The Secret Fairy Society

The Secret Fairy Society Newsletter

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If a Tree Falls.....

If a blog is posted on the web and nobody reads it, does it matter? I have been mulling this question for awhile. Writing a blog is a bit of a paradox. It satisfies the writing urge, but you never really know…

Blogs provide a temporary therapeutic outlet for writers. If you have the urge to write and a correspondent need to GET IT OUT THERE, hitting the PUBLISH button is immensely, albeit only momentarily, satisfying. There! You think to yourself, I have PUBLISHED my blog post! The operative word in that statement is PUBLISH.

Moby Dick serves as the ultimate writer’s metaphor. Once you make the decision to put stuff down on paper (or into Microsoft Word) you can’t deny you have the urge to publish something, ANYTHING! But, like Ahab in Moby Dick, you ride alone on the vast ocean of the written word, hoping to spear a periodical that will accept the submission you sent six months ago. It isn’t easy, however. They dare you to write enough stories to BE ABLE to publish something. You have to have a stable of stories because, for the most part you can’t send your story to any other periodical because they don’t accept simultaneous submissions.

Let's say you have written five really good, polished, finished stories. This means you can only send it to five publications. Each publication takes a minimum of three months, usually six to reject you. Can you see where I am going here? You will be 86 before you can make the rounds of a modest list of publications. Your heirs will receive your final rejection notice or if you are really lucky, they will receive 10 complementary copies of the publication and the honor of telling everyone their dead mother’s short story will be published in the next issue.

You begin to develop a criminal mind. Yes, criminal. You say to yourself, “How will they know this is a simultaneous submission? What are the chances of all ten literary magazines accepting this story?” And so, you defy the carefully bolded submission guideline, that looks and sounds sinister “No Simultaneous Submissions….” You begin to dissemble…deceitfulness enters your writing habit.

Blogging is like being a shopaholic. You receive a momentary rush when you boldly PUBLISH what you have written. It feels like buying a new chatzka for the house. It comes perfectly packaged; the bag the shop owner places it in is crisp and new. Once you return home with your darling purchase you take the item out of the bag, which you carefully save as a reminder of the chatzka shop. You flit about the house, placing the chatzka here and there, you step back, you admire it, you feel a rush of contentment and tell yourself it is enough. Like Yahweh on the seventh day, you can rest. You have enough and you don’t need to ever buy another thing.

And then a week goes by and then a month. The rush is gone. Something is missing inside, you need something fun to happen , you are low, maybe you burned your oatmeal that morning or had to pump gas and the nozzle dribbled on your best pair of shoes so you smell like gas all day. What can you do? SHOP!!! Yes! You tell yourself “I’ll just look around, that’s all!” And the whole cycle starts over again.

Blogging is like that. Only instead of shopping, you write something. You bold the parts you want to emphasize, you lean back and make sure it looks fine on the screen, you move bits around with the mouse, you cut and paste. Finally, like Goldilocks, it looks JUUUUUSTTTT RIGGGHHHHTTT and you PUBLISH it. I just love that part, the PUBLISH part….can you tell?

But then, time goes by. You have a bad day. What to do? Write! Yes! Write something, work on that short story that has been rejected, add a creep or a big hearted prostitute! That will get their attention! That will make them want to accept your simultaneous submission, besides, since you added the creep and the prostitute, it isn’t simultaneous anymore! What if you change the first sentence! Make it “pop” as they say.

But you end up doodling around because you just don’t like to write creeps and prostitutes and you decide instead to comment on the immediate present, Maybe you have read something somewhere that makes you feel crazy like some wacky judge who just released a serial sex offender. You type a few hundred lovely words! You turn it into a blog post, you hit the publish button… You feel as if you have accomplished something…

But, if you publish a blog on the web and nobody reads it, does it exist?

Google philosophy! Google has all the answers. It is the giant chatzka emporium to the world. It has an immediate answer for every burning question. You click the best looking link and it makes you feel better because you find a long list of “ISM's.” You are browsing in the ultimate chatzka store and you end up buying into the ism that puts everything in perspective:

MODEL REALISM -a philosophy propounded by David Lewis, that possible worlds are as real as the actual world.

So the answer is, if you publish a blog on the web and no one reads it, it doesn’t matter because it’s your own little possible world!

More Joni

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2007/11/019055.php

Although this isn't the same song, Joni is certainly timely at this time of year because

"It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees.
They're putting up reindeer,
Singing songs of joy and peace..."

Ah! Joni!

Did I ever tell you about the times I saw Joni live?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2007/11/018965.php

Story From The Writing Life

Last night I had the most delicious experience. I listened as someone read to me out loud. Well, to me and a room of 75 other people, but it felt extremely intimate and I was completely bowled over.

I had the privilege of being invited to a book launch. (It is so cool to be able to write that.)

“What did you do last night, Dody?”
“Oh, I just attended Quinn Dalton’s book launch, that’s all…”

But – That’s NOT all. It was more than just a venue for a special author to share her newest collection of stories. It was like discovering the joy of reading all over again. It was like homemade vanilla custard being poured over dessert. It was like chocolate melting in your mouth. It was like inhaling a bunch of freshly cut lilacs. It was smooth and sultry and inviting.

Can you tell I haven’t had any new experiences lately? In this harsh, old, jaded world we live in it is hard to actually experience something new; something from the virginal perspective. But last night felt just like that.

Quinn Dalton is a terrific writer. I have had the pleasure and the honor of taking a writing class with her in the role of instructor, mentor, and guide. She happens to be a terrific teacher. But writing is her passion and her new collection of stories, Stories From the After Life,” is pure Quinn; full of unvarnished characters with big hearts and quirky thoughts and imperceptible Mona Lisa smiles. Quinn’s stories have a rhythm like smooth jazz and last night she lived up to that description.

Reading her story titled “Jimmy the Brain and the Beautiful Aideen,” while the group Dawn Chorus coolly jammed in the background, Quinn showed the room full of admirers just how you fold one art form into another. The four musicians seemed to sense exactly what was necessary to provide a seamless musical backdrop for Quinn’s story about the beautiful yet wise older woman, infatuated young man and the awkward social misfit.

I can’t help thinking how unfortunate it is that more people don’t choose to experience the joys of the short story. There was a time when you could find them in every magazine. Yet, as the numbers of readers in America dwindle; so too are the opportunities for talented short story writers becoming harder to find. Trust me. H-A-R-D.

But last night was a latte kind of night. It left me with just enough froth on my mind to savor the experience hours after I returned home. It invigorated the writer inside of me and gave me hope. It also gave me something new to dream, that maybe someday I can read one of my stories out loud to the strains of perfectly pitched music. Like seeing live theatre, last night showed me just how provocative the art of short stories can be. Thanks Quinn, for an exhilarating experience. http://www.quinndalton.com/

Gather Ye Assets While Ye May

I have worked where I work for 25 years now. This milestone has caused me to look over my shoulder, so to speak, and wonder where the heck the time has gone. I know that it has been 25 years because I have a plaque which attests to this fact. I am an official member of the Quarter Century Club. They gave me a burrito breakfast to seal the deal and I chose a single diamond necklace as my “gift” for all my years of dedicated service. I could have chosen a camera, video recorder, luggage… the list goes on and on. But I chose the diamond because when I am dead, I want my ancestors to know that the fable about the tortoise and the hare is brilliant and I am a living example. And so I say: to all you future descendants, here’s the diamond to prove it…”

I suppose we all either boil down to being hares or tortoises. As it turns out, I am a tortoise. This comes as a bit of shock to me, (and it may to you, too) as I have always considered myself to be a bunny-like kind of gal. I loved the scene in Legally Blonde where she shows up at the party in her pink satin bunny suit. I also love this same scene in Bridgett Jones. This would be me. Curling my hair, donning fishnets to display my inner bunny (she is in there somewhere competing with my inner 50’s housewife.) I am prone to hop to attention and I think of myself more as a cute female Disney rabbit, kind of like Thumper’s girl friend bunny, than as a Disney turtle. Plus, I have always been drawn to angora. In fact, I still own a pale lavender angora sweater I bought in 1981 from a darling boutique in Portland, Oregon.

So, discovering that I am actually a tortoise was somewhat unnerving. But the truth of the matter is, like that great Aesop story, I have been plodding along, one foot in front of the other for 25 years now and it is only recently that I have discovered how eminently sensible this has turned out to be.

While other women that I have encountered along the way have sprinted ahead of me to become “VP’s” or Private Bankers or Executive Directors for trendy non-profits, leaving for greener pastures, or just grazing from job to job, I have poked along in my position, hesitant to give up my sure thing, my good deal, occasionally taking tests for a little extra money here or a bigger bonus there. I have heaved big sighs and quietly hung on to my health insurance. (I know that this is a main theme for this blog, but I promise to explain this obsession someday. It’s all wound up in my Jane Austen fixation and commitment to personal responsibility.) I have also saved incrementally in boring monthly payroll deductions for retirement. I continue to drearily engage in dollar cost averaging and dutifully increase my 401-K contribution by at least 1 percent after I receive my raise each year.

Nope. No fancy titles for me. I just know every in and out of the wacky brokerage world. Big Yawn. I can, however, effectively wiggle my way through the eye of the needle know as “LEGAL”. Or, at least anticipate what they will say before they say it and save at least two weeks of wrangling and agony. It doesn’t make great cocktail party blather, I mean, no one would probably care to hear about how FAST I managed to divide Dr. Whozit”s mother’s estate before the end of the year, (like, really fast, like, December 29th, when the cutoff was December 10th or something) or the clever way I found the lost money of someone’s addlepated Aunt Esther hidden in a bizarre account at a Bank America in California. Nor do they give a hoot about just how high I was able to finagle the bid of XYZ shares for Mr. Soandso’s Employee Stock Option. It was like a high wire act. It was impressive. I felt like I was playing intergalactic mind games with the unseen trader standing somewhere on the trading floor of the NYSE. All I could see on the screen was the ask blinking up and becoming my bid each time… BWA HA HA!

At one point, it felt like all my careful saving and dutiful attention to security was a bunch of nothing, but I recently came across my 401-k statement from 1991 and OH-MY-GOD, what they say about slow and steady is the dog-gone truth! This is the day that it dawned on me, I AM A TORTOISE.

When I started, the Dow Jones stood at about 860. From there it has only gone up. But things can be pretty if-ey in the world of brokerage firms. It’s a tough business no matter how you slice it. Brokers come and brokers go. Mostly, they go. Twenty five years ago, when I was hired as an assistant to stock brokers, I was only on the job for one week before I realized stock brokers made great money. At the time it seemed like a winning strategy. You earned commission if your client bought a stock and also if your client sold a stock. Even if they lost money!! WOW! Who thought of that? It’s brilliant! But the more I watched, the more I realized how hard it was. First you had to find the people WITH the stocks. To gather assets, that is. That is what they call it, asset gathering.

For years, I pictured all the lovely, white males I work with dressed in blue gingham dresses, and red hooded capes, wearing a wig of blonde ringlets. I imagined them skipping through a dark, green forest of stocks, bonds and cash equivalents, a wicker basket slung over their arm, gathering assets. Mostly, they would run into lions and tigers and bears, but all it took was the occasional bull guarding a pot of gold to set them up for life. The caveat: finding the gold is tough. Really, really tough. I knew right away, 25 years ago, I wasn’t up to it.

I once worked for a woman. She was bold as brass. I heard her telling all her little old lady clients in no uncertain terms, “NO! ALMA! You absolutely can NOT buy a beach house!!! I am going to buy that hospital bond instead. If you want your grandchildren to swim, put a pool in your backyard!”

I would have said to Alma, “OH, GOODY! Can I help you decorate the beach house?” No, I was never meant to be an asset gatherer.

So, I stayed put. Just being a top notch assistant. Knowing the business as well as they did, able to be the best damn Girl Friday anyone could ever ask for; but nothing to brag about. No names to drop. No fifteen minutes of anything but, “Oh, look! The market is up 100!”

Recently, one of those rabbit women who passed me by 15 years ago title-wise commented that she wished she had been more like me; just a good, capable assistant with a wad in her 401-K and solid steady job. Sure, she’s been an Asst VP and a VP and Executive Director… but she is also currently on straight commission in that dark forest of stocks, bonds and cash equivalents, with no pots of gold in sight.

Slow and steady might not be flashy or impressive. But it pays the bills and wins the race. Plus, I think even Walt Disney girl turtles have lovely, long, curly eyelashes and are pretty darn cute.

To Utopia and Back Again…

The problem with Utopia is the impossibility of it ever becoming a permanent state. Luckily, I am privileged enough to be a sometimes traveler to the mystical world, the delicious idea known as Utopia.

We (hubby and I) just returned from a four day stay at my family cottage in Northern Wisconsin. The North Woods. Up North. Way Up. We went to learn the ropes, so to speak, on how to close up for the winter the fragile little house known to all in my family as The Cottage.

With the help of my family, including an Uncle, Aunt, Cousins (1st, 2nd and 4th,) husbands of cousins and children of husbands of cousins, we managed to suck every last dead bug out of the place. This was the King Tut Tomb of dead bugs. Our “to do” list was longer than the amount of time we had to accomplish everything, but as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said on March 11, 1942: “I shall return!”

How, you may ask, does this “working vacation” translate into Utopia? For starters, the information vacuum. In other words, there is no information, except that which can be gleaned from conversation sitting around a dinner table. Ah! The lost art of long, family dinners or the quiet discussion between two people who have been married 25+ years as they sit in two ancient rockers facing the fire, as opposed to listening to the talking heads facing a T.V. It is easy to list the characteristics of this particular Utopia; the woods, the clear cold mornings and evenings, the mist on the lake in the morning. No roaring boats; sublime, simply sublime.

Except for the late night crackle of distant radio stations, you can’t find much information. In fact, we kind of felt like we were in the Twilight Zone, since the clearest station we could locate on the dial only seemed to be playing old Phillip Marlow Mystery Radio Programs from the 40’s. This seemed to be a distant Canadian radio station and for the hour or two we were able to rock in front of the fire and listen, I felt like a time traveler. I could easily imagine that the same show could have been heard over the airwaves by a relative or unknown tourist staying at the cottage when it served as a resort all those many years ago. It was comforting, like receiving a postcard from the cosmos.

The good, hard physical work served as anthropological research of sorts into the past. It is no wonder (according to my Uncle) my great, greats (grandfathers, uncles, ancestors, ancients, etc.) were able to pour pure bacon fat over their pancakes each morning. Chopping wood, scrubbing floors, and sweeping the roof will burn up inordinate amounts of such ingested fuel. No, we didn’t pour bacon fat on OUR pancakes, nor do I suggest that this is a taste temptation I would recommend to anyone except the dog. I guess we have evolved somewhat, but still… you can understand why they were able to consume such… such… or, maybe not. Okay, let’s move on from bacon fat.

It is hard to leave Utopia. For a millisecond, your brain starts to churn with fantastic plans on how you can stay forever. You think how being a waitress in a homey café and writing in between shifts sounds kind of fun. Or, how about applying to become the church secretary at the darling Episcopal Church? Think about the fun you would have designing the bulletin each week! It would be far less stressful than sweating bullets as you rapidly enter short puts on the SPX. And then reality kicks in, the gas starts to sputter in the cottage’s wall heater and the truths of modern day survival start to intrude. Things like: the job you have worked at for a quarter of a century to provide health insurance for your family, the college loans lurking like a lump of dough stuck in your throat, the house, the bills, the animals…

Suddenly, your mind whirling like the baton of a 50’s beauty queen, it hits you. You don’t need to figure out a way to stay in Utopia, because you are already there! Like Dorothy in Kansas, you have had the key to Utopia the entire time! This mini Utopia, this cottage in the woods, you realize, is merely a small sliver of the giant pie that is your Utopian American Life. Utopia is all around you! It is the job God threw in your path, complete with health insurance as well as proof that trickle down economics works, at least for you. Or, the healthy child you have raised, complete with good grades and the smarts to tough it out at a college reputed to have a tougher homework load than Harvard. College loans? Pffhtgt… nothing! A mere trifle! A substitute for a shiny car, a good choice and again possible only because of the job you have held on to for 25 years. Then there’s the husband you can't so without, who keeps all the edges neat and tidy, glue man, sticky boy, call him what you want, he is integral to holding the whole ball of wax together.

Of course, there is also your mom, the little bird, who has loved every word that ever came out of your mouth or off your pen forever. And finally, your beautiful girls, older sis, Uncle and Aunt, Cousins (1st, 2nd, 4th) and the husbands of your cousins and the children of the husbands of your cousins but most especially your little sister who ranks up there with the saints… In other words, UTOPIA.