Rayne E. Golay's Blog, page 2

WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU’VE LOST YOUR CAR KEY?

For a few years now my husband and I share one car. Before we “downsized,” anyplace we’d go, we used only one car, the other left sitting in the garage. More on an impulse than through careful consideration we decided to trade in both cars against a brand new one. Altogether, it was a good decision with one exception—what do I do if I lose my car key while out on my own?

This past December, I stopped at a local restaurant to make arrangements for a Christmas luncheon for my writers’ group. My business taken care of, I headed into the parking lot, groping in my suitcase size handbag for the car key, but my busy fingers didn’t find it. My blood froze, my vision blurred, my heart thrummed like crazy. I returned to the restaurant to empty everything from my bag, cursing myself for carrying such a huge bag when a clutch would do. No key, but the restaurant owner found it on the bar counter. Relieved, I drove off, wondering what I’d have done if I’d really lost the key. My husband couldn’t help as he was at home, several miles distant from me. I guess I could call road assistance, but this time I was spared the hassle.

Since this incident, it’s been on my mind: what would I do if I misplaced or lost the key while in town? With my car it’s not possible to lock myself out, but I certainly could lock it in trunk. Worrying about losing the car key was like a furry animal making sport with my mind.

What follows may be known to you, but when I read about it in Karna Small Bodman’s book “Castle Bravo” I had the answer, the solution, the end of my headache. “Castle Bravo” is a book about a hostile country detonating a small nuclear device in the atmosphere. This detonation creates an Electro-Magnetic Pulse, EMP, frying all electronics in its sight. What if this where to happen in our country? “Castle Bravo” is an engaging and interesting read, but what’s the relevance to losing my car key? In a scene toward the end of the book, one of the characters loses his car keys. The solution is so simple—once you know it. I read the scene aloud to my husband, who was dubious, saying this was fiction, I shouldn’t believe everything I read.

True or not, I had to experiment. In the garage, I locked the car doors from the outside. My husband went about half a mile down the street. He called my cell phone. I answered and held the cell phone close to the car lock. My husband pressed the remote key to his phone and hit the “Unlock” button. Huzzah! Click and the car unlocked. No more “What am I going to do?” no more worries.

This works with my car and cell phone so I leave it up to you to test it on yours. The nifty thing about this is that my car can only be unlocked this way, it cannot be locked.

Of course, I have a valet key in the glove compartment so I can drive off. Of course.

Your take on this is precious so please share your experience by leaving a comment.

Rayne

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A LOVE STORY IN PCTURES

We writers are forever told to "show, don't tell."

My latest blog, A LOVE STORY IN PICTURES aims for just that; in pictures I tell the story of Rosie and John, how they met, what happened and where they stand today.

A LOVE STORY IN PICTURES is at www.raynegolay.com/blog.html

Appreciate your comments.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Talk about being fortunate!

I grew up in a family in which my father was the Nordic countries’ managing director for a well-known American film company. This afforded me the luxury of “freebies” to movies as often and as much as I wanted to see. And I loved going to the movies, I still do. With today’s availability of direct streaming and recording on the DVR, going to the movies still gives me a thrill and fills me with excitement.

When I was fifteen years old, dad took me to see a private viewing of a movie shown only to the Finnish censorship that had to approve each film before its release to the general public. After the viewing, dad asked me if I’d like to translate the subtitles from some movies in English into Finnish and Swedish. Would I ever! Maybe not every fifteen year old would jump at such an opportunity, but I did. After school and homework, I’d watch movies in that little viewing room off dad’s office, got the manuscript to the film and sat by my typewriter sometimes late into the night. Translating film dialogue from English to Finnish and Swedish was no easy task—for one thing I was limited to twenty-five characters per line, spaces included. This was my first experience at writing. It may not seem that translating is writing, but for film it is so in many ways. Because of the space limitation, it wasn’t always possible to do a verbatim translation, which is why I had to combine what I’d seen on the screen with the dialogue in the manuscript and use my imagination to get the gist of it.

In my late teens I read Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.” Done reading, I closed the book and thought, “I could write like that. One day I’ll write a book.” The question of studies came up during my last year in high school. I wanted to study journalism, but dad was dead set against it. The long and the short of it is that I studied psychology, obtained a masters degree.

Fast forward several years to my employment in a multi-national company after I moved to Geneva, Switzerland. In my function as Employee Assistance Professional with its main track in dependence-alcohol, drugs and eating disorders—the company commissioned me to write a couple of book on chemical dependence in the workplace. Although I wrote the books, their publication didn’t give me that wonderful glow of accomplishment, the yes-I-did-it feeling like the one I was to know years later.

Shortly after I took early retirement from this job after twenty-five years, my family held a party for me. My grand-daughter wanted to know what I was going to do with all the free time I now had. I told her I was going to write. “So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you write?” she asked. I explained her that I’d done all my writing on a computer in the office. “Now I don’t have one. I don’t want to use anything as antiquated as a typewriter, and I can hardly read my own handwriting.” A Cheshire Cat grin sat on my kids’ faces. My daughter’s eyes sparkled as she handed me a gift wrapped package and said, “Here’s how, mom.” The gift was my first laptop computer, the means to take me to literary fame.

And so I started writing. Every day, words and words streamed from my fingers onto the screen. I was so excited, euphoric from the sheer joy of finally doing what I’d always wanted. It didn’t take me long to finish my first novel, all 150,000 words of it. Certain that I had a winner, the great book the world had been waiting for, I showed it to an editor friend of mine. His comments were a rude awakening. Just about everything was wrong with my writing. First off, he said me it was a bad idea to write in first person singular. After he was done pointing out all the faults with my writing, except that the story had good “bones,” I realized two things. First, writing fiction is a different animal from non-fiction, and second, I didn’t know the first thing about creative writing. A crushing blow to many, but not to me—it was another challenge I was determined to overcome. I signed on to writing classes, joined a writers group and got into a critique group.

Two novels are the result of hard work, developing a thick skin against critique, not all of it complementary, massaging the manuscripts and editing, editing, editing. Life Is A Foreign Language was published a few years ago. My second book, THE WOODEN CHAIR is slated for publication in May 2013.

My two novels are the result of a long and arduous road filled with patience, perseverance, persistence, with despair from time to time, but a road worthwhile trudging.