Disgruntled

While I was watching a program on the Smithsonian Channel about this guy named Shockley (of course I forget his first name) I realized that my days of genius are gone.

Whoever this guy started out to be, he always thought, even as a young child, that he would win the Nobel Prize for something.  In the few minutes I watched the show, I learned that he got it for inventing along with the two more famous guys, the transistor.  We all know how important those things are.  In the background, mysterious and mystical formulas and mathematical equations floated.  They meant nothing to me.  They never will. But he is responsible for starting what is known as Silicon Valley and all the assorted scientific wonders that has produced.  He went around recruiting the best and the brightest men (humph) and got them to work together...inventing stuff. 
The show didn't say he invented anything after the transistor, though. Maybe he just sat around picking people out for their genius and let them do all the work.  I don't know.

 

Yesterday I saw one of my favorite Alien shows about Albert Einstein's brain.  Really.  And it went on and on about how he must have been visited by aliens when he went into one of his deep thought things.  He used to just sit quietly and think and all these cool things that nobody else can understand came to him.

Trance-like.  Far viewing.  Self-hypnosis.  Daydreaming?  Whatever it was he did, he came up with that totally incomprehensible stuff about bending space and finding wormholes in which to travel to far off stars and not age as much as the people you left behind.

Now, I think that's pretty much bullshit, but I'm not a genius in that way.  Besides, nobody has exactly proven that this will happen as they haven't been gone far enough away at the speed of light to prove it.  It's a THEORY and we are supposed to accept it as fact.

Well, I call shenanigans!

If I sit real still and think inside my brain, I come up with ideas for stories.  There are some people in this world who cannot picture things in their minds unless they see a photo or something in National Geographic...and then they have to strain to come up with a description of what they've seen.  I imagine these people do not become writers.  For all their genius, for all they think of space bending and mass equaling such and such...I think I'd rather have the brain I have.

Even if it is starting to forget more than you'll ever know.

Near Death

Okay, it wasn't really that bad, but...somebody asked me how many words on the WWII story I had in the can.  I decided I would print out all the various disconnected scenes along with the six chapters that are actually the beginning of the story and count the words.  Easy, right?

So, I went looking for the scenes and found three pivotal scenes, nearly whole chapters, missing.  They were just not where I thought I put them.  I could remember what happened but not how, the words were not there for me to recapture, but the ideas were.  I panicked.  I looked through my WORD files.  Nada.  Karyn found something by typing in key words in that little file folder thing on the bottom of the page here for which I was grateful, but I distinctly remembered these two missing scenes that I knew I had written and were apparently gone forever.

I tried her trick, putting several words that were distinct to these passages into the little space atop the folder looking thing on the bottom of the screen.  Nothing happened. 
I went through 819 SENT emails because I knew I had written these passages recently enough and was negligent on deleting sent stuff.  Nope.  Not there. 

I wrote to the very friends I sent these sections to, hoping beyond hope that they had somehow saved these bits.  Nope, though they remembered what I had written.

I read through those SENT folders again. 

I prayed.

I checked my husband's WORD file on his laptop...success!  I found one thing I had written last summer and neglected to put into My WORD file.  That was good, but still, there were two whole big scenes missing.  Memorable, but not word for word repeatable.

Last resort, today, I started looking through my entire documents file.  I found two files with BACKUPWIDOWSWALK on them...surely something I had transferred to gmail then into my files somewhere.
I opened the first and there was the first segment I was looking for.
Opened the second and, bingo!  The last missing piece was in there.

So, I am printing out all the words I have written, wherever I may find them, just to see how many words I have regarding this lovely story.  My heart is happy.  Now I just have to highlight and print all I have. 
I can do that.

Joy to you and me

Back in the 50s, obtaining a goldfish was something special.  I had my tonsils removed when I was five or six.  My reward for the most horrifying, harrowing two days of my life was twofold.  The toy piano I had longed for sat by my bedside when I got home from the hospital and on my bureau sat a fishbowl containing a shimmeringly beautiful fantail goldfish.

Just now I was thinking about what my mother must have gone through to get that goldfish.  In the old days, Woolworths' maintained a huge tank filled with probably two hundred or more goldies.  A kid would go up to it, nose to glass, and find the exact one out of all of these that he/she wanted and the poor salesperson in the pet department (they had parakeets, too) would proceed to dip a long-handled net into the vast tank to locate that exact fish.  Sometimes those slippery little boogers would make this an hour long job.  I bet more than once, the person snagged a similar fish and was able to convince the kid that it was indeed the exact one the kid had chosen.

Now, I can't imagine my mother picking out an exact fish for the unlucky salesperson to get.  She probably just said, "give me a fantail" or in Mom's case, "just give me a pretty fish" as Mom surely was not into goldfish of any kind, picturing how she would be the one to clean the bowl and remember to feed the thing.  I was five!

So, fish caught, it would be placed with a bit of water into one of those white containers we get Chinese takeout in nowadays! Small, sure.  One serving of white rice size. In fact, I can't remove a carton from the bag now without thinking of goldfish.  And it must have gone home with a bowl and net and food, too.  Thanks, Mom.

Goldie suffered two deaths.  My mother, resourceful and incredibly brave, managed to resuscitate it the first time by placing the "dead" fish on several ice cubes.  It did come back to life and managed to live a few more years!  The second time, however, the ice didn't work.  Goldie received a fond tribute as it was flushed down the toilet. I cried.

I am a sentimental old fool.  I've got tears in my eyes now.

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From Mermaids Arms...

Maggie slumped over the big roll-top desk, grabbed the sides with both hands and allowed a few tears to fall onto the ledger in front of her.  She wiped them away quickly, lest someone see her giving in to her emotions.  It was too much.  She’d been through settling her mother in law’s estate, notifying relatives and being ignored by them for weeks.  The only responses she’d gotten from anyone were queries as to how big an estate there was and who would inherit.

   The estate wasn’t big, but there had been some money, which she did not get, even after caring for the old witch for over a year.  “Well, you got to live in that big old house for free, you and your girls.  She never liked you, anyway, girl,” she’d heard in one form or another from several of the loving relatives.
  Loving. Hell. They’d all stayed away from her mother in law for years and years because she was a raving witch, but once the ding dong had sounded, they’d each thought themselves entitled to a piece of the pie.  And, strangely enough, they’d gotten their pieces.  While the old lady had been unbelievably nasty, she had been rather generous to her family...other than her only son’s wife and daughters, her only grandchildren.
   However, and this was the oddest thing, one insurance policy had not been changed over from Bill after his death. Perhaps the old lady thought he still might come back from his watery grave or maybe she’d just forgotten the small policy.  If she had remembered that the policy went to Bill or his next of kin should he predecease her, well, maybe she’d have changed her mind and the beneficiaries.   She hadn’t, though, and after some intense wrangling and threats of lawsuits against her, she now had nearly five hundred dollars to get her and the girls to Ohio.
   She wiped her eyes with the side of her hand and sniffled into her handkerchief.
   No one must see her like this.

World War II story, Mermaids Arms

From my work in slow progress:

     Lee paced across the wooden floor, his bare feet padding rhythmically in a soldier’s cadence.  Something, some nameless frustration, burned through his body, setting every nerve afire.  He shook his head, flexed his left hand.

     The glove didn’t work. While his fingers could reach the strings, he could not move them fast enough and the soft leather end just didn’t press hard enough despite the seam there.  The strings bounced back.  The sound wasn’t right.  The movement—it wasn’t there.  The control—hah!  What control?
     He ripped off the glove, sending it sailing across the small bedroom.  It landed inches away from the guitar.
     Useless.  The glove was useless.  His hand was useless.  His dreams of making music—well, evidently they were just that.  Stupid dreams.
     He needed to punch something.  Hard.  Raising his hand to the wall, he feinted a jab, but he couldn’t follow through. The hand stopped inches away from rending plaster to dust.  Useless it may be, but not without some feeling.  It would hurt.  He left the room, left the damned guitar he’d never play again.

Goaded by yesterday

It has come to my mind that, as a writer, I'm supposed to post "how-to's" on my blog.  I gave that up long ago once I realized that nobody gave a rat's ass.

Yesterday at the LSFW meeting, the speakers were commenting that writers should always post how- to information.  I consider that giving away talent for free.  I think I've already done that, but since I've been blogging here and on LiveJournal for years, maybe there are new people out there who never read my good stuff.  And let's not talk about the other website I had with all the notes about writing I put on there.  Somebody was supposed to transfer all that stuff onto this, but it never happened.

So, I'm gonna start off slowly.

I'm gonna divulge what I do to find cool names for characters.

Simple.
I look at the credits from all the PBS shows first...make mental notes on cool first names and last names.  I try very hard not to use ethnic names for characters as I do not want to possibly alienate readers who find they cannot pronounce character names because there are too many vowels or consonants.  Look, I know that puts me off...those real Irish names that no one could pronounce but someone versed in Erse...drive me nuts.  How can Aislinn be Ashlyn?  Darragh be just Darra?  Why the extra letters?  And then, whoa!  A Polish surname with no vowels whatsoever is impossible to figure out without a hunk of kielbasa in one hand and a chaser of vodka in the other.  If even then.

So, after plumbing the wonders of BBC, my next step, if I haven't come up with anything yet, is to read the obituaries online.  Located in those nuggets of sadness are some really cool names.  You take one from one place, another from another, you're set.

The real problem with a name is that it has to match the character.  Women's names can be airy fairy and you don't want to use that for a strong, 21st century female heroine.  Men...very sensitive here as you don't want a repeat of "A Boy Named Sue" any time.  Certain names are very masculine, others are new and made up (see football players' lineups) and some aren't very heroic.  Sometimes the nicknames are cooler than the real names, but sometime or other, you have to explain the guy's real name in the story and why he's called CAM and not Camerill.  Yes, it can be that oddball.

Name matching.  A dark haired hero or heroine shouldn't have a light haired name.
You can always do initials, but once again, somewhere in the story, you have to use the real name or else people like me will be wondering throughout the read what they stand for.

Women...giving them masculine names is odd. But then, the old saw "my father wanted a boy" is used all too frequently.

I'm big on names...I love searching for the exact right name for a character, even before I write the story.  Look at my stuff and see how I employ my naming methods. http://amazon.com/author/irenepeterson