What is this sh!t?

I've been an organic gardener longer than I've recognized that I'm a writer. I've gardened in front yards, side yards, backyards. In my hubris I've grown sunflowers on a balcony in Switzerland overlooking an enormous field of sunflowers. I've even guerrilla gardened, which, for the uninitiated, is not growing guerrillas but rather gardening in random public areas that need a bit of pretty.

I've smiled, laughed, cried, gone numb, shouted in complete frustration, and fallen in love in my garden.  When the garden's in full bloom, I pass the time weeding and watering, rapt with attention to every leaf and bloom, fruit, veg, herb, insect, and bird, and I often think about my latest WIP and feel my way through how the next scene wants to play out.

Now, early May, my garden is not in full bloom. It's lying there sleeping under a very thick layer of composted cow manure reminding me of the story I'm working on. That story, like my garden, is lean and mean and right now buried under a thick layer of bullsh!t author insecurity because I've changed my writing method from channeled download to structure structure structure and, true to her personality, my main character stubbornly veers off course between my fingerfalls on the keyboard.

Back to my garden. I thought I was doing my garden a favor. Years ago, in another garden, I did this very thing, adding composted manure to my garden, or so I thought. Now my memory comes back that years ago that composted manure was mixed with topsoil before I laid it on my garden beds.  This recent delivery of cow manure is simply composted cow manure from organically fed cows. There's minimal smell and it is indeed composted, but it's also thick and solid and mixed with hay or straw or some other unwieldy long grass that winds around the tiller blades and grinds them to a halt.  Plus, there's such a thick layer of cow manure that I cannot reach the soil underneath.  That sh!t is so thick I can't even hack my way through it.

If it were a writing/editing exercise, I'd offload it onto a separate document or maybe just delete the whole sh!tload of it and start again. It's not a writing exercise though. It's my garden space. Maybe there's a lesson in here. Maybe in my writing I'm expecting too much perfection from a first draft.

Or maybe, next time, I'll get my compost from a modern unicorn and my stories will write themselves.

For more information on organic gardening, go here: http://www.organicgardening.com/
For more information on guerrilla gardening, go here: http://www.guerrillagardening.org/
For more information on a 1936 modern unicorn, go here: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/bull-with-single-horn-is-modern-unicorn/

Find Me

My library overfloweth.

I have 8 bookcases with double deep rows of books, read and unread, plus tippy "read this soon" bedside stacks, a well-worn public library card, a Sony e-reader, a Nook, and a Kindle.

Find me and my reviews here: Melissa's Goodreads

If there are any good reads you're reading, do share!

What are you reading now?

If- by Rudyard Kipling

Writing, to me, is a way to experience life through another lens.  I push my characters to the brink of disaster and then allow them to fall over the edge.  Why? Because I want to know how they react. Under that, I want to know how I might react if I were them and then measure it against what I feel would be true for me in the same situation.  Of course, inherent in writing fiction and probably in examining our own lives and comparing them to someone else's is that false sense of self. Sometimes we can't see our own faults, and we don't recognize our own blessings. With that in mind, I'll leave you with the words of Rudyard Kipling, and the encouragement to build scenes that test your characters' morals and their dreams of leading meaningful lives.

If-

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Big Life Drama Moments

I experienced a major life change last month. Actually, the whole of 2012 was a bit of a challenge. My mother moved in last January, suffering from serious health issues that were quite mysterious, mostly painful, exhausting, and frustrating for her, me, and the rest of my family (meaning, my husband and 2 kids - no one else, I'm an only child). Typical of our relationship, my mother and I clashed and bashed as only alpha mothers and alpha daughters can do in times of unyielding I-don't-know-what-the-heck-to-do-nowness and I found myself in the odd position of trying to take care of my mother, and protect my kids from all the drama.

In my world, when someone I love is suffering, it can really set me off-kilter. And the bratty me that never wants to grow up is stubborn about not wanting to reverse roles with my mother. For the adult me, not knowing why someone is suffering, why they can't help themselves, why I can't help them, consumes my patience like a half-starved wolf. 

September 2012 rolled around and after a sudden kidney failure, she finally had a diagnosis thanks to the persistent efforts of the medical team at Beth Israel Deaconess:  stage 4 Hodgkins Lymphoma.  Normally HL is treated with high success rates, but as my mother had been struggling with symptoms for six years, she had a steeper hill to climb and pretty soon that hill became a mountain. She passed away on November 6, 2012.

My mom's passing was is tough, and it came too quickly after my father's passing in 2008. Remarkably though, my years of studying emotional character arcs and universal story arcs for both my writing and my healing practices have served me well in real life.  I've learned that big life drama moments aren't meant to suck us down into an abyss of sorrow or anger. These moments are in our lives to teach us about ourselves, about life, and about the magic fabric that ties all of our hopes and dreams together. If we, once in a while, allow ourselves to step back from the immediate experience and observe how we deal with crisis, we can mine the experience as something more than just a tragedy. It might even make for a good story someday!

what's your story?

My experience with my mom's illness, her diagnosis, her treatment, and her death has transformed me into something more than I once was. More compassionate, more loving, more understanding, more filled with awe, more at peace. While I don't recommend you all go out and get yourselves a life-or-death circumstance, I do wish for you (and your characters, for all you writers out there!) to find the courage it takes to free yourself from your beliefs about what an experience should be, so that you may discover the transformative experience that it really is. 

Blessings to you in 2013 and happy writing!

September Magic

It's September. A new year for school.  A new year in the Jewish calendar. Time to buckle down.  In the spirit of new pencils and pens, apples and honey, I'm making myself a promise.  I'm going to go full-steam ahead and finish the final round of edits of my upper MG fantasy novel in the next two weeks.


I'm almost there.  I can taste success in the wind (or at least smell the apple pie in the oven).  Let's see, this is about my 7th round of edits. I'm on page 193 of a 270 page manuscript and I finally have a brilliant idea for how to fix my first chapter to reach out and grab my reader friend's nose and pick it.  You read it here:  For the first time ever - it is possible to pick your nose, pick your friends, and now even pick your friend's nose. Satisfying, isn't it?


If you knew me and the current state of chaos in my life, you'd probably think I'm crazy to set this deadline for myself. Take this week for instance: my went into the ICU and requires daily visits, both daughters have colds, my dog is rolling around in something stinkerific in the backyard, I'm waaaaay behind planning a bat mitzvah (as in, not even started), my front stairs are torn up, there's some weird emergency light shining on my car dashboard, and oh yeah, housekeeping got bumped down to Z priority (obvious!).



If you know me well, you'll realize that I thrive in chaos like this.  Seriously.  I am the eye in the storm. I will meet my deadline.  How will I manage? A whole lot of willpower and a sprinkle of magic.



Love you!  Now go work your own magic.

WriteOnCon - to post or not to post

Once again I'm participating in WriteOnCon.  For those of you who don't know about it, it's a TOTALLY FREE online writers' conference for kid lit.  Registration is free.  Participation is free.  Lurking is free.  Exposure to industry professionals is free.  Critiques are free.  It's all free.  Did I say free?  Yes, I did!

Basically in all my spare time this Tuesday and Wednesday, I'll be sitting on my coccyx in front of my computer and absorbing information like a sponge.  Hopefully, I'll make a few friends along the way.

Obvs, I'm excited about the conference.  So, now why have I been debating whether to post my QL and first 250/450 pages?  It's like the blind-date jitters, I guess, and the reasons basically center around self-esteem (i.e., how bad do I suck as a writer?).

It's weird that this fear of being seen peeks its ugly head in my room right now when opportunity is pinging on my computer screen.  Seriously, why doesn't my fear have any logic?  And why have my friends been asking today about the saboteur archetype as defined by the brilliant Caroline Myss?

Saboteur - sabotage.  Fear gives rise to self-sabotage.  Oh.

Best not to let irrational fear get in my way.  My writing has stood naked in front of my critique groups already and survived without coloring me permanently pink from embarrassment.

So, what am I going to do??  Plan of attack.
1) Troll through other people's writing;
2) Leave some critiques.
3) Breathe
4) Post QL.
5) Enjoy

Participating in WriteOnCon 2012?  Friend me!  user name: petrichor

It stuck in my brain and spoke!

A funny thing happened today while I was reading my writing partner George Kulz's blog. George enters lots of writing contests.  One that he entered twice back in May was at Gennifer Albin's blog. 

Gennifer posted a series of images and asked readers to post a caption of 150 words or less. The contest winner was awarded critique of their query letter by Gennifer's literary agent, Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary and Media.

Today is well past May, obvs. Didn't matter to me. One of the images, the one to the left of this post, stuck in my brain and spoke.  So, what the hey, I wrote down the words and hit submit.  Sometimes inspiration grabs hold and shakes the words loose!

For Gennifer's blog and my (late) entry, check out:  http://genniferalbin.com/agentversary-entry-day-5/

Mine is the seventh entry.  My writing partner George's entry is the first.