Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Author Archives: kayewer

• Musings About “Bully”

  Posted at 2:51 am by kayewer, on April 15, 2012

  Ever since I heard about the new film, Bully, which opened nationally on Friday the 13th, I wondered if I should see it.  I haven’t yet.  The reviews say it’s an ambitious film, and it has urged action and reactions from everybody who has viewed it, regardless of whether they are just curious viewers or have been a bully or a victim of bullying.

  What concerns me is that one film can’t truly tell all aspects of the story.  Reviews indicate that the bullies themselves don’t get interviewed.  That would have been a great idea.  The film apparently shows footage of actual bullying incidents, interviews surviving family members of those bullying victims who have committed suicide, and shows how ignorant the education system can be when faced with bullying issues.  I don’t know if watching a cinematic tale, told in the limited time frame allotted to feature films, would be a worthwhile experience for me.

  Bullying is one of those topics that doesn’t get the recognition or treatment it deserves.  Even though society is finding a way to machete its way through the stigmatic jungles of racism, the rights of the gay community and aid to the disabled, nobody seems to really know how to handle the kind of cruelty which bullying brings out in people.  It germinates in our children and polarizes the classrooms and hallways of our schools into factions of perceived power and subjugating oppression the likes of which should have been forgotten after the Industrial Age enabled the common man to read and reason independently.

  Ever since the topic of bullying came out with Columbine High School, I have felt helpless in the shadows cast by these underage terrorists who look like children but speak and act like seasoned and soulless lunatics.  Who are they, and how dare they.  This film strives to reveal the problem and help restore the power where it belongs; to the adults who should take a stand (or, in the case of some of the ignorant ones, know better).

  I hope that this one film isn’t the end of the story.  I think it would be helpful to hear from the bullies and find out how they think their world should be run.  It may wind up sounding like something we have seen before when somebody decides somebody else should not have the right to exist and others go along with it, but this movie is a step toward understanding and possibly ending the horror.  That is a success story worth filming.

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• Exchanging Papers

  Posted at 2:27 am by kayewer, on April 8, 2012

  I’ve been committed to an anthology being assembled by a group of women I’ve worked with for over a decade.  We’ve been at this particular project for some months now, and we’re at the stage at which the final manuscript is taking shape.  It was hard to part with my contribution, because the minute the writing leaves your hands, it’s like sending your child off to summer camp for the first time.  It’s a type of separation anxiety that only writers can feel.

  A short story like mine takes time to develop and nurture.  When I finally let go, another member of our team dropped me an email and offered to proofread for me.  I’m happy for the feedback and the second pair of eyes, because the DIY process becomes harder the longer you’re at it.  Once you have looked at your work 200 times, everything starts to look like drivel and you can’t look objectively any longer.

  A problem I’ve had with word processing is that documents tend to open on page one, even if I stopped typing on page 15.  This leads to a desire to read from page one all over again until I got back to where I left off.  I became so obsessed at one point that I began looking at the sequence of actions in the story to make sure my characters were not sitting down in paragraph one, and sitting down again in paragraph two, without the requirement of standing up or doing something other than sitting down somewhere inbetween.

  I recently shredded the editing copy on which I had noted “sat,” “stood,” “fell down” and other such margin scribbles, and then I ran a fresh one to look for overusage of favorite words.  One of my favorite authors has always stood out when I read her books because of a pet word, “miasma,” which has cropped up enough that I have noticed it.  It’s a harmless quirk, and because her work is historical fiction, there are plenty of chances for there to be a miasma description.  Usually it’s a plague or mid-summer ozone tainted by poor sanitary conditions.  Maybe, though, it’s the cloud of doubt that makes writers like me not want to let go their manuscripts.

  Other than dutifully using “said” in dialogue, I’m not sure if I have a pet word in my writing, but my volunteer editor will surely spot it if one does exist, bless her heart.  Or, if she wants this to all be over, she’ll smile and say nothing, because we are all writing with that same attention to detail, and in each of our manuscripts we see our own little obsessive shortcomings.

   

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged critiquing manuscript, editing manuscript, writer, writers group, writing

• The Period in the Paragraph

  Posted at 2:04 am by kayewer, on April 1, 2012

  When you’re a writer, your work becomes your young and you have to go through the parenting cycle.  A story starts out as a sentence, which you begin dressing up with all its special clothing.  I always start with a diaper, because I need something to catch all the poo that issues from a first draft.

  One has to feed a writing project with all the proper verbs, nouns and sentence structure.  Of course you’d like to take your child out in a stroller or carrier, but this baby is a solo project; if you show off a work in progress, your family will love it even if it is full of poo, and your friends will be afraid to tell you it’s homely because they feel it will develop as it ages.  In this case, they’re probably right.

  If the story starts to talk, it’s gibberish at first, but once you’re past terrible page two it starts refusing things you want it to do and makes demands.  Your stream of consciousness at three in the morning reads like a temper tantrum by the time you get around to reading it at noon the next day.

  You give it a physical with spell check, even though it’s a pediatrician no parent really trusts.  You innoculate it with anti-virus or protect it with a cloud as it grows, matures, rebels, and drives you batty.  Finally, you sit and take a look at your child and wonder if it is really what you started out to do.  You try to buy what you think are nicer clothes for it, dressing it up in prosy description or pleading to just let you cut a little off the top.

  Finally it’s ready to go out on its own.  The last words are spoken and you put a period at the end.  It may not get married or get a degree, but it will let you know how it is doing once in awhile when it gets noticed and does well enough to send some money home.  Unless you’re writing an expose’ and then you get sent all its dirty laundry.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Tagged short story writing, writing

• What’s With All That Money?

  Posted at 1:48 am by kayewer, on March 25, 2012

  The lottery has a huge jackpot right now, and I think the way they handle it is wrong.  A jackpot of $200,000,000 or so is a bizarre sum, and really it is too much for one, two or 20 people to win.  Even the richest men in the world stop collecting expensive cars at ten or twenty or so; after awhile money can be too plentiful to be important, like a dead fad.

  Maybe the lottery should give 200 people one million dollars instead of one person 200 million dollars.  Think of what that money, even after exorbitant taxes, could do for droves of average joes and janes?  A family burdened by hospital bills could dig themselves out.  A family with six children could pay college tuition.  Somebody could start up a business, help a worthy cause or see some place special before they die with one million dollars.

  Sure, one person or a couple with 200 million would not have to worry about expenses for life, but folks in their later years know the value to one dollar and can be overwhelmed with the burden of 199,999,999 more.  Also, the criminal element and folks seeking a quick fix like to go after people with more than one million dollars.

  There is always the question about what one would do with a million dollars, but nobody asks about 200 million.  It’s big and cumbersome.  Of course, in one lump sum, one new multi-millionaire could fix an entire town devastated by floods or other natural disasters, or fund a hospital, or send aid overseas.  In the end, though, we could all use just something extra in our pockets to make life temporarily easier, maybe leave something to our survivors or favorite charities, and splurge on something for ourselves if some is left over.  So don’t you think that maybe the lottery could change their rules a bit and help the masses more?

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged jackpot, jackpots, lottery, mega millions, powerball

• The Pen is Mightier Than the IPad?

  Posted at 2:31 am by kayewer, on March 18, 2012

  eBay has a new commericial in which execs at a board meeting pick on a fellow who breaks out a paper pad and pen while they all have electronic devices.  The others make references to his being in some sort of pre-IPad stone age and, therefore, not hip.  He proceeds to log onto eBay during their chatter, and he quickly buys a device while his pen then leaks an inky deposit in his shirt pocket.  My opinion is that the pen was crying.

  I, too, had a few words said to me for using pad and pen at a meeting at work recently.  I’m a writer, though, and they work better for me than using a laptop.  Besides, most of the people at the meeting had e-pads and Blackberrys, none of which I had either.  Thirdly, I used a pad in a portfolio which was a present from one of my superiors.  I certainly wasn’t going to pitch it just because we’re in the portable gizmo age.

  How superficial and wasteful we are in this electronic age.  With all due respect to the industry and eBay, who are all out to keep their own families eating three square meals a day after all, it seems there is no end to one-upmanship.  Folks buy an Apple product in November for $500, $600 or more, then chuck it for the next one in March.  The waste products from these things, such as mercury,  go to chemical cesspools in places like India after poor wretches canibalize and rip apart the workings of discarded electronic products (if the article on “60 Minutes” rings true).  We don’t seem to care that we discard so much cyber junk just because a new fair weather friend has come along.

  What is wrong with pen and paper?  Why is the art of penmanship condemned to die?  Is it because we want to be lazy, or because we’re so worried that other people will think less of us if we don’t follow the trend?  It reminds me of stories of products which were useless but everybody had to have, like the Pet Rock.  Remember those?  Think about it:  we paid money for a rock in a box!

  This “cost of WOW” really disturbs me, because we Americans tend to spend a lot of money for little reward.  Is the cost of some stranger’s approval an annual replenishment of a $700 device?  Is social standing valued by jacked up prices on materialistic junk?  No, and I’ll say that to the end.

  In the “Dune” series of books by Frank Herbert, mankind became apathetic with the advantages of electronics, and a few smart people formed alliances with machines to subjugate the dumb public until they rebelled and took back their ability to think beyond the “Wow” factor of convenient devices.  I hope that doesn’t happen in our or our children’s lifetimes.  I’d rather be able to write in cursive with my own hand on something that can be recycled, like paper from a non-electronic tree.

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• Hurling Invective

  Posted at 3:37 am by kayewer, on March 11, 2012

  I can’t figure out why we should have to watch people throw up on television shows and in movies.  I enjoyed the movie “Super 8” until a character got sick.  That ruined it for me.  Sure, it’s a part of being human, but back in the old days people put their hands to their mouths and exited the scene, and we got the picture.  Have we grown so jaded by the sensationism we get onscreen that we need to be exposed to such disgusting behavior?

  Of course we have many euphemisms for the act of vomiting, such as throwing up, hurling, puking, talking to Ralph.  It’s strange how we try to skirt around unpleasant things in life when talking about them, but put them out front visually in movies and shows and call it entertaining.  I’d prefer being bored to watching somebody else’s stomach discomfort in living color.

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• Sign of the Day

  Posted at 3:41 am by kayewer, on March 4, 2012

  Passing by a hospital, I saw a large sign for the “Eye Emergency Room.”  Sure, it’s great to have a place which specializes in eye problems, but would somebody with an eye emergency actually be looking for a sign that says “Eye Emergency Room?”

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• The Meaning of Life?

  Posted at 3:12 am by kayewer, on February 26, 2012

  Yes it is a well-worn subject, a Monty Python staple skit, an ongoing preachable subject at church and arguable in front of women’s services facilities and on the steps of political buildings.  Why add to the confusion?  Because only by discussing it can we come to terms with it.

  Some people live without existing; others exist without living.  Humans and other creatures of varying degrees of substance or purpose are born and die every second of every day.  Some living things we have too much of, while others are in short supply.  Yet when it comes to human beings we often argue over the subject of life as if everybody should be expected to conform to one idea without exception.  That can and should never happen.  It is the diversity of life itself that makes the very notion of pigeonholing it into absolute law, book, chapter and verse impossible.  Even God in His wisdom made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Adam and Adam ad infinitum.  He also made trees and rocks, lions and tigers, clouds and earthworms.  If you subscribe to evolutionary theory, the creation of the universe included such diversity as a part of the greater plan (the dinosaurs probably had a purpose that was short but necessary in the grander scheme of planetary development, but that discussion is for another time).  Either way you look at it, diversity is the key to how the earth works.

  Life is its own chaotic experience.  From one second to the next, every square microscopic measurement of space on this planet is being changed just by our being here.  As you read something like this online, billions of particles that could or might have a purpose are starting their journey, and others are ending theirs.  We will never know how many opportunities never came into being, or which ones should not have been started.  What life truly means comes from what good is made from what does live.

  . . . .to be continued.

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• 10,000 Phantoms

  Posted at 1:07 am by kayewer, on February 20, 2012

  Congratulations to Phantom of the Opera for celebrating 10,000 performances on Broadway.  I had the privilege of seeing my first performance just months ago; I really don’t know why I waited for the chance to see this timeless production, but now that I’ve sat in the front row of the Paris Opera House. . . .I mean New York’s Majestic Theatre, I won’t let it be my last.  The current cast is a perfectly matched family of performers who bring magic to the stage eight times a week, including Hugh Panaro (the current Phantom) in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stunning concept.

  If you aren’t familiar with it, the stage musical is based on a classic story by Gaston Leroux about a facially disfigured man of immeasurable musical talent, who lives in seclusion inside the opera house, making his presence known when business does not go according to his specifications.  New owners take over the business and, after a rehearsal goes awry (possibly at the Phantom’s hands), the prima donna quits and a beautifully voiced chorus girl is introduced as her replacement.  Christine Daae is being vocally trained by the Phantom, who desires her but stays in the shadows until, after her triumphant debut, he appears to her in person, hiding his face behind a mask.  When the opera’s new patron turns out to be Christine’s childhood friend, their friendship of years ago becomes love, and the Phantom’s rejection turns the love triangle into a challenge which can only end in mayhem and death.

  The most famous moment in the show is the climax of the first act, when the opera house’s magnificent chandelier is sent crashing to the stage by the Phantom.  My seat in the front row was within touching distance of the chandelier, which begins the story in pieces onstage and rises to the ceiling to become the reborn centerpiece of the experience, transforming the Majestic and us into the Paris Opera and its audience.  The musical numbers, the spectacle, and the tragedy combine into a mesmerizing experience that looks as fresh as when it first debuted in London in 1986.

  It’s always a pleasure to applaud a production like this.  I’d recommend the show to anybody who likes a good love story, a good cry or a good way to see what a Broadway show is like.  I have embraced the Music of the Night, and so should you.

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• The Problem With Computers

  Posted at 12:46 am by kayewer, on February 13, 2012

  I posted here yesterday, but my computer didn’t know it.  I was out and about, but had a chance to write earlier in the day than usual, so I wrote about my pending Saturday activities, and it was ready to go.  I hit the “Post” button, but nothing happened.

  Oh-oh, sounds like the computer might be sick.

  I don’t care if the computer in question is a Mac or PC, there is nothing like the threat of a computer crash to put despair into the hearts of men.  Fifty years ago the equivalent might have been watching an errant bulldozer on fire plowing toward your home and all your precious belongings doomed to become irreplacable rubble.

  It’s bad enough when a PC starts booting up slowly, or decides to run an update when you have to power down and pack it up.  It’s always frustrating to write through pages of inspired prose, only to find it impossible to save or store, or that you’ve put off your automatic update for ten minutes, the ten minutes are up and your machine shuts down.

  I don’t know what happened to the stuff I wrote.  It must have vanished like those gems of ideas I get at three in the morning that translate into garbage in the morning because I wrote them down in the dark while half asleep.

  My intentions were good.  The computer was bad.  But I’m here now, and I think this rant will be a go.  It’ll never replace yesterday’s, but I always promised myself that I would never look back on writing that never got anywhere.

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