New digs

Hi,

I am very excited, I just took on a new gig with Women’s Radio.  In that space I post articles on writing as well as blog postings.  Visit me there for more on writing!  I’ll also continue to post here, but not as often.  Come stop by!

http://bit.ly/bI6c9e

I want to be Susan Boyle

I want to be Susan Boyle

I don’t have the same kind of time as Susan, I’m older than she.  But I think the three  years can be bridged.  So I’ll repeat, I want to be Susan Boyle.

I want to have my chance. When asked, on Britain’s Got Talent, why so long?  She replied “up until now, on one’s given me a chance.”  I weep again. I cry every time I watch that break through moment of talent and nerve. Every time.
Can I do that too? Can I have a chance even at this late date?  Even at this later time in my life when fame is reserved for the under thirty set.  Susan did it. I can too.

What I want is my Susan Boyle opportunity.  The problem is that there is no American Idol or Britain’s Got Talent for writers. We are on our own. Conversely, there is little make up involved.

I want the chance, I want the success of chance.  Susan made her name and her fame strictly on her audition, not by winning.  She came in second in the final program.  Did that matter? It did not.  She has a CD, she has 38 million hits on her video,( a number of them from me). A number of them, I suspect, from people just like me who admire her nerve, her chance and her success.

That is my hero, the nervy, coming from no where Susan Boyle who took a chance, came through. and is now just famous enough. Maybe more than just famous enough.

You go Susan. Hold our dreams, while we wait for our chance.

Character Sketch: the Photographer

I once spent my birthday with a  new photographer I hired for brochure and poster work.  His name was Jim Block. And he was an artist (pronounced arteest). He was a baby boomer by statistic and experience and I am a boomer by bare statistic. He was  fifty, I just turned thirty eight. Our whole conversation reminded me of the Steely Dan  song “Hey nineteen. No we have nothing in comon, no we can’t talk at all.”

Jim was still in the throes of the child debate. His girl friend’s biological alarm just went off, yet they were still thinking. He explained how he had researched the subject throughly. He thought that babysitting his  8 and 10 year old spoiled niece and nephew would give him a fair taste of what parenting was all about. He thought he may take the children  to Disneyland.   He and his girlfriend weren’t married but jointly own a house. They exchanged rings beaten out of quarters. “In God we Trust”  could still be read along the thin edges of the ring.  He had followed many careers. Photography was the latest.

I thought, I am not his generation at all. How could I be? There’s 12 years between us, which is a long time in adult consciousness, an unfathomable gap in childhood. Andrew and I are of the opinion that six years between siblings constitutes two only children, and six years in family time, produces great differences in income and in attitude. Wouldn’t that be the same for a generation?

It was interesting to talk with him, or rather listen to him. He spoke at length while I drove, analysising his life, his girlfriend and the clients we were setting up to photograph. He took up all the oxygen in the car, I had no air to speak.
And it was my birthday, something I loathed to tell him because he’d make it all about him.

Was this the difference between a Boomer and an Xer?  The inability to listen to another life, another way of experiencing the world?  It seemed it was all about him, hour after hour. He was stifling.  His story of searching for the perfect rice cooker made me want to leap from the moving car. And I was driving.

I don’t have a resolution for this, I’m just recording a day.

My best friends are Boomers and one person does not a generation make.

But one experience can make a hell of a great character sketch.

Sea Food Friday

All you can eat -  Sea Food  Friday
2 flavors of pudding
under the salad bar sign.
Grim guests march
Up and down the vast selection
pasta, enormous king crab legs,
cups of butter
finally settling into seats
much larger than those of the antique dining set
at home.

Spring Colors

March Yellow Daffodils

On the fresh lawn

A plastic Santa

Faded to pink

The Souvenir

I use a wonderful mug I bought in Japan.
It has funny pushed out face on one side of the mug and the same funny face pushed in on the other side – like sculpture.

I remember picking it up from the table in the large gift store at the Hakone Open Air Museum. The Open Air Museum was not a sanctioned experience listed on our itinerary. We came across it by accident, on our way to something else. The guide shrugged and said  well,sure you can go to the museum if you like. It’s not raining.  So we did.

Most of the art was outdoors, but one indoor building  housed  Picasso prints and a   replica of Picasso’s studio, incongruous and delightful.
And I liked this mug, a souvenir to remind me of this interesting and sudden experience that was so lovely.

My mother looked down at the mug and sighed heavily, you aren’t thinking of buying something like that are you?
I knew the rules of travel; don’t purchase anything that can break, don’t purchase anything too big to fit into your pocket, don’t buy anything that must be shipped home.  Don’t buy anything sharp that won’t make it through security. Don’t buy.

My mother does not  like to shop.  In fact, some gift shops terrify her and she refuses to enter, which is fine, everyone has their own tolerances, but my mother drags ME away from gift stores as if they are carrying porn, drugs and druggy porn  rather than photography and history books.
But I persist. Just as I persisted with the Amelia Edwards book I bought in Luxor, just as I persisted with the tiny porcelain chickens we found in Dubrovnik.  I knew what I wanted, but resisting her disapproval is difficult, sometimes impossible.  But I learned over the years to listen to what I want.
And I bought the mug.  Breakable, awkward and too big for my pocket, it’s now mine.

It sit on my desk this morning, reminding me of the museum, and the unexpected afternoon filled  with art.  That mug does exactly what a souvenir is suppose to do; encouraging me to do it again.

Character Sketch

You never know what you can do with an encounter – bad or good. This woman lives in Santa Rosa, CA and I encountered her briefly while I was walking my dog – Zeus -  This is what I was able to write.

Character sketch

The woman a the top of the street yells at the neighborhood kids
for touching her lawn.
She hovers at the front window
to catch miscreants with dogs
did you clean up the poop?
She yells through the closed window.
Did you put it in the correct garbage bin?
No, you idiot not that gray one
The other gray one.
Three years ago
a new street sign was planted in her precious yard.
Seemingly overnight.
She calls the City every month to protest the sign
She writes letters to the editor every week
Objecting with various verbs
to city signs on private property
She lives
With an elderly parent
the one she liked the least.
Cat hair covers her Wall Mart sweat pants.
Her long  hair is a money saving gray.
Her face has sagged
from the gravity of her situation.
The city sign in her yard.
Three years old but still looking new and  yellow.
Dead End.

National Craft Month

In honor of National Craft Month – March, this is my personal history with craft encounters:

Cut snowflakes in January – all mine looked alike.

Glued and pasted Valentine cards in February – was relieved to later discover pre-made sets at the grocery store.

Pasted Shamrocks in March – Some class mates could create a pot of gold, a rainbow and make full-scale leprechaun hats, to dress up that one moment on March 17th.  My hat never fit.

Dyed Easter eggs in April – my mother was blessed with a steady hand and hours of patience. I was cursed with an awkward technique and a distractible nature. Three eggs; purple, green and a sort of brown.

Created May flowers and hats, we wore the hats about as long as we did the Leprechaun hats, but they were pretty and spring-like.  Oh, except mine.

June was a fabulous moment of freedom where the only art project was to mark off the last days of school with a red pen.

My mother loved to suspend red white and blue streamers across the back porch and post flags for the Fourth of July. I stood on the sidelines and watched the annual parade, but declined to decorate a float or perform. Yes, I let the parade pass me by.

September brought back the groove of crafts and activities. We gathered red, orange and yellow leaves and pressed them between sheets of wax paper. That was back when you could play with a hot iron on public school property.

What did my Halloween pumpkin resemble?  The terms now a days is special. I created very special Jack O’Lanterns.

We made pilgrim hats for Thanksgiving. This represented my first visceral experience that boys had it much easier in life than girls. Their pilgrim hats were easy to make – they looked like that of a leprechaun.  The girl’s hats were impossible white things that didn’t stand up well under increasing frantic folding. And I was only five.

December was so replete with images and creative possibilities; baking, ornaments, hand made gifts, hand made cards, garlands, flags, festive hats, that the mind reeled.

I began to love August because there was no craft project attached to the month.

So here is to August, the month that for me is one long craft-less holiday.

Angry Editors

I understand how a book in an edit phase can weight heavily on an author’s soul. I was just hired to help an author with her book, now replete with red edits.  She couldn’t even look at it. She handed the MS me and hired me on the spot to read her own work and tell her what to do.

Some editors are marvelous, they understand the goal of a creative work and they understand how to deliver edits and improvement in, shall I say, a kind manner?

Editors are terribly valuable to writers and more often than not, help.

And they cost the earth to hire.

I suspect that like shoes, with an editor, you get what you pay for.

The expensive editor will know what you need, know you can’t proof your own work, and know that because you can’t do this yourself; they have job security.

The value priced editor will do the work, certainly, they will mark up the manuscript with red arrows, circles and long discourse on just WHY the comma should go HERE and didn’t you study fragments in school? You see the heavy sighs all over the page.

These editors extract bits of your soul as part of their compensation. These editors also work on hard copies, making sure you see all their red marks, the margin notes about the history of the comma, question marks (that’s all, just question marks).  Comments like “I don’t understand this.” Their triumph is mailing back the bleeding manuscript to you knowing that you now must re- type the whole MS according to their corrections and spend three days puzzling over what that question mark in the margin really meant.

What the angry editors don’t realize is that I, as a writer, am not that impressed with the lengthy red margin note explaining that I needed an em-dash not a regular dash.  Thank you catching that. Fix it.  Let’s get this established from the start: I am impressed with your copy editing skills, that’s why I hired you. I don’t need a grammar lesson; I don’t want a grammar lesson, thank you. And there is no need for three pages of single spaced typed notes chronicling everything wrong with the book. There no need to yell.

I am currently hiding a bleeding manuscript in a drawer (why do you think I relate so well to my clients?)  The editor wrote angry disparaging comments all over the manuscript, I should know all the rules, I should be able to proof read my own work. I could read between the lines:  why was he doing this?  Why must he read such crap?  He was very angry indeed.

If I could edit, I would.  I can’t, so I hire out.

In this case the editor, as far as I can tell, is angry because I gave him a job.

I will not make that mistake again.

If you suspect that your editor is more interested in lecturing you about every mistake you made, and at the same time reveling in how right they are about everything. Fire them.

You do not need an angry, frustrated, English teacher, you need a partner who is willing to help you, not tear you and your work to bitter shreds.

And if you are a fabulous, electronically inclined editor, drop me e-mail. I want to make sure my clients are treated well.

Free Workshop

Stop by for a quickie.
Free writing workshop at Tomes books,
in just one hour – write more better.
Are you in the Sierra Foothills area for Easter?
Come visit author and instructor Catharine Bramkamp

Sat. April 3 at 2:00PM  -
Tomes books, 671 Maltman Drive #3
Grass Valley CA

Catharine Bramkamp will run a short workshop so you can practice how to
not “write like you talk”.
You will learn to sound smarter and thinner.
She will also read from her new book  Don’t Write Like You Talk