Eileen Maksym's Blog, page 23

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid!

Imagine finding this treat in your Halloween bag!

(Click the image for more surreal photography by Chema Madoz courtesy Who Killed Bambi)

A gentleman with a refined taste in mice

What a dapper feline!  Artist Martine Roch makes collages of old-timey photographs and pictures of animals.  Click on the image to see more at Who Killed Bambi.

Nightmare

A hallucination from artist Jon Jacobsen.  Click on the image to see more at Who Killed Bambi.

Fighting prejudice one flower crown at a time

 

Sophie Gamand takes photographs of pit bulls in flower crowns to examine and challenge stereotypes.  Very evocative — and very beautiful — images.

(Click the image to go to the article at Beautiful Decay!)

Does sex really sell?

This is one of a series of photographs by Rankin that features celebrities with dead fish.  The series is meant to use sex to highlight the issue of over fishing.  I think it fails spectacularly. My interest in this image is wrapped up in how utterly bizarre it is, and I don’t really pay attention to the intended message.  Studies have shown that this is actually generally true of sexy ads.  People who are attracted to the images focus on that hot woman stretched out on the hood of the car, not the kind of car that’s being advertised.  Sex might not actually sell.

(Click on the image for the Beautiful Decay article!)

Down to the bones

Artist Maskull Lasserre takes pre-existing generic wooden sculptures and “recarves” them to display the anatomy beneath the surface.  I find these works very profound.  Beneath the surface of everything we see is a complex reality.  The best writing is able to crack the world open and let us see the innards in all its messy glory.

 

Not a hiatus, per se. A slowatus.

Hi folks!

I am currently working on book 2 in the Haunted series.  It is taking up all my time and my creative energy, so I’m going to have to cut back on the blog posts for the moment.  But this blog will not be bare!  I will be continuing to post images I find on the web that tickle my imagination, and that I hope will tickle yours as well.  So stay tuned!

Write what you don’t know

There’s a certain amount of tension when writing a character that has a strong, defining experience that you yourself have not had.  One of my protagonists in the Haunted series is a woman who lost her father to suicide.  I have not experienced that tragedy firsthand.  Sometimes I wonder if I should even be writing about it.  How could I possibly do justice to that?

My friend and mentor Paul McComas (I’m constantly calling him that, I should make an acronym or something) likes to talk about a period he went through in college that his writing teacher called “The Earnest Young Man Stories.”  Told “write what you know,” he produced a series of stories about a sensitive college aged guy interacting with the world.  After a number of these stories, his teacher told him “You know…you know people other than yourself.”  Point being, when we write fiction, we don’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, limited to the strict area of our own personal experience.  Our personal experience informs our writing, but so does our relationships with other people.  So does the things that we read, the things we watch, the things we observe , the things we deduce.  

I do need to be careful, I think, because despite the fact that my work is fiction, it will still inform my readers’ understanding of that experience, the same way the things I read inform my own. (This, incidentally, is one of my issues with things like The DaVinci Code and 50 Shades of Grey. People base their views of theology or of how to properly go about BDSM on what they read in these books, and both are irresponsibly, and, in the case of 50 Shades, dangerously inaccurate.)  But that doesn’t mean I need to, or should, limit my exploration of the human experience based only on my tiny slice.

Depression Doesn’t Discriminate. Depression Lies. It’s Okay to Get Help.

This is about Robin Williams, like thousands, millions of other blog posts and Facebook posts and tweets and god knows what else out there.  Like just about everyone, I am shocked.  Like just about everyone, I am very sad.  Like just about everyone, I feel this was a personal loss, that his talent and his spirit touched my life on a deeper level than any other celebrity I can name.  And that in his struggle with depression, with despair, with those constant feelings of being not-enough, I see myself.

It’s all been said before, and with more grace than I am capable of.  But there are three things that I will say, things that must be repeated, by as many people and to as many people as possible.

Depression does not discriminate.

Depression strikes men and women, the young and the old, the famous and the obscure, the rich and the poor.  

Depression lies.

It gets into your head, and it tells you that nothing is ever good enough, that no one loves you, that the future only holds more pain, and that you might as well give up.  These are all lies.

It’s okay to get help.

Chances are, you know someone who struggles with depression.  It might even be you. There is absolutely no shame in getting help.  Talk to a friend.  A family member.  Your doctor.  See a therapist.  If it’s right for you, take medication.  You do not have to suffer in silence.  People will listen.  People will help.

If you or someone you know are having suicidal thoughts, please call the number above.  And please pass that number along.  Post it on your Facebook page, on your twitter, your Pinterest, your Instagram.  Suicide is contagious.  Suicide rates spike after a well-publicized suicide, and this is the most publicized suicide I’ve ever seen.  Please help make sure that people who are struggling with this know that help is at hand.  Give them the number, and be there for them.

And if anyone needs someone to turn to, you can contact me.  I will listen.

Blog hop: Writers on writing!

I’ve been known to write about writing from time to time (okay, more frequently than that…) so I’m excited to be participating in this blog hop!  Many thanks to TiffanyEms Pitts for including me, and for Camela Thompson for handing off the baton!  Now, onto the Q&A!

Where do you like to write?

I prefer to write in coffee shops, because one, it gets me out of the house and away from all the distractions, and two, coffee!  When we lived in Evanston, IL, there was a coffee shop across the street from our apartment called the Brothers K.  It is a wonderful, friendly place with wonderful, friendly people and wonderful, friendly coffee.  Their baristas have actually won awards for their coffee making prowess and their artistic talent in the foam-and-espresso medium.  I’m an iced coffee person, but I would still periodically order a cappuccino just because they were so heavenly.  I still visit every time I’m in the Chicago area, and they still recognize me.

Now that we live in Tuscaloosa, AL, my coffee shop has become the town’s one free-standing Starbucks (there’s one in the Target and one in the Barnes and Noble).  The people here are very nice as well, and know my usual (iced coffee, breve with hazelnut) so well that they often have it ready for me by the time I get to the register.  I take my coffee, snag a table, and camp out for a couple hours, until it’s 2pm and time to pick my kids up from school.

Which part of researching your current novel was most interesting?

Tara Martin, one of my main characters, is an undergraduate neurobiology major.  I wanted to have her taking a psychology course, so I looked at a course listing for Yale, my alma mater, and decided on a social psych course that focused on group decision making, particularly the phenomenon of “groupthink.”  I wanted to show a lecture, so I researched groupthink, and was particularly drawn to the investigation into the circumstances that led up to the Challenger disaster.  I was in second grade when the Challenger exploded, and fascinated with space exploration, so the disaster hit me hard.  Revisiting it, reading the particulars of the explosion itself and discovering the pathological decision making that led up to it, was a powerful experience.  I wound up writing a whole chapter about a class that focused on that exact subject.  I will doubtless wind up cutting it, since the specifics of that particular instance aren’t necessary, but I will still use the general ideas in what winds up happening with my characters.

How important are names to you in your books? How do you choose them?

I don’t pay much attention to them, actually.  Mostly I just have to make sure I don’t reuse the same names in every single one of my stories — I’m very fond of Sarah and Tracy for some reason!  I think the only time I’ve paid any attention to the names was when I was writing a semi-autobiographical piece about something my husband and I went through.  I wanted to gender-swap the characters, but I kept the initials.  Eileen became Edward, and Peter became Patricia.

Do you read your reviews? How do you respond to the bad reviews (if you get them)?

I do, although I’m not sure I should.  I’m a lot better at dealing with criticism and rejection than I was when I started out, but getting a bad review still makes me want to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and never, ever come out.  Once the urge to be melodramatic passes, I usually manage to look at the bad review pragmatically.  If the reviewer has a valid point for some way my writing could be better, I try to take the advice. 

What are your favorite books to give as gifts?

Just one book: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.  I have lent my own copies out five times and never gotten them back, so now I just give the book as a gift to anyone who hasn’t read it yet.  I think everyone deserves to have that bit of hilarious genius in their lives!