Tag: storytelling

What You Don’t Know You Believe Can Hurt You

.Reading time 6 minutes.

And why I adore dialogue with you on here.

Your insight is dramatically helpful in the monumental process that is a story teller turnings shame into vulnerability.

Your points give a clear much needed out for when us writers doubt what we are really doing.

We need this way out of our maze of fear and lies we believe feel and react to. Believing I’m exposing my friends makes me feel defensive and small like a weasel. I often suspect myself of something that makes me just like a

Writing a good story is big work.

It’s heavy lifting to process reality into an uplifting story that makes sense and creates meaning and change.

Figuring out how we got out of a tricky spot and how and why we succeeded who and what where the problems and what we learned worked or works is an art. Sharing it is brave.

Finding a way out of lives that won’t bring joy or flow properly no matter what you do or hide is priceless.

I think your points do something to help bring my personal imagination out of the bone yard. A place where I feel like I’m betraying and hurting rather than helping. Hurting isn’t my nature. So I feel paralyzed. So, I fight back.

tabloid producer and accuse myself mercilessly. So I figure the whole world is gonna see me like what I am, some Rita Skeeter, that horrid witch reporter for The Daily Prophet let’s her magical green feather pen stretch butcher and molest the truth about Harry Potter and his friends without a spark of conscience. She’s one of my least favorite fictional characters, ever. So, I’m ready and on the offensive and the defensive, when just like Rita Skeeter, I make this crap up about myself. Then, like the annoying Wizarding community I go and believe the whole thing.

So, then I’m defensive as heck.

I am not like Rita Skeeter!

While I am the only one in this “conversation”.

Only trouble: I wonder if all great writers must have this stupid “conversation” and find a way to end it every time and move forward.

You’re list did something lots of books on writing I’ve read didn’t do.

I’m not sure what it is, but I feel a little bit quenched. In a good way. : )

All the best writers write about what they know with a terrific purpose that’s got nothing to do with exposing their friends. For me, its It’s about helping myself. My friends are part of my life, and lots of what I learned is from my not-so -friendlies. What else is there to write about? How else than to tell my own experience of myself and how my friend’s and family’s crap has affected them and me and the rest of us?

But “Who do you think you are to judge you big meany!?” Still needs to be dealt with regularly. It’s gotta be dealt with. I have to do it. And I have to do it regularly, the way some other professionals have to build up their confidence regularly.

I believe the majority of great story tellers, have to do this. And your words are helping me now. And maybe, it’ll never get as bad as Rita without me knowing where the attack is coming from again.

I wonder if my inner critic identified with a sensationalist tabloid producer. I feel aversion to. I don’t know anything about tabloid writers, and don’t consider them great, or story tellers.

I guess I feel like they are infections. When we are not immune the rest of us wonder if we are also being paid to be contagious pernicious judgey gossips with no right to feel good about our calling.

Huh. I just realized something.

I guess I haven’t figured this out. I don’t know any sensationalist gossip writers at all. Not one person I know thinks I’m that way either.

I just realized. Me trying to avoid being that way is ludicrous. I spin in that cycle rather than just realizing I am not that way. Huh.

Well.

There’s really nothing to talk about.

Note: May get permission to use the points that sparked this. Gotta post my response there first and see if I am nuts after all.

Self-Potrait

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Each thing I do
Gets done in me
What I make up
It marks me up
Each choice I make
Is colored paint
My palette is my day
Skillfuly blended
Chosen colors
Artfully painted
Or just mixed up
I make me
Anyway

It Just Happens

.Reading time 2 minutes.

The Wayward Spirit

By

M. L. Redford

the wayward spirit wafts in
through the window when the patterns of weeks, months passed, at last,

let go and shift
she moves about the room like Franny Glass making one or two things

flutter a bit, and is gone
out past the opposite shoulder as I turn in to see what I hear

to notice things
in the room which were always there but hadn’t been noticed for weeks

or maybe months
and which had obviously been there for a purpose, staring through the books

on the shelf to find
a forgotten bookmark, an absent fold, maybe a latterdaymexicanpink

autumnal ritual –
seven parts revelationinitiation and fifteen parts flutterbybestowal –

curiouser and curiouser
are the ways of the spirit: if I follow, will I flutter, will I perch or will I fall?

either way I’ll find
the pink of gist and need to meditate before I waft or get stolen

but the spirit talks
of grounding, without talking, for she is no airy/faeree: the meaning disappears

the more you look
but in looking at the unfindability you discover all the meaning for to see:

body, soul and beauty
but no room at the inn for language, ‘you can speak a hundred languages

if you want but
you’re never as wise as the illiterate who speaks with love in her heart’

she says, without a single word
but thought of a hundred languages smaller than the stars which float away;

the language of Waywarduese
butterflies about all over the points, and all of those points held

in one wing-spread,
colourful and puckering hold, sprinkled and dlappled like rain

Oh!
Can I have it?
Is it for me?
It’s for me?
It’s for me!
It’s Mine!
You stole it from me!
I’ll be generous and
share it with you
if you let me keep it.
Please

blue green orange and red rainbow design decoration
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Have You Ever Gotten Lured Into A Disqus Discussion?

.Reading time 7 minutes.

 

person looking searching clean
Photo by Gratisography on Pexels.com

 

I just did.

I Just got lured by a Disqus discussion…

Question that trapped me?

You won’t belive it. I didn’t.

Since I spent all my writing time on Disqus tonight I have no choice but to horrify you with my unsuspected wayward answer to that pirate question.

Here goes.

Question:

What home appliance has helped you most?

That’s when my answer surprised me.

 
Air conditioning, and refrigerator.
No, refrigerator and then air conditioning, that’s what I thought at first.

But then I remembered.
The rest of what appliances to you can hire someone else to do for you.
But you can’t hire someone to keep you cool or keep your food from rotting.
And a fireplace can keep you warm in winter and sorta cook your food.

Oh dang. That’s not the question though is it?

Don’t we, all of us take appliances for granted?

No, we all don’t.
I don’t.

I’ve roughed it for years with no appliances and I know just what it feels like.

I got stuck “pioneering” for about seven years on a ranch in the middle of the Sonora desert in Mexico when I was kinda young and child labour was a thing.

You get used to being hot as hell, all day and all night. You get used to cooking over a fire or on a makeshift stove. You get used to washing your own and everyone else’s dishes in a split oil barrel. Even cooking over another shape of the ubiquitous 50 gallon drum, wasn’t so bad.

Using your own hand or your parter, that’s an adventure a small hand held appliance doesn’t do justice to. I didn’t know about that then though. But scrubbing embedded mud off of piles of greasy jeans, that feel like leather in your hands.

You lean over the wash tub or a taller cement version, called a lavadero if you are super lucky, and move up and down rubbing the garment over across the washboard.  You are all bent over, till your back burns and aches.

So, you just started on this fluffy queen size quilt that you need several people to help to wring out. You are just stretching your back  into shape again, I used to imagine Plastic Man going back to his human shape, and letting the burning subside for a seconds. That little break is great, but that’s when the acrid smell of the weeks worth of soaking baby diapers reminds you of that feeling you are going to get when you put your hands into the slimy freezing water to grab a slimy diaper and wiggle that last bit of poop off it. That is when desperation overwhelmed you even before you snatch the slimy thing out and start wringing the nasty water out, before you even start rubbing it with the big pink bar of Zote, then scrub the hell out of it for as long as it takes.

Once you are scrubbing, its mind numbing endless repetition, diaper after diaper, but getting in there is the hardest part. I’d take them all out at once so I didn’t have to reach back into the pail. That was the part that still gives me the yucky-shivers.
That is a red-knuckled, chapped handed, broken blistered palms nightmare that goes on and on and you get all wet. It takes all day.

Your week is ruined just from thinking about it.

You never do learn the way the local woman scrub mud covered dirty stained rags into bright clean shirts, and emerge with softly calloused fine hands that don’t bleed.
When I got back from my expat adventure, I went back to school in Texas. To save money since I lived on a grim student budget, I opened windows and turned on a fan not the AC.
I didn’t even once consider washing clothes by hand, though. I would have skimped on our meager food first.

Instead, I collected scarce quarters for the laundromat, and washed three enormous one whites one coloreds one darks, every two ore three weeks, in the commercial washers, till I got an old used washer.

Okay, okay, I saved money again, for several more years after that and spared the environment, too by hanging laundry on a clothesline in summer months. I still do it. Sun brightens whites and bleaches out organic stains, plus there’s the fresh breezy smell garden smell, that lingers on the clothes and feels like home, not perfume. But no, I freaken never ever ever washed or scrubbed clothes by hand again.
I love washers!
I heard there is a new one that doesn’t ever break down. That you can buy when you get married and leave to your kids in your will, and it will do the same for them. I want that one!
I think it’s a new type of Speed Queen. Anyone know if this is true?
If it is, is there also a legendary refrigerator and AC system with that kind of reputation that anyone knows of?

The two next in line:
Real badass AC and refrigerator I can get that’s not just marketing hyped.
On a lighter cosmopolitan note, the bread machine and crock-pot are two of my three best little friends.

What home appliance has helps me most?

I know the truth about this. It’s the washer.