Fallen Angel

The demise of my childbearing potential has come with some inconvenient side effects. During the office renos this month, I happened on a conversation between two colleagues about plugging a computer directly into a wall socket. “Is that allowed?” one was asking, “or do we have to use a power bar for surge protection?”

“You can plug it in directly,” the other replied, “but I’m all about surge protection.”

I almost chipped in with a fervent, “So am I!” because the oscillating fan in my office has four settings and I could really use one that has a fifth.

The other hormonal hiccup is dry skin all over and itchy skin in patches. A particularly persistent spot has developed on the inner edge of my left shoulder blade. The other day I was pretzel-twisting to reach it and thought, “Why is it so itchy here?”

The answer immediately followed:

“It’s where your wings used to be.”

Out Where the Buses Don’t Run

So the fellow who was signing for the deaf during Nelson Mandela’s memorial service got into some trouble by supposedly signing gibberish. Later news blurbs have the poor guy admitting that he’s a diagnosed schizophrenic and had freaked out when he saw angels entering the stadium. I guess that’s when his signing went sideways and the media put him under the global microscope: “Nutbar Fools Security and Gets Too Close to World Leaders at Mandela’s Funeral.”

How did he get that close to those world leaders when security was tighter than my jeans fresh from the dryer?

Part of me sympathizes with him – not because of his alleged personality disorder, but because on hearing his side of what happened, my first thought was, What if angels were in the stadium? Seriously. It seems to me that if angels were to show up anywhere, Mandela’s memorial service would be an appropriate occasion. He was a great man. He was a good man, a kind man, an ultimately peaceful and patient man. He was the sort of soul whom the angels would want to ensure gets back to where he belongs, to that better place we’re told of but fear we won’t ever see.

Do I believe in angels? I don’t disbelieve in them. I believe in oxygen, after all, and I can’t see that, either. If angels do exist, it makes sense that some people can see them. Many people see ghosts. Many people are tapped into the great beyond in ways the majority can’t imagine (and that might be why the majority don’t see the same things – they have ceased to imagine anything except the worst). Seers and mystics are not new to society. Now, as throughout history, they’re simply counted among those with mental problems. Writing them off as lunatics makes the rest of us feel better, but maybe, just maybe, this man at Mandela’s service actually saw angels and slipped into “signing gibberish” from fear. Not fear of the angels themselves, but of a relapse in his diagnosed condition, and the inevitable criticism of everyone who’s plugged into the global network. He could be a deeply spiritual individual with a gift for seeing things unseen. Truly, a gift for seeing angels, ghosts, whatever, a gift like that could drive you mad because so few others understand or share it.

Where am I going with this? “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” Maybe the crazy ones aren’t crazy at all.

Writer's Conundrum

A Scribe’s Skirmish

writer’s conflict

the impossibility

of writing with

magnificence

contrasted with

the impossibility

 

of

 

abandoning

the challenge

writer’s conundrum

            © Nicole D. Myers 2013

What do you do when neither version is working? You dump the whole project. Except that there is something in a writer’s makeup that refuses to quit.

My personal poet laureate, the exceptional Nicole D. Myers, wrote this poem a few weeks—yes, weeks—ago, and has kindly given her consent for me to share it here. I asked because dang if she didn’t nail the universal quandary square on the coconut. I loved the poem from the get-go (it’s posted on my office bulletin board) and came face to face with an example of “the conundrum” last weekend.

The angel story isn’t working. Shifting perspective temporarily fooled me into believing otherwise, but as Ter observed following my latest grouchy rant, I have emerged from my room unhappy and dissatisfied each time I’ve tangled with it. She recommended that I bag it for the nonce, adding that I can always go back to it when the time is right. The story is good. It’s just not meant to happen right now. So I skulked back to my room, opened chapter 18 of my stalled Castasian novel, and actually finished it (the chapter, not the novel). At least I worked on something, even if it evolved from admitting defeat on another count.

Only admitting defeat does not come easily to this writer. While I was distracted with the tale of Reijo and Jannika that afternoon, the other part of my brain was pondering the problem with Cristal and Shade. It is a good story. Why the %^$#*&^ isn’t it effing working????

The answer came, as usual, at bedtime.

It’s not one story. It’s actually two. Two different freaking stories about angels. This explains why Cristal and Shade in her version are completely different from Cristal and Shade in his version. I mean it. The characters in one POV (point of view) are polar opposites of the characters in the other, hence my garment-rending angst over getting anywhere. Clearly I have four characters using two names. I’ll fix that forthwith, but the relief I felt at discovering the potential for a whole new pair of stories set in this angelic realm was akin to the relief of discovering that the headache you’ve endured for weeks is finally gone.

The impossibility of writing either with magnificence remains. Okay, so does the challenge of crafting two separate stories when I’d anticipated a single piece. If there’s any good news here, it’s that I have a whole new world in which to play ... assuming I can relax enough to accept what comes when it comes and quit forcing it when it won’t.

Writer’s conundrum indeed.

Chai du Jour

3.5 of 5

Moka House this morning, strategically located across from the Starbucks in the village. They don’t do a chocolate chai, so I sprinkled chocolate powder on top of a regular chai and proceeded to sip and scribble. They brew it from Mighty Leaf tea but they foam it up thick and creamy, so compared to Bucky’s and Teavana, I give it a 3.5. Tomorrow I’ll see how Serious Coffeeʼs stacks up against the competition. 

While I was sipping, I made notes galore about the angelsʼ realm. I had a blazing revelation yesterday and, as usual, nothing is as I suspect. I had to handwrite it, though, before I forget anything important. This story has got me in a bit of a tizzy given that a) itʼs coming out of sequence, which wrecks my neatly ordered method of starting at the start and writing through to the end, and b) the realm with which I am dealing is wilder than I imagined it would be. Not that I had much to go on before I began; angels donʼt get a lot of air time in Sunday school. Aside from delivering the occasional heavenly message or dropping off a set of golden plates for translation, they were pretty much left unaddressed … which frees me to write what my characters describe. All my children are interesting, but I am developing a special fondness for Shade. He is literally caught between two worlds and has been a party to this one long enough to become fearful of an inevitable outcome, yet his heart drives him toward Cristal in spite of it. I donʼt yet know what the point of the story will be, but I found this scrawled in my notes and it seems to capture the essence of the piece: 

They cannot be together

but they must be together

because they are lovers

from the dawn

of time

And in This Corner ...

I saw it on a form at work and thought, Cool name for a …

A what? A vampire? No.

A vampire hunter? No.

A hit man? No.

A spy? No.

Well, what then??

An angel.

Oh, perfect. I know nothing about angels. Beyond the usual, I mean. Winged messengers from God. Naked cherubs who sit on clouds and pluck harps all day. Clarence Oddbody doing good to earn his wings. This means I have to do research. Yuk.

Wait a minute. Research could mess with the story. Why not let him tell it the way he knows it and see where it goes? I might learn something. I learned about my vampires this way. (My vampires are a little different from everyone else’s.) My cool inspector and I held a jam session last night, during which so many pieces fell into place that I am devoting the rest of this weekend to working with this story. I’ve no idea how long it will run or how it will end, but I write because I want to see what happens.

His name, by the way, is Shade.