Echoes in a Hollow Space

TV Show pitch: This Old Crone
Like the PBS seres, This Old House (the original remodeling show), but featuring the transformation of an old crone rather than an old home. It should be hosted by the person who really knows how to do the work rather than the half-assed dilettante hosebag. In this series, instead of covering up the flaws in the crone, we shine a bright spotlight on them so that anyone, including the crone, can learn from them. And the eccentricities of construction will be celebrated rather than trying to turn them into something sleek and modern. Repair work will be done, of course, but with the knowledge that decrepitude is inevitable and the only sure and certain principle ruling the Universe is entropy. Rather than mourning this, the show will encourage us to accept it with as much grace and dignity as possible and learn from it, as well. But we must also remember that if entropy rules the Universe, irony is its only begotten daughter.

Everyone's path is their own. No path is superior. Everyone has to find their own way. The path of quiet contemplation is as valid as the full-throated war cry. Anyone who judges your path isn't as secure in their own as they think they are. One person has trouble crossing a room without pain; another climbs mountains. In the end, it doesn't matter. All that matters is the flame in your heart. If it dies, you've failed. If it's still burning, you're still burning, and you're where you need to be.

One of my ancestors is named Mary Polly Armor and I always want to read that as Mary Polyamory. #BecauseThatsJustTheSortOfBrainIHave

What’s the first major news event you remember in your lifetime? I was going to say the assassination of JFK but it’s really the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember those drills, our young teacher herding us little bitty kids into the cloakroom to shelter. I remember her crying each time and I didn’t figure out until later that it was because she never knew if we were hiding out because it was real and the bombs were on the way or if it was just another drill. I was terrified and didn't really know why.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion that paranormal activity is caused by places being built on Indian burial grounds. It’s quite prevalent in paranormal research and I’ve also fallen prey to the thought of vengeful native spirits. Lately, I’ve reconsidered this. It’s as essentially racist as the Ancient Aliens/Van Daniken notion that primitive (read “people of color”) societies could not possibly have invented the wonders they did—it had to be gifted to them from Space Overlords. The Indian burial ground notion has even pervaded popular horror movie culture. The one exception to this that I can think of in popular culture (rather than supposedly legit research) is the movie Poltergeist. The dead folks in that movie were just vengeful dead folks, not vengeful natives. I can't think of such an exception in paranormal research. It makes me feel guilty that I even considered the Indian burial ground scenario. Although I'm not sure my white guilt is any more helpful than white appropriation or white nullification of culture. Mostly I realize it's not about me except for when I can work for positive change.

Here near LAX we got a gentle rolling from the July 5th 7.1 earthquake (downgraded to only 6.9), but it did go on for a very long time. Sometimes they are gentle at first then the big whammy hits, so until things stop there's always the fear it will get bigger. One of my neighbors was standing out in her front yard screaming, however, which I thought kind of extreme but it takes everybody different. I did feel seasick afterwards, though.

The only thing I know is that whatever negative thing you are when you're young, you will still be that negative thing when you're old, only more so. Unless you do a s*** ton of work on yourself between youth and age, if you're a young rage monkey he'll be in old age monkey; if you're a judgmental young twat you'll be a judgmental old twat. The good news is, if you're a thoughtful, considerate person when you're young you'll most likely still be a thoughtful, considerate old person. The seeds of who our selves are planted at the moment of our birth.

I think the dictation on my Word program must be Scottish. It never wants to capitalize the name Ken.

I lived a block from the Sidewalk Cafe in the 80s. We often ate there in the day time, but knew to stay off the Boardwalk at night: too wild & dangerous for girls on their own. It sounds like things have changed—and not changed: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/08/a-night-with-a-bouncer/#.XRlOldiNsgk.twitter



I have to confess that as much as I loathe Ancient Aliens, it's a good show to have on for background noise when I'm not feeling very well. I can read Twitter while it's playing and look up every once in a while to yell very rude things at the screen. #NeverSaidIWasntWeird

I don't feed the crows every day. But every time I do feed them, the day after one of them will perch on the rail near my open front door and yell at me to feed them again. #LoveThemCrows

The Detectorists – a lovely, gentle, funny show. One of my favorites.


I have a terrible confession to make. I hope you'll still be my friends once you hear it: I like the lumps in cream of wheat.

Be forewarned: this isn’t about a haunted house, it’s about a haunted person. It’s about a strange thing that happened around the time of my mother’s death which has troubled me in the four years since she passed. I am writing about it mostly because I want to make sense of it. If someone could suggest a rational explanation that isn’t more preposterous than a paranormal one, I would glom onto it like a leech to a fleshy leg, but I suspect there is none.

In the last few years of my mother’s life, a marked coldness dominated her room—much more than the rest of the house. I had to buy her an electric mattress cover so she didn’t sleep so cold at night. The chill was so pervasive it stretched about five feet out of her bedroom door into a small adjoining den. Walking through the den towards her door you would hit a well-demarcated wall of ice. Being a mostly rational human being, I searched for possible sources of the chill, had the heating company check the vents, but none of us could find anything. And to test the existence of this wall of cold, I had my friends walk through the den to see if I was imagining it, but they felt it, too. Even the skeptical one.

The day my mother died, I brought her home for hospice to that bedroom. She arrived at noon and was gone by about eight that night. Two remarkable things happened after she died. First, five to ten minutes after she passed, our cat (who had not gone into her room once the cold stuff started happening) came to the foot of her hospital bed and started rolling around, showing her belly and acting coy as she did when my mother talked baby talk to her. The second thing, which I didn’t notice until the next day, was that the cold had completely disappeared. No wall of ice emanating from her door, the bedroom the same temperature as the rest of the house. And it has never returned in the four years since, even in the coldest parts of winter (which in L.A. is a relative thing, but you catch my drift).

What haunts me is wondering what caused this. I am certain there are no lingering spirits in this house, nothing sinister. I have lived in a genuinely haunted house—and that was sinister and creepy. I can tell the difference. Here, in my current home, there may be the occasional transient spirit—something of a lifelong pattern for me—but nothing sinister-creepy. So, I don’t think there was anything evil in my mother’s bedroom sucking the life/heat out of the place. I sometimes wonder if my mother, who was herself a force of nature, was sucking the energy out of the room in her fierce determination to stay alive.

See, Mom had two incidents of possible near-death experience in her later years. There was the time in her late eighties when she got a severe blood infection and almost died. She told me that one night she woke up in the hospital and three shadowy figures stood in the corner. They didn’t speak aloud, she said, but in her mind. They told her that if she wanted to leave this life at that time she could go, but it was up to her. She told them she wasn’t ready to leave, and they said she could stay but things would get much harder from that point on. She survived, and things did get much harder. Maybe a year after this incident, her shaky kidneys finally failed and she had to start dialysis. A year after that, she had a stroke. We were lucky in that it didn’t affect her mind, nor was she paralyzed in any way, but it severely affected her vision and her sense of balance. Though she was still strong and remarkably flexible for her age, she could no longer stand upright without a walker or she would fall right over. She had to go into rehab for three months and came out of it with her fighting spirit intact.

She confessed to me, though, that her three shadowy figures visited her in the rehab center and offered her the same deal. Again, she refused, and again they said things would get much harder. And they did. Things were okay for a while, but the severe stenosis in her spine made things difficult. “I don’t know how she’s still walking,” said her doctors. “Determination,” I said. But in order to tolerate the severe pain, Mom had to go on opiates.

Thank the gods, she kept her faculties until the last month of her life, but the other thing that haunts me is the memory of her slow, inevitable decline. Yes, I know, the circle of life and all that crap—but it’s very hard to watch up close. In particular, there is my memory of the time the hospital fucked up and took her off her opiates then sent her back to the rehab facility after her being off the drugs for several days. The rehab facility couldn’t legally start the opiates again without a doctor’s authorization but it was evening by the time she got back there and she was going through withdrawals. The doctor on call was not answering his page. I held her in my arms while she writhed in agony for over two hours before the doctor finally responded and the drugs finally took effect. It was the most harrowing night of my life. Even sitting by her bed holding her hand while she died was not as harrowing because she was at peace then.

I tell myself she’s no longer in pain, she’s dancing now in the Summerlands—and I believe she is. But some things are not so easy to move on from. April 7 would have been her 98^th birthday. My friends and I—those who were her adopted kids—always celebrate her birthday by going out to a restaurant she would have liked, but this Sunday I had to cancel our plans. I’d been suffering for days from some unspecified belly complaint. The symptoms were real but I can’t help thinking the source was somewhere inside my spirit.

Yes, I know she’s at peace now. She’s not haunting me. I’m haunting myself. I did therapy and grief counseling in the year following her death and that helped but I was still working then and distracted. Now I have time to contemplate things and I have been doing ancestor work lately which has been hawking up a bunch of stuff. This is mainly a good thing, as it’s helping me to process so many things that I pushed down and away. And these things need to be processed for my own soul’s growth. As I’ve often observed, once you entered Faery, there’s no going back. You must go forward to find your way out again. On the other side, things will be better, but in the meantime, I haunt myself. The scales drop from my eyes, one by one, and I feel lighter once I’ve faced things I didn’t want to look at before. Things will get better. Or so I tell myself. It’s easy to be fooled when you’re a mere mortal.

And I still would like to understand the icy cold that came and went. I probably never will—leastways, not completely, not on this side of the veil. I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad.

This is not about you it’s about me.

I really try not to whine. Whining is different from talking things over with people. There’s a wheedling, “pity me” quality to whining that isn’t present in a good talking-out. Sometimes, though, the urge to hit the martyr bandwagon is strong, so very strong, and I don’t always resist the wienie whiny syndrome. I thank from the bottom of my heart everyone who has listened patiently to these screeds. You are truly heroic to have resisted the urge to slam the door in my face (or throw the phone against the wall).

When the urge strikes to pile a bunch of “poor me” on some poor soul, I try to step back and do the whining just to myself. Maybe even mumbling it all aloud when I’m securely alone. About five or ten minutes of this exaggerated pity party is all I can stomach. It doesn’t always prevent me from repeating this act with another person, but it makes it far less likely. There’s nothing like bathing oneself in the sticky glub of whinosity to give one (me) a strong desire to want to come clean. Coming clean is impossible when the sticky mess of whining is involved.

Coming clean involves talking about important things without the martyr flags flying; it also means refraining from sarcasm or put-down wit—another trap I all to easily fall into. Outrage and insult are as often about life not turning out as we wanted it as they are about genuine concern over injustice. It’s important to know which is which, being straight first with yourself so you can then be straight with others. If you’re not sure where your motivations lie, keep your powder dry but don’t shoot any salvos. If you’re not sure where your motivations lie, the best thing is to keep quiet.

Listen to the crickets chirp in the lull. I’ve been doing a lot of listening to the crickets lately chirping outside the sitting room window on these warm summer nights. Although the sound is about biology, attracting a mate, to human ears it’s a soothing, meditative sound. It induces in me a mood for contemplation, a desire to see things straight. Contemplation is the antithesis of whining, which is all about the martyr, all about life disappointing us. Contemplation is about accepting the moment for what it is now, good or ill. I don’t always get there, I all too frequently fail, but I am trying at least part of every day to savor the silence and let go of accusation, acrimony, and martyrdom.

It is so very hard, especially when life is disappointing, and when I am not feeling well, as has been the case for most of the last month….Ah, you see, the whine creeps even into this. It is hard to resist. But so very necessary.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

ETA: Whining is not the same as venting. See the comments.

If by chance you missed this over at Nathan Bransford's blog, Valerie Kemp has written an excellent guest blog on the subject of first chapters.

It's got me thinking of my own first chapters from my finished novels and analyzing why they succeeded or failed. Ms. Kemp makes the excellent point that a first chapter is a promise to the reader about what the rest of the book is going to be like. If it's a high-action chapter, the reader probably expects the rest of the book to be high-action. If it's leisurely and contemplative, then that projects into the reader's mind a much different book.

She makes a number of excellent points which I won't reiterate here—go read the original. But that concept up there in my previous paragraph is one of those should-be-obvious things that often gets overlooked. I know I've overlooked it many times. Sometimes I catch it in the rewrites and make good on that promise to the reader, sometimes not.

I'm thinking in particular of my third novel, Shivery Bones. The first chapter was an action-filled chase scene involving the hero, Ezra. Very in media res, and at the end a burst of unexpected magic. Which was gripping, but not reflective of the story as a whole. Oh yeah, there were actiony bits, more fights and chases, and throughout the book I like to think there were bursts of unexpected magic, but the bulk of the story was much more about the internal journeys of the hero and the heroine, Jolene. She has to learn to love and trust again after terrible tragedy and to accept the natural cycle of life, and Ezra...well, pretty much the same thing, with the added twist of realizing that true love is sometimes about sacrificing your own best interests for the sake of someone else.

None of that was in my first chapter. An early critter said something of the sort to me. "If I didn't know you wrote more contemplative books, I probably wouldn't have read on since this chapter has a lot of adrenaline going on." I ignored that criticism, thinking it beside the point. Very late in the game with this novel, after I'd sent it out many times, I realized the truth of this insight. But it took a rejection from an agent to drive that nail home: "The rest of this book wasn't what I expected from the first chapter."

I wrote a new first chapter which at least had a more contemplative and mysterious vibe to it—centering on Jolene this time rather than Ezra, then transitioning into the action chapter. I think it makes a stronger novel. Unfortunately, during the years I tried selling it with its original first chapter, the market has become saturated with certain tropes used in the story, making it a hard sell, with diminishing chances it would sell. I'd moved on to novels four, five, and six so reluctantly trunked this one.

Would it have fared any better in the market if I'd taken my early betas advice and written a new chapter one back then? Absolutely impossible to say. There are probably other flaw bombs in there that haven't yet exploded in my consciousness. But I do know that writing a new first chapter was the right thing for this book, and the right thing in terms of that implied promise to the reader.

Writing blocks, for me, can take a couple of different forms. Sometimes I become blocked for a week or two because my Muse is trying to tell me that I've taken a wrong turn somewhere with a current project. He's making me stop until I figure it out, back up, and get off the wrong path. Once I get clear on that, things generally start moving again.

Another kind of writing block is more insidious and harder to cure because it involves the recognition that I've taken a wrong turn inside myself. I stop writing when I get out of balance, but it's sometimes hard to realize that's happening. Fortunately, these reassessments of my life's path occur only every ten years or so, and the good news is that I've gotten much cannier about recognizing them. In my misspent youth, I'd sometimes spin my wheels for months, even years on one horrible occasion, mostly in a state of denial. Denial is the road to nowhere, pretty much.

So, how to fix myself rather than the project I am working on? Not always easy, but admitting there is a problem is a crucial step. Usually, in the midst of that whole reassessment thing, it's required to sit down somewhere quiet, to let the doubts and fears and questions and wants and hopes and aspirations and whatever crowd around. Once they do, it requires more quiet time to listen to their various complaints, let them sink down into the deep levels, and see which of them are valid and which of them are just more wheel spinning. It requires asking them, asking myself, what I really want. What's important to me, and not necessarily the great wide world.

This is not a society which values quiet time and passive receptivity. We are doers. We believe in going out and hunting down our solutions rather than letting them pad in on soft paws and lie beside us. We don't like mixing our metaphors, either. If we're on the damned road, we want to stay on the damned road. If we're out in a forest clearing sitting around with wild things—well, we don't want to do that. It's too passive. And, besides, wild things are scary. What if they attack us, try to eat us? What if we're like that guy who went into the wilds of Alaska and relied too much on books on nature craft rather than being taught true nature craft and wound up eating poison mushrooms and dying alone and in agony?

But sometimes that's exactly what you have to do. Well, not eating the poison mushrooms part, but the going into the wilds and sitting around the campfire.

This is not a time of year that lends itself to quiet time. It's become this mad, rushing thing; a crazed pursuit of some perverted perfection of consumerism, getting caught up in doing things a certain way and being the ultimate hostess. But it should not be. The Winter Solstice was always a time of sitting around the fire while the cold rages outside, of taking an accounting of the year and the harvest just past, of feasting and expiating the gods so that they will bring the spring once more. It's a time of waiting for the world to be reborn.

After weeks of wheel spinning, I've finally started to make myself sit down, be quiet, and listen to the wild things as they tentatively, shyly come padding in to lie near my fire. They are as scared of me as I of them, but they do not try to eat me. (Or feed me poison mushrooms.) They have already begun talking to me, going deeper. And I've finally started to listen.

Stay tuned.

I'm in the midst of book packing frenzy and I'm still buying books. Not many, just a couple, but clearly, I have a mania. I ordered a book from Amazon because I realized in packing up that I had book 2 and 3 of the series but not 1--and I had to complete the set right now, didn't I?? I felt like going on to the next book in a series I've been reading in the hour before I collapse into bed at night, so I picked that up. I will probably be picking up the sequel to a book I finished last week. I wasn't sure I'd continue with the sequel because of problems with the first book—a slow and impressive build of world and character followed by a rushed and nearly passive action closer—but I find I can't stop thinking about a certain character and I thought I really should try to exorcise that private demon. And I ordered a book on labyrinths because I am researching them for a novel and because a friend and I are thinking of building one in her garden.

(Did you know most people have it wrong about labyrinths? They aren't the things where you wander around and get lost--those are mazes. Mazes are designed to fool and are left-brain puzzlers to be figured out; labyrinths have one way in and one way out and are a path meant to be walked for contemplation. The Minotaur was not actually in a labyrinth but in a maze. Labyrinths are places where you walk a sacred path to get into a meditative state--like they have at Chartres or Grace Cathedral in San Francisco or the Nazca lines or Celtic burials or . . . well, there are a bunch of them around the world, some ranging back millennia to pagan times. Christian and pagan, pretty much every religion or way of knowing has some form of the labyrinth. I will not be using labyrinths in the maze sense in my novel, but in the meditative sense.)

(But I digress.)

And speaking of rushed and passive action sequences...that next book in the series I've been reading had a similar problem in the opening pages. I couldn't help wondering if these sequences in the ending of one book and the beginning of another weren't a result of being forced to edit down a ms. from a larger size to one more acceptable to the present publishing climate? I suppose it could just be writers' fatigue and rushing to get things over with, but I've noticed that rushed, passive action thing happening in quite a few books lately. I can't decide if it's a symptom of the publishing environment or if I'm just noticing that sort of thing more these days. What really cheeses me off is that I think in both cases it would have been so easy to fix--just make the verbs more active, make the POV slightly more immersive. In the casing of the ending sequence it felt rather like coitus interruptus after that long, careful build. In the case of the opener, it just felt sloppy and tired.

You can't have everything, I guess.

And about all I'm doing these days is hunkering down to write and hunkering down to pack. I'll try to sneak in some crits when I can, but I have to focus my priorities on finishing Night Warrior and in getting moved.

Oh, and Night Warrior is probably going to be called Midnight Ragas in the second draft, for reasons which will become apparent...in the second draft. (It will take some twiddling which I don't have time for right now. Must. Finish.) For right now, it's staying Night Warrior.

And I can't help wondering if NW is going to have a rushed and passive action sequence in order to Get. This. F-er. Done. *sigh*