chronicled & illustrated

Time to look forward!

I’m brimming with ideas and creative urgency. I know I can’t/won’t get it all done but while things are percolating, I want to get some of it down.

I began a short story yesterday. It’s an idea that came to me over the holidays which, in and of itself, is something to celebrate! (getting an idea while busy doing lots of non-writing activities!)

While driving to and from Maine (and a wonderful Christmas with my younger son and gorgeous granddaughter!) I thought and thought and thought about it. Thinking about a story and writing it are two different things. But I’ve also learned that thinking it through is most advantageous. I believe that in the past I’ve sometimes been too eager to begin too soon. I’m still a bit uncertain about the unfolding of this tale, but nonetheless, I’ve begun and am excited about it.

I’ve signed up for a second round of Exquisite Corpse! Yay. That’s all I can say: yay!

I’m thinking of writing and illustrating some books for Cadi, my three and a half year old granddaughter. Um. Perhaps I should change that to A book.
Having been involved in the process of online publishing (see Third Person Press) makes me realize that I can do this for her, for myself and for very little money. And who knows where that might lead. Children’s books were an interest a long time ago and one that I studied and worked at for a long time. It would be good to get back to it. I have several ideas in the percolator.

A book about the house we live in. This has been an idea since we moved here. The house is old, we know a lot of the history of it and it’s interesting! I’ve been approached by a friend/historian/writer about it. He is doing a book about an old house on the island that has been in his wife’s family for many many years and has two houses other than mine that he’d like to see a book on. In other words, a series.

I’ve been thinking about it and know that my style of book would be completely different from a historian’s. But here’s what I’m thinking of including: some of my *artsy* photos of details of the house and yard, short personal essays, historical essays, and historical fiction, maybe a poem or two, maybe drawings and perhaps some transcripts of interviews with a woman named Georgie who grew up in the house. That sounds long but I think I would have to be extremely selective. Some of the fictional parts are necessary because 1) I write fiction and 2) there are gaps in our historical knowledge of the house and 3) filling in those gaps with conjecture would make the project fun to write and more fun to read!

So we’ll just have to see about that. It’s a huge project and I have no idea if my vision of it would be acceptable for this particular series of books. But it’s a definite maybe.

Then there’s that unfinished novel from last November…….

This must be done: I have two stories that are CLOSE to being ready to send out to possible publishers. I must do quick revisions, maybe give them to someone to review and get them out!

See other stories about and photos of our old house
Putting on a new roof: http://nancywaldman.net/2007/07/25/the-up-side-of-outside/
The White Lilac Fact/Fairy Tale: http://nancywaldman.net/2007/06/20/of-things-dreamed-of/
Near-by Fires and what I learned about what’s most important: http://nancywaldman.net/2007/05/17/weather-or-not/

view from little tobago; taken by nancy

I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to write tonight so to play for time I went over to Under the Stars to see what my friend, Sherry blogged today. I didn’t even read it. She had a meme going on, so I decided to take it from her and see what I came up with.

The Five Most Impressive Sights of My Life

1) The Grand Tetons driving into Jackson Hole, Wyoming from the east. They took my breath away.

2) A thunderstorm forming in the distance while driving through New Mexico.

3) A pod of whales off the coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

taken by my friend Ed Warner; I was too busy being impressed to get any decent shots of them! The best part was the sound. The captain of the boat cut the engine and we would hear SPLOOSH! as they came up out of the water followed by a WOOSH! as the air came from their blow holes. Everything was perfectly silent except for these soft, remarkable sounds.

4) View of the water and the rain forests in Tobago (see above)

5) Sparkling snow shadows in my yard when there’s fresh snow fall and a full moon!

Bonus Answers:

• Any woman giving birth
• Driving past London landmarks like Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and Westminster Abby while coming home from the theater in a cab
• Niagara Falls (an AMAZING amount of water goes over those falls!)
• Fall leaves in New England in any *good* year

Thanks for the mental trip down Impressive Memory Lane, Sherry.
NOW I’ll go read your answers.
Here’s Helen’s blog where Sherry got the meme

soft landing
Originally uploaded by nuanc

I don’t want to write about writing today, so I picked out this photo from my flickr site to inspire me.

Maybe the title spoke to me more than the photo itself. A “soft landing” implies what went on before. If I’m landing, that means that something somehow got me up high enough that I needed to get back to earth.

What possibilities does that bring up?
An airplane
A hang glider
A parachute
A para-sail
A strong gust of wind
A huge kite out of control
A very big and friendly (or unfriendly and hungry) bird

Other than the airplane which is scary enough—but a necessary and therefore acceptable risk—I’m not likely, given my personality, to leave the earth by any of those means. I do have wonderful dreams of leaving the ground, but it is never exactly flying. It’s more a sudden ability, a defiance of gravity (what a great phrase, eh?) that catches me by surprise. Suddenly I am like a man on the moon. I jump just a little and instead of coming back down, I begin to float. If I do it ‘right’ I can stay aloft and guide myself through whatever setting I’m in. It’s a controlled, suddenly simple feat and that seems to be the best part of it: I find am capable of gliding through the air. No problem with the landing, either. I just lose altitude and settle down on my own two feet as gently as can be!

Of course, the need for a landing could be from being in a tree. THAT idea I really like. As a child, I used to climb trees whenever I could find one big enough. It was the 50’s. Most of the neighborhoods were new and the trees put in by the developers were saplings. But I had one friend who lived in an older house, and out back was a huge live oak tree. Those are the ones with the low, spreading thick branches. We’d climb up easily, taking up our paper and pencils and paper dolls and nestle into the crooks of sturdy limbs. I remember it as such a lush hideaway and other-worldly time-apart.

Getting our feet off the ground, especially if we can do it without scaring ourselves more than we like, is a treat for sure. But what we’re really after is the soft landing, the relief and sense of connectedness of coming back to earth. With our feet firmly on sand, grass, dirt we know that we’re where we were meant to be, gravity and all.

white lilacs,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Lilacs.

Lilacs were not a part of my life until I moved north in my thirties. When I discovered them the first spring, it was as if I had dreamed them. They felt that important and that personal. And yet, I never remember a conscious thought of lilacs before then. Growing up in southern Texas, lilac wasn’t a flower, or a smell—lilac was a color.

In my fifties, I moved even farther north and now I have lilacs in my yard. They are white.

I have to re-dream lilac.

The lilacs in my yard are old; some so tall that we don’t bother to even try to prune them. I can see them from the second story. I imagine they were first planted by Florence Forbes around the turn of the last century when the house was built. She married George Forbes, an engineer and—by reputation—a sweet man, after the death of her first husband. Her daughter by the first husband was named Ava and Ava’s daughter was named Flora.

George and Florence’s house, though large, was a smaller version of his brother’s house nearby. That house was gone by the late 20’s, first abandoned, then vandalized, then burned. The brothers’ family was from Scotland. In fact, George, the elder, was born there. They named their homes after castles in Scotland. The brother’s large house was named Craigevar. George’s more sensible house was named Moneymusk.

George and Florence had no children of their own and when they died in the 1920’s within a few years of each other, the house they built was left to their granddaughter, Flora. But Flora wasn’t the only grandchild. There was another offspring of Ava’s named Billy and Billy, in the vernacular of the times, was a ne’r-do-well. He was a gambler, a drinker (in the times of prohibition) and incidentally, a cripple.

The house was inhabited by Flora and Billy, and soon all of Billy’s nefarious friends. Flora loved the house as she had loved her grandparents. She had lived with them off and on in her later childhood. By that time, Craigevar was no more and her relatives all lived far away in Glace Bay and Baddeck. Some lived in the States. She saw the house she had inherited being turned into a house of ill-repute.

There was a family nearby who had worked for George and Florence. The father did caretaker’s duties and the wife came in to clean. They had four children. In an act of desperation —trying to regain control of Moneymusk from her half-brother, Billy, and his friends—Flora invited the family to come and live in the house.

One can only imagine the sobering effect it had on the ruffians to have a poor, working family with children living in the house. Perhaps there were scenes. Perhaps the friends—who were, after all, only drunks and gamblers, not evil persons—simply left one sunny morning when they realized there were decent people, a family, in residence.

No one knows what happened to Billy.

Flora lived with the family for some months and then, for reasons lost to time, decided to go to the States.

The family stayed and took care of the house. Flora never returned and they stayed and stayed until the mother and father died. The house was left to the oldest son, John R., who stayed and stayed—for many years with his sister, Georgie, who did all the cleaning and caretaking. In his older years, John R. married and he and his Dutch wife continued to care for the house until they grew too old. Georgie and the widow of John R. still live nearby and have told some of these stories but have been careful not to tell other parts of it.

Some of this is fact, and some the stuff of dreams.

But this is true: all this time, white lilacs came back fresh and new every June, becoming thicker and taller with each passing year and if lilacs are white, any of it is possible.

FINISHED: I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes
by Jaclyn Moriarity
BEADED CURTAIN RATING:
READING: Causeway by Linden MacIntyre
EDITING: Big Enough, a short story
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
SMELLING: Oh yeah, lilacs
GROWING: Looks like mostly varieties of peas and squash
HOPING FOR: Some beans, too
MOOD: Dreamy