writing

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and…writing?

I’m not a big fan of most amusement park rides, especially the gravity-defying beasts that whiplash your heart between your stomach and your throat. 

I do like Dark Rides, though – the more imaginative, the better. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland is my all-time favorite.

The beginning is peaceful, idyllic even. You climb into a caravan of horseless carriages going “merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, to no place in particular.” Suddenly, the seemingly benign adventure goes berserk! No matter how hard you crank the steering wheel, your car careens in all directions. You crash through the Toad Hall fireplace, barrel through haystacks, nearly run over pedestrians, and narrowly avoid an explosion in a dynamite-filled warehouse. After managing a daring escape from the long arm of the law, your car twists and turns through the darkness, until…OMG! You meet your demise in a head-on collision with an oncoming train. Then – get this – Satan awaits you at the fiery gates of Hell!

 

But don’t fret: In the Magic Kingdom*, all passengers return safely to the sunlit shopping kiosk disembarking area. Hi-tech, it’s not. But I think it’s great. It’s a C-Ticket ride to Hades and back, with a happily-ever-after ending. 

I also think Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is a great metaphor for memoir writers. There’s no instant rush of adrenaline…just a series of wide-awake encounters with your scariest nightmares. You’re not always sure you can push past the obstacles, nor can you be 100% certain that your project won’t hit the skids. Sometimes the pitch-black gets to you. You’re never in real danger, of course; still, you’re always choking back the fear that you could be stuck for a very long time in the cobwebbed surreality of this emotionally charged adventure. But when you tunnel your way out of a difficult passage—wow, that’s magic! You emerge from the darkness with a huge smile on your face, ready to go again.


*Although the original Disneyland ride is still operational, Disney World drove Mr. Toad’s wild ride into oblivion in 1998. 
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Friday Five: flight patterns

1. Saying ‘no’ last week gave me the extra umph I needed to take off in another, more important direction (to wit: number two).


2. I’ve rediscovered my writing momentum! I’m not at cruising altitude yet, but I’m feeling more free to move about the cabin. I finished writing a new chapter this week, and (mixed metaphor alert) while I still need to sandpaper the rough edges and apply a glossy topcoat, I like the overall shape.

 

3. Yesterday I astonished myself: I actually flipped somebody off! I’ve only done that once before in my life, but whoa, I let that bird fly like a pro. I was headed home from my yoga class, Om Shanti Hee still echoing in my head. (If I’m not mistaken, that’s a chant for peace. The irony, it burns.) I’m thinking I should go to yoga again today, to detach from the fact that I did it. Although…if anyone deserves the middle finger salute, Mr. Menacing Guy in the tricked-out Mercedes, YOU definitely do.   

 

4. A gallon of regular has soared to an astronomical $4.64 at our neighborhood gas station.

 

5. Like many tent evangelists of his day, my father often talked about The Rapture. (In a nutshell: Christians fly away to Glory; and there’s much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who get left behind). If you’ve ever been tempted to make flight plans (just in case!), you might find this article interesting, albeit a little irreverent.

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Hatchlings: Birds and Books

Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven.
Francis Beaumont

We’re weather wimps used to being outdoors and on the go, but it’s a rainy, indoors kind of day. Still, I braved the elements to snap these new pictures!

 

Mama Hummingbird’s scrunched down in her nest, shielding her four-day-old babies from a downpour. More often now, she ventures out to find food or to chase away potential predators. She’s a devoted mommy, protecting her tiny chicks while they grow.

The hatchlings are nearly naked, covered only by the downy feathers cropping up along their backs. You can’t help but notice those oversized, orange beaks! The black bulges on their heads will soon become wide-open eyes, but for now, they’re blind and wholly dependent on their mother. 

Like nesting, writing my book requires a great deal of faith, coupled with lots of butt-in-chair time. I’m still learning to trust my intuition, still trying to quiet my inner critic. No doubt about it, this dream of mine is really hard work!

My Ideal Readers (hat tip, Stephen King) helped me hatch a plan for handling some requested revisions. I’m very excited about the possibilities. The cold rain’s pelting my office window, but I’m snuggled into a cozy afghan, ready to write.
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Farewell to a Beloved YA Writer

Once upon a lifetime ago, I taught junior high English. Among my many challenges: trying to encourage 12- and 13-year-old students to sit still long enough to read a book. Talk about tilting at windmills. Nevertheless, author Theodore Taylor’s book, THE CAY (required reading back then) almost invariably captured their interest.

Taylor, an exemplar for today’s YA writers, died this week. Here, a few excerpts from his obituary:

ON FINDING INSPIRATION: “The writing usually began with a haunting, a real-life incident so arresting that author Theodore Taylor could not shake it from his mind. At the typewriter he used that unforgettable event as a cornerstone, the foundation of a world created on the page.”

ON CHARACTERIZATION: “The fiction that resulted rang so true that for decades young readers sent Taylor letters inquiring about his characters, most often those of his novel “The Cay”: a bigoted boy named Phillip stranded on an island during World War II with Timothy, a compassionate black man upon whom the boy’s life depends.”

ON HIS AUDIENCE: “Above all I try not to ‘write down’ to the young reader,” he once said.

ON WRITING: “I’ll get into a novel knowing something about the beginning, knowing less about the middle and knowing nothing about the end,” he told a Times reporter in 1997. “I don’t want to know anything about the end until I get there, and I hope I’ll be able to recognize the end when I get there.”

HIS LEGACY: “Even this week, as Taylor lay dying, mail arrived from young readers of that 1969 novel, a now classic work that helped set the standard for young-adult literature.”

If you haven’t yet treated yourself to anything written by Taylor, I adding THE CAY to your own list of required reading.

An Embarrassment of Riches

I like to take lots of pictures, as reference and reminder that my writer adventures are real and not just a dream. These photos, taken over the past couple of days, provide unmistakable proof of how very lucky I am.
 
First, I took a trip to a luxe location, for interviews and play time with some Ladies Who Lunch. This is a shot of my two-day playground research venue:
 
 
Here’s a photo of the Rolls Royce golf cart I drove to the place where we lunched. I valet parked, of course. 

 
 
I got home just in time to go to my writers’ group meeting – and to catch up on personal and publishing-world gossip with my beautiful friend and writing mentor, Robbiewriter.

 

 

Today, after my horseback riding lesson, it’s back to work on my manuscript — trying to transform my mental and digital images into the proverbial 1,000 words.