Winter Wonderland

The paragraphs below were written in January, 2009, saved as a draft, and never published. Well, I couldn't let even one golden word of mine go unpublished, could I? So I'm publishing this today, four and a half years after the events it tells of occurred. But please notice that it shows the Law of Attraction, which I speak about in today's other blog (actually written today), in action. This long snowy trip with its many delays could have been horrible, but instead, except for some bad food, was really almost fun. Read this or not, as you will. I just couldn't resist publishing it because it really is appropos of what I just finished writing today. No pictures, though--sorry about that.. 

My trip back to Washington from Maine on January 4, 2009, was very interesting. In a weird way, I actually enjoyed it. I got up at 3:30 a.m. Eastern time so that Scott could drive me from his house in Maine to New Hampshire (a 1-1/2 hour drive), where my plane took off at 7:10 a.m. Sandy decided to come with us, so that he'd have company on the drive back. I really appreciated that--although Scott says she slept the whole way over and back! But she was willing, and she gets lots of kudos for that!

Everything went pretty much according to plan: from NH to Chicago, I had an empty seat next to me---YAY!!! From Chicago to Phoenix, I had a large 13-year-old black boy next to me who first stuck his elbow in my ribs (never seemed to notice) and then laid his head on my shoulder and slept the whole way! Literally! He slept through the landing and the noise of slowing down and everything, and never woke up until we got to the gate and everyone else started getting up and moving around. Four solid hours!!!

Phoenix stands out because I bought the worst meal I've EVER had (EVER!!!) in the Phoenix airport--a four-cheese pizza from Pizza Hut which was nothing but grease and AWFUL cheese. In fact, really the only thing wrong with my trip was the food--this meal in Phoenix and my supper in Seattle (more later on that).

The flight from Phoenix to Seattle left a little late but was otherwise fine. A fellow sat next to me and never spoke until we landed--then he talked a blue streak until we were walking into the terminal! Landing in Seattle was fun: it was snowing like MAD and the runway hadn't been plowed. But it went okay--my talkative seatmate explained that, even though the runway was greasy, we were a large heavy plane. Though logic suggested we should land and slide right off the runway, the plane is equipped with a large rudder and that keeps us moving straight ahead after we land in the mess of ice and slush and snow.

The real fun began here in Seattle. First, as I say, it was snowing madly and had been for a while. We got in at 6:10 (instead of 5:30) and my next flight (to Spokane, where I had left my car 25 days earlier) was supposed to leave at 8:55, but was already delayed until 9:40. I decided I'd have a nice meal and just watch something on my iPod and the time would go quickly. Nice plan, but. . . . I had a pasty yucky chicken quesadilla at Casa del Agave in Seattle--one more place I'll NEVER eat at again! In fact, the best thing I had to eat all day was the coffee my son made me before we left home in Maine.

One nice thing, though: I was recharging my iPod while I watched it (Southwest is so good about the charging stations) and got to talking with a really sweet young man who is in his freshman year at Whitford or Whitman College in Spokane. Victor was very polite (he let his phone ring--it was his father--while we were talking because, he told me later, it wasn't polite to interrupt to answer the phone!)--and very talkative. I made sure to sit behind him, rather than next to him, so that we talked a little bit, but mostly we each did our own thing. I didn't want to be rude, but I was pretty tired and didn't want to try to make conversation once we took off.

Ultimately, Victor and I and about 80 other people boarded our flight at 10:15. It was still madly snowing--and we were told there were similar conditions in Spokane. We sat in the plane for an hour (I had three seats to myself so that was no problem) while Southwest let us know periodically that there was some minor problem with a guage that read the fuel level in one of the tanks. After about half an hour, during which the GREAT Southwest crew kept us well-informed, they finally told us, with a bit of sarcasm, 'cause THEY were at the end of their shift, too, and were not happy about the delays, that maintenance had been called to check things out, but no one wanted to come back to the airport because of the snow. I can understand that, because the highways were either a big mess or closed, but still. . . .

Anyway, Southwest took us off that plane and put us on the plane next door--which was cold and had to be warmed up before we could get on--and then they spent an hour de-icing it (which was fine with all of us--safety first, after all). We finally got off the ground at 12:30, with a little disclaimer that they weren't certain we'd be able to land in Spokane, that we might be re-routed. That was the only time I was a bit perturbed: I'd have thought they'd just keep us in Seattle, where'd it probably be easier to get us all to Spokane the next day. But in the end there was no problem. After a bumpy flight (all the flights all the way across the country were bumpy--there were a lot of exciting weather things happening country-wide on Sunday!), we landed in Spokane at 1:30 a.m.--25 hours (Pacific time) after I had gotten up in Maine that morning).

I waited until all the bags were unloaded, but mine did not show up. I turned around and headed for the baggage claim area--and almost tripped over my two bags, tiredly leaning on each other and wondering where the heck I was. Seems they made an earlier flight and had been waiting there patiently--right in back of where I was standing watching the bags come down onto the baggage carousel--for me to show up.

Earlier in Seattle, I had already decided I did NOT want to try to dig my car out in the middle of the night in Spokane (it was under LITERALLY 5 feet of snow, some of which had fallen 3 weeks earlier!), so I had called and booked a room at the hotel where the car was. The hotel shuttle picked up me and another girl (who'd just spent a week in 80-degree weather in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico--what a change for her!) at 2:00 a.m., and by 2:30 a.m., I was in a nice warm room in the Spokane Hampton Inn. It was 5:30 a.m. in Maine, and I knew my son was already at work (he's Sales Manager at a Lowes' store there), so I called him to report I was now only 2 hours away from home, but I was NOT going to try to dig my car out and head for home at 2:30 a.m. with heavy snow still falling. He agreed.

Four hours later (6:30 a.m. in Spokane, 9:30 in NH), I got a call from my company in NH asking if I knew anything more about my job. I didn't (had been hoping THEY did!) so I made a few calls, still couldn't find anything out, and went back to sleep. Got up around 11, asked for an extension on my check out time till 1 pm (which they gave me--I LOVE Hampton Inn), packed up and came downstairs to check out. That was the best part: I ate a nice lunch while the hotel staff dug my car out--YAYYYY!!!! I TRULY, TRULY LOVE Hampton Inn!

I loaded up, got in, and drove home on roads that became clearer as I got closer to home. Stopped only to get windshield washer fluid, because of course the car chose that time to run out. Got home just before 5 to a lovely pale winter sunset over "my" Columbia River valley and the sound of geese honking above, as they left the river to go to wherever they spend the night. Brought my stuff into the apartment to find out the furnace wasn't working and the temperature was below 45 degrees inside (below freezing outside). Tony, the maintenance guy, had already gone home, and I took pity on him and told him I'd use a space heater for the night and he could come in the morning to fix it. It was a cold night, but I went to bed early and didn't really notice. Tony came at 8:30 on Tuesday, and the heat was soon working fine.

I was unpacked by 6 p.m. Monday night, so my trip ended 42 hours after it began with no real problems. Even those two TERRIBLE meals and the cold apartment weren't really that awful. Everyone I encountered on the trip was pleasant and tried to be helpful, and that always makes things go so smoothly. The Southwest crews, the Hampton Inn people, Victor--everyone was doing their best, so I have no complaints. Now I just hope I get my job in Massachusetts, so I can turn around and do the trip in reverse next weekend!!!

Creating Darkness

My actual cake was prettier!

It's been nearly a month since my last blog. Where DOES the time go? In that month, both my dog and I added a year to our chronological ages. My dog is now 6 years old (42, in dog years), and I am nearly twice that. I don't mind in the least admitting that I just turned 72 and I can say with absolute truth that, when I get up in the morning, absolutely nothing hurts! And, as my mother predicted, this new decade, my seventh, sees me even happier than did the previous six! I'm delighted to be able to make both of those claims.

And this decade has already seen a sea change in my life. I tossed that phrase off, and then decided I wanted to be sure I was using it properly, so I wiki-ed it. It's defined there as a gradual transformation that winds up with the object looking the same on the outside but substantially new inside. That is exactly what I meant by the term. Yay, me! Dictionary.com defines it as "a striking change in appearance," Merriam Webster calls it "a marked change." But both of those definitions imply the outer form has taken on a new look, and that's really not true for me. It's all been internal.

Can't resist showing you Cheo en pointe!

Inside, I'm almost all novelist now. Which is to say, I'm thinking and analyzing as a novelist. I do not imply that the outer world sees me as a novelist, for that is definitely not the case. In almost two months, I've sold around 30 books and given away 400 for free. That's one of the ways Amazon.com promotes your book cheaply but fairly effectively: they allow you to offer it for free five days out of 90. Both of us hope that will get more people aware of the book, so that sales will increase. We'll see. . . ..

So what does it mean to be a novelist internally? It means everything that happens out there, whether in a book I'm reading, a TV show or movie I'm watching, or a live interaction I'm having with someone is fodder for my pen. I talk to myself about what I experience in grammatically correct sentences, with modifiers, subordinate clauses, and parallel structure. If I detect an error, I go back mentally and write over it. And I think in paragraphs. It truly is a new way to think about the world I live in.

Creating darkness is part of creating a novel

And (here's where the title of this blog comes from) I imagine bad things happening to my characters. This has been a problem for me, and that's why I'm writing about it here. I'm a great believer in the Law of Attraction, and one of my characters (not the main one) speaks a dialect of LOA. The gist of this Law is that like attracts like. Physically true, right? Well, mentally true as well. If you seek happiness--all who do not, please step back three paces. Hmmm, no one moved. Point made!--then you can attract it most easily by BEING as happy as possible, by focusing on things that give you at least some joy, by remembering or anticipating things that were or will be pleasurable. Not necessarily hedonistically pleasurable, although there's nothing wrong with that, but, say, a world of no physical pain for myself and all who wish to join me in that world. Or a world of abundance, of fulfillment, for myself and all who wish to join me in that world.

You get the point, I hope. And the corollary is that, if I focus on things that do not make me happy, then I will attract more of the same. Of course, we all have problems, even the most Pollyanna-ish of us occasionally spills chocolate ice cream on our blouse or steps in doggy do-do or worse--you get this point, too, I'm sure. Well, to practice LOA, you find something to focus on that makes you feel better than you do when you're pissed off thinking about that chocolate stain or those smelly shoes. You do not ignore them; rather you focus on the blouse with the stain completely gone, the shoe smelling like new-mown grass, the body without the infectious disease raging through it. You do what needs to be done to fix things, but once you've done what can be done, you move your attention to something that makes you feel better.

One thoughtful reviewer--so far.

Yet, here I am, as a novelist, creating those stains, that "sole-ful" mess, dangerous life-threatening situations for my main character. Doesn't that seem to go against the LOA? Isn't there enough darkness in the world without my adding more to it? Only one person who has read my book has written a review of it--so far--and her review was complementary except that she said my violent scene went farther than she liked to see in novels she read--though she understood why I wrote such an intense scene. That is actually one of the things that brought me to write this blog--and the blog that will follow this one, because I want to explore my answer to the questions I've raised here.

So, tune in next time--and it won't be a month before I get back to this, I promise.