Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 134

Clear Vision

Recently I’ve been having trouble with my contact lenses. I’ve worn them so long – over 50 years –
that most of the time I don’t even think about how different the world looks when my vision isn’t corrected. Like many people, I’m extremely near-sighted, and I also have astigmatism. So what I see before I put my lenses in is not only generally blurred, but consists of overlapping images of different sharpness. My hard contact lenses (Rigid Gas Permeable) deal nicely with these problems. For decades, I waltzed through life without having to wrestle with how clearly I can see.
I’d heard about the importance of looking away, blinking, or even using lubricant eye drops while working for long hours at the computer. Apparently we don’t blink as often as we normally do when we’re staring that the screen. That “tired eyes” sensation is not due to fatigue but to dryness. In my case, this was made worse by the natural drying-out of eyes with age (and the hormonal changes of menopause), and made even more worse by the number of hours I normally wear my lenses. Wearing them daily – washing my hands and putting them in every morning; washing my hands, cleaning them, and leaving them to soak every night – had become so much a part of each routine, I never thought about it. That’s one of the good things about habit – I reliably got my teeth flossed and brushed, my night time medications taken, and all the other daily self-care things. The down side of such habits is that they’re hard to break or to modify. So when my optometrist advised me to take them out for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, I blithely and optimistically agreed. I set out to do so with all the good intentions in the world. The problem was that there was no time in my daily routine that I could easily and automatically add this contacts-lens-break.
The other problem, perhaps even more of an obstacle, was that although I do have a pair of back-up spectacles (I’m wearing them now), the prescription is old and my vision has changed, so they don’t give me good correction. In addition, the lenses are so thick, they distort objects, the most disorienting being the keyboard of my piano, which appears to be bowl-shaped! So, naturally, all my good intentions went by the wayside.
Earlier this winter, I noticed that my eyes were burning and feeling scratchy, even when my lenses were clean. I attributed the irritation to the particulate matter in the air, because we live in an area where many people heat their homes by burning wood. I went about my life as the symptoms got worse. Finally the inevitable happened, a flareup so painful that I sought medical help. Both my primary care physician and the ophthalmologist I consulted assured me there was no damage to my corneas, only what’s called “contact lens overwear.” 
I looked up “contact lens overwear” on the internet. It’s always a risky thing to consult that vast, unregulated body of knowledge and superstition, but I found sites that appeared medically trustworthy, looked at the terrible things that can result from this condition, and got properly terrified. My optometrist checked the fit of my lenses – nothing wrong there – and created a new prescription for distance spectacles. Therein arose a dilemma, because if I wanted to use my old frames, which fit me well and are of good quality, I’d have to leave them for several days. Which means I either have several days of incredibly-blurry-vision or wear my contacts for those days. I’ve left my contacts out for long enough that the symptoms have resolved, but.  But my eyes have lost their tolerance, and I haven’t been able to wear them for more than a couple of hours a day. It’s entirely possible that I have been rushing the process and I won’t take up any more space whining about it. The logistics will work themselves out, one way or another. The interesting thing – the coolthing – is how the physical aspect of vision mirrors the creative aspect. We think that “seeing clearly,” whether in writing (or any other imaginative endeavor) or in everyday life, is not only desirable but necessary. (Certainly, when driving it’s a good idea to see clearly!)
When I was little, I’d lie in bed after I woke up, imagining figures in the shadows and folds of my curtains. The blurriness made shapes run together because the edges weren’t clearly defined. I saw animals, heroic people, monsters, dragons, castles – pretty much whatever people also see in clouds. Think of how many games are based on seeing patterns, and the importance of ambiguous shapes that can be interpreted in many ways. The Rorschach Ink Blot Test may have originated as a tool of psychiatrists, but it’s also great fun to “find” things in the blots.
I wonder if the blurriness of my physical vision promotes a different sort of coherence. Sharp edges (“Good fences make good neighbors”) may interfere with seeing how objects – people, dreams, lives, goals, landscapes – flow together and are connected. When objects are indistinct, we bring our own imaginations to our discernment of them. When driving a truck, this is a recipe for disaster. When contemplating our inner journeys or those of our created characters, it’s an open door to deeper meaning. We use the word “see” to mean the physical and physiological processes of vision, but it also means to understand, to comprehend. It’s not a passive process, but one that demands active engagement. A certain amount of ambiguity is not only inevitable but helpful. It’s said that no two people read the same book because we experience those printed words through the lens of our own history, emotional state, associations, education, dreams, and more. Stories that are mystifying can be frustrating, but ones that are mysterious are delicious, in large part because we the readers or listeners or viewers get to fill in the blanks, guess what’s lurking in the mists, invent explanations, and so forth. The “clear sight” is not the photographically faithful image, it’s the resonant connection between inner and outer truth.

Painting by George Cope, 1879.

A Very Special Dedication

One of the true pleasures of this writing life is encouraging younger writers. Sometimes they are
younger in the sense of career development, not years. Sometimes it's both, but the difference is more of life experience and craft technique -- high school and college students, for example. Yes, they're young enough to be my children (as you can see from the gray hairs in my pic), but they have all or most of their formal education behind them. Someone else taught them how to read and write a reasonably coherent sentence, as well as the foundations Western history and civilization, hopefully a second or third language, and basic math and science, not to mention the arts.

Every once in a while, life hands me a treasure in the form a child brimming with curiosity and dreams. I don't want to take the place of parent or teacher, but one thing I can do is let that child know they can become a writer (or an artist, or a musician, or a dancer). I can show them a book with my name on the cover and say, "You can do this, too."

Sometimes, kidlet rolls eyes in disbelief, but sometimes...sometimes I see the "penny drop." The spark ignite.

I've had the privilege of encouraging two children of a dear friend, also a writer. I can't in any way claim credit for how great these kids are turning out -- that's all their parents' doing. But I did just get this note that brought tears to my eyes:

Dear Deborah, 
I am writing poems for Young Authors, and I am dedicating my book to you, because I think you are very special to me.

There is indeed hope. The future is in good hands. 

The painting is by Swiss artist Albert Anker (1831-1910)

Mystery Critter Drama Continues...

Today's update: there is still something scrabbling up there above our bedroom. Dave has advanced the theory there were two squirrels, looking for a nesting site. We're still on schedule for the pest control folks...

Stay tuned.

Mystery Critter Revealed!

Today's check on the humane trap revealed the culprit:







The fluffy stuff is the insulation he (or she, I can't tell) clawed up. It was extremely annoyed at being confined. The moment we released it, it scooted up the nearest tree, one of our beautiful old California oaks, flipping its tail and chittering its opinion of our hospitality "in our general direction."

As you can see, the squirrel suffered no visible ill effects from incarceration. We are still in the dark about how it managed to get in the attic space, so we're keeping our "free inspection" with the pest control people tomorrow.

The squirrel population around here goes in cycles, in part dependent on how happy the oak trees are, and therefore how productive of acorns. When there's a bumper crop, the next year there's a population explosion. They have plenty of natural predators, everything from great horned owls to bobcats to coyotes and cats. And automobiles. I kid you not; I've hit one that made it to safety and then reversed course in a stellar Darwin Award performance.

On Our Way to a New Dog!

Today we embarked upon a courtship with a potential new dog. Tajji is a Seeing Eye Dog, a gorgeous sable German Shepherd Dog, who is now 10 years old. (GSDs typically live 9-12 years.) Seeing Eye work is physically as well as mentally demanding, so her owner is looking to retire her to all the delights of "just being a dog." Today we met her and her family (actually, Tajji's mommy plays in one of the bands in which Dave is also a member, which is how we heard about her).






Oh. My. What an amazing and wonderful dog. Dave and I have been looking at one another and wondering how we lucked out. She's got all the intelligence and intensity of a working-line GSD, coupled with sweetness of temper and focus on people. Compared to our old guy, Oka, who was quite aloof, she's outgoing and sociable with people she's just met.You'd never guess she was 10, she moves so freely.

So she'll come to stay with us in just a little bit while her owner travels abroad to places he isn't comfortable taking her, during which time he will make arrangements for a new dog. If all goes as planned, Tajji will just visit us forever.

There will, of course, be Issues. Like many service dogs, she's either "on" = working, or "off" = no rules. We have Rules For Dogs. Some we'll likely relax since she's older, but others we'll work on teaching her. She's a dog we will likely never have to raise our voices to except in emergency. She hasn't had recent cat exposure, so we'll do a step-wise introduction to our two dog-savvy cats, the first part of which has already happened, across either a sliding glass door or a baby gate & leash. Cats not too worried, at least at that distance. We'll also need to quickly address how to walk easily on a leash (as opposed to a working harness). Considering that she is bursting with energy and has been living in a small apartment, and our property is 1/3 acre, with adjacent meadow-for-romping and 3 mi RT walkies into town, it's likely she'll settle happily into a new and more active routine. Our approach, as with other things, will be several-pronged. We'll do our best to set up situations where she gets it right the first time, building on a dog's natural behaviors. We already have a bunch of techniques -- like a using front-clip harness to discourage pulling on the leash. We also have credit for dog classes we didn't use last year with a wonderful positive-technique trainer who can help us with strategies for a happy, successful dog.

Tajji's owners left with many expressions of relief and happiness that she'll be able to retire to a place where "bones rain from the skies" and every day is a new adventure, learning to just be a dog.

I'll be posting our adventures as we go along.

Springtime Mystery Critter

We live in a rural area. Or maybe semi-rural, as we can see our neighbors but we're close enough to
forest to enjoy regular appearances by wildlife. Deer, of course (AKA rats on stilts -- yes, I know they're cute but they can devastate a garden in no time flat), raccoons, oppossums, skunks, bobcats, coyotes, various rodents that live in the ground, various non-rodents that live in the ground, various reptiles usually benign but occasionally of the rattle and poison persuasion. A few mountain lions live in the vicinity. They're solitary creatures requiring a large territory, and they generally prefer to leave humans alone, so we don't see them this far "down from the mountain" too often. (There was a recent sighting, so be sure to lock up your cats and dogs at night if you don't want them to become tasty snacks.)

Something has apparently worked its way under our roof, most likely through the heating ducts, and makes loud scrabbling noises. Our house is pretty well critter-proofed after the Great Skunk Mating Stinks (see below as to why I think our new visitor is not a skunk, besides that skunks aren't awfully good climbers). So it's unlikely that anything larger than a mosquito got past our barricades. We have an appointment with a pest control person on Monday. Meanwhile, the cats have become Very Interested in those noises. And we are concerned that the poor thing might perish of thirst. And die. And putrefy. And stink.

Okay, the stinks.

Some years back, the local skunks decided that the crawl space under our house -- under our bedroom, to be specific -- was a dandy place to meet and tussle over who got to mate with whom. The routine goes like this:

scratchscratchscratch
squeak! squeak! squeak!
STINK!! STINK!! STINK!!

This got old fast. Really fast. Hence, barricading any and all Ways Under The House. Since there have been no repeat performances, but plenty of skunks in our garden and neighborhood, I conclude we were successful.

To be fair, skunks are nice neighbors when they aren't stinking up your bedroom. They aren't destructive and they tend to discourage things that are. One hypothesis for the absence of gophers in our garden is the presence of skunks. They dig nice holes that aerate the soil. They munch on pests. You just have to be vigilant about letting the dog out at dawn and twilight as skunks tend to be most active then. For some reason, getting squirted doesn't deter dogs from going after skunks again.

Banana slugs are another matter entirely. We have tons of those, too. Apparently, a single encounter will put a dog off the notion of chomping on banana slugs for life. It's the gooey gluey mucus, I suppose...

Cancer Sucks, Thoughts From My Friend Connie

I've written before about my friend Constance Emerson Crooker's memoir, Melanoma Mama: On Life, Death, and Tent Camping , the "death" part being her ongoing tussles with Stage 4 melanoma. Stage 4 any-kind-of-cancer is majorly bad news, but melanoma is particularly nasty. Connie has, in her own words, won the lottery when it comes to treatments, but her future hasn't always been rosy and for all I know, is not now and never will be. During a nasty reversal, she wrote words that amaze me with their honesty:

When I imply my days might be numbered, people sometimes say, "None of us know how long we'll live." As if we're all in the same boat. As if I'm supposed to agree that it doesn't matter to me that I've been diagnosed with an incurable, life-threatening disease, because, after all, life is sure to end for all of us. Sorry, but I can't be so sanguine about it. I'm not saying this to garner the sympathy vote, but having Stave IV melanoma is not the same as knowing, generally, that all living things must die. It just isn't. Knowing that I can theoretically get crunched by a speeding train or knocked on the bean by a meteorite is not the same as the day-to-day realization that there's an enemy lurking in me that loves to suck my blood and grow out of control in all kinds of inconvenient places. I don't like it. I hate it.

It's not about not having lived yet. If there's some pleasure, licit or illicit that I've missed out on in life, I honestly can't think of it. I'm a fiend for sucking up life, rare and juicy.

It's not about not having contributed enough good yet. Of course I could do more, but I'm proud of my accomplishments.

Here's what it's about. Being sick just plain sucks. It's like being trapped on a nausea-producing carnival ride that won't stop to let you off. It's about feeling helpless in a cruel, cold universe that wantonly wipes out whole species, and doesn't give a flying fuck about one struggling human.

I'm reminded that the most loving and most powerful thing we can do for someone we care about who is living with cancer is not to cheer them up. It's to listen.


I highly recommend Connie's book, especially if someone you love has a serious disease like cancer. I wouldn't go so far as to give copies to everysingle friend and family member I know, but if her words have spoken to you, do check it out.

Deadline Burnout Burbles

Last night I sent off the revisions for The Heir of Khored , the final book of The Seven-Petaled Shield trilogy. Am feeling very pleased with it. That wonderful feeling of reading your own work and thinking, "Wow, I really nailed that scene!" So, elation but also exhaustion. As you can tell from my (well, partly deliberate) sentence fragments.

What do you do when you've been working on a project for what seems like forever (7 years) and it's finally done. Out of your hands. Fini. (I still have to do page proofs, but the essential work is done.) Some writers go on vacation. Kick back, get a massage or twelve, watch all the seasons of Eureka, go out to dinner, etc. Others sit around and mope, wondering what to do with themselves. One very fine writer of my acquaintance gets depressed until she starts the next project.

Me, I have a list of things I've put on hold during the crash and burn deadline period. I've written out a few things, pinned the paper to my bulletin board. I stare at it, my mind bereft of ideas as to how to accomplish the tasks. I think that state of blankness is about par for the course. The thing is, when we pour ourselves into a project, particularly one with a a deadline so it's not only all-encompassing creatively but in terms of how many hours it eats up every day, and then it's over, it's as if we've been pushing a very large, very very heavy object and it suddenly slides out from under us. Falls off a cliff. Disappears into another dimension (aha! PublisherLand!) I feel like a cartoon character staring into the void where my book used to be.

As much as I want to dive into the creative projects I set aside because of the deadline, I also need to take care of the void inside of me.

In other words, play. Play rather than stupefaction, but play that replenishes and refreshes. It's not only pleasurable, it's necessary. If I don't take care of myself, if I continue to overwork, then I run the risk of creative exhaustion. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to not let that happen, especially since I'm in this writing business for the long haul. That means knowing the pace at which I work best.We're not all the same in this. I'm sure there are other writers who work full-out all the time. I'm not one of them. I love having that turbo-charged gear for when I need it, but I can't live there all the time. And that's okay. It's more than okay. Pacing myself is one of the ways I protect the joy I get from writing.

And, as has been said or rather sung before, that's what it's all about.

The Knitting, er, Writing Life

I'm always impressed by how often writers are creative in other ways. We're musicians, dancers, singers, sculptors, painters, and martial artists as well as story-tellers. (Or maybe these are all other ways of telling stories and it's all the same thing.) Many of us are also knitters or crocheters. That's one of Vonda N. McIntyre's beautiful beaded sea creatures on the right.


I like to knit for a lot of reasons. For one thing, I learned from my mother (and I still have a pair of her double-pointed needles from her own youth). I love the soothing, repetitive movements. I love that I can do it and something else at the same time. I love that when I'm done I have something beautiful and useful to give away. (I do a fair amount of charity knitting, which you can read about here.. I love that friends will scavenge yard sales for supplies for me, thereby creating a living "knitwork" of love throughout the community.

But most of all, I love the enduring lesson of Writing According to Knitting: It doesn't matter how many mistakes you made, you can always unravel the dratted thing and start over. Maybe other people don't need this lesson repeatedly drilled into their brains, but I do. For me, it's the essential underlying principle of revision. If a first draft, like a knitting project, is so well within my skill and comfort zone that I don't make any mistakes, all it takes is a light polish (read: blocking) and I'm done. But I'll never get any better that way. I have to try things I've never done before, often things that call for concentration, consistency, and staying in touch with the tension of my hands or the tension in the story.

It's fine to stretch beyond my abilities. In fact, it's necessary. And delirious and terrifying. But you know what? If I make an awful tangle of it, I can always go back and do it over. And over, until I either set the project aside until I'm more adept or my skills come up to snuff.

So take a flying leap off the edge of reality. Push the envelope harder than you thought possible. Try something you've always believed impossible. Take risks and then grow to meet them.

"Going Silent"

When I notice that someone I've been following on a social media site (including a blog) has "gone silent," I want to know why. Some of this is idle curiosity of the gossip type. Occasionally, the reason can be much more serious than such happy occasions as the person taking a vacation or being buried in an engulfingly-wonderful work project. My own excuse for not posting more regularly this year is that I'm happily wending my way through editorial revisions (that is, revisions in response to feedback from my editor) for my June DAW release, The Heir of Khored.

On at least one occasion, quite a few years ago, the other person's silence was due to a life-threatening situation that prevented the person from obtaining help. Only the concern of friends who noticed brought the necessary assistance. (In this case, the person had been incapacitated and without food or water for 48 hours in a closed apartment in the summer.) I was one of the people that took action for our friend, asking someone local to to a welfare check on the person, and I came away from the experience with a profound respect for the power of social media to create positive communities that not only nurture and enrich our lives, but can literally save them.

One reason I don't engage in flame wars or "Someone On The Internet Is Wrong And I Must Set Them Straight" arguments is that these aren't the communities I'm interested in. (I also think both are a complete waste of time I could be using to write more stories.) Sure, trolls can pop up anywhere, but I don't have to hang out where they do. I can and do hang out in places where people are genuinely interested in one another, where discussions take place in a respectful and intellectually lively manner, and where friendships flourish across international borders.
The big message, though, is that trying to figure out why someone has stopped posting is very much like reading tea leaves that have been stirred by demented porcupines. Could be a very good, happy reason like a book deadline or a honeymoon. Could be they're in the ER. Could be they got bored with the internet.

Could be none of anyone's business, or something they truly want kept private. This is one of the hardest reasons because we need to back off, to accept "no" for an answer, and to drop the issue from our minds as well as the public discussion.

So how do we inquire with tact and kindness? What social skills do we need to balance our concern and our respect for their privacy? I'm still trying to figure these things out. Unfortunately, the best instances are also the ones I'm least likely to see or be able to use as role models because they are, indeed, private. So I am left with my own best judgment and intuition as guides. Whatever I say, however I say it, will arise from my own heart and no one else's.

Perhaps that's the way it should be.

By the way, the revisions to The Heir of Khored are going splendidly. Stay tuned for snippets.

I took the photo in a New Orleans cemetery in 2012.