Better Than Dead

I’m sure this book is a triumph of stylistic elements, a singular work of staggering genius, combining as it does the art of reading and the art of…what would you call that?  I’ll have to add it to my Goodreads To-Be-Read queue.

Random quote of the day:

“The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.”

—Diogenes of Sinope (404-c.323 BCE), fragment 20, tr. Guy Davenport

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Being a character-based writer means that generally plots tend to accumulate around who my protagonists are rather than the other way around. So I usually have the illusion of knowing a great deal about my people before I officially commit them to the page—officially being when I actually type “Chapter 1” at the top of the file. Every once in awhile I get a surprise.

That seems to have happened with chapter one of the new novel, Time in a Bottle. (Really dislike that name, really need to think of another.) As soon as the protagonist, Molly, spilled onto the page, she came across much perkier than I’d originally envisioned her. Younger. More a creature of sunshine than I would have made her out to be. I resisted this pull, even typing a note to myself at the top of chapter one: “Age her up, serious her down.” But she refused my admonition. She persisted in being who she was.

I’ve long since learned that when a character pulls that hard in a certain direction, I really need to shut up and follow. I’m just along for the ride, after all, and most times they really do know best. If I analyze this in that light, I see that the story which is going to unfold might actually work better with this personality. She’s going to be dealing with the shadow world of the subconscious, helping to dispel some of those shadows, so it really doesn’t make sense that she’s as serious as I tried to make her. She’s going to need that sunshine to get through this, to even buy into this mess in the first place. She’s something of a rescuer, after all.

Of course, sometimes I’ve been fooled in this regard, too. Sometimes a character pulls me off in an unexpected direction and it turns out to be a dead end. Generally, this means I haven’t gotten to know them as well as I thought I had before starting out on the journey and they turned out to be tricksters, having their teasing way with me. This can be painful and require much rewriting.

But hey, writing is rewriting, right? There’s always going to be a lot of that in my future.

Random quote of the day:

“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”

—attributed to Alexandre Dumas the Younger

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

She voices what I’ve long said: there’s no such thing as a perfect query, although people drive themselves crazy searching for the magic formula. However, she did give tips on what makes queries effective.

Jodi Meadows also has a running series on this subject on her blog.

Random quote of the day:

“Altogether, the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore, if any man wishes to write a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and, if any should write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul, and live a noble life.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, entry for April 14, 1824

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

—Richard Yates, quoted in “The Lost World of Richard Yates,” by Stewart O’Nan, Boston Review, Oct/Nov 1999

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I had me the nicest wish fulfillment dream last night. I dreamed I got an email from an agent named Anna Scott in the office of some BN agent I’d sent my ms. of Shivery Bones to. (I marketed the hell out of Shivery Bones and decided it was time to give that one a rest and move on to something else, but apparently, the old submariner part of my brain hasn’t given up flogging it.)

Not only did Anna of my dreams love the book and want to represent me, she’d even done preliminary checking with an editor at one of the big houses and they wanted to offer me $100,000(!). I met with her and we hit it off and I said, “Yes, I want you to represent me and I will sell this book to them for $100,000.” The End and everyone lived HEA.

Yes, I know. That would never happen in RL. Wish fulfillment! Straight from the land of the Happy Fairies of Nod!

I’d been awake a couple of hours before I remembered that Anna Scott was the name of the Julia Roberts character in Notting Hill (a wish fulfillment fantasy if there ever was one) (one that I happen to love, being a wish fulfillment fantasy kinda gal). I googled the name and there is a talent agent named Anna Scott, but no literary agents that I could see.

It would have been nice if it had been a wish fulfillment fantasy with precognitive overtones, but alas…

Random quote of the day:

“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

It’s been a terrifying week, actually. Tuesday night, after a day of running errands and feeling fine, my mom got a terrible stomach ache after dinner.

“I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” she said, sitting in the rocker in the living room.

“You just sit there and I’ll do the dishes.”

“Okay. It really does hurt, but it usually goes away in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

She’s been having these stomach aches after dinner for a couple of weeks, you see, but they always go away after a short while. This one was persistent.

So I did the dishes and I realized she’d been quiet for a long time. I came in to check on her and she’d passed out. I don’t just mean a little faint—she was gone. Completely unresponsive, head slumped forward, pale, clammy, cold. In fact, I thought she was dead for a few terrifying moments until I picked up a pulse. I jumped for the phone to call 911, but her head lolled back and she made this scary aspiration sound, so I tipped it forward again, and she got sick, and then she started to revive a little, but by that time I had the paramedics on the way and the 911 operator on the line. They got there really fast and she was wuzzy but talking a little by then. By the time one of the nice firemen and I had gathered up her medicines and they’d loaded her on the stretcher, she was actually sort of chatty. The paramedic said they’d stabilize her in the ambulance, but it looked like she’d be okay, then they transported her and I followed in my car.

Something must have been in the air that night because the local hospital E-room was full up, as were many of the others except Brotman, which is a horrible place, and when the paramedic mentioned it, Mom declared, “I’m not going to Brotman! Don’t take me there!” Which actually unknotted some of the sheer terror in my stomach a little if she was being that adamant. They managed to get her into Santa Monica-UCLA, but even that was almost full. On the drive there, I passed three other ambulances in full cry.

She was very thoroughly checked out at Santa Monica. They couldn’t find anything sinister going on until they did a CAT scan of stomach and then they found an undiagnosed stomach issue—the doctor described it as a kind a hardening of the arteries in the intestines so that she wasn’t getting enough blood in her stomach when trying to digest food. That’s what had been giving her stomach aches. Blood thinners and smaller meals will help with that issue. I’d had a bout of 24-hour stomach virus the previous week, and that may have been contributing to things. She had the same symptoms as me in the following day and a half.

Why did she pass out in such a scary fashion? The pain this time had been more intense than previous times and the doctor’s theory is that she passed out from the pain. Her heart is sound, her BP had come back up, she’d stabilized, so at 2 a.m. we took a taxi home from the hospital.

Don’t get me started on the parking problems around Santa Monica hospital. There is no emergency room parking longer than 20 minutes. I had to walk a block and a half in the dark from a $10 parking structure to get to the emergency room and I wasn’t about to repeat that at 2 a.m. It all seemed quite minor compared to what we’d gone through earlier, and I was so grateful to be taking her home again I didn’t worry about it. I was still grateful the next day, but rather “perturbed” when a neighbor gave me a ride to pick up my car. I’d pulled into a legal visitor’s parking space okay, but it was one of those double ones and I didn’t pull all the way to the wall. They had booted my car and were going to tow it. I don’t usually do the hysterical female thing because it’s just not my way, but I pulled that trick out of the bag that day and launched it on them. Besides, I was in a legal space. They unbooted my car and let me drive away.

Mom was quite sick for a few days and her primary care doctor said to keep her hydrated, but don’t force the eating issue too much. She managed to start eating (albeit lightly) by yesterday so I thought I might actually go to work today, but then the stress caught up with me and slammed me. I haven’t felt at all well today and stayed home. She’s alert, eating (still lightly), and we’re going to her doctor next week.

But I can’t quite leave that terror behind. Somewhere in me there’s a post on death and dying wanting to be written and the cycle of life, but not now. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to face that one. Who ever is ready for that one?