Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

life

Writing with obstacles and rainstorms barring the way

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Steering around the logs

We’ve been getting a lot of rain lately, several weeks worth actually. Water is gathering on our side walk, and pooling there for days because the ground is so saturated. But the last two days have been dry and warm, so off to the lake we went to water ski.

The lake we usually go to was over capacity and the ramp was unsafe, so we headed for one further away but likely to be able to put our boat in.  We arrived and it looked great. I drove the boat off the trailer and my husband parked the truck. It wasn’t long before I was idling toward the dock to pick him up and head out into the wide lake while he prepped for skiing. Once he sat down, I increased the throttle and headed off for one of our favorite parts of the lake where we were sure to find smooth water. But I hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when I had to slow the boat and turn the wheel this way and that to avoid sinkers (logs floating just beneath the surface and not favorable to boats racing along).

My husband ever positive that there is a place on the lake for him to ski encouraged me onward. At first I complied, picking up speed and straining to pick out the telltale signs of a branch poking up from a hidden log positioned to hole our hull. I pulled back on the throttle after going halfway across the lake and got ready to turn into the arm we favored.  By then my husband was standing up in the boat, watching out over the canopy for sinkers he might need to warn me about. The boat speed kept the bow tipped up, so in order to see, I had been propped up on one knee and turned sideways in my seat so I could see over the windshield that was low cut and interfering with my view when I sat. My leg was starting to feel the strain of holding me on the seat, and my foot was wedged awkwardly against the seat back. There was no adjustment I could make without giving up the best view of the water ahead. I was certain we would not be skiing today, and I knew my husband would have to drive for himself to come to terms with that, besides my leg was beginning to cramp. It had been a long winter.

I told him to take over. He did without a word, driving the boat all the way into the arm, searching for a clear place to ski. But the lake was studded with sinkers and short thick branches and gnarled knots of wood floating every ten feet as though someone had applied a grid.

We played about dodging the long limbs and knots for an hour. Then we headed back in, put the boat on the trailer and resigned ourselves to not skiing for at least a couple weeks, if the rains were done.

As we drove home, I realized that this was the perfect metaphor for my writing this year. I had been steering around various obstacles: work, getting a college-bound high school senior organized for graduation, visiting my dementia-suffering mother, and taking care of this and that. I hadn’t any time to write and had to wait for the weather of life to abate a bit. So now I am here writing again and certain my planned date of publication for my fourth Students of Jump book was now delayed and my plans to fully draft my first contemporary fiction would have to be reconsidered.

It looks like the sky will be dry for awhile and life’s obstacles are looking sparse as well. So I am back to writing and hope all of you have clear skies, too.

#rain
#writing
#obstacles 

Advice: How I keep myself from getting all mixed up about who I am

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All me, just different.

Like most writers, I have a day job.  I am a teacher.  I am also a wife and mother, so adding a writing life just increases confusion to the standard complicated life of this everywoman.
I have to keep them from overlapping.  My teaching is about the student, not about what I do in my spare time. (Did I actually say I have spare time?  Little pebbles of time I can sometimes shaped into a useful mound is more like it.)  And when my husband needs to rant on about politics, house building, or the barking dogs next door, I can’t be Mrs. Teacher Lady or the Don’t Bother Me Now I’m Creating person.  Same goes when my daughter needs to talk boys or fashion or Minecraft, where she wants to go to college or,…..  Back to keeping them from overlapping because I think you get the picture.
I found
that setting up different accounts on my computer helped.  Each is named specific to that person, has a
unique password, and the desktop and Firefox persona are designed to express the
habits of the individual.  The bookmarks
for each personality are only on the login they belong to.  So if I get confused and want to go to a
particular site, I won’t find the address in my bookmarks which is a quick hint
to me to check who I am.  Each email is
unique and won’t have the same contacts either, so I don’t have to check my
email to make sure the right name is at the bottom.  (I had one awful panic thinking I had not clicked on the write persona for an email I was sending when I kept everything on one login.  Not going through that again.)  My phone is rigged to check all the email
traffic, but they are not lumped together.  I keep them separate with different
signatures.
So when I am L. Darby Gibbs, my desktop is an ever changing landscape of mountains, trees and flowers that remind me of New Hampshire.  The mom/wife in me has a more organized setup: a single landscape of an old stone house with a bright red door and roses by the stoop.  Teacher lady sports a cubist environment.  These personalities are reflected on my Mozilla page design as well.  The profile picture for each personality is different, too.
That is my simple solution.  The person I login is who I am.  It is particularly easy on Windows 8 to have all three personalities logged in.  I can moved from one to the other fairly quickly, yet it is clear which is which. 
So if you are juggling emails, platforms, website logins, and audience, try creating different computer logins.  There is no law stating that each person must really be a different person.  Just like when you set up that account for the child/ren in your life, you can also set them up for the different aspects of your life without feeling as if you have a split personality.
Do you have a simpler way of doing this?  I am all about simplicity, and I would enjoy hearing how you manage your different selves.

The other half of a writer’s life: family, friends, the other work

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Write when you can.  Be there the rest of the time

All writers juggle their private and public lives with their writing lives.  It doesn’t matter if they write for a living or write part time.  Yesterday, I had a rare day free from any after-work demand from my job.  I had a post for my blog to write, and the possible chance that I could work on Book 4 of my Students of Jump series during that open evening.  All in all getting home and working on my computer was definitely one of the options open to me.  But it was not to be, and I knew that at the start of my day.

My daughter had a project to do for a scholar’s program she was accepted into.  That project called for her gathering quite a few pictures, audio and video together.  Normally, this is not a problem.  We have a computer we used to use, before we got out of the business, for wedding videography loaded with all the necessary software and support features needed.  But technology is not always reliable, and the monitor started intermittently failing.   It is not hard to figure out what sort of delaying factor this had on her project.  We worked for hours nursing this monitor along from the time school let out and her midnight deadline arrived.

I was there for advice, instruction in software usage and emotional support as that monitor raised her stress level.  Fearful of  finding herself with a two-minute film imprisoned on a hard drive we could not access, she was working from a flash drive which slowed her progress as well.  But when we came close to the deadline and she had completed the video, we switched to another computer to upload the rendered product.  You’re probably wondering why we just didn’t shift the software to another computer. Well, it’s been some years since we were videographers and that software is old and cannot work with Windows 7 or 8.  She was managing with the oldest computer in the house because she had no choice.

Usually it takes a few days to hear back how she scored on a project.  Today we arrived home, and she checked her email to find she had been notified that her grade was posted.  My daughter told her father and I about the notification then accessed her grade book.  The nervousness she was feeling was evident in her grip on her iPod and how she turned away from looking at its screen.

If I wasn’t nervous myself, it would have been funny watching her slowly turn her head back toward the image, her eyes squeezed as though anticipating having something thrown at her as she tried to make out her grade.  With a dramatic “Oh, my, God,” she threw back her head and leaned against the back of her chair, a picture of sudden enervation.  We weren’t sure how to interpret her response and asked how she did.  To avoid bragging, I’ll just say she did very, very well.  Neither of us had much sleep last night, and there was some uncertainty about what was actually wanted, so I would have clapped my hands over just about any grade.  She had reason to be pleased.

So you found me out. This is one long excuse for not posting my weekly Wednesday post this morning.  But tired as I am, and though I did not get to work on my book and went through a school day feeling a bit fuzzy and running on my “I’m not a tired teacher” gear, I’m glad I was there for my girl. 

Family, friends, work: we write in and among, around and through these demands every day.  Sometimes they are big events; some inconvenient; some, like this activity, part of being a mom.  All of these are part of being a writer.

What have you had to write through and around?  What moments are you thankful for that got in the way of writing but left you feeling proud you were part of it?  Tell me your tale of distraction/connection.

Writers are collectors

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You may not find a series of shelves massed with tiny figurines or thirty-odd tennis racquets mounted on the wall and never used, but we’re collectors.  We keep scraps of images, places, phrases, and emotions.  Some of us organize them in neat rows on revolving memories deep in our subconscious while others of us let them tumble about getting stuck together, so we can just reach in and grab a clump.  But we are constantly collecting from the world of experience around us.

pine resin, cool breeze, the heavy alarm of cicadas

I have lived all over the US, visited abroad a few times, and I can smell and hear these places no matter what current place is about me. In my mind the Narraganset trail lays out before me, twisting eagerly toward the Oregon Trail which I also know well in parts.  Standing on the deck of a ferry moving between Seattle, Washington, and Victoria, Canada, I can feel the rumble beneath my feet, the stiff breeze dragging at my ponytailed hair, the stacks of tandem bicycles filling the lower deck, row after row of them.  I can still see the riders standing about chatting in their matching jerseys and riding shoes that clicked in awkward careful steps that seemed to lean the riders slightly back on their heals.

I recall the day I moved into a new house when I was nine years old.  We moved often, and I had formed the habit of running outside to check out the neighborhood the moment I was excused by my parents.  I would peer up and down the street searching for children near my size and age.  This day I looked beyond the cul-de-sac I lived in, across the connecting main road into another cul-de-sac.  Three little girls were playing in the street.  I don’t remember how I introduced myself, but I do remember they greeted me warmly, and we played until twilight and the street lights began to flicker on, which was my signal to return home.  We agreed to play again the next day, to be life long friends.  Just as I was about to head home, one girl asked me if I was Catholic.  I admitted that I was Lutheran.  Suddenly, the girls became a wall, shoulder to shoulder in front of me.  One girl stated quite dismissively that they were not to play with children who were not Catholic.  They left me standing in the middle of that cul-de-sac watching their stiff little backs as they strode away.

I didn’t go home despondent; I was confused.  We had had a lovely day playing together, and one word had changed everything.  The next day I met two girls who lived several blocks away but were far more willing to enjoy lovely days with me regardless of my faith.  All six of us took the same bus, but I don’t think I ever talked or even glanced at those three cul-de-sac girls again.  I wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t angry.  But that moment of separation is saved inside me.

We writers gather these moments, and somehow they grow into stories, poems, essays, novels, and histories because we never stop looking at them, turning them about in our minds, viewing them from different angles, remembering tastes, textures, sensations of the moment.  We are connoisseurs of memory and experience.

What have you collected recently?

#writers
#memories

Married for 30 years: How did that happen?

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Keep as much as you can in common

When I look back at all my husband and I have done in our lives together, it is not so hard to understand how we could be married for more than 30 years.  Rather than go into the specifics of all those adventures, I  am going to supply a list of general rules that we follow that I feel are the reasons we are together and are planning on staying that way.

  • We recognize that we have many dissimilar interests, so while we respect those differences we encourage those interests we have in common.  We both love to waterski.
  • When we have disagreements, we work on the premise that everything we say should be geared towards working it out. 
  • I cannot read his mind nor he mine, but we have had plenty of time to learn to read the body language we use.  Given that, we make every effort to keep the lines of communication open.  Sometimes that means taking some time to figure out what it is we want the other person to know, whether he/she “should have figured” it out or not.
  • We don’t say anything negative about each other to other people.  We don’t argue in public.  We do say positive things about each other to other people.
  • When it comes to spending a large sum of money on something, we both have to agree.
  • We have a designated bill payer, designated lawn care person, designated kitchen cleaner, etc., but the other person is welcome to help anytime and does. 
  • One of us is always better at something than the other, so we always help each other.
  • We don’t make the other person feel uncomfortable.
  • We happen to have the same occupation, but we go about our jobs differently.  So we know there is more than one way to do something and still do it right.  That means we can learn from each other, even when we are already experts.
  • We don’t love each other despite or in spite of our flaws.  We love each other because of all we are: flaws and finer qualities together.
  • There are some things neither of us like to do, but they have to be done.  So we make sure we do them together.
  • Most importantly: We like each other.

We do mess up on occasion, but we always come back to one thing:  underneath the problem is the promise that we love each other.

Photos, memories, mothers and time – never enough

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Over the last few months, I have been noticing my step mother has been suffering from short-term memory loss.  She will, in fact, ask me the same questions several times over the course of a ten minute phone call.  She writes lists of things she has to get done and then forgets where the list is or even that she already wrote it.  She does not remember if she paid her taxes this year.  This loving woman has been my mother since I was a little girl, so my attachment to her is strong and deep. 

Just months ago we were talking about books, her customers, being a mother, and what activities she has planned.  These days she cries during most of my calls, she is frightened of driving at night, tells me repeatedly that she loves me and is fearful I will take offense at something she says or does and stop loving her.

I call her multiple times a week since we live several states apart, and I can seldom visit her. 

She asked me quite recently to create a photo album of my daughter since her birth to the present.  At first I thought of this as a task that would be quite time consuming especially since I have sent her pictures over the years, and she could build such an album herself.  But in the last few months, she has admitted to having problems remembering things.  I am beginning to think that what she was asking for was something to keep her from forgetting her granddaughter. 

So now I am busy building that life album for her.  I hope it is enough to help her hold onto a granddaughter she loves.  The journey ahead looks particularly uncertain, my time with her off kilter and short.