Writing is Its Own Inspiration? Day 2

Welp. I don’t have much to say today, at least I don’t think so. Additionally, a storm is on the way, so I might want to write and post fast.

I’m saddened and angered by the shooting in Uvalde today. I definitely want to write about that once the storm is over and I’ve had a good night’s sleep. I have to be up in 7 hours and 45 minutes for work.

I have always planned to write about my thoughts about romance novels and love songs, and that’s something I definitely plan to do later. This will likely have a Germane Amazon Link.

I also have had something of a breakthrough on one of my fiction works, so I need to go into that.

Do I have a Gratuitous Amazon Link today? Why, I think I do. If memory serves, today’s book is Ruined, by Paula Morris. Ruined is the story of Rebecca, who is sent to live with a family friend in New Orleans, where she attends a snooty private school where she doesn’t fit in. Oh, and she befriends Lisette, the ghost of a slave. We get to learn how Lisette died, how that fits into the life of the family of “mean girl” bully Helena, and what that has to do with Rebecca.

Now I’m going to post this, then shut my computer down. Good night and I’ll see you tomorrow for my rant on what happened in Uvalde today.

What is Inspiration?

Chapter 3 of Pep Talks for Writers deals with inspiration and the idea of a “muse.” I’ve been carried away by inspiration in the past, largely during my fanfiction writing days, when the words just sort of come to me.

I had a dear friend (RIP, Janet) who had a form of aphantasia, I think. She couldn’t imagine characters in her own head, she had to have a physical image of the character. This is why she exclusively wrote fanfiction for television shows. Their faces were right there. She also didn’t understand what a writer means by a muse. She seemed to think that those writers were having hallucinations of an actual person telling them what to write. Several of us explained to her that, for most of us, “muse” is a metaphor for that “groove” you get into when the words just happen.

Not that every one of us have that experience. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, does experience a hallucination telling them what to write. But that’s never happened to me.

In Chapter 3, though, Faulkner tells us that most professional writers just show up and write. That sitting down at the keyboard, or with the pen and paper, or whatever, is inspiration enough.

And that is one thing I need to work on. The showing up part. Putting the words down and making them go by sheer force of my will, rather than by waiting for my “muse” to help me. I’m going to try to do that more often in the future.

I Had My Tongue Surgery on Wednesday

And I’m going back to work on Sunday. At least, I hope I am

Boy, does everything between my ears and my clavicles hurt, though. It’s no fun to eat. It’s no fun to swallow. I have had to let a bunch of saliva drip out of my mouth twice.

For pain medication, I have Tylenol #3 and 400-milligram ibuprofen pills. The surgeon said that I can take the ibuprofen every 3.5 hours instead of every four, and I may have to start doing that.

There’s not much to say about the actual procedure. I was out for most of it. The block they used to hold my mouth open tasted horrible. I remember that much.

So now we wait. We wait for my mouth to heal, and we wait for the pathologist report to come back and see if my margins are clear. It there is any dysplasia in the apparently clear area the surgeon took, I’ll have to go back for more surgery. Fun.

But when I’m 80 years old and looking back on this, I’ll be glad I did it.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! I’ve read three books while convalescing, so I’m going to be able to get ahead a little on my Goodreads account. I’ve been kind of worried because I only have 366 read books, and there’s a bunch that I wouldn’t try to sell through Amazon Associates. Where did I leave off? Crap.

Okay. We were supposed to do the Monster High books by Lisi Harrison next, but it looks like they’re out of print, and not even available as Kindle books. So, onwards, to Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin, by Megan Rosenbloom, which is just like it says on the tin. Rosenbloom, a librarian, talks about the history of books bound in human skin, the rumors regarding them, actual examples of them, and the controversy regarding what to do with the books that they’ve identified (should they be rebound in ordinary bindings and bury the original bindings or left as-is or what?) A very interesting book demystifying a macabre topic.

The City & the City, by China Miéville

I loved this book.

I mean, I really loved it. Like, sometimes a strong ending can raise my impression of an otherwise lackluster book. But a little way in, I told a bookworm coworker, “I think I really am going to like this book.”

A while later, I told a bookworm friend, “This is turning out to be really good. You should check it out.”

Then, when the plot thickened, I told my coworker again, “Yes. This is great.”

And once I finished it, I told someone, “It’s a pity you aren’t a reader; you’re really missing out.”

So I think it’s safe to say that it was great all the way through.

It’s going to be a challenge to give a summary without spoiling too much, so maybe I’ll just talk about what I expected versus what we got?

Actually, first I’ll talk about the inspiration. Miéville’s mother was terminally ill, so she asked him to write a book for her. Most of his books are “speculative fiction,” an umbrella term that covers fantasy, science fiction, and some horror. This was not his mother’s interest, though. She preferred mystery and police procedurals.

And so, The City & The City (Germane Amazon Link!) was born. It is a tale about two cities occupying the same place geographically. I was expecting some kind of interdimensional shenanigans, but instead, they literally are geographically in the same place.

In our world, we have two towns, Baarle-Hertog, Belgium; and Baarle-Nassau, Netherlands*. These two towns are intertwined with one another in such a way that there’s a story (which I have yet to verify) that when they resurveyed the town, they discovered that the front door of a house, and thus the whole house, was in the wrong country. It would have been a bureaucratic mess to redo everything (I know the house would need a whole new address, because the street it was on has different names in each country, and I believe that the residents would even need to have changed their nationalities), so they just moved the front door to a different part of the house, where it would stay in the same country.

So. Think that, but larger. Much larger. Then to make things even weirder, the residents of and visitors to the two cities are not allowed to interact with the other city. They have to “unsee” the other city entirely. The only way to interact with the other city involves crossing the official border, at which point they can only interact with the city that they’re in after the crossing.

In the city of Besźel, Inspector Tyador Borlú is called to the location of a dead body. It turns out that the body was Mehalia Geary, a Ph.D student in the other city, Ul Qoma. Borlú has to investigate this murder without ever acknowledging the presence of the other city. He eventually has to go to Ul Qoma to assist in their investigation of the murder and that’s where an interesting book becomes really fascinating.

:chef’s kiss:

*Back in the days when I thought that Alex and I were going to be able to fly into Amsterdam, travel Germany in a big circle, then go back in through Belgium and back to Amsterdam, the Baarles (?) were on my list of things to visit. And maybe I will be able to do it someday.

Biopsy Results

Welp. It’s not the best news, but it could be worse.

I didn’t catch all of the words that the pathologist had in the report. In fact, the surgeon needed to call the pathologist to see exactly what’s going on in my mouth.

It’s not cancer. It’s not precancerous. It’s the stage before that. It’s something that, if we leave it alone long enough, could become cancer.

So we’re not going to leave it alone.

I’m scheduled to have it excised on May 18. Two weeks from today. Then we’ll have to watch it from then onwards until we’re sure it’s not coming back.

So. Like I said, not the best news, but it definitely could be worse.

I have to fast before the procedure, because they’ll be knocking me out for this. Thank God. The biopsy was unpleasant enough.

Then, since my job is almost all talking — answering phones, calling doctors, helping people at the register, etc. — I’m taking Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off and hope to basically not talk at all for those days, then when I go back to work, it’ll feel better.

I’ve also bought 32 single-serving things of baby food. Stage 2, so that it has a bit of texture. I’m also going to stock up on canned fruit, pouches of tuna, and other soft food as well. I’m also going to order a new cup for my blender, so that once I’ve had enough of tuna and pureed mango, I can cook and then mash it up real good and, well, make my own baby food.

I wonder how beef, tomatoes, cheese, and taco seasoning would work? I’m sure it would taste like a taco. But would the texture be edible?

Stay tuned for “Mashing up Food with Olivia,” here on To-Hither.com.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have The Glass Sentence, the first book in the Mapmakers trilogy, by S.E. Grove. The Mapmakers trilogy is set in a world where something happened and different areas of the world ended up separated in time. You can travel from one to another, but what used to be southern Canada is now the ice-age Prehistoric Snows, a big chunk of Oceania is “the 40th Age,” etc. And no one can agree when it actually is. I have to admit I haven’t read the second two books in the trilogy (I visit my local Half-Price Books in hopes of finding it, but haven’t had any luck yet), but this book is fantastic.

How Do I Create?

The second chapter of Pep Talks for Writers (germane Amazon Link!) is about the circumstances that one uses when one writes.

One of the things that Faulkner talks about is planners versus “pantsers.” “Pantsers” are people who line up their characters/subject/whatever and just write and see where it goes. Planners, well, that’s pretty self-explanatory.

I’ve always sort of done both. Back when I could let my mind wander on the job, I used to get a lot of writing done. Sometimes I was at the photocopier or the fax machine or sorting documents to send to shareholders containing the annual report, or waiting for a report to upload to a database or whatever.

I could use that time to say, “Sally’s memory won’t come back until she’s home, but her home burned down 20 years ago. Should I just make her an amnesiac forever? But I really want to restore her relationship with her brother. The graveyard. She sees her parents’ graves and that’s what triggers her memory. Subconsciously, being ‘reunited’ with them is coming home and. Oh, yes, that’s perfect.”

And then I’d go home and write the scene. And, yes, that is a scene I wrote. It was in a Dark Shadows fanfiction that I’ve just realized I might be able to scrape the serial numbers off of and remix. Well, technically, I realized that I could do that when I was thinking about this chapter while unraveling the first blanket* and then I sat down and wrote all this out. But potato-potahto.

So I guess I’m more of a planner, but there are definitely surprises in the process of the planning. I’ll be prewriting something and a new character will pop up where I’m not expecting it and I’ll have to incorporate that new character, things of that nature.

The chapter ends with a challenge to mix it up a bit. And I guess that my experiments with dictation might count for that. I could also maybe get Evelyn to sit down and have a writing day sometime. She has a picture series in her that I’ve been trying to get her to commit to because just maybe that will be the thing that brings her financial success.

At the very least, I want the books (about her Jack Russell mix dog) to be out there in the world.

*I know that a couple of posts ago I said that I was going to make those blankets into a new blanket, but now I’m thinking about knitting a coat out of them. The threads have all seen better days, so it would have to be a casual sort of coat. Also, I definitely plan to work two threads of each color so that it comes out sort of heathered. And also having four strands should mean that if any one (or even two) wear out, the whole thing won’t fall apart. I hope.

Tongue Biopsy Update

I had my biopsy on Wednesday. It’s Saturday night and my tongue still hurts. OMG.

The surgeon says that it doesn’t look like anything scary. It actually looks like a skin graft (N.B. Do not Google “tongue skin graft.” There are too many “before” pictures.). So we did the biopsy anyhow, just to make sure that it *isn’t* anything scary.

In other news, I’ve discovered that I subvocalize* when I write, but not so much when I read. I’ve been able to read pretty much nonstop without any pain, but even starting to compose posts is pretty uncomfortable.

I think that at least part of why my tongue still hurts is that I use it for so much. The surgeon said that there are no limitations on what I can eat, but some stuff hurts to eat because I move my tongue (like to scoop the food out from under my tongue) while I eat.

Also, my job is almost all talking. Whether at the drop-off window, the pickup window, answering the phone, or working “resolution,” I’m likely to have to talk to somebody — patients, doctors, coworkers, etc.. If I knew then what I know now, I would have taken Thursday off as well so I could rest my tongue.

I have a checkup on Tuesday and I’m going to try to go all day with minimal talking tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll feel better soon.

I’m trying to decide what I’ll eat once it is no longer so uncomfortable to eat. I’m thinking maybe a hamburger from either Culver’s or Whataburger. I’d hoped to make it a burger from Fletcher’s down at the Pearl tomorrow, but that’s not going to happen.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is West of the Moon, by Margie Preus. West of the Moon is the tale, inspired by someone that really existed, of Astri, who is sold by her aunt and uncle and escapes. Together with a mute girl and her younger sister, Astri begins a voyage from Norway to the United States.

*That’s when you move your tongue, larynx, etc. but aren’t actually talking.

I Have a Biopsy in 14.5 Hours

I chipped a tooth a month or so ago. Evelyn and I were eating curried chickpeas and potatoes over brown rice and some of the rice was a little hard. I bit down on a piece of rice, and felt a stabbing pain in my tooth and jaw.

I gave it some time to see if it was just a temporary pain or if I really chipped my tooth. And a week or so later, a small piece of tooth came out of my mouth. So I made an appointment with my dentist to have her look over the tooth, which was cracked, and so was another tooth on that same side.

While she was in there, I had her look at some pain I was having on the other side of my mouth. I was worried that it was a cavity, because it had been so painful for a while, but it turned out to be a big chunk of plaque that was scraping my gums.

While she was there, though, she said that there was a white mark on the side of my tongue. She gave me a whole list of things it could be, including candidiasis, and, well, I do take inhaled steroids and I’m not perfect about rinsing my mouth out. She agreed that was probably what it was and said she’d give me a prescription for nystatin.

Instead of nystatin, though, she referred me to an oral surgeon for a biopsy just in case it’s leukoplakia, because leukoplakia is potentially precancerous.

So. I called the oral surgeon and made the appointment, and it’s set for 2:30 pm this afternoon.

My anxiety leads me to catastrophize, so I half-expect him to take one look at my tongue and ask if I have my affairs in order because my tongue is going to kill me.

So. 14.5 hours to go. My pharmacist’s mother died from cancer, so she is very supportive of me finding out what it is and tackling it. My son has a vested interest in me getting this taken care of, particularly if it is potentially precancerous. I have an even more important interest in getting this taken care of.

I guess we’ll know what we know when we know it.

Oh, and I am taking care of my affairs. I’m doing housekeeping-type chores more than anything else. I’m knuckling down and getting those blankets unraveled so I can make new blankets from them. I’m shredding old junk mail and looking for memorabilia that might be mixed in with it. I’m reading and weeding my book collection (and then cataloguing the ones I’m keeping). Because the surgeon may decide that the white mark isn’t anything to worry about, but 65 people got killed by stray bullets in 2008 (nationwide) and so maybe there’s a stray bullet out there with my name on it. Maybe I’ll get hit in the head by a meteorite. Or maybe I’ll live to a ripe old age and just have less clutter in my life.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh. I think I’ve posted this one before, but I love it so much that it’s worth posting again.

Creativity, 4/24/2022

I finished the first “pep talk” of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo. In it, Faulkner tells us that we don’t need permission to be creators. And I am, of course, already a creator. I knit and I crochet, and (inspired by Micarah Tewers), I’m thinking about getting back into sewing.

And I write. In the back of my head, I’d always planned to become a professional writer pulling down a full-time income. Of course, the way the world fell out, I will need two full-time incomes to have the life I want, but the professional writing thing would certainly work as one of my full-time incomes.

I’ve been toying with several novel ideas and I may put some time in on those as well as the blog. One of them was the gothic novel I talked about earlier this month. I also have a fantasy novel set in a female-dominated world where that is just as out of balance as our more male-oriented one is. The Journey song Wheel in the Sky has long made me think of a different fantasy novel, this one about someone questing for the cure for the illness of the queen of their land.

And then, just yesterday, I had an idea for an inside-out version of Beauty and the Beast, where the prince is cursed and, rather than looking for a way to break the curse, the government just names a regent, locks the prince away, and keeps going. Beauty is the daughter of a foreign dignitary who comes to their country and happens to overhear a conversation in which the regent is hiring someone to kill the prince, who is about to come of age. She decides that she needs to save the prince. Will they fall in love? I guess we’ll see when they finally meet. Will the curse be broken? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that land’s destiny to be ruled by a prince with a curse.

I may continue to massage these in my mind. But for now, I have this blog.

It’s Friday!

I’ve been subscribing to Amazon Prime for video because most of the things I’ve wanted to watch are on there. For example, The Wheel of Time, which I’ve written about here. Also, though, there was Undone and Hunters, which looked very interesting as well.

I think I started with Hunters and then watched Undone. To get my money’s worth, though, I’ve been looking for other things to watch. I’ve watched a few major movies, like Knives Out, some foreign films like The Great Hypnotist (a Chinese movie, and I loved it), and some foreign television series like You Are Wanted, which is from Germany.

Right now, though, my obsession is El Internado: Las Cumbres, which is from Spain and concerns students in a “boarding school” which has dark secrets (also, this season, dark lighting*, which is frustrating to me).

I don’t want to binge things. I know I can watch them again, but I like to savor my television shows. So, to that end, I’ve been watching El Internado one episode per Friday night. And it’s Friday night, so “Yay!”

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link will be Streetlights Like Fireworks, by David Pandolfe. Streetlights like Fireworks is a series about family, found and otherwise, teen runaways, and psychic powers. Such a good series. I was very disappointed that he ended with four books. Mr. Pandolfe, if you ever read this, please bring us back to Jack and Lauren’s story!

*They tell me that Netflix has a way to compensate for dark scenes like these, but Amazon Prime doesn’t. Get with the program Amazon Prime!