pjthompson | Entries tagged with cycles

Random quote of the day:

“There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.”

—Chögyam Trungpa, The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Eight

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“A bed witnesses out birth and it witnesses our death: it is the ever-changing theater where the human species enacts, by turns, engaging dramas, ridiculous farces, and horrible tragedies.—It is a cradle decked with flowers;—it is love’s throne;—it is a sepulcher.”

—Xavier de Maistre, Journey Around My Room (tr. Stephen Sartarelli)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance.”

—John Updike, Self-Consciousness

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Laurel and Hardy, Ariana Grande, or the Salvation Army Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

My mother loved collecting chatchkes. Some because she loved them, some because they were given to her, some just because they were there. Most of them are not really to my taste, so my plan has been for some time to sell them on eBay. Why shouldn’t someone who actually likes this stuff have it? And why shouldn’t I make a little cash on the side?

I’m keeping some of the chatchkes because I do like them, but there are others I’m keeping because I feel too guilty about selling them. These were dear to my mother and I just can’t bring myself to get rid of them. Let whoever has to clean out this house when I croak and won’t know what my mother loved deal with them. (Sorry, unknown person of the future.)

It’s odd the power that things can have over us. We shouldn’t let them, but we do. Still, I console myself that I am getting rid of a whole bunch of junk. That is, treasures that I do not sufficiently appreciate.

I have put some of the eBay plan into action, but I still have a ways to go before listing and selling. It will only be two weeks today since I left my job and I’ve had some serious depressurizing to do. I’m slowly getting there. I think I have plenty of time to bring this plan about, but we all think that, don’t we? One never knows when time will run out. But I would like to get this junk gone before that poor above-mentioned person has to deal with it. I really want to streamline this house. Need. I need to. For my own sanity.

Maybe I’ll even have the gumption to start cleaning out my mother’s room soon. It will be three years in January since she passed. I’ve moved things into her room in temporary storage, managed to give away all her clothes to the cleaning lady (who actually did the job of cleaning out the closet), but mostly her room remains a time capsule. I just haven’t had the heart to deal with it—and frankly, I see no reason to push myself. It’s an important part of the grieving and moving on cycle, but it’s also important to do things when the time is right for me.

Those things in that room are not my mom, much of it not even vaguely precious to her, but they are the last tenuous physical link I have to her. I need to get to the point of getting rid of them without feeling like I’m getting rid of her.

There are people who will say (who have said) that I should bite the bullet and just do it. But I fundamentally disagree with them. Grief is a process. It must be moved through on its own timetable. And only the one who is doing the grieving knows what that timetable is.

In the meantime, I am surrounded by junk, both precious and not. But I am in motion. I hope to stay in motion, to keep moving forward until time stops.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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.

Current Music: Here's the Tender Coming - The Unthanks

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?

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

In yesterday's post I spoke of time being a writer's friend. I am reminded that we live in a society that doesn't value time—or rather, the natural rhythms of time, the slow pace of natural cycles. We're always spending time, faster and faster, filling it with occupations and quicker ways of doing things—largely, I suspect, to avoid thinking about what comes after when we run out of time.

I'm not an enemy of technology and instant gratification. Far from it. I think it's great to live in the future, and have so many resources at our fingertips, so much neat swag and cool gizmos. But sometimes the cost of all this speed and tech and stuff is too high. Anything of value takes time: time to learn, time to know, time to savor. We live in a time that makes us work hard to find the space and breath to savor anything. I have to constantly remind myself to stop, take a moment, breathe, look at the sky, smell the crisp air, feel the wind on my face. Savor the world. Let it savor you. You don't always have to run after it full tilt. Have patience that you will find it and it will find you.

"A soulless world encourages faster, quicker, thrashing about to find the one filament that seems to be the one that will burn forever and right now. However, the miracle we are seeking takes time: time to find it, time to bring it to life.

The modern search for a perpetual motion machine rivals the search for a perpetual love machine. It is not surprising that people trying to love become confused and harried, and as in Hans Christian Anderson's story 'The Red Shoes,' dance a mad dance, unable to stop the frantic jig, and whirl right past the things they, in their deepest hearts, cherish most."

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

But enough of the serious junk, here's the Bangles covering Simon & Garfunkel:

Watch on YouTube

From September 24, 1995:

When I hear the way in which some people speak of the Great Goddess it makes me cranky and ill at sorts because they are using her to batter away at the ruling power structure, using her as a weapon. And she is the antithesis of a weapon.

We are all part of this male-dominated society. We can't escape its influence. We are thinking like men or we would never try to use the Earth Mother as a weapon. She abides and is bountiful; she is the life-giver; she ends life, certainly, but it is in the natural cycle of things, not in the murdering of.

Before we can truly understand her, we must teach ourselves to think in new ways. And that is the hardest trick to learn. Ultimately, how can you un-teach what you have ingested with your mother's milk? By being conscious of the Great Mother, by constantly asking yourself questions and looking at your motivations, by speaking only after consideration and not out of emotive reaction.

Crack this open and fall inside.

We live in the Information Age, but I sometimes wonder if we still respect Knowledge.

Or maybe we've progressed beyond the Information Age at this point and gone into the Socializing Age. I pass no judgments. Each human society creates what it needs to survive and make it feel good about itself. Until it creates itself into chaos and something new comes along to replace it. A natural cycle, like sunrise, sunset.

Don't mind me.

On a far less fascinating note:

I was reading a discussion of music over at

matociquala's place. The song "Hallelujah" was mentioned a few times. I went on from that discussion to read

postsecret with iTunes on random in the background. Yep, "Hallelujah" came up on the cycle.

iTunes has a quirky sense of humor, I've noticed. Just a bit ago it played "Lua" by Bright Eyes, followed by "Come Fly With Me" by Frank Sinatra.

And on an even less fascinating note:

I often love Frankie's music. For me, his version of some songs are the definite versions (though I think he blows on other interpretations of other songs). But I think he must have been a terrible sh*t of a human being. Tina Sinatra can sue me if she likes, but I still think he was a terrible sh*t of a human being.

Current Music: Tuesday Afternoon - Moody Blues

One person who read my novel, Shivery Bones, said the title made her think of pirates. Ar! I could live with that—if it was the Johnny Depp type of pirate.

Unfortunately, the novel has nothing to do with pirates. It has to do with channeling gods and goddesses; the birth and death cycle of the Great Goddess; love, sacrifice, and redemption; the meaning of lif(e); and good and evil vampires. Oh yes, it's also about the Spanish Inquisition, but nobody expects that.

I'd planned on writing another type of novel after that one. I was writing a series of contemporary fantasy stories about a small, mythological county in Southern California called Dos Lunas and the very strange people who live there. I had a nice superstructure worked out that would allow me to use much of that material in a novel, but somehow that didn't jell and this old novel, Night Warrior, sunk it's fangs into me. I'm closing in on 60k words now on a novel centering around one of the "support players" in Shivery.

And just this morning my subconscious delivered of me a solution as to why the Dos Lunas novel didn't jell. That's the way these breakthroughs happen for me. Distract myself with something else and let the lower end of my brain work on the other stuff and then pop! A squawling mass of new ideas comes forth.

And the conclusion I came to about using the Dos Lunas stories for a novel: those stories are...stories. They were written novelistically (which is why I'm not a great short story writer), but I don't really think they are part of a novel. The superstructure is fine, but the journey my hero, JK, needs to make has to be told in a different way. It has to be a part of this universe and this novel, not those stories. They have turned out to be a very elaborate backstory.

I may still be able to make them work as stories some day, but it isn't a priority for me anymore. I'm a novelist. That's the way my creative mind works; that's the creative muscles that have developed. And JK will have his day. Just not in the way I originally thought.

Of course, my lower brain didn't have any good ideas about what to do with the minor character who wanted to hijack the entire novel. I plan to slip her some sedatives once I start writing that novel again.

Profile

pjthompson

My Website

Navigation

December 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jan. 7th, 2026 12:41 pm

Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with cycles

Time

Bed

Cycles

Memento Mori

Memento Momi

First chapter fail

Love and stress and terror and love

Look around, leaves are brown

From the notebooks: the Great Goddess

Here's an utterly fascinating thing

Shivery Bones, matey

Profile

Navigation

December 2025

Syndicate

Expand Cut Tags