Category Archives: Uncategorized

June 10, 2024 · 2:32 pm

Identity

“We grow, regress, get stuck, fragment, hide, and find ourselves over and over again.” – Audrey Stephenson, Psychotherapist.

Learn!

Dear Ones,

Today’s readings and my own writing are themselves fragments struggling to find growth. I began by looking at my query status on Query Tracker. Added another rejection to the list. Okay. Next I wrote a short chapter in a new manuscript, one that I do not love in the way that I love the finished one I haven’t found an agent for. It’s hard to fall in love with a new manuscript sometimes. For me, anyway. I am sentimental, perhaps.

To escape, I ventured outside to the laundry room, which is separated from the main house by only a few feet, thinking I would do some productive laundry readying for my work week which begins tomorrow, Tuesday, which is quite wonderful right?–not on Monday, dreaded Monday–but on Tuesday, which I have to be grateful for. And I am. So, a little laundry, and then back to writing, I thought. Until I spotted the giant bug on the laundry room door. Yes, the Mormon crickets are still upon us here. Clearly a sign not to do the laundry.

Then I wrote in long hand–natural left-handed cursive usually brings me back to myself. Maybe even always when I spend enough time there. Today’s topic in my guided journal was Soul Searching: The quest to unlock one’s true self is an ongoing process, because we’re changing all the time (Breathe Journal, c2023. Guild of Master craftsman Publiscations Ltd. http://www.breathemagazine.co.uk. 72-3). Here are two of the prompts given in the journal and my responses:

  1. *Observe every aspect of your surroundings–from the bed you sleep in, to the transport you use. Things around you can shine a light on how you interact with your environment and indicate what you believe about yourself. What do you notice?

Sue’s pillow

Me: My bed must be clean and bright, soft and matchy-matchy- and made! Looking around me: Polished wood. Sunlight. Windows. Plants. Crystal. Books. Lois’s quilt. Photos. Art. Candles. Sue’s pillow. Baskets. Listening to music…

Lois’s quilt

(After I finished, I noticed I didn’t observe “the transport” I use. I could take a picture of my feet, which is what I try to use the most, but we don’t have a mani-pedi salon in Austin. Then I thought of my dear Jeep, Joni Blue. She’s not new, but she’s paid for, and she’s taken us to many beautiful places. She’s currently outside with the crickets, so I will not be going outside to take her picture.)

2. *Breathe. You will be astonished by how often you hold your breath. Just notice. Drop your shoulders, stretch your neck, allow your abdomen to soften. Breathe. Notice what comes up as you come back to yourself and jot down any thoughts.

Me: This is one of the best gifts I learned way back in Lamaze childbirth class and years later in yoga–the magic loosening and lightening of the body and mind through the breath. Surpisingly, I still forget to practice it, often until I am panicked. I need reminders.

Time to breathe

For today, perhaps this enough. Two hours of dedicated writing, reading, journaling, and blogging. If it doesn’t feel good enough, perhaps it’s because “we grow, regress, get stuck, fragment, hide, and find ourselves over and over again,” and that’s all part of the progress.

Wishing you growth and rest, a room of your own, and the company of good souls. I’d love to hear what you’re working on, or not working on, or dreaming about. Thank you for reading, following, and commenting on my blog. Fondly, Lori

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May 31, 2024 · 4:09 pm

100th Post, a New Library, and Mormon Crickets

Austin, Nevada last week.

Hello readers and writers! It’s a bright and shiny day here in Austin, Nevada. We’re experiencing our first really warm days and our summer activities have begun. I’m told that two high school seniors  graduated yesterday in our tiny school district in a lovely ceremony with all the pomp and circumstance of a much larger school. Congratulations to them and their families! In addition, our new library opens to the public Tuesday, and our summer friends are arriving—they of the full-time RV life—bringing their fresh faces and musical entertainment to our quiet town.

How are you? Is the season bringing you joy? What are you up to in your community and life? What changes does the summer season bring?

I opened the main page on my WordPress blog today and noticed I’d written 99 blogs so far. The number 99 is so close to 100 that I felt it best to get down to it and send out another. I don’t post regularly, so 100 posts isn’t really too impressive considering I started this blog in 2013. I spend much more time working on my manuscript and querying prospective agents than I spend blogging.

Still, it almost always feels good to write a blog post (once I’ve committed to sitting down and I’m at least a few paragraphs in-not so much at the beginning when I’m staring at the blank page, obviously) – it’s a way to reach out to family, and friends, old and new, and also is a sort of diary where I can record images and thoughts on times and places—and of course, there’s the curative element of a diary or journaling.

Recent and current books I’ve been reading: A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles; The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo; A World of Curiosities, Louise Penny; and Hang the Moon, Jeanette Walls. They are all wonderful!

A lovely book, and a fun journal I bought in January while traveling.

I was excited to learn that A Gentleman in Moscow has been adapted to the screen in a series (thank you, Denice from Washington who stopped into the library last week!), so I will watch that as soon as I finish the novel.

The Night Tiger is enthralling- we’re listening to it when we travel to the grocery store (112 miles away), and any other time we’re in the car for more than 10 minutes (which is anytime we leave town since we are so remote…). Here’s an example of the wonderful writing just from memory. Choo describes a doctor’s writing as “a conga line of ants.” Brilliant!

As for Louise Penny… she got me with the first Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery years ago, and I am never disappointed as the series progresses. Wonderful characters, heart, and settings.

Books! Wonderful books!

I am a big fan of Jeanette Walls and have read and reread The Glass Castle several times. Hang the Moon is another big thumbs up!

Meanwhile, the crickets are back. Just last week I was remarking that there weren’t any in our yard this year and maybe the gigantic hordes that usually march through town would miss us this year. Uh, no. I’m sure that no matter where you live you have some kind of unusual local wildlife… There are other parts of this state, for example, that experience large migrations of tarantulas, and I know the cicadas are a huge presence in other parts of the country. I’ve heard that Miller moths are everywhere in parts of Nebraska… It’s all a bit eek, but I always think of the line from one of the Jurassic Park films, “Life finds a way.”

I am one of trillions… I just want to travel south (I don’t know why!), but your house in the way! Please move your house!

This, too, shall pass!

Have a wonderful weekend and please do  check in and share what’s going on in your little corner of the world!

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February 22, 2024 · 9:51 pm

Hold On

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things–childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves–that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”
– Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
So well expressed. I realize that is a large part of my writing- “keeping a hold on the thousand and one things.”

So few photos here. So many more in my heart. More beloved children, friends, family, and all the rest than there is space. But writing provides an opportunity to keep them all.

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February 12, 2024 · 9:33 pm

Nature Breaks

So grateful to have the opportunity to venture out today, to a place where we encountered only two other vehicles, no power lines, billboards, buildings or pavement. So grateful. Yet my heart worries for the creatures there. Their tenuous freedom. Their beauty. Nature breaks my heart.

Nevada, USA
Open Range
Wild

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January 13, 2024 · 3:22 pm

Road Trips

Think back on your most memorable road trip.

Had to be with Jan and her friend and my poodle, Judas, back in 1975 or 6? Minnesota to California.

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January 12, 2024 · 10:54 am

Guest Post on Happiness Between Tails by da-AL

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January 12, 2024 · 10:49 am

Thank you, da-AL!

So lovely to be invited to your wonderful blog. Excited to meet your readers, too!

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December 3, 2023 · 3:17 pm

Book Review: Driving Dad Home

Having dedicated a great deal of time, energy, effort, and money–but mostly dreams and heart–to writing throughout my life, I’ve always longed for close relationships with other writers. People who would “get me” in a way that I didn’t feel “got.”

So it was with great pleasure when I learned that my dear friend Jan married a man who wrote. This was many years ago, and, like mine, John Halter’s career was varied and interesting. In my own case, I would add soul affirming, which is probably the case for John as well, but I have never asked him. Anyway, we both did something other than write to earn our livings, but we both always wrote. I worked in flower shops, and libraries, and taught school, while John was a professional sailor, riverboat pilot, and marine mechanic.

Driving Dad Home is John’s first published book, a memoir. It is published by Nodin Press, LLC out of Minneapolis, MN and is available on Amazon. Bravo, John!

John Halter’s Driving Dad Home is in part the story of John and his father, Russ, and their road trip from Arizona to Wisconsin where Russ’s family has procured a place for him in a memory care facility. That, in itself, provides more than enough to immerse the reader. A 96-year-old father who doesn’t want to leave the home where he chose to live out the remainder of his long life “hoodwinked” by his family, the dying alcoholic second wife they wish to save him from, the terror, anger, and anguish of Russ’s dementia—all told in the author’s particularly engaging style—would be plenty. But Halter gives us more.

In his attempts to placate his agitated father and make it to their destination safely, he learns that getting his dad to talk is the best remedy. As the miles unfurl, so too do Russ’s recollections about everything from his childhood on a South Dakota farm, to his years serving in the Navy in WWII, to his years as a husband and father living in Minneapolis, and to the years that followed, when John and his siblings were all grown, when their mother died, and the life their father made for himself afterward—all of which is as important to the author as it is to his dad. I don’t want to give anything away, but it was an excellent read, and I was left with a renewed appreciation and understanding of the generations before us. And I also came away believing that love is often a silent force swirling around us that we do not know and cannot recognize.

For some of us, thankfully, there comes another chance. This is a story about one of those chances.

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August 14, 2023 · 4:58 pm

A Fine Suddenness, or Maybe Never

Thoughts on Writing After a Year of Sending out Queries for my WWII-Era Homefront Historical Fiction Novel Set in Lake Arrowhead, CA… and A Whole Lots of Maybes

Photo from my collection of prints of paintings by Lake Arrowhead artist and friend, Dave Wescott.

I am discouraged. It’s been a long haul, and I’m tired. I wonder if it’s too late—if I’m even a capable writer. Maybe I am a past-prime-nothing-special-mainstream kind of a writer with nothing new to offer in a world crowded with bright-fresh-creatives churning out compelling new stories that I am not equipped to write.  

Maybe, more accurately, I wouldn’t write those compelling new stories even if I could, because I truly don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean I never will. Maybe I’m going to want to! With creating, one never knows. Meanwhile, what I write these days is what I feel the magical desire to create. If I were being paid to write, or I were writing an assignment for a course I was taking, it would be different. At least a little bit different, but still really fulfilling. And I have done that successfully.

So I think that means that stubbornness is not the problem. But who among us knows well their own foibles? A self-examined life is not worth living perhaps, but I am not always sure my self-examinations are thorough or astute enough. That is one of the many reasons I need you, my friends!

Writing from my heart for no other reason than I want to create something of my own is a very different task than an assignment or a job, and that is what I’ve been at with A Fine Suddenness, and with many earlier projects. This self-appointed task has been with me for most of my life, with innumerable hours invested outside of my “real” life, most of them happily. Those hours have stretched into a lifetime of practice.

Another beautiful painting of Lake Arrowhead by my dear friend, Dave Wescott.

Pretty great setting for a novel, don’t you think?

I’ve invested a good amount of my limited income into writing as well. There have been many journals, computers, printers, reams and reams of paper, hundreds of pens (and oh how I love those pink, yellow, green, and blue highlighters!) and yes, the multitude of books I’ve purchased on writing, and the subscriptions to writing magazines. Then there’s the cost of attending various writing events—retreats, conferences, special courses, all of them fabulous and expensive.

The MFA in Creative Writing I earned in 2009 was a big investment that took me years to pay off. I do not regret it.  Graduate school was an amazing experience. I loved every moment of being part of a group of writers immersed completely in our projects, all of us in over our heads, happily drowning in words, study, reflection, discussion, research, and ideas, all filled with the satisfying knowledge that no one among us questioned the importance of what we were doing. It often feels as though the rest of the world could care less about poets, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, and novelists, but it didn’t feel that way when we were in school together.

Cheers to all of my creative friends–and all creatives everywhere!

Few parents would encourage their children to enter into any of these fields. I’ve had friends who must have temporarily forgotten what my degrees are in, because they openly laugh at their children’s desires to study any of the humanities while in conversation with me. “Imagine,” they say. “What a waste of tuition.” It’s clear what they mean. Those fields don’t make any money.

I understand that money is necessary, and my life would have been easier if I had more, but I also know my soul would have shriveled had I worked in any field that didn’t allow me to at least exist in close proximity to the world of literature and learning and language that teaching and library work gave me.

It was never about money.

Writing has been my passion for a very long time. And I believe it has been worthwhile, even at this moment, seeing how things stand. I have never developed a writing platform. I don’t have much of a following on my blog (which is admittedly not something I have any technical skill in setting up or growing). Despite regularly studying the publishing field, sending out personalized queries to agents who work with my genre, and working, working, working on improving the queries, the summaries, the comp list, my bio… all the while making my manuscript the best it can possibly be, I haven’t secured an agent.

Maybe I should stop trying. Maybe I should write, but just stop trying to find an agent, or a small publishing house that might consider publishing my work. After all, it’s not about the money. I’ve never expected that.

What is money?

Photo courtesy of Pexels Free Images

Holding a beautifully bound copy of my own work, that’s definitely at least part of what I want, since I so value books, but I understand the process of writing and the joy of finding readers who might enjoy reading what I’ve written are what would move me most.

Maybe I should seriously consider self-publishing, even though I do not want to. Maybe it’s the only way, and maybe it wouldn’t humiliate me in a Willy Loman Death of a Salesman kind of way.

That’s a whole lot of maybes…

What do you think?

I’d love to hear from you!

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March 27, 2023 · 1:53 pm

Today

     Have you ever stood on the edge of a precipice, and feared it, but also looked about, spinning in all directions like Maria in The Sound of Music, dizzy, joyous, and completely awestruck? The view! The accomplishment!

I believe this is Long’s Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Sometimes I forget to label my photos, but I never forget the wonderment.

Or, maybe you were so tired that all you wanted was to do was teleport through time and space, and find yourself, your old self,

whole and hopeful, somewhere and sometime else. I certainly have. And sometimes we can do that for a time. Close our eyes and

dream it. But we always wake up.

     So you stand on the top of this particular mountain, and you don’t know whether to fall, or to fly, or to trudge back down the

same way you came up, erasing the missteps, retreating to safety—but you know you must do something.

Or perhaps, arriving there was the only point. The destination and not the journey. A place to reflect, and perhaps take a

photograph. Plant a flag.

     It’s funny that no one ever really knows if what they experience is natural or common to others, but still, some of us wish to

find out. For many of us, it’s reassuring to think that we aren’t alone in our displacement, or instability, or lack of perspective. For

others, it’s the individual experience that matters, the thing that only that person can learn in exactly that way. It’s their chance at

epiphany.

     I believe writers seek their epiphanies through their craft, and cherish the selfishness of the pursuit, but also need to believe in

the possibility of finding connections, heart, mind, and soul, whether that be with themselves, their readers, or something much

more ephemeral. For me, there is also an urge to understand the natural world.

     So here I am today, in the bright hours between storms, standing on the precipice of an unknown future. Knowing that nothing

is certain, and big changes are ahead. I think I’ll call it Today.

Photo provided by Pexels

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