Category: Essay

Mix tape memories

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Rumor has it that my generation was the last to make mix tapes.  And you know what?  I believe it – by the time I graduated high school, my friends and I had moved on to making mix CDs of stuff we downloaded from the internet at places like Napster and Kazaa.  I marvelled at the lightning-fast download speeds on my college campus, where you could download a song in only five minutes…while the rest of the campus lay sleeping.  Any other time, you could expect to wait at least a half an hour.  And that was if you were lucky.  It’s hard to imagine routinely waiting that long for a download now.

mixtape

Photo by Kay Kauffman

But back then, it was hard to imagine digital music ever fully supplanting physical copies of songs.  For some people, perhaps it still is.  Playlists are the new mix tapes.  Where CDs were once the height of technology, now they are as antiquated as dinosaurs.  And tapes?  Well, you might as well have crawled out of a cave.  “Tape?  What’s a tape?” the kids will say.  Don’t even get me started on vinyl.

I stumbled across some old mix tapes I made in high school the other day and have been listening to them in my car during my commute.  As a teenager, my living room boasted a stereo system that included a five disc CD changer, a digital AM/FM tuner, and a dual tape deck with auto reverse.  Now I think the only CD player I have in my whole house is in my computer.

The stories we tell ourselves

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From the moment we are conceived, we are part of a story.  And once we are born, we begin to tell our own stories.  New plotlines are added every day; new characters and plot twists pop up like dandelions in new spring grass.  These stories shape our personalities and color our interactions with the world around us; the stories we tell ourselves affect every aspect of who we are and who we will become.

icy

Photo by Kay Kauffman

Stories shape, and sometimes even become, our worldview.  But when that worldview is challenged, how do you respond?  Such challenges are often met with outrage, sometimes even hostility.  People throughout history have paid the price for their inability to rewrite their own sagas, sometimes losing sanity and life.  As ink jockeys, we know that all writing is rewriting, but what about the ordinary storytellers of the world?

To the journey

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This was originally posted on Griffin’s Quill on November 30 as a reflection on Goal Achievement Month for Authors. I had planned to post it here as well a bit sooner than this, but, well, you know how it goes…

Hmm…

I started this, my GAMA post, on November 7.  You can see how well that went for me.

November disappeared on me this year.  I was all set to do GAMA and NaNoWriMo and have a fantabulous month.  But you know that old saying about the best laid plans of mice and men?  Well, I used to know it, too.  Then November snuck up behind me and walloped me over the head with this really cool frying pan I saw on the FAIL Blog the other night.  Now I have no memory of pretty much anything beyond the last five minutes.

I’m like Dory from Finding Nemo, only hopefully much more endearing and much less annoying.

Redefining extraordinary

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This post began its humble life as a comment on my friend Tricia’s blog post “Extraordinary.”  It was late and I began writing, suddenly wide awake.  Pretty soon, I realized that my comment could easily become as long as her actual post if I wasn’t careful.

I first read Tricia’s post on Griffin’s Quill and I found it absolutely amazing because I’ve been dealing with so many of the feelings she mentions in her post myself lately.  So much of my life is one long, monotonous march toward the end – the end of the laundry, the end of the dishes, the endless cries of, “Don’t do that!” and “Don’t hit your brother!” and “Play nice!” and “Stay in bed, for the love of God!”  It’s dreary and dreadful and mind-numbingly boring some days.  I feel like I’m living in a fog.

But then, I open a book.

The writer’s identity

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Writing

My noon hour yesterday was much like many other noon hours at my day job.  I grabbed my computer, my wallet, and headed down the street to the local café-type establishment to quiet the beast inside (because yes, my stomach is a snarling, ferocious beast, foaming at the mouth as it waits, ever-impatient, for the victuals that will eventually slide into its gaping maw).  I took a seat, ordered my food, and withdrew my laptop from its handy-dandy carrying case to work on my story (and when that failed, to at least continue looking over one of five samples sent to me by a friend for some vicious red-penning).  As I was trying to solve a major plot problem (Ha!), a conversation caught my ear.  One of the waiters was discussing writing with the gal in the booth behind me.  He is a college student majoring in English; she is one of many people who have written a book, only to (likely) have it remain unseen by the masses, covered in dust, and taking up space in her home.  “But I sent it to so-and-so – he writes Christian books, you know – and he thought it was very good!” she proclaimed to half the bar, the waiter, and me.

Ignoring the woman, I asked the waiter what he enjoyed writing and what he wanted to do as a writer.  He was where my interest lay because he is at that point in his life where he still has the world at his fingertips and anything is possible.  Sure, anything is always possible, but at 28 with a husband and four kids, it’s not likely that I’ll be able to study abroad and learn French through immersion or spend a summer backpacking through Germany absorbing local culture anymore.  Anyway, he replied that he had wanted to be a novelist and he liked sci-fi, but that he’d been fighting depression and not writing as prolifically as he’d done before.  I mentioned that I’d just finished a fantasy novel and that my own depression had made me want to lock myself in my room to write.  Naturally, this piqued the woman’s interest, so she turned her curiosity away from the waiter and onto me.  “I’m sorry, what do you do?” Click here to find out!