Writing from the Seniors Apartment

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

If you need a very quiet place to work, look up a friendly senior citizen living in a senior apartment complex who needs someone to look after the place for a few days. My father is still in transitional care, the floor guy is stretching the refinishing our hardwood floors over too many days, and the pile of things to do that can’t be done in Caribou’s has grown alarmingly. So today I am working at the kitchen desk of my Dad’s place at the Commons on Marice. The only sounds I’ve heard in the last three hours are two ringing telephones and the air conditioner clicking on when the temperature hit seventy-eight.

The first hour I spent making phone calls and dealing with business. The second hour I worked on revisions of a freelance project. The third hour I pushed through writing five pages of a new work. I should have been completing a medical insurance application.

My Dad is a meticulous housekeeper. The bed is made before breakfast, the morning’s paper is recycled before lunch, the kitchen counter is cleaned of everything beside his medications before bed. I know where I was trained, but with our house in a remodeling mess I’ve been working on a corner of my desk surrounded by shoes and bags and empty cups. I can write from that corner, I just can’t seem to do anything else. Like submissions in this September sweeps month or the medical insurance application or scheduling a follow-up doctor’s appointment for myself.

A friend suggested that I should capture the emotions and craziness of this month when my father’s rapid health decline intercepted the reworking of ceilings and hardwood floors in about a quarter of our house including access to the only ways in and out of our house. I told him I was writing every day. He said that was too structured and what I should be doing was allowing myself to dump all the frustration of today’s healthcare system and such into a journal.  I think he said write all the shit someplace because no one would ever believe it. But years ago I gave up that kind of journaling.  I mean, what if anyone were to read your journals after your death and had to dig through pages and pages of frustrations about discovering the sour cream you just bought had an expired sell date or the car mechanic didn’t tighten down a cover when doing an oil change or your father’s transitional care unit staff hadn’t called his physician in the first four days he was in their facility.  What would someone learn about your deep inner workings or carry away from that assortment of information?

Better to push out a few more paragraphs or pages of Ginseng Field. Too bad there are waiting lists at these senior living centers. They could make wonderful places for writers to work in a whole lot of peaceful quiet.

Writing during Crisis

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

My elderly father is seriously ill. This time the call came on Sunday evening while my husband and I finished dinner. The buildup to the phone ringing developed piece by piece through two weeks of multiple doctor visits, tests, worry. He is fragile. Time spent next to his hospital bed disappears like a ball of yarn rolling down a staircase. The doctor was supposed to be in at ten only now it is eleven thirty and then it becomes one thirty. With freelance work facing deadline, a volunteer writing project due soon, and unpredictable time available, I find myself working on a new novel long into the night. Does it make sense?

Dare I compare creative types to serious athletes who answer stress with pushing to complete an extra mile or adding five more pounds on the machines or swimming additional laps in the pool? Right now I find finishing two more paragraphs, one more scene, a character description bridges that place between the unknown duration of the crisis and the ability to control my work.

Some of us do wonderful creating in the murkiness of insecurity. Some of us become frozen in the moment and find putting one foot in front of the other the most taxing action that can be mastered. When sleep isn’t easily chased, writing brings me more peace of mind and body.

Monitors are sounding up and down the hall. A one-legged man takes his first walk outside my father’s door, a family moves together with a wheelchair, a young woman leans against a wall while her fingers text messages to the outside world. The nursing staff is kind and competent. “Why don’t you take a break, honey,” one says.  A new book waits to be read on my Kindle, there are emails from friends and family gathering, but I trust ten minutes of writing to provide respite.

 

Did I Tell You about Getting Sick?

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

So I spent a week in sick bay. Got some good fiction writing done between coughing attacks. Maybe traveling country roads with a fictional father and son was easier than dealing with a very real temperature and aching body. Maybe I’ll read those pages in a few weeks and ask “what was I thinking” then remember that I wasn’t really thinking very much.

Fortunately I don’t get hauled under by wandering viral sicknesses very often because I am a restless patient. With three unread books waiting for quiet time, I paged through magazines and played computer games and listened to music. Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich was carried from room to room then in the car to and from Door County.  I reread the first twenty pages a few times and look forward to starting over soon and losing myself to her storytelling.

The news of Helen Gurley Brown’s passing almost made me purchase the latest Cosmopolitan, but I’m of a different generation than its readers. My magazine shopping as a young woman was an odd collection of Cosmo, Ms., Good Housekeeping, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune. You could say I was not defined by gender. You could think I was unfocused. In reality I like good writing and interesting editors. It is a good thing today that magazines are so expensive or we would be filling our recycling bin at an alarming rate with the number of newspapers and magazines that could be coming to our house.

No excuses this week. After I clear another layer of stuff off my desk, make sure my calendar is up to date and the bills are paid, I will get back to my daily routine.

 

Time for Change?

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

When is the time right for  major change? My life as a writer is far less structured than any other role in my career. Lately I’ve been focusing on book activities and resurrecting a collection of short stories. There have been signings and book club gatherings and networking on the book’s behalf. The short story collection is a whole different set of activities centered on building a submission plan for individual stories and wading into revision with some works so old I no longer have working storage technology to access the files.

Beyond writing, the world has its way of  influencing priorities. I have an elderly parent who can experience a crisis at any moment resulting in significant time demands. I haven’t experienced that kind of interruption since our kids were young. We have a great house that needs attention with a few bigger projects that were delayed until Harvesting Ashwood: Minnesota 2037 was launched. Doctors suggested no further pushing back of standard appointments. Only one of those resulted in change– adjusting to glasses which still limit the amount of time I am comfortable at the computer or reading. Bummer.

The question for the day is whether we can bring a new dog into our lives. Since we lost our joyful and rambunctious Wheaton Terrier in February the house has been so quiet. We’re dog people and are used to sharing a bit of a sandwich, a walk, the sofa with a four-footed friend. We don’t exactly agree on the ideal age for this prospective family member. A puppy sounds logical because we’ve always begun our canine relations with a small, biting, creature. We’ve been searching shelters and ads and found it almost impossible to find a young dog of the sort we really want. But can we spare the time to work through the first months of an animal baby?  Is there ever a right time to leap into what could be a ten or twelve or fourteen year relationship?

The weatherman pointed out this morning that we have two and a half minutes less sun every day now than two weeks ago. That equates to twenty minutes of less sun every eight days. Back to school sales flyers are arriving every day. The old academic rhythm still marks September as the start of my new year. Is that right reason to adopt a dog now or should we wait until all of summer is gone and life slows? Beaner came to live with us while I was traveling for spring college recruiting.  Kirby joined the family on Memorial Day weekend. I drove two hours each way to bring Rufus home two days before Thanksgiving.

What a shame there isn’t an algorithm to predict successful change. Maybe we can ask Amazon and Google to help us by designing a master algorithm that could be loaded with personal data and spit out relevant information. Wow, that would be worth some money.

Talk of changing direction, I think I just found a cool idea for a new short story that might be more invigorating than revising a riveting work from ten years ago.   If we had a new puppy I’d be distracted from starting that story by house training. If we had a new puppy, I’d stop fretting about whether this is the time to add a dog to our family. Is there ever a best time for change?

 

 

 

Risk Sharing

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

A key member of a small press asked why a publisher should accept financial risk for bringing a writer’s work to the market.  His company expected writers to share in the cost of producing books and marketing, usually thousands of dollars. They are not unique.

I can’t totally agree. As a freelance writer producing work for Fortune 500 companies, I’m not asked to assume financial risk for the success of a website or video. The corporation’s investment in the content I create is a relatively small portion of the total project cost. The creative agency and production company charge major dollars for their work. They aren’t placed at financial risk either. The corporation knows what it wants to achieve and invests appropriately. If the message doesn’t resonate with consumers, the corporation assumes responsibility for making a bad decision.

Applying that business model to publishing, the responsibility remains with a publisher to make well-researched decisions about content they want to bring to market and make appropriate investments. In an ideal world, if a publisher asks for a writer to share financial risk, they should first make the business case—what is the market, how will this book compete, what are the costs, what are the opportunities.

Again in an ideal world, I would push this same concept into businesses marketing self-publishing services. Self-publishing companies need  the integrity to tell a writer if a manuscript isn’t ready for release or doesn’t have a natural market. If that company can’t help the writer develop a viable marketing plan, then the writer should know they are contracting with  a printer of books. Maybe that printing company offers an imprint, but in today’s world that may not have a whole lot of value to a writer looking for a partner in selling books. Publishers understand how to be successful in the publishing marketplace. Printers know how to design and print books.

Perhaps the search for approval (aka an agent and/or a contract) makes us gullible and thankful when a self-publishing company responds to a query. Instead of thinking as creators of valuable content, we might be relieved that somebody wants to help publish our manuscript. We write checks, follow directions and wait for something great to happen. Well, maybe not great, but at least something more significant than having boxes of your book dropped on the driveway.

I want my publisher to know more about the market than I do and to share business data if they propose risk sharing. If I assume all the risk and self-publish, I hope to spend wisely by building a team of the best pros I can afford to bring a polished work to the market.

Now, back to working on the new novella. As always, the writing might be easier than the selling.

 

Scratch. Rewrite.

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

A sad tale of technology gone wrong—a favorite story turned into a novella was stored on a flash drive about seven years ago. The flash drive has now disappeared and all that remains is the original short story as submitted for a summer program at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

The thirteen pages in hand are okay, but flawed. The core story is good, but it is rather like finding blueprints for all the rooms adjoining the kitchen when thinking about a food prep area remodeling project.  Good characters only carry the read so far.

Second sad tale in the process—researching pivotal elements of the story disclosed too many discrepancies with reality to make the story plausible. Is it possible to write the story if one character doesn’t die? If the main character moves to a Wisconsin farm instead of Europe? Is it time to walk away from the project?

Third (and last) sad tale—this story was supposed to grow into my first novel and couldn’t be pushed beyond a fifty page novella. So why was I attracted back to Ginseng Fields?

My electronic and paper storage systems (used in the lightest sense) have plenty of abandoned projects. Some are three hundred words, some are two thousand.  Not being a writer who keeps every sentence ever written, I’m sure thousands of words have slid into the recycle bin as well. Knowing when to walk away from work that has earned a title is tricky. I was recently in a glassblower’s studio and felt awful about shards of a beautiful base pushed into a corner. The artist was nonchalant and said everything else he made in that batch turned out beautiful. Hold on to that thought.

Three sad tales do (hopefully) lead to a pleasant place. Forced to abandon parts of the original plot opened space to explore why I wrote the original story.  Beyond being attracted to these odd net-covered fields in the Wisconsin countryside, why did I begin writing?  Almost ten years later I can answer that question. When I began the story our family was dealing with the serious health decline of my mother. I thought I was writing about how people prepare for such a loss when I wrote about a woman whose father is dying of cancer. In retrospect I understand the real story was about the complexity of the father-daughter relationship and how that plays out in the woman’s selection of a partner. Now there is a story under the storyline. There is lots to explore.

Ten days and 8,600 words later the project is alive and strong.  What was at the center of the story is now acknowledged. No one dies so there are no easy ways to resolve issues between the two main characters. They are more interesting, more developed.  It’s refreshing to write a contemporary story.

It feels like the time to walk away from this story is past. Bringing it to an end worthy of the time invested is a different challenge.

Marching America

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

So many things can be said about being American. People wear red, white and blue or paint a flag on their chest. There are bumper stickers about my land and your land. Tonight fireworks will make thousands of small children cover their ears and thousands more clap their hands in delight. Obamacare, recall governors, tax reform, cities in disrepair. That’s all democracy in action.

Standing on Highway 42 in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin is about as American as the Fourth of July. Lots of people from Milwaukee, Illinois, Minneapolis stream come here to remember what it was like to live in a small town or to watch their kids have a blast catching candy from friendly strangers on floats built on someone’s driveway.

 

 

The Democrats marched. The Republicans marched.

The Catholics marched. Didn’t see any Lutherans self-promoting. (Garrison Keillor would have a few choice words about that.)

The University of Wisconsin marching band rode on wagons. There was a woman with camel and a cow on a truck and elegant clowns dancing together. A guy sang in Italian, a Latino boy lassoed by-standers, and the Belgians announced their festival.

 

The vets opened the hour tour of local pride with one of their own pulling the last float asking no one to forget his pals who lost their lives in Vietnam. Under hot sun on a rare ninety plus degree day in this town on the shores of Lake Michigan people applauded until the end.

This is America.

Summertime Writing

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

What’s your summertime writing behavior? Are you reading this during breaks at a writers’ workshop or sitting in a cottage? Do you take vacation days to barricade yourself at home with your laptop? Will your Fourth of July be spent editing the work you wrote over Memorial Day weekend? Do you take the summer off? (How do you do that?)

The gift of morning sunlight began my tradition of getting up early to write when I was working full-time in the corporate world. Whether completing exercises in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, writing a page of story development, or revising old work, I tried to commit sixty minutes before starting the regular day activities. This discipline helped me break a few bad habits like playing computer card games before beginning a project or believing nothing of value could be done in one hour. I didn’t feel guilty about ignoring my second ‘job’ or become irritable as weeks passed and I forgot more and more about a promising storyline.

When my work role was defined by a monthly paycheck and long hours, I often frittered away snippets of an hour or two.  Hungry to complete an entire short story for my writing group, I didn’t value writing just two or three paragraphs. Looking for the magic equation of how many pages successful writers produced each day, I felt I couldn’t ever finish anything in tiny sips of time.

A book on creating time for self-restoration changed my thinking. The Woman’s Retreat Book by Jennifer Louden encouraged grabbing as little as sixty minutes to rebalance life. If I wanted to produce more, I had to use each hour. For me, that meant walking away from time-robbing routines like clearing my desk, finding the right music, making a cup of tea, or playing computer games. Ian Graham Leask, a writing coach and friend, once challenged my insistence that I had to do these things to get into the right frame of mind. I think he called the whole routine bullcrap and suggested I take a legal pad and a pen to a library and write every day for a week.

Ian was right. Music and a clean office make for a pleasant work experience, but writing can be done almost anywhere. A coffee shop, an airplane, the waiting room of a doctor. Sometimes I carry a page that needs revision in my bag and make notes or revise one line when I’m alone and stuck somewhere.

Back to the question, what is your summertime writing practice? Be gentle as you self-assess.  But if you want to write more, you might need to be receptive to exploring changes in your current pattern.  Maybe sunscreen, a glass of ice tea, and a chair outside could shake up that creative mind.

 

 

 

 

 

Writer at Rest

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

One thing working in corporate America has going for it is that there are some boundaries around hours of work. You might do emails and text messages from early morning through the evening. You might make revisions on a big presentation while watching television. But the majority of the time you shut off work at a decent time in the evening and chill.

Writing is a different kind of master. If you’re creating new material, you work as long as the words and thoughts flow. If you’re marketing and promoting, you research and read and dig through websites and go to bookstores and meet with people for as long as it takes. If you’re doing both at the same time, heaven help you.

It can all get too involved until one day you realize you’ve listened to the same playlist for two or three weeks straight, that all there is to eat in the house is cereal and crackers and a bag of cheap chocolate candy, that the reason you’re wearing workout clothes is that is easier to sleep in something loose. The flowers across the room are wilted in a vase without water and family members are making comments about how you could use a break. You agree that you could use a break, just not the same kind they are suggesting.

When I worked in the corporate world writing happened late at night or on weekends or days off. If there were other things to do at those times, writing slipped in priority. Sometimes writing slipped far down the list of priorities for weeks and months until I became a she-wolf searching for something to rip apart. Suppressed creativity can do that to some of us.

Today I took off. The house is a mess. There isn’t a whole lot to eat in the kitchen. Clean clothes haven’t traveled from basement to the bedroom. But the air was cool and the sun bright. I spent time outside with friends, drank root beer out of a frosty mug, and took a nap when most people were eating dinner. And wrote this from the heart.  No links or big moments. A writer has to rest.

Common Good Books

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

We visit a bookstore about once a week. Until Common Good Books moved to its new location, our default selection was a big box bookseller because that is what exists in our part of the Twin Cities. We always enjoyed the cozy basement quarters of the old Common Good Books, but getting there wasn’t easy.

This week Faith Sullivan and I did readings at Common Good Books featuring women leading their families out of bad economic times. St. Paul was having one of those grand June evenings and people drifted in from neighboring areas. We were at home as surely as if we were gathering in Faith’s backyard or my living room. Folks making their way to the reading area greeted each other by name and shared stories. Other writers took seats to show their support. There was Carol Connolly, St. Paul’s Poet Laureate, Roger Barr known for his Christmas stories in the Villager, Paul Zerby whose Korean era book was on a table beyond the audience, Charles Locks searching the shelves for his book about life in the Virgin Islands.

Some of the other two dozen people recognized a writer they knew and a grand June night became more special. While grateful for the remaining national booksellers, readings in Garrison Keillor‘s bookstore have panache because the person in the chair next to you might have their name on the spine of a book in a shelf right behind the podium. Or maybe they live next door to your kid’s soccer coach or bring their dog to the same groomer. At the very least, they might live in the neighborhood known as St. Paul.