M.K. Stelmack's Blog

Connie's Song

Right then, I need to share my theme song for Connie. Like Ben's, it's Christian but I didn't know that when I found it. Instead, I thought it was word-perfect for how Connie feels about Ben at the beginning of my story. Coupled with Ben's song ('Mended by Matthew West') they express exactly how the two are entwined together.Here it is:

It's Coming Together

I'm notoriously late for everything. I didn't used to be. It was an incomprehensible state that only happened to those who didn't care about...well, simply didn't care. Now, I'm late for everything. Playdates, hair appointments, bedtime. I've made it to work on time, only because I thought that work started a half-hour earlier than it does.Long story short, I'm a month behind getting my next novel started, but I'm submitting to its grip now. I've rummaged through the Internet and come up with a couple of images I've printed off and sticky-tacked to the wall by my desk. The one of Constance keeps falling from the wall and thrown under the wheels of my chair. Here she is without the paper wrinkles.I don't think she's anybody famous but the image I chose for my hero turns out to be Chris Hemsworth. I guess he's an actor, not sure. Let me check. Yes, he is. I think he played an elf and other roles where chests were bared. Here's a more modest shot.I also discovered my theme song forThe Box,my working title for the work-in-progress. It's actually a Christian song of Jesus speaking to an ordinary follower/seeker. I think the lyrics fit perfectly how Ben sees the woman he loves, Constance. I'm leaving you with the music video. Actually, if you were to cross Chris Hemsworth and Matthew West, that would make the Ben in my mind. Hmmm...maybe better left to the imagination.Oh, and I sketched out scenes, identified the GMC, located turning points, but that's black scratchings on a white surface. Boring.

Skate at the Lake

Picture taken on Sunday after another skate at the lake. Passage below recorded on Wednesday, January 25, 2017.Eight o’clock at night, and I’m feeling glorious. I skated today on my town’s lake as part of my job working at a local school. Yes, my job involved going with a bunch of kids on a sunny day, just a few degrees below zero and no wind—weather doesn’t get better than that in January in Alberta--and skating with them. Feeling uplifted began even before I hit the ice when a mom showed me how to lace my skates like a pro. Quite literally. Some NHL guy apparently ties his skates the way I now tie mine. I wished I’d known this tip sooner because had I known this thirty-five years ago, I’m sure the scouts would’ve picked me up. Oh right, I’m still a female, even if I'm in men’s skates, so maybe not.But today, I tell ya, I felt like I could’ve been a contender. My not totally dull blades cut across the ice, making that unique cutting sound. You can’t replicate that winter audio. Maybe a saw drawn lightly over wood. Maybe. Anyway, I circled and swooped, spun and glided like someone wearing a Russian-style hat with ear flaps and a bulky parka can only pull off.And the kids. Wow. You know those time lapse videos of a flower blooming or snow melting on green grass or some such other unveiling of spring? That was what it was like watching the kids take to skating. To see the young ones wobble and windmill their arms, fall and stand and fall and stand, clutch a leg or the back of a chair and then—and then!—in the space of a half-hour push off and away, spin and turn and not fall, glide and stop and glide again, that, my friends, was a true blossoming.Then, if that wasn’t enough, after my “work” was done, I took my son skating. Learning how to skate has been slow for him. Each season it has become easier but he could never get the hang of it. This year, his sense of balance seemed to kick in and when I last took him skating, he played a game with himself of standing one skate and then the other. Progress. Today, I got him laced up like a NHL pro and he set off, while I bent my head over my skates. Putting on skates is another example of trying to press something solid through a pliable but limited opening. By the time I was ready to go, I turned to see my son actually skating. Gliding, turning, scritching across the ice. And he knew it, too. I could see it in the tilt of his body and the confident speed of his movements. He was finally experiencing the joy of skating.Another blossoming in January. Another day down at the lake.

Happy DO Year!

Here it is, the start of a brand spanking new year, and I've given up on making a new resolution because if I have to purposely add one more thing to my agenda, I will capsize and sink. It's not that I'm busier than other people, it's than I spent last year focussing my busyness on the things that deserved them. Like me, for instance. Tomorrow I will celebrate a very important birthday. It will mark the beginning of my last 365 days to accomplish all the things I swore I would accomplish before my even more very important birthday. Preparations began last year when in the change room of Mark's Work Wearhouse I realized that my body was irredeemably middle-aged. The hairdresser has a full-length mirror and until she sweeps the cape over me, I must face how yet another indifferent public image-maker views me.It's not pretty. The trouble is, I feel exactly like those women in their eighties feel, when they shuffle a few dancing steps and say they're still young at heart. Let me tell you, it's the truth. I'm still in the midst of figuring life out. I still play pretend and call it novel-writing. But there's nothing like facing the mortality of a body with a muffin top to make me realize that I needed to start walking.Literally and metaphorically.And yes, some days it feels as if I'm in training. But even here, these guys aren't alone, are they? Or how about these school soldiers in India?They are in it together. All look of varying age and probably grade, some better dressed than others but all of them following their teacher, all of them doing the walk.Sometimes it is a real walk. Sometimes it is sitting at a keyboard and tapping out the story that rattles about my brain. Sometimes it is my daughter who must fight to finish an assignment while her best friend parties, because she chose the academically tough route. Sometimes it is my son who chose to walk with Jesus and so now needs to do the right thing even when no one is looking. Man, that's a tough one.I don't know what walk you've committed to. Or walks, for that matter. I don't do mine alone, neither do my children. No mountain is climbed alone.So, as I push on through middle age I look forward to knowing that though each of us must walk with their own two feet, it can be done in matching shoes.

Taste, share and remember

Yes, the first batch of my crackle-top molasses cookies is ready for me to take to the staff room tomorrow. These cookies are special to me, not the least because they are super easy to make. But the essential reason is that when I make these cookies, I remember. I remember when I got the recipe for them. One of my room-mates during my fourth and final year of university had made them with her mother in our apartment and I tasted one, and immediately needed the recipe. I wrote it on yellow paper and still read it to this day, more than twenty-five years later. I remember baking them with the man who became my husband and we had this idiotic conversation about how the cookies were lined up like kids in a classroom which led to a dissection on the shortcomings of modern education. I remember filling the tall cookie tin that can easily hold a hundred cookies with this cookies and days later, picking up the tin to hear two cookies skid around the bottom. I remember filling Christmas tins with them to give to the bachelors in my life.This evening, when the second pan of them came out of the oven, I joked with my daughter that we needed to taste them to ensure they were at my usual high standards. I hope I remember that when she took a bite and said, "Mmmm. They are."Every time I share them, I get a memory as sweet and addictive as the cookie itself.

With your nose so bright

Yes, that is a book in our family Christmas tree, one of several tucked throughout the branches. I have more Christmas picture books along the mantel and across the room on the bookcase. For the purposes of this post, I discovered that I have forty Christmas books. Each year I buy a new release, and with the copyright page as the record of the year, I can reference when I bought each book. The one above predates even me, having been published in 1949. It might even be a bit of a rare book, since the Wikipedia entry on Rudolph declares the first children's book was published in 1958.I remember reading it to myself in grade two. It was a glorious moment because I recall that the previous year, the text had been a meaningless march of letters and spaces but that now it all made sense. I'd unlocked the code to reading, and I could claim Rudolph's story as my own. The story of a young buck whose shame became a gift.And ain't that the truth about us all? Reading and writing are my passions, but for all my life, I lacked the courage to claim them. It's a well-known that you can't make a living from writing but I got it in my head that to justify the time I took to write, then I must at least make it pay for itself. So for a number of years, I freelanced, compiling a portfolio of newspaper and magazine articles. I felt I had to justify my writing to myself and all those reindeer with their noses not so bright.Then I wrote a novel, good enough for a publisher to request I re-submit after a rewrite. I didn't do it because I thought that they were just being nice. Little did I know that publishers aren't in the business of being nice. Or maybe I didn't feel worthy, I dunno.I've written half-finished novels and first drafts. This year, I wrote a novel and published it. People around me made way more of a big deal about it than I did. Last week I received validation from a well-recognized publisher that my work really is good, and I tried to celebrate it with colleagues and family but once again I find myself dismissing the recognition even though it was the news I'd wanted.I think a lot of us are ashamed of our gifts because we believed others who said that our gift wasn't worthy. Quilt makers, woodworkers, sculptors, fashion designers, architects, game designers--how many Rudolphs didn't have the chance to lead others, to make them see, to help bring joy to others?What is your bright nose? And do you lift it up to cast a light onto the world?I'm no Rudolph yet but I'll try to do a better job of leading my sleigh.

Not the foggiest clue

(courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons)Fog has become a regular occurrence here in sunny Alberta. Not the early morning diaphonous belts that commuters can blast through or the isolated cloud that squats over the lake but the thick material that shrouds absolutely everything revealing vehicles and pedestrians at the last possible moment, threading along the streets andFog alters the mind. The world that once existed for as far as the eye could see is now circumscribed, the boundaries of existence drawn close. You have to believe that there is more out there not because you can see it but because it must be so. Much is left to logic. Even more to faith.There is nothing more useful to a writer than a fog to illustrate the unknown and the unexpected. It's the standard setting in the detective noir genre. Need to heighten the suspense? Deepen the fog. It seems as soon as humans have their vision impaired, we are instinctively prone to fear, to the expectation that nothing good this way comes.Driving in fog is stressful, since highways are designed for us to see farther than the faint gleam of red from the tail lights of the only discernible vehicle. But there is the element of the otherworldly, the dreamy state where life is a slow unfolding, a softened lens on all that is harsh and inescapable.On the days that the fog lifted or is burned away, there is the crystal bright hoar frost built on tree limbs during those days of diminished light and now released in all its severe breathtaking brilliance. A reminder that all will be revealed in its own good time.

You Big Galoot.

That's Max, living the life, chilling out with my daughter who is a magnet for all animate entities. And it's a good thing for Max she is a magnet because he's okay with being dragged into anybody's orb if it means he doesn't have to lift one hefty paw to make it happen. It's why I address him as You Big Galoot. He's also known as One Fat Cat and Lubber.Yes, he's lazy, but in all fairness to him, he was born that way. His two brothers were the real toms and his sister was the most active until she was spayed whereupon you can't look at her sideways without her peeling from sight. Max can't be bothered to outrun Death. He'd probably roll on his back as pictured and ask for the Reaper to give him a belly rub.Oh, to be that dumb. Don't get me wrong. Being human is an awesome position. No other species I'd rather be. But...yes, with me there's always a but...there are times like right now when I'm blinking like a drugged owl at the screen that I wonder what it would be like to experience the lifelong stupor Max wears so well.

Bundles of joy

I dare you to not click on the link below. Even if you are among the millions who already have, especially if you are among the millions, you will not resist the one minute of pure joy those four babies radiate, vibrate, integrate.I think the four little monkeys could teach a lesson on joy. I hope so  because I confess I’m not very good at this whole joy thing. It became painfully clear this week with the publication of my novel. People congratulated me and while I graciously accepted with thanks, my inner grumpy cynic said, “Really? Who cares? They’re just saying it to be nice.”The pastor at my church considers himself a bit of a prophet because a couple of weeks back, the word from Jesus was ‘babies’. The following week he learned that four women in the church were expecting. Yep, four. Just like the picture above. He was ecstatic, his long strides up and down the church aisles swivelling the heads of the congregation in order to track him, his arms sweeping across to whip up applause for the expectant parents, his voice loud and impassioned. Out popped my cynic: “Oh for heaven’s sake, it’s just four. You won’t fill an ark with four of anything.”Except that’s not how joy works, is it? Joy has nothing to do with accomplishment, really. Do those babies experience joy because they invented the father who makes funny faces or the mother who makes them warm and comfortable so they can enjoy the funny faces? No, joy is what happens when right things collide. When a quick word with Jesus leads to four pregnancy announcements, when a soft Mommy bed is paired with Daddy picture show, when the story in my head builds into something that others can grab hold of.The greatest joy for me in book-making will always be in the solitary creation of it. That’s when my real things collide.Now, if you already haven’t, give over to the babies….

Thank you.

I thought this would be the easiest post to write because it’s about me.At least, it should be about me because something very important will happen this week. My first novel will be published. Not the first novel I’ve been a part of. I’ve co-authored four before this, but the first that was ALL me. Yet, even as I write that, I know what a load of bunk that is. You know, how in every book, there’s an acknowledgements page? Diana Gabaldon writes an awesome one. She has tons of people to thank and no wonder, given how that her stories are galactic in their complexity. But she writes up her thanks as if she was in a grand adventure with them, peppering it with details about their time together. Then, she cites all her major references and gives us a recommended reading list as well. She is nothing if not thorough.On a much smaller scale, I feel the same way. No, wait, it’s okay, I’m not going to thank anyone here because I believe I covered my bases within the novel itself, so feel that you will have to read some budding writer’s long-winded speech about all the little people in her life that have made her into the small blip in the publishing world she is today.It’s just that I’ve finally realized that I never had to do this alone. Ever. Yes, of course, I had to put butt to chair and fingers to keyboard and push to the end. But there’s nothing remarkable in that, or no more remarkable than a farmer who plants the crop in the spring and carries through to the harvest, and then repeats the cycle for the rest of his working life.There is nothing that makes life more pleasurable than doing what you love with people who love doing the same thing. That was my experience working with ten other writers to produce 12 novels in less than a year. It was…fun.And it showed. My critique partner noted that I seemed to have found my voice with this story, and I think she’s right. I discovered that I like writing humor, and that people laughed at what I wrote–and in the right places. I discovered that I liked writing mid-length stories populated with eccentric characters who lived in smaller communities. I discovered that I could write a novel in four months while working a day job.But I wouldn’t have discovered any of this if I hadn’t joined with others. In fact, I’d told myself that I wouldn’t be able to do it so I’d refuse the opportunity at first. It wasn’t until the continuity editor invited me that Iaccepted. I accepted not because I believed in myself but because someone else did.So, as a very small thanks, that’s why I have her book to lead off this post which celebrates the publication of my novel and to round it off, I’m inserting the cover from the other continuity editor who also believed in my story.So, yes, even though I said I wouldn’t, I’ll say it again, thank you ladies.