Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 77

Rejection and Rumination

The Apple Store rejected me as a part-time specialist, which is their title for the people who wander around the store and answer questions and sell you stuff and never seem to have any time to help if you just want to grab something and go. I feel… well, rejected. Obviously.

I definitely had my self-protective instincts kick in right away, with the whole range of “well, they were so chaotic — late and no-shows to the interviews, not answering phone calls, sending emails with no way to respond — all for the best” and “it would have distracted me from my writing, just as well,” thoughts. But I’ve still been stuck, for days now, in ruminating. Most people probably think of ruminating as the cow-chewing-its-cud form of thinking, a slow pondering, but in psychology, it’s more specific than that. From wikipedia:

Rumination is the compulsively focused attention on the symptoms of one’s distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions. Rumination is similar to worry except rumination focuses on bad feelings and experiences from the past, whereas worry is concerned with potential bad events in the future. Both rumination and worry are associated with anxiety and other negative emotional states.

So my ruminating has been rewriting and regretting my answers to the interview questions, of course. And, in the answers, a ridiculous amount of reflecting on my past. Oh, but wait… “ridiculous” is a value judgement, a self-condemnation of my thought process. My ruminating feels unhealthy. Regret is pointless. But it’s not ridiculous. It simply is.

One of the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (as mentioned previously, the kind of therapy that I would have liked to have practiced if I’d made it through therapy school), is “cognitive defusion,” which means learning to accept your thoughts as just thoughts. My thoughts have been stuck in rewind and I keep trying to break myself out of that by self-judgements. Stop being so stupid. Done is done. Etc. But those are CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) thought processes, trying to break out of my thought patterns by substituting different thoughts. (As might be obvious, “stop being so stupid” would not be the CBT therapist’s message of choice: a CBT person would suggest something more like, “there were other strong candidates.”) But it’s time to try a more ACT approach, which would be to look at my thoughts as what they are: reflections upon the past as a form of emotional control to avoid the feelings of sadness and rejection. So. I feel sad. I feel rejected. I feel disappointed. My hopes for that path to a richer life — one with more structure, more socialization, more activity — have been dashed.

I had dinner with C on Saturday night. We talked a little bit about my… career path? I suppose that’s the best way to refer to it. Apple hadn’t rejected me yet, but I was very much already ruminating and regretting my answers to certain questions. My first interview had a couple questions that I’d wished I’d answered differently, but my second one — well, I would have liked to re-do pretty much everything about it. I was really thrown off early on by trying to answer a question that should have been answered with, “Are you kidding me?” with honesty and depth instead, and then never quite feeling back on track. They were not hard questions at all and I don’t think my answers were particularly bad, but I guess I’d been expecting something different. Less bland, less questions with answers that seemed so obvious that they felt like traps. Oops, ruminating again.

Anyway, C pointed out that just because I’d decided not to be a therapist in the past didn’t mean that I couldn’t change my mind in the future. But it feels to me like my reasons for not continuing in therapy school are just as valid now as they were then. I thought back when I started that I was emotionally healthy and strong enough that I could help other people and then life hit me with a tornado of pain and I realized I wasn’t. C said something kind, along the lines of me being plenty strong but also really sensitive, that I would be an excellent therapist — in fact was already for my lucky friends — but that she could see that such an intense job might break me. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who seems to use “sensitive” as a compliment, not a pejorative. “You’re very sensitive,” in my life has mostly been delivered with sighs of annoyance, and she says it as if it’s a compliment. Digression, I suppose, but maybe not.

So where was I going with all this? Oh, right — being rejected by Apple has made me very sad, but in turn, it’s reminding me to work on my own stuff with the ACT tools that I learned years ago. Maybe I’m not ever going to be a therapist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t practice on myself. So I’m allowing myself to ruminate, trying to step back and look at those thoughts as what they are, simply thoughts, nothing that can hurt me. Well, no, that’s wrong — they can hurt me, because thoughts can cause pain. But I don’t need to let me damage me. I can just experience them for what they are and then let them go.

The “me damage me” was a typo. I meant to write “them damage me.” But I am leaving it for the potent reminder of what it is: any damage my thoughts cause is me damaging me.

One of the ACT elements is defining “emotional control” as a bad thing. It’s super important not to use the tools of cognitive defusion and acceptance as ways of feeling better. The point is not to control your emotions that way, but to experience your emotions and then move on to your actions. That said, though, I do feel better after having written this all out. And yes, probably as soon as I get in the car to go to yoga, I will start ruminating again. And when I do, I will notice myself doing so, and will label my thoughts as thoughts (an ACT technique where you literally think, “I am having the thought that…”) and when the thoughts bring up feelings, I will not tell myself I am stupid for having such feelings, but simply let myself feel them, however unpleasant they are.

Yoga time. Yay. It’s just what I need right now. I suspect it will make me cry, but hey, that’s okay, too.

Unnamed Trope

One of the sessions that I went to at the FWA conference was titled something like, Putting the Super in Your Hero and it was a fun look at what makes superheroes entertaining and what authors can do to make their characters more like superheroes. Characters should be decisive — they should make decisions, not just let the universe push them along. They should be active — even if their action fails or has negative consequences, characters that simply react are less interesting. Then, for the superhero thing, they should be courageous, take the high moral ground, be colorful, do extraordinary things, be flawed, and be likeable. The two that most interested me were the first two, though — making decisions and taking action. I’m definitely adding “Make decisions, take action,” to my little mental list of rules to remember. (Others: “Abandon reality” and “Solitude sucks”.)

And I have no idea why I got onto that digression. I started this post meaning to write about searching tvtropes for a name for a trope that I’ve decided I hate, hate, hate. Hate with a deep passion. Wish to never see again and will always stop reading when I uncover it in use. But I can’t find its name. It’s some kind of a mix of Broken Bird and Bratty Half-Pint only… she’s playing the heroine.

In the case of a book that I downloaded yesterday, started, and returned to the library after fifty pages or so, the heroine is a grievously abused teenager. Parents dead young in a tragic accident, she’s been sold as a slave multiple times, starting from when she was five years old. In the first few scenes there are repeated incidents of violence against her, as well as plenty of implications of the miseries of life as a slave, scarring, and implied sexual violence against children. And yet… she has absolutely no hesitation about talking back, being defiant, doing exactly what her new owners ordered her not to do, and being incredibly rude to people who have not offered her threat or unkindness. What kind of caricature does that? I like urban fantasy’s damaged, kickass heroines just as much as the next genre, but I don’t like it when they’re stupid. And I don’t like it when abuse is trivialized, so that years of torture just become a convenient backstory for why a character is wary. I like unrealistic genres, but I want the characters I read about to behave like real people might, even when they’re super tough, magically gifted, super-hero characters.

It’s funny, I hated the book so much that I have immediately forgotten its name. It had a pretty cover, though.

So many interruptions today — it’s almost 5 and this blog post, which I started at 8:30, is my sum total of accomplishment. Well, except for phone calls and laundry and cooking and assorted other useful things. But words must get written, so on to the real work!

Florida Writer’s Conference

I spent my weekend at the Florida Writer’s Conference, put on by the Florida Writer’s Association. I submitted a couple proposals last year, around New Year’s which is generally when I remember that I should start acting like the kind of professional who takes running a business seriously, networks, gets her name out there, etc. All last week, while I pulled my presentations together instead of writing, I regretted it. My enthusiasm was at level zero or below.

I had a really good time.

I also learned a lot.

This should have been obvious but a conference with people who are interested in the same things as you are is a lot more fun than a conference with people who are passionate about a subject that you get paid to pretend to care about. Good life lesson there, yes?

My favorite session was given by Allen Gorney, speaking on Dialogue in Every Medium. (I’m so surprised to discover that he’s local and a Full Sail person — I don’t know why, but I didn’t realize that.) Less than halfway through his presentation, I went ahead and bought a book he recommended, while everyone else tried to scribble down notes as fast as they could write. The book is Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. I’m reading my notes and oh, there was so much good stuff that I want to remember, but I also wanted to write about the other sessions I liked and I also should be writing a book and I’m also really tired because it was a long and busy weekend. *sigh*

But here goes: Allen said, “We speak in thoughts, we write in sentences.” I took from that permission to let go of forcing correct grammar on my dialogue. I’m always fighting with that need anyway. I do let my dialogue be casual and relaxed, I do use words in it that I try to eliminate from the rest of my writing, like just and really, and I do let characters speak ungrammatically, but I spend a lot of time second-guessing dialogue that comes across as thoughts. An example from today’s work: “EMDR, that’s what they’re doing now. It’s some eye motion thing. You like stare at a light or something.”

If I hadn’t just been to this great presentation on dialogue, I’d be tweaking that. I might turn it into, “They’re doing this thing called EMDR now.” Or “Have you heard of EMDR?” Or something else entirely. Plenty of options, but if I spend my precious time thinking them out–the way I usually do–I’ll never get to all the other good stuff I learned. But what I definitely learned is that “EMDR, that’s what they’re doing now,” is okay because it’s a thought being spoken, not a sentence being written. (I’m wondering now if I completely misunderstood the meaning of what Allen was saying, but I refuse to believe that, despite the fact that the sentence is written.)

So more good stuff, including an explanation of the Actor’s Thesaurus which makes me wish I hadn’t gotten rid of that book the last time I cleaned out my shelves. I didn’t find it useful, but I wasn’t using it right. The basic idea, though, is that you should be able to put an action verb by each sentence of dialogue that conveys the goal of the sentence. So “EMDR, that’s what they’re doing now” might be pleading or arguing or… well, if I hadn’t gotten rid of the book, I’d be able to look for more options. Drat. But “if explain is the action verb, rethink the sentence.”

On pacing, the longer the line, the slower the pace. To have a really quick pace, use back-and-forth, short lines, no dialogue tags. I think I knew that intuitively, but I like having my intuitions validated by being stated outright. But Allen also suggested removing words in dialogue. There are the obvious ones to remove — the “well”s and the “um”s, the “like”s, and the “some”s–but it seemed like he meant more than that, so I asked for more explanation, and he did. His example dialogue was:

“Do you have any pets?”

“Yes, I have a dog.”

The second line would be more natural, more reflective of a real person, if it was “Yeah, a dog,” or even, “A dog.”

Finally, he suggested that in the revision process, the author should determine two adjectives to describe each character’s speech that reflect their surface traits and two that reflect their inner struggle. And then look at a single character’s dialog against those two adjectives. The thought of adding an easy half dozen revision passes to my already insane revision rounds sort of terrifies me, but I do like the idea of establishing adjectives that should reflect the character’s voices. Grace is an efficient nurturer. I’m going to have to think more about what her subtext is.

I have so many more thoughts! Too many more. One of the coolest things I got out of the conference was the realization that A Gift of Ghosts is really not a romance. I’ve always suspected that. When people ask me what it is, I don’t say “paranormal romance” even though that’s the easiest, most understandable description, because it feels wrong. I usually call it a romantic ghost story. Well, it turns out that if you try to analyze the structure of Ghosts as a romance it falls apart. It doesn’t have a romantic structure. It’s… not a romance. But if you look at it as a ghost story, the story fits a perfect three act structure, with each beat coming more or less where it should, and with the act descriptions happening exactly where they’re supposed to.

And that’s a terrible explanation, isn’t it? But okay, my second favorite session was Michael Tabb, with a presentation titled From Zero to Hero. I loved this presentation, it was great, but it assumed a level of knowledge that probably most people in MFA programs have. I am not in a MFA program. In fact, I haven’t taken a writing class except for one in high school which I hated. I’ve picked up some along the way, but I definitely don’t have the base knowledge that would have made the entire presentation meaningful to me. But to summarize some of what I learned: the protagonist is the character who’s changing. (I probably knew that already, really, but it’s one of the issues I’m having with Grace — in a romance, the heroine is, by definition, the protagonist, but in this story, Noah is the protagonist. In Thought, Dillon was the protagonist which is why that story is so confused. Sylvie’s life changes, but Dillon is the one who grows. I should probably rewrite that one as a YA, ha. Ah, well. But moving on, the protagonist needs to have both an inner and an outer journey.

To go back to my original cool realization, in Ghosts, Akira’s inner journey is about accepting her ability and her outer journey is about helping Dillon. The first chapter doesn’t end when she decides to move to Florida — it ends when she decides to lease the car that Dillon is trapped in. The love interest, Zane, is helping her on her journey by accepting her and assisting her and letting her believe she’s okay, but their relationship is not what the story is about. Ironically, the antagonist is probably invisible — it’s her dad, really, and his way of handling her ability. That’s her obstacle.

Sadly, my notes now get very messy and long. My handwriting stinks. But the screenplay structure calls for three acts — Act 1 is 25% of the story. On the third beat, there’s an Inciting Incident. With Ghosts, the first beat would be the scene in the car, the second is her meeting with Zane, the third is when she reaches out to Dillon. That’s the Inciting Incident, that’s where the story starts. Act One ends with a Big Decision. The beats are not quite right — there’s the house, the car accident, the scanner, the meal at the diner, and the movers, but Act One ends when Zane persuades her to stay and give Tassamara a chance. That’s the Big Decision. Act Two is in 2 parts and it’s 50% of the story. The first part ends with the Belly of the Beast. For Akira, that’s when she reveals the ghost boy and his father. For her, that’s taking a huge chance, revealing herself to the world, but she does it to help them. The second part of the act ends with the Worst of All Things, the threshold of defeat. In Ghosts, that’s when she convinces Henry and Rose to move on but they leave Dillon behind. If her ultimate journey is about helping Dillon, that’s her moment of greatest failure — she gave him something lovely and now she’s taken it away. But then Act 3 comes along and she makes the decision to do something very risky to help him, Climax, and then the New Normal, where they set the dinner table to include the ghosts. It’s far from perfect, but I did that story pretty close to right, working on intuition.

But knowing how to do it gives me a nice framework for looking at my ongoing work, especially when I’m stuck. I’ve read about this structure before, but not in a way that made enough sense to me to do it. It seemed so restrictive, so formulaic. But seeing it in terms of inner journey as well as outer, and decision points, not necessarily action scenes, makes it feel much more natural to me. I am going to be looking at Grace with this in mind, although maybe not until the first revision.

The timer on my chicken (baked thighs with lemon, capers, and garlic salt, they will be delicious) is going and I haven’t even started my sweet potatoes (white ones, mashed, with a little garlic and olive oil), drat it, so thus ends my FWA conference notes for the day. But those were not the only great sessions, and I really did come away from the weekend feeling inspired and excited to put learning into practice. I’m glad I went.

Stew(ing)

Along the way of writing A Gift of Grace, I had an idea that raised the stakes, which I approved of, and so I intended to use it. I’m finally at the point where I need to write it and it doesn’t have a secure foundation. That means I should go back and write that secure foundation in, but the very thought makes me want to stab myself. Hari-kari? Was that the ritual suicide that involved ripping open your guts? I should go look it up, but I refuse to succumb to the lure of random internet research today.

I’ve been working on this book for almost a year now — I started it as last year’s NaNoWriMo — and I am not going to start revising it until a first draft is finished, even if my draft readers are going “huh? what? where did that come from?”

I also realized yesterday that an element of the story that was always clear to me is never once explained to the reader. It is a bit much to expect the reader to read my mind, and so that also makes me want to go back and revise. But no. No, no, no.

This is the question I’ve been stewing over and this is the decision made. But the process of fretting about whether I should revise made me think about the word “stew” when it equals worry. It suggests that worry is a process of cooking, as if there’s heat to the idea of worrying. Not a lot of heat, not a boil, but a low heat.

When I was working on becoming a therapist, the kind of therapy I wanted to practice was called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. One of the things I liked about ACT is that it teaches techniques that… well, felt more in line with my experience of the world. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is probably the most commonly-used type of therapy today, teaches people to look at their thoughts, logically analyze them, and reject the bad ones. So if you’re feeling self-loathing, a CBT approach would be to look at the good that you’ve done in the world, the people that care about you, and remind yourself that you’re a good person who is loved.

It does not work for me. My thoughts are great at telling me that I’m fine, but my feelings let me know that actually, I’m just lying and not very convincingly. I can think as loudly as I like, as positively as I like, but it doesn’t change the underlying feelings. ACT instead says, yep, that’s a feeling, embrace it, this is the way you feel, and now move on, what can you DO that will help you feel better? Not what will you think, because thinking isn’t the problem, but what action will you take? And in that “embrace the feeling” stage, there are exercises to do, specific techniques to let yourself experience pain, feel it, and let it go. You don’t do the exercises to escape from the pain (known as experiential avoidance in ACT and considered not helpful) but to allow yourself to feel the pain. Anyway, after turning this into a very long story, I’ve decided to work on developing a stewing exercise, where I let myself ruminate and worry, in fact focus on my worrying instead of trying to escape from it, while I visualize my worries slowly cooking and breaking down. Worry stew. Maybe not delicious, but the imagery is so satisfying somehow.

My second reason for thinking about stew is that CostCo had fresh cranberries yesterday and so I bought meat to make stew. (This seems like a non sequiteur but cranberries are a fantastic ingredient in beef stew — they add a delicious tang and a beautiful color.) This morning I realized that for various reasons, namely a commitment to make pot roast on Sunday, I should either make my stew today or freeze the ingredients until sometime next week. But eh. I was not in the mood. So I made a lazy stew — no flouring and browning the meat, no deglazing the pan with red wine, no fancy stuff, just throwing some raw ingredients in the crockpot and hoping for the best. Ingredients: carrot, parsnip, celery, onion, three cloves of garlic (peeled, but not crushed), dried parsley, dried rosemary, fresh cilantro, salt, 1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar, 2/3 cup of chicken broth, stew meat. I’ll add the cranberries about an hour before I want to eat. If it works, I’ll be pleased, because it seriously cuts stew-making time and effort down to… well, I had everything in the crockpot before 8AM, with time to eat leftover coconut curry seafood stew for breakfast and still be at my computer by 8. Fingers crossed that lazy stew tastes good, though. I will be seriously annoyed with myself if I’ve wasted my stew meat with something that I don’t like enough to eat for three days.

Worry, worry, worry

I hit a point in my writing over the weekend where I couldn’t remember what I’d already said, so I had to go back and reread what I’d already written. It was a good reminder to me to relax. I spend so much time picking at individual words these days. Twisting and turning sentences. Asking myself if the characters are working, if I’m being too repetitive, if my backstory is too much, if I need to include more action in patches of dialog.

And then I reread it and its funny and entertaining and if it’s sort of annoying that I’ve written 20,000 words in which nothing much has happened… well, they’re still 20,000 entertaining words. So maybe this will be a story in which nothing much ever happens. Things will not happen in an entertaining and highly readable sort of way, so maybe that’s good enough?

I’m determined to go to yoga today (it’s been a while because I have been not well and struggling), so I thought I’d write a blog post instead of writing my book, but even just writing about writing my book makes me want to go back to writing that. Nothing is happening, but it is amusing me. So enough blogging, time for a 30 minute writing sprint. Wish me luck!

Autumn arriving

It felt like fall today, so I made myself winter food for breakfast: veggie hash, which is basically just whatever veggies I have available, chopped up reasonably small (for fast cooking) and sauteed, with some protein source mixed in. Today, it was acorn squash, sweet potato, carrot, parsnip, bok choy, and red onion with bacon. Some spices — garlic-salt and ginger — while cooking. At the last minute, I added half an avocado because I had two that are ripe. Wow, the avocado just made it. It added a touch of cool creaminess, but the heat of the veggies was enough to soften it, so all the veggies became lightly avocado-flavored. That sounds weird, but it was delicious.

In the last four days, I have edited 150,000 words. (Mostly not my own words.) I am seriously wiped out. Editing is such focused work. But I enjoyed it. Most of all, I enjoyed going over to a friend’s last night for our weekly writing get-together and getting to be back in my own world again. Spending my day hours editing made my evening hours of writing all the better.

I haven’t thought much about editing as what I should be doing to make money while I write for fun, but now I’m considering the idea. I thought I was so burned out on editing that I would never go back, but… well, I don’t know. Maybe.

Yesterday, first day of October, I stretched my lunch break to two hours so that I could spend one of them floating in the pool and reading a book. I think this is the first time that I’ve still been swimming regularly as October begins. This year I saw maybe two love bugs, that was it. Usually by now we’re infested with them. Maybe the summer was too wet? But I’m grateful for the last lingering days of enjoying the water.

This feels like a very boring blog post, but I’ve got a bunch of businesslike things to do — making a new box set, pulling The Spirits of Christmas from non-Amazon sites, downloading a translation, writing a book description and a forward — and I’m feeling so fried from the editing that I’m avoiding all those things. Plus, avocado in veggie hash & swimming in October are things I want to remember, and blogging works that way for me. But back to work I go…

SF:SE 2015

I spent my weekend at the Speculative Fiction Southeast convention, which I found out about just a couple of weeks ago.

I think this was the first year for this convention, but I hope it won’t be the last. It was tiny, but I loved the focus. After spending a decade going to many, many conferences/conventions — I usually did between 3-6 a year, ranging from the enormous (Macworld, SXSW) to the tight knit — I’m a little cynical about them. It’s so easy to go to a con and get all inspired and equally exhausted and then a week later, life’s back to normal and everything that you were inspired to do is just a distant memory. Although, ha, I just remembered that I started this blog at a conference one year. SXSW, I think it was. Oi, that was a long time ago.

At any rate, this con was fun. Interesting people, good conversations, and sessions on subjects that I am actually interested in. I did find one session on publishing modes to be acutely painful — it is surprisingly close to torture for me to sit still in a room where someone is giving information that is (IMO) horrendously bad. I had to put my hands over my mouth at one point to stop myself from objecting and I finally did raise my hand and say something, but it was frustrating that the panel didn’t have a good representative of indie publishing on it.

Also frustrating — if you’re going to change the rooms where people are presenting, why not put a sign up? Sure, technical difficulties happen, but tape, paper, a marker, and you don’t have people sitting around wondering why no one is showing up.

But I don’t want to complain too much. It was fun, a worthwhile investment of both time and money (although I’m going to guess that they’re horrifyingly in the red — there’s no way they had enough attendees to cover the expenses of so many conferences rooms, even if they got a great deal), and I do hope they come back next year.

Favorite info: Orson Scott Card’s rant about first person narration, which completely validated my own feelings about first person pov.

Favorite experience: Funnily enough, Maria Snyder’s sister shares my sister’s name and birthday! That was an extraordinarily random connection, but it will make a very nice story when I give my sister her birthday present next week. (And yeah, it’s a little complacent of me to assume that she’s not going to read this post and have her present spoiled, but I feel safe.)

I wish I could say that the conference inspired me writing-wise, but… not so much. I did not come home with story ideas pouring out of my ears. I wrote a couple paragraphs last night just to keep the story going, but I don’t think that’s going to happen tonight. So it goes.

Bookmark giveaway addresses

April, Patty, Kristin, and Janet — please email me your addresses (to sarah at sarahwynde-dot-com) so I can send you bookmarks! Yes, that’s four instead of three, so one of you won’t be getting A Gift of Ghosts bookmark, but really, choosing one person to not get a bookmark is well beyond my abilities.

Fortunately, the bookmark for The Wedding Guests is also super-pretty, so I hope whoever gets that one is happy with it, too.

Thank you all for doing good deeds!

Lazy Sunday

I have a sore throat. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s allergy-related, and it could be, but suspecting that it’s my own damn fault does not make me feel any less sorry for myself.

Nor, unfortunately, does it make me any more inclined to avoid the foods that I’m allergic to. Cheese & chocolate are worth a little suffering. If it wasn’t Sunday, I’d head over to Trader Joe’s, in fact, to buy fresh rice noodles to make myself the most delicious crab pasta dish — crab sauteed in browned butter (allergen!), with lemon zest, garlic, lemon juice, white wine (allergen!), lots of cilantro, and served over rice (allergen!) noodles. I made that recipe up last week when my friend S sent me a couple of cans of Dungeness crab meat and it was so good that I’m still thinking about it.

But I also know that a year into my AIP experience, I’ve gotten so cavalier that I’m losing the health benefits I gained. Pain influences my choices too many days lately. Would I be more inclined to write today if my throat and hands didn’t hurt? Maybe. Maybe I’ll go eat some sauerkraut and convince myself that it has enough virtue to balance out the goat cheese.

Apart from the sore throat, aches-and-pains, it’s a grey, rainy, bleak day, further reason to think browsing the internet and/or watching television and/or reading bits and pieces of old books is more appealing than writing. My usual techniques for being productive on grey days all revolve around caffeine (not AIP-friendly, of course) and sugar (ditto). And I am abruptly reminded that I drank a real latte — a pumpkin spice latte, in fact! — on Friday, which is a whole bunch of real dairy. That’s sort of comforting, since it means I might still be able to continue including goat cheese in my diet as long as I avoid cow milk. It was delicious, and maybe even worth it.

Friday was actually a spectacular day after I got over being gloomy about the state of the world. I got Z a new pink basketball at Target (and myself a pumpkin spice latte and a pair of capri jeans for $7.50) and we spent the afternoon in the pool. Much splashing & floating, much throwing of the ball, much, much sun. I wish I knew how to capture the memory of that day in a way that could really replicate the physical sensations of my love for my dogs, the affection and joy and happiness of playing with them when the sun sparkles on the water and the water itself is pure smooth comfort on my skin. A writer ought to be able to, but I suspect when I reread this two years from now or whenever, I’ll think — huh, must have been a nice day with the dogs — without really having the slightest recollection of what the day was like.

But B does these little tentative jumps into the pool these days — he wants his front paws on my shoulder before he’ll step into the pool, and then once in the water, he swims delicate little circles around me, always returning to sit on my arm, and then paddles straight on to the steps and out. He’s baby weight — 14 pounds — and it reminds me of those long-gone days of taking toddler R into the water, always alert. On Friday, it was so warm that he didn’t bother to immediately rush to roll himself dry, just wandered around wet until the next time he wanted to come in again. And bark, bark, bark if I go under. I think he’d really prefer it if I only ever stood, never swam, in the water.

And Z was so happy about her new ball. Her doggie smile, open-mouthed and panting, tongue hanging out, while she stands on the steps of the pool and watches the ball float away from her is the purest, clearest, most joyful expression. I wonder if I have a picture. Well, this is from the beach two years ago, but it’s as close as I can come. Doggie joy.

Commemorating 9/11

Today is the National Day of Service and Remembrance. I didn’t actually know that, until I went looking for something I’d heard on the radio about doing a good deed on September 11th as a way of acknowledging the day, but apparently it’s very official, federally recognized and everything. Forbes has a story about it, if you want more info.

For me, commemorating through remembering and memorializing comes a little too close to wallowing, not because the tragedy affected me personally but because it was so overwhelming at the time and maybe also because I’m a pragmatist. I could light a candle and say a prayer, and maybe I will, but what good does that do anyone? Especially right now while hundreds of thousands of desperate people are fleeing the middle east. It doesn’t exactly feel like we’ve come a long way in the past 14 years, or if we have, maybe it was in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, Patrick Rothfuss has given me a better outlet for my need to remember the day. Doing What We Can is surely better than doing nothing, especially today. I’ve never felt so grateful to donate money, to have the opportunity to say, yes, I am not quite helpless in the face of the world’s horrors. Pretty much helpless, but not entirely.

Anyway, today is also World Suicide Prevention Day, which seems sort of like terrible timing on their part. I would think the date’s other significance would get in the way of getting much attention. Although, I don’t know, it is a depressing day, so maybe they figured now was a time when people needed to be reminded that the world is not always as bleak as it seems?

In that spirit, I’ve decided to give away the pretty beaded bookmarks that I got to celebrate 250,000 downloads of A Gift of Ghosts. I meant to do one of those serious Rafflecopter things with them — tweeting and liking pages and all that jazz — but eh, that does not inspire me. This does. If you donate to Worldbuilders and/or suicide prevention and/or do some other good deed today and share it in the comments to this post, either on Facebook or on my blog, I’ll enter you to win one of three bookmarks. I don’t get a lot of traffic, so your odds are pretty good, and the bookmarks are lovely. (This is not the world’s best picture, but it gives you the idea, I hope.)

Plus, even better, you too will get to know that in a world that sometimes seems impossibly dark, you’ve chosen to be a little tiny flicker of light. That doesn’t feel like enough, but you can never tell which spark will light a fire. Maybe it’ll be yours.