Author: Becky

A book I didn’t know I needed


A Christmas gift from Timothy (thanks again!).

Though I hadn’t followed Patti Smith on Instagram, her posts were like a little gift that would show up occasionally in my feed. Because of other things I liked? Because I follow or am followed by others on Instagram who follow her? I don’t understand algorithms; I just appreciate when I’m not inundated with posts relating to animal cruelty, animal death, animal illness. I can care, and I can and do donate to rescue organizations and to specific fundraisers, but that doesn’t mean I can deal with seeing more and more over and over.

I digress. Patti Smith was an occasional, serendipitous gift from one of the few social media sites where I find more peace than politics, more art than acrimony, more fun than friction–accompanied by photos!

Then I received this book and even before I opened it, I felt a connection with it. Then I read her Introduction, and it all sounded like words I’d been waiting to hear. Most pointed, it’s a book of DAYS. An entry per day of the year (and one thrown in for years with that extra February 29). Patti posts daily on her Instagram just as I post every day here, always with a photograph; I also try to present some photo or graphic with each of my blog posts, only she does it with more brevity and focus (look! a camera pun!).

Before his shop closes as he shifts his focus to other creative endeavors, I ordered a 2023 planner from Adam JK. At first I hadn’t ordered one because it seemed superfluous when I considered all the things other than this blog where I record things: a small book to keep up with the meals I eat and the meds I take to manage my health; a book where I scribble random things including my answers to a daily word challenge; the coloring journal that I try to connect to where I am in/what I’m doing with the Neverending Saga.

Now I’ve figured out a unique way to use Adam’s planner. Every daily photo in Patti’s book makes me think of something from my own life: a phrase or comment that reverberated in my brain–for good or ill–for decades. A place I’ve been or thing I’ve seen that made me happy. What reaches me from a piece of art. A loss still etched on my heart. Something I read or a funny story I heard or a quirky or impactful person I’ve known. My planner from Adam will provide a place for me to note what Patti’s day has given me, and in that way, it will provide a bit of structure and purpose to the seemingly random.

Some days I may even share on here. With a picture of my own. If you want Patti’s photos, she’s thisispattismith on Instagram (where I’m now, finally, following her). Or you can purchase this wonderful book and see years of her documenting in single photos what, where, who, when, why Patti Smith was in a moment. Because she’s a celebrity? No. Because she’s an artist with gifts I’ve admired since I became aware of her in 1978.

ETA: Missed telling you the Day 5 NYT 7-Day Happiness Challenge is “Get Closer to a Colleague,” and today, Day 6, is “Put a social plan on the calendar.”

Photo Friday, No. 839

Current Photo Friday theme: Waves


Pacific Ocean view near San Diego, March 2000

The entire California coastline has some of my favorite views, but its majestic, crashing waves are mostly in my memories and not in photos. This was shot on film when I visited our friend Steve for his 30th birthday celebration. Steve took me to see as many beaches as I craved. He also took me to San Clemente, which had become home to one of the characters I began writing in the 1970s–the ones I’ve been rewriting since 2019.

(Click to view larger size on black background and see people on the rocks.)

It’s in the writing


Today is National Screenwriters Day. In the world of entertainment (I include film, television, theater, and music here), there are a lot of jokes about writers, mostly at the writers’ expense. You can find laudatory comments about screenwriters at “30 Quotes about Screenwriting from A-List Directors & Actors.”

The first on that list is: “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.” – Alfred Hitchcock

I create a screenwriter who also is sometimes a playwright in the Neverending Saga. He doesn’t get a lot of story, but he’s connected in some way to all of the main characters. To give myself a challenge, I wrote the opening scene to one of his films (it isn’t in the novel, though it will be referenced), and it was fun but a lot harder than I expected it to be.

Without my screenwriter, my characters would be missing a friend, an advisor, an inspiration, a person who breathes life into their work, and some apt descriptions of them filtered through his perceptions. He gives me a chance to use humor and kindness. As every writer in every format knows, a minor character can have a major impact.

Thank you, Phillip. You’ve been part of my brain since the 1980s. ♥ Let’s keep collaborating.

Challenge

Somehow I came late to the game of a happiness challenge being published in the online New York Times feed. Wednesday’s challenge is Day 3: Make small talk with a stranger.

I was doing labs (routine, every three to six months) barely after sunrise this morning, when the tech turned my arm over, preparing to draw blood, and she noticed my tattoo. She asked whether it hurt to get a tattoo in that area of the wrist, and I said that it hadn’t. She said she was considering getting a tattoo on her wrist but was hesitating because it might be painful.

“Do what makes you happy,” I said. “Life is short.”

“I think I will,” she said with a big smile.

Yep, it’s basically clichéd old-person advice. Sometimes things get repeated because they’re true.


Me, Daisy, and my tattoo, 2018

ETA: If you’re interested, the Day 1 challenge is “Take stock of your relationships”; Day 2 is “Try the 8-minute phone call”; and Day 4, Thursday, is: “Tell an important person in your life how you feel about them.”

Tiny Tuesday!


Tuesday turned into a BIG errand-running day, because everything seemed to take longer than it should have. The only small thing I have to offer is a sketch from the coloring journal Lynne gave me last May. I’ve only done a few entries in it, and I’m enjoying it. After all, I blog here every day, so I don’t necessarily need to journal a lot. (Speaking of blogging, I did get my 2023 banner changed today! 😁)

I wish the people in my life believed in themselves as strongly as I believe in them. The truth is, I don’t always believe in myself as much as I believe in them. Maybe we all need to work more diligently to be the friends to ourselves that we hope to be to others?

Button Sunday

Dear 2023:

I have to be honest with you. Your predecessors ’20, ’21, and ’22 set the bar pretty low what with pandemics, wars, deaths of people NO ONE WANTED TO LOSE, insurrections, and the effects of climate change. Still, upon further scrutiny, there was plenty of good stuff, too. Turning your setting to more “good stuff” would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

looking back/looking forward


Sometime around Thanksgiving, I shared a photo of the underside of a stone and promised to show you the other side. This is a gift I sent to a dear friend. Every time I see a heart, I think of her.

It’s been a quiet week but a good one for connecting with longtime friends by text, email, and phone. We’ve mostly gotten our Christmas stuff down and by tomorrow, it will all have been packed away. I hope to be asleep well before midnight, despite the fireworks that distress the dogs at Houndstooth Hall. I’ve never fully gotten my energy back since being sick in September/October, but other than fatigue, I feel pretty good at the end of another year.

One thing I feel positive about, as I look back, is that I managed to read seventy-six books this year, both fiction and nonfiction. After a prolonged reading dry spell the first two years of the pandemic, it feels promising to know I can once again give my attention to other people’s books. I’ve been a little concerned that I haven’t written much over the last quarter, and it occurred to me that my focus might have been another thing impacted by my health challenges.

Also in 2022, I did finish one novel and begin another. I’ve done three or four paintings on canvas; painted six ornaments I gave away; painted the wooden letters Aa to hang on the brick wall of Aaron’s Garden, and colored, I think, 36 projects–coloring pages, a bookmark, and an angel. I’ve written a few poems and sewn a few doll outfits, done a lot of organizing, donating, and purging from the Hall, and grown new plants and kept old ones alive. When I add it all up that way, I feel like I’ve been more creative than I realized over the past year.

Wishing you all a new year of good (or improving) health, satisfaction with the things you attempt or complete, abundance in all good things, serenity and energy as needed, and the gift of knowing what a wondrous creation you are, even when you don’t remember or believe it.

Much love and peace to you all.

No new Photo Friday challenge this week

I shared photos of my Christmas angels on Instagram and several people say they colored one, but I don’t have their names on any of them. Though many without names were likely ones I did (especially if glitter was used), here are a few more without names that I don’t think I colored. Some may be from Lynne and some may be from other people. If you stop by and recognize your work, tell me, so I can put your name on it.


1. After “Ecclesia,” a gospel miniature from Salzburg or Passau, late 12th century
Pencils: yellow, blue, gray, and ivory


2. After “Mary, Countess of Pembroke,” by Paul Van Somer, circa 1605-10
Acrylic paints: blue, pink, gold, brown, and almond, dots of blue on the pink add texture


3. After “Valiant Ladies” fresco in the Castle, Mantua Piedmont in Italy, late 14th century
Acrylic paints: white, purple, green, yellow, almond, overbrushed with a royal blue glitter paint, and some gold glitter dots on the bodice


4. After “Young Girl” by G. Netscher, circa 1660
Pencils: pink and greenish gold, almond, and brown, possibly crayon in wine and rose


5. After “The Virgin of Vladimir,” Novgorodian work of late 15th century, Russia
Pencils: various shades of orange, purple, lavender, and almond


6. After “Italian Breviary” circa 1380
Pencils: lightly used rose and blue, yellow, brown, and ivory


7. After bride from “The Betrothal,” Suabian, circa 1470
Pencils: three shades of green, and blue, red, brown, and tan


8. After “Italian Breviary” circa 1380
Unfinished and uncut. Pencils: lightly colored rose, orange, blue, three shades of green, yellow, orange, crimson, and pink, almond; only hands colored on back

By the way, if you WANT to color an angel, I can send you one. Let me know in comments and I’ll email you for an address. Pencils, pens, crayons, paints, glitter–as long as it’s permanent and won’t smudge and can be folded into its angel shape and then lie flat for storage, pick your medium. Also, it needs to be dated and signed so I won’t have to ever do another post like this. It’ll be displayed each Christmas as long as I’m around and fairly lucid.

Here’s one I just colored in the last day or so, another Countess of Pembroke.

That’s how it works

Saw this on Instagram, likely a repost from Twitter*:

Like Ware, I could not quit laughing.

*I reserve the opportunity to express my feelings about Twitter at some later date.

This is as good a time as any to recap what I’ve read this month. I do have another book to read, but at more than 500 pages, it’s unlikely I’ll have finished it by the first day of January.

Though December’s reading includes only one work of fiction (i.e., “making it up as they went along”), I think even in the realm of nonfiction, writers shape a narrative in a creative way. More about that in a moment.

First up, fiction in the form of a cozy mystery:

Bones of Holly is the 25th (!) in Carolyn Haines’s Sarah Booth Delaney series. It’s set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a few years after the devastation from Katrina, with the memory of that hurricane delicately woven through it. Enjoyable as always to experience these characters, and it made me think a lot about Three Fortunes in One Cookie, even to the point of having a conversation with Timothy about that novel. We rarely look back at the books we had published, but that one continues to nag me for a few reasons.

I’d very much wanted to read Valerie Bertinelli’s Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, published this year, but I also wanted context for it. So first I read Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time, 2008, then Finding It: And Satisfying My Hunger for Life without Opening the Fridge, 2009. If I pare down the journey of her life in a three-word soundbite: Food, Family, and Fame, as an older reader, I sometimes felt like I understood young Valerie better than she understood herself (in an everywoman kind of way). In the third, current-day book, with both of us older and more mature, her growth and perceptions have been tempered by a lot of loss and a greater self-acceptance.

You might guess that my own interest was based on my enduring affection for Eddie Van Halen, and it was with some relief I read how their story is dramatically different from the fiction I’m writing. Years ago, I borrowed Eddie’s smile and drew on a little of his charm for my musician, but my character’s love story (with a woman nothing at all like Valerie) is all their own. (Maybe not nothing, as my female, like Valerie, enjoys sports, but I took that from one of my own real-life friends before I learned it about Valerie.)


Then I read three works from a young woman I met/follow/interact with on Instagram, Shilo Niziolek. I enjoy her photos of her dogs, her world (home, city, travels, time in nature), and her personal fashion aesthetic, and we share a mutual fascination with crows.

I can’t give a better description of I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay (Ghost City Press, 2022) than this one from Goodreads:

…a micro chapbook of collage poetry. Shilo uses her own medical records, prints of her own images, and magazine material to create poems that seek to take back power from her own medical history which is plagued with chronic illnesses and trauma. These pieces speak against the narrative that those with pre-existing conditions lives are somehow worth less, that they are not as full. The collection asks us to look closely at the world and our own magic just by existing in it.

I love collage, I love poetry, I love magic, and I feel I’ve come to know Shilo, so of course I happily dove into this collection. It became a place I want to revisit so I can shift attention between the poems, the photos/art, and the medical records underlying it all. It’s almost like a puzzle. (Like Tom and me, Shilo also puts puzzles together.)

Both Fever, Querencia Press, LLC, 2022, and A Thousand Winters in Me, Gasher Press, 2022, are memoir/essays of creative nonfiction. They present perspectives of trauma from chronic illness and domestic violence, and musings on grief, loss, love, and sexuality. Niziolek has an MFA and is a writing instructor; it’s unsurprising that her writing is fluid, lyrical, and evocative, compelling a reader to want to take this frequently painful journey with her. Undercutting that pain are the complex, enduring nature of friendships, relationships with family and a partner, and an appreciation for animals and natural beauty.

In one of those “we find what we need when we need it” moments related to all my struggling with what to do about the problematic nature of my journals (and I had a side conversation about journals on Instagram with Shilo’s mother, also a writer), I reexamined the process of creative nonfiction. I was reminded of mentors and teachers who urged me to write essays examining certain aspects of my own life. And I realized I don’t need to destroy those journals (too late for a few dozen pages, and that’s fine). I need to use them as material (NOT FOR PUBLICATION; I’m not as brave as Shilo!) to create a not-necessarily linear narrative, one based on recurring themes I can tease from the details I recorded.

I needed to remember what it is to be a writer first, and a novelist second. I do plumb my emotional life for my characters, even though everything about their lives is vastly different from mine. Fiction: making it up as I go along, right?

It’s all a lot to think about over the coming year. Shilo’s writing is a gift in itself and also for the way it has informed and inspired the writer in me.