Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

memory

A Stab at a Self-interview: Question 9 ~ Social media and me

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Do you spend a lot of time on social media?

Hmm. Not like I used to. In the past I gave a lot of time to Twitter and Google+ (made a lovely friend and joined a wonderful group). I have an account with Pinterest and Goodreads as well, but I visit rarely. I’ve since narrowed my activity to Facebook and keeping up this blog. I just can’t be split all over the place keeping an internet presence, writing and publishing, and working the day job.

Even my efforts at keeping those two sites up are cranked down quite a bit. I visit Facebook once a day and read the two groups I like, post a comment or two and maybe visit my books page and make a post there. As for this blog, I am trying to post once a week on Saturdays. Even so, I’ve missed a few days here and there.

But my writing is a daily effort. I am working on the third book in the Standing Stone fantasy series and am meeting the goals I set for myself to ensure a publication in September. When I’m not writing and putting in my brief social media visits, then I’m spending time with my husband and learning to play a musical instrument.

I posted awhile back about keeping the mind sharp. One of the points I made is how much learning to play an instrument it related to maintaining memory. So I’ve taken the plunge and I’m learning to play the twelve hole ocarina. I won’t be posting any songs online anytime in the near, and probably distant, future. I am about as novice a musician as they come. I am learning about notes and rests and treble clef, etc. It’s another language to say the least.

So no time for a big social media presence. But I do have author pages at Smashwords and on Amazon for those interested in knowing me better than just what I post here.

I am working up the courage to start a newsletter. It was one of my summer goals. Summer is not over yet, but I won’t promise anything. I’ll have to learn how to create an email base, a newsletter, setup signup pages and add them to my books as well as this site. But it will have to wait for the completed draft of book 3 and the weeks it will be with my beta readers when I can take a short writing break.

#socialmedia
#memory

16 Actions You Can Do to Improve Your Memory

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Be the Butterfly – Enjoy life and remember

I’ve been studying memory and what I can do to maintain and improve my own. My mother and father-in-law have both suffered from Alzheimer’s related dementia and memory loss. It has been heartbreaking. What has been even more an issue is the effort those around them go to looking for ways to hold back or even turn back the loss of memory our loved ones suffer.

My father-in-law’s memory of all children, grandchildren, friends and even his wife was completely gone in the last year, and his death in late last year was gut-wrenching. For all of that loss, we kept reminding each other that it was his last three years that were the most troubling. Not such a long period of time when we remembered that he lived to 93 in good health and gleeful about life and family.

What did he do that probably helped stave off a disease that had been diagnose early in his 70’s?

  1. He was active all his life and played competitive tennis into his 70s, practicing daily when not competing in seniors tennis.
  2. He played tennis into his 80s. Then played vicariously via watching the US Open and other major tennis meets. Did you know your muscles will actually be stimulated if you watch a sporting activity with interest and interaction?
  3. He watched his diet, eating balanced meals and taking appropriate levels of vitamins, minerals and herbs.
  4. He treated everyone respectfully and with kindness.
  5. He was strongly involved in his church and spent many years with his wife as a marriage-encounter teacher.
  6. He wrote his children letters often (not typing or email).
  7. He maintained a positive attitude and encouraged others to as well.

But as I said I’ve been studying memory. And there are numerous ways to maintain memory even against debilitating diseases.

  1. Stay active – tennis, walking, indoor skydiving, yoga, jogging, jumping rope, ping pong – get your heart rate up and move around. Physical activity and Risk of Cognitive Impairment and Dementia in Elderly Persons
  2. Eat intelligently and selectively. There are numerous foods that are said to help your body combat illness and disease – blueberries, cranberries, cherries, coconut oil, olive oil, fish, garlic, oatmeal, broccoli (I’m one of those people who think broccoli is nasty tasting, but broccoli spears don’t seem to bother me) Can blueberries assist in maintaining memory?
  3. Listen to music, classical, instrumental, music from your favorite memories, jazz, new age, etc.
  4. Learn to play a musical instrument – kazoo, harmonica, guitar, flute, piano – anything that forces you to learn the musical language and reproduce it with sound. Heck, play your armpit. How Music Affects the Brain for the Better
  5. Reduce stress in your life and develop ways to combat and deal with it when it arrives – exercising maybe or the next suggestion Chronic Stress Can Hurt Your Memory
  6. Get enough sleep, not too much nor too little too often. Routine sleep habits that provide the amount of sleep your body needs can help deal with stress, reduce stress and even help you not approach stressful situations as stress inducing Too Little Sleep, and Too Much Sleep, Affect Memory
  7. Hang around positive people who care about you and enjoy your positive company Optimism and Your Health
  8. Marry the person that makes your life complete and whose life you bring happiness and security to
  9. Take vitamins (cautiously, of course. Do your research) Vitamin Bible
  10. Challenge yourself daily to recall memories important to you The Effects of Aging on Memory
  11. Write a book – you’d be surprised how demanding it is to create lives for several other people, plot out the difficulties they are going through and figure out how to get them out of the inescapable corners you back them into. Write flash fiction if you want the same challenge but on a much tighter scale
  12. Meditate – you don’t have to turn your legs into a pretzel. Lay down on the couch and decompress for fifteen minutes. Meditation Benefits
  13. Simplify – I don’t mean sell everything and move into a tiny house. Just remove some of the complications in your life
  14. Research your family history – keeping track of all those ancestral lines is going to work your mind and give you an alternative to think about when life is handing you tough stuff.They got through it; you will too.
  15. Garden, keep a bonzai or raise koi – being involved with something that takes time, and takes it slowly will give you time to reflect and gain strength in watching your efforts create beauty in nature
  16. Don’t do everything listed above – pick out a few to add to your life (activity) and a few to alter your life (diet)

#memory
#meditation

We Write from Memory, for Memory and Sometimes to Memory

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Memory is essential for everything we do. We learn through memory, understand through memory, forgive and even forget by way of memory. We revisit our past and consider our futures all through memories built from ours and others recall.

Recently, chatting with H. M. Jones whom I met on GooglePlus just a week or so after reading her book Monochrome (filled with the underpinnings of what motherhood is, not to mention the very important feature of memory) got me thinking back on the other avenues of writing I had taken.

Jones invited me to consider submitting a poem to a women’s online anthology she has started up to give a voice to women finding publication difficult. I haven’t tried to publish any poetry in many years, so I was surprised at how intrigued I was by the opportunity.

Memory: I remembered my pregnancy-inspired poetry from nearly twenty years ago.  I am certain her book and the various topics we touched on in our discussions were the trigger. I checked out Jones’s Brazen Bitches anthology link on her H. M. Jones Writes website. I knew instantly which one of my poems belonged among the selection she had already posted.

I searched for the one I had in mind within my file of long packed away poems. It was just as I remembered it. I returned to those strong maternal feelings for a child yet to be born and realized that my daughter had reached the age when seeing this poem inspired by her beginning would show her what my hopes had been and what they still are.

I sent “Sister Clytemnestra” to H. M. Jones and held my breath that it was ready to speak for itself.

Memory: without it writers have nothing to give. It is through memory that we find a way to speak for those not yet ready to voice for themselves or not yet filled with remembering or the remembered.

When Hannah Jones (H. M. Jones) let me know that she would be adding my poem to the anthology, I felt exuberant, and the first thought I had was that my daughter must see this poem.

I have to admit I was more excited to show her than she was to see it. But she did read it and we talked briefly about its origins and inspiration. I was expecting a, “Gee, mom, you really were thinking about me.”

That’s not what she said though. She saw familiar mythology, and remembered texts she has read and studied.

I had forgotten she was an aspiring/growing writer herself. I realize now it will be a bit before the intent of the poem and its direct connection to her rises past the other aspects she was more focused on noting.

My daughter is a designer/engineer at heart. What grabs her attention fits more under the vocabulary of “foundation,” “process,” “structure,” and “skill.” She was busy dissecting not appreciating.

But I remind myself of memory. She will remember after a bit that the poem I showed her belongs to her more than anyone else. It may speak to others, but it was speaking to her long before she was listening. And one day, she will get past the what of it and see the intent I had that she become the women that she has grown into without ever knowing that was my wish until it had already happened.

#memory
#motherhood

Tuesday Prompt: #43 2012

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Dig out an old photo of when you were a kid.  Write about the moment it was taken. Imagine the image in black and white whether it is or not.  Keep your descriptions of colors in the grey scale. Go for the shadows, the bright spots; enrich your description by looking at the sharpness of the lines, the feelings the picture evokes and the story it is ready to tell.

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

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.