12 Things I learned while snorkeling in the Red Sea

I’ve been debating for a while now, how best to use my blog. My life is fairly unstable at the moment. We’ve moved to the other side of the planet, and my boys still aren't registered in school. So I have two big fiery balls of energy racing, bored through my only writing space for about 12 hours a day. This, while I also attempt to relearn to cook with a range of ingredients I’ve never heard of before. It’s been a long process to figure out what I can find and what has to be made from scratch and what can be learned and what has to be lived without. I also have to learn at least enough of a new language to be able to maneuver my new city. And set up a household, not being able to find half of what I’m used to living with. And all this after probably the most exhausting six-month period of my married life. I feel as though I’m relearning how to live. It’s a good thing I get the occasional adventure on the weekends.

So I haven’t been writing all that much in the past several months, which means that I haven’t felt like I had that much to write about here either. But I have been learning, and note-taking and storing away for later.

I remembered this weekend that the whole reason I agreed to come here was to learn and to write. So that’s what this blog is going to be. It’s going to be a place for sharing the things that I am learning.
With that in mind, here is a list of things that I learned while snorkeling in the Red Sea. Some of these will end up in stories someday. Some of these will not. All of it has been incredible to experience.

1.    The Djinn – you may know them better by the name of Genie.

We had a wonderful Saudi host named Zuhair, who was more than happy to talk to me about legends, stories, belief, and superstitions.

According to Muslim belief, each time a person is born, their very own Djinn is also born. It's your own personal Djinn. Unlike humans, which are temporary, djinn live forever. So the world is positively filled with them. But while you are alive, the two of you are connected. That feeling you get when you suddenly shiver with fear, and you don’t know why? Your Djinn has seen something that you have not, and you can sense it through them. They also are the conduit of bad dreams and dark thoughts. But they are not necessarily evil. They, like humans, are good, bad or neutral. But they do tend to be tricksters.

A person may be born into a certain religion, but your Djinn does not necessarily share your same beliefs. They may have been born Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or any other religion. Mohamed is famous for having converted his Djinn to Islam. Zuhair tells me that it’s a story that’s written in the Koran. It was one of the miracles that Mohamed performed as a prophet. Not having read the Koran, I’m going to take his word for it.

2.    It turns out I’m not afraid to swim in water that I can see through, even deep water.
I’ve had a lifelong fear of deep water, so I was nervous about this whole snorkeling thing. I’ve even had swimming pools freak me out if I couldn’t touch the bottom. But the waters of the Red Sea are extremely salty, so first off I was ridiculously buoyant. The boys didn’t need lifejackets. If they got tired, they just lay back and rested. They couldn’t sink if they tried. And they did try.

But I was still pretty nervous getting in. We started in an area about 3 meters deep. It wasn’t that deep really, but there are sharks in the Red Sea, and I couldn’t touch the bottom. I started hyperventilating the moment Kaalam shoved me off the side of the boat and into the water. (Yeah, he’s that kid!)

Brandon saw me starting to panic and told me just to stick my face in, look around. I wasn’t convinced, but I obeyed, and the world that opened up was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The coral was brilliant red and purple and yellow, and there were schools of tiny, colorful fish everywhere. There are some sights in the world that are just too beautiful to be afraid of. I spent hours in the water and never wanted to go home. We’ll be starting scuba certification soon. I can’t wait!

3.    I desperately need a GoPro camera.

4.    Zuhair fished for most of the trip. He’s an avid fisherman and shared several fishing tips with us as well. I know nothing about fishing, so I have no way of dissecting truth from lore, but I love the thought process that surrounds it all.

Never expose caught fish to the moonlight. They will go bad immediately. If you go fishing at night, choose only the darkest nights. When the moon is shining the fish see it and swim deep to get away from the light, so you won’t catch anything. But if there is any moonlight in the sky, you have to cover the fish with a blanket or your catch won’t make it home.

He says his blanket has wrapped up his family and his fish, and it all smells the same. It’s the best blanket he’s ever owned.

Fish should always die out of the water, never in.

The Red Sea fish all look like something that belongs in an aquarium. But they’re yummy anyway.
 

5.    At 3 meters deep, a teapot looks an awful lot like a sea turtle until the boat comes to a stop and the waves settle down. But it still makes an amazing treasure for an 8-year-old boy.

6.    Flat fish are a result of the parting of the Red Sea.

There is a kind of flat fish, with both its eyes on the same side of its head. They were in the way when Moses parted the Red Sea and the weird, flat shape of them is the result.

7.    Kites will fly really well off a boat. Right up until they invert and end up in the water. Once wet, they will not fly.

8.    It’s possible to play with a whale shark.

The Red Sea has whale sharks. They’ll come up alongside your boat at night if they see the boat lights. Zuhair says the best way to get rid of them is to lay a plumb line weight on top of their head. They’ll swim down 30 meters to the end of the plumb line when the weight finally comes free. If you’re serious about catching fish, you should turn your lights off and let the whale shark bother some other ship. But if you’ve caught enough for the night, you can do it again and again, until the whale shark grows bored and swims away.

9.    There is an ancient way of rigging up your bait for deep sea fishing that lets you wedge the bait between 2 stones. This protects the bait until it gets to the depth you’re looking to fish and pulls the bait deep without the use of another weight. When it gets to the end of the line, you pull a trigger line, and the stones fall away. Then you can fish for the big fish. Zuhair still does this occasionally. He likes not having to haul the extra weight up along with the fish.

10.    Saudi has a dessert made out of shredded wheat that is to die for.

The shredded wheat is coated in honey and wound into the shape of a tiny little nest. Three shelled pistachios nuts are nestled into the center. Whatever else is in it, I need to learn to make it because it’s amazing!

11.    There are jungles in Saudi. Sadly, I’ll probably never get to see them. They’re in the mountains by the border of Yemen. As adventurous as I’d like to think I am, I’m not going near a war zone. This makes me sad.

12.    Mada'in saleh cannot be camped at.

The Nabateans, the ancient civilization that built the Treasury at Petra, built clear down into Saudi. There are great big structures carved directly into the stone. According to the stories, Mohamed traveled past the ruins with several of his followers. His followers wanted to stop for the night, but Mohamed told them no. The ruins were of a different time, belonging to a different people. Zuhair may have briefly inferred that the ruins were haunted, but I’m still working on fully understanding the accent.

Either way, to this day, the Saudi’s do not spend the night there. No surrounding city has ever been built.

Zuhair really likes us. He’s offered to drive us up, and tour guide the ruins for us. He’s also offered to take us out on the boat again. Once in the afternoon for more snorkeling, and once at night, to do some fishing.

This is going to be the most amazing experience of my life. I can’t wait to start getting it all into a story.

I am not a feminist. But I still hated that shirt.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “Wise Reader”. Years ago, I was able to attend Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. It was a fantastic opportunity and I think that I might have learned more in the one week about writing than I had in all two years of my English degree smooshed together. It was phenomenal.

One of the things he talked about was the “Wise Reader”. He advocated finding one or two people who you really trusted and training them to read your work. This wise reader wasn’t looking for grammatical errors or sentence structure. They were simply being trained to react to your story. Did it make sense? Was it believable? Did they enjoy it? It’s a fairly good way to find the big problems in a story that a reader might not be looking for if they’re focused on grammar.

But the number one rule of this process for the writer is that the wise reader is Never Wrong. Ever. They might not have the same reaction to your story as someone else. They might not have understood something that you thought was pretty clear. And they most certainly don’t know how the story should be fixed. But the reader’s reaction, no matter what the cause, Is Not Wrong. And the reason why, is because once you send a story out into the world, you no longer have control of it. It no longer belongs to you. Their reaction is honest and regardless of whether or not you choose to change the story, you just can’t argue with, “That’s how the story made me feel.”

I’ve been running into a lot of talk lately about sexism online. The Hawaiian shirt worn by Matt Taylor at the announcement that we’ve landed on an asteroid has been one of the many focal points of this discussion. It was unprofessional and immature at the very best, sexist and demeaning at the very worst. People have been making claims that it’s incidences like this shirt that are one of the things that are keeping women from entering the sciences.

This whole discussion bothers me. A lot. I do not consider myself a feminist. I am not a social justice warrior. I don’t just stay clear of these discussions, I usually avoid the people having them. I’m not interested in having to pick a side.

I don’t like the angry, defensive men who lash out with sexist blanket statements about women. They feel they are defending themselves and that to preserve their masculinity from the attacks of the feminists, they must lash out. There is a certain percentage of them that are crude, because they simply don’t know how else to be in the face of being accused of crudeness.

But I equally don’t like the feminists who believe that all men are pigs and must be put in their place. Historically, women have had it hard, but with every group who fights for freedom and equality, sometimes it’s hard to know when to stop fighting. Or even which battles are worth fighting. People talk all the time about things like the “wage gap”, but if you actually look at the way the numbers are calculated, the statisticians are comparing nurses and school teachers to doctors and lawyers. When you compare the wages of the sexes in the same fields, there’s almost no gap at all. What small gap exists (7% - not the 45% usually claimed) exists because of life choices women make, like taking time off to raise their children. This, among a great many other things, makes me distrust the label of feminism deeply. I was once told that what I needed was to align myself with the "good feminists" to help defend myself against the "bad feminists". I'd quite frankly like to stay out of those fights altogether.

Which brings me back around to the stupid shirt that started it all. If you follow the arguments about it all, the shirt is being fought over by the men who feel threatened and the feminists who feel they’ve got proof of man’s debauchery. There’s been almost no discussion about the actual issue. The shirt was inappropriate for a professional context. It’s that simple.

Many women, me included, felt that a shirt with half naked women plastered all over it was inappropriate and quite frankly, it made me uncomfortable. I don’t appreciate pictures of g-stringed women showing up in the Facebook feeds of the people I follow either. Does that make me a feminist? Nope. It makes me a mother of young boys who would have liked to have shown her boys (who are being actively encouraged towards the sciences) a video of a great technological achievement of our day. It makes me a mother who doesn’t want to have to hide my Facebook feed from my kids because of other people’s choices. My plan is to teach my sons to be the kind of men who would never consider the half-naked body of a woman to be either an appropriate fashion statement, or an appropriate picture to share. I’m married to the kind of man who would object to that and that’s the kind of men I intend to raise.

Like Scott’s wise reader, it doesn’t matter if the shirt was his favorite made for him by a friend. It doesn’t matter that it was off hours and he came rushing into work to give the press conference. I was made uncomfortable and that isn’t wrong. It also isn’t feminist. It’s my honest reaction. Is his shirt going to keep women out of science? Probably not. There are more women in the fields of science now than there ever have been. Some estimates at the university level are as high as 60%. It’s more likely just to get him fired when all those young women head out into the field and eventually one of them gets hired as his boss.

Mostly I don’t like that I can’t just not like the guys shirt without having to pick a side. I am the mother of two very active little boys and if you want to talk about sexual inequality, I could really go on about the modern education system’s intolerance of normal boy behavior, due to the overly feminine makeup of educators. There is a reason why so many boys are on Ritalin and it isn’t because they’ll all broken. In the long run, is it going to matter if we get our girls into science if we lose ours boys in the process? That’s not going to fix anything. That’s just going to shift it.

I get that men are tired of being accused of being pigs. A great many of them aren’t. I’ve spent many years building my closest friendships with some of the very best men this world has to offer.

But can’t I not like a guy’s shirt without being labeled a hysterical feminist either? There is a whole lot of room in the middle ground called ‘simple decency’ between those two extremes. All I am is a mom who had an honest reaction to a shirt. You might not agree with me, but you can’t tell me that I’m wrong either.

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Finding time to write

Since placing in Writers of the Future, I’ve been in a bit of a panic. That was all I had ready, so now what? I can’t be a writer on just one published story. Shortest career in history.

So I’ve been trying to find ways to slip writing into my schedule more than I have. Which is tricky. I go to conventions and sit in panels filled with men who tell me that finding time to write at home is easy. All they have to do is focus and if the kids act up, they just send ‘em to talk to mom!

Well, that’d be a lot easier, if my name wasn’t mom.

My reality, that I’ve had to accept, is that I simply won’t ever have 14 hours a day for three straight months to focus on spitting out a novel. I just won’t. I’m not the primary breadwinner. I am the primary caregiver. And it's pretty much going to be that way until the youngest leaves home. The best I can hope for is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week during the school year once my little one hits first grade. Only somebody still has to do the laundry.

Anyway, in my quest to find time to write, I bought the NanoWrimo Writing Tools Story Bundle as advertised by Dave Farland. It’s a bunch of e-books about writing, one of which was Million Dollar Productivity by Kevin J. Anderson. In his 25 year career, he’s written something like 130 books or so. I’m assuming that number is higher by now because that man never stops writing!

I was a bit skeptical at first. I was expecting things like, “Think about your story all the time.” That one was in there and it wasn’t a surprise. But do you have any idea how hard it is to follow even the simplest thought from point A to point B with “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!” interrupting your thoughts every 30 seconds? It’s like wearing the thought canceling earphones from Harrison Bergeron, designed to make even the brightest of person below average in less than a day!

But then there were some other suggestions that really caught my eye. Keven J. Anderson hikes A LOT. Which, when he first mentioned I was a little jealous of. I love hiking and it’s one of the things that have given way in the face of all the rest of my life’s responsibilities. But as he hikes, he dictates into a voice recorder. He can dictate several chapters of first draft in a day, then he sends it out to be transcribed. There are times when he employs 3 typist full time to keep up with him. Cool Huh?

Wasn’t sure it’d work for me, but I thought I’d give it a go. For the past 2 days, I’ve turned my phone off and hiked into the nearby national forest. I’ve always talked to myself anyway.

Total breakthroughs on the story that I’m working on! I’ve been stuck for a week. This afternoon, I took my laptop, got as far as a picnic table and pumped out 1200 words of the climax in about an hour and a half. When I got stuck, I got up, hiked around and brainstormed into the recorder. When I figured it out, I sat down and wrote. Not quite his method, and I haven't exactly climbed any 14ers, but 2 days in, it’s working for me.

And bonus, because I was 20 minutes from home, there were no looming chores to bother me. Everybody else’s needs got left behind. All I had to focus on was writing, brainstorming and enjoying an incredibly beautiful fall day. Now all I need to do is figure out where I can go in the winter time where I can walk around, talk to myself and not get kicked out for weird-ing out the other people in the room.  

I’m a fan. Even though I have an office, I’m going to keep leaving the house to write. I’m going to start carrying my voice recorder everywhere I go. And I’m going to keep taking advantage of the little moments I can find in the day. Eventually progress will be made, right?

I’m hoping to get my story finished before NanoWrimo starts so I can spend the month doing first drafts. Only 7 days to go. NanoWrimo has made November the best month of the year!

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Patience - Not my virtue

It’s been two and a half weeks since finding out I was a finalist in Writer’s of the Future. Sometime in the next week and a half I’ll find out the final results. I’ll have to admit, every day that goes by, I’m a little more nervous than I was.

When Writer’s of the Future posted the names of the eight finalists on their blog, I was excited. I cyber-stalked a few of them. A couple have already published. So you know, I’m like, not intimidated at all, right?

Well I knew intellectually what it meant to get this far in the contest. From what I understand, they have somewhere between 800 and 1200 entries per quarter. So to be at the top of that list is pretty good for the self-esteem. Even if I don’t place, my story made it to the top eight and that rocks! But last night, they posted a list of all the finalists, semi-finalists and honorable mentions. I read down the list and it just kept going, and going, and going… Suddenly I started to realize just how many people 800-1200 must be. And the names on that page that kept scrolling were the very best of all of them – just a fraction of the stories submitted. It sort of made it real, if that makes any sense. I was terribly humbled to be included in that top group of writer’s in any capacity.

So now I wait. And I’m really not very good at waiting. I know so many people who are so good at patience. My neighbor across the street is one of them. Nothing seems to ruffle her. You should see her with kids, she’s amazing. Patience seems to be one of her primary virtues. I’m so not like that. I’ll keep chewing at my fingernails and try not to snip at my poor kids while they just try to get through their own day.

My husband likes to remind me that whether I’m good at waiting or not, the same amount of time will pass. Worry won't alter the time stream. I’ll still have to wait, so I might as well not worry.

Wish I could actually apply that wisdom. :)

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Life really is good, isn't it?

One day left of Camp Nano and I'm sitting at 53500 words and 5 completed first draft short stories. That's just 1500 words away from finishing. I'll be able to easily pump that out today on revisions and rewrites by the time I pick my youngest up from preschool. And I've got to say, I'm feeling really good about this.

Last year, my husband announced that he was going back to school to get an MBA. It wasn't a surprise to me. We'd talked about it on and off for years and I knew it was a goal that was eventually going to catch up to us. But it was something I'd been dreading. When we got married, we were both in school and it was easy to balance schedules and homework and everything else, because we were both doing it together. But this time around we're balancing his full time job, full time school and two little kids at home. It was not sounding fun to me at all.

But when he started classes in January, I realized his MBA might just be the best thing that's ever happened to my writing career. The boys are in school for a good part of the day, which has opened up all kinds of day time hours for me. But now in the evenings, I'm looking forward to the nights when he's got homework. Because I get to sit down and write for hours without any worry about neglecting kids or husband.

And just so you all know, I have the best husband in the entire world. With the amount of time his MBA program was going to take this year, I was most worried about having time with him as a family. Eighteen months is a long time to not see dad. But he's gone out of his way to make every minute at home count. If the boys are up, he's playing Lego's with them. If there aren't any assignments pressing, he's reserved the evening for me. I think the hardest thing so far this year has been realizing that when he has time between classes, I need to fold the laptop up and make sure I'm making time for family too. I'm determined not to let a fantastic marriage drift apart, just because we're both trying to get somewhere. And it feels good to finally know that we are both getting somewhere.

Last night, we started keeping 'gratitude journals' with our kids. We have one son who simply isn't capable of seeing anything but the sunny side. Our other son is pretty upbeat. most of the time. But when he gets down, his entire world falls apart and there's nothing good anywhere. And there never will be ever again. He can be pretty dramatic. We thought that keeping a daily account of the good might gently help to steer his focus. Remind him of what we have. Our little family has a lot to be grateful for. Brandon and I are keeping these journals too.

My first entry was about gratitude for my husband. He believed in in my ability to write before he ever read a single word I'd put on paper. He encouraged me to seek an education and to think of ideas and concepts that when I was young, I'd have sooner ignored. He's made time for me to write and read every word I've written since I started. He's become a fantastic Alpha reader for me, because he wants to see my writing in print as much as I do. But most of all, thirteen years into our marriage, I still know that he loves me. More now than ever. I was pretty picky when I chose my husband. Turns out it paid off. I wound up with the very best.

And I am very, very grateful.

Wonderfully horrible first drafts

I mentioned in my last post that this month I'm away at Camp NanoWrimo. It's my very first trip to camp and I'm loving it! Things are going much better at this nano than at others. My kids are older and mostly at school all day. I've been more organized which has allowed me to become more focused and I'm not having to squeeze my writing in between Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's definitely been stress relieving.

My goal was originally to write 45000 words by the end of the month. I was hoping that would equate to somewhere between 4 and 6 short story first drafts to rewrite when the month was done.

As of this morning, I'm at 48100 words and have 4 completed first drafts. With one week left that gives me time to hit 55000 words (my new goal as of half way through the moth) and have 5 short stories to clean up and start sending in at the end of the month. And the most exciting part is that the short stories are good!

And when I say good, I mean that the writing is awful, major plot lines don't materialize sometimes until the very end of the story, characters are flat and underdeveloped and at some points, the plot doesn't really make any sense.

But the seeds are there. I've fallen in love with the potential for every one of them. Whole worlds waiting to be explored, characters dying to get out there and do their thing in a much better version in the rewrites. For at least three of the short stories, I see the potential for whole novels following after. I am coming to understand the truth of the statement that you really don't need to be a good writer. You have to be an excellent re-writer. And that's where I get to make these stories shine like they ought to.

I'm quite excited about all of this. I'm finally feeling like my dream of being a writer is phasing into an actual reality.

Before Nano started, I was working on cleaning up a short story that I wrote last year. It was originally a very short, very rushed little story with little to no character development and just about the most depressing ending you could ever imagine. A man's daughter gets killed in front of him and then he accidentally ends up ingesting and devouring her soul, essentially destroying what's left of her forever.

Horrible right?

But the rewrite is awesome. Everybody has a reason to be there. Everybody has a powerful motivation. Sadly, the girl still dies. But I manage to not make it the worst thing that could ever happen. In fact, the ending is infused with hope this time. And that's something I just couldn't see happening the first time through. Hooray for crappy first drafts and the chance to write it all over again!

If writing really is performance art for shy people, then I'm just glad that unlike the stage, we don't have to get it right the first time.

I'm planning on turning my story in to Writer's of the Future this month. Hopefully it does well. I'm realistic enough to realize that chances are astronomically against me winning the first time in. But it's a start. And it's a start with a story that I feel really good about. And that makes it real.

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Filters through which we see the world

This weekend I ran into a bit of a clash with another woman in my congregation at church. Without going into too many details, I'll just say that something happened at church that I had no idea would have been an issue for anyone else. Not until I received an emotionally charged and pretty mean spirited email from her later on in the day.


I was pretty shaken. It came out of nowhere. I thought about how to respond for several hours before answering her email with one of my own. I apologized, explained the context of what had happened and then apologized again. I honestly hadn't intended to upset anyone. It wasn't long before I received a second email, just as angry as the first, accusing me of being condescending in my response.


Anyone who's ever actually known me, knows that I'm not a confrontational person. I tend towards shy and for most of my life I have avoided being around other women, simply to avoid this sort of drama in my life. It's not worth it to me. I don't want enemies. I barely have time for friends. And drama is exhausting.


But the whole thing got me thinking. I assumed when I apologized and explained what happened that it would diffuse things. Because  that's my world view. Most of the time, understanding the motives of a situation will change my outlook of it. It's been a useful skill for me in avoiding all that confrontation I try so hard to avoid.


But this woman, who I barely know, has a very different world view. I'm not sure I've ever actually spoken to her before this, but from the one interaction I have had, she strikes me as a woman who feeds on drama. She is the sort of person who has enemies. So when she read my apology, that's the filter she was using. I'm pretty sure that no matter what I said, she'd have found a reason to take it as evidence that I was diving into the fight.


I might very well be unfair in that assessment. Like I said, I barely know her. But first impressions are pretty intense sometimes. I've decided that the only thing for me to do at this point is to bow out. I'm not interested in drawing things out any further. She can take her half of the fight somewhere else.


But I am writer and I think this whole thing has been good for me. It got me thinking about what sorts of filters are my characters using.? How can two characters in the same room see the situation they are both in as entirely, fundamentally different?


I was writing the mid section of my Writer's of the Future story last night and this came into play. I had an antagonist who was going to do something terrible. He was about to quite brutally take away anything and everything the protagonist has ever held dear. I thought the antagonist was going to be cruel and flippant. But when I looked through the filter he was using on the situation, I suddenly realized that wasn't who he was at all. He honestly believes that what he's doing is the right thing. The only thing. He even apologizes in his own twisted way. But then he goes and kill's the girl anyway.


He's a better bad guy now. It's a more emotionally charged scene. I'm quite pleased with the results.


I plan on submitting this story for the first quarter of the year. Hopefully it does well, though I'm hesitant that no matter how well written it might be, the girl still dies at the mid-point. There just isn't any other way to examine the idea behind the story if she doesn't. And from what I've read, WotF tends towards stories with less murdering 17 year old girls at the mid-point. But they can't say no if I don't send it in right? And there's always another story in the next quarter.


Hopefully there aren't any more angry emails though. I learned what I can from that and I'd like to move on now.

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