Happy 2006! and Contest Excitements!

January will bring the reading of the manuscripts ,and I am looking forward to that a lot. I have skimmed some, as many as possible, and enough to see the intensity. People are writing their hearts and passions. It is good for me to see and feel this. It is ,in an odd way, like being fed by my colleagues.

I really congratulate all who entered. I know how hard it can be to really seal the envelope and put it in the mail or push the SEND key on the computer. It takes courage and each time is a self-affirmation.I am glad Emily decided to have this contest. I think it is generative.

* ***********************
My holidays have been interesting in that I have been writing poetry--and I am no poet. But I always turn to poetry when there is a need to keen, wail, sing, go beyond what my fiction can do.

And for some wonderful reason, I have been able to go deeper and more into the dark. For some reason, perhaps because I have worked hard this year, another bar of my self-imposed prison has fallen. And I am enraged that I was so willing to sit, kneel, stoop, in grossly uncomfortable positions ,there for so long. And in some ways I still do this false contortion of self, but many bars have fallen. I can stretch and perhaps that means the words can hammer more powerfully.

I am a lucky woman to be 66 and finding all these riches.

Happy New Year again to all my colleagues. I hope we all move, write, grow, sing, dance, and find new movements, new visions, new ways of being our best selves. And, thank you, Emily, for this neat Blog place. A very good place.
Shalom, Claire

How Would You Like to Fall Down the Rabbit Hole into Wonderland?

"What do you think about returning to Wonderland?"

Here's what Lousie Easton, one of my students, wrote about what falling down the rabbit hole means to her.

"It will bring me back into a world that is completely mine, that is the exclusive harbinger of my soul; my being; the person whom I have been made to believe was out of touch with the true world. My friends in Wonderland are unlike Alice's - they aare real, human, not too likable, but always yearning to be heard, to be loved! They are both young and old, pure and impure, living in darkness, but forever hoping to see the light, to find the Wonderland in the outside world."

Click here to find out what falling down the rabbit hole is all about...

http://www.thefictionwritersjourney.com/Falling_Down_Rabbit_Hole_Metaphor.htm

Writing Contest Ends in 6 Days!

The Count Down Continues!
Only 6 Days left to Enter
The Writing Contest for theWinter Solstice!

Don't Be Afraid To Fail
by Randy Kerker

You've failed many times,
although you may not remember.
You fell down the first time
you tried to walk.
You almost drowned the first time
you tried to swim, didn't you?
Did you hit the ball the first time
you swung a bat?
Heavy hitters,
the ones who hit the most home runs,
also strike out a lot.
R.H. Macy failed seven times
before his store in New York caught on.
English novelist John Creasy
753 rejection slips
before he published
564 books.
Babe Ruth struck out
1,330 times,
but he also hit
714 home runs.
Don't worry about failure.
Worry about the chances you miss
when you don't even try.

When my daughter, Natasha, was 14 (she's now 37) she found this poem in a full page ad in The New York Times. She cut it out and taped it to her wall. She still has the original framed and hanging in her house.
And now there's only 7 days left to take a chance and submit your writing to the First Annual Writing Contest of the Fiction Writer's Journey!!

Don't Be Afraid to Fail -- You Can Only Win!
Not only will you receive a gift just for entering,
but you will have taken the chance to put your work out into the world.
It's a great feeling. And we support you in the risk!

http://www.thefictionwritersjourney.com/Contest_Winter_Solstice_2005.htm

on the journey!
Emily

Holiday Season Letters and Semantics of Season

Who would have thought that whether to say "Christmas" or "holiday' would be a major PC issue in 2005. Tonight my significant other and I had heated disagreement on it. I will not share my views; it's too hot a topic, but interesting sociological note.

What I was thinking of is how a lot of friends I correspond with are writing very poetically.

One friend wrote about a stump of oak tree in her front yard which kept sending up little green leaves and her husband kept cutting them back. Finally she stopped him, and after ten or so years, they have a kind of mini tree on top of stump.

And one year her son strung this little odd "tree" with white Christmas lights. She remembers sitting with him on the front porch, cold, late at night, watching the lights and the tree. He died this year. But she keeps coming up with these wonderful memories of him. I know it's too soon, but I keep thinking, she's got a book here. Maybe only for family and friends, but it's good.

I've become very "attached " to this man I never met and who died a year ago. And he had a lot of faults, but he saw with an artists's eye.

Then there are the older among us who seem to be pulling out stops on remembering holiday seasons "back when." Back when grandfather lit the stove in parlor and we ran in cold to warm up before attacking gifts and our grandmother's fantasia of a breakfast. How pipes broke and a layering of quilts was necessary to stay warm.

Another friend writes of how her extended family is making out spread sheets to keep straight what everyone wants for holiday gifts. And the difficulty of updating these sheets ,when some members of family are less computer literate than others, is producing tight--lipped Family Conflict.

A friend sent me a bulb which I was so afraid wouldn't make it. I have no green thumb. I worried about it with her, and finally , she, I guess, tired of hearing my laments, mailed me another one with bud already out. But, guess what, my own little plant, cared for by a non- green -thumb -person has sprouted a bud. I was so happy and proud and picked up planter to PEER at it. Feeling as though I had given birth. Now the question is, will we have sibling rivalery?

A friend is sick and going in hospital for tests. Holidays do not protect us from the abrasions of life. Fear and danger walk hand in hand with music and candles. Our holiday has many faces. Nite. Claire

Winter Solstice Contest Manuscripts

December 13, 2005

What a treat to see the manuscripts come in. Via e-mail or snail mail.
And they all seem so intense. It's amazing to me how energizing and excited I am being privledged to see other writer's work.

Being part of this contest is a real treat. There are so many people out there with sensitivity, high consciousness, and the desire and courage to put their feelings on paper.

I congratulate you. It makes me more pushed to get my own things out.

And I keep hoping more memoirs and fiction will arrive. As a writer, beginning late to move into high seriousness about her own work, I would like to help others not wait as long as I did.

In 1978, I took a year off from my career to try and write. And then I gave up and went back to "orthodox" work. Such a pity I was so unloving to my beginning pieces. They were far better than I realized. I damned them because the New Yorker wouldn't publish. What a bad writing mother I was. How naive I was about the process in needing to practice to become better. I needed to know that if I'm writing from the heart, the act of writing becomes as much "payback" as publication. (I once would have thought that comment "corny" and "unsophisticated.")

Back then, all I needed was trust in myself and the patience to keep going. And perhaps someone to tell me those things. But, alas, that didn't happen.

So I went back into the formal career world where with raises and promotions I could fake myself into thinking I was getting what I wanted.

If you want to write, do it-- write write write. And don't worry overmuch about how good it is. Just write and love the fact that you have the passion to want to arrange, toss, throw words on paper. I have NEVER (and that's saying a lot) seen a writer who practices who does not improve and move nearer the visions that prompt her/him to sit down and put hands on keyboard or pen to paper.

Happy holidays. Claire

Creative Gifts for the Holidays! Add One to Your Wish List!

Looking for Holiday Gifts! Books and Jewelry for the Creative Journeyer in the Gift Shop!

Have a Happy and Creative Holiday Season!

From the Fiction Writer's Journey!

The Inner Critic is a major opponent to our writing and creative pursuits.

What follows is from The Inner Journey Newsletter. Highly recommended: http://www.higherawareness.com


Love Yourself

"If you had a friend who talked to you like you sometimes talk to yourself, would you continue to hang around with that person?"
-- Rob Bremer


Thanks to the power of our inner critics, most of us have a very poor opinion of ourselves. Yet self-contempt merely keeps us miserable and stuck in our mediocrity. If we were to make only one change to transform the quality of our lives, we might try sending a little love our own way.


"A critic is a legless man who teaches running."
-- Channing Pollock


"Unkind criticism is never part of a meaningful critique of you. Its purpose is not to teach or to help, its purpose is to punish."
-- Barbara Sher


"You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."
-- Buddha


Receive Spiritual Tips daily. Shift from being ego-driven to more soul-directed. Keep one foot walking a higher path - a higher perspective of life. For details, Click Here.

Greetings to Marblehead Clan

I just wanted to say how great it was to work with you all this past weekend. It was magic. Reality has hit like a Mack truck, but the inner writer has her space and is patiently waiting for me to get caught up a little bit. Thank you all for your support. - Bonnie

The Perfect Present from Yourself to Yourself...

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott,
1996 Nobel Prize winner for literature

The time will come, when,
with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror.
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, “Sit here, Eat. Relax.”
You will love again this stranger who is your Self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart,
to itself,
to this stranger who has loved you
all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
but who knows you by heart.

Holiday Book Gifts

Being lucky enough to have a significant other who likes to give books as gifts, I prepare my list each year.Here's what I have asked for this year.

LUCY by Ellen Feldman. About the love affair between FDR and Lucy Mercer, secretary to his wife, Eleanor.

Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore by Suzanne Shea. While the author was recovering from breast cancer, and unable to start-up her writing, she got a PT job in a local bookstore. This is the account. This is autobiographical.She finds a great deal of satisfaction in directing customers to books and in some cases, opening new reading avenues.

On Call by Emily R.Transue, MD. The usual (but always interesting to me) story of young female doctor's first year of residency.(Shades of childhood and reading Sue Barton).

Let Me Go by Helga Schneider. A young girl is deserted by her mother in 1941. The mother leaves to be a guard in Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the girl is middleaged she and mother meet-disastrously. Then when mother is dying/in her nineties, a friend suggests they meet. And...? I'm intrigued.

And, George Eliot: The Last Victorian by Kathryn Hughes. I think Eliot's feminism and unconventional life in a conventional age are fascinating and book was reviewed as focussing on those aspects of her life.

Basic Judaism by Milton Steinberg. Recommended by a friend when I asked for books to educate myself.

On list that goes out to family there is general request for any book on great photographers and their work.

And, last, is my inevitable book gift to me from me. I haven't decided.

By the way, the genesis of this list is prosaic to say the least. A catalog, Bas Bleu, marketing only books , arrived, and these are the ones I marked off. Only Steinberg's came from my "to buy" file on computer. There are so many books to read.
Oh, one more. Another friend asked for gift idea and I said Amazon.com and see if there was used copy of Forsyth Saga. Has been a long time since I read that.

It would be interesting to know what books people have read this year- anything that really was a HIT for you.

As I frequently do after blogging, I am thinking, can anyone be interested in what books I want for holidays?????? Hm? Well, I guess so in so far as it suggests some books you might want to peek into.

Nite, Claire

Manuscripts are coming in!!!

Hello all! I'm writing to say how exciting it is to see manuscripts coming in. Some are up to the max in length, some are short. All are wildly different, which is how it should be. I find that oddly reassuring. Knowing again that all writer's voices are different, and all are valuable, worth being heard.

When they come in, I put in computer hard drive file and then into a back up system. Next the name of author is deleted and the manuscript is forwarded to Emily after I have given it an identifying number. We will begin reading after the last day of submissions.

It's prehaps so exciting to see the manuscripts come in because it gives me energy, always, to see other people writing and daring to submit.

The look into other minds, other truths, this is a gift for sure.

My own writing goes well. My Julie is falling in love. I had not planned that. She is just doing it. It's an unexpected bonus to enjoy being part of the writing when she and Steve meet on the back steps to talk, flirt, argue, laugh, and increasingly become intimate with one another. No hot sex yet, just the move toward knowing each other, and wonderful, wonderful to write. (I guess the hot sex will be wonderful to write also if it happens, which is up to them.)

One other discovery. I have passed the point when I realized this book is going to end one day. I will finish it. That realization (seems so prosaic and logical, yes?) made me so sad, almost sad enough to cry. I don't want to let these people go. Then I remembered the rewriting I know must be done, and believe at a minimum, another year is needed on this novel. So I relaxed and put aside my sadness for the moment.

So , welcome to December and the coming 2006 which maybe will be a slightly saner world than 2005.

And know there is this real live person (me!!!!!!!!) sitting here enjoying seeing your work come in.

Peace. Claire