Out with the Old

This is what happens when you do Morning Pages more or less regularly for 13 years and don’t throw any of your notebooks away.

Julia Cameron might have room to store stuff like these ad infinitum, but I don’t. Anything useful I’ve long since turned into drafts  or transferred to a To Do list (I keep a few Post-It type flags in the front of each notebook so I don’t lose good ideas) so I’m ruthlessly Cleaning Things Out.

I am resolutely NOT revisiting the past, but I have noticed, as I have been feeding pages into the recycling bin, that my handwriting was a lot clearer when I first started, probably because I was writing more slowly. In the past year I’ve been making a conscious effort to write as fast as I can because it is supposed to be more useful to write without thinking about it and see what happens. One day I finished all three pages in seven minutes (that was this week, not in the days when I was doing college-ruled one-subject notebooks. Those could take 45 minutes to an hour.)

As you might be able to see in the top row of the photo, I started out in wide-ruled one-subject notebooks my kids didn’t fill up at the end of the school year (some have drawings of tie fighters inside the back cover). I progressed to college-ruled when my husband finally de-accessed some of his college notes. And then I discovered more compact, twin-coil bound notebooks that have three advantages: cheery covers, a compact size that fits easily in a backpack or computer bag, and a coil big enough to fit a pen inside so there’s not bleary-eyed search for a writing implement at 6:15 a.m. Helpful hint: the best selection is available in August; by the time the Back-to-School sales are over with, the best covers are gone.

For what it’s worth, I’m now coming to the end of notebook #27. Can you find it in the photo?

Addendum: If  you count more than 27 notebooks in the photo, you really need to get a life it’s because a few of the old ones had only a few pages left so I considered them as one (for example, #5, #5a, and #5b).

© 2012 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

Grammar Cops Take Heed

The cartoonist is Zach Weiner, the comic strip is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Many of the strips seem not to be written for my particular demographic, but a few times a month he errs and makes me laugh.

© 2012 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go (except for the cartoon, of course, which is copyrighted by Zach and used with implied permission, since he makes the code available for this very purpose).

Christmas Reading: The List

Bowing to reader demands {waves to Jen Klein}, here is the Christmas Day reading list referenced in my previous post:

Me: a book Older Son received for Christmas, Cul de Sac Golden Treasury
By Richard Thompson. He discovered the comic strip several years ago in the Washington Post, and it partially filled the hole in the heart left by the discontinuation of Calvin & Hobbes. Alas, no stuffed tigers or transmogrifiers, though.

Older Son: a book he bought for me after finding it on my Wish List: Hark! A Vagrant, a collection of histoliterary comics by Kate Beaton. Click here for one of the reasons I wanted it. I’m limiting myself to one two-page spread a day, so as to spread out the enjoyment. (Parental advisory: Hark! A Vagrant grew up on the internet, not in a newspaper, and the language occasionally is more dorm-level than you’ll find in Cul de Sac).

Younger Son: 1776: The Illustrated Edition, a gift he bought for me because several years ago I had been blown away by David McCullough’s book about the most desperate year of the American Revolution.

The Illustrated Edition (a coffee-table book in size as well as genre) contains excerpts from the original, dozens of photos, and a dozen translucent envelopes bound into the spine that hold some three dozen letters, maps and other source documents relating to the era.

We all enjoyed the disclaimer on the copyright page that all the “removable documents are reproductions of original items and are not originals themselves.”

Well, duh.

© 2012 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

Booked for Christmas

On Christmas afternoon I looked around the living room and noticed that both sons and I were doing the same thing: poring over books that somebody else had received for Christmas.

Made perfect sense, because we have the rest of our lives to read the books we received, but Older Son would be hauling his books back to Our Nation’s Capital in a few days, and we had only a limited opportunity to check out his, and vv.

Warmed the cockles of me heart, it did.

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

Roll Playing

From-scratch, yeast-raised, shaped by hand, and absolutely mandatory for Thanksgiving Dinner Up North with The Much Honoured The Lady of Reay and family.

This batch originally consisted of 17 rolls but a certain amount of quality control was involved. (It was a sacrifice, but somebody had to do it.)

The recipe’s right out of the KitchenAid mixer book (60 Minute Dinner Rolls) except that I now mix the dough in the bread machine instead of the mixer. So far nobody’s complained.

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

Five Months Work, in Photos

Here is visual evidence of how I spent most of the summer and autumn, all in the service of the Work in Progress: two books, a blue foamboard, a pack of 3 x 5 file cards, and a handful of push pins.

I wasn’t writing: I was revising a novel (contemporary young adult, and that’s all I’m going to say about it).

These were my tools.

Screenwriting Tricks for Authors is available only as an ebook, well worth the download fee. I found it a bit tricky to follow the diagrams explaining act structure, but only because they didn’t show up full screen on a Kindle, even at the tiniest type size. I suspect on an iPad they’d show up just fine or on a Kindle app on the computer.

What was extremely helpful–and enjoyable–was the author’s scene-by-scene breakdown of movies. Watching Harry Potter 1 with Kindle in hand was one of the better afternoons I’ve had in a long time.

Save the Cat, which I borrowed from the library in old-fashioned book form, was exceptionally helpful for the actual storyboarding.

This is a screenwriting process that works for fiction as well. It involves breaking down the Work in Progress into scenes, one scene per card (or one group of related scenes per card), and then pinning them on a corkboard in a sequence that, ideally, falls into three acts, I and III being shorter than II. The trick is getting each act to end with an appropriate turn of events.

And after it’s all nice and tidy on your corkboard–or foamboard if you don’t feel like shelling out for a corkboard the size of a dining room table–you hunch  over a warm computer for weeks on end and wrestle the written version into something resembling the nice tidy storyboard version.

It’s easy. All you have to do is take out the scenes you love in which nice stuff happens but does not affect the outcome of the book, and ignore the pile of words you’ve tossed out, all 10,000 of them.

But you know what? Now that the surgery is over, I don’t miss any of those scenes one bit.

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

Rustlers Nab My Peanut Crop

Last summer I was weeding a neglected part of the garden when I spotted a plant that looked like either wild indigo or sweet pea. I thought I’d let it grow in place until I could identify it, but later that day I accidentally uprooted it while pulling out a clump of something else.

Imagine my surprise when I found a peanut shell tangled in the root system. In fact, the shell was the root of the root system! Someone had evidently fed raw unshelled peanuts to a neighborhood squirrel, who had buried one in the gravelly soil beside our driveway.

I potted it immediately, and after a few weeks it began to grow nicely.

Peanut, growing nicely in August.

I had plans for networking with other potted peanut growers. I envisioned a small but tasty harvest, carefully roasted.

Then came the day last week that frost was predicted, so I began to move the houseplants from their summer homes on porch and picnic table.

I noticed that the peanut wasn’t looking so good.

Peanut, not looking so good in November.

I’d like to think my peanut crop was harvested by the same critter who planted it in the first place, but I wonder. The price of peanut butter has jumped 30% in the past week due to a refinery problem… No, wait. That’s the excuse the oil companies give for price hikes.

The spike in peanut butter price is due to a poor harvest.

So I’m thinking: if the economy’s so bad that copper rustlers steal gutters from occupied houses and strip the wiring out of vacant ones, can peanut rustlers be far behind?

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

The Conquerer Mildew

Poe got it wrong.

It’s not the worm that conquers all.

It’s mildew.

I discovered last week that I no longer have to worry about where to store my great-aunt’s prayerbook, her mesh evening bags c. 1910, my mother’s First Communion prayerbook, her college and nursing school diplomas and class photos, my First Communion prayerbook, or the dozen or so photo albums documenting my first 18 years.

Mildew got ‘em all, along with two dozen 1920s novels for girls (The Motor Car Girls, the Marjorie and Mary Jane series, early Bobbsey Twins), magazines and books documenting the Kennedy assassination, and innumerable holy cards from great-relatives funerals.

I knew it would be difficult to sort through the memories my mother had stored in two very old hump-topped trunks that came over with somebody’s ancestors on the boat from Ireland. The trunks were stored in attics during most of their first century, but in the mid-1960s my parents moved to a home that didn’t have an attic. It did have a semi-finished basement, though.

Things were fine for a while, but then some water got in, probably in the 1970s, and then things began to deteriorate (in so many ways). And now it is time to clean out the house.

I’d already decided that anything chipped, cracked, scratched or otherwise damaged was not going to make the trip to Wisconsin. But I hadn’t expected to play Grim Reaper to so much that had been kept for so long.

It was an intense afternoon.

I was able to save a handful of very old photos. When I came home, I transferred them to a new box and put them in our attic, hoping a couple of Midwestern summers will bake the smell away. By the time I realized that the photo albums also reeked, the trunk of the car was full. I wasn’t keen on driving 400+ miles with them contaminating the passenger compartment, so I arranged to have them shipped.

When they arrive (and I hope it takes a while), I’ll sit outside some mild winter day and remove them from the albums. Many of the photos are falling out, anyway; those old black photo corners had an adhesive life of maybe ten years. I’ll note the date and ID people left to right on the backs of the photos and put them in the attic with the previous generations until summer works its magic.

You will not be surprised to learn that I am now casting a cold eye on many things I have accumulated over the years.

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

A Disturbance in the Force

We’ve been without dependable telephone service since Tuesday morning. Sometimes there’s a dial tone, sometimes not. When there is a tone, there is usually so much static it’s difficult to hear the caller…but not always.

The internet is glitchy, too; I’ve had to reset our router four six seven times since Friday night, and Walking Partner’s network, which we use as a back-up, is fading in and out, too. When I can get online, the download speed is about a third of what I’m paying for.

I informed the phone company–we’ll call it AT&T–and the phone part is semi-fixed, meaning I now get a dial tone frequently instead of only occasionally. This afternoon a nice lady called and promised someone would stop by on Friday to have a look at things.

{Friday? Was she serious? But of course she was. We now return you to our regularly scheduled post…}

I suspect the tech who eventually shows up will find the problem is squirrel damage to the phone/DSL wire. It usually is.

However, this morning as I was heading across the street to meet Walking Partner for a stroll to The Bridge, I discovered a sinkhole by the main cutoff valve near the curb. The hole was about four inches in diameter then; when we checked on it a couple of hours ago, after a moderately heavy rain, the hole had grown to about six inches, wide enough that we could see inside. Past brown tree roots and a yellow cable of some sort, I saw water reflected on one side, and darkness on the other.

I poked a long stick down the hole. The depth seems to be around three-and-a-half feet deep directly under the opening, and farther than the stick would reach on the right (to the bottom of the photo).

I was tempted to go back with a flashlight and longer probe, but in a moment of uncharacteristic caution, decided it might be a good idea to stay away from that part of the street lest the pavement collapse as well as the ground.

Besides, what if the hole isn’t just a hole. What if it’s…a Portal?

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go

A Successful Family History

This summer it has been my privilege to help a client prepare her family history.

This could have been bad news (even at my hourly rate!) but the client–we’ll call her Bea–did several things right that made the work, while intense, one of the most fascinating editing gigs I’ve ever had.

The first thing my client did right was get born into an interesting family. Her father, aunt and five uncles are the children of Virginia tobacco farmers who persevered through family tragedy and the Depression of the 1930s. The original farm is still in the family and the annual reunion is a community event in their southeastern Virginia county. We discovered in the course of editing the material that her grandfather was born a hundred years ago this month.

The second thing Bea did right was involve her father, aunt, uncles, and a couple of her grandfather’s cousins in the project. I gather it was hard work getting everybody to sit down and write their 500-word biography and any supplemental stories of growing up they wanted to contribute, but she persisted, and the stories are wonderful. It turns out that most of the relatives are natural storytellers, and even the people who were more comfortable with a just-the-facts approach supplied enough detail so that their personalities and pride in their children came shining through.

The third thing that set this history apart from a mere record of who begat whom list was the original research Bea did. She spent one full week this summer in two libraries, one in Virginia and one in North Carolina, discovering birth records, marriage certificates, census documents and slave records that gave a history to ancestors who before had been only names and fragments of story.

The fourth good decision she made was to include different perspectives. For instance, the history includes two accounts of a great-grandfather’s murder by a deranged brother-in-law: one written late in life by her grandfather, who almost witnessed the event and was so traumatized by discovering his father’s body that he would not talk about it to his own children, the other by a cousin, who added detail the grandfather’s account does not mention.

There also is a fictionalized memoir of a great-great-grandmother’s life as a slave before the Civil War and her life after Emancipation. This section–clearly labeled a dramatization–is based on the family tradition but includes dialogue and added historical detail to make it more accessible to younger family members.

The fifth good decision she made was hiring a graphic artist to design the book. If you’re going to spend several years of your life putting together a project like this, do it right. And she did.

And the last good decision, if I do say so myself, was hiring a professional writer to look over the material before she sent it to the designer. My job was to fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation while still maintaining each writer’s distinctive voice and not overriding regionalisms, query inconsistencies of fact and spelling, double-check what I could and flag what I couldn’t, and in general, work with Bea to make the book a fitting tribute to her grandparents.

(The catch I’m proudest of was adding “a regional word for creek” in parentheses after a phrase about her grandmother walking an uncle to school “and swinging him over the branch.” Bea was brought up in Wisconsin, but I’m from a part of Ohio settled not long after the American Revolution, when Virginia was the next state to the East, and some of our creeks are still called branches.)

I haven’t seen the finished product yet; the book is still in the design phase. I’m looking forward to the day this autumn when the page proofs are ready so I can finally see photos of the people whose lives I have followed with so intensely!

© 2011 Anne Bingham and Making It Up as I Go