Contexts

I fell when I was 13. When I tried to save myself, I landed on the ball of my right foot. Weak ankles should have been my middle name. The ball of my ankle actually popped out of the socket and then went back in. Yeah. That was the first week of summer break between sixth and seventh grade. I spent the whole summer laid up and barely able to move. So I finally got desperate enough at age 13 to read a book. My mom brought home a stack of books a few days after my accident and in desperation I picked one out.

It was 1983. There was no internet. We didn’t have cable. The 7 or 8 free tv channels we had didn’t have anything interesting on. There was no VCR or VHS tapes yet. I couldn’t walk on that leg for weeks! Never got an x-ray or anything. My parents wouldn’t pay for that. So I sat around and read this book I’d picked from my mother’s stack of books and loved it so much I realized that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: write stories!

The book was Daughter of Witches by Patricia C. Wrede.

I worked for 36 years as a caregiver because that just happened and it didn’t require much from me – just my soul and all my time and whatever was left over at the end of the day, assuming my day didn’t just melt to the next day in a triple shift of caring for someone with mental illness or alzheimers.

My father was my last patient. I retired after him. I sat around for a while and rested. I really needed that rest. Then I decided after my contemplation to go back to college then to university and pursue that degree that would allow me to write which is all I ever wanted to do.

So this, my second semester at UTD, my first as a Junior, I had a class called Contexts. This class focuses on a type of literature. The Professor, Dr. Patterson, focuses on memoirs and diaries, specifically one type of memoir and diary: the Holocaust.

One thing I learned is that there are 4000 memoirs and diaries to come out of the Holocaust. People who were already threatened by death went on to document the crimes happening to them and around them even though if they got caught it would mean being shot. I got to read two diaries and three memoirs over the Spring Semester. To say they are depressing is a huge understatement.

One of those the professor mentioned but that I’ll never read is this one.

The Nazis had the Jews do all the hard work. This means that the gas chambers and to some extent burning the dead were all jobs which Jews themselves had to do to their own people, a method of completely dehumanizing someone. Those who were working in the crematoria were called Sonderkommandos. This person accepted the job not knowing what it was and spent months pulling his own countrymen out of the gas chambers. If you’re in any way into horror, this is it right here. Real. Horror.

We’re approaching 90 years since the Holocaust happened. There are people who completely deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. The fact there are 4000 diaries and memoirs suggest that it did.

I’m considering highlighting portions of the books I’ve read. I thought about doing it on Facebook but I’m not sure they’d be cool with the subject matter. WordPress might allow me the freedom to post some excerpts with the understanding that these excerpts aren’t about happy things. There’s not a happy thing that happened in regard to the Holocaust. Most of those who were rescued after Hitler was defeated didn’t believe being rescued was a happy thing. By the time they were rescued, their ability to feel happiness had been forever altered.

The author of the above memoir did not survive.

Ten Months Later

Ten months later, two semesters at UTD completed, I was reminded of my prior commitments when my WordPress account charged another year to my account. I’m definitely keeping this account. I’m reevaluating if I want to keep my merchandise at Amazon. I love the kindle and I have a lot of kindle books but their recent decisions with buying kindle books and ownership has changed some of my thoughts about using them for my own merchandise. I guess I’m just old but I believe when you buy a book, even if it’s digital, that content is always yours – not the intellectual property, of course. Copyright laws and all. But that copy belongs to me because I paid for it. Versus renting which I as a university student certainly have done on occasion. There are other options out there.

Just when it appears as if publishing and print material is taking it’s last gasp, as if the world has turned its face against print media, as if books and reading might be so antiquated that no one ever really cares, there comes a new wave of readers who jump into the realities that reading can do for us what nothing else can. Can’t afford a vacation? Read a book! It can calm my mind, take me places I’ll never go, and show me lives I’ll never live. Since starting my university journey, trying to obtain a B.A. in Literature, I’ve discovered loads of new authors who I really do enjoy. Oddly, I like Sophocles. Didn’t care for Homer. Didn’t mind Ibsen. Not a huge fan of James. Marquez was interesting and long. Really did learn a lot during this last semester, the first of my Junior year.

I haven’t forgotten my experiment. It’s still ongoing but I’m just not doing much with that right now and for those who were reading my books, I’m sorry I stopped in the middle of a volume like that. But the more I go along, the more I realize that if I rewrote a portion of Joanna, I could really make that into something. At the same time, I just really enjoyed putting the books out there and enjoyed holding the printed copy in my hands. When I started doing this experiment, publishing them was free for me. Now that they’ve upgraded to pdfs I need Adobe Acrobat or something similar and I just don’t have that $600 a year to pay for that. Not and I’m not earning that money back. I love hobbies and all but as a retired person, my hobbies need to bring in money and the crochet, quilting, and art can bring in money. When publishing these books was free, it was fine that I was only getting about ten dollars every few months. Now they want me to put in such an investment … It was one thing when I could just buy the software and use it as needed but Adobe doesn’t do that now. They want to pull as much money from my pocket as they can so I have to think outside the box and outside the box typically means getting away from picky Amazon where everything has to be just so and moving to another venue where it costs me less. Additionally, the movement to get away from U.S. tech has accomplished something I didn’t think anything could. The fear of being spied on is real with social media and now with various issues arising in the U.S. people are shopping outside the U.S. for social media and tech services. There is everything you need out there and I found an option for Adobe products which would cost less than a third of the price and offer up the exact same thing. So I’m seriously considering that but I am right now focused on my university journey because that is super expensive and takes a lot of effort and concentration.

Which is to say, I haven’t forgotten my books. I never forget them. I’m still writing! But I am working my next career and trying to become something else while always aware a literature degree may not pay the bills. So while I’m so in love with publishing and all the joy it brings me – I just really love creation and publishing like quilting is making something out of pieces – ultimately my responsibility toward myself is to make sure my tomorrows are going to be okay. That – that is a big job right now in this chaos which has erupted in the U.S. and abroad. Gotta have multiple income streams. More like flood plains in these days.

With all of that said, I apologize. I’m doing some required certificates right now, one of them being Adobe, with the hope I can transfer that to the other product I found. Once that’s done, I’ll resume my publishing experiment/journey/adventure! After I get the nasty required courses out of the way, I’ll have some fun and a bit more time to enjoy the play side of publishing and hopefully I’ll have a little place where I can be gainfully employed but not trapped in a mire which is, sadly, so much of the work I was accustomed to doing during my 36 year career as a caregiver. I still care. I just spend all that on myself now.

1, 2, 3 … Breathe

Life has not been treating me very fair lately. I discovered during a recent appointment that a medication I’ve been on for just over a year to treat my diabetes may have damaged my heart. I’ve been feeling off, drained, unwell for over a year. This is the same year during which I’ve been dragging myself along, unable to accomplish much more than to just sit and dream of things I wanted to get done but can’t seem to make any progress in. Not to say this is the reason Dorian 2 isn’t published. There are many reasons for that lack of publication success.
In order to continue my experiment of publishing books such as Dorian 2 and then Rossyn 1, I’ll need to pay for then acquire Adobe Acrobat. My investigations state this is the program that Kindle is going with. And that’s a wise choice, really. It’s a well-established program which is easy to access if you have the yearly subscription fee which isn’t lightweight. But it has all the power and ability to be The Desktop Publishing Genius to get your book published.
I’m pooling money to start university in under 3 weeks, and life. So … when I get the money together to add Adobe Acrobat to my life, then I’ll get Dorian 2 out. I’ve already got the book to tell me how to do all of this. One thing is settled even if it’s not purchased.
As I’m sitting here on this Monday morning wondering why my 50s are so much more stark and confrontational than my 40s were, I’m staring at this bookcase which has set in my house for 50 years. It’s older than me by quite a bit and contains books my great-grandmother left behind as well as some that her daughter, my great aunt left. They all passed to their son and brother, my grandfather on my mother’s side. I found myself looking at this bookshelf yesterday and at a book I hadn’t read in the 50 years it’s sat there. I’d read the ancient copy of Jane Eyre several times, read the Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, The Dairyman’s Daughter (some bit of religious drivel), and Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables. For whatever reason this brightly colored book hasn’t been read so I pulled it out of the small wooden shelf of ambiguous age and decided to read it as my mind is being pulled this way and that with the horrors of being 50 and facing extended ill health just as I’m trying to move into a new chapter in my life with university and following a dream I’ve had since I was 13.
The Amethyst Box written by Anna Katherine Green was printed in 1905 and has my great-grandmother’s name written in exquisite penmanship on the inside page. She wrote her married name because in 1905 women still only existed within a marriage. Her real name was Victoria. I know this because her Bible from 1897 is also on that shelf. Before God, she used her unmarried name.
Anna Katherine Green is still considered by many to be the mother of detective fiction despite the fact someone else published a detective novel slightly before her. But she went on to write many of these from the late 1800s to the early 1900s and was a legend in the detective novel world. And her book is fabulous. Like the chain on a roller coaster that snatches at the undercarriage and drags the coaster up to the top of the big drop, the first page grabbed me and I can’t believe I haven’t read this before! It’s been wonderful to have this little bit of a distraction in a month where I’m not really writing because my mind is churning as I’m facing appointments and tests and realities I’m not sure I’m ready to confront. But the reality is, more time is going by where I can’t keep on with my experiments. I can’t even send in other works to be copyrighted so I can immediately follow up Dorian 2 with Rossyn 1 and 2. My money is tied up with university and day-to-day expenses. I’m at a stopping place for the moment. I’m uncertain what my future holds but I want it to include me writing more and more and turning this experiment into something else. Something more. What is a dream if you fulfill it and then no one notices?
For anyone who would like to see what the first detective fiction looked like, many if not all of Anna Katherine Green’s books are available to read online at http://www.gutenberg.org.