The Aurora tragedy and the fragile boundary between reality and fiction

James Holmes (inset) and Heath Ledger as The Joker

I was slogging away at my new novel, writing about the tenuous boundary between reality and fiction, when I first heard the news about the horrific shooting at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises at the multiplex in Aurora, Colorado. Witnesses reported that just before opening fire, killing a dozen people and injuring scores more, the shooter said “I am the Joker.” For him, evidently, the dividing line between truth and fantasy had grown irreparably breached. 

In yesterday’s Daily Beast, Dr. Michael Stone, who has studied over 200 mass murderers, is quoted as saying the majority, most typically young males, are not psychotic. Often they are loners who suffer from paranoia or other personality disorders, and some external event or person triggers their outbursts of deadly rage. Some are sociopaths. We still don’t know what set off James Holmes, and whether his dropping out of graduate school was cause or effect. But his recent purchases of arms and ammo, and the way he wired his apartment with explosives, chose his “full ballistic” costume, and staged the massacre at the Batman premiere, suggest painstaking planning and premeditation. 

My novel-in-progress is a work of fan fiction and fantasy involving dueling soap opera stars on the imaginary XYZ network. Yesterday, I was struggling with a scene in which the hero, a romantic lead on an afternoon soap, arrives at the studio and is confronted by a cop who informs him that the set has become a crime scene. Someone has been murdered overnight, but my hero, Lieutenant Jonah McQuarry, at first believes the entire scenario is part of a new script he hasn’t yet read. 

Just as they rolled out a gurney bearing a black body bag and the truth started to dawn on my protagonist, Friday’s episode of General Hospital – which has some remarkably similar characters – came to an end, and ABC switched to the news. The Colorado massacre was front and center, and I clicked over to CNN for more details, thus effectively ending my writing session for the day. Hunkered down in my recliner with a glass of wine, greedy for more details, I learned that until the murderer opened fire, some in the audience believed he was part of the show, some sort of promotional gimmick. 

When John Holmes declared, “I am the Joker,” did he actually believe he was the character? If so, was he the Joker as embodied by Jack Nicholson, or by Heath Ledger? I’m guessing the latter, both because there’s a better generational fit and because Ledger’s tragic death six months before the release of The Dark Knight in 2008 compounds the complexity of the killer’s identification with the Joker. Did he believe he was destined to die like Ledger, thus making him some kind of legendary martyr? He’s alive, in police custody, so perhaps some answers will emerge as the story unfolds. 

Ages ago, when I was a creative arts therapist at a psychiatric hospital for the severely and persistently mentally ill, I knew many patients whose delusions revolved around stars and celebrities. There was an elderly woman, a wonderful artist and pianist, who believed George Gershwin had been her lover and still visited her on the ward. And there was a young man, a paranoid schizophrenic, who was convinced he had turned into a woman and had sex with John Lennon. As a nondirective, nonjudgmental therapist and a passionate Beatles fan, my response was “Really? What was it like?” 

John Lennon autographing an album for Mark Chapman hours before the murder

That was months before Lennon was shot down outside his apartment in the Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His killer, Mark David Chapman, had once been hospitalized for depression but had otherwise functioned relatively normally without obvious evidence of mental illness. He was obsessed with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and saw himself as the novel’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield – yet another instance of the comingling of reality and fiction.

 

These days, the individual obsessions of the late twentieth century seem positively quaint. Social media and mass communications have become so overwhelmingly powerful, the images of violence and mayhem so inescapable, and powerful deadly weapons so readily available, it’s no surprise that for certain deranged individuals, the lure of deadly international fame will prove irresistible. Sadly, the massacre in Aurora probably won’t be the last.  

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday, Sir Paul – Sorry I never knew you!

 

Englishmen in New York – 1966

In August of 1966, I made it all the way into the foyer of the Beatles’ penthouse suite at New York’s Warwick Hotel, about twenty feet from the bedroom where John and Paul were sleeping. It’s one of the great regrets of my life that I didn’t barge right in and wake them up.

Today, as Sir Paul McCartney turns 70, joining the illustrious crew of septuagenarians that includes Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and yours truly, I’m thinking back to my years as a Beatlemaniac and the long and winding road that brought me to their penthouse suite.

The journey began with the long, distorted twang of an electric guitar – the opening chord of “I Feel Fine” – followed by George Harrison’s catchy opening riff and John Lennon’s powerful vocal, issuing from a portable radio in the studio I shared with another painter high up in Columbia University’s Lowe Library.

“What is THAT?” I asked my studio mate, the radio’s owner.

She put down her brushes and gave me an incredulous stare. “That’s the Beatles,” she said in a tone implying I must have come from another planet.

It was the fall of 1964, and pop music hadn’t been even a blip on my radar screen. As an art history major at Barnard, I’d spent the last couple of years grinding away toward my goal of earning a Phi Beta Kappa key, then spending a semester at the Art Students League putting together a painting portfolio for admission to Columbia’s MFA program. In April I’d married my  first husband, and we were modern jazz fanatics. We owned a state-of-the-art set of stereo components, but never listened to AM radio, and we refused to sink so low as to buy a television set.

Of a dozen MFA students, I was the only figurative painter. My themes had centered on jazz musicians and the Kennedy assassination, but that fall, as the Beatles’ music grew on me, I bought a few fan magazines and began to paint them – fairly abstractly, on huge canvases with big sweeping brushstrokes and barely recognizable features. Abstract expressionism still held sway at Columbia. Robert Motherwell was the big-name artist in residence that year, and the only specific advice I can recall his giving me was that it’s a good idea to have a drink or two before going to the studio.

No one knew what to make of my work, and I suspect they gave me the MFA largely to be rid of me. After that I was on my own, in an apartment on Riverside Drive West in Washington Heights. My husband’s job took him on the road a lot. More isolated than I’d ever been before, I continued to paint the Beatles, more and more realistically. I focused on John and Paul, never quite sure which of them I preferred. When HELP, their second movie, came out in glorious Technicolor, I saw it over two dozen times. After years of academic striving, I’d belatedly regressed to being a teenager.

 

WMCA DJ Gary Stevens

Top 40 AM radio was my ever-present background music. My loyalties vacillated between WABC and WMCA, but somehow, in the summer of 1966, just before the Beatles’ second Shea Stadium concert, I connected with Gary Stevens, a DJ on WMCA who’d gotten an exclusive in with the Fab Four. He encouraged me to bring my paintings down to the Warwick Hotel where they were staying, saying he’d meet me and try to get me upstairs to meet them and show them my work.

I schlepped three canvases down from Washington Heights by subway (I’d scaled down the dimensions since graduating from Columbia). Somehow Gary shepherded me through the hundreds of screaming teenagers and into the elevator that rose nonstop to the penthouse. We exited directly into the antechamber to their suite, and I arranged my paintings against the wall, ready for the viewing. He told me to wait there while he checked whether they were available.

A couple of minutes later, he was back. “Sorry, John and Paul are in bed asleep,” he said.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I replied, as my racy dreams went up in smoke.

Why on earth didn’t I say, “Oh, that’s okay – I’ll just go wake them up?” Probably because of my residual Midwestern prudishness – the same reticence that overcame me three years later, when Jimi Hendrix took my phone number and said he’d like to come down to my loft to see my paintings. I waited in vain for days, afraid to leave my loft lest I miss his call. (This was before the days of answering machines.) Why didn’t I simply track down his number and call him instead? But then in 1969 I wasn’t yet a Radical Feminist.

Anyway, happy birthday, Sir Paul. Today, we’re probably both singing Paul Simon’s lyrics – “How terribly strange to be seventy.” But we’re both still rocking.

 

 

Hip Lab Rats Dig Miles Davis

Miles Davis in the 1950's

Lab rats prefer Miles Davis to Beethoven – but only if they’ve listened to Miles after being injected with cocaine. When they haven’t been coked up, they prefer Beethoven – or, best of all, silence.

Those critically important findings come from a study right here at Albany Medical College. As reported by Cathleen Crowley in yesterday’s Times Union, the study made the Top 10 list of “Most Ridiculous Research on Animals of 2011″  from the California-based group In Defense of Animals. The lead editorial in today’s TU made the point that the research isn’t absurd, and that it may in fact provide important information about cues that stimulate drug cravings and lead to discovery of ways to neutralize these cues and block addiction.

But I’m more interested in the rats’ musical tastes. Since adolescence, when I actually met and spoke with Miles several times, I’ve been wild about his music. On the other hand, I’m far from a Beethoven fan, and I’ve often taken a snobbish pride in putting him down. Too bombastic, too repetitious, too harmonically mundane. Give me Bach or Bartok any day, or anything from Schumann or Brahms to 20^thcentury avant-garde music. (I’m not a fan of Mozart either, but I won’t go into that.)

Ludwig Van Beethoven

But when I reread the article, I saw that the Beethoven they played for the rats was “Fur Elise,” a solo piano piece played by students the world over. So they didn’t really get a fair dose of Beethoven, in my opinion. And though I hate to admit it, I actually enjoy much of his chamber and piano music. As a teen, I even played some of the sonatas, albeit abominably – the Apassionata and the Pathetique were my favorites. But somehow I doubt the rats would have appreciated his Fifth Symphony, let alone his Ninth with its Ode to Joy.

As for the researchers’ Miles Davis selection, “Four” is a moderately uptempo tune he recorded with a quartet in the early 1950’s for the Prestige label. I still have the ten-inch LP in a carton along with other vinyl treasures I may get around to auctioning on E-Bay one of these days. Maybe the rats liked the regular rhythmic pulsation, conjuring up sense memories of their mothers’ heartbeats.

I can envision many more experiments. Do rats prefer Beethoven’s piano pieces to his symphonies? What about Beethoven vs. Mozart or Bach? And which period of Miles’s career do they like best? The early neo-bop combos, the magnificent orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans, the crossover electrified oeuvre of his later years? And how do various drugs affect their musical preferences? Do they like uptempo jazz with cocaine and mellower ballads with marijuana? Somehow I can’t picture this research happening any time soon. No big loss, really.

I was planning to end this post with my “How I met Miles and what he said to me” stories, but I couldn’t condense them into a couple of paragraphs. You’ll just have to wait till next time. So as not to miss them, why not subscribe to my blog?

Forget cool cats - we're the cool rats!

The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

Bruce Springsteen

Everything’s looking so rosy today, I’m singing that catchy ditty from the 80’s, The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.”*  I’m feeling happier than I have in ages, and that scares me a little – for me, with my bipolar diagnosis, high spirits can be a precursor of over-the-top mania.

But why shouldn’t I feel elated? I started the day by scoring a ticket to the Bruce Springsteen concert at the Times Union Center next Monday. I’d assumed the concert had sold out ages ago, but an article in the TU’s Preview section said some single tickets were available, a least when they’d gone to print last night. I abandoned my breakfast, grabbed my laptop and my debit card, and less than an hour later, I had my ticket. I say “less than an hour” because it took me nearly that long to navigate all the barriers thrown up by Ticketmaster. I’m proud I remained calm and collected throughout the procedure – for fear of waking my husband, I refrained from the yelling and swearing that computer hassles are wont to provoke in me.

Twenty minutes after that, I had my ticket for CountryFest at the same venue as well. The WGNA extravaganza presale began at ten this morning, for one day only, and this time I wended my way through the Ticketmaster labyrinth with relative ease. Then, on a roll, envisioning an outing with my granddaughters, I checked out the ticket situation for the Ringling Brothers Circus and Cirque du Soleil, both coming to the TU in May. But I restrained myself without buying any – for now. I need to check with my daughter anyway.

Over-the-top spending is a red flag for mania in bipolar disorder, but I plead not guilty. I was using a debit card, after all – I haven’t used a credit card in several years. I knew I had enough in my account, and I stopped short of blowing $400 on Cirque du Soleil tickets for my whole family. My life style is fairly stripped down and simple. I usually feed my need for a music fix by ushering at The Egg and the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall and catching the concerts for free, but I can’t resist treating myself to an occasional luxury.

Another symptom of oncoming mania is verbal over-productivity, whether spoken or written. But isn’t that a state to be desired, especially by serious writers? Yes, it can be, in the form of hypomania, a state just shy of mania. There’s a sense of heightened wellbeing and creativity, and riding the wave can be enormously satisfying, as long as you don’t let the wave send you crashing down onto the ocean floor.

I’ve got so many blog ideas right now, I can hardly keep up with them. But I need to stay focused on Script Frenzy. I’m on track to produce 100 pages of film script by the end of April, and I’m having a ball. No doubt that’s the main reason I feel so happy – the creative log jam that’s had me stuck for ages has finally broken up, and I’m free to go with the flow.

I’ll try to sandwich a few blog posts in among my pages of film script. Here’s where you come in –  let me know if my blogging gets confused and irrational, and I’ll be sure to tell my shrink.

*My Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades is a 1986 hit by the group Timbuk 3. Some Wikipedia trivia I didn’t know: this was their first and only hit, and it made VH1’s list as “One of the Greatest One-Hit Wonders” of the 80’s. The husband-and-wife duo of Pat MacDonald and Amber Cleveland originally thought of the lyrics as voicing the thoughts of a young nuclear scientist, and “bright” as referring to an impending nuclear holocaust. They were surprised when it turned into a sunny feel-good anthem suggesting a promising future.

Timbuk 3

 

I’ll never be a Master Gardener

Today I confessed a shameful secret I’ve been harboring for nearly a decade: I was turned down not once but twice for the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Master Gardener training in Rensselaer County in upstate New York. The self-disclosure was so satisfying that I’ve decided to go public with it on my blog.

After my Nia class at the Y, I was chatting with two Master Gardeners about last weekend’s flower and garden show at the nearby community college, and they were raving about the flowery archway one of their fellow M.G.s had created at the entrance of the show. Impulsively I pulled one of them aside – she’s a retired psychotherapist with empathetic listening skills – and confided in her about that long-ago humiliation.

I’ve endured my fair share of rejections over the years as an artist, writer and job applicant, but I’ve always aced the application process when it comes to training programs and schools, up to and including top-flight Ivy League colleges like Radcliffe and Columbia. Perhaps that’s why this particular failure rankled so badly – that, and the fact that I had absolutely no clue why they considered me a persona non grata.

But over the years I’ve come to realize they may have made the right decision. Back in the day, I was wild about gardening. I wrote about it, even developed an elaborate proposal for a book called The Blissful Gardener. But I decided that I probably didn’t have the credentials or experience to sell it, much less the gorgeous photographs demanded for that kind of book. My gardening efforts, in fact, were fairly pathetic. I loved the sense of joy and wellbeing engendered by gardening. I had great ideas and design sense, and I loved planting my latest finds, but I lacked enthusiasm for the more mundane tasks that demanded perseverance – minor things like mulching, weeding and watering.

For the interviews, I brought copies of articles I’d written and described the fresh contributions I could make to the Master Gardener program. But I’m afraid I didn’t come across as much of a team player or journeyman worker compared to the applicants who’d put in countless hours as volunteer gardeners over the years.

Back then I was in a depressive phase, still adjusting to retirement and not yet a published author, and I remember sobbing about how I was a total failure and nobody wanted me for   anything. But that feeling is long gone, and I’m better off without the serious time commitment entailed in being a Master Gardener. At Saturday’s garden expo I sat in the front row for a presentation on “Tough Plants for Tough Places” by the program head who’d twice rejected me. I peppered him with questions and contributed a couple of nuggets of my own.

Did my nemesis remember me all these years later? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. All that shame, anger and depression is gone at long last. As my therapist friend says, it’s good to have closure. And though I may never be a Master Gardener, I can still be a blissful one.

Missed concert prompts war on clutter

By all reports, Sunday’s Albany Symphony matinee concert in Saratoga was marvelous. I’m sure I would have loved it, but I lost the tickets! Perhaps that’s what prompted me to attack the moldering cardboard cartons of memorabilia in the outdoor storage shed – my life’s in desperate need of order and clarity.

My husband purchased the tickets at a recent church auction. They’d been donated by a couple with a subscription series who couldn’t use them, as they were vacationing out of town, so we had no proof of purchase. I clearly remembered stashing the little white envelope in my handbag when I got them – or at least I thought I did. But just to make sure, I decided to double check on Saturday night. To my horror, they weren’t there.

The handbag is a good one, a red leather Tignanello with lots of zippered compartments and deep pouches, and I rummaged through all of them, then turned the purse inside out and shook out the contents on the sofa. Among all the used tissues and cough drop wrappers I found lots of loose change, an expired driver’s license, and business cards I’d collected who knows when, where or why, but no tickets. Nor were they in the side table drawer where I usually stash tickets and other time-sensitive papers.

Panicking as Saint Patrick’s Day segued into Sunday, I searched all the relevant nooks and crannies I could think of. Still no tickets. I gave up around one-thirty, popped a Lunesta – my first in over a month – and fell into bed. Next morning, my husband woke me by saying “Any more ideas about where those tickets might be?” We resumed the search, but I had to bail in time to make choir practice before the service, and they never turned up.

My spouse was good about it – he even sprang for brunch at the New World Bistro, so now we were out $50 on top of the original $40. He didn’t lecture me or even raise his voice, and when I asked why not, he said “I figure you’ve been torturing yourself more than enough.”

Back home as concert time rolled around, l was overwhelmed by an atypical urge to attack my clutter. For my search and destroy mission, I decided to tackle the outside storage shed that contains cartons of miscellaneous books and papers I’ve been meaning to sort  for decades (well, two decades, anyway.) Months ago, a branch from my neighbor’s dead maple had smashed onto the flimsy metal roof during a storm, and we hadn’t gotten around to “fixing a hole where the rain comes in,” as Paul McCartney would say. Expecting water damage, I’d been afraid to look, and my fears were justified. Half a dozen boxes stacked beneath the leak had been soaked, and the contents spilled out haphazardly.

I donned rubber gloves, pulled up our giant trash receptacle and began to jettison soggy books and papers. Trekking back in time, I trashed dozens of how-to-run-your-own-business books from my decade as founder of ElderSource, Inc., my long defunct home care agency, notebooks and photos from my years as an art therapist, extra catalogs and show announcements from my years as an artist in SoHo. There were dozens of wedding announcements from 1975, of which I salvaged a handful, and a copy of Daily Girl, a soft-core magazine from 1973 with a feature article and full-page color photo of the interior of a geodesic dome I’d constructed for a feminist art show called Erotic Garden. (Once the show was over, the dome took up residence in my loft, where it served as an extra bedroom. My daughter was conceive  there, but that’s another story.)

I even found the notebook from my freshman seminar at Radcliffe, which featured weekly dinners at a Harvard house featuring speakers like Erich Fromm, Marshall McLuhan and B.F. Skinner. But what I most want to find is the letter enclosing a check for the prize money I won for showing my paintings at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. That would give my paintings a provenance and increase their value if I want to sell them.

Today’s another sunny, abnormally warm day, so I’m going out to the shed to resume my search and jettison more junk. I’ve only got a couple of hours; then I’ve got to get spruced up to go to the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall to hear Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. It should be a great concert, and fortunately, since I’m ushering, I don’t need a ticket. Now, if I can just find my name tag!

There’s lots more to say about disorganization and culling clutter. Do you have any stories or advice to share? I’d love to hear your comments.

 

Choir inspiring at Whitney’s funeral

Those Baptists sure know how to throw a fine funeral! Along with millions of others around the world, I watched Whitney Houston’s service at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark last weekend on CNN. Expecting to catch an hour or so, I found myself transfixed, and four hours flew by in a flash.

“We’re taking you to church,” one of the many reverends said early on, and indeed they did, for a blend of music, eulogies and preaching that was surprisingly uplifting and even joyful. It brought back memories of the funeral I attended at a black Baptist church in Poughkeepsie in the 1980’s, still the most inspiring I’ve ever attended. Like Whitney’s, it was a blend of sadness and exaltation, rocked by a marvelous choir. The program called it a “Coming Home Celebration.”

The service was for Sherwood Thompson, the Chief Recreation Therapist at Hudson River Psychiatric Center, where I worked as an art therapist, or as New York civil service chose to call it, a “Recreation Therapist (Art).” The hospital is closed now, but back then it had a flourishing creative arts therapies department that included dance and music therapists. Thompson was a former college football player with a B.A., and with our master’s degrees and our lofty artistic proclivities, we never stopped hassling him, proclaiming that we shouldn’t be supervised by a jock and agitating for our own department. Fresh from two decades as a freewheeling artist in Manhattan’s SoHo district, I had absolutely no sense of organizational teamwork or decorum, and fired off frequent inflammatory memos of complaint to the hospital director.

Choir at Houston funeral

Amazingly, Thompson never fired me. Instead, he was unfailingly gracious, saying that for staff, he’d rather have “racehorses I need to rein in rather than mules I have to kick in the behind.” Eventually we reached a truce of sorts, and when he died from complications of diabetes, a dance therapist and I attended his service. We were among a couple of dozen whites in a church packed with hundreds of black people, and we sobbed uncontrollably. The magnificent choir and stirring rhetoric fueled and stoked our emotions, and it was a cathartic experience even though we didn’t buy into all the Jesus and God talk.

So it was at the Whitney Houston memorial service. The passion poured loud and clear through my small-screen TV into my living room, and the choir and gospel singing were transcendent, even though I couldn’t buy into the notion that Whitney is now singing amidst a choir of heavenly angels.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I’m a little envious of those whose faith gives them such a firm foundation for coping with loss and grief, not to mention the expectation of a blissful life after death. I envision our denomination as being like a gigantic whole wheat donut or bagel – full of bran, raisins, fiber and lots of other wholesome and nourishing ingredients. But smack dab in the middle, where there should be spiritual inspiration, there’s nothing but a hole.

Nonetheless, FUUSA, the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, has a choir, and last fall I joined it. Although I’m a lifelong music lover and play jazz and pop piano, never in my life had I sung in a choir before, perhaps because I’ve always been more of a rugged individualist. But joining a choir was an inexpensive item on my bucket list, so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s a greater challenge than I expected – I sing alto, which is a lot like second fiddle. My sight reading’s rusty, and the melodic lines can be subtle and surprisingly tricky, but the choir director says I’m doing “more than okay,” which is praise enough, so I’m hanging in there.

I haven’t yet experienced the state of transcendent togetherness so evident in good Baptist choirs, but there’s always hope. Matt Edwards, our choir director, grew up in New Orleans, and under his tutelage our lily-white choir has finally learned to clap on the after beat. Once in a while, though it’s generally frowned on in UU circles, we even sing about heaven and Jesus.

Groundhog Day – Taking New Year’s from the top

Okay, it’s true confessions time – I frittered away the first month of the New Year. But maybe Groundhog Day is the perfect holiday for making those resolutions I never got around to a month ago. February 2^nd is appropriately amorphous and a bit confusing – I can never seem to remember what it means when the groundhog sees his shadow, or not, as the case may be. And today I learned, to my dismay, that it’s all a hoax anyway.

Apparently the folks in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, decide ahead of time whether Groundhog Phil will see his shadow or not – the rodent’s actual behavior on February 2^nd has nothing to do with it. The Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle meets ahead of time in tuxedos and top hats to predict the verdict, so the fix is in. Regardless, they say, Phil is never wrong, because there will always be more winter somewhere.* (Somehow this scenario brings today’s political landscape to mind, but that’s another story.)

Today, apparently Phil saw his shadow, thus predicting six more weeks of winter, whereas his rivals, including General Beauregard Lee at the Yellow River Game Ranch near Atlanta, predicted an early spring. (I watched the Georgia festivities on YouTube. The General evidently lives in a Southern-style mini-mansion, but he didn’t venture outside. If you were an animal on a game farm, you probably wouldn’t either.)

Of course the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day comes to mind. He’s fated to live the same day over and over ad nauseam, and that’s what I feel I’ve been doing for the past year or so, suspended in the limbo of a dreary gray time warp. It’s like flying in a jet through an endless cloud bank and losing all sense of direction or momentum. Unfortunately I don’t believe there’s any pilot at the controls, and I have no idea how to work the navigational system.

But that’s the kind of depressive drivel I’ve vowed to leave behind in this upcoming year. I rather like the airplane metaphor, but I could donate it to one of the characters in Death Denied, the novel I started last November during National Novel Writing Month. On the whole, I’ve been feeling a lot better, so much so that I decided (with the agreement of my shrink) to cut back by a third on my Zoloft. I’m feeling more energized already, so we’ll see . . .

My trusty old computer crashed disastrously a month ago today, contributing in a major way to my January doldrums. We managed to recover most of the data, but the machine is still under the weather and perhaps terminally ill. So I’ve switched to the laptop my husband has been urging me to try for ages. There are quite a few changes I need to get used to, but I’m actually beginning to prefer it. One feature that could turn out to be a pro or a con: the most comfortable place I’ve found for using it, in terms of posture, back support and keyboard usability, happens to be my bed. My cat Lunesta seems to agree – she’s curled up cozily atop my legs and purring.

And now for the next big hurdle: can I figure out how to post this blog entry? If so, then maybe I’ll finally feel empowered enough to confront getting my books up on Kindle by the end of February. Yes, I can!

  *[See the complete story on today’s Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/punxsutawney-phil-2012-winter_n_1249355.html%5D

Resolving to remember my gratitude

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, a new one just begun.

 Although Christmas is behind us, John Lennon’s lyrics are still apropos – this is the ideal time for reflecting on the years of our lives, past and present. It’s Wednesday, midway between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’m gazing out my window at a windy gray day that looks much like November. I’m feeling suspended in limbo, wondering how to spend these last four days of 2011. Should I try to be wildly productive, or should I just wallow in self-indulgence and resolve to be more proactive in 2012?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help making resolutions during the darkest days of the year. They’re generally much the same  – exercise more, eat better, lose weight, get organized, stop procrastinating, throw stuff out, write a new novel. Oh yes, and stop playing computer games. I usually make only marginal progress, but there’s always the hope that next year will be better.

Today I lazed around in bed till noon, reading a book about procrastination – what causes it and how to overcome it. I picked it up at a library book sale last spring, but I’ve procrastinated about reading it till now. Will it help? I realize that’s pretty much up to me. Back in high school, I remember making the resolution, “Stop being a procrastinating perfectionist.” I’ve long since stopped being a perfectionist, but the procrastinating part definitely still applies.

A new resolution I’m adding can be summed up in one word – gratitude. Yes, it’s discussed in lots of self-help books, and my Nia teacher frequently ends class by having us focus on all we have to be grateful for, especially the people who are most important in our lives. Many writers have suggested reviewing and maybe writing down the things we’re grateful for at the end of each day. It’s something I haven’t done enough of, but this coming year I plan to take it more seriously.

Above all, I’m grateful for my beautiful and wonderful family – my husband, my daughter Stacey, and my two wonderful granddaughters, Kaya and Jasper. I can’t resist posting the beautiful photos my daughter took of the girls. I gave them the fairy wings they’re wearing in the Christmas photo, and their other grandmother gifted Kaya with the cello, which she’s been playing for a couple of years. Doesn’t she look every inch the brooding artist? It runs in the family, I guess.

I’m also grateful to have had the wherewithal to buy them a reasonable number of gifts, though we didn’t go overboard. Nor did we use our credit cards. But my checking account was pretty well tapped out, and I’m grateful for the Social Security payment that showed up in my balance last night. With grandchildren, it’s truly more blessed to give than to receive, but I’m looking forward to going to the mall momentarily to take in a movie – Sherlock Holmes, maybe? – and to indulge myself in a couple of gifts for moi, as Miss Piggy would say.

Here’s wishing you a wonderful New Year. May you have much to be grateful for.

Mad dash to the finish for NaNoWriMo

Van Gogh's Night Cafe

National Novel Writing Month will be over in exactly 24 hours, and I’ve only got 48,000 words. The finish line is in sight, and by midnight tomorrow I’ll have to crank out at least 2000 more. I’m determined to do it, even if I have to pull an all-nighter the way I did for college term papers.

I hope the NaNoWriMo  administrators never read this blog post, because I’ve got a confession to make – I cheated a little. At about 35,000 words, like a marathoner, I hit a wall, and I knew I’d never make it at the rate I was going, so I copied a few online articles relevant to my research and pasted them into my document. Methods of suicide, assisted dying and state laws about same – fun stuff like that. Only a few thousand words, but enough to help me over what would otherwise have been a hopeless hurdle.

Even so, I’m proud to say that about ninety percent of the words are mine, all mine. Of those, I hope more than half are the actual first draft of my new novel. Those I’ve been formatting in traditional black type, double spaced. But they’re interspersed with miscellaneous meanderings. Many are about the developing plot and the evolving characters. I type those in single-spaced red. Green is for personal ramblings that have little to do with the novel – except that often they lead to new ideas for my fictional tale. And purple is for blog posts like this one, which I’m also copying and pasting into one enormous, unwieldy document.

I’m writing scenes about whatever captures my fancy at any given time, without worrying about where they may eventually end up in the book. Which point of view I pick depends on my mood – sometimes it’s Paula Rhodes, the temperamental CEO of Compassionate Care, the home care agency inspired by ElderSource, Inc., which I ran in the 1990’s. Sometimes I’m drawn more to Claire Lindstrom, the idealistic nurse who was my main protagonist in Eldercide. And then there’s the evolving character of Carolyn, who assisted at the death of her husband, who was suffering from the end stages of pancreatic cancer.

Edvard Munch - The Scream

My printer may have died, but I don’t have time to diagnose what the problem is and whether it’s fixable or I need to buy a new one. So I don’t yet have a hard copy to work with, nor have I reread most of what I’ve written. Sometimes I scroll back to read the last scene in order to hazard a guess as to what comes next, but by and large I’ve managed to banish my inner critic.

When December arrives, I’ll do a “save as” and begin dividing this humungous document into manageable sections. Then I’ll see what I’ve come up with and where I go from here. At that point I’ll have the luxury of slowing down and maybe letting that inner critic to have her say.

Though I’ve written four novels and published two of them, I’ve never worked this way before, but I’m enjoying it. Most importantly, the NaNoWriMo challenge has inspired me to barrel through the creative block that plagued me for so long, to get back to my writing, and to discover that my muse hasn’t deserted me after all.