Authoring & Playwriting

Progress is getting better as the new year starts. Working on another audio book and on my fourth draft for the next novella. Sales have picked up and social media is still getting a large amount of traffic.

Also applying for Editor with ebooks. Crossing my fingers!

Santa was very discerning over Christmas and brought me a book written by one of my favourite poets, Joy Harjo.

Harjo is a Muskogee Creek Nation poet, who caught my attention with her collection of poetry in ‘Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings’.

The older I become, the more I am at home with the poets. I see me ending my days, sipping a good whisky and writing poetry. Not in any melancholic way, but as a matter of giving thanks for the gift of being a pen in the hand of the Universe.

Here below, are some quotes which caught my eye and captured my heart:

Joy Harjo - Catching the Light (my responses in brackets)

“I was in the dark and decided to investigate the dark to find the light.” p1

(Some are happy to investigate the darkness and stay there, dwell there, and wallow. Deep calls to deep, light to light; but when you have no light within, you will not find the light without.)

“And I was coming to learn that words were ladders, with each rung leading between the darkest hours of sunlight, from confusion to accomplishment, or in the opposite direction.” p3

Poems as points of illumination…”I have come to conclude that, ultimately, it is about catching light in the dark. Poetry…can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark…/Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.“ p3/4

“For Holy Ones to touch down in that manner is powerful and dangerous; everyone must pay attention.” p6

“We might even find a trickster in the seat of power. We have always had clowns and tricksters in every culture. They inhabit the power places because their role is to remind us that though we may hold and even wield power, power does not belong to us. It is meant to be shared.” p7

“Language is a living being.” p8

(This struck a chord with me. Language is a living being! Wow. Life is breath, and to speak out language, to utter its nuances, there has to be air in our lungs expelled to pronounce a poets words of light.)

“I came to writing poetry because I needed a language that was beyond ordinary. I was not a speaker. /I was the silent one who sat in the back, often caught up with invisible wars from fresh present to a historical past that revealed itself to me in shards and waves. “ p8/9

(I know this experience of being on the margins with no voice, but now at 65 1/2 years of age, I’m finding my voice).

“At the very heart of creation is a need to connect, even if it is to connect to no one in silent defiance or curious desperation. The inner world is even more immense than the measured world we have created out of wants, hunger and sometimes, need. Every word marks an act of creation, an intent…I have come to see the process as a kind of call-and-response. Silence calls out, as do the kinds of voices that can be heard only when silence is present.” p17

“The poet listens with pen, pencil in hand…The road isn’t always clear. There can be jams, wrecks of questions, belief on its knees,/ mountains of sand, or fires-and you learn with practice that these are part of it. We can go under, over, or through, or around. Or be lost. The Laguna Pueblo novelist and poet, Leslie Silko, in her stories and poems, often references the storyteller who, one day, was so immersed in the story that she disappeared in the story, never to be found. She essentials becomes the story.” p17/18

(The writing process is riddled with jams and wrecks, from questions without answers, until we have this sense of immersion in our stories, when the lines between writer and character are blurred and jams and wrecks fade out of view and the way ahead is clear).

“Artists are aware of the metaphorical aspect of their creations, they sense that their work is prayer-not a prayer to the white, patriarchal, angry god of judgment, but an immersion in a flood of creative brilliance, larger than the human imagination.” p20

“We are all as actors, wearing the masks of family, generation, or occupation. We step into the story when we take our first breath. We will lay down the masks when we return to the spiritual jumping-off place.” p20

“It was all connected, this poetics of listening, word making, and dancing. There was power to transform, to lighten the heaviness of the burden of being human. That’s how I can to understand the power of poetry and music. It was a tool, but more than a tool. Words and music evoked a state of mind that lifted us up when racial and historical despair threatened.” p24

( and I would add economic despair experienced in the UK in the 1980s!)

“Like everyone else there, (in the bar) I was looking for a vision, for freedom from the ugliness of shame and loathing. I was looking for a language to speak my way out of there, hence the scribblings on bar napkins, my face covered by my long hair. I made a cave of silence in the mess and found poetry there.” p29

(Looking for a language. That is what writing is about - looking for a language to help us create a way out of despair, of spiritual torpor or material (dis)ease.)

“Earth is a living being. We cannot own the Earth; rather we are an essential part of the Earth. Our relationship with the Earth will decide the fate of our families, our future generations. To dig, destroy, take more than you need, and to do so with the intent to benefit a few is considered disrespectful to all, and more than that, extremely dangerous.” p31

Writing poetry:

“…to make word trails that could lead to justice.” p31

(The writer as change-maker. Yes!)

“These lands aren’t my lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are the land.” p38

“Writing itself is an act of affirmation, even of sovereignty. We confirm that we are human beings, that we are alive and making and breathing culture.” p38

“As scribes of our generation, we are called to remember what matters.” p39

(Writing is more than a diversion from reality, but a way of entering into it, more fully. Or to quote Karen Armstrong - “Story…is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.” From “A Short History of Myth”.

“To regard the Earth, or Ekunucaku, as a person, as a mother, is not a romantic notion. Understanding this will be essential to our survival. To understand this relationship means that we have respect for life, for the mother principle, for women who stand alongside men, not beneath them. In this collective Earth crisis, we are experiencing the outcome of disconnection…” p40

(Yes, shoulder to shoulder, because our work as writers is an act of community).

From Flannery O’Connor…

A change to my diet has given me more energy to work. Almost complete with the final chapter for my next novella. Also was able to buy a new microphone for audiobook recording and podcast interviews.

Since watching ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, James Baldwin has claimed a place not only in my imagination, but also my heart.

He refused all classifications, labels of ‘gay’ or ‘socialist’ and settled on ‘writer’, believing that labels restrict your talent and your audience. What is meant for a wider audience, becomes niche. It’s a lesson we can all learn from.

Here below, are some seeds of light, shared at this season of epiphany, of the light coming on in a world darkened by the scourge of war, disease and poverty. A time when our ability to hurt one another seems greater than our power to heal.

This power, however, is not political, but that of language. With that in mind, I’d like to share with you some healing words from James Baldwin’s essay ‘Nothing Personal’:

“It has always been much easier…to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.” P694

“Where the people can sing, the poet can live-and it is worth saying it the other way around too: where the poet can sing, the people can live.” P695

“But, if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.” P699

“And what we are struggling against, is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.” P700

“Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost.” P701

“How is it possible to love the child if one does not know who one is?” P702

“…for to become educated (as all tyrants have always known) is to become inaccessibly independent, it is to acquire a dangerous way of assessing danger, and it is to hold in one’s hand a means of changing reality.” P703

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith.” P704

“The light. The light. One will perish without the light.” P705

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.” P706

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” P706

If you use a traditional publisher, this is what you can expect.

If you self-publish, you keep both the publisher and author cost, and if you distribute yourself, you keep the distributor costs. If you print and get your books in a bookstore, you don't always need a distributor, especially locally. It's all very tedious for little return.

Writing a book will not make you rich.

Having physical books on hand is nice but it can be pricey. Any book, physical or ebook, should be about the story. Nobody buys the publisher, bookseller, or most times, even the author. They buy the story. Put your logline skills to good use.

You still have to sell your own book if you get a traditional publisher. No matter how you publish, sell the story. Why should a reader invest their time in your book? What will it do for them?