Respect Your Work

“Should I pay to be published?”
 

Not a week goes by when I don’t bump into some variation of this question. I’m newly baffled by it because, for some reason, it was one I never asked. I think I respected my work even when others didn't seem to.
 

Paying never occurred to me. I was ready to go to my grave unpublished. As it is, I am ready to go there (though not for sometime, I hope) un-lauded or never to be published again. I’m ready to never have this-that-and-the-other rather than pay someone to please, pretty please, let-me-work-for-you-and-I’ll-even-pay-you.
 

That’s what vanity/subsidy/co-op publishing is in fact doing. Whatever the Mot Du Jour these operations use, whatever slick terms they couch it in, this is what a writer does when engaging with them. Writers then pay someone for the opportunity to work for them.

I had plenty such opportunities. I unwittingly submitted to publishers who appeared traditional, and was offered such contracts. They use language like “we invest in your book as much as you will,” and “we like our authors to take part in every aspect of the process.”

Well, I have invested in my work. I've invested time, sweat and tears. I have taken part of the process at every turn when my (traditional) publishers asked me. But money?
 

Money flows from publisher to author, not the other way. Period.
 

The other day a writer, who was about to sign with a large press, asked if paying four-hundred dollars for editorial fees was on par with the market. A few months ago another writer told me her small publisher asks only for one-hundred dollars to have her picture book set for a print edition. Doesn't that sound reasonable?
 

Not to me.

 I should add here that there is a difference between self-publishing and paying a vanity publisher. Not all "paying" is created equal.
True self-publishing is a courageous decision to go it alone and be your own publisher.
I’m not courageous enough, so this also isn't for me.
There are good reasons to undertake this. Writers sometime want control of every aspect of their work including the design, title, editorial decisions, cover, and more. These fall into the publisher’s court in a traditional arrangement. True- many self-published, (who now use the term “Indie” for Independent, which used to mean small but traditional publishers) have grown weary and despondent of ever seeing their work in print through the traditional routes. But some have been well-published traditionally and are looking for more control.
The most admirable to my thinking are the self-published who have always dreamed of starting a small press and of being publishers, and so they start with their own books. Many publishing houses had their origins in such an endeavor. Assembling a team that includes an editor, a designer, a marketing person and so on, and you've got the start of a small publishing house. Good luck to you, because you will need it.
 

So back to paying a publisher for “services”-

Respect your work. You are the creative genesis of the business. You are the alpha and the omega. You may get paid a lot or- more likely- not a lot. But you get paid. The business can and will do without many of its traditional operators, but never without writers. We are the real deal. I wouldn't take any other.

A Time to be Quiet

“If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.”

                                                                     ~Tom Lehrer

How do you feel about the plethora of blog posts that say they have nothing to say?

You've seen them if you hang around the blogosphere. One of those “I know I haven’t blogged for a while, but really, nothing much has been going on…”

And if you are on Twitter, you've seen enough of these (mercifully shorter) “standing in line at my favorite coffee shop waiting for my latte, bored…”

OY.

I have a friend who has such contempt for the endless space filled by these published nothings, that this friend will not ever admit to seeing this blog, or any other. Friend refers to us who hang out here as “bloopers” and “Twits.”

Friend has a point.

But we have a better one, methinkst.

I have found beautiful posts on others’ blogs. I’m not on Twitter, but I have seen some clever tweets that are worthy of great Haiku poems. So a lot of it is benign? A lot of traditionally published books are surprisingly vacuous. And the latter aren’t free.
 

And my last point is the one I really popped in to talk about. There’s writing about nothing, and then there’s quiet writing. Quiet stories, quiet poems, and quiet novels. I have found that some of the most subtle and exquisite writing is not about much, at least not on the surface. I’m thinking of Henry James passages where the writer makes us rest a bit while observing the quiet seemingly mundane gestures of his characters. Not a lot going on, and yet a whole lot present.  

The television series Seinfeld was supposedly about nothing. The characters could make much of standing in line at their favorite coffee shop, waiting for that latte. It was different, and it was great.
 

Made my point. Now I’ll go and be quiet.

It Will Be All Right, Or- How to Overcome Fear of Author Events

I thought that since I am now the Grand Maven of Authorly Events, having just had my very first book reading/talk/signing party, I can bestow some wisdom for all who think about this and need advice. Obviously I’m jesting here, (just a little) because you’d want to hear from the uber-experienced on this. But it gives me a way to prattle about mine.

If you’re not shy, you might be looking forward to these. It’s a different ballgame for us shy persons. We have serious doubts we will even survive and live to tell the tale.

What are the greatest fears Authors have when thinking of Author Events?

Fear number one: No one will show up.

Here’s what happened –

Fear number two: I won’t be able to open my mouth, and if I do, no sound will come out.

Here’s what happened:

I didn't lose my voice or my place, and they laughed and even gasped a little.
 

Fear number three: I won’t enjoy it at all.

Here’s what happened:

Fear number four: No one will buy the book or ask me to sign it.

Here’s what happened:

This^

And this^

And plenty of that^.

----

Author is happy. Just go do it!

Is an E-book a Real Book?

Or

What’s REAL anyway?

A writing colleague asked the other day, “is an E-book not a real book?”

She had a reason to ask it this^ way. Her debut novel, traditionally published, was published as an E-book no paper edition. Her parents, not much older than I am, asked when she’ll have a real book published.

The first dictionary definition I found said---

BOOK: A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.

But we know dictionaries are properly conservative, and always a bit behind the curve.

In substance, more than form, a book is its content. So E-books are real books. That said- why do I have the need to print a paper copy of every manuscript, even after saving to another computer, to a flash drive, and finally, to The Cloud?

{And what kind of Cloud never makes rain, anyway? Take that, Dictionary.}

I have a dear friend, a generation plus older than I am, who scoffs at E-books. But same friend and I have not met face-to-face or spoken on the phone in over ten years. We live very far apart and communicate, almost daily, via E-mail. Bet my friend considers our friendship real.

And my kiddos, a generation and a half younger than me, don’t even understand the distinction. Much of their life is E-life. Even their real homework often knows no paper.

~~~

I was thinking about all this yesterday, when sending out invitations to my debut novel’s Launch Party. In a way, although the book (real paper) came out in August, its launch then was all virtual. This Sunday The Voice of Thunder will have its first real, hence “launch,” party. You know, real tea with real cookies. Not-

And hopefully, real guests.

So if you’re anywhere near, I’d *really* love to meet you. Here’s a, ahmm, virtual invitation-

When: This Sunday, January 13, 3:00pm. (Yup, tea & cookies time. And my book too.)
Where: Afikomen Judaica, 3042 Claremont Avenue, Berkeley CA 94705
Who: Me, my book The Voice of Thunder, and hopefully a few friends. Maybe you?
What: Reading, answering all questions, (about anything and everything) and having nice tea-time refreshments.
Why: because it is a truth universally acknowledged that every new book is in need of a party...

^ {for real} ^

~~~

Back to the beginning.
I’m of the school that the most real is neither seen with the eyes nor of this world. Call it imagination, or give it a theology.

It’s been real.

Keep the Child in View

As blogosphere joins most other spheres in New Year’s lists and resolutions, I’m determined not to. Oh, I can’t beat them, but I won’t join them. It’s plenty crowded over there and mine won’t be missed.

Because where I am, lists have a diluting effect. And lots of lists are a dilution of the dilution.

Have you noticed that when we tell of one child who is affected by some horrible challenge, the telling is more effective than when we pile them up? The Diary of Anne Frank, the story of *one* Holocaust victim, was a door to the event that killed millions. A million and a half Jewish children perished. But we remember Anne.

And so the other day, when I heard this quotation from Charles Dickens, I instantly knew that I had a new motto, a guiding pole, for the New Year. “Keep the child in view,” Dickens wrote.

All right, not a list, but one luminous guidepost. Keep the child in view.

Dickens’ children with their pet raven “Grip,” by Daniel Maclise 1841

DS was asking me why so much emphasis on the horrible massacre in Newton Connecticut is put on the twenty young victims, and not the six adults who died trying to protect them. His point was rational. These adults did something heroic. These adults had dependents and have lived lives of effort and striving. Why is the whole world focused on the children, with an afterthought of a mention about the adults?

My response, after some contemplation, was that the adults’ life journeys were already set. We knew them as teachers, school principal, and the school psychologist. But the children, every one of them, were a world of possibilities and wonder. A possible inventor who will change the world. A possible great leader, or even a prophet.

That is what keeping the child in view means to me: keeping that sense of possibility and wonder. Keeping it in my story telling and in my life.

Welcome 2013. I will remind myself to come back to Dickens, and keep the child in view.

Christmas in West Jerusalem

Our family has established our own Jewish tradition for Christmas, inspired by my childhood in west Jerusalem in the early sixties.

We are the outsiders, looking in.

We take a walk on Christmas Day, beginning in the late afternoon. As the sun goes down, the Christmas lights go up. Front lawns twinkling, colored lights on trees placed by windows, and an occasional neighbor who’d gone Santa-wild with bobbing reindeer on the roof and illuminated giant Mr. & Mrs. Claus waving mechanically. We come home, chilly but jolly, to hot chocolate and the calm harbor of our Jewish home.

No, I didn’t have any of these winter lights displays in my childhood. If fact, west Jerusalem streets, pre-1967, didn’t have a single overt sign of Christmas. The Jewish part of the city, then cut-off from its older parts, had neither church bells nor a whiff of a hint of any but the Jewish Holidays.

My mother was a member of the local YMCA. We treated it as a health club and a good place to park me, the daughter of a single working mother, for summer camps. Its Christian character was so subtle that you’d blink and miss it.

But one Christmas day, when I was seven, my mother decided we’d take the bus and go to the YMCA on King David Street to see the Christmas tree in their lobby. The YMCA had the only Christmas tree in town. She felt I should at least know much of the world was experiencing something that day.

There is nothing like the first time of something. My first glimpse of the towering green pine, a real tree in the corner of an indoor space, all adorned with twinkling colored lights, was the stuff imprinting memories are made of.

It was so beautifully exotic.

To this day, my viewing of others’ holiday decorations has the same intriguing and fabulous effect on me. It isn’t mine, it is of the other, and it is lovely.

I have no wish to bring it into our own living room. I like being an outsider looking in. I like that you wish to share it by putting the light so it is visible to us.

Merry Christmas, friends.

Shades of Gray

Because one blogger compared my book to it, and another writer thought The Voice of Thunder belonged on the bookshelf along side it, I am now reading BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY. No, not the world-wide best-selling but decidedly smutty other book.* This SHADES is a critically-lauded literary award-winning Young Adult book, by Ruta Sepetys. The only smut in this book is the outrageous behavior of our species when we are convinced we hold the right to abuse one another in the name of “truth.”

Yes, this book. And it deserved every glowing review it got.

*The one I’m not reading is “GrEy,” British spelling, whereas the good book I am  reading is “GrAy, American spelling. Who knew we’d have one over the Brits in taste and literariness?

This got me thinking about how I have always had a visceral recoiling from black-and-white thinking. I come from a region where everyone (that’s everyone) has an opinion about everything. My parent’s idea of social get-togethers consisted of friends coming over for tea and cookies after dinner, and arguing together. The evenings often ended in raised voices, declarations of mental inadequacy on the part of the other, and, finally, a walk to the door and an agreement to do this all over again next week.

And my parents and their friends were the open-minded ones. They discussed things. They didn’t throw stones or vow to kill. They only committed to arguing and trying to persuade. But they did feel, strongly, that they were “right.”

And so I came to this great melting-pot, the U.S.A.. Here the pervasive cultural ethos, sometimes referred to as WASP, was the polite avoidance of arguing. Underneath, many still feel they hold the absolute truth. But polite conversation avoids religion and even politics, the mainstays of both social connectedness and divisiveness where I came from.

It suits me fine. My interior meter tells me black-and-white is the illusion. I do believe there are higher truths that are not shades of gray. I also think it is the height of hubris to think we are privy to those from our perch. I’m a shades-of-gray lady.

For me- black & white is for wearing, not thinking.

Let it Shine...

From our home to yours, taken moments ago...

Holiday Time is Not for Dieting

Dieters and health fanatics, beware. This is not a post for you.

An acquaintance passed on to me what she felt was a fantastic new recipe: Fat Free Potato Latkes.

If you know that Hanukkah is about celebrating the miracle of sacred oil, which was to last only a day but lasted for eight days and kept the temple’s sacred light glowing, you would not be cheering fat-free. I pointed to her that the holiday is not a celebration of the potato.

“But fat-free is so healthy,” she said.

What’s health got to do with it? This is where the health-nuts will leave me, I know.

Because The Miracle of the Oil (not the Miracle of the Potato, which could make an interesting holiday) is nourishment of the spirit, and fat-free, forgive me, isn’t.

Imagine Thanksgiving without stuffing. Then you’ll get the gist of this holiday robbing Grinch who’s roaming around to steal the meat of celebrations.

Celebrating is not fasting, and it isn’t dieting. That we can do during times of penance, and every great tradition has those.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should eat eighty-three latkes, full fat with sour cream on the side. (I might, though I’ve not committed to it yet.) But spare me your fat-free and let go of my Latkes, yearning to breath free.

Here’s the recipe I use, something I got from my mother who got it from hers. Enjoy!

Full-fat Latkes

4 cups grated, drained (squeeze hard and then squeeze some more) potatoes

I cup grated drained onion

3 eggs, beaten

½ cup matzo meal (I prefer to use breadcrumbs, but I’m not supposed to say it)

1 t. salt

½ t. pepper

Mix all the above. Shape with your hand about half cup of mixture at a time, and fry in LOTS* of good vegetable oil.

*Lots and lots = at least half an inch deep

My friend’s kids endorse them in South Korea. Go Latkes!

The Great Business of Publishing

With all the angst, tribulations, anguish and trials writers go through on the road to publication, it’s no wonder we whine, cuss, and even throw rotten eggs at this amorphous thing called The Publishing Business.

And what better time to point the finger at the publishing establishment and wag it? Its failings, its consolidations, its being usurped by the self-published… Ha! Told you, Publishing! You weren’t doing your job! See?* (*Sometimes this really means you failed to accept my book or my best friend’s book, or properly promote the best book I ever read.)

Now that I am in the “published” section, I can attest that frustration doesn’t end there. It morphs. I’ve seen it years ago with published friends, complaining about aspects of publishing that I could only secretly dream of being able to complain about.

So I decided to do something different here. I missed being publically thankful on Thanksgiving, but there’s no expiration date on gratitude. I woke up determined to find three great things about the business of publishing.

It was easy. I could probably list ten. But lists get tedious after three. Here goes:

*Publishing is about books. The business makes books, not weapons, or doodads.

**Many, if not most, people in the business love books.

***Best of all, publishing produces some great books.

IT’S A GREAT BUSINESS.

What Does This Rejection MEAN?

A few days ago one of the kid-lit writers on my favorite chat-board asked if there was a code to decipher the ubiquitous rejections that state something along the lines of, “nice, has potential, not for us.”

Most writers answered by saying that it means nothing. Since the rejections that say nothing clear and specific about the story are essentially forms, the only thing they mean is that your offering is not accepted. That’s it. For people who are not accustomed to putting themselves in the line-of-fire that comes with competitive endeavors, (like writers, actors, musicians etc.) explaining the form rejection would be to say that it’s akin to getting the standard polite letter to a job application. You know, the sort stating that you were among the best applicants but alas they cannot offer you the job. It’s a step above not getting any response, but it tells you nothing. Not even, truthfully, that you were in fact among the best applicants. Maybe, maybe not.

The chat-board responders were right, of course. The letters may have been personalized with the writer’s name and the story’s name. The story may have been referred to as “cute,” “clever,” or “interesting.” But until it said something along the lines of “the story would be stronger if Mary is the one who figures out how not to have her little lamb follow her, instead of the teacher giving the answer,” until then it was not a reaction to her story. Without comments specific to the story, no decoding will make it so.

Repeat: forms mean NO, and nothing else.

Feeling stuffed full of holiday pie, and with many form rejections in my journey’s baggage, I sat to let out some of the steam with what I think these forms would say had they been one hundred percent blunt and said exactly what they mean. Here’s my version of the decoded message.

“Dear think-you’re-a-writer,

I don’t rightly know if you are a good writer, nor do I know if your story has potential. I barely had the time to glance at the first two lines, and the only thing I know is that I don’t want to read further.

I can’t tell you what to do with your story, because I don’t care. As we won’t be publishing it, I don’t have the time to think about it.

If you saw my heaping pile of submissions, you would not feel special in getting this form. It’s just what mass submissions have brought overworked people like me to.

Nothing personal,

Ms. Pretty Drained”

 

Lesson? None. Other than it’s time to move on, and think no more about it.

And if you get a truly personal response, one where the editor/agent has something illuminating to say about how Mary and her lamb may someday break their pattern so the teacher doesn’t have to come up with the answer, kiss that letter and send virtual air blessing to the editor/agent. They bothered, in the middle of wading through a huge pile, to craft a response. I’ve been fortunate to get some of those, and they were helpful. No decoding needed.

And please don’t cry, Mary.

Timely and Timeless

When I first began querying editors with what was then a story picture book called The Voice of Thunder, my query included the word timeless. For some reason I felt that I needed to emphasize that a story set in the past was still relevant.

After expanding the story into a longer story for readers in middle grades and up, I added the word timely to the query.

Some part of me knew that it was both. Now, only months after the novel’s release, war has broken out again. More than forty-five years (and a few wars in between) after the story’s setting, once again Israelis everywhere have cleared their basement shelters and readied them to serve for what they were intended when built.

In the intervening years many of the shelters became storage spaces, filled with bicycles and unused furniture. The two Gulf wars brought scud missile attacks, but for these Israelis were told to use sealed rooms in their homes and gas masks. The basement shelters remained filled with clutter.

In Gaza the war never ended. I don’t know if the building codes there are similar to Israel’s, where every residence must have a shelter. But the ongoing shelling and bombing from the air is a sad part of the reality, even as it is spaced by periods of a lull in violence.

My story is tragically as timely as ever.

©Shalom of Safed

I pray for peace, and by definition peace can only come when it is peace for all.

Can Opposites Both Be Right?

A person much smarter than I am said this: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.” His name was Niels Bohr, one of the twentieth century’s most important physicists.

Bohr was a physicist. This is not about G-d or unearthly matters. Neither is my post. It isn't even about the sanctity of scripture. it is about the variety of human perceptions. This, from my perch, is a crucial aspect of writing good fiction.

That’s the way I see the election cycle we just passed. I never seek profound truths in politics. Politics is the worldly art of deal-making. But parties couch their drives with underlying philosophies. The philosophy of small government and self-sufficient individuals, and the one of government that re-distributes some resources to the weakest in our society, both of them contain deep truths about how to be good human beings.

That’s also the way I feel about the conflict in the middle east, where The Voice of Thunder, my novel for middle grades, is set. There, too, is a story of two rights.

As writers (unless we write “How To…” books) we are searchers not so much for the pragmatic but for profound human truths that give our stories their value. Yes, it must be served up as entertainment. Sure, it should reflect a lot of what is and not just what it should be. Granted, it should not come across as preaching. (This I get to do here, wink.)  

But in the end if a story is to be good literature, it will contain profound truths. No, this^ isn’t one of my many typos. I wrote truthS, plural.

I don’t mind being labeled a relativist or even wishy-washy when it comes to this world, human theories, and human perceptions. My life’s experience has led me to perceive those who think otherwise as fanatics.

I even think we need fanatics at times, to stir a ship that has run too far off course. That is how fanatical I am about the reality of many human truths.

Trust that it isn’t a copout. It’s harder. Accepting that I wasn’t given a ticket to view the ultimate is humbling to grasp. It’s also more difficult to write about many truths.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo, that Klingon-ish sounding word, is setting the American writing world on fire. Haven’t heard? Think I’m kidding? Think I slipped on first-rains puddle and bumped my head?

Well, any of the above may be true. But NaNoWriMo is real also.

A few years ago someone thought to make November National Novel Writing Month. It wasn’t one of those acts of congress, like declaring August National Pickle Month. (You’d think they don’t have enough to do.) What started with fewer than a hundred participants has mushroomed. In the last ten plus Novembers it has caught on, and the nation is writing.

 

Now that the self-publishing outfits have become sponsors, the writerly engines are full on. (CreatSpace, Amazon’s service for self-publishing, is listed on the NaNoWriMo site as an official sponsor.) One blogger in-the-know said almost a quarter-million people have committed to it.

Committed to what?

Over the month of November they will write a fifty-thousand words (or more) novel, with a beginning middle and end. They will reach the end before November reaches its end.

Now that’s quite a commitment.

©MMRule

I have never accepted writing by the pound, or by the (word) count. I’ve found my own way to creative productivity. But if this is what throttles your engine, go for it. It’s only (gulp) 1,666 words per day, and if you don’t have a job, as many of us don’t, it can be 208 words per hour, eight hours a day, everyday of the week. That’s about one printed page an hour. But who’s counting?

Well, NaNoWriMo is, actually. That’s why I’m not doing it.

To all the brave souls who started, I wish you a great adventure. Maybe even a masterpiece.

Let It Be Enough

On one of the kid-lit writers’ chat boards, a multi-published author was lamenting her lot. Yes, she has a great agent, a strong major publisher, and commercial success. But she has yet to get a single literary award, and now she must come to terms with the notion that maybe she just isn’t that kind of writer. A No-Newberry Nelly. Never.

The discussions on this board are always thoughtful and, not surprisingly, articulate. Writers chimed in to say that they only dream of the sort of success she has. That they can’t get their foot in the door of a New York publisher, or any publisher. Some said that while they are published, their trajectory pales next to hers. Others went on about how much they and their kids adore her books.

But then the conversation made a wrong turn.

Writers poured in their angst at all things literary. They declared they would read her amusing and joyful books over any Newberry winner, any day. To my un-humble mind, this was sour grapes. The fox can’t reach them, so he declares the grapes not worth having. 

©Von Bandersnatch

As often happens on the board, someone brought sanity back in. A writer told of the first time she saw her own book in print, and knowing the insatiable appetite for more worldly success and recognition, she said to herself, “Let it be enough.”

Wherever you are today, I wish you just this. May it be enough.

Author, AUTHOR!

We’ve all heard we must not let others define us. But last Saturday I did, and it was one of those *moments.* Whatever you may say about shoulds and shouldn’ts, there they are.

I attended a regional SCBWI conference. This unwieldy acronym stands for Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. You’d think such a literary bunch would have come up with a less awkward name, longer than some picture books. Regardless,  it’s a good and supportive organization run entirely by volunteers, and it welcomes all from the never-published to veteran professionals.

I’ve attended this very conference before, three years ago. Back then, my father had just been admitted to the hospital in what I sensed would be the final time, and I hadn’t had any book accepted for publication. I felt my ever-present shyness more than anything else.

This time I returned as a PAL author. (PAL=Published And Listed, and “listed” refers to SCBWI’s own list of "legitimate" publishers. They are not as accepting of vanity and self-publishing.) Their conference had my book for sale, and I had a desk with my name on it for signing.

I feared no one will buy my small and un-jazzy looking book, stacked next to the very spectacular offerings from other authors. (Three of the authors are famous, at least in kid-lit, and others have very trendy looking books.) But it did sell, and I did sign some, and the separate session for published writers was useful to me. My father is in the next world.  All an all, now is not three years ago…

I returned home with what DD described as a strange glow.

 “I’m an author,” I said to my husband.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what it says on our tax returns.” He was looking at those on screen. I squinted and looked also.

“No, it says ‘writer,’” I said. “I’m an author.”

He and DD looked at me funny.

“I sign books!” I said. That was about all they could take.

They didn’t get it. But you might. The very act of signing a book I wrote, which a stranger had just purchased, was one of those moments.

Yes. I’m an author. And I’ve got the sign from the conference^ as a memento.

STORIES TO DIE FOR

Some years ago, when thought of writing with the intention to publish was still a private one, I got the best advice. This bit of advice sustains me to this day.

It was a cozy morning of light rain falling outside, and tea and cookies inside. I was the mother of a kindergartner and a preschooler, and another mother from my son’s class asked me to her home for tea. I thought it was a getting acquainted sort of invitation. It turned out to be more than that.

The other mother showed me her work space, a corner oak table with a computer, and printed manuscript pages scatted about. She was writing a novel. She had asked me over not to talk about our sons or their school. She asked me to her home because she was hoping to pick my brain.

Really? With what I thought I had put out, I couldn’t imagine what pickings were there. But a comment I had made about a biblical character had sparked her fire, and now it was smoldering, just like the logs in her fireplace. I am so immersed in Old Testament stories it had not occurred to me that whatever I said reverberated. I didn’t even remember the comment. Now her fire was dying down and she had invited me to re-ignite it.

© Baba Buffalo

I no longer remember what her novel was about, only that the biblical character of Rachel bore some resemblance to her main character. But the whole setting sent me into a place I had neglected.

Except for my husband, on our very first real date, I never told anyone I intended to write for children. The chance of ever being published seemed remote, and it was better to keep such an endeavor private. But for some reason I told this mother, who I barely knew, about my secret hope and ambition.

“I have a few stories I would like to tell before I die,” I said.

She asked if I’ve been writing, and I said, “Not yet.”

“Maybe,” she said, “just maybe, if you don’t think of it as something to finish before you die, you might start and then even finish one.”

It was one of those sacred moments. Someone I barely knew had given me the key to unlock the door.

I have lost touch with this writer long ago. I heard she was agented and that her novel had sold. I looked for it periodically under her name, but never found it.

Wherever you are, KC, I owe you this chapter in my life.

BOOKS as FRIENDS

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. And inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

Groucho Marx

 

Let me linger with my favorite friends for a wee bit longer. Books. And this time I mean, specifically, paper printed books.

It was suggested, in a comment to my last post, that the solution to the space guzzling of my book-addiction is the great innovation of E-books. So true. So efficient. And also so contrary to the idolater in my nature.

To me a book is more than content. A book is presence. You can hug it like you would a dear friend, and glace at it with gratitude months after you met, got to know each other, and became part of each other’s lives.

It’s the idolater in me that keeps insisting the book, that physical presence in the form of a rectangular flattish sort of box, is a being that reciprocates to me what I am to it. I have hugged a book I loved, and even kissed a volume that opened my eyes just as only a dear friend could.

How do you hug an E-book? Pray tell. Really.

There is something ephemeral about all of e-things. Maybe it brings us back to the illusion that is all existence, or all matters of this world. Maybe there *IS* only thought, and E-books are a far closer representation of it. That’s a nice and very spiritual way to look at it. But I’m not evolved enough for this Jorge Luis Borges sort of ruminations in my everyday life.

I need my physical books, the way others hold to religious artifacts. I need physical reminders for what is supra-physical. 

And back to that deep thinker, Groucho Marx. E-readers now come with their own light. You now can read even inside of a dog.

Temptations

I generally avoid temptation, unless I can’t resist it.

I should avoid bookstores when money is tight. I always tell myself I’ll just look, read a little, and only purchase if it is a must.

And must it almost always is.

I don’t have issues with chocolate, or intoxicants. I have an issue with books.

Now it occurs to me why, no matter what living space I’ve occupied, I was driven out by books. First they asked me to just move over, squeeze a little. I’d do it for books, because they are worth it, and each one asks for only a little. Then they took over.

©Painting by Shelagh Duffett

I may have to sleep on the lawn, but I most certainly wouldn’t think of leaving my books there. They might, you know, get wet.

Now that I think of it, my parents’ home was walled with books. When they divorced, my father left with, as he later put it, only his books.

Briefly we had some shelf space, and then we didn’t. My mother eventually replaced the space he left with more books.

And my father’s home with his second wife got lined with books.

With such a legacy, what chance did I have?

I read them, I write them. But most of all- I get them. Then I get more.

I really should avoid temptation, unless I can’t resist.

Asking for Forgiveness

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we are to ask others for forgiveness for offenses committed in the past year. “If we cannot forgive others,” said the Hassidic Master Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, “how can we expect G-d to forgive us?”

But it occurred to me that the effort not to be offensive can lead to not saying much and not doing much. I have been guiltier of that than of doing the wrong thing. Not only this last year, but most of my life.

The down side of only saying nice things is that sooner or later no one can take what you say as having any weight. No writer wants to end their days having said the equivalent of noting.

So rather than asking for your forgiveness for what I may have said or done that caused offense, I ask for forgiveness for all I should have done, could have done, but didn’t.

The times I should have stepped in to help.

The times I should have spoken up, even if some people wouldn’t like it.

The times I could have stepped out of my comfort zone, but I hid in my safe space instead.

Please forgive me.