My Magic Kingdom for an Authentic Florida

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Orlando can be disconcerting.

Not just the Disney area – though that long strip of International Drive is a strange blend of Route 66-flavor liquor stores and road stops, interspersed with every party-meal franchise restaurant imaginable. Along with the theme hotels and cartoon signage. Theme parks have proliferated in the area, like so many clones grown from the dispersion of tourist-dollar spores. There’s Sea World, Aquatica, Wet and Wild and Disney Beach. Epcot, of course, Dinosaur Land, Holy Land. Every theme imaginable has its park.

But what gets truly disconcerting is that the housing developments have a theme-feel. It’s hard to put your finger on the quality of it. They seem self-consciously pretty, with vast expanses of common areas that might accommodate a carnival at any moment. Even the downtown is composed of pretty buildings in shining glass and pastel colors. Each has an unusual, frisky roofline.

That’s when it hit us – nowhere were the sagging warehouses, the depression era buildings that have been desultorily rehabbed. Everything is of a certain era and aesthetic. It creates a sense that everything is a façade, that nothing is truly authentic.

When we were in Lincoln, Nebraska, I wrote about our debate over the aesthetic – or lack thereof – of the West. And I don’t like the lack of care that comes from that, the ugliness by default. The magic kingdom approach, though, seems like a relentless glossing of reality.
After passing downtown, we glimpsed off to the side a lake in a park. A boathouse and pavilion sat reflected on one end. It looked to me like old Florida, in its Spanish splendor. It could have been another facsimile. Old Orlando City Theme Park: come listen to the old-timey flamenco bands and eat cotton candy and get your Ponce de Leon souvenir doll, ride the fountain of youth waterslide!

Even in a glimpse, though, it had a feeling of age and authenticity, in a place where little else does. It managed to be beautiful, also.

A friend who grew up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee turned down a job in Gettysburg because she said she’d never again live in a tourist town. Tourism kills the soul of a place, she said. When I asked her why, she couldn’t explain it better than that.

I suspect it has something to do with creating an appearance to temporarily please. There’s no pay-off in substance when attracting tourism. All is for fleeting pleasure, not for long-term sustenance. In some ways, that kind of calculated prettification is as unsatisfying as leaving things ugly because it’s not worth the effort.

Curls and Girls

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My hair is developing waves in it. While this may seem like a minor point, it’s significant in that I’ve, for the past forty years, had bone-straight hair. Unless I chemically altered it, which I spent a fair amount of time and money doing.

It’s especially noticeable down here in Tampa, the humidity antipode to Laramie. I’m down here with three other gals who typically make up my work team. Two of them are about five years older than I am and are full of “change of life” advice. One’s theory is the “curlier as you age” theory. Up until now, though, she’s been all about the “gray hair has a different texture and thus is curlier” theory. But, since, I have only a few silver hairs, right at my part, she’s generously revised her theory to include my drift to curliness with regularly textured hair.

And I don’t mind the waves. Kind of different.

What I do mind is the whole “peri-menopausal” thing. A medical type recently informed me that peri-menopausal includes the 10-15 years before and after the actual Pause. Which means, for those terrifed to do the math, one can have perimenopausal symptoms for, yes, that’s right: THIRTY YEARS.

Has anyone else noticed that this comes out to at least a third of a normal life?

I don’t buy it. To me, this is like the “we’ve been dying since the day we’re born” view of life. Just because something is a certainty in the future doesn’t mean it’s already in process. You can move towards a thing without being it. And once you’ve moved through an event, you don’t have to carry it around with you, the tattered remains of it like streamers hanging off your limbs.

Change of life, fine. It happens. Hormones shift, our bodies change. Different physiological priorities.

Now can we move on?

White Horse Optional

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My friend, Laura – and old friend from high school recently rediscovered on Facebook – asked me to help her come up with a “headline” for her Match.com profile. It’s basically dating-twitter. 140 characters to advertise who she is and what she wants.

Of course I said yes. I love to find the right words to describe people. I asked her if she was looking for true love, sex and fun or babies and the white picket fence. I expected her to quibble with me, to equivocate over what she might want now versus later. But no.

True Love, she promptly replied.

So I ran with it and we came up with this:

Waiting for the fairytale. Blonde belle seeks prince among men. White horse optional.

I wondered if it would be too much. I’m clearly interested in the fairytale ending, be that what you really wished for or not, but I know a lot of people out there (read: men) have issues with the female ideas of happily ever after. Can’t say I blame them really. What reasonable man wants to get mixed up with a gal who thinks she’s a princess and it’s his job to rescue her and take her off into the sunset? The thing is, we don’t really think that. We’re big girls now.

That’s why the white horse is optional.

By the following day, though, Laura reported 229 page views on her profile, 35 contacts and one verified hottie who says he owns a white horse. She’s talking about holding out for the full luxury package after all.

Another friend of mine was devastatingly dumped by the guy she’d invested in. He told her he loved her one day and the next that he hadn’t loved her in a long time. He was surprised she didn’t know that. It took her a while to pull herself together and a while longer to date again. But she hasn’t found IT again. Now she’s spending time with a guy she’s been, by her own description, “dating by default.” When I ask her about it, she sounds like she’s not convinced she can do better than that.

I want them both to have the happily ever after. I’m a believer in true love. I never expected to have it and here I’m nearly twenty years with a man who’s a better companion to my life than I ever thought possible. He’s added a richness and intimacy to my life that my girlish fairytale endings didn’t know to include. I like that he tells me he’s become a better critical thinker from being around me. I especially like that he’s someone interested in becoming a better critical thinker. He’s a prince among men.

Romance stories are often criticized for ending at the moment of the Happily Ever After, be it the wedding, or the exchange of vows of eternal love or what have you. The thing is, if you do it right, once you ride off into to the sunset, you get to live there.

And that makes so many other things worthwhile.

Perfect Something

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I’ve come to think that people who get excited about having perfect pitch are assholes.

Is that too strong?

I mean all my life I’ve been hearing about perfect pitch and how those who have it are these kind of fragile nobility, both blessed with this extra faculty, but also cursed to suffer in a world of cacophony. That’s the obnoxious part. Clearly I have issues with my lack of inherent musical talent, but I don’t feel like I bear a grudge towards those who have it. Most of the time I feel grateful that they’re out there, making music for me to listen to. And to sing along with. Remorselessly off key.

But the whole perfect pitch thing seems extraneous to that.

I spent some time in my life working on auditory neurophysiology, so I know something about sound and how the brain processes it. And there are interesting studies on what is now called absolute pitch. (See? Someone besides me got annoyed with the “perfect” judgement.) The most interesting aspects of absolute pitch are that people either have it or do NOT have it — there’s very little middle ground. The graph to the right is from the study linked to above. The authors of this study indicate that the probability of scoring above the vertical line by chance alone is about one in a trillion. The middle-ground folks, they theorize, are well-trained and have taught themselves to identify tones. If you’re interested, you can take the survey and test on their site. My pure tone score? 4.5. Right in the upper left corner of that box down in the “don’t have it” end of the graph. Interestingly, my piano tone score was 10, which means my harp teacher managed to teach me something.

The reasearchers say there’s genetic predisposition — if it runs in your family, you’re likely to have it. There’s also the learning aspect. If you started music lessons by the age of seven, you’re also more likely to have it. And if you have siblings who were taking lessons while you were growing up, you’re even more likely to develop absolute pitch.

A lot of fantasy/magic stories like to tie perfect pitch to magical ability, as if there’s a certain keenness to their minds the rest of us lack. And people like to tie high IQ to absolute pitch. To me though, this is like tying IQ to spelling ability.

I’m a compulsive proofreader. I can’t help it. Misspelled words stand out on the page to me like they’re in bold type. Obviously a lot of this is learned, but I’ve also felt like this is an inherent ability. Kev commented on my words & music post the other day, saying that, as a programmer, he literally can’t read content until he’s first scanned for syntax errors. I also heard of an editor so accustomed to proofing on-screen that, when she first started reading on the Kindle, she found herself compulsively proof-reading.

The thing is, I can’t imagine the book where magic is tied to proof-reading and spelling ability. It’s frankly just not romantic enough. Though I suspect much the same mechanism is involved. Penelope Trunk at Brazen Careerist likes to rant about the tyranny of the proofing-nuts. She even hints that perfect spellers have borderline Asperger’s syndrome and cites a documentary about it. (Interestingly, the absolute pitch survey also asks about family history of Asperger’s syndrome and autism, so maybe there are links.) Certainly no one is going to go around talking about being a tormented soul, bombarded by typos in a perfect world.

Though I sometimes contemplate volunteering to edit the menu at our local Chinese place. So far I’ve resisted. Can’t figure out a way to offer without sounding like an asshole.

Seems like a good behavioral guideline to me.

Reading Time

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I’m so amused that I have to share.

I bought an ebook yesterday from Fictionwise for my Kindle. This is one of the sites that sells ebooks and emags, that ISN’T Amazon. (I know — who thought it was possible?) Fictionwise seems to be a pretty decent site, though I paid more for this ebook than I have for any so far. They promised me a 50% rebate, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it and finally decided it wasn’t worth $7 to me to screw around with it any more. A little bait & switch-y there, but so it goes. Along with the traditional book information, they give this:

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat – What’s this?]:
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [895 KB], eReader (PDB) [317 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [312 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [278 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [277 KB] – PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [306 KB], hiebook (KML) [699 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [364 KB], iSilo (PDB) [259 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [322 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [379 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [450 KB]
Words: 96890
Reading time: 276-387 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

My favorite part is the offered “reading time.” I suppose this kind of thing is inevitable in a culture where every minute is squeezed for maximum effect. But, is it just me? This seems like such an odd quantification for pleasure reading. I mean, sure, when I was in college or grad school, I figured out my approximate reading rate, so I could plan how long a particular text would take me to get through. Like I would any job. As a consultant, I have to be very good at knowing how long, in terms of billable hours, a given project will take to accomplish. Both by me and anyone on my team. What I do for work or schooling, though, rarely applies to my leisure time.

For those who don’t want to do the math, the reading time suggested here varies between 250 and 350 words per minute. My reading rate is generally around a page a minute, if I’m being pretty direct about it. We already discussed here the whole “paragraphs as mountains” concept and that “industry standard” for genre is 250 words per page. Denser works have more words per page. I find it really interesting that the supposed industry standard for genre matches the bottom end of Fictionwise’s reading rate.

I’m sure there are people who sit around and figure this kind of thing out. All part of product development and placement. Still, as much as I believe I’m jaded and cynical now, things like this continue to surprise me. Which probably shows my enduring naivete in the face of the world’s attempts to toughen me up.

Despite it all, there’s a part of me that’s still the little girl who always had her nose in a book. The girl who picked out the thickest books on the library shelf, because they would last longer. I want to immerse, to lose track of time, to slow down in the second half, so the story won’t end too soon.

Let my reading be timeless, please.

Fractals and Obituaries

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Kalayna Price is disappointed in the pattern of her days.

Kalayna, one of my online friends (again someone I’ve never met in person), posted the above on facebook this morning. She, like many of us, is a writer who also works at a “real” job that pays her actual money. She often posts comments at the beginning of her work day, remarking on the fact that she’d rather be writing. She reports on how many words she wrote over her lunch hour. She’s driven and pushes hard for the brass ring we all want: to make enough money writing to quit the day job.

So I know what she means about being disappointed in the pattern of her days. Especially when a few days or a few weeks vanish with not enough writing accomplished. You begin to feel this vague desperation that nothing will ever change, that you’re not trying hard enough, even as something inside you whimpers that you’re already pushed as far as you can go. Maybe it’s like this for everyone who is pursuing a goal.

There’s this whole idea of fractals related to time-management and the pursuit of goals. A fractal is a mathematical construct that demonstrates the concept that very small patterns are echoed in larger patterns. Thus the outline of a pebble is reflected in the outline of a mountain range. So, the idea is, the pattern of each day will create the pattern of your whole life. If you spend 5% of your day dorking around on facebook, then 5% of your entire life is — yeah, you got it.

You can play with this idea, but I can tell you right now: it leads to depression and obsession. One way to explore it is to track your time. Just brace yourself for the results, is all I can say. Then, you try to reapportion your time so that bigger chunks are spent on the things, say, you’d like to see mentioned in your obituary–were you to have the opportunity to see it, which you won’t of course. This is where the obsession comes in. You’ll find yourself scorning the “wasted” time spent on non-obituary-worthy things like sleep and meal preparation. You’ll start parsing out, minute-by-minute, who is wasting your time, which means a chunk of your life, multiplied fractally.

Oh yeah, I’ve been there. And it’s not pretty.

I love to read obituaries. Mostly I’m fascinated by what family and friends consider to be the salient details of their loved one’s life. “Active in her church,” “was happiest fishing in his beloved mountains,” “adored her grandchildren.” Rarely do they reflect a life journey. They might list degrees and accomplishments, books published and prizes acquired. More usually it’s a genealogical record of parentage, marriages, divorces and progeny, with a few personal details thrown in, to liven it up.

My point is, none of us know what the pattern of our lives will be until it’s complete, and then we’ll be too dead to see it. And clearly, unless you get a great biographer interested in you, no one’s going to write anything interesting about it, either.

Days are a random increment of time. A coincidental product of the way our planet spins. Some days we write thousands of wonderful words, other days not at all. Some days we spend in the sun with a margarita by the ocean. Others are spent working on what someone is willing to pay us to do. All of these things make up our lives, in rising and falling waves, constantly changing in amplitude. The pattern of my days now are not what they were like when I was 12 or at 32. I suspect at 62 they’ll be something else altogether.

I trust that what they’ll be is the flowering of what I do now, not an echo.

Multiple Identities

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Many writers use pen names in the genre world. Some are just deviations or abbreviations of their day-to-day names like Chuck Box writing as “C.J. Box.” Others use multiple names for the various “types” of stories they write, like Jayne Ann Krentz who uses that name, her married name for contemporary romantic-suspense, her maiden name, Jayne Castle, for paranormal romance and Amanda Quick for her historic romantic-suspense. She gave an interesting talk at the RWA National Convention about how she’d destroyed the “Jayne Castle” voice for a while, because readers wouldn’t buy it. She later resurrected the name with the upsurge in interest in paranormal romance.

So, I can see the point: Chuck picks something that looks good on a cover. Jayne uses several names, to guide readers to the kind of story they like to read.

But it starts to get silly in the world of online writers loops. Maybe it’s complicated by the fear of internet stalkers thing. But often someone will have an email address like bethwrites@whoosies.com and then her IM avatar will be called Stella, Queen of the Night. Then she’ll email you and say her name is really Mary Beth Jones, but that she writes as Angora Conch. It splits my skull, I tell you. Especially if I’ve only met her online and have managed to recognize bethwrites and Stella as the same person, but she wants to hook up at the RT convention, but her name tag will probably say Angora.

I know, I should talk. But I’m only Jennifer for legal stuff. Everything I’ve written is as Jeffe Kennedy. My email address is my name, at my domain name, which is my name. My avatars are all some version of Jeffe. I contemplated seperating my fiction and nonfiction selves with a pen name, but all my stories feel like a part of me. I want them all to belong to the same name.

It’s interesting to me, because the literary types rarely do this. Oh, they’ll do the Chuck Box thing, or like I did. But, as a “serious” writer, your name, your self, is your copywrightable product. Much was made for some time of making sure you got the yourname.com domain, since your name is your product.

Of course, there’s the element of fantasy in the world of romance. Readers escape into it, so it’s natural that the writers do, too. Everybody wants to be the spy or the superhero, with multiple secret identities. But there’s also some obsfucation involved. Anne Rice wrote BDSM stuff as A.N. Roquelaure and another novel that toyed with pedophilia as Anne Rampling. Perhaps it’s a nod to the Puritanical whispers in our culture, the urge to hide behind an alternate identity. Though the trend these days seems to be to proudly acknowledge all pen names, which to me begs the point of having them in the first place.

Of course, the most interesting part of any spy or superhero story is when the secret identity is revealed. Noteworthy that it’s also the crisis point when the hero is brought down. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night follows day, thou canst not be false to any man.”

I wonder sometimes, if the secret identity makes one more true or more false, inside our skulls.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

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So, David made a good point this weekend.

Which he often does, being an insightful guy. I told him about my post on Saturday and how I’m thinking I might just give up on trying to have music, too. After all, I said to him, I have words and I can draw, paint and sculpt passably. I can quilt and “have an eye for color,” our real estate agent says. I have so many venues to express myself creatively, maybe I can just give music a pass.

But you already have music, he told me. Which surprised me.

You sing around the house all the time, he said. I hear you singing. You already have music.

And I realized he’s right. I have music running through my head all the time. Sometimes I sing along. Just because I don’t sing well enough for anyone to want to listen or because I don’t play an instrument (I’m just NOT counting the harp playing) doesn’t mean that music isn’t there for me. I’ve been so fixed on the idea that I needed to be able to play music, that I missed what I really love about music in the first place:

I love that space where words and music intersect. It’s fascinating to me how, when words are sung, they’re intensified by the melodies and harmonies behind them. What I would love to do is write lyrics. I wonder how one gets into that if one isn’t, say cleaning house for an aging former-80s pop icon? When I was having dinner before seeing Legally Blonde on Broadway, the guy at the table next to me turned out to be a lyricist. He was having dinner with the gal who composed the music (who’d run off to take a phone call). She’d found him, it turned out. Just like it happened for Drew Barrymore.

Where is Hugh Grant when I need him?

Our First Spat

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Alas, the Kindle honeymoon is over.

No, he didn’t let me down. Didn’t stand me up or fail to be there when I needed him. And really, the love affair is still strong. I just discovered one of his flaws. Inevitable in every romance.

It turns out I can’t buy books for my Kindle-having friends.

I thought I could go to Amazon, buy several books for my friend Karen’s birthday and send them to her Kindle. Instant birthday present! She turned me onto the Kindle in the first place so it seemed good and right to do this.

But I can’t.

I can give her a gift certificate, says the Amazon guy. Or send her the hard copies. We can actually share registries and trade books. But I’m old-fashioned, and a writer to boot: I want the author to get her sale out of it. I don’t want to send a generic gift c, I want to send a specific book. A specific series, in fact. Giving a friend a book you love is a way of communicating, of sharing the experience. It’s a letter, written in someone else’s voice.

If Amazon wants to change how we read books, they’ll have to get a grip on this.

Words and Music By…

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My friend, Linda Ceriello, asked me interesting questions about writers and creativity the other day. She’s one of my oldest friends, dating back to third grade, though we suffered a vast chasm of difference starting with seventh-grade angst that lasted twenty years. It’s funny that we were really only friends for four years, which should be negligible in the grand scheme. But the friendship was an intense meeting of like minds then and I find I enjoy the same things about her now.

I’ve been mulling her ideas since — whether writers like to analyze their artistic process so much because words are our medium. As opposed to, say, painters. She elected to leave musicians out of the equation, as a whole other kettle of fish, and I can appreciate her point. I’ve long been interested that authors will frequently choose painters as protagonists in books, usually in a transparent metaphor for the writer herself. There’s a certain two-sides-of-the-same coin aspect to writing and painting. Whereas musicians feel to me like the writer’s antipode. They seem to understand a world that has no words. Even though lyrics can be part of a song, the music part is this whole other aspect that, while it speaks to me, is also impenetrable to me.

David and I have this long-standing conversation that revolves around his hearing the music and me hearing the lyrics. The new Nickelback song, about the girl on the dance floor being so much cuter with something in her mouth, I don’t like so much. It irritates me, that whole attitude that a woman is most attractive with a piece of anatomy shoved in her mouth — and we all know it’s not the thumb. David, who used to play lead guitar in a band, likes the song, but didn’t know what it was about until I told him. And he still doesn’t care — and, no guys, not because he agrees with the sentiment — but because that’s not a relevant part of the song to him. Conversely, he gets frustrated with me when I can’t tell that a song is using the same melody played at a different rythm. I just can’t hear it, I tell him.

I have an Irish harp and I’ve been taking lessons for several years now. I did this deliberately, to learn to understand music. I have this idea that I can get to the point where I look at a sheet of music and all the notes will mean something to me in the same way words do. It’s hard for me, to both read the sheet music and watch my finger placement on the strings. I frequently lose my place on the page — something that has never happened to me at a reading. The words are there for me in a way the music isn’t. People think I’m being modest when I tell them I don’t play the harp well at all. Believe me, I don’t.

Frankly, I doubt I ever will.

A writing friend told me yesterday that she believes anyone can be a writer. That with enough study and dedication, everyone can learn to write a book. She’s also big on learning the rules of genre fiction and gave me critique on my novel based on how many words I have on a given page. And I don’t think she’s wrong. I think it’s probably good advice. But when she describes longer paragraphs as daunting mountains for a reader, it makes me think that I don’t see words on the page in the same way.

I don’t see paragraphs and lines of words, I see the images they evoke, the sounds and smells of the story. But then, I don’t hear the music when I look at a sheet of music.

I’ve often said that writing is a funny art to practice because pretty much anyone can write something down. I suppose anyone can plunk on a guitar or scribble a drawing. But in some indefinable way, it’s harder to discern when the writing achieves something more than stick figures and chopsticks. So, Linda, maybe that’s why writers spend so much time talking and writing about creativity and process. We’re trying to find how to define our art.

I feel certain (no qualifier) it’s not by the number of words on a page.