Advice from Agatha Christie

Be a tradesman

I’m reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography. Now, let’s not kid ourselves. The Dame has got some game.

Dame Agatha Christie is the best selling novelist of all time. She is the most translated individual author, and her works are the third most published books. Whatever criticisms may be leveled at her literary skills–deserved or not–we’d have to agree she knew something about building a career as a writer.

There’s a fascinating passage in the autobiography about the necessity for a writer to take “account of the market for his wares.”

If you were a carpenter, it would be no good making a chair, the seat of which was five feet up from the floor. It wouldn’t be what anyone wanted to sit on. It is no good saying that you think the chair looks handsome that way.

She goes on to say,

It’s no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius–some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman–a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas; but you must submit to the discipline of form.

So, what is the point of me quoting this?

Take a couple of Tuesday Tips from Dame Agatha.

I’m about to embark on another round of play submissions. So, I’m going to read the guidelines carefully and adhere to the rules for each submission. My chair–or play–can be as handsome as you please, but if it doesn’t fit the rules, why bother to submit? And if it doesn’t fit any rules. . . well, I suppose a miracle might happen. But, it’s probably going to involve self-producing or self-publishing. If you want to market your work, you have to know the market.

The other tip — “It’s no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius.” I thought of this recently when a friend reported on a play reading that was less than wonderful but for which the writer and director wanted to hear no criticism. It seems to me that Aaron Sorkin (another writer who knows something about building a career) had it right when he had a character say, “If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.”

A whole lot of praise and approval is nice for the ego. Constructive criticism and a mind open enough to hear it is better for the play.

Minn-Kota and Manatees

Waterfront living.

We’re finally getting our waterfront lifestyle together. We’ve had a small boat for a while. And our house has a boat ramp. It’s not so easy, however, to put the boat in and out of the water, since we don’t have a truck with a hitch (and since I don’t really want a truck running over my labyrinth several times a week).

So, we had to put up a boat lift.

No sooner did we get that done than all kinds of things got in the way of excursions. We had company. We had to go on a series of trips. The weather has been god-awful hot, and who wants to be out on the water in the baking sun under those conditions? We had other house projects that needed work. And then, it rained. Day after day. (The grass is looking good–but then, you have to mow the grass.)

All of this is leading up to today’s Monday Miracle–which is the latest improvement to the whole boating thing.

We got a trolling motor. A Minn-Kota Edge. Yesterday, we took it on a shake-down cruise.

It works great!

It’s bow-mounted, and so easy to put in and out of the water. Five speeds, forward and reverse, so it can get you moving pretty fast–if that’s what you want. And it’s so quiet.

This is how I like to travel by boat. I prefer the slow speed. And the quietness is great. We came right up on some manatees just hanging out in the back part of the creek where there are no houses. Because the motor is quiet, we could get fairly close. Because it is slow, we were in no danger of injuring them.

I love having manatees in the back yard. (The alligators–not so much.)

(Speaking of alligators and manatees, you can check out the Manatee Web Cam. It’s off-season for manatees at Blue Spring, so they are alternating live manatee-less streams with some videos. I like the one where the manatee chases the alligator out of the water — althoug, at my house, I’m hoping they just leave them in the water.)

Domestic skills

I don’t have them.
It is a long-established fact that I don’t cook. It’s not that I can’t cook. I’ve been known to manage a mean Thanksgiving dinner. I can bake things. If I set my mind to it, I can probably cook just about anything.

It’s just that I don’t often set my mind to it.

My mind is busy with other things.

Like–at this point–sewing machines.

Sewing. Another area of domestic dysfunction.

I have a Girl Scout sewing badge. I made an extremely ugly jumper once in Home Ec. There are buttons that owe their existence as functioning fasteners to my needle. I’ve hemmed things.

Recently, I made some curtains for the Casa.

And therein begins my tale.

Once upon a time, my mother bought me a sewing machine. It was a simple, straightforward thing. A needle, a bobbin. A couple of tension adjustment settings. A handful of different stitch lengths and types. (Zig-zag!) Forward. Reverse.

I’ve tried to use it a handful of times over the years. Something always goes wrong. Adjusting the tension is extremely tricky on it, for some reason. In addition, the needle always breaks. Always! I don’t think I’ve ever completed a simple seam on less than two, usually three needles. I’ve had it overhauled once, and the problems still continue.

After finally completing the curtains in way more days than it should have taken, we came to the conclusion that perhaps, just perhaps, it was not the operator but the machine.

At that point, my mom announced that there were three sewing machines sitting unused over at “the old house.” (The house which my mom inherited, with all its contents, from my grandmother.)

So, now we are embarked on another odyssey of trying to get one, at least, of these machines to work.

Machine #1 requires significant intervention with an oil can, if not a sledge hammer. It appears to be frozen solid. The needle won’t go up. It won’t go down. Set that one aside to take to the repair shop.

Machine #2 actually runs. It runs so well that we can’t seem to disengage the needle the way you are supposed to do in order to fill a bobbin. Set that one aside to take to the repair shop.

Machine #3 also runs. The bushings, however, that hold the spindles that hold the spools of thread, had disintegrated with age. Set that one aside. . . .No! Wait!

It turns out you can order those parts.

So, we did.

They came yesterday.

Today, we put the new parts in, and I brought the machine home to test it. I’m up to page 5 in the manual. It will sew straight lines and zig-zag lines and overcast stitches and hems and buttonholes and buttons and monograms and I-don’t-know-what-all. It beeps and buzzes and lights up, and I will need a degree in advanced programming to figure it all out.

While I’m studying it, maybe I can get the machine to cook dinner? I wouldn’t put it past it.

Divinity

Pecan, that is.

I’ve just come back from a road trip to North Carolina involving kin, cars and colleges. (And let me tell you, that was a stretch to get that alliteration into that sentence.)

My mom has a new car. She wanted to sell/give her old car to my niece. There’s just under 1200 miles between them.

Road trip!

We met in the middle to do the car hand-off and so my niece could look at a couple of colleges in North Carolina. (UNC and Duke, both gorgeous campuses!)

The thing about a road trip–aside from all the usual adventures and the rest stops and service stations, the breakfast buffets and sudden rain storms, the testily recalculating GPSs and the stiff joints–is the opportunity to revisit regional cuisines. (Or visit them for the first time, I guess, if you didn’t spend your childhood summers driving up and down I-95 like we did.)

So, there’s barbecue and country-fried steak and what have you. But. . .if you’ve never had Divinity. . .you have missed out.

We stopped at Smith’s Fireworks (no relation–just a long-standing business in South Carolina and a long-standing tradition of stopping there). And, as always, they had Pecan Divinity on sale.

Mmmm-mmmm.

Divinity consists mostly of sugar, corn syrup and egg whites. It’s not about nutrition or health in any way. It’s about melt-in-your-mouth sweetness.

My recommendation, if you buy it, is to buy the smallest package you can find. If you make it, give most of it away. Quickly.

There are very few things that taste as good.

Someday, when I’ve managed to buy a new candy thermometer and if the humidity around here ever drops below 50% (not that many recipes actually have weather requirements, you know), I am going to try to make some Divinity myself.

I might have to pick up some pecans, but I usually have the other ingredients on hand. Now, some people put candied cherries in their Divinity instead of pecans. You may do this if you like. Just don’t bring it around my house.

Pecan Divinity. That’s the ticket.

The Gammage Cup

The other Muggles

Once upon a time, there was a children’s book that resonated with adults. It was full of humor, adventure and whimsy, and the author’s imagination concealed some profound truths about humanity.

It was not by J. K. Rowling.

The Gammage Cup by Carolyn Kendal was published in 1959. It won awards: a Newbery Honor book and an ALA Notable Children’s Book. It’s about being yourself and following your heart and how those in charge could be totally wrong and how doing things just because they’ve always been done that way can get you into a whole lot of trouble.

Mostly, it’s a lot of fun.

With heroes called Minnipins, how could you go wrong?

Add in some misfit Minnipins–Gummy, Mingy, Walter the Earl, Curly Green and the aforementioned Muggles–banished from Slipper on the Water because of a refusal to paint their doors a proper Minnipin green (among other things), and an inability to conform to the standards of behavior laid down by the ruling class of Periods (so-called because Fooley the Balloonist had a list of abbreviations among his things when he crash-landed years ago, and his descendants have been named things like Ltd. and Co. ever since) as well as a contest among Minnipin villages for possession of the Gammage Cup just at the point when the Minnipins’ mythical enemies, the Mushrooms, reappear, and you have a gentle, very clever fable that entertains as well as enlightens.

This book, although well-loved by those who know of it, was never a blockbuster, as far as I can tell. It’s still in print, though, and available from Amazon if your local library doesn’t have a copy.

Check it out. I think you’ll like it!

Punctuality is. . .

. . .the politeness of princes.*

And something that eludes me when it comes to birthday presents.

This Thursday, I am thankful for nieces and nephews who seem to forgive me even though I never get their birthday presents to them on time.

Honestly, I really don’t know why that is. I must have some deep psychological block, because I am very organized and prompt about other things. It’s not like I forget their birthdays. Often, I think of the birthday a month in advance. I think, Oh! Look! Nephew A’s birthday is next month. I wonder what he would like? Then I do absolutely nothing about it.

As the impending anniversary of Nephew A’s nativity impends a little closer, I think, Golly! Nephew A! I’ve got to get him a present. I think of possibilities. I ponder toys and books and–I don’t know–drum sets (because you never actually have to forgive your siblings for hogging the sofa during The Mary Tyler Moore Show). And I do absolutely nothing about it.

About a week out, I think, I absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt must get that present off to Nephew A.

And. . .I do absolutely nothing about it.

At a certain point, short of FedEx or other overnight delivery options, it’s just too late. It’s not going to get there on time.

At that point, it turns into a phone call. An I’m-sorry-but-your-birthday-present-is-going-to-be-late-please-don’t-hate-me phone call. (And maybe that’s the point? An excuse to talk to those long-distance, too busy with the Wii or the iPod or the iPad or the television kids?)

I don’t know.

I’ll try to do better, although I’ve been saying that for years.

Meantime, I’m really thankful they don’t hate me.

* Louis XVIII

Ho, ho, ho

Just like a Yo-Yo.

I’m wondering where my Duncan Yo-Yo is. I bet my mother gave it away. Mother’s do things like that. They want to have room in their houses for their own stuff after decades of raising you. They have a little bit of sentimentality for the Barbie doll clothes your grandmother made and for those plaster handprints, but yo-yos don’t usually make the cut. There are garage sales and thrift stores and church bazaars, and suddenly your prized possessions–that you haven’t thought about in years–are gone.

Remember Duncan Yo-Yos?

I can’t even remember what grade it was, but every kid had one. We learned the Sleeper, Walked the Dog, and went Around the World. Surprisingly, we were very rarely hit in the head by some other kid’s errant spinner. Teachers, on the other hand, had drawers full of confiscated yo-yos.

It was fun.

I daresay we had more of a sense of accomplishment the first time the Butterfly came back to hand than any Temple Runner sliding under an arch. Maybe not. I’m terrible at Temple Run. My nephew sits by me coaching, “Jump! Turn! Slide, Aunt E, slide!” and still I lose. So, for all I know, the satisfaction might be as great. I’d have to actually have some small success at Temple Run to have any real basis for comparison. I’m just guessing, based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s theories of Flow and the idea that there has to be some hope of achieving the goal in order to really enjoy an endeavor.

Yo-yos offered that. We could practice, and we could get better at it. The improvement was noticeable–both to us and to our peers. In other words, we could show off!

Yo-yos had style. There was color and movement–and just a hint of danger. A person could get hit in the head by a flying yo-yo, and our yo-yo practice was usually done to accompanying cries of “Not in the house!” But it was just a hint. This study, in fact, shows that in a ten year period from 1993 to 2002 there were only 14 cases of yo-yo related injuries, and they were all minor.

Of course, 1993 to 2002 was not the heyday of yo-yos. (Oh, felicitous phrase!) The heyday was back in my giddy youth, almost forgotten. The only reason I remembered it now, was because of Hiroyuki Suzuki and this:

I wonder where my Duncan yo-yo is.

Healthy discontent. . .

. . .is the prelude to progress. *

Last week–was it only last week?–I posted about some of the organizational tools I have used to try to keep up with my Hydra-Headed To Do list. At that point, I suggested somebody remind me to talk about the progress bars I used recently with a group of friends. Well, y’all fell down on the job, and nobody reminded me, but I’m going to talk about them anyway! So there.

You know what I mean when I say, “progress bar,” don’t you?

Every time you load some software, you see one. If you’ve ever participated in a school fundraising drive, you’ve seen one. (That thermometer that rises as the money rolls in? That’s what I mean.)

Back in November, for about 3 months, I made the most incredible progress on a variety of fronts because of some progress bars.

I had a few tasks that could be quantified–like editing a certain number of pages, writing a couple of chapters of my upcoming book, accomplishing 12 tasks of tax preparation. Things like that.

I found some nifty HTML code that allowed me to create a progress bar, and then I noodled with it and changed the colors and added glittering animated gifs when the bar reached 100%.

They looked something like this, with a countdown timer to display how much time before the end of the month, and some progress bars to show how close I was getting to meeting the goals. (Please note: Any resemblance to any actual goals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

This is not a perfect implementation of this idea. For one thing, I have to manually calculate the percentage of progress as I go along and edit the page. But as a beginning pass at it, it was a whiz-bang!

Why was it a whiz-bang?

Because it was incredibly effective!

Stuff like editing, which I hate? I sailed through it. I’d do a couple of pages, and instead of quitting, I’d think, If I do a few more, I get to move the bar along a little more! And I’d keep going!

At one point, I had ten or fifteen progress bars going, and I was just watching those colors move farther and farther right and those glittery butterflies flutter. It was a game. Much more fun than checking things off or crossing them out.

If you’d like to add a similar progress bar to your own website, you can find a code generator here. If you prefer a vertical, fundraising thermometer-type thing, this might be a good jumping off point.

If you’re technically-challenged, there are always paper and stickers and crayons. The point is. . .a visual representation of your progress, interactive in some way, even if it’s just gold stars, can make a huge difference!

* Mahatma Gandhi

The Sound of Silence

…isn’t really so silent

This morning, I happened to wake up around 5 am. Unable to get back to sleep, for some reason, I got up to do my morning pages and read for a little while. (I’m reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. This fact has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post.)

Just as I was about to fall asleep again–because the new revelations, while actually quite fascinating, are not spell-binding (okay, so it has a little to do with the rest of this post)–I heard a heron.

Have you ever heard a heron?

It sounds like the worst violin lesson ever. (I should know. Once upon a time, I took violin lessons.) It sounds like Harpo Marx’s horn. It sounds like–well, not unlike–a donkey braying.

I thought to myself, This is the silence I moved 1000 miles to get. This caw. These croaks. These cicada songs and squirrel chirrings.

And then I thought to myself, It’s a miracle.

Because this is exactly the silence I moved 1000 miles to get. Even the distant traffic, the occasional shotgun blasts, the boat motors, pump motors, a/c motors–all of those are infinitely preferable to the shell shock of living beneath an undisciplined toddler.

The difference is I was awake by the time I heard the heron honk. It wouldn’t have startled me out of a sound sleep with a bang, a thud and the earthquake rattle of the walls. The battle fatigue of those days has abated.

I can wake up when I set my alarm clock. I can write this blog post in peace. I can anticipate an owl’s hoot or a heron’s honk instead of strain to block out the shake, rattle and roll.

I shouldn’t have had to move 1000 miles to get a few minutes of silence, but the miracle is –it worked.

Hope for Humanity – Pt. 2

Small steps, big changes.

I follow Shaun Usher’s blog, Letters of Note, where a fascinating letter is posted every day. Sometimes, the letter was written by someone famous. Sometimes, it is by someone for whom this posting of the letter is all the fame he or she will ever get. (The former slave writing to his master is one such.)

The hope for humanity to which I am referring does not lie in these letters.

It lies in Shaun. Or, Mr. Usher, I should say. (I am, by the skin of my teeth, of a generation that was taught a certain formality toward people one does not know, in spite of uneasy, although often delighted, co-existence with a less stately present. And don’t get me started wondering why I’ve somehow begun identifying myself as “of a generation.” I think it may be the beginning of the end!)

At any rate, I have a little extra hope for humanity today because Mr. Usher, last Wednesday, wrote a letter of his own to all his readers. In it, he noted that he had concluded that too few of the letters on his website were written by women. He had decided to “redress the balance” and was asking for recommendations. (He has since noted that he’s been inundated with letters as a result, so please don’t rush off and send him more. Yet. Let’s wait until he asks.)

This, to me, is a remarkable occurrence.

I’m a member of 50/50 in 2020 and the Women’s Initiative. I was involved in the mid-80’s with the Women’s Project. These are all organizations that seek to draw attention to an enormous inequality in the theatre industry in terms of opportunities for women. One of the biggest hurdles they all face is in having the current lack of gender parity even recognized. Data is difficult to gather, often ignored or explained away by factors having little to do with gender. As a result, more than half the world’s stories remain untold.

To have someone announce that he has come to the conclusion that he is only telling part of the story and intends to change that is, as I said, a remarkable occurrence.

It’s especially amazing if he came to that realization all on his own without nudging of wife, sister, mother, girlfriend, etc.

Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. And I don’t suppose it really matters. He has the power to take some action, and he’s taking it.

The two days immediately following this announcement and request featured wonderful letters by Clementine Churchill and the incomparable Katharine Hepburn. (There’s even a film clip of Hepburn reading her letter to Spencer Tracy.)

I look forward to all the days to come. In the meantime, here’s a letter:

Dear Mr. Usher,

Thank you!

Elaine

Not of much note–but definitely sincere!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Monthly Archives: August 2012