, C.B, C.F, and C.M.  Mine was just the only combination that sounded like a name of it's own, a sort of feminized version of the French word for heavens, le ciel .  Ever since that time, it has been my all-purpose nom-de-plume and secret identity; so, when I had to establish a user name for this blog years ago, it seemed a natural choice.  This was to be a collection of personal meditations and a way to reach out beyond street-level interactions.  It wasn't a...

     It's approaching a month since I last posted on this blog.  There are reasons.  As I've mentioned before, where there is silence, there is still activity you're not seeing...yet.      Among all of the usual summer things to do, I've been working at building the website that will display some of the short stories we (my husband and I) have been writing.  It's slow going, and every little piece is a puzzle I have to solve.  There has been frustration and discovery, and enormous satisfaction in the simplest accomplishments like getting the title to show up or getting a menu to work right.  I still feel a little like a fraud, not really knowing what I'm doing, but jumping in and making it work anyway.  The good news is that it shouldn't be much longer before I have the framework ready and can start managing the site instead of just building it.  So, please be patient while my attention is elsewhere.  I'm hoping it ...

     It's a recurring debate we have, my husband and I.  He argues that the universe is built of numbers and math, and I tell him that's nonsense.  Like most of our conflicts, this one is just for fun.  We both know what's up, that the real answers are somewhere beneath all the words, and we actually agree more than the debate would indicate.  Still, we take opposite sides for the sake of the game.      There is plenty of "proof" out there for his scientific view.  Significant numbers and ratios seem to be all around us when we examine our physical world.  For me, it proves nothing.  The universe is.  Numbers and math were just invented to help us understand what is.  There's really no more significance to any given number than any other.  They have no power of their own.  They are only footholds in a greater comprehension.  The relationships are really the key.  Their pattern is the base of...

     Legos are perfect training for the creative process.  We didn't have a bunch around the house when I was young.  There were a few among the hand-me-downs and garage sale toys we played with, though, and I used them at houses of friends or relatives.  I remember that regardless of how big the supply or how small the project, there was a good chance you'd be one short of the right size and colour for the job.  No matter.  That was good for teaching how to improvise a solution.  Standard blocks and other building toys were good practice, too, and the habit of reusing materials in our house gave me plenty of opportunity to stretch my creative muscles.  My Barbie drove around the house in a tissue box convertible, wore designer handkerchief dresses and ate from acorn cap plates.  Seeing things in new ways was standard procedure.  I only mention the Legos because playing with them is a common experience for many; so it's an easi...

     One of my sisters can juggle.  She may not be the only juggling sister, but she's the only one I've seen doing it.  She does pretty well.  We're not talking about flaming knives level, but she's juggled all the usual less deadly objects.  She performs smoothly on her own or with a partner.  I've only ever been able to manage three items for a very short while, myself.  It's enough to get the idea of it, though.  To be successful at the feat, you have to keep moving.  You have to do what needs to be done when it needs doing, and any break in timing could undo the whole dance.      This same juggling sister once commented that she didn't know how I managed to juggle so many things in my life.  It was long ago when I was a young wife, taking care of a home and a child, working part time and trying to start a business, and at the same time, diving into several creative projects of my own.  It's done just ...

     It was some time around 2am on Saturday morning, and I was sitting on a hospital bed with a needle in my arm, waiting for a nurse or doctor to return.  We were at the emergency room in response to a crisis that turned out to be less life-threatening than I feared but frightening nonetheless.  Me, asking to see a doctor.  You know something had to be wrong.  So, we were sitting there at a calmer moment, and my husband reached into my backpack that he had filled hastily on our way out of the house and pulled out my notebook.      "How are you going to use this one in Ullen's story?" he asked, smiling.  This was one of those moments when it became absolutely clear that he is perfect for me.  No socks in the bag, but he brought my notebook.      I told him I doubted this particular event would work with that storyline, following a weaponsmith who had fallen on hard times in his pseudo-medieval fantasy world....

Ah, Summertime! When life becomes a full-speed tumble through weddings, graduations, picnics, and all sorts of social events that rush from invitation to "holy cow! That's tomorrow?  Wait, what day is today?" so fast you can feel the breeze as they pass.  Your evenings are spent with chores you couldn't get to on the weekend, and you barely have time to breathe much less compose a thoughtful blog post. What happened to the time when summers were long days filled with tree-climbing, bike rides, fishing and swimming?  When soft dark nights were right for stargazing, firefly hunts or crack-the-whip?  Then again, I guess that was just another kind of tumble. So, point one: I apologize for the posting delay, and the meager offering this time around. And point two: If I don't get around to another post as soon as you'd like, please imagine me with a jar of fireflies. And, yes, it's close enough to summer; my thermometer tells me so.

Somewhere in my early teens, I suddenly came to the realization that I had quite a few stories to tell and not so much time to do it in. I had always been writing and had always followed creative sparks in other arts wherever they lit up my imagination, but this moment was my epiphany. Moment is the appropriate word, too, because it was that sudden. One minute I was more or less typically shortsighted as other kids my age, and the next, the sky opened up and dropped a sense of mortality on my head. There was no apparent impetus for the revelation, no sudden winking out of a young life that presaged the thought. All at once, I just knew, and it seemed like the knowledge had been lurking in the dark corners of my mind all my life, that there was somewhere I was supposed to be and I was running out of time to get there. Some people might classify it "a calling," and I suppose it could be, but to me it's always been this weird little thing that happened to me when I wa...

In writing, as in most things we do, people tend to settle into patterns. We develop habits, both good and bad. The more we write, the more we start to take ownership of the language. There are grammar rules we honor above others (different for each writer, of course) and cringe at the transgressions when we see them in others' work. We form attachments to certain words or phrases and use them time and again in our writing. Yet we also get quirky with language as it becomes a familiar friend. We break rules where we choose and cobble together new words where the old ones just don't seem to fit. These choices become distinctly ours. The style and the rhythm of our words repeats unconsciously in each new story. Though the content may differ, the pattern is familiar. It's the trellis beneath the vines, a comfortable structure for ideas to grow on. Without realizing it, all of these habits gradually develop into a recognizable voice. In a similar way, most write...

There are fluid properties to free time, whether vacations or their lesser cousins, weekends. You would think it would stay put in its own neat little pile. Here is the time that's mine, you could say. I've carved this piece from the block I share with the world, and it's my time to relax and be free to do what I want to do. It would seem to be the definition: Free Time. But instead, it seeps out of the corral you've designed. It leaks or ebbs from where you had intended to keep it, and you end up filling that free time with responsibilities and mundane tasks rather than the things you say you'd do if only you had the free time. This is my twentieth year at my workplace, so I've been allotted more vacation time than ever before. It's so much that I had to plot most of the days at the start of the year, spread out across every month, just so I won't run the risk of realizing I have a whole pile left at the end of the year. Theoretically, ...

If you've ever taken an art class, chances are, you have been taught to notice negative space. Maybe, you've taught yourself or recognized it accidentally at some time when your mind was left to play ungoverned. The term and its definition could be new to you, and in truth, the two don't mesh as neatly as one might expect. Negative space is the blank part of the composition. It comprises all the unmarked territory on the canvas, the empty piece of the picture. By calling it negative, we are expressing that this is the part without. No line, no form, no active participation of the artist. However, as I've said, the term is deceptive. In recognizing negative space, we are seeing the shape of what isn't there. The artist comes to know the weight and texture of those absences and respects that what the artist doesn't do can be as powerful as what they do. Once you unlock this idea, you start to sense the spaces between all things. Negative space is not l...

My notebook is well-travelled. This one has been with me for thousands of miles, taken along on road trips and camping adventures so it would always be handy when inspiration struck or to fill long hours with useful activity. It's been written straight through from the top of each page to the very bottom. Notes and rewrites clutter the margins. There are lines marked out and rephrased in half-height letters sandwiched between the usual rows. For clarity, I began the book by writing only on one side of each page, so that the marks wouldn't show through to muddle the other side, but when I reached the last page, there was nowhere else to go. So, I flipped the book and started a second pass. There are notes scribbled on the covers, and the whole book is so dense with ink that I imagine you could measure the difference in weight compared to when it was new. This current notebook holds chapters of the novel as they were when first conceived, scraps of other stories, outline...