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Letters from Abu Graib by Joshua Casteel

We have some fascinating people in our workshop.  One of them is Joshua Casteel, who was an army interrogator at the infamous Abu Ghraib.  He ended up leaving the army as a conscientious objector.  I'd tell you more about him except he's been advised that someone or some group is after him so I'll keep the personal info to a minimum.  His book, Letters from Abu Ghraib, just came out.  It's a collection of his actual emails to friends and family from Abu Ghraib.  He assures me that none of the content was changed from his original emails.  He came in as part of the clean-up crew after the scandal.  It's a peek into his personal journey from a dedicated soldier to a conscientious objector.  It sold out from the local bookstore within 2 hours.  I'm waiting for the bookstore to restock it, but my friend, who did manage to buy it, has finished it already and says it's quite good.

Amazon currently says it's temporarily out of stock but if you order it anyway, they'll restock it.  Check it out:  Letters from Abu Ghraib by Joshua Casteel.

For those of you who have any doubts about Bush lying when he says we don't torture, check out more photos of Abu Ghraib.

Susan Ee
feraldream.com

After noticing some fine sawdust on the deck I went out to inspect and found a round hole in the bottom of a rail.  I saw a beetle-looking creature moving around in there, and then it actually stuck its head out and inspected ME !!  I sprayed some bug spray in the hole and forgot about it...until yesterday morning when pieces of shredded rail were all over the deck.  A woodpecker had gone after the critter in the deck rail.  Clearly, something had to be done. 

After doing some research, I surmized that the critter was probably a carpenter bee and that the recommended method of eradication was wasp spray, which I should have bought yesterday afternoon instead of last night because the woodpecker came back early this morning.  Yikes....pieces of wood everywhere !!  I sprayed the railing and went back inside. 

After chasing off the second woodpecker I noticed a good-sized buggie on the deck.  OMGosh....I had no idea they were so big, or so pretty...

Beautiful Bee

I was sorry that I had to spray the wasp spray, but as you can see, carpenter bees, and the woodpeckers who go after them, are very destructive.  Notice Carpenter Bee chewing on the evidence... She defiantly picked this up right in front of me !!

Very Destructive Bee

I wanted to get a better shot, so I harassed her a bit, and then she came after me !!  Sorry this shot is a bit blurry, but I was on the move.  WOW...she was MAD....notice the lifted leggie in the front....she was chasing me....Not going back out there for awhile....

Very Mad Bee

This list of tips for writers comes from an unlikely place.... the NEA blog on reading, which I was browsing trying to find the origin of that list I just posted.

1. Join a writers group, if only for the deadline. Always, for anything you write, have a deadline. When you meet one deadline, make another. When you blow one, definitely make another, and by all means forget you ever made the first one. Guilt is not your friend.

2. Be funny. Whether you’re writing comedy or not, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be amazing, because writing well without at least occasionally being funny is almost impossible. Try to make a reader laugh, or at least smile, with the way you pace and phrase a line. If you can’t use language to provoke one of the commonest, most pleasurable experiences around — laughter — how in the world are you going to do the harder but not necessarily better thing, and make a reader cry?

3. Enlarge your vocabulary. I’m serious. Your vocabulary is your tacklebox. If you go fishing with only a couple of lures, you’ll catch the same kind of fish over and over. Bring an overstuffed tacklebox, and there’s no lunker you can’t land. Use your vocabulary judiciously, of course, because not everybody has as big a one as you do. But don’t be afraid, every once in a while, to use a word your reader might not know. How else are they going to learn? How else did you?

4. Keep it sensual. By this I don’t mean write dirty, I mean engage all of a reader’s senses, especially but not exclusively the visual. Whether with a description or a metaphor, create pictures in your audience’s head. If you want to write about abstractions, be a philosopher, and reach even fewer readers than you already do.

5. Make stuff up. There’s been a vogue lately for writing that feeds on pre-existing material: novels about a famous love affair, novels about a notorious calamity, novels about great writers, etc. This kind of novel can work, but something original is almost always better than something derivative — more surprising, more fun, more suspenseful. In fiction, as on Wall Street, derivatives are an easy payday, but they don’t create wealth; they only redistribute it. The trouble with making up a new story is, alas, that it’s harder. Does Antioch teach a full-length course in plotting? I wonder, because it’s the least teachable skill a writer needs. If only it were the least important.

A related point here: the difference between telling the truth and making stuff up is getting slippery lately. When in doubt, trust what works. If the true stuff reads better, you’re probably writing nonfiction, so take out most of the made-up stuff. If the made-up stuff reads better, you’re writing fiction, so take out most of the true stuff. If you can’t decide which stuff reads better, write poetry. There at least, the true and the made-up belong together.

6. Keep rewriting the ending till it’s perfect; then wait a week and write it again. Writing an ending is the great lost art in American fiction. With the possible exception of your first graf, your last graf is the most important. If you can’t decide between two endings, they probably both need work.

7. Go for broke. Odds are you’ll be broke anyway, so you may as well go for it.

8 . Write every day. I’ve never tried this myself, but I hear it works.

I'm going to change the tempo up a bit here - seems like I've had a lot of heavy thoughts on my mind lately.  But I want to pose this challenge if you will to anyone who is willing to participate.  I've been proposing this question to the women in my life as a sort of research project for a new writing experience.

So here it is ladies... (and men if you want to join in and give me your perspective), the million dollar question - What do women want?

Sometimes we are afraid to admit what we really want because we don't want to be the only one. For some of us, being the only one is a scary thing.  We like to have a sense of belonging even if that means sacrificing who we really are inside.  So if you're up for the challenge, feel free to comment or message me. 

Looking forward to hearing from all of you!

xAmorette

I'm not sure what this is...poem, song or something like that. All I know is I wrote it and it is simply entitled Epic.

It was also heavily influenced by Dragonforce.

On more than one occassion, I've found myself thinking, "Why me?".  Whether because of some unfortunate circumstance or catastrophic event that has come my way, I always find myself peeling away the proverbial onion layers looking for an answer. 

After surviving one tragedy after another, it's hard not to wonder "Why me?" because it's almost like we are being personally targetted.  But I've come to realize in my now 'wise' years, that sometimes we can't question certain situations.  The reasons have yet to unveil themselves to us.  Maybe, they'll never be revealed and we just have to deal with it.  Harsh to say, even harsher to feel. 

Losing a loved one becomes surreal - the pain, is almost unplaceable.  It's like nothing ever experienced before.  You cry, you are hysterical over the shock.  A flashback of your loved one plays over and over in your mind.  Brilliant flashes all in rose colored fashion.  Feeling as though a piece of you has died with them, you suddenly snap back, and there is a calm that washes over you.  You are fine.  Quiet and still.  Your mind is trying to reason with your body.  Every fiber of your being trembling beneath the exterior and suddenly, you are a wreck once more.  It's been more than a year now since I felt pain of loss.  The second birthday without him quickly approaching...The second anniversary of his passing right around the corner.  There are days when my thoughts will not leave him, and days when I feel as though I never knew him. 

It is a pain, an emptiness in my heart that will never be healed.  I've had to remind myself on more than one occassion that it was not me who died.  I am a survivor;  What doesn't kill me, only makes me stronger.  Now, I am stronger for him.

. 

What soon-to-be-published book are you excited to read?

This is the new book coming out from one of my favorite Voxers, R.G. Ryan.  The book is due to be published in September, and contains many of the best of R.G.'s observations from a seat at St. Arbucks.  Please watch out for this book, and support a fellow Voxer by buying it when it comes out.  If you are not familiar with R.G.'s writing, here's a sample.

Life is so simple here in Iowa City.  I write, go to class, hang out with my friends, workout, read comic books, critique other people’s work.  It’s awesome.  No stress.  No complications.  No responsibilities.  No logistics.  No money issues (rent is $500/mo here).  Seriously, my most common concern for the day is whether it’ll rain or not.  I love it.

My backwards story was a difficult process.  Although I like the story that come out of it, I plan to try the experiment again.  I had tried to come up with an ending first, then the story.  That was really hard in that I kept thinking, that's a great beginning!  Adrian Khactu, my highly entertaining and brilliant classmate here in Iowa, was the one who told me about this particular backwards exercise.  He says that he first freewrites enough to get an idea of the story, THEN envisions an ending.  Oh.  No wonder it was hard.  That makes a lot more sense.

My next experiment will be to incorporate a particular city into a story, where the city matters.  Adrian and I are both doing this not because we think it'll improve our writing, necessarily, but because we're cheap whores who want to be accepted into a particular anthology.  Submission to the anthology is by invitation only and we managed to crassly invite ourselves.  So our stories had better be dazzling.  And that's the plan.  :-)

Susan Ee

http://feraldream.com/

The 4 emotional stages of the Iowa Writers Workshop, summer session:

EXCITEMENT - there's always so much excitement to joining a new group, especially when I go to an exotic place like Iowa City!

HAPPINESS - downtown Iowa City is awesome.  Lots of restaurants, lots of cafes, several gyms, a few grocery stores, a great library with comfy chairs and all of it within walking distance of both the campus and my place.  And because Iowa City really is a writers mecca, there's this sense of being in a very special place.  I love that they have quotes of authors imprinted on the sidewalks and more bookstores than I can count.  Here, if you meet someone, there's a very good chance s/he is a serious writer and you can talk about the art and craft of writing to your heart's content.

DISAPPOINTMENT - our instructor is highly respected, absolutely adorable and lovable, kind, generous, funny and brilliant... but he doesn't say much in class.  There are no lectures, very few pearls of wisdom that get passed on to us, no real craft discussions.  He's an artist.  His discussions are esoteric and enigmatic and its up to you to fill in the gaps on what should be done to improve your work.

The students are the best group of writers I've worked with -- they're all talented and skillful with interesting voices.  But it's not the best group of critiquers I've seen.  I'm not necessarily talking about each individual critique, I'm talking about clarity and the need to get some consensus on the feedback so the writer can put weight on a particular issue.  With our group, it often feels that everyone has a different opinion on what should be done to take the story to the next level.  At the end of the critique sessions, I feel that the writers often walk away with a muddied picture of what to do next.

My last disappointment was that we only get two story submissions per student for the quarter.  I'm used to a much more intense workshop format.  At Clarion West, we wrote a story a week for 6 weeks and critiqued everyone's submissions every weekday.  It was intense and transformative.  I was hoping for something just as intense and just as transformative.

CONTENTMENT - I've now reached a good balance in how I feel about my time here. 

Although our prof doesn't say much, when my story came up, he caught me in the hallway before my critique and told me that it was "really amazing."  He also talked about my story for 30 minutes in our private conference and lent me 3 books on heroes, myths and feminist writing.  I still don't know how to improve my story exactly, but the fog is slowly clearing as I learn to interpret his enigmatic suggestions and allusions.  This is his style.  I've realized it's my job to fill in the blanks because it's my story.  And how I interpret his comments will be strongly colored by how I see my story.  I'm cool with that.

Re our critiques -- at first, I thought it was just luck of the draw that our group had so little agreement in our constructive feedback.  But now, I'm thinking that this may be normal at this level of writing.  It's easy to agree on what needs to be done when there are basic problems in a story.  But it's much harder to agree on what needs to be done to improve that last 10% - 20% -- questions of how you modulate the voice of your narrator, get your story to breathe, add more emotional weight to your ending and questions of whether this story needs any of these things in the first place.  These are very difficult questions and we're no longer talking craft, we're talking art.  And because we're talking about art, which comes from the heart and not from the head, people can get quite passionate about their opinions.  I've decided to stop focusing on how the overall picture is muddied and start focusing on how each person approaches a story.  They're good writers -- their instincts work for them and I can learn something by opening my ears.

Re the number of stories -- by great luck, it turns out that someone else in my class is also a Clarion West Alum.  Yay!  I was really surprised because Iowa is not exactly known for their speculative fiction, despite the fact that they had Kurt Vonnegut on their faculty.  Anyway, we've agreed to write a story a week and give each other feedback.  I'm also recruiting others to give me feedback as well, although I'll only ask them to read one or two.  I'm experimenting with each story.  The one I turned into class was my most experimental piece ever.  Wild and wacky and a blast to write.  The next one was a story that mixed a literary character within a genre story.  I was trying for emotional weight in a Twilight Zone-ish plot.  The one I just finished is my first hard science fiction piece wrapped in a light-hearted story.  My next one is going to be written backwards -- by envisioning the ending, then writing the rest of the story to get there.  Each has its own challenges and pleasures.  Each has its own volume of lessons for me.

ACK!  This entry is way longer than I expected.  I have a backwards story to write.  Happy 4th!

Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/