Am I really to blame?

The Poetic Museling are blaming me as one of the guilty parties for the situation they find themselves in now. I conducted a workshop on "Developing a Poetry Chapbook from Concept to Completion," during the 2008 Muse Online Writers Conference. Some of the poets who took this workshop continued to meet after the Conference to write and critique, and collectively decided to create something that was greater than each of their individual works.

They're now assigning blame to me for giving them courage, vision, and tools to go forward with a dream to create a real book. They called me "mentor", and asked for my advice along the way as they chose and edited their poems, and I was happy to oblige.  

The resulting Lifelines Anthology, written by the Poetic Muselings, is now available on Amazon. Am I excited and proud of what these poets have created out of that class?  You bet I am.  Do I accept the blame (and kudos)?  Nah.  They did it all themselves, following through what was little more than a series of prompts with guts, tenacity, talent and a lot of hard work. The resulting book is a beautiful thing, full of insightful poetry, life stories, and a great deal of vision.  Well done Muselings.  It was all your own doing!

Free (Literary) Lunch

Way back in my undergrad days I attended a launch party for Alison Armstrong's The Joyce of Cooking. It was a heady affair for me, not least of which because I was in the midst of my very first graduate level class in James Joyce, having become rather smitten with Ulysses, and I felt utterly, absolutely accepted as an equal there, thanks to a very kind introduction by my then teacher Sydney Feshbach, who later became president of the James Joyce Society in NY where the launch was held. I've since had at the back of my mind that I would also like to do a literary cookbook of some description - combining my love of books with a love of eating (and even greater of love reading about people eating).  That hasn't really happened, not least of which because I'm not a chef, but I did put together a fun little cookbook titled The Literary Lunch: Recipes for a Hungry Mind, which involved scouring some of my favourite books and developing recipes based on meals that characters actually ate.  Most of the books didn't provide recipes, but I had a go at formulating my own and tested each one and they were all pretty nice.  Most are easy - only one was a little complex and that's in keeping with the complexity of the novel that inspired it The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. So here's the one complex recipe from the book.  If you'd like the other easier ones, you can have them for the not very complex price of $0.  To grab a copy just drop by my website http://www.magdalenaball.com and sign up for my newsletter there (I don't send out many - just updates when new books come out - and don't worry - I'm not that prolific!) and a copy will be yours.  Happy cooking!

From The Magic Mountain

He dressed conscientiously for the evening meal, and sitting n his place between Miss Robinson and the schoolmistress, he ate: julienne soup, baked and roast meats with suitable accompaniments, two pieces of a tart made of macaroons, butter-cream chocolate, jam and marzipan, and lastly excellent cheese and pumpernickel. As before. He ordered a bottle of Kulmbacher. But, by the time he had half emptied his tall glass, he became clearly and unmistakably aware that bed was the best place for him. (83)

Magic Mountain Macaroon and Butter-Cream Chocolate Pie

Butter Cream

Ingredients

1 tbsp cocoa

12 tbsp very soft butter

1 tbsp hot water

2 egg yolks

½ cup sugar

In an electric mixer bowl, mix the cocoa and water. Then add the egg yolks and sugar. Place the bowl in a pan of hot water over medium heat, beat with an electric mixer until the smooth and shiny. Then beat in the butter until smooth. Set aside.

Pie Pastry

Ingredients

1 ¼ cups flour

¾ tsp salt

7 tbsp cold butter, cut into pieces

5 tbsp ice water.

In a food processor (put into the freezer 10 minutes beforehand), combine flour and salt. Add butter and process until like bread crumbs. Sprinkle water on and process into a ball. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes. On a lightly floured surface, roll out and fit into a greased 9 inch pie pan. Crimp the dough to form a decorative border (using a fork). Prick the pastry with a fork. Chill for at least 30 minutes before filling and baking.

Filling

Ingredients

2 cups single cream

8 oz dark couverture chocolate

½ cup sugar

8 oz ground almonds

2 egg whites, whipped until stiff

Bring the cream to simmering point in a saucepan. Put the chocolate into a bowl and stir in the hot cream. Keep stirring until it has combined to form a sauce. Stir in the almonds, and sugar, and let cool to room temperature. Gently mix in the whipped egg whites until combined, and place in the tart shell. Bake at in a preheated 350ºF or 180ºC oven for 45 minutes until the filling has set and is slightly puffed. Cool on a pie rack. When cool, pipe butter cream frosting around the edge and over the top in a lattice effect. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Blooming Red Finalist in USA Best Books Award

BLOOMING RED ANNOUNCED AS A FINALIST IN USA BOOK NEWS “BEST BOOKS 2011” AWARDS

LOS ANGELES – USABookNews.com, the premiere online magazine and review website for mainstream and independent publishing houses, announced that Blooming Red has been placed as a finalist for poetry in THE USA “BEST BOOKS 2011” AWARDS on November 1, 2011. Awards were presented for titles published in 2010 and 2011.

Jeffrey Keen, President and CEO of USA Book News, said this year’s contest yielded an unprecedented number of entries, which were then narrowed down to winners and finalists. Winners and finalists traversed the publishing landscape: Simon & Schuster, St. Martin’s Press, Random House, Penguin, Harper Collins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons and hundreds of independent houses contributed to this year’s outstanding competition. Keen adds, “Our success begins with the enthusiastic participation of authors and publishers and continues with our distinguished panel of industry judges who bring to the table their extensive editorial, PR, marketing, and design expertise.” Keen says of the awards, now in their ninth year, “The 2011 results represent a phenomenal mix of books from a wide array of publishers throughout the United States. With a full publicity and marketing campaign promoting the results of the USA ‘Best Books’ Awards, this year’s winners and finalists will gain additional media coverage for the upcoming holiday retail season.”

Of Bloming Red, reviewer Joyce White said "Reading these two award winners is like partaking in their womanhood, tasting their femininity, and meeting their past head on. Their poems cry out for their inner child who still wants Santa to come visit them, you know...equality for all; and, I agree with Carolyn who says "[in] Einstein's less than balanced world...we would be less than dead."  Maggie writes of abundance and waste, of gluttonous dyspepsia...of the inability to digest joy when others are hungry, what cannot be created or destroyed...a huge database of Christmas past (found in the attic)...random messy knowledge curse of recall becoming parcels he could leap...with only one present leading him to greatness...with anticipation turning to memory before weeping eyes...a house full of dreams, visions and desires, each glass ball becoming a wish, taken from the tree of life we decorate at Christmas...super connections pulsing, through the anti-matter of your tired brain, wrought with nostalgia and wrung through time's dryer...Once the paper's gone, it's just us again, tired, spent, remembering life...one tap of the keyboard a newbie springs forth...no sacrifices in blood here...this is a rational zone so many years on fertile.  Make your holiday great and read your family Blooming Red. It is a great holiday stuffer!"

A complete list of the winners and finalists of The USA “Best Books 2011” Awards are available online at http://www.USABookNews.com.

Great Spooky Lit

Here in Australia, we don't celebrate Halloween very much, but try telling that to my daughter, who has been planning her costume since last Halloween.  Of course I like to celebrate every occasion by reading - but maybe I'll make my books just a wee bit spookier than usual.  Here's a little list of three scarily wonderful books that readers who don't want to tip over into the horror genre can still enjoy when everything else is too light and upbeat.

First off the bat is Carlos Ruiz Zafón.  Take your pick - they're all good and all spooky, but I'm going to recommend The Prince of Mist just because it's his YA book, quick and easy to read, and spine tingling, even at the end. 

Then there's Neil Gaiman.  You could go with The Graveyard Book, but actually Coraline is the more disturbing because more like a universal nightmare.  Those button eyes and mother-not-mother still haunt me when I think about it. 

Finally, from the archives, there's Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  I'm going through a little Stevenson revival at the moment, and as with The Prince of Mist and Coraline, what works so well in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the universal chord that the book touches.  We all have a touch of Hyde in us (though hopefully not to the same extent) - that evil twin (the not-mother, the spurned clown) who takes us near the edge.  We can almost understand, empathise with, and even see ourselves slipping into that bad guy role.  Bwahahaha.  Happy Halloween.

Extreme Reading

I'll read anywhere.  Even on a windy sand dune with

pockets and shoes stuffed full of sand, and children's voices mingling with hungry gulls in the background. Here I am reading John Flanagan's last Ranger's Apprentice book number 11: The Lost Stories.  I've got an interview with John next week and although I wouldn't normally be drawn to these kinds of 'boys own' adventures, my twelve year old loves them and I agreed to read the books and interview John on his behalf.  I have to say that I've been enjoying the books very much, even to the point of ignoring my kids shouts to come and roll down the dunes with them (um, tempting as that was), since I had to see what Rangers Halt and Will did next.  I did eventually put the book away and made it up and down the giant dunes multiple times, Will and Halt accompanying me all the while. 

I like encorporating the scene of my reading into the whole fictive experience.  Sitting in a beautiful remote landscape (and this one was truly beautiful) while reading about smashbuckling daring deeds is part of the fun.  The wind in my hair mirroed the wind in my characters' hair as they rode their talking horses, and fought battle after battle against pirates, roamers, "moondarkers" and highway robbers, leaving their world a safer place.  Where's the wildest place you've ever read?  The most inhospitable or exquisite conditions?  Do you require a 'fine and private place' to read or can you drop everything anywhere and dip into that lovely fictive world? 

Musing on the Muse

Every year I participate in the Muse 
Online Writers Conference as a presenter, and every year it seems to get just a little bit bigger.  The first year I presented, I ran a poetry workshop.  A group from that session were so inspired, from each other as much as me - I encouraged them to critique one another and they really jumped into that, that they formed a poetry writing group called Poetic Muselings that continued to work together.  Their anthology titled Lifelines has just been accepted for publication by Inkspotter Publishing.  Am I proud?  You betcha.  This is about the best outcome a writer teacher could hope for, and is due in large part to that wonderful rarified air of a conference that transcends space, linking a group of individuals towards a shared goal.  I've since run workshops on characterisation, workshops on writing a query (and several of the people on that course have gone on to have the books they've queried accepted by traditional publishing houses - yay!).  This year I did a joint week long workshop with the wonderful Karen Cioffi on "Creating and Building Your Author/Writer Online Presence".  It was a big, full-on course that went from website and content creation through to article marketing, SEO and keywords, podcasting, creating ebooks, online commerce, and information marketing.  Kind of like a one stop online platform bootcamp.  Any one of those topics could have run in a full week workshop, but our ambitious attendees got stuck in and worked hard, setting up or tweaking their websites, creating and submitting keyword rich, optimised articles, and even creating their own podcasts.  I was so inspired by both Karen and our attendees, that I completely revamped my own website during the week, moving it to a new platform and giving it a fresh new look. There were many different workshops held, dealing with topics as diverse as shoestring marketing, writing suspense, working social media, developing a unique voice, obtaining contacts, writing flash fiction, fantasy, horror, self-publishing, creating worlds, espionage, and even creating monsters.  If I had the time, I'd probably take every one of the courses.  As it was, I was busy teaching my own!  But one of the benefits of the Muse, is that all the workshops and documentation remain visible for several weeks afterwards, and you can bet I'll be trawling the boards to gather in as much of this collective store of knowledge as I can.  If you didn't make it this year, there's always 2012.  

Writing, Fear, and Yoga

 

Though it may look like the writer isn't doing much, sitting for hours in front of a laptop, the brain is heavily engaged.  The work is often emotionally demanding, taking us places that we're afraid of but need to go, and forcing us to look into the black heart of our deepest fears to uncover truth in our characters and situation.

  It takes great courage to walk the difficult path of the artist, and often the effort is physically exhausting.  Fear is always tracking you, and the closer you are to reaching your writing goals, the more intense and insidious that fear can become.  Fear is a great shapeshifter, looking like block, like the need to research, like being too busy to write.  It can stop your story in its tracks just when you're about to make a breakthrough.  My latest work in progress is particularly challenging, taking me to dark recesses of the past, exploring notions just beyond my intellectual capabilities, and forcing me to rethink what I know about fiction.  Every writing session is hard.  That's how I know I'm on the right path - because it it were easy, I wouldn't be pushing myself, growing, or moving my skills to a higher bar.  So how does one cope with this fear in all of its incarnations?  How do you push through it towards completion? 

My biggest ally against fear is to move my body.  Exercise of all kind helps, but for me, there's nothing quite like either swimming, or doing yoga - two forms of exercise that have a mental impact on me.  Both swimming and yoga are what I call breath practices, because they rely on regular and focused breathing. It's often too cold for me to swim.  I don't much like heated indoor pools (the chlorine doesn't agree with me), so I tend to do a lot of yoga.  Yoga is amazing for writers.  Here are three reasons why yoga is a natural ally for the writer:

• It helps teach us to see writing as a practice, rather than an end point.  We keep moving along the writing path, growing, changing, and pushing towards wisdom and expression.  It's not possible to fail, no matter how hard it is, when you have this perception.  Showing up for practice is all that's needed.

• It teaches you to breathe.  Ah, breath.  How simple and yet how powerful. Breathing is the perfect antedote to fear.  I first found out how powerful it was when I was in labour with my first child, screaming in pain.  An angel of a midwife came to me and taught me to breath slowly, deeply, with my full body and I calmed down and got to work.  I've turned to breath again and again in times of stress, strife, and fear, and it never fails to remind me of the transience of each moment and the need to work, calmly, through panic. 

•  It teaches patience.  Sometimes the right words take time to come.  You have to keep showing up, doing the exercises, stretching, breathing and working towards the vision.

Yoga teaches me to see my writing as work that has to be done - a responsibility and positive impetus rather than a vanity (another manifestation of fear).  So next time you're struggling with the dragons of fear -- call it what you will: block, self-doubt, other priorities, "no-time" -- try taking a 30 minute yoga break and see if that doesn't help.  Breath through it.  Even when it hurts.  Then back to work.  The world is waiting for you to change it.