“Lovely but creepy” is me in the campground bathroom apparently

So, yeah, today I was singing in the shower at the campground and I didn’t realize that I was singing. It was some sort of unconscious thing. 

And I heard someone gasp. 

And then I realized that I was singing quietly, “Pretty women, fascinating, sipping coffee, dancing. Pretty women, are a wonder.”

And I gasped. 

The person outside the showers said, “I heard you. It was lovely. Just kind of creepy, Carrie.”

“Like me?” I yelled out. 

She laughed and left. The door slammed shut behind her. 

I still do not know who this person was. I would totally put this in a story, but it feels like an editor would be all, “Carrie. Dude. This is unbelievable. Nobody would be that dorky.” And then I’d have to admit the truth that it really happened and that it happened to me and be embarrassed all over again. 

So, instead I’m just blogging it here.

IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW!

My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!

Gasp! 

It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed! 

You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?

In the Woods
In the Woods


ART NEWS

You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site. 

PATREON OF AWESOME

You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps). 

Check it out here. 

WHAT IS PATREON? 

A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you. 

Passive Aggressive Much? And How to Become More Awesome in Just 30 Minutes a Day

Over on the random thought part of the podcast, we hear about Carrie being passive-aggressive at the campground bathroom, Shaun sing, and random people at Smokey’s Barbecue and Lobster.

But here is the more intellectual stuff. Um. Slightly more intellectual stuff?

This guy Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book Outliers and in it he outlines his belief that if you practice something for 10,000 hours and do that in a deliberate way, then you’ll become a top performer.

Who are the outliers? They are the best and the brightest. 

We don’t want you to freak out over that 10,000 hours bit because that’s like saying, “Hey Shaun, I know you can’t run more than 60 seconds right now, but this Friday you’re going to run for 93 minutes.”

Spoiler alert: Shaun ran for 93-minutes straight on Friday. Carrie did too.

Anyway, this guy named Danny Forest who writes on Medium breaks it down to something that feels a bit more doable. He says that he can learn soft skills in about eight hours and breaks it into working 30 minutes each day on those skills. 

That seems a lot better than 10,000 hours, right?

There’s a difference between competence and brilliance, but that half-hour concentrated focus is how so many of us build our skills. Even dogs. 

So, inspired by Mr. Forest, the Farrar has three things he wants to learn: 

  • Make movies on Adobe Premiere
  • Spanish
  • Stained glass stuff
  • How to be a better parent

And Carrie also made a list:

  • Make movies on Adobe Premiere
  • Make felted paintings
  • How to self publish
  • How to draw
  • How to write travel stories
  • How to be Anthony Boudrain
  • Spanish
  • How to cook in the French style, but also to make kick-butt saltanas and samosas and all things in pockets, basically.

What do you want to learn? To do?

For writing, focusing on writing or reading about writing for a half hour a day is really an essential tip to becoming a better storyteller. You see that advice everywhere and you see other people countering that advice saying to ‘ignore all advice,’ which is also actually advice. 

Yes, do your own thing and do what works for you. That should be obvious. But don’t forget that you can’t become a brilliant guitar player if you’ve never picked up a guitar. You have to put in the time. 

Writing Tip of the Pod

Practice what you want to be good at. Do it in small bites. You’ve got this.

Dog Tip for Life

Dogs are good at sleeping and practicing that. Be like a dog.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

WRITING NEWS

IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, ORDER NOW!

My new book, IN THE WOODS, is out!

Gasp! 

It’s with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed! 

You can order this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?

In the Woods
In the Woods


ART NEWS

You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site. 

Carrie Jones Art for Sale

PATREON OF AWESOME

You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps). 

Check it out here. 

WHAT IS PATREON? 

A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you. 


Camper Wisdom and Dialogue Hints

So, I’m back in the camper for the summer because we rent out our hosts to tourists every year. Well, it’s the second year, that almost makes it every year, right?

To put this in perspective, we have two dogs, one obese cat, two humans (occasionally three) in this tiny camper from the 1980s. We painted it white so it wasn’t as depressing, but let me tell you, painting things white doesn’t make anything actually bigger.

Anyways, I was trying to quickly make a camper video about dialogue and I failed completely. Here it is below. Don’t judge too harshly.

If you don’t want to die from secondhand embarrassment let me sum it up for you. The takeaway from this video is meant to be people react to different things in different ways. People speak in different ways. Show this in your dialogue. Think of how your mom talks, your bestie, your avo, the lady at the bar, your rabbi. Not everyone talks the same. Think of how they all react to one simple situation like a rat popping out of the garbage bin in the kitchen. It wouldn’t all be the same, right? Respect and embrace that difference and show it in your story.


WRITING NEWS

IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW!

My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed! 

You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?

In the Woods
In the Woods


ART NEWS

You can buy limited-edition prints and learn more about my art here on my site.

Carrie Jones Art for Sale

Patreon of Awesome

You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).

Check it out here.

WHAT IS PATREON? 

A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you. 

Hugging Strangers is Possibly the Best Way to be Human

She had stayed at our camper site for nine years, not continuously, but for a couple weeks at a time each summer while her husband came to Maine  to abandon the Alabama summer heat. She’d had to stay home and work those summers, visiting him twice. They thought they’d spend a lot more time here soon.

 

But this year, she walks across the campground road (Road 4) towards me, in a black summer dress, loosely draped across her body. She is half slow, half purposeful, which means that she’s trying to do something that’s hard to do. I stand up from the picnic table where I’m working and meet her.

Her arms open wide. Her hands shake and she says, “This… this used to be our campsite.”

 

And I instantly know who she is.

 

“Oh,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

 

I have no words.

 

I open my arms and she steps right into them, this stranger who is not a stranger. This stranger who is human like me.

 

It’s our first of three hugs.

 

Her husband died last year, in between summers, and she sold the fifth-wheel that they stayed in. Someone is possibly using it for transient agricultural workers up in the Machias area. She’s not sure.

 

“Our shed was right here. There was a deck, a huge deck right here. They took all of it.” She shakes her head.

 

Her husband built the deck. He had her antique music box in the shed and the music would play out into the road. All their friends were here, a group of 60 to 70-year-olds, mostly, and they would gather every night, talking, laughing. Her husband kept one man from drinking for the six weeks they were together here. He built a deck with a baby gate (for free) for a wormer and his wife because they had an 18-month-old baby and the wife was always alone with the baby, always watching it, always exhausted and trapped.

 

“He’d spell her for a half hour or an hour each day. She couldn’t believe how kind that was,” the woman tells me and she breaks down again.

“Everything is so different. Our shed,” she repeats. “It was right there where your fire pit was. We couldn’t have a fire pit. The smells and sound. It reminded him of Vietnam.”

 

We hugged again.

 

I don’t know her first name. It doesn’t matter, honestly, because I know parts of her – the raw, authentic parts, the love and the grief that came flowing out when she saw us at her campsite, which is now, our campsite. And I’m so honored.

 

She had been a woman in love and she still is – and here was the place where she and her husband would play Wii Bowling, and serenade the campground road with jaunty music that echoed out of the music box they kept in the shed. They’d hike up the steep hill into a scattering of spruce and pines, neighbors’ campfires trying to erase his bad memories and recreate the good, squirrels and chipmunks racing from tree trunk to branches. And all of this was a home.

 

And it isn’t hers any more. Just like some day it won’t be mine.

 

“I’m… I have food in the microwave,” she says.

 

We’ve turned off the grill where dinner was cooking so I could talk to her, but I don’t tell her that. It’s not my job to tell her things. It’s my job to listen.

 

“I… I might come back next year.”

 

“If we’re here,” I tell her, “I hope you stop by and say ‘hi.’”

 

“I will. I will,” she says and she nods bravely but her lip loses its firmness and she starts to crumple. I hug her one last time and try to hold her up. We all need to be held up sometimes. Strangers. Friends. Family. Ghosts.

 

We often imagine that our experience is the real experience. We forget the others who have come before – who have belonged in our campsites, our house lots, our countries and lives. The lives that come before and after us often seem so unreal. We claim things as our own, but are they ever really ours? Only for tiny fractions of time.

 

And that’s okay. Lives and experiences can pass astonishingly quickly; some of us can barely remember moments in our own lives, let alone the lives of the people and peoples before us. But they were there. They are there. Sometimes they walk across a tiny road and open their arms to us. Sometimes they are scents we can barely catch at night, little mewings and whispers of pasts and futures we won’t get to be a part of.

 

And that’s okay, too, because we get to be a part of our moments, live them, listen to them, and experience them ourselves. And we can try to be stewards, prepare for other futures and remember others’ pasts. That would be best, I think, if we could act with kindness for those who have suffered losses and for those who have to bear the future burdens. That’s what humanity should be about, not just the cold shivers, but the hugs, the wishes, the hopes and the stories.