incinerate them?

there's a strange monday silence here in the office. my brick red walls, the morning sun comes in from behind, if i turn to the right i can see the brillant blue of the calm lake. i see books all around like little doorways waiting to be opened. and open computer files of several stories i wish to work on today. i'd like to give my excuses to both the books and the files, "i don't have time for all of you, don't have time to explore the worlds inside." but how do you excuse such opportunity. a mountain of gold you don't have time to spend.

don't you think one of the best things about heaven will be its timelessness?

oh, a friend called during my blogging thoughts. she is getting her first book contract!!! whooohooooo for CATHY!!!!!!! years of hard work and continued pursuit, and now she's just beginning on the crazy and wonderful and okay, neurotic journey toward seeing her name on a book cover.

earlier today i wondered, if i wasn't a writer, what would i be?

a prodigal wandering around the world, a professional gambler who's lost it all and dealing cards in vegas, a shady private investigator, a chain smoking alcoholic working at a something job i'd hate thus the chain smoking and the drinking?

is it writing that keeps me in line? okay, this is probably ALL a lie. this would be the dark cindy, the one without god, the person that my many weaknesses gravitates toward being.

maybe instead (hopefully), a more involved community member and kid's baseball coach, a photographer for a travel magazine, a director in a small theater, a sailing family going around the world, someone doing more to make the world a better place like helping stop the sex slave industry in southeast asia, etc....

it's always strange considering the alternate lives we might have lived. the places we might be living in, the people we've missed meeting by meeting the ones we have. but then also those we would've never known if not for the corners we'd turned.

watched a pretty dark and graphic movie this weekend. 21 grams. incredibly filmed and very moving though i recommend it only for those who indie-type R-rated flicks that are both disturbing and thought-provoking. a poem in the movie said something like, "the world revolved on the outside and something in each of us revolved for us to find one another" or something much better yet similar.

sometimes i wish to live many lives, but living also has it's share of wounds and scars. hemingway wrote once, "me i like life very much. so much it will be a big disgust when have to shoot myself...." such tragic to see someone who loves life deeply, lives life fully (even if waywardly in the quest of that living), and ends life so horribly.

i also consider the millions of people giving forty years to jobs they dislike (yet choose this), living lives they wish to be out of, or not living at all because it's just too painful, disillusioning, unsafe. christians who build their own walls even as christ tries kicking them outside a bit.

a proverb in the message bible,
"a life frittered away disgusts god."

then this cracked me up:

"when the samaritans learned that his (jesus) destination was jerusalem, they refused hospitality. when the disciples james and john learned of it, they said, 'master, do you want us to call a bolt of lightning down out of the sky and incinerate them?'

even walking along with THE LIGHT, his buddies ask him, "hey, should be incinerate these people for not letting us stay overnight?"

funny, yet terrible, where our godly intentions sometimes go.

my random thoughts have certainly been random lately. and yet, there's the connected thru-line always. i've got books with worlds waiting to be discovered. my own words and stories that i grasp from the air and tap into a computer file. lives to live, to observe, and to wonder at the missed and the experienced. shoes of my own and of others to take a stroll in. celebrations to be had (yeah CATH!). anger to relinquish, people to find ourselves revolved toward.

it's all in the living.

time, don't take it all too quickly please. god, help us capture today and tomorrow or any tomorrow we have and savor it, use it, create something beautiful within it. or whatever you have in mind.

and just think, this is just a glimpse of the eternal.

bummy ouches

another week bites the dust.

i found out via lisa samson's blogspot on the death clock that my life expectancy is april 25, 2054. if so, i might actually finish several of these writing goals.

my hair is blonder than anticipated after a morning at the salon this week. now the head has brown lowlights instead of blond highlights.

me bum hurts from driving in the car too much. it needs a vacation.

extended family mayhem, missing uncle found but still lost.

watched one of the worst movies ever...vanity fair. what a disappointment.

my oldest son is just hilarious. having to drive him 20 miles every morning to high school has been great for us.

heard from two sources that my new book, the salt garden, is in england. whoohoo, or would that be cheerio?

figured out that my philippines trip will require around 27 hours of travel before arriving in manila. talk about pains in the bum.

finally getting back to work on stone rivers. rewrote opening of until she's gone and made slight progress in clockworks.

thanksgiving is two months and a day away. the best holiday ever.

ahhhhh friday.

thursday

cool news today, a norwegian publisher is contracting to translate and publish my first three novels, the ones that are out-of-print here in the states. already they're in german and one is in dutch, and for me, it's as exciting as the first publishing contract. bookshelves in norway...imagine that.

what does it mean to be 7 years old and have had two major encounters with rattlesnakes? at age 2, my son was bit and survived. then last weekend -- here's eyewitness son's account, "it was all curled up and struck at me but i jumped out of the way." once i saved him from drowning too.
as a very little guy, this kid told me about a dream, "the birds came and took me to where the children were, but i started crying really hard and said i wanted to go back to my mom, so they took me back."
i hope they don't return for a very long time.

writing chronicles: more progress on manuscript in progress clockworks.
more rewriting progress on stone rivers.
perhaps i really can accomplish something without contracts pressing me onward. thanks to you who keep asking me, that helps too.

random, random, oh the randomness of a thursday afternoon. hey, i think i was born on a thursday afternoon. now, that was random.

seeing you

"to be impelled to prove your masculinity through flat denials of your anxieties (fraid a nothing had been your motto as a child) and bold lies about your exploits. to be forced to practice the most severe economy in your attempts to "render" your life artistically, because your capital of self-understanding was too small to permit you to be expansive and your feat of self-exposure too powerful. to make a virtue of necessity by packing troubled feelings below the surface of your stories like dynamite beneath a bridge. to be tempted by your enormous ambition into writing a novel, despite the risks inherent in amplitude...." -- excerpt from hemingway by kenneth s. lynn

ernest hemingway's mother thought him lazy, not using his potential and spiritually wayward. f. scott fitzgerald wrote that his friend had not been fully recognized for his genius. some saw him as a great swimmer, outdoorsmen, irrestably charming, a vibrant literary giant. others as arrogant, manipulative, backstabbing and cruel.

what does it take to see someone without our own glasses fogged and smudged? what conclusions we easily make when viewing one slice of a personality? it is rather hard to see someone else. probably impossible to fully see as each of us is in continual change and motion. but to see, even a little, of who we really are, would it make us better, make them better? or would it bring disillusionment complete. or greater fear?

do we want to see?
i'd answer yes, most especially to the faces that immediately come to mind, even to many beyond my circle and those who have little time for me and me for them.

and yet, sometimes viewing inside ourselves and inside of others can be quite terrifying. or...perhaps not, perhaps instead, it is the remarkable reminder of our need for more than ourselves.

would you rather

home from south lake tahoe. what a place. casinos and village shopping areas are a people-watcher's heaven. sis and i people watched a people watcher which was even more fun. great time in the sand and sun with kids, great kayak ride with the spousey, and sis and i lost money at the blackjack table though it entertained for quite some time.

and now the work (how can it be called work?) calls to me. interesting, for some time and even more time lately, i've peered closer into the rhythms in prose writing. something of sentence structure, word meter, paragraph lengths, choices, syllables, white space, sharpness...

so today, i return to a novel i finished writing nearly two years ago. people regularly ask me, "when is that novel coming out, the one set in the women's prison?" i then must reply that i haven't done a thing to it. it's waiting in clumps and odd stacks with marks all over sections while other sections have waited miserably. today, it waits no longer.

i'll be peering close, not just at the story though story is supremeo, in my opinion. but also at the feel of its structure. not only what it is, but how it will be read, what it evokes in the telling.

any comments or theories are welcome -- post away (come on, my writers, editors, readers) or email me if you would rather. would you rather? funny, i just found a great first-draft scene someone once gave me to read called "the would you rather scene." there's also a game called zobmondo brought to my attention some time ago. it's about choices, but choices like "would you rather have the CIA or the Mafia after you?" "would you rather eat your mother-in-law or your dog if you were starving to death?" the choices get exceedingly more bizarre and often disgusting.

so would you rather...okay, i can't start this right now.
off to work.

lucky shoes

i wore my lucky shoes today.

and hit road construction twice which made me late for a lunch date which made me hurry toward the restaurant so i crossed the lawn instead of sticking with the sidewalk and that lawn just happened to be recently and thoroughly watered (you can picture it, right?). throughout the day, i heard several times a song that i didn't need to hear and found some papers that reminded me of other things i've lost and i spent an hour trying to speak with a human at MCI and AAA, "press 1 if you want to sit on the line for 53 minutes" (though AAA was much better than MCI).

AND YET i had a wonderful lunch with a friend, a surprise phone call that became its own gift, found a fun pack of goodies from tyndale house in the mail (thank you!), got my office nearly organized with my sister-in-law's enormous help, made my little son laugh till he fell off his chair and made my big son chuckle (both equal accomplishments), helped my daughter with algebra (even greater accomplishment), and sat for awhile on the back patio waiting for the moon as the crickets and lapping water sang him on up.

my lucky shoes have carried me all over europe on five different trips walking the lands of the netherlands, france, germany, austria, czech republic, and italy. i've worn them on field trips, to lunches and meetings, to date nights, to conferences, on airplanes and trains and subways, to kids' class parties, kid sport events, weekend getaways...i could go on, and on. oh, the stories those shoes could tell.

and so, i love my lucky shoes, even when they're not so lucky. no, they aren't as fashionable as when i bought them six years ago. yes, they've seen better days, much better. but i'm not getting rid of them -- how could i? some days, for the good or the bad, i just need them on my feet.