So I was walking across the main road that’s on my paper route when I passed over this for the first time:
There I was, standing in the middle of the road, wondering why they would print the word “Danger” on a manhole cover. It’s in the middle of the road! Cars drive over it all the time! So I took this picture.
Luckily, I got out of the way before a car came.
Blog post of December 2nd, in honour of Every Damn Day December. Check it out! It’s not too late to join in!
Is it a good sign that I want to blow up everyone in my NaNoWriMo novel? I’m thinking a nice gas explosion would come in handy right about now. Unfortunately that would mean killing off the narrator. I doubt that would go over well in most literary circles.
I think the most creative way I’ve written for anyone to die has to be my story of the unluckiest man alive:
http://neverendingstorydepository.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/unluckiest-man-alive-dies/
What’s yours?
Every once in a while I come across an opinion piece in the newspaper or on the internet, stating the importance of Vitamin C in preventing and even curing illnesses. By far the most astounding account of it is this:
http://www.sott.net/article/256313-Did-Liposomal-Vitamin-C-cure-cancer
in which Vitamin C was apparently proven to cure leukemia in a child. The data is actually quite convincing.
I stumbled across the concept by accident years ago, when I realized that if someone else in the house had a cold, or if I felt the beginnings of one in myself, if I took at least a 1,000mg (1 gram) pill, I could avoid the cold altogether. This didn’t work, however, when we all had H1N1, but then again, according to the article, maybe I just didn’t take enough.
It seems to me that there’s enough evidence that Vitamin C works, that it brings up once again the subject of the big pharmaceutical companies having the monopoly over the market, and that doctors are perpetrating their hold on our wallets.
Nevertheless, I urge anyone who hasn’t already to try taking 500 – 1,500mg per day, in the case of the common cold. You can’t, from what I understand, overdose on Vitamin C, though it is thought best to be taken throughout the day rather than in one large dose, as anything more than is necessary for your weight and size will just go straight through.
It’s cheap and it works. On what, we have to trust the “experts.”
Twins. Part of the plot in my NaNoWriMo project required a case of mistaken identity, so instead of having one protagonist, I’m writing one and a half. I call the twins “one and a half” protagonists because I’m writing in the first person – so I’m getting all of what one of them thinks and only half of what the other does. They’re both good guys, Marcel and Max are. Decent men from a good family – very much the same in many ways.
As usual, something happened in real life which made me contemplate the differences between siblings. In this case it was a conversation with the lady who manages the dry cleaner on my paper route. She has two granddaughters who she loves to talk about. She was telling me how unalike they are, even though they’re very close in age. This is a subject (among many) that has always fascinated me, being an only child. My own children didn’t grow up as siblings usually do, since they all have such physical differences, so it’s something I must study from a distance.
The difficulty I’m experiencing in my novel is that the twins, Marcel and Max, sound the same when they speak. It makes sense to me that they should, but they end up coming out like these guys:
Not all that polite mind you, but they speak exactly alike.
Once NaNo is done and I can put some thought into it, I’ll work on finding something unique about the two, which will come out in their speech. But in the meantime, I’m wondering what about their natures, and not their nurture, can help my readers to tell them apart.
Have you ever written siblings and come across this problem? Let’s learn from each other!
I read once, when my kids were very young, that a baby who laughs when it is startled is a baby who trusts his or her mother. It’s something that I found followed through to their toddler years and beyond. I joked with my kids that I was going to do horrible things with them; cook them and eat them for dinner for instance. They’d laugh, knowing I would never do such a thing, because they trusted me.
There was one instance that I will never forget and I try not to regret for the simple reason that it taught me something.
I was leaving the pool where Alex was, at the time, doing physiotherapy. He wasn’t walking yet at the time, so he must have been less than five years old. I carried him out of the building, loaded with purse, swimming clothes and Alex all in my arms. I remember it was cold. I put him down on the curb in front of the car but to the side where I could see him, so I could wrestle my car keys out of my coat pocket. Had a car come, I was prepared to stand in front of it to prevent him being hurt. I proceeded open the doors and put the bags in. Then I waved goodbye to him and pretended to get into the car, expecting him to laugh. He knew I would never leave him there by myself. But instead of laughing, he smiled at me and waved back.
Whether he didn’t understand the joke or not, the vision of that tiny little boy sitting bundled against the cold, waving goodbye to me with a trusting smile on his beautiful, innocent face, still brings a tear to my eye.
Our children live in the world we construct for them. Whether they are healthy or sick, they can learn to be happy from us as parents because they trust what they see – the example we set. Alex spent the first eight months of his life in the hospital. All he has ever known, from birth, is pain. To this day he wakes up almost every morning with reflux, trying to vomit past an operation he had at six months of age called a fundoplication – basically, a knot was tied in his esophagus to prevent anything coming up. And yet he is the happiest child I’ve ever met. Other people observe this and ask me if he’s ever unhappy. It’s all he’s ever known. He sees me deal with his morning time retching with ease and he is reassured that it’s normal.
One day I know he will find out that it’s not. Will he stop trusting me at that point? I have no idea. It’s for sure that I’ll have the task of assuring him that even if it’s not something everyone experiences, it’s just the way he is, and that’s okay.
The point I’m trying to make I suppose, is that our children are our sponges. They take from us what we show them, and whatever that is, they trust it, because from the very beginning, we are all they know. I hope, for my own part, to preserve that for as long as their personal experiences away from me will allow. And that they will continue to laugh all their lives.
Write what you know; write what you know; yes, yes, okay we get it already. But have you ever wanted to write who you know? Fictionally that is.
When I write, I write characters. Plots in my stories, are secondary. I take, for instance, a scenario, ask ‘what if?’ and off I go. Once I have a character in place, they decide what happens in the circumstance I put them in.
I know a few people very well. Family, friends – I can’t help but know them. The people I don’t know very well, I study. I watch the way their expressions change when they talk about certain topics that they love or which scare them… you get the picture, right?
But there’s that saying again. That rule. Write what you know.
Now say, for instance, I was to write about someone I adore. They probably wouldn’t mind. They’d be able to hold my bestseller up high and say, ‘This is about me!’ and they’d be proud to do it. But what if I wrote about someone who I don’t respect? Or someone whose personality is less than scrupulous? I wouldn’t use their real name, of course. And the story would not be the one they lived in real life. But they’d know. And I’d know that they knew. And then I’d have to wonder; are they planning to do something devious to smite me? After all, they aren’t the most the most pleasant person to deal with in the first place. How far will they go?
Write what you know. I know very little about ‘things,’ but I know a lot about people. About characters and what makes people tick.
Have you ever ‘written’ someone you know, fictionally? How would you feel if someone ‘wrote’ you?
Tick tick tick… boom!
I’m an excellent person for keeping secrets. Unfortunately, I’m a horrible liar. Unless it comes to my mother, in which case I’ve been practicing since I was four and had it down to an art by the time I was a teenager, I blush, I look the other way, I avoid eye contact… I do everything in the book that will show anyone with an ounce of observational skills that I’m not telling the truth.
Is it a good idea to entrust a bad liar with a secret? If the person you’re confiding in knows your deepest darkests, and they also know, say, your spouse, do you hope that somehow they will suddenly find the ability to not blush, or simply avoid your loved ones lest they give you away?
I’m finding myself confronted with these issues, not in real life, but because of my writing. My plot is so thick with secrets at the moment, that not only am I having a hard time keeping track of who knows what, but I’m finding it difficult to not give things away to my reader.
I actually studied the body language of people who are lying, just so that I could write a more believable liar. In this, I’ve found the perfect way to tell when my kids aren’t telling the truth, and how I, myself, can become a better liar.
But back to telling secrets. Everyone has them, whether they’re big like infidelity or small like you think someone looks horrible in their favourite suit. Fibbing is a necessity when it comes to secrets. Secrets in fiction can be the backbone of a story.
Can a person who is a bad liar even have secrets? I sometimes feel as though I’m an open book, for all to see. Maybe that’s why secrets are prevalent in my fiction – practice for real life. I’m puzzling it out on paper.
Do you suffer with this dilemma, either in fiction or in real life with yourself or someone you confide in?
Tell me. Tell me your secrets. I won’t tell anyone, promise. 😉
Has anyone else noticed that their view count has gone down? I’m blaming it on the new pop-up window in the reader that allows people to read a post without going to the site.
While this new feature is sometimes handy, it discourages other WordPress users from clicking on the actual post. When they don’t look at the post, they don’t see our site, and when they don’t go to our site, they don’t see what else is on our site.
Just think about it this way: One of the people you follow may have found the cure for the clap yesterday, but if you only read about how his or her cat looked cute rifling through the cantankerous neighbours trash bin today, you’ll never know! That’s valuable information there you’ve missed out on!
So tell me, is it just me? Or has your view count gone down too?
“Write what you know.” It’s one of those things we’re told to do, along with “show, don’t tell,” and a bunch of other guidelines we’re given as writers, that will apparently give us the tools we need to make us better writers and bring home our first million. It’s the “write what you know” thing I want to focus on today though, and I’ll tell you why.
I almost got hit by a bus today.
Don’t panic, I’m okay, but it was a close call. I’m talking inches. Millimeters even. It got me to thinking about my NaNo project, as does everything in my life – when I decide to write a novel, I live and breathe it, almost literally. Having something as dramatic as a real-life near-death experience happen to me (okay, okay, the mirror of a bus moving half a mile an hour nearly clipped my ear as I walked along the edge of a sidewalk) being worth mentioning, could happen to one of my characters, right? You can bet it will.
So back to writing what you know. I don’t think they really mean it in the strict sense of writing what you do for a living outside of writing, for instance. Or even writing about characters who write, though many writers do (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). If we did that, everything we wrote would be autobiographical. And what would the fantasy writers do? I’m thinking an elf accountant would be rather boring.
I think writing what you know can be taken in a more broad sense of feelings, emotions, and yes, little experiences like almost getting hit by a small, slow-moving school bus that’s coming to a stop beside the curb.
So my challenge, for all my fellow NaNoers who are reading this, is simple. Write into your story the next time you write, about something you’ve experienced in the last week. If your characters are in space it can be a sensation, or a sentence you remember hearing or saying.
And if you’re writing an autobiography – oh what the hell. Lie! I dare you!
P.S. Let me know how it goes!
I had no idea that it was a ‘thing,’ but apparently, with senile dementia comes paranoia. As my mother ages I’m thinking more and more that I need to research the stages, before she goes through them.
Last night she told be that she had been talking to her sister, six years her senior, on the phone and that her sister is losing her mind. My mother loves to complain about anything, but when it comes to her siblings, nothing has ever been more delightful to her than being superior to them. Being an only child I can only assume that this is a result of early childhood bullying, or simply being told what to do, since my mother is the youngest of five.
Anyway, she was gleefully informing me about how her sister had related the same thing story times in the space of five minutes, and then the subject of my mother’s apartment came up. To backtrack a bit, before my mom moved to town, I lived in her apartment since I hadn’t found a place of my own. Her apartment came available on the market, so I bought it. Then when her old house sold, she bought my house and I moved out of her apartment the day she moved in. Confused yet? Just keep going.
She forgets that she came to visit me when I lived in her apartment. She swears up and down that she never saw the place before the day she moved in. When I tried to remind her last night, she not only denied it, she told me that I was the one who was losing my mind, not her – she’s obviously worried about it even if she won’t admit it.
What really got under my skin, and is worrying me, is that she accused me of saying she saw her apartment before she moved in just to make her think she is going crazy – like I’m doing it maliciously.
I’m getting close to the point where I’m going to have to move her into a place where she can have assisted living. Not a nursing home, necessarily, but a retirement home at least. She wants to move in with me, but I just can’t handle it. My children have to come first, as well as my own health. She is just too much work.
I’m just afraid if I wait too much longer, she’ll think I hate her. This paranoia thing is really scary.
lindaghill.com 