Suzanne Ferrell's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-life"
Forced To Be Silent
No, I haven't been tied up and gagged. Darn...er...
Anyway, I have viral laryngitis. I've had laryngitis before, but it was the cute kind where I'd sound like Minnie Mouse. And I have a nurse friend, that when she gets it she sounds like Barry White.
No, this time it's so bad, that when I try to speak, all that comes out is a noise that sounds like squeaky door hinges in a haunted house.
Forced me to the doctor early on and she said..."You can't talk for 3-5 days, and I'd prefer it be 5 days."
I laughed, nearly silently, then typed into my phone that I'm a L&D nurse.
She laughed too.She's smart enough to know that a good part of my job is educating patients and family. Then she wrote me an excuse to be off work, because she was dead serious about me not talking.
Sigh. I also live with a slightly compulsive spouse. Moderation is not in his make-up. So if the doc says no talking...hubby takes it as gospel, (after he stopped laughing). Speaking of laughing...anyone who knows me and knows I'm not allowed to talk have laughed, too! GRRR
So for the past 4&1/2 days I've been silent, except for the occasional slip, to which hubby reminds me, "no talking" and the uncontrolled cough. While being quiet, I've learned a few things.
1. Hubby doesn't understand charades. In fact, he really only understands two hand gestures, and one of them is "Thank You". You know what the other one is...
2. I've become quite productive. Cleaned up the old mail file in the chair next to my office chair. Sorted what is bills, what is junk to be thrown out and what needs shreading. Kitchen and bathroom are clean. Prize packages for my books KIDNAPPED, HUNTED and CLOSE TO HOME are ready to mail out tomorrow.
3. I'm more focused on my newest book, SEIZED and managed to get another chapter written. YEA!!
4. Being silent makes you be inside your own head. You have to think clearly. You also can let your mind wander and explore things you've shoved into your subconscious, i.e. story lines, plot possibilities, promo opportunities.
So, while I'll be glad to begin talking tomorrow...IF the voice is back...I've learned how to be silent and how to use it. I may have periods where I don't talk, just because it's useful!
Anyway, I have viral laryngitis. I've had laryngitis before, but it was the cute kind where I'd sound like Minnie Mouse. And I have a nurse friend, that when she gets it she sounds like Barry White.
No, this time it's so bad, that when I try to speak, all that comes out is a noise that sounds like squeaky door hinges in a haunted house.
Forced me to the doctor early on and she said..."You can't talk for 3-5 days, and I'd prefer it be 5 days."
I laughed, nearly silently, then typed into my phone that I'm a L&D nurse.
She laughed too.She's smart enough to know that a good part of my job is educating patients and family. Then she wrote me an excuse to be off work, because she was dead serious about me not talking.
Sigh. I also live with a slightly compulsive spouse. Moderation is not in his make-up. So if the doc says no talking...hubby takes it as gospel, (after he stopped laughing). Speaking of laughing...anyone who knows me and knows I'm not allowed to talk have laughed, too! GRRR
So for the past 4&1/2 days I've been silent, except for the occasional slip, to which hubby reminds me, "no talking" and the uncontrolled cough. While being quiet, I've learned a few things.
1. Hubby doesn't understand charades. In fact, he really only understands two hand gestures, and one of them is "Thank You". You know what the other one is...
2. I've become quite productive. Cleaned up the old mail file in the chair next to my office chair. Sorted what is bills, what is junk to be thrown out and what needs shreading. Kitchen and bathroom are clean. Prize packages for my books KIDNAPPED, HUNTED and CLOSE TO HOME are ready to mail out tomorrow.
3. I'm more focused on my newest book, SEIZED and managed to get another chapter written. YEA!!
4. Being silent makes you be inside your own head. You have to think clearly. You also can let your mind wander and explore things you've shoved into your subconscious, i.e. story lines, plot possibilities, promo opportunities.
So, while I'll be glad to begin talking tomorrow...IF the voice is back...I've learned how to be silent and how to use it. I may have periods where I don't talk, just because it's useful!
The White Rabbit Meets American Pie…
(This is a copy of my blog from 1/28/13 over at the Romance Bandits blog. www.romancebandits.com)
For you who have read or watched the animated version of Alice In Wonderland, (Or even the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version), you will understand when I say, I have fallen down the rabbit hole.
In the story when Alice goes down the hole, she moves from one odd scene to another, seemingly without any rhyme (or sometimes too many of them) or reason. But on she goes, jumping from cottages with strange biscuits to eating mushrooms with opium smoking caterpillars to tea parties with a Mad Hatter and March Hare, to a game of croquette with the Red Queen of Hearts and almost loses her head! (Shew! What an adventure.) Dizzy yet? That book and both movies made my head spin…yet, like Alice, I tend to follow the White Rabbit when he wanders into my head.
Here’s how it happened today.
Halfway through my daily word count, I was taking a break to do some PR work on Facebook and Twitter, when suddenly a tweet popped up that caught my eyes. THIS DAY IN HISTORY. (White Rabbit) Well, if you know anything about me, dear readers, you know I just love oddities about history, so of course I had to click on the URL (rabbit hole).
And we’re off.
First I scanned the page. Hmm, Martin Luther King JR was born in 1929. Cool. A brief read confirmed a lot of what I learned in school. Nothing new. 1974 fashion designer, Rachel Roy (don’t really know her work) was born, interesting, but not enough to send me down another hole. 1919, an 8-foot wave of hot molasses floods the streets of Boston, killing 21 people. Okay…gotta read about that. Bookmark that for possible use in a book.
Further into this rabbit hole I go. OMG, in 1831 Victor Hugo finished writing The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. He’d been contracted to write it for over a year. Who knew publishing companies with contracts were around back then? (I imagine it was a wealthy sponsor more than a business.) How cool is this, nearly 2 centuries later his Les Miserables won Golden Globe honors for acting?
Okay, new hole…a little more relevant to me. In 1972 Don McClean’s epic American Pie hits #1 on the charts. Love that song! Can actually sing all the lyrics, a feat which completely amazes my family as they know I make up my own lyrics when I don’t know what the singer is singing. Must look up that one. Oooo here’s a link to the lyrics. (Left turn in the rabbit hole).
When I was in high school, that song had been out about four years. (You do the math.) My English Teacher, Mr. Harker, a tall, bald man with nearly coke-bottle-bottom-lensed glasses and a late 19th-century type beard, who wore vests and cotton shirts and faded jeans to class, handed us each a copy of the lyrics. (Yes, this is how I know them.) He challenged us to interpret the words based on the history of rock and roll. (Okay, this was way cooler than MacBeth, which I happened to adore, but using stuff from my life to interpret something..way cooler!)
Ooooo, another URL, interpretation of the lyrics. Let’s see how spot on I was. (Right turn in rabbit hole and further down we go.) The first verse tells us about a simpler life when Don was a young teen delivering newspapers on his bike. Then the fateful day when Buddy Holly, Richie Valenz and the Big Bopper all died in an airplane crash. How devestating that must have been?
Then there’s the chorus, “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry. Them good ol’ boys were drinking whiskey & rye. Sayin’ this will be the day that I die. This will be the day that I die.” Two American icons. American as apple Pie and Chevy. Both represented a simpler time of the 50′s. Now that’s gone.
On to verse 2. Our troubadour is now an older teen, going to sock hops (“I was a lonely teenaged broncin’ buck, with a pink carnation and a pick up truck.”) , only to question his girl’s loyalty. He references ”The Book of Love”. Some in my class thought it was about the bible, since the bible is further down in the verse and God is mentioned point blank. But I was one of the few who knew the song, “Who Wrote The Book of Love” from a 1950′s do-wap group, The Monotones. (Yes, got extra credit for finding that one!) And the girl dumped him at the dance, (“And I knew I was out of luck”) The Day The Music Died.
(further into the hole we go) Verse 3: Okay, this is a lonnnnnnnng verse to interpret, because there are so many icons referenced. It’s been more than 10 years without his idol, Buddy Holly, and now there’s this new guy he calls the Jester. Who is the Jester? Some thought it was Mick Jagger because of the line “Moss grows fat on a rolling stone”. But there’s also the reference to “A coat he borrowed from James Dean”. Bob Dylan wore a similar coat on an album cover. The King was thought to be a reference to Elvis, because he was called the King of Rock N’ Roll. But then the King and Queen could be JFK and Jackie O and the jester could be Oswald. “And while the King was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown” and “no verdict was returned” could be the loss of justice in a trial when Oswald was killed. Hmmm
Here in verse 3 he also references more change. “Lennon reads a book on Marx”, (not Groucho) and “the quartet practices in the park” (The Beatles farewell performance at Candle Stick Park). Sigh. I can’t even begin to get into the 4th and 5th verse.
It’s at this point, I realize I am truly, truly deep in the rabbit hole, my day so skewed and my word count lost, that I slowly turn away from the lure of symbolism and metaphors (White Rabbit) and retreat to the sanity of my WIP, before I start chasing URL’s about the Beatles, Janis Joplin and a host of others.
For you who have read or watched the animated version of Alice In Wonderland, (Or even the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version), you will understand when I say, I have fallen down the rabbit hole.
In the story when Alice goes down the hole, she moves from one odd scene to another, seemingly without any rhyme (or sometimes too many of them) or reason. But on she goes, jumping from cottages with strange biscuits to eating mushrooms with opium smoking caterpillars to tea parties with a Mad Hatter and March Hare, to a game of croquette with the Red Queen of Hearts and almost loses her head! (Shew! What an adventure.) Dizzy yet? That book and both movies made my head spin…yet, like Alice, I tend to follow the White Rabbit when he wanders into my head.
Here’s how it happened today.
Halfway through my daily word count, I was taking a break to do some PR work on Facebook and Twitter, when suddenly a tweet popped up that caught my eyes. THIS DAY IN HISTORY. (White Rabbit) Well, if you know anything about me, dear readers, you know I just love oddities about history, so of course I had to click on the URL (rabbit hole).
And we’re off.
First I scanned the page. Hmm, Martin Luther King JR was born in 1929. Cool. A brief read confirmed a lot of what I learned in school. Nothing new. 1974 fashion designer, Rachel Roy (don’t really know her work) was born, interesting, but not enough to send me down another hole. 1919, an 8-foot wave of hot molasses floods the streets of Boston, killing 21 people. Okay…gotta read about that. Bookmark that for possible use in a book.
Further into this rabbit hole I go. OMG, in 1831 Victor Hugo finished writing The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. He’d been contracted to write it for over a year. Who knew publishing companies with contracts were around back then? (I imagine it was a wealthy sponsor more than a business.) How cool is this, nearly 2 centuries later his Les Miserables won Golden Globe honors for acting?
Okay, new hole…a little more relevant to me. In 1972 Don McClean’s epic American Pie hits #1 on the charts. Love that song! Can actually sing all the lyrics, a feat which completely amazes my family as they know I make up my own lyrics when I don’t know what the singer is singing. Must look up that one. Oooo here’s a link to the lyrics. (Left turn in the rabbit hole).
When I was in high school, that song had been out about four years. (You do the math.) My English Teacher, Mr. Harker, a tall, bald man with nearly coke-bottle-bottom-lensed glasses and a late 19th-century type beard, who wore vests and cotton shirts and faded jeans to class, handed us each a copy of the lyrics. (Yes, this is how I know them.) He challenged us to interpret the words based on the history of rock and roll. (Okay, this was way cooler than MacBeth, which I happened to adore, but using stuff from my life to interpret something..way cooler!)
Ooooo, another URL, interpretation of the lyrics. Let’s see how spot on I was. (Right turn in rabbit hole and further down we go.) The first verse tells us about a simpler life when Don was a young teen delivering newspapers on his bike. Then the fateful day when Buddy Holly, Richie Valenz and the Big Bopper all died in an airplane crash. How devestating that must have been?
Then there’s the chorus, “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry. Them good ol’ boys were drinking whiskey & rye. Sayin’ this will be the day that I die. This will be the day that I die.” Two American icons. American as apple Pie and Chevy. Both represented a simpler time of the 50′s. Now that’s gone.
On to verse 2. Our troubadour is now an older teen, going to sock hops (“I was a lonely teenaged broncin’ buck, with a pink carnation and a pick up truck.”) , only to question his girl’s loyalty. He references ”The Book of Love”. Some in my class thought it was about the bible, since the bible is further down in the verse and God is mentioned point blank. But I was one of the few who knew the song, “Who Wrote The Book of Love” from a 1950′s do-wap group, The Monotones. (Yes, got extra credit for finding that one!) And the girl dumped him at the dance, (“And I knew I was out of luck”) The Day The Music Died.
(further into the hole we go) Verse 3: Okay, this is a lonnnnnnnng verse to interpret, because there are so many icons referenced. It’s been more than 10 years without his idol, Buddy Holly, and now there’s this new guy he calls the Jester. Who is the Jester? Some thought it was Mick Jagger because of the line “Moss grows fat on a rolling stone”. But there’s also the reference to “A coat he borrowed from James Dean”. Bob Dylan wore a similar coat on an album cover. The King was thought to be a reference to Elvis, because he was called the King of Rock N’ Roll. But then the King and Queen could be JFK and Jackie O and the jester could be Oswald. “And while the King was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown” and “no verdict was returned” could be the loss of justice in a trial when Oswald was killed. Hmmm
Here in verse 3 he also references more change. “Lennon reads a book on Marx”, (not Groucho) and “the quartet practices in the park” (The Beatles farewell performance at Candle Stick Park). Sigh. I can’t even begin to get into the 4th and 5th verse.
It’s at this point, I realize I am truly, truly deep in the rabbit hole, my day so skewed and my word count lost, that I slowly turn away from the lure of symbolism and metaphors (White Rabbit) and retreat to the sanity of my WIP, before I start chasing URL’s about the Beatles, Janis Joplin and a host of others.
