DAILY LIFE: Noah's Ark
"I said that these blindness games will be valuable to you as a writer. But their main value to you can be in another way. For writing doesn't depend as much on the images you see with your eyes, or the sounds you hear with your ears, as it does on your 'inner eye,' your 'inner ear,' the understandings you have inside you that you glean from all your senses, including your heart. The more you learn about your own inners, the deeper understanding you will have about yourself and about everybody. You'll be seeing with your heart, and then if you write it down, fine. The writing will be the richer. But the writing's not the most important thing in the world. The understanding is."
--Jacqueline Jackson: Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail: A Book About Writing among Other Things.
Topics in this post: simplicity, Internet addiction, braille, blindness, self-publishing printed books, self-publishing e-books, authorship, scanning books, Christmas.
*** Intro
I'm going to have to preface the first couple of entries below with an explanation; otherwise, they're going to be unintelligible.
In 2001, in the space of a week, I lost the ability to read with my eyes. I'd acquired a case of dry eye that was so severe that my eyes no longer had the ability to focus on details, such as print. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, I eventually got some of my eyesight back, but for about three months, between my eyesight situation and the accompanying pain, all I could do was lie in bed, listening to audio books, or else type stories into my computer without being able to read back what I was typing. (I didn't know at that point about assistive technology. All I knew was that I had to keep writing.)
Since then, my eyesight has been off and on, with me going through periods where I can only read with my eyes for ten minutes out of the hour. I've found a few more activities that I can do when my reading eyes are out: I can read stories by text-to-speech or braille, and I can listen to Internet radio or podcasts. I can also dance or do housework or talk to friends and family. But that's pretty much it. If my reading eyes are out on me, there's no way I can watch videos (which are bad on my eyes under the best conditions), and chances are good that I can't leave the house, because I'll be busy putting wet washcloths over my eyes every couple of hours.
Those have been the best times of my life.
Oh, one aspect of them has driven me crazy - not being able to easily rewrite the stories I type into the computer - but otherwise, I've felt more at peace during these periods than during any other time of my life. Somehow, a concentrated focus on a very few activities makes me better balanced mentally than anything else.
Trying to figure out why put me a search for information back in 2004. I began reading up on various groups that place simplicity at the center of their lives: hermits, monks, the Amish, the Quakers. I finally ended up dividing them into subcategories:
1) People who live a solitary life - i.e. hermits.
2) People who mix periods of solitude with periods within a small community - for example, certain orders of monks.
3) People who stay as much as possible within their community and don't mix with the "world" - for example, the Amish.
4) People who mix with the world a lot - for example, the Quakers.
After doing a lot of experimenting - such as spending one year having a whirlwind social life - I finally determined that I work best in the #2 category. Like a lot of writers, I need times of solitude to get work done, but unlike most writers, I can't easily pair those times of solitude with mixing with the outside world a lot. Partly it has to do with my lifelong struggle with mania (which has manifested itself for the past decade in Internet addiction), and partly, I think, it's because I have a one-track mind. Throw me into an environment where lots and lots of things are going on, and my mind grows fuddled. Worse, I become addicted to that environment and can't tear myself away. What I needed, I decided, was as little time as possible spent in the "outside world" (which these days mainly means the Internet), a reasonable amount of time spent with family and close friends (my "small community"), and a lot of time spent on my own, doing a few, simple activities. I needed a life pared down to its basics.
I've known this for a while now, and have known that I ought to readapt my life so that it followed, as much as possible, the life of simplicity that I'm forced into when my reading eyes go out on me. The problem has been getting up the courage to do so. I've been putting it off and putting it off, waiting for I don't know what - some divine being to come down on high and tell me this was the right moment, I suppose.
That was the situation at the beginning of this month.
5 December 2007 (Wednesday)
[An entry from my private journal.]
Flashback: I'm a child again - sometime after age eleven, when I moved to this house. I decide to play Noah and his ark. I place a blanket over the children's table downstairs, and then carefully prepare the small amount of belongings I will take with me on my trip into the new world - mainly books and stuffed animals.
In retrospect, looking over my records of my daily schedule, it seems obvious I was headed in his direction.
September to October: In a manic state as I prepare Bard of Pain for publication, I spend nearly all of my time doing layout or rereading old stories (under the guise of editing them). The time I don't spend doing this, I'm online.
Flashback: The clouds begin to thunder, the rain begins to fall. I'm safe under the blanket. Suddenly I remember that I've forgotten a stuffed animal. I rush upstairs to retrieve him, praying that the rising waters won't sweep me away.
First three weeks of November: I spend nearly all of my time online, marketing Bard of Pain. Even when I run out of marketing tasks to do, I stay online. My relationships with Jo/e and Doug begin to suffer. I pass up opportunities to correspond with new friends. I fail to answer business correspondence. With only two exceptions (October 9 and 21), I've spent no time writing stories since early September.
Flashback: Every time now that I return to the safety of the ark, I remember yet another thing - another object that I can't survive without. Off I go to retrieve this extra belonging.
Suddenly, halfway down the stairs to my ark, I halt. There is no point in returning to the ark, I realize. I have already drowned.
Last week of November: Returning from three days away from home to spend Thanksgiving with the in-laws, I promptly return to my old pattern. In a desperate attempt to wean myself away, I find myself returning to old readings on living a life of simplicity. The effect on my schedule is immediately noticeable: I begin doing things other than posting online and reading old stories. However, every time I go online, I download tons of writings, music, and other materials that I'm sure I'll need during the period when I'm offline. I never end up looking at them.
Flashback: I am eight years old, dreaming. Some terrible disaster is about to arise; I must get away. First, though, I must stay to retrieve some important belonging, even at the risk of losing my life. The disaster nears . . .
I will have this dream, in many variations, over the next thirty-five years of my life.
December 1 to 3: I have another bad bout of Internet addiction as I download several megabytes of files that I know I just cannot survive without when I go offline. Each day, I fail to go offline.
Enough. I've had enough. I'm changing my life.
* * *
Writing this a day after the decision, I still find it hard to write about it. I suppose that's partly because it arose from a conviction rather than a rational process of thought. I've done plenty of reasoning about this in the past; since 2003, I've read every book and article I could get my hands on concerning people who live lives centered on simplicity, such as hermits, monks, and members of various "unwordly" communities (the Quakers, Amish, Old Order Mennonites). I've subscribed to newsletters for solitaries; I've read every new article, blog entry, and post at Hermitary, examining the advantages and disadvantages of such a life. What happened this week wasn't reasoned thought but awareness that I'd reached the point of no return: I had to do this.
I'm not planning to move to a cave; to me, simplicity means centering myself on my family, friends, writing, and health (physical and mental). To my friends, the only difference this is likely to make is that I'll be better about keeping in touch with them by e-mail, phone calls, and occasional real-life meetings. To my acquaintances - the ones who know me only from Web contact - it means I'll be around a lot less [though they are welcome to e-mail me]. To my readers, I hope, it will mean I spend more time on writing and other publishing matters.
But saying all that seems inadequate to describe the feeling of change.
One of the more honest illustrations I've seen of Noah's ark shows the world as Noah emerges from the ark: corpses litter the land. I think it was this imagery that convinced me for so long that I had to be involved in the world - I had to be there, amidst the whirl of societal affairs, to help others from drowning. I wanted to be like the Quakers, balancing inner peace with outreach to others in the world.
I'm beginning to realize, though, that the part I have to play can't be done if I'm thrashing in the waters. I can't help my apprentice if I'm in an Internet haze; I can't be there for my friends and family if I'm busy clicking on links; I can't be writing stories for my readers if I'm off at another real-life social event. And I can't help anyone if my life is forever centered on desperately grabbing objects - off the Internet and in the real world - as the waters rise about me.
So I can only sum it up this way: I feel as though I've touched dry ground.
And the dove came in to him in the evening; and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.
And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.
*** 6 December 2007
[Returning to the entries I wrote for my public journal.]
I went online tonight with great trepidation, worried that I'd fall back into my old pattern of uncontrollable surfing. To my relief, nothing awful happened; with a very few exceptions, I stuck to the list of activities I'd prepared beforehand, and though I was feeling click-happy by the end, I got offline once the tasks were finished.
However, I was on for far too long: five-and-a-half hours. I didn't even do the two main tasks I'd planned: announce the latest chapter of Bard of Pain and announce the latest issue of True Tales. In both cases, I didn't accomplish the task due to unexpected delays, but I need to go through my list and figure out how I can spend less time online next time - "next time" being Monday, I think. It will mean not getting a chapter of "Bard of Pain" announced this week, but I'm not going to let myself get into an Internet haze right before Sunday, which is when I spend time with Doug. I'm having to learn to put my family and health above my desire to meet deadlines.
Paula Huston, in a passage from her book on the simple life that I read tonight, says, "The natural result of solitude and silence is a far clearer picture of ourselves, whether or not we really want to see it. Longtime habits come into glaring focus; formerly innocuous-seeming quirks now appear embarrassing or even ominous. We can't simply enjoy our idiosyncrasies anymore; we've become aware of what sits behind them. The longer we look into the mirror of solitude and silence, the more we see: So this is what keeps me tied to that job I hate - my shopping habit. And this is what causes my irritable snapping - I always feel like I'm being cheated out of my fair share."
I'm embarrassed to discover that she's right. About a dozen times today, I found myself saying, "I must have this now!" I had no idea, till today, that my "gimme" habit was so far ingrained. Here's a typical conversation between myself and my conscience (second cousin to my subconscious and Muse; I think they're all the same person, but they're pretending to be separate).
Me (finishing the Rosetta Books edition of The Puppet Masters, which I downloaded from Wowio several months ago): "I need to read more Robert Heinlein e-books now. I'll surf for them when I go online."
My conscience: "You're not allowed to surf any more. You can wait till next summer to read Heinlein's novels. You have plenty of other books to read."
Me: "But I want to read him now!"
My conscience: "So scan him. You own the printed version of practically every book he ever wrote."
Me: "I don't want to go to all that bother. I just want to surf for an e-book edition."
My conscience (patiently): "Why don't you look through your hard drive? Maybe you'll find a novel there you like."
Me (several minutes later, having opened a file of Alan E. Nourse's Star Surgeon): "Oo, this is a Project Gutenberg edition! I wonder what other science fiction novels Project Gutenberg has."
My conscience (rolling his eyes): "You haven't even started reading this one yet. Why worry about what you'll read next?"
Me: "Because I want the other science fiction novels at Project Gutenberg. I'll download them when I go online."
My conscience: "You're not allowed to download more science fiction e-books until you've finished reading the ones you already own. You have plenty of other science fiction e-books to read."
Me: "But I want to read the Project Gutenberg books now!"
And so on and so forth. As it turned out, when I checked my laptop tonight, I discovered that I'd downloaded a ton of Robert Heinlein books from Bookshare.org last spring, right before my subscription gave out. I hadn't even bothered to unzip the books since that time.
I'm beginning to get the uneasy feeling, as I write this entry, that I might have spent more time this evening surfing than I'd assumed. Well, if I did, at least I kept myself from downloading anything. As time goes on, I'm sure it will become reflexive for me not to go "Gimme, gimme" at the first thought of something online that I might like.
*** 8 December 2007
I tried out the demo version of the Duxbury Braille Translator today. As I'd guessed ahead of time, they make you fork up four hundred dollars before you can produce a useable braille file, but at least I figured out that it will be dead easy to make a braille translation of my e-books, once I get my hands on a working version of Duxbury.
Then I wrestled with InDesign. December is not the time of year for me to be producing a print version of "Bard of Pain," much less learning for the first time how to lay out a book in InDesign, but I had fun playing around with the controls; among other thing, I designed a logo for my press, using the italic version of Galliard.
In between each activity these days, I'm trying to take a ten-minute break for meditation and contemplation, in order to center myself down periodically on where things matter: simplicity. I'm not terribly good at meditation, though, and contemplation all too often turns into contemplation of the next task on my list. So tonight I decided to take a different tack.
"Growing up, you would think, is a process of the world gradually opening up to us, like a crescendo in music, starting small from when we are born and then spreading wider and wider. But somewhere along the line we begin to close again so that we start cutting off the world. We don't hear as much, we don't see as much, we don't feel as much."
That's a passage from Jacqueline Jackson's Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail, which has been the single-most influential book upon me as a writer. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that it was what made me a writer. When I first read it, at age eleven, I had already wanted to be a professional writer for two years, but this was the book that showed me how to accomplish my goal.
The main lesson it taught me - one that I've continually failed to heed over the years - was to be aware. Be aware of what's happening around you, be aware of how other writers do what they do, be aware of the thoughts in your own head. (The fact that I began keeping a journal regularly from age thirteen onwards is thanks to Jacqueline Jackson.) Five chapters of her book are devoted to the five senses. Here is Ms. Jackson again, describing how The Wind in the Willows treats the senses:
"The book is dripping with the golden drops of touching, tasting, sniffling, gazing, listening, and the less tangible inner senses of awe, wanderlust, homing, friendship, God, beauty, love, joy, contentment. Every page is as aquiver with awareness as Mole's moist nose."
Every page of Turn Not Pale is too. The subtitle of the book - quite accurate - is "A Book About Writing Among Other Things." By the time I'd reached adulthood, I'd identified Ms. Jackson's exhortations to "awareness" with what the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow described as "peak experiences" and the rest of the world describes as mystical union - periods when you are so absorbed in another object that your own identity is bound up with it. It's a type of meditation, but it's one in which the point isn't to go beyond the world around you but to go into the world around you.
I have a tendency to think of it as experiencing first-class art and drama without having to pay for the privilege. It's like taking blinders off and being able to experience what the great artists and authors experience when they encounter ordinary objects.
Well, I thought to myself, let's see whether I've lost the ability to do that, after a decade on the Internet.
So I lay down on the love seat with a pair of scissors.
They were simply what I'd grabbed off my desk, and they looked homely. They had a cheap plastic handle that was designed to fit the hand but otherwise was uncomfortable. The plastic was scuffed. The blades were dirty. One blade was rounded at the tip, while the shorter one wasn't, which I'd never noticed before. The scissors were made in Finland.
I couldn't find much more to say about them. I tried tasting a blade and the handle ("All interesting tastes . . . aren't good tastes, but to be a writer you have to be willing to sacrifice something for your Art," says Ms. Jackson), but they had no taste. I looked more closely at the blade and realized that, while I'd always thought of metal as smooth and featureless, this metal actually had minute lines, like wood grain.
That seemed to be the only interesting feature about the scissors, so I settled down to switch over to conventional mediation. As I did so, the light reflected off the blade.
At that point, I stopped breathing.
If you'd asked me beforehand, I would have said that the light which reflects off of scissor blades is white. If I hadn't had the scissors six inches from my nose, that's what I would have seen. But seen close up, the "white" light was actually broken up into pinpoint-sized fragments of color, each pinpoint different. It was as though the postage-stamp-sized light on the blade was a stained glass window with ten thousand panes. Each time I shifted the scissors minutely, the stained glass window transformed itself into a new pattern.
By the time I remembered the rest of the world, I was five minutes over my usual time for meditation.
*** 11 December 2007 (Tuesday)
Yesterday, I made another try at limiting my time on the Internet. I went online at ten p.m., planning to stay online for three hours. At eight a.m., I finally got offline.
Mind you, virtually everything I did in between was needed work: announcing Chapter Four of "Bard of Pain" in various places and announcing the December issue of True Tales. But I learned from this that I need to rework my publishing plans so that I spend less time online. And since it takes me a day or two to recover from these Internet binges, I think I'm going to switch from an "online twice a week" schedule to an "online once a week" schedule. I'm finding that I really don't have much desire to go online, since my life goes so much better when I don't.
Ironically, my Muse visited me for the first time in two months on Monday morning - a result, I have no doubt, of me spending so much time recently reading Heinlein. I'd really like to get myself to the point of doing three hours of fiction-reading a day. Oh, for the days when I spent virtually every waking moment reading or writing fiction. Back in 1995, as I think I've mentioned at this blog before, I was averaging five hours of writing per day; I got one hundred thousand words per month written in the second half of 1995 - a total of half a million words, or six novels.
I'd be happy now if I could just reach my goal of thirty thousand words per month. But I can't persuade my Muse to produce so much as one hundred words a day unless I spend a lot of time reading fiction. He's horribly imitative and won't write fiction if I'm not reading it.
At the moment, though, I'm being crowded by Christmas activities (among other things, my friend Katharine, who lives on the other side of D.C., stopped by today to give her gift) and by me trying to get to know InDesign better, for I asked my father to come by later this week to help me design the print edition of "Bard of Pain."
Katharine, hearing of my financial difficulties, offered to loan me the money to have "Bard of Pain" printed through Lightning Source, but I'd rather take a stab at selling it first through Lulu, to see how it does there. If the print sales at Lulu are lower than the Kindle sales at Amazon, I'll know that limited distribution is the main problem I've been facing. If, on the other hand, the print sales through Lulu are higher than the Kindle sales, I'll know that I need to put my primary focus on print editions in the future.
I've spent a lot of time in the past month trying to figure out where I went wrong with my "Bard of Pain" marketing. Since my readers aren't telling me, I can only speculate. But I do hope that three steps I'm planning to take - selling "Bard of Pain" through Amazon's Kindle store, selling a paperback version, and making more effort to publicize the book to readers of religious fantasy and ethnic fiction - will improve sales. It's tempting simply to skip on to Lawnmowers and see whether sex sells better, but any marketing mistakes I make now will likely affect my other books as well. So I'd like to see whether I can overcome whatever problems are plaguing "Bard of Pain."
One good bit of news is that my eyes have been holding up well, probably thanks to the humidifier Doug installed in my study. My eyes really aren't happy any time the temperature goes below eighty, and they're distinctly unhappy when the temperature goes below fifty, but I've been able to fool them into think that this is a winter in damp Seattle or Oxford, rather than in the dry Mid-Atlantic.
I forgot to mention that, despite my lengthy time online on Monday night, I actually managed to spend a substantial amount of time on all my daily tasks: write fiction, read fiction, edit fiction, publish fiction, exercise, household duties, family/friends, and read about simplicity. So I not only gave myself a green star (for doing three hours of fiction-reading and at least two hours of publishing) and a red star (for writing my thousand daily words of fiction), but also a silver star for making a stab at meeting my quotas in all the other activities.
Ah, the benefits of a twenty-hour day. Now I just have to figure out how to meet my daily quotas - it's only a seven-hour workday, darn it! - without staying awake for twenty-four hours straight.
*** 14 December 2007
Spent the day struggling with my OCR software, which wouldn't do anything I wanted it to do. All I wanted were pages from a hundred-page book that retained the hard returns and italics. Instead it sent me pages with gobbledygook in the source code, every few paragraphs, that looked like this:
[Wrd/Ltr Spacing: 100,100] [Char Style: Character 8] [Lft Mar Adj: 1.8"] [Tab Set: (Rel)0"L, 0.2", + 0.7"L] [Ln Spacing: 1.13] [Para Style: Style 3; [Lft Margin Adj[Tab Set][Font Size]] [VAdv: 0.45"(Rel)] [Left Marg Adj: 1.8"] [Tab Set: (Rel)0"L, 0.2", + 0.7"L] [Char Style: Default Par;[Font Size: 10pt]]
The result was a one-megabyte file that was messed up on virtually every page. So then I tried having it send me a plain-text version. The results weren't much more readable.
Yesterday, my father came over to visit. It felt like boot camp.
"Okay, you slobs, so think you're layout artists, do you? YOU'RE NOT! But in two hours, I'll have you broken and remade into BOOK DESIGNERS!"
It took exactly two hours for him to give me his Book Design 101 lesson. Along the way, I learned lots of nifty stuff, like how to change the "Optical Margin Alignment" (that's what InDesign calls it; I had a fit of the giggles when my father read that aloud) so that the punctuation hangs out into the margin.
He did plenty of things that would have left me stymied if I'd tried them on my own. How could I have known to give the word spacing in the justification setting a minimum of 85%, a "desired" of 100%, and a maximum of 130%? Or to set the hyphenation so that there were at least two letters before the hyphen and at least three letters after the hyphen, with a limit of three hyphens in three successive lines, and a hyphenation zone of .65 inches? ("I'm in favor of even wordspacing," he told me in explanation of the three hyphens in a row. I assured him that I was too.)
At one point, when we were struggling with the issue of how to prevent the tail of a dropped-cap Q from touching the word below it, he said, "Maybe you should change the text." I laughed again and told him that this was a William Morris moment. (Morris, a nineteenth-century author and printer, had a habit of changing his text to make it look better on the page.)
He royally chewed me out for not starting with a Master Page, and all my protests that I'd just been doing a rough mock-up till he showed me how to actually put together a book were for naught; my "rough mock-up" became my final product.
I'm still worrying about the page margins, though. It's the one decision I made that caused my father to wince.
There are other minor things I need to do to get the text ready, but now I'm ready to start thinking about the cover - or rather, about trying to get my hands on the line art for the cover, which appears in Volume II of William Cullen Bryant's Popular History of the United States (1883). I sure hope the book is popular enough to have some cheap second-hand copies floating around, because I can't get it through the public library's interlibrary loan system, so I'm going to have to buy it. I wish I still had access to the University of Maryland's interlibrary loan system, but they upped the annual fee for that to $150. I couldn't justify that expense, given that I can only read standard-sized print for three months out of the year.
Meanwhile, today (since the weather was warm) Doug and I brought in the Christmas greens: branches from our holly tree to create our traditional Christmas Branch (my parents could rarely afford Christmas trees, so we had Christmas branches instead), as well as twigs from the boxwood bushes to decorate our Advent wreath, which consists of a circle of bare branches throughout Advent, then becomes a Christmas wreath when we add the evergreens on Christmas Eve.
So we're putting up evergreens during Advent. That shows we're heretics. Anglicans have been excommunicated for lesser offenses.
*** 16 December 2007
We got all the rest of the Christmas decorations up, other than the ornaments that are stored within the Advent calendar and the popcorn-and-cranberry strings that we still need to make.
The front door has a red bow on it that we took from a giant evergreen decoration we rescued from the trash last year. (All of our Christmas evergreens came from the trash last year. We didn't have any handy evergreens in the back yard of our Annapolis home.)
In the living room, the secretary that my grandmother once owned carries a paper Victorian tree - a gift from my mother - with artificial hollies poking out from it (also rescued from the trash). In front of it are the Christmas crackers - also from my mother, who's the most fervent Anglophile in a family of Anglophiles - and behind it, on display, is a double-page spread from Tasha Tudor's rendition of "The Night Before Christmas." (I own a ton of picture books. I put different ones on display every month.)
On the dining room table, above a display of Matt Tavares's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," colored bulbs hang from the chandelier. Nearby is the Advent calendar and Christmas candle.
In the kitchen, more colored bulbs hang from that chandelier. Some of the bulbs are from my childhood, while the rest - you guessed it - we rescued from the trash last year. Whoever threw them out hadn't even opened the package.
On the kitchen door leading outside is a stocking knitted by Doug's grandmother. The stockings that have our names on it - mine was made when I was six - won't be hung on the hearth in the kitchen till Christmas Eve.
The rest of the room looks as though it's been hit by a bunch of tipsy elves. The holly branches are draped over the kitchen table, so far out that they present a walking hazard. More holly is hanging behind the table, in the window. There are decorations on the branches, decorations on the windowsill - all three levels - and boxes scattered everywhere.
My mother has kept custody of most of the Peterson family decorations, but I have a few decorations from my childhood, such as the tiny china elephants (a parent and three children) that used to grace my mother's dresser, the sleeping china fawns that were a gift from my great-uncle, and the tiny stocking that I gave to my cat Kari when I was young. (I also made her a paper chain.) The rest - spiderwebs and Alice in Wonderland decorations and Beatrix Potter decorations and an evil-looking clay snake winding around a cross that I will explain as a medical symbol if a priest ever stops by - all the rest of the dozens of decorations have been bought by Doug and me, gradually over the years, a decoration or two each year. (Well, okay, I went wild and crazy back in the days when I was flush with cash.)
There are also woodsy decorations all over, given to my mother by an artist who makes woodsy art. Aside from the pine cones, they look as they were picked up from the lunar surface. "What is that?" visitors inevitably asked.
The cardboard creche on the side table comes from my father, who owned it when he was a boy. I can't remember how old we decided it was - 1940s? 1930s? - but it's old enough to have a "colored" wise man, so labelled. He's off on his own, behind the white wise men. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus all look as though they just stepped off the boat from England.
There's nothing like Christmas for bringing families together, if only in the form of decorations.
*** Conclusion
Nine thousand five hundred and sixty words. That's how much I've written since last Monday. Last month, I wrote zero words.
(My Muse interrupts here to say, "Of course you're writing fiction. If you spend most of the day reading fiction, I'll give you fiction back. If you spend most of the day reading discussion board entries, that's all I'll give you." My Muse is far too logical.)
As to what the long-term results will be of this change in lifestyle, we'll see.
ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY (i.e. since Halloween. Take a deep breath.)
Fiction written and edited:
--"Compassion's Keeper" (Life Prison).
Fiction edited:
--"The Balance" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Death Watch" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Deception" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Twists and Turns" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Barbarians" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Hidden" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Forge" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"The Consultation" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Truth and Lies" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Edgeplay in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Stonewall in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Work-for-Hire in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers" (Leather in Lawnville).
Fiction laid out:
"Bard of Pain" (Amazon Kindle edition, braille edition, and print edition).
Contract signed:
"Working Outside the Box: The M/s Conference 2007" (for Power Exchange Magazine).
Fiction read:
--david stein: "Political/Personal."
--Helen Eustis (with illustrations by Reinhard Michl): "Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman."
--Dr. Seuss: "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back."
--Assorted Christmas picture books.
--Robert A. Heinlein: "The Puppet Masters."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Farmer in the Sky."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Double Star."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "The Door into Summer."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Tunnel in the Sky."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Starman Jones."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Time for the Stars."
Research literature read:
--Brent Sampson: "Sell Your Book on Amazon."
Leisure nonfiction read:
--"Quaker Faith and Practice" (Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995).
--Henry Edward Manning: "The Daemon of Socrates" (1872).
--Paula Houston: "The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life."
--James O. Hannay: "Wisdom of the Desert."
--Jacqueline Jackson: "Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail."
Podcasts listened to:
--From BBC:
----Digital Planet.
--From ABC (Australia):
----The Spirit of Things: The Religion of Shakespeare.
----The Spirit of Things: S.H.A.M. - Self-Help and Actualization Movement.
----The Ark: Crusader Medicine.
----The Ark: The Virgin and the Grail.
----The Ark: Buddhist Scrolls.
----The Spirit of Things: Temple Music in the Time of Jesus.
Videos watched:
(Okay, yes, I've been straining my eyes.)
--"Electric Company" (excerpts).
--"Free to Be . . . You and Me" (excerpts).
--"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." (With Dudley Moore! and Peter Sellers! and Ralph Richardson! and Spike Milligan! And music by John Barry! I hadn't seen this production since I was a teen; it's just as good as I remember, especially the actress who plays Alice.)
Books bought:
(Thank you, relative who gave me a Barnes & Noble gift certificate last Christmas.)
--Morris Ronsenthal: "Print-on-Demand Book Publishing."
--Aaron Shepard: "Aiming at Amazon."
--"Gaylaxicon 2006 Sampler."
Events attended:
--An Advent Procession with Lessons and Carols, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, K Street, in Washington, D.C.
Places visited:
--North Carolina, to spend Thanksgiving with relatives.
--Jacqueline Jackson: Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail: A Book About Writing among Other Things.
Topics in this post: simplicity, Internet addiction, braille, blindness, self-publishing printed books, self-publishing e-books, authorship, scanning books, Christmas.
*** Intro
I'm going to have to preface the first couple of entries below with an explanation; otherwise, they're going to be unintelligible.
In 2001, in the space of a week, I lost the ability to read with my eyes. I'd acquired a case of dry eye that was so severe that my eyes no longer had the ability to focus on details, such as print. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, I eventually got some of my eyesight back, but for about three months, between my eyesight situation and the accompanying pain, all I could do was lie in bed, listening to audio books, or else type stories into my computer without being able to read back what I was typing. (I didn't know at that point about assistive technology. All I knew was that I had to keep writing.)
Since then, my eyesight has been off and on, with me going through periods where I can only read with my eyes for ten minutes out of the hour. I've found a few more activities that I can do when my reading eyes are out: I can read stories by text-to-speech or braille, and I can listen to Internet radio or podcasts. I can also dance or do housework or talk to friends and family. But that's pretty much it. If my reading eyes are out on me, there's no way I can watch videos (which are bad on my eyes under the best conditions), and chances are good that I can't leave the house, because I'll be busy putting wet washcloths over my eyes every couple of hours.
Those have been the best times of my life.
Oh, one aspect of them has driven me crazy - not being able to easily rewrite the stories I type into the computer - but otherwise, I've felt more at peace during these periods than during any other time of my life. Somehow, a concentrated focus on a very few activities makes me better balanced mentally than anything else.
Trying to figure out why put me a search for information back in 2004. I began reading up on various groups that place simplicity at the center of their lives: hermits, monks, the Amish, the Quakers. I finally ended up dividing them into subcategories:
1) People who live a solitary life - i.e. hermits.
2) People who mix periods of solitude with periods within a small community - for example, certain orders of monks.
3) People who stay as much as possible within their community and don't mix with the "world" - for example, the Amish.
4) People who mix with the world a lot - for example, the Quakers.
After doing a lot of experimenting - such as spending one year having a whirlwind social life - I finally determined that I work best in the #2 category. Like a lot of writers, I need times of solitude to get work done, but unlike most writers, I can't easily pair those times of solitude with mixing with the outside world a lot. Partly it has to do with my lifelong struggle with mania (which has manifested itself for the past decade in Internet addiction), and partly, I think, it's because I have a one-track mind. Throw me into an environment where lots and lots of things are going on, and my mind grows fuddled. Worse, I become addicted to that environment and can't tear myself away. What I needed, I decided, was as little time as possible spent in the "outside world" (which these days mainly means the Internet), a reasonable amount of time spent with family and close friends (my "small community"), and a lot of time spent on my own, doing a few, simple activities. I needed a life pared down to its basics.
I've known this for a while now, and have known that I ought to readapt my life so that it followed, as much as possible, the life of simplicity that I'm forced into when my reading eyes go out on me. The problem has been getting up the courage to do so. I've been putting it off and putting it off, waiting for I don't know what - some divine being to come down on high and tell me this was the right moment, I suppose.
That was the situation at the beginning of this month.
5 December 2007 (Wednesday)
[An entry from my private journal.]
Flashback: I'm a child again - sometime after age eleven, when I moved to this house. I decide to play Noah and his ark. I place a blanket over the children's table downstairs, and then carefully prepare the small amount of belongings I will take with me on my trip into the new world - mainly books and stuffed animals.
In retrospect, looking over my records of my daily schedule, it seems obvious I was headed in his direction.
September to October: In a manic state as I prepare Bard of Pain for publication, I spend nearly all of my time doing layout or rereading old stories (under the guise of editing them). The time I don't spend doing this, I'm online.
Flashback: The clouds begin to thunder, the rain begins to fall. I'm safe under the blanket. Suddenly I remember that I've forgotten a stuffed animal. I rush upstairs to retrieve him, praying that the rising waters won't sweep me away.
First three weeks of November: I spend nearly all of my time online, marketing Bard of Pain. Even when I run out of marketing tasks to do, I stay online. My relationships with Jo/e and Doug begin to suffer. I pass up opportunities to correspond with new friends. I fail to answer business correspondence. With only two exceptions (October 9 and 21), I've spent no time writing stories since early September.
Flashback: Every time now that I return to the safety of the ark, I remember yet another thing - another object that I can't survive without. Off I go to retrieve this extra belonging.
Suddenly, halfway down the stairs to my ark, I halt. There is no point in returning to the ark, I realize. I have already drowned.
Last week of November: Returning from three days away from home to spend Thanksgiving with the in-laws, I promptly return to my old pattern. In a desperate attempt to wean myself away, I find myself returning to old readings on living a life of simplicity. The effect on my schedule is immediately noticeable: I begin doing things other than posting online and reading old stories. However, every time I go online, I download tons of writings, music, and other materials that I'm sure I'll need during the period when I'm offline. I never end up looking at them.
Flashback: I am eight years old, dreaming. Some terrible disaster is about to arise; I must get away. First, though, I must stay to retrieve some important belonging, even at the risk of losing my life. The disaster nears . . .
I will have this dream, in many variations, over the next thirty-five years of my life.
December 1 to 3: I have another bad bout of Internet addiction as I download several megabytes of files that I know I just cannot survive without when I go offline. Each day, I fail to go offline.
Enough. I've had enough. I'm changing my life.
* * *
Writing this a day after the decision, I still find it hard to write about it. I suppose that's partly because it arose from a conviction rather than a rational process of thought. I've done plenty of reasoning about this in the past; since 2003, I've read every book and article I could get my hands on concerning people who live lives centered on simplicity, such as hermits, monks, and members of various "unwordly" communities (the Quakers, Amish, Old Order Mennonites). I've subscribed to newsletters for solitaries; I've read every new article, blog entry, and post at Hermitary, examining the advantages and disadvantages of such a life. What happened this week wasn't reasoned thought but awareness that I'd reached the point of no return: I had to do this.
I'm not planning to move to a cave; to me, simplicity means centering myself on my family, friends, writing, and health (physical and mental). To my friends, the only difference this is likely to make is that I'll be better about keeping in touch with them by e-mail, phone calls, and occasional real-life meetings. To my acquaintances - the ones who know me only from Web contact - it means I'll be around a lot less [though they are welcome to e-mail me]. To my readers, I hope, it will mean I spend more time on writing and other publishing matters.
But saying all that seems inadequate to describe the feeling of change.
One of the more honest illustrations I've seen of Noah's ark shows the world as Noah emerges from the ark: corpses litter the land. I think it was this imagery that convinced me for so long that I had to be involved in the world - I had to be there, amidst the whirl of societal affairs, to help others from drowning. I wanted to be like the Quakers, balancing inner peace with outreach to others in the world.
I'm beginning to realize, though, that the part I have to play can't be done if I'm thrashing in the waters. I can't help my apprentice if I'm in an Internet haze; I can't be there for my friends and family if I'm busy clicking on links; I can't be writing stories for my readers if I'm off at another real-life social event. And I can't help anyone if my life is forever centered on desperately grabbing objects - off the Internet and in the real world - as the waters rise about me.
So I can only sum it up this way: I feel as though I've touched dry ground.
And the dove came in to him in the evening; and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.
And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.
*** 6 December 2007
[Returning to the entries I wrote for my public journal.]
I went online tonight with great trepidation, worried that I'd fall back into my old pattern of uncontrollable surfing. To my relief, nothing awful happened; with a very few exceptions, I stuck to the list of activities I'd prepared beforehand, and though I was feeling click-happy by the end, I got offline once the tasks were finished.
However, I was on for far too long: five-and-a-half hours. I didn't even do the two main tasks I'd planned: announce the latest chapter of Bard of Pain and announce the latest issue of True Tales. In both cases, I didn't accomplish the task due to unexpected delays, but I need to go through my list and figure out how I can spend less time online next time - "next time" being Monday, I think. It will mean not getting a chapter of "Bard of Pain" announced this week, but I'm not going to let myself get into an Internet haze right before Sunday, which is when I spend time with Doug. I'm having to learn to put my family and health above my desire to meet deadlines.
Paula Huston, in a passage from her book on the simple life that I read tonight, says, "The natural result of solitude and silence is a far clearer picture of ourselves, whether or not we really want to see it. Longtime habits come into glaring focus; formerly innocuous-seeming quirks now appear embarrassing or even ominous. We can't simply enjoy our idiosyncrasies anymore; we've become aware of what sits behind them. The longer we look into the mirror of solitude and silence, the more we see: So this is what keeps me tied to that job I hate - my shopping habit. And this is what causes my irritable snapping - I always feel like I'm being cheated out of my fair share."
I'm embarrassed to discover that she's right. About a dozen times today, I found myself saying, "I must have this now!" I had no idea, till today, that my "gimme" habit was so far ingrained. Here's a typical conversation between myself and my conscience (second cousin to my subconscious and Muse; I think they're all the same person, but they're pretending to be separate).
Me (finishing the Rosetta Books edition of The Puppet Masters, which I downloaded from Wowio several months ago): "I need to read more Robert Heinlein e-books now. I'll surf for them when I go online."
My conscience: "You're not allowed to surf any more. You can wait till next summer to read Heinlein's novels. You have plenty of other books to read."
Me: "But I want to read him now!"
My conscience: "So scan him. You own the printed version of practically every book he ever wrote."
Me: "I don't want to go to all that bother. I just want to surf for an e-book edition."
My conscience (patiently): "Why don't you look through your hard drive? Maybe you'll find a novel there you like."
Me (several minutes later, having opened a file of Alan E. Nourse's Star Surgeon): "Oo, this is a Project Gutenberg edition! I wonder what other science fiction novels Project Gutenberg has."
My conscience (rolling his eyes): "You haven't even started reading this one yet. Why worry about what you'll read next?"
Me: "Because I want the other science fiction novels at Project Gutenberg. I'll download them when I go online."
My conscience: "You're not allowed to download more science fiction e-books until you've finished reading the ones you already own. You have plenty of other science fiction e-books to read."
Me: "But I want to read the Project Gutenberg books now!"
And so on and so forth. As it turned out, when I checked my laptop tonight, I discovered that I'd downloaded a ton of Robert Heinlein books from Bookshare.org last spring, right before my subscription gave out. I hadn't even bothered to unzip the books since that time.
I'm beginning to get the uneasy feeling, as I write this entry, that I might have spent more time this evening surfing than I'd assumed. Well, if I did, at least I kept myself from downloading anything. As time goes on, I'm sure it will become reflexive for me not to go "Gimme, gimme" at the first thought of something online that I might like.
*** 8 December 2007
I tried out the demo version of the Duxbury Braille Translator today. As I'd guessed ahead of time, they make you fork up four hundred dollars before you can produce a useable braille file, but at least I figured out that it will be dead easy to make a braille translation of my e-books, once I get my hands on a working version of Duxbury.
Then I wrestled with InDesign. December is not the time of year for me to be producing a print version of "Bard of Pain," much less learning for the first time how to lay out a book in InDesign, but I had fun playing around with the controls; among other thing, I designed a logo for my press, using the italic version of Galliard.
In between each activity these days, I'm trying to take a ten-minute break for meditation and contemplation, in order to center myself down periodically on where things matter: simplicity. I'm not terribly good at meditation, though, and contemplation all too often turns into contemplation of the next task on my list. So tonight I decided to take a different tack.
"Growing up, you would think, is a process of the world gradually opening up to us, like a crescendo in music, starting small from when we are born and then spreading wider and wider. But somewhere along the line we begin to close again so that we start cutting off the world. We don't hear as much, we don't see as much, we don't feel as much."
That's a passage from Jacqueline Jackson's Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail, which has been the single-most influential book upon me as a writer. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that it was what made me a writer. When I first read it, at age eleven, I had already wanted to be a professional writer for two years, but this was the book that showed me how to accomplish my goal.
The main lesson it taught me - one that I've continually failed to heed over the years - was to be aware. Be aware of what's happening around you, be aware of how other writers do what they do, be aware of the thoughts in your own head. (The fact that I began keeping a journal regularly from age thirteen onwards is thanks to Jacqueline Jackson.) Five chapters of her book are devoted to the five senses. Here is Ms. Jackson again, describing how The Wind in the Willows treats the senses:
"The book is dripping with the golden drops of touching, tasting, sniffling, gazing, listening, and the less tangible inner senses of awe, wanderlust, homing, friendship, God, beauty, love, joy, contentment. Every page is as aquiver with awareness as Mole's moist nose."
Every page of Turn Not Pale is too. The subtitle of the book - quite accurate - is "A Book About Writing Among Other Things." By the time I'd reached adulthood, I'd identified Ms. Jackson's exhortations to "awareness" with what the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow described as "peak experiences" and the rest of the world describes as mystical union - periods when you are so absorbed in another object that your own identity is bound up with it. It's a type of meditation, but it's one in which the point isn't to go beyond the world around you but to go into the world around you.
I have a tendency to think of it as experiencing first-class art and drama without having to pay for the privilege. It's like taking blinders off and being able to experience what the great artists and authors experience when they encounter ordinary objects.
Well, I thought to myself, let's see whether I've lost the ability to do that, after a decade on the Internet.
So I lay down on the love seat with a pair of scissors.
They were simply what I'd grabbed off my desk, and they looked homely. They had a cheap plastic handle that was designed to fit the hand but otherwise was uncomfortable. The plastic was scuffed. The blades were dirty. One blade was rounded at the tip, while the shorter one wasn't, which I'd never noticed before. The scissors were made in Finland.
I couldn't find much more to say about them. I tried tasting a blade and the handle ("All interesting tastes . . . aren't good tastes, but to be a writer you have to be willing to sacrifice something for your Art," says Ms. Jackson), but they had no taste. I looked more closely at the blade and realized that, while I'd always thought of metal as smooth and featureless, this metal actually had minute lines, like wood grain.
That seemed to be the only interesting feature about the scissors, so I settled down to switch over to conventional mediation. As I did so, the light reflected off the blade.
At that point, I stopped breathing.
If you'd asked me beforehand, I would have said that the light which reflects off of scissor blades is white. If I hadn't had the scissors six inches from my nose, that's what I would have seen. But seen close up, the "white" light was actually broken up into pinpoint-sized fragments of color, each pinpoint different. It was as though the postage-stamp-sized light on the blade was a stained glass window with ten thousand panes. Each time I shifted the scissors minutely, the stained glass window transformed itself into a new pattern.
By the time I remembered the rest of the world, I was five minutes over my usual time for meditation.
*** 11 December 2007 (Tuesday)
Yesterday, I made another try at limiting my time on the Internet. I went online at ten p.m., planning to stay online for three hours. At eight a.m., I finally got offline.
Mind you, virtually everything I did in between was needed work: announcing Chapter Four of "Bard of Pain" in various places and announcing the December issue of True Tales. But I learned from this that I need to rework my publishing plans so that I spend less time online. And since it takes me a day or two to recover from these Internet binges, I think I'm going to switch from an "online twice a week" schedule to an "online once a week" schedule. I'm finding that I really don't have much desire to go online, since my life goes so much better when I don't.
Ironically, my Muse visited me for the first time in two months on Monday morning - a result, I have no doubt, of me spending so much time recently reading Heinlein. I'd really like to get myself to the point of doing three hours of fiction-reading a day. Oh, for the days when I spent virtually every waking moment reading or writing fiction. Back in 1995, as I think I've mentioned at this blog before, I was averaging five hours of writing per day; I got one hundred thousand words per month written in the second half of 1995 - a total of half a million words, or six novels.
I'd be happy now if I could just reach my goal of thirty thousand words per month. But I can't persuade my Muse to produce so much as one hundred words a day unless I spend a lot of time reading fiction. He's horribly imitative and won't write fiction if I'm not reading it.
At the moment, though, I'm being crowded by Christmas activities (among other things, my friend Katharine, who lives on the other side of D.C., stopped by today to give her gift) and by me trying to get to know InDesign better, for I asked my father to come by later this week to help me design the print edition of "Bard of Pain."
Katharine, hearing of my financial difficulties, offered to loan me the money to have "Bard of Pain" printed through Lightning Source, but I'd rather take a stab at selling it first through Lulu, to see how it does there. If the print sales at Lulu are lower than the Kindle sales at Amazon, I'll know that limited distribution is the main problem I've been facing. If, on the other hand, the print sales through Lulu are higher than the Kindle sales, I'll know that I need to put my primary focus on print editions in the future.
I've spent a lot of time in the past month trying to figure out where I went wrong with my "Bard of Pain" marketing. Since my readers aren't telling me, I can only speculate. But I do hope that three steps I'm planning to take - selling "Bard of Pain" through Amazon's Kindle store, selling a paperback version, and making more effort to publicize the book to readers of religious fantasy and ethnic fiction - will improve sales. It's tempting simply to skip on to Lawnmowers and see whether sex sells better, but any marketing mistakes I make now will likely affect my other books as well. So I'd like to see whether I can overcome whatever problems are plaguing "Bard of Pain."
One good bit of news is that my eyes have been holding up well, probably thanks to the humidifier Doug installed in my study. My eyes really aren't happy any time the temperature goes below eighty, and they're distinctly unhappy when the temperature goes below fifty, but I've been able to fool them into think that this is a winter in damp Seattle or Oxford, rather than in the dry Mid-Atlantic.
I forgot to mention that, despite my lengthy time online on Monday night, I actually managed to spend a substantial amount of time on all my daily tasks: write fiction, read fiction, edit fiction, publish fiction, exercise, household duties, family/friends, and read about simplicity. So I not only gave myself a green star (for doing three hours of fiction-reading and at least two hours of publishing) and a red star (for writing my thousand daily words of fiction), but also a silver star for making a stab at meeting my quotas in all the other activities.
Ah, the benefits of a twenty-hour day. Now I just have to figure out how to meet my daily quotas - it's only a seven-hour workday, darn it! - without staying awake for twenty-four hours straight.
*** 14 December 2007
Spent the day struggling with my OCR software, which wouldn't do anything I wanted it to do. All I wanted were pages from a hundred-page book that retained the hard returns and italics. Instead it sent me pages with gobbledygook in the source code, every few paragraphs, that looked like this:
[Wrd/Ltr Spacing: 100,100] [Char Style: Character 8] [Lft Mar Adj: 1.8"] [Tab Set: (Rel)0"L, 0.2", + 0.7"L] [Ln Spacing: 1.13] [Para Style: Style 3; [Lft Margin Adj[Tab Set][Font Size]] [VAdv: 0.45"(Rel)] [Left Marg Adj: 1.8"] [Tab Set: (Rel)0"L, 0.2", + 0.7"L] [Char Style: Default Par;[Font Size: 10pt]]
The result was a one-megabyte file that was messed up on virtually every page. So then I tried having it send me a plain-text version. The results weren't much more readable.
Yesterday, my father came over to visit. It felt like boot camp.
"Okay, you slobs, so think you're layout artists, do you? YOU'RE NOT! But in two hours, I'll have you broken and remade into BOOK DESIGNERS!"
It took exactly two hours for him to give me his Book Design 101 lesson. Along the way, I learned lots of nifty stuff, like how to change the "Optical Margin Alignment" (that's what InDesign calls it; I had a fit of the giggles when my father read that aloud) so that the punctuation hangs out into the margin.
He did plenty of things that would have left me stymied if I'd tried them on my own. How could I have known to give the word spacing in the justification setting a minimum of 85%, a "desired" of 100%, and a maximum of 130%? Or to set the hyphenation so that there were at least two letters before the hyphen and at least three letters after the hyphen, with a limit of three hyphens in three successive lines, and a hyphenation zone of .65 inches? ("I'm in favor of even wordspacing," he told me in explanation of the three hyphens in a row. I assured him that I was too.)
At one point, when we were struggling with the issue of how to prevent the tail of a dropped-cap Q from touching the word below it, he said, "Maybe you should change the text." I laughed again and told him that this was a William Morris moment. (Morris, a nineteenth-century author and printer, had a habit of changing his text to make it look better on the page.)
He royally chewed me out for not starting with a Master Page, and all my protests that I'd just been doing a rough mock-up till he showed me how to actually put together a book were for naught; my "rough mock-up" became my final product.
I'm still worrying about the page margins, though. It's the one decision I made that caused my father to wince.
There are other minor things I need to do to get the text ready, but now I'm ready to start thinking about the cover - or rather, about trying to get my hands on the line art for the cover, which appears in Volume II of William Cullen Bryant's Popular History of the United States (1883). I sure hope the book is popular enough to have some cheap second-hand copies floating around, because I can't get it through the public library's interlibrary loan system, so I'm going to have to buy it. I wish I still had access to the University of Maryland's interlibrary loan system, but they upped the annual fee for that to $150. I couldn't justify that expense, given that I can only read standard-sized print for three months out of the year.
Meanwhile, today (since the weather was warm) Doug and I brought in the Christmas greens: branches from our holly tree to create our traditional Christmas Branch (my parents could rarely afford Christmas trees, so we had Christmas branches instead), as well as twigs from the boxwood bushes to decorate our Advent wreath, which consists of a circle of bare branches throughout Advent, then becomes a Christmas wreath when we add the evergreens on Christmas Eve.
So we're putting up evergreens during Advent. That shows we're heretics. Anglicans have been excommunicated for lesser offenses.
*** 16 December 2007
We got all the rest of the Christmas decorations up, other than the ornaments that are stored within the Advent calendar and the popcorn-and-cranberry strings that we still need to make.
The front door has a red bow on it that we took from a giant evergreen decoration we rescued from the trash last year. (All of our Christmas evergreens came from the trash last year. We didn't have any handy evergreens in the back yard of our Annapolis home.)
In the living room, the secretary that my grandmother once owned carries a paper Victorian tree - a gift from my mother - with artificial hollies poking out from it (also rescued from the trash). In front of it are the Christmas crackers - also from my mother, who's the most fervent Anglophile in a family of Anglophiles - and behind it, on display, is a double-page spread from Tasha Tudor's rendition of "The Night Before Christmas." (I own a ton of picture books. I put different ones on display every month.)
On the dining room table, above a display of Matt Tavares's "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," colored bulbs hang from the chandelier. Nearby is the Advent calendar and Christmas candle.
In the kitchen, more colored bulbs hang from that chandelier. Some of the bulbs are from my childhood, while the rest - you guessed it - we rescued from the trash last year. Whoever threw them out hadn't even opened the package.
On the kitchen door leading outside is a stocking knitted by Doug's grandmother. The stockings that have our names on it - mine was made when I was six - won't be hung on the hearth in the kitchen till Christmas Eve.
The rest of the room looks as though it's been hit by a bunch of tipsy elves. The holly branches are draped over the kitchen table, so far out that they present a walking hazard. More holly is hanging behind the table, in the window. There are decorations on the branches, decorations on the windowsill - all three levels - and boxes scattered everywhere.
My mother has kept custody of most of the Peterson family decorations, but I have a few decorations from my childhood, such as the tiny china elephants (a parent and three children) that used to grace my mother's dresser, the sleeping china fawns that were a gift from my great-uncle, and the tiny stocking that I gave to my cat Kari when I was young. (I also made her a paper chain.) The rest - spiderwebs and Alice in Wonderland decorations and Beatrix Potter decorations and an evil-looking clay snake winding around a cross that I will explain as a medical symbol if a priest ever stops by - all the rest of the dozens of decorations have been bought by Doug and me, gradually over the years, a decoration or two each year. (Well, okay, I went wild and crazy back in the days when I was flush with cash.)
There are also woodsy decorations all over, given to my mother by an artist who makes woodsy art. Aside from the pine cones, they look as they were picked up from the lunar surface. "What is that?" visitors inevitably asked.
The cardboard creche on the side table comes from my father, who owned it when he was a boy. I can't remember how old we decided it was - 1940s? 1930s? - but it's old enough to have a "colored" wise man, so labelled. He's off on his own, behind the white wise men. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus all look as though they just stepped off the boat from England.
There's nothing like Christmas for bringing families together, if only in the form of decorations.
*** Conclusion
Nine thousand five hundred and sixty words. That's how much I've written since last Monday. Last month, I wrote zero words.
(My Muse interrupts here to say, "Of course you're writing fiction. If you spend most of the day reading fiction, I'll give you fiction back. If you spend most of the day reading discussion board entries, that's all I'll give you." My Muse is far too logical.)
As to what the long-term results will be of this change in lifestyle, we'll see.
ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY (i.e. since Halloween. Take a deep breath.)
Fiction written and edited:
--"Compassion's Keeper" (Life Prison).
Fiction edited:
--"The Balance" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Death Watch" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Deception" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Twists and Turns" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Barbarians" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Hidden" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Forge" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"The Consultation" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Truth and Lies" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Edgeplay in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Stonewall in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Work-for-Hire in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers" (Leather in Lawnville).
Fiction laid out:
"Bard of Pain" (Amazon Kindle edition, braille edition, and print edition).
Contract signed:
"Working Outside the Box: The M/s Conference 2007" (for Power Exchange Magazine).
Fiction read:
--david stein: "Political/Personal."
--Helen Eustis (with illustrations by Reinhard Michl): "Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman."
--Dr. Seuss: "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back."
--Assorted Christmas picture books.
--Robert A. Heinlein: "The Puppet Masters."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Farmer in the Sky."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Double Star."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "The Door into Summer."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Tunnel in the Sky."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Starman Jones."
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Time for the Stars."
Research literature read:
--Brent Sampson: "Sell Your Book on Amazon."
Leisure nonfiction read:
--"Quaker Faith and Practice" (Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995).
--Henry Edward Manning: "The Daemon of Socrates" (1872).
--Paula Houston: "The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life."
--James O. Hannay: "Wisdom of the Desert."
--Jacqueline Jackson: "Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail."
Podcasts listened to:
--From BBC:
----Digital Planet.
--From ABC (Australia):
----The Spirit of Things: The Religion of Shakespeare.
----The Spirit of Things: S.H.A.M. - Self-Help and Actualization Movement.
----The Ark: Crusader Medicine.
----The Ark: The Virgin and the Grail.
----The Ark: Buddhist Scrolls.
----The Spirit of Things: Temple Music in the Time of Jesus.
Videos watched:
(Okay, yes, I've been straining my eyes.)
--"Electric Company" (excerpts).
--"Free to Be . . . You and Me" (excerpts).
--"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." (With Dudley Moore! and Peter Sellers! and Ralph Richardson! and Spike Milligan! And music by John Barry! I hadn't seen this production since I was a teen; it's just as good as I remember, especially the actress who plays Alice.)
Books bought:
(Thank you, relative who gave me a Barnes & Noble gift certificate last Christmas.)
--Morris Ronsenthal: "Print-on-Demand Book Publishing."
--Aaron Shepard: "Aiming at Amazon."
--"Gaylaxicon 2006 Sampler."
Events attended:
--An Advent Procession with Lessons and Carols, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, K Street, in Washington, D.C.
Places visited:
--North Carolina, to spend Thanksgiving with relatives.
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