Have Another Cup on Me...

 

Yesterday daughter and I began listening, on audiotape, to the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. Four years ago in the shuffle of moving from Oregon to Hawaii I lost my set of Robbins' tapes. As we were packing to move from California back to Oregon, a sweet friend drove for two hours to give me copies of his tapes.

Now, isn’t that a gesture worth writing about?

Daughter and I planned to become motivated for success as we drove up I-5 aiming for our new home. Except that with two adults, one 4-year-old in a car seat, two dogs and a cat stuffed into our faithful Toyota pickup truck, it was like this:

 

 Or maybe this:

 

Okay, back to Robbins. The first assignment given by Tony is to do two things that would change the course of your life.

 

Two things. Things you have been putting off. Maybe call a person and clear up some misunderstanding. Do the thing you don’t want to do. 

My two things?

I finally decided to send my manuscript Mother’s Letters, Daughters’ Secrets to a publisher. I had a publisher on my docket. They wanted a completed manuscript and I was waiting until I had one.  I checked their site and found they are not accepting submissions at the present time. Har har. “This summer,” they said.

Okay. Check in with another publisher. Can't find this particular publisher on the web.  Har, har, har. I guess everything is pointing the eBook submission. 

 I need a cover.

 So I ordered Corel Draw in hopes of making a book cover. Any words of advice?

Keep checking in as I follow the tapes I will pass on what inspires me.
 

 

And from dear Zig:

 

 

                                                     

 

 

Some say we need a coach to keep us on our toes or entropy sets in.

If you want some personal attention you think I can help you with sign in with the contact form at the top of the page. I will get right back to you and will not share your email.

 

aSoulMan: “We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive”— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Handle stress with grace. In late March, President Obama was addressing a highly controversial topic during a speech in Jerusalem when a young man began heckling him from the audience. Not missing a beat, the president listened while the young man finished his comments and responded by stating, "This is part of the lively debate we talked about," without expressing anger or frustration.

Disregarding President Obama's politics, he handled what could have been a tense situation gracefully and ultimately got a standing ovation for his quick, collected reaction.

A Good Ole Rambling

 

I ought to check the block where we live to see if anyone else is writing a blog on writing. I want to be honest that I am still the best on the block.

 

We recently moved from California to Oregon so we have a new block. From the forested hills of the Cascade Mountains to Hawaii to the Willamette Valley where the green grass grows, where the wetlands are, where the water fowl roam, and where, at night, the frog's sing. We have had a busy three years or has it been four? Time is tied up in some sort of-- a what did Stephen Hawkins call it? A Singularity? I don’t know what that is. I just know what feeling jumbled is.

 

I lost my sister last week and wrote about it on my other blog http://wishonawhitehorse.blogspot.com

 

My sweet sister. Her life was extraordinary. She said she believed her parents had died and hid her in a closet. We know it was her grandmother to took her to the orphanage, but that’s all we know. My parents adopted her by proxy, and from the moment off the plane, she was our girl. Jan never felt the urge to go to Korea as some other adoptees have, she was American through and through. There is a wonderful picture of mother and Jan taken shortly after she arrived that was printed in The Dalles Chronicle. I found it last night with the magic of microfilm at the University of Oregon Library. It is posted on my other site http://wishonawhitehorse.blogspot.com

 I believed, given her past, that Jan was a survivor, and she was until death won. And, of course, it brings up one’s own mortality, and I getting tired of people dying.

This is a writer’s blog so I ought to be talking about writing, but my  brain is wandering and my fingers are recording it.  When I was packing in California I gave away a box of books on writing, so I am now on my own. I had the box set aside, but when we were loaded that is the U-haul boxes had left on a semi, and our pickup truck was loaded with a cat, two dogs, a daughter, a grandson and me, there was no room for the box. It went into the donation pile. So, go to The Salvation Army store, there ought to be an excellent supply of books on writing. But where did they end up? I don’t know, Temecula California maybe.

 

One book that survived the packing ordeal was The Art &Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall. If I consider that to be an oracle that would be telling wouldn’t it? Is it time for me to write a Novel.

A steamy one? People like that. Vampires? I think the world is saturated with vampires. They say to write what you love, write what you know, although I heard one author say he wrote what he didn’t know for he was tired of hearing the same ole same ole in his head.

 

Writing a memoir is not all that much different than writing a novel, the only difference is it's real. I once heard a teacher say, "Everything I said is real, I just changed the words."

All I can say is follow your heart, your dream, and keep writing. Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) said writing will take you where you want to go. See, although my books are gone I remember something. Gosh I hope maybe that book is in a box somewhere in our garage.

 

 Onward and upward,

 

Jewell D

P.S. A coffee cat for you.

 

 “This is what books should do: Carry a person and not be carried by him; take the day off his back, not add its own ounces of paper to his vertebrae.” –Erri De Luca Three Horses, Translated by Michael F. Moore

Three Horses, the measure of the life of a man. Let’s hope for long-lived horses.

Doesn't it distress you to think of books ending up as lighted letters on a computer screen? What has happened to the smell of old pages, the silky smoothness of new, the stolen moments under the sheets reading by flashlight?

Writes De Luca, "I read used books, because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll hold onto them for a spell. Books should die like people consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on the shelf."