Mark Twain Free Month

October is the best of months in the Rah household. Ruby Hazelnut has her birthday. The second weekend brings us the absolutely fabulous Richmond Folk Festival (now in its 11th year and one of the most well-attended folk festivals in the country), and the fourth is my favorite weekend of the year, spent at the Central Virginia Celtic Festival and Highland Games (kilts, pipers, shepherd's pie, Scottish dance and large men throwing stuff).

Plus we usually have gorgeous weather here in Richmond: a little cool, sunny, bright and fresh. Perfect fall days.

So there are a lot of things that come together to make October the Best Month Ever. But October wouldn't be October without the blissful lack of Mark Twain.

Don't get me wrong: Mark Twain's a fine guy. Or so I assume; I've never met him. But he wrote some good books, and he did say some pretty funny things. In fact, he said so many funny things that people give him credit for a lot of funny things he didn't say. To wit:

The saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics" is frequently attributed to Twain, but even Twain said he didn't say it. He said it was Benjamin Disraeli, a British Prime Minister, who said it. The only problem is that Disraeli never wrote it, and he was pretty well dead before anyone said he said it. Which just goes to prove what I've always said: You can't believe anything Mark Twain ever said.

But the fact that Mark Twain was such a liar is not why we have Mark Twain Free Month. We have Mark Twain Free Month because the Poet-Accountant is obsessed—obsessed—with Mark Twain. He reads Life on the Mississippi like some people read the Bible. He scours Wikipedia articles for opportunities to improve articles by inserting in them notes about Mark Twain. He is probably one of only two or three people who has actually read, in their entirety, the first two volumes of the fully annotated Autobiography put out by the Mark Twain Project. Barely a twenty-hour period goes by that Ruby Hazelnut and I are not tortured—I mean regaled—by a pithy saying or hilarious anecdote of Twain's.

'Til we meet again, Sam.
Which I'm sure will be at 12:01 a.m. on November 1.

Thus: Mark Twain Free Month. In which the Poet-Accountant must refrain from reading anything written by or about Mark Twain. In which the Poet-Accountant must refrain from quoting Mark Twain or otherwise making any references to "Mark," "Sam," "the bard," "a wise man from the nineteenth century," or even "my friend."

Because as Mark Twain surely once said, "A happy marriage is one without me, at least for one month out of the year."

Or maybe that was Benjamin Disraeli.

In any event, when Ruby Hazelnut and I wake tomorrow, it will be to breathe in the fresh, crisp, Mark Twain Free air of October. Please join us.

Proofreading Doesn't Take a Holiday

[Because I recently learned that one of the Poet-Accountant's colleagues has actually never even heard of the movie Sleepless in Seattle, I feel obliged to mention, as a kind of public service, that the title of this blog post refers to the 1934 movie Death Takes a Holiday. It is a classic movie. You should go watch it (and then let me know how it is).]

Ruby Hazelnut, the Poet-Accountant and I just spent a lovely weekend in Charleston. It's been some years (some many many years) since the Poet-Accountant and I have been there, but it's still lovely, and Kaminsky's is still there.

It does appear, though, that since I stopped frequenting the city, it has become the Typo Capital of the World. Check this out:

On Saturday evening, we went for a sunset sail on the three-masted Schooner Pride. After we motored away from the pier, the crew got ready to set the sails. Which is when I saw this on the t-shirt of the crew member untying a rope in front of me:

Look at that very last line. It's USCG licensed for what? Forty-nine passongers. Awesome. I pointed this out to the crew member, and he rolled his dreamy eyes. Yeah, he knew, and what was worse was that the owner of the boat had recently ordered a new batch of shirts. Without fixing the spelling. I was apparently the only person ever to notice, so he gave me my very own shirt for free. I am proud to sport the Schooner Pride's licensing for 49 passongers. So proud.

Next up was on Ft. Sumter, home of the first shot of the Civil War and of a typo on a National Park Service sign. I'm very sorry to say I don't have a picture of that one; we had spent too many wonderful minutes listening to Ranger Antoine give his park spiel (he was a total tie with the guy at Alcatraz who was our previous holder of the title Best Park Ranger Ever). But the typo was along these lines: The canon at this spot was was a 92-pounder.

That afternoon, we came back over the Ashley Bridge from seeing the very cool (and very empty) Drayton Hall plantation, and right there on Cannon Street was a bright yellow triangle that read CONCTRUCTION.

When we went back the next morning to get a picture, all the construction signs had flung themselves face down on the sidewalk overnight in absolute mortification.

Then, because the drop of ink doesn't fall far from the red pen, it was Ruby Hazelnut's turn to get into the typo-finding action. That night we had dinner at the Charleston Crab House, which has a fantastic shrimp po-boy and this description of the Black Grouper on their menu:

(It's there in the phrase characterized by its has firm.)

And finally, because the rotten stepchild that is North Charleston couldn't bear to be left out, there was this gem as we left town:

Fabulous.

One place we didn't see any typos? The wonderful Hyman's Seafood, where we sat at a table that had previously hosted the band Phish, the actor Matthew Broderick, the super-dreamy Timothy Dalton (if you don't know him, please please go watch him eat up the screen as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre) and the amazing (and amazingly modest) Neil Armstrong. The man who walked first on the moon.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Multiverse of Editing

I've been thinking a lot about editing, mainly because I've been immersed in it myself. It turns out that, astonishingly, most people don't like to edit. Writers I know talk about it as a necessary evil or tedious or painful or all three. Since I told The Three that our next step together was to work through entire pieces—including editing—they've been as silent as me on Twitter.

So why is it that my idea of a perfect day is an intense session of editing, followed by an intense session of rock climbing, capped off by an intense session of taco-eating? (Hey, I just described yesterday! Sometimes life really rocks.)

I considered that it might be my German blood enjoying bringing order to whatever craziness my Celtic blood poured all over the page—and there's probably something to that. But what it really is, I think, is the way that I started writing in the first place, writing the same characters over and over in different stories. Sometimes the characters didn't change much from story to story; sometimes a story needed them to be slightly different people; sometimes they had to be very different people.

Nine out of 10 adorable baby turtles prefer left-handers.

There's this theory in physics called the multiverse, which is the idea that there are an infinite number of universes (universi?) out there, so there are an infinite number of variations of all possible realities. In one reality, humans might not exist at all; in another, things might be exactly like they are in our universe, except that I'm right-handed instead of left-handed. (We don't like that universe.)

We only see the universe we live in; we can only deal with the reality we have right now. But characters don't have just the one life like we do; characters live in the multiverse. There's an infinite number of lives they could lead, an infinite number of variations—big or small—that affect the stories we tell about them. One life could be almost indistinguishable from another or seem absolutely unrelated.

(I say seem because there's of course always the heart, the essence of the character, and that doesn't change, regardless of which story you tell about them.)

There are those times when the story you drafted is just a starting point, when you have to throw out the middle or the end (or even the beginning). When it turns out that the journey you wrote first was really just to lead you to the journey you really need to write. It can be sad to lose paragraphs or scenes or entire groups of characters, but every time you make a change, you're just opening up another universe, another set of possibilities.

In the universe of this galaxy, the barista who makes
my flat white looks just like Hugh Jackman.

In the physics multiverse, there is no one right universe, but in the writing multiverse we eventually edit our way to a right universe.

Maybe this seems esoteric, but all this is just another way of saying: Let your characters breathe. Let them explore. Don't let them get stuck in your first vision. Think about all the decisions you've made in your life and the places you might have gone (good and bad) if you had taken a different path at any of those moments. Your characters can do that—and you don't lose anything: All the other possibilities are still out there.

That's why I love editing. There's so much possibility, so much demand for creative thinking, for following the thread of a change and seeing where it takes you. If you're standing there with Robert Frost at the two roads diverging in the wood, you only get to pick one. Your characters can go anywhere.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: New Writing Digs

I'm pretty sure it was Tennyson who wrote, "in the spring a cranky Rah's fancy frantically turns to thoughts of getting the heck out of Dodge." Or something like that.

In any event, it's true: When the weather starts to get nicer, I want to be free. Free! I want to shake the dust of this heavily scheduled life and go somewhere—and not always Scotland, by the way. (Okay, always Scotland, but Rah is reasonable. Rah is rational. Rah knows that she must be way, way richer before she can go always to Scotland.)

This summer has turned out to be a little more heavily scheduled so far than Rah would like it to be, but the Poet-Accountant, Ruby Hazelnut and I did manage to get away for a few days to the beautiful Shenandoah National Park in western Virginia—where, between hiking and horseback riding, I managed to do a little real estating.

I like my cave, but one never wants to get too...cave-bound, you know. One must emerge occasionally from the cave to see what other caves there are out there.

Now, Luray Caverns had a really lovely spot. Lovely lighting; not too cool, but definitely not hot. Internet connectivity might be an issue, but I'm pretty sure I could run a line down.

There was one insurmountable problem, though: dealing with unwelcome visitors. Something like 400,000 people tromp through there each year, which is like 399,999 too many for me.

Next, I thought Why not think outside the cave? Maybe there are other options, some of which don't involve massive quantities of vitamin D to prevent rickets. (Some people say you should suffer for your art, but that's not the kind of suffering I'm into.)

Anyway, so we hiked up the strangely named Hawksbill Mountain (isn't it the case, the Poet-Accountant asked, that hawks have beaks and not bills?) to see what kind of residential opportunities there were at 4,050 feet.

At first I thought, Man, I could totally get into writing up here. The problem? Way too much vitamin D. You've seen my skin, right? I seriously don't want to end up with lobster skin that clashes with my hair. So far, we have rickets versus cancer. Not a pretty choice.

I figured that was it; There's no place like home. A cave in need is a cave indeed and all that. Then we went on our final hike. And there it was! The cave of all caves! Rah's new writing digs!

Do you see it there, tucked under that massive boulder? I'm telling you, this place has everything. Fresh water, a nice sunny spot above (take that, vitamin D deficiency!) and an impenetrable driveway:

Just the place to retreat to while doing that most horrifying of things: querying agents. Gulp.

Tree Climbing!

Note to self: Always choose to write books that involve fun research. Like going to Scotland. Or dating rock stars. Or climbing trees.

Okay, Cranky Rah has never actually dated a rock star, but two out of three ain't bad. I had a lovely morning out in a local park with Ruby Hazelnut, one-third of The Three and my best rock climbing buddies. And the Poet-Accountant, who preserved the moment in pictures.

The beautiful red oak we climbed.

The lovely ropes and knots that keep us safe.

Hooking on the foot ascender, because climbing
with only your arms is hard.

Ruby Hazelnut gets ready to climb.

Ruby Hazelnut doing some branch walking.

Cranky Rah and one-third of The Three hanging out.
The fabulous S served as one of my beta readers for the book involving tree climbing,
and when I came down from my first climb I said, "I'm going to have to totally rewrite that chapter."
S's response? "Yeah, you are."
This is why we research. And have beta readers who will tell you the truth.

Cranky Rah, looking not so cranky. Because, hey, rewrites are fun. (And no, I'm not lying. I love to edit.)

About 50 feet up. Do I have to come down?
Can't someone just send up some tea and shortbread?

Group Hug: Writing From the End

The Three and I had our last writing group of the school year last week, so it seemed appropriate to talk about The End and specifically getting past whatever blocks you have to get to the end of a story you're writing. And since we were talking about writing to the end, I thought it'd be fun to write from the end in our writing exercise.

First we warmed up by writing from the beginning. I offered The Three a set of opening dialogue options (from the random dialogue generator of my favorite random writing stuff generator):

• "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?"
• "H-how long have you been standing there?"
• "She's old, and it's about time she died."
• "If you leave now, you lose everything."
• "I knew you wouldn't be able to see it through."
• "He was unconscious when I found him."

Be safe: Squeeze your own lemons.

The Three chose "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?" and (after a lively discussion about the grammatical issues in that sentence—I totally la-la these girls) we spent 10 minutes writing the story that starts with that line. Amazing, there was not a death in every story written. Of course, some of the stories had more than one death, so it all averaged out in the end.

After we talked about Getting to the End of a story as a writer, it was time to write again. This time, The Three chose to write from "She's old, and it's about time she died." What I didn't tell them until after they had chosen it was that we weren't going to write from the beginning; we were going to write from the end. They had to write to the piece of dialogue instead of from it.

More death ensued. Of course.

Getting to the End

You might have noticed it’s a lot easier to start a story than to finish one. You’ve got a cast of fascinating characters and an exciting beginning, and you might even know the tragic end it all comes to. But somewhere along the way you get lost.

The Secret of Getting to the End

Here’s the big secret: Write a story you want to finish and decide to finish it. End of blog.

Yeah, yeah; of course that’s not the end of the blog. Because it’s really not that simple, is it? What happens when you hit a wall? You have to figure out how to break through it.

Problem: You’re Bored

If you’re bored with your character or plot, your reader probably will be, too. You know what bores you? Boring things. Duh, right?

I don't know about you, but I'd
find something else to do, too.

So what do you do when you’re bored? First you complain to your mom. Then she tells you she bets that cleaning a toilet would solve that problem real quick. Then you go and find something to make you unbored, because you definitely don’t want to clean the toilet.

So when you’re bored with your characters, find something to make them un-boring.

• Give a character an obsession or an interest. Make it something that seems, on the surface, out of character. How does that change how she behaves?
• Change a relationship. Maybe your characters are bored with each other. Maybe they need to break up or betray someone or reveal a secret.
• Change what happened last. If your protagonist succeeded at something, have her fail—or vice versa.
• Introduce danger. Maybe your characters are too safe. Hurt or threaten them. If something bad has already happened, make it worse.
• Get rid of what bores you. Go back to the last point in the story that excited you. Read forward, find that spot where you start to get bored and make something bad happen.
• Change something elemental. Maybe Brunhilda isn’t the right name for your character. Maybe Marcy is better. Or Skydancer. Maybe she doesn’t live in a faceless suburb but in a downtown building that’s about to be knocked down.

Skydancer is too happy. She needs to live here.

Problem: You Don’t Know What Happens Next

Everything’s going along swimmingly, but you suddenly realize you have no idea what’s going to happen next. You can use any of the tactics above to introduce complications, but you can also try something more structural.

• Skip ahead. If you know what happens further in the plot, go ahead and write that. Maybe that will help you figure out how to get there, or maybe it will just help you bury your head in the sand until later. (Warning: This is an editing-heavy approach.
• Trash your last scene. Even if it was working for you, temporarily discard the last scene you wrote, go back to the scene before it and head in a totally different direction.
• Go back to the beginning. Do you have enough conflict and characters for the long haul? Increase the stakes or add new characters who can cause trouble.
• Write from the end. If you know how everything ends up, start there and work your way backward.

Problem: You’ve Lost Heart

See, isn't outside better?

What if you find yourself bored with your characters and your plot and at a loss about what happens next? This is where you have to get outside your story and outside your house.

By getting outside of your story, I mean explore the world of your story in a way that doesn’t directly add to word count:

• Make a scrapbook. Go online and collect pictures that look like characters, locations or things in your story. Find your protagonist’s favorite hat or a special piece of jewelry. Immerse yourself in the physical details of your story’s world.
• Create a soundtrack. Find a song or put together a whole playlist of songs that reminds you of your story in some way. Listen to it over and over until you get into the mood. 
• Write an unseen scene. Write something outside the scope of your story: a scene from another character’s point of view; a letter from one character to another; a poem about or by one of your characters.

Cranky Rah likes the new flat white
from Starbuck's. Decaf, because she's
kinda...jumpy.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing, though, is to not write. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Get out of the space you’re in, and let your brain breathe. Meet up with a friend who’s willing to listen to you go on for a while about your story. (Buy her a tasty drink while you’re at it.) Getting someone else excited about your story will get you excited.

Let It Go…Let It Go…

What if, despite everything you’ve tried, nothing you do brings your story back to life? First, just take a break. Work on something else for a while, then come back to your story in a couple of weeks and look at it with fresh eyes. If even that doesn’t leave you feeling like Dr. Frankenstein—“It’s alive! It’s alive!”—then it’s probably time to let it go.

It happens to the best of us, but don’t let it get you down. Everything you write, even the things you don’t finish—sometimes especially the things you don’t finish—make you a stronger writer. Just keep at it, and keep everything you write. Old writing is great for two things: proof that you’re getting better—and a good laugh right when you need one.

Swedish Authorities Say, "Don't Try This At Home"

Still adorable and oh-so tasty.

The last time I blogged about the weird places research leads us, it was to the edible dormouse, a creature of big-eyed cuteness and, to the Romans, supreme tastiness. Today, it takes us to trying to split an atom at home.

Cranky Rah was not trying to split an atom at home. Cranky Rah was simply learning about how neutrons split apart from protons so she could work it into a metaphor about twins (which sounds weirder than it comes off in the book, I promise). Anyway, what I ran into was this article about this pretty crazy Swedish guy who collected a bunch of radium, americium and uranium and tried to cook them up in sulphuric acid on his stove top as a kind of mini nuclear reactor. Because he was, you know, curious.

What kills me is how he'd been working on this (and blogging about it) for some time before it occurred to him that it might be illegal. He politely contacted the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority and they, needless to say, responded in person.

Friends don't let friends go to
dinner dressed like this.

Now, seriously, don't do this. And in case you have a burning desire to try it (probably because someone just told you not to), this post from Live Science will hopefully convince you that

1. It's pretty hard for normal people, and even evil despots, to get the materials one needs to split an atom in one's kitchen, and
2. That even if you were able to get your hands on the appropriate radioactive elements and even if you were able to cook up some uranium 235 next to your Keurig, you wouldn't be around to see the atoms splitting because you would be deader than an edible dormouse at a Roman feast. And probably about as crunchy.

All this talk about radium reminds me of the fabulous song Marie Curie by the Deedle Deedle Dees. And if that's not enough quirky historical wonderfulness set to music for you, listen to their song about Abigail Adams. 

Don't Hate Me Just Because I'm Symbolism

Symbolism gets a bad rap, mostly because of that particular ilk of literature teachers who just can't get it through their heads that sometimes a blue curtain is just a blue curtain. (And don't get my buddy the Dungeon Master started on trains...)

Who can blame the haters of symbolism, really? Statements like A symbol is an object that represents an idea and A symbol has a literal element and a figurative element can put the most lit-loving of us in a coma. But here's the thing: playing with symbolism in your writing can be really fun.

The Simple Symbol

Regardless of what my friend Alex
tells you, stop signs with a white
line around them are not optional.

Let's start back with that mind-numbing definition. What does that mean anyway—a literal element and a figurative element? That's just a way of saying there's an object (the literal) that stands for an idea or emotion (the figurative). You see and translate symbols all around you everyday, like when you understand (I hope) that the object that looks like a stop sign has the meaning Stop!

In their simplest form, symbols can be, well, simple. Like Luke Skywalker wearing white and Darth Vader wearing black. Or an ordinary-looking golden ring standing for ultimate power.

The Not-So-Simple Symbol

It's no worries if a symbol in a story stands for just one thing, but one of the way cool things about symbols is that you don't have to limit yourself to just one—or just one meaning. A symbol can have more than one meaning, or its meaning can change as the protagonist changes.

I looked up liberty, and I got this picture
of these dogs. I mean, I guess they're
not at liberty, but they sure look happy.
I must be a tyrannical government.

Let’s look at the mockingjay in The Hunger Games. In the beginning, this “creature the Capitol never intended to exist” is a simple symbol: It reminds Katniss of her father; it stands for the freedom of the woods. But it comes to mean much more.

When Katniss meets Rue, the mockingjay comes to represent not just Katniss’s home, but Rue’s as well. After Rue dies, it reminds Katniss why she’s fighting. And by the end of the books, the mockingjay has grown to stand for resistance and a hunger for freedom, things even the harshest government can’t suppress. Katniss, in fact, is the mockingjay, a “creature the Capitol never intended to exist.” So is Rue. So are all those who stand up to tyranny.

The Symbol on Steroids

Here's another boring definition, of the word motif: A motif is an object, idea or image that repeats throughout a work and supports the theme. One version of a motif is a collection of related symbols that are, in turn, related to a dominant idea in your story.

Let’s say your main character’s life is unraveling. You’ll show this through your plot points, of course, but you might also show it in the knitting project she keeps having to pick apart, the way her hair won’t stay pinned back in barrettes, the foreign language class she’s failing, the way she keeps getting lost. These related images show up over and over, in various forms, reinforcing the idea that your character can’t get the threads of her life wrapped up neat and tidy.

Shaping Extended Symbols into a Story

I dig Yeats, but this statue kinda creeps
me out. Try his poem White Birds or
The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

I’ll be honest, I don’t usually plan symbols into my writing. I give a girl a scarf decorated with brightly colored birds, and the next thing you know, I’ve included a poem by Yeats about sea birds and I've thrown a kid out of a tree like a flightless bird and…you get the picture.

Extended symbols, especially, often grow for the writer during the course of writing. You may not even realize you’ve sown the seeds of an extended symbol until you get to the end. In editing, you can go back and strengthen the symbol, weaving it through the entire story.

Or not. Despite how much English teachers live to parse symbolism in literature, it turns out a lot of writers didn’t intend or don’t see the symbolism in their works that lit majors do. Read this groovy article about a 16-year-old kid who got sick of English class and wrote to a bunch of famous authors about whether his teacher was right to obsess over symbolism.

The cool thing is this: You’re the writer. You can symbolize (and yes, you can use symbolize as an intransitive verb, though it's kind of stinky) intentionally, or symbols can arise in your writing through serendipity. Or you can kick them entirely to the curb. If you think you might want to give symbolism a chance, here are some different elements and characteristics that might give rise to interesting symbols that enrich your story:

• Color
• Sound
• Object
• Image
• Texture
• Weather
• Physical Characteristic (scar, tattoo, birthmark)
• Piece of Clothing
• Phrase/Saying/Quote

Caveat Symbolizer

Let this be a lesson to you:
This scholar talked about
symbols so much he
turned to stone.

Remember the lesson of the blue curtains: Don’t beat your reader over the head with symbolism. It may be a bit much to, say, name a character Tempest, give her cloudy gray eyes, have her be temperamental and unpredictable and have the wind whip up every time she’s around. But if used with a modicum of restraint and infused with freshness, symbols are a groovy way to draw your reader deeper into your story. And besides, they really are fun. How often do you get to throw a kid out of a tree to underscore your theme of learning to live life to its fullest?

Rah Does Not Live By Words Alone

Usually when Ruby Hazelnut goes out of town, I tell all my friends to pretend I am also out of town—or that I have been abducted by aliens. I have, in fact, never been abducted by aliens and have no interest in being abducted by aliens (though for the record, if I was abducted by aliens I would totally ask them what's up with this whole dark matter nonsense, because I'm pretty sure physicists are just making that up because they are totally stumped). The point is: When one is abducted by aliens, one is unavailable for coffee or lunch or general socializing. And that is how I like everyone to behave when Ruby Hazelnut is out of town, so I can write all day long, every day.

Last week, I did break tradition for one day, to go on a 30-mile bike ride with the Poet-Accountant. I did this for two reasons:

1. It is generally considered a good idea to hang out with one's spouse occasionally. More so on one's 18th anniversary. This is how one has another anniversary.
2. Rah loves to ride. Especially long distances. It airs out the brain. And Cranky Rah's brain definitely needs to be aired out. Frequently.

We rode on the C&O Canal Towpath, which is my favorite place to ride, ever. It goes up past the falls of the Potomac River, which is one of the Beautiful Places of the world.

See, here's proof I occasionally leave my cave:

That thing I'm looking at is a river. Crazy, right? (Actually, I seem kind of unimpressed in the picture, but that's just me getting into a good brood.) You think of the Potomac River as that wide placid water making its lazy way past George Washington's digs, but before it gets there, it is this wild foaming thing.

You don't have to bike to enjoy this amazing place; you can just park at Great Falls and walk over. But you should totally bike it if you're ever in the area. The towpath was made for mules to tow barges up the canal, it's really flat and a super easy ride. 

Our next ride? Probably a two-day on the almost-finally-finished Capital Trail, which will run from Richmond to Williamsburg. 

Words Rah Loves: In-laws

Cranky Rah is not a fan of articles or essays that begin with sentences like Webster New World College Dictionary defines cliché as...  Likewise, she doesn't think it's hugely creative to begin a blog post by sharing the outcome of a Google search—and yet here we are:

I just Googled the word in-laws, and in addition to the usual Wikipedia hits, here are some of the things that came up:

• Dr. Phil's advice on managing in-laws
• I HATE MY IN-LAWS!!!: In-laws stories
• Ten Basic Rules for Dealing with In-Laws
• Curse of the mummyji (from the Economist, about in-laws in India)
• The weird science of in-laws (from the Boston Globe)

Ouch.

It doesn't get much better when you go to the Online Etymology Dictionary (one of my favorite places online because I am such a word geek). It says the earliest record of brother-in-law is from the thirteenth century, but that by 1894 it had been shortened to in law, meaning "anyone of a relationship not natural." And it shares this quote from Blackwood's Magazine in 1894:

The ultimate in-law.

The position of the 'in-laws' (a happy phrase which is attributed...to her Majesty, than whom no one can be better acquainted with the article) is often not very apt to promote happiness.

Double ancient ouch.

It's not that I don't get it. I do. I know people (and, no, I will not be naming names) who have in-laws who, shall we say, are not natural. And maybe this is like proclaiming you like Brussels sprouts (guilty) or Barry Manilow (double guilty). But I love my in-laws.

I'll be honest: I can be prickly. (This is the nice word for it. Remember, this is a family blog.) And unconventional. My poor in-laws have had to put up with a lot from me. Homeschooling. A disdain for Disney World (I know, I know) and all things commercial. There are a lot of things we don't see eye-to-eye on, philosophically and otherwise. And I'm pretty much impossible to shop for.

But they ask questions, and they talk to the Poet-Accountant and me openly about our parenting and lifestyle decisions, and though I'm sure there have been times they've been doubtful—maybe even worried—they have never been anything but supportive. And I like to think they think that Ruby Hazelnut's turned out all right—so far at least.

So even if that was all I had to say about my in-laws, that would be enough. I adore them, I appreciate their openness and love more than I can say, and I am eternally grateful to them for their son, who is the most awesome husband and father ever. Period.

But, unbelievably, that's not all.

Twice a year, my glorious, fabulous in-laws whisk Ruby Hazelnut away to Grandparent Camp in Atlanta. For one week in the spring and two weeks in the summer, they go to the American Girl Doll store and the Georgia Aquarium; they visit cousins and take trips to the library; they visit Indian mounds and see plays. It's a grandchild's dream, and I know because I had grandparents like that.

And what does Cranky Rah do, you might ask? She writes. She tells all her friends to pretend like she is dead (or, less violently, out of town), and she writes. All day long. Every day. Every day.

It's a writing retreat I don't have to pay for or leave home for. And though I love and adore Ruby Hazelnut and want her, at some point, to come home, these are awesome, awesome days. They make me a little more human. A little.

Cranky Rah's spring retreat starts Monday. Thank you, Rosa and Eddie.

Where Rah will be in her head next week:
following Wren and Ink up into a sycamore tree and their story.

Villains, Redux

Last July, The Three and I talked villains. The Further Four and I just got around to this topic today, mainly because they didn't exist at the time. (Well, the girls existed, individually, just not as a writing group.)

Freewriting villains is fun, so we started out by using Rah's favorite random stuff generator to generate some negative character traits. The three traits the girls liked were rude, secretive and violent. The instructions were simple: Spend five to seven minutes writing a brief bio about a bad guy or girl with those three traits. Make her nasty. Tell me what kinds of horrible things she does.

Yummmmm.

As usual, we got some crazy diversity out of this group of girls who are all about the same age and come from pretty similar backgrounds: adult villains and teen villains and villains of indiscriminate age. Villains who like order and hate long hair; villains who eat bunnies for breakfast; villains who get grounded; and one evocatively named villain called Gobstopper Grasshopper.

After we had our villains firmly in hand, we chatted villainy. This was pretty high level and basic: We talked about how the villain's job is to oppose the main character and cause conflict. We talked about how villains aren't always evil. Sometimes, they're antagonists, like your mom when she destroys your hopes and dreams by not letting you go hang out with your friends because your room still isn't clean.

Most importantly, though, the villain is the hero of her own story. To write a great villain, you need to understand her as well as you understand your main character. You need to answer those three questions: What does my villain want? What's in her way? Does she get it?

To get inside the head of our crazy villains we wrote again, this time from the point of view of the villain. Two rules for this go-round: Write in first person. Don't make your character not evil all of a sudden.

I didn't want these villains to suddenly stop eating bunnies for breakfast; I wanted to know what made that bunny-eater eat bunnies? What had the world done to make him that way? How did he feel about the world being arrayed against him?

Cranky Rah knows how she feels when the world is arrayed against her: Irritable. Vengeful. And in sudden, desperate need of a clean house.

Here's Cranky Rah, her friend Quaker Ann and other
like-minded cleaniacs, power-washing the world.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: Waxing Philosophic

Cranky Rah is in the throes of a winter malaise. She should be working on the next draft of The Work in Progress, but the brain is Decidedly Not Interested. This happens from time to time, and it is one of the few things in life Cranky Rah does not stress about. It will come back. She will write. That is what Cranky Rah does.

But it's had me thinking about big questions like Why Does One Want to Get Published? and Why Does One Write?

Abandon all hope,
ye who trespass in Rah's cave.

My awesome writing friend Cool J once heard an author say that you need to know why you want to get published—not judge that reason, just know it. For Cool J, it's the need for the visual artist in her to hold her words in her hands. For me, well, let's just say we're not going that deep into Rah's cave today. Beware the caution tape.

Sometimes when I talk to writers, though, it seems like that's all there is. There's a lot of talk about agents and editors and getting published and fretting about deadlines and working through another draft and, quite frankly, it seems like a lot of Work. The kind of work that makes you wonder why anyone would do it in the first place.

So I started wondering: Why do we write? Not how did we start writing or why do we want to get published or why do we write what we write about, but why do writers put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard? What drives the creation?

Phones hung on walls and had these
things called cords, which basically
handcuffed you to the phone.
I had a bright yellow one.

I don't remember exactly when I started writing, but it was sometime in middle school, when I met Jobie. She wrote stories, and I thought that was neat, so I started writing stories. We spent all summer writing and reading our stories to each other, and I mean that pretty much literally. This was the Age of Atari (an epoch of the Stone Age), before home computers or the Internet. Heck, this was before Call Waiting—and there was the rub: My mom worked part time, and she wanted to be able to get in touch with my sister and me if she needed to. So she required that I not be on the phone for the 10 minutes before and after the top of the hour (like 9:50 to 10:10 a.m.) and for the 10 minutes before and after the bottom of the hour.

Jobie and I spent the 20 minutes of each phone ban writing, and then we spent the next 20 minutes on the phone, reading to each other. Then 20 minutes writing, 20 minutes reading. Over and over. All. Day. Long.

What did we write about? Well, let's just say that within the Age of Atari was the Period of The Lost Boys. Jobie was into vampires way before Stephenie Meyer. I was more into rock stars and this one black-haired boy from school, but they could be vampires, too. Anything was possible.

That's when the populating of my brain started, I guess. I don't write because I have some Great Deep Lesson I want to share with the world or because I want to explore the Big Questions of Life. Maybe that happens anyway in the telling of a good story, but I write because there are people in my brain, and they want out.

Connor might be related to this one.

There's Wren, who lives in a treehouse and wakes up in other places a couple of times a week. Ink, the black-haired boy who hears color. Vivian, who wishes her mom's tattoo wasn't on the cover of that country album, and Jacoby with his mad uncle. Connor, who inherited an island of seals, and Waverly, whose dad digs up dead people.

They're all hibernating right now, which I totally get. It's supposed to snow today. Again. And we're all totally over it. But spring is coming. Soon we will be awash in vitamin D, and everyone will wake up. Maybe they're stirring a little even now, which is good, because it's getting a little cramped inside my head.

Group Hug: Playing with Setting

In Rah's world, the word "tomorrow" doesn't always mean "tomorrow." Sometimes it means "I know I said on Thursday I'd post the next day about writing about setting with The Three, but on Friday I was too busy rock climbing and eating tacos (not at the same time), and on Saturday I was too busy rock climbing and eating a Proper Pie (ditto on not at the same time)." I think we can all agree that these are awesome reasons to not get around to posting.

Anyway, The Three and I did write about setting on Thursday. Since so many good things come in threes, our writing exercise about setting had three steps.

Step One: Get a Character

Start by choosing a character name from a random name generator. Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of the character. You can write anything you want about the character, but he or she must be contemporary. The character name we picked was Jude. The Three love an androgynous name.

After we wrote about Jude, we spent a few minutes talking about what The Three know about setting, which was pretty much what I talked about with The Further Four back in January.

Step Two: Get a Setting

Now, spend five to seven minutes writing about the carousel in the picture, in list or paragraph form, whatever rocks your world. Be sure to include as many of the five senses as you can, and don’t forget to include the carousel's surroundings (meaning if you're riding the carousel, you can see outside of it to what's going on around it).

I loved how a couple of The Three ended up giving the carousel a personality: ominous or lonely. Because that's where we were going next, with the discussion of setting having a personality.

Once we'd had that discussion, it was time to try out writing about setting as a character.

Step Three: Give the Setting Some Anima

(Not anime. Anima. Important distinction.)

Now we want to look at how setting can play a role in how your character behaves. We’re going to place him or her in the setting we wrote about earlier, but we want to give this setting a personality. When you write, you can add in as many other characters as you want—or none at all—but you must assume that there are a bunch of people in this setting, just like in the picture. Write for 10 minutes. Share.

This can be a little tricksy, so you can always assign a personality for the setting: You want the setting to annoy your character or confuse your character or protect your character. In fact, try it all three ways and see how each affects your character and the plot, because the harmony of the world digs things in threes. Like three tacos or three rock climbing partners or three really fabulous teen writers who let me experiment on them every month with writing prompts.