Kelly 5.0-The New and Improved Version

To hear my mother tell, it wasn't an easy birth. Kicking and screaming, fighting my way out of the birth canal---For the writers and readers amongst us, we'll call that a foreshadow. I was never an easy child, nor an uncomplicated adult. But, I've made it to fifty, so I must still be here for a reason.

You know the old saying "There is a lot of water under the bridge?" Yeah, that. Think Atlantic Ocean. Might as well include the other three as well. During a hurricane. And a tsunami.

  

But I have learned a lot and I think at fifty, you are allowed to share some of that knowledge. So here are a few of the more non-traditional things I've learned along the way; things that will hopefully see me through the next fifty years:

Raising good children is the most satisfying experience on the planet- I'm not talking about birthing them and making sure they live to see adulthood, I'm talking about raising them: teaching them to be compassionate human beings, giving them the tools so they can succeed, loving them even when you feel like strangling them. My children have been my greatest gift in life and I never considered parenting a hobby. It's paid off. I have two wonderful young men that continue to amaze me.

Laugh every day and make someone else laugh everyday-Of course there are documented health benefits to laughter, but the thing is, it just feels good to laugh. Make a point to do it every day, and if you can't get someone else to laugh, at least make them smile.

Strange is okay-My standard response when someone says "You're strange (weird, odd, crazy, etc.)" is "No, I'm unique." And that's a good thing. It reminds me of an old Edie Brickell song: What I am is what I am are you what you are or what?

 The power of the raised eyebrow-This subtle facial expression is very powerful when you use it correctly. If you aren't a natural, you'll have to practice and learn the technique (like I did). But once mastered, you will be able to convey a lot of thoughts without openly offending anyone.

Work to live, don't live to work-Yes, I work a lot. But, I do work to live. A life dedicated to working is not living. It's working.

Bad decisions usually weren't bad decisions at the time-We all spend way too much time looking back and thinking "if only I'd have taken this road instead." But here's the thing: We rarely remember why we chose the path we did. When given options, we all try to chose what is best for us, so at the time I made those decisions that I now consider 'bad', well, they seemed like my best option at the time. And who knows, maybe the other option would have been worse. Stop tripping on it and move on.

Fighting is a good thing-My dad used to say "Don't run up a hill you are not willing to die on." This has become a mantra in my house. Stand up for what you believe, and fight for the things that you are willing to take a punch for.

Weight IS an issue-I have struggled with my weight since I was 5. Yes, at five years old, I was the biggest kid in my class and for most years of my life, have been that big girl. I've tried every diet known to man, I exercise and I eat healthier than most, but it's always there. Even when I'm in one of my 'thin' stages, it's always there (fellow fatties know what I mean by this). When you are chronically overweight, everything you put in your mouth causes a mini guilt trip. Not a day passes when you don't think about it. Those that haven't lived this kind of life can never understand the personal torment that chronically overweight people experience.  It is a horrible way to live.  As I get older, I still work hard to control my weight and it's still an uphill fight. However, here's the big difference: I no longer do it because I want to 'look good', I do it now because I want to be healthier. Weight is a mental health issue, one I'm sure I can never resolve, but it is also a physical health issue---and I'm sure I will be working on that for the rest of my life.

Never underestimate the power of an animal's love-A pet will love you whether you are young, old, big, little, red, white, blue, gay, straight, obnoxious, reserved, overdressed, naked, conservative, liberal, happy or angry. Not a day goes by that my dog or cat doesn't make me smile and I can't imagine not having an animal friend in my home.

"If in doubt, don't" is bad advice-I've missed a lot of opportunities because of my own self doubt. Doubt often comes from fear, and fear you should try to overcome. If in doubt, think about why the doubt is there, re-evalute the situation and see if your reasons for doubt are justified. You may find you are missing a potentially golden opportunity just because you are afraid to fail.

Don't let people tell you 'you can't'-When I was a teenager, I wanted to do two things: write books and build houses. I heard so many times "writing is a hobby, not a job" and "no construction company is going to hire a girl" (It was the 70's, okay?) that I let that negativity infect me and went to nursing school instead. No one is allowed to tell me "you can't" any more. If they dare, I say "watch me." Now, I write. And I will build my own house some day. Watch me.

The Turner Erotica: Robert Begiebing on BookTalkNation.com

 April 24, 2013 at 7:00 pm EST, author Robert Begiebing will be interviewed live on BookTalkNation.com about his latest release, The Turner Erotica: A Biographical Novel. Begiebing is one of the most fascinating speakers I have had the pleasure to listen to and his knowledge of historical fiction writing is legendary. Don't miss this opportunity to talk with him, ask a question or just listen and learn from him.  

Go to BookTalkNation.com and register for the interview and send in a question for Robert Begiebing. A wonderful opportunity to hear from an amazing artist.


I have included below an excerpt from an interview with the author conducted by John Lemon, editor and owner of Ilium Press.   

Research. Art. History. Oh, and erotica.

The story behind the story is a story in itself...

JL: J. M. W. Turner was a revolutionary 19th century artist. Explain how his work changed the landscape of art.

April, 2013 from Ilium Press

RB: This is a big question probably not adequately answerable in an interview like this without sounding like a parody of glib art criticism. But let me try to lay out some points to suggest Turner's significance. Beyond sheer genius, being the youngest member elected to the Royal Academy, one of the first things that comes to mind is his taking the art of watercolors to a whole new level of technique and competence, demonstrating that water can be as important, detailed, and powerful as oil painting. He was a real pioneer on that front, just as he brought the techniques of oil painting to a new level, including original uses of some of the new pigments available in the early 19th century.
Turner is arguably the greatest painter Britain has produced, and his paintings have become national icons. He's buried in St. Paul's Cathedral along with other great British artists and national heroes such as Lord Nelson. The National Gallery accepted his posthumous bequest in 1856, representing 60 years of dedicated artistic labor—including something like 540 oil paintings, 1,600 finished watercolors, and 19,300 sketch studies.
He's the great master of advancing painterly traditions even while forging a new visionary Western art that reaches through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. If he studied during his journeys abroad old masters such as Titian, Claude, and the Venetians—Canaletto, Titian, Tintoretto—particularly for confidence in his lengthy elucidation of light, he also studied his more local 18th-century predecessors from Blake to West to Mortimer. And he worked in all the traditional genres—history, biblical and mythological themes, landscapes, marines, and so on, avoiding only portraiture per se. Probably in part because he made a respectable living without the grind of portraiture so many lesser painters depended on for patronage. (After his famous self-portrait at age 26 or 27, he stayed away from it.) It's his land and seascapes that represent him at his most advanced and visionary—

JL: So, to be clear, it is as what you are calling a visionary artist that his influence is greatest?

Robert Begiebing

RB: Yes. As a visionary artist, reminiscent of his near contemporary Blake, Turner developed on canvas a perception of strong light eroding the solidity of the material world; he became, as one critic called him, a "painter of light, air, space." His life partakes of the character of his works: ever evolving, mysterious and puzzling to the observer who is forced to think; he avoids explanations, but was known to wink and say, "Make that out if you can." This deeper and mysterious attribute of his work seems to parallel his private life—his relations with women, his illegitimate children, and his private abodes and incognitos unknown to most of his acquaintances. He found a way to employ his whole self, including the mature and immature self, the eccentric self and the Royal Academician, a self that expresses an almost adolescent curiosity or fascination with the architecture and physiology and energy of sex (evident in the erotica), which seems, in turn, an expression of his inexhaustible appetite for observation.
His effects, traditional and visionary, lay beyond the competence of most artists at the time, including painting with his fingers, fingernails, brush ends, etc., along with the usual accoutrements. He's advancing the art at every level. And his influence is vast, not least unto the European and American Impressionists but also all the way into the mid-twentieth century abstract, non-objective painters, and no doubt beyond.

JL: Can you give a few examples?

RB: If Turner influenced the French (from Delacroix in 1825 to the Impressionists in 1870) who used his example pointing the way nearer the heart of Light more than he influenced English painters, the Americans above all developed a devotion to Turner. As early as the 1830s American artists such as Benjamin West and Washington Allston championed Turner as did William Ellery Channing in the North American Review. Thomas Cole studied Turner and met him. Fredrick Church was deeply influenced, as was Abba May Alcott, described as a "female Turner." And then there are the American Luminists, of the 1860s mostly: Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade. Their studies of light and atmosphere were more generally serene, but they are a sort of Constable meets Turner group. All these Americans were suggesting on canvas the palpability of light; if forms are isolated structurally, they are tied together coloristically through a golden glow or blue tonality playing over them. Turner is not without influence on the Transcendentalist writers as well, in the sense that they seek the divinity of light and submergence of one's personality in Divine power. Charles Eliot Norton mounted an exhibition in America and Ralph Waldo Emerson read Modern Painters.
Thomas Moran is called "The American Turner." By late 1860s and 70s the American palettes grow even lighter and more colorful as American artists prepare for the full impact of impressionism in the 1880s-90s (studying the ways light affects color relationships as well as compositional organization): think of Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, even John Singer Sargent. And then there is James McNeill Whistler whose gestural manner and use of color for moods, as if he were creating music and poetry, looks ahead to the abstractionist expressionists.
Is it too far a reach to suggest that in the twentieth century, to take just two examples, Rothko's bands and blocks of color and Jackson Pollock's energized brush strokes and gestural splashes and power drips of paint display a chain of influence? Look at Pollock's Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance. And come to think of it, Motherwell spoke of Turner's lead in organizing "states of feeling" as "questions of light, color, weight, solidity, airiness, lyricism…." Turner valued not only cosmic energy in his paintings, he adumbrated these much later artists in his quest for emotionality, for unconscious energy, for nature's elemental forces. It's very difficult for me to look at some of these abstract expressionists without seeing the familiar visionary subjectivity in Turner's late works.

JL: There has been a significant amount of controversy around the theft and destruction of the Turner erotica sketches. Explain your research that leads you to believe this really occurred and by John Ruskin's hand.

RB: By the documentary evidence available to us, the destruction most likely did occur. If you credit the documentary evidence (it boils down to four documents, letters and diary entries) you don't end up trying to prove a negative (i.e., no holocaust) through reasonable speculations and extrapolations. Just before or just after someone's death, the burning of potentially embarrassing documents was not at all uncommon in the nineteenth century. One of the most famous instances is Isabel Burton's burning of Sir Richard Burton's manuscripts and papers after his death. She cited Ruskin's burning of the Turner erotica as one excuse for her doing so, to preserve another great man's reputation.
There is some debate, however, over how much Turner erotica was burned, or even whether any was, since Turner scholar Ian Warrell posited another way to look at the surviving erotic studies in a long academic essay on the matter. Warrell was tentative and exploratory about a possible interpretation of evidence that might at least suggest the immolation never occurred, but the press (The New York Times and The Guardian) got wind of Warrell's essay and turned the matter into a "case closed" and "we've all been fooled by this legend" news story, in the sensational, absolutist manner journalists are too often prone to feed us benighted citizens in the interests of commerce.
On the other hand, the specifics of the theft by narrator Stillman's hand are fictional though plausible, given what we know of Stillman and the rather mysterious falling out he actually had with Ruskin, his one-time mentor.

Check out all of Robert Begiebing's books at his website www.begiebing.com

Visit Ilium Press at www.iliumpress.com



Interview reproduced with author permission. 

NO VAN GOGH

Almost four novels written. The first one I don't usually count, because even divine intervention  couldn't fix that, but novels two and three are pretty good (if I do say so myself, which, I just did). The problem is, I haven't been able to get an agent who likes them enough to sell them. Notice I say 'likes them enough', it's not that those that have read them haven't liked them, just not enough to jump on the Kelly train.

A  few weeks ago, I started thinking of what to do when this fourth novel is complete. Do I start on another? Send out a hundred more queries? Or just stack it on top of the others? Personally, I think four unpublished is enough. I need a hobby that doesn't revolve around rejection. Maybe I'll sit on the porch and count the cars that go by instead. Yes, I'll stack this one on top of the others and shove it in a box.

We all have our own monsters; mine are typed in 12 point font.

Maybe, I thought, I am the Van Gogh of writing. Maybe, after I die, my kids will find a stack of manuscripts, read a few and decide, 'these aren't so bad'. Maybe they will find someone to take them on, and I'll be posthumously famous, my kids earning royalties for the rest of their lives. Vincent, like me, was agentless. He peddled his wares on a street corner and perfected his craft in a mental institution. Not exactly what I had in mind, but after reading thirty-plus versions of "I love the story but..." I decided it was time to embrace my inner Van Gogh.

Last week, while I was hacking off my ear, I heard the notification 'ding'-- Another email from an agent. I didn't want to look, but thought, what the hell. I put down the straight razor and read a familiar first line..."I love the writing, but..." As I continued to read, though, it didn't actually seem like a rejection. Instead, it was a suggestion for a tweak to the manuscript and ended with:

"What do you think?"

"I think I should find an old newspaper to wrap this ear in," was my first thought, but I didn't know if this particular agent would appreciate my dark humor. Oh, hell, of course she would. She just read THEY CALL ME CRAZY. "And she liked it, but...."

So I responded (I left out the ear part), and attached a chapter revision that addressed her 'but'.

And today, I sewed my ear back on.

THEY CALL ME CRAZY

Represented by Svetlana Pironko

Author Rights Agency

Narcolepsy and Writing

My friend Jen Boissonneault wrote a blog post about dreams, which in turn inspired another friend, Natalie Kenney, to blog about dreams, and I thought this would be a good time to jump on the dreamwagon. My dreaming is a little different than most because I have Narcolepsy.

Jen and Natalie. I was probably napping somewhere.

Not the "I'm-just-tired-all-the-time-so-I'll-claim-an-illness" kind, but the real thing. Although I'm sure I've had it for decades, I was officially diagnosed about ten years ago, and my life definitely changed.  I've tried all of the medicine on the market, but found the side effects were more than I could handle, so I adjusted my lifestyle. I sleep four times a day, for a few hours at a time. It's currently 3am, and yes, I am writing this post. I now schedule every part of my day and if my schedule is interrupted, it can be very distressing.

 I experience cataplexy almost daily, so I have learned to control my emotions. I love to laugh, but I make sure when I do, I am sitting down, or at least holding on to something. Otherwise, I may fall down. Sleep paralysis I experience quite frequently, and although I should be use to it, it is still frightening every time.

So what does all of that have to do with writing and dreams? I'm getting there. First a nap...

While many people have difficulty falling asleep and then typically take an hour or more to reach the first phase of REM sleep, I don't. My non-REM periods, the 'brain resting phase' of sleep,  are very brief. Typically, I'm asleep in less than five minutes of my head hitting the pillow; my husband claims it's more like less than a minute. But although it may appear that I'm sleeping at first, I'm really not. I go through periods of hypnagogic hallucinations, which many artists, like Beethoven and Salvador Dali, said aided their creativity. Some, maybe, but most are frightening. They seem more real than reality, if you can imagine something like that. And it is the one time during my sleep period that I don't realize I am actually asleep. I once called 911 during this period and told the operator there was someone in my house and my husband had been shot. I could smell the gunpowder. Yeah, explain that one to the cops at 2am.

Then, finally, I get to the good stuff. The REM sleep, the dream state. This is the best part, not only because I dream lucidly every time, but because I can control my actions in my dreams. There's a fancy medical term for that, too, but basically, if I'm having a nightmare, I just change it. I turn monsters in to puppies, or I fly away. I like to jump off buildings and mountains and then catch myself just before I hit ground. Call it my dream hobby. I guess this is my sleep reward for making it through the hallucinations without going crazy.

Then I wake up, almost directly from REM, and can go right back to whatever I was doing before my nap. And, yes, I do this at least four times a day.

So, of course I have the cataplexy to deal with, and my brain will eventually burn out from lack of rest, if I don't die of a heart attack during a horrifying hallucination first, but there are benefits,  as a writer.

My creativity meter is always on high. I've found myself 'creating' a scene in a dream, watching it, changing it, smelling it, feeling it, and then waking up to write it. The middle of the night is my most productive time, because the house is quiet, I've just had a two hour bout of inspiration, and can sit down and write non- stop for hours.

Then it starts all over again.

Please check out Jen Boissoneault's blog post about dreams facts and Natalie Kenney's blog post about her own dreams as inspiration for writing.Then feel free to jump on the dream wagon with us this week!

Editing: Nothing to Cry About

 If you are a writer involved in a group of like-minded crazies, I'm sure you've sent a message similar to the one I sent a few weeks ago to my inner circle:

I need a reader.

 It was a simple request and was met with a response from my friend and author David Rawding:

Sure. Page for page?

And that's how it began. I sent him 30 pages, he sent me 30. Then it became an episode of Writers Gone Wild as we delved into a week of editing---marathon style. In a week, we both did a fairly in depth evaluation of each other's novel, forsaking sleep, food, showers and work. Not really, but it took all of our spare time. And it was well worth it.

Hanging out with David Rawding

David and I have very different writing styles and our strengths are in different areas. However, our editing style is very similar, and that is where the real fun came in to play. Neither of us are much for writing 'good job!' all over a page. We're both  thick skinned and prefer helpful comments to empty compliments. To- the-point, at times harsh and at other times, pure comedy.

His comments from one particular scene were brutal.  It didn't need to be there, and the actions of my protag made no sense. Yes, my friend made fun of me. Yes, I deserved it. Yes, I was able to laugh about it-- so hard that tears filled my eyes.

You see, I love the editing process. I want to know what works and what doesn't, what needs more description or less, and what is downright wrong about a scene. I take comments and suggestions very seriously and use them to make my work stronger. But it can be a tedious process devoid of humor, so it helps to have someone who can lighten things up a bit--Even if it's me they are making fun of.

Afterall, being able to laugh at yourself is a great trait to have. And hopefully, it will keep my readers from laughing at me later. 

Check out David Rawding's website at www.davidrawding.com and read about his manuscript, Taking on Water.