Susanne

NaNoWriMo-Update (2)

November 27, 2006 by Susanne 4 Comments

I’m racing to reach the finish line. Currently I’m at 45,000 words. So I might be able to finish on Tuesday or Wednesday. Being so near to the end feels very good. (I guess that finishing will feel even better.) After so many words it seems that finally there is some action in my novel. In order to have something exciting happen I introduced a classic sci-fi concept: Something is threatening to destroy the earth and my little group of people will have to save it. It’s my novel, I can write what I want.

On Saturday I even had a write-in with one of my writing buddies. She lives only a couple of streets away. When I opened the door to her I saw that we actually had met before! (There are no cafés here, so we decided to meet at my place.) We had met at a workshop on, um, sword-fighting. (Sorry, the site I’m linking to is in German, but there is no such thing in the English-speaking world. Basically it is the blending of Middle Age sword-fighting with martial arts.) See, that’s something about me that you didn’t know. And I’m not doing it anymore, because some things have to go. Even in my life.

It is always so nice to meet other people doing NaNoWriMo. People who are doing crazy things for fun too.

There is a local group of NaNos whom I met the week before last. They are doing quite well, two of them even finished their novels. We’ll be having a dinner to celebrate on Friday.

(Wow. A short blog entry. Who would have thought I could do this…)

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo

Why writing songs is hard

November 25, 2006 by Susanne Leave a Comment

This, of course, is the second part to my previous post on “why writing is easy”. Well, for those of you in a hurry, I can say as much: It really isn’t. But it seems to be for me.

I’ve been writing a lot about this so it isn’t exactly a secret: I don’t even find making music easy to do. You know, music makes noise. As a child I have been living in a house where the landlords complained about us children all the time. (And they even had children of their own.)We even learned to climb the stairs quiet as mice. So imagine their reaction when we bought a piano. And I actually enjoyed playing so much that they restricted me to one hour per day. Oh, and when we moved to our own house when I was fourteen, my piano sat in the living room and everybody told me to please stop playing so that they could watch TV. Even today, when I’m on stage, I have a strong impulse to apologize for taking up people’s valuable time. And for being loud.

So after years and years of avoiding to call myself a musician, of looking for outside proof, for a license to make music, in the end I found that in the course of those years not only did I make a lot of music without realizing it, I had acquired a degree in music education as well. So, some fifteen years ago I stopped agonizing about it and just started saying that I am a musician. I have a right to it. I’m making music. And I’m earning my money by teaching it.

But I’ve been blocked all the time. I’ve been wanting to write songs since the age of twelve. I started humming something, hadn’t a clue how to catch it, and then I stopped. When it comes to my biggest and most precious dreams I’m easily discouraged. When in university I met somebody who actually wrote songs. AND HE WAS JUST A NORMAL PERSON! I thought, “Well, if he can do it, I might too.” Started walking around with songs in my head, but didn’t know how to write them down or record them. When I tried to write them down, they changed, because writing down music requires much practice. And I didn’t have any recording equipment. So it became a “one day”-thing. One day I’ll write songs.

Then I attended a workshop on vocal improvisation by the fabulous Rhiannon and we had a song writing exercise. We did a writing exercise for the lyrics on one day and were sent home with the homework of setting some of that words to music. Improvisation was allowed and one could take all the other singers and let them sing. Or you could bring an instrument. I loved this exercise. Loved it. I went home with a melody to some of my amazing lyrics going round and round in my head. I couldn’t wait to go to my piano and write the melody and harmony down.

When I came home there was a letter telling me that everything I had done that year to further my academic career had been futile. The work of nine months was dismissed as being not up to standard. Wham! I phoned a friend, I phoned my advisor, I cried, I talked with my husband… My little melody was gone.

But then I did something that I’m really proud of: I sat down at the piano, took the lyrics and made up a new melody. And wrote it down. The next day at the workshop I taught the whole workshop to sing my song fragment in harmony. Rhiannon looked at me and said, “Where did those harmonies come from?” Well, I can’t say.

Then I knew that song writing really mattered to me. And then I promptly forgot and finished my dissertation and and didn’t get my degree after all. I got pregnant and had a son. And then I knew that one day had to be now. Since that workshop every year in November I have made a commitment to myself to write songs. And each fall I’ve written half a song or so. Last year I started in earnest. For Christmas my husband even gave me a card saying that he had founded a club to further my attempts. He gave me his old hard disk recorder and I recorded two of my songs. He mixed them. And then I found that though melodies come easy to me, since I’m a singer who has been doing jazz and improvisation for ages, I was handicapped by my piano skills.

Off I went to take lessons. And that teacher is brilliant and I learned a lot. But instead of writing songs I fell back into student mode and only thought about playing jazz songs on the piano. Then I tried to write songs again. Then I started the blog. And then was now.

Some days ago I had an epiphany: I’ll only learn to write songs if I write them. (Yeah, I know, deep thinking, that.) So I made a commitment to write crappy songs until I know how to do it. And then I’ll have to learn to follow through. Beginnings are very easy for me. Lack of ideas? BWAHAHA! Capture them somewhere? Harder. Finish something? BWAHAHA again. But for a different reason.

You have to see that writing is really much more easy: it’s portable, it doesn’t make a noise and you learn how to do it in school. And also you don’t need equipment. Well, not much anyway.

Technorati Tags: creativity, midlife-crisis, self-help, song writing, writing

Me and the blog reading

November 21, 2006 by Susanne 2 Comments

I went to a blog reading on Sunday. To this blog reading to be exact. As part of the audience, in case you wondered. And my husband even let me drag him along. I was a little nervous though because the reading’s theme was “Weibergschichtn” that means “women’s stories” only “Weib” is quite archaic and not PC. (And for those of you who know German “Gschichtn” should be “Geschichten” in high German.) (And my dictionary tells me “Weiber” equals vixens, but I remain doubtful.)

So you ask, “What the frell is a blog reading?” It has nothing to do with crystal balls or so, but everything with, well, reading part of your blog in front of an audience. It seems that only Germans do this. Because – as Kaltmamsell put it – German bloggers are literally ambitious. (Oops. German mistake. They are ambitious to write literature.)

Kaltmamsell

So we went there, both of us, our son in the able hands of my MIL. The reading was at a very reasonable time – 6 p.m. Marvelous for people who are used to have dinner at 6.30 and go to bed at eleven or so. And it was held at a hamburger place. So we even could have dinner there. Since this wasn’t the first blog reading I have attended (but I never got around to post something on the first one) I went prepared. I brought my camera with me, and dressed properly. What, you think that there is no dress code at a blog reading? You are so wrong. Though, to be fair, I don’t think that anybody else is aware of this. You know, these are the times when I realize that I’m living in a kind of suburbia. To the last reading I went in all the glory of my new red and orange frilly and flowered blouse, topped with a lacy, self-knitted silk-cardigan, jeans and my new boots. Wow, did I look out of place! I know that there are people who think that wearing something orange and red would make you look out of place anywhere, specially when frilly and flowery, but trust me, I looked fantabulous. But everyone else wore black. Or grey, or beige (which isn’t even a color). There might even have been someone daring a pale blue turtleneck. Well, I don’t live in the big city anymore, and I don’t belong to the intelligentsia. (The dress code is the one that I have dubbed “I had German major in college.” Well, or architecture. Mostly black, sometimes brown, conservative with a twist and glasses.” I can only counter that with my suburban housewife sportswear look or, sometimes with my “I am a singer in flowing gowns”-look.)

This time I was prepared and so I had donned an olive green jacket to camouflage my red tee. I still wore my new boots and jeans and my red beloved winter coat, because it’s by noa noa and therefore stylish, even if it’s red. I was prepared, I hadn’t come alone because at the first reading I attended I felt a little lonely. The other people had come in twos and threes. They didn’t talk to strangers, apparently. I felt as weird as the two goths sitting at my table. This time on our way to the reading I told my husband, “I’ll be nervous the whole time, and I’ll want to say hello to everybody, and then I will be too shy and very sad and go home.” And so I did. I even had commented on their blogs the days before and told the world I’d be there.

Would you do it? Go to one of the A-bloggers of your country, shake her hand and say, “Hello, I adore your blog. BTW I commented yesterday and I have a blog too.” And then she’d probably look at me and say, “Um. What? Susanne. Um. Hello.” and if I were lucky she’d think to herself, “Oh. The mommyblogger with the diapers. How pathetic.” And maybe she wouldn’t, but now I’ll never know, because I just sat there (in the back! my husband doesn’t like to be up front) and I snapped a couple of photos. (I’ll have to ask permission to put them up though, since all of them are blogging pseudonymously. Something else that almost all German bloggers do, but I don’t. And Martina Kink)

And now I’m doing something wrong – again – in blogging about the blog reading. As isarblogger put it, posts about blog readings are boring, because everybody only writes that everybody else was really “great” and “charming”. Which they were. All four bloggers reading were great, charming, good looking and well dressed. (Black mostly, but there was red dress (shocking!) and a black and white skirt.) They read well, even Miss M. who hadn’t done this before and was a little lacking in the department of microphone technique. (A little tip: with that kind of microphone it is okay to back off a little. This has the additional advantage of you being able to stand up straight.) There were a lot of people in the audience who obviously enjoyed themselves. Oh, the bloggers (now you know why this entry is called “me and the blog reading”): There were Frau Klugscheisser, Kaltmamsell, Martina Kink, and Miss M. Of course I knew almost all of what they were reading, since I have been following the blogs of three of them for quite some time. Miss M. will be a refreshing addition to my list of feeds. (Not that I really need more feeds to read. Currently I’m at 131.)

Frau Klugscheisser

Blog readings are a little strange. There are only a few texts that stand up to be read aloud in front of people. Especially when they are written to be read in passing. Blogs are more like newspapers than like books. You can make a book out of a blog, but then you’ll have to change things. Or not. There are German blogs out there that read more like a series of short stories like Merlix. All of this got me thinking. I know, I’m doing it again. I should rename my blog “I am mother, hear me think.” Firstly, I am a little jealous. All my ambiguity towards blog readings doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t say yes immediately if somebody asked me to participate. I’d whip out my bra-story in nothing flat. And they all have about a hundred times the readers I have, or more. Nowadays I even feel self-conscious when commenting, because every comment on Kaltmamsell’s blog brings in several dozen people. They never stay though. I think one look at my masthead is enough to scare them off.

So, at the reading I thought about the differences between German and American bloggers (or Canadian maybe). I feel much more like a part of the American blogosphere. I think that it is because of blogher and crazyhipblogmamas and mommybloggers of course. There is no mommyblogger-movement in Germany that I know of. And there is a difference in the way that I am commenting. The German blogs I love – like the ones from the reading – are all a little dry and sarcastic. And when you comment on those blogs you feel that you have to be clever and write something intelligent and funny in a dry and ironic way. When I’m commenting on American blogs I’m all “hugs”, “That’s great!”, and “sniff”. I like both, but I’d rather have some more warmth in the German blogosphere. And no, I’m certainly not the best person to start something like blogher German or German mommybloggers.

I really hope to attend more blog readings in the future, though. It is nice to actually see the people one is reading every day. Even if one is too shy to say hello. (And now I’m probably off for some “link fishing”, since I plan to tell them that I wrote about their reading. After I have translated this to German.)

(And do you know, how long it took me to write this? Two hours. And, yes, I know it’s too long.sorry. But those are the two hours that I didn’t have for my NaNo-novel today. (And do you know how long it’ll take to translate this? Um, no, probably about one hour, since I can leave most of the links as they are. And I don’t have to look up German words.))

Technorati Tags: blog reading, blogging, bogher, mommyblogger

Why don’t you just relax a little?

November 17, 2006 by Susanne 6 Comments

Ever since that post about friendship some time ago I’ve been having conversations with friends again. It’s amazing. And one of them I even met. And we talked. Of course. And she said to me,

“Why don’t you just relax a little? You don’t have to do all at once all the time.”

I told her that I’m striving because I’m not content with the way my live is. Or the way I am. But that’s not the whole truth. First of all, I know myself. I’ve been living with me for almost forty years and I can tell you this: Relaxing is very easy for me. Saying, “Oh, I worked so hard, I don’t have to be good all the time.” BHAM! Next thing I know I’m back where I started. Twenty pounds heavier, messy home, haven’t made music for weeks. And all that would be perfectly fine if I didn’t get so unhappy about it. And then there’s this:

All my life I’ve been having “great potential”. I was really proud of that. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But then, slowly, it dawned on me: Great potential means nothing if it remains potential forever. If it remains potential, you eventually will die a loser. I’ve had a great role model on this. My father is a intelligent man with big potential. My mother was attracted to him in the first place because of his sparkly conversation and the fact that all of the walls of his room were covered in sketches. He drew. Well, he gave it up when I was a little child and never picked up a pencil again. Because he wasn’t “good enough”. He had lots of interests and hobbies, but all he ever did was sleep on the couch with a book in his hand. I don’t say that my father is a loser, no. But it is a sad sight when somebody doesn’t do anything that he is longing for.

Another example: Since I am a music teacher I often happen to meet people at parties who tell me that they had always wanted to play the piano. My knee-jerk response to this is, “Well you can still do it.” And they are afraid, and they don’t and it breaks my heart to see the longing in their eyes.

I don’t want to become one of those people who end their lives regretting the things they didn’t do. I don’t want to wake up and think, “I always wanted to write songs, or a novel, but I never did. And now it’s too late.”

Yeah, this is called midlife-crisis. And I realized that there’d never be enough time, or space, or money. That I have to change now, and do the things I want to do, now. I’m not obsessed with it. It’s totally okay to write a novel and neglect the music for a month. But not for a year. And as my favorite piano teacher put it, “You’ll never regret not having watched every single episode of “Lindenstrasse“.” (German soap opera.)

But you will regret not trying to live your dreams. For sure.

Technorati Tags: creativity, midlife-crisis, self-help

NaNoWriMo Update

November 13, 2006 by Susanne 6 Comments

Hello, I’m still here, only I have been very busy with this novel thing. Those of you reading this through a feed reader (well, actually the one of you reading this through a feed reader) might not have noticed, but I have a little button in my sidebar with “NaNoWriMo participant” and my word count on it. As of yesterday evening I have written 20,505 words. So I’m on track though I had wanted to be a little ahead. Well, my son had another round of barfing, sniffling, feverish, almost better, and then ear infection sickness…

I’m quite confident that I will be one of the winners of NaNoWriMo. That’s somebody who has reached a word count of 50,000 words by the end of the month. But I didn’t manage to do this without disturbing my “normal life” after all. So I’m very glad that I told my husband. He was very still at first, and so I hastened to say, “If it interferes with our life, I’ll quit. I’ll do my normal housework, child care and errand duty. The time for this has to come out of TV and blog reading time.” Which it has. Mostly. And he only scolded me twice for doing it. So far.

Mary Tsao has given her readers a synopsis of her plot. I think that that’s a very good idea, so here’s my story:

I’m writing about a 104-year-old psychic woman married to an alien living on a star ship. Since it has aliens and space ships in it, I declared it to be science fiction. Though there is no science in it. The biggest part is a journal written by this woman to regain her sense of self. So far she has written about her youth, how she became interested in meditation, her first marriage, her six children, everyday stuff. For the sake of the word count this reads like my blog only longer and – more boring. Since she hasn’t had the time to tell anyone where she was going, she’s considered missing and there are two police-officers looking for her. Reluctantly. In the course of the last few days her great-granddaughter has arrived on the scene. She’ll probably be transported to the space ship too…

I really don’t know what will be happening. The only thing I knew in advance was that this woman (her name is Melissa by the way) would end up on that space ship. I really don’t know why or what will be happening then. With a plot like this you’d think this might be really interesting, but it isn’t. Telepathy, aliens, space ships… But I still feel like I have no plot. This is partly due to the fact that the whole thing is told through journals and dialogue. I didn’t plan it that way. Well, not much, I knew there would be journaling. I figured I’ d stick to what I write best… The dialogue was a surprise. I had always thought that I couldn’t write dialogue at all. As of now the people in my “novel” sound a lot like me, but they don’t sound all alike. Oh, and there are some paragraphs of “stream of consciousness”-writing where you can hear the alien think. That’s very easy to write when you’ve run out of ideas.

I told some of my students about NaNoWriMo. One dismissed it obviously as one of my spleens. The other one couldn’t believe it: Why are you doing this? Are there prices? Why don’t you cheat? They should be reading all the novels. What? Nobody is even reading the novels? So why do you do this? May I read your novel? It sounds really interesting. Well, I’m not sure. Nobody will read it in the state that it is now. It’s terrible. And boring, as I already mentioned. And I don’t think I’ll be working on it again after November. We’ll see.

So obviously I couldn’t quite make it clear to my student. But then, as much as I like exercising, I wouldn’t spend my days like him, training for three to four hours each day only to be fit for playing tennis for as long as I possibly could.
I’ve been quite proud of myself for having such a steady output. But every time that I congratulate myself like, “Yeah. I’ve done it! 20k!” I go to the German NaNoWriMo forum and find a thread like “I have reached 50k”. Argh. Interestingly my two writing buddies are nowhere near that word count more like 4,000 and 11,000. I really hope that they will speed up soon.

I’m spending the whole day procrastinating about the writing and then I spend my whole evenings typing as fast as I can. I write about everything, regardless of its importance to the story. This is not about quality. this is about the word count. Every day I have to force myself to sit down and write – and when I’m finished I find that I actually enjoy it. But I’m never looking forward to it.

And I’m already planning to participate again next year. (Which I didn’t tell my husband yet.)

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo

Why almost finished is not enough

November 7, 2006 by Susanne 4 Comments

I just had an epiphany and recognized one of my major stressors: almost finished is not enough. Well, it was my mother’s birthday and I needed a gift. As always I was very early with the thinking and planning, then ordered a book on amazon on time. But then I had an idea: wouldn’t it be a good idea to give her a copy of the song that I sang at my sister’s wedding and that we recorded almost by chance in September? Good idea. Six days before her birthday we even mixed the song and I burned it on CD.

Then it happened (and I fall for this trap every single time): I thought, “Oh, I’m almost done.” and forgot about it. Put a little reminder in my PDA to mail it two days before her birthday. On the mailing day I had to do this:

Burn the CD again, so I didn’t have to give her my only copy.
Design a cover and print it.
Find a jewel case without scratches.
Find an envelope.
Find the drawings my son had made for her.
Find the photo CD that I had meant to give her for months.
Write a few kind words, and maybe find a birthday card. (I solved this by writing directly on the drawings.)
Find a marker and put her address on the envelope.
Find a stamp and find out how much postage it costs.
Go to post office before 5 p.m.

Okay. All of this took 90 minutes! (Never underestimate the time for anything done with computers.) For one measly present. that was “almost finished”. So imagine me doing Christmas presents. And birthday presents for most of my husband’s family who un-conveniently were born around New Year.

I did fell all smug before, because I have done almost all my Christmas shopping. But I’m not so sure anymore. It might be a good idea to look at everything again before Christmas actually comes around. Maybe there are more presents who need a little 90-minute attention.

My husband (who is often wiser than I) says that it takes the same amount of energy to do something from start to “almost finished” as it does to do the last ten percent of it. That would mean my “almost finished” is “only half done”. Argh.

Technorati Tags: self-help, time-management, to-do-list