The Hellish Handbasket Blog

  • Thinking errors

    I hardly ever know what I’m going to blog about when I start a new post. That means I’m a pantser when it comes to writing. A pantser is a writer who writes by the seat of their pants. Which is very odd expression, when I think about it. I searched for the term and discovered it originated with early pilots who relied on the feel and pressure of their butt in the seat to fly their plane. Good thing I’m only a writing pantser, not a pilot pantser. Crashing into things when writing usually is not fatal.

    Speaking of writing, another episode of writing from prompts occurred on Friday. Only four writers showed up but we made our valiant attempts to weave stories from five words.

    Here are the five words for this week.

    difficult

    communicate

    camouflage

    discovery

    control

    Here is what I wrote, and disappointment warning, it’s not very good. The thread eluded me.

    When you suspect danger is lurking in the bushes, you can thank your ancestors you are ready to run. Ancient humans who ignored the difficult lesson of assuming danger was everywhere failed to transmit their inferior genes to the next generation. In contrast, the superior genes of humans who assumed the dappled shade was camouflage for a hungry tiger survived to communicate the importance of staying in control, which meant their descendants enjoyed a healthy fear of dappled shade, even when the shade was just shade. You can thank your superior genes you learned to run.

    I don’t know what staying in control has to do with anything, but there you go. Not all impromptu essays make sense. Hence my claim to be a pantser. If I did some revising, maybe I could massage this little story into something more coherent, but why bother? Nobody cares.

    Speaking of staying in control (or not), or speaking about caring about soemthing, there is something my family cares about and cannot control and that is a member who has gone AWOL. Last night I called a city police department and asked them to do a welfare check on our family member who may be having some cognitive difficulties. Of course, my siblings feared disaster, but none of us seemed willling to take action. Including me, at first. I am usually inclined to let the chips fall, assuming most adults should be allowed to manage their own lives, even when that means choosing to drive off a cliff, but my sibs were exhibiting signs of manic anxiety, so I made the call last night.

    The police officer informed me the family member was apparently okay, still alive, anyway, but I know from experience that people experiencing the onset of cognitive impairment are experts at hiding behind social norms. For example, our mother was a master at using polite conversation to hide the fact that she didn’t understand a thing and couldn’t have reasoned her way out of a bathroom.

    In my family member’s case, I have a feeling the chips will continue to fall, but if I’ve learned anything from my mother’s mental decline, chips fall whether you want them to or not.

  • Wherever you go, there you are

    I still haven’t learned that I can’t outrun myself. I keep trying. Moving from place to place, job to job, relationship to relationship. Everytime I look over my shoulder to see if I finally ditched my shadow, there it is, following me step for step. It’s not fair. I want to be somebody else.

    I was thinking today about the strangeness of being in a body. Not just this body, any body. Like, how does consciousness suddenly enter and animate something, turn it from a nonliving thing to something that lives and maybe breathes, eats, poops, and grows? I don’t get it. I keep trying to get it. Which is probably part of my problem.

    I think having a place to live has caused some cognitive dissonance in my aging brain. It’s such a profound difference from my previous living situation. It’s like I melted and recoalesced as a different person. That’s probably why I keep thinking I have to keep running to escape whatever residual trauma I’m dragging along with me.

    I think a lot about the journey of the past year and a half. The places I saw, the people I met, the disasters I somehow avoided. I have certain images etched into my brain. The forest outside of Flagstaff. The desert in Quartzsite. And the epic roadtrip across the country to Boston and back. Now, from the safety of my tiny small-town burrow, I have a profound disbelief that the person who saw all those places was me.

    Here are this week’s five words that prompted the scene below.

    authority

    charlatan

    swivel

    green

    coffee

    Dave and I met at the local diner for coffee, as we usually did on Saturday mornings. We never say much, just the usual chit chat before work. Today Dave stared into his coffee for quite a while. 

    Finally I noticed. “What’s up Dave?”

    “Frank saw an alien at Fred Meyer pharmacy a few days ago.” 

    “Wow. How did Frank know it was an alien?” 

    “It was short, thin, and green.” 

    “Green? Was it wearing clothes?”

    Dave said, “Frank wasn’t sure if it was skin or if it was some kind of uniform. Definitely green, though. Kind of a neon chartreuse. He said it hurt his eyes to look at it.”

    “Oh brother. Dave, a lot of people are short, thin, and wear green. Frank was pulling your leg. It might have been a kid dressed like a dinosaur. Maybe it was a protester in a frog costume. What made Frank think it was an alien?”

    “Frank said its head swiveled in a circle.”

    “Swiveled! What do you mean, swiveled? Like in the Exorcist?”

    “Yep. He said it was really something.”

    “It sounds like it was something alright. A tequila-induced hallucination. Dave, you got snowed. I have it on good authority, Frank is a charlatan. He’s pulling your leg big time.”

    Dave scratched his head. “I dunno. I was coming out of Walmart, and I saw something green get into a little silver car, shaped like a Beetle but rounder. It started rolling toward the shopping carts, and I yelled, ‘hey, look out.’ He stopped and leaned out the window. He asked me, ‘Do you want a ride?’ I said ‘no thanks.’ He drove straight up in the air and disappeared.”

    Ha. Maybe all I need is to meet an alien in a silver Beetle. Beam me up!

  • A writer among writers

    The writer’s group meets at the library every Friday. Every other Friday is a study hall. We sit around a table and write with a minimum of chit chat. Not many people show up, probably because the pressure to actually sit down and write something is too much. I have made a commitment to show up. I can focus with no distractions, and I can help other members do the same.

    The other Fridays, we write from a prompt. More people attend those meetings, probably because it’s more fun to be free to write and share with no pressure. Plus, they all know each other. I’m the newcomer/outsider. They have been welcoming. I think they are glad to have new writers because the current members have more less become bored with hearing the same stories week after week. I know I have, and I’ve barely been there a month.

    Here are the five words from last Friday’s meeting:

    layer

    ambivalent

    page

    destination

    repulse

    Here is my take on those five words:

    When it comes to choosing a destination, my advice is, don’t be ambivalent. Curiosity is key. Even if you are repulsed by the idea that you might meet strangers, I urge you to be brave. Strangers are like pages in a book. Sometimes after reading a few pages, you know this is a place you will return to again and again. Other times you might decide you don’t like the story and throw it in the trash. I have layers and layers of pages with uninteresting destinations in my trash bin. Sometimes I think about burning them, but now that I’m old, pretending I can erase the past just by burning a few books seems like a waste of time. Now I focus on choosing new destinations because I know interesting strangers are waiting for me around the next corner.

    During the read-your-work time, I entertained them with two more excerpts from my month of daily writing. I have thirty blogposts written in December 2023. Some are too long to read, although I think they are funny. Some I’d be too embarrassed to read because the writing is so sloppy. A couple might be considered too edgy or even offensive (one about womens’ response to prohibitions on abortion, for example). I suspect most members share my liberal values, but I can’t be sure. That leaves me with about eight posts to read. This week I read a fake article about Hollywood celebrities auctioning off their children to raise cash to pay their debts. I got some belly laughs, which made me happy. I also read a short poem about a cat. That one also was well-received.

    I’m allowing the group to know me, which for me takes courage and willingness to be known.

    In other news, I have a new chair. This might seem trivial, but to me a new chair means less hip, shoulder, and back pain. It seems ridiculous to be talking about a chair, given the precariousness of human civilization. You can consider a pain-free chair a metaphor. Or you can do what I do and call it what it is: a chair.

    Good things are still happening around the world. We don’t hear about them because they are obscured by news about sad and scary things. I subscribe to a newsletter that reminds me daily that people are doing amazing work to mitigate the effects of climate change. I wrote about this heartening progress in my previous blogpost. The good news doesn’t erase my awareness of the tragic and frightening, but I am reminded that good exists.

    I read something today about what comes next, assuming the U.S. survives the current crisis. The author didn’t present specifics; instead, they offered a blueprint for the future based on a shift in attitude. Rather than focusing on policy, they suggested the guiding principles for change be based on pursuit of the common welfare. Their premise was that good policy would emerge from a vision of shared wellbeing.

    I have no idea how Americans would somehow decide to adopt such a vision. Getting Americans to come together and agree on anything seems impossible given the current levels of animosity and distrust. Inspiring citizens to rally around a leader who espouses such a vision defies reality. My conclusion is the quest for shared wellbeing is a lofty but futile goal.

    When I despair, I read the newsletter. Solar farms not only make communities energy self-sufficient; they also create habitats for plants and wildlife to thrive in the shade underneath. Encouraging indigenous tribes to adopt synthetic leopard-print clothing is helping their leopard population to rebound. Building highway overpasses over critical wildlife migration trails means elephants and other species can move through their habitat without getting mowed down by trucks.

    See? Good things are still happening. All is not lost.

  • Write what you want

    I returned to the scene of my debacle on Friday. The conference room had been upgraded with pink naugahyde cushy office chairs. I don’t think I’ve seen pink conference room chairs before. I applauded the interior designer’s taste, knowing they most likely got a really good deal from City Liquidators. Kudos for having both style and frugality.

    When I got there ten minutes early, just about everyone I’d met so far was there already. I took a seat at the end so I could be near the electrical outlet and plugged in my modem phone. As long as I’m at the library, I can use the library wi-fi to do software updates and backups.

    Before the fun began I interrupted a moment of silence between chit-chat to apologize for bludgeoning them with the chapter I read last week. I said I would not torture them like that again. The organizer was gracious and said it was fine, no need to apologize, that’s what we are here for. I suspect she realizes if she accepted my apology for writing a story no one but me could relate to, she’d have to take a good look at the book she was writing. Maybe it would have helped if I were a better narrator but my erratic tongue-twisted style couldn’t have been any worse than her tedious monotonous drone about life on an asteroid.

    We did the five words exercise, which I’m starting to think is really lame. Here are the five words and after the words is the paragraph I wrote in 20 minutes. In my defense, I didn’t want to do the assignment, but felt obligated to be a good sport in my quest to belong to the group.

    fault

    remorse

    rascal (my contribution)

    raisin

    oblivion

    Five words jumped off the page and ran around the dining room. Those rascals. See, there’s one now, skittering around the corner into the kitchen, too fast for me to catch. I tried and slipped. Something snapped in my leg, but Rascal obviously felt no remorse. Darn it! There’s another one! Remorse was something that word had clearly never felt. I tried to smash remorse into oblivion, but that was a lost cause from the start. Oblivion dashed past me and leaped for the stairs. With my  broken leg, well, going after oblivion was a nonstarter. I wasn’t sure what to do—I could hear little word feet running around the bedrooms. They were taking over the house. In my defense, I have to report it wasn’t my fault. Dang it. There goes another one. Just because fault got away this time wasn’t my fault. Next time, I’ll make sure fault and oblivion meet. They are obviously meant for each other. Anyway, before my femur snapped, I was heading to the kitchen to get raisins for the rabbit, and … what just happened? Did raisin get away too? This is completely out of hand.  Words. What can you do. I’m lucky there were only five of them. I’ve seen entire books filled with words. Let me tell you, that can really get your heart rate going. If you aren’t careful, they will lead you right off a cliff.

    They laughed, which is all I wanted.

    Later, I swiveled in my pink chair and asked what projects people were working on. I knew what the organizer was working on: the endless asteroid mining saga. I was trying to ascertain if the other so-called writers were actually writing. In retrospect, I think asking the question was probably a mistake. The woman sitting across the table from me glared and said something about starting a series of essays and then getting blocked, bogged down, something to that effect. She was not happy to be put on the spot. I didn’t regret asking. She could have chosen not to answer.

    She deflected and asked me if I was working on something.

    “My next book,” I said. “But I’m having a hard time figuring out what the characters want.”

    She proceeded to give me a few words of advice about devleoping characters. Wasn’t that sweet? I know, right? I thanked her in my friendliest tone and looked around the table. No one else besides the sci-fi fan was working on anything. She announced her 190,000-word manuscript was done and it has been out to beta readers for two years. I had assumed the book she was reading to us every week was a work in progress, but no. What she was reading was the finished book.

    In other news, I sold one ebook on my new Book2Read platform. As soon as I sell $10.00 worth, I’ll see some money in my bank account. How cool is that?

    I know what you are thinking. Carol, really? We don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but isn’t that bordering on pathetic? No, and let me tell you why.

    Everything I write is for me.

    Why not? I’m old. I might have twenty more years to live, if I’m really lucky. Why the hell shouldn’t I write what I want? I never made art to order, which is why I never made it as an artist. Now, as a writer, I don’t write to the reader market, which means I probably will sell very few books. Who cares? My life is richer and fuller because finally, after so many years of stifling my writing voice, I am creating characters who say and do things that crack me up.

    What could be better? And let me ask you, my five blog readers, if that is your dream, how come you aren’t doing it?

  • The writer’s price of admission

    On Friday I returned to the writer’s group for write and read night. Once again, we contributed five words (my was regret) and then we read some of our work. I volunteered immediately.

    I pulled out my latest book, the third of the trilogy. I chose a chapter I really liked that seemed to encapsulate the conflict between two opposing persuasions: ridiculous fashion tips versus quack health remedies. My characters faced off to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Copa Cabana.” What could be more amusing? Nothing, am I right? I thought so.

    The chapter turned out to be longer than I expected and really hard to read out loud. I would make a terrible audiobook narrator. I slurred and stumbled, my tongue gottwisted. My overactive saliva glands overactively salivated. Good information, in case I ever get asked to do a book reading. I digress.

    A few paragraphs in, I knew I had the wrong target audience. One or two listeners made some sounds that I interpreted as chuckles, but mostly there was silence. I am pretty sure had I been able to look up as I sped through my dialog, I would have seen the group pinching their foreheads between their thumb and forefingers with their eyes squeezed shut. The reason I know this is because that is how they listen to the writer who reads from her asteroid mining company sci-fi tome. I digress.

    I ploughed through the chapter and finally finished. Nobody had anything to say. Not a surprise. I bludgeoned them with jokes that would be funny only to someone who grew up in Portland and spent twenty years in L.A. That is to say, me and my one and only fan, who grew up in Portland and now lives in L.A. Yes, I write for an audience of one. I digress.

    I knew these aspiring writers were not going to be my ideal audience, any more than I am theirs. Still, as uncomfortable as it was, I knew I had to do it, just once. To join the group, to be on the inside, I had to show them who I was, which in this case meant I had to reveal to them the kind of work I write. I didn’t want to. But I knew I had to. Better to get it over with up front.

    Now it’s done. I can relax. Next time we have a write and read evening, I can settle in, listen to other people’s endless drivel and never again have to share my own endless drivel. This was my self-imposed hazing ritual. I am now innoculated against the requirement to disclose my writing to anyone who won’t appreciate it. Now I can keep writing for me and my wonderful fan.

  • Letting go

    The most exciting thing that happened to me this week is seeing a half-dozen female turkeys stroll across my patio. Yep. That’s the boring life I lead these days. What’s there to complain about when I have a bathroom and a kitchen? A story without conflict is ho-hum. See previous blogpost about the sci-fi writer.

    Speaking of the writers’ group, I returned on Friday evening. It was a “study hall” night, two hours of working on whatever. I showed up on time and set up my laptop. Eventually Vicki, the leader, arrived. While we chatted, a third person entered the room. I think her name was . . . Lena. Louise. Linda. It doesn’t matter, take your pick. Big white glasses, piled up hair, a wildly colored print blouse! Now here was a real writer!

    We got busy. I don’t know what they were working on—we didn’t talk. I continued an editing project I’d started at home: a dissertation candidate’s proposal. I have only one speed, that’s head down, teeth gritted, and only one mode, bite it and shake it until the candidate cries uncle. I did all that and got it done and sent by the time the study hall ended at 6:30 p.m. Job well done. Vicki warned me next week was “show and tell,” or words to that effect. Even though the idea makes me want to puke, I’ll show up. I’m not a quitter.

    Speaking of dogs with bones, the theme of the week seems to be letting go. Mainly letting go of old friendships. Did something get into the water? Two of my friends said they are purposefully jettisoning friendships they suddenly realize aren’t working anymore.

    I could speculate if I’m one of those friends that will be getting the shove out of the friendship truck, but if you know me, you’ll know I don’t really care that much. If someone doesn’t want to be around me anymore, that’s okay with me. Why suffer? Odds are, I don’t want to be around them either. Win-win.

    Friendships that stop working gradually fade so far into the rear view mirror, they drop off the contact list. I’ve had some of those. Being the introvert that I am, rarely do I feel anything but heartfelt relief. It’s like climbing out of a muddy hole in the sidewalk. Time to walk down a different street.

    Over the course of my life, I have collected a few close friends, people from my childhood, from high school, from L.A., New Mexico, and Arizona. These friends are the ones who love me despite my faults, the ones who will cheer me on, the ones who will share their stories with me and listen to mine. I treasure these friendships and work to keep them alive, even if we only talk once a year. Like old friends do, once we refresh our memories, we pick up where we left off.

  • A rabid introvert walks into a writer’s group

    It finally happened. I joined a group. You might not think this is odd, probably because you are somewhere further toward extravert on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. I am an extreme introvert, therefore I rarely join groups. And if I do, I endeavor to remain on the fringe, preferably near the door, so I can bolt back to solitude at anytime.

    My sister suggested I need to make friends in my new town. I always listen to my sister’s advice. Thus, on Friday evening, I joined a writer’s group.

    At 4:00 p.m. I walked from my apartment to the local library. Before I left, I checked the sky. Cloudy. I hoped the rain would hold off for a couple more hours, but it’s the Willamette Valley: You never know. However, I chose to carry my mother’s cane instead of my umbrella: I knew it would be dark when I walked back, and I figured keeping my balance over uneven sidewalks would be more important than staying dry. It was one or the other, I couldn’t carry both.

    I got to the library early, as is my wont, and after a few minutes, a woman arrived and entered the conference room. I followed and introduced myself to Vicki, the leader of the group. She was friendly and welcoming. Later, after I found out her last name, I looked her up. She seems to be a prominent member in the local nonprofit world but I couldn’t find an author website.

    Soon other writers arrived, until there were seven of us. We sat in cheap wheeled office chairs around an oval conference room table. People introduced themselves by their first names and reported their writing genres. Science fiction/fantasy, poetry, slice of life, and me, cozy fantasy. Although to be honest, my first book wasn’t all that cozy, and I don’t think my new project will be terribly cozy either. But that is another blogpost.

    Anyway, the assignment was to come up with five words as a prompt to write for twenty minutes. Breakable, inevitable, levitation, hope, and my contribution, tornado (or some variation on those words). I had brought a lined journal in anticipation of taking notes, so I was ready. Vicki set a timer, and we got busy writing. Three people had laptops, one of which failed at the outset, much to the vocal dismay of the laptop owner, so most of us wrote on paper.

    Twenty minutes later, we stopped writing and started sharing. Vicki chose the person to my left, going clockwise, so I was last.

    It quickly became clear that (a) I was not a terrible writer, and (b) everyone wrote significantly more words than I did. While I spent the twenty minutes paring the five words into a concise, tight, minimal paragraph, they were writing pages of somewhat aimless ramblings (that’s my opinion as a listener). Good news for me, though. Apparently, conciseness is not a requirement. (So noted for the next meeting.)

    One of the poets wrote a poem—no big surprise. The other poet wrote a description of something that happened to her, I guess a slice of her life. The guy to my left wrote some kind of quasi-philosophical self-reflection. The fantasy writer across the table (who teaches math and science at the local high school) wrote something about magic, levitating elves, and forests (I can’t remember details, sorry, I’m not an audio learner). The woman with the dead laptop wrote about her chickens. Vicki wrote a scene from her current project, a science fiction novel. (The legs of the landing craft stirred up small tornadoes.)

    Not realizing the assignment was about maximizing quantity over quality, I wrote what I thought was a smart witty little gem:

    When the tornado ripped off the roof, I knew I was in trouble. I thought my best hope was to cast a levitation spell, but the magic was slow to rise. I sighed. Breakage was now inevitable.

    Yep. That took me the entire twenty minutes.

    After that, only Vicki had something to read to the group, so she proceeded to regale us with the ongoing story of outerspace miners coping with life on a spinning asteroid. A husband and wife leadership team showed some lovey-dovey, and then the captain got to work on the day’s dilemma: Who could she hire to deliver their next shipment of water?

    I drew pictures in my journal to stay present while she read in a flat tone. To be honest, even if she had read with some excitement, there would have been nothing much to get excited about. I could not discern any real conflict. No envy that the wife was the captain, not the husband. No fear that the station might run out of water. Not even much worry about how a supply ship would deliver supplies to a spinning, tumbling asteroid. As bored as I was, I was relieved that my writing was no worse than hers.

    My conclusions: (a) She needs an editor, and (b)I’m going to fit in well with this group. If it’s not snowing, I plan to return next week.