Natasha Fondren

I am not a shoe person, not like her. I’m a movie person, a book person, and a save-for-a-rainy-day person. My husband is not very like me in this regard. He buys clothes and shoes and stuff.

Me?

Not so much. Glenn is constantly sighing and going, “You need new pants.” “You need some shirts.” “You need new shoes.”

When we first met, a few months into our relationship, he took me clothes shopping. I thought he was trying to get brownie points, but I later learned that he was less than impressed with my wardrobe.

So it came to be, a couple months back, that I brought a pair of shoes to donate to my volunteering gig. They were appropriated one place, but as I was holding them, someone asked me for them. He pointed to his shoes, and explained why he needed new ones.

In looking at his shoes, I realized mine were ten times worse. We’re talking flapping soles, worn edges, frayed, loose threads. I was speechless. I kept thinking how weird and ironic this situation was.

The shoes were appropriated elsewhere, and given that I was still struck speechless, I gave up trying to make a joke and gave him a hug. I wasn’t quite sure if he laughed at me because I hugged him or because he saw my shoes and thought it was funny, too.

But I finally bought a new pair of shoes. “Barefoot” shoes. Designed to leave your foot free to develop the muscles God put in your feet.

Since several Facebook friends asked for picture, here they are. What do you think? Weird, huh?

Yeah, I know. Style really isn’t my thing.

I’m not convinced Pope Pius XI understood a writer’s business when he named St. Francis de Sales as the patron saint of writers.

St. Francis de Sales wrote some books, it’s true, but most novenas and prayers and intercessions concerning him involve greater faith, more constant faith, etc. This is one of his novenas:

O Blessed Francis de Sales, who in your mortal life did excel in all virtues, especially in love of God and of neighbor, I earnestly entreat you to take me under your immediate protection, to obtain from God my perfect conversion, and that of all sinners, especially of (the names of persons for whom you wish to pray should be mentioned here). Amen.

As I was shopping for my St. Jude candle, I came across a candle for St. Martin Caballero. St. Martin Caballero (aka St. Martin of Tours) is the patron saint of soldiers and France, but he also has a history of helping businesses and giving good luck. Consider his novena:

In the name of the most powerful God, Oh! Saint Martin. Remove the bad luck from my house. Give me good luck, work, and money. Oh Lord, tell your servant St. Martin, tireless and eager shepherd of souls, to raise his voice in this abyss where I find myself and protect me from all affliction and evil. I consecrate this day in memory of the pristine virtues of your holy priesthood (state your petition). Amen.

Is that not more appropriate to the writing business? Good luck? Work? Money?

I think so.

Do you have any lucky writing mugs? Good luck charms? Candles? Rabbit’s feet specifically for writing? Patron saints for your writing intercessions? Gods or Goddesses you pray to for help in your writing or your writing career?

I’m going to amend this post with some GREAT contributions by you guys.

Heather Dearly added A Student’s Prayer to St. Thomas Aquinas (note paragraphs 3-5):

Creator of all things
true source of light and wisdom,
origin of all being;
graciously let a ray of your light penetrate
the darkness of my understanding.

Take from me the double darkness
in which I have been born—
an obscurity of sin and ignorance.

Give me a keen understanding,
a retentive memory, and
the ability to grasp things
correctly and fundamentally.

Grant me the talent
of being exact in my explanations
and the ability to express myself
with thoroughness and charm.

Point out the beginning,
direct the progress,
and help in the completion.

I ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Bernita suggested “Ganesha, the elephant god, patron of arts, destroyer of obstacles, lord of success.”

Ottavina added: I think contemplative monk and writer Thomas Merton should be one of the go-to guys for writing. He’s not a saint, but he wrote this prayer that seems to fit the uncertainty of where one’s writing or one’s life may be going:

“MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.Nor do I re ally know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

I’m thinking about a lot today. I’m thinking this post is like a whole week’s worth of blogs. So if you’d rather, you can just read one part a day. Or skim fast. Or skip it altogether. I don’t know why I was so talkative.

Sunday is play day for me. I have a character I can’t find a story for. I’ve put her in three or four different worlds, but she doesn’t fit. For some odd reason, I MUST write a story about this character.

So today I searched for inspiration: I read Tales of the Golden Corpse—a book of Tibetan folk tales—the Idiot’s Guide to Astrology, the Dummies Guide to Mythology, thumbed through Jacqueline Carey’s Santa Olivia and cried because I wanted to take it home, and also through Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna for the same reason.

I also started reading Neil Gaiman’s Journal from the very first post: American Gods Blog, Post 1. At one time, I thought I’d read and finished American Gods, but it appears as if I haven’t. I’m a little confuzzled on how that happened, but am extraordinarily happy that I have a Neil Gaiman book to read. On my Kindle, of course.

the safety manager on Glenn’s boat wouldn’t let him off to go to the doctor in Seattle before they left, which meant his 2cm x 2cm spider bite (or whatever it was) grew while they were traveling at sea for two weeks, to fevers and fainting and extremely low blood pressure and nerve damage to his arm and a whopping 10cm x 7cm wound with 12cm x 17cm swelling that’s going to take two months to heal. The doctor sent him to the ER yesterday and freaked us out, telling us a week in the hospital and surgery and ambulance and don’t stop at go, but second opinion says we’re on track.

He’s got morphine and vicodin to get him through the pain. I’m a little curious as to what morphine (or vicodin) is like, but not that curious.

So I spent my play day at Borders. The funny thing is, I can tell how old a book is by how many times I sneeze when I open it. Brand-new books are generally fine, no problems. Whole sections are better than others: I rarely sneeze in the YA section, but in the Mythology section, I had to use my inhaler. In the Literary section, I’m a goner.

Borders is better than Books A Million, and Barnes and Noble has the worst record: twelve sneezes in a row within one minute. If I walk into a library, my lungs just die upon first breath.

My love affair with the book smell, the feel of paper? So over. But I still dream of working in a book store.

So this anti-ebook/anti-reasonably-priced-ebook thing publishers seem to have going on? Freaks me out. And the only thing I have to say about this pricing brouhaha between Amazon and Macmillan is that I’ll be very sad if publishers insist upon charging more then ten dollars for an ebook. Someday, if I win the lottery, I will spend thousands and buy every book on the planet and from every single author on the planet. I’ll have a huge, wonderful, beautiful library with a state-of-the-art air system so I can breathe and read and spend all day in there.

In the meantime, I can only read on my Kindle or at Borders, and price matters to my pocketbook.

I think price matters to readers, too. If my last royalty statements are any indication, my lowest-priced stories are selling the most. Which is BIZARRE, if you take into account hook, story, subject matter, quality, quality, and quality, but… it seems price point is what sells. I mean honestly, my lowest-priced ebook is just STUPID. It’s plain. Cliché. A story told a million times. (At least as I recall it: it was written in one month, six or seven or eight years ago.) It probably ranks as my second worst story.

As an author, all my Amazon royalties should double next year, which rocks, so I’m thrilled with Amazon’s new deal with at least one of my pubs. (Haven’t asked the other if she qualifies.) One is willing to conduct a lower-price experiment, and I’m going to see if the other one is up for it, since she has my best book. I’m thinking I should actually promote it. What an idea!

It’s been doing well on the piracy sites, which sorta makes me proud, in a backwards sort of way. As long as they don’t get too far up in the Google rankings, I don’t worry too much. (At the moment, they are too far.) I’ll do what it takes to push them down so that honest people don’t “buy” them for free when they don’t know any better, but I don’t believe those that seek out the pirated book would actually PAY for my book if it were unavailable on piracy sites, so I don’t get my panties in a knot.

I do need to do more to get pseudonym higher in the Google rankings; that will also push down the pirates and torrents.

Have I rambled enough? What have you read lately? How are things for you? What do you do on a “play day?” What are you allergic to?

I’ve really been feeling anti-judgment, lately. I’m just astonished at how much we judge everything. Constantly. We don’t even notice. Even little, tiny things.

Someone decides to get married? We must make a judgment on it. Everyone must have an opinion, and it must be FOR or AGAINST.

Someone wants to X route in their writing career? The community must make a judgment on how that’s either DUMB or the SMARTEST THING EVER.

Someone wants to feed the birds? We must all consider the possible ramifications and MAKE A JUDGMENT. And then DECLARE OUR OPINION.

(So here I go, making a judgment.)

In Kindergarten, we have to learn right and wrong and such. We start sorting things into black and white, because that’s how we understand the world. As we grow up, we start to recognize the gray area. We mature.

I’ve been thinking that the optimum time for a human being is in their early twenties or so, when they still recognize the gray area. Because it seems that as we get older, we start forgetting about the gray area. We start filing ourselves into FOR or AGAINST with everything. We get rigid in our thinking.

We de-mature to Kindergarten.

This is a generalization, of course, so it doesn’t apply to everyone. And I’ve often thought it doesn’t completely apply to writers and actors and the like, because we so regularly step into other people’s shoes.

I want to be about understanding, not about judgment. I don’t want to choose a side: I want to find a middle ground, or at least some way where we can let people live their lives, as long as it harms none.

The little judgments we make are astounding. And to have an opinion is a judgment, too. But a blog needs opinions. And I just seem to be flat out of those, lately. They make me tired, because then everyone will have to sort themselves into FOR or AGAINST.

What think you?

…most of what’s on my mind, I don’t want to blog about yet. So blog thoughts just aren’t coming. These snippet posts seem to be all I can do, lately.

Writing Fast

I’m a little envious of people who both write full-time AND take a year to write a book. Wow. Just think of all the research you could do, and how leisurely you could write! You could feel proud and on track for having written 400 words a day, AND take 65 days off a year! (Or use 65 days for brainstorming or research, etc.)

Or maybe I’m just upset that my novel for “real name” is going slow as freakin’ molasses. And I’m writing it amidst pounding out words for pseudonym.

Honestly, I’m just sick of the pressure to always write faster. But what can you do? Gotta pay the bills. And really, I’m not real fond of that pressure, either. They’re close to the same thing.

Learning Spanish

I’m learning Spanish. It’s hard, as I’ve never worked with a Romance language before (just the barest of Italian). I’ve been dreaming in Spanish, which is encouraging. One of the things I’m using to learn is LiveMocha, which is great. It’s a bit like Rosetta Stone, except it’s online and free.

It’s like learning a language on Facebook, because once you submit an exercise, three or four people will write and tell you that you suck and need to try again. (Okay, not really that bad, LOL!)

What’s funny is that I grade TOEFL tests now and then, since I speak English. And WOW. I’d heard they were… ridiculous, but they really are. The last one I graded was on the study of etymology throughout history, written in unreadable college textbook style. (And NOT the applicable kind of etymology. Just long terms that I’ve NEVER used in my ENTIRE life, used in thick and sludgy prose I had to read three times.)

Real useful. *eye roll*

I’m also using Fluenz and a wonderful book called Listen ‘n’ Learn Spanish with Your Favorite Movies. The last one is definitely my favorite, and my Netflix account is getting a good workout, too. I also dabble with the free courses written by the Foreign Services Institute. Useful, but “hard” learning.

My goal is to be conversing at Intermediate level by the end of February.

Contact Form

Lastly, I’m getting a lot of blank contact forms. Could a couple of you contact me, just so I can see whether spammers are blanking me, or if my contact form isn’t working? Thanks so much!

So what’s up in your world? Any blog ideas for me, LOL?

I seem to have no new thoughts. Or if I do, they are merely snippets.

I proof-read a bit of non-fiction today, and I was thinking that although non-fiction is a struggle, chore, and difficulty for me, the one fun thing about writing non-fiction is that you get to use colons and semi-colons.

I spent the afternoon basking in them. Punctuation is beautiful. (But I already said that.)

I also edited an old, old work for ebook release. I’ve been dragging feet on this one. The first chapter is unfixable, but really, aside from some word pruning, the story is a lot better than I thought it was. I thought it would scare away readers, but I think it’s fine. Actually, it’s got a lot of heart.

Lesson in that, I suppose.

You can get the word count from Amazon on lots of books, using this method from Alexis Grant. Isn’t that AWESOME? I love it!

“Every word wasted writing a blog post is a word that could have been spent on your novel.” That was updated around Facebook, and while it’s funny, I disagree. There’s a long line of writers throughout history who regularly wrote letters, journals and essays. So much so that I’d sooner believe these exercise are necessary.

For me, constructing sentences, organizing my thoughts, and finishing things helps me. Particularly the “finishing things” part. It takes forever to finish a novel. It feels good to finish something every day, even if it’s a blog post or an essay or a piece of flash fiction.

/start rant

And finally, do we need to have an opinion on everything? I just see so much invested, particularly as writers, in predicting the future and saying what’s right and what’s wrong. No one knows for sure what the future holds, and people get so worked up opinionating about ebooks and the dire state of publishing.

Really, are you in a position to fix the publishing industry? To change the future of publishing? Well, then why not look at things now, and see how you can position yourself now to make money or meet your objectives? Why not see what works for you now?

And does everyone need to follow your path, too?

Because that seems to be the gist of these opinion pieces. Everyone must self-publish, or everyone must delay ebook releases, or everyone must install DRM, or everyone must not install DRM.

I’m so over those articles/essays/blog posts. I don’t know where the future of publishing lies. I’m placing my bets on certain horses, and I could care less where other people place theirs.

/end rant

Anyway, what are you thinking today?

And my new website is live. Will you go and have a looksee at natashafondren.com? Let me know what needs fixing?

That’s all. I’m wiped. I did it all in a day.

Tomorrow’s for writing. I mean, today.

What was your weekend like?

My solution for everything, now, is to change. (I know I skipped number two. It’s a little personal. Not that I mind sharing it, but it just sounds… pretentious.) So on to number three.

If I keep doing the same thing, I’m going to get the same result. Every time I’m mad or dissatisfied or upset or I don’t like how something in my life is, I force myself to change something. Anything.

Because that’s the only hope for changing the result.

I’m proud of all the change I made in my life last year. I love my life, and it’s very close to my ideal, but I’m not satisfied yet.

I used to hate change, but now I’m addicted to it.

What would happen if, every day, I changed something, some little thing? Something that will take me closer to the life I want?

What would you like to change this year? What little thing can you change today, to help bring that about?

Please don’t misunderstand my last post: my best friend is the strongest, bravest, most courageous, most amazing woman I know. I mean, I wish I could explain it all and tell you why and wax on about her, but her story is not mine to tell. I’ll just say she certainly has not had a perfect life, although I think she’d say it was very blessed in many ways.

As I was saying in a comment to Lauren yesterday, pain is relative. In general, the greatest pain you’ve felt is equal to the greatest pain your neighbor has ever felt. In the retrospect of our own lives, we lose this realization. We think back to the time in grade school when we broke our fingernail, and we compare it to the time we broke our back, and we think the broken fingernail didn’t hurt as much.

But really… they both were equal in that they were the greatest pain we’d ever felt.

When looking around, our tendency is to pick and choose, to say Hah! You think that’s bad? Let me tell you about…

To make matters worse, pain fades in the memory of it. We imagine the time we had crippling, excruciating pain, but no amount of imagination can provide that feeling. In our memory, it doesn’t hurt as bad as it did.

On the other hand, everyone has a breaking point. I mean, broken spirit and everything. (I’m not saying it can’t be healed.) And I think some people have felt that and some haven’t, but even that doesn’t matter, because people think the worst they’ve had it is pretty close to the worst it can get.

In other words, before we’ve felt that snap, we think we’ve been there and survived… but we haven’t.

Just like, we’ve either been to the point of begging for our life or we haven’t. We’ve either had our spirit broken or we haven’t. We try to relate, or sometimes we just can’t imagine it but we think we can. We imagine that we would never beg for our life. But in the end… we’ve either been there or we haven’t.

And we’ve either been to the point of uttering our last prayer with the certainty we were about to die, or we haven’t. There’s no begging then, it’s true.

It sounds like I’ve talked myself out of the argument I meant to make.

I guess in the end, I don’t know.

But I do know this: we can choose to judge or we can choose to respect and understand and be compassionate. Yes, it’s human to blame the victim (like The Secret implies), even when we don’t realize we’re doing it. It’s comforting, because it suggests we have an element of control over things we sometimes don’t have control over.

We do have control over our mind, mostly. But have we all been to the point where we’re hanging on to that last thread of control as the only thread left?

Well, I guess every day, for everyone, is like that, in a way.

So I’m back to I don’t know.

What think you?

There’s always something. You know those people? The ones who… just seem to be attractants for bad luck. Things always happen. Some self-caused, some not, but the whole package deal makes you look and shake your head and wonder what they’re doing to attract that kind of life.

I was born one of them, but we’ll just skip over the childhood drama, of which there was a lot, and the seven or eight years of illness in my twenties, which is pretty much me just sitting in bed.

I remember one good friend from high school, getting really perturbed and throwing up her hands in the air and saying, “You can never just go somewhere, can you? Something always happens! Every time we go somewhere, something happens!”

Glenn was the same way when we first met. He liked to wait for when “all our ducks are in a row.”

Let’s put it this way: after living with me for eight years, he has stopped using that phrase, and has not mentioned even attempting to get all our ducks in a row.

My point is, I’m sick of being one of those people. I want an easy life. I want a nice, predictable life. I want order. I want security. I want a life like my best friend, who has a daughter and a husband and a family and a secure job and income and house and she’s most oftentimes happy. She’s blessed, sure, and she’s had hardship, for sure, but… her life is definitely not there’s always something.

Maybe this might seem to contradict with the desire to upgrade my RV so we can live on the road, but even that “adventure” can be done in an easy, relaxed, almost-predictable way. You know?

When I was little, for some odd reason, I became convinced that the first half of my life would be hell, and the second half would be easy-peasy and wonderful.

I thought this would happen when I was thirty. And then when I was thirty-five.

I think I made the first steps when I was thirty-five, but now I’m thirty-six. And while there’s not always something, there’s still often something. It’s clear that somehow, I have no idea how, I’m going to have to force the issue. I am tired of waiting.

A good portion of these things that happen have not been my fault, but plenty of what has happened to me has been my fault. I try to find a way it’s my fault, at least, because that gives me the power to change things.

So anyway, that’s my number one goal for the year. I want an easy life. I have no idea how to get it, but that’s my goal.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

How do you make your life so that there’s not always something? Do you know people where there’s always something? Have you been one? How did you… stop it? What’s your number one “idea” goal for this year?