Archive for the ‘When Life Happens’ Category
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
I’m back in the motherland, visiting friends and family. In preparation for the long flights required to get here, I loaded my netbook with works in progress to work on during my gadget’s long battery life. I then spent the longest plane ride catching up on movies and TV shows through the video on demand system and slept on the shorter legs because I’d watched too much crap instead of calibrating my bio-clock to minimize jetlag. I told myself there would be plenty of downtime at my parents’ house and I would get lots of writing done there. I’m very good at lying to myself.
There has been loads of time during my first week here that could be used for writing, but the same thing that always happens when I visit happened again. Spending my days speaking Swedish means I can’t put English worth a crap on the page. My sentences are all wrong. I reverse the noun-verb order and can’t find a synonym to save my soul. My sentence structure becomes super simple and my work read like a first graders’ “What I did this Summer” essay.
This visit, I have writing deadlines for paying gigs. So to keep my brain in English mode, I’m consciously only reading books in English , instead of cruising my mother’s well stocked library for Scandinavian mysteries. This is a trick I use in the U.S. when I sit down to write letters and emails home. I read a passage in Swedish or catch up on Swedish online news sites. I also play Swedish music. It works fairly well, although my mother says my spelling has become atrocious. I think she’s just forgotten that it’s always been that way—a trait that carries over into any language in which I attempt to write.
The problem with my method is that my brain has never fully entered Swedish mode this time, so I search for words during conversations and use a lot of “uhm” and “what do you call that thing that….” To add to the confusion, there are a lot of words that sound the same in English and Swedish, but have completely different meanings. For example, the word karl means “man”, but is pronounced just like the English word “car” if you speak my Swedish dialect. This made for some hilarious misunderstandings the other day when I told my friends about the new models I’d been test driving at a dealership.
I need to find a quick and reliable way of switching and calibrating my brain to the language I need/want to currently use. I don’t think this is much different from switching voice when working on more than one piece of writing at a time. I have to do that when working on articles, essays, and fiction at the same time. It’s probably also similar to switching between characters’ voices. A while back, Laura Ender posted on Bark about how she uses her drama training to accomplish just that and during Get Lit! earlier this year, Janet Fitch shared how she reads poetry before sitting down to write. She said it helps her find her voice and pay better attention to her sentences on the word level.
How about you? What tips and tricks can you share that will help me pop my brain into correct language/voice/character mode?
(This post is also available on Bark.)
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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
This summer has been a tough one. My mom was first diagnosed with breast cancer sixteen years ago and twice since then, the family has made a collective sigh of relief when she passed the statistically significant milestones of 5 years as a survivor. This summer we were cheated again when doctors determined that the lump she found in her armpit was malignant. They also discovered a tumor in her spine. I guess after a full mastectomy and more than seven years of lying dormant, the cancer decided to rear its ugly head again. We went through a couple of months of tests and discussions before mom decided on a combined treatment of chemo and hormone therapy. I went home to spend most of August with her and the rest of my family. Needless to say, there hasn’t been much time for writing.
From the little writing I have done though, I notice that it’s hard to write in English when everyone around you is speaking Swedish. I have a similar problem in the US when I try to write emails in Sweden, but I attributed that to being so immersed in English for so long that I’ve lost part of my native language. Maybe what’s really happening is that my brain throws a switch and only interprets and outputs in the language that’s going on around it. Often I find it easier to write emails in Swedish while in the US if I play Swedish music in the background. Maybe that’s the tool that flips the switch, so to speak. In the past, when my husband joins me for visits to my family at home, my head is very tired after a day of switching back and forth between English and Swedish. It makes me really admire interpreters who often speak only a word or two behind the people they are interpreting for. Obviously, their switches must be much more oiled and therefore friction free than mine.
After a month in Sweden, I’m about to head home and do so with mixed feelings. It’s really hard to be far away from mom while this is going on. I need to be close enough to where I can snuggle up for a hug every now and then, or talk to her about whatever pops up in my head without having to figure out the time difference before making a phone call. At the same time I miss my husband, who’s been a rock and an incredible support during this whole time. I wish I could figure out how to build a Star Trek transporter so that I could go back and forth as I wanted.
I’m leaving on good news though. After the first cycle of treatments, it appears that mom’s armpit tumor is shrinking. We’re hoping this is an indication of a significant reduction showing up on her scans that will be taken after two more rounds of three week cycles. Anybody reading this post, please visit the Breast Cancer or Susan G. Komen Foundation sites and consider making a donation.
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Friday, July 25th, 2008
Wow! Why is it that computer things that we estimate to take a few hours usually ends up taking a few days? I’ve been immersed in HTML and PHP code for several days now.
My hosting company moved to new servers and offers lots of new bells and whistles for their customers, including Word Press Blog support. So, I decided I was clever enough to figure out how to customize the Word Press themes to work with my site and manipulate the PHP code to do what I wanted it to do. Well, after several days, I now know more about PHP and CSS than I hope to ever have to use in the future.
I also revamped the rest of the site a bit to go with the new blog look and added a photography section to display some of my more successful shots. There are also more pictures of me on the site, something several visitors and friends had asked for.
So, hope you enjoy the new stuff. I’ll be updating some of the sections as I go along–especially the links section. Now I’m off to bed for some ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
Posted in Blogging, When Life Happens | Comments »
Monday, January 28th, 2008
I haven’t been here for a while, mostly because I decided to set up a blog on my own web server rather than using the blogger site. Then I looked at different free blogging software and although they are all great, there’s some work involved with setup and maintenance. So, I decided to just keep this one.
Quick updates:
- The Chad Little article was well received by the magazine editor. She asked me to do another profile on someone I had pitched to her a while back. The new article is almost written and the Chad Little profile will be in print next month.
- I’ve applied to graduate school at EWU’s MFA program in literary non-fiction. Don’t know yet if I got in, but do know that work finally agreed to give me 50% unpaid leave for next year. I didn’t think I could participate in a writing intensive MFA program and work full time.
- I joined Enchanting Reviews as a staff member and is having a blast reading and reviewing books. It isn’t paid, but I get free books. Let me repeat FREE BOOKS. What can be better than that?
- Larry Hippler emailed me to say he’d been on the site and was happy to see I’d mentioned his book. I met him at the PNWA conference where one of his short stories was a finalist in the contest. Check out his book at http://cathedralstreet.net.
Ta-ta for now. I’ll start blogging more often. Not sure if anybody is reading, but I’m enjoying it and that’s what’s important. 
(Moved from my old blog: http://writingvalkyrie.blogspot.com.)
Posted in Article Writing, MFA, When Life Happens | Comments »
Saturday, January 19th, 2008
Am on my second day of no work because of too much snow. This is the first time in something like ten years that the campus has closed. I think the only times before this was when St. Helen blew and Spokane was covered in ash, and maybe when the terrible ice storm blew through town. Both of these events are before I became a Spokanite, so I don’t have very good details.
Between shoveling snow–it takes about 2 hrs to clear our drive way–and staying warm, I’m actually getting quite a bit of writing done. I’ve done some shorts submissions to various places and also got caught up on some reviews.
Now I’m off to brave the roads for my weekly bowling night. A writer’s life is so very exciting and diverse.
(Moved from my old blog: http://writingvalkyrie.blogspot.com.)
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