The Written Picture

Wintry things

It hasn't all been writing around here.

We've decorated our tree.

Celebrated our first snow.

Watched this girl dance as The Sugar Plum Fairy. (Photo edited with the Waterlogue app.)

Went on adventures with this little guy.

And tried our best to keep him out of trouble.

Happy Winter/Merry Christmas to you and yours!

 

Burn this.

Kenny and I stood on sidewalks and watched their black shadows: two little ears sticking up from a round body and long flowing skirts and scarves. One small and round, one tall and slender. They held out their orange pumpkin buckets. Sometimes we could just barely hear, "Trick or treat!" or "Thank you." Sometimes we heard Bud call out "Happy Halloween!" over his shoulder as they stepped off the porch. And our girl was always helping him up and down the steps, always watching over him, leading him, guiding him.

At one point I turned to Kenny and said, "Burn this moment into your memory." Their two black outlines stood patiently on an orange-lit porch, waiting with buckets, ready to say, "Trick or Treat!"

You can't photograph that: the cold night, Bud shouting to us, "I got more candy!", the grain elevator above us silent and eternal on the darkening horizon, and how it all goes so fast.

Wasn't our girl just Dorothy with sparkly red shoes, too shy to even say the words, trick or treat, on a dark night under the spotlight of a stranger's porch? And this night she's a gorgeous gypsy dancer, her long hair touching her waist.

Later at home, she took the kerchief off her head and her hair flowed like her dress and her wide sleeves. She looked like a Spanish dancer, like the hostess of the manor as she answered the last of the trick-or-treaters at our door.

It all goes so fast.

I love my husband, and I love our children, and our quiet lives under burning Maples and the Halloweens that line up one by one and the small silhouettes of flowing scarves and tiny ears that last only for a second.

--from my notebook, October 2007

Foreshadowing

Seven years ago, all the little dancers had already gone home. But the older girls were still on stage rehearsing, and my girl didn't want to go. She sat in the audience and watched.

Since then, she's gone from 2 hours a week of dance to 8 1/2. And this year, she's dancing the lead.

It sort of feels like we've come full-circle.

Before & After - the ballerina edition

It's almost recital time and her pointe shoes that were brand new in September didn't make it to the end of the year:

But that's OK.

I love looking at the difference. I love the black marks and fabric on the toes worn down to nothing.

It's hard to ruin something so beautiful. It's hard to turn it gray, scuff it up and then toss it out because you're done.

But to me, the tears, rips, scuffs and black marks are just markings on a map. The evidence of a journey well - travelled. For me, it's just proof that you danced.

So. I wrote a novel.

It started in Colorado when my daughter was little. We were at Lake Estes with my mom. My girl found a stick by the lake and picked it up.

"It looks like a gun," she said. Little indentations covered it like a curly design or intricate carving. Her eyes widened. "Maybe it's Indian writing."

My mom said, "Maybe it belongs to a cow girl. Maybe she's named Jessie Timberline."

All the way back to our cabin my wheels were spinning. The adventures of Jessie Timberline. She had to have a spunky voice and be a teller of tall tales. There had to be a bad guy and a wanted poster. There had to be Indians and a horse and a gun.

And I could write it as a gift to my daughter.

This is what she looked like when I started it:

This is what she looked like when I finished it:

She may never read it, but still it was a promise I'd made to her - one that I needed to keep. So with some quick formatting and a cover design, I uploaded it to Lulu and had it printed. I just needed to see it finished.

Here are some interesting facts about it:

• It's 253 pages/72,336 words long
• It went through 3 complete rewrites - with some sections being re-written over 20 times. At least.
• I outlined it 3 times.
• It took 7 years. SEVEN YEARS.
• Most of that time was spent doubting myself and whining. I should have just shut up and written.
• I wrote it by hand and then typed it in on the computer. Then I rewrote it by hand. Then typed in the changes.

• There will only ever be one copy.
• It's not the first novel I've written; it's the first one that's this finished.
• It's nowhere near what I wanted it to be, but it would take a lifetime to get it there and it's time to let it go.

Writing is the thing I most want to do, and the thing I'm most afraid of even though I do it every day.

Ironically (or maybe not), the story is about a girl who makes a promise to her dying pa. It haunts her and no matter what success she has, she gives up everything just to keep that promise. Some days that felt like what I was doing.

The final 20 pages were the worst. More than once, I told myself, "You know what? This just isn't worth it." Then I'd get back to work, telling myself it could be the worst thing ever written just as long as it was finished. Then as I worked, I listened to my own head as it told me how horrible I was and how worthless. But that's the way dreams go. You have to prove you really want them.

So finally, I'm free of it. Then the other day, my little guy was vrooming cars on the floor, when suddenly he said, "Paul Cactus."

I perked up. "Paul Cactus?"

"Yep." He looked at me with a faint smile like he was waiting to see what I'd say.

"Paul Cactus swallowed a cactus," I said. "That's how he got his name..." So who knows what adventure will come next.

Tennessee Williams said, "Make voyages. Attempt Them. There is nothing else."

Seeing Double

Recently I found out my favorite camera phone app can do this:

It's a throwback to the days of old film cameras where you could expose a shot and then without advancing the film (so no automatic film advance) take another picture on top of it.

You can get the same effect in Photoshop by placing one picture on top of another and adjusting either the opacity of that picture or the blending mode. But I'm old fashioned. I like doing it in the moment and seeing what happens.

The way the app works is that you snap the picture and then without seeing a preview, you have to snap another. So it takes some thought. Or luck. Or both.

I don't know. Maybe they're horrible. Maybe they're too much like a piece of bad modern art. But I like them. There's something fresh and unexpected about them.

And if nothing else, it's something to do in the car when you're bored.

Or you can entertain kids when they're bored.

I don't know that they'll win any awards or anything like that, but for now, they're satisfying my incredible urge to get back into film photography - both the toy kind and the instant kind.

So until then, I'll be in my backyard...

...pretending my phone camera is really a little plastic film camera.

I've gone too far.

I'm aware that I may sound backward. Nine years ago when I bought my first digital camera, I swore I'd never go back. I haven't shot a roll of film since.

Now I'm obsessed with it. Going digital has made me lazy. I can't even imagine taking a roll of film and nailing a photoshoot with it. Yet, I used to do it all the time.

So I've been shopping around for film cameras. But I don't want just any film camera. I want one that makes my photos look like bad vacation photos from 1963.

I'm obsessed with my camera phone because I love that it can take little snapshots. But I still spend a lot of time post-processing them so they look like they were taken on a leaky little camera. Now? I just want the leaky little camera.

I'm not switching back permanently. I like to think different cameras are like paintbrushes and paint. You pick the tool that helps you best say what you want to say.

I don't know what started all of this. Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Even when it comes to cameras. Oh well, like the poet says, "Going far means returning."

**These photos were taken 10 years ago with a disposable Polaroid camera.

I feel like I should say something about Harry Potter

When she was 7, I took my daughter to the midnight release of the 5th book, The Order of the Phoenix. Just once I wanted to see what it was like: the news cameras, the long line of people snaking from the registers through the shelves and back around to the front doors, the cheers when the boxes were brought out from the back, walking along dark sidewalks holding a thick book, knowing you were about to take an adventure and that it would be good. I don't even know if she remembers it.

After that, the books came to our post office box, though no less exciting.

She got old enough to start watching the movies, and we took her to see The Order of the Phoenix in the theatre the night before the final book was released. "I have an idea," I told her as we walked back out into the bright sunlight. "I'll read The Half-Blood Prince to you to catch you up, then we can both read the end together."

Reading those books aloud to her is one of my favorite memories. We read long after the sun went down in the dark of my bedroom with only a little reading light illuminating the page. I read until my voice was cracked and dry.

We were in Colorado on a family vacation when we finished the final book. I read 160 pages aloud while two storms picked up and moved through. The wind blew hard while we lay across the bed watching Long's Peak disappear in a shroud and reappear again twice. All afternoon, the wind banged the blinds, the sky turned dark, and we read in a dream.

I remember once looking up at her through blurry eyes and whispering, "I can't. I can't read this." And her leaning in, "What does it say?" And me with a choked voice reading, "Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive."

Some people don't get the hysteria. And that's how they see it, as hysteria. And I understand that, I really do. If you don't like the books, you don't like them. Simple.

But here's how I see it.

You do the dishes. You do them again. You fold the laundry. You fold it again. You go to work. You fill your car with gas. You do it again. You lie awake in bed at night and think, there's not enough money in the bank, someone is not speaking to you, this is not working. Our days are dusty and common.

Sometimes you need something to wait for. Sometimes you need something to hope for. I loved falling into the story - the castles, the talking portraits, the tea leaves and Butterbeer. I loved the whisper of turning pages. I loved the words. 

And I love that it took a long time to unfold. We're used to getting hamburgers in under 5 minutes, entire books in even less without leaving our house. In 300 pages (or less) a book is done. In two hours (or less) a movie is over. I loved that for 7 years (I started reading them in 2000), I wondered whether Snape was good or evil.

It was hard not to wonder anymore.

And that is the fun of a good story. That it stays with you - while you stand in line at the supermarket, while you drive to work, while you lie in bed at night after another day is done. That for a while it gave you something to hope for.

Now my daughter's older, and this summer, she's reading all the books in the series on her own. And last night, she went to her own midnight release - the final Harry Potter movie. And today just feels like something is over. Like the magic is gone.

Mischief managed.

BUT. I keep looking at my shelves, at those hard-backed spines all in a row. Maybe I'll read them again like she is. Maybe even though the mystery and the hope is gone, I'll fall under their spell again. Time can move forward, moments can fall away and disappear, but I can go back to that world over and over again, escaping for just a little while. That's the real magic.

It Doesn't Feel Right Yet

I recently upgraded to this camera, and I'm still trying to work out all the kinks. My hands don't know what to do yet. I'm fumbling with dials and switches. But still, here are some early shots.

I'm sure I'll get there at some point.

But in the meantime, it doesn't help when this is what you have to work with:

It's that time of year...

I've mentioned before that my little girl dances. Dress rehearsal was last night and we have two performances over the weekend. Here's what I'll be seeing and photographing:

Hope your weekend is just as good!