Writers, Find Your People!

Logo courtesy of GCLS.

I just got back from a writer’s conference, and boy is my hand cramped! (*rim shot*)

This was the annual GCLS convention, the first in-person in three years, so it was a frenzy of panels, master classes, meet-and-greets, plenary sessions, jigsaw puzzles, awards, and delirious terpsichore. Oh, yeah, I said terpsichore. Because I know my way around a dictionary and a thesaurus. Although there’s also a thing I learned which is called an Emotional Thesaurus. Writing!

My mind is full of memories, ideas, and to-do lists about how to elevate my craft, and we’re about to go to a museum with DINOSAURS … but let me quickly try to encapsulate all this creative energy.

GCLS Panel on “Writing Tools of the Trade,” photo by Karin Kallmaker.

GCLS: A Conference of One’s Own

This conference was Writers, readers, editors, publishers, librarians, and all manner of people who enjoy a good story. The vast majority of these folks write women-loving-women fiction. Now, that’s not my particular jam, but so what? I learned a ton!

There was a phenomenal master class on writing from memory, taught by Sheree L. Greer, worth the price of admission on its own. But I also got intelligent hints about using social media like Tik-Tok for people my age (i.e. over 25). World-building, narrative arcs, characterization: those apply to history writing, too. Tax planning for the self-employed because I might eventually sell more than two books.

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Ambling through Bakersfield

Yesterday we passed by Bakersfield High, Home of the Drillers. At 8 pm, it was 97 degrees outside. Seems like there ought to be a better name. Home of the Scorchers? Home of the Heat Waves?

First stop on our tour of Bakersfield, the Drillers! Photo from Bakersfield HS website.

Heading Out for Adventure

We are on a road trip once more, a real one that involves more than just driving up to Seattle to see my brother. We took the big car, the “fun car,” the one that holds lots of crap and still likes to go up hills. Her name is Scarlett O’Hara, but we always call her Fun Car. And we did load it up, cramming things under the seats and behind the suitcases. There are so many bottles of water that the car sloshes when we brake hard.

One minor casualty occurred ten minutes from the house. I pulled my favorite sunglasses out of their spot in the car and… tragedy!

Not even duct tape would work!

But I rather believe that small bad luck leads to a good trip overall, so bon voyage us! Down we swoop through Central California, which is baking or marinating or searing, depending on which chef metaphor you want to use for drought and climate change. Far more dead orchards than I can remember in my youth. Lots of signs blaming the governor for stealing water and dumping it in the ocean. MORE DAMS! scream the signs. As if somehow damming the water further, because the water in the existing dams is low, would solve everything.

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Whose Place of Refuge?

Hale o Keawe, a Hawaiian sacred structure at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau National Park, aka Place of Refuge. Photo by KK.

Mark Twain did come to Hawaii. It was 1866, at the very beginning of his journalism and humorist career. He hadn’t written novels yet–no Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, or Pudd’nhead Wilson. He had just published a novelty story about a jumping frog, when the Sacramento Union decided to give him a go, and sent him off as a correspondent to the Sandwich Islands.

Twain followed in the path of other tourists, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. He followed the British, after Captain Cook, after those intrepid Polynesians who had sailed up from Tahiti and Samoa. There were also French, Spanish, Japanese, and eventually the Americans, with their navy, who decided to anchor more firmly than Cook proved able. After that came a never-ending stream of more tourists, including yours truly.

Like any jewel, the history of Hawaii includes a stream of struggles from those people, over discovery and ownership.

Twain in the 1860s, photo from Library of Congress.

Roughing It in Hawaii

Twain’s Letters from Hawaii cover the long voyage across the Pacific; he curses Magellan for naming the uncooperative waters “peaceful.” Twain writes of being seasick much of the time, despite knowing his way around boats, as he would later describe steering steamboats in Life on the Mississippi. Upon arrival in Honolulu, Twain is smitten by “luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes.”

He is impressed by the presence of the Hawaiian royalty, the kings and queens who governed Hawaii at the time. But the locals are characterized as lazy and flea-ridden, though Twain says virtually the same about his “traveling companion,” the irascible Mr. Brown, a likely mythical figure who complaints constantly of the heat and insects. Upon viewing the plantations for pineapple and coffee, Twain urges the Americans to hurry up and come on over before the Brits and French take everything. American farmers would eventually take him up on the idea.

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