Blog Archives - Second Quarter '06
June 06
[Friday June 30] Kingston!
Ah, Kingston! After an absence of 22 years, I’m finally back. For a while, it had begin to look as though I wouldn’t make it, travel arrangements being what they were, but it all panned out in the end and, as I said, here I am. I had flown away from a solid week of uninterrupted, sullen, equatorial rainfall in Trinidad, to bright sunshine in Jamaica. Hooray!
Kingston is an interesting place for a writer. It has such
a dichotomy of personalities. New Kingston, as you might imagine, is all
high-rise, full of glass-fronted business places and somber, well-designed
banks. The streets are filled with smartly-dressed business people and
uniformed school children hurrying to their destination. Fascinating? Not so
much.
But then there’s Old Kingston. Think Mad Max. Block after
block of desolate, ramshackle buildings in a scenario that I can only describe
as post-apocalyptic. Vines reclaiming everything, uncollected garbage sitting
in storefronts so long it had become part of the landscape. Fading signs,
shuttered windows, bullet holes in the walls from all the gang violence that is
a part of daily life in Old Kingston. Beware: in this part of the city, if you
wander into anybody’s turf, you stand a pretty good chance of getting shot.
And the people are tough and gritty and very, very poor.
Jamaica doesn’t have the natural gas and oil that Trinidad has. They rely
primarily on the tourist dollar, and the money sent back home from relatives who
had left the island to find a better life abroad. All along the sidewalk,
people were ‘making a hustle’, trying to earn a hideously inflated dollar,
selling small, scanty heaps of mangoes, pineapples, bananas, and root vegetables
like yams, eddoes and sweet potatoes. I couldn’t help but wonder: all these
people, lined off on the sidewalk with their bedraggled wares spread out on
newspapers on the ground. . . but if nobody has any money, and everybody’s
selling, then who’s buying?
[Wednesday June 28] Janet and John revisited
Dick and Jane taught America to read. In Britain, and down here in the colonies, it was Janet and John, and, of course, their dog, Fluff. But the drill was pretty much the same thing: Janet and John going through basic routines such as look-look-looking and run-run-running. Oh, how I envy this generation, with all the wonderful resources available to them, Sesame Street, Blues Clues, the CD-Roms and the fabulous, glossy books! Any one of my son's books would put a spanking on old Janet and John!
But guess what I found! It's an old spoof, written by my sister, Rachel, and me when I was just 16 or 17...a looooong time ago, as evidenced by the Remmington Steele reference. It was hacked out (literally and figuratively) on our old manual typewriter, you know the kind, with the keys that went clack-clack all the time and got tangled, and the ribbon that ran from spool to spool and got ink on your fingers. It had me in stitches, and it reminded me that even then, I had literary aspirations. I thought I'd share it with you:
JANET AND JOHN REVISITED,
Or
HOW TO NOT GET RICH QUICK
Look, look, look
Look, Roslyn, look.
Rachel can type.
Look, look, look.
Roslyn can type, too
See Rachel type.
See Roslyn type.
Roslyn and Rachel are proud of themselves.
Roslyn and Rachel plan to send their poem to the publisher.
Roslyn plans to get rich.
Rachel plans to get rich.
But look,
Look, look, look.
See Roslyn cry.
See Rachel cry.
See Roslyn and Rachel realise that they forgot the typewriter ribbon.
For want of money, the ribbon was lost,
For want of a ribbon, the poem was lost,
For want of a poem, the interest was lost.
Look, look, look.
See Roslyn lose interest.
See Rachel lose interest.
See Roslyn and Rachel decide to call it quits
And go watch Remmington Steele.
THE END (of a promising career)
Okay, it's idiotic. But at 17, I thought it was hilarious!
[Thursday June 15] Proud to be red, white & black
Well,
our Soca Warriors lost to England in the World Cup today, but damn, they put up
a good fight. We, the smallest country ever to play in the World Cup finals,
held one of the world’s greatest teams – including “Bend It” Beckham, and trust
me, he can bend me anytime – at bay for 82 minutes. It hurt, badly, to see us
lose a game that was so critical to the hopes of this country.
But you know, I’m proud of them. They’ve won the respect of the world, who thought we’d be pushovers, a nothing side, a guaranteed win, especially after we held a team like Sweden to a Nil-Nil draw last week. The world has sat up and taken notice. And not just of the courage of our players, but the character of Trinidad and Tobago’s people, both here and abroad. Our supporters have been met with nothing but warm, open arms by the Germans, and everyone else we’ve met.
I went to see the match in the cinema today, we had a live feed on a huge screen. What a way to watch a match! And again, my people made me proud. We were all so full of expectations, so happy, all wearing our national colors, red, white and black, all leaping to our feet to sing along with the national anthem when it played on that football field thousands of miles away. And in the Cinema lobby, a true Trini party was going on. Faces being painted in our national colors, T&T flags waving, and, most of all, an “Engine Room”, what we call a percussion musical group, who beat out rhythms while we danced. It was beautiful. And even though we lost today, the way my people conducted themselves made me very proud to be a Trinidadian.
And as I was driving home, reflecting on how important it is for us to keep up the self-esteem of our people, and make sure that whatever we did, we did well in the eyes of the world, I wished I was athletic, so that I could find myself somewhere on the world stage, doing something that would make my country proud of me. And then I thought. . . oh, you know what? I don’t have to be an athlete to do that. I write! I work damn hard, and I am a multi-published author, and I write about my country for people to see, and sit up, and take notice. That’s good enough, isn’t it?
[Wednesday June 14] Jamaica, me soon come!
My Jamaican patois might be lousy, but I've got a good excuse: I haven't been to Jamtown in donkey's years. Not since I was 18, as a matter of fact, and believe me, you don't want to know how long ago that was. I've got a whole bunch of hazy but happy recollections of it. I remember walking barefoot up Dunn's River Falls, and finding a Jamaican dollar bill floating there. I remember standing at the side of the road somewhere on the North Coast with my girlfriend Monique, waiting for a minibus, eating a whole, warm, sweet pineapple with a penknife, and then finally catching the minibus and being so crammed in that Monique had to sit on my lap...and she wasn't a tiny girl.
I remember a midnight hike to the top of the Blue Mountain Range, and because of the altitude it was so cold we found peaches and strawberries growing near the summit - on a Caribbean island! I remember trying to see how many boys I could kiss over the course of a 2-week vacation, but that's another story for another time.
Well, I'll be retracing my steps at the end of June. Hooray! I've been invited to conduct a workshop on short story writing at something called the Coconut Festival near Montego Bay. Mo'Bay, one of my favorite places! And a Coconut Festival, of all things. Everything there will be about coconuts: coconut races, coconut craft, coconut cooking, and, yes, all the short stories will be about coconuts. That will be something to experience. I'll also be doing a reading of some of my work, so I'd better get that voice in gear.
I'll definitely be blogging - and Plogging on Amazon - from there, so stay tuned!
[Saturday June 10] Romance and football? Nahhh...
Been wondering for a while if I should even bother to blog about the World Cup...football, that is. And that's FOOTBALL as it was intended to be, not 'soccer' as the uninitiated call it. If most of my readers are romance lovers, would they be interested in football?
But then again, I am (sort of), so why not. And besides, this isn't so much a post about football as it is a boast about the fact that TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO IS THE SMALLEST NATION EVER TO QUALIFY FOR THE WORLD CUP!!!! as a rule, I hate superfluous punctuation, but I have to say that if anything deserves a few extra exclamation points, that's probably it.
We're in! And we're playing in about ten minutes! Not only do I get to revel in the glory of seeing my national colours, red, white and black, gracing the screen, and knowing that a billion people across the world are getting to watch MY PEOPLE play, but I also get to watch a bunch of superfit, sweaty, powerful, manly men run across a field for 90 minutes.
I think I'm going to like this game. It just started! Talk to you later!
After the game:
Ha! They thought we couldn't do it! They thought we'd get 8 goals in our asses from Sweden, but we held them to nil-nil! Quite an achievement, with just ten men on the field. Next stop: Trinidad and Tobago vs England. Bring it on, Becks!
[Thursday June 1st] Spider season
It must be spider season. For the last several weeks, I've killed at least one spider in my house every day. Bug lovers; I'm not a wholesale murderer of little creatures. As a matter of fact, I am notoriously lenient with them, as well as a wide range of other pests, such as snakes, rats and mice, who I usually spare the death sentence and escort outside to the empty lot next door. Yeah, I'm soft that way.
But Arachnids? Death becomes them. They represent probably my most irrational phobia. And for some reason, maybe it's the change in the weather from the dry season to the rainy season, but they're heeeerrrreee..... A whole bunch of freshly hatched baby ones, small versions of the big buggers that sometimes plague my home like evil spirits. And I shudder at the thought that, statistically, it is extremely likely that before the season is out, I will stumble upon the granddaddy of all the little ones I've been smacking. And I'm not looking forward to it.
Ah, life in the Caribbean. Anyhow, in honour of this creepy circumstance, my new short story for June is called Webs. And no, it's not creepy at all. In fact, it's rather romantic.
May 06
[Thursday, May 25] Slump over!
Seems that my little writing slump is over. I'm love with my book again! Had a brainstorm about a week ago, and figured out how to fix a tricky little problem in the plot. I needed something to happen with my heroine 'round about Chapter 10 (don't think I'll tell you what it is, it might spoil the surprise), but it just wasn't gelling. I think I've solved that problem by surgically implanting a new character...all the way from Chapter 1. How do you do that? The same way porcupines make love: very carefully.
It means I have to sift my way through the narrative, threading the new character through the plot, removing inconsistencies, and essentially setting things up so that her sudden appearance in my subconscious is imperceptible in the story.
And ah, I'm having fun with it! It's a wonderful feeling, falling back in love with your book. Sort of like having been with someone for so long that you start to take them for granted, and then they smile at you or touch you in a certain way and fall head over heels all over again.
The problem is, like wanting to be with your lover, all I want to do now is be with my book. And you know my schedule; one measly, paltry, precious hour a day is about all I can wrangle. Everything else is just gravy. The problem is that when I'm like this, it's all I can think about, and all I want to do. Apart from the time I spend with my children, everything else is a blur. I'm like an addict whose mind is so focused on that next hit that nothing else feels important, not work, not friends, not the poor, poor dog...just my book, and the characters that are imaginary to everyone else, and so real to me.
Driving is time away from my book. Blogging is time away. Work? Definitely! As I write this, it's 10:13,and I am trashed. It's all I can do to finish what I'm blogging, feed the suffering fish, and go to bed. But that's okay, because tomorrow I get one more precious hour in which to write.
[Monday, May 22] Kaavyagate?
It's been weeks since I've been able to drag myself over to the laptop to do any blogging, a shameless admission for someone who, only two months ago, made a vow to blog a couple of times a week. But, as they say, life intervenes: work issues, kiddie birthday, kiddie flus, complete with fevers, snotty noses and no sleep for mommy, and the joy of breaking in a brand new treadmill that I bought to help me walk off the lard that has been depositing itself on my butt recently, mainly due to the combined effects of having aforementioned kiddies and the time spent sitting before aforementioned laptop in the first place.
That said: I read with some concern and a great deal of empathy the latest plagiarism story (and it's many, many follow-up chapters that seem to get more and more complex as time goes by). If you're a big reader, you probably already know about it: the accusations of plagiarism that have been leveled against teenage Kaavya Viswanathan, which have been so vociferous that her $500,000 deal with her publisher has gone sour, her books have been yanked, and she has become the scandal of the town.
Now, I've had my share of teenage folly, in one way or the other, so I am not about to cast judgment on her. Determining her guilt or innocence is not up to me. The thing that has horrified me even more, is her alleged involvement with something called a book packager.
EH?
A book packager? Now, I've always known of the existence of ghost writers, and I look upon that whole exercise with a bit of scorn. If you can't write, I think, then don't be a faker and put your name on a book written by someone else. That's just plain dishonest. But it seems that these book packagers go a step further. Imagine entire companies that take an author's outline, character sketch and concept, and actually write, edit and produce the damn thing, and then slap the author's name on the cover! Apparently there are some giants out there that do just that, every single day, and make millions doing it.
The mind boggles. And I think it stinks. It stinks, first, because it is unfair for so-called authors to claim the work of others as their own, to do nothing but sit back and let the profits roll in, while some of us slave daily to produce work that is really ours, to much less success, mainly because we don't have the backing of such an entity.
Second, it stinks because it degrades the world of the novel to a vulgar degree of commercialisation. Now, don't get me wrong; I do get paid for my books, and I think all writers should; it's hard work and we deserve it. But to denude the process of any artistic merit whatsoever, to turn a slew of novels into die-cast, wishy-washy assembly-line products with no more soul than a toaster, is just wrong.
I'm sure I probably won't get rich doing this, and there will always be writers who will by taking the book factory route, but, you know what? That's okay. At least I know that my novel, for what it's worth, is all, all mine.
April 06
[Thursday April 27] Stop this book!
Right in the exact, dead middle of my new novel. Contractually, I need to keep my romance at between 80,000 and 100,000 words, and I just trudged over the 40,000 word mark. Welcome to middle-of-the-book hell. Lots of writers hate this spot. I know I do. It's months and miles away from the beginning of the book, when you start off all gung-ho with your hot new idea and your hot new characters, and you play with your plot and wonder to yourself what comes next.
It's months and miles away from the happy ending we all look forward to, when you know everything is going to be all right with the world, and your characters (and your readers) can usually look forward to a lagniappe of hot, horny make-up sex (or at the very least, a fevered make-out session).
What you are, in the middle of the book, is becalmed in the Doldrums. Your characters, by now, have had at least one major fight, and are probably either not on speaking terms, or are contemplating homicide. You're tired, beginning to doubt yourself, and that magical moment when you type THE END seems an impossibly long way away.
This is the point where you find yourself thinking - have you lost your mind? Who told you you could finish this? As a matter of fact, who told you you could write? Stop this book! I want to get off!
Then, you know what? You slog through the mid-book crisis, and all of a sudden your fingers are flying again, and there's wind in your sails and your ship is scudding along. Your characters make up - for the time being - maybe even get a little sump'n-sump'n, and then you remember what it was you loved about writing.
I'll be there soon. And in the mean time, I know I can, I know I can, I know I can....
[Tuesday April 25] Careful what you wish for!
I once read somewhere that you know you've been working too hard when you start half-hoping you could get sick, just so you could have a legitimate reason to stay home and laze around in bed all day. For the last few weeks I've been idly thinking; hmm, wonder if I could contrive to catch a cold or something, and win myself a day home. Nothing too serious, mind you, like TB or the bubonic plague, because, after all, sick leave is no good to anyone if you're lingering at Death's doorway. Just a little touch of something that makes it okay to hang around all day in yesterday's underwear.
Wish granted. Packing the kids bags into the trunk this morning, as part of the daily leaving-for-work ritual (See A Day in the Life, above) when lo and behold, I spin around too fast and whack myself into near-unconsciousness on the trunk lid.
All I can say on that matter is, ouch. Blood. A surreal, floating sensation. And it hurts like hot bleeding blazes, thank you. So here I am, whacked out on painkillers with a dent in my forehead, a headache to beat the band, and an urge to sleep like the tail end of a drinking binge. So much for the idea of hanging around all day, twiddling with my novel, and surfing the Net. Oh no, my dears; I've slept away the morning, got up for lunch, and now I think I'll just sleep away the rest of the day. My new characters, Rita and Dorian (Dorian Black, would you believe, oh, ha ha) will just have to wait.
I could use the rest, because I know that at 6 o'clock that door will open and my kiddies will come barreling in, and, as we say in Trinidad, my "free paper" burn.
[Tuesday April 18, 2006]
Ay, Caramba! Easter is over. A little hiatus in the middle of the humdrum of the work week, as here in Trinidad we get a 4-day holiday. Hooray! Well, as much of a holiday as you can get with the two tile rodents (we don't have rugs, so we can't rightly call them rug-rats) clamoring for attention.
In a bit of a writing slump these days. Not a peep out of my muse all weekend (not that I'd have had the time to write, given the situation with the aforementioned tile-rodents). Dragging along, managing to scratch out a page or so a day. Ah well, it'll perk up soon.
For the record, the most pages I have written in one day is...drumroll, please... 27! But that was ten years ago; I was young then, foolish, and knew no fear. I couldn't pull that off now if you paid me. Speaking of which...buy one of my books! What's everyone waiting for?
*end of groveling for book sales*
[Friday April 7, 2006] Shoot me. Now.
Okay. Two weeks online. Google links working, advertising dollars paid up, and all of my friends have responded to my haranguing to link up my site and to pass my URL around. 200 visitors so far (yay!) But not a book sold. Not a line in my "Let's write a story together" project. (THAT was a brilliant idea.) No e-mails (other than from my homegirls), no comments (other than from my homegirls.)
Disaster. I think I'll go out in the garden and eat worms.
