Ann Marie Gamble

The New Ann Plan

It’s been a good year for the Brain Trust, a group of writers I meet with in person. We chat, brainstorm, commiserate, and egg each other on. We pick apart story structure of movies we’ve seen instead of rating them; I can admit in this crowd that I read eleven True Blood books in twenty days even though I profess no interest in paranormal stories. But we got a lot of writing done, tried some new things, got things submitted and accepted, and had a couple of NaNo winners.

This week the activity has been thinking concretely about goals for the year. We e-mail our list to the group and cheerlead. I like reading what the others are cooking up and how their year ebbs and flows—kids at home and university campus neighbor, I know that really the new year starts in August (you even get new supplies), but I’m willing to play along with the January people.

But I’m having a rocky week. Work? Argh! Family? I’d like to put the “diss” in “dysfunctional.” Writing plans? I’m quivering. But I’ve done this before, and I’m starting to see that I go through stages.

Grandiosity: This is the year, baby! I’ve got this nailed! I will draft that FBI trilogy and a screenplay and I’ll sell a TV pilot! You can hardly tell I’m not thirty! Letterman, save me a chair!

Around this time the Christmas candy runs out.

Despair: Oh. My. God. I can’t even get the dishes washed in the same day that we eat off them. I’ll be lucky to finish a poem—no, a haiku. No, wait, don’t they have rules about lines or something? A free-verse tweet. Nobody wants to read any of this claptrap. I need glasses. I need a haircut. I need to spend my time looking for a real job. I’m going to put on all my fleece clothing and go back to bed.

Resignation: I’ll just keep slogging along . . . like I’ve been doing. It’s not glamorous, or fast, but I’m chipping away. Make the list, roll up the sleeves–and Facebook games are the Devil’s spawn.

A whiff of excitement creeps in: Some of this stuff is lame, but this one here is a pretty good idea. Yes, spring break never turns out to be Novel Writing Retreat Week, but I get inspired and get tons done in April. This is doable.

These next you might flicker through pretty fast. Recognize that feeling it doesn’t make it permanent.

Abandon the whole thing: This is crazy, I feel crazy, I’ve got things to do.

Paralysis: Where the heck do I start?

Research: With more background information, I’ll really be ready to launch this thing. In fact, here’s a whole stack of vital background info.

And finally . . .

Launch: Sitting down in front of a fresh piece of paper, a new notebook, a blank screen. Do you dip in a toe or dive?

I might be moving out of the resignation phase. Unlike my writing buddies, I’m having trouble making a numbered list. My main project is a revision, where the predicted timetable has been thrown out of whack as I realize that it needs a period of percolation before it gets another pass. My goal is to finish it (where “finish” means “get into readable shape”) rather than make myself frustrated missing more deadlines. So my other goal is to keep working, on other projects while this one rests. My plan this year is less about counting and more about process.

January 5th, 2012 | Posted in Creativity, Process | No Comments »

Crying Over the Cranberries

“There’s nothing like duck grease to oil a pan.”
–Grandfather Chick
Or maybe he said goose grease? . . .

I used to work at the public library, and I was scheduled at the reference desk on Wednesday nights. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the desk was fully staffed but the public was not, and we had plenty of time to “familiarize ourselves with the collection”–scour the cookbook collection for what we would take to the dinner we’d been invited to the next day. Oh 641s, how you whiled away our hours!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the library stayed open. The night before and after Christmas, however, the board looked at the traffic data and started to close for a few days. My mom and I seized the lull and dashed up to Chicago to spend Christmas with my grandfather. He hemmed and hawwed but his wife got them a tree; we got up at a reasonable hour and opened gifts, him having to reassure that he was not senile, he knew there were more presents for him but this one was very interesting, thank you very much. Read the rest of this entry »

December 20th, 2011 | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Fresh Eyes

It’s getting cold around here. We had a few false alarms–”Feels like winter is here to stay!”–and a couple days later it was 70, but today there was a good, from-the-ground-up edge to it that had us hunkering into our coats as we waited for the bus.

So we were staring at our shoes, younger son and I, instead of at the birds, the cars, the passersby; wedging our chins into the openings of our jackets and wondering whether it was time to look at the time again, when we noticed something on the sidewalk.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 6th, 2011 | Posted in Creativity | No Comments »

Finding the Perfect Gift

I’m blogging about the tricky people on my Christmas present list at the Pop Culture Divas.

I remain this easy to buy gifts for

December 1st, 2011 | Posted in Blogging, Creativity, Travel | No Comments »

Better Characterization through Personal Hygiene

The fancy manicure, twenty minutes in

Mission: end a bad habit.

I’ve been shredding my nails and it’s time to stop. One thing and another, I decided to glue on fake nails–give me some time to get out of the habit of picking at them and give my fingers a chance to heal.

It’s jarring catching a glimpse of this foreignness at the ends of my hands. I can’t pick at my fingertips any longer–but neither can I smear on lotion (it gets gunked under the long nail tips), open soda cans, or let my hands soak in water (the glue isn’t that great). Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2011 | Posted in Characters, Process, Writing | 1 Comment »

Mother’s Response

Time to sleep. The night is well started; she reads her daughter’s letter with worry, care, hope, bracing herself against the rushing in of shapeless fears. These, she admits, are grown colts. The pasture is no longer mine to guard, my watch as mare shadowing the leggy, tipsy foal is over. This foal stands strong. The son’s letter is harder to parse. Reading in dim light, she wants to know the ends of both stories, impossibly: those sections haven’t yet been written.

Dogs breathing, fridge purring, a squeak from a bird and a click in the heater sound the broken gait ending the day’s action. Corralled in her kitchen, she reads. Night hours are the hardest, the anguish rides in on the backs of old memories or sticking to still-fresh details of today. She rises and knocks around boxes and jars of verbena, spearmint, slippery elm, lemon balm, some she picked leaf by leaf and dried in the still atmosphere of her cellar, knowing she would concoct the sleep-gift combined from these. She searches for an herbal-induced calm. Through the window she lists the colors in the halo of the streetlamp; she rereads the letters; she remembers wind in her hair, a gallop, the free rein she believed was her automatic gift to her offspring. She knows there’s no open range, there’s no grassland, there’s no herd.

———————–

Reply to “The Storm” by Julie Youmans. Read other responses to the prompt.

Tags: it's just fiction
November 4th, 2011 | Posted in Parenting, Play | No Comments »

The Storm

The words of the title of a horror movie appear in this story somewhere. If you can guess the title (and win a prize!) or you want to read more short short fiction (you can vote on which you like), check out the Friday Flash site.

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The air hung heavy, portentous curtains muffling any activity but watching. Occasionally there was a push of wind—a practice gust, directed and forceful instead of the random zephyrs and eddies of a sunny summer day, but enough to flatten grass and churn dust. It wasn’t sunny. Wispy puffballs of clouds had scudded east to more congenial regions and our sky was blanketed with gray and grayer coils and snarls out of a sheep’s nightmare. Somewhere, the wind was moving fast—we’d been under a tornado watch for hours, finally upgraded to a warning—but these same globs simmered over our street, blotting out all the blue. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: FridayFlash
October 28th, 2011 | Posted in Play, Prompts | 5 Comments »

Apostrophes and Dates

No.

Really, no, for all the usual reasons.

Apostrophes denote dropped letters or possessive, so you don’t need one before that s in constructions like “the music of the 1940s.” You could argue about “1940s’ music” (look closely at the position of that apostrophe), but I will maintain that “1940s” should be treated as an adjective and keep my eye on you for the rest of the semester.

Dropped letters, remember, so this is okay: “These conditions endured through the 1870s and ’80s.” We’ve dropped the numbers showing the century. Read the rest of this entry »

October 27th, 2011 | Posted in Editing, Grammar | No Comments »

Clutter Control

I gave away the dress that would be perfect if you needed to dress like a medieval lady.

I have never in my life needed to dress like a medieval lady, but my mother was in a baroque band for a long time, so it seemed like a plausible circumstance to find myself in. They might need extra courtiers at the madrigal dinner, or one of my eleventh-hour tambourine fill-in gigs might be someplace where they wanted you costumed.

Another of my grandmother's dresses (she's the one on the right)

In the about six years since this dress has been in my closet, though, not even an invite to a renaissance faire. It was my grandmother’s, so it’s a little too long—for Halloween it’s easier to trundle out my default hobo costume (which requires nothing in my usual wardrobe! Nothing at all!).

But I’m trying to clear the place out. Room to move, fewer places for dust to gather. Less time spent finding space for the current objects. Acknowledgment that, with my mom out of the baroque band, my kirtle-wearing, tambourine-playing days are over. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: no NaNo this year
October 18th, 2011 | Posted in home repair | 2 Comments »