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Sometimes my daughter allows me to watch anime programs with her. She is very careful with what she’ll share because I often “ruin it” for her. I don’t blame her– sometimes (often) I’m insufferable in my deconstruction, especially if the material is sexist, racist or homophobic. Yesterday she asked an interesting question: Why do the voice actors in English sound so terrible, but they don’t in Japanese? I hadn’t thought about this directly before, tho had noticed that it’s rather unbearable to watch anime that’s dubbed into English. We always watch it is Japanese. Maybe, I said, it’s because it’s more than just the words. There’s cultural context. There’s body language. There’s historical context. Even if you translate one word from that language to another, you can’t translate everything else. You just have the word. And often the word doesn’t mean exactly the same thing anyway. So, because we understand the words in Japanese, and then hear them in English, we can see that there’s a enormous gap between them. And it sounds wrong. Also, what one culture finds important might not have the same impact in another culture. If something is considered beautiful in Japanese, it might not be of note in English. These things can’t be translated. There’s also the language of emotions….

Thinking about our conversation has brought me back to my own writing. I suspect that there are aspects of the culturally translative at work in my texts, even if I’m not writing from one language to another. Curiouser and curiouser…. For instance, I know that I have a particular writing (for lack of better word) ’style’. I am prone to dropping subject pronouns, for instance, and also very fond of sentence fragments. I’ve come to this ’style’ as a natural extension of spoken Japanese. In Japanese, it’s not necessary to include a subject reference all the time, because after it’s used once, it is inferred that it’s still there. To bring up the subject repeatedly just sounds crazy. When I first began submitting my work for publication I had to fight to keep my sentence fragments and dropped pronoun references. Even now, if I come to a new editor, I have to argue for it all over again.

Culturally, this is very important to me. Because it’s not only about proper grammar– what might be at work are different forms of culturally constructed/situated units of thought. These differences casts the worldview through an alternate facet. And that’s a wonderful thing.

I’m not saying it’s a free-for-all. Ditch grammar, do anything you want. Clearly that would result in a lot of unshapely fiction. But if you find you’re repeatedly being critiqued about an identifiable aspect of your writing, that crops up across a range of stories, etc. maybe it has a specific cultural source. Don’t purge it right away. Pick it up. Hold it in your palms. Raise it to the light and see if it shines.

Sometimes I find I cannot write. There are many self-help books and websites and blogs that will either offer a great many suggestions as to how to break free from writer’s block, or, that writer’s block doesn’t really exist at all. WTFE. Sometimes I’m just bottom of the barrel empty and I can’t bear to open the file. I try to input a few words, but they ring false, taste tinny on the tongue. Like playing a sonata on an untuned piano– it sounds like something you know, but it’s horribly off.

Stop.  

Some suggest that you should just write through the awful, put it all down, and then you will write past this moment and into a better place.

I suppose this could work, even if it doesn’t work, because time is passing in the midst of writing tinny offkey words…. But I don’t want to bruise my ears on top of tired and depleted.

I think these moments of “cannot write” happen to me because when I’m writing I’m not just involved with the project at an intellectual level, but also at an emotive and intuitive level as well. Emotions and intuition are filtered and channelled into story just as much as technique, theory, structure, plot, characterization, etc. So, when something in my personal life (tho, really, there’s so much grey area between a writer’s personal and private life, especially if you work from home and live with a family, etc. ) that taxes me spiritually and emotionally, it can become very difficult in moving forward in creative writing.

So what? Difficult things/times are difficult for everyone, it could be said. A shopkeeper, a dentist, an accountant, a short-order cook, a car wash attendant, a lifeguard, a dog-walker, everyone can feel depleted, and they still have to work. Suck it up.

There’s this amazing concept in Japan called kotodama. I’m not able to do it any justice, on a blog, but the basic idea (shared by many other cultures as well) is that when we speak a word, we are not just speaking a word– we are invoking it. The word becomes a living thing. (i.e. the word is god, etc.) Imagine! All those words, coming alive, like little beasts and creatures and flitting off into the universe…. When I’m in the right place, I can feeeeel the aliveness of words, and they are miraculous. When I’m not in the right place I’m not able to invoke them, and they fall, like unformed brick, upon the ground. And, I think this has to do with spirit.

The reality is that there are deadlines. Rent, groceries, bills and the press of time. Summer is more than half over, and, still, the words fall lifeless. Inert.

I try not to beat myself up. Because it doesn’t help at all! Instead, I try to do things that will nourish my spirit and my soul. I read novels. I watch some movies. I meet with friends and talk and laugh and share a meal. Listen to music and cut flowers from my modest flowerbeds and bring them to my desk. Borrow a friend’s old bicycle. Eat one piece of chocolate-covered Manuka Honey every day, because the package says, “Happiness Guaranteed”…. ^__^

It also helps to have a wonderfully supportive and professional agent! I asked to meet up with her and requested a “gentle kick in the pants” as well as “a few words encouragement”. She said just the right things at the right time, and I rode the skytrain back home, thoughtful and lighter. Since then I’ve written four pages. The words aren’t flying out into the world like swallows swooping from their nests– maybe they are more like fledgling robin….

But, I have faith that the spirit will grow stronger. The spirit cannot be strong all the time. Look to the cycles of nature. The seasons, the tides, the phases of the moon….

All in time.

Making Andalusian gazpacho for the very first time. Listening to Bach’s 18 short preludes for keyboard. A rotary fan on the lowest setting. A glass of honey lemon water with ice. Watching the trailer for Predators four times. Writing in my journal. Putting up the red hammock. Rocking gently side to side in the indigo cool.

Half World is on the shortlist in the YA category. The Sunburst Award is an annual prize given to the best works in Canada that fall under the umbrella of  literature of the fantastic. I’m so honoured and chuffed that HW made the list. They will announce the winner in the fall.

Arriving to hydrangeas, the moist of air. The strawberry plants have grown and the fruit nibbled upon by woodlouse and squirrels. They left me enough for a small bowl for me and my daughter to share after supper.

My son has shaved off his pirate-ish beard. I am grateful…. ^__^

Unpacking slowly. Instead of the patterns of the old, here is an opportunity to try something else. Same house, different time.

Some things don’t change, however. I can still hear my neighbour through the closed window. “Paula,” he calls. “Paula.” His dog is still wanting.

I, however, must sort through ten months of paperwork and file them…. OTL

A summer for writing. The cool and damp is a good clime for for it. I won’t be drawn to the lake, to don snorkel and fins, to gaze at the gold fracture of light, the ripples of reflected sunshine strobing along the long stems of water lilies. They are more beguiling from below, than above.

Sat out back with a small glass of wine. The moon was rising. Night so cool, so pleasing against the skin. The quiet calms. And darkness makes tomorrow possible.

I’ve been packing up books and clothing. We leave Edmonton in two days and onto an altered trajectory.

Transitions and change can unsettle, and the animal heart longs for consistency. That’s why it beats the way it does.

But, as Octavia Butler said, Life is change.

Change also makes new things possible.

Sounds like a title from a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and, hmmmm… Jude Law! Why not? (But who would carry the baby? I think it ought to be Hugh Grant. What with his comedic tortured and sheepish brow schtick.)

<grin>

Next week we will be travelling back to Burnaby. 9 1/2 months have passed! So very quickly I don’t know what can be said. We will head south on the #2, and stop in Calgary for a few nights before taking that familiar pass through the Rockies. I wonder how many times I’ve driven that route? Too many. Now that I’m in my forties I’m finding it more difficult to do the drive in one day. I think this might be my measure of whether or not I’ve passed the threshold into a particular kind of “older” body. Whether or not you have the endurance and stamina to drive for twelve hours straight (with a break for lunch).

You could have gotten your learner’s license in AB and helped me drive home, I told my daughter. Yah, helped you crash, she scoffed. Both my children (tho my son, now, is legally an adult!) have no interest in getting their driver’s license. It does not signify a rite of passage, nor do they associate it with autonomy and freedom…. We can get where we want on transit, they say, with a careless shrug of their shoulders. But, what about in the case of an emergency? I ask. We can call 911, they say. I shrug! On an environmental level, it’s great that they’re not aching to buy a car and add to the emissions problem. On another level, a dated and raised-in-the-country level, I cannot understand their lack of desire for a driver’s license! Maybe it’s a split between an urban and rural frame of mind. I grew up knowing that I could only get to where I wanted after I had my driver’s license. I think there’s some hard-wiring involved as well. The fight or flight wiring. I feel the need to be confident that I can drive away, whenever I want, should I have the desire or need. When the pandemic sweeps the country (Tiptree, “The Screwfly Solution”), when the aliens land (H.G. Wells’, The War of the Worlds), when the rapture goes bad (Jim Munroe’s, Therefore Repent!) … you’re not gonna want to stand in line at the Greyhound station. I told you so! I’ll tell my no-license children. Shut up, Mummy. Drive!

In fact, the very first functioning time travel apparatus could well be a novel. Imagine– you pick up a book and follow the life of the central character from infancy to adulthood, into old age, then death. 300 – 400 pages, say. I could read it in one day. Yet in reading the book, and if it’s well-written, I can feel the experience of time via the vehicle of the characters, and in the midst of vicariously experiencing fictional lives, I experience an intact alternate time bubble while simultaneously existing in my own. They’re just words on a page!  Super trippy!

I knew there must be something written about it, but a quick cursory search didn’t bring up anything that I wanted. So I turned to a feminist SF listserv I belong to and posted my question to the group mind. I had two lead within seconds. Literally. The people on this listserv are well-read, wide ranging  readers, and if it’s in any way connected to SF, and books (as well as a great many other areas, I kid you not) someone will have a suggestion. In seconds! Two members offered up these suggestions:

Time and Narrative (Vol. I, II, II– clearly, there’s a lot to write about!!!) by Paul Ricoeur

About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, by Mark Currie

Einstein’s Dreams, by Allan Lightman

I’ve been thinking about the importance of constructing a believable bubble of time in narrative fiction because during the fantasy writing workshop I facilitated last weekend, I briefly mentioned the connections between  time and setting…. There needs to be an awareness of how much time is passing in the novel, for the characters, and the semblance of its ‘natural’ flow in and around setting. Even though most readers are not focussing so keenly on how time is playing out, their intuitive sense of perceiving time will be twigged when it’s not flowing seamlessly. We can be snagged by something that yanks us out of the illusion of fictional time.

Writers new to their practice might find themself trying to fix time and setting in particular ways. Time-relative words like “Now” signify different moments for the character, the writer, and the reader. Pointing to “now-ness” actually points to the impossibility of making it mean the same thing for everyone at the same time. It’s a time connundrum.  In order to keep the bubble of character time intact, there’s no need to use the word, “now”. Now is already implied if the character is just doing things in her space-time. A similar thing happens with spatial words like “here” or “there”.

Time…. I marvel.

Wiscon was intense, wondrous and inspiring! Sooo many feminist writers and readers– I didn’t realize just how many until I saw everyone at the Tiptree award ceremony and GOH speeches. Holy smokes! I wondered. This is a power indeed. Greer Gilman was awarded for her complex and profound novel (tho clearly it breaches the borders of “novel” just as it expands notions of gender), Cloud and Ashes, and GOHs Nnedi Okorafor and Mary Anne Mohanraj gave stunning and deeply inspiring speeches. Met many amazing feminist writers of colour, like Neesha Meminger (Shine, Coconut Moon) and was so grateful…. I also couldn’t help myself and was all, well, dog-like fawning (hmmmm, why a fawn? are they “fawn-ish”?) over Carol Emshwiller and asked if I could take a photo with her. ^___^. I am such a huge fan of her biting, hilarious intensely feminist novel, Carmen Dog. It’s brilliant.

Now it’s time to change the channel. I’m facilitating a creative writing workshop at Women’s Words this coming weekend. After that I’m looking forward to the plunge back into the deep and dark waters of writing and writing. I need to submerge. The darkness calls.

I was just skyping with my ex girlfriend and I was bemoaning the latest gender fiasco that I experienced during my flight back from Toronto. A young francophone mum (with hair cropped as short as mine) was travelling with her young daughter, who was about three years old. We had just pulled up to the accordion gate and people began turning on their cellphones, etc, retrieving items from the overhead bins. The little girl was banging her little suitcase back and forth, the extended handle coming rather close to my face.

Don’t do that, the young mother said, in French. Why not? the girl asked. Because you might hit the garcon, the mother replied.

Garcon? Garcon?! How old is a garcon? Is that a young man? A boy? Wasn’t man, “l’homme”? I wondered. At what point is a boy a man? I was so caught up with the finer points of the translative and the decoding of age that I by-passed gender. At least, I fumed, let me be my age, woman!

Garcon, because my hair is cropped, I don’t wear makeup, and I was wearing a blue shirt? It’s also our height, I said to my ex girlfriend, who is also my height, and sometimes mistaken for a boy. When our height is inserted into this equation, it’s been sealed. ( But, I’d like to point out, I have grey hair at the temples…. And, I see numerous shorter Italian Canadian men at the Italian market!) So, race is a factor too.

Maybe she didn’t really look at you, my sister suggested. Maybe her eyes skimmed over the “shape” of me…. Does this matter? I’m not sure. It speaks of the young mother’s worldview– not mine. I wonder if there will come a day when no one will make assumptions of gender based upon appearance, and that will be the normative practice. How marvellous that would be! To be free from the limitations and prescriptive  narratives that have been married to the notions of “woman” and “man”. Clearly I’m not there, yet, because it bothers me to be called a “man” or “boy” (or garcon) and I’m identifying the mum as a woman and her child as a little girl based upon the normative cues she is using to decode me…. Confounding! The difference might be that I’m aware of the filter and can peel it away, whereas I have a sense that she does not know that a filter even exists….

But it’s not at just the level of gender– it also swirls with race, height, age. The perfect storm, I said to my ex girlfriend.

Why not just say, “person”? <crooked grin>

I’ve been bemused and hopeful about the gender thing, however, because my teen-aged daughter and several of her friends are enamoured of a Japanese rock star called Miyavi. He has the prettiest and most beautiful face I’ve seen in a very long time…. He is married to a beautiful young woman, and they have a new baby and he can totally ”pass as a young woman” (see! I’m still trapped by that code!!!!). I ask my daughter questions: are all his fans female? No, he has male fans too, my daughter informs me. Gay or straight? Both, she says. He’s eye candy, she says. Interestinger and interestinger.

He’s really good on the guitar!  

He’s a lovely gender role model for the 21rst century.