Posted in Poetry on March 25, 2011| 5 Comments »
It Gets Verse Book Review
I ntense
T ouchingG ritty
E ntertaining
T ender
S andra HanksV ulnerable
E ducational
R aw
S trong
E motionalRhyme is sometimes trite
Other times just right
Then perhaps, a fright
Useful tool for the fight
I really do like it when
verse serves to inspire
another to try it, when
it lights a fire
See Amy’s solution
to sending her thoughts;
it’s a contribution
to the world of bon mots
Posted in love, Men, Music I like, Poetry on March 11, 2011| 21 Comments »
Sisterhood
Girls! We’re tough
we’re smart, we’re strong
and even those don’t get along
should know that cheating on the sisterhood
will never do but some ass mister good
We’re women and together we can
hold the man in a firm hand
to limits that constrict his playing
And when we share the shit he’s saying
he has no choice but to confess when
all that bullshit he’s professin’
might actually achieve some traction
to those who don’t quite get his action.
Yes, Girls! We’re tough
we’re smart, we’re strong
Could give a shit about a song
composed of lies. Don’t sing along
Instead believe your sisters good
rely upon the sisterhood
and learn the answers you must find
are for the sharing … we don’t mind …
It is so right to tell what we know
and help you to avoid the blow.
You may not thank us then, or now,
preferring to be some dumb cow
who buys it all, just laps it up
but those who have drunk from that cup
know too well that taste of poison
have heard those nasty notes of noise, and
have come out the other side
still in tact, and with our pride.
Girls! We’re tough
we’re smart, we’re strong.
Sack of shit
A sack of shit
I stepped in it
It made a mess of my shoeGave it a toss
Said adios
And finally I’m done with you
And now a bit of music …
Posted in Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, Poetry, Sex on March 6, 2011| 12 Comments »
To spite his face ...
What drives a girl to suffer
the pain of being lied to
when she has the tools to buffer
and she knows the words are false?
If it’s evidence she’s wanting
… some handle on the facts …
there’s not too much trouble hunting
proof that leads to the last waltz
No man is quite so clever,
some are dumb, and that’s one fact,
And it’s really rarely ever
we’re not hep to all the schmaltz
But we stumble over “Mi amor”
and find we’ve fallen in
that deep hole without our armor
What’s with that shit impulse?
Those lyin’, cheatin’ scoundrels
pull the wool so carefully,
but we catch on to the hound’s, hell!
then ache as we convulse
So …
What drives a girl to suffer
the pain of being lied to
when she has the tools to buffer
and she knows the words are false?
Two years on a tightrope
Tensile strength’s a wondrous thing
when strung ‘tween heav’n and hell
and balancing upon a string
has often served me wellI’ve found a step in some directions
moves me toward a goal
(though a predilection for erections
leaves me less than whole … )Scampering back a step or two
toward heaven? or toward hell?
and I’m remembering what I knew …
All lessons learned too well.On one end, there’s my future
the other holds my past
but either end can injure
and both could be my lastI’ve walked the rope almost two years
between his needs and mine
broken promises and tears
unraveling the twinePossible? It never was,
with this I learned to cope,
withstanding lies and all because
our world was hung on hopeThe tensile strength is ebbing
the tightrope’s come undone
it’s loosed the complex webbing
keeping he and me as oneIt’s snapped, that rope, and left me
hanging inches from the earth
my safety net has saved me;
still in tact and know my worthThere’ll someday be another
with the strands all forged anew
Yes, there will be other lovers
and, yes, someone will be true
Posted in Expat Living, Friends, Island life, Seychelles, Uncategorized, Writing for a living on March 3, 2011| 11 Comments »
What a lovely dawn! And bloody good thing, as I’m on Day 2 of no Internet connection. Once again, beauty and BlackBerry save the day, but frustration levels are high.
Yes, I am aware my ISP is called Kokonet and that does convey an image of a company run by Gilligan, so I guess I must now assume he and the rest killed off the Professor.
One truly crazy-making aspect of life on this rock is the un-charming tendency for peeps to answer questions with what they think one wants to hear.
Yesterday, for example, I was told every hour that my connection would be restored, “in about an hour”. Not that that was ever a real possibility, but it must have been assumed the answer would please me.
It didn’t.
Professionalism often here means nothing more than one is paid for what he does, no matter how poorly they do … or don’t do … it, and when their pay is partially supplied by bills I pay for a lack of service … well, pleased I am not.
Do I phone with the request: Lie to me more, please.
Uh … nope.
If I had less work pending, I’d say fuck it and head for a beach, but I do have stacks of things needing doing, and doing online, so I’m heading to town where I will threaten testical removal in hopes that inspires some action, then finding friends with another ISP that may or may not be working in hopes of getting something accomplished.
Sheesh. If only I was Mrs. Thurston Howell the Third! I’d just pour martinis and not bother with work …
Posted in Children, Family, Loss, love, Men, Music I like, My Chinese Checkered Past, On getting older, Poetry, tagged divorce, Invisible Element, Marriage, Thoreau, Victoria Lodge Devon, Zarcort on March 2, 2011| 14 Comments »
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I woke this morning to an odd dream, not unpleasant, set in Victoria Lodge, a fab Five Star B&B in North Devon that belongs to my friend, Jacqueline. It’s a beautiful place in a lovely English village on the Bristol Channel where I passed my days walking Jac’s sweetie of a greyhound through the Valley of the Rocks as I pondered my future.
Jac’s friendship and hospitality were huge gifts, and her house was my bolt-hole, a life-saving haven, a calm harbor in a storm-tossed sea.
I awoke with a smile, although wondering why such strong images of that time and place presented today …
until …
I drifted into full consciousness and realized today’s date: 2 March.
It was on this day in 2008 my husband of 15 years informed me of his betrayal and plans to hit the ejector seat button on our life together. Nope, didn’t see that coming, and the sideswipe almost send me careening off a cliff.
Mark was the man I’d left my life behind for, my trusted partner in building a future from scratch, in parenting two children, the only person I’d ever felt completely safe with.
Shit happens.
Three years have come and gone, and although I can too vividly recall the moment life’s path forked drastically I’m still following my feet. The road’s been rocky and strewn with potholes and no few twists have needed navigating, but it is what it is.
I’m surprised to find this date so deeply burned into my psyche that a dream as profound as this morning’s presents even with no conscious connection, but it’s often my inner awareness that keeps better track than my waking mind. I’m too busy to dwell upon losses and it’s the future I must look to, not the shadows of what might have been.
I’ve taken my lumps and my lessons … and the gifts that came with. I’ve had some amazing moments that could not have happened if the path had not diverted and managed to love and be loved again. There’s been music created and named for me, some magical experiences, joy-filled pauses that required a change in circumstance to occur.
Three years ago, I could no more have predicted a moonlit proposal or a romantic wander through ancient pyramids than a visit to Mars, but those happened and wouldn’t have had the shit not happened, too.
Of course, Sam and Cj are blessings, and they alone provide all the “reason” there would ever need to be for the path to have wandered where it did.
So, there are no regrets … simply memories and the knowledge that what happens, happens, and will keep on happening. There is more life behind me than ahead, but that’s no reason to live in the past. The future won’t play out as long, but I’m still in the game, and although I have no expectation that the rest of my road will be smooth there will be reasons to smile.
Today, as I remember my losses, I look forward to gains with gratitude for the fact that it’s rarely been dull.
The last year alone provided enough not-dull to spawn a raft of words (Check out “It Gets Verse”, a book of poems that spilled out in 2010.), and continues to inspire.
So, on that note, I’ll close with a bit more wisdom gathered, more experience collected, more words strung together as life goes on …
Scoundrel
What is it with a man
who has it in his head
that no matter the hour
and the fact that I’m in bed
can’t stop his hands from dialing
my number every night
with a need to tell me often
how his life is now a fright?I don’t want to hear his needing
or his fucking endless pleading
for the chance to maybe seeding
a new bedHe has sown those seeds to women
who have no idea he’s givin’
it about around the world from here to there
(And I wish so he’d get out my damned hair)
But me, I learned my lesson
and no longer spend time guessin’
if he’s lying or he’s truthful
cuz there’s no doubt that what’s useful
it’s the only motivation
he can bearHe’s as shallow as a puddle
and although he seems a muddle
he has all his ducks so lined up in a row
that he’s aimed upon his targets
and the women he has marks up
are too clueless in their thoughts
that he’s their beau.He is yours if you deliver
and he’ll have you all a quiver
just as long as there’s a payoff in the end
For he goes nowhere ‘les it’s paid for
but you’re guaranteed a lay, for
he’s a horny little bugger,
(Ask his “friends”!)So, Yo! New girls …
Never say I didn’t warn you
Give your heart and see it torn, you
should really pay attention when I say
he’s a lyin’, cheatin’ scoundrel
fewer morals than a hound, you’ll
be knowing this already in a way
But you’re probably ignoring
all the signs that you’re deploring
and pretending that I have gone awayAnd I have, at least I try to
but he’ll never let it lie, too
much ego in the man to let me be
Plus he loves the life that I live
and he’s hoping I might still give
him what I have, or half,
and all for free
with not even any word of
honesty, that’s just unheard of
in that world of his that’s all about “ME, ME!”
Yes … I live and learn and live some more, catch whatever stardust floats by, grasp at rainbows and ride out … and write out … the rough bits.
It is what it is, intangible and indescribable as a tint of morning.
Posted in Writers, Writing for a living, tagged Gender Genie, NY Times on February 19, 2011| 5 Comments »
Apparently, it’s an easy thing to tell if writing comes from a man or a woman, or at least that the conclusion a couple of guys came up with.
According to this article in the NYT, what’s written will “immediately reveal which sex is doing the writing” even when all references to gender are removed from the text.
… what the gender-identifying algorithm picks up on is that women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns — ”I,” ”you” and ”she” especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners — ”a,” ”the,” ”that,” ”these” — along with numbers and quantifiers like ”more” and ”some.” What this suggests, according to Moshe Koppel, an author of the Israeli project, is that women are more comfortable talking or thinking about people and relationships, while men prefer to contemplate things.
They’ve come up with a test that can be used to pin the penis on the pen … or whatever …
Take any piece of fiction and do the following:
1. Count the number of words in the document.
2. For each appearance in the document of the following words ADD the number of points indicated:
‘the’ (17)
‘a’ (6)
‘some’ (6)
any number, written in digits or in words (5)
‘it’ (2)3. For each appearance in the document of the following words SUBTRACT the number of points indicated:
‘with’ (14)
possessives, ending in ‘s’ (5)
possessive pronouns, such as ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘his’, ‘hers’, (3)
‘for’ (4)
‘not’ or any word ending with ‘n’t’ (4)4. If the total score (after adding and subtracting as indicated) is greater than the total number of words in the document, then the author of the document is probably a male. Otherwise, the author is probably a female.
No thanks. That just sounds tedious and I am crap with numbers. Thankfully, however, there’s now a “Gender Genie” online that does the math for you.
Or, as in this case, for me.
I not only write for myself, I also write for others and often AS others, some of whom are men. Because I do this for the sole … and crass … purpose of making money, I’m bound to do a good job of it. That often means shedding my own skin and crawling inside that of peeps paying me to write them, even when it’s hairy and sports bits I can usually only appreciate as a recipient, not a wielder-of.
I am good at this, I know, but wanted to see if the Gender Genie could spot the me in the men I write for … Would that be a GG spotting? … so I submitted a couple of segments of work for analysis.
The first was a few paragraphs from a short story I wrote as myself for myself (Featured in “Papaya … and other seeds”, available for purchase here on this very blog). Not surprisingly, this was the result:
Next, I bunged in a section of a ghost writing gig for a phantom man who had a great story but wouldn’t have been able to write it if the life of all subsequent generations depended upon him getting it down. This is how that one scored:
So, although that Mars/Venus thing happens, it appears when it comes to writing I’m multiplanitary. (I like that more than hermaphrowrite, since I’m girlie beyond redemption …)
Cool.
Posted in Music I like, Writing for a living, tagged Musicians, myspace on February 15, 2011| 8 Comments »
Although I attend well to social networking when it comes to others, I admit to falling off shamefully when it comes to my MySpace page. Today is an attempt to make up for that a bit.
While I do manage to fairly well keep up both my personal and professional facebook pages, MySpace gets shoved to the back burner, mainly because the work I do from there is species specific … it’s almost exclusively about musicians and I’ve rather gone off them lately due to a nasty taste in my mouth, the residual of scummy duplicity.
A couple of vids crossing my radar today bring slight guilt pangs of neglect, however, so it’s “contribute to MySpace day” … unofficially, of course.
I’m a strong supporter of independence in the music industry and well pleased that technology has made it easier for artists to share and spread their talent, keeping the monster that has been the record industry from dictating every who, what and where as had been the case for too long. There’s a lot of truly great stuff about, and finding and following those making it can now happen even when the band you’re presently into is on the other side of the planet and relatively unknown.
Although all strive for superstardom … and, btw, I do onesheets, bios, liner notes, etc. for those musically gifted, but literarily challenged … digital distribution offers the option of importing music without the filter of mega-companies deciding what’s available for your personal consumption. Through YouTube vids, MySpace and facebook shares bands can go viral, and thousands may be brought into the fan fold, well pleasing not only those who saw fame coming, but also the artists who start making the big bucks.
As a service to my MySpace musician clients and buddies, I’m offering up a couple of videos that could prove helpful as the illusive fame thing happens. The fact that they make me laugh … having had the sort of experiences via musicians these address … is bonus.
Oh! The groupie … and talk about that nasty taste in the mouth!
Here’s a musician’s perspective:
Here’s a hilarious take on the online version …
And for a giggle …
Posted in Friends, Island life, Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, Poetry, Seychelles, Writing for a living, tagged Ernesto Cortazar, Zarcort on January 21, 2011| 6 Comments »
2010 was not a great year. It wasn’t the worst I’ve had, but certainly didn’t live up to my wish that it be a complete turnaround from the previous 365 days. Although I was extremely fortunate to get through those twelve months with no one I love dying, disappointments were rife and some great plans proved to be little but dust in the wind that often lodged in my eyes and produced prodigious tears.
Because I am who I am and I do what I do, the fallout also produced words, some of which rhymed or scanned, and in an effort to produce something to show for the year I’ve put them together in an eBook.
Some of the work included has been seen here on the blog, some hasn’t, and all in the book come with images, so even if some may have seen the words before, they’ve not seen them quite like this.
Titled, “It’s Gets Verse”, the book is dedicated to those who touched me in one way or another over the course of last year:
If you’ve made me laugh,
this book’s for you.
If you’ve caused me tears,
it’s for you, too.
Each hasn’t depth
without reversal,
and life, we know,
is no rehearsal.
For all who’ve had me
feel so much …
the good, the bad …
I’ve loved your touch.
In an effort to establish some value in my own mind for the collecting of all the bits of soot and ash from 2010’s burnt offering, I’m offering my offering for all of $5 a download. (PayPal works — sandra.splash@gmail.com — or cash through the post.)
I’ll be well pleased if I find that all the shit I went through last year was worth fifty bucks or so …
Posted in Poetry, Writers, Writing for a living, tagged honesty, Walter Scott on January 11, 2011| 4 Comments »
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
~Walter Scott
A conversation with a young writer a while back on honesty combines with an apparent lack of integrity in business and government coming across in the world news and personal experience with some who have a very casual relationship with truth and leads me to today’s post.
I make up stories. Of course I do; I’m a writer. I write about ghosts of pirates and old ladies who can fly and all sorts of other completely fictional scenarios. The fact that many of the tales I jot down never happened does not, however, make them lies. In fact, vital to each is its honesty.
My young pal is writing sci-fi, intricate stories of the seemingly impossible convoluted by circumstance outside the limits of anything but his imagination, yet my advice to him is: Keep it real; keep it honest.
How does that work? Well, the same way it does in life.
There are rules. There are always rules. Rules of action and reaction, of fairness, of balance, and through the process of creating a world, even an outrageous world of your own making, rules must be engraved in stone and followed.
For example, I just finished writing a scene in the book I’m working on now where a character is standing high on a rock contemplating the view before her. In reality, there is no woman, no rock and no view until I write it. It’s at that point it becomes substance, even if the substance is nothing but a string of words. I could easily endow her with superpowers that would allow her to leap, then fly, or I could make her as big as a cloud or as small as a gnat, but the one thing I cannot do is write what can’t be according to the rules of her world.
She feels the breeze upon her skin, so that breeze must be what a breeze is and her interpretation of it must be within the realm of what is possible for her. I can choose not to include the breeze in the tale, but it’s there and there’s no room for cheating, for glancing over what must be, what is. Her world isn’t airless, nor is she the type not to notice a warm, enveloping breath, so it must be written as it happens.
I wrote recently about my way of thinking of life as a series of books within a book, how I have a mental library I access as a meditation technique and where I store stuff in some sort of order I don’t always have access to.
Thinking in those terms, when reading news accounts of real people, I often wonder how their books play out. Not the truly evil, as there are plenty of horror tales that run according to plot, but those who bend and twist truth as if it is something bendable and twistable. It’s not, you know. It’s not. And the spiders weaving those tangled webs are very frequently left to dangle on a thread going nowhere.
It’s the same with people in the non-newsworthy world … whatever that may be at any given moment … who seem to think they’re getting along just fine by tweaking reality when it seems convenient, doing one thing, then saying they’re doing another … or nothing at all … living one lie after another as if life is nothing but a series of lily pads offering options to hop without consequence rather than a path that will be taken no matter how many times a plop in the muck happens.
The life books of those folks must be full of missing chapters and run-on sentences leading nowhere. All that doubling back must get tiresome, and since none of us gets a chance for a full rewrite, the story must grow terribly labyrinthine and cluttered with many dead ends.
The fact is many of our stories interconnect, fact and fiction, and once we’re part of another book or another’s book becomes part of ours plots mingle. Everyone is on their way to their own ending, but one influences the other and plot twists often happen in tandem. When all is based in real, in truth and honesty and integrity, scenes open, run and close in an order that makes sense, that scans, that works no matter how deep the tale, how serious the diegesis, how diabolical the outcome.
It’s cheap and easy to write bad fiction … there’s certainly a lot of that about … just as it is to live it. When the frog eats the spider and the lily pad sinks we lose interest until they’re scrambling to find something with substance to pull themselves up by. That would be truth.
There are, of course, various interpretations of truth, degrees of certitude, some flexibility in defining where accuracy and honesty go in different directions. In writing, such partings must be … well … spelled out, clearly or obliquely, or readers may feel tricked into a web that’s lost its form. Bored and frustrated, they’ll turn away, stop caring, toss the book at the wall and vow never to go THERE again, and the dishonest writer has just slit their own throat.
In life, however, a lie is a lie, and although some may appear to gain ground with the telling thinking they’re paving the way toward what they may think is a right direction, in the long run gossamer lily pads go nowhere.
Gossamer Lily Pads and Where They’ll Get You
If a frog eats a spider
and the spider’s had a fly
where’s the nutrition if
it’s all been a lie?The spider says, “I’ve done it,
and there’s a way to go”
So a hop to a lily pad
makes sense to the toad.When the spider can’t be trusted
and there never was a fly
and the frog knows the lily pad
is nothing but a lie,just loosely woven spider spit,
a floating maze of fraud,
it serves them all quite rightly
to be left to swim in mud.
Posted in History, Hopeful thoughts, I wanna, On getting older, Poetry, WTF? on January 4, 2011| 12 Comments »
Apologies for this convoluted mess of a post. I’m processing, and that’s not a tidy endeavor, so this thing is all over the place …
Being a reader and a writer, I suppose it makes sense that I often think of life in terms of books.
One of my favorite images, developed when I was a kid and honed over the years, is of internal libraries we each carry with us; volume after volume of stories lining endless shelves and constantly being added to. The history section grows as we age, as does general knowledge and reference works, and although some are better than others at retrieving info we know is there, just about everyone is aware of the fact that dusty corners hold stuff we haven’t bothered to look at in a very long time.
I use my library as an aid to meditation and often find illumination for troubling issues while wandering the stacks. There’s an entire section with nothing but numbers on the spines … all in Roman numerals. (I don’t know why, but that’s what it is.) The first is marked “I” and I can trail my finger along … V, X, XXV, XXXIII, XL, L … and stop where it feels right. Each book is a rough accounting of one year of my life, yet none are finished but have blank pages interspersed throughout since many of the yarns have yet to complete their weaving.
The library itself is inside a book inside my head, but much like reading on my iPad, I have no idea how thick this book might be. I know I’m a good way through, but just how far from The End, I can’t see. It could very well be that the next turn of the page is the last … or perhaps there are still quite a few chapters.
I might sketch notes in the corners if I could get to those pages by somehow jumping ahead — they are fairly blank, after all — but thumbing forward is futile and ends up heading back through chapters on history. That’s not a bad thing. Not at all. In fact, filling in gaps can be quite helpful even without knowing how it all ends.
One rule of fiction writing dictates everything included in a story must either reveal character or advance plot. Interestingly, reads back through my book seem to indicate that rule was followed even though at the time it seemed either nothing was happening or what happened was scripted by the William S. Burroughs school of writing. Oh, those not-so-lovely Deus ex Machina moments that make no sense at all … the shit asteroids falling from a clear, blue sky … the people popping up seemingly out of left field and tagging up … the bright, shiny objects floating into the path and compelling me to follow.
Yep, those WTF moments, the where-the-hell-did-that-come-from issues … when looking back in the Big Book of Sandra I do get the idea that all these shredded threads actually unspool from a source and following the fragments is possible. Some of it even makes sense when looking at it backwards, or if not sense at least symmetry. After all, I’m where I am now and getting here is what the story’s been about … so far.
As a new year begins, the image of blank pages ready for filling presents, but I’m not writing my life, just living it. It’s not me setting the scene but the sea and the clouds and the blue sky above, the bird chirps, the sound of the dog’s leg tapping along in time to her scratching happening with no need to be described … it all just is.
I can’t write others’ actions or reactions. I can’t build a character who loves me enough, never lets me down or saves the day. It’s not for me to calculate another’s trajectory and where it intersects mine. I can want to, but I can’t DO it. No. What is, is.
What also “is” is the part I can’t know — the part composing on its own. Are we coming toward an unexpected plot twist? A lottery win? The death of a loved one? Someone wonderful about to enter stage right? Cancer? A job offer? A heart attack?
Any or all of that could be part of the plot … well, not the lottery thing, since apparently you have to actually buy tickets and I don’t … and if I die tonight, my book is done and I’ll be filed away in the libraries of those who know me, but will continue to fill pages in others’ books … cross-references are a huge part of the life of Life books and parts of my story will continue to be included in the story of others for a while.
My volume varies in size from library to library … much thicker in my grown daughter’s than in Cj’s, for example … and there will be many different versions of my story. The version I have access to now will never be read by anyone, so no one will ever know the me of me that I know, just as I can’t know the them of any of them. Our stories are not only unique, they are forever beyond the comprehension of anyone, even ourselves; unfathomable biographies covering millions of seconds, each leading to the next until they stop doing that.
And there will be rewrites, some kind, some less so, but all tailored to fit the edition to the library hosting.
If I could write the rest of my life, I would end the book for MMX with ” … and she lived happily ever after to the end of her days”, then start on a new one with an outline for just how that would unfold making sure there were many, many pages left for all the great stories about to commence. For all I know, however, it’s already written, and perhaps that is how it goes. Maybe I do live happily ever after. Maybe all the carefully composed outlines have forged themselves in some sort of unassailable form that MUST be followed. Maybe. For now, though, all I can do is look forward to the read … and the ride.
For all who’d like to take a look,
my life is but an open book.But please, I beg you, all my friends,
some word if you know how it ends.
A collection of my short stories:
I'm in this one, too ...
And I'm in here, as well ...
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | ||||
Paradise Preoccupied 