Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 92

Dropout

Right about now, minus one year, I dropped out of graduate school. If I’d stayed, and stayed on track, I’d be graduating soon, maybe even this weekend. I’m trying to decide if I have regrets. I sort of think the fact that I’d rather go drink a glass of wine and watch Doctor Who then sit with this feeling means that I do, at least a few.

Ostensibly, I dropped out of school to become a writer. Really, I quit because it was increasingly clear to me that I wasn’t healthy enough to be the person on the professional side of the counseling relationship. If it hadn’t been such an incredibly difficult year, filled with loss and pain, I think I would have managed, but in the long run, I don’t think it would have been good for me. The more into it I got, the more I felt like I was wearing a mask and that the mask was part of the job description.

I’m not sure being a writer is going to work out for me either, though. I know how to earn a living as a writer: write fast, write what you think people want to read, write and let go. Write to sell, basically, and produce as much as possible as quickly as possible. It’s basic math. Instead I’ve spent the past year kicking around A Gift of Time, writing and revising and thinking and revising some more and thinking some more. There is no possible way to become a successful writer if I spend a year working on one project and at the end of the year toss everything and start over. (Oh, by the way, I started Time over again this week. Ha. Back to the beginning.)

On the other hand, I felt really pleased to be starting Time over. Thought — well, I had promised to deliver Thought by June 2012 and so I did. And I love parts of it, just the way I love parts of Time. But I also think that it’s not nearly as good a book as I’m capable of. I learned a lot writing it. I worked on action scenes and pace, movement from place to place, descriptions, dramatic tension. But it was never all that clear whose story it was: Dillon’s or Sylvie’s or Lucas’s. I think Lucas is a better character in my head than he is on the page, and I wish I’d had sections in his POV to get him down better. Honestly, Lucas is probably the truly most important character — he’s the one who has the clearest goals — and he’s not nearly as good as he ought to be. The ending should have been his ending, as much as Dillon’s and Sylvie’s and it just wasn’t.

I could persevere with Time. I’ve been doing that for six months. I’m actually at 35,000 words, which is a solid chunk of book. And if I was going to earn a living as a writer, that’s probably what I ought to do: write, write, write, finish it off, accept the fact that it’s not as good as it could be, and move on. But I just can’t do it. I’d rather not earn my living as a writer, but love what I’m writing. Love and be proud of. I want to someday re-read Time and think, ‘oh, I amuse myself’ with a cheerful glow of contentment, the way I do when I re-read some of my best fanfics. That means starting over. That means being profoundly impractical about the hour-per-product investment of time.

I don’t know that dropping out of graduate school was impractical — maybe not nearly as impractical as quitting my editing job was in the first place. But a year later, I don’t seem to have figured out anything at all about my life and how I intend to make it work. Except maybe that doing work that I’m proud of and that I love is more important to me than my long-term retirement planning? Which is a nice thought, of course, but it’s not going to pay the mortgage when I run out of savings.

Meanwhile…back to Time. The nicest thing about starting over is that after a year with these characters, I really know them. I spent six months fighting Natalya’s propensity to be sarcastic and now I’ve given up. She’s the kind of sarcastic person who can usually keep her mouth shut, which is why Akira thinks she’s so serene and sweet, but Akira doesn’t know her insides the way I do.

Magnolias

I can never remember when flowers bloom in Florida. It feels as if they’re blooming all year round, but they’re really not. Late April, though, is magnolia season. A few weeks from now, the white petals will turn brown and drop, littering people’s yards with debris that looks like dirty tissues. Not the best look. But a good reminder to appreciate them while they’re beautiful.

Magical Florida

I think my weirdest personality trait might be how much I enjoy giving presentations. If I could somehow synthesize the chemicals that flow through me when I’m in front of an audience, I bet I could create a nice addictive drug that would make millions of dollars. (From curing depression and anxiety, not just getting people high, if that matters.)

I spoke to a class at Full Sail today. So much fun. Great audience, too — interested and attentive and willing to be interactive. The presentation was a revised version of the one I gave a couple months ago. It’s getting better, but it’s not entirely right yet. There’s a process in creating a presentation that is about figuring out what you want to say and then figuring out how to say it and then how to show it. I still need to do a little work on the first part in order to smooth out the second and third.

One of the things that I talked about, though, was how good storytelling is basically good lying. Once you’ve learned how to lie well, you’re halfway to knowing how to tell a story well. And what better place to learn how to lie then from the people who try to determine whether you’re lying or not?

The FBI has lots of interesting information about interrogations and signs of truth or falsity. A condensed version (highly condensed) of one technique called Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) says that true stories (and therefore good lies) contain the following types of details:

Context — details that place the story in a time and setting

Sensory — sight, sound, smell, details that evoke physical sensation

Emotional — people telling the truth about their own experience share how they felt, people reporting on an experience or making it up skip that

Unusual, unexpected, superfluous — real events have details that surprise people and when someone is telling the truth, they share that detail

I tied that concept to Kurt Vonnegut’s line about every sentence in a story needs to move the action forward or reveal character, but I added a bit, making it “move the action forward or reveal character or relationships.” Those two ideas — about details and about sentence-level goals — might just add up to my ideas about how to write. Some people write books about the subject, but I think I might be two-thirds of the way to figuring out my own philosophy: Tell good lies in a way that Kurt Vonnegut would approve of. Funnily enough, I’m not actually a huge Vonnegut fan. He’s a great writer, of course, but I don’t want to live in his worlds. So maybe for me there’s another element about writing a world in which I want to live?

Speaking of which, one of the students asked how I picked the locations I wanted to write about. I don’t think I answered her question very well, because I went into an immediate digression about Florida. I’ve lived in a lot of places. Omitting Florida and in order of time spent: California, New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Illinois, London, British Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Washington. I’ve vacationed or visited even more, but I’m not going to bother with a list because it would take too long. There are plenty of countries I’ve never visited (all of Asia and Africa, for example!) but I’ve checked out most of the states one way or another.

That gives me the authority to say that Florida is magical, so what better place to set a magical story? I saw immediate skepticism, so I said, “No, no, really, Florida is magic. You walk outside of your house and there are these giant birds, like huge, and they’re just there, in your front yard.” Tom, the teacher, said, “For me, it was the lizards.” I nodded immediately. Florida is rife with lizards. They’re everywhere. And did you know that geckos chuckle? The noise a gecko makes is exactly like a smug little laugh. But I digress again — there were still dubious smirks on student faces, so I said, “I will prove it. I will prove that Florida is magic. I will find a photograph.”

Technology being what it is, it took me a minute, but I finally managed to pull up the following photo, which I showed each and every student on my phone.

That bug is a scarlet-bodied moth wasp. It was flying around my bedroom the other day and when I finally got it outside, I took a picture.

Apart from being the prettiest bug you will ever see in your life, with its red body and lacy wings, the scarlet-bodied moth wasp has the amazing attribute of being the only bug that shares a chemical defense. “The adult male moth extracts toxins known as “pyrrolizidine alkaloids” from Dogfennel Eupatorium (Eupatorium capillifolium) and showers these toxins over the female prior to mating. This is the only insect known to transfer a chemical defense in this way. “ Is that not cool?

And definite proof, IMO, that Florida is magic. Tassamara is small potatoes compared to scarlet bugs that pretend to be wasps and have heroic males defending their mates via sprinkled pixie dust (um, pollen.)

Hawk

Look closely. That speck on top of the chimney is a hawk.

Walking the dogs this morning and a hawk breezed over my head. Of course there was no possible way I was going to catch a picture of it in flight. Between juggling two dogs’ leashes and the two dogs tugging in different directions, I can barely manage a still picture. But it was kind enough to sit for a moment on a roof — just long enough for me to snap this picture — before zooming away again. You probably can’t even really see it — it’s the speck on the top of the roof.

This afternoon, though, I was on my home from the grocery store when I saw it again.* I took a quick picture, thinking it would move, then started walking toward it. Took another, and another, and another, and… you get the idea. This is the very last. I stood under its light-pole and it twisted its head what seemed like a full 180 degrees to stare down at me, then decided that I meant nothing and went back to relaxing.

Hawks in flight are elegant, but this one, sitting still, looks plump and satisfied, like a country squire character in a Jane Austen novel.

*I say “it” as if there’s only one — I’d like to believe that it’s Joan the Hawk, the bird that R sees when he’s at school, just because I like the name they’ve given that hawk so much, but R says no, too small. Still, he thinks the neighborhood probably only has one hawk. It needs a name!

Existential dread

I’m having a strange month.

The details don’t feel like my story to tell, but my stepmother is on the health roller-coaster, the one that goes slowly up and then much too quickly down, down, down. She’s been sick since we were in Belize and now she’s in intensive care again, or she was yesterday.

As a result, Gizmo is living with me. That’s been 90% pure pleasure. He’s a nitwit, but so sweet. The 10% is that as I have been falling more in love with him, Zelda has been getting a little more suspicious, a little more inclined to shove him out of the way and glare. He’s completely tolerant, he lets her be the boss, but I feel sad for her. Jealousy isn’t pleasant, even for dogs. I’ve been making sure she knows she’s first dog, but Gizmo does need to get brushed and loved, too, and she just has to put up with it.

Requisite cute dog photo:

Zelda and Gizmo

One of the positives of having Gizmo is that he’s helped me stop missing Trill quite so much. Ironically, given how often she bit me, her loss has been the hardest pet loss I’ve ever experienced. My childhood dog would have been first, but when we lost him, I’d been gone from home for five years. I sobbed for hours, but he wasn’t a fixture in my day-to-day life, and two days later, it was a sadness, not an emptiness. Trill left an emptiness. A silence. It’s been almost a month and I still miss her every morning. (That’s an improvement, though, over the first week, where I cried every day and felt ridiculous almost every time. She was a bird. A grouchy bird! But she had such a big personality. Ugh, I probably have to go cry again.)

Moving on… worrying about C — and in relation, worrying about my dad, who seems older every time I see him, more tired every time I speak with him — plus all of last week’s horribleness, has got me hovering in a state of existential dread. I want to feel like the world has good things in it, positive outcomes, happiness. Instead, I’ve got that sense of generalized anxiety that grinds away in the back of my head, reminding me constantly that life is fragile, the world dangerous. I’m not enjoying it.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about that, because I don’t particularly want to be reminded of it two or three years from now or whenever I re-read this post, but it’s all a long-winded explanation for this picture:

A bird on our morning walk

Seeing birds like this, views like this, when I’m just out walking the dogs, reminds me to be mindful of the magic around me. It’s a reminder I really need at the moment, so I’m going to be trying to post pictures of my morning walk for a while. Probably not a long while, because I’m not that organized, but expect to see some flowers and birds for the next few days.

Table lamps

While we were away, my dad finished cleaning out his house, which meant that my house got flooded with stuff. We came back to a place that looked ready to star in an episode of Hoarders.* We didn’t quite have to climb over the furniture to move from room to room, but  it was a near thing. Couches, chairs, objects, just…stuff…was everywhere.

Slowly and steadily over the past week, I’ve been finding places for it. Counting the outside furniture, we have 24 chairs. Also three couches and a stool. Never, ever, ever — I say this with complete conviction — will I ever need seating for 30 people in my house.

Never.

But I keep walking into my living room and thinking, wow, this looks different. Finished. If it weren’t for the books still piled in corners everywhere and the paintings and artwork leaning up against the furniture, it would look … it would look like a grown-up’s house.

Now, of course, I’ve been grown up for a long time. And I’ve lived in lots of houses. I even own real furniture — a comfortable couch, a kitchen table, a dresser. But this influx of stuff changed something.

I finally decided — it’s the table lamps.

Table lamps apparently are a magic ticket to conveying an illusion of adulthood.

*Digression: Actually, I’ve never seen an episode of Hoarders, only heard about it, but I just got distracted and read all about it for twenty minutes so now I know that we were, in fact, nowhere close. Clutter, yes, but my version of clutter is nowhere close to pathological.

Crocs and iguanas and scorpions, oh, my

From the porch of the house.

I promised a few animal pictures. This was the crocodile, in the water below the house. It seemed like a perfectly nice crocodile, as such creatures go, but I have to admit that I was a little nervous when I was hanging up laundry not ten feet away from where we’d seen it earlier in the day.

The iguana.

 

The first time I saw the iguana, I thought its head looked just like a mini t-rex. This picture doesn’t capture that perspective, but it was a pretty impressive iguana. Compared to the little geckos we have in Florida, it was godzilla.

A little blurry, but the mama scorpion in all her glory

The babies are too tiny to see, but apparently baby scorpions have a much nastier sting than the big ones because they deliver all their poison instead of reserving some for later. Isn’t that the kind of thing that would make you happy to know as you were falling asleep on the floor of the bedroom where you’d seen a host of baby scorpions earlier in the day? Poor R. But he toughed it out. I should make him a medal. Or give him a title of some sort — Sleeps with Scorpions?

Belize moments

Some of my favorite photos and memories from Belize.

An osprey with at least one young one in its nest on Caye Caulker

R loved the osprey. Two days into our trip, he said that watching it feed its baby would be his favorite memory.

Checking out the paintings on a house during our tour of the backroads of Caye Caulker

We rented a golf cart and explored the entire island at golf cart speed. The day we were supposed to pay for the boat ride, credit card machines were down throughout Belize, so most of the boaters had to go to the ATM to get cash. We got there first and when I walked out and saw the line, I felt guilty over having cleaned out the ATM of $50s. But S pointed out that if we’d been playing the Amazing Race, we would have just scored big.

R and me having a moment of discovery

R found hermit crabs. Looking down into the shallow tidal pool, I spotted a couple, then a few more, then dozens, then maybe hundreds. They were everywhere. Later in the trip, I was in the water when something bit me, hard. I’m pretty sure it was a much bigger hermit crab. R said he saw a huge one.

 

Lunch at Terry’s Grill

Terry’s Grill — a guy with a grill and a picnic table on the beach, currently rated the #2 restaurant on Caye Caulker on TripAdvisor. I had the grilled shrimp and it was one of my favorite meals of a trip that included many, many good meals.

 

R and me sitting on the sailboat

The Ragga Queen took us down the coast to Placencia and reminded me of how much I love being out on the ocean. I could spend endless hours watching water, lost in my daydreams. Someday, although maybe in 2014 at the rate at which I’m currently writing, I’ll be working on a book called “A Lonely Magic” about a girl named Fen (nicknamed) who finds out the world is a much bigger place than she ever imagined when she meets a boy on a Chicago street and gets whisked off into his life. Credit will be due the lovely hours on the Ragga Queen, cradled in the waves.

 

Those tents look even tinier in the picture than they did in real life

Our tents on Tobacco Caye. I’m not sure I’d actually call the tents a favorite memory: wow, it was hot and uncomfortable during the night. But wandering the island and snorkeling, sitting on the dock with R, watching the birds swoop down for the fish guts and the rays glide by in the water — lots of good stuff about the island.

 

Bicycle parking at the Tipsy Tuna

Placencia. We didn’t ride bicycles, but the colors and the sign are a pretty perfect representation of the town. It used to be isolated — the only way to get there was over a dirt road that killed cars quickly or by boat. But Francis Ford Coppola built some fancy resort up the coast in Maya Beach and started a building boom. Five years from now Placencia might be awful — totally touristy, completely artificial. But at the moment, it felt like a magical little town, colorful and bright and cheerful.

 

Our last afternoon, sitting in beach chairs, watching the water and drinking tropical fruity drinks

That drink between S and me is a coconut basil mojito. I tried it because it sounded so weird, it was impossible to resist. It was delicious, although heavy on the greenery. Maybe all the basil made it healthy?

Silence = sadness

Sometimes the worst part of a trip is what’s happening at home while you’re gone.

Our lovebird died while we were away. We don’t know why. I thought probably stress — too much change, too many different locations — but my dad said that she’d seemed perfectly happy for the first week, chirping and squawking just like always. I don’t know that it matters. People wanted to talk about it tonight (Easter, so family dinner), but I walked away, I don’t have the stamina to casually chat about what could have caused her death. I would have started sobbing again if I’d stayed.

I loved that bird. She was cranky and mean, she bit and complained and she hated that she was low creature on the totem pole. But she was also lively and spirited and smart and much more full of personality than any creature so small had a right to be.

The house is so much quieter without her.

The Litany of New Foods

Once upon a time, I liked only white foods. White rice, mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream. When I left home for the first time, I wound up eating plain pasta mostly, eventually graduating to crackers with slices of cheddar cheese, and then moving on to plain bagels with cream cheese. Sadly, I’m not kidding. During college, I could go days at a time eating only one of those foods and mostly eating other food under the mild social pressure of roommates and friends acting worried about me.

Michelle was the first person to teach me to eat and like other foods. When she and I spent six months in Europe together, she got me to try squid (it’s white, after all) and Nutella (initially with marshmallow fluff, I seem to recall) and even artichoke (served with mayo, which is, of course, white.) She liked to try every new fruit that came our way. Her attitude was “take a bite and if you don’t like it, stop there.” She even tried durian, which has a smell that is so completely overpoweringly disgusting that being in the same train compartment with one made me nauseous. (I cannot believe that wikipedia says that some people find it “pleasantly fragrant.” Those people are insane.)

Anyway, Michelle started me on a path to food curiosity and then I moved to San Francisco. Sushi. Thai. Indian. Dim sum. Avocados and mangoes. Weird ingredients like cilantro and salsa! From thinking that only white foods were good, I became an adventurous eater, always willing to try something new, at least once.

Before going to Belize, I thought “relatively poor country” plus “traveling on a tight budget” would equal “rice, beans, tortillas.” Well, I was right about the rice and beans part — almost every meal included them as a side — but I was wrong about the lack of adventure. What follows is a list of the new foods I tried, and my opinions about them.

Barracuda: A strong-tasting fish, more like swordfish than anything else I can compare it to. I ate it at least twice, I think, once in a coconut curry, and it was fine. Just fish, nothing amazing.

Conch: Wikipedia tells me it’s an edible snail. I wasn’t so sure about the edibility the first time I had it — it tasted like I imagine shoe leather would, only with less flavor. But I tried it in ceviche and again in a coconut curry and it was much better. I wouldn’t order it at a restaurant again, but I’ll try it if it comes my way.

Lionfish: Tasted like fish. White fish, maybe a little closer to haddock than snapper, but unremarkable. I suspect that it’s all about the preparation. I’d try it again as a creole dish or maybe fried, but I didn’t love it. (I only had a bite of Suzanne’s.)

Hogfish: One of the worst dishes I tried, but I suspect it was the preparation. I ordered it with butter and garlic and it came to me swimming in a sea of yellow liquid. I like butter, but more as a flavor than as a soup. Anyway, the fish was fine, but not exciting. Same restaurant as the lionfish, so again, a different preparation might have made me like it more.

Hudut: Wikipedia failed me! But hudut is a traditional fish stew of the Garifuna people, made with coconut, garlic, and fish. I’m guessing other ingredients vary. The link I found said it had thyme in it, but I didn’t taste any thyme and I’m pretty sure that the hudut we had included okra. It was delicious. I think the fish in ours might have been snapper, but I don’t know for sure. If I asked, I don’t remember the answer, and I probably didn’t ask, because delicious is delicious, after all. The type of fish didn’t matter. Along with the hudut came a ball of a doughy substance. I know it contained plaintain, but I’m sure it contained something else, too, because it didn’t taste like banana. You take a spoonful of the dough and drop it into the soup and it turns into something like a little dumpling from the heat. I didn’t love it–it was sort of thick and chewy, but I didn’t dislike it either. (I think I’ll write another post about that meal, because if I tell the whole story here, I’ll never get back to the other foods.) Anyway, if you have the chance to try hudut (and you like fish and coconut), totally go for it.

Johnnycake: Ah, looking for a link let me know that Belizean johnnycakes are not the same thing as the ones in historical novels set in New England. The Belizean variety is made with flour and coconut milk and tastes a lot like a biscuit, while the American version is made with cornmeal. But it was delicious and a new food for me even if it wasn’t the romantic historical food I thought I was getting.

Stone crab: I wasn’t sure how different stone crab would be from other crab that I’ve eaten and taste-wise, it wasn’t really. It wasn’t as sweet as some Alaskan crab or as salty as the crab you can get in Maine, but mostly it was just crab. Except that breaking it open was a serious challenge — forget those little tongs, we needed a serious meat tenderizing hammer and even then, you had to hit it hard.

Stewed gibnut: You know how often people say strange meat tastes like chicken? (Frog legs do taste just like chicken.) Gibnut tastes nothing like chicken. I think it was closer to a roast pork taste, but with a different texture, meaty but not tough or stringy. I knew it was a rodent, but until I found that link, I didn’t really know what kind of rodent. I’m glad it’s closer to rabbit than rat! Although honestly, as long as it’s not dog or monkey, I’m good with trying pretty  much anything. The stewed gibnut was a little salty but overall yummy. I would absolutely eat it again.

Most of the food I ate in Belize was really good. It was the most unexpected and yet delightful part of the trip–so much fresh seafood and so much of it delicious!