Complicated here, during the last week. Not bad, just… complicated. Thought I’d sort of summarize a couple of points of potential interest, but first, a question for regular visitors:
Have you had problems accessing RAMH recently? One of your number has reported getting repeated “the connection was reset by the server” errors. It’s prevented her from even seeing the site, apparently. (I got the information via a Facebook message.) I haven’t been able to reproduce it from any of various locations, using various browsers and operating systems. But I wanted to check before proceeding to see if anything like that has cropped up for the rest of you. (Of course — ha! — if it has, then you won’t be able to read this post.)
Okay, now onto “real” matters…
The first is about The Pooch.
Three Saturdays ago, I had a scary moment watching her collapse to the floor in a pair of apparent seizures, one right after the other. She seemed sorta-kinda okay afterward, but then last weekend we noticed that she’d started, apparently, to see things. She’ll suddenly look up, then off to one side, then up, down, to the other side… It’s like there’s a bird loose in the house. (Or outdoors, or wherever she happens to be.) She doesn’t do it all the time, just enough to be unnerving. Especially when she barks at “it.”
We’re still researching it with our very good veterinarian’s assistance. But if you have or are considering owning a Yorkshire terrier, you need to read up about a condition called liver shunts. (First indications were that The Pooch had one, but now, apparently, not.) Briefly, in this condition, toxins which might otherwise be cleaned from a dog’s circulatory system by the liver are instead bypassing it, going to the heart and then, of course, pumped out into the rest of the system. Two of the most alarming bits of information we learned over the last few days:
- Yorkies are 36 times more likely to have liver shunts… than all other breeds combined.
- Without treatment — or with only medical, non-surgical treatment — most dogs with liver shunts are euthanized within ten months of diagnosis, so that they won’t suffer.
As I said, The Pooch doesn’t after all seem to have a liver shunt (although we’ve started making arrangements to confirm definitively). If you, too, have a Yorkie (or Maltese, or Irish wolfhound (!)), please spend a few minutes educating yourself if you haven’t already. A good place to start is the University of Tennessee/Knoxville site, here.
Next topic: writing. Ah, writing…
A couple weeks ago, I described a step I’d taken to break me out of a particularly stubborn period of creative blockage. Technological details aside, it’s basically involved forcing myself to go back through and read every bit of Seems to Fit which I’ve written so far in this draft, and detail for myself the inconsistencies, gaps, redundancies, and other structural issues I find.
The Missus, God bless her, knew this was driving me crazy. And she waited until one day last week to ask me directly how it was going, in the absence of any information voluntarily forthcoming.
I’m afraid I sort of growled at first.
“I’m finding,” I said, “that I am, finally, exactly as good a writer as I need to be to write this book.” Before she could interject, I added, “That’s the good news.
“The bad news,” I went on, predictably, “is that I still, after all this time, cannot tell a story for sh!t.”
But in the few days of reading and journaling since that conversation, y’know, I’m thinking today that maybe it’s not so dire.
What I have noticed is that at about 40% of the way through writing the book, something seems to have gone pop in my head. Suddenly, the pace picked up. Suddenly, the way the characters talked to one another didn’t sound so wooden. Suddenly, things got more… interesting. It’s as though I realized at the time that I had to do something, anything, to keep the damned story from spiraling down the drain… and then did it.
Now, I’m not exactly dancing a celebratory jig here. In the first place, if a story is going to drag somewhere, the first 40% of it is not the place you want it to happen. (I can see the query letter now: Oh, and please start reading at about page 150 or so.)
Second, I’m still only about two-thirds of the way through. Plenty of room for further error.
And you know? Even if I never touch any of the rest of it, that 40% is going to be a bear to revise.
(I should also note that — so far — most of the direct copy-and-pasting I’ve done from earlier drafts has taken place within that 40%. So I’ve read and re-read and revised and re-read the bejeezus out of all that stuff already, years ago; it’s just really not that fresh.)
Still, I’m hopeful.
Finally, I thought you’d all appreciate a little musical interlude. You may or may not be familiar with Amy Winehouse’s 2006 hit, “Rehab” [Wikipedia / video]. Here it is, in either case, reinterpreted by a Jamaican vocal group known as The Jolly Boys — whose average age, reportedly, works out to 70 years old:
Per the “About” page at the Jolly Boys Web site, their history goes back to the 1940s and Erroll Flynn. Here’s what the site says about their musical style, referred to as mentos:
Mento was the music of the Jamaican dancehalls before ska, rocksteady and reggae came along. A people’s music typically played in the countryside on acoustic — often homemade — instruments, it dates to the late 19th century. Its lyrics often dealt with rude or slack topics, or addressed the social issues of the day. Although often confused with calypso (largely because calling it “calypso” was a handy way of marketing it to tourists who didn’t know any better), it has a rawness and rhythmic feel that is uniquely Jamaican.
Kickin’, huh?
DarcKnyt says
First, I have no issues of late with the site. I took some steps on my end to rectify the … um … connection “issues” I was having, and it’s solved all but the problem of video-viewing on my antique laptop, but that’s probably a matter of the processor, not the connection. Or a combo. Either way, RAMH seems good to me. Just FYI.
Next, I hope all goes well and the news is only good for the Pooch. God love ’em, dogs deserve happy lives, don’t they? Like kids, they’re too innocent and unconditional for suffering IMO.
Third, boy do I get it with the writing thing. I tore my only extant finished ms apart a few months ago and it didn’t survive. Now I lament being so hard on it and want to go back to an earlier draft and be more merciful and gentle. *Sigh*
Like I said, videos and me don’t mix right now … so … ;)
Hope you had a good weekend.
Jill says
So sorry to hear about your pooch, JES. My little Sheltie had seizures that a specialist determined were caused by a calcium deficiency, but she had other problems in addition to that. I lost her in 2003. It is heartbreaking to see these little loves going through something that we are helpless to figure out, or at least it takes awhile to determine what it might be. Lots of bad things going on with some of these breeders that result in animals getting sick. However, your pooch may be very resilient and things will get better. I am holding the right thought.
Good luck on your writing! Don’t be too hard on yourself, and remember to pat yourself on the back for being persistent and doing this in the first place.
moonrat says
oh no!!! no better way to cultivate bathos than bring a dog. i hope she’s ok.
Froog says
Hope The Pooch is going to be OK.
And keep chipping away at the WIP. Gutta cavat non vi sed saepe cadendo, as the Romans said; “A waterdrop hollows out a stone not by force but by frequent dripping.”
I imagine you have particular difficulties with it because it’s been so long in the works now. It’s hardly surprising that parts of it you composed years ago might start to seem a little stale now; partly, perhaps, you’ve become a better, or at any rate a different writer since you first wrote them; but then, too, maybe you’ve just read – or thought about – these passages too many damn times over the years now; it would seem fairly natural to be more ‘excited’ about elements you’ve created more recently. Good luck with it!
We haven’t had any character names on ReCaptcha for ages, but today I get Buzz Sokolow. Take it as a good omen.
Froog says
And The Jolly Boys are awesome! How do you find this stuff?
(I can’t help feeling I’ve run into Buzz Sokolow in a Coen brothers’ movie somewhere…)
marta says
Best wishes for your pooch. Dogs do indeed deserve happiness. (What Darc said.)
Isn’t worth something that you can see what might be wrong or at least not working for you in the writing? It would be worse if you were delusional. Well, it would. You can write. You know that. Therefore, you fix what problems you see.
You are working hard, sticking with it, being honest with yourself–wow! Don’t despair. And be more merciful to yourself.
Thanks for the Rehab song. Glad to know I don’t have to listen to the Winehouse version–which makes me want to reach through the speakers and give her good hard shake.
And I’ve no problems getting onto RAMH other than my schedule.
John says
All: Thanks for the good wishes about The Pooch. We’re taking her this week for a visit to a veterinary ophthalmologist (!)… Trying to figure out if her “seeing things” might be an optical problem.
(The liver-shunt thing is now only an unlikely possibility for her, but we need to eliminate alternative explanation(s) for a couple of symptoms.)
And thanks for the encouragement on the WIP!
Darc: Luckily, I’ve managed to retain the earlier versions. Well, I say “luckily” although I’m ambivalent about them. Roz Morris, of the Nail Your Novel blog, recently posted about revising earlier drafts “without losing your story’s soul” — it’s all about finding what was good about early drafts.
Jill: Over-breeding — oh yeah. Ours is “purebred” but we got her as a rescue. (Hard to imagine someone abusing what was then a dog of less than 3 lbs., but there ya go.) With small dogs, especially, people seem to want to push for ever-smaller models, so to speak. The result is dogs for which the significance of tiny problems is hugely magnified. Just as one example, when we took her in to the vet last week, she got three annual shots… and then had blood drawn for a liver-shunt test. She was hurting — four separate needles must have pretty much exhausted all options for where to stick her, because her total surface area is so small. :)
Moonie: pathos, please. I have my pride. Heh.
Froog: Damn — now that’s a mouthful of Latin, and completely unknown to me before. Who knew Ovid was a Taoist?!?
Sometimes when I look back at my 20-year-old first draft, I’m astounded by how… well, pretentious it (and presumably I myself) was. There’s a hell of a lot of excelsior padding to wade through to get to the core. Of course, I’ve still got my pretensions — you can’t survive on the Internet without them — but at least in this round I’m trying to keep them bundled away in a separate cabinet while I’m writing.
“Buzz Sokolow” is a classic!
marta: Agreed on protecting dogs. The Missus and I sometimes talk about how… well, not how cruel it is, exactly, that people “have” pets. But there’s a sort of unintended cruelty built into living with pets, in the same way that there is with living with another person. You know it won’t be permanent — one or the other of you will have to say good-bye sometime — but you do it anyway. With pets it’s especially complicated, because they’re not in a position to decide for themselves, and don’t “know” about impending good-byes, and so on and so on.
Being merciful to oneself: I read something somewhere recently exactly about that point. Basically, it said that writers are waaaaay harder on themselves, all the time, than they need to be. It’s got to be exhausting for the people around us. *laughing*
Nance says
Wonderful version of “Rehab”! These fellows remind me of The Buena Vista Social Club. (http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/feature/1999/03/09feature.html).
A year or so ago, one of my Jungian therapist friends asked me to name my Shadow (or hidden and repressed alter ego) without stopping to think about it. “Amy Winehouse!,” popped out. Gracious. I really like her music, too.
I wonder if people who tell good stories verbally are equally good at writing them, and, when they are not, why not.
John says
Nance: I’ve seen others mention the BVSC, too. I just loved the Jolly Boys video (and their history) — and one of these days I must see the BVSC film. I’m embarrassed I haven’t yet!
Funny, that — about naming your Shadow “Amy Winehouse.” Somehow I get absolutely NO Amy Winehouse vibe from you, but that, I guess, is the very definition of a Shadow side. The Missus and I went through a similar exercise some years ago — we were asked to name each other’s Shadows — and mine was “Coop.”
(The Missus said this fit on three dimensions: (1) Gary Cooper — the strong, silent type; (2) Kyle MacLachlan’s strange, off-center Agent Cooper character, from Twin Peaks; and (3) just the whole idea of keeping things (particularly emotions) cooped up.
About telling vs. writing stories: interesting questions. Off the top of my head, I don’t think the good tellers would necessarily make good writers. Some of the process is the same, especially for shaggy-dog stories which get told and re-told, burnished repeatedly. But there’s something about writing which (to my mind) requires more, um, conscious manipulation of the language. People do talk naturally off the cuff, but I don’t know many people who write that way. Even the logorrheics among us. :)
The Querulous Squirrel says
I had a cat with seizures and it was terrifying. I’m sorry about Pooch. Keep at the writing. Our judgments about our own work, as you know, waxes and wanes. Do what you love.
cynth says
I haven’t had any trouble getting RAMH, but then with a resident IT tinkerer, it would have to be a MAJOR problem.
Hope your little one is okay. As exasperated as I get with the cat, I still feel like I have to make sure she is taken care of, even if she doesn’t want me to do it!
When something has been around, writing wise, for a long time, you may need to diddle with it, but don’t forget that just because it was done a while ago, doesn’t mean the writing isn’t viable. I know of a person who thinks that all her writing before children is nothing but sentimental clap-trap. I’ve read her earlier pre-motherhood stuff, and although some of it is kind of dewy-eyed, it isn’t bad. We all grow with our writing and without it. Keep honing John. You’re marvelous with words–even if I am prejudiced!
John says
Squirrel: Thanks for the encouragement, both on The Pooch and on the writing. You’re right about the latter, especially with that “as you know” aside — what it implies, properly, is that anyone who’s spent a lot of time trying to put stories into words knows about the running-hot-and-cold feelings.
cynth: A few days before this post, I put another one up here which pinpoints the real problem nagging at me — not writing, but storytelling. I’m fairly confident of my ability to string words together in a coherent way. It’s when I chain that requirement to fiction when my knees get wobbly. :)