Category: writing life

I Need an Ejector Chair–and Other News

I sit way too much, and my back is paying the price. Where can I buy a desk chair that ejects me after a set amount of time and will not let me sit again until I move around for a while? I don’t want to fly up through the ceiling like the guy in the cartoon. I picture spikes coming up through the seat or the seat suddenly becoming unbearably hot or cold, something that gives me no choice but to get up immediately.
 
I already use timers to remind me to take a break, but I tend to ignore them. Just this morning, when the timer dinged, I shut it off, and kept working. Then an urgent email caught my attention, and soon I had been sitting way too long. I’m visiting the chiropractor again on Wednesday, but I wouldn’t need him if I’d just MOVE.
 
Inventors, get busy. Lift chairs already exist for folks who have trouble getting up. I need one for the relatively able-bodied who need to be forced to stand and move around. Ideally, we could set a time, say 30 minutes, and for the next 10 minutes or whatever you cannot sit in that chair. Call it the Timed Office Chair Ejector, TOCE for short.
 
Meanwhile, things are happening, and I want to bring you up to date.
 
* Between the Bridges, the third novel in the Beaver Creek series, is out and available right now at the bookstores in Lincoln County, Oregon or from your favorite bookseller wherever you live. Support your local bookstore if you can.
 
* Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, my poetry chapbook, will be out March 15, which is very soon. Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, my first full-length poetry collection, is coming in April, and No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s will follow in June.

 
The schedule is getting busy, just way I like it. Here are the book-related events currently set for the next few months.
 

  • Saturday, March 9, 4 p.m.—Zoom—I’m marking my birthday and the launch of Blue Chip Stamp Guitar with an online reading hosted by my publisher, The Poetry Box. To register and receive the zoom link, visit https://thepoetrybox.com/live-03092024.
  • Wednesday, March 20, 1 p.m. PDT—Zoom—I will join Jody Day’s Childless Elderwomen chat with several other fabulous “nomo crones.” Our topic this time is “Caring for the Caregiver.” We will discuss our experiences taking care of our spouses and/or parents and our fears about who will take care of us when we need it. Register at https://gateway-women.com/gateway-elderwomen. The session will be recorded, so you can watch it whenever it works for you. If you worry about anonymity, neither your name or your face will be shown on the screen.  
  • Saturday, March 23, 12-2 p.m.—in-person at the Nye Beach Book House, 727 NW Third Street, Newport, OR. I will be signing copies of Between the Bridges, the new novel in the Up Beaver Creek series, as well as my other books. Come, buy an autographed copy at a local bookstore instead of an online chain. If you are not in the area, the book is available in print and on Kindle wherever books are sold.
  • Thursday, April 25, 7 p.m.—Facebook live and in person at Marco Polo, 300 Liberty St. SE, Salem, OR. I will be the featured reader at the Salem Poetry Project, sharing poems from Blue Chip Stamp Guitar and Dining Al Fresco with My Dog. An open mic follows. Watch the Poetry Project Facebook page for information. https://www.facebook.com/SalemPoetryProject/.
  • Tuesday, May 14, 6 p.m.—Zoom—I will be one of the featured readers at the bi-monthly Head for the Hills series. An open mic follows. Visit the series’ Facebook page, for details or email dale@champlindesign.com to get on the mailing list.

 
AT THE BLOGS:
Childlessbymarriage.com: “Obsessing Over Dogs vs. Obsessing Over Children”
Unleashedinoregon.com: “The Strange Valentine’s Day/Ash Wednesday Mashup”
 
READ AND ENJOYED:
The Squannacook at Dawn by Richard Jordan, The Poetry Box, 2024. As I started reading the first poem in this beautiful chapbook, I felt myself relaxing into something beautiful. I was with the poet on the bank of a river in Massachusetts, breathing fresh air, watching fish ride the current, and listening to blackbirds singing. This winner of the Poetry Box Chapbook Prize is deserving of every accolade. I thought I would not be interested in a book about fishing. I haven’t held a pole since I was a little girl, but it’s about so much more than fish. The language, the unhurried pacing, and the Zen of being out in nature captured me immediately.” I love these lines in “Blackbird Through October Mist”: “It is important/now to lift the paddle, let it rest/across your lap. This is the time to glide.” This whole book feels like a long, easy glide, and I treasure it.
 
House on Fire by D. Liebhart, 9:25 Books, 2022. I stopped everything to read the last 70 pages of this novel, which begins with a mother asking her grown daughter to kill her father. The father has dementia, and caring for him has become next to impossible, but he made the whole family swear they would never put him in a nursing home. The daughter, Bernadette, an ER nurse, knows all too much about dementia and death, but she can’t kill him. Nor can her Bible-quoting sister. Even without that, she has her hands full. Her son Jax has major behavioral problems and has been kicked out of every school in the area. She barely makes enough money to pay her bills, with no help from her sometimes partner Shayne, who lives and works at a commune up in Topanga Canyon. Things are complicated and about to get more so. This is fiction, but so real I believed every word. Five stars for this one.
 
WATCHED AND ENJOYED
 
“True Detective,” Season 4, starring Jody Foster, streaming on MAX. This is one spooky story. They are in a part of Alaska where the sun doesn’t shine at all in the middle of the winter, so it’s always dark. A group of men working at a research station in the middle of nowhere suddenly disappear. Foster is determined to find out what happened. Twists and turns galore.
 
“The Color Purple,” 2023 version, streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime. This updated version shares the same heartbreaking story, but it’s a musical. The music is fantastic, and the cast, featuring Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P. Henson, does a fabulous job. If you’re not crying at the end of this, you’re tougher than I am.
 
The timer says I have three seconds to get away from this chair.
 
Cheers.
 
Sue

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What Do You Do When Your Back Goes Out and You can’t Stay in One Position for More than Five Minutes?

For one thing, you don’t post on your blog for three weeks in a row because all you can think about is your back, and that’s boring. I’m still getting things done, just . . . differently.

My back has gone bonkers. I just spent my third weekend babying it. The only semi-comfortable position is upside down with my back flat on the floor, the bed, or the deck. See photos. The world looks quite different in reverse. The clouds are gorgeous. The ceiling looks like a new world I’d like to explore. The dog is intrigued. She sniffs. Hmm. What’s going on? Then she barks until I take her out for a walk where I moan for a block, then turn her around, saying, “Mama has to go lie down.”

Please don’t send advice. I’m drowning in it. I’m seeing the chiropractor every other day. I just want to share some of the quirky things this has caused me to do:

* Binged the 8-episode series Clickbait, a mystery-thriller that kept me guessing right up to the surprise ending, which I watched in the wee hours this morning. Highly recommended.

* Watched “The Starling,” a movie with Melissa McCarthy, and “An Unfinished Life” with Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman. Both good. Put them on your list, too. I also watched some real stinkers, but I won’t mention them.

* Decided to rearrange my office again, ordered a table and a high-rise chair to go with my standing desk, coming Thursday, assembly required.

* Decided to digitize 50 years’ worth of sheet music and ordered a new tablet, coming tomorrow.

* Joined the Walmart shopping club for the free delivery.

* Sampled an online mandolin course, which now keeps telling me to start my first lesson.

* Shopped for guitars and cars. Now my computer is full of ads for both.

* Soaked in the hot tub for hours, trying out all the features on the control panel. If I could move my computer desk to the hot tub, I would stay there all day.

* Listened to a bazillion podcasts, most of them stupid.

* Zoomed countless poetry readings, changing location every few minutes. I honestly don’t know how I will ever sit still in a chair when COVID lets us meet in person again.

* Revised my memoir one more time, sitting, standing, and lying with my laptop on my belly.

* Planned landscaping and redecorating projects that I will undertake when I can move again.

* Continued playing music at church, where I was grateful Catholics change position a lot—sit, stand, kneel, walk up to Communion . . .  Stand up straight! I thought I was.

* Let the mail stack up and the dirty dishes wait.

* Thought about how maybe I can’t live here by myself anymore even though I love my place in the forest.

* Counted my blessings that I could still walk and move and plan even though it hurt. Lots of people can’t do those things.

Is it getting better? I’m honestly not sure. I’m not crawling around with two canes now, so that’s something. I can stand without screaming, but . . . I don’t know. I’m doing what I can to mitigate the effects of sitting at my computer all day, mostly by just not doing it. Hemingway wrote standing up, so I can, too. Meanwhile, the floor is calling me.

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It was all writing all the time

On normal days, I juggle several lives at once. I’m a writer with new writing to write, old writing to sell, and published books to market. I produce three blogs that require my responses to a steady stream of comments, especially my Childless by Marriage blog. I seem to have become the Dear Abby of the childless set. But I’m also a musician with a “day job” as a church choir co-director, plus numerous solo gigs, jams and open mics, and a constant need to practice on the piano and guitar. I also have a massive house and yard to maintain in addition to taking care of myself and my dog—and she’s not much help. Bills, laundry, groceries, doctor appointments, walking the dog, worrying long-distance about my elderly father, trying to find time for my friends . . . you know, real life. Sometimes I get all tied up in knots trying to do it all.

But sometimes I get to run away. Sometimes I get to focus on just one life. That’s what I did last weekend when I drove to Portland for the Willamette Writers conference. I have been part of Willamette Writers since shortly after we moved to Oregon. I co-founded the Oregon coast branch with my friend Dorothy Blackcrow Mack. This year, as part of the new Timberline Review staff, I was there to represent the magazine and celebrate our first issue, to teach a poetry class, and to pitch my unpublished books to editors and agents. I helped judge the Saturday night open mic, too. In between, I participated in workshops that got me inspired, educated and anxious to write, write, write. Tom Robbins was there. I got to study with Jennifer Lauck. I hobnobbed with Bryan Doyle. As equals! Well, almost. I also ate, ate, ate. Those cookies with peanut butter in the middle? OMG!

It was all writing all the time. I could forget everything beyond the Doubletree Hotel. Yes, I kept getting text messages about church choir, and yes, I had to play a funeral Monday morning, and yes, I needed to call the vet, take the car to the shop and a dozen other things, but for three days, all I had to do was eat, sleep, write and talk about writing.

It’s amazing and a bit alarming how many people want to be writers. Hundreds of writers attended this conference, most paying a big chunk of money in the hope of getting that nugget of information or that successful meeting that would rocket their manuscript onto the bestseller list. It happens. Every year, we have success stories, people whose careers were launched at the Willamette Writers Conference. That’s why people keep coming.

It’s a weird conglomeration of folks. Writers are not necessarily social people. They’re more comfortable alone with their books and their computers. The conference setting forces them to “network” and we don’t all do it well, but we do our best. We sit down next to another writer and ask, “What do you write?” Thus the conversation begins.

A central activity all weekend is “pitching” our books to agents and editors. People walk around looking like they might throw up or faint because they’re so nervous as they approach the “pitch marketplace,” a room full of “buyers” sitting at little tables waiting to hear their pitch. This year, we had eight minutes. We were herded in one door and escorted out the other when the organizer shouted “Time!” Handed an evaluation sheet on the way out, we staggered down the hall, some euphoric, some suicidal, most somewhere in the middle. Three out of four agents wanted to see my work. But this is not my first conference. It’s just like speed dating. Maybe there’s a spark, but it might fizzle the next time you meet.

Eventually the conference ended with a last speaker who urged us to “never give up.” Then it was time to take off my lanyard with the card that identified me as part of Timberline Review, as teacher, editor, author. I felt so naked without that identity when I finally walked to my car and left the hotel. I immediately took a wrong turn because I couldn’t read the street sign until I got too close to turn back, then ran into a five-mile backup behind an accident on I-5. Ah, reality.

Yes, I got weary of lining up at buffets and in the ladies room. Yes, I was sick of taking the elevator up and down. Yes, my body was starting to whine about sitting too much. But oh it was nice to live just one life at a time.