NaNoWriMo 2023

/ Nancy Palmer / Leave a comment

I’m signed up for NanoWriMo this year and have been consistently showing up to the page, although not always making my word count. Celebrating the 100th year of the Orange County Library System by at “Neil Gaiman in Conversation with Art Spiegelman” at the beloved dr phillips center was worth getting behind on my count, especially as I attended with my Amazing Offspring and their partner.

The Orlando area NaNoWrMo group powered through an incredible amount of writing during the Write Around Disney event. Camaraderie galore, lots of walking and standing in lines (it IS Disney after all), and writing, writing, writing. Oh, and fresh hot beignets. You could spot our groupby the dusting ofpowderedsugar so many of us wore.

I must complete my goal this year. I’ve ordered my WINNER t-shirt and I can’t wear it if I don’t earn it. The things I do to work around my natural tendency to lose interest around 1/3 of the way through! I also am reminding myself that you can edit work once it’s on the page. Can’t really revise it until it exists though. Although is that true? This story has shifted around in my head pretty dramatically since I first conceived of it years ago.


Big thanks to all my NaNoWriMo buddies for helping me get the pages going. You rock!

Long Hand

/ Nancy Palmer / Leave a comment

Dear Muse,

I am so drawn to write to you a long letter in my volatile hand, a letter that meanders and plaints about writing and my inability to express my thoughts and the quixotic workings of my brain. But what is the point? I can’t mail it; you’ll never receive it; knowing these things I become self-conscious and step even further away from any ability to express myself. I am quietly jealous of those writers who know or c;aim to know what writing must or should be for at the very least, themselves, to qualify as ‘good” or ‘worth writing’ or even honest.

Me, all I know is that I am often lost in the wild woods. And sometimes glad to be there.

Dancing Down His Bones

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He has said

THIS is how the world will be.

He has looked to himself

to his reflection

to his shadow

and said, and believed,

the world is shaped around me

this is what the world is.

He has said it enough

now others believe

and the shape of his words is the shape of their worlds

And he is both the reflected and reflecting,

and the world tilts and bends and moves

as though he were gravity

as though his words were claims to the shape of things

as though he might be the shape of everything.

 

She has said, “No.”

She refuses to change her shape.

She refuses the change in the shapes that surround her.

She seizes the world in both hands, two eyes,

She seizes the world with her heart.

She says, “No,”

and defies him

denies him

She says, “No,” and she cries,

she says “No,” she defies

what weight he claims as gravity.

She shrieks, she laughs her grief, she flings

head and arms and denies what he thinks

And she dances,

she dances down his bones.

His rage cannot touch her, wild thing,

the world reshapes itself beneath her dancing feet.

her arms embrace the world

and her voice, ringing,

cascading

finds in the chaos

other voices.

They find each other.

They shape a new shape

and they are dancing down his bones.

 

 

Shaping Life

/ Nancy Palmer

I’ve been thinking today about consciously shaping one’s life. I was in the middle of a rambling post about how to live, how to die (yes, Shakespeare, every third thought is my death) when I was interrupted by a call from a weeping family member. She asked me if I had some suggestions about how to talk to a five-year-old about death.

Pow.

What do you say to a five-year-old about death? I wish I could give her a hug. Some things are best communicated through presence, the embrace of a body, a very literal reminding that someone is loved and that you are here—right here—for them. I can’t hug her, though. Too many miles between us. So I gave her some words.

Words are what I have.

I like words. I like people who like words.

Why am I with them so seldom now?

I enjoy a luscious phrase cascading. I savor a well-written verse, even as I struggle to release the logical mind seeking specific meaning, absolutes and open myself to the sensation of the words. Invoking, dispelling, confounding, revealing: the craft can elevate or demean and always, always I am reaching.

I am so happy when I’m with people who understand what it is to fall through a page and come out the other side changed. I expand in the energy of people who create: words, images, music, dance. Who are aware that life, too, is a creative choice. But the choices I’ve made in my life, sometimes from love, sometimes from fear, have not led me often to be with them.

I think it’s time to change that.

What do you say to a 53-year-old about death? Death is a long-time companion of mine. We’re on familiar terms. I know the dust waits.

I am considering my life, considering it as a creation, choosing the shape it should take. When “I” am over, who do I want to have been? Yes, I know: the poets and philosophers have always been delving this mine. But for most of us, these moments of crystal awareness are few. We should heed them. At least I should.

I’m going on a quest for words, and the people of words. The images will come along the way.

Self-Medicating with Games and Dog

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Honestly, he’s likely better at platformers than Yours Truly.

Complex feelings this hectic month. I’ve been pushing to the very edge of my physical and emotional limits, and sometimes beyond. So I’ve been overtired. When I am overtired, my usual coping mechanisms aren’t enough to keep me functional, and so I resort to the opiate of the nerdy masses: video games.

Why, yes, I AM playing Dragonquest Builders 2 on the Switch, why do you ask?

Tea and a Tome

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Kestrel bookmark fragment © Carl James Freeman, 1989.
Used with kind permission of the artist.

Today’s tea: organic jasmine green, with a shot of honey generously provided by one of our gracious hosts during last week’s Crescent Beach conference of writerly types. Evokes good memories.

Today’s book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Botanist Kimmerer is a scientist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This doubled authority charges her writing with confidence and passion. Her technical background might lead you to expect bare factual reportage, but beauty of her words comes from the well that poets frequent. I love discovering wonderfully written creative nonfiction. Laced through with Kimmerer’s personal experience and study, Braiding Sweetgrass gives us the interweaving of three sources of knowledge: science, tradition, and soul.

I’m reading more slowly these days, but I really don’t mind with a book this rich in content and language. I find I’m being educated in multiple fields at once, with joy along the way. Highly recommended so far.

Dorian Update

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How High’s the Water, Mama?

The wind has been rattling our storm shutters and our spirits. But my household is safe, and I’m thankful. Gratitude sits side by side with concern for our northerly neighbors, and grief for the islands.

I’ve been in floods, seen the water rising. I was a child, and the memory is haunting. And we were able to flee. I can’t imagine being a parent in this situation.

A neighbor is mobilizing, and I’m grateful for that too. We’re sending water, food, blankets, funds. It’s not enough. How can it ever be enough? But it’s something.

I hope this post find you safe and well. Love to you all.

Maintaining Me

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(I had a tan the year this was taken. I think it was 1986.)

I’m getting myself in order, physically and mentally. There’s a certain amount of “housekeeping” that comes along with maturity. I dislike the barrage of annual appointments required for modern medicine, but I try to remain grateful that I’m in a position to receive healthcare, where so many in our world aren’t.

Had a visit with a new-to-me dermatologist, a cheerful man with a head of curly gray hair who looked me up and down and said wonderingly, “You haven’t been in the sun much at all, have you? You are r​eally pale! Where did you grow up?” I was tempted to tell him Rivendell, which is true in its way, but perhaps a bit esoteric, so I went with the physical truth instead. Which led to a discussion of how Charles Manson is also from WV originally, which led to a discussion of serial killers, which is, honestly, NOT the conversation one expects to have while naked with a stranger. 

Wanted to take a spur-of-the moment road trip to DragonCon, but putting myself into that kind of physical stress while switching meds around is not a good choice. And I’m feeling a bit impulsive lately, but not so impulsive that I’d consider collapsing in an airport a fun option. (Ask me how I know!) I have a bit of environmental guilt about even considering it, but considering it I am: WorldCon is in New Zealand next year. Hmmmmm… certainly time to plan.

A year. That’s a good intermediate goal, right? If I scrape my fragmented energy together, and point it at one thing, I’m pretty decent at accomplishing Stuff. Now I’m going to break down the Intermediate goal into step-by-step goals, and see where I can go.

First, though, short term goals. Only six more medical appointments for me this month. I can do it!

Life After Life

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I’ve spent entirely too much of my life listening to and believing Authorities who told me, for whatever reason, that I couldn’t/shouldn’t be myself, tell my stories, be ME in this world. One of the benefits of collecting all this gray hair is my growing accumulation of perspective. I can see better now where these Authorities (in reality, humans every bit as flawed as I was/am!) got these perspectives. And that these are reflections of their own fears, opinions, preferences, jealousies, understandings or misunderstandings, and don’t necessarily apply to me.

Another benefit is the ability to look back at my own life more objectively, seeing how obeying Authority was a survival mechanism. And I realize, again and again, that I can forgive myself for not being a stronger person … I SURVIVED! I missed some chances, but this is okay. Repeat: this is okay.

I’ve begun my own life after life. I’m going to talk to some cool people and get their experiences about beginning in the middle: following a new path in middle age. And I’d love to hear about your story, especially if this is a path you’re walking too.


Monkeys and Such

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Your Inner Critic, Like A Pet Marmoset, is Waiting to Throw Poo on You

I’ve been feeling a Great Urgency (yes, capitals are required) to get the next book done as soon as possible. The reason is personal, and not the subject of this post. I’m actually just venting a little bit about my Inner Critic, that internal voice I was trained intothat tells me I’m inadequate to the task.

Danny Gregory, on his blog today, gives ample evidence of his own inner critic in evidence. (He’s trained a lot of us to call it The Monkey. The name works. Particularly if, unlike me, you can avoid imagining Mickey Dolenz.)

Point is, Danny has helped SO MANY people reclaim their creative selves, or make it through the hardest times of their lives, or … like yours truly … believe that we deserve to say yes instead of no to opportunities. If he’d listened to his monkey, fed it and wallowed in the monkey’s “but it’s not perfect!” excrement, instead of working on anyway, so many lives would be bleaker for it.

Which reminds me that someone, somewhere, may need my creation too.

So while my own personal Inner Critic has, with the help if Danny and my other creative tribemembers, been downsized from Gorilla (I know, not a monkey) to marmoset, I’m still going to leave the Marmoset Chow in the shelf and keep working.