Author: Becky

Magnetic Poetry 365:22

I usually work on these poems in the middle of the night, and Tom usually reads them when he’s feeding the dogs in the morning. He said this one made him feel like he needs to defend his gender. I don’t blame him. Then I wondered if people will think I’m writing about my life, which makes me feel I need to issue a disclaimer: Words randomly pulled from the Magnetic Poetry box and shaped into a poem have a narrator, as does any story, and the narrator and author are not necessarily the same person. I think most people know this, but then I read comments on other writers’ articles and blogs and I remember that reading comprehension is not innate.

Sort of related: Recently, someone wondered to me how much in my novels comes from my own experiences. Who can say? I read an article on memory the other day that explains why all memoirs are actually fiction, so fiction is certainly even more what I’ve always called it–fictitious. The same goes for poems.

IMAGINATION. That’s what makes writing fun for me. My brain has always had a disease I call “characters,” and this is why dolls were fun for me as a kid and remain fun for me today. Every doll has a story, and none of those stories are my story. I couldn’t possibly stand on my tiptoes forever.

In which I am a good sport

Last night, Scott Heim posted a link on FB to a Web site that kept me up an extra two hours because I couldn’t stop laughing while I looked at it. It’s called Totally Looks Like. Check it out when you need to giggle and have some time on your hands.

Meanwhile, for you haters who are always hating in my hate-free zone, just because I’m SO FREAKING GOOD TO YOU, here’s one that really cracked me up, though I am NOT about hatin’ on KS. I just have a sense of humor.


Happy Kristen Stewart Totally Looks Like Sad Kristen Stewart

Also, thank you Timothy J. Lambert for directing me to my new user pic for when the hating happens.

Random

My love/hate relationship with Facebook continues.

It got really dark earlier–SUPER dark–and I thought a big storm was rolling in. We got drizzle. That’s a lot of drama for not much payoff. Sort of like Facebook.

If I venture out to take care of some errands, the bad weather payoff may come. I will then bitch about that, too.

I’ve been on the phone almost since I woke up trying to take care of scheduling things and returning calls, and each of these calls has been an exercise in frustration. (In fact, I’m on hold right now.) If businesses want to deal with me on the phone, then why is the person I need to talk to always unavailable or “the system is down” or the person I get on the phone has no idea what I’m talking about? Trust me, none of these contacts is with some call center in India. People just don’t have their shit together. Wait–is tonight the full moon? Or was it last night? Maybe I’m dealing with werewolves.

I swear a rat just fell past my window. Maybe it’s like those birds in Arkansas. Rats falling from the sky, John McCain saying nice things about Barack Obama, and me getting nine uninterrupted hours of sleep last night. What is up with the universe?

A Compound bouquet for you, photographed on sunnier days:

Soundtracking

On his blog, Jeffrey Ricker asks:

Here’s a question–or actually several: what music inspires you? Have you ever written anything inspired by a particular piece of music? Do you listen to music while you write?

Here’s my answer:

I do make mental and sometimes real soundtracks for the novels I work on. Off the top of my head: Three Fortunes involved a lot of R.E.M. and a bit of U2 (Kieran was Irish, after all). I listened mainly to George Michael while working on I’m Your Man because there’s a lot of yearning in his songs and in the novel. I not only listened to the Pet Shop Boys during the period when we wrote When You Don’t See Me, but their songs became our chapter titles and the band was special to Nick. A Coventry Wedding was all Beatles, all the time, and though a lot of Beatles songs are mentioned in the novel, there are also coded references to their songs or song titles. Here’s one: Jandy meets a crotchety old artist in the book whose name is Wayne Plochman. In reality, Plochman is a brand of mustard: thus, “Mean Mr. Mustard” from the album Abbey Road.

I’d probably need to reread the other books to remember what songs were inspiring me while I wrote.

I write in silence, usually. The exception to this is when Tim and I work in the same dwelling, because he always has music playing. So a lot of times I mentally connect songs to my mood when I was writing something, even though they didn’t necessarily inspire it or have anything to do with it.

Speaking of music… One regret I have is that we took a fragment of a song lyric out of It Had to Be You. Every time I hear the song, it makes me laugh because of the scene it evokes–and not using it cost the readers a laugh in a comic moment in the novel. We were beginners and afraid of being sued.