Cynthia Stock

An amazing author for your soul!

Touched

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I am not a sommelier, but I know what wines I like. I am not a book critic. I am an avid reader and hope someone will help me understand what I felt was the brilliance of Walter Moseley’s Touched. The cover, two hands held side by side with fingers upright and a face superimposed on them, compelled me to pick the book from the “New Fiction” shelves at the library. It is a small book. The 159 pages are 5 x 7 1/4″. The story, the words, the size made it easy to read without stopping until the last page. Then, I was left in wonder.

Marty awakens from what he believes was a centuries-long sleep a changed man. He believes he has been recruited and altered to play a part in the eradication of the human race. From there, the reader faces many questions. Is the narrator reliable? A few pages in, it no longer matters. Immersed in an alternative reality, the possibilities of which include science fiction to schizophrenia, the reader confronts the quintessential questions of humanity. Is Marty/Martin/Temple the infection of or the cure for humanity? For me this dilemma expanded and applied to everyman. Are humans the destroyers or saviors of this earth? Do we, as a species, have the inner strength to resolve differences and amass the resources to save ourselves? Reminiscent of The Overstory, Touched returns more than once to the concept of the oneness of the environmental and human ecosystems.

I found the ending haunting and provocative. After being reprogrammed by Marty’s intervention, a man leaves Marty’s home to get away from the sound of a howling dog. The man fears it will keep calling for his attention. I interpreted that the man feared changing back to what he had been, a hateful, racist thug, thus positing the age-old question: are humans doomed to repeat past mistakes?

Neither expert nor editor, I’ll only mention things I found interesting about the writing. Mosley’s use of names insist I examine my own moral compass. Marty’s wife, Tessa, has had relations with a man named Truth. Marty’s last name is Just. His alter ego is Temple. Mosley describes the color of people using various shades of browns and grays. I have a mentor who talks about muscular sentences. I found Mosley’s writing sparse, yet muscular. The biggest compliment I can give any author is to say I will reread this book before returning it to the library. I have been Touched.

On turning 68 in 2019

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My 68th birthday looms. It creeps towards me, tenacious, heat resistant like the ground cover in my shrubs. I tear up clumps of the succulent green with baby’s breath like flowers and throw it in the dirt. In a week, it is spreading, thriving, a lush carapace for soil turned to dust by the sun.

 

This year I am grateful I am upright, as I am every year. My gait deviates a bit. My right leg swings out to the side when I walk; the right foot wobbles before it hits the ground. That’s MS for you. If stopped by a cop, I refuse to try and walk in a straight line, because I’ll always look drunk. I’m prepared to refer him or her to the clinic, to the doctor, where I log intermittent moments of my journey and hope to have enough time left to create a few more.

I am grateful for a partner who gives me space for my obsessions, who loves me for who I am, who still holds my hand when we sit on the sofa together.

I am grateful for the fact that the moment I sit before a blank page and type just a few words, something awakens. My mind pinballs from the present to the past to the present to the future. I create sorceresses and serial killers and murder victims. I reencounter patients and students and lovers I’ve sequestered in that biological computer known as my brain. I read books and see what I’ve missed in my stories. I revise and think to myself “Who needs drugs when the mind is immersed in the magnificent process of creating?” I want to be TC Boyle and JC Oates and Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler and Wallace Stegner and Andy Warhol and Van Gogh all rolled into one.

I want to see my son perform on The Ellen Degeneres Show. His songs come up on my play list when I’m working out and my pace quickens. I can’t believe how talented he is.

Mine is a wonderful life.

 

Then reality abrades its noxious way into my consciousness and I mourn. I mourn for what I see as the erosion of all the progress women my age thought we made in the early 70’s.

I remember reading Our Bodies, Our Selves and began to see and understand my body as my own, divorced from the “body politic” and not distorted by “the Gaze.” I celebrated a sense of visibility and having a voice that was and would be heard. I chose a career with a “living wage.” I smugly thought, if I have children, they will be proud of what my generation accomplished for my gender. Foolishly I rested on my laurels thinking the fight was over, the battle, no the rights, had been won. Forever.

 

As 68 gets ready to bulldoze over 67, I mourn the current socio-political climate, which, like my ground cover, proliferates and spreads. What it spreads is not pretty or protective. It spreads ignorance, prejudice, and hate. I mourn the roll back of resources and funding that will guarantee women reproductive health and personal freedom. I mourn that money and connections allowed a sex trafficker a lighter punishment and enabled him to commit the same crime again, reaffirming that women and girls in this country are nothing more than cheap merchandise. I mourn that the top elected official in this country voiced his sense of entitlement when it comes to women’s bodies, a “man” who so misunderstands sexual assault that he deflects allegations of it with “She’s not my type.” I mourn that it took two daring sports figures to get people to face the injustices and inequities that plague our so called free and democratic society. I mourn the fact that I fear the physical environment in which my grand-children will live and grow.

 

My birthday wish: Let me do one thing that will make the world a little bit better.

The road to self-publishing

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My Book Baby

 

I never dreamed of being a writer, but I have always been one. I “journaled” for many years. Back then I called them diaries and included graphic drawings, a pressed daffodil, retrieved from our front yard after a tornado, and a desiccated silverfish that squeezed between the pages and died amid the purples and pinks of my colored pens. As an adult, I took creative writing classes, read, and read some more. My first novel started as a short story and developed into my second child. Members of my small writer’s workshop told me my main character, an eight year old boy who experienced life with a perspective enhanced by circumstance, not age, needed to tell his story in a bigger world.

Any parent knows it is a job that requires twenty-four seven vigilance. It was no different with my book baby. I suffered sleepless nights when the boy wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d awaken and see him squinty-faced in overalls, a single ray of sunshine lighting his presence at the side of my bed. He never spoke, but I heard him. Somehow he communicated what part of his story I needed to tell next. I sat for hours at the computer and created scenes where my character grew. I submitted chapters to workshops and cried when I had to excise parts to make the exposition tighter. I eliminated unnecessary, beautiful words, the kind that roll over your tongue and come out a physical sensation. I agonized over the constructive criticism of a professional editor. When I finished the rewrite, I felt satisfied, almost ready to call myself “author.” Think again. In a talk about creativity and art, Phillip Glass said he didn’t feel his music was complete until it had been heard. I understood. I wanted my child to be seen and read.

The second part of the author’s journey began. I was ready for anything with one limitation: I wanted my book in print before I turned sixty-three.

In the course of my writing education, I took classes from a community writing organization and a local university. The university instructors provided a glimpse of the publishing process: acquisition of an agent, sale of the book by an agent, purchasing of the book by an established house, and marketing, printing, and distribution driven by that house. Finding an agent seemed as important as finding the right babysitter. I needed someone I could trust with my book baby, who would nurture it, love it, and market it with care.

My parents raised me with the mantra: if you worked hard, you would succeed. For me it had been true. In competitive swimming, I practiced twice a day and secured a scholarship enabling me to go to an out of state university. In school I studied and graduated with honors. In my professional life, I secured every job for which I applied. After two years creating a life, I knew someone would want to publish my little boy’s story.

The university provided select authors an opportunity to go to New York and meet with agents of well-known publishing houses. I flew to this experience with high hopes, belief in the quality of my work, and not the faintest idea of how to sell myself. I blogged about Moneyball, the movie in which a GM takes a chance on questionable talent in MLB. I researched editors, rehearsed my synopsis and sell, and made myself sick from the stress. Silly me. For sixty years I depended on the reward-for-hard-work myth. A mandatory paradigm shift blind-sided me and rattled my confidence. Was I a worthy parent, a real writer?

Every agent but one was young enough to be my daughter. Generation shock. I stuttered and mumbled to relative novices at life how the story of a man who killed his wife, lost his son, and lived with the nightmares from a prolonged childhood hospitalization alluded to the story of Job. In ten minutes, I couldn’t make them love my boy-man. In New York I received one request for my full manuscript, one for a partial, and very cordial rejection e-mails. Living with rejection came with a huge BUT. But you haven’t read the whole thing.

Sylvia Plath said “The greatest enemy of creativity is self-doubt.” I taped her words to my computer.

I began the unsolicited submission process. I only sent to agents open to unsolicited material. The others: They didn’t know what they were missing. I started a folder of which agents I submitted to, what I sent, and if I got a response. Hand-written rejections were touted by instructors to be an exceptional compliment. So it’s better to be back-handed in cursive. Most came as form letters. My list of rejections grew. I became more skilled at matching agents with my genre, sharpening my synopsis, and mass producing packets of cover letters, the synopsis, and the first fifty pages of my manuscript. A sort of baby bundle. I took solace knowing the author of The Help received almost sixty rejections. Dr. Seuss garnered over four hundred. I juggled this second job between stretches of twelve hour shifts, strained my marriage, and gained thirty pounds. I thickened my skin to tolerate what felt like bullying and refused to let disappointment keep my child from taking its place in the world.

I never lost faith, but I chose a new approach: self-publishing. With my sixty-third birthday less than a year away, what did I have to lose but my husband, my sanity, and my health?

Self-publishing services amounted to a smorgasbord of choices. Another writer-friend had already self-published. She shared her experience; I followed her lead. I searched company web sites, publishing packages, and, of course, cost. Teasers came with every package. Until I began to shop, I didn’t realize I’d be a decision maker and marketer of my product. A career in professional nursing hardly prepared me for such an undertaking. The very nature of nursing mandates that people seek your service. I never had to sell myself. Even in a high stress area like critical care, all I had to do was appear at the bedside and be a consummate, compassionate, knowledgeable, decision-making professional. A piece of cake. I dedicated myself completely to my work, just as my parents had taught me.

I finally bought a mid-priced package. The company made the process remarkably pain free. From the beginning, contact people helped me format my manuscript to company standards, provided me with thorough editorial comment and recommendations, suggested reasonable time frames for task accomplishments, and updated me frequently about processes out of my hands. But I had the final say with my story, my baby.

I selected my book cover from a small pool of photographs. To my amazement, I found my boy in a symbolic pose of the quest I created. A shadow in the penumbra of a brilliant sun, my protagonist climbed a mountain representing his life of adversity. It was a picture I had found on the internet two years before I finished my first draft. It felt like a new life inside kicking for the first time. I took it as a sign.

A few days after selecting my cover, a package arrived in the mail while I was at work. My husband placed it on a shelf in the foyer. He thought it was just another book I had ordered. On my next day off, a representative from the company called and asked my opinion. “Of what?” I asked. With the phone in one hand, I found the package and opened it. My hands shook when I held the precious thing, not unlike the first time I held my son. I didn’t need to say anything to the rep. My voice spoke the language of joy. I allowed myself a half-scream. The rep laughed. I held my novel in its hard proof copy. Five years of work took tangible shape. All the files of chapters in their original and rewritten forms, all the on-line saved documents, all the time spent molding the world and characters of the novel came together. Despite the beautiful cover, the artistic design of chapter pages, and the presentation of the jacket biography, reality hit when I found the ISBN and Library of Congress numbers. Like a footprint on a birth certificate. I was a real author of a published novel.

I want my novel to be read by those who love the written word. It would be nice if it were a best seller. I have already cast the stars to play my protagonist in the different stages of his life on screen. I have received my invitation to the Oscars for which it received a “Best Screen Adaptation” nomination. In reality I deserve to celebrate my part in two accomplishments: the writing and the publishing. Creation. On this day that is more than enough: I just found out I sold my first book.

 

 

 

 

Why does ED happen

Stories to tell

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I started reading Just Kids by Patti Smith. It describes one artist’s journey to find the best genre for self-expression and a niche in the art world. To say the memoir unsettled me is understatement. More than one aspiring artist has asked “Do I have to suffer, do drugs, experience the dark abyss of depression, lose a lover, to create?” As described in her memoir, Ms. Smith’s young adulthood existed in stark contrast to mine. It forced me to evaluate my own life and to question what makes me think I have a story to tell or the talent to express it in compelling narrative. I never slept in doorways or crashed with a stranger who became an intimate in the course of an introduction. I didn’t drop out or drop LSD. I came from a stable, nuclear family and obeyed most of the rules. When I did cross the line, I achieved the perfect balance of rebellious fun not injurious to myself or the future. I finished college in four years with a moderate amount of social experimentation. Then, equipped with an education and a marketable skill, I went to work and developed into a professional. Dull stuff? When did the conception of the relentless need to write occur?

I have always been a reader and a writer. In sixth grade, my best friend and I competed to see how many books we could read over the summer. I kept a diary, wrote silly stories, and imagined what it would be like to be Sylvia Plath. She had articles published in Seventeen magazine and other journals. That was enough for me. I didn’t know of her struggle with sorrow until I read The Bell Jar. She articulated my miasma of confusion and pain. It felt like the ink from the pages had seeped into my brain, read my mind, and unmasked me on the page. However, I wanted to be the teller of my tale.

My first job I cared for a girl/woman about my age. She and her boyfriend drove into harvested cornrows, parked their car, and “made out.” In the middle of winter in the Midwest, a white rime dusted the dirt. They left the car running. An old sedan, they never thought about anything but the pleasure of solitude and sexual awakening. Exhaust recycled in the car and carbon monoxide seduced them into an irreversible sleep. When I first cared for her, she had the telltale red lips, not of lipstick and flirtation, but of carbon monoxide poisoning. A macabre irony.

That same year, a man with end stage lung disease “died” before my eyes. His respirations became more labored. His color transformed from pale to gray. His heart segued from a classic rhythm to a scribble of lines no more organized than a child’s drawing. I watched the muscle tone in his face turn flaccid. His eye lids closed like a gentle final curtain. Unlike movies and television, death needed no flair for the dramatic, no symbolic closing of the eyes by a bystander. I hadn’t yet learned not to be afraid of the dead, but I busied myself with washing the sweat from his face and notifying the house supervisor. The attending physician started to fill out the death certificate. In the time it took us to dance around the reality of death, the straight line of the EKG monitor started to have an occasional blip. The blips accelerated into a tachycardia and the man gasped. A fine mist burst from his mouth. He resumed the work of breathing. He lived for another twenty-four hours before he performed his final encore.

The first five years of my career I drank to get to sleep. I worried about what I had missed, what I could have done differently or better. I wondered if I would or could ever know enough to do my job. I partied to find oblivion and solace and a way to live with the responsibilities I assumed by my choice of profession.

Forty years later, I am still nursing. Leaving the hospital after work one day, I walked out with a novice nurse I was training for critical care. A man hollered “Hey you!” I turned and stared into a handsome face I recognized that belonged to a man I had cared for when he had a heart transplant ten years ago. I think I remember his name. But I know I remember his positive attitude, his courage, and the gift he gave me just by letting me take care of him.

“I see you’re still doing the good work.” He hugged me. “She’s the best. You take a lesson from her,” he told my apprentice.

I remember the first loss, the first recovery, and many of those that followed. I remember the suffering and joy of patients and their families. I remember the demands of living a life interfaced by a job that required constant learning and emotional commitment.

In deference to becoming an artist, I never lived a life of reckless abandon. But I do have stories to tell.

Six tips about Tadalafil

A Writer’s Petit Mort

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On days when I have no time to write, I feel a vacancy, a black hole in my gut so painful and endless it reminds me of the first time I was in love. His name was Dan. He had a New York accent diluted by years in the Midwest. He avoided the draft because the Army didn’t have combat boots big enough to fit him, and he restrained his hormone saturated body to perfection in a tight slim width of nylon known as a Speedo. I loved him because he admitted I was smarter than he and it didn’t frighten him. We talked every day. And a part of me shriveled and retreated into self-loathing if I didn’t see him or hear from him. I was 17 years old.

I use legal pads and pens or my computer to write. If I don’t sit down and hard copy the words and sentences and dreams that torment me in the early morning hours, I flash back in time and relive the feelings of deprivation  I experienced when Dan and I were apart. There is a longing, even a lust to decorate a page with thoughts I don’t want to forget. When I hold a pen, I think about linking my fingers between his. When I smooth a page before decorating it with loops and dots and t-crosses, I return to a time when I ran my fingers through his hair, around his ear, along his jaw. On the computer, the requisite light touch on the keyboard mimics how I teased his lips when he fell asleep in my arms on a bus trip. I knew every nuanced crease of his mouth. When I finish a scene I experience the surprise and awe of our first French kiss, a kiss making heat and tongue and wet the flavor-of-the-month.

I like to think I am mature now, married, secure, consumed by efforts to crush stagnation with generativity. My writing renders my age meaningless. Passion ignites me via a circle of energy passing through and around me. I wrote the last word to my novel and asked my husband what word should end my work. He chose the same one I had moments before in my work room. “Amen.” (So be it.) I made a hard copy of the last chapter, sent the full manuscript to g-mail for storage, and hooted and hollered and danced around the house. I thought of love and the shuddering final ecstasy of the act. I reeled from the concoction of words birthed from me in the form of a book. The French call it the petit mort. I call it writing.

 

Six tips about Tadalafil