Write On and On and On

When I proudly handed a copy of my first children’s chapter book to my sister-in-law, she took it, looked at it, and said, “That’s a lot of writing.”

She was not overly enthusiastic. 

When I started sending funny, little, quirky emails to friends and family sixteen years ago (before blogging, before vlogging, before posting) another close relative said, “And stop sending me those damn silly emails.”

He was less than encouraging.

Rejection comes in all flavors. Yet . . . I write on and on and on.

Sixteen hundred words a day or as much as my line editor can safely edit without losing her mind. Over the years, I have learned a couple of tricks and tips and techniques. Here are five.

1) For Women Only or Overly Meaty Men: Write braless: There is nothing worse than writing for sixteen hundred words worth and then realizing that your boobs have turned blue from lack of oxygenated blood. It’ll throw you off. Trust me.

2) Thesaurus – Yes or No: That’s a big yes. My professor said to throw the thesaurus out. Whatever. I’m pretty sure that no one knows all the synonyms for the word “heave.” Editors get testy when you use the same word for stuff over and over again. So, if you need another word for heaved in the following sentence, “Her bosom heaved,” with a thesaurus you could write: Her bosom surged. Her bosom billowed. Her bosom huffed. See? How handy is that? 

3) Snack With Caution: Writers live at their keyboards. Potato grease in sour cream & onion chip dust can make the computer keys slick. Bad things can happen when your fingers slide around. Words like shoot and shot can come out in the wrong spots. That’s my theory. Poorly executed grammar, creepy spelling errors, upside down word choices, and dazzling typos are ALL due to slippery chip grease fingertip trouble. True story. True chronicle. True fiction.

4) Handling Massive Rejection: Eat more chips. Type more words. Tell more stories. 

5) Why Write? Because one day your ten-year-old granddaughter will hand you a story she’s written just for you about pumpkin seed fairies, and she’ll say, “When I grow up, I want to be a writer just like you, YaYa.” 


What I like best about being a writer and dreaming of having a wildly successful book, novel, tome, or opus (thesaurus alert) is that there can never be too many good ones. 

Good books are like potato chips; you can never stop with just one.

Linda (Keyboard) Zern 

Best ER Visit - Ever!

Born in 1958 and raised under a billboard of the cute Coppertone girl getting her swimsuit pulled down by that cute puppy—which wasn’t at all pervy back then—my husband and I didn’t discover sunscreen until the mid-seventies.

The result of which is that Sherwood and I have more scars than professional pirates. We basically lived outside, in the sun, unprotected from the searing elements like nomadic warthog ranchers throughout our teen and young adult years.

Standing at the reception desk at our dermatologist, my chest covered with an enormous surgical bandage, I pointed at my husband. His ear was covered with an enormous surgical bandage. We looked like survivors of a “peaceful protest” in a big city.

“We were born in 1958. Can you tell?” I joked to the receptionist.

The receptionist, young and unscarred, did not laugh. I find many young people sluggish in their ability to understand irony or satire. Okay, they’re dolts.

Recently, my husband complained about yet another pre-funky spot on his ear. At our house, funk is skin cancer, so pre-funk . . . well . . . you get it.

I was thrilled when he came to me pointing at his ear. I’d been using frankincense, a natural oil, with a great deal of success on a few of my pre-funk spots. But you have to use a lot and often. I told him that. A lot and often.

“Lay down,” I commanded. I tipped the tiny bottle up to apply the miracle oil to his pre-funk ear spot. A tiny drop of oil trembled on the curve of his ear, then ran straight down inside, hit his eardrum, and killed him.

Okay . . . maybe it didn’t kill him, but he sure gave a great impression of someone dying. He writhed in pain. Writhed. Was writhing. Did writhe around.

Wrapped in a towel, fresh from my bath, I called my daughter and demanded, “Does Phillip have clothes on?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Your father is dying. I may need him to take your father to the hospital.” I hung up.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” I asked.

“No!” my husband said, while writhing in pain.

“Get in the car. Put on a mask. We’re going to the hospital.” I pulled on a darling little dress and a coordinating Covid mask.

It was our finest trip to the ER. It was empty of Covid corpses or victims. It was clean to the point of gleaming. They triaged us in the parking lot. We waited five minutes in the sit-there seats, saw a PA, RN, and doctor in ten minutes. They flushed the man’s ear, diagnosed a hitherto unknown ear infection (thus the bizarre death pain) and gave me a stern, condescending glance.

“Let’s not do that again,” the doctor said, after I explained the frankincense treatment/accident.

I stuck my tongue out at him, but because I was wearing a Covid mask he had no idea.

Best emergency room visit EVER.

Linda (Skin Walker) Zern

A HORSE CALLED POMMEL

  

“Put a mask on,” I commanded my husband.

“I’m not wearing a mask to go to Home Depot. No one else does.”

“If everyone stripped naked and went jogging, would you do it too?”

He looked confounded. “I used to streak on motorcycles naked.” He had that been-there-done-that-nude look on his face. “But I always wore tennis shoes so that I didn’t hurt my feet when I shifted.”

He always includes this last bit of information about wearing shoes while naked when he reminisces about his wild and wooly teenage years. I don’t know why. But he does.

So the mask debate rages on. But not at our house. Truthfully, we’ve been on lock down for about a decade and so not a lot changed when the world went mad and started setting their hair on fire to kill possible infection.

Sigh. Besides, we’ve already survived the big, bad germ war.

My husband, the former naked motorcycle rider, works for an international computer titan, headquartered in the heart of California’s nerd land. Early this year, he traveled to the edge of our fine nation where herds of nerds like to hang out. There are nerds from every land and clime—gross wet-market countries included. So in January, my husband headed to Santa Clara county in California to hang out in the cafeteria and to touch lots of grubby surfaces, door handles, and computerly stuff.

He came home with one kick-butt cough.

I blamed dirty airplanes.

The cough was so bad he headed to the doctor to be told he had a virus. “Go home,” they said. He did. And promptly gave the unknown, creepy virus to me.

I got the weirdest cold of my life. “This is the weirdest cold of my life,” I said to anyone who would listen. No one did. “This is the weirdest cough of my life,” I said to no one. And no one noticed. After three weeks enduring a cough that left me in danger of passing out, I lived to tell the tale.

How do we keep our spirits up during lock down? We watch gymnastics on YouTube and pretend we understand the scoring system. I like to imagine my nerdly husband trying to hang from the high bar the men use to fling themselves around on. Since Sherwood can’t straighten his legs and point his toes AT THE SAME TIME without inviting muscle contorting foot cramps, the vision leaves me in hysterics.

“I would pay money to see you hang from that bar,” I gasp.

“It would kill me,” he admits.

“Better that, than the ‘Rona.” I pat his hand and reach for a bowl of boiled peanuts.

And so we wait and watch and wonder what happened to all the non-judgmental memes from the pre-pandemic days of live and let live. Now, it’s judgment 24-7 about everything from the number of micro-inches between my nasal passages and yours and whether or not that mask I’m wearing is cute enough to be scientifically effective.

“How’s the pandemic raging?” I ask my husband.

He slides the bowl of boiled peanuts my way. “Hard to know. The headlines are ripped straight from the front page of the National Inquirer. Outer Space Alien Toddler’s Eyeballs Explode From Skull – Covid Suspected,” he reports.

“Sounds like things are slowing down then.”

“Ready to watch the pommel horse competition from Rio?”

“Sure. I would pay money to see you flip over a horse called Pommel.”

“It would kill me,” he confesses.

We eat boiled peanuts and wait for the end of yellow journalism.

Linda (Happy Streaking) Zern