Blog Archives - Third Quarter '06
September 06
[September 1st] Brainstorming
Is it really September? How'd that happen? Was I asleep? What did I miss?
I'm reading easily the best book on writing I've come across in a long while. It's called the Fiction Writer's Brainstormer, by James V. Smith Junior, and it's the bomb. It has really helped me to focus. Sometimes, when you've been writing for a long time, especially when you have so many other pressures such as children and a job, the writing begins to come by rote. I hate that. This book has helped me to find a new fresh way to look at my story. And just in time, too. My deadline for delivery of Dear Rita (my new Harlequin Kimani) is November. Not a hell of a lot of time!
August 06
[Wednesday August 23rd] Diploma course?
Sitting here listening to the rain outside. They say we should expect a Tropical Depression overnight, and that there's a cyclone brewing out in the Atlantic. Oh goody, just the excitement we need.
I was wondering: does anyone know of a good American university that does distance learning programmes in creative writing? I've been toying with the idea of doing a postgraduate diploma or something in writing, but something pretty broad-based, with fiction and non-fiction, copywriting, journalistic writing and autobiography. If you've got any ideas, or if you've had a bad suggestion and want to warn me of any organisation, I'd be grateful for your feedback. You can e-mail me or let me know here.
[Thursday August 17th] Mildew
Does anybody know how to get mildew stains out of clothing? I did a duuumb thing. My daughter got the cutest little pink outfit from some friends, and what do I do? Put it in the laundry hamper with the intention of washing it just to get out the shop dust, then I leave a washing machine valve open and flood the washroom, and then A WEEK LATER discover said cute little outfit stuck to the bottom of the hamper, all mildewed. And she hasn't even worn it yet!
Oh horror! Any advice?
[Tuesday August 16th] ONE star???
I recently had the shock of my life: I stumbled upon a review of May Summer Never End on Amazon and discovered that some young lady had given me ONE star. ONE star? My first diss ever. I nearly fell over.
Not to be totally self congratulatory, but nothing I have ever written could possibly deserve a single star, especially for the reason she gave...it had too many big words. How old are you, Gina? Twelve? Sorry you can't read, sweetheart.
Boring? My work? Huh. Right.
[Wednesday August 2nd] Perspective
I'm an idiot. Not to mention a damn fool. Here I am moaning about my precious plum tree being chopped down, and how I feel as though I'm "grieving for someone I lost", when a colleague of mine lost his son in an accident over the weekend. Somewhere out there, a mother is weeping for her son, a family is devastated, and I've got my knickers in a twist because my tree got hacked up?
Reality check.
July 06
[Sunday July 30th] The Bleeding Tree
My plum tree is bleeding. My gardener came while I was out on Friday, and took it into his head to quote, prune, unquote my trees. It was a wholesale massacre. I'm not even going to get into what he did to the glorious 20-foot tall pine out front. And the carambola tree that isn't even mine, which hangs over the neighbour's wall, providing a handy screen between my house and theirs. But what he did to my plum tree made me weep.
He butchered it. I counted 17 major limbs that he has lopped off, for some obscure reason assuming that I wanted them gone. Oh, my god, I have been complaining to everyone (except him, he conveniently doesn't have a cell phone) but nobody seems to understand how I feel about it.
Now, it isn't the plums you might be thinking about. It isn't one of
those round purple things you get in North America and Europe. It's what
we call a Jamaica plum, a fat red thing with an outie navel at the end. I
planted that tree when I first moved into here, 8 years ago. It was just a
stump. And it blossomed into a glory to behold.
And it is deeply entrenched in my heart. The day we brought Riley home from the hospital, my mother was up in it, picking plums (it bears in May) waiting for us. Throughout my maternity leave, I used to go there in the morning and sit under it in the shade, and let him look up into the branches.
With Megan, same thing. We used to walk out there in the morning and enjoy the coolest part of my yard. And when plums came into season we had an embarrassment of plums, a carpet of them covering the ground. People used to come and help themselves to those that hanged over the fence. It was always full of birds. And the branches were low enough for Riley to pick his own, and even Megan used to reach up and touch the leaves.
No more. He's gone and butchered it like Jack the Ripper, lopping off limbs ad hock, with not a branch within reach being allowed to survive. and I feel as though I've been physically attacked. I went to visit it today, and it's still bleeding, hugs gobs of sap falling down to the earth. Oh, my. I feel like I'm grieving for someone I lost.
[Friday July 21st] Stuff happens here
Oh, blah. It's a blah day at the end of a blah week, and damned if I feel like writing anything. I'd been sailing along since I came back from Jamaica, writing steamy hot sex scenes, and now that Rita and Dorian have gotten their rocks off, I'm back in the doldrums again, just plodding along. It's really hard to write those linking scenes, the stuff between all the "good" parts. I read of a writer who just skips over the linking scenes and marks the blank spaces with the words "Stuff Happens Here", writes all the hot, exciting bits first, and then goes back and fills in the rest, but I'm not really that sort of writer.
For a global thinker, I write surprisingly linearly; I need to begin at the beginning and end at the end. So, here I am, plodding through my "stuff". Things better heat up again real fast. Maybe I ought to just toss them back into bed for no reason in particular. I made 'em after all; they have to do as I say. Talk about a God complex. Bwahahahah!
[Monday July 3rd] Free day in MoBay!
My only free day in Montego Bay before I head back home in the morning. I decided to spend it wandering around, soaking up the atmosphere, and, if I got lucky, sniffing around for a story, or at least a setting for a story. I headed for Gloucester Avenue, better known in MoBay as the Hip Strip. It’s Montego Bay’s minuscule version of Times Square, with luxury hotels, bars, casinos and nightclubs. I have to confess I popped in at one of the casinos, where I bought a few meager tokens (not being a gambler) and played the 5 cent poker slots for an hour or so. To my delight, I more than doubled my money – all $3 of it – and then lost it all again in a single miserable 10-minute losing streak. Oh, well.
On to the stores. There was jewelry and make up, of course, but I’m not big on either. I browsed the art and craft places, which is where I got this month’s prize, and amused myself that way. Unfortunately, as is the case with most tourist economies, the Hip Strip was dominated by an unending series of tourist traps, cluttered little stores lined from ceiling to floor with tacky made-in-China tchotchkes like ceramic mugs with nipples, Rastafarians with humongous penises, plastic back-scratchers and T-shirts, all plastered with the Jamaican flag. Most of them were run by non-Jamaican Indians or Pakistanis, most likely a small group of families who spread their merchandise out over the strip. I wondered if much of the desperately needed money thus earned was staying in Jamaica or whether it was being siphoned off to the East.
The food? Oh, jerk, jerk, jerk, of course. And a mean curry chicken, too. Jamaica has jerk stores like New York City has hotdog carts. And it’s goooood. And if you’re in the neighborhood and in the mood for fine dining, stop off at The Native. Trust me; you’ll be glad you did.
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The Hip Strip |
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Remember the Jamaican bobsled team? From the movie Cool Runnings? This is their bar. And the bobsled really is in there! |
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Of course, two obligatory beach scenes just for you. |
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[Sunday July 2nd] The festival gets off the ground
Back to Ellis Piece, to Merle’s 18 acres of former slave plantation for a day of poetry and prose reading, and I am (ahem) the star attraction. Much more of an audience this time. Literature lovers filed in with their families to picnic under the trees and eat jerk chicken and the famous Jamaican red beans and rice, curried chicken and festival, and to talk about books. And while the children climbed the rope ladders and squealed while being spun around on the chair-plane, the grown ups gathered around and read to each other.
It was wonderful. Jamaicans love poetry, and the range of works delivered was impressive. I read my short story, Sex and Obeah, which you can read here. This time, yeah, I can say I had an appreciative audience. And I did sell a few books and sign a few autographs. So I have upgraded my delusions of greatness to delusions of okay-ness.
After the readings, everybody settled down for jerk chicken, rice and peas (actually, red beans and rice; for some reason Jamaicans call beans peas) and coconut water supplied by a dreadlocked coconut man who was all too happy to enjoy a spliff in the open air, an activity that didn't raise so much as a double take from all present, but something which would probably net you a good 3 years in jail in Trinidad.
Here are some of my pix:
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| Certainly the most unusual place my books have ever been laid out! | Merle's little book nook. |
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| Me doing my reading of Sex and Obeah. I'm dwarfed by the place. | The kids couldn't care less about any poetry readings. They played on the chair-plane instead. |
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| There was a contortionist. | And a bunch of young guys doing tumbling tricks. |
Incidentally, one of the young acrobats flirted with me like a madman. Very flattering, but I considered pointing out to him that not only was I a big "hard-back" woman, as we say in Trinidad, but I am also old enough to be his mother. Highly amusing, all the same.
[Saturday July 1st] On to Montego Bay
At the crack of dawn, I hop a coach for the four-hour drive across the island, from Kingston on the South Coast to the much more relaxed, much more luxurious and tourist-friendly North Coast. Through Fern Gully, past Dunn’s River and Ocho Rios, to Mo-Bay itself. Instantly, the tensions of Kingston melt away.
My hostess, Merle, picks me up at my hotel, and, after a quick stop for the obligatory jerk pork and ‘festival’ (fried cornmeal dumplings) we go on to her flower estate in an area called Ellis Piece, a former slave plantation in the town of Lethe. Here, I was to deliver my workshop on short story writing, which was my reason for coming to Jamaica in the first place. I wish I could say that I did a bang-up presentation to a packed house of appreciative student writers, who all crowded me afterwards, bought up my whole stash of books and hounded me for autographs, but if you were to read that here, you would be on Donna Hill’s or Sandra Kitt’s website, not mine.
What actually happened was. . . not much. Through a series of mishaps, my intended audience never turned up. I eventually made my presentation to my hostess and a talented and wonderful Jamaican poet and English teacher called Jane – and meeting her alone was worth the trip. Other than that, two of the handymen on the estate wandered in for a listen, and one of them fell asleep. A lady who I gather helps up at the estate house listened for a while, got bored, and left. Three little girls, who told me that they don’t like to read or write, also sat for a while (having been press-ganged to do so by Merle), and one of them fell asleep. The donkey that stuck its head in to see what was going on was even less interested. Certainly put my delusions of greatness into perspective.
More tomorrow.
