A Sale at The Wild Rose Press!

All the Rosettes (short stories) are on sale! 99c. until the end of April!

And that means The Joining is too!

Take advantage of the offer to find out what makes Erik crash on a planet on the far reaches of the known universe. Discover alien places, for sure!

Memories

Don't you love showers? They're not just convenient means of waking up and getting oneself clean. They're also the source of endless inspiration, the place where your thoughts come into focus and your plots take form.

Many a story has been hatched in the shower.

Can you believe that once upon a time I hated showers?

More than that. I dreaded them. I shook in panic at the mere thought of taking one, and baths were not an alternative at that time. We only had a small half-bath in our efficiency, my mother and I, and that was it.

Obviously, I got over it. How? I don't know. It was a long time ago. Somewhere along the line, I discovered the pleasure and luxury of showers. The delight provided by the sensory isolation of the sound of running water, the soothing effect of hot steam, and the knowledge that no one expects you to hear anything for at least ten minutes.

When you're a mother, that's a lot.

And so I forgot the absolute fear and loathing of showers I once had.

What brought it back to mind is the realization that my elderly mother detests being cold, and the constant noise and irritation of running water, and therefore she will not take a shower. It's her old-age fussiness that brought back memories of my own childhood aversions.

What else have I forgotten?

I read several sci-fi novels recently where memory, either too-acute, or lost, is a central element of the plot. Whether regained, impossible to erase, or forever gone, memory is such an essential part of what makes us, that we don't even give it a thought.

Let's not even ponder memory as personal history: that's merely the simplest aspect of it.

Memory makes and remakes us constantly. Memory and recall. Recall and memory. Our ability to recall long-term memories and short-term memories: events that happened a long time ago, or just moments past. Our ability to arrange the memories into sequences, and more than that: into meaningful sequences, related to other memories and events, that are also arranged into meaningful sequences, themselves easily related...

That's how our mind works. A spiderweb of connections: ideas, deductions, recalls, memories, connections. All of these are made up of words, images, sensory information, emotions, rational thought processes.

Eliminate one, and you have a big gap that nothing can bridge. Forever and ever, you will go around it, but never over or across. That place is simply lost.

Whether you're considering the actual human mind, or a fictional story-world, this web is there: an infinite network of connections that you can never know fully, but you're aware it's there. And when you need it, you can dip into it. The same gaps that loss of memory cause in your mind can be created by lack of foresight in a fictional story-world, with the same result: an empty space, devoid of information.

Even if you have no gaps, in the case of a fictional story-world, you mustn't tell it all, or put every detail of it into your story, any more that you would recall every memory at every moment of your actual life. But as the writer, you must be aware of all the possible details of your story-world, as you are aware of your own self. You must know your story-world down to the molecular level, down to every sensory input. Know the colors and the scents, and the flavors of your imaginary places, and the way the people think there. So that the logic of your story is always that of your story, even if it's not necessarily quite realistic.

Because, hey, some days, we just don't want reality. We want the reality of the story, not the one outside our door.

Don't Forget to Read!

I mean, we're all readers, or else you wouldn't be stopping by.

I like books. You like books. We all like books. We forgive our favorite authors their lapses in characterization, their little plot holes, the things they forget to tell us, and we fill the blanks in our own minds, recreating a story-world that becomes all ours.

As long as the story is compelling, we'll forgive. Pile up too many errors, and we get mad.

Whether we read or watch a movie, we tend to argue with the characters. "You idiot, how could you believe this, he never said..." (fill in the blank). Or: "well, of course, I don't know what you heard, but that's not what she said."

We want the characters to pay attention. And a skilled writer will play on the fact that a reader will be more aware of the story-world than even its own people.

Why then don't we read everything with the same care and attention?

Contracts. Announcements. Ads. Newspaper articles.

What's there is obviously there, but we never seem to stop and consider what isn't there. What hasn't been said. We become both the characters (but not the smart detectives) and the fiction readers of our real world.

We fill in the blanks of our reality the way we fill in the blanks of our story-worlds. With what we'd like to be there.

Whereas we should be the detectives of our reality. Eve Dallas. Columbo. Patrick Jane. Sherlock Holmes.

We should be observing, noting the missing pieces, the things unsaid, the details avoided, and drawing conclusions as much from the missing evidence as from the facts staring us in the face.

And like the CSI heroes, we shouldn't just leap to conclusions. We should look for that evidence.

All that in a text.

Paranoid? Who, me?

Nah. Just a reader.

I've been interviewed!

Check it out. I had a very nice chat with the most gracious hostess Emma Lai:

Emma Lai Writes: Author Interview - Masha Holl on The Brightest Heaven

Thank you Emma for inviting me!

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Research

You never know what you'll find when you open a book.

I'm reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (Harper Collins, 2008), and even though it should be a dry treatise on the psychological causes of our insistence on repeating the same mistakes, I find it a most enjoyable experience.

Maybe it's because Dan Ariely shows that our instinctual understanding (or at least my instinctual understanding, as writer) of human motivations and urges, is not as flawed as we might fear. And that the extreme reactions we like to showcase in our stories, at the point of crisis, are not as far-fetched as a cool, rational mind would like to make them.

And maybe it's because the author of Predictably Irrational is himself an excellent writer, a rare gem in the world of academic prose. He doesn't just provide information, and the names of the researchers involved in the experiments he describes, he entertains his public with the work he obviously loves and performs with a passion.

What have I learned so far in this book? That expectations do trump reality -- your senses will be betrayed by your mind. That ownership gives things more value than they're worth -- value is not a static, objective concept, but a scale that depends on variables as intangible as the moment when you decide how much you care for the thing you're considering selling or buying.

I can't help but wonder, as I read this book, how a Zen master would walk through life. Would he be as predictably irrational, or would his rational self govern him at each step? Could a human attain enough self-control to stop and consider every decision with a quiet, if not cool mind, before launching himself into reckless action?

Some days, I wish I was that Zen master. Other days... I just don't know. Whenever you gain something, you also lose something. And the grass is always greener...

Book Lists

I came across another one.

You know them. The lists of "classics" you "should have read" if you're a "book nerd."

Considering that I'm just a few pages and a stand-up performance short of a PhD in literature, you'd think I'd cross off every book on every such list.

Nuh-uh.

My lists of books read, unread, to-be-read, and never-to-look-at are just too odd.

Sure, I do have War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo on my lists.

I also have a French collection: Zola, Balzac, Sartre, Camus. I'll have to put it into some order... some day.

The fact is, I've done my "serious" reading in graduate school. And before. When I had classes. And papers due. You know, grades.

What do I mean by serious reading? My good author friends, do no make faces! It does not mean "good" reading. It means obligatory, not-by-choice reading.

I read War and Peace for fun, but Anna Karenina as obligatory reading (although it ended up being fun). I read Crime and Punishment for fun, but Chekhov as obligatory reading. Some of the authors and titles shifted from one category to the other. Some didn't. Some I revisited. Some I ignored pointedly after I closed the book once I was done with the assignment. Some I could almost burn (if I could ever bring myself to destroy a single book). Some I'd take with me to a deserted island.

Now lest these authors and titles start impressing you, I will admit that I also enjoy graphic novels, comic books, and manga. I am an old-time fan of science-fiction and fantasy. I couldn't survive without my regular dose of genre novels. I read all of the Harry Potter books, but none of the Stephenie Mayer ones (timing, I guess). And yes, I am a big fan of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

The point is, there is no bad reading.

There is such a thing as not pushing yourself, as limiting your curiosity. When my first child was little and I felt my reading was going by the wayside, I joined a book club -- just a few friends who got together for coffee and chatting. We decided on a book and talked about it. Nothing formal, but I read some authors I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. And I enjoyed the books.

I pushed myself out of my comfort zone.

We should always do that. We should push ourselves. Be curious. Opening a book is a great way to take a risk without risking danger. And a library is a wonderful place to open a book without opening your wallet.

Too Short

I never thought I'd write this.

My story is too short.

I mean, I used to have trouble writing anything less verbose than a Tolstoyan novel. It's the Russian genes, you know. The European upbringing and all that.

And then I discovered the pleasure of shortening my tales.

Now it's too short. By about 2000 words.

Do I need to add a scene? Expand a few here and there?

No, don't tell me. I'm going to sleep on it.

As the Russian folk tales say, "the morning is wiser than the evening."

Maybe I'll dream the solution. It's happened before.