A Writer's Life - In A Nutshell

To Sleep, Perchance To Write

I have to admit that I haven't done much writing lately...while awake. Last night I had a vivid dream of sitting in the dark with a scrap of paper and a pen, scribbling wildly a string of prose that flowed as smooth as water. Was this my conscience trying to tell me that it's been too long since I picked up with the stories I have started? Perhaps I should listen to my inner-therapist. (it's a lot cheaper and easier to get an appointment!)

So...you may be asking "Well, what have you been doing?". The answer is reading....reading....and more reading. I seem to go through books pretty quickly, I think, and usually have several going at one time. I am also the happy chapter leader of the Shreveport area Pulpwood Queens book club (the Red River Pulpwood Queens). Once a month my friends and I (some who happen to be authors in their own right) meet to discuss books and literary happenings. I am quite disappointed that the Louisiana Book Festival has been cancelled this year, for I was looking forward to another exciting literary excursion to Baton Rouge this fall. My framed poster of last year's La Book Festival hangs on my living room wall, reminding me of all of the wonderful people I met in 2009. I suppose I shall have to get my "meet-the-author fix" by taking smaller trips throughout the year... Ooh! I see that one is coming up this weekend!

News: Awakening Inspiration Lost

BARATARIA BAY, La. – The sand dunes and islands of Barataria Bay, a huge expanse of water and marsh on Louisiana's coast, have become the latest casualty of the environmental disaster spewing from BP's offshore well. And fishermen are bitter.

Barataria has played a vital role in Louisiana history. It is where the pirate and Battle of New Orleans hero Jean Lafitte established his colony of Baratarians. The estuary was also the setting for "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin. Like other wealthy 19th-century New Orleanians, Chopin spent summers on Grand Isle, to the bay's south, and made the evocative island a focus of her work. (source Yahoo! News)

A Month of Mother's Days

"We thought that, perhaps," said I, hesitating, "it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them." - Charles Dickens, Bleak House

For me, Mother's Day is not merely just a once a year holiday. Mother's Day is every day. These are the days that Mother is obligated to take her daughter to dance classes, recitals, sit with camera in hand at the many school performances, pick up brownies at the grocery store for class snack (there is no time to bake), doctor's appointments, play dates, choir practice, meals, baths, and oh so much more. Therefore, I am reminded every single day of the gift that God has given me; my little girl.

That being said, there is hardly time for creative writing at the closing of an average school year. By the time the end of the day draws near, I want nothing more than to crawl under the covers and read...whittling down my stack of Southern fiction novels, a few non-fiction tomes thrown in for good measure.

So, when there is so little time, what should a writer do? I have found that you do whatever you can to stay focused on literary activities, even if that means you do nothing but blog, network, send off manuscripts, attend book clubs, scribble down story ideas in the carpool lane, and even write a poem while sitting at an ever-lasting red light. Even when a writer is not writing, he or she is still a writer. Life happens. If a writer goes a week or two without producing anything of significance, that does not make one less of a writer. This is the mantra that I attempt to remind myself while snuggling down with a good book at ten o'clock at night, when I feel as if I should be writing and my brain is too exhausted to think.

"The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it." - Jules Renard author

Time sure does fly when you're writing, have the flu, take trips, and spend more time at pre-school dance class than you do at your own computer. During these times I have to take creative inspiration where I can get it! I keep cursing myself for not purchasing a notebook to keep in the car and find myself scribbling poetry and story ideas on the back of receipts stuffed in my jumbled up purse.

I have recently submitted some short stories to the Oxford American magazine and the New Orleans Review. I'm keeping my fingers and toes crossed and am determined not to let these magazines and others forget my name. The Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans has created a poetry competition that I intend to take a stab at in the near future as well.

To add to my monthly schedule, I am starting a chapter of the Pulpwood Queen book club. I'm excited to gather my local friends for book discussions and various projects and road trips. Speaking of road trips, I have recently taken another excursion to New Orleans and I doubt it will be very long before I return once more. I just can't get enough! Each time I load the trunk of my car with plastic sacks of new and signed books to bring back home. The Garden District Book Shop is a Southern reader's heaven! Many people drink, gamble, smoke...I read and drink coffee.

Where is human nature so weak as in the book store? - Henry Ward Beecher

A Little Bit Here, A Little Bit There...

Waiting for my iced coffee with hazelnut, I watched the speckled brown finches swoop down from the clay awning, gathering twigs and the occasional french fry from the pollen dusted bushes lining the drive-thru. Aren't we all just gathering twigs for our nests?

- April, 9:05a.m.

Thoughts like these frequently cross my mind while driving, trying to sleep, and even taking a shower. Most times I do not have a notebook on hand and the eventual thought ends up being written down a bit skewed. Note to self: buy more notebooks for "twig" collecting.

I've been gathering quite a few twigs for my nest over the past two weeks. Many of them have been brittle, or have even snapped in half. I'm still waiting for the french fry! I currently have 3 articles going at once and have been doing extensive research on each. I've done everything from eating crawfish, driving south to look for frogs, and even found myself out in the woods looking for the grave of a possible saint. At the end of the day I'm overtaken by so many wonderful ideas for writing that I find it hard to sleep.

As for my creative fiction, aside from another submission round with the Southern Review, I have been lucky enough to have a great friend who has shared his writing expertise by giving me pointers on my newest short story. Owning his own publishing company and having written many books over the years, I am taking his critiques to heart in order to make my story even better than before.

I write down everything I want to remember. That way instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on. - Beryl Pfizer (writer, actor)

A Commonplace For Everything

"To those, who have been accustomed to the use of a Commonplace Book, the advantage of a convenient Repository of the kind is well known; and to those, who have not, its utility must be sufficiently obvious. The man who reads, and neglects to note down the essence of what he has read; the man who sees, and omits to record what he has seen; the man who thinks, and fails to treasure up his thoughts in some place…will often have occasion to regret an omission, which such a book, as is now offered to him, is well calculated to remedy." RENAISSANCE COMMONPLACE BOOKS FROM THE BRITISH LIBRARY

In reading Unveiling Kate Chopin by Emily Toth, I kept coming across mention of something called a Commonplace Book. I had never heard of such a thing but seeing that Kate was a writer in 1800s America, I was compelled to find out what exactly what the biographer was referring to. I find Victorian culture fascinating and being an avid scrapbooker and writer myself, I found the following explanation:

According to Wikipedia, Commonplace books were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. "Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis which means "a theme or argument of general application", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual. Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.

I always find myself re-reading informative passages, newspaper clippings, beautiful poems, recipes, song lyrics or excerpts from various books wondering how I would ever remember that they were there later. What better way to compile these things and perhaps leave your children something that they can cherish once you are gone than a "Commonplacer"?

According to the website Self Made Scholar, the steps for creating a Commonplace book are quite simple.

1. Choose your medium (notebook, binder, journal, blog, etc.)

2. Choose your content (include anything you would like to remember)

3. Choose an organizational system (dividers, sections, chapters, tabs, etc.)

4. Keep it up!