Well, I guess we’re in a bit of a blog drought here. Usually inevitable with huge inputs of information coupled with creative outputs.

I’ve been thinking heavily about the Fiction Fridays. I’ve been advised they’re a good idea, but since going to Dave’s novel workshop I am in the process of giving my world such an overhaul that I’m not sure I want to anchor myself down right now with existing text. So I’m going to spend more energy working on the outline. Also, 500 words here are 500 not in my novel. So, honestly, there is a good chance that while I’m actively working on the novel, I won’t be doing Fiction Fridays. But I do like the concept so I’ll be returning to them later.

To do:

1. outline novel and series 
2. final draft of short story
3. first draft of novel
4. first draft eye surgery book
5. submittable draft of novel
6. find agent 
7. proposal for eye surgery book
8. submittable draft of eye surgery book

Sprinkled in that are two tutorial lines for Geekatplay. May write a whole book. Will probably have a magazine article or two going on.

And saturating my life is my family.

And that triathlon training.

I have a confession to make: with all the job stuff, house cleaning stuff, and workshop stuff I let the daily training go. I’m back to doing it but am in recovery mode. I’m only walking, but next week I’ll add some running into it and hope to run (not walk) the full 5K of my town’s country fest in late June. Won’t be fast, but I’ll do it. We got a membership at our city fitness center, and I like that place much more than Gold’s Gym for two reasons: It has an indoor track, life guarded pool, and most importantly, it’s not a meat market.

Intergalactic Medicine Show has just accepted my short story “Tile Setters”!

Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

First of all, I understand that comments people are trying to post aren’t showing up, and this started happening when we changed servers.

Second of all, here I am in a quiet room and no kids are going to interrupt me. I am because I have a lot of hours to just write.  But I feel a bit like a fish out of water without my family surrounding me.

Today we learned about throwing our nets wide for our audience and bringing emotion into the story.

And today my story was critiqued. I found out that my narrator voice isn’t working well. This was a question I wanted answered, so I’m glad to find this out now. A lot of other interesting ways that people viewed my story. I love seeing this reflection, how someone else has created the story out of the words I wrote.  But I definately have some work to do.

I have a writing assignment then I’m going to work on my short story, The Amaranthine.

Well, I know I’m just a drop in the flood of those talking about this but Guillermo! del Toro! and The Hobbit! I loved Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and I’m very excited about this director. I enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy.

Speaking of movies, I saw 10,000 BC yesterday. The only reason I can’t call it wasted time is because it was such a blast ripping it apart with my husband. The next bit is a spoiler, so if you care, you can stop.

In the end “Evelon”? (the pretty girl) has escaped being chained up for sacrifice after her beau shot down the egyptian ‘god’ she was to be sacrificed to. It’s all chaos, and the dude that originally captured her is also in love with her and grabs her off to run away. Well, she stabs him and then runs to her warrior love.

Vladimir: She’s going to die.

Me: No she’s not, that’s too down for this frankenstien-of-cliches movie. It must have a perfect ‘happily ever after’ ending.

We banter about it, and he’s right. With his last breath, the evil slaver shoots an arrow at her yelling, of course “If I can’t have her, you will never have her.”  

Our hero holds her and cries and she reaffirms her trust in him and then dies. I’m confused but only for a minute, when we sense something approaching. “They’re going to… no way! They are!”

They resurrected her! For no reason other than to let them live happily ever after.

We were both right. Vladimir sensed the immediate mood while I knew what the whole picture was aiming for.

How in this world someone could invest so much money, and so much effort, into such a film as this is beyond my ken. That said, because this movie is so bad on so many levels, it does get enjoyable to watch, if only to have something harmless to poke fun at. Maybe the filmakers were going for a “how many factual mistakes and cliche’s can we dump into this movie and still get it made” theme.

Fiction Friday is going to be later today. I’ve been deep into preparing for the workshop and at the same time preparing a resume and portfolio.

What a challenge it is to put together two pages that must tell a story of work history that will prompt the knowledgable reader to want to hire this guy right now, while also closing the sale with the HR person who only knows that the wierd geeks want someone who knows PHP, ASP, CSS, SomethingML, SQL, C#, and a whole alphabet of stuff.

Having contemplated this, I had a great insight to the short story I’m working on. There are hundreds of programming languages, and each of them reduce to the almighty 1 and 0. Wow! Solution to a problem, I’m totally stoked to write now. For the short story.

Both of the men started, turning around to face threat before registering that the voice was a woman’s. But her size raised their hackles again. She stood a head taller than them.

Anything else was hard to see. She stood near the trees, shaded from the moonlight. Peter realized that he’d actually seen her before and mistaken her for a tree. She was a tree woman. In the daylight, he would be able to see the green tint to her skin. If she was older it would be streaked with rougher brown patches of bark wherever things were likely to rub. Except for the skin and height, tree people didn’t actually resemble trees, but they’d become such spirit kindred to plant-kind that first glances, those visual perceptions devoid of logical analysis, revealed their nature rather than their appearance. If Peter had been searching the trees for something, he would have seen her.

The sound of footsteps splashing through the stream spoke the truth of her words. Was it prophecy or better hearing?

Peter watched the woman, who said nothing else, waiting for Chars to arrive before he asked anything.

He’d never seen anyone of the tree folk. No one had seen them since they’d helped push the evil sorcerer and his Uruthwai into the banished valley a hundred years ago. Peter didn’t know any tree folk had ever been in this forest. They were from the woodlands that dressed the great mountains of the east.

The rhythmic sloshing of water became louder and louder, the breath of Chars exertion underscoring it, until finally he stepped onto the bank with an exclamation of surprise.

Another moment of silence held them.

The woman smiled. “I startled you all,” she said, the skin of her eyes crinkling in her delight.

Peter’s meandering thoughts of legends and honor and which question to ask her first halted. He didn’t know whether to laugh or be irritated, so he acquiesced.

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, there is a lot to hide,” she said, gesturing to the cart, “and a lot to speak about, so we need to be moving,” she said.

***

I may write more on this today, I may not. I am in the grasp this blasted short story that whispered the secret of it’s flaw to me a couple of days ago. I am, BTW, looking for a couple of readers for it. Especially if you’re a doctor. I need to know if my clinical sorcerer is thinking the way a doctor would.

But what I really should be finishing up is my required reading for Dave’s Workshop.

Writing this afternoon, I found myself deep in a conversation between my characters that had nothing to do with the story. If it were a novel, I could let them get away with it. Unfortunately, I must censor them. I liked it enough that I’ll actually save what I wrote of it, though. 

Click here to see the previous entry for the story line of Peter, Char, and Donquio. There are clarity changes I would do to it now, but alas, so it is.

When the twilight had deepened into dark night and the first sister moon peered over the trees, Peter was confident that the Kuzdu had chosen not to follow them at night. He silently thanked his God for that, then looked to his next course.

The forest path brought Peter and the two other clerics to a small stream. Only the locals who hunted often would know that if, rather than crossing it, you followed it upstream a short distance you would come to another sparse path into a wilder part. Peter considered the option. The footing was sure enough for the horse, but would be difficult with the cart. It would slow them down quite a bit, and he wasn’t sure how well it would throw the Kuzdu off. Kuzdu were not well known for their tracking ability, but they did use dogs. For a short distance after the stream crossing, the main path was well worn and recent passage would be difficult to determine, but it soon forked off into several smaller trails, that were difficult to navigate unless one was familiar with the forest.

Chars gestured across, “If I cross here and travel up for a while then back track and return to you, we may distract them.”

“If they don’t use their eyes,” said Donquio.

“They are overconfident right now,” said Chars.

“But they’ll soon become frustrated and angry,” Peter replied, “and that will serve us as well. They have few men to spare in a search for us while they subdue the town,” Peter’s stomach twisted again at the words. Family and friends, all of them now lost to the barbarian conquerors. He choked and paused, then finally continued in croaking words, “Morning will bring a strong search party. We must make our path complicated to the point of impossibility. At the very least, this will split them up.”

“Go down the main path until the second sister appears among the tops of the trees, then take one of the offshoots until she rises just above them, and then return to us back the way you came. The cart will slow us down a great deal on the stream. We will meet you on the bank.”

Chars put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, his eyes solemn with the sorrow they all felt. He clapped once on the shoulder, nodded and then turned back to cross the stream.

Peter and Donquio watched a few short moments. Their task now was to get the cart over the rocky bottom of the stream. As experience had shown, the horse was easily able to navigate over the smaller but well packed stones, but the cart’s wheels often rutted into the rocks. Through the whole ordeal, Donquio remained silent and sullen. Grief had a hold on them, a burden that dragged at them more than the cart, which they often had to heave out of the stream’s bed. But the fear was stronger, prodding them almost as if the whip was Peter often looked back, cringing at the clammer of the passage that would be easy to hear over the gurgle of the stream. They would hardly be able to hear any pursuers that could be tracking them.

The first sister was well above the trees and the second sister nearly above them herself when Peter and Donquio finally got to the trail leading off the stream. They pulled the cart out of the water and unhitched the horse for a short rest until Chars joined them. Dismay still dogged them, and now they both watched anxiously down the water’s passage through the trees for their companion.

“He’ll been here soon,” said a woman’s voice behind them.

When things are happening: Golwin’s story is occurring some years before the opening of the novel, which I’m tentatively calling “Light of the Uruthwai”. Peter’s story line happens about a thousand years earlier. The first entry for Peter is chronologically well after the next entry and the one I’m about to post.

I’m designing these so that there are no spoilers for the novel, nor would a reader who never saw these be confused.

And if you like this, I wouldn’t mind if you pass on a link to your friends.  

I’ve been getting a lot of hits about intercultural marriage lately.

What is it that you want to know? It’s hard to do. I’ll tell you that much.

Sometimes a person doesn’t even know they’re getting into an intercultural marriage, since both might be the same race, income, and education level. But families can be very different.

But if you know you’re going to be married to someone not of your culture, there are a few things to think about. First of all, don’t do it just because it seems like it would be cool. It looks cool from the outside, but that wow factor quickly gets old. I don’t hear my husband’s accent anymore, therefore it is no longer exotic to me. But the differences are still something we stumble upon. And they can be harder to overcome than the typical marriage.

A successful intercultural marriage IS cool, but not because of what it looks like from the outside. It’s because of how much work it took to overcome the obstacles to communicate and understand each other well.

The experience of the marriage will probably be different for both. One spouse will live in the country of origin and the other will be a stranger in a strange land. It’s important for the spouse who is at home in the land to support the out of place spouse. Don’t make fun of or put down any lack of understanding about the culture. Try to learn some or all of your spouse’s native language. Bring the positive parts of the culture into your home if possible.

Food: In general, in any kind of family life, sharing a meal is an important bonding time. There are going to be dishes your spouse loves that you hate.  It is important to try to establish your palate for things your spouse likes. You won’t be able to do this for everything, but when you can’t it doesn’t mean their food is bad. Don’t put down their food or them because they like it. It may be one of the few things of their culture that they can experience in the new land. Find dishes that are good for everyone to eat at the table, and then situations where both can have the food you like which the spouse hates. A good way to do this is to go to restaurants occassionally, or eat the meal you want at a mealtime where you aren’t sitting down together such as lunch. 

Language: Support for the non-native language spouse will vary depending on how fluent they are in the new language. Sometimes they’ll never become fluent enough to get certain things done like important paperwork such as taxes, insurance, etc. (Of course, that can be hard for the native speaker!) Getting married to an immigrant probably means you’ll have to take on those kinds of tasks. But it is very important that your spouse becomes fluent enough in the new language to feel comfortable and make friends outside of your home. Help them come into social and safe situations where they can only communicate using the language of the new land. I’ve found this is especially troublesome for the stay at home mother who is in a new country. I’ve seen old women who’ve lived for decades who never learned the language. They are confined to a very limited social circle, though often these women are also married to men of their culture. But if you’re fluent in your spouse’s native language and they work at home, then it is very important you help them get out and have opportunities where they’re required to speak the new language.

But it is also important to establish a circle of friends who are native the country of your spouse’s origin. Depression is common among immigrants, especially in their first few years, and is a stage of culture shock. Finding as much social support as possible is very good, since these friends have all been there and done that. Very often among this group there will be other intercultural marriages, and friends like that can be good for both of you since they’re familiar with the particular differences you have to work with.

Story: Try to read literature and/or watch TV and movies from their land. Not only will it expand your horizons and help you understand their culture, but it will expand the cultural experience that you both share. I must admit, though, I couldn’t watch my husband’s favorite TV serial from Russia about the Russian mob. But that wasn’t because it was Russian, it was because I don’t like crime gang shows or action movies much. That’s going to happen, but again it isn’t because their stuff is bad.

The most important thing is to follow that golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Try to put yourself in the place of your spouse and then act towards them the way you would want someone to help you.