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Author, Historian, Storyteller

History, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I think that I have finally figured out why I was never good at improv.  Total non-sequitor I know, but stay with me on this one!  I trained as an actress for four years.  In all of that time, I could never get the hang of improv.  It’s not that I can’t think on my feet.  I’m pretty dang good at thinking on my feet.  It’s that I could never relax and go with the story at hand.  Improvisation made me a nervous wreck and I could never figure out why.  Well, I finally have.  It’s because I knew I wasn’t telling the best story that I could.  I was telling a story, but there was something better, lurking underneath that I hadn’t had time to come up with.  And that is what I am good at.  Pulling out the story that is lurking underneath!

My process is simple.  I observe.  I ask questions.  I discuss.  I research.  Then I let all of it kick around in my head until finally my brain sifts through it all and says, “Aha!  This is what is relevant.  This is what is significant.  This is the story that needs to be told!”  And then I sit down and write.  But I can’t write until my brain is done with the sifting.  Everyone and everything has a story, you just have to dig it out.  Excavate out all of the crap and detritus that have accumulated around what is really important until the crux and the anima of the subject at hand are revealed.

To do that takes time.  In Improv you have no time.  If you take time, your audience gets bored and leaves.  This is why I can’t do improv.  I need time.  I need to reflect and sift through what I know.  Ask questions to expound on what I don’t know and then sift some more.  I am not built for improv.  I marvel at those that are, because that is just not how I function.  But that’s all right.  It takes all kinds, and I have some research on heavy artillery used in the Civil War that is just dying to be read, kicked around and sifted through . . .

DatingLeave a comment

I over heard a couple of girls . . . women . . . girls discussing an article that they had read at lunch today.  Or at least I think it was an article.  At any rate, it was all about the Top 10 Things That a Guy Needs to Know Before Dating You.  In other words, ten deal breakers.  Ten things that if he doesn’t understand, if he can’t get on board with, the two of you just won’t work out as a couple.  This intrigued me.  It posits some interesting questions.  Are there things that, if a guy knew coming in, would make things easier in a relationship?  So obviously I listened even more intently to the conversation that I wasn’t a part of.  (We’re gonna call this an occupational hazard.  I wasn’t eaves dropping because I’m nosy, I was eaves dropping as a study of human behavior for future/current characters.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!)

Anyway, I was kind of befuddled by the answers that I heard these girls discussing – and mind you it is their answers that makes me qualify them as girls and not women.  Their biggest concerns seemed to be that a guy know that he needed to take them to fancy dinners and buy them expensive presents; that a guy needed to be able to buy them a really big engagement ring.  Their answers got me to thinking about myself and I realized that my priorities are COMPLETELY different from theirs.  In fact, none of mine have anything to do with money.  So since I can’t seem to focus on anything else but this and I’m going to write it out anyway, here ya go!  My “Top Things That a Guy Needs to Know Before Dating Me.”

  1. At least once a week, I will walk out the front door wearing clothes that don’t match.  It’s not on purpose, not some cool hipster style.  It’s because I slept in, was trying to do ten things at once and didn’t bother to double check that my clothes matched.  At some point during the day, I will look down, realize that I don’t match, give a smirk, and then move on with my day.  This is the extent that it will bother me.
  2. I’m a planner.  I need to have plans.  Now that’s not to say that I can’t be flexible.  These plans can change.  They can be rearranged.  I’m perfectly okay with saying, let’s get together tomorrow at 7 and we’ll figure out what we’re doing from there.  But this vague, “Oh, I’ll call you tomorrow and we can figure something out” that guys seem to be such fans of, doesn’t work for me!  If we’re talking now, then I don’t need to talk to you tomorrow to figure something out, because we can figure something out RIGHT NOW.  I have other things that I need to get done tomorrow.
  3. Disagree with me, call me out if I’m being stupid/unreasonable, and if I tell you to jump you better be asking “Why?”, not “How high?”  There is no bigger turn off than a “yes man”.  It is not all about me.  My wishes, needs and desires are not the only ones that matter.  So you acting like my desires are the only ones that matter in the relationship, tells me that you have very little respect for yourself.  I need to be able to respect the man that I’m with, and if you don’t respect yourself, how I am supposed to?  There is a fine line between a “nice guy” and a “wet sponge.”
  4. I’m a goofball.  I get very excited about very random things.  I find joy in everyday life and I like to share that joy.  I do not care that onlookers often find this strange . . . especially when I’m sharing my joy with them, because I don’t know anybody around.  For those that can’t picture this go to my twitter account and find the “Yam” tweet. It’s in all caps because my phone was malfunctioning at the time. But all of my friends laughed hysterically because they knew, despite my insistence that is was just the phone, that I was actually that excited … over yams … you had to be there … go find the tweet.
  5. And I know I’m going to catch slack for this one, but here goes.  Don’t tell me that I look beautiful, unless it’s an appropriate descriptor.  I’m a writer, and a word snob.  I’m a HUGE word snob.  There’s a plethora of words out there that can be used to describe how someone looks.  Mix it up, and choose appropriately.  Why?  Because if I’ve just spent two hours getting ready to go out with you, and you tell me that I look beautiful, that compliment will have completely lost its efficacy if you said the same thing to me two days earlier when I didn’t match and was running on four hours of sleep.  Words are powerful if used correctly; empty if they are not.

So there you have it, my top 5 anyway.  I’m sure I could get to ten, but I’m going to stop at five because these alone are making me sound like a bit of a nut, and I tend to believe in stopping while I’m ahead.  I am ahead right?

Change, Happiness, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I studied theatre in college – and no I don’t want to hear your stories about how you did theatre in high school.  Why do people always do that with the arts?  You tell anybody that your career aspirations are in an artistic field and they HAVE to tell you about how they once, or sometimes still, dabble in that too.  I swear I’m gonna start telling engineers about when I used to play with Lego’s and business men about my lemonade stand and how those experiences make me a kindred spirit in their chosen career path!

 

Any who . . . not the point I’m driving towards, so I’ll step down off of THAT soapbox.

 

I studied theatre; namely acting and directing.  In my first BFA acting studio we did a Sanford Meisner exercise where you stand about two feet apart from your acting partner, face to face.  Then you both repeat the same thing back and forth to each other until organically the words change into new words.  The idea is to let your brain disengage so that you can truly feel and communicate honestly with your partner.  Well after repeating back and forth absolute nonsense for lord knows how long, my conscious brain disengaged and before I knew it out popped, “Why do you always have to be so funny?”

Now mind you, this was a classmate that I had known for a couple of months at best.  This is not something that you say to someone that you hardly know, especially in front of a group of people!  Naturally, she was offended by my question, but following the rules of the game she had to repeat the same thing back.  She had to use the words that I had thrown at her to convey her emotions back to me.  So she was offended, which made me victorious because clearly I was succeeding in the game (and I do have a bit of a competitive streak, not gonna lie), which made her even more offended (rightfully so!), which made me realize that I was being an ass and so on and so forth.  We worked our way through an entire argument using words that had quickly become nonsensical, until finally all we could do was stand staring at each other and break out in giggles.

It was one of the most surreal, honest, genuine moments I have ever had in my life and definitely as an actress.  I am no longer an actress.  It is a skill that I possess, but not a career that I want.  I learned very quickly that I am not brave enough to be an actress.  I am not brave enough to stand face to face, every night, with a character and do them the honor and justice that they deserve by opening myself up and allowing them to answer through me why they’re so funny, or sad, or strong, or whatever.  I prefer to spill my soul on paper in the privacy of my own head.  I tend to be fairly introspective that way.

But, if I were able to go back in time, to when I was in college in that BFA studio, I wish that I could have stood in front of a mirror and turned that question in on myself.  Only slightly different, “Why do you always have to be so strong?”  That was my thing, my mantra.  I didn’t ask for help, I did everything by myself.  Because to need help was weakness and I was “too strong” for that!  Which I now see to be total and complete nonsense, and really wish that I could have figured that out much earlier in life!

I think it’s absolutely healthy to realize that you don’t have to be strong and put together and “perfect” every day.  Because putting that kind of pressure on your self is exhausting, and life is hard enough without adding all of that on top.  Some days are “eat the Nutella straight out of the jar” kind of days, and there is nothing wrong with that!  I think I could have been a lot happier if I had figured that out all those years before.  After all, truth be told, it takes a hell of a lot more strength to ask for help, than to suffer in silence.

Today was not an “eat the Nutella straight out of the jar” kind of day, just an introspective kind of day.  Although some Nutella does sound pretty good . . .

MothersLeave a comment

I’ve hurt my ankle so many times, that it’s become a permanent injury.  It almost always hurts, some days more than others.  At first on those more painful days I would limp to try to take some of the weight off the bad ankle.  But then I noticed that I started to develop problems in the knee on my opposite leg, and my hips would hurt, which would throw off my back, which caused a kink in my neck, which gave me headaches.  By limping to help my ankle, I inadvertently affected the rest of my body.

My ankle felt better, but the rest of me suffered.  I finally realized that if I walked normally and gritted my teeth through the pain on those bad days I was better off in the long run.  And truth be told walking normally didn’t extend the duration of my “bad days”.  All the limping did was draw attention to the hurt and cause collateral damage.  Eventually I stopped noticing the bad days.  It’s not that the pain went away. I simply didn’t acknowledge it as I had before.  It had become a part of my reality, for better or for worse and I wasn’t going to let it affect me anymore than was necessary.

I think the same can be said for our emotional scars.  By fixating on our past hurts and injustices we inadvertently affect every other aspect of our lives.  Whether we realize it or not, we are limping through life, and that limp seeps into and damages everything else we hold dear.  But if we can have the courage to stop limping, to grit our teeth and walk through the pain with our heads held high, we will no longer be held hostage by our darkest hours.  And eventually, those scars will cease to draw our attention away from what is truly important.

Mother’s day always itches at one of my scars, a scar that will be with me for the rest of my days.  I’ve gotten to the point, that on most days I’m fine.  I walk through.  But for me, Mother’s day is like ripping the band-aid off of a fresh wound.  My mom died when I was 20 after an 18-year illness.  It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out that I, for all intents and purposes, lost something that I never had.  I cannot relate to the Hallmark propaganda that floods the markets every May.  When something bad happens, my first reaction has never been, “I want my mom.”  I cannot relate.

I have a handful of “adopted” moms, that I love dearly, and that I have turned to for support and guidance.  They have and I’m sure will always play a huge part in my life, and I don’t know that I will ever be able to thank them enough for that.    However, every year come Mother’s day I find myself picking at that scar and remembering the loss of my own mother.  And sometimes before I know it, I realize that I’m limping once more.  But that’s okay because we’re all allowed our bad days, and I know that tomorrow will be better and the limp will subside as I once more hold my head high.

Change, HappinessLeave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things that we put up with because we know the result at the end of the day makes it worth it.  Every single one of us does things, sometimes on a daily basis, that we don’t necessarily want to do, but we know it’s worth it.  I mean seriously, who genuinely likes using a stair stepper?  I can think of a hundred other things that are a lot more fun and a lot more fulfilling than that.  However, I like the way that my legs look when they’re toned and I know that cardio is good for my health.  So despite the fact that I basically hate, loath and despise my stupid little stair stepper, I still use it . . . occasionally . . . when I have new Netflix that I can watch while stepping.  But what happens when the end no longer justifies the means?

Maybe your priorities or goals change, or maybe, like in my instance, you decide that the crap just isn’t worth it, regardless of what the payoff might be.  It seems obvious to me, that at that point it is time for a change.  It is time to make changes and probably drastic ones.  But there is something so alluring and safe to the familiar.  Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.  After all, your new destination might be worse than where you are now.  So you put up with more crap.  You say that you’ll fix it tomorrow, you’ll make changes later, you’ll look for a new job next week.  In the mean time you carry on, business as usual, putting up with more and more crap until finally that proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back falls.

Have you ever noticed that there is always a straw, always a breaking point?  And it is rarely something big or noteworthy, it is generally something small.  I can’t think of a single time in my life when a feeling of disquiet, of discontentment, didn’t finally end in some straw falling that finally propelled me to action.  I’ve never sat back and said, “You know what, I don’t absolutely love my job, I’m going to actively fix that.”  I’ve always allowed myself to be just shy of content, just shy of happy because it could always be worse.  Or I think that I should be grateful for everything that I do have.  Trust me, I remember when I didn’t have a job at all!  So I stay where I am until that proverbial straw falls, pushing true happiness aside.  Which really leads me to question why happiness isn’t at the top of my priority list.  It should be.  It should be above everything else!

I would like to say that I didn’t have to wait for a straw to fall.  I would like to say that happiness is #1 on my list.  But this morning there was definitely a straw and I honestly question whether happiness even makes the top ten of my list right now.  So I’m going to make changes, the first of which is rearranging my priority
list.  I don’t know that happiness will be #1 – I’m going for realistic goals here – but this time around, it is going to at least make the top ten.  Along with using that stupid stair stepper more often . . .

CharactersLeave a comment

Have you ever met someone whose greatest motivation comes from someone telling them that they can’t do something?  If you have, then you’re familiar with Emma.  Emma is my firecracker, she’s my wild card.  Despite the fact that her father was working closely with the Union, until her entire family is killed by a rogue Confederate officer, she ultimately aligns herself and begins spying for the Confederacy.  She is rash and quick to act.  Which sometimes works out quite well for her, and sometimes it really doesn’t!  Regardless, she adapts, she bounces back.

There is really something achingly beautiful about watching someone that no matter what you throw at them, they come back for more.  They take what they’re given, learn from it, grow from it and become better for the lesson.  Sometimes it takes a couple of rounds before the lesson is learned, but they keep coming back for more.  From the outside it can be painful to watch as someone takes beating after beating after beating, but it’s not up to us to ease their way.  They’re too stubborn.  They have to learn on their own, even if it means constantly repairing the breaks until they resemble a stained glass window.

I love stained glass windows.  Where else can you find something that is considered gorgeous, breathtaking art work, composed entirely of broken pieces welded together?  If those same mosaics were instead painted, or constructed from a solid pane of glass, some of the beauty would be lost because the beauty lies in the breaks.  It is prettier broken.  I feel like people are the same.  Each fall, each hurt is a story and that tell-tale scar is our body’s way of proclaiming to the world that we got back up and kept moving.  We kept living, and we like the windows are prettier broken.

Emma falls down and breaks a lot.  But she gets back up.

CharactersLeave a comment

Blog readers meet Anna, Anna my blog readers.  That is all.

 

Just kidding!  Anna is one of my favorite characters, and she is as tough as nails.  She is strong, quick on her feet and a spy for the Union.  When she was a teenager her father, an exporter in the north, wanted to secure a business deal with a tobacco plantation owner in Virginia so, to sweeten the deal, he threw in his daughter’s hand in marriage.  Thus Anna was packed off to Virginia and wed to a man she’d never met as soon as her father’s contract was signed.

She never adjusts to the Southern way of life, and despises the fact that her one offspring is a daughter whom is raised as a quintessential Southern Belle.  So when the Civil War breaks out and her husband is named a Confederate officer, Anna jumps at the chance to spy for the Union, her true home.  Among other tactics, Anna uses her husband’s social standing to hold afternoon parties where women gather to chat and play parlor games.  Only she invites other operatives so they can pass intelligence.

Anybody want to play a fun game of memory?  You remember that game.  The first person says A is for Apple.  Then the second person repeats A is for Apple and then adds B is for bear, etc around the circle until somebody gets the order wrong.  Well with a predetermined set of signals – placement of a kerchief, where hands are held, etc – C is for Confederate, G is for Grant and S is for Shiloh translates into the Confederates are planning an attack on General Grant at Shiloh.  Adds a whole new dimension to that game now doesn’t it!

However, Anna’s biggest challenge comes when her daughter, Kady, discovers that she is a spy.  Instead of running to her father to tattle, Kady tells Anna that she wants to be a spy too.  Initially Anna rebukes her, but circumstances arise that require Kady’s assistance so Anna is forced to bring her into the fold.  So in the midst of her espionage activities, Anna must also reconcile her fractured relationship with the daughter that she never wanted in the first place.

Characters, History, Inspiration, WomenView all 2 comments

I’ve been a fan of history for as long as I can remember.  Not in a memorize dates and names of battles and all the generals that ever lived sort of way – don’t give me a quiz, I will fail miserably.  More in a fascinated by the motivations that caused people to act and behave the way that they did, that can only be studied in hind sight sort of way.  I credit this fascination to my father.  He was a history major and then taught history in high school for a spell.  I have a feeling that he was one of those teachers that made the subject interesting and memorable; the way that all history should be taught.  I guess this, because this is how he taught me history, not in the classroom but at home.  Much more emphasis was placed on the whys and wherefores as opposed to the specific dates, times and names.  My childhood was spent watching more WWII movies than I can even recount.  I still have a special place in my heart for “Father Goose” and “Operation Petticoat,” gotta love Cary Grant.  Come to think of it, I still have a special place in my heart for Cary Grant . . .

At any rate, I find history fascinating.  So when I was visiting a friend in Richmond, Virginia and she suggested that we go tour the White House of the Confederacy I said yes.  We wondered through all of the exhibits, read about the little toy cannon that actually fired tiny little cannon balls that Jefferson Davis had made for his son and, like all museums, I wound up in the gift shop.  While perusing the merchandise, I came across this little booklet.  It was less than 70 pages long and it was about female spies in the Civil War.  To say that I was intrigued would be an understatement.  I sat down in the middle of the gift shop and started reading.  It was amazing!  In this time of women in petticoats that were put up on pedestals, here were stories detailing how they would use those very petticoats to hide correspondence.  They would use their perceived “frailty” to continue passing information even after being caught and jailed for being a spy!

These women were brilliant and cunning and brave, and sitting there reveling in their tales a melancholy fell over me.  How had I never heard of these women before?  Why, in an entire museum, was there more about a tiny toy cannon, than an entire group of operatives, which I later learned had major impacts on battles and eventually the course of the war?  I found this sad.  So I bought the booklet.  Then finished my vacation, went home and for the most part forgot about it.  But in the back of my head these women kept kicking around, and the next thing I knew there was a story forming.  It started out as a TV show – a period piece for Showtime or HBO.  It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles and a friend out here convinced me that this idea of mine was better suited as a book.  Yes, I essentially moved to Los Angeles to turn my TV show into a novel.  Enjoy the irony, I do.

This is when I finally sat down and started to write the novel In a Time Never Known.  It is the story of Anna and Kady, two southern ladies, a mother, daughter duo, who are spies for the Union.  We get to see the sacrifices that they make, the people they encounter and the lengths that they are willing to go in our country’s darkest hour.  Now my spies are fictional, but I’d like to think that the spirits of the likes of Elizabeth Van Lew, Belle Boyd, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Rose Greenhow and the Moon sisters to name a few are present throughout the pages.  These are the characters that I have fallen in love with, and these are the characters that I would like to introduce to you . . . in my next post . . . because this one’s really long already . . . and I kinda want to go to bed . . .

Characters, Permission, Right vs Wrong, VoiceView all 3 comments

 

I have been writing for as long as I can remember, but it’s only recently that people have been telling me that they “love my voice.”  I took the compliments and felt honored by them, but didn’t really understand.  What was “my voice” and why was it only now coming through so strongly.  It wasn’t until I started to compare my work now to older work, and where and who I am now compared to times in the past, that I finally saw what people were talking about.  My writing has developed a personality all its own, a voice that yearns to tell the stories it hears kicking around in my head, and tell them in a way that highlights all of the things that I find significant.

 

Finding my voice as a writer was actually all about accepting who I am, all of who I am – the goofy, inappropriate, awkward, blunt, honest, atypical, exuberant, moody, defiant, stubborn, passionate whole – and giving myself permission to share that with the world.  I use the word permission very specifically because I had been taught from a young age; I think we are all taught, that we need to conform.  Don’t be so loud, don’t draw attention, don’t be weird . . . because heaven forbid someone should know that you’re an individual and have a personality.  Scary!

 

But this is what I was taught, so that is how I lived.  Being me was “wrong”.  Occasionally I would forget, but there was always someone there to shoosh me back into the box . . . where I was miserable.  I had no voice because I had no access to who I truly was, and with no voice I would get so frustrated that I couldn’t see straight.  I could see my inherent talents, and I could sense my inherent passions, but I was so focused on making sure that what I was doing was “right” that everything I did was wrong.  I knew it every second of every day, and knowing that I was wrong made me hesitant to use what voice I had because I was afraid of being rejected for the person that I didn’t want to be in the first place.

 

It wasn’t until I realized that I was spending all of my time and energy perfecting a person that I didn’t want to be that I finally started to reevaluate what exactly was so “wrong” with who I was.  I realized that there was nothing wrong with me.  What was wrong was that I had listened for so long to all of the people who insisted on pigeon holing me into what they perceived to be “right”.  It was then that I realized that I had no need for those people in my life.  I had no need for people who made me feel ashamed for living a life of passion and joy and risks.  There are people in this world who love me for living those ideals.  Those are the people that I needed in my life and it was with those people that I tested my real voice.  It was with those people that I learned to scream it to the rafters.  And when I was done, they weren’t cringing, embarrassed by my display.  They were smiling and laughing with me.

 

The next thing I knew, I was writing.  I was writing more than I ever had in my life, and I loved what I was writing.  I felt strong and courageous as I let my characters sweep me away in their story.  I bared my soul to them and they did the same in return.  They share with me their deepest, darkest desires and secrets and I try to honor them by being brave enough to put them down for all to read.  They live and breathe by my pen, and I live and breathe for them.  In creating them, I have found myself.  I have found my voice.

Beautiful Quote