Guest Bloggers – Page 14

Guest Blogger Amanda McTigue . . .

I’ll confess with some dismay that contrary to the many uplifting articles and memoirs I have read about the serenity of older age, it continues to elude me. Serenity, that is, not the march of years across my face, kneecaps and pelvic floor muscles.

I’m looking forward to any later-in-life serenity that may come my way. Indeed, I practice all kinds of meditations and mantras and daily exercises, etc., to invite it in. But my emotional set point tends to be what it’s always been: low-level (self)doubt.

That’s the place whence I write. If that’s true for you, let me offer some slant wisdom here from some fellow artists. Take Tatiana Maslany. You may have seen her in a futuristic TV show called “Orphan Black” in which she plays (gorgeously!) multiple clones of herself. She’s a hell of a young actor, and here she quotes one of the great dancer/choreographers, Martha Graham:

“It is not your business to determine how good [your work] is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open… There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching, and makes us more alive than the others.”

Snaps to Ms. Graham and Ms. Maslany.

Or here’s a writer I love, Peter Schjeldahl, describing the work of the painter Albert Oehlen. I know next to nothing about the visual arts, but I always look for Mr. Schjeldahl’s columns in The New Yorker because I love the ways in which he helps me see things:

“Oehlen’s process has evinced endless sorts of borderline-desperate improvisation—until a painting isn’t finished, exactly, but somehow beyond further aid. He told me, ‘People don’t realize that when you are working on a painting, every day you are seeing something awful.’”

“Divine dissatisfaction.” “Blessed unrest.” “Beyond further aid.” These are my kinds of people.

Good work, great work, and certainly awful work: it all comes out of whatever souls we’ve been assigned. While I wait for serenity to grace my days, I write. Often the moments before addressing the page are filled with dread, needless dread, yes, but it’s my dread. It doesn’t matter. I write. This is something I’ve taught myself. You can too. When my unrest isn’t “blessed,” my rule is, write it, don’t read it. Not yet. If I think things need fixing, they’ll get fixed later, but in the moment, I write. I slap it down. Just the way I’m doing here about slapping it down.

I’ll cop to a suspicion I carry—really something closer to superstition. I wonder whether my unrest is precisely what makes me productive. You may wonder the same. But let’s let the rest of the world chatter over that one, while we get to the page.

Confident or not, joyous or dread-filled, I’m going to go ahead and climb into the boat I keep tethered right here at my desk. I’m going to untie that hitch and launch. Some days I motor out. Some days I just drift. But out I go, untethered to how I feel about the work. The feelings may come with me, or not. Either way. Out we go. So be it. I’m writing.

Citations:

Dickinson, Emily. Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Poem #1263.

Loofbourow, Lili. (2015, April 5). Anywoman. The New York Times

Schjeldahl, Peter. (2015, June 22). Painting’s Point Man. The New Yorker

Amanda will be the March 17 Writers Forum Presenter: Writing Emotion: How Do You Catch a Cloud and Pin it Down?

Amanda’s novel, Going to Solace, was cited by public radio KRCB’s literary program “Word by Word” as a Best Read of 2012. She holds the West Side Stories Petaluma championship for live storytelling (2013 and 2014). She also makes regular appearances with the monthly “Get Lit” gathering at Petaluma’s Corkscrew Wine Bar. She’s just returned from Cuba where she was researching her second novel. In 2016-17, she’ll be directing “The Magic Flute” at Sonoma State University.
Guest Blogger Leslie Larson gives us the scoop on where stories come from.

Writers on reading tours can be pretty sure that as soon as it’s time for Q & A, someone’s going to ask them where they got the story. That’s the word that’s usually used, got, as if the author might have picked up the story in the maternity ward at San Francisco General Hospital, or found it in the frozen food aisle at Safeway. The question might be offhand, as in, “Where’d you find those chenille throw pillows? or it may be asked with the earnestness and urgency of a child questioning the existence of God. It’s often followed by a swarm of spinoff questions. Did the story come to you all of a sudden? Did you just start writing and see what happened? Did you start with an outline? Did this happen to you?

Some writers give sly responses to the inevitable question of where they get their ideas.

“I steal them from girls,” Dorothy Allison quipped at a reading I attended. Robin Hemley, who wrote Turning Life Into Fiction answered, “Joyce Carol Oates gives me her extras.”

No matter how many times I’m asked this question (and it ranks right up there with “How did you decide to become a writer?” and “What is your writing routine?”), I still don’t know the answer. I suspect that most writers spend a fair amount of time wondering where their stories come from, though they probably spend more time worrying about where their stories are going.

“Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure,” Annie Proulx said in an interview in The Missouri Review. “A memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind.”

Personally, I don’t care so much where stories comes from, as long as they come. One of the most exciting times for me is the state of fidgety nervousness, or perhaps excitement, that signals something’s out there, something’s taking shape. I begin to hear whispers. I catch glimpses of shapes I can’t quite make out. Characters materialize in bits and pieces, beginning perhaps with only a bitten-down thumbnail, a lisp, or a weakness for salty foods. It might be a scene: an old kitchen or a vacant lot, a place where something happened or is about to happen. As these tantalizing fragments begin to surface, I start looking everywhere for the story: in dreams, in the newspaper, on the bus. The next bit of conversation I overhear or the discolored scrap of notebook paper I find on the sidewalk may be exactly what I need to launch my story. There’s no telling where it might crop up.

In the interview mentioned above, Proulx said her character Loyal Blood, from Postcards, leaped complete and wholly formed from a 1930s Vermont state prison mug shot. And there’s the famous case of Thomas Hardy who, while pruning his fruit trees, conceived from start to finish the plot of the greatest novel he would ever write. Unfortunately, he forgot it by the time he finished the job, so he pocketed his shears and went inside for dinner.

Certain activities are conducive to finding stories. For me it’s walking, weeding, popcorn eating, and personal hygiene—particularly nail clipping and eyebrow tweezing. And reading, that’s a big one. When I’m looking for my story, I sense the presence of untold or abandoned stories in other writers’ books. The roads not taken, the bones and corpses that fertilized that novel, the shoots nipped off before they could bloom. Something might get knocked loose in my head. A cast-off stalk that didn’t find the right soil in one writer’s story might take root in mine and surprise me with a magnificent blossom.

I’ve found that you can’t force a story to come; you can’t get one—like a new car—just because you want it. But you have to be ready for it: waiting, watching, listening. In this condition, you’re likely to get too many ideas, because everything takes on meaning. You realize how ripe our everyday lives are with intrigue, insanity, loopy characters, hilarity, irony, and twists of fate. We’re surrounded by stories, our own and other people’s. Family secrets, childhood traumas, persistent fantasies. All fair game.

Do we find the story, or does it find us? Is it already inside us, just waiting to be told? Why do we write about some things rather than others? More than once, I’ve started what I thought was my novel, armed with notes, character sketches, rudimentary scenes, outlines, only to find myself—after ten, or fifty, or two hundred pages—putting it aside so I can crank out what I think will be a short piece, a piece that turns out to be the novel itself—the real story, or at least the story that gets told. The original becomes yet one more stack of aging papers, another dead-end reproaching me from the shelf in my closet.

Someone else’s story, perhaps, waiting to be found.

Leslie Larson’s critically acclaimed first novel, Slipstream, was a BookSense Notable Book, a Target Breakout Book, winner of the Astraea Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her second novel, Breaking Out of Bedlam was an AARP Hot Pick and a finalist for France’s Chronos Prize in Literature, awarded by the National Foundation of Gerontology. The New York Times called Breaking Out of Bedlam, “A kick.” Publishers Weekly said, “Delightful…Plenty of heart and humor.” And the Boston Globe called it, “A funny, touching novel.”

Leslie’s work has appeared in O (The Oprah Magazine), Faultline, the East Bay Express, More magazine, Writer magazine, and the Women’s Review of Books, among other publications. She is an editor at North Atlantic Books and a former senior writer at the University of California Press.

Leslie has taught creative writing workshops across the country, was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, and has been a member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop since 1995. She was born in San Diego and lives in the Berkeley.
Guest Blogger Rob Koslowsky writes about how . . .

Mathematicians Address Verb(al) Decay

Regular verbs feature a past tense that ends in “ed.” Words like brush or bump become brushed and bumped in the past tense. But what do you do with those irregular verbs that don’t follow such an easy rule?

Arise becomes arose (past simple) or arisen (past participle) while find becomes found in both cases of past tense. English students need not despair. Two mathematicians recently collaborated and uncovered the fact that irregular verbs will convert to a regular form. It just takes time.

The principle of atomic half-life is invoked. Erez Lieberman and Jean-Baptiste Michel’s formula suggests that the more popular the verb the longer the time it takes to be reduced to a regular form in its past tense. For example, have will become haved instead of had—in 38,800 years—and hold will become holded instead of held, but in a much shorter 5,400-year timeframe. Note that have is used 100 times more frequently than hold, a characteristic leading to its longer half life.

Erez Lieberman says, “Mathematical analysis of this linguistic evolution reveals that irregular verb conjugations behave in an extremely regular way—one that can yield predictions and insights into the future stages of a verb’s evolutionary trajectory.”

Their mathematical formula was based on the analysis of a 177-word long list of Old English irregular verbs that have been regularized over time. The extrapolation of the English language that has evolved over time is one that will take time to prove.

Jean-Baptiste Michel says, “Before, language was considered too messy and difficult a system for mathematical study, but now we’re able to successfully quantify an aspect of how language changes and develops.”

I suppose we’ll continue speaking and monitoring which verbs become regularized. I suspect my descendants will one day comment with wonder on this article that they seed (formerly saw) and readed (formerly read).

Rob Koslowsky has spent 34 years in the high technology field of optical fiber transmission systems and solar energy systems. His early writings were based on personal experiences and historical non-fiction in the areas of science and technology. This work built upon his first book entitled A World Perspective through 21st Century Eyes (2004) and provides stimulating content for his monthly newsletter A World Perspective, now in its twelfth year of publication. His second book, The Upstart Startup: How Cerent Transformed Cisco, was published in 2014.

Rob has served as an officer of the Redwood branch of the California Writers Club and has written numerous short stories, song lyrics, and poems.

Breach of Trust: A Laura Paige Murder Mystery (2015) is his first novel.

Rob is a member of the IEEE, Sonoma County Astronomical Society, and the Northern California Science Writers Association.
Guest Blogger Zoe FitzGerald Carter, author of Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Loss, and Letting Go (Simon & Schuster), writes about being a reluctant memoirist.

I never intended to write a memoir. As a reader, I’ve always preferred fiction to non-fiction and my book, Imperfect Endings, which is about my mother’s decision to end her life after struggling with Parkinson’s for many years, started off as a novel.

I wanted to write a fictionalized account of my experience growing up as the youngest of three girls and explore how it felt to have two powerful older sisters fighting over my soul. My idea was to create a crisis in my characters’ lives as adults and then show how the old alliances and animosities from their childhood were re-ignited by this “current” event.

At the time, I was struggling to make sense of my mother’s suicide and I thought, “Hmm… well there’s an interesting crisis.”

After writing the first 50 pages, my agent suggested that I turn the book into a memoir, claiming that it would have more impact as a “true” story. (I think she also figured it would be easier to sell than a novel.) After much hemming and hawing, I decided to give it a shot.

Despite my fears, as soon as I made the switch from fiction to nonfiction (and tossed out all the made-up stuff), the tone, language and pacing of the book seemed to fall into place. It may sound strange to say that writing a book about your mother’s suicide was enjoyable—and there were parts that were difficult to re-live—but I did find writing “from life” more rewarding than I had expected.

It was certainly easier than writing fiction, as much as I hated to admit it. Now that I was the character and these were my feelings, my experiences, generating new material was a breeze. Instead of making things up, I was excavating what already existed and using that material to fuel the writing process. I can’t say I became a fast writer, but I definitely got faster.

Day after day, I would settle myself in my office or in a café and focus on an experience or time period that I wanted to capture. Once images and events began to drift up, I would scribble them down, especially if they seemed vivid or emblematic of a central issue or character. I would then take this material, flesh it out and—if warranted—turn it into a fully developed scene.

I came to think of this like translation. I was essentially taking emotion and memory and translating it into language. But being able to enter into an experience while also standing apart from it, observing and recording it, takes a certain dispassion. (No wallowing allowed!) It is fascinating to travel back to an important event or experience and reconsider it from different angles, but you also need to maintain a critical distance in order to turn it into art. This is especially true when you are deciding what to include and what not to include; what serves your story and what is superfluous.

Once you have your story, the next hurdle is getting it out in the world. And I’m not just talking about the infuriating scramble to find a publisher. Writing memoir involves a HUGE degree of personal exposure. It is not for the faint of heart. (I had a number of heart-stopping anxiety dreams after my book was bought and sometimes wondered if having a publisher was worse than not having one.)

But whenever I found myself fretting about having sold my soul—not to mention the souls of various family members—I would remind myself of why I wrote the book and whom I was trying to reach. So many people go through some version of my story and I liked to think that reading about how my family made these difficult end-of-life negotiations—imperfect as they were—might be useful and perhaps comforting for someone else. I certainly hoped so.

Holding on to your personal, complex truth is especially important when your book is published and the story that you wrote while comfortably ensconced in your private writing bubble is suddenly blasted into the public domain. You no longer have any control over who reads it—or how they will respond to it. And once you start the invariable mad dance of promoting your book, you can feel like you’ve turned your life – and even your self into a commodity.

Which brings me back to my original assertion that I am a reluctant memoirist. And it explains why I am currently at work on a novel.

You can take a memoir workshop with Zoe at Writers Grotto in San Francisco: “Taking Your Memoir to the Next Level.”

Zoe FitzGerald Carter was born in France and grew up in Washington D.C. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Vogue. Zoe teaches memoir writing at workshops and conferences. . . . scroll down for conference information. In addition to her novel on self-help culture, Twenty-One Days to A Perfect Life, she is working on a nonfiction book about race and elected kinship.
Today’s Guest Blogger, Ted A. Moreno, writes about how “happiness is our natural state of being.”

What’s so great about happiness? Why are most of us always striving for happiness? Why is it so hard?

Wikipedia defines happiness as: a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.

What I think is interesting is that when we are happy, we don’t notice it as much as when we are unhappy. To me, this suggests that happiness is our natural state of being.

We are very aware of when we are experiencing negative or unpleasant emotions or when we are not content. We try to do something about it. We seem to be more motivated to avoid unhappiness than to pursue happiness.

I also think that for many, unhappiness can become a habit.

What is your habit of being?

Bob Dylan said that happiness wasn’t the point. In one sense I agree with him, because we will often sacrifice our happiness to gain something. For example, we’ll push our bodies during exercise so that we might have health, which could add to our happiness.

However, I think that it’s safe to say that we want those pleasant and positive emotions as often as we can get them.

The Big Question of course is, how can we be happy most of the time?

I’m happy when I’m still and peaceful. When I’m walking out doors. When I’m holding my children, hugging my wife.

What makes me really unhappy is a lot of noise, disorder and chaos. I’m unhappy when I think I’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Lack of sleep increases my unhappiness.

I think the thing that most contributes to my happiness is being free to do what I want and need to do.

What about you? I’d like to hear your thoughts about happiness.

I explore this topic in my podcast Ted in your Head. You can listen on my website: Tedmoreno.com/podcast. From there you can find links to subscribe or download via iTunes or Soundcloud or just listen on Stitcher.

Have A Happy Day!

Ted A. Moreno, C.Ht.

Creator of the Moreno Method for Life Transformation™

Hypnotherapist and Success Performance Coach

Check out Ted’s book:

“The Ultimate Guide to Letting Go of

Negativity and Fear and Loving Life”

Available at Amazon.com

Offices in South Pasadena and Covina

(626)826-0612 / (909) 257-8260

Phone Sessions Available
Agatha Christie was president of The Detection Club from 1957 to 1976. Formed in 1930, The Club was a group of British mystery writers who helped one another with technical aspects of their writing and wrote a number of works together.

Aha . . . an early writing club, or writing group, showing the value of writing with others.

I was curious about the popularity of Agatha’s books, so headed to my computer chair to research, where answers were clicks away, unlike the “good old days” of thumbing through drawers of cards in the library.

The following is excerpted from New Yorker Magazine.

Here’s how the typical mystery novel starts:

Eight or nine people are assembled in a small place: a snowbound train, a girls’ school, an English country house. Then—oh no! A body drops. Who did this? And why, and how? Among those gathered, or soon summoned, is a detective, who says that no one should leave, please. He or she begins questioning the people concerned, one by one. In the end, he collects all the interested parties and delivers the revelation: the murderer, the motive and the method. Anyone who has ever seen a Charlie Chan movie, or played Clue, or read a detective story of the past half century will recognize this scenario, created by Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime.

Two conventions for detective stories had been established when Agatha began writing them. First was the detective’s eccentricity. Sherlock Holmes, for example, when not chasing a criminal, lies on his couch, felled by boredom and cocaine, shooting bullets into the wall of his study. A second rule was the detective, when working, shows almost no emotion. What he or she does show—and what constitutes the main pleasure of the stories—inductive reasoning.

Agatha generally followed these rules, but she elaborated on them, creating the scenario described above—the small place, the interrogations, the revelation—and used it, fairly consistently, in sixty-six detective novels published between 1920 and 1976.

At the start, she was a clumsy writer. But she was able to offer her readers what they wanted, a whodunnit, also called a “puzzle mystery”—a story that is a contest between the author and the reader as to whether the reader can guess who the culprit is before the end of the book.

Agatha favored a clean conking on the head or—her overwhelming preference—poison. That choice was possibly a product of her war work in the dispensary, with its many shelves of potentially lethal drugs. But poison probably appealed to her also because it did not involve assault. Agatha disliked violence. When, in her novels, someone starts to look dangerous, her detective does not pull a gun. He doesn’t have a gun. Bystanders may wrestle the malefactor to the ground. In one case, where there are no bystanders, the detective squirts soapy water into the murderer’s face. It works.

The murder that sets the plot in motion is rarely shocking. For one thing, readers almost never see it happen. Furthermore, the victim is ordinarily someone with whom we do not sympathize. Often the victim is a rich, nasty old person who enjoys taunting his prospective heirs with the accusation that they wish him dead, so they can collect their inheritances.

This rule—that Christie’s murders do not touch the heart—admits of one curious exception: the murder that the culprit commits, after the main murder, in order to get rid of someone who knows too much. Here the victim is often a nice or in any case blameless person, and readers witness the crime, or its prelude. In “A Murder Is Announced” (1950), Miss Murgatroyd, who knows that Letty Blacklock wasn’t in the dining room when the gun went off, is taking the washing off the line when she hears someone approaching. She turns, and smiles in welcome, obviously to a neighbor. It has started to rain. “Here’s your scarf,” the visitor says. “Shall I put it round your neck?”

Christie created two famous detectives: Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple.

Poirot’s most obvious characteristic is his dandyism. He dyes his hair, smokes thin, black Russian cigarettes, wears pointy patent-leather shoes ill-suited to walking the grounds of the country houses where he must often do his sleuthing. He deplores the English preference for fresh air, thin women, and tea. During interrogations, Poirot exaggerates his foreignness. The person being questioned then takes him less seriously, and in consequence tells him more.

Miss Marple is the opposite of Poirot. She comes from a sleepy village, St. Mary Mead, and she seems a sweetly bewildered old lady. She has china-blue eyes and knits constantly. Nobody thinks anything of her. They should, because she is a steely-minded detective. When she is on a case, she makes it a rule to believe the worst of everyone. She reports with regret that experience has confirmed this point of view.

In John Curran’s book, “Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks,” the notebooks are school exercise books in which Agatha worked out her plots. She made lists of possible victims, culprits, and M.O.s. Then she picked the combinations that pleased her.

Marlene’s Musings: There you have it. If you want to be a successful mystery writer, simply make a list of victims, culprits and methods. And then. . . just write!
Guest Blogger Sandy Baker talks about first time publishing.

The thrill of publishing one’s first book is joyful, a dream come true, right? Oh, the anticipation of getting my children’s picture book into print and out there in the marketplace! I attended lectures, workshops, and conferences to acquire the information I needed to become an indie publisher. I’d heard horror stories from authors who’d been scammed by vanity presses, paid too much for a web design, or didn’t know an ISBN from the BOE or a DBA, POD or LCCN. That would not be me.

I bought a block of ten ISBN numbers. After all, if one costs $125, ten at $250 is more than a bargain. I set up my own Butterfly Books imprint and obtained a resale license from the state Franchise Tax Board. I was now a sole proprietor ready to do business and offer the world my first children’s gardening book, Mrs. Feeny and the Grubby Garden Gang. This of course was after I’d hired an illustrator and book designer whose charges will remain undisclosed.

Late in the game, I discovered Butterfly Books already existed. Actually, that imprint became official the very same week mine did. What are the chances? (It takes a lot of sleuthing on the Internet.) That owner was a lawyer; therefore, I wisely decided to avoid an infringement or conflict of interest lawsuit by quickly choosing another imprint name: Black Garnet Press, of which there are no duplicates!

My book was to be a typical children’s picture book: full color, 32 pages, 8” x 10”, and hardbound. I priced it at $15.95, in the mid-range of this genre. I found a company here in the U.S. that would print them, one, ten or 100 at a time. This is called Print On Demand (POD), and the company I chose after much research and advice was Lightning Source International (LSI), an arm of the huge Ingram distribution company.

The company would take only 20% of the selling price. Wow, and I would get 80%. We’ll round up to $16 for the ease of it. So 20% of that price is $3.20, and my 80% is a whopping $12.80.

However, the cost of printing the book was and still is $9—which of course comes right out of my 80%. So, $12.80 – 9 = $3.80, my “royalty” on the book. That’s actually not unlike the BIG publishing companies’ payouts. Not bad, so far.

Say I consign the book, an agreement that is typically 50-50: the shop nets $8 on a $16 sale and so do I. That means I receive $8 for a book that costs $9 to print and forget the royalty. How’s that for a business model?

I decided not to purchase 2000 books from a printing company in Korea or China—I know authors with 1800 of them still in their garage. It really is less expensive to print overseas, but who needs that many books?

Granted, children’s full color, hardbound picture books are among the most expensive to produce. Turns out that LSI doesn’t offer dust jackets nor does it print the title and author on the spine. Arrrgh! Are there lessons to be learned here?

Note from Marlene: It seems Sandy did learn a thing or two about publishing. Since Mrs. Feeny and the Grubby Garden Gang was published, Sandy has produced and published eight books.

SANDY BAKER’S passions are gardening, writing, reading, and traveling. Sandy recently published Adventures of the Hotel Sisters, fictionalized 1920s short stories about her maternal grandmother and her eight children. Sandy’s interest in this era harkens back to 9th grade when she wrote an extensive term paper on 1920s’ clothing, dances, Prohibition, gangsters, Stock Market Crash, and Women’s Suffrage. In between writing and reading, her major gardening project entails removing her front lawn and replacing it with mulch and 24 Provence lavender plants. Sandy is a Sonoma County Master Gardener and president of Redwood Writers, the largest branch of the California Writers Club.
It’s the time of year when gifts are exchanged. Bell ringers thank strangers as they put coins in red kettles. Stores beckon shoppers promising warmth and great sales. Friends gather, sip good cheer. And if you’re lucky, you’ll receive a holiday card or two.

It’s also the time of year for solicitations . . . in the mail, on the internet, over the phone. . . “Our need is great. Won’t you give?”

We can’t possibly share our money with everyone who asks. But we can share kindness, broad smiles and stories that invite us to pause, and reflect the meaning of the season.

‘Twas the night before Christmas here and there, someone is reading, reflecting and nodding.

Santa’s Secret Wish by Betty Werth

On Christmas Eve, a young boy with light in his eyes
Looked deep into Santa’s, to Santa’s surprise.
And said as he nestled on Santa’s broad knee,
“I want your secret. Please tell it to me.”

He leaned up and whispered in Santa’s good ear.
“How do you do it, year after year?
I want to know how, as you travel about,
Giving gifts here and there, you never run out.

How is it, Dear Santa, that in your pack of toys
You have plenty for all of the world’s girls and boys?
Stays so full, never empties, as you make your way

From rooftop to rooftop, to homes large and small,
From nation to nation, reaching them all?”
And Santa smiled kindly and said to the boy,
“Don’t ask me hard questions. Don’t you want a toy?”

But the child shook his head, and Santa could see
That he needed the answer. “Now listen to me,”
He told the small boy with the light in his eyes,
“My secret will make you both sadder and wise.

The truth is that my sack is magic. Inside
It holds millions of toys for my Christmas Eve ride.
But although I do visit each girl and each boy
I don’t always leave them a gaily wrapped toy.

Some homes are too hungry, some homes are too sad,
Some homes are desperate, some homes are bad.
Some homes are broken, and children there grieve.
Those homes I do visit, but what should I leave?

My sleigh is filled with the happiest stuff,
But for homes where despair lives, toys aren’t enough.
So I tiptoe in, kissing each girl and each boy,
And I pray with them that they’ll be given the joy

Of the spirit of Christmas, the spirit that lives
In the heart of the dear child who gets not, but gives.
If only God hears me and answers my prayer,
When I visit them next year, what I will find there

Are homes filled with peace, and with giving, and love
And boys and girls gifted with light from above.
It’s a very hard task, my smart little brother,
To give toys to some, and to give prayers to others.

But the prayers are the best gifts, the best gifts indeed,
For God has a way of meeting each need.
That’s part of the answer. The rest, my dear youth,
Is that my sack is magic. And that is the truth.

In my sack I carry on Christmas Eve day
More love than a Santa could e`er give away.
The sack never empties of love, or of joys
`Cause inside it are prayers, faith and hope. Not just toys.

The more that I give, the fuller it seems,
Because giving is my way of fulfilling dreams.
And do you know something? You’ve got a sack, too.
It’s as magic as mine, and it’s inside of you.

It never gets empty, it’s full from the start.
It’s the center of lights, and of love. It’s your heart.
And if on this Christmas you want to help me,
Don’t be so concerned with the gifts `neath your tree.

Open that sack called your heart, and then share
Your joy and your friendship, your wealth and your care.”

The light in the small boy’s eyes was glowing.
“Thanks for the secret. I’ve got to be going.”
“Wait, little boy,” said Saint Nick, “Please don’t go.
Will you share? Will you help? Will you use what you know?”
And just for a moment the small boy stood still,
Touched his heart with his hand and whispered,

“I will.”
Guest Blogger Francis H. Powell: Writing About Ghosts.

What are your feelings about…Ghosts…do they exist? They are ridiculed, have been made mundane, absurd films like Ghostbusters have trivialized them. Kids aren’t blinkered and naïve. Cynics rule.

Christmas seems the perfect time to unleash a Ghost story.

Many writers set out to write thrilling stories to a cynical disbelieving audience. Perhaps the golden age of ghost story telling, the Victorian age, was a period when readers were far more susceptible to believing in ghosts. Modern day readers are far more pragmatic, scrutinizing what they are reading. Houses are lit up with bright neon light, streets are not dark and shadowy as they were in past times. I guess very few writers who write ghost stories have ever encountered a “real” ghost, so they are letting their imaginations run wild.

For a Ghost story to work it has to sustain a high level of tension, from the opening sentence to the last. Short story format works really well on this account. The author faces a mountainous task of how to conclude the story. It’s not like a crime story…in which all the readers’ questions can be answered at the end, the reader of a ghost story has to be engaged by the plot but at the same time needs to feel uneasy and on edge. A successful ghost story should be overflowing with atmosphere, descriptions of sounds, colours, feelings should prevail.

A good Ghost story should not be too far removed from reality, not too fantastical, this way the reader can believe in it, imagining themselves facing such an encounter with a phantom. A good ghost story should not be like a distant long, long ago fairy tale. The reader should be led to believe the story takes place in the recent past. Writers should shy away from the over-used “old lady” or “tiny infant” go for a ghost that is in some ways a mirror of yourself and representative of your fears. Indicate gruesome happenings but let your reader fill in the details.

You can test your ghost story by telling it in a room filled with bright light, during the middle of the day, if you are scared under these circumstances, your story is a winner.

Where should a writer look for ideas? Should they venture back to their childhood and tap into their childhood fears? Do we have to have led troubled lives to write a good ghost story? For M R James, considered an undoubted master of the genre, apparently this was not the case. A colleague of James’s once said, perjoratively, that his was a life untroubled – a smooth progression from Eton to Cambridge and then back to Eton. He never experienced real life; it was in every sense academic. So seemingly an academic, living in a rather insular world has the makings of a great ghost story writer and perhaps it is the ghost story genre that allowed him to challenge the rational world he inhabited, that lay behind his motivation.

How should we write our ghost story? In the third person or the first person? One option might be…write it in the first person, but make it obvious the narrator is untrustworthy, flitting between reality and madness.

Ghosts, like people, come in many forms and have different missions whilst amongst the living. Some return from the dead to wreak vengeance; others have good intentions, wanting to help a loved one. Some are the spirits of people who were murdered or committed suicide and so are not at peace and are still troubled beyond the grave.
What we can say, definitively, is that ghost stories should always contain a lot of suspense, always trying to create anticipation and excitement. Atmosphere is vital in building tension in the
story.

Born in 1961, in Reading, England, Francis H. Powell attended Art Schools. In 1995, Powell moved to Austria, teaching English while pursuing his varied artistic interests of music and writing. He currently lives in Paris, writing both prose and poetry. He is the author of Flight of Destiny.

This article is part of a Festive Spirit Blog Hop. To read posts by participating authors and bloggers, click on Francis H. Powell’s Home Page. Scroll down, choose a name, click on it and you will be transported to another dimension. Enjoy!
Guest Blogger Rachael Herron writes about successes and failures.

It’s December! I know this for a fact (I just rechecked the calendar). No matter which hemisphere you’re in, regardless of season, this year is getting ready for her final bow. It’s completely impossible that 2015 is almost over because about seventeen minutes ago the year was just starting, full of potential and wonder and pale spring-green hope.

I’m prone to doing what everyone else does at the end of a year: weighing the past year’s successes and failures against each other.

But you know what? Failure weighs way more than success. When you put things on that imaginary scale, each small failure weighs as much as a wheelbarrow full of rocks while each huge success weighs almost nothing. Success makes you lighter—it makes you able to float for a minute or even an hour—while failure drags you so low your chin scrapes the pavement.

That? Is not fair. I don’t know about you, but I can have a million successes each day (I woke up alive! I made the best cup of coffee known to mankind! I wrote a sentence I could be proud of and wouldn’t mind other people reading! I knitted a row without stabbing myself with the needle and bleeding to death!) but that one thing I screw up makes me feel like the amazing things don’t count. The scale isn’t affected by the airy happy things I place on the success side, and then it cracks in half with the weight of that awkwardly worded email I sent in which I accidentally hurt someone’s feelings.

So hey. Let’s do things differently this year.

Throw away the scale.

Let’s NOT tally up our successes and failures. Failure will win because it’s big and loud and hulk-smashy. Success (with its fairy wings and gossamer breath) will get pummeled and then go hide in the bathroom to cry.

Screw that.

If you just have to make a year-end tally, write down what you’re proud of this year. Things like:
•    At your day job, you didn’t smack a single person.
•    Your blueberry muffins disappear from the kitchen within seconds.
•    You made someone laugh until they cried.
•    Your socks matched more days than they didn’t.
•    You started that novel, and now you have more words written than you did last year.

If your fingers get itchy to list the failures, DON’T. Break the pencil and marvel at your own strength. You already spent enough time on what didn’t go well—I know you did. From enormous impossible things like not saying the right thing before a loved one died to tiny silly things like only remembering to put eyeliner on one eye: You have spent enough time hurting.

Forgive yourself like you would forgive the person you love most. Don’t spend time “learning” from it — you did that already without even having to try. Be kind to yourself. In three weeks let’s turn the calendar page without fanfare. Last January we thought we had a whole year to finally get things right, but come on. What a burden to place on a brand new year. What was really true was that we noticed where we were in time. We can do that any old day. Let’s do that today, December 10th. Or September 17th. Or February 3rd.

Every day is a good day to notice where you are, right now.

Celebrate your successes because they are daily and many and they are spectacular.

RACHAEL HERRON is the bestselling author of the novel Splinters of Light and Pack Up the Moon (both from Penguin), the five-book Cypress Hollow series, and the memoir, A Life in Stitches. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, and when she’s not busy writing, she’s working her other full-time job as a 911 fire/medical dispatcher for a Bay Area fire department. She’s a New Zealand citizen as well as an American, and she is a proud member of the NaNoWriMo Writers Board. She can probably play along with you on the ukulele.

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Santa’s Secret Wish by Betty Werth