Six, with massive apologies to A.A.Milne

When it was one,
My blog had just begun.
When it was two,
Each topic was still quite new.
When it was three
It was hardly just about me.
When it was four,
It was not much more.
When it was five,
It felt barely alive.
But my blog is now six,
(though it’s rarely that clever,)
I think I’ll keep writing for ever and ever.

My blog turned six today.  Six years ago, I lay on the sofa and allowed Josh to set the whole thing up.  At the time, he said that he was going to write it with me.  But I don’t think there has ever been a post by Josh on here.

There are over 2000 posts.  I write pretty much every single day.  I post about 90% of what I write.  I write when I don’t have any time to write.  I construct the post in my head while I’m showering, and then I quickly scrawl it out in moments throughout the day.  I’ll write a paragraph and then need to leave to do something.  And then I’ll email myself two sentences from the yoga mat before I turn off my phone.  And finally, I’ll finish off the post and leave it for a few hours to marinate.  Sometimes I’ll think of something to add in the middle of the night (it takes me a long time to fall asleep), and I’ll add that before hitting publish in the morning.

I go through stages where I need this space like water, and other times when I can take it or leave it, and other times still when I don’t want it at all.  In the past, I’ve thought about walking away from it, creating a ghost blog, more than I’ve thought about hitting delete.  This is a post about why I haven’t, and why I don’t really even think that anymore.

Writing here every day used to feel like something. I. had. to. do.  Like weeding a garden.  You can’t expect to have a garden if you’re not going to maintain it, and you can’t expect to have your blog read if you’re not going to maintain it.  When I thought like that, I sometimes went through periods of stress where I scrambled to think of what to write.  Or I’d be going somewhere and I felt like I needed to post something really good to carry the blog until I got back (and if I couldn’t write something amazing, became stressed about that).  I spent a lot of time feeling like my space owned me more than I owned my space, which I think is true of some houses as well.  There are some houses that seem to own the owners, that are constantly intruding on the owner’s personal time and causing the owners undo stress.  This blog at times was like that sort of house instead of being a harbour, a cozy space where I could curl up and talk.

At some point, I don’t even remember when, I stopped the constant tugging at my blog and owned it instead of allowing it to own me.  When I sit down to write, it is with a different mentality.  I remind my blog that it is here for me, that I own it and not the other way around.  It is a place I like to visit, that makes me happy.  It’s a place where I can have a conversation.  Where I can have my say.

Actually, I think I know when it changed.

My friend’s father, before he died, used to get coffee every morning with a bunch of other men at this water ice store near his home.  We went to the same water ice store at night sometimes with the kids, so I could totally picture the scene as he described it.  The men would come every morning to get coffee that they could have brewed at home; nothing special — just hot coffee from a press thermos served in styrofoam cups.  And they’d sit at the table and talk for a while before they all went off in different directions to start their day.  They called their group something like the Coffee Club.

I loved the idea of that coffee group and wished I had something like it.  I’m sure sometimes it was stressful to get there in time, and sometimes he probably had other things he wanted to do more but felt the social pressure to show up, and sometimes he was sick and missed his group.  It wasn’t perfect, after all, it was reality.  Reality is messy.  It’s hard and wonderful and it’s a timesuck and a harbour.  I don’t know if the group still meets now that he’s gone; I can’t imagine that if they do, it’s the same without him.

After he died a few years ago, I stopped allowing this space to own me and I started to see it as such a gift, a place to have a cup of coffee and talk in the morning.  Or, it was more accurately an ever-shifting coffee club that could be formed whenever I needed it to form.  I usually prefer it in the morning as a way to start off my day (I probably publish at least 75% of posts in the morning).  It’s this touchstone before I set off in a multitude of directions.

It’s never wasted time, it’s rarely stressful time.  There are times when the blogosphere affects my mood — how could it not? — but the drawbacks are infrequent and the company is warm and engaging.  You all make think.  You push me sometimes to look at why I think something or why I do something.  Sometimes you change my mind.  Sometimes you make me dig my heels in harder.  You are my coffee club.

So I will keep writing here.

Sometimes I need this space — as I said — like I need water.  But more accurately, I need it like I need a vitamin.  Sometimes I don’t really need a vitamin at all depending on what I eat, and sometimes I need it very much, but I always take it nonetheless because I believe that it might stave off problems in the future.  I write something every day because it exercises my brain.  Because it makes me look at myself and really see myself.  Because I may catch a problem within myself while it’s still small and easily fixable.  I write here because humans need a coffee club.  We need to connect and be with one another.  We need to know that if we slip away, we’ll be missed.

Thank you, for six wonderful years, for being my coffee club.

Putting together the LFCA tonight, I was struck by just how many people submitted news for the fake loss blogger.  Not in the sense of how many people were taken in by this person’s story and jerked around, but how many compassionate people there are in the blogosphere that they would see someone else’s pain and do a small good thing to try to help that person feel less alone.  I know a lot of people are still reeling from the lies, but I wanted to point this fact out because this is the side of the blogosphere I love.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Class, today we have a guest lecturer; a fellow MFA who utilizes setting in the most amazing ways in her blog posts (so I can only begin to imagine what I’ll encounter when I finally get to read her book).  Please welcome Wordgirl.

Wordgirl is the author of Bloodsigns — the current incarnation of a blog she originally began in 2007 in order to stretch her writing muscles, overcome writer’s block, and document her struggle with infertility that began in 2004. She received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 1998 and has taught composition and creative writing as an academic gypsy at various places: The University of Montana, Salish Kootenai College, The University of Minnesota, but most recently she spent 8 years teaching at a local Community College, a tenured position which she left in order to pursue IVF treatments, parent her stepson and finish her novel.  In 2009 she gave birth to her daughter.  She has an unpublished collection of short stories of the same name as her blog, numerous personal rejection letters, and a novel in progress about the 1862 Dakota Uprising.

[Wordgirl steps up to the lectern to enthusiastic applause.]

When I got to Thirty-eight Street, I crossed over to the south side and walked along the bar fronts there. Cars were parking in front of the bars, and men and women were getting out to go in and drink. Behind the bars were sheds and then rows of small new houses built on new streets and beyond that an empty drive-in movie and a railroad spur and then the town stopped and the fields of winter wheat began. – From Richard Ford’s Wildlife

I believe it was Alice Walker who once talked about how crafting her novels and characters wasn’t so much about placing these created personas in a deliberately crafted scene so much as it was listening to the characters as they came to her — and follow their voices into the lives they were to lead. This seems to dovetail with the great fiction teacher John Gardner’s urging in his book The Art of Fiction that the creation of fiction is that of a vivid and continuous dream — and it is our work as writers to enter that dream — and continue to build a believable world and a believable set of characters so that our readers are swept up in the current of events that unfold — and in their being swept up in that narrative arc it’s our hope that they witness this transformation of our protagonist — and by witnessing that change — following that journey — become emotionally moved by it — so that when they leave our work, put it down, the world and the characters linger like a dream that they can’t shake upon waking.

In class so far you’ve asked yourself some questions about your own writerly voice, your characters — and now of course that you have these characters in hand the question becomes how to place them in a world — a setting, scenes … the bones of the fictional world so to speak. I’m going to be addressing the short-story here in particular, only because it was my focus for a number of years — and because I believe if you can write a short story you have every tool you need to move on to a novel.

The two short stories that I wrote for admission into my MFA program were stories that were loosely veiled pieces of non-fiction. At the time, it was easiest for me to follow the bones of an event that had actually happened to me (for in those days I took the Hemingway quote of ‘write what you know’ far too seriously) but what I can see in looking back on those pieces is that they were first drafts that were never allowed to develop fully — they did not have all of the essential components a piece of fiction needs: plot, character, tone, and form. “Plot is what happens in a narrative; character is who it happens to (or who makes it happen); and tone is what it sounds like. Form is the pattern of its assembly, its arrangement, structure and design” (Bell 25). … I had done the first part — which is I had sat with the characters and I had removed my inner critic and just allowed myself to enter the dream of what would happen if these characters were sitting with one another, and I imagine, for some of you — that’s where you are now.

The next step is to understand the importance of setting/scene in a piece of fiction (which is that matter of form/assembly)– and to begin to put them to work in your own piece. I like how Madison Smartt Bell puts it in his book Narrative Design — he says that the first part of the process of writing is imagination (which is where we are) — and the next, he suggests, is rendering — which is where we’re heading.

And while we’re at it — I can’t think of a better book to recommend in terms of structure than Bell’s book Narrative Design — which I still use. In it he revisits the triangle — do you recall this from any English Literature class? Imagine we’re beginning at the base of the triangle’s slope — this is the character’s beginning. As we follow the narrative, events happen, characters arrive and depart until we arrive at the critical moment of the story/novel — and then we have the falling action and resolution.

The bones of a story, the skeleton is comprised of scenes. Scenes are what determine the pace — dialogue notoriously speeds things up, exposition (and detailed descriptions of event) slow things down. Take a look at the excerpt from the Ford novel Wildlife that I included above. It seems deceptively simple at first because we have only a single character — and their interior monologue in the first person — but notice the vivid descriptions of Joe’s world in the last few sentences– what they reveal about his mindset, what he notices, what tone it sets — how it grounds us in a particular emotional place for what might come next in the novel.

Whether you happen to already have scenes in hand or are just working with characters this is a terrific exercise that allows you to see how detail anchors us in scene/ and allows for our readers to continual suspend their disbelief (that vivid and continuous dream idea again.)

Homework: I love the exercise from David Ray in What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers — The Five-Highlighter exercise. Using five different colored highlighters, mark a text (first a piece of fiction that you admire and consider successful, and then your own) with different colors for each sense impression, for example blue for visual, red for auditory, green for taste etc. Find passages that use all five senses — and then see how your own scenes match up.

Gearing up for the Summer Olympics in a few weeks, I once again created a Summer Olympic printable schedule by going day-by-day through the posted schedule since I couldn’t find one in an easy-to-use format.  These times are for EST so check your own listings to make sure these are correct.  Since others asked last time, I put the Word Doc I created online and you can access it here since I made it a static page: http://tinyurl.com/summerolympics. (That url works if you want to tweet it so others can find it.)  It will be updated with new information whenever I see it.  And yes, you can watch the Olympics online, but we’re a gather-around-the-television type family more than a view-on-the-computer family.  So if you are too, here are all the events so you don’t miss one.

The Old Olympic trials schedule has been pushed down to the bottom of the page, and now you’ll find the schedule from pre-games (yes, there are sports that go on before the Opening Ceremony) to the Closing Ceremony in an easy-to-use, printable format.

Our must-see events this summer are anything swimming, all diving, and gymnastics.  How about you?

I am not balancing life well at this moment in time.  I started the week off strong, but then work and obligations overtook me.  I found myself thrashing about in a sea of words and code, with timesuck maelstroms dragging me under.  I would go to bed at 1 am and then wake up at 7 am and try to get more work accomplished and couldn’t get a hold of my life.

This meant that I was incapable of purchasing soap.

Crap, you think as you read that: does that mean Melissa didn’t bathe all week?  No, I showered, using Josh’s bar of soap the first day.  I was then caught by Josh and it was implied through the way he incredulously intoned: “you used my soap?” that I was not welcome to keep using said soap.  I then switched to a travel bar that I unearthed since I couldn’t get my shit together to go to the store.  Until one night late in the week when I was out, and I nipped into the drugstore to grab a two-pack of Dove.

The next day, I stayed in my pyjamas until 4 pm — as did the twins — while I finished a project.  Exhausted and mentally fried, I climbed in the shower to clear my head before I tackled the next task.  And as I soaped up my body, I noted that the soap did not smell like my normal soap.  Nor did it feel like my normal soap.  This soap had flavour crystals or something that looked like little drops of Certs Retsyn. (How horrified am I to Google that and discover that Retsyn is copper gluconate.  I don’t know what the hell that is, but it sounds like metal.)  And it was scratching me.  My soap was literally scratching me.

After the shower, I fished the box out of the recycling pile.  It turns out that I not only forget my pants on long trips, but I can’t purchase soap when I have too many projects going at once.  I apparently purchased an exfoliating bar, so I will be spending the next few weeks buffing my skin since I don’t have time again to buy more soap.

But as a side note: do you have your own bar of soap in the shower, or do you share one with your partner?  I’d love to know the breakdown of how many people share or hoard their soap.  We are soap hoarders here (though I am also a soap stealer when I need to be).

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Father’s Day” (Our Tiny Angels)
• “Overjoyed” (Finding Our New Normal)
• “And Another One” (For the Love of Baby Liam)

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Lady of the Lantern has a lovely, lilting post about the realities of her life.  About the push and pull of life: she wants the cream on bread, she knows she shouldn’t have the cream on bread.  She wants to return to work, she doesn’t feel settled returning to work.  I loved the simplicity and the rhythm of this post.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about confidence that resonated with me.  The post also provides you with a way to look at your own confidence levels.  She writes, “And the emotions of pregnancy loss and infertility, failure and self-doubt as a woman, all these emotions pulled my self-confidence down.  Initially, I was scared to go out, scared to meet people, in case the tears came, in case the awkward comments and questions were delivered.”  I appreciated the rawness of her confidence dissection.

Lastly, last weekend was Father’s Day in the United States and A Little Blog about the Big Infertility has a moving post about Father’s Day, her father, and a song from the Lion King.  She writes about her daughter, “Even though V is not biologically related, every one in my family notices she bears a resemblance, physically to my dad. And you may think this is weird, but sometimes she stares off into space and smiles like someone is there, and I wonder if he isn’t watching over us.”  The post made me want to reach through the screen and give her a hug.

And a side note because this video is so much fun, from Pretend to Enjoy (a non-IF blogger, as far as I know):

Taste the Rainbow – Stop Motion Candy and Paint from Jennifer Dorsman on Vimeo.

The roundup to the Roundup: Do you share soap, or so you each have your own bar of soap in your house?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 15th and June 22nd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.