yourpassions.tk

I'm totally hooked on ebooks. I know  many people prefer print, but when I read on my 11" tablet in landscape mode with two columns, it looks familiar, like print. But it’s better. I can changes text sizes on a whim and read in the dark when Other is sleeping. Best of all, I can highlight with abandon and view highlights apart from text, instantly search to keep track of who’s who, share passages without retyping, add volumes of notes ... so many things I never did or can’t do with print. This ability to find things in the book is a boon for writing reviews and preparing examples for classes. Those are only a few of my reasons. More than thirty years ago, when I ran out of wall space for shelves, I made the decision  that my book collection had to enter no net gain status. If I bought one, I had to off-load one. The Friends of the Library love me for all the contributions I’ve made to the Used Book Sale. This book diet comes at a price. I've often wished I could check some...

I never expected to fall in love with Volya Rinpoche, a bald, squarely-built Russian monk who dresses in gold-trimmed maroon robes and sandals, has skin the color of acorns, and is a world-renowned spiritual leader and author. Neither did Otto Ringling, the narrator of Breakfast with Buddha , Lunch with Buddha and Dinner with Buddha , a trilogy of mind-bending, possibly life-changing novels by Roland Merulo . But who could resist that heart-melting smile, that endless compassion and infectious laugh? His naïve observations and whiplash fast “wessons?” But wait. Nothing kinky here.As the story begins, Otto’s whacko, forever hippie sister tricks him into taking a road trip alone with this monk, her latest love interest. As miles and days pass, their relationship grows and Otto decides the Rimpoche is “the real deal.” Between volumes, monk marries sister, plots thicken, and Otto evolves. The novels are poignant in places, hilarious in others, always thought-provoking, and sublimely well-...

In her new book, The Art of Memoir , author Mary Karr repeatedly urges readers to dig deep to discover their true story. As a disclaimer, I’m not digging back into the volume to discuss it. This post is based on what I perceived, understood, and remember, not her specific words. My perception is my reality, my truth. If that varies from literal words in the book, that’s how memory works, and that’s part of my point. Karr, along with countless others, myself included, have continually made the point that as you begin to edit and refine your initial story and reflect about what really did happen , how else you might look at the past, how else might you tell it, your story changes. In fact, you reconstruct history . Some give the impression that this reconstruction conveys our true essence and is truer than our initial understanding or viewpoint, no matter how long we held it. As I read Karr’s thoughts on this reconstruction, I was overwhelmed with the certainty that these “deeper truths...

As I mentioned before, nothing focuses the mind on cockpit design like spending 150 hours in the cockpit of a sailboat more or less in one continuous stretch. Previously, I outlined my conclusions from this experience in prose, but this time I have an actual 3D rendering of my proposed design, with all the details filled in. And nothing focuses the mind on the need to finish designing and build a houseboat that sails more than what is currently unfolding in South Carolina, which I just recently sailed through. Last week, Charleston, where I had spent a week, had fairly deep water running over the streets. Next week it will be Georgetown's turn; the entire town, where I had spent a few days too, is going to have to be evacuated. “You are lucky to be on a boat!” people keep telling me. Indeed, I am! But it's not exactly the right boat; it's a pretty good boat, but it's not QUIDNON. What's been happening in South Carolina is but a preview of coming attractions. People ...

It’s too soon to draft a  memoir about our move, but it’s not too soon to begin reflecting on my sense of things. As I sat is a glorious state of almost forgotten peace and relaxation earlier today, I realized that (speaking only for myself) we’ve entered a new phase, and not a minute too soon. That corner was actually turned the day we were told that the photographer who would make our house look amazing on the web needed to arrive three days early. Before that I’d been in a total panicked frenzy, wondering how on earth we would ever possibly meet our self-imposed deadline for listing. But right on schedule, birds sang, bells rang, and angels descended. Only one room remained out of bounds for the photographer. Tension drained. Then, a few hours before we were scheduled to fly to Austin to find a house, that last room clicked into alignment, ready for showing. We flew off to Austin a few hours later. For three days we looked, well-prepared with seven months of web research. We did fin...

Over the past month I have spent some 150 hours sailing—moving south for the winter. This has given me plenty of time to rethink some elements of the QUIDNON design, and to introduce a few improvements. While some are purely products of reflection, others resulted from direct experience with a sailboat design which I found to be inadequate. Here, I will explain the changes in prose. I will come up with updated drawings as time allows. Wheel vs. Tiller The sailboat I have been sailing has a very traditional layout: a pedestal at the back of the cockpit, with a wheel, a throttle and a shift lever. On top of the post is a binnacle with a compass. On top of that is an instrument cluster: a GPS chartplotter, a radar and a VHF radio. It seems simple, rational, well designed. But it is also horribly constraining. The wheel is comfortable to operate from just one position: standing directly behind it. This gets tiresome rather quickly. Other positions—sitting behind the wheel, sitting to the l...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m journaling the heck out of this relocation experience. I may not be making as much sense of things right now as I’d like – that usually takes more time and distance. But I will have the details as I saw them when things were fresh, raw and new with all the roller coaster dips and climbs as they happen. During this time when each moment is precious, I often face a choice: email a friend or write in my journal. As soon as I discovered email, I recognized its power as a personal history archive or journal. But who has time to sort through half a million emails to find those key 100? Especially when they’re scattered across half a dozen accounts and … you get the picture. A couple of months ago, the lights went on. I saw a way to combine three main journaling streams – paper journal, a journal in Word, and email. I can write a long email detailing current stress and success, then copy the relevant part and paste in my Word Journal doc for the current...

This could be a picture of our belongings heading west to Texas on a South  Hills Movers truck, presumably before the end of the  year.  Moving is complicated and stressful. When I added things up on the classic Holmes and Rahe stress scale , I found that I’m not far from the boiling point of 300. I have a seemingly impossible To-Do list to get the house ready to list with a realtor by our target date. I’m having to pull away from my cherished writing groups and classes and other friends. I’m already missing the home I’ve loved for thirty years. My mate of 52 years baffles and enrages me at times (and keeps me laughing at others). And ye gods, the thought of finding the right house in Austin and getting the deal done in a timely manner and all the work of settling in … YIKES! Of course there’s so much to look forward to: More time with granddaughters and extended family there. Connections with new friends (Austin is a friendly place). A chance to reboot writing groups down there – or ...

Nine years ago as I pulled together the material that became The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing , I thought I knew the answer to that question, what is truth: It's what really happened, or what you really think. It's basic honesty, plain and simple. Everybody knows that, right? That's a good starting point, but as I've learned since then, that's both incomplete and misleading. Some of my increased understanding is old news, things I knew that had not integrated into my cluster of life writing neurons. Meanwhile, advances in the study of memory continue to deepen understanding. These discoveries have profound  relevance for life writers. Here's a list of a few evolving insights worth sharing: Memory is fallible . Contrary to what you probably heard in psychology class, self-help seminars, and various other places, you do not remember every minute detail of every sensation that ever entered your brain. Recent evidence shows that incoming data is filtered, sc...

My heart nearly broke when I checked the resolution of a photo in a client’s family history/memoir I was preparing for upload to CreateSpace.com for printing copies for family members. When I copied the document photo and pasted it into IrfanView (my favorite free photo editor for low-end needs), I saw that the resolution was only 72 dpi (dots or pixels per inch). That’s a small fraction of the pixel density CreateSpace requires. This was the case with nearly all the several dozen photos in the book. I had the gut-wrenching task of explaining to my client that she had a choice: I could resample the existing images to trick CreateSpace into believing they were 300 dpi . . . or she could rescan them. How I wished that she, like the majority of people scanning old family photos, knew all along about scanning at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. Here’s why it matters: CreateSpace will sound an alarm when it analyzes an uploaded document and finds even one image of less than 300 dpi. For g...

Invited guest post by Carol Bodensteiner Long time readers may be surprised to find a post about writing fiction on this blog about life writing. While it’s true that my focus is on memoir, lifestory, journaling and other forms that draw upon actual experience to express personal truth, sometimes the freedom of fiction is more effective in conveying truth. Carol Bodensteiner found this to be true. She has successfully written in both genres and her experience moving from memoir to fiction has lessons for all. I’d been a business writer all my life, so I was used to working with facts. Memoir was a logical first writing step. Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Girl , tells the stories of my childhood growing up on a family farm in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the 20 th Century. When I finally raised my head from writing, publishing, and marketing the memoir, I looked around for what I’d write next. I turned to family-inspired fiction, which I’d never written ...

Thanks to the efforts of his creative wife Vivian, on May 9 this year, about thirty people helped Don Duncan eat his words. We were all gathered at the Whitehall Public Library in Whitehall, Pennsylvania to celebrate the conclusion of The Power of Memoir , an eight-week series of classes  that I had the pleasure of leading. Each week a dozen eager students gathered for two hours to learn a few pointers from The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing . During the class, they read stories based on their assignment for the week. Each week we had a predictably wide spectrum of stories. Some, like the one about a woman’s first date with the undertaker who became her husband, had us howling with laughter. Stories about growing up in foster care touched our hearts. We shared memories of growing up around the South Hills region of metropolitan Pittsburgh, holidays, and other aspects of life. At the conclusion of the class, students brought their favorite stories to a Saturday morning event at th...

The pictures above have deep meaning for me, and I think they are likely to strike a chord with most viewers, evoking memories of their own. I want my stories to have that effect. I want readers to see themselves in my words, finding new ways to see old situations and become more fully themselves. I recently found this left-hand picture from 1973 in a pile I was sorting through. Something in it stirred me, though haziness dimmed my response. I decided to try restoring it. I scanned it with my Epson V600 scanner using Professional mode on the scanner interface. I used the Color Restoration tool and the Unsharp Mask tool set to high. That produced over 90% of the result you see on the right, but I wanted more. I cloned out spots on the pillow and sharpened the picture a bit more. Then I added a warming yellowish tone to approximate the wall color I recall. The crisp, haze-free result makes me feel like I’m “back in the picture,” especially when I view it full size and zoom in on details....

Dreams do come true – the day dream kind, the wish upon a star kind. I know this because many of mine have. I know they have because I wrote them down . Two examples stand out and show how writing dreams down can benefit life writers. Moving to Pittsburgh Around 1983 I began dreaming about moving away from what I considered to be the serious career limits of life in Washington’s Tri-Cities (Richland, Kennewick and Pasco). That was during the hey day of the goal setting movement, at least for me. So I drafted a list of everything I wanted when we moved, even though no move was in sight. That list had over twenty items. Among other things it included Major university. Major corporate headquarters A house with high ceilings A stream in our backyard. (That was pure whimsy, nothing I expected to get.) I stuck that list somewhere and forgot about it.  In 1985 my husband accepted a job transfer from the Westinghouse Hanford Nuclear Project to the Westinghouse Nuclear Center in Monroeville, Pe...

Sometimes you read a story and know something is “off,” but you can’t put your pencil on it. Chances are, the story’s rhythm or “music” is the problem. Most people are aware that rhythm is an inherent facet of poetry, especially classic, rhyming poetry. But if you went to the mall and asked random people if they thought stories have rhythm, the typical person would give you that lopsided, raised-eyebrow look that implies she thinks you’re nuts.  “What do you mean, rhythm in a story? Like in a song? Foot-tapping rhythm with a beat?”  “Any kind.” You shrug. “Well . . . no. There’s poems and songs. That stuff has rhythm. Stories, not so much. No. Stories don’t have rhythm. They’re just plain old talking like people talk." The fact is, plain old talking does have rhythm, at least when thoughts flow freely. Even the occasional “uhm” or stumble is rhythmic. For example, read aloud the following two sentence excerpt from a YouTube interview between Kathleen Pooler and Susan Weidner. As...

In her blog post, “ Jackasses & Monkeys – Inner demons of writing ,” Carol Bodensteiner reveals that her inner writing demons take the form of monkeys. She expresses relief on learning that others, such as Kimberly  Brock, have similar problems. In my opinion, Kimberly’s challenge is worse. She is beset by Jackasses . Carol invited readers to share their experiences. I also have demons, as I believe we all do. Like Carol, I battle monkeys, described by Zen masters as Monkey Mind. My monkeys are different from Carol’s. Mine swing through the trees at random, taking my thoughts along with them, rendering me incapable of staying focused. They dangle distractions, and they're a hindrance all the time, not just while writing. Look this up NOW! Right NOW! one shouts while I'm unloading the dishwasher or chopping celery for salad. When the monkey shouts, I enter a state of paralyzing need to obey. I crave the closure of filling that gap. Sometimes I return to chopping celery, but...