Pat Bertram's Blog, page 193

Temper, Temperament, and Temperature

My life continues its bizarre and zigzagging path into chaos. I finally got my car back from the auto shop, and like a human, it paid me back for the kindness with a temper tantrum. (It is strange how often people treat badly those who do them a favor.) The accelerator cable got stuck when I was out doing errands today, and I had to drive back to the house at 5 miles per hour in second gear. It was almost humorous, actually, but it wouldn’t have been so humorous if I’d gotten reamed crossing a busy street at such a miniscule speed. The mechanic will come look at it later. Old cars are temperamental and have such peculiar things going wrong. This time it’s probably a spring. Or at least I hope it’s that innocuous.

Besides that, I’ve been getting into fights with everyone today, especially the men in my life. They think I should blindly accept whatever they say, and I don’t think I should. I suppose it’s possible I’m at fault, but it’s hard to believe that no matter who I talk to and about what, I’m in the wrong. I should be right about something, don’t you think? It seems impossible to be wrong in everything I say. (That’s why I like this blog. I can say whatever I want, and blithely continue on my life without everything turning into an argument.)

My father is still in the hospital, and he’s being more temperamental than usual. Every time I talk to him, he’s castigating me for something. Yesterday he was accepting of the possible need for a catheter for the rest of his life, but he was insistent that I get him out of there at that very moment. Wasn’t happy with me at all when I said we had to wait to find out what was going on. He did acquiesce to staying a bit longer when I reminded him that there were no pain medications at the house.

Today when I went to see him, he was upset with the idea of the catheter and refused to go home with it still inserted. He’d been having troubles with incontinence, and he said he didn’t mind my having to change his diapers if it got to that point. (Of course, he didn’t ask if I minded.) When I reminded him that the catheter was to drain his bladder, and that it was the full bladder that caused him pain, he got mad at me. He also said he was willing to stay in the hospital longer. Yikes.

I understand that he wants to be in control and that he thinks having a catheter means turning his body over to a machine, but he doesn’t seem to understand the realities of a 97-year-old body — that the body is in control. If it’s not working, it’s not working. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he will get the use of his bladder back. And maybe he will — luck is generally on his side.

Hundred degree temperatures don’t cool people’s tempers, but I’m trying to be as patient as I can. I hope the people I see are giving me the same courtesy.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: bladder doesn't work, catheter, temper tantrum, temperamental, temperature

Doing Things Backward

For all my other books, the story came first, and the cover was a bit of an afterthought, but for my soon-to-be-started writing project — a story of a murder that takes place at a dance studio with all my real life dancing classmates as the characters — I decided I needed the inspiration of seeing the cover. A big thank you to our victim Jan for her so elegant pose (she just sank down to the floor and there she lay in the perfect pose) and to Ms. Cicy for contributing the “Nightmare.”

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: book cover, cover first, Ms. Cicy's Nightmare

The Science of Creating Creativity

A friend sent me an article This Is Your Brain on Writing, thinking I might get a blog post out of it, and as you can see, I did.

The article explains about research into the neuroscience of creative writing. The experiment, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, showed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories, but they found a big difference between novice and professional writers. According to Lotze, the inner workings of the professionally trained writers showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports. They also showed more activity in the regions involved with speech, while the novice writers seemed to activate more their visual centers.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, wasn’t convinced that the experiments provided a clear picture of creativity, saying that “creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study.”

I don’t know who is right, but I don’t quite see how this experiment showed anything about how authors write a story.

According to the article, Dr. Lotze wanted to scan people while they were actually writing. But he couldn’t give his subjects a keyboard to write with, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would have hurled it across the room. So Dr. Lotze ended up making a custom-built writing desk, clipping a piece of paper to a wedge-shaped block as his subjects reclined. They could rest their writing arm on the desk and scribble on the page. A system of mirrors let them see what they were writing while their head remained cocooned inside the scanner.

Um, yeah. That’s exactly how I write — lying on my back with my head wedged into a neuroscanner, my arm reaching up to scribble on papers clamped to a desk I can only see through mirrors.

How could that very process of the experiment not affect the ultimate creativity of a writer? Perhaps the professional writers were more used to working under diverse conditions. Maybe they couldn’t relax enough to visualize their story, and so told it to themselves as they wrote. Maybe the novice writers were able to visualize their stories because they found it harder to actually write under such conditions. Maybe the novice writers were novices because they were involved with a whole slew of other creative mechanisms — etching or sculpting, for example. Maybe professional writers might not have time to indulge in various art forms, so were more linear. Maybe . . . well, as you can see, there are a whole lot of possible maybes not touched on in the article.

The way I see the experiment is that the scientists didn’t learn anything about true creativity in the wild, but only in captivity. Most of us create our own milieus for writing — in perfect silence or with music in the background, writing by hand in bed or sitting at a desk clicking a keyboard, whenever life permits or within strict timeframes.

We generally don’t let others to dictate how we write, and if we did allow such interference, for sure it would change our process in the same way that dancing on a miniscule stage in an informal setting is different from dancing on a vast stage with thousands of people watching, and both are different from dancing in a studio. (If it weren’t different, all dancers would be satisfied with simply dancing in their living rooms.) So obviously, one’s outer space helps determine one’s inner space, which pretty much negates the experiment since they didn’t take environmnet into consideration.

Besides, our brains are only a small part of the creative process. We write with our souls, our bodies, our very beings. And anyway, why do we need to know how our brains create creativity? It won’t make our writing better. Only writing (and living) can make our writing better.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: creating creativity, difference between novice and professional writers, neuroscience of creative writing, studying creativity, true creativity

The Bees Of The Invisible

Life and death are strange things. Or maybe it’s death that’s strange, at least to those of us who are still alive. A wise friend keeps saying we have to just accept the way things are, that we could go nuts trying to figure out the whys of it all, but since I seem to live on the edge of death (other people’s deaths, not mine), death and the process of getting there are often on my mind.

We start out as miniscule bits and pieces of two people, are born, grow from helpless infants to independent-minded children to independent and autonomous adults, finally ending up helpless again as our bodies deteriorate.

A few friends were talking the other day about all the nonagenarians in our lives, and someone asked what use they were. This is a question many of these aged folks themselves ask, so it’s not an insensitive question by any means. When there is nothing left to accomplish, when you can’t move about freely either mentally or physically, when you can no longer enjoy anything, not even your food because your taste buds have decamped, what use is there in living?

My 97-year-old father is “declining” as the doctors say, which is a cute euphemism for “slowly dying”. He could live a year or more, but still, everything is breaking down, even his normally sharp mind. He hates that he can’t think, hates that he can’t make instantaneous decisions, hates even more to have others make decisions for him. Even worse, he finds the situation embarrassing. I tell him, of course, that there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, that it’s part of the process, but my words don’t make him feel any better about himself.

I don’t want to live to such a great age, and especially I don’t want to wind up helpless and dependent on strangers (I won’t have the benefit my father has of a caregiving daughter). My wise friend reminds me we have no choice in the matter, which is true. The only real choice we have is to live as well as we can as long as we can.

For a long time I’ve thought that if God is Everything, then we are the sensory cells of the Everything, feeling, seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting life. And the poet Rilke seems to agree. He wrote, “It is our task to imprint this temporary perishable earth into ourselves, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again ‘invisibly’ inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

Maybe these nonagenarians are still gathering their invisible honey as best as they can, but even so, it doesn’t make it any easier watching the old get even older and feebler, gradually losing their touch on life.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: bees of the invisible, declining, God is Everything, life and death, meaning of life and death, Rilke, slowly dying, what use are old folks

Turning My Ancient VW Bug Into a Drivable Piece of Art

I’m thinking of turning my ancient VW bug into a drivable piece of art. I suppose if I got the thing repainted the original color, it could be considered “art” since such an old beetle is fairly rare, but it might be fun to drive something totally unique, something that screams, “Pat Bertram is here!”

I could, of course, literally paint “Pat Bertram is here” on the side of the car, or do something more productive like “Pat Bertram, author” and give my web address since more than anything I would like some unique way of selling my books. But if I step outside my “author” persona, the ideas are limitless. For example, I’ve seen photos of a bug completely covered with beadwork. I’ve seen one where the body was remade with white wrought iron, making it look like a lace car. The wrought iron body would be drafty, the beadwork would be so heavy the mileage would suffer, so neither would be practical. And besides, both of those ideas have been done.

I recently saw a photo of a bug that someone had rounded into a perfect sphere, but of course, such a stationary work of art would defeat the purpose of making sure the vehicle is drivable.

Perhaps I could decoupage the car with colored tissue paper, then spray it with clear enamel to make it look like stained glass. Or turn it into something resembling a patchwork quilt. Or even cut out tiny squares of various colors of fabric and arrange them into a mosaic-like design so that up close it doesn’t look like anything but from a distance you could see a floral arrangement, perhaps. Or get the car painted the original marine blue and paint a green ivy border around the bottom. Or paint the car to look like a little fairytale house, complete with window flower boxes and thatched roof. Or . . .

I really hadn’t planned to restore the car since I thought the poor thing was destined for the junk yard, but I found someone who can rebuild the engine and rework the suspension, so maybe I should keep it going one way or another. The trouble is, restored or not, such an old car is a responsibility for a non-car-buff because things are always breaking down, few mechanics know how to fix them, and parts are hard to come by, so I’m not sure I want to do it. Either way, I could do something arty to the body, to have fun with it as long as it lasts.

Feel free to offer suggestions!

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: drivable art, restoring a VW bug, turning a VW bug into art, Volkswagen bug, VW art

A Key to Copyediting and Proofreading

Someone asked me today how long it takes me to write a blog, and I’m sort of embarrassed to admit it takes me about three hours from start to finish. I read once that a blog should take no more than twenty minutes to write, but that doesn’t make sense to me. How can anyone write anything of worth in so short a time, especially if a bit of research is involved? Still, three hours seems excessive, though to be honest, at least half of that time is taken up with editing and proofreading.

Proofreading is a problem for all of us, whatever we write — novels, newsletters, blogs. Our brains are structured to see what isn’t there, to fill in the blanks, to rearrange letters and words to make sense. I’m ssre you hvae seen a demontrasion lkie tihs befroe, a clveer gcimmik ot sohw you waht I am takling aoubt — that the brain can read jumbled words as long as the first and last letters are in the right place. (At least to a certain extent — sometimes it takes a while for us to make sense of what we are seeing.) Our brains are trained to see whole words. If we have to read each letter, laboriously spelling out the word, by the time we have finished reading two or three words, we would long since have forgotten what we’d already read.

This ability to read works against us when we write, or rather when we edit or copyedit because it’s so hard to pick out misspelled words even with a spell checker, especially if the misspelling is a real word in itself. Tow and toe, for example. Or point and paint. Even worse, we see the center of things. Our brains fill out the edges, and so often, that’s where we find errors — on the top two lines of a page, the bottom two lines, the first and last word on a line.

I know a few keys to improve your copyediting. The best way, of course, is to get someone else to do it. We know what we want to say, so our text makes sense to us no matter how convoluted it is, but so often fresh eyes find mistakes we missed every time we read it. If you have to do your own copyediting, you can work from the end of the piece to the beginning — that way you don’t get caught up in the brilliance of your own rhetoric. You can pay particular attention to the edges of your text, doing the edges as a separate edit, or you can temporarily make the text a different size. If you normally use 12pt Times New Roman, switch to 14 or 16 point. That way the words that were at the edges of the page have been moved to a different place, which makes it easier to see mistakes. (You have to change the size of the font, not merely zoom to a larger view because zooming doesn’t change the placement of words.)

Using these copyediting suggestions, I can improve my text and make sure there are few errors, but doing the whole thing still takes me three hours. No wonder I don’t have time for working on my novels!

[Click here to find out Why Mistakes Happen]

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: copyediting, editing, finding spelling errors, proofreading, reading words, tips for copyediting

When Chaos Rains

Yeah, I know — the expression is when chaos reigns, but lately it seems as if chaos is raining down on me like an acidic shower that erodes everything it touches. Maybe things aren’t that bad. It’s possible I simply no longer have any perspective on the way things should be.

Take today for example. My car broke down last Wednesday, and every day since then the mechanic has promised to have the car ready for me. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem except that my 97-year-old father is going through a medical crisis, and I’ve had to beg for rides to pharmacies for his medications, to doctors appointments, to and from the hospital. A lovely woman squired us around today, taking us not only to the doctor but to the hospital afterward when the same doctor who didn’t want to admit my father last Thursday decided my father needed hospital care after all.  My friend waited for me for a while, then when I got tired of watching my father sleeping in the emergency room because they didn’t have a bed for him, we went out to dinner. Afterward, she took me back to the hospital so I could check on him once more, and it’s a good thing because they hadn’t fed him. And he was cold.

I got that straightened out, then my friend drove me home only to be met my demented brother who screamed obscenities at her. Cripes, she didn’t deserve that. Well, neither do I, of course, but her only “sin” was doing a good deed. She is used to dealing with the problems of the aged, so she understood what I was going through with my father, but now I feel bad for even asking her.

Luckily she, like everyone else in my life, knows the truth, so she didn’t believe brother dearest’s accusations that I’m killing the old man. (Where does he get this stuff?)

Perhaps I will get my car back tomorrow (with a hefty repair bill, I might add), but it’s no longer critical. I don’t need to worry about getting my father to the doctor’s office or to the hospital since he is already there. Well, sort of there. He’s parked in the emergency room with minimal care because even if they did have a bed for him, they don’t have the staff to man and woman it. Still, he’s right next to the nurse’s station, and she just got on duty and isn’t bored with the day yet, so he should be okay.

Me? I am so not cool. I lost my temper and screamed at my brother . I feel as if I should be above such base activities, but I am not always the person I want to be. Someday, perhaps . . .

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: dealing with the aged, demented brother, medical emergency, when chaos reigns

Doing Something Nice for Myself

Since my life continues to be traumatic and chaotic, a friend suggested I do something nice for myself. My car is in the shop, which is part of the chaos — my father is going through a medical crisis, and my not having a car only adds to the stress. Without a vehicle, I am pretty much stuck with what is in my immediate environs for that something nice. So I spent a few relaxing moments putting together a fake flower arrangement. It gave me my first smile in several days, so apparently it’s working. Hope it brings a smile to your life, too.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: chaos, doing something nice, flower arrangement

Sheep Peach by Any Other Name . . .

Have you ever wondered about the origins or kiwifruit or where it got its name? I didn’t think so. Neither did I. But when I read that the plant was renamed with an eye on the American market, I had to look into the matter.

Kiwis — the fruits, not the slang word for New Zealanders or the name for the fuzzy bird — is a native of China where it was known as yang tao, roughly translated as “sheep peach.” It was also known as monkey peach, macaque pear, vine pear, sun peach and wood berry. (Wood berry makes most sense since the fruit is a berry of a woody vine genus that is widespread in Asia.) Recently, the Chinese name for “strange fruit,” a translation of kiwifruit, has become common in Taiwan and Hong Kong. (I’ve heard it said that what goes around comes around, and apparently this is true of cultivated fruit and fruit names as well as the rest of human activities.)

When yang tao seeds were brought to New Zealand in the early part of the twentieth century, the new cultivators renamed the fruit “Chinese Gooseberries” or “melonettes.” At the beginning, it was mostly a novelty plant for gardens and small markets. Through cultivation, the fruit became bigger and sweeter, and its appeal grew. In the nineteen fifties, the growers wanted to expand their sales to the United States, but neither of these names were acceptable for the American market. They couldn’t call the fruit “Chinese Gooseberry” because the United States was in the midst of a cold war, and anything smacking of Communism was immediate death. Nor could they call it “melonette” because the United States had high tariffs for melons. Someone (several people claim the honor so there’s no point in naming names) came up with the label “kiwifruit” after the small brown fuzzy New Zealand bird, which distanced the fruit even further from its Chinese past. As I’m sure you’ve figured out, the ploy worked, and now kiwis are a staple of most people’s diet, but not mine. I don’t particularly like the fruit, no matter what its name. It seems to me the fruits are again becoming small and not very sweet, but most people still buy it.

Now that I think about it, the original appellation of “sheep peach” is a good name for the fruit. Like sheep, we were herded where the marketers wanted us to go.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: Chinese gooseberry, kiwi, kiwifruit, melonette, New Zealand bird, sheep fruit

Planning Epic Transcendental and Mystical Journeys

I am so beyond stressed out from taking care of my father’s latest medical crisis, my brother’s continued mental problems, and my own lack of sleep because of caring for them that I can no longer find comfort in planning epic transcendental and mystical journeys. But here is an update for those of you who have expressed concern about my idea of walking up the Pacific Coast to Seattle.

Although I would take precautions, there is no doubt such a walk could be dangerous, but for now, that is not something I want to consider. In the past eight years, I’ve watched three people die slowly and painfully from cancer, and now I am watching my 97-year-old father die even more slowly from old age. Not taking the trip because of possible dangers would be merely saving myself for even more probable trauma in the future. Life itself is a danger. It does terrible things to people, taking everything they have until there is nothing left but a husk of skin and bones.

Despite all my thinking and blogging about an epic adventure, there is a chance this walk is merely a fantasy. I am not sure I have the physical capabilities of walking so far or spending so much time outside. I am not sure I can carry enough water and emergency supplies. And to be honest, I’m not sure I really want to do it — the thought could simply be a means of mentally escaping an untenable living situation. Still, if I take the trip, or try to take it, I will be as prepared as possible without carrying the whole world on my back. I’m looking into such things as mylar emergency blankets, down vests, bear spray (I figure if it can ward off a bear, the spray could ward off any human predator, too). I am also researching the best way of carrying things, and no, it isn’t on the back, it’s on the head, but that I won’t even consider. I want to look as if I am on a walk, not backpacking through the wilderness or trekking around East Africa.

The walk is only one possible adventure I am considering. I started out planning an extended cross-country road trip, perhaps visiting the national parks, sometimes camping out with full camping gear and sometimes staying in motels to catch up on civilization’s offerings, and this is still a possibility, especially if my car is running. (If I were to walk up the coast, I’m not sure what I would do with the vehicle during the year I would be gone.) Another possibility is to somehow use my ancient VW as a means of promoting my books, maybe painting it by hand to attract attention or letting people who buy a book sign my car while I am signing their book. (Although I like that idea, I’m not sure how to market it. Marketing, unfortunately, is not my forte.)

And it’s possible I wouldn’t want to stop taking dance lessons, in which case I would take shorter long walks to prepare for the epic walk or go on weekend camping trips to gain experience in the outdoors. (Besides, my dance teacher says she doesn’t want me to stop, and it’s been a long time since someone wanted me around just for me, not for what I could do for them.)

In other words, despite all my blogging, thinking, talking, I have no idea what I will do when my responsibilities end.

Well, I do know one thing. I will sleep, or at least try to. Being responsible for others’ care is exhausting.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Tagged: caregiver, dance lessons, mystical journey, sleep, stress, walking up the Pacific Coast