Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Old Mermaids Journal

Don't forget to check out the Old Mermaids Journal blog now and again. I'm trying to be better about posting there regularly, especially now that I'm doing A Year and a Day of Living the Old Mermaids Way.


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Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Rift is Published!

I'm happy to report that The Rift is now published in e-book form and will soon be in print, too. Here are some FAQ, including how the book came to be. Enjoy! 


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Beginnings

Here's a new post.


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Friday, November 16, 2012

Visions of...Old Mermaids

I am asking more than usual this question: What would the Old Mermaids do? I asked that after I came home exhausted from looking for a car. I said, "What would the Old Mermaids do?" And I got an immediate answer: “They wouldn't have a car." I grumbled about how unrealistic that was, given where I live. But reality is: I like driving. I am rarely as happy as I am when I'm in my car, alone, driving down the highway. My happiest moment in recent years was when I drove from Santa Barbara to Phoenix. I was free of any anxiety: I knew everyone I loved was safe for the moment and I didn't have to save anyone or anything. I drove along the ocean, alone in the car, ecstatic.

Remember in Koyaanisqatsi when they showed the highways and biways and people running to and fro and we were supposed to think that was ugly and out of balance? I didn't think it was ugly. I thought it was beautiful. I thought the nature scenes were beautiful, too. I think our human need to create is natural and glorious human, but once we recognize our creations are a little bit too Frankenstein's monster, we have an obligation to the world to change what we've created—or destroy what we created.

This is the long way of saying that after a few days of grumbling about how unrealistic the Old Mermaids were, I was walking around town, up above the river, breathing in autumn, and I had a vision of the near future. I thought of all the books I’d written and stories I told. Most of them are about finding home. (I think I ended three books with the word “home” without consciously knowing it.) I imaginatively build amazing structures and communities. I am creating home with my novels.

I love to drive because I am on the move, always on the move. Because I am searching for home. I am not comfortable in my body, my house, my place in the world. Sometimes I think it’s because when I was a girl—a wild child, nature’s child running in the woods barefoot and disheveled most hours of the day—my grandparents sold the land next door to us, the land where my Lullabye Forest grew.

The new owners came in and cut down my woods. I was bereft. I have no conscious memory of the destruction, by the way. I just remember my life before and after. And after I felt homeless. But this may just be a story I tell myself. I was probably born this way: squirmy, crying out in raw unexplained grief when I was only an infant, always asking, asking, asking too many question. Railing against injustice like a little Irish Don Quixote, my Rocinante my dog—who got run over by a car when I was 12. (And I was in such terrible grief over his death that my parents took me to a doctor and he gave me tranquilizers.)

It doesn’t matter why I felt homeless or why I’ve felt homeless for much of my life. It is a modern ailment, I suspect. We have lost the songs of our ancestors, perhaps. Maybe when my relatives came to this land, we left behind our faeries—or the spirits of our ancestors. Maybe we’ve gone deaf to the songs of the land all around us. Perhaps we can’t hear our own siren songs any more. I don’t really know.

But as I was walking around my town, I had a vision of the near future—a future where I wouldn’t need a car, at least not often. I could see a home, a place, a purpose, and I suddenly felt completely at home with this vision, this idea. As if all of my life had been heading toward THIS. When I told Mario about it, he said, “Don’t tell anyone yet. Don’t research it. Don’t study it. Just dream it for a while, the way you would dream a novel.” Aaaah, exactly what the Old Mermaids would do. (I am so fortunate that my sweetheart is an Old Mermaid.)

Now I sit looking out into the cloudy day. Sunlight edges the clouds like a glorious silver white lining. I’m listening to Train sing Drops of Jupiter. About a woman flying through the stars. I am no star being. I am of this Earth. I have been chronically ill for a long time. I am sick of it. Truly. Someone once said that all sickness is homesickness. In my case, I believe this to be true. I know where my home is. It isn’t the stars. It isn’t even in my imagination. It isn’t someplace ELSE. I can see it now, feel it now—more than ever. This Earth is home. It is my place. It is my Beloved. Each of us is the Earth. Walking, dancing, singing, loving Earths. Each of us is the Beloved. Each of you is my Beloved.

As for my vision of my future? Well, it is still in the dreaming stages, and I will share more as time goes on.


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Thursday, November 8, 2012

The Making of Whackadoodle Times

(I continue here with my series of "the making of" my novels, taken from my Weird and Wonderful Gazette. Enjoy!)

Whackadoodle Times was originally born out of my frustration over the state of the world and the apparent obliviousness of most of the population about what dire straits we’re in. But, of course, I can’t write novels from a soapbox. Can anyone? Still, I thought it would be fun to write an allegory or satire or blend them together to have an allegorical satire. In any case, we don’t have to label it. Let’s just call it a novel. I was initially poking fun at our culture’s obsession with celebrities and the apparent obliviousness of the rich to the plight of almost anyone else, but in the end what happened was that I wrote a story about Brooke McMurphy, a woman in trouble.

I wrote the first chapter several years ago. I loved the first chapter—just as I had with Butch. And just like with Butch, I got scared. Could I keep going and maintain the quality? I was also worried about length. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe the story should dictate the length, not the publisher. I tend to write short novels. I knew if I wrote a short novel, I probably couldn’t get a traditional publisher to publish it. But the world changed between the time I started Whackadoodle Times and when I finished it. I was now an indie writer with a publisher who didn’t care about length. Yes!

The novel begins when a bag lady comes to the house of two screenwriters and says she will do one great thing a day for them if they’ll let her stay in their guest cottage. When I started the novel, I was going to have the story revolve around that one great thing a day. After I wrote the first chapter, I began to worry about how I’d come up with one great thing a day. That was another reason I put the novel away for several years. When I brought it out to continue working on it, I just let the story evolve—which is what should always happen. The “one great thing a day” became an integral part of the story, not the focus of it.

Except for the first chapter, I ended up writing this novel at our winter retreat in Arizona. About eight years ago, I put out a call to friends to find a place in the Southwest where Mario and I could spend part of the winter writing and soaking up some sun instead of getting soaked by the Pacific Northwest rain. Terri Windling responded and told me about a retreat near Tucson, Arizona, for writers and artists and other creatives. That winter, we packed up our car and headed out to Tucson.

Going to this retreat has saved my life in so many ways; I don’t have the words to express my gratitude for its existence. Every part of it was designed with purpose, in beauty. When I’m there, my prayer every morning is a version of the Navajo Beauty Way; I often chant, “I walk in beauty before me, I walk in beauty beside me, I walk in beauty behind me, I walk in beauty all around me.” In the last few years, I have had a creative opening, and now stories flow very quickly from me. I believe being on retreat in Arizona every year is responsible for that, in part.

The second year I was at the retreat, I wrote Church of the Old Mermaids. This novel changed my life and continues to change my life because 13 of the characters—the Old Mermaids—are now a part of my everyday life. They are more like guardians or spirit helpers than characters in a novel. I’ve now written several novels where the Old Mermaids and kin make an appearance. (Besides Church of the Old Mermaids, there’s The Blue Tail, The Fish Wife, The Desert Siren, along with The First Book of Old Mermaids Tales and the as yet unpublished An Old Mermaid Sanctuary.)

I digress. We were talking about Whackadoodle Times. I wrote Whackadoodle Times while I was on retreat in Arizona. Once I had the characters, the story began flowing. At first, the tone was different from anything I’d done in a long while. Brooke isn’t a happy person. Her wit can be acerbic, but she was so funny that I didn’t care. The story was at times sexually graphic, too. I’ve written sexually explicit scenes before, but what happens in Whackadoodle Times is more realistic than romantic, so it could seem crude and rude to some. But that was what made it funny to me.

I never laughed as much as I did writing this novel, and in the end, I never cried so much. Although my life couldn’t be more different from hers, I understand her: I understand getting to a place in your life and wondering how the hell did I get here. 

I also understand her life because she’s in the entertainment business, and so am I. When the studio head (the stud) is trying to convince her to script doctor Zombie Town and make zombies sexy, I’m laughing at the absurdity, but I’ve been a part of very similar conversations over the year. I often think of the scene in Gypsy where the strippers are telling Gypsy “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” Yep, sexy zombies are the gimmick the studios want from Brooke. Writers are often asked to come up with some kind of “gimmick” in order to get their work published. It’s not a particularly inspiring way to create!

Anyway, I had fun writing this novel. I hope you enjoy reading it. I plan on writing two more novels in the Whackadoodle Times universe. The second one will probably be called Whackadoodle Times Two. I’ve got the story. Maybe I’ll write it when I go to Arizona this year, knock wood.


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All work copyright © Kim Antieau 2008-.