The Universe Will Blow Your Mind

Hi, folks!  No deep thoughts here today, just a guided tour that I plan to take a few more times today.  Want  a windshield view of deep space?  Here is an amazing one for you.  Make sure to click for the guided tour!

The Others

Yep - I've been watching Lost.  I realize that I'm a few years late to the party, but better late than never, right?  Ever since a friend of mine forwarded me the TED Talk video of JJ Abrams and I realized that this was the man to whom I owe the just-plain-freaking-awesome reboot of Star Trek, I've loved him.  Hence the late-night, Hulu-plus foray into Lost.  I'm in the middle of season three, and Dharma has Jack.  There is a lot of confusion about the Hostiles and the Others and Dharma and who they all are, but the crash survivors are pretty sure about one thing: anyone who isn't them is bad.

I have a feeling that JJ Abrams is just messing with me, though.  After seeing all of the back stories so far and how nearly everyone has a complicated, very gray past, I'm pretty sure that even the Others have a reason for what they're doing.  I mean, look at Juliette.  And as much as I dislike Benjamin Linus, I'm suspending judgement.  That seems lately like the best thing for me to do in fiction and in life.

After all, following the loudest voices in my religious circles left me looking at the world full of ordinary people around me as if they were all the Others: crazed wack jobs with no other aim in life than to destroy the country and the family and everything sane and normal and decent as fast as they could.  It took stepping off my particular stretch of beach and meeting them face to face for me to realize that they were just like me and that the crazy ones were the loud, religious voices.

In fact, though I've removed those influences from my life, I had to calm my son down last night after he accidentally watched an ignorant, sensationalist piece of religious propaganda on YouTube.  Seeing his frightened tears and working to undo the damage to his world brought me back to a lot of Sunday and Wednesday night church services dedicated to explaining the end of time.  I wished I could go back and tell the scared little girl I was that things would be okay - that no scary monsters and demons were coming for her.  I wish I could tell her that she would get to live in the world well into adulthood and get married and have kids.  I wish I could tell her that the people she passed in stores and libraries and museums were okay, that they wanted the same things she did, and that she could find friends among them.

My revelation from Lost so far?  Everyone has a back story.  Everyone has both darkness and light in them. And no matter who they follow, where they camp, or what they know, everyone is on the same island.

White and Black Hats

When I read fiction, I'm comfortable with guys in white and black hats.  I understand clear good and evil.  I even think, or have thought, that that's the way things should be.  The guy on the white horse with the tin badge shoots the leader of the colloquially-named gang that has been terrorizing the village, and order is restored.  There's probably even a smooch in it for him at the end from his lady love.  But there's one problem with the way I like fiction to be.  Life isn't like that.

Years ago, I joined a book club in my neighborhood.  Each lady chose a book for a month and then hosted the discussion of that book in her home.  One lady, I honestly don't remember who, chose Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.  I hated that book with a passion because it blurred lines between good and evil that I didn't think ought to be blurred.  I wanted the villain to be the villain, no matter how sorry I secretly felt for him.

Years passed, and I changed.  Then my beloved Jo came out with a new book, and with fear and trepidation for her, I began to read.  (Don't laugh at me calling her Jo.  In my head, we're on a first-name basis, and she loves Dawn Hyperdrive.)  You know how you watch a scene in a movie you kind of want to see and don't want to have seen?  That's how I read her book.  And the very quality that made me hate Jodi Picoult made me love Jo even more than I already did.  Jo loved everybody, even the people who were supposed to be villains.  She understood them with a perfect and charitable empathy.

What if everyone is like Alice's looking glass?  What if there is an alternate reality inside everyone, one we don't see just by knocking on the front door?  What if we never really understand what makes a saint a saint or a villain a villain until we stand in front of the mirror of his soul and see ourselves?

I think I owe Jodi Picoult an apology.

Us versus Them

When I was growing up in Christian school, I regularly attended chapel assemblies.  Most of the time, our headmaster or one of the school teachers or pastors on staff at the church tied to the school would speak on some spiritual issue or other.  We'd sing a song or two and then sit back and listen.  For a long while, I even took notes; it was a good habit for me that helped me in school.  But occasionally, maybe once every year or so, we'd get a slide show.

The slide show would introduce us to the Evils of Rock Music and Pop Culture in General, and they were usually interesting in the way that live war footage on the news is interesting.  The shock of learning what was really out there terrified me.  Because I accepted the teaching that my teachers and pastors were in a straight down-line from God Almighty and that questioning them was tantamount to questioning the Big Guy Himself, I accepted as true all of the presentations on backward masking (messages from Satan hidden in rock records played backwards), occult symbols on album covers, and ritual abuse and sacrifice done by hard-core Satanist fans.

I lived a lot of my childhood and young adult years believing that the world was bad and that the people in it were all bad, too, except for the people from my denomination and a slim selection of other denominations with acceptable doctrine.  I peered at the world outside from behind a fence of prejudice, determined to be horrified at what I saw.  So I was.  But some stubborn part of me still liked part of what I saw.  I loved U2 and Star Trek and novels by atheists like Steinbeck and Hemingway.  I just thought that liking those things was, if not strictly a sin (listening to U2 definitely was), then a dangerous, slippery path to sin.

As I've grown older, I've stepped outside the bounds of my denomination, which I left.  I thought that I had left those prejudices behind, but every time I think I'm completely free, I realize I have another door in front of me to open.  Recently, a series of books and shows and songs and personal encounters have showed me another locked door that I'm beginning to open.  I'm beginning to realize that the people around me are just like me.  Being a part of my denomination didn't make me safe; it made me scared.  And in truth, the world isn't us versus them.  The world is just us.

Distraction

Today was a distracted day.  I finished writing through the end of chapter 5 in book two, but it took me literally all day.  I woke up late and made my daughter eggs because she looked cute and asked me with huge puppy dog eyes.

And then I sat down with very good intentions and listened to my husband's phone calls for a couple of hours while I stared at the same paragraph over and over and willed it to make sense in my head.  He has a very loud and penetrating phone voice that I can hear from clear out in the yard, bless his heart.  And then my darling daughter came in and asked for a bath - which means that she wet her pants.  So I gave her a bath.

 Then I realized I was hungry and went to the kitchen for carrots and hummus and tea while Jane bathed.  After my snack, I thought I should start dinner.  So I made a stew and garlic bread.  Then I sat down again and actually wrote a few pages.  Tea is magic juice, folks.  The toddler bathed for a long while, and my husband mowed grass.  A lawnmower is kind of a nice thing to hear in the background while you write.

But if you recognize this rodent, you'll gather how the rest of the day went.  In between dressing my toddler and getting her food and listening to her questions and her reports on what the cat was doing and how her tummy felt and what her poop looked like and listening to my husband's afternoon phone calls (my other kids have "borrowed" and "lost" my earbuds, which means I will not see them again in this world), I managed to obsess over the fate of one character and force an end to the chapter.  I will probably rewrite it later.

And though my very strong natural inclination is to smack my head repeatedly for giving in to the distractions around me and accomplishing much less today than I should have done, I am giving myself a congratulations sticker.  There are eight pages (seven and a half if we're picky) in the world now that did not exist this morning.  And eight pages are a lot more than I write on the days when I throw my hands up and let the distractions win entirely.  One day, I'll look back on my distractions and laugh.

Or write.

Dear Jane

Dear Jane,
Last night, I took you to McDonald's.  You are three, and going there is a big deal.  You got a chicken nugget happy meal with fries and an orange drink and sliced apples, which were the only things you didn't touch.  You talked and chair-danced to Motown and laughed and climbed all over the play place.

Right now, you are potty training.  You are really fascinated with the ritual of going and wiping and flushing and washing your hands.  Going at McDonald's is fun, because they have loud hot-air dryers for your hands.  But it is also scary, because they don't have tiny potties, and you are afraid to fall in.  So I kneel in front of you and hold you in a kind of hug while you go so that you are safe.

I am trying not to laugh at the noises you make as you try to poop.  You are really serious about being a good girl and keeping your pants clean.  But all of a sudden, holding you this way with your face resting against my face and your arms around my neck and my hands holding your back prompts a memory of me sitting this way on a hospital toilet while your dad held me with his face against my face and my arms around his neck and his hands holding my back while I felt the worst pain of my life so far.

I remember how necessary being held was right then and how frightened I was that something would go wrong.  I remember wishing for a mother and crying along with the other pains and fears that I didn't have a mother to comfort me.  I remember all of my modesty and careful pretense utterly deserting me as I sobbed and breathed.

And as I held you tonight and heard your almost-baby breathing so close to my ear, I thought: Twenty years, maybe thirty years from now, you will be straining like this with your own child.  And I will be so glad to hold you just like this if you need me.  Whatever happens between us while you are growing up, I will be there to kneel in front of you in that painful and purposeful embrace to soothe you and keep you safe.

Love, Mom

The many ways I have screwed up

The paperback version of Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death launched yesterday.  And while I'm grateful it's out and excited to reach a whole bunch of people who eschew e-readers on principle, the process of launching it has showed me yet again that the flaws in my psyche which I thought had tucked their tails and run are still with me.  And I'm going to trot them out for you, digital reader, whoever you are, if you exist, primarily because I want to warn myself against them again and send them running for a while if I can.

The biggest one is pride.  When I imagined becoming a published author, I assumed I would have people.  You know what I mean - the people actors in bad eighties movies meant when  they said, "I'll have my people call your people."  Part of me is surprised that I don't have agents and publishers and their minions banging down my door and begging to register my ISBNs, enter orders for my books at the printer, and arrange distribution.  And the more I let that pride spread its tail feathers in my soul, the less I'll be willing to say, "I don't know how this works.  I don't understand this process.  I am willing to learn.  I am willing to do whatever needs to be done."  I need to remember that I'm not a big shot.  I'm my own minion.

I'm also stubborn.  If I get an idea in my head, I don't let it go.  For instance, I got an idea in my head that before I did anything else for the print edition, I needed to see a proof.  I needed to go through a physical book in my hand to find all of the errors.  Only when the physical book in my hand was perfect could I register it, find out how to sell it, link Paypal accounts to widgets, and look at all of the rest of the work that needed to be done.  Because I let my stubbornness bray in the corners of my soul like a mule, I ended up doing things that could have been done months ago all at the last minute.

Boy, turtles are ugly.  Their heads look like snake heads, and they've got gross claws and yucky feet.  But what this guy is doing is totally me.  When I feel pressure, I tuck inside a shell.  I don't talk to anyone, even to people who could help.  I don't want to bother them.  They're busy.  I can do this myself.  I'll think about it later.  This kind of thinking really sets me back.  And I will be much happier when I can lift my head up and talk, when I can say out loud, "I need help.  I want you to help me.  I am really far behind, and I don't know what to do next."

I may not have people, in the sense of soulless ciphers that exist to do my bidding, but I do have friends and partners around me.  Like all human beings, I'm a herd animal.  I can ask for advice.  I can tell the rest of the herd what's happening.  I can let other people check my stubbornness and hubris and blind self-effacement.

Until I get a publishing deal - then I'll have people.

Shut up.
************************
Buy your copy of Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death for print or e-reader at my website now!

The Ultimate Mystery Box

When we consider the vastness of all that we do not know, we can find wonder - wonder and humility.  But presumption and pride kill them both.

 Because I am a person of faith who finds science intriguing, I stand between two camps of otherwise good people who despise each other's viewpoints.  Often, they also despise each other.  And I would like to raise a timid hand here and ask for both of them to return to wonder and humility.

We don't know for certain what lies much further than our own cosmic doorstep right now.  We have sent machines further and further away to look for us, but comparatively, our breadth of knowledge is small, and we are all making educated guesses.  When we look to the past, whether we choose the lens of faith or the lens of skepticism, we all presume.  Science is at its root observation, and whatever happened in the beginning, no human being observed it.

What we do observe now is beautiful and exciting and inspiring.  It is mysterious.  Our machine ambassadors have captured images of "the Great Dance" that make us long to see more of it.  We recognize our kinship to the universe around us, and like hopeful orphans, we are coming as fast as we are able, suitcase in hand, to meet our distant relations.

I hope that we come with what is best in us as human beings.  I hope that we come with gratitude and daring, with openness and amazement, with curiosity and goodwill.  I hope that the farther we travel from home, the more we can name it and every person in it dear to us - fellow beings that we love for their similarities to us and prize for their differences.  I hope that all of us can learn to love the questions that remain to us, as well as all of those who ask them.

Read Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death as an e-book at Amazon or Smashwords, or order it as a paperback through my website beginning next week!

True Love

Of course, true love looks a lot different after fifteen or thirty or fifty-five years.  By then, it's acquired a patina of wear from failed businesses, shared parenting, and forgiven misunderstandings.  All that water under the bridge leaves a mark.

But there's something about the moment of recognition with another soul that captivates us.  There's something about the brief window of time when love exists not as a scrapbook but as a mystery box.  Then, as we never do again, we see possibility and hope and wonder in each other.  Falling in love is a kind of magic that most of us don't experience too often.

And whether or not we experience it for ourselves, we wish it for other people.  Love, especially fragile new love, invites us to champion it.  We see two people drawing together, and we root for them.  We want their story to succeed.  We want them to open their own mystery box together.

The couple in this Disney short (Paperman - you can see the full version on the Wreck-It Ralph DVD) provoke this kind of empathy in me.  I want them to find each other.  I want them to be happy.  And beyond the feeling of experiencing true love yourself, this empathy is a kind of magic, too.  People who feel it don't get anything from another person's love story except the quiet, generous satisfaction that there is a little more happiness in the world - another chance that something can go marvelously, serendipitously right.

My first book, Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death, is available from Amazon and Smashwords as an e-book, and it's coming to my website next week as a paperback book!

Her Morning Elegance

Happy Tuesday!  Happy Snow Day!  Happy second day of spring break!

And to continue the theme of mystery boxes, I offer you a strangely captivating video that has been a real mystery box to me.  Who is the woman?  Who is the man in black?  What is their story?  And why does stop-motion video suddenly seem so fresh and exciting?

Tell me your guesses - and then go pick up a copy of Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death for Kindles or other e-readers, or try the first chapter free!

The Mystery Box

Last week, a close friend shared a video on Facebook and tagged me in the post.  I almost didn't watch it, because it's eighteen minutes long.  But because I trust my friend, I thought, I'll just try the first three or four minutes and see.  Eighteen minutes later, my imagination was on fire.

Obviously, everyone else in the room adored J.J. Abrams for producing Lost, but I never noticed him until he made Star Trek in 2009 and won my loyalty forever.  I saw that movie in the theater three times and bought it as soon as it came out.  So J.J. Abrams is now a guy I want to hear talking for eighteen minutes.

The whole talk centers on the idea of a mystery box.  So I immediately started thinking about mystery boxes: the red and blue pills in The Matrix; the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland; the strange, pale boy at Forks High who doesn't talk to anyone; the box Pandora was forbidden to open; the apple Eve was forbidden to eat.  We are creatures of insatiable curiosity.  Lock a door and we will find a way to open it.

What I love about the Abrams talk is his idea that we are all mystery boxes, each person alive today or who ever lived.  And each unfamiliar place is a mystery box.  Each new idea is a mystery box.  Abrams made me feel like an explorer with vast, untouched horizons in front of me.  The world is a mystery box full of mystery boxes.  And I think I'm going to go open a few now.  Here's the video!

Open the mystery box of the Dawn Hyperdrive world!  The first book, Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death, is available at Amazon and Smashwords as an ebook and is coming out as a paperback later this week at my website!

Now

The last inspiration on my desktop is one I shared before.  It means a great deal to me, the girl who gave up ballet in second grade because I had started too late to be really good at it and the teenager who gave up violin in seventh grade because all of the really serious players had started learning when they were toddlers and the young woman who never really thought twice in college about a serious acting career because all of the good movies had already been made.

Let me tell you about the woman (yes, the woman - she wrote under a pen name) who puts a friendly, imaginary hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye and says these words quite clearly to me when I see them.  But first, I'd like you to look at her.

Mary Ann's father assumed when she was five that she would never be lovely and able to marry; so he sent her away to boarding school to be educated.  In those all-female boarding schools, she learned Latin and Greek and logic, and she read with appetite.  When her mother died, Mary Ann was sixteen.  Her formal education ended then so that she could keep house for her father.  Though she kept reading and educating herself and questioning the religious teaching of her youth, she remained obedient and quiet at home until she was 30.

Then her life began.

When the man who had told her she was too ugly to marry and refused to hear her spiritual doubts or to let her live and work independently finally died, Mary Ann went to Switzerland and stayed there for a good, long while.  When she came back, she found work as an editor and translator and found love with a man who would remain faithful to her for twenty years, until his death.  She published the first of seven acclaimed novels when she was thirty-nine.

I am thirty-eight.

So when Mary Ann Evans tells me that it's never too late for me to be who I might have been, she lifts me from the inactive despair of believing that my opportunities have passed me by long ago.  I believe her, because she lived what she said.  She died at the age of sixty having made her mark on the world.  If I live only that long, I want to spend every day of the twenty-two years left to me doing what I love.  I want to open my eyes to the world.  I want to connect with the valuable, individual human beings around me.  I want to choose my innermost desires.  I want to wow the Muse.  I want to do all that is in my heart.  It's never too late to start.

Read Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death at Amazon or at Smashwords, and read the first chapter free at my website, where the paperback edition will be available starting next week!

Present

This painting is one I love.  The artist used so many different colors for the clouds and such a lovely shade of blue for the sky.  I like the peace of quiet country fields, and I like the scale of the human figures in the world around them. What I see in this image is that hard work is necessary and honorable and beautiful; that ordinary people, whether we only pass through a certain patch of land or whether we see it and handle it every day, fit naturally into the grander scheme of the universe; and that no matter how muddy our shoes, we all share the same, glorious heavens.

But I have the luxury of space and time and the changes both have wrought on the world showing me what I see in that wheat field.  If I had been the farmer, I would have noticed the clouds only as they told me the weather.  I would have noticed the horse and rider only through a whole overlay of personal history that shaped how I felt about seeing him near that field.  If I had met the artist sitting day after day with his paints while I worked with my hands, I would probably have resented any prompt from him to look at the heavens.  After all, I'd only have time to look at them properly when my back was too bent and my hands too stiff and my legs too slow to work a full day anymore.

And in my life now, with my washing machine and bank account and instant access to global news, what do I miss?  What glorious heavens stretch over me unnoticed?  What fellow travelers leave without a word?  What truth do I fail to draw from the well of the world because I pass it by with my eyes lowered?

So one of the reminders on my computer desktop is: I am present.  Because I completely and utterly adore Kate DiCamillo for giving the world Edward Tulane and Despereaux and Opal and Mercy Watson, I read her Facebook posts.  One of them mused on the old schoolroom habit of saying "present" when the teacher called your name, and Kate expanded into the notion of saying to the world around you calling your name, "I am present."

To whatever is calling my name today - I am present.  I am listening.  I am here.

My first book, Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death, is available from Amazon for Kindles and Kindle apps and from Smashwords for all other e-readers.  Check out my website to read the first chapter free!

Relentless

Here is something my husband does: he uses dry-erase markers on things that are not dry-erase boards.  Mirrors, windows, refrigerator doors - I will randomly find to-do lists, upcoming bills, people to call, exercise routines, or inspirational quotes on any surface that will take (and hopefully one day lose) dry-erase ink.  So I find dry-erase markers in unusual places in our house, like the bathroom sink.

One time that habit came in handy for me.  I was folding clothes on the bed and half-listening to an interview on the radio in my bathroom, which was tuned to NPR.  It seemed like an appropriate clothes-folding soundtrack.  But suddenly the person being interviewed mentioned Steven Pressfield, the author who brought Sparta to vivid, shocking life for me years ago in Gates of Fire.  I tried and failed, I'm sure through some disastrous fault of my own, to read Tides of War, but Gates of Fire had seared Steven Pressfield's name into my memory.  So I went into the bathroom to hear the interview better.  And I heard and scrawled in dry-erase ink the following quote from Pressfield: Show the Muse you're serious.

Whenever I'd thought of the Muse before, I'd regarded her as the personification of inspiration or luck.  If I saw her at all, I saw her dancing away from me out of sheer perversity.  But Pressfield made me think of her another way - as a severe but valuable teacher I wanted to impress.  I'm sure you've heard the Mary Heaton Vorse quote: "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."  Well, I thought as I looked at the words on my bathroom mirror, that I can do.

It was the work of a moment, as Bertie Wooster would say, to change the time on my alarm as I stood there, contemplating.  The next morning, I woke up at four.  I did the same thing every weekday for a few months.  And for a while, rising early worked for me.  It boosted me over the feeling that I had no time to spare for writing.  Then daylight savings time arrived and completely kicked my butt.  I lost my rhythm.  But from time to time, especially when I stopped writing every day, I set my alarm early.  I wanted those extra hours, yes, but I also wanted to prove myself to the Muse.  Look, I would say as I opened my computer while stars still winked sleepily outside, I'm serious, lady.  So you'd just better show up.

Read my first book, Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death!  You can find a copy at Amazon or Smashwords, and you can try the first chapter free at my website.

Dream

Another of the words of inspiration on the desktop of my computer is actually a phrase from the Old Testament: "Do all that is in your heart."

I don't know how you hear those words.  Maybe they sound like an order to you, or maybe they sound like a dare.  To me, they sound gentle.  They are permission: a paid ticket, an arm extended to the horizon, a soft nudge and whisper, an open door.

Where I used to live, I had to drive up a steep hill to go home.  As my car ascended, the incline hid the neighborhood beneath so that I felt that I was driving right into the sky.  Only at the last minute did the road appear under my tires, reassuringly solid, while the houses flashed into view as if I had crossed into another world entirely.

"Do all that is in your heart."  Those words fill me with that same thrill of possibility, that same sense that a door is opening within me and inviting me inside.  I need that kind of encouragement on days when I am too busy to create, on days when the full kitchen sink or the paid work waiting on my desk demand that I give them everything I have.  Obligation is a bold and heartless thief.

When I invoke this phrase, "Do all that is in your heart," it acts as a kind of force-field against the obligation that harries me.  It reminds me that I have permission to create.  The doors are open to me.  I can pass through them into whatever horizon appears to receive me.

Read my debut space adventure novel for kids: Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death!  You can buy a copy at Amazon or Smashwords, and you can try the first chapter free at my website.

Connection

Connection does not come naturally to me.  Part of my soul constantly longs for silence and solitude, something in short supply around my house.  Do you remember that scene in Date Night where Tina Fey's character talks about her fantasy of checking into a hotel alone?  I was so tracking with her.  It would be kind of like being a hermit, minus the poor personal hygiene and sparse diet.

So it's ironic that one of my favorite books is Howard's End by E.M. Forster, because Forster's epigram and main theme is "Only Connect."  The characters in the book suffer when they fail to make the connections presented to them.  In fact, the snobbish isolation of the main family, the Wilcoxes, eventually disgraces and ruins them, while the foolishly generous and warm-hearted connection of the Schlegels secures them an inheritance.

The Schlegels befriend a poor man, Leonard Bast, who works as a clerk in an office, a job that neither excites nor engages him.   Then one day, a description of nature that he reads in a book connects so deeply with him that he walks all night under the stars to recreate that connection in reality.  Afterwards, he can't keep from sharing his experience with real people.

I think that Leonard has to share his deep connection to nature with other people because we human beings are necessary to one another.  We rub off each other's rough edges and comfort one another in a way that no food or substance or indulgence can match.  We matter to each other.  We show each other truths and beauties that we would never know alone.

And when we finally "slipped the surly bonds of Earth / Put out [a] hand and touched the face of God," we turned around and looked at ourselves.  For the first time, we saw our fragile home: the small, warm island in an ocean of cold and lifeless night where each of us draws breath.  We are bound to one another here in a community of mutual life.  And one of the noblest and best jobs an author can do is to show us one of those small, temporary, momentous connections while it lasts.  Here is the epigram of our existence: only connect.

Buy Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death at Amazon or Smashwords, and try the first chapter free at my website first!