Live from the Falls!

by Susan Helene Gottfried


As you're reading this, I'm in Canada, hopefully far from any of my computers, although I suspect we'll have at least one laptop with us. Yesterday was, after all, Thursday, and any of my regular groupies can tell you how important Thursdays are in my world.

I chose to travel on a Thursday because it's been two-and-a-half years since my family's last vacation. I'm overdue, to make a gross understatement.

I love to travel. I love to explore new places, see how other people live, learn new things. I love the possibilities that overload my brain.

The Tour Manager will refute this until he turns shades of blue, but for someone named after a job that you only do when you travel, he's a homebody. Maybe it's that he doesn't like to plan; I don't know. All I know for certain is that I'm the one who sat down three weeks ago and started showing the kids pictures of Niagara Falls. The Tour Manager, upon hearing us, fired up one of our other five computers and joined the effort.

Which is why, as you're reading this, I am running around Canada, reveling in the sights. I was here as a kid, myself; my memories are vague. Something about not being allowed to do something, a blue sky, and a little teepee my parents bought me in the souvenir shop. Of the Falls themselves, I remember virtually nothing.

My dad gave me a CD-ROM with all of his old pictures on it, including pictures of my own first time in Niagara. I dug it out in the hopes that the pictures would invoke more memories.

Lo and behold, my dad -- a man who takes amazing quantities of pictures for no good reason -- had taken exactly FIVE pictures: three were of the falls themselves. One was of my sisters with the falls in the background, badly backlit so that you can't see their faces. And the last one? My dad, in the same setting and equally as backlit.

Not much help in the memory department, I'm afraid. In fact, the pictures were useless in that regard. I'm not even sure they'll scrapbook well.

Even before I made scrapbooks and had kids to fill the books with, I'd become quite the photographer -- probably because it was a way to be closer to my dad. I expect I'll take lots of pictures while we're in Niagara. None of that posed stuff for me, either; I like it candid.

Even if my kids come home with only vague images that'll carry into their adult years, I'll have the pictorial supplements I lack of my fist visit to the Falls. Memories may exist only in our brains, but having a slew of pictures sure helps flesh out those memories and keep them real.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll help remind the Tour Manager how much fun it is when the family heads out on the road.

Dumped by Thumper

By Susan Helene Gottfried

Ever since the flyer came to my mailbox, I've wanted to do this: Ride one hundred miles around Lake Tahoe. On a bicycle. In one day.

They're called Century rides, and they happen all over the country (perhaps the world, but let's feed one ambition at a time, shall we?), usually but not exclusively in conjunction with a foundation that's raising money to fight a disease. The Tahoe ride was brought to my notice by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training.

The idea chewed at me even though I'm a walking orthopedic disaster. My sports medicine doctor says it'll take an Olympian feat for me to be able to pull off Centuries.

Still, I dream.

Every Wednesday morning, I jump on a spin bike at my gym and fantasize I'm doing that Century. I push myself with promises of seeing my children and husband cheering for me at the finish line.

I dream of putting together teams decked out in West of Mars jerseys. Of constantly hitting up friends, acquaintances, and blog visitors for donations for this month's ride. Of learning how to pack and unpack my bike, how to use chamois cream and how to take a drink from my water bottle even though I'm flying.

Thankfully, the Tour Manager's as supportive of this as he is of my writing. One thing we've discovered with my weird body is that biking is one of the few things that doesn't induce pain. And as much as I love my mountain bike, hauling it up the hills around here isn't the easiest thing in the world. Thus, I am now the proud owner of a Trek Pilot bicycle -- a real road bike.

We're just getting to know each other, me and my Pilot. As I write this, I've only had her for two weeks. She's effortless to pedal; I described the experience as riding a Thoroughbred after years on a Clydesdale.

Of course, though, Thoroughbreds are known for being skittish animals and while my new skinny tires may zoom, I'm finding that they aren't as forgiving when I move suddenly.

Like tonight, for instance. I was headed home after a short ride that took longer on my mountain bike, envisioning the lake. I was pulled back to reality by a rustling in the brush beside me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement and swerved, almost falling off from the jerk I'd just given my handlebars.

Two brown bundles rolled over as they tried to stop themselves from falling off the curb and taking me down to the street with them. I saw white ears, white underbellies, maybe a white cotton tail, and then I was past and straightening out, still on the bike, still pedaling. I hadn't even reached for the brakes.

I biked the final quarter mile with a shiver teasing my spine. Instead of Lake Tahoe, all I could think about was what it would have felt like if I'd been dumped by Thumper.

Nothing

By Susan Helene Gottfried

I have nothing to say, it seems. Oh, I am overflowing with ideas as soon as I turn the computer off, but as soon as I sit down to put those ideas onto the screen, my brain goes blank.

This isn't like me. I always have things to say. Too many things, usually. And I'm hardly one to shy away from controversy, or to jump in to play devil's advocate or mediate.

This utter inability to put words to screen is a bit disconcerting. Especially because I can open a file of some fiction and fall into as easily as I can fall into a bed at the end of the day. Maybe even easier.

I can hear my fictional character of Trevor Wolff scoffing at me, a cigarette dangling from his lip in his best James Dean imitation. "The problem," he says with a drawl, "is that you're undisciplined lately. Look at you. Write two sentences here and then flip to another window. You're checking your feed reader, you're surfing blogs. And then you whine about having nothing to say!"

He is, of course, right. As he is right when he adds on the part about me being full of it, too. It's a question of discipline. Isn't it?

It is true that there's actually too much to keep up with. My feed reader regularly has over 100 items waiting for me. My network of fellow bloggers grows by the day, and everyone wants me to notice them, just as I want them to notice me.

I love it, I do. I have always been a bit of a loner, and this network makes me feel more connected to people than I ever have been in my life. I've found that they inspire me as I sit down to write.

It's weird; you'd think that there'd be performance anxiety or fear that they'd hate what I write next. Certainly, when no one commented on a recent post within the first few hours of it being posted, I was worried I'd offended. Then again, I was writing about my fictional band's early road trip, the morning after a late-night Mexican dinner. Bodily functions are always a dicey affair, one I usually steer clear of.

I was in my late twenties when I said to a friend, "I've just realized I'm a competitive person." I'd never thought about it; how can a virtual hermit be competitive? With who?

Her response went along the lines of, "What rock have you been living under?"

That competitive nature saves me from the typical writerly anxiety and instead pushes me to challenge myself. To constantly raise my own bar and expand the scope of my imagination.

So maybe, I ought to tell Trevor, what I'm really doing isn't avoiding anything. Maybe I'm working as I surf the Net and visit my friends' blogs, letting my inner voice burble along until I'm finally ready to put words to page.

Trevor's not buying it, but what does he know? He's not real anyway.

April Showers

By Susan Helene Gottfried

I love April. Yes, even though I sit here clad in my favorite winter fleece, I love this month.

Maybe it's the unpredictability of the weather. The fact that April refuses to conform and insists on throwing us, day after day, a curve ball.

In many ways, I am the same as April. That's fitting, as I am an April baby. The month and I reflect each other. We compliment each other, we contradict each other. That's how I like it.

Most of the major events in my life have taken place in April. Not just my birthday, but my Bat Mitzvah, too. I graduated from college and passed my oral exams to officially earn my MFA in creative writing in April. I started my blog a year ago, in April. And this month so far, I've won awards and accolades.

About the only thing that hasn't happened in April was my wedding, which happened at the end of March. And what tends to follow a wedding but children -- neither of whom were born in April. Not for lack of trying, however.

Given all of these Aprilian warm fuzzies, you'd think I'd love my birthday. Remember, though, April and I are unpredictable. And, thus, I loathe my birthday.

It's not that I mind getting older. Not at all; I've earned these years. Even though I wonder if I should act sedate and wear pastel flowered clothing, I like where I am. I like the paths I'm on.

The problem with my birthday is simple. No matter how little I expect, I never get it. Oh, the Tour Manager is stellar on birthdays, don't get me wrong. And my parents never forget to send an e-mail. It's everyone else who presents the problem.

A few years ago, I declared the entire month of April to be my birthday. Despite the fact that you only had a one-in-30 chance of getting the actual day right, you were never wrong when you wished me a year's worth of blessings.


I had a friend who, a few years back, rose to the challenge of getting the day exactly right. Every single April day, he sent me a birthday greeting of some sort. A joke. An e-card. Every single day.

We've fallen out of touch since then, but I still treasure his effort. Just like April, it was unpredictable and wild -- and fun. It made me, for once, not hate my birthday.

This year, with the Penguins in the playoffs, I've got an equally good reason to draw the cheer out. I declared that my family was going to get dressed up and have dinner in a local seafood restaurant… only to have the playoffs interrupt our plans.

Well, it's April. If there weren't snags in the plan, I'd worry. And if we have to wait until May for my birthday dinner because the Pens are kicking the Senators back to Ottawa, that's a present in and of itself.

Bodacious Inspiration

By Susan Helene Gottfried


Fellow Stiff Tory caught me mentioning Bodacious Sauce a few weeks back. Smart woman that she is, her interest was piqued. What is Bodacious Sauce, she asked, and what's the story about Bodacious Sauce and Google?

Well, until I saw that someone had reached my blog by Googling Bodacious Sauce, I never knew that it actually existed. I'd thought it was a great name for a barbecue sauce, and it totally fit the theme I was going for when I created it. That was all.

I created it back in 2003, for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNo to those of us familiar with the phenomenon. I was writing a scene that had intially been inspired by Metallica's now-infamous commando appearance at a Raiders football game. I morphed the band playing in the back of a tractor trailer into five or six bands, all playing out of trailers, arranged in a very large semi-circle outside of Riverview Stadium. It became the set-up for a battle of the bands in my fictional city of Riverview, USA.

It wasn't enough to make the event authentic. So I took it a step further: there was a rib fest going on at the stadium, over the July 4 holiday weekend. (How convenient that it fell on a weekend, but that's the beauty of fiction.) The Battle of the Bands, sponsored by fictional radio station KRVR, was the crowning event.

For the main character, Boomer, there was only one place to get dinner from: Big Buck's Best Barbecue. The name of Big Buck's came to me as I sat in front of the computer and let my mind wander. I was trying for something authentic. Something that would conjure up images of hot oil drums, sliced in half and blackened by the burnt sugar in the award-winning sauces.

Once I had Big Buck's, the rest came easy. After all, alliteration sticks in people's brains. Which is exactly what Big Buck would want.

As for Bodacious Sauce, a recent Google search turned up more than just the one variety I'd initially found. Maybe I ought to order a sampling of Bodacious Sauces; certainly, the deeper I get into the world of Riverview, USA, the more prominent I expect Big Buck, his Best Barbecue, and Bodacious Sauce to become. Maybe I can find a real Bodacious Sauce to be my signature sauce. Maybe we can work out some sort of deal, where my groupies, in their ever-ongoing search to make all things Riverview real, can buy it and use it on their own backyard barbecues and close their eyes and pretend they are in my world, the members of ShapeShifter there beside them, drooling over the scents of roasting meat and Bodacious Sauce…

Maybe I ought to direct these fantasies back to Riverview. I hear there's a competitor to Big Buck who's ready to open his doors…

Mysterious Moratorium

By Susan Helene Gottfried

Most of my fellow Stiffs, you may have noticed, are mystery or thriller writers. I’m not. You’d think that this would make me feel like I don’t fit in, but I am the creator of Trevor Wolff, a man who fits wherever he damn well wants to. And besides, I like the Stiffs. I’ve learned a lot from them.

They have worn off on me, too. In fact, I think that I’m going to need to take a hiatus from reading so many mysteries and thrillers for a bit, much as I don’t want to. But it’s either them or books, and I’d rather not give them up.

It all started at the end of December. I woke up at four in the morning, startled awake by a distinctive “Who, who, who-who-who”. My first thought was, “Cool. We have owls. Who would have thunk?”

But I heard it again. And again.

And my fellow Working Stiffs crawled into my brain. What if that’s no owl but is actually some guys who are signalling each other that they’re in position to come storm my house? Have they cut the phone lines yet? My cell phone’s downstairs; where is the Tour Manager’s? How will we survive this?

By the fourth or fifth hoot, I decided that any bad guys would have gotten bored by now and given up. Yet the owl didn’t.

I woke the Tour Manager, who, as always, thought I was nuts. “It’s an owl,” he told me.

“Yeah, but … what if it’s not?”

“Go to sleep,” he told me and proceeded to show me how.

I laid awake until the night quieted. By morning, I decided that being visited by an owl was pretty cool.

The next night, I heard the owl around ten. I sent the Tour Manager outside to see where he was. The report came back that he was across the street, between two houses. And that he’d been scared off when the Tour Manager had gotten close.

I figured that would be the end of it, but my owl came back for a third night. And then a fourth. I laid in bed with a book -- yes, a mystery -- and listened to the hooting. At first, it gave me warm fuzzies. We had a new pet, sort of. The owl liked us as much as I liked it.

But then, my brain went into overdrive. Owls, some Native Americans believe, presage death. Whose death was this owl telling me about? Mine? The Tour Manager’s? Our kids’? Maybe one of the neighbors?

I didn’t sleep easy that night.
When I turn this into fiction, my owl will inspire a songfor my fictional band, ShapeShifter. But the Stiffs… they’d have that home be invaded. People will die. That’s how it is when you write mysteries and thrillers.

Me, I’m on hiatus from the books until my brain stops being so morbid. Time to go read a nice romance or two.

Reading Goals, 2007 style

By Susan Helene Gottfried

This being January, many of my friends are making their reading goals for 2007. Often, they choose a number of books they'd like to read. Sometimes, they'll undertake a challenge -- can they read a book written by someone from every country? A book set in every one of the fifty states?

Any goal is an admirable one, especially if it's not too far-fetched.

So, without further ado, I'd like to lay out my two goals for the year.

The first is to do what I did in 2006: Read Less Crap. By crap, I mean a book I disliked so strongly, I didn't finish it. I only count the unfinished books in this category, although there are always the few that I skim, just to see if the ending is as bad as the rest of it.

In 2006, I counted 48 books as crap. In 2005, I counted 54. My choice of book must be improving, which is both good news and bad. The good is obvious. But the bad is because I have too many books here, waiting to be read. If I'm reading more to the end, I'm probably reading fewer books.

Which brings me to my second reading goal of 2007: reduce the number of books in the house. No easy feat, not when books are so easily available and so darn tantalizing.

However, one thing that'll help is that because I trade books online, instead of making a one-for-one trade, I can accumulate points for each book I send out instead. I'm planning to give some of those points away; one site will even let me donate them to book-related charities.

Another way to pare down my books is to give them away. I do a lot of this now, surprising people with something once I've finished it. I'm also planning to offer books as prizes for contests at my blog -- like the one I'm currently running, in fact.

This goal shouldn't be too hard to achieve -- assuming there aren't a lot of others who surprise me with books. Last year, there were. I even won a sweepstakes where I got about 50 books as my prize. And then there are the few books every month from people who have checked out my online wishlist and sent me a book, just as I do to others.

I'm appreciative of this; those books are on my wishlist for a pretty obvious reason. They aren't helping reduce the inventory, but they're welcome to arrive anyway.

I'll get there this year. I made a nice dent in the numbers in December, sending out many more than I received. Every time the stacks in here shrink, I feel more creativity emerge from the clutter. I can see out my windows again. If those two things aren't inspiration, I don't know what is.

Here's to a 2007 filled with great reads -- and attainable reading goals.

On Buying Books

by Susan Helene Gottfried

I think I offended a new friend last week by telling her that I haven't bought her book yet. Instead, my copy came from an online book trading site.

You'd think that, as a writer, I'd know better. After all, every single sale is important in the publishing industry these days. And her book is certainly the first on my list to buy. I really have no good excuse.

I could sit here and say that yeah, I could ride my bike to the nearest bookstore but I refuse because it's a chain and I prefer to buy from independents. That's entirely true -- but I'm in a certain local independent fairly frequently anymore.

Maybe it's that I feel cheesy, knowing she could walk in that same store and look over my shoulder and there I am, buying her book.

But the truth is that I've grown quite addicted to online book trading, and not just because of how easy it is. It's not because of the rush of discovering a listing for something I've been waiting for, nor is it the thrill that is there every time I see a package in my mailbox.

It's the ability to track the book's history that gets me. Yes, I use an online site to do this; every book that you register gets its own individual identification number and as books wind their way around the planet, I get to be the proverbial fly on the wall.

It's fun to get a book that six others have hated -- and find that I love it. It's not so fun to realize I'm the only one who disagrees with the raves of others. When that happens, though, by reading over what those others have said, I get a glimpse into why they thought what they did.

It never fails to teach me something about the way that readers approach the books we write. Do they focus on the plot (sometimes)? The characters (usually)? The setting (almost never)? How are they affected by pacing and suspense? Is there a willing suspension of disbelief, when it's necessary? And do they speak of a need to suspend disbelief that wasn't intended?

I breezily went on to assure my friend that I'll be buying probably four copies of her book. I fully intend to, so that I can watch them travel from person to person and read what everyone thinks. Maybe it won't help her write a better book, but it'll get her name out there, so that when the next book hits the shelf, and the one after that, our local bookstore won't be the only store with a line of people waiting to buy it.

Including me, who promises to buy five copies right there, on the first on-sale day.

Contradictions in Character

By Susan Helene Gottfried

One of the benefits of being a writer is the chance to become many different people. When I created ShapeShifter, it was so tone-deaf me could be a member of one of the world's biggest rock bands. Kerri is an artist; my children draw better than I do. Pam is an aerobic instructor; I have orthopedic issues that give my sports medicine doctor nightmares. About the closest I've come to fictionalizing myself is my newest character, Chelle LaFleur, a journalist with attitude.

In fiction, the best characters are the ones with a contradiction. I know this intimately; most of the time, I feel like a living contradiction. This is something that I've wrestled with for years; I suppose I always will. Usually, it's a dormant issue, something I try not to dwell on. But it came back up for me recently, when I was wandering through a crafts show and realized that one of the vendors was a woman I knew.

I didn't say hello, partly because I couldn't place exactly where I knew her from. But also because this was a craft show that featured struggling artists with visions of the off-beat. These vendors were the way cool, grungy, creative, artist-types I used to hang with.

And there I was, with my North Face fleece jacket, two kids, handsome husband, wallet stuffed with twenties, luxury car parked three blocks away, the alarm armed. The bland, blasé picture of a conventional lifestyle.

I was actually sort of embarrassed. I felt like this woman I knew had also recognized me and was shaking her head, proclaiming me a sell-out. Even if she wasn't, I can see how the charge would stick.

That's only the surface, though. I was at that craft show because I was searching for the funky, for the off-beat. For the remade t-shirts that scream Rock and Roll. The earrings shaped like pink ESP Explorer guitars. To support the people who were braver than I was, who chose this lifestyle as their own because of their dedication to their art. They didn't sell out, and I wish I could do more to help them succeed.

It's a trade-off, I tell myself. My mainstream lifestyle lets me do what I do best: write fiction. I have the comfort of a home office, a cat curled in my lap and my satellite radio playing away, while I dream up characters who live the lifestyle I didn't have the guts, or the patience, or the desire to.

I've always tiptoed that line between funky and mainstream, but I jumped firmly to one side so I'd have the freedom to be right here, doing just this.

It's a contradiction in who I am, absolutely. But it's also what defines my fiction -- as well as my self-image. Just as I define myself by the twin pulls of books and music, so, too, do I have the twin pulls of funky and mainstream.

Saved by the Bell

by Cathy Anderson Moffat

First came the terrible phone call when my friend Robin told me their 22-year-old daughter Wendy had been instantly killed in a car accident. Our daughters had played together since they were three, and my heart bled for Robin, a gentle and loving soul who was ripped apart by this loss.

So when Robin called a few weeks later and wanted me to join her on retreat at Deer Park Monastery (near Escondido, California), I couldn't refuse. Plus I'd studied the teachings of the group's leader--Thich Nhat Hanh--for many years. He's a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk of great power and strength; his weapons include an agile mind, a loving presence, and expertise at Buddhist spiritual practice.

We arrived in early February to a camp of rudimentary wood buildings. I didn't relish the thought of sleeping with five other women in a crude dormitory room. The monks and nuns had convened here in the monastery for a few months, over two hundred of them, most of them from Plum Village, the home monastic order in France.

What began as a mission to help my friend Robin became a healing experience for me. We listened to Thay, or teacher, as the monks called Thich Nhat Hanh. He spoke humbly, yet elegantly, with his poignant stories and gentle sense of humor. We hiked among the hills of white boulders and green bushes with our friends for the week and found a mountain lion paw print. We laughed together in our room with Susan (a financial advisor from London), Marie (a businesswoman and astrologer from Paris), Marsha (a friendly, vivacious lesbian lady from New Hampshire), and Linda (originally from Australia, but now a tired mother from the nearby area).

I even met Thay's massage therapist, a happy monk in his late twenties. I sat beside him on the couch of the tea room and felt waves of heat rolling off him. Did his spiritual practice and life as a monk give him secret powers at massage? I thought so, but didn't have the nerve to ask him.

We ate healthy vegetarian food disguised so that you didn't realize you were eating rice three times s day. We ate mindfully--in silence--chewing each bite and tasting the food. By week's end I learned what all that rice can do to one's GI tract.

Periodically, a monk would ring a bell, and like Pavlov's dogs, we all stopped dead in our tracks. We returned to our true selves by breathing deeply for a minute, following the breath. We practiced mindful breathing and living in the moment. Then we would go about our business as before.

And that's how writing connects with the week with the monks. For to write deeply, one must write in the moment, be aware of all one hears, sees, smells, tastes, touches, and knows. Mindfulness makes life more vivid, more deeply experienced. Great writing takes your reader there, a reader who's acutely aware of the moment, of a string of moments.

During orientation to Deer Park Monastery, the monk told those of us in Budhist boot camp that coyotes roamed the surrounding hills. A few minutes later, we heard yipping and yapping in the outside distance. Robin and I later decided they probably weren't real coyotes, but monks imitating coyotes to fool the guests.

Our friend for the week Jay joked about it when he asked, "How can you tell if yaps are from coyotes or monks?"

You ring the bell.

Nature versus Nurture

By Susan Helene Gottfried

I am a novelist. This fact, even though I don't have a novel in print and on bookstore shelves and available at Amazon, is indisputable.

Notice of this problem of mine began when I was a graduate student. An MFA candidate in creative writing, I'd walk into our writer's workshop armed with what I thought was a kick-ass short story. I'd hand it out the week before it was due to be critiqued by my program-mates; nine other hand-picked students of varying ages, backgrounds, colors, religions, and mindsets.

Invariably, the comments were the same. Lukewarm, at best. The structure was bad. The pacing was off. Where was the epiphany at the end? Didn't I know, there was supposed to be a mind-blowing epiphany?

One day, in a fit of pique, instead of handing around my latest attempt at a story -- a form that never felt natural and, frankly, still doesn't -- I handed around something I'd been working on in the privacy of my basement apartment.

It was the opening of a novel. Not my first attempt at a novel, either. No, my first attempt had been shelved after one of my undergrad professors had liked it so much, he'd sent it to his literary agent -- only to have it come back with the message that my talent needed to mature.

This was my third attempt at a novel, as my second attempt was well on its way to being my Master's thesis and therefore something I had to keep away from the prying eyes of my program-mates. Third time's a charm, the cliché goes, although in most cases, it's not true.

It was this time. Everyone loved it. The students told me they hated workshopping novels in class, but they'd rather see my novel-in-progress than another lame story. My professor told me I was clearly working within my talent. I was, he proclaimed, a novelist. He told me to go forward and not look back. I fully intended to.

Summer intruded, and with it the chance to enroll in the poetry workshop. Summer was the only time that fiction writers got to try their hand at poetry, and that poets got to get wordy with short stories. I was hoping to learn different poetic forms. Instead, we were just to write poems.

So I did. And what do you know, but the criticism I got was exactly the same.

In confused voices, the poets informed me that my longer poems, broken down into shorter stanzas, read like novels. They'd give each other quizzical looks at my peals of laughter, not sure if they had offended or needed to call the nice men with leather restraints and sedatives. I'd reassure them it was all good, but they, too, were relieved when fall came and us fiction writers were returned to our wordier forms.

Since then, I've worn the mantle of novelist quite comfortably, maybe a little bit proudly, even. After all, why fight your nature?