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After an evening of intermittent rain showers, I expected my midday walk through the forest to be a muddy mess. But rather than muck, I was positively giddy to discover this two-foot tall beauty along my path.
It doesn’t matter how many trilliums I’ve enjoyed in springs past or how many I see on a hike; the giddiness doesn’t go away. To me, they’re the woodland answer to an Easter egg hunt, popping up briefly and then disappearing again, hiding until next spring.
Wild currants are lush and lacy, offer three seasons of interest, and beckon enticingly to hummingbirds and butterflies.
A hummingbird’s tiny heart must leap for joy when encountering such a multitude of petals, each nectar filled basin sized perfectly for the little avian’s long tongue. My bigger heart leaps when I see the hummingbirds visiting the bushes, so I have many wild currants planted around my garden.
These flowering bushes are easy to grow in my part of the country and they volunteer readily. I transplant them in the rainy months so I can enjoy the scent and colors of these tenacious bushes from every corner of my garden.
I’m happy to announce that Sara Cravens, nee Parrett, and I have completed another Nora book. Nora and the Lake Monster will be released in ebook, hard cover, and paperback on April 13.
Nora shares everything with her sharp-eyed boy: pillows and books and toys. Everything—except for one mystery shut inside a secret room. When the door is left open one evening, Nora sneaks through. She will need all her bravery and little cat powers to protect her friends from the monster that lurks inside.
Nora and the Lake Monster is a light-hearted story for cat whisperers of all ages, especially those who get lost in the adventures they find inside books.
You can preorder your copy at your favorite bookstore, or if you’ll be attending Norwescon in Seattle between April 14 and 17, you can buy a copy directly from me.
Meet my anemones.
These lovely little flowers bloom outside my kitchen window beneath a transplanted gooseberry bush. I’m pleased beyond belief with them.
Allegedly, they can be invasive in some climates, but I doubt that is likely here, especially given our three months of dry summer. Still, I hope these tiny beauties thrive despite our impending drought, because look at them!
Such cute and cheerful wind flowers, perfect for hiding the prickly baldness of the gooseberry’s bottom stems, if only they will spread.
One of my readers and a dear friend, John Ostrem, gifted me this beautiful painting inspired by his reading of Canopy. According to John: “I picked up my artist’s brushes and painted a tribute to Ostrya with boots on the ground after fleeing the Canopy …”
This morning, after Nora (my muse of No, No, Nora! fame) knocked all my books and my eyeglasses off the bedside table before biting me on every single exposed finger and marking her grand finale by pulling the mattress sheet off the bed, I fed her and my other two cats. It was still dark outside, about quarter to seven on the last day of November.
The moon was full and shining through a huge maple tree in a nearby yard—a tree that drops leaves all over my next door neighbor’s roof. Every autumn, this neighbor, a lovely man who embodies all the best characteristics of that word, climbs daily to the top of his roof with his leaf blower.
This is not the photo I took on my iPhone.
After dispatching the offending leaves from his asphalt shingles, he walks to the far edge of his roof and points his leaf blower as far as he can reach toward the tree across the property line, trying valiantly to loosen the hanging leaves and send them straight down before the wind blows them onto his roof. A manic and heroic act that is, of course, doomed to failure. I do so enjoy my neighbor.
Anyway, the huge round moon behind the leaf-bare limbs was a gorgeous sight, the kind of image that a professional photographer would snap and sell to a software company for a screensaver. And I tried to capture the image on my iPhone camera, and of course it turned out a gray blurry mess with a tiny white dot at the top. Disappointing.
That’s like a lot of things in life, I suppose. So picturesque, perfect, exhilarating in your imagination, but in trying to communicate it to others through words or photos or pictures, it loses something. As far as photography or drawing or painting go, I gratefully admire the abilities of others, but I don’t choose to spend my own time improving my skills. But writing? I guess that’s the one craft/art that I do care about.
I keep trying to communicate what I see in my mind and what I feel in my heart, and the harder I work at it, I realize how much more there is to learn. It is difficult and takes a good deal of willpower to keep at it when I know how far I still am from my ideal. I’ll probably never get there in my lifetime, yet the pursuit seems heroic though it’s ultimately never achievable, like my neighbor standing on his roof attempting to keep nature from raining leaves on his roof.
And I realize that as soon as I write the words down, the experience ceases being mine alone and becomes a reader’s adventure. So it is when we put things out in the world and share ourselves with others. Our inner worlds can be vibrant and enthralling and sharing them with others comes with a good deal of risk. Will they judge us and deem us unworthy? It is a scary, anxiety-provoking thing, to expose ourselves in that way. But if there’s one other person, only one, who sees the picture we paint or the photo we take or the joke we tell or the story we write and experiences joy by it, that one person is worth the risk, isn’t she-he-they?
This is what I’m thinking of this morning as I contemplate the completion of the first draft of my new novel. Showing up at the page every morning and fighting back the procrastination monster has been a daily battle. I’m close to winning the war though, hopefully by the end of this week. And if you’ve made it this far, I will have something new for you to read, something longer than a blog post, something shall we say, novel-length, out very soon in the new year. Until then, I’m off to battle.
Nora comes to life on Monday!
Bright and early on the morning of April 1st, preorders of No, No, Nora! will be shipped to eager little (and big) hands. To celebrate Nora’s introduction to the reading aloud (and reading silently to self) public, I’ve opened a store on Zazzle where you can load up on Nora merch.
Nora is a sweet little cat, and she looks too cute on t-shirts, buttons, and even a diaper bag. If you’re a fan of her nemesis Gustave, don’t fret. He’ll be there too.
And Inventor fans, I’ve got you covered too. Buttons and stickers and keychains, oh my!
Radio silence, or in my case, Pandora silence, has been the order of the day at laptop Darroch for far too long. During my many months away from this blog, I’ve been stretching my creative muscles in numerous ways: re-landscaping my entire garden (who knew there were so many varieties of rhododendrons and azaleas?), knitting piles of sweaters and socks (I have a definite weakness for colorful, fluffy fiber), ripping and weaving rags into rugs for my cats to puke on, oh … and starting many new writing projects.
I’m happy to announce that I have completed one of the writing projects, a fun little storybook called No, No, Nora! Nora is a lovely little cat who wants nothing more than to protect her family. However, no matter what heroism she exhibits, they only see her as naughty, even when she saves the whole town from aliens.
No, No, Nora! introduces the artistic stylings of Sara Parrett, a talented illustrator I had the pleasure of meeting at Geek Girl Con in Seattle, WA. Sara’s quirky drawing style and sense of humor perfectly matched what I was aiming for with Nora, and our collaboration has exceeded my highest hopes.
I hope that you’ll agree.
No, No, Nora! goes on sale April 1, 2019, but you can preorder your hard or soft cover now at your favorite bookseller. Ebook fans can order Nora on Kindle, but yours truly feels that the very best reading experience for Nora requires an analog book, a comfortable knee, and a treasured child.
And yes, as with all my writing, this book is brought to you by life’s little moments. Nora and her brother Nick entered our hearts last spring. Here is the dear four-legged mischief maker, I mean, muse.
The real Nora plotting the day’s mischief.
Stuart Smalley images are copyrighted, so I present to you: cat in mirror.
Remember Al Franken's Stuart Smalley character on SNL in the early 90's? "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me." It was funny because it was true. Franken's self-help guru was suffering from the disorder most of us know only too well--Imposter Syndrome.
This disorder is in no medical journal, doctors don't treat for it, but it is one of the most debilitating ailments known to wo/man. There is no genetic marker to warn us it's coming, no vaccine to ward off its effects, and no easy way to heal it once it's well and truly become part of us.
(The term "imposter syndrome" is, itself, suffering from the same disorder--it is sometimes defined as a "term" or a "phrase" or, most grandly, a "concept"--but never, exactly, a real "syndrome." And certainly not a "disorder." But please allow me the artistic license to call it a disorder--none of the other nouns truly resonate, and it *is* my blog, after all. The poor thing can't even decide if it wants to be spelled with an "er" or an "or", so I'm going with "er.")
None of us is born with Imposter Syndrome. Our youngest, most pure selves knew who we were and what we needed. Food. Water. Love. As we grew, each of us had a core sense of self. Everything was ours: all the toys, all the love, all the everything. We were selfish as young children must be and our parents taught us to share the world as adults must do. And still, we retained that tiny voice inside our tiny bodies that told us who we were, how important we were, how talented and special and one-of-a-kind we were.
And then. When did it happen? I'm of the mind it was middle school--junior high as we called it then. But perhaps it began even earlier. We started looking for love in all the wrong places (Jonny Lee song, that). We tried to please the teachers, our friends, the cool kids at the park or in the classroom. Our parents seemed to require ever increasing proof of our worthiness in exchange for the love we once got for free--not true, certainly, but so it felt. The tiny voice of self grew quieter, drowned out finally by the booming roar of the world.
By the time we reached college, got jobs, moved out on our own (any or all of the above), we'd forgotten that the tiny voice had ever existed. The world was so loud. The demands of everyone around us, the need to work to earn to be enough, made us forget who we were at our core, our most pure selves.
And sometimes that rare moment occurred when someone else's pure self recognized our pure self and said: "You know? You're pretty amazing. What you do, who you are? That's remarkable." And we were left with a sense that it was all wrong. We were all wrong. We didn't deserve the acclaim, the compliment, the recognition. We became imposters in our own lives.
Is there a cure for this disorder? Some miracle medicine we can dose to dispel the dreaded Imposter Syndrome? Mr. Franken's mirror mantra never seemed to help Stuart Smalley, so let's cross that one off the list right off.
Perhaps the Imposter Syndrome doesn't ever go away. Perhaps we always need some, shall we say, humility. But I'd like to think that the ill effects of the disorder become less bothersome as we age, as we begin to care less what we believe others expect of us. When we no longer do to satisfy or ingratiate ourselves to others, but rather do for the joy of doing regardless of the outcome.
And when we reach over to pull another along with us, to mentor or aid or support a fellow sufferer, our tiny voices grow louder, find a space in the noise of the world, and sing.
Charles Dickens famously walked gobs of miles every single day: some sources claim as many as twenty a day, others a measly (?!) twelve--rain or shine. He claimed his daily walks were key to his ability to write the detailed sagas he's known for--though how he found the time and energy after logging twenty miles, I'd like to know.
Did he really do this? Every single day? I don't know, but there is genius to this, and if it worked for Dickens, one of the most prolific authors of his generation, I thought it might have a similar effect on me. Many years ago, I vowed to give it a try--the walking, not the total mileage.
All those years ago, I was an aspiring young writer, and as luck would have it, an aspiring young distance runner as well. Early morning, when the air was fresh and the traffic light, I tried to emulate Mr. Dickens. After the first mile, once my legs loosened and my breathing settled into a steady rhythm, my mind would float off into a waking dream, worries flitting through briefly as my feet pounded the pavement.
While my sneakers ate up the miles, the day's cares and life's anxieties would lessen and the big ideas would begin to break through, tiny crocuses poking through January snow. And as I neared the end of my run, gathering every remaining bit of strength into my rubbery thighs, I would sprint to my chosen finish line and the final idea, the strongest idea, would crush all the others beneath its strident blooms.
I'm not sure what was more addictive back then: the runner's high or the burst of creative energy.
At some point over the years the combined demand of home and work, family needs and job musts, took precedence. My runs stopped. Even if ideas bloomed, I had little time to water and tend them. I missed my early morning runs, my early morning ideas. I missed my creative high.
So. That had to change.
I'm no longer rising so early; marrying one night owl and parenting another will do that to a person. My knees no longer allow me to run on streets, but it turns out the soft trails of the forest by my house suit me far better. I've found that I don't need to run a sprint to rejuvenate my mind--a brisk walk will do, even later in the day.
I don't know if Mr. Dickens walked twenty miles every day or only twelve. I walk far fewer, but I walk. And I can tell you, he was on to something.
What ideas poke through your January mind? I'll see you on the trail.