Box of Memories

This past weekend I spent a day going through a file box of old writing. When I say old I mean pre-computer: before I owned a typewriter up to when I finally owned a typewriter. The earliest thing I found with a date was in mid-1973. I married in January 1974 at age 17.

It is always interesting to look back at things you've written. Usually, I'm encouraged by how much my writing has improved over the years. I'm not sure it helped much this time. You see, I've been feeling very down about my writing. The last year has been a disaster and even saying it makes me feel guilty. I should have been writing. I shouldn't have been sick! I shouldn't have ruptured a disk in my back. I shouldn't have had to have surgery. I shouldn't have rheumatoid arthritis, or fibromyalgia, or chronic pain, or nerve damage.  I. Should. Be. Writing! But I didn't. Hardly any.

This isn't news. I've written about it ad nauseam, and for more than 10 years the cycle has repeated. I get started and am pumping out the words and boom, and two weeks in I'm hit with a flare. Joint pain, muscle pain, migraine headaches, back pain, fatigue take turns. These days the fatigue is scary. After my surgery, I was excited at my improvement. By the end of December, my severe neck and back pain were gone. I made up my mind I could learn to live with the nerve damage in my hand. It hurt, but I could use it and I would not let it hinder me. The New Year seemed promising.

It wasn't until the first part of April that I recovered from two colds, but I was still tired. In fact, my fatigue has been so bad that some days I sleep 12 hours.

I've been so bummed over all this that I decided to toss in the towel. Yes. I said give up writing. Forget it. Pack up all the junk and either put it in a trunk in the attic, which I don't have or burn it in the next cookout. I'm tired of trying. I'm tired of getting up with a plan only to find I'm knocked out by 9 a.m. until noon.

I can't tell you if the pain of my illness is worse than the pain of never writing again. I can take a pill to numb one of them. The other, not so much. Then, I opened that box and started pulling out files. For several hours, I read over each page. The first thing I discovered was that my handwriting is as bad today as it was when I was 15.

However, the words were familiar and I could remember the days I wrote the earliest poems. I remember the spiral notebook I wrote them in. The cover had a pretty mountain scene I loved. I'm still a sap for pretty notebooks. Here's one right out of that notebook. I've kept the format and errors.

I Love You

I love you more than I can tell,

I love you more than water in a well.

I love you more than mountains high,

I love you more than stars in the sky.

I love you more than the ocean deep,

I love you more than I love sleep.

I love you more than the valley low,

I love you more than you'll ever know.

I love you more than the sun and moon,

I love you more than Sunday afternoon.

I love you more than the birds and bees,

I love you more than flowers and trees.

I love you more than a clock can time,

And I'll love you beyond the end of time. 

By Cynthia Patch

(written about 1973)

Yeah, I know. Corny. I was barely 16 and back then things were a lot more innocent. You'll notice this was before my marriage. I didn't even have a boyfriend at this point.

In those days I wrote with a Bic school bus yellow, AF-59 accountant pen. If you remember those, you're old. I loved those pens. You could get them in red, blue, or black. I used the blue, and the pen wrote such a nice clean line. I don't know when I stopped using them, but I doubt they make them anymore. That could be when I stopped using them. When I read the early poems, I could see the pen and remember the feel of it in my hand. These days, I can't hold a pen that slender and the ink has to be either liquid or a gel to limit the need for pressure.

Jump ahead 20+ years, to February 28, 1995, my last year of college. I was taking Creative Writing with Patti Aakhus. I was sorry to hear she passed away a few years ago from cancer. I loved her class. Here's a poem I wrote in that class.

Outcast

She smiled, she laughed, she chatted

Stepped close to the wall of backs

Slipped into the circle

Breaking the bond with strange words and strange clothes.

Faces with slide away looks

Turn away laughing, silencing.

She cried broken tears that covered her sharpness

And sealed the approaches.

When I read this I was brought up short. Did I write that? Wow. I know, not earth-shaking poetry but I really like that. I lived that!

Untitled

Look into my palm

tell me what you see

Tell me if the broken lines

are things that happen to me

Broken dreams, broken hearts,

and broken toys, you see?

Broken by these hands of mine

with all its broken lines.

That is another in-class poem, and I love it. I don't remember if I liked either when I wrote them. I have lived a bit longer and now, I understand them. They mean something to me. Honestly, I wrote more poetry in that class than I had since I was 15. And you can see the difference. I "feel" the difference.

The trip down memory lane gave me some encouragement but it also disappointed me. I've wasted too much time and allowed things to get in the way of the writing. I read in this month's Writers' Forum something that resonated with me. In his article, Tales from My Guru, Hugh Scott said:

"Disappointment comes because you are focused on being published, whereas your focus should be on creating. That is getting on with the writing, enjoying the jigsaw-placing of word into word, the genius of dropping one idea on to another, the excitement of finding a phrase that expresses, oh, precisely what you want to express, and the discovery of rhythms that no one in the world has ever put on paper, and the silent beat of drums arising from the page, and the rocking laughter at the lunatic jokes that demand to dance on your keyboard. Oh, and a thousand other things that are nothing to do with being published but everything to do with creating!"

And that's the truth. Just write and stop worrying about blogs, platforms, social media, and publishing. Write.

I'll finish it here. I think I need to address the constant focus on my illness and instead, focus on the thing that makes me feel like I'm alive. Maybe I'll feel better then.

Here's one final find for this post. I have no idea when I wrote it but I suspect it was in the 80's. I don't know what it was going to be. I only know that now, it feels finished.

I thought of you this morning

When I stood at the window, yawning,

And I smiled.

Good night.

The Cost of Doing Business

I was going to share this meme on my Facebook page, but it reminded me of when I actually bought books for $4.99 or less.

In the late 60's I was around 13 and I remember getting a cash gift from my grandparents. It was an embarrassing amount, and I spent it on a pile of gothic novels in the bookstore! I was so excited. They sold for 79 cents each! I had at least $40.

I was a member of the Weekly Reader Book Club around the same time. Mama let me get new books every month. I can still name some of them!

In the 70's and 80's I was a member of the Doubleday Book Club and getting a real bargain every month on half dozen books. Over the years, I was a member of several book clubs but Doubleday was my favorite. You could buy a hardback book for less than $10. In hindsight, that's astounding. Now they're closer to $30, although book clubs might be lower.

Over the years, I've owned thousands of books. When we moved to Germany in 1977, I had to leave behind about 800 books. When I moved back to the states two years later, I left behind another 700 books. I used the base library, too. Over the years, I've collected many times that and with every move, my husband threatened to divorce me. One day I was going to have a room devoted to books.

When I started college at in 1988 at 31, I was in heaven. I had to buy lots of books. I read lots of books. I even researched lots of books and spent hours pouring over historical books in the library. I had books on Russian, European, Latin American, and American history. I had books on dinosaurs, psychology, anthropology, archeology, and communications. That was only for school and didn't include my pleasure reading.

By this time book clubs were almost a thing of the past so my book purchases were at the store price. I frequented second-hand shops and a couple of local used bookstores. I was still a sap for Book-a-Million, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and Barne's and Nobel. You could always find good stuff on sale, too.

These days I dare you to find a book by an author you love for $4.99 outside a discount store or second-hand shop. I also dare you to find Waldenbooks or B. Dalton in a mall. You won't. In fact, you won't find a lot of bookstores anymore. The meme made me remember all the books I owned and how much I'd spent over 40 years on books. Despite all the books I bought over the years, if it wasn't for the library, I'd not read more than a few books year. I suspect this is a factor in why books sales have declined. Many people can't afford to buy many new books because of the price. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't own a Kindle.

I bought two series of 6 books each for my granddaughter this past Christmas. They're paperback books. Those two 6-book series (only the first two installments in a much, much longer series) cost me over $70. I bought three more books from the series that didn't come in a boxed set. These cost me around $40. That's a lot of money on books. She had already read the third boxed set at school and is in love with the series. Can you see where this is going? I could spend $1000 on this series for her. I won't. Her dad and stepmom bought three more of these books. I told you it is a huge series by author Erin Hunter. The total spent on 18 books is about $150. Hunter should love us.

Don't get me wrong, I understand how hard it is to write a book. I am a writer. But I also am a reader who is on a limited budget and books are not the priority. They are a much-loved luxury that I have to plan for. I do buy books but only when I can afford it. I use Kindle a whole lot but I prefer to buy paper books of those I want to collect. I just ordered a new release from my favorite author and it cost me $15... for a paperback. I wouldn't have done that for anyone I didn't know or who wasn't an author I was sure was excellent.

So, yeah, I wish I could buy books for $4.99. I've read 22 books since January 1. My kindle has about 600 books on it, in a wide variety of genre. I will tell you that most were giveaways. There are a lot of public domain books because I love classic literature. There are about two dozen reference books on it. Most of the time I have a couple of library books on it. I obtained a lot of novels from authors giving away sets of their older novels to generate interest.

I can't tell you how many of my Kindle books were free new author books. As a result of these, I discovered some great new authors to add to my collection. The vast majority of these (free) books are not worth $4.99. In fact, it would embarrass me to give away some of them if I were the author. I've deleted many free books from both my Kindle and my Amazon account after I'd read a few chapters. Yes, they were that bad.

It is important for writers to remember that readers want quality, and readers are willing to pay for it. Yet, I'm not willing to pay for mediocrity or plain rotten writing. The author is not always the best judge of quality and it shows in many of the novels turned out by indie authors. Some books are not worth a plug nickel. I'm sorry if that hurts, but it is true. Of course, a lot of authors think their writing is horrible but I can tell you, not enough of them think that.

Writers need to get used to people complaining about the price you ask for your book. It is a fact of life, whether the books are worth it or not, most especially if it is not. The best way to ensure that they buy more than the first one is to make sure it the very best work you can do. Edit, rewrite, edit, and revise as many times as it takes. Find a good editor, someone who will get tough with you. Ask people you don't know to read it and tell you the truth. Accept that truth with graciousness and view it as an education in writing.

If someone is editing for you, their suggestions are to help you make that story better. They're not an insult to your character. I love editing but telling a stubborn writer to fix their grammar, rewrite paragraphs, or change sentence structure is daunting. Don't be that writer. If you're not willing to make changes, you're not ready to publish it.

Once you've got a well-written book, you won't have trouble selling it. They'll still complain about the cost. That's called the cost of doing business. Incidentally, I don't by that $5 specialty coffee either. I make my own flavored coffee at home, and my coffee is good curled up with a good book.