Category Archives: Blog Post SJ Powers

A Stimulating, Impassioned Discourse on The Day Job

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A Stimulating, Impassioned Discourse on the Day Job

By the time you read this, it will be a couple of days past the end of my association’s Annual Conference. But today, as I write this, it’s a couple of days before the conference, and the plates are flying! Cancellations, last minute replacements, information requests in areas not in my realm of expertise…..

I’ve been doing this job for some time, but never get used to conference time. Sometimes, I go to the conference, sometimes I stay back, tend the fires and juggle the plates. And man, are there plates to juggle today!

Would I rather BE at the conference?  At conference, you arrive before the speakers, the attendees and the exhibitors. A day of unpacking, organizing, meetings and last minutes set-ups.

You’re up before the sun rises, and back at your hotel long after it sets. You sleep with one eye open, worried you won’t get up in time to meet the caterers and unlock the door so they can serve the staff breakfast. You are not hungry yet, but will be as soon as you are scheduled to be elsewhere.

You walk about a million miles in your hopefully comfortable shoes (God help you if you don’t bring any!). You check session rooms, distribute registration envelopes, take tickets, meet attendees, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors. Tired? You don’t notice. The energy that buzzes through the conference is exhilarating; everyone is having a great time, happy to meet you and like you, running on high.

Then, too soon, it’s over.

But I digress. It’s nearly five o’clock, and the fires are now out, the plates have gone back into the cupboard and the blessed weekend is almost here. On Monday, I’ll go back to editing/writing session descriptions for my association’s many upcoming conferences and help members who are, or wish to become, certified legal managers.

This is my job, which by the way, is not just the ‘day job’ I do to support my fiction writing; I actually enjoy it.

Still, I do wonder, if I didn’t work the ‘day job’ would I have more psychic energy to write fiction? Would I blog more, volunteer at a food pantry, spend hours at the library and go to lunch with my friends?

I’ve tried to imagine it. With retirement in the not so distant future, all I can say is, stay tuned….

Shopping (Tiny Fiction #2)

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Shopping, A Microfiction

Shopping

The woman stood in front of her at the checkout counter, needing three receipts for several small items. A few items she paid with food stamps, a few were markdowns from the bargain bin, the last few more markdowns that she paid for with Visa. Loudly, she made much of not having her name spoken aloud by the cashier, a pony-tailed man whom it became apparent she knew. In all, the woman had possibly ten items – this woman in a business suit and smart flats – who needed these three separate receipts and her name not said out loud, as if some one were following her. Or perhaps some one might recognize her, if not by sight, then surely by name.

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Copyright S. J. Powers 2013

Do You Hear Me?

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Can your inner child come out; Listen to Your Characters

Famous playwright Harold Pinter once said when he is writing his plays he doesn’t know who is behind the door until it opens.

Pinter lets his characters tell the story. Well I’m certainly no Pinter, but I can say I have experienced the same. It happens when my first draft is going really well, when it flows effortlessly and my characters are talking to me.  I just need to listen.

Will character X leave her husband? How does X talk, act, think?  If I listen to X, she will tell me.

If I listen, my writing feels unforced and carries with it a certain heat and depth of experience that hopefully resonates. When my writing is forced, it’s uninspired, unauthentic, flat.

Perhaps I’m not always in the right frame of mind when I’m writing. Frankly, I don’t always know until it’s too late. All I know is when my writing is flat, it’s as if X has shut the door and gone into hiding.

And, by God, the silence is deafening.

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Who’s Minding Your Wild Mind?

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Who's Minding Your Wild Mind

George Takei says: “It is in those moments when our minds are clutter-free that true inspiration awakens.”

True inspiration:  If you create… if you’re an artist, a poet, a photographer, a programmer, a composer, a musician, etc… you know true inspiration is instinctual, intuitive, primeval; it’s what Freud called the unconscious, what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, and what writers and others call Wild Mind.

I sometimes think of Wild Mind as sort of an un-state of mind. I know I’ve reached this state when my first drafts basically write themselves. And there’s the rub: the story ideas roaming around inside my cluttered conscious mind usually go nowhere.

Good Story Ideas I’ll (probably) never write:

Shaky Road – An unhappy couple take a long road trip.

Idea Guy – Sort of ironic, eh?

Scenes From an Apartment – Can’t remember (:

Below are some of the stories that came from – or at some point were taken over by – my cluttered conscious mind where my idea of the story took the reins, making sure the story followed what I thought/wanted it to be.

I’ve already written and rewritten these stories many times, and they still don’t work.

Stories from Good Ideas That Still Don’t Work:

Madison’s Absence – A man’s out of body experience.

We’re Not Them – A pregnant woman’s paranoia her baby will be born mentally ill.

How She Will Live – A cautious woman who finds herself single and suddenly in lust.

Bottom line, I’ve learned it’s okay to get your conscious mind (where you inner editor lives) involved when you’re critiquing your creation and when you’re re-working it. And let’s face it, we could all use a good editor!

But hard knocks have taught me that your first draft/sketch/form should come from your instinctive, intuitive Wild Mind, the seat of your originality.

Your inner editor might not like it, but your creations definitely will. But enough about me. How do you get to your Wild Mind? Music? A photo? Meditation? Doodling?

What She Knew (Tiny Fiction #1)

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               What She Knew  30th Birthday

She had a birthday, became thirty, became morbid and suffering and told her husband she would bear no children, that inherent in birth is the sentence of death, that all childbearing is selfish, an illusion of immortality and how well she knew that she would die soon (what is forty, fifty more years compared to eternity?), that she was powerless, that her only life was moving along a path she could not remember freely choosing, and she would not know all experience, live all the lives, reach all the corners that she might, but if nothing else, she said, she wished better for her unborn offspring than this anguish, this knowledge of nothingness-after-life.

Take an aspirin, he said. Not unkindly.

# Published inWindy City Times Pride Issue (in slightly different form). Copyright S. J. Powers, 2013.

A Steamy, Passionate, Sexy Treatise on What’s in a Name

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Is it more than co-incidence that I – a woman named Sue – have so many Sues in my life? To date, I have several close friends and various relatives/acquaintances all named Sue, Susan or Susie.

Others do too I recently found out, such as my co-worker L who has numerous Sues in her life, including her mother. Feeling the need to distinguish her Sues, we only know the woman with whom she shares a ride to work as My Carpool.

So, what’s in a name, I’ve begun to wonder.

Here’s what I’ve found. First, when it comes to writing, quite a lot. To start, the title of your article/story/blog is the hook that lures….

Hook a Book

Keeping readers there is another thing, of course, but for now, you just need to go to Amazon to see that sexy titles sell and sell well.

Words like “passion, romance, steamy, etc.” get noticed and get sales.  Which is fine if you want to write that sort of thing – or can just manage to get some of these words into your title. 🙂

As to all my Sues, I’ve discovered the Kabalarian Philosophy offers some interesting ideas. It’s based on the philosophy that mind and language are intimately linked. They can even tell you what your name means based on this philosophy and certain mathematical principles.

Which is fun, but really doesn’t explain all the Sues in my life or L’s life and maybe your life.

But that’s okay, because I have another theory. It goes like this: Prior to our birth, we each belonged to a specific community of spirits getting ready to be born, and to ensure that we’d recognize each other when we got to Earth….

Ok, what about you? Are you surrounded by/attracted to the same-named people? Many Janes, Bobs, Steves, Judys…?

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You’re Disgusting, Darling, But We Love You

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humor; blog; women; creative non-fiction

Do you ever feel fugly?  (f….king + ugly.)

If you do, perhaps it goes like this. You wake up and your lids are puffed out from their sockets  (why? are your eyeballs expanding?); the back of your hair is smashed flat while the front sticks up like Medusa; and alas, despite the rigorous tooth brushing and mouthwash gargling you endured last night, your mouth tastes of the garlic-breath meal you ate last night.

Fugly. How does your husband/wife/partner/children stand you? But somehow they do.

They might show it by being super pleased by your success, or just happy that you aren’t lying on the couch in a fetal position.

When you are in a fetal position, or running low on energy, or just plain broke, they might offer to run an errand for you, loan you their car, give you money, make a joke or find a movie to cheer you up.  (Moonstruck please!)

They may even go so far as to tell you how lovely you are. Ah, what courage! What love!

What a beautiful, little lie meant to cheer you up.

Thank you loved ones! I hope I can return the sentiment soon….

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How Writing is Like Sex

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Woman writing in the zone

Some say that writing is like sex. An idea I rather like. And certainly, the euphoric state one can get into when writing makes me believe it.  Anyway, if you don’t think too long or to deep about it (no puns intended), I think one could make the argument that writing is very much like sex. And that argument might go like this:

– You need to be in the mood to get inspired to write.

– While some writers are in the mood to write every day, your mood waxes and wanes.

– When you’re in the writing ‘zone,’ your wild (i.e. subconscious) mind takes over.

– When your wild mind takes over, you keep your hand moving.

– When your hand keeps moving and the writing flows, everything around you drops away.

– When everything around you drops away, you forget about eating, drinking, sleeping.

– When you can’t forget you’re hungry, thirsty or tired, you’re probably faking it…

🙂

My Guilty Pleasure

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Yes, I have one. A guilty pleasure, that is.

It’s mysteries. Now, I don’t write them, but I read them more often than not. I love ‘em, okay? I love their simple complexity. For one thing, a good mystery has engaging characters, and for another, it has built-in conflict. Character and conflict – the basis of all of good writing. What’s not to like?

Speaking of good writing….I know a wannabe writer or two who is very curious about how famous writers write. They wonder, should they lie bed with their computer on their stomachs while they write (like Woody Allen) ? Stand up and write, use only parchment paper…. You get the idea.

Of course it doesn’t matter how you write or where you write, as long as you do. Moreover, as Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, says you should set a schedule to write, even if it’s just 15 minutes twice a week. Good or bad writing, just sit down and write something. Which I’m sorry to say, Natalie, I’ve tried, but I just can’t do. I need a bit of inspiration, which many writers scorn.

Well scorn away, it’s what works for me. In fact, if I try to sit down and do some “free writing” I’m apt do this instead:

First, clean the bathroom using a Green cleaning solution, and then wonder if I’m really disinfecting anything.

Second, do laundry. All of it.

Third, watch Chopped, Hardcore Pawn, the mystery DVDs from the library….

Fourth, the most important thing I do, I eventually put down the mystery, and read a book of short stories. Without reading stories, I might never write one. After all, where would I get my inspiration? Plus, I’ve learned how to write stories from reading stories.

My problem is I can read fifty stories and not one of them inspires a word. Then suddenly, the fifty-first story clicks: it’s tone, characters, its narrative voice, who knows what does it, I simply can’t explain the inner rush I feel. It’s not that I’m not curious why it works, but when the “click” happens, when the rush feels ready to implode, I don’t delay. I just say, ‘thank you’ and head to the nearest writing instrument…..

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Everyone has their favorite authors. These are some of mine: Anything by Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Raymond Carver, Molly Giles, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, Ellen Gilchrist, Leonard Michaels, Mary Gaitskill, Jennifer Haigh, Marian Thurm, Miranda July (notice all the M names! – what’s up with that?), among many others. With the resurgence of the short story, there are so many from which to choose.

Why I’m Reluctant

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Writing this blog, not to mention creating my website, has been a harrowing labor of ….. are you waiting for me to say “love…”?

Well, I confess: I hate this.

I hate this: Because I’m a fiction writer expending energy NOT writing a piece of fiction.

I hate this: Because I’m an introvert – meaning I process everything internally, I am NOT outgoing and am definitely NOT the life of the party. It also means it doesn’t come easy for me to share my life, my thoughts or my writing process.

Last but not least, because for this writer of fiction, it’s not easy to write non-fiction.

Yet here I am.

Me Being Reluctant

S.J.Powers; writer; short stories; New Millennium

Next post: My writing process