For the latest on William and Ernest…

For the latest on William and Ernest, please see “Back in the slammer again” on my other blog, to write is to write is to write.

When I created Whiskertips, I didn’t intend to write about cats. The title was a last-ditch effort to find a name not already in use.

I tried Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Contrariwise (a term some people say suits me to a T). I tried Words, Words, Words. In short, I ran through Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

All those years when I didn’t even know what a blog was, people who did were grabbing all the good stuff.

Then, in my moment of desperation, Alice B Toeclaws, resident Muse, jumped into my lap. Voila! A blog was born.

But note the subtitle: Cats, books, and life in general. I expected to do book reviews, family stories, opinion pieces. I wanted to write about whatever came to mind. And for a while I did.

As time went on, however, whatever came to mind became, increasingly, cats.

When I was too tired to write, or when I had nothing to say, I uploaded pictures of William and Ernest.

Then one day, I backed off and took a good look at my creation.

And I didn’t like what I saw.

I was well on my way to being pigeonholed as a Cat Lady.

I am not a Cat Lady.

Yes, I tell stories about the cute things William and Ernest do. Yes, I have chronic backache from scrunching into one-quarter of the bed so William and Ernest don’t miss their REM sleep. Yes, baby-talk is my second language. Yes, I wear cat hair as an accessory. And yes, I post their pictures and write about them as if they were human.

But I am not a Cat Lady.

I am a Writer.

To make that clear, I created the second blog, dedicated to writing.

And I managed to go two whole months without mentioning cats. Then I snapped.

But–and this is important–in that post, I connected William and Ernest to writing.

That made it legal.

But it’s a slippery slope. I know what happens when cats stray in. I feed them. They stay. Sometimes they have kittens.

But not this time. If William and Ernest want Cat Chow, they’ll have to stay on the Whiskertips side of the fence.

Unless they have a very good excuse for trespassing.

The cats of April

Today Ernest and William display their respective attitudes toward photography. Ernest stares wide-eyed. William squints.

I don’t know whether William finds the flash unpleasant or whether he wants to project a macho image, but whatever the reason, in most of his shots he comes out looking fierce, disgusted, or bored. Nothing could be further from reality. His usual expression smacks of deceptive innocence. I think this pose makes him look  like an owl.

Ernest, on the other hand, loves the camera. He keeps his baby greens wide open. Today’s shot catches him resting his head in David’s hand. If Ernest had his way, he would spend his life in that position.

I titled this blog Whiskertips in honor of William and Ernest’s immediate predecessors, Christabel, Chloe, and Alice B Toeclaws, who were for many years our dear companions. I didn’t, however, intend to write solely about cats. Under most circumstances, I would leave a decent interval between cat posts.

Last night, however, I had distressing news. My laptop’s hard drive is on the way out. It is corrupt. Actually, a file has been corrupted, but the other way sounds better.

When the external hard drive, which I should have had two years ago, arrives, and files are properly backed up, a technician will come to my house and install a new hard drive. I shall then send the corrupt drive to the manufacturer and go on my merry way.

Until then, I shall sit in this amazingly uncomfortable chair (a relic of the service station my grandfather, my father, my great-uncle, and various others operated between 1915 and 1970) and work at the desktop. Fortunately, I  e-mailed myself a draft of my WIP before corruption became evident. (I also saved it to a thumb drive. I may be crazy, but I’m not completely witless.)

That’s what I really wanted to write about today. But if I’d announced my misfortune in the first paragraph, it might have seemed like whining. So I started with cats, always an attention-getter, and then segued into unpleasantness. That’s how it’s done. One of my high school seniors phrased it best: “When you’re writing an essay, always start with something that has nothing to do with what you’re writing about.”

Having said what I have to say, I note that this post is about neither cats nor hard drives, but about writing.

It’s amazing how some of these posts meander. If I had time, there’s no telling where we’d end up.

But I’ve spent as much time in this chair as my body can stand. And I still have to deal with the WIP.

And Ernest has just made a nest in a pile of towels still warm from the dryer.

Here we are, back to cats.

Thus are the unities preserved.

Try, try again

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” ~ attributed to Albert Einstein

“Insanity: staying up until 3:00 a.m. both Friday and Saturday revising your manuscript contest submission and then expecting to have enough functional brain cells to proof the final copy on Sunday before submitting it on Monday, when repeated replication of the experiment over the past four decades has already told you it ain’t gonna happen that way.” ~ attributed to Kathy

Pea green: the color you feel every time you replicate the experiment

To err is mine

In the previous post, I wrote that during an evening with friends, we talked about Timothy Leary, Walter Huston, and LSD.

Rereading the post later in the day, I wondered whether I’d spelled Huston correctly. I was about to google Walter Huston to check it out when I realized Walter wasn’t correct either.

Somebody Huston, or Houston, was involved in those experiments with LSD, but it wasn’t the actor who won the Academy Award for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Then, while trying to remember Mr. H’s first name, I realized it wasn’t Somebody Huston/Houston, it was Huston/Houston Somebody.

Are you still with me?

I would have searched Amazon for The Harvard Psychedelic Club, which is what got us talking about the subject in the first place, but I couldn’t remember the title. So I googled something like Leary Harvard LSD and–Lo and behold!–found the name I was looking for: Huston Smith.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have corrected the name in the post. However, the fact that I’d ended it by saying that my friend kept referring to Halloween when she meant Valentine’s Day made my little gaffe rather amusing. So I added a footnote instead.

Fast forward a couple of hours. Checking out the post again, I noted I’d misspelled the first name. I’d written Houston instead of Huston.

Huston is what I’d started with. Wrong position but correct spelling.

So I clicked Edit and added another footnote.

And, as I’d done twice before, I e-mailed my friend a link to the post. I thought she might as well see how I’d spent my day.

The thing is–once upon a time, I was proud of my attention to detail. Other people complimented me on my attention to detail. I told my students about my attention to detail and strongly suggested they get some of their own.

Now I’m falling apart before my own eyes. And, since Whiskertips is visible to whoever happens along, before everyone else’s eyes as well.

I don’t like that.

But I don’t sweat it either. It’s small stuff.

I mean, you should hear about the blunder I made in a post a couple of weeks ago. Talk about embarrassing. I even received an e-mail about it. From a famous person. Whose name I shall not include here because that’s how he found out about the mistake in the first place. From his news feed.

Never mind.

Anyway, today’s slip gave me the idea for this post. That’s a good thing. Someday I might decide to write about the other one.

In the words of Crescent Dragonwagon, and possibly other people as well, “Nothing is wasted on the writer.”

Simple as that

If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don’t want to write, do something else. It’s as simple as that.” ~ Mary Garden

Today I didn’t want to.

Book Review: A Broom of One’s Own

HerStories Memoir Challenge #2

I like Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own: Words About Writing, Housecleaning & Life so much that it’s taken me over two months and two missed deadlines to untangle my thoughts and write this four-sentence review, an irony Peacock, author of two critically acclaimed novels, would no doubt address were I in one of her writing classes.

She would probably tell me that there is no perfect writing life; that her job as a part-time housecleaner, begun when full-time writing wouldn’t pay the bills, afforded time, solitude, and the “foundation of regular work” she needed;  that engaging in physical labor allowed her unconscious mind to “kick into gear,” so she became not the writer but the “receiver” of her stories.

She’d probably say that writing is hard; that sitting at a desk doesn’t automatically bring brilliance; that writers have to work with what they have; that “if I don’t have the pages I hate I will never have the pages I love”; that there are a million “saner” things to do and a “million good reasons to quit” and that the only good reason to continue is, “This is what I want.”

So, having composed at least two dozen subordinated, coordinated, appositived, participial-phrase-stuffed first sentences and discarded them before completion; having practically memorized the text searching for the perfect quotation to end with; and having once again stayed awake into the night, racing another deadline well past the due date, I am completing this review—because I value Nancy Peacock’s advice; and because I love A Broom of One’s Own; and because I consider it the equal of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird; and because I want other readers to know about it; and because I want to.

Busy stringing beads

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, –happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”  ~  Brenda Ueland

Too busy stringing beads to blog.

Source:  Quotable Quotes on Writers and Writing

Henry Miller must have been a blogger

“Writing is its own reward.”  ~  Henry Miller

~ It certainly is.

Source: Quotable Quotes on Writers and Writing

Imperfections

Writing is probably better for all the imperfections of our lives. Fiction requires tension, and the first tension is between the story trying to be told through the writer and the writer trying to find the time to sit down and get it onto the page. I believe this is a good thing. If writers were not willing to work with this tension, then books would be as flat as reality TV. We don’t read fiction for reality; we read it for truth.—Nancy Peacock, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning & Life

One of the problems

One of the problems we have as writers is we don’t take ourselves seriously while writing; being serious is setting aside a time and saying if it comes, good; if it doesn’t come, good, I’ll just sit here.
— Maya Angelou

Happy Birthday to Loy–one of the people who make me take myself seriously.