Reflective Blogging

My thanks to Tammy for including me on her list of five "Reflective Bloggers." She is definitely the epitome of what the award is all about...a blogger whose posts are an "encouragement, a source of love, and provide a Godly example."

One of the greatest gifts of this information age is the ability to learn from the amazing experiences and feelings that other bloggers share so unselfishly. These five bloggers are just a few of the many that give me pause for reflection and renew my spirit.

~Joan, of Rivanna River Days, has opened my eyes to the beauty of the natural world in an entirely new way. Her gentle and insightful posts about the environment, as well as her gorgeous pictures of her home on the river, give us all food for thought...

~Deborah, aka Jane Poe, of Nevermore, shares her perspective on life in general in a stirring poetic commentary that always merits multiple readings, and always makes me shake my head in wonder at her ability to find the perfect words to express her feelings...

~Darlene, at A Walk in My Shoes, has taken us with her as she lives day to day with lupus and as she worked to bring her son back to life after a horrific auto accident. Her beautiful smile and artistic talents shines through in all her words, and she brings beauty to my daily walk...

~My friend Deirdre, at Writing Anam Cara, has a luminous way with words that takes the reader directly into her experience, whether she's describing her hopes for the future, her struggle to recover from the loss of her sister, or just an ordinary day. She writes the way I wish I could...

~Patti Digh, at 37 Days is probably already familiar to many of you. Her philosophical posts about life always make me smile, think, and marvel.

Hormone Havoc

I've been completely distorted lately. I was trying to come up with a word to describe this sensation of feeling disproportionately out of sorts with myself, my life, and everyone I come into contact with, and "distorted" seems to fit perfectly. Yesterday, as I sat holed up in my writing room, I tried to reflect on the reason I was behaving like a petulant teenager, throwing mini-tantrums and storming around "loaded for bear" as the saying goes. Truthfully, these feelings are not unfamiliar. They used to happen on a regular basis - about once a month, to be exact. Any of you who happen to be female know exactly what I'm referring to. However, since I haven't been bothered with that monthly occurrence in well over a year, I thought I was done with all that.

But this week, it came roaring back with a vengeance, the attack of the raging hormones. It's really as if an alien has invaded my psyche and injected me with lethal doses of impatience, dissatisfaction, restlessness, anxiety - all those awful feelings that women dump into the category of PMS, premenstrual syndrome - or, in my case, post menopausal syndrome.

Now, I've since realized why this has happened, and taken steps to remedy the situation (I'll tell you about that later.) The interesting thing - the rather frightening thing - is the way I have felt completely out of control, completely not myself. I literally want to do violence to people and things. I hate everyone I know (and love!) and have this almost overwhelming urge to get in my car and drive it off a cliff - seriously.

This has got me thinking about the ways women really are different from men. And these thoughts are completely antithetical to the feminist way of thinking I've been raised with. But it occurred to me that if I were the President of the United States right now, I might be sorely tempted to push that famous button and annihilate anyone and everyone who was getting in my way.

Of course, being the good girl that I am, I always stop myself from committing any act of violence worse than tossing dishes (plastic!) against the wall. Even in this state of hormonal havoc, I retain my sense of control, because I generally have great control over my emotions. (Whether that's good or bad, only my therapist knows for sure.) But some women are completely ravaged by their hormones - we've all read the horror stories of seemingly "normal" women who murder their children while suffering from post partum depression.

Luckily, when I woke up this morning, I could feel my sense of emotional equilibrium returning to normal. I did some yoga, rode my bike, went to church, and haven't felt like killing anyone (yet). But this episode reminded me once again that our bodies can play vicious tricks on us, and it's well to be wary of them.

By the way, here's the reason this happened - at least, this is my best guess. A couple of weeks ago, I started taking Black Cohosh as treatment for hot flashes, which were really driving me crazy this summer. As I looked at the bottle, I realized I was taking these 540 mg capsules twice daily, when the recommended dosage was once daily. So, I think I may have experienced an "herbal overdose." I cut back immediately, and started to feel better. Another lesson learned - even "natural remedies" can be dangerous if not taken properly.

Sunday Scribbling-Phenomenon

I've never really been one to get obsessed with any cultural phenomenon, not even those pecuilar to my era...The Beatles, for instance. Oh, I liked them well enough, but nothing on par with my cousins, whose turntables spun their lp's endlessly and whose walls were plastered with pictures cut from every fanzine published about them. Since I've lived for half a century now, I've seen quite a few phenomena come and go. I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to indulge their obsessions, and of course, the Harry Potter craze is certainly no exception. Like everything in the 21st century, it's bigger and more fantasmagorical than anything in my memory. I feel as if I'm admitting to heresy when I say that I'm not a huge Potter fan...ok, truthfully, I haven't read any of the books. (I started to read the very first one, and I got so upset at the way Harry's mean Aunt and Uncle treated him that I had to put it aside!) People told me I should have finished it, to see that they got their comeuppance...but I don't know, I think I had a huge stack of other books calling more loudly to me at time.

Maybe my life would be more exciting if I could throw myself wholeheartedly into these types of phenomenal trends. I'm certainly not arguing that J.K. Rowling's huge success is a phenomenon, as was the Beatles. But I guess I'm just more comfortable observing these phenomenal success stories from afar, while I putter around in my totally non-phenomenal life.

more phenomenal scribbling here

Write on Wednesday-Revision Redux

The revision process continues to be on my mind this summer - notice I said "on my mind," meaning I haven't done much more than think about it. The whole process of novel revision seems terribly daunting. I've been collecting other writer's thoughts on their process of revision, hoping to get inspired, and it worked to some degree. I've started revising a short story I wrote last winter, hoping that by "practicing" on something smaller, I'll be less intimidated by the work involved in revising the novel. Here's some food for thought regarding the revision process...as you will see, every author approaches it completely differently!

"I start on the first page. Then, I rewrite that page twenty or forty times until it's right, and then it's finished. Then, I go to page two and I do the same thing twenty or forty times." Stephen Dixon

"I go over what I've written, but I'm not making major changes. I'm just fixing it by making minor changes that might have a big effect. I hardly throw anything out." Jayne Ann Phillips

"I do twenty or thirty drafts. I'm a big reviser. I go back...and polish the beginning, then I force myself to go through page by page from beginning to end, over and over again." Amy Bloom

"I go through with a very cold eye to cut out everything that can be cut without loss." Thomas E. Kennedy

"I polish as I go along. My habit is to perfect individual sentences, individual paragraphs, and individual pages, and when I think they're as good as I can make them, I feel free to go on to the next part. So when I write the last sentence of the last paragraph, I'm done with the book." Kent Haruf

"I do a great many drafts, no matter what it is. This means letting it sit for a few days before looking at it again, then doing it again, then letting it sit and doing it again. I let my friends read drafts after the first ten or twelve. My early drafts are sketchy in the most important ways - everything vital is left out - and they're wordy in other ways - there's all this extraneous material that doesn't matter. So the revisions are in both directions." Andrea Barrett "I do a lot of revisions in fits and starts. When I write, I barrel through from beginning to end, and then back up, and if the beginning isn't working, start over. Once it works, I write through to the end, and start revising, and, if necessary, trash the whole thing, and start over." Myla Goldberg

Writer Bug posted some great revision advice which she picked up at her last residency. She talks about picking 15 areas you want to work on in your manuscript, and then going through it 15 times, focusing on one area each time. Some things to work with include: verbs, redundancy, verbosity, vagueness. She also advises reading the story aloud, which is a great idea.

As I've begun revising my own short story, I've been taking one paragraph at a time, revising each sentence, looking for better words, paring down wordiness, then going on to the next paragraph until I've finished the page. Then I re-read the page and see how it flows. Once I've done each page, I'll go back and re-read the whole thing to see if I need to make structural changes.

So, how about you? Anyone else out there in the process of revisions? If so, how's it going?

Decisions, Decisions

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." ~Agnes de Mille

In case any of you are wondering whether I've made the momentous decision, the one I regularly dither about here at the Byline and in morning pages, the one I keep waffling back and forth about, knowing full well the desire of my heart, but troubled nonetheless by the demands of my schedule...just in case you're wondering...yeah, I guess I've pretty much decided. How's that for a definitive answer?

How do you make decisions? I'm horrible at it, really. Please tell me you have some fail safe process I can follow, or a formula that will give me the best possible answer to everything from which library book to read next to where to build my retirement home. I try to be logical about decisions, looking at the pro's and con's of all the variables, tallying up the strengths and weaknesses I've listed in neat little columns. But in the end, I often just follow my gut instinct, or my heart, or the path of least resistance!

It comes down to the fact that I don't trust myself. Most of the time, I know what I really want, but I'm always second guessing myself in favor of the "greater good" or some other amorphous "what if." Perhaps I simply think too much, worrying my thoughts as if they were beads on an Indian necklace, rubbing them nervously between the fingers of my mind.

I began the summer fretting over making a decision, but somewhere along the way I stopped fretting about it and let the question lay dormant in my heart for a while. It burrowed down in my mind, where it's been quietly simmering on its own as I've gone about my quiet, peaceful days. Along about 4:00 in the afternoon, that period when I start to get restless and dissatisfied with what I've tried to accomplish for the day, I feel it stirring, poking me gently, reminding me "I'm still here...you haven't forgotten about me, have you?"

Truthfully, I think this particular decision was decided for me long ago. The moment I walked into my living room 45 years ago and saw a brand new piano waiting for me. From that moment, playing music became such an important part of my life that relinquishing any opportunity to do that is unthinkable. Might as well ask me to voluntarily stop breathing.

So, come September, I'll be going back to my job at the high school, at least for the time being.

If I come to some other decision, I'll let you know.