NaNoWriMo - What's Next?

I apologize for not posting something sooner to let you know that I was a National Novel Writing Month winner (anyone who completes the 50,000 words and has their word count validated on the site is a winner).  It was my first time attempting and succeeding at writing the complete first draft of a novel.  Despite the fact that I heard about NaNoWriMo late, had never written anything that long in my life, and was sick the first week, I jumped in and decided to give it a try.  I am so happy that I did.  I finished it with slightly over 50,000 words, which made me a "winner" among many thousands of winners.  The fact that there are so many of us magnifies the accomplishment for me.  I feel a sense of unity with the other winners, the joy of a shared experience that turned out well.

I am fairly certain that I will never write the same way again; that is, the way I wrote before NaNoWriMo.  That inner editor is still chomping at the bit to get out of the gate, but I'll keep her at bay in the future until after the first draft.  So what's the next step for me?  I'm currently taking the advice of some published writers and haven't yet re-read my first draft.  I will give it about three weeks and then start to work on editing.  I am sure that I will cut a lot of material and add a lot more.  The basic story is done, but there is still so much more to do with what is there.  I'm excited and can hardly wait.

And if you're a writer, I hope you'll join me in writing a new novel in 2012 because I'll be doing it again come November.

NaNoWriMo Madness Continues

I made a lot of progress and then the past couple of nights had some other things to take care of in the evening.  I am over 10,000 words which I find amazing every time I see the word count on the page.  The madcap idea of trying to write 50,000 words in one month is obviously working for me.  I have throttled the inner editor completely (well, almost completely) and I am just writing.

I am taking to heart the advice that Neil Gaiman gave in a NaNoWriMo pep talk, "You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days.  Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die.  Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny.  But that does not matter.  What matters right now are the words, one after another.  Find the next word.  Write it down.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat."

The novel that I am writing was a collision of ideas that fell into my lap.  I've been writing fantasy recently and decided to try something completely different for NaNoWriMo since one of the rules is that you have to start the novel in November and finish 50,000 words in the same November.  On a whim I decided to try literary fiction.  I didn't know that most literary fiction tends to be quite a bit longer than 50,000 words until I learned that the average word count of the world's "great novels" is about 135,000 words.  Good thing I didn't read that until after I was committed to my idea!

Ignorance is bliss, though.  I decided to try a literary fiction novel about a woman who is my age and feels vaguely suicidal.  She wants to escape from her life. I thought that I should be able to muse and ponder and toss about 50,000 words around that.  Literary fiction is, after all, more about the character than about the plot, right?

Funny how it happens, though, I started wondering why she'd vaguely feel these things.  It turned out that she was being surplussed at her job and wondered how she'd support herself and her young daughter.  It isn't easy to find a job when you're fifty, as plenty of currently unemployed people can attest.    And then out of the blue, she learns a secret about her recently-deceased mother that changes her life.   She thought her mother was an orphan but she wasn't.  Her mother has a sister and grew up in Hermann, Missouri.

As if that weren't enough, a few days after starting the novel, more plot fell into my lap.  I went to Missouri wine country and started reading about my own ancestor's contributions to early Missouri wine-making.  I've always been a genealogy buff and knew a bit about my third great-grandfather.  I read about a varietal that he'd cultivated that I've never heard of, mostly because I don't think it exists any more (dang prohibition!)

More to come later, but now, back to the novel, which has the working title of The German Diary.

NaNoWriMo Progress

Despite being under the weather for the past couple of weeks, I've decided that a late start to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is better than no start at all.  I've never participated in this before, but after some encouragement from others, I've decided to give it a whirl and I have no regrets.  I'm checking in with locals (#stlnano) and with others (#NaNoWriMo) on twitter.   I've joined the NaNoWriMo site and in three very partial days of writing, I've managed a 2,262 word count.  


I should be working on that word count now, but it's been so long since I blogged that I thought it was important that I take a little time out to write this.  Lynxter and I are still eating primarily vegan, with a lot of juices and smoothies, and we are still losing weight.  I went to the doctor to have blood tests about six weeks into the new regimen and had some odd results.  My protein levels were on the low end of normal, which I expected, but my vitamin D level was way below normal along with my platelets (could be a centrifuge error).  More on all of that another time.  


The novel I'm writing this month doesn't have a title yet, but it's about a fifty-year old woman who learns that she has been surplussed at her company and must figure out how she will support herself and her teenage daughter at the same time that she learns her deceased mother had unshared secrets that will affect the second half of her life.  I still have my other writing projects in progress but I put them on hold so I could participate in NaNoWriMo.

So back to it for me.  How about you?

Food and Change

There has been a dramatic change in my eating habits in the past month.

About a month ago, lynxter watched "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" and decided that we should go on a juice diet to lose weight.  Since I wanted to support my partner and was keenly aware that my weight had crept back up over the years we've been together, I thought it was worth a try.  Also, a colleague had recently lost a lot of weight on a juice diet, so I knew it could be done.  I went out to fatsickandnearlydead.com to find out what I'd gotten myself into.

On the website for the film there was a link that asked "Ready to start juicing? Visit RebootYourLife www.jointhereboot.com today".  I'm glad I clicked on the link before just diving in or I probably would have made every mistake possible.  I went through the quiz and dissatisfied with my results, looked around the site until I found the option that included a juice-only set of days.  They called it the "Reboot Standard" program and even though the fellow in the documentary did only juices for 60 days, the website recommends not doing one that long without medical supervision.

The website gave information on how to ease into a juice-only diet.  I went shopping that day and we started the day after that.  To get the ingredients for the suggested menus was not cheap, but it was a good way to find out what we did and didn't like and we justified it by acknowledging that we'd been eating fairly unhealthy for awhile (yes, toasted almond gelato, I'm talking about you).

I learned about the taste of raw foods and how they differ from cooked foods.  For example, while I am a huge fan of Ukrainian borsht, I don't really care for red beets in any juice recipe.  I will have to take a suggestion on the reboot your life site and try golden beets instead but I can't choke down the red ones.  They taste like dirt to me.

We extended the first five days of the standard reboot to seven so that we could do the juice-only days during the workweek.  After five days of juice-only, we've eased back into a schedule that is mostly vegan and includes juices or smoothies for most of our meals.  The goal has been to keep at this until we've lost our excess weight, but to gradually move back into eating solid foods with occasional "reboots" for those inevitable times we "fall off the wagon".

How are we doing?  Well....

I thought I would be starving, but between the juices and all the water I'm drinking, I haven't really been hungry for the past month.  I've noticed that sometimes what I used to think was "feeling hungry" was actually being thirsty.  I've also noticed that I experience the sensation of fullness differently.  I can actually feel my stomach being full, high up under my rib cage.  In the past I didn't feel it that way, my entire abdomen would have a general feeling of fullness.  So maybe describing this as a "reboot" is really the right description.

To that end, I've noticed how certain foods affect me when I've reintroduced them.  When I ate a little mozzarella cheese melted on portabella mushrooms, I had stomach pains.  I always knew I had a bit of a cow lactose intolerance/allergy, but had never recalled feeling it so directly before.  Feta did not have this effect on me, but then I'm not allergic to goat's milk... And while a couple of bacon strips had no effect, eating a six ounce piece of steak has given me stomach pains, probably because it's not the easiest thing to digest in bulk, especially after eating almost entirely vegan for the past month.  So, as much as I like cheddar cheese and cow's milk and steak, I'll be making some different choices going forward.  I may not eliminate any food entirely, but I will make different quantity choices.  Why make my digestive system work so hard if I don't have to?

Despite a four-day trip to Nashville where we had breakfast (twice!) including bacon, biscuits and gravy and grits at our favorite restaurant, the Country Boy in Leipers Fork, I have lost 20 pounds in the last 30 days.  That's a lot of weight, and includes gaining a couple of pounds after that Nashville trip and a couple of days where my weight stayed the same.  I admit that I was looking at calorie content to minimize the impact of eating this way, which I hadn't done in the past (what a shocker it was to see how many calories were in those breakfasts!), and except for those breakfasts I have been avoiding white potatoes and almost any kind of wheat product.  Breads were always my weakness (and a craving) and since diabetes runs in my family, common sense tells me I have to watch those things.  I am almost to the point where I'm going to need a new wardrobe, as I'm looking more and more like the youngest kid wearing too-big cast-off clothing from the older children in the family .

Most importantly, I feel fantastic.  I had a headache for the first three days, which I think was caused by giving up black tea (I have never been a coffee drinker, but I could put away a lot of tea in a day's time).  I found that when I drank more water, the headache went away.  I have had more energy, I haven't needed caffeine, and I have started to appreciate the smell of food without having to actually eat it.  I can walk through the bakery section of the grocery store on the way to produce and enjoy the yeasty breads and sweets and that's enough.  In fact, I think the aroma may be more satisfying than the consumption would be.  I'm not going to test that theory yet, but I am allowing myself to enjoy the smell of these things without feeling like I have to eat them.

While all of this has been going on for the past month, I've put swimming on hold, although I did go to the pool a couple of weekends ago with my mom.  The swimming lanes were all in use for a triathlon, so we walked around the other part of the pool.  I plan to get back to swimming now that I'm accustomed to the dietary changes I've made.  And I found my old pedometer and I plan to start walking as well.

Since getting all of our juices ready and grocery shopping for fresh produce takes up so much of my evenings, I have not been playing much guitar. Seeing the Americana Festival showcases in Nashville last weekend did make me want to start writing again, and even though I haven't written any music in the past month, I did finish the first draft of a short story.  That's a first for me, I start so much and finish so little.

Could the dramatic dietary change actually be a ripple of change moving throughout my entire self?

I like to think it is, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Carry On, Mr. Chopin

Tonight I attended a visitation for the father of a long-time friend who died in his sleep last weekend just three months shy of his 93rd birthday.  It was the most joyous wake I've ever attended, truly the celebration of a man who was well-loved, not only by his wife and eight children, but by friends who came to this visitation even if they hadn't seen him in close to 30 years. 


In high school, I loved to visit my friend's house.  I loved everything about it, from the chaos of so many kids under one roof, to her dad asking where we were off to and then telling us to "carry on."  Their house vibrated with the love and joy of the family within.  They even had a dinner bell hanging outside they rang to bring everyone home.  When they heard it, the kids came home and if they were out of range, they were in trouble.  I loved my family, but I always thought if I had grown up in a large family, this would have been the kind I would have wanted to be a part of.  It was like Cheaper By the Dozen come to life.

My friend's father is survived by her mother, and I chatted with her for awhile at the visitation.  She didn't remember me, and I didn't think she would.  I was one of dozens (hundreds?) of kids that came and went through their house over the years.  She told me that she'd asked one of her daughters if Jonathan Franzen had ever been to their house.  Of course he had.  In fact, their house is pivotal in a lie prepared for the police in one of the essays in The Discomfort Zone.

My friend's father was hard-working, funny and kind.  He was also passionate and articulate and lived life to the fullest, even up to the end.  He is an inspiration for how to live your life, surrounded by love and family and enjoying every minute of it.  There wasn't a family member in the funeral parlor who exhibited one shred of remorse or regret.  They were happy to celebrate the man they loved so much.  So it was no surprise to me that his obituary indicated that "if desired, contributions may be made in memory to the charity of choice and live life to its fullest."

I was happy to be there for my friend, someone I love, respect and admire.  I was also there for myself, to say goodbye to that happy memory of my youth, to see how the story ends, as it were.  Tomorrow my friend's father will be buried in the same cemetery as his relatively well-known grandmother, a St. Louis writer named Kate.  I can't say that I think he will rest in peace.  I'm sure he's at peace, but I can't imagine him resting.  So carry on, Mr. Chopin.

Murder, Mayhem and Radio: I Knew I'd Like Her

I was once the executive producer and co-host of a radio magazine program. The program ended about ten years ago (after a run of about ten years) and was a combination of music, news, public interest, interviews and other short pieces. I interviewed a lot of people over the years, from Ann Rice to Hilary Clinton to people you've never heard of.

One week I had the pleasure of interviewing two mystery writers that had come into town for a book signing, one a seasoned pro and the other a relative newcomer. The interview with the pro was fine, but the newcomer and I clicked. She did good radio. We stayed in touch over the years, and her career blossomed. She's received at least ten awards and published twenty-six mystery novels. I'm really proud of her and I really like her novels.

She was in town recently for Bouchercon, the world’s largest mystery and crime-fiction convention (that I'd somehow never heard of), and was part of an authors panel at Left Bank Books so I decided to go. I went to have the opportunity to say hello again in person to a long-time acquaintance. If she hadn't been there, I probably would not have gone. Even though I enjoy mystery novels, I didn't know any of the other authors on the bill. I did, however, relish the thought of being able to see her in person again after all these years. And while keeping in touch via social networking is great, nothing beats having someone be right next to you when you're talking. I thought it would be an interesting couple of hours.

It was nice to hear the authors speak about their work. They were: Neil Plakcy, Greg Herren, J.M. Redmann, Jeri Westerson, Ellen Hart, Jeffrey Ricker, Rob Byrnes, Michael Dymmoch, and Val McDermid. Hearing them talk about their work made me want to finish the mystery stories I've started and abandoned over the years, so that turned out to be a bonus for attending.

I recognized Ricker, the local boy, as the friend of a friend we'd had dinner with once, not as the soon-to-be-published novelist that he is. I'd had no idea he was a mystery writer. His friends were there, so I didn't have a chance to say hello but I was able to at least wave at his partner before the event started. I didn't know any of the other authors except Ellen.

During the Q and A I asked the final question of the evening and then everyone broke up to chat, peruse books for sale, and obtain autographs from their favorites. After it seemed that most of the books had been signed, we chatted for a few minutes. She got me caught up on the seasoned pro I'd interviewed years ago (Sandra Scoppettone now retired, but her books are apparently coming to eBook soon, which is nice to hear) and told me that she was absolutely crazy about Val McDermid's wife. Ellen was happy to hear that I was writing and encouraged me to keep it up.

When Ellen introduced me to Val, I had a feeling I'd like her. She's originally from Scotland but lives on the northeast coast of England now. My Dad always said that our family was from Scotland even though I've seen no proof, but maybe there's some truth to it. Val had a look about her that reminded me of my great-grandmother (years ago, when my great-grandmother was about my age!). It turned out that Val loves doing radio and does pieces for the BBC. I would have loved to chat longer with her about radio but I had to leave to meet my partner.

A few days later I caught a piece that Val did on the Chalet School novels, and guess what? She does good radio.

I knew I'd like her.

Less Than An Hour From Now

The big milestone birthday is here and in less than an hour I will have lived on this earth for a significant amount of time. Well, significant to me but completely inconsequential in a cosmological sense. So, I'm having a cup of tea in the "Warning! Today you are as young as you will ever be for the rest of your life" mug that was a birthday present from a friend. It's nice to have a reminder that every day I'm young!

Lynxter is taking me out of town this weekend for a birthday surprise but until we leave this afternoon I have more time to write in my blog, say thanks on social media for all of the birthday wishes, and to read.

You see, in addition to the soul-searching that I have been doing about my purpose in life, I've also been obsessing about bees. I know. So much obsession in one little head, right? This is how my brain works. I get interested in something and then devour as much knowledge as I possibly can about the topic. As a result, Lynxter might very well find me maddening to live with, but she handles it graciously. And as maddening as that might make me to live with, you should try being inside my head.

When I first read about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), I thought that keeping bees was a good idea for the sake of trying to help pollinate and re-populated bees as pollinators. It didn't go beyond the thinking stage because I thought I'd need a lot of space to keep bees. That thought went back into cold storage like so many others.

Then I went to Huckleberry's sixth birthday party.

Huck's parents are good friends of ours and they throw great parties, which we are always grateful to be invited to. At the party, one of their neighbors mentioned her husband's beehives and I started asking questions because less than a week earlier, I'd run into someone I hadn't seen in years who has a beehive that she said she was having to feed sugar to. That seemed odd to me in the middle of summer, so I discussed it with my friend's neighbor. Learning in the course of a week that two people with very small, very urban yards were raising bees yanked that thought right out of cold storage and right into the part of my brain where obsession thrives.

I learned a fair amount about bees from my friend's neighbor and came away from the conversation wanting a hive of my own. Knowing that I already live in a house filled with way too many pets to care for, I wanted to research how much time and effort bees would require before I committed to them, but I was already thinking about where in the yard I could put hives that bees would want to live in. If I got a little honey in the process, so be it, but for me, this was all about the bees. So I started reading on the internet and almost immediately discovered Warré hives and natural beekeeping. This is my kind of beekeeping. You mess with the bees about twice a year - once to harvest in the fall and once to add hive boxes when winter is over. Other than that, you leave them to do what they do best - not interact with humans unless absolutely necessary.

There is a ton of information on the internet. I even found plans to build my own hive. I emailed one of my closest friends who lives out of state because she's a wood-worker and I wanted to know if she thought the Warré hive plans I found would be difficult to build. She emailed me back that she'd built one of them already and that she thought I could certainly do it, especially with the right tools. Too bad she decided she had too much on her plate and gave the hive away or I could also pick her brain about keeping bees in this kind of hive.

I remembered that a longtime friend's father has kept bees for years and I learned that the local beekeepers association meets at the same location as my caving grotto (but on a different night). On their website I learned that a caver I've met who lives the next town over is a beekeeper and he said he'd be more than happy to answer any questions about beekeeping that I might have.

Lynxter said that before I put up the hive, I need to build and install the bat box we've been talking about for a couple of years. We might have too many trees for the bats to feel safe, but I'll do it. And building a bat box will be good practice for building a hive. The construction isn't very similar except it will involve measuring, cutting and attaching wood to create boxes. I found a bat box plan on the internet too - one that looks a lot easier than the one I gave Lynxter's son for his Eagle scout project.

The timing for this is perfect. I'm getting started while I'm young.

Milestone Musings on Mission/Purpose

I am sure that a lot of the soul-searching I've been doing recently is because I am approaching a milestone birthday. I find myself looking back on the choices I've made in my life, taking inventory, thinking about the things I am proud of and the opportunities I still have. I am looking forward to the next part of my life and in typical fashion I'm worried that I may not have time to complete everything on my list of things to do and see. I'm not a big worrier, but I do I love life and don't want to waste a minute of what's left of mine.

I have been reading a book about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and how we can write new stories for ourselves that will take us where we want to go. Our destinies do follow our lives, not the other way around. The story we tell ourselves and others about ourselves is what creates our life. It's a book that discusses the power of story.

And it's a book that is causing a personal crisis for me.

Here's the thing. The author says that once you define your purpose - what really matters - that everything else can fall into place. And he says that whatever it is, it should be able to motivate you to walk across a plank 175 feet in the air, wind gusts or no gusts, seven days a week, no questions asked. It's the wind in your sails, the yeast in your bread. And I am having a crisis because I am not sure I can identify that thing in myself.

What's wrong with me?

The author of the book, Jim Loehr, suggests that you imagine what you'd like to hear at your eulogy or to have carved on your tombstone. For some people it's to make their parents proud, for others it's to be the most successful earner in their social circle, for others to seek out adventure and risk. He uses purpose interchangeably with "ultimate mission" and describes it as the thing that constantly renews your spirit, that motivates you when nothing else can. I don't seem to be able to land on one thing.

I think it was Steven Covey who suggested you make a statement about something you want to do and then ask why and keep asking why until you get down to that underlying purpose. When I try to do that, I end up with a bunch of whys. It doesn't strike me as having the focus I'm supposed to have with this ultimate mission. A tiny little voice in my head suggested "maybe I'm over-thinking this." I quashed it and began looking around the internet for ways to find my life's purpose. Mary Jaksch suggested that I answer 15 questions such as what would you do if money were no barrier? and what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Another blogger suggested that I write "what is my life's purpose" at the top of a blank piece of paper and then keep answering it over and over until something resonated. All of this seemed like a waste of time.

Then I found Dr. Susan Biali.

A couple of years ago Biali wrote a blog for Psychology Today (check it out) and her confession in it sounded so familiar that I couldn't believe it. When she says "[i]f you're blessed with tons of different ideas or talents, celebrate them rather than bending to pressure to 'just pick one'" I can feel it resonate through my entire being. It's exactly the problem I am having with this book. I am like a kid in a candy store when it comes to life. There are so many choices I can't seem to settle down on just one. How can I possibly reconcile things like writing songs/screenplays/fiction/blogs, helping my son grow into a good man, playing guitar, cave conservation and exploration, being a good partner, motivating sales people, world travel and natural farming (I'm currently thinking bees....)?

Biali suggests that you should embrace all the different things you know. Give yourself room to try on the different interests and ideas you have. Some will stick and some will naturally fall away. For her, living her way into her passion and purpose has been the process, not honing in on one thing.

And that helps me answer the question for now because I think I am starting to have an understanding of what matters to me in this moment: to continually learn and grow. I have always been a curious person who takes things apart in my mind. It's one reason I was such a good interviewer when I did radio. I like learning how things and people tick, and then placing that in the context of my own life to make me a better person and hopefully more able to share it with others. I do really want to do my part to make this a better world. I have done a lot of things in my life. I have had so many blessings so far and I don't see that ending anytime soon. I am so thankful for everything that I've experienced in my life, good and bad. (You bet, I'll take them both!)

Maybe it's no wonder that a Charles Schultz cartoon I read years ago has continued to stick in my mind and always brings a smile to my face. In it, Charlie Brown is talking to Linus and mentions someone being 21 years old. Linus replies "don't be ridiculous, no one lives to be that old!" Or does that many things.

And yet, here I am.

Close Friends

I've been thinking about building close friendships again today. My partner Lynxter is my closest friend and I'm thankful for that. But I also believe it's heathy to have close friends outside of your primary relationship. And that's where things seem to be difficult for me.

I think most people who know me would describe me as a friendly, affectionate, yet somewhat reserved, person. I am not necessarily that easy to get to know and people probably think I'm more serious than I really am. I have not been a person prone to asking for help in my life, a trait that my son has unfortunately picked up from me. I think being "the smart kid" in school led to me missing out on some of the social skills that everyone else picked up. I have often felt like I don't fit in anywhere, and I still feel that way. It doesn't stop me from wanting or trying to connect, but it's often a lonely place of my own making.

Throughout my life, my closest friends have been women. I have had very close male friends in my life too, but it has been primarily women for a host of reasons that would derail this topic, so I won't get into that today. Reaching out to build friendships with women when your romantic partners tend to be women can be tricky, because there's always the possibility that someone is going to mistake your reaching out as interest in intimacy that goes beyond the platonic.

Let me just say here that I am in a monogamous relationship. In the past, I tried a non-monogamous relationship. I have some pretty strong opinions about it, but I'll only say that in the long run, it didn't work for me. I don't judge others. I have also been in relationships where my partner cheated on me. Those worked for me even less. I know that I am a monogamous person. It is what works best for me and it is a boundary that I won't cross, even if I meet someone I find attractive, which doesn't happen very often, maybe because I'm not looking for it. I have a really strong sense of "treat others as you wish to be treated" and I won't do that to anyone, especially not someone I love.

I had a friend once tell me that in all friendships there is an element of attraction. I think my friend is absolutely right, but I differ with him on the meaning of attraction. He meant sexual interest but I think that instead it can mean intellectual interest or emotional interest or spiritual interest. The hard part is juggling all of that along with the insecurities of everyone involved.

And I have had people mistake my interest in them for sexual attraction. It's a very uncomfortable situation to be in. How do you explain to someone that you like them, but not that way, without bruising the fragile ego of someone you really do like? It's happened to me more than once, so I wonder if I am somehow giving off the wrong impression. I was not a person who dated a lot when I was single, so that thought has occurred to me.

Then there's that whole business of sharing intimate thoughts and feelings. I don't make a habit of ever saying anything negative about my partner to a friend. I worry that they might take something I say when I'm temporarily angry or frustrated as something more meaningful and long-lasting, especially since some of them have the context of a partner I once had, who was pretty universally disliked by my friends. And I don't want anyone to think badly of Lynxter because she's someone I cherish.

I suppose I should trust my friends more and then something deeper might build from there. Maybe that's the crux of it. My oldest friends (and my partners) have seen the best and the worst of me, as I have them. They easily separate the wheat from the chaff and they still love me anyway. They reach out to me as often as I reach out to them, our relationships are equal. There is an ebb and flow to them, to be sure, especially since my closest friends outside of Lynxter now live out of town. What makes them so magical, and what makes me miss having close friends in town, is that when we get together it doesn't matter if ten minutes or ten years have passed, at their core they are still the same friend I have always loved.

Don't misunderstand me. I do have friends who would come if I called at 3am and I would come if they called me at 3am. But they don't feel the same as some of these old friendships and I think that's what I am missing in my life right now.

People Traveling Through Our Lives

Many years ago I read a book that discussed six different types of friendships. And while the book wasn't about friendships per se, that is what stuck with me over the years. The author said there are six different kinds of friends, from convenience friends to friends who come when you call at three in the morning. We all have them and each serves an important purpose in our lives.

Social networking, as I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, has enabled me to get back in touch with a lot of friends and acquaintances I've known over the years. I'm a curious person, and I like knowing where people's lives have taken them so I have been enthralled with social networking sites. At first I was insufferable, now I think I'm only moderately annoying about it since the novelty has begun to wear off. slightly.

I think about the friends in my life - neighbors and office mates, people who belong to the same organizations I do, childhood friends, older friends who shared their wisdom with me and younger friends for whom I've done the same. I have been blessed with having a lot of people in my life.

And yet, when I really think about it, I don't think I have been that successful in cultivating close friends. The truly close friends in my life would still come if I called at three in the morning, but most of them are no longer living in the same city with me. Rather than developing new close friends, I have relied on lovers to fill the void. I don't know if that's particularly unusual in a transient society like ours but I don't know.

What do you think?

Ebb and Flow

Death has always made sense to me as an inevitable part of life. When I say that, I mean death by natural causes. For example, I miss the two great-grandmothers I was lucky enough to know in my childhood, my father's grandmothers, but when they died, I understood that was just part of life and I remember thinking, they're old, that's what happens. It's supposed to. Of course, as I get older, their advanced ages (86 and 87) no longer seem that old to me.

I had a cat that lived into his twenties and even though he's been gone several years, I still miss him. His name was Ralph. In later years I took to calling him Ralph the Reiki Master. He knew when you were upset or unsettled and would come to calm you down, literally putting his paws on you. He was also a welcome cat, bounding out to meet any person who entered our home, and he never exhibited fear.

When he was younger, Ralph loved to leap from the floor to the top of an open door and then perch on his back paws and reach down the front of the door with his front paws. I wondered what on earth he was doing until one day I saw him doing the same thing to my aquarium and realized he'd been in training.

Ralph loved to ride on people's shoulders like a live mink stole, down to the shiny black fur. I remember once he startled a tall friend of mine by leaping unannounced to his shoulders from the floor. I always wondered whether Ralph was a cat who wished he could fly.

As he got older, he started getting thin and bony and then one day, lay down and said he was done. My partner called me and said I should come home from work because he wasn't going to last long. I came right home and Ralph died shortly after I came into the room, as though he'd been waiting for me to say one last goodbye and to ease my transition into a life without him. Oh, I cried. I missed him then and there are times today when I miss him so. I don't ever seem to wish that he were still alive, but rather that I could go back and revisit those days. And of course I do that in my memory, which ebbs and flows.

Several years have passed and we again have a really old cat. He's feral, so we don't know exactly how old he is, but he's been around our family almost 20 years and he's starting to get that old man cat look that Ralph had - bony and skinny. He's heading towards that point of ebb we all will hopefully reach in our lives. For now, Sky still has a lot of flow - he has a great and insistent appetite so I'm hopeful that he won't go soon, but when he's ready, I will be too. Perhaps Sky will join Ralph in the afterlife, he certainly will join him in the ebb and flow of my memory.

Well, Hello Betty!

I love that social networking enables me to get in contact with people I've lost contact with over the years. Recently a young woman who is now somewhere around 30, and who I lost contact with just as she was graduating from high school, contacted me to say that she was coming into town from L.A. and wanted to get together. I'll call her Betty since I want to protect my friend's identity because she is an actress and I'd hate for a tabloid to ever pull out my blog and use it against her, plus I love the phrase "Hello, Betty!" (in the archaic sense, not the urban dictionary sense); so there you have a little walk inside my train of thought.


One of my exes is a middle-school teacher and Betty was a student who used to come hang out around our house. My ex seemed to attract kids who would find our address, show up on our doorstep, and become somewhat of a fixture. We didn't mind. We remembered what it was like to be in middle school and think your teachers were cool but your parents were not; plus they were a great source of reliable babysitters for our own small children who always "adopted" them into the family as pseudo-siblings. That, and we were keeping them off the streets since they would sometimes show up very late at night (and we'd quietly call their parents so no one was worried).


The kids we tended to attract were a little on the wild side (at age 15, Betty showed up with a tattoo that her parents had not authorized, but that's another story). We allowed these errant kids to try out whatever personalities they wanted to try out, without the judgement a family can vocalize. After high school, Betty ran off with a boyfriend to another state and I thought I wouldn't hear from her again; I certainly didn't expect to see her again and thought that I hadn't really had much of an impact on her.


She found me on social media through my son, who is now about the age she was when I last saw her. We electronically traded the basic events of our lives and then one day she sent me a message that she was coming to town and wanted to catch up in person, so we made arrangements to meet at a wine bar not too far from my house. It was kind of a trip to think about sitting down to have a couple glasses of wine with Betty. She was still a teenager in my mind, even though the math proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is old enough to drink.


Over the years she'd gone from being a gawky, hyperactive, pretty teenager to a poised and beautiful woman. That same kid was still lurking in there, but I was so proud of who she had turned into. She said that after I last saw her, she had gone to college to study theatre and had been living in Los Angeles for almost 10 years finding work acting and print modeling. She dumped the boyfriend (one of those toxic relationships we all seem to get into when we're that age) and finally had one that she thought was a "keeper". She talked about how much she loved her work but also shared her frustration with 'casting couch come-ons' and the craziness of L.A. She explained how agents and managers worked and shared that people said she was good but that she sometimes seemed to hold back in her auditions. She had developed a pretty thick skin, realizing that not being cast isn't usually personal but was fiercely determined to deal with that block. I shared my experience working with actors and some observations that seemed to ring true for her.


As the afternoon was turning to evening, my partner showed up and we continued to talk about actors and acting and an indy project that Betty was really excited about. She didn't want to hold back emotionally and not give the role everything it deserved. She also said that because the role was someone who had been a real person, people on the project were being very secretive about sharing information about the woman, who had died from some pretty destructive behavior.


I said that from my limited experience as a director, I've seen that actors can get sidetracked looking at what a person does rather than who they are, but that the key is to really look at what is going on with a person that can lead her to make the choices she makes. That's what makes a character multi-faceted, that's what will give the actor interesting choices, and that what makes an actor's performance riveting to an audience.


My partner suggested that Betty talk with the people on the project who knew the person she would be portraying, and explain that she was asking to know about the person because she wanted to honor her. I thought that was fantastic and diplomatic advice.


I told Betty that she had to be fearless and to give up worrying that someone would see a really great performance and decide that she, outside of the character, was crazy. She was a little afraid she might lose herself in the emotion of a role because she knew she could be a little high-strung. I said that it's about the training, because we are creatures of habit and routine (did I attend that recent workshop so I could give this advice?) and she's had a lot of training, so I knew that she could do it. She needed to trust her training. I said that she could protect herself and know going in that when the clock stops, it stops, and you shut Pandora's play box and go back to your life. I said it was important she remember that because I knew so many actors who didn't learn it (usually demonstrated when they fell in love with co-stars) to disastrous ends. And I also knew that Meryl Streep gets up in the morning and puts her trousers on like the rest of us and that she can shut that box, and if she can shut that box, so can Betty.


I described some of the ideas I'd been hearing and reading lately around fear and the difference between the fear when something is truly life-threatening and the fear when you've worked yourself up about something, and probably magnified it to be way larger than it really is. We talked about the power of the mind. Betty told me she knew that was true and that she'd quit smoking based on something I'd shared years ago when she was a teenager - how I'd quit smoking in my early twenties by responding to my cravings by telling myself over and over "you're a non-smoker and a non-smoker wouldn't want a cigarette" until I really didn't want another cigarette.

I was surprised. I had forgotten that I'd given her that advice. In fact, I'd forgotten that she had ever smoked, but when I think back on it, I think all of those kids did. I asked "did it work?" and she said "you don't see me smoking do you? Of course it did!" She said that she'd always appreciated my advice, something another of those wayward kids I have kept in contact with has told me on more than one occasion.

Five hours went by like five minutes. She gave me a great big hug and said we'd get together the next time she came to town and insisted my partner and I come to L.A. so she could show us around.

We hear so many things in life. What sticks, what slides off, what sinks in and what surfaces later? None of us can know. That's why it's important to be as honest as we can be and to usher into our lives those ideas and people who help us grow.

What We Feed Will Surely Grow

I recently attended a workshop that explored managing the four dimensions of energy to become fully engaged in our lives. The related (but distinct!) dimensions discussed were physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. The premise was that we are creatures of habit and routine and that if we train ourselves in all four areas, that we can effectively manage our energy to realize our "mission" in life. None of this seemed entirely new to me but there was one thing he said that keeps replaying in my head:

What you feed in yourself will grow.


I thought about the times in my life I have proven that statement true in every dimension to successful and detrimental ends. Inactivity breeding inactivity. Rest leading to better recovery. Emotional distance causing more distance. Optimism building more optimism. Creativity leading to more creativity.

Since that workshop I have begun making small changes and trying to ask myself whether an activity I am doing or a thought or an emotion I am having is something I want to see grow in myself. I have often in the past said that I want people in my life who move me closer to my goals. When I have said that, I have always been referring to the goals I have about making myself a better person in this world. I want people around me who challenge me to be my best self, not people who bring me down ethically or emotionally. That hasn't changed. Since attending this workshop, I am now adding this consideration: are the things I am doing in all of the dimensions of my own life things that I want to grow in myself.

The good news is that we're creatures of habit and routine. I am working to slowly move the needle on my huge list of things I want to do in life by trying to look at small changes in habit and routine that I can make to keep me pointed in the right direction.

Things Are Happening Underground

Don't Forget the Umbrella

Supposedly April showers bring May flowers, but while my garden is blooming, it's also bringing more showers. More thunderstorms. More flooding rivers. I like rain as much or more than the next person, but even I'm starting to think "enough is enough!" You think that by now I'd remember to take an umbrella everywhere, but I still forget.

We spent the weekend in Nashville, visiting a couple of places we'd never been before. On Saturday night we went to Belcourt Taps & Tapas, a funky little place in an area of town called Hillsboro Village. There were songwriters performing throughout the evening, our server told us their publishers had booked them for exposure. My partner recognized one of the performing songwriters (Meredith Blis) because we'd all auditioned for the Bluebird Cafe on the same day earlier this year and the three of us briefly chatted. A guy named Erik Dylan did a couple of songs and I think he's got something going something with a song called something like "Jesus Was a Wine Man But I Prefer Gin". The crowd loved him and the publishers seemed to be all over him too. It was interesting to watch "the business" in action. I felt like the outsider I am, despite the fact that our server was a really friendly woman (and former song plugger) who said she hoped we did end up moving to Nashville.

We drove home from Nashville this past Sunday by heading west across Tennessee and then cutting over to Missouri and coming up I-55 north. The flooding was amazing, I wish I'd taken photographs. At one point a lane of I-55 northbound was closed because of the floods and they'd sand-bagged the shoulder.

I feel sorry for the farmers. They can only look up at the cloudy skies and shake their heads, wondering if they'll have to replant the corn or forgo it (and it's current high price yield) and plant soybeans or if the floods have ruined the year (and future ones?) completely. They have to be worrying about the future commodities they've promised.

Another thing that has me thinking of farmers this morning is the fact that I've been listening to Matraca Berg's new album "The Dreaming Fields". The title track is more or less about the death of the family farm (you might recognize it if you're a Trisha Yearwood fan). The chorus is so powerful. I hope to some day write these kinds of lyrics.

Oh I'm goin' down to the dreaming fields
But what will be my harvest now
Where every tear that falls on a memory
Feels like rain on the rusted plow
Rain on the rusted plow

Rain and farms and Nashville. Matraca Berg is certainly no outsider to Nashville even if she is unknown to so much of America. I listen to her lyrics and think, "man, she's seen a lot of heartbreak, but what resilience" and then I read a blog like Holly Gleason's review of this album and you think, "all that and she's a nice person, too? Wow."

The whole album is really good music and really great songwriting. Another current favorite of mine is "You and Tequila" (Kenny Chesney recorded it with Grace Potter on). The chorus is fantastic:

You and tequila make me crazy

Run like poison in my blood

One more night might kill me, baby

One is one too many, one more is never enough

But the bridge is downright brilliant.

When it comes to you, oh the damage I could do

It's always your favorite sins that do you in

Matraca's ability to connect with heartache and dysfunctional relationships is our gain. Hat's off, but don't forget an umbrella.

The Power of Us

I had a good conversation with Will Kimbrough on Saturday night about his guitar effects pedals. I've always been a fully acoustic musician so it's only been recently that I've had an interest in electric guitars and stomp boxes. He gave me his thoughts on the pedals that he takes with him when he travels (Civil War Fuzz and Garage Tone Axle Grease among others) and explained to me how he does this really cool ethereal effect that I love. I am planning to get delay and overdrive pedals in the not too distant future so I can play around with some of this on my own, although I'll also need a volume pedal to do that ethereal swell Will pulls off....

It sparks creativity in me to talk with other artists and I know I'm not alone in that. For me, seeing another musician at work, or any kind of artist really, spins my thoughts into new directions and leads me to places I may never have visited without that interaction. It makes me feel like when I was a kid excited on Christmas morning, or when I see the ocean or mountains again after a long separation, in awe of life itself. A riff or a bit of percussion leads me to explore that thing that sticks in my head in the context of my own writing, whether I'm writing music or a script. And it always takes me somewhere I enjoy exploring, whether anyone else would consider that place productive or not.

We spend our whole lives inventing and re-inventing ourselves. Like the oscillations of our internal physical and physiological systems, our interactions with others also ebb and flow and contribute to our own personal change in a synergistic way. For me, interacting with other artists reinforces the power that we are all part of, that all of us share. It reminds me how truly amazing we are as a collaborative and communal species.

Teachable and Teaching

Over the weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Backroads Birthday Bash & KDHX Benefit at Focal Point in Maplewood Missouri. While we didn't stay for the entire show and I didn't have a chance to say hello to all of my former colleagues, we did have the opportunity to hear seven songwriters (six local and one regional) and they were a treat. It was great music and as usual, I learned something along the way.

For me, it's always inspiring to see what other songwriters are doing. After seeing Rodney Crowell recently, I went home and wrote the entire first draft of a song (music, lyrics, rhythm) in about ten minutes. And yesterday I landed on a rhythm and chord progression for a song that had been dogging me for months - all because I heard Lyal Strickland (the regional songwriter at Saturday's benefit) play something with a similar style. I was fooling around with the technique and my songwriting partner said "yes! That's exactly what w-w-w-dot [the name of one of our songs] needs!" And she was right.

I've started to teach guitar to a friend's teenager. It's a good opportunity for me to reinforce what I know and to share it with someone else. I think I'm also going to be learning all the things I only half-learned when I was teaching myself to play the guitar, like the notes on the frets in standard tuning, scales and the Nashville Numbering System. So far, the teen seems to like my teaching style. At the end of our second lesson yesterday I gave her a song to learn for next week, which I think is farther faster than she got with the two other guitar teachers who came before me. I think this is going to be a win-win.

By the way, my songwriting partner and I still haven't heard anything back from the Bluebird Cafe, but no worries there. We might not be ready yet and even if we are, for us this is really a year for staying more local and honing the craft, in terms of both the writing itself and performing our songs in front of a live audience.

Favorable Critiques Don't Hurt

My songwriting partner and I are members of NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association International) and one of the membership benefits are a number of song evaluations. Over the past year that we've been members, we've sent a few of our songs in and received really helpful critiques. In the past three weeks or so, we sent in several songs all at once and based on the results, I think we're better songwriters than when we began.

The trend is less about fixing what's wrong with the songs and more about what might make them more marketable for country. We've also found that as we've tweaked our songs to improve them based on the feedback, that people who listen to our songs seems to be responding more to them and connecting with them in a way that wasn't happening before.

So this weekend, we are auditioning once again for Sunday Writer's Night at the Bluebird Cafe. Having done this once before makes me feel as though I'm better prepared this time around. And honestly, I think the songs are better, so I'm hopeful. I'm sure that I'll blog about how it goes.

The Decline of Art in the US

This past Saturday, there was a special panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival called Power of Story: Making Art Matter (You can view it online). One of the panelists mentioned that the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking has been administered since 1966 to capture individual creativity levels. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but what I found interesting, is that the panelist said around 1990, American test scores leveled off after having increased dramatically every year prior to that and have actually been decreasing.


So I went looking. I discovered that Kyung Hee Kim, an associate professor of educational psychology at the College of William & Mary, performed analyses of Torrance test scores for almost 300,000 American adults and children and found that all of the scores of the Lateral/Innovative thinking factor, Vertical/Adaptive thinking factor, and Creative personality factor have significantly decreased or have significantly started decreasing. The decrease has been more in recent years than earlier years.


The Torrance test measures creativing in not only artistic areas, but science, interpersonal relationships and others. Dr. Kim says that in western cultures we think of creativity as artistic but that in eastern cultures they think of creativity as scientific.


Dr. Kim believes the decline in U.S. creativity may be in part because kids spend more time with television than in activities that utilize creativity - playing outside for one thing. She also thinks the lack of creativity development and the stifling of children’s creative opportunities in classrooms is having an impact. She is quick to point out that it's speculation since there haven't really been significant studies to look at this.


Creativity is so important to me that I devised a game for my son when he was almost a toddler. We've been doing it so long, I can't remember when we really started. He would ask to be told stories and we started out telling stories to him. After awhile, I wanted him to be able to come up with stories too. So I came up with a game that we played for years.


One of us would come up with three things and then the other would have to build a story around it and tell that story. As time went on, we would come up with the craziest mismatches we could possibly imagine and still the stories came. Good ones, terrible ones (mine mostly fell into that category), mediocre ones. Funny and poignant ones. It was a great game, and I hope it helped my son's creativity even though we didn't start with that intention.


I've also shared with my son the love I have for caving. We have spent many hours crawling through muddy passages and sloshing through borehole passages with water up to our thighs. On those trips we speculate about what might be down a side passage or how to get the best photograph of a pink planaria.

I like to think I'm a relatively well-rounded, creative type and I hope my son shares that capacity. He's been writing a science-fiction novel since he was about 12 and he's thinking about studying physics, astronomy and marine biology when he goes to college in a couple of years, so I'm hopeful.

Winding Down The Metal Tiger

Depending upon which calendar you choose, the year of the yang metal tiger is either gone or passing in the next few weeks. The eastern astrologers predicted that it would be a turbulent year, and I think they were right (aren't they all, one might ask?). By contrast, this upcoming yin metal rabbit is supposed to bring peace, joy, calmness and many happy moments. They say it's going to be a good year to focus on family, creative endeavors and diplomacy. Astrology may all be, as my grandmother might have said, "a lot of hooey" but it seems pretty timely for me right now.

This past year has felt chaotic to me. I've chalked it up to lots of changes and trying to cram a lot of things into an already busy schedule, but it's been more than that. I've felt more like I have Attention Deficit Disorder than I have ever felt in my life. It's been harder than ever to concentrate on the things that are routine, much less the things that are not. It will be fun to look back in a year and see what's transpired and whether those eastern astrological predictions were worth their salt.

I didn't make any new year's resolutions this year but I have made a change that many people would attribute to one: I joined the Y so I could start swimming again regularly. The timing was completely unrelated to the holidays.

I fell in love with swimming when I was ten years old. I spent from 7am until about 9pm in the local pool for an entire summer, seven days a week, swimming on the regular and varsity swim teams. I ended the summer with two things: a trophy for being the league's high point swimmer and the inability to even get near a pool without my eyes starting to burn (didn't wear goggles back then). I tried swimming at a local gym a couple of times over the years after that because I missed swimming and even with goggles, couldn't get over the burning sensation. I gave up swimming.

My younger brother, who swam on the high school team, started swimming again about a year ago. I don't know whether it was because he fell in love with a swimming coach or just missed it too. Maybe both. And in the past few weeks, my partner had mentioned a couple of times that she thought she needed to start swimming and it had reminded me of how much I loved to swim as a kid, but I didn't do anything about it except muse.

My mother was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia on Christmas Eve so my brother decided to come into town from the west coast to spend a few days with her before the new year. The morning after he arrived, they called me to ask if I wanted to go swimming with them. I worried over whether I had a suit that would fit (no swimming, but plenty of hot-tubbing in the backyard has occurred) then I said yes, picked up some swimming goggles and met him and my mother at the Y near her house.

It was fantastic. I swam a pool length without stopping (then had to rest a long time before starting back down the lane because my body memory hopped into race mode but my lungs definitely weren't with the program). I came home and suggested that my partner and I join the local Y so we could both start swimming. We did it, and both had a really great time swimming together in the slow lane. I think she loved it as much as I did.

My eyes were happy. I suspect the chlorine formula has changed over the years or maybe my eyes have restored themselves, I don't know. Maybe a little of both. What I can say, is that I've renewed my love with swimming and it's already brought me peace, joy, calmness and many happy moments.