Surprise Badges & Fairy Godmothers

So...I've been off the internet radar for most of the past week. Some of that is due to being out of town a couple days for Father's Day. The last few days, however, I've been leading a week-long art camp on upcycled fashion. It's been fun - but tiring, which means I've been crashing early every day this week. Almost as soon as I get home, in fact.

And then, in the middle of all my fantastically busy, artistic, non-writing week, I received a flock of tweets pointing me toward a most WONDERFUL surprise.

You see, I apparently have a fairy godmother in the online writing world. And she is supremely awesome. For proof, I submit the following evidence:

Isn't it wonderful?!?? A website banner of my very own, magicked into existence by the blogging Fairy Godmother herself, Donna McNicol. In honor of the Visual Dare flash fiction posted here every week, Donna made this lovely badge for the Anonymous Legacy blog.

If you don't already, I strongly recommend that you follow Donna on Twitter (@DonnaBMcNicol), and her site Write for Ten,  which is a great challenge to write every day, even if it's only for 10 minutes. Her site has a nifty cool banner as well, and you would all do well to link through and follow it:

Of course, weekly writing challenges are NOT the limit of Donna's awesomeness. She's also a writer and author in her own right, with two forthcoming novels and several shorter works already available for Kindle or Nook. Her author website can be found here: http://donnamcnicol.com/.  She also has a writing blog (http://donnamcnicol.blogspot.com/) and a personal blog that spotlights her traveling adventures with her husband Stu (http://www.2takinga5th.com/).


And you know what? My amazing badge is not the limit of Donna's sweet fairy godmother ways. She's also made a banner for fledgling writer's website Sweet Banana Ink, and recently spotlighted it on her writing blog.

See what I mean? If anyone is a fairy godmother with a double scoop of awesome AND fairy dust - it's this lady.

When I joined the Twitter/blogging/online writing community in September 2011, I was totally unprepared for the wonderfully accepting, encouraging network of writers I would find. So much of the artistic world can be cutthroat and divisive, but I have found the online writing community to be anything but. Thanks to wonderfully creative, writer-ly souls like Donna, my journey down the path toward Authorship has been full of encouragement, thoughtful questions, running jokes, and lovely surprises.

Thank you, Donna, for my AL badge. And thank YOU, wonderful readers, for making Anonymous Legacy and the Visual Dare a banner-worthy endeavor!

I hope all of you have a fairy godmother, online or in real life. Do you?

What's the nicest thing a fellow writer has done for you?

FSF: Exquisite

Still need time to get some Real Life things in order before returning to the regular blog posts. BUT.....couldn't resist this week's Five Sentence Fiction prompt from the lovely Lillie McFerrin:

Exquisite

Notre Dame surrounded me, swallowed me whole into her sacred depths, the bones of her old pillars holding up centuries-old flesh with strength undaunted. I journeyed into her hushed darkness, her vaulted chest soaring above me while the rustling breath of other souls eddied around me: joyous, worshipful, attentive, their whispers inhaling and exhaling with the pulse of The Lady as she drew us farther in.

Glorious arches lifted in silent ranks on either side, capillaries drawing soul-whispers into candle-lit niches where prayers swirled and sighed, and fed the watchful shadows of countless patient years. But I was drawn deeper into her echoing chest, pulled toward the far end where a magnificent rosetta window - richly crafted with vivid stained glass - pulsed with the flicker of heavy afternoon light.

I stood before the altar, basking in the streaming colors, and let The Lady's Heart bleed over me.

Love Notre Dame Cathedral.....I'd give anything to go back.

You can keep the rest of Paris. I want to go see My Lady again.

Pulse Check

As a teacher, I constantly give pulse checks to my students. In my classroom, a "pulse check" is a start-up activity or pop quiz, in which I ask broad questions that let me know where the students are - how they are progressing with projects, what they are reading (or not reading), what has overwhelmed them, what has surprised them, and what they think adds or detracts from the class.

I do these every other week or so; and over the course of the semester these pulse checks tell me something  that the individual papers cannot. Collectively, they show me how far my students have come: in their thinking, their writing, what they find important or unimportant. One pulse check tells me details of the moment they're in; an accumulation of pulse checks shows me their trajectory.

Last Saturday night I got a pulse check of my own, and when I least expected it. I was printing out my NaNoWriMo script when I found I was in need of some divider tabs. I fished around in a desk drawer and found them, buried underneath an avalanche of construction paper. When I pulled them out, however, I discovered the tabs were already labelled with old story titles. Story titles, moreover, for book ideas I had not thought of since college. Book ideas that, at the time, I thought would launch my writing career.

Need I say it? The titles were horrible. Every one of them.

Don't think so? Then let me tell on myself for a moment. Here is the full list of what my College Self considered "promising material" for future publication:

Haley's Comet
Yearleaping
Devil at Death's Ridge
The Unpredictability Factor
The Pirate Conspiracy
Summer of the Vikings
Flight of the Predestine
Raising Cain in East Wigging

The worst part of discovering these labels was knowing that, once upon a time, I had a working rough draft for every one of these underwhelmingly banal ideas. Every. Single. One.

Now, if you're not laughing at me, you might be tilting your head to one side and thinking "Well, that one doesn't sound so bad; I'm pretty sure I've heard of that title elsewhere - or something similar to it..."

Which is one of the reasons I find all of these titles so cringe-worthy: first, because they are all so neutral and generic sounding; and secondly because I remember the general concept behind each book, and they were all monumentally bad. Even if the titles themselves were all right (only the East Wigging title still makes me smile a little bit), the stories would not have lived up to any marketing hype. Not even close.

I looked at the divider tabs, and thought about the ideas they represented. Then I glanced back at my NaNoWriMo manuscript, for which I needed the divider tabs in the first place. I hardly knew whether to laugh or blush. In the end, I was encouraged, not the least because the reminder showed me a couple things about myself:

* I'm glad I wasn't published while I thought I was great. Obviously I was infected with some serious "delusions of adequacy" at the time I wrote those labels. I thought then that I had grand, new, cutting-edge tales to tell. Ideas that no one had ever considered. I, with all my inherent creativity, would write those books and wow the world. My Present Self looks back at that season of life and says an earnest thank-you prayer that the Almighty prevented me from taking any of those manuscripts through to the end. I shudder to think of the consequences, had I tried to seriously submit any of those earlier ideas.

* I'm glad I lived a little before I truly knuckled down with my writing. Since making those dividers, I've traveled to five continents, been a sign language interpreter, and learned how to cook hard-core vegetarian and vegan food. I've played flag football in the woods at night (and got a killer bout of poison ivy as a result). I've had an herb garden, been mistaken for Sigourney Weaver, and helped take apart (and reassemble!) a Chevrolet motor. I've been cussed out over the phone by an irrational customer. I've skied in the Andes and hiked in the Alps, been camping in a snowstorm, and read copious amounts of Viking sagas. I had a pickle-canning fiasco that ended in stitches and a tetanus shot. I've played poker for Skittles and won.

Such experiences gave me a wider view on the world than ever before; and when the time was right, those experiences didn't just trickle into my writing - they leapt and flew and wrangled and erupted onto the page. Marvelous eruptions, in ways my Present Self still can't fully understand or explain.

But I have a hunch my Future Self knows very well how it will end. And when that Future Self sees what sort of literary litter I am leaving behind now, she will take another pulse check, blush a little, and say "My, how far I have come...."

People-Watching

This past weekend I got to get on a plane and get out of town for a few days. It was a nice luxury, neatly crammed in the middle of a hectic schedule, and it could not have come at a better time. It had been a while since I'd flown anywhere, and doing so this weekend reminded me of the key reasons why airports and flying are two of my most favorite things in the world.


Airports are my idea of adventure. If you've ever flown into or out of Atlanta, you'll know that it's one of the largest in the world - a self-contained city of sorts, with a kaleidoscopic range of businesses, people and gateways. I never really know which one excites me more: the unbounded opportunities for people-watching, or those flashing TV screens announcing myriad destinations with their connecting flights. It's almost like being caught up in my own distorted version of The Wood Between the Worlds*, and I've only to jump through the correct gate to be whisked off to an unheard-of adventure (hopefully without all that business about worlds ending and being plagued by wicked magicians). But if I had to be honest, I'd have to admit that people-watching is by far my favorite part of air travel.

People-watching is one of the best pastimes to be had for free. I like eavesdropping on snatches of phone conversations; watching travelers on the train or escalators, and try to patch together basic facts of their lives from details of clothing, baggage, phone use, hair cuts and accents. Sometimes I'll even strike up conversations with people on a whim, just to see if some of my guesses are correct. During my outbound trip  I was so diverted in this way that I nearly missed my flight, and for no better reason than I was enjoying myself in the food court, watching rivers of people pour past me, and concocting my own assumptions about each one that caught my imagination.

People-watching has also taught me that you can discern a lot by just studying faces. I'm a lifelong believer that there is some truth in the old adage that if you make an expression often enough "your face will freeze like that." (I've got my reasons for saying this - but that's a whole other blog entry.) If you accept that as something of a truth, and know what to look for, you can tell a lot of things about your airport neighbors: who is a screamer, who holds grudges, who bottles their anger inward, who is somewhat high-strung and oughtn't be pushed too far out of their comfort zone. (These are the people you generally don't want to sit next to on an airplane, as for them air transportation is usually well out of their comfort zone.)

Sometimes I fancy that I've crossed paths with characters from one of my books, as they're sprinting their way to some unknown destination of their own. There's certainly much "scope for imagination" (as Anne Shirley** would say) in an airport, and great fodder for possible future characters, or at least ideas for how such-and-other person might look or behave or sound. One of these days I'm going to arrive at the airport about five hours early with my sketchbook and pencils tucked into my carry-on, and wander the concourses at leisure, sketching and taking note of the diversity I see there. But with my luck, as sure I do that I will lose track of time, and miss my flight entirely.

Though now that I think of it, that wouldn't be too bad. It would just give me more time for people watching.


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* A reference to The Magician's Nephew, by C. S. Lewis.

** Title character from the Anne of Green Gables series