Category Archives: Writers

Favorite Quotes #1

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”—Martin Buber

“Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.” —Phyllis Theroux


“Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau


“Drift beautifully on the surface and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.” —Richard Ellmann


“The respect of those you respect is worth more than the applause of the multitude.” —Arnold Glasow


“Patience is a minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.” —Ambrose Bierce


“The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.” —Michel de Montaigne


“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.” —Bertrand Russell


“Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.” —Voltaire


“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.” —Voltaire


“Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.” —Gustave Flaubert

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books and Readers, On Writing, Writers

Women in the King Arthur Legends

Queen Guinevere’s Maying. John Collier (1850–1934)

Recently I listened to the audiobook (all 51 hours) of The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, beautifully narrated by Davina Porter. Of course I’d read the series years ago when it was a New York Times bestseller, but listening to the audiobook version was even better for getting totally caught up in the story.

With great interest, then, I paid my $10 for this Profs and Pints Online program: “The Women of King Arthur Legends,” presented by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, former instructors at The Ohio State University and co-founders of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

Their talk is well worth $10. I highly recommend it. I had fun comparing and contrasting the women of Bradley’s historical fantasy with the women of Cleto and Warman’s folkloric interpretations. Their overview of the traditions and legends surrounding the women deepened my appreciation for what Bradley accomplished in her wonderful retelling.

Here’s the program summary from the online link:

“Morgan Le Fay, Queen Guinevere, The Lady of the Lake, Elaine. Each of these women play crucial roles in the rise and fall of King Arthur, Britain’s greatest legendary hero. But they’re almost always presented as enigmatic, ambiguous forces in the story.

“Is Morgan Le Fay the evil sorceress who plots Arthur’s demise, or is she the good fairy who takes the dying Arthur to the magical isle of Avalon for rest and healing? Is Guinevere an adulterous schemer, or a woman trapped by politics and the limited possibilities for women of her time? The numerous gaps in the traditional materials of these legends allow many different interpretations, some positive or nuanced, and some that hint at more than a little of the misogyny, fear, and contempt women have faced throughout the ages.

“In this talk, Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman will guide you through the complex world of Arthuriana and discuss how these women and their stories have been understood (and misunderstood) from ancient times to modern retellings. Join us for an enchanted night of swords and sorcery, as we explore what these strange and powerful women offer today’s world.”

The recording of their talk, available online, includes recommended readings, both scholarly and popular. Below is a screenshot of part of their list. I was surprised that The Mists of Avalon did not make the Creative side of the list—it’s certainly creative. But perhaps the omission is due to the books being so well known, they need no introduction. In any case, I’ve added several of Cleto and Warman’s recommendations to my personal reading list.

(Presented by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman)

Treat yourself doubly, to this online presentation from Profs & Pints and also to the fabulous audiobook version of Mists. Together they’re an investment of more than 52 hours, but it’s time wonderfully well spent.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Audiobooks, Books and Readers, Magic, Misogyny, Writers

Eye Surgery Terror and Trauma

For lovers of the written word, good reading vision is a pearl without price. Losing our ability to read, even temporarily, is traumatic for people who Read All The Time. We awake in the morning and read our social media and the news. We sit down to work at our desks and computers, reading and writing on screens or notepads all day. In the evenings we may be back on social media or catching up on email. At bedtime, we have our noses in books, carried away by the power of the written word.

For People of the Book—or for anyone, I suppose, but with particular intensity for People Who Read—eye surgery is terrifying. What if it goes wrong? What if I’m blinded? In allowing a stranger to cut my eyes, have I made the worst mistake of my life?

I recently endured eye surgery, and it has brought me what I dreaded only slightly less than total blindness: I have lost my once-excellent close vision. I had postponed cataract surgery for as long as I possibly could, and when the time came that I must undergo it, the results threw me into a near-panic:

I could no longer see to read.

The surgery took from me my close reading vision and gave me sort-of good distance vision in its stead. Not a fair or advantageous trade, in my world.

Today, I’m in the difficult in-between phase: The surgery is behind me. Thank Godde. My eyes, however, have not yet healed enough that I can go to my optometrist and get the new, post-surgery glasses that will—I hope and trust!—fully restore my reading and computer vision (and correct the astigmatism that blurs my vision at all distances).

Tips for Coping

In hopes of reducing the trauma for other profoundly nearsighted People Who Read, I’ll share what I’ve learned during this ordeal.

1. First and foremost, find a surgeon with good communication skills. My cataract surgeon has a reputation for excellence—both my optometrist and a retina specialist who cleared me for the surgery sang his praises. I, however, cannot recommend him because his communication skills are abysmal. He volunteered no information; he told me nothing of what I could expect before, during, or after the surgery. He did not even tell me what kind of intraocular lens he intended to implant in my eyes. When I asked, he bristled at the question and snappishly said that I was a candidate for only the most basic type, those being fixed monofocal lenses matched to distance vision. From my own research, that is what I had expected to get, but I was taken aback that the surgeon resisted explaining or even discussing my options, or why I had no options.

My first bit of advice to you, therefore, is to find a surgeon who will talk to you.

2. Prepare as well as you can for the extreme imbalance and mental as well as physical strain you will experience after one of your eyes is “corrected” to inflexible, relentless farsightedness, while your “uncorrected” eye remains profoundly nearsighted. During the seven days that elapsed between surgeries on my two eyes, the imbalance kept me in a state bordering on vertigo. I felt queasy and tended to list to port, then to starboard, while walking. I had trouble getting up and down the stairs in my home. I possessed no depth perception and couldn’t tell where I was in space, or where anything else lay. I’d reach for an object and miss it. For seven days I did a lot of napping, because seeing the world through two vastly mismatched eyes made me feel sick.

Astonishingly, at the post-surgery follow-up the day after operating on my left eye, the surgeon said I was OK to drive. Preposterous! And highly irresponsible of him. With the astigmatism in my left eye making everything blurry, the uncorrected 20/400 vision in my right eye making me functionally blind on that side as it overlaid its blurriness on my left side, and with my perpetual vertigo from the imbalance between the two eyes, I was most certainly not OK to drive.

To get myself through that miserable seven days between surgeries, besides sleeping a lot I modified two pairs of my old glasses. On one pair, I taped over the left lens to block out my “corrected” eye so I could see to read with my right eye through my familiar no-line progressive eyeglasses. I modified another pair of old eyeglasses by removing the left lens entirely and taping over the right lens. This helped block out the 20/400 vision of my native right eye so that my brain could focus on seeing with my surgically “corrected” left eye. My right eye is strongly dominant, and during the seven days between surgeries my brain strove mightily to rely primarily on my right eye, as it always has. Only by blocking off that eye could I force my brain to shift its focus to my now-farsighted left eye.

Old eyewear modified for post-surgery needs

3. Besides modifying old eyeglasses to help you cope between surgeries, I also recommend that you ask your surgeon about operating on your dominant eye first. I believe a great deal of my disorientation, discomfort, and incapacity between surgeries could have been alleviated if my dominant eye had been the first to go under the knife. In hindsight, I wonder why determining my dominant eye wasn’t a basic part of the pre-op examination. It seems logical that a surgeon should want to work with a patient’s natural abilities, rather than go against them.

4. Buy reading glasses and have them on hand before your surgery! Being a lifelong wearer (since second grade, anyway) of prescription eyewear, I had never owned a pair of over-the-counter reading glasses. I knew nothing about them. I had no idea what power of reading glasses I needed, but guessed at 3.0 based on this chart at Readers.com.

The second surgery, performed on my right eye exactly one week after my left eye, utterly stripped me of my reading vision. I had been forced to trade my excellent close vision for good-enough distance vision. Now, with both eyes “done” (or done for), I could drive without glasses, but I shall never again be able to read without them. The sacrifice of my close vision saddens me. It seems a big price to pay, for someone who Reads All The Time and who is writing a new novel when she isn’t reading.

Only my cheap mail-order reading glasses kept me from roundly cursing the name of the surgeon who said I had no options and then left me unable to focus on the Written Word. The reading glasses are getting me by, just barely, until I can go to my optometrist for the real thing.

Computer glasses rubber-banded
to empty eyeglass frames

4. Buy computer glasses or multifocal reading glasses. As luck (or my eyes) would have it, I did already own computer glasses that are made to slip over one’s regular eyewear, to sharpen one’s view of a monitor. To use them post-surgery, I removed both lenses from an old pair of my eyeglasses and, with rubber bands, affixed the plastic computer glasses to the empty metal frames. They are enabling me to work at my desktop computer, after a fashion. I’m writing this while peering through them at my monitor. Constantly switching back and forth, however, between computer glasses (to see what’s on my screen) and reading glasses (to see my phone and everything else that’s on my office desk) is driving me to mutter curses at the surgeon once more.

In hopes of finding a more workable solution that will tide me over until I can get proper prescription eyewear, I returned to Readers.com and discovered Foster Grants that claim to combine reading vision, computer vision, and “interacting” vision, all in one. The glasses are on order and due to arrive in less than a week. I will return here and report my opinion of what purports to be a kind of over-the-counter no-line progressive lens.

Seek Empathy

Going back to recommendation No. 1, above, about finding an eye surgeon you can talk to: Patients lucky enough to have a surgeon who understands People of the Book, People Who Read All the Time, may escape many of the terrors and traumas that I have endured. With an understanding surgeon who will seek to maintain your ability to read throughout the process, you may find the surgery—and its aftermath—to be far less stressful than I have. My surgeon simply didn’t care. He brushed aside my concerns and showed no interest whatsoever in my needs and priorities. When I expressed to him my distress over not being able to read post-surgery, he shrugged it off as a trivial thing, not as a loss that strikes at the core of who I am.

For a lover of the written word, an inability to read and write—even a temporary incapacity—is a situation that will induce near-panic. I share my experiences in hopes of helping others to prepare yourselves, as far as possible, for the sacrifices that accompany eye surgery.

I hope you have booklover friends who will understand your cries of anguish when you cannot read and your surgeon doesn’t care. Let me end by quoting a friend who reacted to my pain and frustration as all true People Who Read would react:

“He needs a different profession. For an eye surgeon not to respect his patient’s need to be able to read should be criminal.” Amen.

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books and Readers, Writers

Tolkien and Lewis

Middle-Earth and Narnia: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Invented Modern Fantasy

I found this presentation by Professor Harry Lee Poe (Union University) so enjoyable, I watched it twice. The second time through, I took notes, some of which I’ll share here. Any fan of Tolkien or Lewis will do well, however, to pay the $12 registration fee for unlimited access to the full lecture. Prof. Poe provided an enlightening overview of how Tolkien and Lewis related to one another in developing modern fantasy. Their works spawned an entire field of storytelling.

Among Poe’s points:

  • The Lord of the Rings is a three-volume book. It’s not a trilogy.
  • The Ring of the Nibelungen was Tolkien’s inspiration.
  • Lewis served as “the great encourager,” urging Tolkien to write his stories of Middle-Earth. Lewis gave Tolkien the idea for “the wound that would not heal” as well as the basic structure of the “journey story” — there and back again.

“In the journey story,” Poe said, “the hero risks all, ventures all, travels to the end of the world to do the great deed, and having accomplished the great deed on this fabulous quest, having fought all the foes, he returns a changed person.” (Sound familiar?)

For Watching & Reading …

I’m behind on my movie-viewing. Prof. Poe mentioned these films, only one of which I’ve seen:

He also mentioned the Scottish author George MacDonald, whom Wikipedia describes as a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow writer Lewis Carroll. Clearly, I need to spend some time with MacDonald’s books, and catch up on all the movies I missed while I was absorbed in my own fantasy worlds.

My thanks to Professor Poe for his valuable overview of Where Middle-Earth Met Narnia.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books and Readers, Writers

Help for Writers in Covid Times

From The Authors League Fund: “With the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of writers across the U.S. have seen a sudden and dramatic loss of income. Overnight, writers lost writing, teaching, and editing jobs, as well as speaking engagements, school visits, and other paid appearances. Many have spouses who also lost work, and many face the difficult transition to schooling young children at home.

“We immediately shifted our focus to address this need. While we typically help up to 80 writers per year, since mid-March 2020 we have helped 300 authors, journalists, and poets. Our support is used for rent, utilities, groceries, and medical bills. We continue to help writers enduring medical crises and older writers living on a fixed income.

“Thanks in large part to generous support from donors, we are doubling our budget and hope to do so again in 2021. … We hope you will support our work with a tax-deductible donation of any size. Make a secure donation by credit card at https://authorsleaguefund.org/donate/.

“We understand if you are not in a position to give. If you are struggling, do not hesitate to apply for support at https://authorsleaguefund.org/apply/. … We also recommend this detailed guide to COVID-19 resources from our sister organization, the Authors Guild: www.authorsguild.org/covid-19-resources-for-authors.”

(Please help if you can. Writing, always a precarious career, has been a particularly difficult way to make a living in these strange times. —Deborah J. Lightfoot)

Leave a Comment

Filed under Coronavirus, Writers

Escape to Magical and Mystical Sites of the British Isles

Magical and Mystical Sites: Europe and the British Isles. Cover of the 1977 edition.

The British TV program “Escape to the Country” has been the perfect pandemic companion to my reading of Magical and Mystical Sites: Europe and the British Isles (1977 hardcover) by Elizabeth Pepper and John Wilcock.

Thanks to the far-ranging property-seekers who long to move to the quiet rural areas of the British Isles, I can almost pinpoint in my mind, without a map, many of the mystical sites that are featured in the Pepper-Wilcock travelogue. Which is a good thing, since the book contains no maps,* only tedious driving directions such as “Following the road from Ballysodare around the foot of the hill to a farm leads to a narrow pathway up the steepest side of Knocknarea hill,” or “Here a right-hand turn on a winding, single-track road leads after 2½ miles to Staigue Fort …”

It’s a hardcover book, yet it’s littered with the kinds of detailed how-to-get-there instructions that one would expect to find in a paperback guidebook which is meant to be replaced annually with an updated edition. If, however, you can train your eyes to skip past the innumerable references to such-and-such road and this-or-that path, you’ll enjoy reading about the magical and mystical sites the authors visited in their research for this 1977 book.

I not only skipped past the driving directions, I skipped from Ephesus to Malta, and then into Southern Germany. The magical lore and history of those places was interesting, but the narrative really picked up for me in Part III, covering mystical sites in Cornwall, Glastonbury, Wales, Scotland, the Western Isles, and Ireland. Those chapters bristle with intriguing details about magical women of the wild wood and witches’ brews “cooked with various incantations over a fire of oak logs in a vessel made out of the skull of a decapitated thief.” Great stuff for a writer of fantasy!

Despite the tedium of the overly detailed driving directions, the lack of maps (which such a book cries out for),* the paucity of illustrations (the line drawings that introduce each chapter are lovely but insufficient), and the tiny type in which the book is set (small enough to threaten eyestrain), I’ll rate it four stars for its comprehensiveness. Those who have an interest in the history and traditions of magic will find a wealth of details that go far beyond the typical focus on Atlantis, Stonehenge, and fairies. Fantasy writers especially will want to keep a notepad near at hand to jot down the many ideas which this book is sure to spark.

*(The 2000 edition—sporting a different cover—appears to be updated with the much-needed maps. I haven’t seen it; I bought the 1977 hardback, as pictured above. But the description here, of the 2000 paperback, says: “Rounded out with excellent photographs and maps, Magical and Mystical Sites is a complete historical and practical guide to the sacred sites of Europe and the British Isles. Illustrated.” That sounds good. You’ll definitely want the version with maps and photos.)

 

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books and Readers, Magic, Writers

A Trip through 2020 with the Positive Jar

I love the idea of a Positive Jar. Starting one for myself this very day.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Writers

Writing Systems and World Building

The title of The Hobbit, translated. Screenshot from Professor Marc Zender’s “Writing and Civilization: From Ancient Worlds to Modernity.”

Continuing through my collection of Great Courses—sets of DVDs that I rediscovered in my bookshelves after forgetting I owned them—I turn today to Professor Marc Zender’s “Writing and Civilization: From Ancient Worlds to Modernity.”

The course’s overview of writing systems from Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs to Mayan and Aztec glyphs is fascinating, as is the discussion of the origins of the Roman alphabet. (Flip a capital A upside down and you’ll see an animal’s head with horns. The name of the letter alpha derives from the Hebrew aleph, meaning “ox.” The shape of the letter derives from an earlier symbol resembling the head of an ox. B started as a picture sign for a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs. In Semitic languages the sign was called beth, meaning “house,” but the Greeks changed the name from beth to beta. And so on through the letter Z, adopted from the Etruscans, who got it from the Phoenicians.)

While it’s all been interesting, the lecture nearest to my heart, as a writer and reader of fantasy, deals with so-called featural scripts, including the invented, fictional alphabets designed for works of fantasy and science fiction. The inventions of J.R.R. Tolkien are standouts in this category.

Professor Zender devotes a satisfying amount of time to Tolkien’s writing systems, pointing out that Tolkien was a professional linguist and a specialist in the history of Germanic languages and scripts, both alphabetic and runic. Quoting from the course guidebook:

“In The Hobbit, first published in 1937, Tolkien used Anglo-Saxon runes as a kind of code for Modern English. Tolkien also invented several writing systems of his own, including the cursive script known as Tengwar or Tîw (meaning ‘letters’) and the angular characters designed for cutting into wood, stone, or metal known as Certar or Cirth (meaning ‘runes’). … He even gave his fictional scripts a fictional inventor, Rúmil. … Tolkien provides charts and full descriptions of his writing systems in appendix E of The Lord of the Rings.”

I confess that, until now, I had barely glanced at Appendix E. After completing this series of lectures, however, I got out my much-loved, much-read 1975 Ballantine Books boxed set of LOTR and took a closer look. The knowledge I gained from Professor Zender about the development of “real” writing systems deepened my appreciation for Tolkien’s achievement in creating his fictional scripts and giving them such deeply thought-out histories.

I’ve not gone so far as to invent an alphabet, but I have imagined several specific words in my fictional language of Ladrehdin. My audiobook narrator is having a field day with them.

Now … Anyone up for learning Quenya? Or Sindarin?

From the slipcase of The Lord of the Rings, 1975 Ballantine Books boxed set.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books and Readers, On Writing, Writers

Fun With DIY Videos at Biteable

A writer friend recently posted a book trailer she’d made with the Animoto video builder. I loved it except for the Animoto watermark that was displayed on it.

Searching for an affordable, flexible, easy-to-use video maker for my own books, I explored Powtoon and Animaker as well as Animoto. With these, it seemed that the only way to avoid the company’s watermark and to outright own my handmade videos was to subscribe for a full year. Shorter, more affordable subscription terms were not offered.

Then I found Biteable. It’s definitely the one for me. You can subscribe monthly instead of for a year, and every video you make while subscribed is yours to download and keep forever. Biteable’s templates are so easy to use, and their library of stock footage is so comprehensive, covering every need, you can create a great many videos in a month, making this service by far the most cost-effective of any that I looked at.

Another great advantage with Biteable is that you are allowed to use the videos you make for commercial purposes, “something that other video editors don’t allow,” notes Brightspark. I can’t imagine why any writer would pay to make videos that they are not then legally allowed to use for the commercial purpose of promoting their work. That feature alone raises Biteable far above the pack.

Waterspell Book 1 detail

Waterspell Book 1 video intro scene

Brightspark claims that voiceover isn’t available at Biteable. That is incorrect. After I made a very cool (if I say so myself) book trailer for my Waterspell fantasy novels, I emailed the video to my audiobook narrator. He recorded a voiceover in an MP3 file, which I then uploaded to Biteable and synced with the video. Syncing the audio was simple, since Biteable’s video-editor allows lengthening or shortening “scenes” in half-second increments. It required only a few adjustments to the length of each scene to perfectly match the narration with the video.

For authors seeking an affordable, easy-to-use online video-maker for creating book trailers, I highly recommend Biteable. You can subscribe for just one month if you like, and every video you make and download during that time will be yours to keep and use whenever and wherever you wish, unrestricted and watermark-free. Check it out: Biteable.com

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Audiobooks, Writers

Singing the Social Media Blues

Waterspell on Goodreads


Was there ever an attempt at “social media” that turned out more difficult to use or clunkier than Goodreads? I set up an author profile at Goodreads years ago, but soon abandoned it because it’s so maddeningly difficult to beat into submission. Every update requires multiple attempts to make the edits “stick.” I thought I never WOULD manage to upload the new Waterspell covers and force the interface to show those as the default covers.

I wonder how useful Goodreads actually is to authors like me, who are trying every way we can to reach a wider audience. Cutting through the static is enormously difficult.

With new audiobook editions of my fantasy novels in the works, however, I’m once again struggling with such things as a Facebook page. “Clunky” isn’t a strong enough word for THAT particular platform—it’s dang near impossible to use, and Facebook’s algorithms ensure that few people will see it. I’ve now done my utmost to update my author profile at Goodreads. I’m trying to do something with LinkedIn, though I’m not sure it’s particularly suited to my needs. I’m not looking for a job. Twitter? Yech. I quit Twitter years ago and have no intention of going back.

What’s next? Instagram? A YouTube channel? Are any of them worth the effort they require? Are they worth the time they take away from writing and editing? I don’t know.

What I do know is that word-of-mouth is the only truly effective way of spreading the word about books that are worth reading. Fingers crossed that the soon-to-be-released audiobooks will catch on, the forthcoming fourth book will get some attention, and Waterspell will finally reach its intended audience. Given the glowing-ness of the reviews the trilogy got, I live in hope that more of my potential readers will find my work. I know they’re out there.

My eternal gratitude to everyone who has read the trilogy and left reviews at Amazon, Goodreads, and book blogs. I love you all, dear readers.

1 Comment

Filed under Audiobooks, Books and Readers, Waterspell fantasy trilogy, Writers