Good Day, Flu Day

My brother-in-law referred to me the other day as a "high-energy person."  He said it without preamble or pause as though it was a given fact.  Not long ago an old friend of mine described us (friend and I) "as basically the same person" and used the word "frenetic."  I was intrigued by both observations.  I don't refute them.  I've just never thought about myself that way.  I'm don't have a hyper or tumultuous personality.  I like peace, quiet, and solitude.  But I do talk fast and I walk very very fast, and, more to the point, I do like to get a lot of things done each day.  You can see why I don't refute it.  :)  Being productive makes me happy.  Opposite, unproductive=>unhappy, holds true as well.

So being sick?  That's about the worst thing that I can happen to me.  Not only do I feel badly physically, I feel bad mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  I can't get anything done.  Curses on the germ gods!

This week I have the flu.  I never nap yet I am napping all day and sleeping all night.  Who is this sleepy demon possessing my body?  Even when I am awake, my eyelids are hanging half-mast.  Fever, chills, etc.  You know the picture I'm drawing.  I'll leave it there.  In short, the flu.  You probably have it too if the Tylenol shelf at my local grocer is any indication.

Bad for certain parts of my life - this blog, facebook, email, getting together with friends, photographing Christmas morning (not to mention being in photographs Christmas morning), twitter probably thinks I've died, I haven't updated goodreads in forever...  The one thing the flu has been GREAT for is the pile of books on my night stand!  Yesterday I finished a book, started and finished a book, started another book, and watched a movie I loved (Moonrise Kingdom.  Focus Features has me down.  It rocks harder than the Good Housekeeping seal.).  I've read countless picture books to my children. I truly listened to and inspected everything they've told and shown me because I wasn't busy with five other things at the same time.  

I'm starting to think this flu is a gift.  :)

As 2012 wraps up I want to list a few books and authors I liked, including the ones I read yesterday.  I'm not even going to number it because it is not in any way comprehensive.  It is just a few recent ones off my fever-addled, fuzzy brain.  I hope you like them.

• Malinda Lo - Ash - fairy tale retelling with a lesbian twist - very cool person too as far as I can tell
• Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone - mystery in voice of Carter Ross investigative reporter, not my usual genre but entertaining, award-winning author and very nice guy
• David Levithan - every day - co-author of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and a million other best sellers.  He's brilliant, I LOVE his writing style, and his storylines blow me away.
• Lisa Scottoline - Save Me - very fast pace as we have come to love from her (Did you know, by the way, that "Scottoline" is pronounced like "fettucine", not Scott-o-LINE?  I learned that this year.  Same with Jody Picoult -  "Pee-co" not Pi-COLT.  Feel badly I've been murdering their names for years.)
• Manhunt and Chasing Lincoln's Killer - James L. Swanson 
• Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky - in process but I generally love epistolary novels
• In the Shadow of the Banyan - Vaddey Ratner - not my most enjoyable read but one of the ones that has stuck with me, inspiring a lot of thought and wonder.
• ADDED - The Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda - I almost forgot this one because I read it in January.  
• Most excited about in 2013 - The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

Merry Christmas, friends!  Happy Holidays!  Have a happy New Year!  If you like snow, I hope you get it.  If you like warmth, I hope you keep it.  :)

~M.M. Finck

http://www.facebook.com/mmfinck

@mmfinck on twitter

Musical Muses

I recently heard a popular recording artist say that she doesn't listen to much music when she is writing a new album.  This makes sense to me.  

If I am writing a murder mystery from the perspective of an investigative reporter, say, I wouldn't read a book about the same.  (I've never actually written that.  It happens to be what I'm reading now.  Check out "Faces of the Gone" by Brad Parks.  Nice guy; good, award-winning book.) However, I would read other mysteries.  Keeping myself suspended in tension (or romance, literary fiction, etc.) 24/7 even when I am away from my laptop helps keep my writing on spot.  That's the mood part - both mine and my novel's.  The craft part is that the novels I read make for great study. If I like a device used by the author, I might try it.  Opposite is true, of course, for things I don't, like long prologues.  Unsurprisingly, the more unfamiliar what I'm writing is to me, the more I want to immerse myself in it.  

But at some point, the study goes from tutor and catalyst to distraction.  A time comes when I am so deep in my own head and my story is rolling, that I become deaf to the rest of the world.  I don't even read that much at night.  There is no room in my head anymore for anyone else's voice.  I give everything I've got to my story.  Everything else is suffers, but I am manic.  I have no choice.  I close the laptop in the wee hours and pass out for a few more until I wake up, take care of the absolute minimum of my other responsibilities and then become deaf again.

Music is different.  Music is my muse, not my study.  Music never messes with me.  It freely and always gives me what I need.  It helps me unlock safes and translate foreign languages.  You would not believe how many of my gnarly plot/dialogue/character knots have loosened and slipped into solved in my car with the stereo blaring.  Here are some of the artists to whom I owe pockets of my sanity:

• Mumford & Sons, possibly my favorite band ever
• Lumineers
• Ed Sheeran
• Taylor Swift
• Florence + the Machine
• Fun. (don't sleep on the first album, very diff from 2nd, but great; sound can be misleading, have to listen to lyrics - an attribute I love)
• Brett Dennen- an incredible poet
• Amos Lee - soul, baby, soul
• Hunter Hayes
• Joshua James - another poet
• Augustana - too much talent
• Matt Nathanson
• and always, always The Killers

I would never describe myself as hip on music.  But I love knowing people who are.  I suppose I owe some of my sanity (and word count!) to them as well.  :)

Happy Holidays, my friends!  For those brave NaNoWriMo souls, great job!  Be proud.  Keep it up.

~M.M. Finck
www.facebook.mmfinck
@mmfinck on Twitter

Grateful for Gratitude

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast..."

- Melody Beattie

A month or so ago I got some very bad news.  The kind of bad that left me ghostly-mute for a couple days.  For some reason I started to digging through my mental garbage to find pieces I should be interpreting differently, even be grateful for.  I was shocked by how much there was to choose from.  The more I focused on them, the more I started to see meaning and a bigger picture.  It changed the direction of my thoughts and the rhythm of my heart.  The healing, bonding power of gratitude is why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  Today I'm particularly grateful for my disorderly nieces and nephews who are reeking wonderful chaos in my house as I type this.  :)  I hope you all have a great 'feast'!  

~M.M. Finck

Pledge to Veterans

"On the battlefield, the military pledges to leave no soldier behind. As a nation, let it be our pledge that when they return home, we leave no veteran behind."

-Dan Lipinski 

I extend a heartfelt thanks to all veterans.


~M.M. Finck

Lazy-Dazy Dreaming Days

To be human is to aspire.  Without it we quake.  (Ask any recent retiree.)  A dream is aspiration taken to reason-defying heights, to reality-defying heights.  Dreams give us wings.  The pursuit of a dream is a godly feat.

Everyone loves a dreamer-made-good story.  Professional sports, collectively, is a parade float carried on the shoulders of hundreds of them.  Rudy, Secretariat, the guy who is getting a one-day contract with the Miami Marlins so that he can have an MLB at-bat.  Hollywood too.  Children's fairy tales.  Do you know that every country in the world has its own version of the Cinderella story?  Every single one.  We love when dreams come true.  

The thing about dreams though is that they don't come true all at once.  Between the sudden, euphoric (usually small, progressive) lurches toward success stretch sometimes-long periods of deathly, agonizing quiet.  I know of no stories that present the heartbreak of the silence or the back-steps in real time.  Dreamers are thought to have their heads in the clouds, detached from reality, not productive members of society.  I myself have likened the term "dreamer" to lazy.  How wrong I was.  

Dreamers aspiring to something great are exactly what propels mankind at its best.  In all areas - science, entertainment, sports, politics, writing.

Recently I have enjoyed some small success.  A bit of unexpected praise and a promising outlook have led to no small amount of hoopla amongst my family and friends.  It feels great.  Your glee for me and faith in me is more meaningful than you know.  But...

My lowly, lonely, perserverant faith had to predate yours.  It's the only way.  As dreamers, we have to believe in ourselves before we have any right to.  Before we've published a word, before we've stepped foot on a professional soccer pitch.  We need an internalized belief that our dreams could happen in order to muster the fortitude it takes to wade through the muck and gruel to get there.  It is a reluctant willingness to look like a fool, like a dreamer. 

...our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows.
- Mark Twain, "The Great Dark"

Faith in your story, faith in your characters, faith in your writing, faith in your storytelling, and faith in writing as your occupation.  At best, these are sand houses.  I don't want to meet the person whose houses are made of armor.  The granularity is our humility and our courage.

We doubt, yet we write.  We not only brave but court painful criticism, yet we write.  We fear, yet we write.  We endure hours of research we don't understand, make fifty fruitless attempts at plotting our story before finding the method that works, and bravely call ourselves "aspiring writers" and bear the ensuing awkward lull.  Yet we write.

That stay-at-homeless mom with her infant daughter, "writing a book" in a coffee shop, getting refills in the same tea cup, persevering through annoyed glances and countless rejections - that was J.K. Rowling. 

You know the joke: You know you're a writer if...  You are sitting opposite a doctor wearing a very serious expression.  She says, "I'm sorry Ms. So-and-So.  I'm afraid that you have cancer."  And you think, "Cancer.  Wow.  I can use this."

Our setbacks and silences cut us to the bone.  The pain is sometimes unbearable.  The winds of doubt slow us down.  We're human.  But, don't let them blow you down.  Use them.  They make us more experienced in the emotional tumult of life, more empathetic.  In short, better writers.  Only the strong will survive.  Be strong. 

"Every great story on the planet happened when someone decided not to give up, but kept going no matter what."
-Spryte Loriano

Be godly.

I hope you are well.  Thanks as always for coming by!  I love to see your visits!  If you'd like to, you can also follow me on www.facebook.com/mmfinck by liking my page.  I post book and film reviews, quotes I run across, and I'll keep you up-to-date on my own dreamy pursuit.  :)  Take care!

~M.M. Finck

What Was Never Lost Need Not Be Found

A member of my writers' group enjoys studying VOICE.  I've been told by agents and editors that I have a strong one.  It probably shouldn't have surprised me - I come from a large, loud Irish family; if you want to be heard around our dinner table, you have to earn it. - but it did. Voice wasn't something I was consciously working on.  I felt relief more than anything else to hear this news, checked the box, and continued working on any number of other skills that I hadn't been honing since infancy.

But, my writers' group friend and a few of you have asked me to talk about it.  Voice.  In my efforts to prepare for this, I, of course, began at google.  (Where else?)  If you search "find your voice" there are innumerable experts who will tell you where this elusive part of you is hiding and how to summon it.  Imagine that when we were kids we thought it was in our throats!  Silly us.  Honestly, everything I read was insightful and well done.  I don't think that there is anything for me to add.  But...

What I'd like to suggest is, if all the guidance out there isn't working for you, maybe hit pause for just a little bit and try something different.

Don't try to sound like "yourself."  Don't try to sound like the authors you read (and feel lacking when you don't.)  Writing is all about faith and I don't want you to lose yours.  God knows, I fight to keep mine every day.  Instead, I say:  Sound like your characters.

Be clear whose head you are in.  Think and feel like that character.  KNOW that character before you set your fingers on the keys.  Make your characters identifiable from one another in every possible way.  They talk differently, the view things differently, they like and dislike different characters and things.  If you throw everything you've got into sounding like your characters, you won't have the energy anymore to undermine yourself.

"I am a part of all that I have met."

~Alfred Tennyson

And everything we have met is a part of us.  Everything we've seen, heard, touched, lived through, been exposed to vicariously, read, etc.  There is so much within us that we can use to create amazing characters.  Try their voices on for size.  Sounding like Nona, a deaf Italian girl living in an orphanage in upstate New York, or Geronimo, an ex-con on the run near the Texas-Mexico border, is way more fun than trying to sound like M.M. Finck.  Believe me, I'm there, in between the lines.  :)

Have faith that you sound like you.  No one else can do it better.

Until next time...  I hope you are well!  Thanks for coming by!

~M. M. Finck

Some Like Sand, Some Like Paper

 "Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve."

- Carol Shields 

 O how I wish I'd said this first - if only feelings appeared in ink.  I hope you are taking the summer to catch up on books in which you've long wanted to bury yourselves!  Some like sand, some like paper.  I prefer them at the same time.  :)

~M.M. Finck