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Welcome to 2012

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:57:33 GMT

As I was brushing my teeth this morning, I was thinking I should write a little fable—“Barbie in Wonderland.” Except no one except two of my mothers-in-law (my father-in-law married three times) has ever called me Barbie (and don’t you dare; I’ll snap at you) and the Wonderland I’m thinking about is the world of social media. Yeah, to quote Alice: “Curiouser and curiouser.”

Here we are, four days past the beginning of Aquarius, and I always try to write my blog a day or two before the sun enters the next sign. I sure missed it this month! Why? I’m glad to say that I’ve been busy. I’m editing new books for two new authors. One is a bloke in England who’s writing about how to improve your life. He’s giving some good advice. The other is a physician who has enduring interest in the energy of X-rays and MRIs and other medical apparati. (OK, that would be the proper plural of apparatus if apparatus were a Latin word. I like it better than apparatuses.) This physician is also interested in healing energy. He’s had encounters with the Edgar Cayce folks, attended Jack Houck’s spoon-bending workshops, and met a lot of other people who do energy work, mostly in holistic healing. Me, too. I once got a kiss on the cheek from one of Cayce’s sons, and I’ve bent spoons with Jack. And I’ve been editing for the American Holistic Health Association, whose president and founder, Suzan Walter, has been my friend since 1981 when we met at a Women In Management meeting. I’m also still editing the memoir of the solo violinist, who has had an extremely interesting life, and an author whose book I last worked on in 2006 is now coming back for more editing.

But that’s not what I mean by wandering around in Wonderland. The Wonderland in question is the world of social media. I’m working up to it. Why? To publicize Secret Lives, of course! I think it was my son who helped me get started on Facebook a couple years ago. Now I have a Barbara Ardinger FB page and a Secret Lives page, to which I post a few times a week. Maybe that’s not enough, but when I finish editing in the middle of the afternoon, I am pooped. Editing is extremely labor-intensive work because I’m looking at every comma and semicolon and parenthese (singular of parentheses), plus spelling, and I’m also doing some fact-checking. One of my authors, for example, is just finishing a history of Bolivia, but he doesn’t know how to add the tildes and accent marks that Spanish words require. So I not only fact-check his dates and spelling, but I also add the tildes and accent marks for him. And by the middle of the afternoon, all I want to do is collapse on the couch and pet the cats. A man who lives here in Long Beach and I are talking about how he can help me publicize Secret Lives, and one thing he said I could do in the afternoon is get out my iPhone and send (post? text-message?) some comments. Well, (A) I do not have an iPhone, though I did buy a new landline phone right after Christmas because my beloved purple phone died, and (B) like I just said, my synapses are in shreds when I finish a day of editing.

So I have two Facebook pages. I post to them when I can. As soon as I figure out how to download the photos from the camera I bought last week, I’ll post photos, too. (The camera I bought is supposed to be idiot-proof. We’ll see.)

I’ve also begun blogging on a nifty WordPress site, Feminism and Religion. I was invited by my friend Carol Christ, author of She Who Changes, which is a terrific book about process philosophy. I think I’m supposed to submit a blog every two weeks, though we’re still talking about schedules. My most recent blog is about humor in religion, and I ended the blog with Verbena, my favorite Found Goddess. But most of the comments I’ve received so far are in response to my assertion that the holy books of the standard-brand religions don’t contain much humor at all. My point is that the Goddess has a sense of humor.

My next blog will appear on Super Bowl Sunday. I am not a football fan. I see no point in watching large millionaires giving each other concussions. Part of my blog is an excerpt from the chapter in Secret Lives where one of the Goddess’s “thoughty devotees” gives her opinion of the Super Bowl. In the novel, this is the day the Norns (gone mad in the modern world) declare war on our circle of crones and use thunder and lightning as their weapons. The crones create a cone of power that is steered by the Green Man and one of the younger women. The dragon they created in Ch. 1 comes back to join the fight, and the women invoke martial goddesses. I recently also wrote four political parodies (did I mention that I watch MSNBC when my synapses start to function again?), infomercials, which I will post on FAR. One for each of the current Republican candidates. Hah!

A friend on a list I’m on recently recommended GoodReads, so I’m working on that, too. Yesterday another of my authors, whose young adult novel I edited late last year, spent an hour on the phone with me getting me set up on GoodReads. I’ve put a lot of the books I’ve read in the last six months or so on my GR bookshelf and I’m asking anyone who’s read Secret Lives to review it on GR, too. I obviously want to build up a big audience for all my books, especially Secret Lives. (Duh.)

And I’m tiptoeing into the world of Twitter. Now that really is behind the looking-glass. I get on that page and feel the Jabberwock stalking me. Well, no, it’s not really that wild or scary. I just don’t usually know what to do when I get there. I feel like Alice running after the embodied cards and chess pieces. Faster and faster, but where am I going? And all of this is to publicize Secret Lives.

I was the guest of honor at a literary salon here in Long Beach on Sunday. I read a bit of the prologue and said that the goddess that appears to the shaman is the same goddess I actually saw in 1992 when I almost died after an all-day asthma attack. Next, I spoke about what happens all too often to elderly women who lose their homes and are parked in retirement centers. Then I read the language of flowers ritual, which brings tears to readers’ eyes (mine, too). Finally, I introduced the audience to Madame Blavatsky, the talking cat, and Frances J. Swift, the compleat bureaucrat who is residence manager at the Towers. I ended by reading from the chapter in which the cat is reading Alice in Wonderland and disguises herself as the Cheshire Cat to annoy (haunt) Frances. “I’m mad. You’re mad. We’re all mad.” Poor Frances—haunted by a talking cat that appears and disappears. No wonder she has a nervous breakdown. “Off with her head.” Indeed.

I hope you’ll all buy and read Secret Lives. Make all my wandering through the social media worth while, Write reviews of it on GoodReads and Amazon. Favorable reviews, please. And five stars!

Happy holidays!

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:25:07 GMT

I went to the Circle of Aradia’s Yule ritual last night. It was the 40th anniversary of Z Budpest’s invention of Dianic Wicca, and Z was there as an honored guest and she and I had a nice little chat. It was also the 25th anniversary of the Circle of Aradia, founded by Ruth Barrett, the best ritualist I’ve ever worked with. It was good to see Ruth and a whole bunch of other women I haven’t seen for various reasons in five or ten years. (None of us, of course, look any older.) Among the 200 or so women in attendance was a journalist for (I think) a website in the San Fernando Valley. She was looking very bewildered at the circle casting and the dancing and chanting, so because I don’t dance, I went over to her and spoke with her for a little while. “What’s going on here?” she asked. After I explained that I in no way represent COA in any official capacity, I spoke to her about the ritual year and the Yule celebration.

It’s a celebration of the light, I told her. Yule is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, immediately after which the earliest, tiniest spark of light is reborn. Then the wheel of the year takes us through the spring equinox to the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year and gives us the most light. Then the light begins to fade again and we enter the “dark side” (no, not Darth Vader’s dark side) of the year, which takes us past the fall equinox and back to the winter solstice. “It’s both literal and symbolic,” I told the reporter, and I also suggested that she see the year as a day moving from midnight (winter solstice) to noon (summer solstice) and back to midnight.

We deal with dark and light in our lives, too—our careers, our daily work, our relationships, everything. Like all of us, I’ve had my dark times—mainly the whole decade of the 1990s when I was doing temp office work and living on meager unemployment “benefits” between temp assignments. I also lived a mile from the Nixon Library with a crazy roommate; after six months with her, I moved to Long Beach (a bright moment), but then I was evicted from the first condo I rented because the owners let it go into foreclosure. I was homeless for a month and lived for part of that time in an SRO hotel. I had to sneak my cats up the back stairs. The men gathered in the women’s bathroom to smoke, so I emptied the litter box in the trash in their bathroom. But the light came back on when I was walking down 2nd Street one day and came upon a yard sale. I asked the woman if she was moving, she said yes and showed me her apartment, then told me where the owner of that condo lived. I walked down the street to Mary's house. Mary said her cat never approached visitors. Within ten minutes, her cat was sitting in my lap. And I had a place to live. That’s how I met my friends Michael and Angelo, and now Angelo (who bleaches my hair) and I go to the theater together a lot. Today, a decade later, I’ve got it pretty good with my editing work and a new book published. Yes, of course, I’ll mention Secret Lives every chance I get.

I wrote about both “endarkenment” and “enlightenment” in Pagan Every Day and just posted the pages so you can read them again. (Scroll down past solar gods and Mothers' Night, December 25 and 24.) I also spoke about Yule and the light and Modraniht to my friend Pat Lynch a few days ago when she interviewed me on Womens Radio.

We’re in the holiday season and gazing at Hannukah (another celebration of the light), Christmas, and Kwanzaa with their family gatherings and gift exchanges. I bought Charles a couple books (no surprise there) and bought Phish a ceramic goddess she saw and coveted at the Long Beach WomanSpirit fair a couple weeks ago. I’ve also received several electronic Christmas letters—consider this my letter; I’m too lazy to write another one—and some real cards. One is from Michael Ball. Members of his fan club get a card from him every year. Michael’s a handsome man, an actor as well as a singer. But he’s doing Sweeney Todd now, so the fan club Christmas card shows him in full Sweeney drag. He’s almost unrecognizable … and his message says “Have a bloody good Christmas.” Hilarious!

Here’s the rest of my abbreviated holiday letter/blog. My major news is that I published Secret Lives, my novel about grandmothers who live in Long Beach and do magic. My Christmas wish is that you will buy and read and enjoy the book.

Tonight I think I’ll watch my favorite version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, the one starring George C. Scott. I always enjoy watching Scrooge rise out of his dark nature and into the holiday light that presumably lasts for the rest of his life. He gets some really fast psychotherapy from those three spirits! Tiny Tim famously says, “May God bless us, every one,” to which I’ll add my wish for peace on earth. but in small, local packages. My wish is that we’ll end the other war in the Middle East and that everyone everywhere will have enough to eat and that the Goddess will bless Her daughters and Her sons with health and abundance. If we act locally by being courteous to the people we meet and paying small acts of kindness forward, we can add little bits of lovingkindness to the consciousness of the planet and work toward a critical mass that can transform the planet. Let’s all work on that. And buy Secret Lives !

How to sell more books??

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:27:19 GMT

When I decided to self-publish Secret Lives, I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work. I’m having an interesting adventure. Also investing a fair amount of money in the adventure. I’d like to sell more books and make a return on that investment. I suppose I could summon up some Great, Universal Mind Power and project it into the heads of every pagan or witchy woman on the planet. Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives. Mind Power? Yeah. Right. Like Universal Mind Power works. So I keep working on PR.

Six of my books were published by traditional publishers, large and small. Here’s how that works. You and/or your agent submit the manuscript (or sample chapters) to an acquisitions editor. You wait. Eventually, the acquisitions editor gets back to you and/or your editor. If they like the book, they write a contract, the terms of which are almost totally in favor of the publisher. So you and/or your editor do some negotiating to get you a better deal—a higher advance on royalties, a higher percentage (your royalty), more free copies, etc. Next, you answer all the questions on the author questionnaire, which is where you list all the important people you know and your media connections. Oh, and you give more information about the book. Then you finish writing the book and it’s published and the publisher does lots of PR and your book ends up a best seller.

Well, not quite. I believe what I’ve described was largely true half a century or more ago, back in the good old days when publishers were still run by individuals who cared about good writing and respected their authors. Those were the days when publishers took good care of their authors. Today, in the Age of Murdoch, publishers are bits of multinational corporations and seem not to care about anything except making money. A book is a product. An author is an adjunct to the product.

My first book, a mass market paperback titled Seeing Solutions, was published in 1989. A book of guided visualizations, it was published at a time when there were few books on that topic. It got some very favorable reviews. But not enough. I sit here today and think about how naïve I was. First, a psychic who was a friend of a friend “got” that my little book would sell a million copies and I’d be traveling around the world. And I believed her. Second, I paid a bunch of money to a woman I’d met at a leads club to do PR. Trouble was, she was going through a personal crisis at the time, and when I talked to people she’d booked me to be interviewed by, they kept saying that if they spoke with this PR agent for an hour, she spent fifty minutes talking about her personal crisis. One Sunday morning, she phoned and told me that she’d figured out that her father was the infamous and unknown Black Dahlia killer. That’s when I fired her. We learn expensive lessons when we’re young and naïve, don’t we.

I’ve been treated very well by some of my publishers and still call some of my editors friends. One plays the bassoon, and when I went to a concert where I heard a bassoon solo, I sent her a note. She recently wrote to me and said they want to convert Practicing the Presence of the Goddess to Kindle. But of course!

Other publishers haven’t been as kind. One changed the title of my book without telling me. Finding New Goddesses became The New Goddesses. Fortunately, I had a spy in the room. After she told me about that dumb new title, I wrote a series of very strong emails to the publisher and explained why my title was the correct title. I CC’d all my friends, including other authors, one of whom told me later that the energy in my emails had crashed her computer. But I got to keep my title! A couple years later, I met my editor and her boss at a Book Expo. She and I moved to a table down the aisle to talk about goddesses. Her boss sat in his booth and gave us that old hairy stare.

Dan Poynter, who seems to know what he’s talking about, tells us that the “old NYC publishers” are becoming irrelevant, that people want to read books the NYC publishers reject, that more and more authors are self-publishing. And e-books are also increasingly popular. So I sent Secret Lives to Sherry Wachter to typeset and design, and she did a beautiful job, and then we sent it to CreateSpace, which also did a good job. I like CreateSpace a lot because they employ live people you can talk to on the phone. Like my favorite Make It Work tech, they explain things. Clearly. I’d like to adopt some of them. Secret Lives has also received some very enthusiastic reviewshand I’ve been interviewed several times, including two sessions on blogtalkradio that were loads of fun. More reviews and interviews are coming up in magazines like SageWoman and Crone, both published by my long-time friend Anne Niven. I’ve also submitted the octogenarian sex scene (which is pretty tame) to a publication that focuses on “senior erotica.” I hope they like it!

I want this novel to be read. I love the women I wrote about—they’re as real in their way as you and I are. So is the cat. Well … maybe. The cats I live with don’t speak English. I’m as old now as some of the women I was writing about twenty years ago, and I know that the issues the senior citizens in Secret Lives deal with are real issues that my friends and I are facing.

So how do I sell more books? If you have any ideas that work, send me an email and we'll talk. If it’s a useful idea, I’ll give you one of my nifty Secret Lives mouse pads.

Dialogue and Dialect, Part 2

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:41:41 GMT

Last week I wrote about American English dialects and why we need to write good, realistic dialogue for our characters. To show what I mean, I examined the way some characters in Secret Lives speak. Now I’ll write about three central characters.

Emma Clare, one of the founders of the circle, speaks an ever-variable Ozark dialect. She comes from a traditional of Celtic witches, and her grandmother, Mammy Annis, lived in the Ozarks. In Chapter 11, “Daughters of the Powers of Fire,” I retell the family story. That’s where real library research is useful. The works of Vance Randolph were helpful, as were other books on Ozark customs. That’s how I learned, for example, that when you’re making hominy you have to rub the corn to get the ash mud, hulls, and eyes out. I wanted Emma Clare (who is 97 years old) to speak accurately, but I didn’t want her to sound like a cartoon hillbilly or a refugee from Hee-Haw. When she talks about her grandmother (below), I had to make sure her speech is not too countrified. Readers have to understand her! “Methody” is a real word (but not much used today) and the lottery is an allusion to Shirley Jackson’s unforgettable short story. (I give the link to the story in the FREE READER’S GUIDE on this site).

      “Well, then,” Emma Clare began, “Mammy Annis kept her people rooted in the land and the old religion. They prospered and ever’thing done well. But as the circuit riders found their ways into our hills, some believed that modren gospel they brung. Baptist or Nazarene or Methody or whatever, the people allus came back to Mammy Annis, though, when they needed real help. For mule races,” she laughed, “and important things like luck in the lottery. For birth control and impotence, too. She really knew how to bring in a good harvest.”

In a later story, when Emma Clare conducts the croning ritual for her granddaughter, Marie, her Ozark accent disappears. This is to show that she can speak standard American English if she wants to. She just doesn’t often want to.

Two characters speak languages all their own. Frances J. Swift is the compleat bureaucrat who manages the Center Towers. Madame Blavatsky is the talking cat. I heard their voices—like the voices of all the characters—speaking in my head and wrote down their dialogue. I tried to spell and punctuate it so the readers of Secret Lives would also hear their voices. It’s important to remember, however, that even when we’re reading silently, there’s a voice in our head reading aloud. That’s why the voice of each character has to be both distinctive and comprehensible. If the dialect is too thick, the reader’s mental tongue keeps getting tangled and the reading slows down, and if the dialogue is bad enough, the reader may just throw the book across the room. (At 650 pages, Secret Lives weights 2.4 pounds. That’s a dangerous weapon.)

When we first meet Frances in Chapter 2, as Bertha is sneaking the cat into the Center Towers, Frances assume a faux-cordial voice. “Well, Miss Bertha! How are we this lovely evening? Did we have a nice visit with our nephew? He’s such a fine young man, isn’t he, so good of him to take such good care of you.” In the story about Coyote the bag lady, Frances is highly suspicious of what “those women” are doing. She doesn’t want any homeless people in her domain. “Now, you are surely aware of the rules and policies of this establishment,” she says, “wherein guests, invited or not, are concerned. No unauthorized overnight guests are permitted without specific authorization from the authorities … that is, ah, from me.” You see? She speaks like every awful corporate memo we’ve ever read. And it gets worse.

In the next story, Frances accuses Bertha of stealing food from the lunchroom.

   “Now, as you must know, we cannot tolerate wasteful habits and practices here at the Center Towers. Our esteemed management, that is to say, our highly trained culinary dietician, plans our culinary menus with the greatest possible care to fulfill the daily nutritional needs of our elderly senior citizens who reside here with us, such as yourself. And we hope and expect that all meals will be taken in our luxurious dining room, except in the case of unavoidable illness, that is … of course unavoi—”
   “I eat there every day” [Bertha replies]. I’m almost always nutritionally and culinarilly satisfied.”
   “And you … er … carry purloined food away.” She leaned toward Bertha, peering at her as if to detect evidence of a guilty conscience. “I’ll come plainly to the point, Miss Bertha. Are you … ahem … saving, collecting, or hoarding food to save? So many of our elderly residents feel such a need to hoard, to clutter their … now you must be aware that hoarding is unnecessary and unsanitary. It betrays an exhibition of poor citizenship here at the Center Towers, as it could lead to inexact and imprecise planning and significant overexpenditure from our already generous nutritional food budget line. And hoarding can … ahem … also lead to infestations of noxious insects, which would lead to the further monetary expense of fumigation.” She took a deep breath. “This is only a teensy hint, Miss Bertha….”

See how it works? Lawyers and other bureaucrats write extremely redundant prose to—they say—avoid ambiguity. During the 1990s, I did temp work in offices. Frances talks just like people I worked with. What comes out of her mouth is convoluted nonsense. It's hard to write, too, until you get into the flow. Then you kinda can't help yourself. And pretty soon, she keeps hearing someone saying, “Off with her head!” It’s Madame Blavatsky in disguise as the Cheshire Cat.

Yes, that cat. I hired PumpUpYourBook to organize a blog tour for Secret Lives, and one of my assignments was to either interview a character in the book or have one character interview another. I couldn’t help myself. My interviewee was Madame Blavatsky. The first words out of her mouth in Chapter 2 of the novel show her personality. She’s talking to Bertha and the others who are discussing what they want a familiar to do. “Youse girls know yer stuff,” she says “Yeah, ya know what yer doin’ here. I wasnt so sure at first, ya know. Dint know if Bertha here was typical or not. But now I’m satisfied. Yeah, youse girls know how it works.”

Why does a cat who was a famous 19th-century occult author talk like she used to live in New Jersey? I have no idea. But that’s what she really sounds like. I can still hear her in my head even as I write this blog. (Oh, gee—now she wants me to erase all the foregoing and give the whole blog to her.) This cat helps Bertha turn a psychic fair into a vaudeville show, drives poor Frances into a nervous breakdown, and shows up in a four-footed Ghostbusters costume when the crones decide to do a reversing ritual.

Writing her dialogue got tricky, too. I had to remember to take the apostrophes out and spell words to match her pronunciation without going overboard and making her dialogue look incomprehensible. I’ll let her have the last word today. Here’s the opening of the blog interview. “Hiya, dearie,” says Madame Blavatsky. “It’s good ta be here. This here innerview is gonna help the author of that novel we’re in.” After considerable braggadocio, the interview closes. “I done a lotta good in that novel. Our author was really smart ta put me in her book. I’m the star!”

Dialogue and Dialect--Talking Gooder English

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:05:30 GMT

I’ve just learned a new word used by Shakespeare probably never by anyone else. Vastidity. It means bigness. It’s almost as much fun as a word I heard once heard somewhere and like to use—nakedidity. What is it about that “idity” ending? Three tiny syllables. It just sounds funny.

I’m rereading Simon Winchester’s fascinating history of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything (Oxford University Press, 2004), and getting my knowledge of the history of our language refreshed.

Language is a major part of our lives. It’s how we communicate. ( Duh.) Even if we’re sending text messages, we’re still using language. It’s said that the basic grammar and syntax rules of our mother tongue are “hard-wired” in our heads at an early age. As infants, we listen to people talking and put the words together and pretty soon we’re talking too. We’re using language ourselves. “Language” in the sense I’m using it here, BTW, comes from the French word for tongue and was first used in early Modern English around 1600, while Shakespeare was still working. “Talk” as a verb comes from “tale” and “tell” and was first used around 1548, shortly before Shakespeare was born.

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition and description.

“Go sit in the mall,” I keep telling my authors. “Listen to how people actually talk. Don’t eavesdrop—what they say isn’t important. Listen to how they say what they’re saying. Listen to their word choices. Listen to the rhythms of their sentences. Listen to how regular people use sentence fragments when they talk, how they use contractions and clichés and idioms. Pay attention to their verbal tics like ‘like’ and ‘you know.’”

Characters talking right is part of the verisimilitude of a novel. Their speech has to be appropriate to where they live and to their class. The numerous dialects of American English reflect our economic and social classes, geographical areas, levels of education, and other differences in the population. I’m wondering, though, if the stupid, nearly illiterate “language” of text messaging isn’t beginning to destroy some of our American English dialects, at least in writing if not in speaking. Anyone who lives anywhere can write “OMG” or use numbers as letters (“good 4 u,” “gr8,” etc.) or leave out the “unimportant” words—like prepositions—of a sentence. It’s the tiny words and phrases that tell people where we come from. If you listen carefully to some TV shows, you can tell that though they may be set in New York, they’re filmed in Los Angeles with writers and actors from California. Someone living in NYC is not likely to use our west coast “surfer dude” dialect. Back east, for example, they don’t say “totally” and “majorly.” Out here we do. Part of the “charm” of Jersey Shore is that the people talk right. We can tell they’re not actors from Nebraska or Oklahoma or—OMG!—Santa Monica.

Most of the characters in Secret Lives speak what is called standard American English plus some slang and some four-letter words. (Yes, old women know how to cuss. Why should that be a surprise?) But several characters speak in distinctive dialects. Two of them—Emma Clare and Madame Blavatsky—are major characters. I’ll discuss them next week, along with Frances J. Swift.

Let’s start with a few characters that don’t appear in every chapter. One member of the circle is Verlea, a black woman who was born in New Orleans, worked as a domestic until she retired, and now lives in the Center Towers Retirement Residence in Long Beach. At one point, talking about the sorrowful history of black women in America, she loses both her temper and standard English. This happens when two characters “adopt” a homeless bag lady named Coyote, who has suffered so much abuse that she’s nearly dead. I didn’t want either of these black women to speak “ebonics.” Coyote says very little, but as far as we know, she’s always been on the streets, so “fuck” is a major part of her vocabulary. To be sure these two women’s dialects were appropriate to their characters, I asked two of my speech students at the university to read Coyote’s story. They made some corrections, which I gratefully accepted.

It’s always good to get help. I also asked B.J., the daughter of a friend at Long Beach WomanSpirit, to read the stories in which Janie, who is 11 ½ (going on 40), appears. She told me that Janie needed to grow up and not talk like a five-year-old. Good advice! That’s where the “Motherrrrr” came from.

Another character who, like Coyote, appears in only one story is Celestia Wolfe, who is my version of Little Red Riding Hood. She’s in the book because she has to deliver an important letter to Herta, one of the major characters. Celestia was supposed to visit Herta in the 1940s, but she somehow wandered off the path. In her red dress, Celestia looks like a 1940s movie star, and though she’s managed to learn some English, her syntax is not quite right. That makes it easy to tell she’s not from here:

   “They told me I would meet the grandmothers here,” she said after a minute. “Yes. Grandmothers. Yes. How do you do? I am so nice to meet you.”
   “Well,” said Maude, “you’ve come to the right place for that. Nearly every woman here is a grandmother—”
   “Can we help you?” Rosa repeated. “At least come on inside. Don’t you think it’s a bit warm today to be wearing a raincoat?”
   “Yes, thank you for being warm today. With you I will come inside. There is a room, perhaps?”

It’s her syntax that distances her from the circle and from us. She is obviously foreign. But I didn’t want her to be too foreign, nor did I want her to sound like Andy Kaufman, so I kept her language fairly subtle. In her story (Chapter 8), she is captured by two horny old World War II veterans, whom I had a lot of fun comparing to Tex Avery’s lust-filled cartoon wolves, before she is finally able to deliver her message to Herta. I also got to write a fist fight in that chapter. That was a challenge!

To be continued. Come back next week and find out about the voices of Emma Clare, Madame Blavatsky, and Frances J. Swift. Each one speaks an English dialect all her own.

Publishing is an Educational Experience

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:13:29 GMT

Back in the olden days in college, in addition to my majors in English and theater and education, I acquired what I like to refer to as my “secular education.” I had been a fairly solitary child before I left home and was extremely naïve when I got to college. My secular education overflowed with Educational Experiences. Dorm life. (I describe a real dorm party in Ch. 15 of Secret Lives. Some of the characters went to the same college I did.) College theater. (I was a member of the Black Mask student group and worked on all the plays for four years.) Cutting classes while sitting with ten or twenty friends in around a table in the student union. (On reflection, not a good idea.) Boyfriends. (Don’t ask.)

Educational Experiences, of course, teach us those famous Life Lessons. Like don’t come back to the dorm at midnight after a cast party because when I was in college the housemother locked the dorm and you have to crawl in through a basement window. Which I did a couple months into my freshman year. I was grounded for a week. Like don’t believe everything an actor tells you. Like don’t cut class. It took me until graduate school to learn that lesson.

Today, forty-odd years later, I am still having Educational Experiences. The big one? Publishing Secret Lives, of course. As of September 8, I have released my beloved crones and their friends to the world. The novel is now for sale on Amazon.com and the Kindle conversion is in the works. I’ll investigate B&N pretty soon and start a Nook conversion, too.

Getting on Amazon has been majorly educational. If you go to the page that sells Secret Lives, you’ll see vendor listings. Used copies?? There are no used copies! As I’m writing this, I know who’s ordered copies of the book. Friends of mine. What are these vendors selling? I don’t have a clue. I’ve sent emails to them. No reply. The customer service rep from Amazon who phoned me a couple days ago to help solve this mystery has begun an investigation of the vendors for me.

The folks at CreateSpace are courteous and helpful. Thanks to them—and to Sherry, who designed and typeset the book and knows how CreateSpace works—I have a real book. I also have my very own Member Dashboard, and the nice people there have helped me order review copies and carry out other important authorial tasks. Things that are “intuitive” to some computer users just leave me shaking my head. So I ask for help. And receive it. I can still hear my father saying, “If it’s worth having, it’s worth asking for.” I’ve remembered that good advice all my life. And I also know the value of “please” and “thank you.” There are a couple folks at CreateSpace that I’d adopt if I could.

As I keep telling the authors whose books I edit, the author is ultimately responsible for the accuracy of her book. That’s why publishers send us galleys. We need to read them Very, Very Carefully.. My son, who holds an M.A. in English, proofread the manuscript before I sent it to Sherry and found errors I’d overlooked. Two or three trusted friends also read it and found errors. The funniest one was “Ralph Loren.” We fixed that right away. Then I read the pdf of the text. And found more errors and typos. Typos are, of course, examples of spontaneous generation. They grow by themselves and like termites infest and chew up a manuscript.

But you know what? When an author is reading her book, she tends to read what she knows is on the page. Which is not necessarily what is really there. And there’s a big difference between reading (a) a Word document on a computer screen, (b) a pdf of the text on the computer screen, (c) a printed copy of the pdf, and (d) the actual page in the actual bound book. It looks different every time. That’s why I found thirty-eight errors in the first proof copy. Thirty-eight errors! How could that happen? Well, for one thing, I’d been reading what was in my head, not what was actually on the page. Sherry fixed ’em all. I hope there are no more errors in the book ………… but those dratted termity typos might be crawling around in there again.

I also (with help) set up a Facebook page for Secret Lives to which I post comments and little snippets of the text and the reader’s guide. That 500-character limit is making me crazy, but people are Liking the book and responding and writing comments. If you’re reading this, please go to the Facebook page and Like the book and speak up. Write me a note.

Now I’m doing a bunch of other things to publicize the book. I went to Pagan Pride L.A. on September 18 to give a workshop on writing pagan fiction and sell books and I came home with nearly $300. I’ve put the book on Witchvox. I’m working with a blog tour organizer. I’m going to try to get interviewed in October (for Halloween) by the local Long Beach papers. I’ll be reviewed and interviewed in magazines and on websites. You know what I’d love? For Secret Lives to become a cult favorite. What can you do to help my wish come true? Please do whatever you can.

Finally, I have more or less completed the FREE READER’S GUIDE, which is on my website. The reader’s guide is like the commentary track on a DVD—I explain the literary allusions, add references, make comments. It’s the book’s annotation. I had almost as much fun writing the reader’s guide as I did writing the stories that make up Secret Lives. Go there now and read some of the secrets of Secret Lives.

Keeping busy until Secret Lives comes out

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:12:17 GMT

I only allow myself to buy books and DVDs during even-numbered months. On August 1, therefore—and before 8 a.m.—I opened the catalog whose pages I’d been folding down for several days and logged on to its website. Click, click, click. What did I order? The first thing I’d seen on the cover: a book titled Shakespeare’s Genealogies. It’s all the family trees of all the characters in all forty-two plays. Wow! You really need that kind of resource when you’re watching the history plays. I’ve got a bookmark in my Riverside Shakespeare on the page with the family tree of Edward III, many of whose descendants were fighting (on both sides of the Wars of the Roses) to gain the English throne. The Wars of the Roses are really confusing. History is complex. Even Shakespeare’s version of history is complex, and he was writing a Tudor-approved version of history.

So I ordered the Shakespeare genealogies book, and then I ordered books for my son and daughter-in-law for Christmas, but I won’t name them here because my kids read this blog. Then I picked up another catalog and … oh, goody!— The History of the Pun. Anyone who’s read anything I’ve written, especially Finding New Goddesses, knows how much I like puns. Why shouldn’t there be a serious study of wordplay? Click, click, click.

Then to Amazon and my shopping cart. First, I ordered a 1966 D’Oyly Carte production of The Mikado because I wanted to see the operetta in the Japanese costumes and acting style that Gilbert and Sullivan themselves might have seen in 1885 when they wrote it. I’ve seen lots of Mikados, of course, including one production that used the costumes and sets that were used in Topsy-Turvy, but my favorite is the English National Opera production of 1987 starring Eric Idle (yes, the Monty Python Eric Idle) as Ko-Ko, the cheap tailor turned into Lord High Executioner. This production isn’t faux-Japanese; it’s 1930s English society with BBC enunciation. Nanki-Poo sounds a lot like Jack Buchanan.

I also ordered Terry Pratchett’s newest Discworld novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, and The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel. The novelist in Secret Lives who is not me asks Madame Blavatsky, the talking calico cat, if she knew archy and mehitabel and—

OH. YEAH. SECRET LIVES. What I wanted was to be able to hold the book in my hands on my birthday last month. That didn’t happen. Then I thought it would be a book by mid-August. Well, Mercury is retrograde … so I’m working (really hard) on going with the flow. I used to know a metaphysical teacher who had her own little offset press that broke down every time Mercury went retrograde. Mercury rules communications (among other things), so writers need to be pretty careful during retrograde periods. Well, maybe everyone does. Don’t get upset with stuff. Don’t insult people. Don’t start fights. Be careful what you sign. Be nice to your computer.

I am therefore soldiering on. Last week, I put in two days reading the semihemidemipenultimate pdf of the 650+ pages of the text. Tuesday—10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday—noon until 8 p.m. Sherry had made all the changes from the previous proofread, so I had fewer for her this time. As my authors know (possibly all too well), I’m a Major Fussbudget, so I had more picky changes (commas, niceties of phrasing) this time. When she made those changes and sent me the next pdf of the text, I didn’t read the whole book again. I just checked the changes. And sent her three more corrections.

She told me it was time to go to CreateSpace and set up my account. I went to their website. Have I mentioned that websites make me crazy? What is supposed to be “intuitive” on websites—including Facebook—for most people isn’t for me. I just sit there. “Huh? What am I supposed to do now?” When I phoned CreateSpace and the nice man asked about some little detail, I couldn’t even answer him. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I phoned Sherry. “I’m on the website and have no idea what to do.” She’s had a lot of experience with CreateSpace. She calmly walked me through it, I sent them a credit card payment, and Secret Lives got its very own ISBN number (which numerologically adds up to 7, the number of the scholar). I think the process I’ve just been through is kinda like Janie’s menarche ritual and Marie’s croning—a rite of passage into a new stage of life. Next Sherry and I talked about the copyright page. We added credits for her and my daughter-in-law for their good work on the book. Then I added urls. First, for the free rea—FREE READER’S GUIDE (I decided uppercase will get people’s attention), which will be on this website pretty soon. Second, for my Facebook Secret Lives page. Third, for this blog. I also updated my Facebook page again.

And now I’m also pedaling as fast as I can to catch up with my editing. What am I working on? A nice metaphysical book by an Austrian author who currently lives in Italy and is trying to come back to Los Angeles. A Ph.D. thesis by a graduate student at Lancaster University in England. This is my fifth Ph.D. thesis from Lancaster in a row. The candidates just pass me along. It’s lovely. BTW, Wallace and Gromit live in Lancaster, but I don’t think they’ve been to the university. A long novel about world issues encountered by the philosophical protagonist and his family as they build a new business. A science fiction novel that I think is heading toward being about the Sumerian gods. A witty book of astrology on the Lady Asteroids (plus Chiron). A novel about a man who frees himself from the corporate life and learns about cosmic mysteries. A history of Bolivia. A book about fitness for which the authors coined the word “intensercise.” (It means intense exercise.) Good for them! I love variety. I seem to have a lot of it. My authors are all smart and interesting people.

It's My Birthday

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:07:32 GMT

Today is, as they say, the first day of the next year of my life. Yesterday was my birthday. So what did I do? I started the day by getting my car washed. I live only a couple of miles from the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which do more business than most other ports in the whole world. That means we’ve got diesel trucks galloping up and down the 710 freeway, which goes from the ports, through west Long Beach, and up toward L.A. and Pasadena, with freeway interchanges that lead all over the U.S. They’re working hard to make the trucks cleaner, but there’s still a lot of dust and crud that wafts across the skies. (We also get that nice marine layer, which at least keeps it marginally cooler than it is inland. I wish I could send cooling vibes to everyone I know who lives anywhere east of the Rockies.) Something else that keeps my car dirty--I also live two or three blocks from Fire Station #2. So fire engines go up and down Walnut Avenue every day. More dust. More crud. I haven’t been out to look at my car yet this morning, but I’m willing to bet it’s not shiny clean anymore. Sigh.

The second thing I did for my birthday was take two slices of red velvet cake with me to visit my friend Anniitra. We’re twins. Well, she’s a large, wonderfully talented black woman, and I’m a short white woman, and I’m five years older than she is, but we share a birthday and have been friends for many years. We ate our cake and had a nice gossip.

Then I did something I do maybe once a year. I went shopping. When I first moved to SoCal in 1976, my friend Rebecca took me to South Coast Plaza. Often. Once we spent an eight-hour day there. But as the years have passed, I’ve become less fond of malls, and now they make me crazy. They’re too noisy! Though I’ve been a Nordstrom customer, off and on, since the 1980s, I don’t wear their clothes anymore because I don’t work in offices anymore. But I like their shoes and some other things. Yesterday, I bought a new leather wallet. Then I ventured into the mall. I actually managed not to get lost this time. When I found La Parfumerie, I bought another bottle of the only perfume I wear, Vanilla Fields. My next stop was down the freeway, where I stopped to buy some chocolate-hazelnut truffles, then I stopped at a local metaphysical bookstore, Points of Light, to leave some flyers for Secret Lives, and then I went by the bank. Back home. I spent the afternoon working. Some editing, some writing, some reading. I’m honored to be on the board of a new Goddess publisher named Goddess Ink, and I’ve got a submitted manuscript to read and comment on for them.

In the middle of the afternoon, the phone rang twice. The first call was from my son, and we had one of our usual interesting literary conversations. Later it rang again. “Happy birthday to you…..” This was my friend B.J. calling from Georgia. I first “met” her when she sent me a fan letter for one of my books maybe a decade ago, and she was one of the people who helped get me through the death of my first Heisenberg. We’ve been friends ever since, and a couple weeks ago as I was writing a piece called “When the Goddess Calls” for one of the Llewellyn 2013 annuals and decided that the Goddess can send text messages, it was B.J. I asked if I was spelling the text messages correctly. Yes, that’s an oxymoron. She said I got ’em right. Yesterday we talked for an hour.

I finished my birthday by watching my DVD of the San Francisco Opera’s 2001 production of The Merry Widow, which I love, followed by about an hour of a Michael Ball DVD. Then it was bedtime. It occurs to me that some people might think I a dull birthday to you, but to me it was perfectly satisfactory.

You want to know how obsessive I can get? (Just ask my authors.) Earlier in the week, I turned on TCM and watched Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. At one point in Anna Karenina, Vronsky exclaims, “Anna!” As he said that, I heard an echo in my head. But it wasn’t Fredric March’s voice. “Anna!” There was a bit of music with it. Well, this happens to me all the time. I’ll frequently wake up in the morning with 20 or 30 seconds of music running in my head. It’s usually Gilbert and Sullivan, and I can identify it pretty quickly. But this “Anna!” had me stumped. It went on auto-repeat and I finished the movie and went to bed. Next morning, it was still there and I still couldn’t figure out who was exclaiming. So I did what I often have to do: I stood in front of my DVD shelves and looked at the spines of all the musicals. Aha! There it was. In Act I of The Merry Widow, Anna Glawari (the Widow) finds Prince Danilo asleep in the Pontevedrian embassy. They were lovers when they were young, but the prince is now a mere civil servant, whereas she’s a very rich widow. “Danilo!” “Anna!” Mystery solved. That's why I watched The Merry Widow.

I also spent an hour or so yesterday replying to birthday greetings on Facebook. With nearly every “many thanks,” I also asked, “Have you been to my Secret Lives page yet?” Since last month, I’ve had two really smart women reading the Secret Lives pdf and finding more typos. I went through the whole pdf, too, and made some small changes, then ……. holding my breath, I let my baby go and sent it back to Sherry. The next thing I have to do today is work on the “preanswered” Q&A for the book, which I will send to my blog tour promoter. Like I said last month, I never complain about being busy. Everything I’m working on is entertaining and interesting. (I’m tempted to look in the thesaurus for some nice, obscure synonyms for interesting, but I’ll spare you that. I am forever advising my authors to stay away from the thesaurus.)

My Writing Process

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:19:14 GMT

I’ve been thinking about this blog for more than a week. Usually, I have it written by now and just have to post it when the sun moves into the next sign. Not this time. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to write about—I always have a dozen ideas bouncing around in my head. It’s not that I don’t have time. I’m self-employed. I can work any eight or nine days of the week I want to. I can work any 28 or 29 hours of the day. Well, actually, I don’t work quite that much. By mid-afternoon most days, I get up from this chair, pick up a novel from my stack of books, and read with my eyes closed. I live like a cat for an hour to give my biological clock time to refresh.

I’m not complaining about being busy! What if all I had to do was watch daytime TV? The thought makes me shudder. This month, I am editing for my authors, writing for three Llewellyn annuals, and proofreading the pdf file of my new novel, Secret Lives, which I hope will be a Real Book by the end of July. (I watched Pinocchio last night. I'm wishing on a star for big sales.) If I can just quit writing it. Which leads me to my topic: my writing process.

Let’s start with my editing process, which I’m using on myself as I write. I’ve just finished a “documentary memoir.” This author and I met in the spring of 2010 at a meeting of a writers club. His book had been published in 2008 by a well-known POD. They didn’t serve him well. There are errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage on nearly every page—and they said they’d edited it for him. Shame on them. He’s 91 years old, so it’s a very long book. Along with my usual picky line edit, as we worked together I suggested some reorganization of chapters and the addition of front and back matter. In the 2008 version, there were long breaks in chapters, as many as fourteen pages of illustrations (the documentation—wonderful old photos, newspaper clippings, letters to and from the author). We moved nearly all of the documentation into chapter appendixes so the narrative is now uninterrupted. Reorganization can make all the difference in the world in the readability of a book. The author sent his book to the POD publisher earlier this month. Fingers crossed!

In addition to editing for six or seven authors, I’ve spent the last two weeks writing for three of the annuals published by Llewellyn Worldwide, which published my book, Goddess Meditations, in 1999. I’ve been writing for the Witches’ Calendar since 2004, but this year they decided to reformat the calendar, and they also decided to use three or four authors instead of a dozen. On the same day I was informed that I wasn’t writing for the Calendar anymore, I received notes from two other annuals editors. Would I write for them? But of course! So I wrote a piece for the 2013 Witches’ Companion on how to celebrate a sabbat if you’re alone but not accustomed to being alone. I was also asked to write for the 2013 Spell-a-Day Almanac. Twenty-five spells. They assign the dates. One of my spells will appear approximately every two weeks. My spells are probably different from most of the others. Example—hold a pagan jewelry race. That is, have everyone put on all their jewelry, and the first person to crawl across the finish line wins. Example—the magic Parking Space Word. Example—set gratitude as your intention for the year. I’m still working up to writing my piece for the 2013 Datebook.

Being a fussbudget editor, of course, I have to edit everything I write. Several times. I hired my son (who holds an M.A. in English) to proofread the manuscript of Secret Lives. I went through it myself. You’d think it would be error-free. Hah! I’m finding funny little things, not only typos (mine), but the occasional misspelled word and sentences that don’t make as much sense as I thought they did. My typesetter and book designer, Sherry Wachter, and I have worked together before, though, so we both know how the process goes—

Oh. Yeah. My writing process. I don’t quite remember what it was 20 years ago when I first wrote Secret Lives, but my guess is that it was pretty much what it is today. I start thinking about my topic. I walk around talking to myself. Ideas start sprouting like crocuses in February. I fertilize them by doing a bit of research, both in real books and online. When I go to bed at night, I plant more flowers in my metaphorical garden. I rearrange the plants (topics, ideas, sentences, good phrases) and start composing paragraphs in my head. Sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. with more writing going on. I do not get up, though; over the years I’ve trained myself to remember what’s worth remembering and to forget what’s not. This is how it goes, at least, when I’m writing nonfiction. When I’m writing fiction, I’m watching the characters and listening to them and writing down what I see and hear. I'm also specifying that I’m the one in charge of gooder English. When I take a break from editing my authors’ books, I go back into my mental metaphorical garden and start weeding and pruning. I used to start the actual writing in a notebook, but I don’t do that anymore. (My handwriting turns into scribbles by the end of the first paragraph.) Eventually, like today, I sit down, open a new document, and start typing. If I want to stretch that garden metaphor, I guess what I’m doing is transplanting all my flowers from my head to my computer. Computers are nice. I can sit here and write and edit and rewrite and edit some more all day long. But I won’t. I gotta get to work.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

Mon, 23 May 2011 12:19:11 GMT

I drove up to UCLA a few nights ago to see the Reprise Theater Company's production of Kiss Me, Kate, which is one of my favorite musicals. As you no doubt know, it’s a backstage retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with songs by Cole Porter. I was humming “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” for a week before I saw the show, and a week later, I’m still humming it. I don’t have permission to print the lyrics here (and I’m not about to commit plagiarism), so I invite you to spend five minutes watching it on YouTube Turn your sound up loud. The song is sung by the two gangsters who … well, if I give you the whole plot, it’ll fill up this blog. They sing it in front of the curtain while the scene is changed behind the curtain. The song is hilarious. The stanzas are puns on the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. “Her clothes you are mussing” is rhymed, for example, with “Much Ado About Nussing.”

Having been a Shakespeare scholar (well, I earned my Ph.D. with a major in English Renaissance literature with an emphasis on the drama—which means Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and that bunch), I really like Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve got a whole long shelf of them on DVD. I suppose, having been a scholar, I’m supposed to approve of the versions that stick to the canonical texts, like the series done by the BBC in the early 1980s and which is available on Netflix. And I guess I’m supposed to disapprove of the versions set in strange places or with modern costumes. I’m not a purist. I like many of the modern adaptations, even the 1998, Oscar-winning movie Shakespeare in Love (more about Romeo and Juliet in a minute) and the BBC’s 2007 Shakespeare Retold, which is versions of four plays so completely rewritten they use almost none of Shakespeare’s verse. But the plots are recognizable. Their Taming of the Shrew starring Shirley Henderson (as a shrewish British politician) and Rufus Sewell (as a cross-dressing, impoverished member of the gentry) is hilarious.

My favorite play of all time is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I first read in high school and first paid attention to (there’s a significant difference there) as a sophomore in college. It’s also one of the first plays I took my son to see. He was five years old, and the play was done outdoors in front of one of the buildings on the campus of Southern Illinois University. I can still remember Puck sitting up in a tree. My favorite version is the 1999 movie set in Italy and starring Kevin Kline (Bottom), Michelle Pfeiffer (Titania), and Stanley Tucci (Puck). But here I have to admit that I’m not fond of every single variant on a Shakespeare play. The 1968 movie directed by Peter Hall (and with a wonderful cast, including Helen Mirren and Judi Dench) is boring. Too canonical. And there’s an operatic version with music by Benjamin Britten. The set looks like a giant green bed. All the action takes place in this “forest.” It’s very strange. The most fantastic production is the 1935 movie by the famous German director Max Reinhardt, who deconstructed and then reconstructed the Hollywood Bowl. This is the version with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. This was when Rooney was 13 years old. Several years before his Andy Hardy movies. His Puck howls but does not tap-dance. This DVD is best with the commentary track turned on.

I also have a some interesting versions of Romeo and Juliet. One is the 1996 movie directed by Baz Luhrman and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes. It’s set in Verona Beach and the Montagues and Capulets are gangsters with guns. A lot of Shakespeare’s text is cut, but there’s enough to make it a good movie. More interesting—notice how often I use this word? It’s because I’m trying to be tactful—is the 1936 movie directed by George Cukor. Now we need to keep in mind that Romeo and Juliet were teenagers. DiCaprio and Danes were five or six years older than the characters they played. In the 1936 movie, Juliet (age 12 or 13) is acted by Norma Shearer, age 34. Romeo is acted by Leslie Howard (whom we all remember as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind), age 43. My favorite is John Barrymore as Mercutio. Barrymore, a wonderful actor, was 54 years old. And he got Mercutio perfectly! Well, his acting style is old fashioned, but he sure read the iambic pentameter right.

And, finally, there’s Hamlet. It’s said to be the best or most famous play in the English language. Me, if we’re talking tragedy, I prefer King Lear and I own the Joseph Papp production starring James Earl Jones. And I recently read Christopher Moore’s novel Fool, in which Lear is a nasty old man and the Fool ends up marrying Cordelia. (There’s a precedent for this: in 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote the play with a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar. It was popular with Victorian audiences.)

Back to Hamlet. I like Branagh’s 1996 movie, which is Most Compleat and goes on forever. Better, though, is the 2008 RSC production starring David Tennant (best known as Dr. Who) and Patrick Stewart. More fun is the French opera by Ambroise Thomas, written in 1868, at a time when the post-Revolution, post-Napoleon French throne was occupied by Louis-Napoleon, possibly the densest ruler who ever lived. What’s interesting (here I go again) is that the play wasn’t just translated into French. The French people adored Ophelia. Think of Princess Diana—that’s the level of adoration the 19th-century Parisians had for Ophelia, whom they see as a femme fragile who goes mad when her lover rejects her. This was a big motif in French drama. The opera opens with the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude (not seen in Shakespeare’s play). At the end of the second act, Hamlet gets drunk, staggers around on the banquet table, and pours wine over himself. Also not seen in Shakespeare. Ophelia gets her mad scene in Act IV. She strews flowers all over the stage as she sings her big aria. She stabs herself. Repeatedly. She dies. The audience is on its feet, shouting “Brava!” And she gets up and sings some more. Finally, Hamlet survives the duel and is proclaimed king. It’s quite something to watch. So is Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which approaches Shakespeare’s play from the point of view of these two minor characters and reminds me of Waiting for Godot.

It must be obvious by now that I can go on and on about Shakespeare. I could write about the wonderful version of Merchant of Venice that is set in the 1930s, a very dangerous time for Jews. The version of Love’s Labour’s Lost set in the 18th century. But I won’t. “Our revels,” as Shakespeare wrote, “now are ended.” At least for this month.