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D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

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Major life changes

The “Holls”*

December 22, 2018 by D. Hart St. Martin 2 Comments

(Your humble narrator sighs, then carries on.)

As a kid in the 50s, I, like pretty much every kid in America who wasn’t Jewish, couldn’t wait for Christmas morning. My sister and I would get to open two presents on Christmas Eve—one of our choosing and the other one holding the new long flannel nightgowns our mother had sewn for us at times when we weren’t around to see. Our nightgowns themselves were no surprise—the color/pattern of the flannel was, though it was always holiday related.

Not me

Christmas Eve night was a sleepless affair. I’d lie in bed staring at the clock all night, wishing to sleep, wishing it was 6 a.m., the time of rising on Christmas day declared by my mother. It never was. It never, ever was. My sister slept the night through (lucky kid), and I’d have to wake her when it was time. I didn’t always get what I wanted, and that was disappointing. But after all, the anticipation of a moment is almost always better than the moment itself. And that was the Christmas of my childhood.

Not my tree

I continued to decorate as an adult, collecting ornaments and eventually a 4’ fake tree, until the year my dad died in 2008. I just couldn’t. And I didn’t for six years. Then, in 2014, I pulled the tree out and set it up again, early in December. I loved the lights, how prettily they twinkled, especially at night. But when Christmas Eve hit, I realized that tree hurt. My soul screamed in pain at the sight of it. I don’t know exactly why.

I’m not a child anymore. I have a tiny family, the members of which either celebrate Hanukkah or work many extra shifts the month of December, and are, therefore, not available. (Yeah, bring on the whine and don’t forget the gouda.) I’m alone, and it’s depressing. Why salt the wound with the presence of the tree?

I took the tree down, stored all the decorations dutifully and tossed the tree itself in the trash. It had seen better days, as had I, and it was time to let go of something that no longer worked in my life. I haven’t put up any decorations since.

Not a photo. (I mean, look at the shadows.)

That is not to say I don’t observe the winter Solstice—that moment when the sun appears to turn and head back to the northern hemisphere. That holiday has substance, requiring no faith whatsoever. It’s a scientific fact—the face Gaia presents to the sun will shift as she makes her way around her star.

That is also not to say that I disrespect those who celebrate any of the myriad of holidays which “coincidentally” land at this time of year. To all of you celebrating out there, enjoying your families (I hope) and expressing your faith, I wish you all the best for now and the new year. (And don’t forget my special holiday gift to everyone—Fractured and Tainted free through Christmas Eve!)

*From my Aussie friend who wrote of doing something “over the holls.”

Filed Under: Lifestyle, Major life changes, Personal stuff, Uncategorized Tagged With: childhood memories, holidays, writing the pain

In Which WTF Becomes My New Mantra

December 1, 2018 by D. Hart St. Martin Leave a Comment

My beloved 18-year-old Saturn died two weeks ago. She only had 31.5K miles on her, but when the dementia of a terminal electrical problem sidelined her, I knew it was time to put the old gal down.

She was a good car. I mean, 18 years. Come on. Only a couple of small problems over our time together. She even had her original brakes. I’d dubbed her “Bratgirl” because she looked a little like a sports car. I certainly felt like my ass was dragging on the ground when I drove her. But, she had to go. Here’s my last shot of her as I backed away in her replacement.

When I make a decision like buying a new car, I generally do a minimal amount of research and then go. Do it. Get it over with. Plus with an anxiety disorder that has left me mistrustful of automobiles in general, I needed to deal quickly with the reality of my fear of the car just stopping—STOPPING—in the middle of the road without power.

I began by looking at used cars offered by a rental company. I’ve known several people who’ve had very good luck getting a car this way. Then I looked at new cars and discovered that for only a few thousand more, I could get a brand new car with no mileage to speak of. Worth it to me.

So on the Saturday after the Thursday Bratgirl first crapped out on me, I forced her to take me to the local Toyota dealership where I abandoned her in favor of a brand-new, bright-red Yaris. I named her Ruby Saturday.

And here she is.

First new car in 18 years. Do you know how much has changed in that time? I got pretty much the cheapest car on the lot. It has Bluetooth and a push-button start and a backup camera. Standard. All of this advanced technology is great, but my driving skills have been truly challenged. Take today.

Today, I drove to my writing workshop, pushed the button to turn the car off and saw a yellow light on the start button. I’d never seen that before. What the fuck? What’s the yellow light for? I pushed the button to start the car again, then turned it off again. Yellow light remained. I looked around and noticed that the car was still in Drive. So my car was telling me to shift to Park. (The Saturn would have refused to give me the key, but Ruby Saturday doesn’t have a key to hold hostage.) Lesson learned.

Ah, but that wasn’t the end. When I came out, I got in, put my foot on the brake and pushed the button, and once I’d backed out of my parking space (with the screen displaying the backup camera’s viewpoint) and shifted into Drive, no music. What the fuck?

A big icon filled up that little screen telling me…what? I thought it was telling me the Bluetooth wasn’t working. So I switched over to the radio, but no radio. And the damn icon wouldn’t let me change things at all. I played with it for a couple of minutes (back in Park), but to no avail.

So I drove my brand-new, bright-red Yaris named Ruby Saturday back to the dealership and whined to the young man in the service bay, “I’ve only had it for a week-and-a-half, and this happened.”

And you know what he said? You know what he said after he said it wasn’t the Bluetooth? He pointed to the icon on the screen and said, “It’s on mute.” And proceeded to show me all the places I could turn the mute off.

Progress. We can’t live without it, but it’s damn irritating to live with.

Filed Under: Life in general, Lifestyle, Major life changes, Uncategorized Tagged With: progress, tech stuff, writing life

On the Nature of Fun by Guest Blogger Jim Proctor

May 16, 2015 by D. Hart St. Martin 2 Comments

Today, I’m pleased to welcome Jim Proctor to my blog. He’s the author of a novella (“Made in the Stars”) and two novels (The Last Steward and Veronica Phoenix). Veronica Phoenix is his latest, and I loved it! You also should check out his Facebook page, especially if you’re an author looking to connect with one of the most helpful fellow authors on the planet. So, without further ado, a few words from Jim on painting a cinder block wall.

Would anyone care to guess how much fun painting a cinder block wall is? Anyone? What’s that? Did someone say “Zero”. That’s a good answer, and it would have been my answer until this morning. In the movie “Freaky Friday” the teenage girl (Lindsay Lohan) calls her mom (Jamie Lee Curtis) a Fun Sucker because “You suck the fun out of everything!” Personally, when I hear “fun sucker” and “Jamie Lee Curtis” in the same sentence, I get an entirely different idea of… never mind.

Painting a cinder block wall is negative fun. The activity is a fun sucker. It gets into your mind and begins sucking away the fun. But it doesn’t stop when it has sucked up all the fun you might have had while painting. No, it sucks away even your memories of fun. By the time you have been painting for an hour, you begin to wonder if there is any point in continuing to live. By this point, if you are lucky, the paint fumes are already killing you.

I am painting the cinder block wall of the basement of my parent’s house, trying to get the place ready to sell. After finishing the first coat, I dragged out the shop vac and began vacuuming all the cobwebs hanging from the overhead joists. Do you remember the scene in Lord of the Rings where Frodo walks into Shelob’s lair and the place is full of cobwebs. Frodo keeps getting caught in them. That is what the basement looked like. There were a lot of very unhappy spiders when I finished.

When I go back, the wall will get a second coat. Then I will move a few things and start on the next section of wall. Once I get a solid base of the UGL Drylock Supreme, I will break out my Wagner Power Painter and shoot a layer of Kilz primer over it, and then maybe a layer of white latex. Yes, lots of fun.

Filed Under: Major life changes, Writing Tagged With: author reflections, fun, guest blogger, home renovation, writers, writing

I’ve Lost my Voice!

July 19, 2014 by D. Hart St. Martin 1 Comment

A writer’s voice is a combination of style, phrasing, and flow. It is potentially the most useful tool in the writer’s little pencil box. Some writers possess a voice so easily identifiable that all an astute reader needs are a few sentences to name the source. And voice does not manifest in fiction alone; with the possible exception of newspaper reporting, it can exist anywhere that words are brought together to tell a story.

Now, enough of defining voice. This is a personal story. This is not a training session on how to find your voice. (The way to find your voice is to keep writing until you find it. That’s it. Moving on.)

Several months ago, my brain began doing a rather odd thing—probably brought on by one or more of a few stressors which I won’t go into here. My brain began applying a sing-song inflection to everything I thought, everything I heard, everything I read, and everything I wrote. All words strung together in any perceivable manner turned into this kind of chant in my head.

At the time, I was working on the first draft of the third and final book of my series, Lisen of Solsta.  In first draft, my brain’s affliction was active but did not harm the text.

(And, so you’ll know, I ran this past my psychiatrist recently, and he deemed it a passing problem, likely stress related. But he’s not a writer; what does he know?)

A week ago, I moved on to second draft, and I found myself fighting the work but not knowing why. Last night, a painful epiphany hit me like a hammer. If I can’t perceive my writing as anything more than a sing-songy mish-mash of words, how am I going to find the flow? I mean, there’s singing and there’s sing-songing. The former allows words to soar; the latter, a pain in the ass. If I can’t tell if a sentence or a paragraph flows, what the hell am I doing writing at all? Needless, to say, a great many things got thrown around my office last night. Sigh.

So if anyone has dealt with something like this or knows someone who has, let me know. For now the plan is for me to let the writing go for a little while and let my poor, aching brain rest and hope to God (hear me, God?) that the little chanting person in my head moves on to some other soul and lets me have my mojo back. I am a writer, damn it! And Lisen’s story needs an ending.

Filed Under: Major life changes, Writing Tagged With: stress, writers block, writing

Thank You for the Music (A Father’s Day Orchestration)

June 13, 2014 by D. Hart St. Martin Leave a Comment

I’m sitting here tonight doing what I do nearly every night—listening to symphonic music on my Walkman while I write. And as I was writing and listening, I grew aware of my highly trained ear and its evolution. At the moment, it’s the soundtrack to the Sci-Fi* channel’s Children of Dune, the first cut, “Summon the Worms.” The piece begins softly with mournful strings and then begins to build until the strings and brass play point and counterpoint back and forth on the same theme. And then it bursts wide open with the tympani leading the rest of the orchestra into the billowing centerpiece. I play it over and over again because it, quite simply, makes my body tingle.

When I was in elementary school, my father would sometimes take me to his weekly orchestra rehearsals. He belonged to the local community orchestra which put on maybe three or four concerts a year. I would sit at the back of the rehearsal hall at the local high school with him and rejoice in the music that surrounded me. He played percussion. If it wasn’t brass, strings or woodwinds, he was your guy (except for piano and harp, of course).

orchestra
The Pomona Valley Symphony Orchestra in rehearsal  circa 1958

My very favorite instrument he played was the tympani—the big copper kettledrums. I loved, and still love, that deep-throated pounding sound, almost like the beating of a heart. You have to tune those, you know. There are usually two or more in the orchestra, and they’re tuned to different notes. Each time before my dad would perform, he’d spend many minutes with his ear within millimeters of the drumhead tapping it lightly with the padded tympani mallet, and as he did so, he would turn one tuning screw a skosh clockwise or counterclockwise to get the desired pitch. (The drums typically have a range of a perfect fifth, according to Wikipedia.) And then he’d repeat the process with the other one. He loved those drums, but they didn’t belong to him. The school district owned them.

DaddysPOV
The orchestra from my father’s point of view

Dad would also let me sit with him during performances. That’s when all the hard work week after week came together in a perfect whole. I would sit on a chair just like his chair—an angelic-looking little blond girl—and watch and listen as the orchestra gave life to black dots on paper. I learned to play the piano starting in first grade, moved on to accordion and then violin along the way, but I believe that the greatest music education I ever got was sitting in that orchestra absorbing the contribution of every instrument alone and then together. I can tear “Summon the Worms” apart and appreciate its soaring due to the time I spent sitting at the back of that orchestra.

DaddyLauraMe
My father, my younger sister and
myself in a publicity photo for the orchestra.

So, to my father who’s been gone for nearly six years now, I say thank you. Thank you, Daddy, for the music, all the music. My life would falter were it not for my love of music. And while rock-and-roll is great and I love it dearly, it’s the magic of an orchestra that never fails to take me places I’ve never been before.

*That’s what the SyFy network was called when the miniseries first aired.

Filed Under: Major life changes, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: childhood memories, Father's Day, music, writing

Worthy Women of Courage

June 11, 2014 by D. Hart St. Martin 1 Comment

I’m pissed.  A few days ago I wrote a lovely piece about my father I intended to upload this weekend.  I’ll still upload it, but I’m pissed and I need to tell you why.  Several months ago I allied myself with a group on the internet and Facebook called Ordain Women (OW).  I’ve written about this before and about my concerns if the general authorities of the Mormon church decide to come down hard on these women.

The war has begun.  On June 8, 2014, Kate Kelly, the founder of Ordain Women, received an “invitation” to answer charges of apostasy (see NYT article here).  Likely the evidence will include the belief on the part of the church that Ordain Women and its members and supporters are directly questioning the authority of the “divinely” inspired leadership of the church.  The fact that these women always speak softly, dress in their Sunday best whenever they perform some sort of public action and only ask that said leadership ask God the question “Has the time come for women to be ordained?” means nothing to these men in charge.  They see these women as questioning the laws of God.  The LAWS of GAWD, for heaven’s sake.  (And remember that this is a church that was founded on the principle of “ask and it shall be answered.”)

Silent vigils are planned for the day and time this “disciplinary council” is scheduled to meet (June 22, 7 p.m. ET).  Sister Kelly, who, as an attorney, knows how to answers these fools and refute their charges, will not be present.  Knowing that Ms. Kelly has just moved from Virginia to Utah, her “former” bishop has ordered the meeting to take place in Virginia in a ward (a small community of church members) to which Ms. Kelly no longer belongs and to which she will be unable to travel (especially at the tail end of a weekend).  She will be allowed to send a written statement, but no phone or internet will be allowed.  Either show up or shut up.

To the wonderful women of OW who are reeling from this betrayal, I say, be strong.  Be not afraid.  I don’t believe in God as you perceive him, but I believe that there’s something out there which, when petitioned, will send you the strength and courage you require.  The bigwigs of Mormondom may have fired the first salvo and the wounds may feel deadly, but the recognition you seek as human beings of equal value to me is a worthy cause.  I know that often one of you will quote a line or two from “Come, Come Ye Saints,” but I choose to end with words from the Finale of Les Miserables.

“Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!”

Filed Under: Major life changes, Women's Rights, Writing Tagged With: excommunication Mormon church, MoFem, Mormon feminism, Ordain Women, women's rights

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