Category Archives: hobbies

And now for something almost completely different….

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Back in June of 2013, The Cutter presented me with a fun writing challenge.  He gave me four random things to use cohesively in a blog post.  The result is here.  I, in turn, threw down the gauntlet with five arbitrary topics and he brilliantly responded with this post.

The idea was so much fun to write, I thought I would try it again and offer the challenge to anyone else who wishes to participate.  This is not a recurring challenge and there is no deadline.  It just offers a little something outside the box and gives writers an excuse to deviate from their normal routine.  And who knows?  You could pick up a few new followers in the process.

Here are my five random ideas.   If you like the challenge, I’d love to read what you write – don’t forget to tag me.  And feel free to pick some random topics of your own and share it with your blogging friends.

  • ballerina
  • photo finish
  • movie script
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Chinese Food

Happy writing!

When passion supersedes thinking

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Sometimes I think too much.  I beat an idea to death because I am too stubborn to let the words flow they way they want to flow from my brain.  When that happens, the passion I have for those words seems to die a slow death and is replaced by the perfunctory task of trying to string a simple sentence together.

A few nights ago I watched the movie “Chef” with Jon Favreau.  Although his career path in the movie is obviously not a writer, his struggle to hold onto his passion becomes interrupted and his job becomes a menial task.  He lets too many outside influences tarnish the joy he gets from, not just cooking food but, creating food.

I took a lot of wisdom from that movie, so much so that I watched it a second time.  The underlying theme really struck the right chord in the orchestra of my creativity.  I watched his character peel back the unwanted opinions that had been constricting his imagination and he went right back to the basics, to the thing he fell in love with, and he rekindled his passion for food.

creative writing

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I’m going to wipe my writing counter clean and start from scratch.  I’m going to build the ingredients of my stories and get back to that place where my love for words began.  I’m going to let that passion speak for itself and not pound it into submission.  I am simply going to write.

 

 

 

 

Just one nice, looonnnngggg sniff

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I had just about given up on harnessing anything creative today when my dog sat on the floor next to me and rested her face on the window sill.  Almost motionless, she stared intently as a chipmunk ran back and forth across the lawn, each time carrying another acorn to its hiding spot.  Callaway didn’t utter even the slightest whine as she watched the little furry creature passing by about 50 times.

chippy

Every so often the chippie would pause for a rest, choosing to stop about 10 feet from my living room window.  This intrigued Callaway even more.  Pushing her nose up to the screen, she took deep breaths with the hope of getting just a tiny hint of Eau de Chippie.

I knew the writer in me had begun to take over for the pet owner when I realized her behavior reminded me of Hannibal Lecter displaying his highly acute sense of smell to Agent Starling from behind his glass partition.  There’s hope yet for finishing my novel….I just need to pay more attention to my dog!

 

 

There is always a little movement in the shadows

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I was 12 years old when I first saw the movie “The Changeling”.  True to its title, it altered some metaphysical part of my being.  I was a relatively normal child, as normal as kids could be in the 70’s and 80’s, but I still remember my reaction to that movie and the subsequent “change” that happened in me.  I knew from the moment that story ended that I would never be the same.  I didn’t sleep in my own bed for at least three days and I vowed I would never play with that same tri-coloured rubber ball again.  To this day, it still haunts me to see the Pepsi emblem. It reminds me of the horror I felt watching those scenes of a bouncing ball take on a life of its own and subject George C. Scott to interminable terror.

If I were a recurring patient at a psychiatrist’s office (perhaps I should be), I undoubtedly would be told that the reason I prefer a shower to a bath was a direct result of Russell Hunter’s tale of a haunted house and the fury that a spirit could unleash on living, breathing human beings.  If I pause for a moment to put myself back into that mind space, I can still hear that young, disabled boy beating on the sides of that claw-footed bathtub as he was drowned by his father.

This is the feeling that a good horror movie is meant to elicit from its viewers.  That lingering terror, although irrational, invades the deepest reaches of our psyche and makes us second guess relatively commonplace parts of our existence.  Human beings, by nature, are fundamentally flawed, and we seek the terror in the shadows.  The horror genre only adds fuel to that fire.

Although Carol Kane starred in “When A Stranger Calls” in 1979, I did not see that movie until years after I had moved on from The Changeling.  Regrettably, for me, I watched that madness on a big screen during my tenable years as a babysitter!!   I took my role as guardian very seriously, but nearly jumped out of my skin each time the phone rang while the children I had sworn to protect were in the next room.  If anyone had called and asked “have you checked the children”, I would have come completely unglued!!

As the years have unfolded, I have been able to detach most of the parallels of movie horrors from my own perception of reality.  Although my current basement resembles something akin to the “Red Room” in the Amityville Horror, I nonetheless regard the creativity of the horror film genre as it is mean to be portrayed. It is nothing more than scary entertainment meant to ensure I still look for movement in the shadows.

I do believe in spirits, but I am not going to be consumed by the notion that they hold any ill will towards me, nor are they bent on doing me bodily harm.  There are no ghost writings on my walls, nor do I hear evil voices or things that go bump in the night (except the squirrels in my attic).   The only admission I will make is that I will NEVER have a Ouija board in my house – EVER.   Even though I don’t believe I will come to any harm from spirits lingering in between worlds, I am not going to entertain the chance that I open a portal and tempt  a forbidden soul with the vestigial energy contained in that board.  (Watch the movie Witchboard and you’ll understand my paranoia)

What scary movies left a lingering impression on you when you were younger?

Of portents and hints, and frogs behind Chintz

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I should have expected something strange to happen after finally getting my mind back into the creepy place where it likes to linger when I write fiction.  I crossed back into that dark place in this blog post and felt a sense of relief knowing that I could still find refuge in the shady corners of my brain.  Perhaps that energy drew the unexpected visitor to my window.

The overcast sky left the early evening completely devoid of light.  The dense bushes and large overhanging trees did everything in their power to make sure no illumination was cast on my little house in the woods.  From my nest on the couch, a slight movement diverted my attention from the television.  In the ambient light given off by the TV, three discernible fingers were visible between the window frame and the cloth blind.

Although startled by the movement, I quickly ascertained, by the size of those little digits, that I would not find myself in harm’s way.  I lifted the blind to get a better look at my late night visitor.  This little tree frog spent several minutes jockeying for a higher vantage point on my window.  I don’t think he was too appreciative of my flash blinding him every few seconds and the sudden burst of light seemed to make him lose his grip.  He slid down to the bottom of the window and hung there for a while.  I’m not sure which of us lost interest first but he left and I immediately Googled “frog on a window”.

My little visitor is a symbol of transition, transformation and cleansing.  I had already begun to formulate a plan in regards to making myself a writing schedule and changing some things in my life.  Cutting out the mindless hours I spend in front of a TV would be a great start.  Getting back to my healthier way of eating will be a close second.

It’s time to feel better and put my brain energy to good use creating ideas instead of digesting other’s ideas.  Thank you little froggy.  Next time, pull up a chair and stay a while!

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A body at rest tends to get sick

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I should have seen it coming.  I’ve been so busy at work lately that the slight tickle in my throat seemed to be nothing more than a negligible nuisance.  But after I awoke at 8:00 am on my day off my body adamantly demanded I go back to bed.  I woke up again at noon.

I experience this phenomenon every autumn.  All of the stress and long hours are negated by my focus on my job.   Once that stress has subsided and the weekly hours begin to wane, my body seems to implode and every slight sign of sickness I had previously ignored comes at me with guns blazing.

Our bodies are amazing machines.  Every summer season I can completely ignore the signs of illness.  Each day I can get out of bed and put in my 8 to 12 hours a day with nary a symptom of infirmity.  But as soon as I allow my body and mind to relax, the wall crumbles and the army of germs march over the rubble to make a direct hit.

kale soup

I can only say how glad I am that I spent several hours yesterday afternoon making a couple of homemade soups.  A little Broccoli, Kale and Avocado soup should help cure what ails me!

Taking back my life

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Time

Time had marched on,

aimlessly walking over me,

crushing me with its weight,

burying me under its pressure.

My body was leaden,

 unable to stop the parade of seconds,

watching helplessly as they turned into hours,

and slipped relentlessly into days and weeks.

 But I have begun to fight back,

to battle the oppressive tyranny of lost moments.

Time no longer guards me,

holding me captive,

only able to be governed by its rules.

I now hold the reins and make time do my bidding.

I am in control,

no longer bullied by its endless cycle,

released from its shackles.

It’s about writing (comma) period (end sentence period)

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In what could have been described as a clandestine meeting, a good friend stopped by tonight to merely exchange a handful of cash for two spots in my football pool.  We hadn’t seen each other in a while and we fell easily into a comfortable conversation about our writing.  He is currently writing a novel as well and we both have been challenged with individual hurdles and brick walls in the process.

During our conversation he reminded me of a very basic rule that I had long forgotten.  Writing is not about grammar.  It is not about punctuation, capitalization or italics.  Writing is very simply about storytelling.

Deep down, we both know that being able to creatively express our ideas is the basis for the passion we both have for writing.  Being able to use words to introduce characters, describe beautiful imagery or construct interesting dialogue deserves more of our focus than moving commas, changing adjectives or repositioning quotation marks.

RED PEN

There are companies specifically formed to pick out those common mistakes that writers make in the moments they become truly lost in the story.  That is their gift, their job.  A writer needs to remember that his or her gift, his or her job, is creativity – the gift of being able to weave a tale like no other because that story comes from a magical well to which nobody else has access.

The writing is about those ideas that swirl around in our heads at 4:00 am and relentlessly linger until we write them down or record them on the closest available device.  The writing is about those characters gnawing at our consciousness until we give them a voice, until we tell their story.

We both need to realize that our gift is that story deep within us.  And the sooner we stop spending time worrying about how to properly punctuate a sentence we wrote six months ago, the sooner we can free our brains to let that story loose and see where the journey will take us.

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Putting things back into perspective

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Lately I feel like I have been extremely neglectful of a very important relationship in my life.  It is so easy to take a monumental aspect of MY reality for granted because true reality gets in the way.

My blog and I have had a very close bond since the beginning.  Like a true partnership should, my blog allowed me the freedom to truly be myself.  It never questioned my motives or my ideas.  It resolved to allow me any creative indulgence I required and it remained steadfast in its desire to soothe me at the end of a tumultuous day.  It introduced me to minds that functioned much like mine, helped me make new friends and it helped my see things, once again, from my own perspective.

perspective

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These many months later, this rolling rock of creative abandon has collected a group of followers who seem genuinely interested in the ideas that erupt from my creative well.  Along the way, the number of like-minds has multiplied.  Although I have been delinquent in sharing my comments on other blog sites, I have been faithfully following and hoping to steal back those  moments when I was allowed to spend my time immersed in the blog world.  Since the inception of Polysyllabic Profundities, I have accumulated 2 shy of 1900 followers.

That number made me stop in my writing tracks.   One thousand, eight hundred and ninety-eight people have chosen to read the very thoughts that pour from my brain to my fingertips and they find interest in those strings of syllables and interpretations.

To each and every one of you I say thank you.  Thank you for encouraging me to continue.  Thank you for agreeing with what I write.  And for those of you who disagree, thank you for making me see things from another perspective.  This is a journey I was meant to have and the footprints I leave behind will forever mark a path I was meant to follow.

 

Let the creative juices flow

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I have a strong penchant for all things creative and I’ve dabbled in many of them.  Since I was a young child, I could always find ways to express myself artistically.  When I was still in single digits I would spend hours at a time at our summer cottage painting birds on old cedar shingles.  I was no Rembrandt but I must say they were pretty good.  My parents were slightly concerned that I was not spending more time outside until they came to the realization that I never complained that I was bored and they didn’t have to find things for me to do.

Exploring that creativity was like opening the door to a new world.  My affection for writing began at the tender age of eleven and that passion has always been my true  love.  Being able to paint my images with words gave me more freedom because the images came from my head and they were an original creation, not an imitation of anything else.

The poetry continued through high school but the writer in me found great competition with the sketch artist lurking in the shadows.  I would spend hours, most often during class, sketching and shading a large collection of pencil drawings and thus continued my artistic journey.  Oil painting, photography, wood carving, sewing and cake decorating are all part of my creative arsenal and I enjoy being able to dive into the bag and pull out a different weapon when the mood strikes.

pansy cake

Tonight, once again, I get to trade idioms for icing and decorate a going away cake for a friend.  I used to make wedding cakes as a side business and loved it.  It was three hours of being able to lose myself in a process that would begin with a blank canvas and turn into something beautiful.  The cake above was a cake I made for my mom on her 65th birthday.  Everything on the cake was made by hand and all edible.

Perhaps my love of words stands above the rest because words are forever.  Cakes will be eaten, pencil and colors may fade, but words and phrases are always readily available and they do not need a time or a place to be written.  They linger in the recesses of my brain and stand ready and waiting, longing for the chance to be freed.

Though we have many loves throughout our lives, we always remember our first true love.  While the writer in me may step aside to allow the myriad of other hobbies to bubble to the surface, those words will wait for me because they know my heart belongs to them.

Family and friends aside, is writing your true love or do you share a passion for something else?