Ghost Words



via kristinjustice @ Flickr



The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

- Omar Khayyam

I read a terrible, can't-believe-people-read-this-stuff genre novel (which shall remain nameless) last week. It was full of sterotypes and poor descriptions. But as with every book, I found a great passage. The scene tied into the above verse, and it hit me two ways.

First:

Been wishing I could recall some of my words lately, but no luck. Those three queries I sent last week? Wasted. Two Rs and the other says 4-6 weeks before I'll hear some more silence. Got a twisted feeling in my gut. You know, the one that makes you want to hurl. Maybe the MS wasn't right for them, but then again, my query stinks.

I suppose it's because I spent the last year working on my MS, and not enough time working on the query. Guess I'm trigger happy now. But thanks to my writer friends (Matt and Leigh), I realized my mistake before I was too deep in words of no return. We all learn, but I've also got plenty of doubts about the MS lingering upstairs with the rest of my demons. No amount of tears will bring the queries back...so move I on. My new task is simple: SIMPLIFY.


Second:

In this day of digital cuts and deletions, words can be cancelled from the record, wiped from the hard drive, etc. (Especially when you want to preserve them, it seems!) But Omar Khayyam speaks the truth too. I see it with my own scenes. I write them, edit them, and somehow when a beta reads them...some of those original words manage to reveal themselves. My "ghost words" come back as little blue edits or red comment bubbles, safely restored to me in the margins. Aaaaand we're back to the Multiverse idea.... Two roads...ahh...that's another poet!

Aside:

A Ghost Word is a word suggestive of a non-existent opposite. Wikipedia example: Aftermath = Beforemath

Wikipedia also says: A ghost word is a word that has been published in a dictionary, or has been adopted as genuine, as the result of misinterpretation or a typographical error.

The most famous example in English (and many other languages) is "scapegoat" which is a mistranslation of the word Azazel (In Hebrew: עזאזל) originated by William Tyndale in his 1530 Bible, and appropriated in the King James Version of the Bible (Leviticus chapter 16) in 1611. Confounded by the word, Tyndale had interpreted Azazel as ez ozel - literally, "the goat that departs"; hence "(e)scape goat." According to the Talmud, Yoma 67b, Azazel is a contraction of az (harsh) and eil (strong) and refers to the most rugged of mountains. This identification is supported by Rashi, the great Medieval grammarian, who interpreted Azazel to be the name of a specific mountain or cliff over which the goat was driven[1]. According to R.H. Charles, it was called so for its reputation as the holding place of the fallen angel of the same name[2]. Modern scholars generally reject Tyndale's interpretation and favor one related to a fallen angel/evil demon interpretation. Today in modern Hebrew Azazel is used derogatorily, as in lekh la-Azazel ("go to Azazel"), as in "go to hell".

Every book has something worth remembering! What new ideas did you pick up from your last read? :)

Speaking of Ghost words...I'm changing the blog schedule, so there's no post on Thursdays. I'm fixing a query, starting to outline another WIP, and running out of steam! Plus, I figure I'll actually have some time to visit other blogs more often!

International Romance - Greek Sojourn

Welcome to the third week of International Romance! Nicole Ducleroir and Katie Bell have already left us some interesting stories and this week we have Jessica Bell (bottom left). Here's a little introduction:

Jessica Bell is an Australian who lives in Athens, Greece, and writes literary women's fiction and poetry. Her debut novel, String Bridge, is scheduled to be published by Lucky Press LLC, in late 2011. She makes a living as a freelance writer/editor of global English Language Teaching materials for Pearson Education, Hellenic American Union, Macmillan Education, Cengage Learning and Education First. A list of other publications can be seen on her website, www.jessicacbell.com. She posts four days a week on her blog www.thealliterativeallomorph.blogspot.com

Ok, my post is going to be a little different. I’m not going to talk about my love for my partner (though I do love him to bits); I’m going to talk about my love for Greece.

I travelled back and forth from Melbourne, Australia, to Greece between the ages of two and twenty, until I moved here permanently at 21, almost ten years ago. For some reason my heart has been here all my life. And though the country has given me much bureaucratic grief, I still can’t bring myself to leave. Here’s how it all started …

When I was about six years old, arriving to the Greek island where my grandparents lived was like stepping foot into an enchanted pop-up fairytale book. At dawn, especially, it was a Never land of lush luminescent green mountain, deep purple sea, sherbet orange sky and sharp-toothed cliffs so high you could literally walk on clouds — a much needed change from falling asleep on a vibrating carpeted floor that reeked of old amplifier wheel grease and waking up to cigarette smoke wafting through ducted heating vents. My parents were musicians.

The island’s windy mountainous roads are framed with olive groves and air so crisp you can snap it like celery. The houses are stained with whitewash and embedded with old-style stiff wooden shutters, tailored by the locals to keep the summer swelter out. They are painted blue, red, or green, but occasionally you may come across the odd pink or orange shutters, which are more often than not inhabited by the eccentric barmy type who are color-blind, or the young and loaded foreigner who believes an island revolution should be in order.

Goats meander about the streets, butting each other’s heads senselessly, as they try to escape oncoming cars and motorcycles. The roosters, chickens, and geese fire up the locals at the first sign of sunrise. Birds chirp, cicadas “jijiga” in the olive trees, and dogs bark as the bread truck, a red beat-up Ute, delivers fresh hot bread to each residence and slips the required amount of loaves into hand-made cloth bags hanging from wire fencing.

Summer on this island engraves your skin with a longing to spend sunrise to sunset lying on a small, empty, white-pebbled beach in a secluded cove at the end of a private dirt walking track. At midday, it gets so hot you need to wade through heat waves rising from the unevenly tarred road like kindred spirits before you can wade in the Ionian to cool off — a flat, motionless oil bath which glows with an infinite turquoise glint. Although it may seem you are stepping into velvet, however, you emerge covered in a thin salty crust which you can brush off like sand when it dries.

Most folks have a siesta between two and five in the afternoon, so there isn’t much to do except wander the streets and explore. By about six p.m. the sun still reads midday, and the waterfront cafés fill with shouting teenagers drinking frappé. And there they stay until it’s time to return home, quickly scarf down some homemade mousaka, and get dressed to party until seven the next morning.

By about ten p.m. the sun hides behind a mountain of shrubby arid terrain, and the cool edge to the air is relieving. At the mountain’s topmost peak, a silhouette of an Orthodox church can be seen, accompanied by a soundtrack of owls and crickets. At this time of day mosquitoes congregate for their evening feasts. Shepherds’ voices echo through the valley while their goats’ bells jingle as they steer along their hot dusty trails back home.

In the morning, when glittering sunlight made patterns on my wall through the thin slats of my bedroom shutters, my mother would make me Vegemite toast. I’d eat on the verandah, without a plate, propped up on a whitewashed ledge full of tacky red plastic buckets, where my Nona would hand-wash our laundry. Dad would play guitar in the garden, and mum would sing along as if she were the happiest person alive. Papou would tend to his veggie patch, and as soon as I’d finish my toast, I’d probe the olive trees for camouflaged cicadas.

At night I would ask Papou to play cards with me on the wobbly kitchen table covered in clay brown checkered laminate which matched the wrinkly brown-orange lino floor. We’d sit by the wood-fire oven to use it as a side-table for our flat orangeades.

Papou would show me his clever shuffling tricks with his sun-spotted trembling hands and I would smile and nod at his mumbling despite hardly ever understanding what he said. My father later said he often told stories about the earthquake that initiated the mass migration to Melbourne in 1953.

However, I do recall one instant when I’d understood what he said. It was one afternoon before going for siesta that Papou and I sat together in the lounge room for a while. I was flipping through old photo albums as he picked up the newspaper and sat in his faded maroon armchair facing the window. I glanced up for a second to see him looking from side to side and then patting his shirt pockets.

“They’re on your head,” I said.

His eyes lit up as he removed his reading glasses from his balding and scratched head (from consistently knocking it against the wine cellar entrance), put them on his nose, and said as if he had been touched by an angel, “How you know? How you know what I look for? My God, my God, you have gift!”

At six years old, of course, I believed him, until my mother explained I had just used common sense. At least she’d made me feel intelligent instead of crushing the novelty of possibly being psychic.

I’ll never forget the day my father returned from spear-fishing one morning and had brought home a massive live sea creature as big as his head, thinking it was just an empty shell.

We all gathered on the verandah to take a closer look at the twenty-centimeter thick monster that slowly emerged from its shell like a slimy skinless muscular arm. It was bright red with purple veins and a slippery transparent membrane. But Nona suspected it was a local delicacy and promptly ‘prepared’ it for the grill. She put it in the washing machine. To tenderize. The whole house stank of dead fish for weeks, and thank God the washing machine was never used for its intended purpose. Most of the time it just sat, unplugged, by the toilet as an ‘asset’.

It turns out the creature was deadly. If its poison hadn’t been sucked out during its two-hour cycle in the washing machine, Papou and Nona would have been poisoned to death!

So as you can see, I have plenty to write about. My memories are endless. A lifetime of writing inspiration. And that’s what I love about it the most. This country makes me want to write! Thanks for reading!

Thanks, Jessica!

Don't forget to join us next week for Joanna St. James!

Related articles

• The Greek Islands (harrys-travel.com)

 

Turkish Farmer's Markets

Image by NatalieMaynor via FlickrSo here's another difference between Turkey and the US.

In Turkey, I visited my neighborhood pazar (farmer's market) once a week. A local street closed down and farmer's hoisted their colorful tarps, tents and cloth umbrellas over their crates of veggies. The smell was intoxicating. Fresh herbs mixed with tomato, cucumber and melons...Oh, those melons were the best I'd ever eaten in my entire life! Vine ripe was not a term used lightly. Everything tasted like you grew it in the backyard.

I expected to get a deal there, versus the higher prices found in the supermarket chains like Migros. If I missed my pazar, I could always stop at the one across town the next day. I brought my market tote, which never went out of style in Turkey, btw.  I'd fill it up with fabulous fresh produce, maybe some köy yumurta (village eggs) with yolks the color of ripe apricots, and walked away happy as a lark with more than enough food for the week. The idea was, the farmer had cut out the middle man, so I got more for my money.

It's a different story here. On Saturday mornings I have to get up at the crack of dawn and fight the crowd for a two dollar organic tomato. My local farmer's market here is quaint, with small white wooden stalls and local musicians to match. But if you're later than 9 o'clock, it's slim pickins, and the eggs are way expensive. If I miss the early shift there, I can always go to the regional farmer's market, which is open more days than just the one, but stocks less "beautiful" stuff in the steel building near the airport. I can also get some pretty decent eggs at Harris Teeter for less. Where's the fun in that? Sometimes I just say "bah humbug" to it all and head to Trader Joe's.

I can't really blame the farmers here though. Land is expensive, so they don't have the same efficiencies of scale that a farmer in Turkey still has. And even though I know the farmer's market here is expensive, I get excited when a new one opens. And I still get up on Saturday mornings to fight the crowd and support their lifestyle. After all, if I keep going, they'll keep farming.

Related articles

• One Woman's Year Without a Grocery Store (food.change.org)

Blue Plate Special

via PlakayaYaz.com

A new, base model Honda Accord costs about $50,000 USD in Turkey today. That's pretty steep compared to what I can get it for here in NC. The car isn't any different, but each country has a different tax schedule and the result is less car for your money in a lot of locales, not just Turkey. I've a client who says he paid $90,000 for a Honda Odyssey in Singapore recently. No wonder the rest of the world drives small cars, right?

So what does that have to do with Blue Plates?

In Turkey, an expat can get around the tax. Sort of. If you bring a car in and intend to take it back out with you, then you can get blue plates. Mavi Plaka they call it. I call it: Stop that driver and see if she has any Marlboros...but that's another post. I'm a foreigner, so techically I can import a car, go through (a million) hoops and mayhaps get away with paying less than the dealer MSRP in Istanbul. Well...let's just say hindsight is 20/20.

I put my 3 month old Acura on a boat and picked it up at the seaport in Turkey. Then it got interesting. I was an expat, but I was married to a Turk and apparently that was a problem, even though the car was in my name. I couldn't get blue plates. I couldn't get yellow temporary plates. I had to import the car and then get white ones. Just get divorced, says the attorney. Ha! I drove around with (blue) CT plates and no one asked me why.

Six + months of headache and miles of red tape later, I got the priviledge of paying my tax to the Turkish government and went to get my plates. According to the logic, they should be white because I paid the tax, right? Well, no. I got blue ones.

And wouldn't you know...we moved to Abu Dhabi shortly after.

What's in Your Basement?

via HurriyetDailyNews.com

First of all, I wish I HAD a basement. Here in the south, we're on a crawlspace because the frostline isn't very deep. (I really miss the storage space.)

My old house had one. It was an 1875 Victorian gothic farmhouse and while we were restoring it, I was always on the lookout for neat old stuff left behind by previous owners. All I found was a small silver letter opener and a couple of rusty nails.

In Turkey, a basement can hide more interesting things....like wellheads attached to a network of secret underground cisterns, teaming with carp. Not unusual for Istanbul, but even cisterns don't take the top spot of amazing basement artifacts.

I was reading my Hurriyet Daily News the other day and I came across this:

"The Roman-era city of Germenicia was unearthed by chance during an illegal excavation in the basement of a house."

Double-take!!!

OK. So what they really mean is someone noticed mosaics in their basement and they wanted to see what the rest of the pretty pictures looked like. A few eminent domain rulings later, and Turkey has another historic site to visit.

Related Articles

Mosaics found in SE Turkey lead to unearthing of ancient Roman city (hurriyetdailynews.com)
Germanicia Found? (rogueclassicism.com)

Assassin's Creed

via officialpsds.com

Santa drops off all kinds of fun things about this time of year, and with teen boys in the house, PS3 games are king. My boys can't wait to tear into a new game and defeat it in no time flat.

But I confess. I'm addicted to Ezio too. So much that I even put up with all the glytches in Assassin's Creed 3 - Brotherhood. But shortcuts like pasting code from a similar spot, over and over and over again...I can't really overlook those. (Reminder: Avoid repetition like the plague in my own storylines.)

Before I go off on a rant...I should tell you Assassin's Creed 2- Bloodlines was the best game I've played in a while. And when I say "played" - I mean watched and directed my beloved to "turn left, turn left, TURN LEFT!!!!" while I hopped up and down on the couch. (He doesn't appreciate the excitement. Says it makes him stressed out and he can't concentrate. *snicker* OK, enough amusing myself here at his expense.) I have no gaming skills whatsoever, but I help figure out what to do next when it isn't immediately obvious. The boys on the other hand...they've been there, done that, and it's Spoilerville whenever they're in the room.

You won't catch me playing Call of Duty, or other shoot-em-up games, (Well, I did play Metal Gear Solid 4), so why am I playing AC (and all sorts of Uncharted, Red Dead Redemption, etc.)? It's the REALLY COOL storyline!

MC accesses his ancestor's memories through his own DNA and, with an Animus (I'll write a whole post about the Animus aka time traveling/parallel universe later), relives them to find clues to a present-day dillema. World domination conflict in two flavors. And the international settings are the kicker. (My Pomegranate tie-ins for today.)

AC1 is set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, AC2 and 3 are in Renaissance Italy. The main objective is to find the Piece of Eden and your opponents are operatives of the Knights Templar. All in all, it's some very nice historical fiction. I've picked up interesting ideas from each of these games, and sometimes my boys will refer to them if I'm stuck writer's block.

At the dinner table...

ME: I wonder if there's such a thing as blue amber?
SON: There is. The Cintemani Stone (Uncharted).
ME: Oh, yeah!

I got a couple of gems from that conversation, actually. (Totally LOVE Cintemani! It's going places, I tell you.)

The powerful Borgia family is the enemy in AC3. Here's the short trailer:

Related articles

• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Has A Killer Cameo [Spoiler Alert] (kotaku.com)
• 'Metal Gear' cameo for 'AC: Brotherhood' (digitalspy.co.uk)
• Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (joystiq.com)

International Wives

It's nowhere near Valentines Day yet, but International Romance is in the air! Sorry for the cliché, but I have to say - I LOVE these stories! I wish there were more than four weeks in January, because there are a lot more faces that could grace these pages... If you missed Nicole Ducleroir last week, you should really read hers, and of course next week we'll have Jessica Bell.

This week, as promised, we have Katie Mills, aka Creepy Query Girl (top right) sharing her story in signature fun style. She's an American writer, teacher, and mother living in France. Here's her blogger profile, in case you haven't had the good fortune to find her before:

I used to be a normal married mother of three. Then I finished my first book in january 2009 and slowly transformed into the creepy query girl. Now in my spare time I'm tracking literary agents' every move. On the internet. Not like, outside their windows with binoculars......yet.

And here's her story!

When you imagine a young woman spending her first year in Paris, you’d think she’d fall in with some skinny, pointy shoed, slick-haired smoker named ‘Luc’ or ‘Pierre’.

And truth be told, I did go out with a few of those types in the first months I spent abroad. But since I have an aversion to men with girly hands, it was doomed from the start.

One day, while walking home from one of my (many many) French classes, an American classmate mentioned his rock group was looking for a female vocalist. I offered to audition since I grew up surrounded by musicians and missed performing.

Jean-Christophe or ‘JC’ (pronounced Jee Say) was the drummer for the group. He didn’t look like any of the other French guys I’d dated. Actually he could have passed for an NFL linebacker.

I can’t say it was all stars and fireworks upon our first meeting. He didn’t think the group needed a female vocalist, especially a little blond American chick who looked about as hard-rock as a well groomed poodle.

He handed me the mic without a word. Okay maybe one word.

He said “Sing.”

So I did. Once they realized I could carry a tune alright (I mean, how hard is it really to sing Zombie? I just did my best imitation of a barking dog.), JC had to accept that I might be around to stay. Eventually he loosened up and we became friends.

I discovered after awhile that, despite his name, Jean-Christophe was probably the most American French boy I’d ever met. His favorite movies included ‘Rocky’ somewhere in the title. His favorite restaurant had two golden arches heading the menu. He preferred beer over wine, hated smoke filled rooms and wouldn’t wear pointy shoes if his life depended on it. Being with him was like being home, as strange as that sounds. And now, after eight years of marriage, three kids, and seven years of life in France, I couldn’t imagine a home without him.

The same thing can be said for this ramped love affair I’ve been having with the English language in the last few years.

I always liked to write. I always liked words. But since moving to France, and learning to speak, think and even dream in another language? – Let’s just say it’s given me a whole new outlook on my mother tongue. Like my husband, writing just feels like home. I love that no matter how funky my accent gets, or how much I stutter over English words and phrases I used to be able to spew without a second thought- when I hold my fingers over a keyboard, it all comes rushing back to me.

It’s reassuring to know the words are still there. They don’t hide from me when I’m writing like they do when I’m trying to have a conversation in English after being out of the country for almost three years at a time.

Don’t ask me why this is. It probably has something to do with how the brain functions.

But in any case, if it weren’t for the French language and this beautiful country, I honestly don’t know if writing would be as important or as magical to me as it’s become.

Just like if I hadn’t been surrounded by skinny French guys with girly hands, I might have never been drawn to the six foot, broad shouldered, Franco-shoulda-been-American that went on to become my husband!



Katie and family