tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69325466123605951912024-02-19T06:42:29.953-08:00 Things I've Killed with my head with my hands accidentally intentionally occasionally including parts of myselfHeatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-45865945208370476492018-11-11T18:37:00.002-08:002018-11-11T18:37:37.345-08:00<div class="MsoNormal">
Hello old friends, and welcome new ones joining me from the Best of Boneshaker!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thanks for checking out my web page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are lots of blog entries beneath this,
but I want to sneak you an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Januarium</i>, which will be available
on Amazon as an ebook by the end of the month. 'Cause it's my birthday, and for my birthday, I'm making myself a novelist. I'll post a link to it once it's published. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Januarium is a young adult/LGBT adventure in an
alternative 1911 San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>16 year
old inventor Tinker Martin’s father was born into slavery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reparations and a group of Quakers enabled
him to become a doctor, but Tinker worries slavery could return and is
committed to designing a flying bicycle that anyone could build and use to
claim their freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her best friend
Yuri is a bicycle courier who trades her scrap metal for bike repairs and
understands her passion for things with gears and wings.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Elizabishka!” cries Yuri, taking
my first name, Elizabeth, and making it adorably Ukranian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sweeps me up in a spinning hug.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Thank you for having me over to test
machines and do laundry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haven’t seen
you in weeks! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have made the
flicycle?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He reads the pain on my
face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mustache droops, following the
corners of his mouth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“No!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, with time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the washing mechanism, yes?” he takes
in the scaffolding, the diamond frame, the rear wheel with the strap running
around the hogshead. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I will load up my
laundry, and you will tell me what happened.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
I glance at his bicycle in the
corner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s his bakery delivery bike,
with two huge wicker baskets hugging the rear wheel, now overflowing with
smelly socks and shirtsleeves. Yuri follows my glance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Don’t worry,” he says, “we line the panniers
with big papers before we put in the bread.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
He loads the barrel while I tell
him about the flight and the crash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
face goes bloodless when I get to the twisted frame and accordioned wings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He pats my shoulder, saying, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“well, I hope you will let me try to fly next
one.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
I blurt out an involuntary laugh,
and say, “I think you’re too good a friend to risk on one of my harebrained
contraptions.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Your heart is sore still from the
crash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s have a successful washing
machine to remind you you’re not that dangerous.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
I smile at him and pour in five
gallons of water I’ve set aside in a carboy, plus a handful of soap
shavings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yuri borrows my mallet to
pound the lid on the barrel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He gets on
the bike, gets off the bike, and adjusts the saddle so his knees aren’t up in
his armpits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then away he goes, doing
what Yuri’s best at.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Skate wheels rattle against the
barrel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stop Yuri, adjust the angle,
and the barrel spins smoothly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can
hear the water sloshing through the clothes inside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll have to remember to paint the iron frame
so nothing rusts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Things seem to
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I start the stove in the corner so
I can start steaming Graciela’s window frame. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Yuri looks over at me,
sheepish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Tinker, I met a bicycle.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Is she pretty?” I ask, spoofing
off his lovestruck tone.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“The prettiest.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His eyes roll heavenward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“She’s called the Slipstream, and she’s
incredible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Diamond safety frame, of
course, gear ratios for incredible power and speed, and, get this—she’s
aluminum.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
I whistle, impressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Fast and light, rigid and responsive, also
more brittle and horribly messy to make.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I begin carefully disassembling Graciela’s window sash.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“More expensive, too.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Ahh, but the good ones always are,
aren’t they?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How much?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Yuri swallows nervously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I have a little savings.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“She fast enough you’d win races
with her?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Yuri looks sideways at me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You know me as not a man who brags.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wait for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I know the wheelmen in the area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>With this bike I would win races.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He pedals on a while in reverie, then whispers, eyes narrowed,
“Slipstream.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Well,” I say, grabbing an oil can and heading
over to the bakery bike, “I hope you bring her home someday so I can meet
her.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I start tuning up his bike while I
wait.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The salt air is so corrosive in
San Francisco, and ungreased gears wear fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Me, too,” he says, letting go of
the handlebars to stretch his back while he pedals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“So what is on your mind these days?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Making next plans for flying bicycle?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Have you been following this
Januarium thing? It’s fascinating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They’re turning Alcatraz into a refrigerated arctic preserve.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tighten the springs on his brake pads so
they feel more responsive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I notice
the front ones are unevenly worn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I grab
a replacement pair from my kit.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Yes, the Russian paper carries
this story, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t imagine why in
this lovely climate someone spends enormous money making this frozen hell.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“You read Russian?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought Ukrainian was quite different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it won’t be hell,” I say, unaccountably
offended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There’ll be foxes and musk
ox, living in a glittering a glass dome off the shore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be magical.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I see the brake pads wore that way because
the wheel is bent out of true and rubbing wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I take it out of the fork, and start
adjusting the tension on the spokes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Yuri shakes his head, pedaling on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Rich people are crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, yes, I read Russian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am a man of many talents.” He says, arching
an eyebrow like a lothario.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Besides,
there’s not enough Ukrainians here for our own news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Russian is not my home culture, but it takes an
edge off homesickness.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Wow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s impressive.” I look up from the wheel
for a moment, taking in my trilingual friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“But you know what else is impressive?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Januarium!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This Cantilever
fellow isn’t just keeping pets, he’s using the cold and the animals to research
inflammation and metabolism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His work
could reverse degenerative disease, and extend human life!”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
The bucket on the stove is boiling
over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I slip a T-shaped chimney of pipe
over the top. Soon, steam pours out the ends, and I slide the warped pieces of
window frame in the top pipe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since it’s
oak, it will take an hour or more to soften.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Plenty of time to finish the wheel, tighten the headset, and oil
everything.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“You ask me, it’s unnatural.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure, you’ll live forever--as world’s first
immortal popsicle.” Yuri stops pedaling and his voice drops with intensity,
“Tinker, I just made my first joke.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“What do you mean?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t terribly funny.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Yuri looks cross.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“In Ukraine, I am what you call
laugh-a-minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very funny guy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But you got to really know the language to
make jokes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is my first English
joke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the first time Yuri the
funny guy makes it over to United States.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Given my first taste of Yuri’s
humor, I’ll have to take “very funny guy” on faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> But Yuri's my chuckaboo, so </span>I say, “You’re
right, Yuri.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s huge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We should do something to celebrate, to
welcome Funny Yuri to the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>First, though, let me check your socks.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-8937499187911007332015-02-02T15:01:00.000-08:002015-02-02T15:03:10.362-08:00My Mother's Bear<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a sun-faded, wallet-size photograph of a bear that
hangs on a ribbon from the rear view mirror of my Mom’s Subaru Forrester. The bear’s name is Melody. Clipped to the photo is a small package of
melba toast crackers, for the bear who isn’t in the picture.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM3-GQNMHzkZNxqfBznE7xiKckLKy1rRLPN3KpjcoCBoEoQPVXUJe9d3WRACYKnTo6LaVxSRULjAvy4QIfNfw4-SMTBPzBMr5FOt4xoiTMt3TjeO61BigEN1oa_Z69XZ4ge_XCyCYfpIQ/s1600/Bears.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM3-GQNMHzkZNxqfBznE7xiKckLKy1rRLPN3KpjcoCBoEoQPVXUJe9d3WRACYKnTo6LaVxSRULjAvy4QIfNfw4-SMTBPzBMr5FOt4xoiTMt3TjeO61BigEN1oa_Z69XZ4ge_XCyCYfpIQ/s1600/Bears.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mom used to be terrified of bears. She met my dad through the outing club in
college, he was her climbing instructor. When he proposed, he told her that if he married
her, moving to Alaska was part of the package.
She was delighted. She bought a
wedding dress and they invited all their friends to a pot-luck at Yosemite,
surprising them all with the wedding.
Mom never changed into the dress, and ended up getting married in her
hiking boots instead. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So naturally, my
childhood summers were spent hunkered in the jump seat of my dad’s pickup,
listening to the rattle of the canoe on the roof, on our way to float the
Gulkana, or the Little Susitna. We’d
always try to get a few miles downriver the first night, just to get away from
the sound of the road. We’d find a place
to camp a few hours before dark. Once
we’d settled in, Dad would set up the tent, Mom would set up the kitchen,
always a good safe distance away from where we would sleep, and I’d head off
with the dog to gather firewood. After
dinner and a family assembly-line of dish washing, we’d settle into our
standard sleeping arrangement: on the far left, you have a loaded, large-frame,
8-round revolver, next, Dad sleeping soundly, me in the middle, scrunched down
two feet to make room for the dog at my head, and on the right, Mom, lying
awake until 3 every morning, listening to every rustle and snapped twig. Because everywhere in Alaska is grizzly
country.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I was little, I couldn’t decide how much of a threat
bears were. I’d try staying awake like
my mom, because it seemed responsible, but always fell asleep anyway. When I got older, watching Mom fumbling,
fatigued through the second or third or fourth day of camping, I offered to
take watches with her, staying awake so she could catch up on sleep. “Wouldn’t do any good,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t want to sleep, it’s
that I can’t.” So I gave up, and slept hard, because there was nothing else
useful to do. Summer after summer, I
watched my mom worry. We saw fresh
prints, we saw bear scat. But we never
saw bears. The dog in the tent stayed asleep
most nights. Once or twice she would hop
up, barking and growling at the woods beyond the tent, but whatever it was
always meandered off, the dog would go back to sleep and our campsite would be
undisturbed in the morning. I became skeptical, growing suspicious that
mom’s fear had more to do with a belief that she could control an
uncontrollable situation by worrying about it.
And while I saw evidence that our family’s insistence on clean, cautious
camping in bear country was enough to keep us safe, Mom saw evidence that her
worry was protecting us. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mom used to say it wasn’t bears that scared her so much, it
was what people had done to bears. Campgrounds were harder for her to sleep in
because of “garbage bears”-- the ones that stayed near the campground because
they’d learned that dumpsters provided easy meals, and that humans were a
stable food source. Those were the ones
she visualized tearing through the tent flap following the smell of an unnoticed
gob of peanut butter mashed into your fleece jacket at lunch. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s the cool thing about my mom though. Her fear becomes her fixation, and she
manages it by learning everything she can.
She read and re-read a big stack of books on bears, Scary Alaskan Bear
Tales, books on living in the bush, scientific books on bear behavior, feeding
habits and population distribution, anything to help her feel prepared. Then, when I was fourteen, she surprised us
all by entering the lottery to go to McNeil River. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
McNeil River Bear Reservation is a 200 square mile preserve,
accessible only by float plane, 160 miles away from the nearest town. Human activity is strictly regulated: you can
only camp in specific places, you can only cook or eat with the other visitors inside
the fortified cook shed. The only people
allowed guns were the head ranger, the legendary Larry Aumiller, and whatever
ranger was lucky enough to be posted with Larry that summer. This, my mom figured, was about as perfect an
arrangement as humans could manage in bear country. The bears here would be safer, not trained to
associate humans with food. She could to
this. It would be therapeutic.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Her name didn’t get drawn. She entered the next year and got in. She got two tickets, and opted to take my
dad. Camping was how they met, after
all. I think it’s possible she might
have wanted to show him she could sleep through the night, given the right
circumstances. They had an amazing
time. When they came back, they were
full of stories of Larry, who had already spent unwitting years as a Dunn
family hero, plus photographers with three-foot lenses in expensive shock-proof
cases, like Kiki Mimori, an Italian photographer then in her mid 60s who did
frequent work for National Geographic , who made enough to live in Italy and
maintain an apartment in Anchorage. More impressive than all this was the fact
Mom slept like a baby every night she was there.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On their second day, Mom and Dad went out with Larry. It was early in the summer, and the salmon
hadn’t started migrating up McNeil River yet.
But they were running at Mikfik Creek, which was, in some ways,
better. It wasn’t as picturesque, with
the famous falls you’ve seen in almost every documentary on bears, but you
could get a lot closer to the prime fishing spot, and therefore the bears. This was where Larry, his rifle strapped to
his back, led Kiki, my parents, and about six other people. Any more than that, and Larry said he got
more worried about managing the humans than the bears. They settled in on a flat grassy patch just
before a steep bank that led down to the stream. Any bears who had been there first took off at
the sound of the pack of hikers, “But they’re here,” Larry assured. “They’ll be back soon.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first grizzly showed up within twenty minutes. Then more, sometimes as many as four sharing
the same fishing hole. My parents
witnessed a constantly shifting social dynamic on the other side of the creek;
blustery competition for the prime fishing spot, male bears trying to push in
on the females with cubs and getting rebuffed.
They never saw an all-out fight, but my parents got to see plenty of
fake charges, bared teeth and serious swats with thirty-pound, six-inch-clawed
paws. The social scene was made all the
more engaging by the fact that at any time, the tensions could boil over from
the bear side of the river to the human one.
Larry never had to cock his rifle, but it came down off his shoulder a
few times, just in case. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the bears who was a regular at that spot that summer
was Melody, a female with two yearling cubs.
Twins are more common for bears than humans, but still an exception to
the rule. Larry kept a mental genealogy
of bears going decades back. He never
named cubs in their first year, since so few make it into their second. But Melody had managed to raise twins to a
stable age where they could begin to make it on their own. Larry said it was time to name them. He wanted names that sounded like their
mother’s, so he could remember who came from whom. Kiki suggested Carmel. Larry thought that sounded good. My mom suggested Melba for the other
twin. Larry nodded, saying, “I could
remember that.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My parents came back from their five days at McNeil River
with rolls and rolls of film. Printed up
into slides and projected on our silvery screen back in our living room, I was
amazed how my parents could tell one bear from another. Mom never got a chance to take a good picture
of Melba, the cub she named, but she got one of Melody. She had the slide printed up so it could hang
from the rear view mirror, a reminder of a great adventure and a fear—if not
conquered, at least faced, negotiated with, and left on better terms. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mom’s not afraid of bears anymore. She left Alaska to join me down in Washington
State not long after Dad died. The black
bears we encounter hiking in Washington’s parks don’t concern her much. Here, her fear is hobo spiders—<i>Teginaria
agrestus</i>—German forest spiders that hitchhiked in shipments of furniture to
Washington where they decided they prefer living indoors. Their necrotic bite will eat out a divot in
your flesh the size of a hand. Mom is
dealing with her fear much the same way as she did with bears. She takes precautions for living in spider
country, putting up night lights and screens over the heating vents. She’s bought books. She captures <i>Teginaria</i> around her house and
sticks them in the freezer so she can take them to a local entomologist she’s
made friends with; so he can peer through his microscope and tell her if she’s
caught a poisonous <i>agrestus</i>, or one of the nearly identical but harmless
<i>gigantea</i> or <i>domesticus</i> species. So far,
they’ve all come back <i>gigantea</i>. That’s
good news. The <i>gigantea</i> can give you a
good scare as three inches of spider goes scuttling across your foot; these are
spiders big enough to hear. But they
prey on hobos; so the fact my mom shares her house with a lot of them may be
more of a blessing than a curse. These
huge, creepy arachnids are actually keeping her safe. I can’t tell my mom not to be scared, or, I
can; It’s something I’ve done enough to know it doesn’t help either of us. In the past few years, however, I’ve noticed
some of my mom’s night lights have come down, some of the screens have fallen
and not been replaced. Like the bears, she’s
finding a way to live with them. </div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a teenager, I was
angry that my mom let her fears get in the way so much. My rejection of her caution turned me into a bit of a daredevil,
diving through city traffic on my bicycle on the way to work, climbing trees
way past an age that such a thing is considered appropriate. I wanted to throw myself into the world and
show her it would catch me, so maybe she could finally relax a little. But the
older I get, the better I’m able to accept that I’ll never change her caution,
not even by offering myself up as an example who remains unmauled, unbitten,
and unsquished by angry drivers. Accepting
this about her has allowed me to see and respect my mom’s disciplined approach
to encountering and making peace with the things that scare her. If she can find peace in her house full of
monster arachnids, certainly I can accept her in her entirety, with her fears
and limitations, and admire her skill at finding her unique, quiet way past
them.</div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-72550836851799170012014-10-01T16:51:00.000-07:002014-10-01T16:51:07.883-07:00The Waiting Game<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I went to the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference in July
with two goals. I wanted to know if my
book was ready; where the quality of structure and writing was in relation to
books getting published. My other goal was to find a way forward. I pitched The Januarium to nine agents and two acquiring editors at the PNWA conference.
It’s been a month and a half since I sent out my last submission. How’s the manuscript doing?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Januarium Scorecard<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 90.5pt;" valign="top" width="121">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 90.5pt;" valign="top" width="121">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 76.4pt;" valign="top" width="102">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe, Edit and Resubmit<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 104.6pt;" valign="top" width="139">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-left: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 116.8pt;" valign="top" width="156">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No response yet<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 90.5pt;" valign="top" width="121">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Agents<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 90.5pt;" valign="top" width="121">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 76.4pt;" valign="top" width="102">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 104.6pt;" valign="top" width="139">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">0<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 116.8pt;" valign="top" width="156">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 90.5pt;" valign="top" width="121">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Editors<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 90.5pt;" valign="top" width="121">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 76.4pt;" valign="top" width="102">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">0<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 104.6pt;" valign="top" width="139">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">0<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 116.8pt;" valign="top" width="156">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Is the Story Ready?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mmmmaybe. According
to feedback I’m getting from agents, probably.
Three rejection letters have mentioned specifically that the writing is
good. One agent even said expected sell,
just that she wouldn’t be the one to sell it. I’m not through the gate yet, but
the gatekeepers seem friendly enough. My
inner gamer hopes my Charisma is high enough, and wonders what die I should use
for an influence roll. But, seriously,
the feedback I’m getting is really encouraging.
Not, revise for pacing, or your characters are flat. So, while there are always things to improve,
I feel like goal one is met. I’m learning
The Januarium stands pretty well against books that are getting picked up for
publication. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Way
Forward<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">See that 1 in the Maybe column? One agent sent me back all my copy with
extensive notes, and asked to see a revision.
I’m a week out from having it done.
The main assignment was to get a better grip on how good sci-fi opens,
specifically where in the story the unique mechanics of the alternative
universe are introduced. Turns out right
up front is the best answer, and I’ve added two letters between the main
character’s father and uncle as a preface.
I hope it’s enough. But for now,
goal two is met.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One Story the Numbers
Don’t Tell<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There were three agents in particular that felt like the
best matches for The Januarium. One was
the first I submitted to, and the first I heard back from. She’s the Resubmit. The other two were the submissions I sent out
last, and they wanted the whole manuscript.
So as the responses trickle in and the No numbers stack up, I’m holding
out hope for those last two. As the
agent who said she’d be keeping an eye out for my book deal reminded me, all it
takes is one yes.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the meantime, I’m waiting, and flirting with ideas for
novel #2. Anybody have good resources on
junk DNA?</span></div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-63330954622830790312014-07-20T21:19:00.000-07:002014-07-20T21:19:23.451-07:00Top 5 Writers Conference WinsI was lucky enough to go to the Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference this weekend. Four days of meeting other writers at all stages, pitching my book, The Januarium, to agents and editors, and poorly managing my caffeine addiction. Here are my top 5 personal highlights:<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
5. Standing in a long line to pitch to one agent, asking the
two nice ladies behind me if they’d mind saving my place while I pitched to an
editor with no line, getting to do it, and having both the editor and agent ask
to see pages.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4. My roommate, Karen, who may have used my toothbrush accidentally,
but was still the best roommate imaginable, talking me through my nerves about
pitching, practicing with me, and putting up with me staying up until midnight
Friday working on my synopsis.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3. Meeting agent Roseanne Wells at the hotel poolside
accidentally, getting to talk to her about my book and agenting and her
adorable socks for 20 minutes, (I think I was supposed to keep the socks a secret) and having her request a full manuscript.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2. Meeting a passel of people as enthusiastic about writing
as I am, who want to exchange help and critiques and ideas and gush about our
love of the semicolon together. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. Coming home to a mess of things to do ASAP: email new
writer friends, blog post, send out requested materials to 9 Agents and 2
Editors, put clips up on my blog, edit my synopsis. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The #1 worst thing? I really want to curl up
with the wife and dog and veg out for the evening. </div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-14052856580401563102014-07-01T20:47:00.000-07:002014-07-01T21:55:20.866-07:00About the Book, pt 1<div class="MsoNormal">
The Blog About the Book, part 1</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve tried to write novels before. There was one I started when I lived in
Mexico called Ballet Commandos of Tacoma, which collapsed into plotless mush
20,000 words in. Then there was
Wrestling Zebedee, an epic graphic novel about a young woman cast out of her
small-town, Fundamentalist Mormon community for getting raped, who is taken in by
a Ute Indian elder, hitchhikes to Seattle with a peyote dealer, and eventually
becomes a pirate radio DJ. Once I did
the math and realized that since I was working full time, I’d be illustrating
the story for the next five years, I sensibly walked away. I did, however, paint this awesome cover. Then I swore to myself if a story ever swept
me up again, I would follow it doggedly, <i>not</i>
in graphic novel form, until it left me. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLN1owPNslMpi5qallwmOyYjM0K0hkqt-5hJCzQvbb-IaJ31PxVOEBsqMW2mi-0tfZuspdsANEGEETgy0M9EDzQ6gviR-KnkDEUTDznwu7QWequw62KgCyiF4rFaXcPotlJMEYsfJkA8g/s1600/Wrestling+Zebedee.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLN1owPNslMpi5qallwmOyYjM0K0hkqt-5hJCzQvbb-IaJ31PxVOEBsqMW2mi-0tfZuspdsANEGEETgy0M9EDzQ6gviR-KnkDEUTDznwu7QWequw62KgCyiF4rFaXcPotlJMEYsfJkA8g/s1600/Wrestling+Zebedee.JPG" height="320" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Siglinde, from Wrestling Zebedee</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I began writing my new novel, The Januarium, as a phantasmagoria.
I’d just finished Kraken by China
Mievelle, who, by the way, I worship in a creepy, I want-to-be-you kind of way,
and put the book down thinking ‘I could do that.’ I could layer bizarre, imagination-stretching
situation upon absurd character upon known physics-defying plot point until I
had something truly new and inimitable.
I started with Alcatraz Island, covered in a glass dome, and converted
into a refrigerated arctic research station.
Then there was the main character, and her quest to create a
human-propelled flying bicycle, then her teacher’s workshop, with
clockwork-timed mirrors that follow the sun like sunflowers to bounce light
down the alleyway through the glass window water heater, identical twin old ladies who live together, playing cello and piano. The wild leaps of imagination mostly stopped there, but those first few images had enough energy, I
was able to follow them through into a complete story.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Writing it was like stumbling through a cave system with a
weak flashlight. I had no idea where I
was going, only that there was another safe step forward to take, moving
constantly towards completeness. I think
I could do it again. I think it will be
easier the second time; processes discovered accidentally collapsing into
efficient, organized structures. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been reading first novels lately: Jean Kwok’s stunningly good Girl in
Translation, Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince, which makes me want to tear my hair
out because her main characters are petty, a little cruel, and their emotions
leap around nonsensically. Margaret
swears the second book is better. I’ll
probably read it, just to see how. Then there’s
the first two books in a trilogy by A. R. Ivanovitch, Haven, and its sequel
Dragoon. Both were self-published
directly through Amazon. Haven made
me want to stab my eyes out. It was
well-plotted, but the whole book manages an awkward word choice or dangling
participle with almost every paragraph. An
example from the third page, “My professor Barry Block, had a knack for
enthusiasm that was usually wasted on the students.” First, we’re missing a comma after
professor. Then does he have a knack, or
does he have enthusiasm? And if it is wasted on the students, is it really a
knack at all? In the second book, the
writing improved enough that I could enjoy the story. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can’t help but hold The Januarium up against each of
these, and see a different fear. In Girl
in Translation, there’s the fear of unrepeatable goodness. Jean Kwok’s incandescent coming of age story
will be a brutally tough act to follow.
If I had her experience, I’d be completely thrown, terrified to ever
write again. I wonder if that’s why
Harper Lee didn't. Who knows why one
book was enough, for her? Maybe another
would just have been superfluous, maybe a lifetime of meaning and love and poignancy
condensed itself down into one work of art.
There’s certainly a lifetime of all those things in either Girl in
Translation or To Kill a Mockingbird. Knowing you've put so much of yourself
into one book there may not enough left in you for a second is
terrifying. The Januarium felt that way,
about three quarters of the way through.
Although I’ll admit my love and poignancy reserves have bounced back a little
since then.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Januarium isn't going to be Girl in Translation. I’m okay with that. Jean Kwok earned the right to study writing at
Harvard. I've done the best I know how with help from some awesome people, (foremost <a href="http://pawnstorm.net/">Tom Dylan</a>) and I hope I've created something
entertaining and full of love and rich, untasted flavor. But it’s not as smooth and sparkling as I
would expect of something coming out of a major publishing house. Neither is the Dragon Prince. Rawn's books went big, but if I'd reached that big an audience with a
book I’d later consider regrettably bad . . .ugh. I’m sure I’d find a way to live with myself,
chalk it up as a lesson, and go on, but
I would be constantly uncomfortable with it. Hopefully it would gnaw at my ribs late at night until I made that monster a friend who pushed me to write better. Anyway, what sucks is you can only write as well as you can. I’m sure Melanie Rawn worked her ass
off. But, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, even
with a mirror, there’s always that little spot at the back of your head you’ll
never get to see. And I feel like her
agent, renowned for her support and nurturing, as well as the editorial staff
who worked with Ms. Rawn, let her down.
That book shouldn’t have made it past the gatekeepers, in my
opinion. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last in my narcissistic tour of terror is A. R. Ivanovich’s first
book of the self-published War of the
Princes series, Haven. Haven makes Rawn's The Dragon Prince look sleek and polished. But unlike Melanie Rawn, Ivanovich‘s
entire support and production team comprised her sister. It has the problems of Dragon
Prince—unsympathetic main character with inexplicable mood swings, along with persistent
sentence-level problems. For all I know,
I could be doing this, too, and I wouldn't know it. Hard work does not guarantee good work.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hold The Januarium up, mentally, against these three books,
wondering where on the spectrum it will fall.
Better than two of the three, I hope.
Publishable? Maybe. Ideally with help. I'm probably being naive, but I want an agent and a big publishing house
because I want to see how the professionals work, what they do, and, if I’m lucky, to receive the blessing of as many swift kicks in the pants
as it takes to become a significantly better writer. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To this end, I have a goal of querying 100 agents. I maintain a spreadsheet of names, agencies, predilections,
emails, and submission guidelines (they’re different for every agency), plus
mostly empty columns for submission and rejection dates. When I hit 100, I have my own permission to
e-publish, just like Ms. Ivanovich. In
the end, that’s not a bad option. Her first
two books review well among readers on Amazon, and if the third book in her
trilogy, Monarch, (out this May, haven't read yet) improves as much as the second did, she’ll have something seriously
good. Good enough that an agent or
publisher would be stupid to ignore her, plus, she’ll have a ready-built
audience of readers waiting for whatever her fourth book will be. Her first book is free, the second is $3.99, the third is a dollar more, so she's got the double-plus of a
small income to show for her efforts. So pardon me while I put down my gavel of judgement and thank her for the inspiration, and remind myself to keep my head down and
get back to work.<br />
<br />
Also, should Ms.
Ivanovich google herself and find this, I apologize for casting shade. I hope everyone who reads this blog buys your books just to prove to me what a shade-casting chump I am, and you can laugh and watch your PayPal numbers grow. Or, email me if you want me to make amends as your
editing minion. It would be an honest honor.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Post Script! I just
found out Jean Kwok just published her second book, Mambo in Chinatown, last
week! So exciting! Also, crap!
Now I have to drag myself by the shirt collar through the rest of The
Dragon Prince so I can read it!</div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-28189704967803921882014-06-24T19:57:00.001-07:002014-06-24T19:57:54.079-07:00One way to down it<div class="MsoNormal">
I wish I could be old right now. Rewind me a few months from death, fingers
knotted and aching, breath unreliable.
What luck</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to steal a few hours of age from myself, or a day or a week—work
up my tolerance and understand what will go missing,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
then, when my life is all poured out, every drop wrung from
the flesh</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I could spend that week in an unlined face, laughing, skidding
on succulent joints, then throw it all off</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
like a dress that never belonged to me.</div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-69997846600070592582014-01-17T10:24:00.000-08:002014-01-17T10:24:56.535-08:00Thin Line from Crazy<div class="MsoNormal">
Beverly Dove (not her real name) <span style="text-align: center;">has the most amazing handwriting—the kind
they’d given up teaching by the time I rolled through the penmanship grades in
the eighties. It’s all over everything she’s
dropped off in her packet: over a map she’s drawn and colored, labeling where
each story in her XanderPuppy series of
children’s stories takes place, carefully naming the life-size paper dolls she’s
made of her characters, double-layered then neatly stapled shut and stuffed
with newspaper, and posed together in photographs, printed in full color, 8 ½ x
11”. She wants our shop to carry her
stories. She hasn’t published a book,
mind you. I guess she wants to print
pages off her computer and sell them. Her
care and effort are enormous, inspiring, and terrifying. Her thirteen stories, written for ages 6-7,
involve two children, their puppy and various other animals having adventures
and chatting on various wavelengths of telepathic communication she’s named
jabbersonic, subsonic, and puppysonic. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can understand why she dropped it off here. We’re a metaphysical/ herb store. One co-worker describes it as a temple
disguised as a shop. Most of her
displays look like altars you can buy stuff off of. In an increasingly disposable, meaningless
world, all of us who work here are passionate about objects of real-ness and
use and meaning. To the point we don’t
see paper towels, we see the forest sacrificed to make them. We wipe the fingerprints off the glass with
homeless birds and two pounds of fresh atmospheric carbon. That’s a seriously precious paper towel. This can lead to some packratty
behavior. Vendors send us products in
rubber bands—we have drawers full of them.
Ziplock baggies too. It’s also
why Barbara Dove’s manila envelope has stuck around beside the register for
over a year; it was honest and full of love, and we don’t want to carry her
stories which are saccharine and full of well-behaved children, but we don’t
want her bravery and care to be wasted either.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I collect Barbara’s kind of crazy; part because I can’t look
away, part because it keeps me honest, critical and real. When I was living in Mexico, I took these
photographs of the garden of a 70-year old man named Richard Cornu. He’d given vast swaths of flower bed over to
elaborate dioramas of battling toys. He was
delighted to catch me taking pictures, and invited me to lunch. I swallowed everything my mother taught me to
keep me safe, and accepted. I don’t
remember what we ate. He rambled like
old people who forget their listeners do; he talked about his life, born in
France, moved to Puebla when he was a teenager.
Apparently he was re-enacting battles from WWII in his garden beds,
using toy soldiers, hot wheels, some plastic dinosaurs. He felt guilty about escaping the war,
abandoning his country to Nazi occupation, and makes up for it now by using his
garden bed to remind everyone who passes of the sacrifices of his generation. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtGoaPyZQcfijA6jzB17bgUtI0iKHoucxl41mzzRM99C_Vz2pDOiOA5gERk-jFVAq59_5PDpArUocomTVZXN3UA4qWhlys8k9H2iR1Z5lHQGfx9wbL154cNOcPW1lnqFTgInaOU3s8lKc/s1600/2013-02-25+18.44.02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtGoaPyZQcfijA6jzB17bgUtI0iKHoucxl41mzzRM99C_Vz2pDOiOA5gERk-jFVAq59_5PDpArUocomTVZXN3UA4qWhlys8k9H2iR1Z5lHQGfx9wbL154cNOcPW1lnqFTgInaOU3s8lKc/s1600/2013-02-25+18.44.02.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I collect this kind of crazy because I see myself in
it. Every work of art is waving a mad
flag of love around and hoping others will recognize it and respond. My novel is no different. I just finished my seventh draft, maybe spent
half my free time of the past two years making this. Each edit is just another
staple in the pigeon doll, the correct stegosaurus to represent General Charles
de Gaulle. The only difference between
my novel, XanderPuppy, and Senior Cornu’s garden is I try to stay current, see
what people respond to, and hope I’m waving my giant, attention-getting love
flag in a more recognizable pattern.</div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-35971365477424484682013-10-24T21:23:00.001-07:002013-10-24T21:23:37.839-07:00BoneshakerI'm excited to share the comic I just had published in Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac out of Wolverine Farm Publishing in Fort Collins Colorado. For those of you who can't find a copy, here's the comic. Domo Arigato to Michael Jones for helping me with the Japanese kanji in the background.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil5zld_EqZ1xBUiDBYUaRxmAE_wzBtDefM3wPafWi95k5_3pVKIEg11XECgaHqfPC9BU2H7_LrlT_PcvKUgkec0DP5wjjush2cmuvnl10x5pO8OzomZ1XfsKbEwMH1o1FrckyQ1jY45Kg/s1600/img+haiku004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil5zld_EqZ1xBUiDBYUaRxmAE_wzBtDefM3wPafWi95k5_3pVKIEg11XECgaHqfPC9BU2H7_LrlT_PcvKUgkec0DP5wjjush2cmuvnl10x5pO8OzomZ1XfsKbEwMH1o1FrckyQ1jY45Kg/s1600/img+haiku004.jpg" height="640" width="440" /></a></div>
<br />Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-63089885725229738082013-09-25T21:55:00.002-07:002013-09-25T21:55:24.161-07:00The Dead Dad Club<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I hope I’m alone in this, but right now, there’s an bizarrely
high number of people in my extended circle sloughing off the mortal coil. One
of my best friends lost her dad a few days back. He was just sixty-five, healthy active guy,
low-stress job, and BAM—heart attack.
Gone.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My dad died when I was twenty-one, and, ever since my wife,
Margaret, and I got the news from our bewildered friend, getting ready to board
a plane to go back east for the days of nightmarish crisis that follow the death
of a family member, I’ve been pacing and organizing my thoughts; trying to
figure out what information I have that’s useful to pass on, since at my age,
there’s not a load of my friends who have been through this process before. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here’s what I got.
Ahem.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There’s a dead parent club.
If you’re in it.
Congratulations. Poor you. All of us who are lucky enough to outlive our
parents join it eventually; some of us join earlier than others. Being part of the Dead Dad Club, or it’s
sister organization, the Dead Mom Club, doesn’t make you instantly wiser; on
the contrary, it makes you more prone to wander around in a dysfunctional haze
and possibly do some stupid, dangerous, self-medicating things for the first
few months. The only benefit of
membership is that you’ve probably lost part of that buffer of assumed safety
most of us wander through the first part of our lives with. I think most of us unconsciously assume that
we’re mostly safe while we’re young, and if we’re lucky enough to have loving,
committed parents, we probably grow up assuming that they’d take that
metaphoric bullet to keep us safe.
Unless you’ve actively worked to deconstruct this belief, it’s probably
still there—until somebody dies, and it’s gone.
This is the hidden membership fee of joining the Dead Dad Club.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Peeling off that psychological layer of protection is a big
existential shift; acknowledging that you’re number’s up next. This offers you either the opportunity for
some fabulous self-destructive behavior, or the chance to get a lot more honest
about your limited time on the planet and use the fire that will inevitably
consume you to fuel your passion for whatever you want to do before you
die. Hopefully, you do a little of
both. Me? I wrote a novel because my
friends started getting wrinkles. You’re
never the wrong age for a midlife crisis. <b><i>Because you never know how much longer you
have to live. Mwoooahahaha. <o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What’s often overlooked when we’re busy laughing, rightfully,
at forty-five-year-old dudes driving late-model penis cars, is that a crisis
like this is a shitty, painful opportunity to recognize the consequences of
your actions, and clean up your act, let go of unhealthy, draining
relationships, bad habits, or whatever is holding you back, and use that
freed-up energy to plunge heartfirst into where ever you suspect your personal
sweet, juicy, meaningful bliss might lie.
You don’t have to take advantage of this opportunity. But as long as you’re suffering, you might as
well get something beneficial out of it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This leads me to one of the best, most useful things anybody
told me when I was grieving for my Dad; you’re
never too old to feel like an orphan. Yes,
it sounds like wallowing claptrap. Guess
what. Your parent died. Within the appropriate time frame, you’re
allowed some wallow. As we get older, being
an orphan is an increasingly universal constant. What does it mean? Orphans in children’s books get to have all
the adventures, partly because nobody’s there to protect them from having
them. But ultimately, we as readers feel
their experiences more keenly because, unlike most ten-year-olds, orphans (in
the literary, no adopted/foster/step parent sense) are entirely responsible for
their actions. Nobody is going to step
into the middle of the story and say, “I’m sorry my daughter rubbed the magic
lamp setting a djinn loose and wrecking your antiquities shop, Mr. Suleman,
I’ll pay for the damages.” Nope. If you’re an orphan, it’s up to you to
wrangle a shop-fixing wish out of that djinn yourself, and get it back in the
bottle before it wrecks Lower Manhattan.
Or whatever. It’s lonely and
scary losing that protective buffer. But
it can make you a better, more interesting person. Or not.
That’s optional too. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My best advice to someone grieving, is, as long as you’re
engaging your grief, you can’t do anything wrong. If you’re downing a half-bottle of whisky so
you can let down your guard and really be in touch with the pain, chug-a-lug,
my friend. If, however, you’re downing a
half-bottle of whisky so you <i>don’t</i>
feel the pain, you’re setting yourself up for a short lifetime of alcoholism. Because that pain is there until you sit with
it and let it have its way with you. You
may need to do weird things. I felt the
desperate need to be outdoors with my grief.
For me, God, or whatever I needed to draw solace from couldn’t be found
indoors. Since I was grieving on a
college campus, and had no car to get away to, say, a large park, this led to
some awkward circumstances. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But whatever. This is
your time to be an entitled bitch--as long as you’re aware of the consequences
of your actions, and can live with them.
Cry when you need to. If people
are disturbed, it’s probably because they’re out of touch and you get to be the
little blackbird of dourness that offers them the chance to enter a more
compassionate reality.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When my Dad died, I had to mourn every single way I loved
him. It’s like my mind had this giant
mourning checklist; hundreds of items long, and I’d be unpredictable around
those things until I had time to sit down, dig in, and really feel miserable
about them. Somebody would offer me
coffee, and I’d start tearing up because I’d realize I’d never get to steal another
sip of Dad’s mug of coffee, which was always a quarter milk with five rounded
teaspoons of sugar. I hated never
knowing when something would come up and I’d start crying. So I became a marathon mourner. I was going to set the world record for
getting over it and back to normal life.
When I found a new bubble of sadness, I’d try to go off by myself and
push on the idea, find what hurt, bawl if I needed, until it stopped
hurting. I was the massage therapist of
grief. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here’s a hard-won secret.
You can only feel so bad. The
best thing to do—for me—was to let myself feel as miserable as I could. Just plunge in to grief as deep as I could
go. What I found was there’s a
bottom. You can’t go beyond a certain
point. Like the ocean floor, you can
settle in there for a while, under the weight of all that’s happened, and be
held, as long as you like. Then the
energy naturally dissipates, and you get kicked back up to the surface for some
cathartic deep breaths. After a while—and
I mean months, it became mechanical and assured. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">How bad is it? That’s
completely individual, and depends on your relationship. My Dad and I weren’t super, secret-telling
close, but we loved and respected each other enormously. His death was about three times harder than
when my first partner of four-ish years left me. I figure when Dad died, I had four months of
being an utter mess, and another five of the exhausting but predictable hard
work of grieving. Take that and do your own
math. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last advice: when the opportunity arises, don’t be afraid to
be happy. You’re not betraying
anyone. Some day in the third month, you’ll
have a really nice day. You feel
lighter, and you laugh like an idiot about something. Somebody asks you how you’re doing, and you
want to tell them you feel fantastic, but you’re embarrassed, because maybe
they’ll think your dad didn’t mean anything to you. So instead, explain that you’re living closer
to your skin. That the darks are darker,
the lights are brighter, that everything smells more intense. Because it does. You’re happy not because your relationship
was shallow, you’re happy because happiness is a biological inevitability, and
some part of your unconscious has decided to give you a well-deserved
break. Take it and be glad. Because there’ll be more work to do tomorrow. </span></div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-67749825874252833522013-09-05T21:28:00.006-07:002013-09-07T08:40:15.745-07:00The Mouse<div>
When I was seven, my dad found a litter of mice in the shed and, after sharing the wonder of life with me and my friend Mark, proceded to suck the kits up with the shop-vac. I laid awake that night thinking about the blind squirmy babies, if they were dead yet, and what their deaths were like. I didn't understand how my dad could appreciate this little mouse miracle enough to call us over, and then turn on the vaccuum. I appreciate now how he didn't shield me from situations beyond easy answers.<br />
<br /></div>
There are a thousand ways civilization as we practice it is undercutting our species' ability to survive on the planet. Our governments are largely abnigating leadership in changing them, so it's up to each of us to hash through inconclusive research and competing priorities and draw our own lines. One I've chosen to stand firm on is not using poisons. The problem with rodent poison is that it turns rodents into poison. Which in turn make poisoned beetles, owls, bacteria, groundwater, pacific chorus frogs, and garden vegetables. Once that stuff leaves the box, there's no telling how much of the food web it takes out before it becomes inert.<br />
<br />
My wife, Margaret, wisely draws the line at living with mice. She's lived in places where they've gotten out of control, and told me enough to stories of creepy, urine-covered hanta virus hell to convince me that our three spoiled housecats shouldn't be counted on to provide enough deterrent. So since I won't let her hide little cartons of rat poison everywhere, our compromise is that I become the house mousesquisher.<br />
<br />
<div>
When the cats cornered an adolescent white-bellied field mouse in the living room, I swallowed my seven-year-old conscience and reached for the vaccuum. Then I realized that if the bag was full, the mouse might be able to crawl back out. I opened the case. The bag was full. I scoped out the cat and mouse tactical situation. Caraway was stationed at one end of the book case, Wingnut at the other, and Fenris seemed to be covering the corner that would provide the best coverage for an escape route. Good cats. I sprinted to the kitchen and found vaccuum bags stashed under screwdrivers and grocery sacks and a wedding picture from a friend's failed marriage. Old bag spews dust and lint as it comes off, new bag goes on. Books get stacked in piles so I can move the cases away from the heat register providing prime mouse cover. </div>
<br />
I wedge the case away, watching the mouse, watching the cats. Part of me expects a spectacle of mouse panic. Which I'm sure is there, but the little creature seems surprisingly collected--it just figures out the safest place, runs there and stays. I turn the vaccuum on and the cats scatter. Fearsome predators. I tilt the case back far enough to slide the attachment tube to the mouse. There's a hollow 'THOO" sound as it goes up the tube.<br />
<br />
<div>
I was a vegetarian for twelve years. Vegetarianism is a compassionate, rational response to a factory farming system that turns feeling, thinking animals into meat units. I don't believe our cultural memory extends far back enough to know how farmers thought of their animals before they got packed away into the abstractions of industrial agriculture. How much did we love our hogs? Were we less terrified and neurotic over our own deaths because so many of us were personally responsable for delivering animals we knew to theirs? Did the bacon taste better because it came from someone you loved?</div>
<br />
I want to repersonalize death. I don't want to anthropomorphize, or engage in emotional hair-tearing, nor do I want to distance myself from the pain I cause by pretending it doesn't exist because animals are non-verbal or have differently shaped brains. I want to explore what I know about death from those I have participated in. <br />
<br />
Which is why after capturing this mouse in a vacuum bag, I reached for a hammer. The vacuum bag was nearly empty. Still, it took a long time to find the mouse, because, like a mouse, it was quiet. Holding perfectly still, I mistook it several times for a lump of lint. A little more probing revealed which end of the oval lump was it's head. That's what I aimed for. Then a few more smashes to make sure it was quite flattened, and any mistakes I'd made would be brief ones. Then into the dumpster behind the house. Sorry, cute furry one.Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-18610497938566040362013-09-05T21:24:00.000-07:002013-09-07T08:32:17.608-07:00Secrets of Orchids and Allergies<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMOuAyWErCaXu0IeiH7V6dC59LNgXSZ1Mg4hzTB96nKXNyBkhbxoKRo7863uXdK-50XQd1kJ_CB0_jzld0quPFe0TL9D8AqaJ5ElBw7Udkm7eGB6EQpxJ0DYY1Ery6Je6UMWntXhbsjjg/s1600/HomeOrchid-01m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMOuAyWErCaXu0IeiH7V6dC59LNgXSZ1Mg4hzTB96nKXNyBkhbxoKRo7863uXdK-50XQd1kJ_CB0_jzld0quPFe0TL9D8AqaJ5ElBw7Udkm7eGB6EQpxJ0DYY1Ery6Je6UMWntXhbsjjg/s1600/HomeOrchid-01m.jpg" height="200" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, that one.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
My friend Luna gave me an orchid. A classic; the color you think of when
somebody says orchid, and the type you think of too—a phalenopsis, or moth
orchid. I loved it. It was a sweet, delicate sigh amidst my rollicsome, jangly life. I read up on it's needs; lukewarm water about every four days, frequent, weak fertilizer. I went slightly nutty, started
daydreaming about having a bay window—nay—a greenhouse—nay—a turn of the
century, glass-paned conservatory where I could wander among my far-flung
specimens, smoking a pipe of vanilla-scented tobacco, and muttering Latin names
to myself while the victrola crackled out Hayden in the background.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yes, I am a colonial
fetishist. Yes, I realize I am
romanticizing an era whose glories were about 100% built on economically and
socially exploiting awesome people and cultures all over the world, many of
whom are still struggling to recover from our arrogant hubris. I’m sorry.
The heart wants what the heart wants.
My heart wants tweed. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I bought another phalenopsis. Like I do, I found out they were cloned
hybrids of southeast Asian origin. They
moved into my kitchen window because I do the dishes. Anyone who does the dishes knows the
benevolent power of a beautiful kitchen window.
It counters dealing with a moldy salad bowl left in an unnamed wife’s
backpack over the weekend, or having to plunge your hands into a dish of watery
meat solids and beef tallow. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then tragedy struck.
I saw a naturopath for a little mild, dry rash that had persisted on the
back of my hand for a year. She recommended
(as I would have in her shoes) that I put tea tree salve on it, so we could
rule out fungal infection. I mentioned
that I’d had a bizarre, violent reaction to tea tree oil the previous year,
when it turned the skin of my toe to sponge, with water blisters under water
blisters under water blisters. But maybe
the stuff was old or something. She said
try the salve anyway. I did, for five
days. By day two, I noticed a burning
smell when I applied the salve. I saw
her downtown and mentioned it. She said
to stop the treatment immediately. I
did. Not soon enough. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Turns out, what I had wasn’t fungus, it was a mild, gentle
nudge of eczema. The eczema was a due to
a mild, gentle allergic reaction to all the essential oils I work around every
single day, most prominently, tea tree oil. Within two months, eczema had taken over the
backs of both hands, and was creeping up my fingers. A month later, I had to wear gloves to bed
so I wouldn’t scratch in my sleep. The
month after that, I was wearing gloves full time because my skin broke open and
began weeping. I had to change gloves
several times a day or layer in gauze so I didn’t weep through. The foods I began reacting to read like a
week’s grocery list. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But then there were orchids.
The worse things got, the more I needed them. I needed them passionately, and desperately. I think if it weren’t for my wife, my cat
(who I eventually turned allergic to) and orchids, I would have sunk into a
permanent, sleepy depression. I would
spend 20 minutes lingering in front of the orchid display at Trader Joe’s,
basking in their glow, while mentally classifying them; brassia, cattlea,
oncidium, doritinopsis. Margaret, my
wife, bought me a brassia—a Mexican spider orchid, with a two-and-a-half foot
spike of cheerfully creepy, spidery blossoms marching like soldiers into the
air.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOQKErrtBkdFFFkOG4e7hMJO1Wo_6BPmnNb85nRnHE9HMmn9ywMIycK9NX797DUcIPDaRTGPQMjohKebtPbULsrTJLtcuO0phWGRn4AGWnWToTmZhjZhOTfu_DxIMkFKdmNl8_PKyT06o/s1600/BssdmWhiteKnightWhole.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOQKErrtBkdFFFkOG4e7hMJO1Wo_6BPmnNb85nRnHE9HMmn9ywMIycK9NX797DUcIPDaRTGPQMjohKebtPbULsrTJLtcuO0phWGRn4AGWnWToTmZhjZhOTfu_DxIMkFKdmNl8_PKyT06o/s1600/BssdmWhiteKnightWhole.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brassia/Oncidium hybrid "White Knight." <br />Smells good when it blooms. <br />Also, Margaret is awesome! </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I bought books on orchid hybrids and care. I bought special orchid pots for them, with
holes in the terra cotta so these air plants could let their roots
breathe. I began coveting papheopedela—slipper
orchids. So the main reason you’re
seeing cheap orchids everywhere these days is the advent of meristem
cloning. It’s a process that takes the
hard tip of a root or flower spike (it turns out in orchids this is
undifferentiated tissue, like stem cells, it could become any part of the
plant) and splices it, turning it into, literally, millions of plants. So you can thank meristem cloning for that
$7.99 phalenopsis looking like a botanical supermodel on your dining
table. Before meristem cloning, it would
have had to been raised out of a bottle of seeds, with a hundred thousand brothers
and sisters, and run you around forty bucks.
Slipper orchids can’t be meristem cloned. They have to be raised from seed like their
forebears. Smell that whiff of
tweed? They’re special because they’re
not (as) mass produced. Even better,
only super orchid dorks will know how special they are, so I get to be a super
geek PLUS not a twitty jackass, because I get to be snobby without looking
snobby because only other snobs will know. Plus--(don’t tell!) Southeast Asian hybrid papheopedelums
are super easy to grow. Swoony
intoxicating goodness!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What adds to their mystery, for me, is their association
with the slipper orchids that grow in the high-altitude, old-growth forests of
the Pacific Northwest. Our local lady’s
slippers are endangered, and have been flummoxing botanists for decades. We can’t grow them in “captivity.” They are dependent on some esoteric
relationship with certain trees and fungi in the soil. I appreciate them because, as much as I like
science, I like things that outfox our efforts to understand them even
better. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Soon, I got two. One,
when I bought it had five small lancelate leaves, and one enormous blossom the
size of my hand. I haven’t gotten it to
bloom again, but two and a half years later, it’s huge and green and healthy
looking. The other is a gracious,
striped, green and white flowered maudia.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuZzNWcdkRk5ichKETJNYVbzHT8YPnW5pYnLNTt4lc0zoWKX6wpAF5a_X4fIRRiGSeraQjvVEj5XtDvpatxOxPdGrdAPe6-c_mzpgQXDy66guxZquXWcj7odMe8kepkFXvAE15A8LVwx8/s1600/Paphiopedilum+maudiae+green.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuZzNWcdkRk5ichKETJNYVbzHT8YPnW5pYnLNTt4lc0zoWKX6wpAF5a_X4fIRRiGSeraQjvVEj5XtDvpatxOxPdGrdAPe6-c_mzpgQXDy66guxZquXWcj7odMe8kepkFXvAE15A8LVwx8/s1600/Paphiopedilum+maudiae+green.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I, Maudius</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So here’s weirdness.
My allergies and eczema got better.
This huge hurricane of inflammation passed through my body and left me
in better shape than I had been It took
a year and a half before things approached normal, and the rest of two to
settle down. I got my normal, thin,
elastic, smooth skin back. This was
huge. I still need to watch my spices—I can’t eat too much of any particular
spice too many days in a row before I start reacting to it. I might start feeling agitated, my heart
racing, and wake up with puffy lips, or find an itchy hive or two on my hand. But, otherwise the eczema’s gone. I need to take a break from dairy now and
again, but otherwise I can eat whatever I want.
This had three interesting effects.
1. I don’t take any food for granted, and remember my solemn promise to
my diet-restricted self, that, should I ever get my skin and digestion back, I
would never say no to a French pastry I wanted.
2. I approach everything I eat,
whether it’s organic kale or a GMO-laden corn dog, as a giant gift of love from
a glorious tasty universe that I am a part of. 3. I got bored with my orchids. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To a degree, this is no surprise. Orchids had been a rare pleasure that couldn't
hurt me in a grand field of deliciousness that would leave me itchy and
hyperventilating for weeks. As the world
opened up, maybe other things competed, and dimmed them in comparison. I maintained them dutifully, but began to
resent the work my collection—now called affectionately, the ‘chids—demanded. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then a few months passed, spring got close. Allergies were still a mere blip on the
scene. Then I started liking them. A lot.
I went from disinterested to slightly crazy about them in a matter of a
few weeks. Then, the allergies
struck. I got itchy, I needed to drop
milk, citrus and black pepper from my diet, my lips puffed up, and a dainty
powder-sugaring of hives sprinkled across the backs of my hands. For a few weeks, the heart-racing
restlessness that kept me awake and tormented for months returned. My need of them predicted the rise of my
allergies. That or I’m allergic to
liking orchids. <br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn0yewT50OxH37ZM3MIimutWBSHoBC3N5Syx6mNZYKVbAxXXhWFfMOCqCCYiYYDtX2vInVFOS2uBzMriALcx364pywggTpdFICNQ7LvkFzUpvNyPeNeeN1bcY2KoWl1iO8RgYbhrw9yS8/s1600/2009-09-05+00.03.53.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn0yewT50OxH37ZM3MIimutWBSHoBC3N5Syx6mNZYKVbAxXXhWFfMOCqCCYiYYDtX2vInVFOS2uBzMriALcx364pywggTpdFICNQ7LvkFzUpvNyPeNeeN1bcY2KoWl1iO8RgYbhrw9yS8/s1600/2009-09-05+00.03.53.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">Aaaaany day now. . . .</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I keep them, and I love them. They are my thriving green canaries in the
allergic coal mine. My maudia is days
away from blooming, for it’s second time.
The first bloom is a given; somebody else got it there. The second bloom is the flower’s confirmation
that your relationship is working. I feel
like an anxious expectant parent. Expect
a Facebook post any day now.<br />
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<br /></div>
</div>
Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6932546612360595191.post-88858143658435276772011-01-31T19:09:00.000-08:002011-01-31T19:53:40.522-08:00Bikes vs. SlugsI spend twenty minutes a day, five days a week, three seasons a year dodging slugs on the Olympia Woodland bike trail on my way to work. It's hard to think of something I do as regularly, other than, obviously, work and ride my bike. I had Charlotte's Web read to me enough as a girl to be uncomfortable knowingly killing anything, and Slug slalom is generally a mental attentiveness practice I find calming. I like to think I've gotten good at it. Telling a leaf from a slug far enough in advance to dodge at 15 MPH is not an exact science, but when in doubt, I dodge, and my tires generally stay clean.<br /><br />Once a slug settles into your tread and has a day to cure, it turns into a rubber cement-like substance that will adhere anything to your tire until you stop and pry it off. You may need to do this several times until the layer gets thin enough to stop picking up leaves or gum wrappers, or tiny rocks that tick with each revolution to remind you how fast you're going.<br /><br />My headlight isn't strong enough to for me to see them at all at night. Every ride home in spring and fall (they seem to hibernate most of the winter) I imagine hitting all the slugs I had to dodge on my way in, vindictive bicycle careening willfully into the too-slow-to-be-bewildered stalked eyes, first letter of "huh?" beginning to creep out of gastropod mouths, and then it's off on the speeding wheel of transubstantiation. Slug into glue, tire into road debris collage, bike into ticking, whisking one-woman band.<br /><br />The practice of avoiding them becomes meditative. Modern mendicant zen cyclist, I compose haiku for them sometimes.<br />Slug I hit miles ago<br />Body thrown under bike tire<br />Protesting life's speed.Heatherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03090796920152673212noreply@blogger.com1