Steps to the Paranormal Story
Joann H. Buchanan

What makes a writer? What inspires us to sit for hours in front of a computer for no other reason than to get lost in our own worlds? Is there a formula that works or some sort of magical powder that calls the writer’s muse? Is there a potion for success? Some will say write something that is worth reading. But how does a person sit down and do that? How do we know that a character we create isn’t going to be flat? What about the worlds they live in, are they believable? What is it that makes a person get lost in a sea of words that will, with any luck, entertain the next person to come along?

The truth is that there isn’t a magical formula—elves from another realm don’t drop off manuscripts at our doorstep and last but not least, none of it happens overnight.  A novel, poem even a song happens one word at a time. It all begins with that first word on a blank page.

I can’t give you the formula or any sort of fairy dust. What I can do is give you a glimpse into my own life and what carries me away to other worlds.

When I was a child, I was often in trouble and sent to my room. Yes, I was grounded A LOT. I’m not ashamed to tell the world that even then I had an opinion. I had a mouth and I wasn’t afraid to use it—even if I was in the wrong when I told my mom I was going to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. I know some of you reading this have a smile on your face, because you told your mamma that too. Of those reading this, how many of you woke the next day wondering what happened? I just had to ask that one.

I grew up in a time when cell phones were these brick looking devices that yuppies thought were cool to have. The phone I used hung on the wall and had a long cord I somehow managed to get tangled in when I was talking on it. MTV was some new channel that had one video playing on it over and over. The term reality show would have meant something like peeping tom and yes, I rode my bike without a helmet.

Being the young opinionated girl I was, my dad decided that grounding me to my room was not the way to handle me. Instead, he grounded me to my room with only 2 things to do. Read or write. That’s it. I wasn’t allowed to do anything else. Because it was summer time, they were sure it would teach me a lesson in respect. Let me tell you what it really did. Getting grounded shaped me into a writer.

I had read everything I owned and then some.  One day, out of boredom, I picked up a piece of paper and started writing a story about a bird. That was the first time I discovered I loved the worlds that were in my own head.  I became obsessed with the written word. I couldn’t read enough and yes, I couldn’t stop thinking about the stories I was writing. When I was off  grounding, I would hop on one of the city buses with notebook in hand and start writing short stories about the people who would climb aboard.

They were what I would now call character traits and observations. I now believe those hours on the bus, each ride totaling a $1.25 a day, ended up being some of the best practice days I ever had. So that is what shaped me into a writer.

Now I’m sure you want to know more about techniques that work. The truth is that the fairy dust for this exists inside every person who has ever wanted to write.

 The first tip I have is simple.

Read—Reading is the way to sharpen the mind. It allows us to learn new ways to use words. We pick up on things subconsciously when we don’t even know it. The term, reading is fundamental, well if you want to be a writer it is essential to your work. Read every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s for a half hour or longer. Just do it.

Don’t just read things you think are great. Don’t get stuck on the classics. You can learn as much from a poor writer as you can from a great one. Sometimes even more, because you begin to pick up on things that do and don’t make writing work.

From here it is a matter of actually doing the work. Yes, I said the dreaded four letter word. WORK. There is a lot of work that comes with writing. The cool thing about it is that if you love it, then it doesn’t feel like work.

Remember that notebook I talked about earlier. Well here is another place it comes into play. When I’m doing something, a WHAT IF will strike me. So I pull out my notebook and write it down. I have pages and pages of WHAT IF’s that will probably never be used.

WHAT IF. . . I was a goldfish in a pond surrounded by hawks?

WHAT IF. . . A plane landed in the middle of a field that was from a different planet and the pilot was a man?

WHAT IF. . . The cat lady down the street was a taxidermist and her husband was sitting in her garage, stuffed?

What ifs are the life blood to our stories, even when we don’t realize it. They form the plots our characters play in.

The important thing is that you don’t leave the house without that notebook, not if you are really a writer. Mine is now an app on my phone. My how I love today’s technology.

The next thing you need are the Characters.

Your characters don’t have to be like mine. They don’t even have to be human. They can be anything you want, so long as you make them real to your reader. To make things real to the reader, well now that part is simple. Your characters need traits. They need to live and breathe to the person reading about them. There needs to be truth in them.

What is a trait? I had to giggle a little when I wrote that sentence. Not because I think it’s funny, but because I remember a time when I didn’t even know that’s what I was doing for my own characters. Here is an example.

Jane tapped her long nails on her teeth when she looked up at the clock in the doctor’s office.

This simple sentence should tell you a couple things about Jane right off the bat. Jane is a woman, she has long nails which means she probably has money, and most important, when she is anxious, she taps her teeth with her nails. We don’t know why she is anxious, we just know she is.

A character trait is something about that character that makes them less flat. Jane is probably an annoying person to be around who cares more about looks than anything else. She has a shallow mind and her life is about to change.

Another character trait for Jane could be that her hair is pristine, not a single one out of place. She is obsessed with looks, so it makes sense that her hair would be perfect, even in a hurricane.

Character traits are also how a person looks. Jane has blond hair, cut in a bob and she wears a lot of pink. She is a living breathing Barbie and a woman most of us know and love to hate.

Once you know what your character looks like, think about what she talks like. Does she have a fake laugh? Jane does. Does she hate politics? Jane’s opinions never differ from her husband because Jane doesn’t think for herself. She plays bridge and has a regular routine. Today is different for Jane though and she feels it. Her life is about to change. Now you have to find out why her life is about to change.

Now that you know who and what your main character is about and you have looked over all the WHAT Ifs you have been writing down, it’s time to write the first sentence.

What oh what is the key to the first sentence? The truth is I don’t know. I start with the first word and move on. There are times I sit down and start a blank page with nothing more in mind than a word I heard earlier in the day. I know, how can a single word inspire an entire novel?

Think about the words you use on a daily basis. What are the common ones? How about the word, HELLO. Think about the number of ways that word can be used.

• It can be a question. “Hello?”
• It can be a statement of irritation. “Hello!”
• It’s all in the context.
• She picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
• A man cut in line at the supermarket. The woman behind him said, “Hello!”

Even the word HERE has a few different ways it can be used. Here on Atlantis, a place where there is more water than land…(Opening line to Dragon’s Eye.)

The first sentence can make or break a story.

“Through dragon’s fire made of ice,” (The first line of THE KISS)

The first line needs to draw the reader in and create an image so strong, he or she can’t walk away. It needs to evoke some sort of emotion right off the bat. The first line to Moby Dick…They call me Ishmael. Wow! To me one of the best first lines ever. As well as, “It was the best of times it was the worst of times.” A Tale of Two Cities. Both tell me I’m in for the ride of my life. I’m in for a story that is going to carry me into another world full of possibilities.

The rest of your story should fall into place as long as you are entertained. That’s what it’s all about anyways. Entertainment. There is no other word to describe what we do. There are no techniques I can give you that will make you great. Just what I know works for me. I can only tell you how I got here.

So, to break it all down…

• Read
• Observe
• Write

Now that the basics are down, the question remains, “How do we take it to the next level?”

The Paranormal—

Where is the paranormal, the darkness, and the things that go bump in the night? How do I scare the crap out of my readers?

The definition of paranormal is simple. It’s anything that science is unable to explain.

For example, a woman is sitting at work and hears a scream that sends her into a panic. She is the only person to hear the scream. Everyone else sits as if their entire world has been left undisturbed. A few minutes later, she receives a call. Her daughter has been struck by a car and is now in the hospital. As cliché as this particular example sounds, it is something that takes the woman out of the realm of normalcy and straight into the paranormal. The time she hears the scream in her mind is when her daughter is struck by the car.

Now let’s take a look back at Jane, the woman from above. She is an unhappy housewife. How do we take that into the paranormal? We add another “WHAT IF” to the situation.

What if Jane finds an antique pendant that gives her the ability to see truth? What if that pendant is not really causing her to see the truth of others, but what she fears they are? So now we have the unhappy housewife who thinks what she is seeing is the truth of others. In this we find out that her fear is that her husband, the ever faithful Joe, has no idea what she is thinking and has nothing but love for his wife.

In the paragraphs above I stated that Jane was a simple minded person who was annoying to be around. Now she has a little voice in her head telling her that Julie is a cheat and that’s how she wins at Bridge all the time. To top it off, Jane is able to prove her suspicions are correct. There is the justification for believing what the pendant says to her.

All the while, the pendant could be stealing her energy. The goodness that Jane had, though annoying, has been tarnished by evil and she is beginning to believe everything the pendant tells her.

Can this be explained by science? No. Therefore it is paranormal. Paranormal is taking a simple thing, such as a pendant, a house, a voice, to the next level. Paranormal dives into the imagination and taps into the darkest parts of the characters we create.

We live in a world filled with paranormal people. We meet them every day. The person who is a devout Christian can be turned into a raving lunatic if they believe the voice inside their head is God. The little old lady who feeds all the stray cats in the neighborhood, well perhaps she is a trainer for familial.

To me, the truest form of paranormal is writing about a normal person who is shoved into extraordinary circumstances. The woman Jane is a good example. All she did was make a purchase and it changed her life and the way she viewed everything around her. It gave her the strength and power to state things she was thinking all along. What makes that scary? Have you ever heard the saying, “A woman scorned?” Well there is nothing more dangerous than that.

Digging the horror up in a novel is simply digging through the façade and seeing the darkness that resides in all. The paranormal, the unscientifically explainable things that exist, the bumps in the night, it’s all about amplifying something that exists beneath the surface.

In a quote by Stephen King, he states, “The trust of the innocence is a liar’s most useful tool.”

Therein rests the horror, the paranormal of it all. In order to make the paranormal and horror believable, you must first always make sure there is truth in what you are writing. “Jane” is a perfect example of that. She is unhappy, annoying and most of all, innocent to the evil that really exists in her world. The pendant just allowed it to come to the surface. It gave her the portal and justification she needed.

Now let’s take a character that needs no justification. What if a person is already dark at heart? Take Ralph in my novel I AM WOLF. Ralph is a paranoid schizophrenic who already has a dark soul. I asked myself, what if I cultivated that darkness ? I took his character as far as a dark character could go for this story by having him receive a bite mark from another paranormal being—a shape-shifter. Now Ralph who was already so far gone in the abyss of the human psyche needed zero justification for his actions. He existed in the darkness. He became the murderous thing that goes bump in the night. He no longer had that impulse control most people have in life, that impulse control we call normal.

The observations of life can be twisted to meet the writer’s needs. Take them, churn them into what you want and spit them out. Leave no one alive and never allow the images to escape the readers mind. If gross is what you are going for, then please don’t hold back. If evil is something that is grown in a lab, then let it be the most hideous thing in life according to you, the writer. If the paranormal you are writing can be explained away then by all means, please rethink what you are talking about. Remember that the paranormal exists where no other explanation can be made.

For those who don’t know, horror doesn’t have to be bloody, it just has to be terrifying and believable. What is your horror? Horror takes us out of the normal state of life we live in. It creates images that we can’t escape. A prime example of this is in a classic book, Frankenstein. The creator was really the monster, not the creature he created. Remember what Stephen King said about innocence? The creature was an innocent. Dr. Frankenstein himself, was a darker more sinister being than that which he created.

Description is a key component in horror writing. If it bleeds, say it. What color is the blood? If it screams, how does it sound?

Horror and paranormal are twins when it comes to writing. The vampire that walks down the street and feeds on us, (as romantic as it has all been made out to be), is really horror. What is the vampire feeding on? Hello. Humans.

Is cannibalism not in your vocabulary for horror? It is in mine…lol.

Yet because a vampire is a mythical creature, it also falls under the realm of paranormal. Now take Jane again. Remember the pendant gave her what she needed but all the while it fed on her energy. All the while it sucked all the goodness from her and turned her into a . . .that’s for you to decide. Make sure you think out of the box on this one.

Writing is a passion. Not everyone will have the desire to do this. That’s actually good for us, the writers. Writers are a dime a dozen. So love what you are writing because the competition is fierce and the journey is long. If you love it, none of that will matter and what I’ve written here…well, of course, they are things you already know.

Joann H. Buchanan
Joann H. Buchanan, author, radio show host and mother of 5, lives inKansas. She is the author of Soulless Light, I Am Wolf, and The Kiss. She is working on two series—The Burning Times and The Children of Nox.

Until recently, Joann hosted The Eclectic Artist Cave on The Shark Radio Network where she interviewed writers, producers, musicians and creative people of all kinds. Extracts of her work can be found on Scribd.com and her blog http://joannhamann.blogspot.com

All of Joann’s novels are available through World Castle Publishing: http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com and amazon.com.

Her motto is—Entertain and shock.

 © 2012  Joann H. Buchanan. All Rights Reserved.

Valley Boy, a Coming-of-Age Novel by Jack Remick

Valley Boy ($13.95, 254 pp, 6×9 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60381-145-3), by Jack Remick, covers a year in the life of a third-generation Okie teenager who is struggling with the stigma of his heritage.

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**ALSO AVAILABLE IN KINDLE **

“Valley Boy is the story of every kid who wandered out of the Valley into Baghdad by the Bay with dreams, imagination, curiosity and a mind that admitted stuff besides cars and girls. I’m tempted to say this is Remick’s best work …. The story is witty, tense and true. The protagonist is Ricky, but this is Linard’s story too—which makes this novel a more fulfilling coming of age journey than that of the self-absorbed, self-righteous icon of the Eastern Experience—Holden Caulfield …. Remick might be accused of writing a happy ending but I, for one, am happy to see an ol’ Okie boy find his place in the shade and out of those god damned vineyards and peach orchards. Good for Ricky. Good for Remick. It takes guts to write a novel such as this.”

—Frank Araujo, Anthropologist, Linguist, and Author of The Q Quest, A Perfect Orange, Nekane, The Lamiña and the Bear

“Valley Boy is a teeming amalgam of allegory, pathos, and stark language, all wrapped in a blend of dark humor and strangely relatable characters. What is Valley Boy about? Turkey debeaker Ricky Edwards heads to college, falls in love with a rock guitarist, and faces coming of age challenges—such as learning how to order coffee and the importance of following The Rules—revealed in a storyline reminiscent of an Allen Ginsberg poem. Remick writes with a fresh voice in prose as raw as the open wounds his subjects are apt to suffer. An unrelenting literary experiment that is also a terrific read. Best enjoyed with a caffe latte … or maybe a macchiato?”

—Cole Alpaugh, author of The Bear in a Muddy Tutu and The Turtle Girl from East Pukapuka

“A lost Valley Boy is dying to belong so he takes a job debeaking turkeys—hot, sweaty, mindless work that still demands precision—to make the money to buy a hot car—the pricey ticket required for acceptance into the Lifters (all male hot rod club), but forces beyond his control—blind teenage lust, blue collar legacy, his inherited talent for the piano, love from an older woman, his jaundiced view of the church, and an exorbitant price for the blue Mercury Cougar—these forces pull the Valley Boy to the brink of his big decisions: Does he stay in the Valley? Does he marry the girl next door? Valley Boy is Remick at full power. Valley Boy is a non-stop read.”

—Robert J. Ray, author of Murdock Cracks Ice, and The Weekend Novelist Series.

Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he’d rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns—which drives Teresa, Ricky’s hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher’s daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark.

Says Remick: “When you grow up in the Central Valley you meet people who never stray much beyond their home town unless it’s to go next door to a football game. If you’re not the right caste, you learn to work with your hands and you work hard. You wonder if you can ever get out. I wrote Valley Boy in part to remind readers about the Diaspora, the Westward migration, that started in the Dust Bowl. Most people think the Migration ended with World War II, but it didn’t. In Valley Boy, the main characters are third-generation Okies who didn’t make it to the Pacific, got stuck in the dust, and were left behind in the orchards and vineyards doing the gut-busting labor that turns young boys into old men way too soon. I wanted to write about those Okie boys, like Ricky and Linard, who work and live with the bad taste of lost dreams in their mouths.

Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. Valley Boy is Book Two of a series, The California Quartet. More volumes will be released by Coffeetown Press in 2012: The Book of Changes and Trio of Lost Souls. The first book of the series, The Deification, was released in December of 2011. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press in 2011. Also coming from Coffeetown in 2012: Gabriela and the Widow. Click here to find Jack online.

Valley Boy is available in Kindle and 5×8 trade paperback editions on Amazon.com, the European Amazons and Amazon Japan. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com or Ingram. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources and Midwest Library Service.

http://blogs.botw.org/Arts/Writers_Resources/

Murdock Cracks Ice, by Seattle-based novelist Robert J. Ray ($14.95, 262 pages, ISBN: 978-1-60381-881-0), first published in 1992, is back in print. Fans of the hard-boiled but soft-hearted detective Matt Murdock will soon be able to obtain Ray’s other books in the much-acclaimed mystery series: Bloody Murdock,  Murdock for Hire, and Dial “M” for Murdock. Murdock Cracks Ice the only book of the series that takes place in Seattle.

Valley Boy is a teeming amalgam of allegory, pathos, and stark language, all wrapped in a blend of dark humor and strangely relateable characters. What is Valley Boy about? Turkey debeaker Ricky Edwards heads to college, falls in love with a rock guitarist, and faces coming of age challenges – such as learning how to order coffee and the importance of following The Rules – revealed in a storyline reminiscent of an Allen Ginsberg poem. Remick writes with a fresh voice in prose as raw as the open wounds his subjects are apt to suffer. An unrelenting literary experiment that is also a terrific read. Best enjoyed with a caffe latte … or maybe a macchiato?

All the best,
Cole

© 2012 Jack Remick. All Rights Reserved.

Paula Lowe, editor at Solo Novo Magazine, invited me to write a few guest blog posts on the magazine’s Facebook page. I saw this as a chance to pull together into one sequence some of the ideas Bob and I have developed about structure, the novel, and screenwriting.  Paula, who is herself a world-class poet, suggested more in-depth posts on writing. This short course is the result. Click the link below.

Writing Tips for the Committed Novelist -

© 2012 Jack Remick. All Rights Reserved.

I write memoir fragments. Following a few of Robert and Jack’s writing techniques, I am working on getting rid of the passive voice, replacing weak verbs with strong, using concrete nouns, shucking armored prose, and looking for metaphor.

Eliminating the passive voice requires taking ownership of my thoughts and feelings and imagery. My ah-ha moment: taking ownership is scary. Taking ownership means I must stop being the victim. Taking ownership leads me to truths about myself like: I’m afraid to express myself with certainty because I am afraid of being wrong or stupid. So I hedge all writing, all painting, all thoughts using my passive voice. The passive voice is a great tool if you want to create a character like me in your novel. But I want to be strong, so out it goes!

Shucking armored prose is also about taking ownership. Don’t fill up the page with abstract nouns and weak verbs like, my favorite, I’ve been thinking, or I would have thought…and for god’s sake, stop with all those adverbs! I can’t always avoid armored prose, but I’m learning not to love it.

In writing The Auto/Body Connection I explored the idea of metaphor. In this piece, I wanted to find the metaphor that would infuse my writing with personal meaning. It’s not just a story about an old car. It’s the relationship that is the story.

Find Susan’s book online here:
 Fragments: Growing Up Bohemian Poor in Dementia’s House

The Auto/Body Connection
© 2012 Susan Canavarro. All Rights Reserved.

I turn 65, when life is supposed to be less stressful and free of complications, and my Honda receives a death prognosis in September, 2011.

A mechanic takes a cursory look at my leaky engine. I ask him, Well, is it going to live? He leans on the counter, looks at me with solemn eyes. He says, You’ve got three major problems: a steering fluid leak, a transmission leak, and one or two bad UV joints that need fixing.

I hang my head and sigh with the recognition that I’ve lost the battle. He says, If I were you, I’d just let it die a natural death. And I know he is implying the repairs are going to be very expensive. He knows I don’t have money to throw away on dying cars. I leave, assuming his death knell for my Honda is one of kindness and consideration for my financial situation.

But what he didn’t understand was that the cost of a newer car was beyond my means. I would not be able to afford a newer used automobile nor a new insurance policy. And I didn’t want to be stuck with an older machine which may have unknown problems to be discovered one by one. At least with my car, I know certain things: I know it has never been in a major accident. I know there are no hidden structural or mechanical problems. I know that every ailment that blooms is due to my neglect. I know what to expect with my old Honda—old cars leak.

But more important than the actual cost of a newer car, there was a personal hidden cost: losing my car meant losing my freedom and independence, and more than that, it meant losing my sense of security and safety. I love road trips, discovering new roads less traveled in the country, finding small towns along the way, exploring new beach scenes, knowing I can go anywhere, be anywhere and feel safe and secure enveloped in the comfort and warmth of my own car. I felt secure in knowing that if I had nothing else in life—no money, no place to live—I’d at least have my Honda to sleep in.

I knew I couldn’t let my car die without a second opinion. I took it to another repair shop. The mechanic looked at it, said it had a bad steering fluid leak and one bad UV joint. He estimated it would cost $638.00. Only $638 dollars? Wow, maybe this is doable! I was elated. From my saved pet-sitting earnings I could plunk down at least $500 in cash. And he agreed to carry the last bit with installment payments, so I said, Let’s do it!

However, fixing the car wasn’t a snap. The engine compartment, frozen and filthy, was full of old brown pine needles and maple leaves and dirt from having to park outside through heat and cold and wind and snow…and of course, from my neglect of the poor thing.

First, his crew worked hours just to get the parts off.  Second, since they don’t make parts for ‘86 Hondas anymore, they needed to purchase used parts. Used parts are a hit and miss game, not always in perfect condition. He bought used parts three times, he paid his crew for the work three times, and he never increased his original estimate. I knew he was losing money on my job, but he comforted me by telling me that he would fix the car…that was his job…he would work on it until it was fixed. Impressed by his integrity and compassion, I want everyone to know his name: Paul Potter – he owns and operates Potter’s Tires and Automotive on Hwy. 101 in Florence, Oregon. There isn’t a Honda dealer in the world that would do what he did for me.

After all repairs were done, I waited once again to hear that death knell—that he never wanted to see me again or work on my old car again. I imagined him saying, don’t bring it back. Not fixable. He never said those words. I asked him if he would help me keep it running for a few more years. That’s when he said a well maintained Honda should get 250 thousand miles. Uplifting words for me. With the odometer reading at 191 thousand miles, and because I drive it only about 4 or 5 thousand miles per year, my car might drive me 8 to 10 years into the future. He gave me suggestions for maintenance and I promised to bring my car in for frequent tune-ups. The least I can do is bring my future business to his shop for basic preventive care medicine. Perhaps if he catches problems early, it will cost less to fix them.

My Honda is old and neglected. Parts are rusting and rotting and falling off or frozen in place. Green moss grows on metal behind each wheel. It looks pretty; I leave it there. Other people pick it off. Door locks no longer work. An unseen force grips the key and won’t let me turn it one way or another; my arthritis grips my fingers in a strangle hold and I can’t budge them either. The window-washer fluid hose snapped apart like someone had cut it with shears. Chronic fatigue. The black vinyl material covering the exterior metal parts is shedding dead skin like the peelings of my sun burnt knee-caps in 1984 Hawaii. The dried-up rubber seals in the doors are breaking apart, falling to the ground. With seals no longer tight, cold air and water seep in. The once-nice bumpers broke out in huge fade spots a few years back that look like the areas of skin which have lost all pigmentation due to discoid Lupus. The car’s skin, with a bad case of acne, has pits and scars and bumps of tree sap and bird crap and a few big ugly dents. Its dark blue color is now a faded navy-blue, the color drained the way my mother’s eye-color drained to gray when she grew older.

Old cars develop leaks over time like our bodies begin to leak from places we never thought we’d leak: mouth, eyes, ears, nose, and those ahhummmm unmentionables.  Neglect. There are products, such as duct tape for repairing the leaks; there are medications and exercises. Use it or lose they say about our bodies and minds. Well it’s true of cars too. Keep it lubed, drive it or lose it. So I’m driving my car everyday at least ten miles, up hills and down, whether I want to go out or not. Get it warmed up. Lube those joints, Susan. Wish I had the will to do the same with my body.

I bought a warming-wrap used by hikers and I lay it over the car’s engine under the hood at night hoping it will keep the engine warm and dry. The parts salesman thought I was nuts. The heat will just escape under the engine he said, but I thought it worth a try. And besides, what else is new?  I am a little bit nuts. And if it works, I’m a millionaire! I also spread newspapers on the windshield to keep the ice from blanketing the glass in a cold snap—nothing worse than scraping ice off with frozen hands on a chilled winter morning.  One morning I discovered all movable parts on my car frozen solid. I couldn’t open the doors without the hair dryer, wipers were stuck, ice hard and solid on my windshield. So now every winter I spray the locks, door edges and wiper-joints with a de-icer which prevents freezing of parts. I swallow Advil at night so my body won’t freeze up before the morning light arrives; Bengay on sore moving joints and parts; Orajel max-strength on the deep hole vacated by a decayed and loose filling: de-icers for my body.

I’m thinking of using duct tape to cover the exposed metal parts. Black duct tape would look just like the original black covering and it would protect the metal from rust—if the water and the freeze and thaw temperatures don’t cause the tape to crack and flake off. I duct taped the windshield-wiper water-hose together, but it didn’t hold for even one day. I used a bright red duct tape. Many colors of duct tape will soon be decorating my car in my attempt to hold it together. There is a candy-stripe red and white, a purple, hot pink, red, green, yellow, white and black and the standard silver tone. The car, my new canvas. This reminds me of a painting I did in grad school on which I wrapped duct tape around the entire canvas. It developed into one of those paintings with multiple meanings and associations. In my mind it started out as an expression of pain but it wound up as an expression of healing. Holding my car together with colorful duct tape…hmmmmm.

What’s happening with my auto is happening to my body: aging, breaking, freezing, and leaking. When you grow up with a car, so to speak, you and it become old together, all the aches and pains of the car and body are living in parallel aging worlds, but it’s as if the rust and destruction and frozen joints of one are transmitted to the other: the minute you start the car, you are jump-starting the transmutation of the rust and goo of this hunk of metal and iron into your own old muscles and organs.

The alchemy transforms it to calcium deposits, cholesterol, high blood sugar, aching back, muscle loss, waning hormones, frozen aching joints and sore muscles. Bloat. It takes a while every morning to rev up my body, to oil its engine. Grasping the walls and furniture for support, I hobble and shuffle to the computer and I don’t walk normal until I’ve swallowed a few Advil. It takes a good ten minutes to start up my car. As I pull out of the parking lot, the car spitting and coughing chugs its way to the coffee shop. Sometimes it flat-out refuses to go.

Some parts of the aging process of our bodies and our autos are due to normal atrophy that would occur no matter what we do. On the other hand, we could make them last longer with better care. Due to my neglect of the health of my body, things have fallen into disrepair or dis-ease, as my father would say, at a faster rate than they should have. These days I am holding my body together with artificial means in an attempt to keep it functioning. I call it the duct tape of adaptation, self-healing and medicine.

Somehow the old faded blue Honda has become very important to my own physical and emotional survival and to my understanding of what my life has become. It’s not just about independence and transportation anymore. We need each other. It’s a strange symbiosis. I must keep my old car going. To do that, I must take better care of my now fragile body and mind…to keep on going, to keep on being.

Find Susan’s book online here:
 Fragments: Growing Up Bohemian Poor in Dementia’s House

What do software code writers and novelists have in common? In this, Roxana’s second guest blog, she makes that connection.

The Wedding Bell © 2012 Roxana Arama
January 26, 2012

In my previous post on Bob and Jack’s blog (see Guest Writers), I wrote about the early stages of my novel The Wedding Bell. This post is about my journey as an apprentice toward the later stages of writing a novel.

Before turning to fiction writing, I was a full-time software developer with a bachelor of science in computers. Once I began writing, I renounced all my project-development training in order to be a real writer, one that lets the book reveal itself to her as she listens to those voices in her head. I knew what I wanted that book to be about, I had a laptop, so I began writing. I goaded every character and prop in my story to do the work I wanted it to do. I thought that I was letting the creative part of me blossom, when, in fact, I was writing myself into every scene, and plastering myself over every prop. I was listening to voices, but they were all me. And so I wandered for a few years, until I came to embrace the obvious: writing is a lot like object-oriented computer programming. Yes, I know how that sounds!

It took years for me to absorb the knowledge that became second nature when I was writing software. For the last year, I have been studying the books that Bob and Jack think essential for a writer: from structural anthropology to rhetoric, all discussed here on their blog. I renounced the pledge I had made in countless writing classes to just write the book and trust that it will sort itself out, eventually. Outlining ceased to be a dirty word. Spending time knowing each of my characters, their parents, the view from the window of their favorite room, the buckles on their shoes, was not optional anymore. Writing about writing, thinking about ritual and myth, became part of the routine. Just as in software, even though you know the story you want to tell, you can’t tell it until you design your classes of objects. And even when you know the entities that populate your world, their behavior when put together is not always predictable, as any developer who had chased a code defect for days can tell you.

During the last ten months, I developed my characters and anchored my objects and put them to work in dozens of scenes. At a recent writing practice, Jack told me that I have enough material to give the CUT-TO technique a try.

CUT-TO is a powerful tool that Bob and Jack borrowed from screenwriting. The writer imagines the book as a movie, and writes down a quick cut from one scene to the next, highlighting the objects in the scenes, the transformation of those objects between the scenes, and the hooks that transfer the suspense from one scene to another. The writer works on this exercise from memory, without any props to stir the story in the desired direction.

In computer programming, this technique is called pseudocode, an informal script of the high-level behavior of the algorithm.

After writing for months to the setting, and to the description of characters, and to the dialogue, and to the action, this cut-to exercise forced me to go big-picture again. All those objects and all those characters that had been around, though slightly misplaced, snapped at attention, lined up like beads on a necklace. I went home and wrote two more sessions that afternoon. When I was done, I had a bell-shaped inkwell sitting on a table next to a crystal bell, and I had black ink spilling on the floor like blood from a wound, and I had ink seeping into the lines of girl’s hand – and the palm of that hand looked like the scar on the main antagonist’s chest. Before my eyes, objects were morphing and people were changing in ways that I had not set them up to. It was though the voices had taken over, but this time they were not mine.

Here is the beginning of that writing practice session. I followed the format Jack used for the cut-to he wrote for his novel BLOOD (http://networkedblogs.com/taj6e).

CUT-TO for the beginning of ACT II

1. Act II opens in a scene called Crossing the Jagged Pass. Betrothed Princess Meda and King Duras’s wedding entourage cross the Jagged Pass. Duras tells Meda to leave a lock of hair as an offering to Mount Clopot. The earthquake happens when Meda is alone of the path. First Councilor Oroles comes to the rescue, not Duras. Plot track on the incompatibility between Meda and Duras. Objects (on their own plot tracks): blade, hair, blood, gates. Also: snow/white – tar/black cauldron. Hook to: the arrival scene.

2. Cut to: Meda arrives at the Castle of the Lakes. Prince Getas, Duras’s younger brother, falls in love with her. Objects: red trunk, short hair, cloak, fire, stairwell. Hook to: the wedding.

3. Cut to: Meda spends a week in the underground sacred chambers of the Temple of Concord in rituals of purification and integration into her new country and life. Objects: water, fire, white tunic, darkness, smoke. Hook to: the wedding

4. Cut to: Duras, Oroles, and Zyraxes the Wise (the old councilor and priest to Duras’s late father) watch over the sacrifice of a white ox for offerings to the gods. Zyraxes reads the entrails – all good. Objects: white skin/white clothes, blade, blood, white linen towel, silver. Hook to: the wedding.

5. Cut to: Duras arrives at the Temple in a white litter and walks alone through the garden among the statues of his ancestors. Objects: white cloak, stone tablet with the peace treaty, oak statues, ash urns. Hook to: the wedding.

6. Cut to: The high-priestess watches over the dressing and adorning of the bride. The metal is silver, not the most cherished in Meda’s home country. Objects: silver, white robes, hair, silver and sapphire crown. Hook to: the wedding.

7. Cut to: Meda and Duras get married under the marble statue of the Great Mother Goddess. Zyraxes, the high-priestess, Prince Getas, Oroles are all present. The cartographer interrupts the ceremony with a mournful prophecy that the union would not bring the peace Duras had hoped for. Meda is crowned Queen of Tarnia. Objects: red string to tie the wrists, red wine, white statue of the goddess, crown, blade, silver, white wedding robes, white ox’s skin, fat & bones. Hook to: the banquet.

[Roxana's novel is under control and moving toward completion. We'll let you know when the book is published. JR]

The World of Ink Network brings you shows on books, authors, illustrators, the publishing industry, marketing and much more. Come listen…

By Mathew Robinson

discussing Jack’s latest release, The Deification

http://rfmp.net/2011/12/31/the-final-cut-episode-84-interview-with-author-jack-remick/