The Mad Scientist

Pleasant Day Travellers!

That's my new name for you, although it's hardly a 'new' name by now, it still works beautifully.  Life is full of journeys, some more specific than others, and the knowledge that you are choosing to travel along with me is extremely wonderful.

I wish my mom was still alive to come along on this trip, it is one she would have loved; it's the journey she prepared me for since birth.  I am Jean's daughter, with all the wondrous and miserable things that she gave me; no matter where I go in life, I can never stray very far from that fact.  I don't want to stray far because Jean was a rare and special lady, but she was also tragic because Mom never truly embraced her eccentricities.  She fought against them her whole life, always trying so hard to be more mainstream, more normal, and that fight broke her on the inside.

Jean blamed herself for not being more like them, she saw the normal coming so easily to everyone else but not to her and self destructed quietly over a long period of time.  My deepest regret is that I could not save her, that I didn't know then what I know now and I wish I could have given her some peace.

It is too late for that, but I'm a mother too, so I know exactly what she would have wanted for me. Jean wanted better for me than she got but, more importantly, she wanted me to get if for myself, to do it my way and on my own terms.  My mother saw her crazy in me and did not try to squash it like her mother did, she encouraged it, fostered it, defended it and cried about it occasionally.

But the crazy was her gift to me, to all of her children, and there is no finer gift available.  Jean gave me the very best of herself and I am running with it, running with scissors quite possibly, but I that won't slow me down any.

So, when I posted last week about my changing my word, I was quite serious.  My theory is that changing the vocabulary I use about The Last Prospector will affect the way I present myself and the book to the world.  Until recently, I have not been my typical over-the-top, zealous self about promoting my writing and this is because I succumbed to self-doubt.

No more, no more.  The grand experiment is working, it started working the very moment I changed from self published to scratch, the real Cairn came back.  No more agonizing and wondering if people will like The Last Prospector, it is one of the tastiest morsels I have ever created and that is truly saying something.

In fact, it is so good that I might put a copy of the book on covered glass cake plate in the kitchen where Clyde's endless supply of homemade cookies usually live.  That is precisely the kind of eccentricity Jean would have loved.

Scratch Test

Even a casual reader of this blog can glean that I am somewhat preoccupied with food and cooking.  If it was a preoccupation with something less welcome, like a collection of my toenail clippings, people might accuse me of having a form of mental illness.  But everyone eats, and all cultures of the world embrace cooks; it is perhaps the most socially accepted form of madness.  Not just accepted, but condoned and even encouraged, a touch of madness is part of the job and everyone loves a crazy chef.

But I digress somewhat because this communique is not about food; I have had a small, but interesting, epiphany.  The words are important and perhaps, just maybe, I've been using the wrong ones.

This is how it started, I gave some completely unsolicited advice to someone I barely know about something I have no experience doing.  However, I stand by that advice and am poised to take it myself.  I recommended to this person that a simple change in wording would effect a much larger change in the action overall.  Theoretically, a changed word can resonate differently inside you, make you approach a familiar situation in a different and more organic way.

The word I am considering changing is actually two words: self published.  Those two little words can be the kiss of death for a rookie from Suttertown and make most people automatically look over the book that they really should be reading.  Personally, I do not understand the mindset because a self published author has to be more committed, more tenacious and more creative than someone who has an editor and publicist taking care of the details.

There are a lot of pretensions in the literary world, which is extremely weird to me because that is the exact same world that published Modelland by Tyra Banks.  I love Tyra, but come on, Modelland?

This is the part where I'm supposed to say that I can't change the system or I can't fight city hall.  My anarchist heart beats for precisely that, so it is time to change the vocabulary.  I'm going back to my roots, to what I know for sure works.  I am changing my word and maybe the established order along with it.

Out with a term that does not resonate with me, I will be a self published author no longer.  I am very pleased to introduce the new me; Cairn Rodrigues, Scratch Writer.  Everything is better when it's made from scratch, from cupcakes to novels, the craft and dedication are equal.

People are impressed when they are offered a handmade treat; in fact the flavor is improved when they are told that the bread was kneaded by hand.  I know how I feel when I offer up something to those happy people, a confidence and surety that comes from knowing I did it all from the ground up.

That is what The Last Prospector is, the whole series in fact, a delicious treat made up of the most unassuming ingredients that were crafted with great care by hand.

This is all a grand experiment of course, but I do love a grand - and wacky - scientific theory.  It's all that initiative, I suppose, that keeps me trying.

The Words Are Important

Yes, it is a very self serving notion seeing as how I wrote a book chock full o' words, but it is still the truth.  Words are great fun because there are so many of them and, if you look hard enough, you can find exactly, precisely the word you mean.  Since I'm not big on ambiguities, I've always collected words, filing them away until some esoteric nugget surges forward to describe my immediate need.  There is rarely any hidden subtext in my spoken words, no cryptic meanings and only a pinch of pretentiousness.  If I want something thrown out a window, I will say to have it defenestrated, because that one word says exactly what I mean.

Another great thing about words is how fun many of them are to say, yes I know it's weird, but where is the harm?  Not just regular words either, people's names often grab my attention because I enjoy saying them; I'm not a football fan but I know who Drew Brees is and love to say his name.  Personality notwithstanding, Marquis De Sade is fun to say as well, and there is a long standing joke between my husband and I that our next dog will be named Fisher DeBerry, because I love saying Fisher DeBerry.

So, when I set out to write the books, I knew subconsciously that words are important but I did not know that it would be a recurring theme in the series.  Prospector alludes to that notion when he tells his story to the Hunts, but it's Awnyx's friend Snatch who says it first.  Snatch is by no means the last character to say that the words are important and it took me some time to grasp the reason, other than the obvious of course.  By the end of The Last Prospector I realized what that idea meant to Solstice and that realization was an almost blinding epiphany.

Words are as important to the fabric of Solstice as the light stealers and the power of words is almost a character in the story.  However that character has certain rigid demands, if the words are important, then the words that I choose to tell about the words are equally as important.  To make that somewhat less confusing, I have to select my words with more than the usual care because some of our words are not in the vocabulary of Solstice.  They do not have a sun or moon, there is no bible and no chocolate, and it is very hard to find good words for 'brown' that don't involve chocolate somehow.

Keeping away from such common words as angel, heaven, christen, baptize and hell is an ongoing challenge, however I did manage to find a small chocolate loophole in book three.  But those words have no historical context in Solstice so I can't justify using them there and sometimes have to become very creative.  Like most challenges though, there is much to be discovered because of the conflict, things that I wouldn't have even thought about had I not challenged myself at all.