Every year my ancient nana would call me up to make sure that I’d voted.
“It’s the least you can do, Carrie. The least you can do,” she’d say. “It’s our civic duty to protect the enchanted.”
Who are the enchanted? According to my nana? Women. Children. The disenfranchised.
My nana, Rena Philbrick Morse, was not a least-you-can-do sort of person, but voting was her bar for the ‘least you can do.’
She had high expectations of her family and of women.
Voting was tremendously important to her because women’s right to vote happened on her tenth birthday. She always heard from men that she knew were less intelligent than her disparage women’s brains. A farm girl, she heard a lot of men say that women were too delicate to do physical labor. That farm girl lived to be 100 and spent 99 years of it working her garden.
When women were give the right to vote, she celebrated with her mom knowing that she would have a voice.
A voice.
The Horror
My nana was a tall woman, rail-thin, brought up three kids of her own when her jazz drummer husband left her. She was involved in New Hampshire for an extremely long time. Her eldest son ended up desegregating the UNH fraternity system back in the 1950s. She was the valedictorian of her high school and her mind? Her mind was brilliant and so sharp. She was a woman who was stoic. She didn’t emote. She was a plank of barn board that refused to bend no matter what beat against her.
So when she called me crying one November, I couldn’t understand. I thought someone had died.
“No,” she gasped. “No.”
It was worse than that.
One of my older relatives didn’t vote. She had claimed she had ‘no head for politics.’ She’d been lying about voting for years.
I’m not sure how my nana survived that.
But she did. She survived because someone needed to drive that relative to the polls. She survived because she knew she had work to do. We all have work to do.
The Purpose
The purpose of motivation and engagement or protecting ourselves and others through words, through action, through voting? It’s your purpose. It’s our purpose.
In the local politics of our town, a lot of people don’t agree about things and they argue like their souls depend on it, like the world will collapse if their point of view doesn’t become policy, but they still manage to jump each other’s cars (mostly), make casseroles when someone is sick or dies, applaud each other’s kids when they score at a game. They mourn when someone suffers a devastating loss and celebrate when there is a win.
And hopefully they will vote in November.
I told someone about what my nana said and they responded, “The least you can do? It’s one of the most important things you can true.”
That’s how so much of this life works, isn’t it? Sometimes the things that are the least you can do are also some of the most important? That might be voting. That might be talking to a neighbor. That might be making connections and giving someone praise. But it’s something. We all can do something. And keep doing it. Until our world gets better.
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Normally we talk about writing somehow, right? Because we’re a writing podcast.
But we aren’t this week.
This week, we’re talking about fashion advice for men because Carrie saw a post on The Art of Manliness that was “101 Style Tips for Men.”
First off, let’s just give a shout out that there’s a website called The Art of Manliness. That is a brilliant name.
Carrie’s favorite tip was this one:
27. Always dress like you might decide to drop by a restaurant or nightclub with a dress code.
Because you might. And even if you don’t, you might as well look like a guy who’s got plans.
The Art of Manliness
All the advice reminded us of those old 1980s, 1990s talk shows where the women would get their husbands make-overs in a super hetero-normative way and these guys would come out with this total, “Oh my gosh, I’m hot” saunter.” Or else they’d try to hide.
But it also makes us think about our fixation on fashion and appearance and buying things. If you look at that list it requires buying a lot of things. That requires money. And that’s a little frustrating.
How about “101 Feel Good Tips for Men” that are about being good people or something? How about if we spend a little more time our souls and our attitudes and our civics instead of worrying about never wearing graphic t-shirts?
Oh, wait. You can’t make money off that can you?
Dog Tip for Life
Wag your tail. That’s all the style you need.
Writing Tip of the Pod
Style isn’t something you want to copy. Style in writing is voice. And your voice? It shouldn’t be determined by a list of 101 tips on what to think and how to write and who to be. It shouldn’t be about copying other people. It should be all you. Your voice.
Just like you shouldn’t go around trying to pretend to be Tom Cruise or Bieber or Idris Elba or Russell Wong and dressing like them, you shouldn’t go around writing like J.K. Rowling or James Patterson or Naomi Shihab Nye.
Be you.
Be your own style.
And if that puts you on a How Not to Dress or How Not to Write list? Who cares.
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, 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?
I’m about to revise a lot of my own stories and in the next couple of months, I’m going to see if I can figure out how to self publish instead of continuing traditional publishing, so I’m trying to pretend that I won’t have a ton of editors helping me, no writing mentors, just me.
And that’s a little scary.
But it’s made me think more fully about my own stories and how I can apply the tools I use when I teach writing to my own darn writing.
I know! I know! That should be easy, right?
It’s not as easy as I thought because it requires stepping away from the book and thinking as a reader, as a writer, and as an editor, but mostly as a reader.
And the main element when we write a book is that we want our readers to keep reading. So, I think I’m going to start what I like to call (Drumroll please) the Wednesday Writing Series About Hooking Your Reader.
I’ll be giving two hints a blog post. Let’s start!
TWO QUICK HINTS TO KEEP YOUR READER HOOKED ON YOUR BOOK
Begin your story with the moment that will transform the main character or world.
Begin with the girl moving to Maine from Charleston and seeing something strange on the side of the road like I did with the NEED series.
Begin with the male member of the ‘class couple’ telling his girlfriend that he’s gay like I did in the TIPS ON HAVING A GAY (ex) BOYFRIEND books.
Have a really strong voice of the narrator.
The Martian’s first line is, “I’m pretty much f*cked.”
That combines the pivotal moment with a super strong narrative voice.
Or the Color Purple begins with, “You better not tell nobody but God.”
Which has a great voice and a mystery set in, too. What shouldn’t they tell?
Next week, I’ll have two more tips.
Do Good Wednesday
Puerto Rico still needs assistance and so does Guatemala. You can help by spreading the word or donating to the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit involved with advocacy for Latino communities.
The Hispanic Federation’s three big campaigns right now are:
Check it out. Think deeply. Care. That’s how you do good. That’s how you make a difference in the world and your community. You’ve got this. Sparty the Rescued Dog believes in you.
Sparty: I do! I believe in you.
Writing News
The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy. How cool is that?
You should totally buy my book about Moe. It’s awesome and quirky and fun because it’s about Moe Berg and it’s a picture book. I’m heading to Houston, North Carolina, and Virgnia soon, just to talk about it. How cool is that?
OUR PODCAST DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow.
Writing Coach
I offer solo writing coach services, but I’m also teaching a Write! Submit! Support! (WSS) six-month class online via the Writing Barn in Austin. For details about that class, check out this link. For more about my individual coaching, click here.
And finally, for the month of July, my book FLYING is on sale in ebook version on multiple platforms, which means not just Amazon. It’s a cheap way to have an awesome read in a book that’s basically Men in Black meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer but with chocolate-covered pretzels.
Proof of the sale-nature of July.
Thanks so much for reading my blog! Please comment or say ‘hi!’ if you feel like it!
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
I only hated two professors in college. One because he was misogynist buttface who only liked guys and was openly derisive about women being incapable of creating art because we were busy “focusing on making babies.” I walked out of his class after yelling at him for a good three minutes.
Most people think I am mellow. I am not mellow. Sometimes, I have no chill. This was one of those times.
I was the only woman in that class. My boyfriend was in that class. Two other guys were in that class. Nobody else walked out. Just me.
The other professor taught poetry and liked to tell students that they weren’t real enough or raw enough. She wanted pain. She wanted authenticity. She wanted confessional poetry and most of us just sort of wanted to write about white baseball caps, rainbows, and dolphins.
In retrospect, I sort of feel badly for her because I probably would have gotten frustrated about all those poems about white baseball caps, rainbows, and dolphins, too.
But still. It was what we were right then, a lot of us – baseball caps, rainbows, dolphins.
And the rest of the professors? They were amazing. I had really great professors in theater and poetry even though I was a political science major.
Here’s a letter I wrote to one of them recently when he retired from teaching. I was thinking about this a lot after I reposted my Seamus Heaney blog.
Dear Professor Farnsworth,
I don’t think you will remember me, but I will always remember you because you, your class, and poetry helped save me in a time of my life when salvation seemed highly unlikely.
I spent most of my time at college sick with seizures caused by an Epstein Barr virus that had attacked my brain. I spent most of my time wondering who I was, how I could fit in, and what my voice could possibly be when my broken brain was no longer my own.
You helped me reclaim my voice, but more than that? You helped me expand it.
I was not much of a poet.
I am still not much of a poet.
And you?
You had such a voice.
Resonant, understanding, persistent, encouraging.
You read my poems, all our poems – even the ones about vampires, and taught us that even if we didn’t know our voice right then, our voice would find us if we gave it space and attention.
Space and attention.
Space and attention and intention.
Those very same things that you gave to us.
You are one of the best teachers we could ever know.
You taught us to build up ourselves and our poems, to construct our stories and our voice, piece by piece, word by word, symbol by beautiful symbol. You taught us to craft our poems and our lives with patience and love and strength.
Patience.
Love.
Strength.
Add insight? And that is what you, Robert Farnsworth, represent to me. Patience. Love. Strength. Insight.
Your legacy?
Your legacy is huge and important and ripples into so many other lives? So many lives…
You have helped us to become.
Thank you. May your next stanza of becoming be as beautiful as this one has been.
DO GOOD WEDNESDAY
Write a letter to someone who made a difference in your life. Send it.
WRITING NEWS
I am super excited about the upcoming TIME STOPPERS book coming out this August. And honestly, if you want to help me feel less stressed about failure and the writing world, leaving a review for the books and buying them? That is the best thing you can do for me.
Anyway…
This middle grade fantasy series happens in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine and it’s all about friendship and magic and kids saving their magical town.
An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters . . . This new fantasy series will entice younger fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.” – School Library Journal
“Sticks the landing . . . The world building is engaging . . . between the decidedly wonderful residents and the terrifying monsters who plague them.” – BCCB
“Amid the magic, spells, adventure, and weirdness of this fantasy are embedded not-so-subtle life lessons about kindness, friendship, and cooperation.” – Booklist
CARRIE’S BOOKS
For a complete round-up of my 16-or-so books, check out my website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.
OUR PODCAST DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.
The podcast of awesome
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips.
I spend almost all my time trying to be a nice person. It’s always been like this; I kid you not. Like in fifth grade I was voted MOST COURTEOUS like that was some kind of damn honor or something, right?
Carrie is polite.
Carrie is courteous.
Carrie is word-of-the day worthy.
That’s not who I thought I was.
“Most Courteous” wasn’t what I wanted to be, you know, right? Like I wanted to be “Smartest” or “Prettiest” or “Class Clown” or “Most Athletic” even though “Most Athletic” is something I could never be since I have zero hand-eye coordination. This is because I don’t use my left eye to see. They thought I was blind when I was born. I had an operation. I had glasses when I was one year old and kept them all the way until fifth grade when I prayed to God every night to not have to have glasses in middle school.
There was this stupid Dorothy Parker quote that says, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and that quote was like the word of God to me. I knew I would always be most courteous and not real superlative worthy unless I actually got rid of those damn glasses.
So I prayed.
At the doctor’s office, I sat in the chair and stared at the eye chart. It was all on my right eye, I knew. It had to perform at 100 % to get rid of those damn glasses.
The doctor was all, “Can you read this line?”
And I was all, “E.”
And he was all, “Can you read this line?”
And I was all, “T.O.Z.”
He made an interesting noise, like he was impressed. “Go down as low as you can. Just keep reading each line. Start at the top. How about that?”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath and started from the top. “E F P T P Z L P E D.”
I went on and on. I could see them all.
Sadly, the magical return of my eyesight didn’t make me magically popular as one boy reminded me at a sixth-grade dance at St Joseph’s the one Catholic church in our town. We had one Catholic church, which was where some of the Irish and French Canadian kids went. We had Protestant church, which was Presbyterian. That’s it.
I wanted to be one of those church kids so badly. But one of my dads was an atheist. Another dad was a lapsed Catholic who believed that hell was where we were living right now, on Earth. And my mom gave up her Methodist Church in Manchester because she caught the minister cheating at bowling and called him out on it.
“He lied to my face, that man,” Mom would self-righteously retell us for decades. “Right. To. My. Face. And this man was supposed to be in charge of my spiritual growth? I’ll show him spiritual growth. He was always looking at my cleavage, too. Creep.”
Bowling mattered a lot to my mom. But I was just annoyed because her cleavage and insistence that you aren’t supposed to cheat in bowling meant I couldn’t go to church.
And I wanted to.
I wanted to belong, you know?
So, when S. slow danced with me three times in a row at the CCD dance, I felt like I might actually belong.
But then he pulled away from me and said, “Carrie, let’s face it. Neither of us are lookers. So we might as well make do with each other.”
I stepped out of his arms and I said one word, “What?”
“I’m saying… I’m saying… We’re not tens so we might as well make do.”
I cried and I ran away and hid in the bathroom. I didn’t come out even when his mom, a freaking chaperone, came in to check on me. I didn’t come out until there wasn’t any music playing at all.
Only then did I run out to my mom’s old Chevy Monte Carlo, which was waiting in the parking lot. I wrenched open the door and slammed myself inside the car.
“What is it?” Her smile went into the anger place where her lips were just straight lines. This was how she looked when she talked about her little Methodist minister friend.
I blurted out what S. said. With my mother, there was no pretending something bad hadn’t happened. There were no secrets, unless they were hers.
“That bastard,” she said.
“I’m ugly.” I sobbed that out somehow.
“You aren’t ugly. That boy is ugly. His heart is ugly. He was working some line. He thinks he’s some actor. Some comedian. He’s a punk.”
But I knew in my heart that my mom was lying. I was ugly. I had to be.
I suddenly became someone I didn’t think I was.
And the thing is, no matter how many times I’ve heard people tell me I’m not, heard boys and girls call me cute or beautiful or lovely or pretty, I’ve never believed them. It’s S.S’s words that I hear in my head, over and over again.
Neither of us are lookers.
We’re not tens.
Prom dog
I have this other friend who photographs well. She is the opposite of me because I photograph like poop.
She says to me sometimes, “I don’t know how so many guys like you. You and me? We’re alright looking, but we’re not beautiful like OTHER GIRL.”
And I smiled at her.
OTHER GIRL is skinny and blonde and full of acne scars and holes of anxiety that threaten to eat her insides away. And I worry for her all the time.
And I am?
Alright looking, I guess. I became who she said I was.
Her words shouldn’t matter.
It freaking matters.
Other people’s words have echoed and echoed and shaped me until I don’t even want to be in a photograph anymore. I’m too afraid that the image of me that I see will be even worse than I imagine.
I had delusions of insignificance. Every time I felt badly about who I was it was because someone else had put me in a comparison situation.
You know how that is right?
Ah, I’m not as successful as Rick Riordan.
Ah, I’m not as beautiful as all these famous actresses and models or even that random police dispatcher in my town.
Ah, I’m not as smart as…
Ah, I’m not as good a runner as…
But the thing is? That’s crap. You are magical as you. You don’t need to be compared to anyone else or compare yourself to others. Superlatives are bull. We are all superlative at being ourselves.
Your life is your message to this world.
And what is that message? The truth of you? The truth of me? It sure isn’t how we look. It’s how we are on the inside. For me that’s word-of-the-day Carrie, Courteous Carrie, Writer Carrie, Photographer Carrie, Hug Your Dogs All the Time Carrie.
That’s the truth of you, too.
And looking into mirrors? It’s about more than seeing what’s on the outside, about more than being defined and labeled by what’s on that same outside. It’s about the inner you. The real you and seeing it – really seeing it – and knowing how freaking magic you are just by being you, authentically and truly you.
That’s not saying you don’t have flaws, that you won’t mess up. We all mess up. We mess up constantly.
Some people are afraid of the #metoo movement, of making their own mistakes when it comes to racial issues, religious issues, sexuality, identity, ability.
That fear? It’s good. It makes us better. We are all heading straight into truth; burning it out of ourselves, all the ugly things that we don’t want to see. We can’t let our fear slow us down. We can’t let other people’s visions of us control us. We can’t be afraid to look into the mirrors that see deep inside of us.
Social media brings out trolls. That’s so true, but it also gives us a voice, a hope. We have a new template for telling our stories, for making our lives and for sharing them in a world where our voices often didn’t matter. We can share our magic in so many ways.
And it’s intoxicating and terrifying. People are interested in other people. People are sharing with other people. People are even interested in us. In us.
And that’s power.
And that’s magic.
Use it wisely. I know I will try to. I know I make mistakes. I know that I am human. But the thing is? I love being human. I love growing and evolving and changing. I hope you do, too.
Writing News
CARRIE’S BOOKS
For a complete round-up of my 16-or-so books, check out my website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.
The next book coming out with Bloomsbury in August is this one! More on the series here.
OUR PODCAST DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE – New episode tomorrow!
The podcast of awesome
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice, and life tips.
In Episode Eight, we learn a little bit about voice. Also, in our ‘voice experiment,’ Shaun lets loose with a couple of f-bombs, so I’ve marked this episode as explicit. The man cannot be controlled.
Whether you’re writing or just living, your voice is an integral part of what you are communicating to the world.
Writer Tip Of The Pod:
Voice isn’t just about your sentence structure and word choice; it’s how your narrator sees the world. It’s what drives them. It’s the subconscious experiences that have created their reality.
To get to the voice of your character, you have to be your character.
Dog Tip For Life:
Don’t be afraid to let your inner world be part of your voice. Don’t be afraid to extend kindness to others. Let the kindness in your heart be reflected in your voice.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
