Your Extraordinary Life

by Brenda on May 15, 2012

Forget Me Not

Where is it

 

I had it at eleven, lost it in the tween,
And found it again at eighteen

Egocentric, self-centered, “Look at me! Aren’t I amazing!
I am indestructible and beyond your reach, see me soar

Into the arms of my destiny all mine to design, no fear, have I.

I pledge allegiance to my character, vowing to stand guard over it
Strong-arming dream catcher thieves and the doomsayers, lurking

In the fringe, scheming to sabotage my flight of fancy
Set to carry me on my journey as I rise above the ordinary. My aspiration

To be extraordinary is clear. I sprint onward with reckless abandonment,
So sure am I never to take the back seat of this life.

My resolve firm, my identity radiant, even the blazing sun
Pardons my innocence arrogance and youthful ignorance, knowing

I know not. Years gather behind my youth, bringing forth a weighty

Doubt. It tugs at my seams and leisurely unravels the fabric
Until my core lay bare on the marble floor of middle age

Alongside a humdrum life, once boundless, now drear.
I plod through the day sucking out an existence

Bleak of inspiration, I sigh. There I am, stuck between
Past dreams and today’s truth, neither lighting a path to higher

Ground where my destiny strums her fingers. My heart
Yearns for what it does not know, knowing as it does what it has

Is more than it deserves in my children and the life I

Took but did not design. If blessings were stars, the
Cloaked passage waiting for the impression of my feet

Would glister, dazzling even the wise Moon. My course
Forward remains hidden to me until I surrender.

If peace is to dwell in my soul, calm, and serenity
To bloom within my heart, I must traverse the years

To find and face the moment where I buried my radiant
Self, to accept this life was always mine to define,

Even the detours and trips down the gray roads, were

Shepherding me to this point of flux, where I now lie
Exposed on the cold floor with my battered spirit, waiting

For what it knows not. Changes loom amidst the shadows,
In the tween of dark and light, past and present, cooing me

“Look at me! Aren’t I amazing!
I am indestructible and beyond your reach, see me soar

Into the arms of my destiny all mine to design, no fear, have I.
I re-pledge allegiance to my character, to stand guard over it-until the end

I sprint onward with reckless abandonment,
Certain I’ll never take for granted my extraordinary life.

 

If doubt has unraveled any of your dreams and your at the corner of lost and I might never be found, re-pledge yourself to yourself.  Have you remembered to count your blessings today?

{ 36 comments }

A Writer’s Creative Process

by Brenda on May 11, 2012

Inside the Writer's Mind

In answer to queries that I’ve had about my writer’s voice, subject matter, fact vs. fiction, and where I get my ideas. And is everything about me.

Your writer’s voice and is everything about you:

I write from the left side of my heart, talk as if I am an open nerve, will slice open a vein to write without reserve or inhabitation on all those emotions that are often trapped behind an organ.

I concede I write provocatively on any subject I feel passionately about and will cross boarders if the urge is strong. I will write honestly about emotions and our flaws we tuck under the mattress and pray stayed buried. I write frequently and comfortably in the ‘I’ voice, even if ‘I’ am not the subject. I will stand naked on the page if what challenges me requires me to speak as if the “I’ is me. I will bare the weight of assumptions if only to define, explore, expose, and challenge the preconceptions in a woman.

Even though this is my chosen voice—bold and brazen—I rarely confess, even to my two and half friends, when I am buried in the middle of a life’s dark abyss, if I am blue, or if I feel the weight of the world pushing me inward. I won’t and I don’t. I was raised by wolves and gypsies and was taught—aggressively as well as passively—to be tough, to not linger in the two-ringed pity pool, to not wear my knickers inside-out, to buck up in the face of adversity, and if I must whimper, to do it with dignity. I will however find a release for my angst, frustration, confusion, wonderment, anger, fear, loss, excitement, doubt, liberation, boldness, and snarky disposition, and wild joy, in my words.

I will defy my family upbringing, and write around the rule of show and not tell, in my poetry.

Do you bend the rules? Do you tell the truth? Do you blend fact with fiction?

If I am writing fiction, I will bend the facts, elaborate and be inventive. In the name of story, I will create.  When I am writing in my fiction voice I will weave into the story my own life truths, myself, people I know, events, experiences, any and everything I have tasted, touched, lived through, cried over, laughed about, lost, and buried. I will and I do. I don’t know many authors, but those I’ve read about say this is what the writer does. We gather fodder everyday in the strangest of places. The tidbits we collect appear on the page when we least expect it.

Where do you get your ideas?

I don’t have a one stop shop answer for this question.  As noted above, I steal from my own life all the time, but not in complete chunks. Rather I weave in pieces. After writing a book and reading it, not as a writer but as a reader, I realized I had written pieces of my real self into the book. The book is not my life story, but within it, there are shards of glass, snippets, and fractions of moments, which are mine. Of course, there are others in there besides mine. People I know, don’t know, family, events I lived through, or heard about, but finally at my hand, I manipulated, rewrote, even lied, for the sake of the story.

But this is not always the case.  I recently wrote a short story where the main character is writing her Christmas letter to Santa. In the letter, she talks about abuse and a murder. I have no personal experience with either and have absolutely no idea where the story came from. I sat down at my desk and out the story came.

What about writer’s block?

Sometimes when I am stuck in my mind or a moment I can’t get out of, I write open letters to the universe.

Being a hostage to my thoughts is my version of writer’s block. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about because I do have endless flittering thoughts racing around in my mind, crashing, drifting as a sporty ten-second car does around a curve, but the string of thoughts and the solitary words interlock, forming a chain of potential. It stays only that, a possibility of more, until I am unstuck inside. This is writer’s block Brenda style. To resolve, I sit my butt in the chair and type until the words break free. The letter to Santa is a good example of untangling my thoughts and getting over myself.

Thanks for the questions.

 

What kind of writer are you? Do you have an opinion on any of the questions asked of me?

{ 35 comments }

Don’t Take Love for Granted

by Brenda on May 7, 2012

Love and all it's stages

Don’t take for granted for it has a will of its own.  Yet you will do, not just once but time and time again.  You’ll watch it leave you, or you yourself will leave it where you found it, along with the person you found it in.  This is a lesson only learned through life and it is not one I can bequeath. Although I would if I could.  Rather, I thought I’d leave some rough guidelines as well as early warning signs to watch for.

Love and lust when it’s hot

  • Your nighttime dreams invade your waking dreams
  • You can’t control the electrical currents shooting down your limbs when he is close
  • Your thoughts are like the inside of 5,000 piece puzzle – jumbled
  • Your lust boils, and rises like a vapor off your skin
  • You fail to notice-ANYTHING
  • You remember your lover’s touch long after…

Love out of habit, while lust is tepid and only hot after copious amounts of wine

  • Your dreams are less animated, PG13 (heavy petty and groping), more than less, and prime time viewing is appropriate
  • Your body involuntarily freezes, is toy soldier rigid and not pliable like putty, when he hovers
  • The mess in your head is more ordered, easier to follow, and no longer bewildered
  • Lust is not lost and easily recalled with a bottle of Merlot, Barry White, and facial paper doll cut outs of Hugh Jackman, Rhett Butler, Johnny Depp, Gerard Butler, etc., mentally placed over your own lover’s face as he ….
  • You lover’s  words start to blur into white noise, the grinding the back of his teeth make while chewing makes you want to hurl a dinner plate in his direction.  You’ve started to make a mental list of all the things that bother you
  • You take a shower soon after..

The move from ‘hot‘ into ‘out of habit‘ is and isn’t curable, preventable, and in some cases, it might be desirable.

Incurable romantics live for the first phase. They rarely stick around once the daydreaming about the lanky man with grey eyes they see on Tuesdays at Starbucks starts.  Once into the ‘out-of-habit’ phase of a relationship, the romantic knows that the hot and lusty phase is over.  They also realize how much work is required for rekindling.  If it was only a fling and not the real thing, the true romantic won’t stick around to restart the flame.  However, if, and it’s a big IF, the romantic knows in the pit of their stomach the feelings they are feeling are bigger than a fling, then they will fight heaven and live through hell, X-lovers, move baggage, lose weight, write poetry, alter the universe, just for a fighting chance at ever after.

The End

… they lived happily ever after…

Even after bliss, like what you have with your latest lover should be bottled at sold over the counter.  After a longish time, after all the battles, the badges of honor, when all is said and done, and if, by some miracle, the real thing is found, the Some Enchanted Evening, sort of passion,  you (the new romantic) will forget how hard you fought to win it.  You will.  Don’t shake your head at me, you will forget.  One night you’ll  slip between the sheets wearing grandma underwear and white sports socks.  It feels so right being together.   All the reasons why you fought so hard to begin with start to blur into nothing.

When you say to yourself in the darkest of nights, I’ve forgotten what put the need in me,  you’ll know you’ve taken your lover and that love your fought so hard to have, for granted.

Options are few at this juncture.

  • Buy sexy knickers and book a room in a hotel with room service, with the plan not to leave the room the entire weekend
  • Have the talk
  • Pretend that watching reruns of Law and Order and eating frozen pizza is what you wanted all your life
  • Join a gym, write a chick lit novel, became an overnight success, and take a new lover ( or several)

If all else fails, or you’ve given up on this lover, start over, dump your granny undies (dump ‘em anyway), and take another spin on the dance floor of life, never giving up on the possibility.

Care to share one lesson you’ve learned in the pursuit of love?

NOTE:  I am working on a new book, and my character, Rosa, is stuck in a moment she can’t get out of (a theme I love exploring). She like many of us have, is redefining her life.  This is an old post from my early blogging months I went in search for today for Rosa. I believe the sentiment never changes and after dusting it off ( as a writer does when we revisit our own work) I am re-posting.

{ 38 comments }

← Previous Entries