Karen Abrahamson – Page 21 – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

For the Writer: Travel Open

By Karen Abrahamson | February 7, 2011

Dawn at Holy Amristar's Golden Temple (2000) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Reviewing my travel journals for excerpts in this site reminded me of facts I had long ago forgotten. Like the fact that Moroccans have a unique way of holding their hands when clapping, or the way my Mauritanian guide, Akbar, poured his mint tea by holding his red teapot at least three feet above the small juice glasses we drank from, or the way the Rajasthani women regarded my small gold earrings as symbols of an ancient royal family. Alone, these aren’t particularly earth-shattering bits of information, but in a story they provide unique bits of authenticity about a country that help establish a place for others.

To me these are the small bits of place – I call them the gifts – you can only gain by travelling. So how do you go about gaining these insights?

My basic philosophy is to travel open.

This speaks to being willing to be where you are:

1. Coming from our fast-paced culture it can be easy to set a schedule that keeps you moving on to new places all the time, rather than taking the time to get to know a place. When I traveled in India, for the first month I hired a car and driver to help get me to all the spread out places I wanted to go. They expected me to spend a day in each location. Instead I spent the time traveling around the state of Rajasthan, and only that, when the company I had hired the driver from had advised that the one-month period allowed most tourists to visit Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and one other state.

But the way I traveled I was able to spend two evenings as the sun went down, with a hotel owner and his friends as they played evening ragas (songs to the time of the day) on sitar and tabla on the rooftop terrace overlooking the lake of Udaipur. I was able to meet an Indian woman in an old fortress town and be invited home for dinner with her family. I was able to sit beside the pool at the golden temple of Amritsar and chat with young Punjabi women. On other trips I was able to stay an extra day and walk the long, pristine beaches of Zanzibar. Or decide at the last moment NOT to go to Beijing, but to return to the Tibetan highlands of Lamusa instead.

2. Traveling open also means not being consumed with your own needs all the time, and not being afraid. Some of the ugliest travelers I’ve seen are the people who won’t take the time to adhere to local customs. Like the tourists who won’t remove their shoes at a temple door. Or the tourist who complains vociferously about the native food not being like it is at home. Note to tourist: YOU ARE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY, HERE!

I once had a lovely Indian guesthouse hostess practically cry with pleasure when I said I would love to eat whatever her family was having. I was invited for dinner every night and had some of the best food I ate in India. She even took me into her kitchen and showed me her spices. As a result of being open to things like this I’ve been invited into Tibetan tents, and taught how to make chapti. I’ve sipped tea with retired Ministers of Culture who were trying to preserve their country’s ancient arts, and I’ve had a man in an empty Cairo street turn and give me flowers in welcome when my first inclination was to be afraid. All of this when I rarely spoke the language.

Rajastani kitchen (2000) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Traveling open means being willing to put aside your own schedule to take advantage of the many gifts along the way. Like the young woman at Burma’s Schwedigon Pagoda who told me her sad life tale that inspired a short story of mine.

Most of all, traveling open means traveling with a smile. That, and a writing notebook or computer, are the most important things you can pack when you travel. One gets you the memories and one helps you keep them. These are the gifts that fuel my writing.

Destructive Forces, or The Beauty of Making Things Worse

By Karen Abrahamson | February 5, 2011

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about the destructive force of Ben and Shiva. Ben has his penchant for getting in behind breakable objects and purposefully shoving them off of shelves. (I have much less brick-a-brack these days.) Shiva has developed a penchant for shredding paper—cardboard—plastic. Anything he can sink his little teeth and claws into and I constantly am catching him at this lovely trick on things like – oh – my business license, the cardboard box in the corner, or a manuscript stacked and ready to be mailed out.

I wonder if editors would understand a few chewed corners.

Hmm, maybe they would just figure I have mice, or was particularly nervous about mailing this one out?

Buddhist nun at Mingan, Mandalay, (1997) Photo (c) Karen Abraha

Anyway, in the midst of trying to preserve my manuscripts and various and sundry pieces of memorabilia from my travels, I got to thinking about destruction and its place in our lives and writing. At the same time a writer friend of mine sent me a link to some fantastic photos of the erosion and destruction of Detroit . The photos are bizarrely science fictional and evoked thoughts of Night of the Living Dead, Twelve Monkeys and War of the Worlds, and yet they are absolutely and utterly beautiful with their haunting look at faded glories. Maybe it’s just me, (but I think not, given the hordes of other visitors to places like Angkor, and Athens and Machu Picchu) but I am fascinated not just by the vestiges of what was once great and has now been destroyed, but also in the cracks in the great edifices and the things climbing through from the other side. As I watch the people of Egypt struggle for democracy I think of new life, like the fromages tree that grow from the Angkor ruins that I have on the home page of this web site. Or maybe it’s the wisdom and laughter that shines through from an age-ruined face.

What does this have to do with writing?

A writer’s job is to make things worse and to recognize that destruction is life. This is hard, because even though I think we are attracted to destruction—fascinated by it, even, if you notice the way traffic slows next to a serious traffic accident—we hate to inflict it on other beings. We are fascinated and repulsed by news of a slaughter of others. Haiti’s earthquake, for example, or Hurricane Katrina, or the Tsunami that wiped out so many in Malaysia and Thailand. And yet as a writer our hands pause as we destroy our character’s beloved possession, or reputation. We hold back from hurting them physically or mentally. We take heed of the cardinal rule and DON’T kill their cat or the dog or the horse, but we don’t do other things to wound them either.

Which makes our writing boring.

Think about it. Are we interested in a character skipping happily through life? No. Even all those Jackie Collins novels of the beautiful people carry their own carnage. That’s what makes us read those novels and all those T.V. magazines: seeing the crumbling of those magnificent edifices of the cults of personality.

So it’s not just thrillers and action stories that should have destructive forces, whether they’re external or internal to our characters, we need them to ignite the passion in the reader and make them want to read on. The ‘oh-no’ moment. The tension of anticipation of when the lover finds out that they’ve been cheated on. The implications when a character finds their home, their family, their life (insert your character’s loss here) is gone. We want to know and we want to understand how character’s overcome, because we all have those forces in our lives and we want to see what comes after.

Ruins and fromages trees, Angkor, Cambodia (2008) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

The difference is, in our writing (unlike all life situations), the edifices of the character’s old life may crumble or burn, but something lovely and fragile and – more – arises from the ashes. Like that fromages tree. Like the wisdom I see in those old eyes.

So get back to your destruction when you turn to your keyboard. I’m going to keep an eye on that chewed box in the corner to see what loveliness arises.

For the Writer – Travel Light

By Karen Abrahamson | January 31, 2011

I remember the time in China that I had sprained both my ankles: one sprained bracing myself on a horrific twelve hour train ride to Xi’an on the May 5th weekend, (For those of you who don’t know, the May 5th weekend is like July first and the entire Chinese population gets on trains, buses, planes and, for all I know, mules—and moves. ) and the second one sprained carrying a heavy pack on Xi’an’s uneven sidewalks. And then there was the time I was suffering from the early stages of pneumonia (unbeknownst to me) and had to carry a pack and camera equipment uphill from the train station to the Northern India, hill station town of Shimla. Both of these little episodes bring home one of the key lessons I have for travel.

Village woman- Sarahan, Spiti, India (2000) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Travel light. Which means you don’t take five suitcases on a cruise. Heck, you don’t take five suitcases anywhere! But travel light speaks to more than just baggage.

Travelling light means:

1. Travel alone or with only another person. Traveling in groups brings your culture with you and means you will be less likely to focus outside and away from your home culture. Some of the worst moments I’ve had while travelling have been sitting in the middle of the African veldt and having to listen to hard rock music courtesy of a group of campers who were so into their own world they couldn’t take the time to partake in the world they were in. At the same time, in most locations the fact that you are part of a group is likely to discourage local people from talking to you.

Traveling alone forces you to become a part of your surroundings to survive. You are forced to learn the language – or to stumble along without it. You are forced to seek local people for human companionship. If you settle in for a few days, this allows you and the people around you get used to each other. You know what I mean – it’s when you can actually start to make eye contact and people smile in recognition and it gives you the opportunity to really observe people and your surroundings.

2. Travel light also means keeping luggage to a minimum. Being keen on photography makes this a bit of a problem for me, because along with my personal effects, I also carry a fairly extensive camera bag. Praise for the digital age when I just have to carry memory cards and a digital storage device instead of fifty to a hundred rolls of film.

But traveling only with what you can comfortably carry yourself means that you can travel into unusual settings and more remote locations. It also means that you are not dependent upon traveling to resorts. So what do I travel with? Well my list is pretty basic:

• 3-4 pair of underwear

• 2-4 pairs of socks (depending on climate traveled to)

• 2 pair quick-drying trousers (one you wear, the other you pack)

• 2 t-shirts (one you wear, the other you pack)

• 1 long-sleeved shirt (and possibly 1 ‘nice’ shirt in case you want to splash out for an evening)

• 1 sweater or fleece

• 1 light wind and rain proof jacket

• First Aid kit

• Sewing kit

• Any medications/vitamins/toiletries etc. you think you might need (e.g. urinary tract infection mediation, dysentery medication, and don’t forget the moleskin for those pesky blisters on the feet.)

• Good quality walking sandals (Merrell, Teva) and/or hiking boots depending on the climate traveled to.

• Flashlight

• Pocket knife

• Book or two to read (or an e-reader)

• Note book or two with enough capacity to cover all the journaling you do during the trip – don’t underestimate – I’ve filled ten pages a day on a lot of trips. (or an e-notebook, but remember you often don’t have electricity) This is critical for writing about a place when I come back.

• Writing implements.

And of course camera equipment – always with more batteries and memory cards or film (if you still use it) than you think you’ll need.

Tibetan woman at festival, Lamusa, China (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

This is my packing list, and it may seem small to some of you. Actually it’s fairly extensive when I think of an artist friend of mine who took only a shoulder bag of personal supplies and a pocket sized sketching and water color paint kit. That lasted her three months. Believe me, it isn’t fun to lug around a lot of extra junk when you are hiking up a mountain. Take too much and you end up discarding the extras as you go.

Because carrying extra weight up hill both ways is never fun. Not with sprained ankles and not with pneumonia. Besides, taking too much with you means you have no room to bring the memories back home.

Sunshine and Chasing Your Tail, or Having Fun in the Muddled Middle

By Karen Abrahamson | January 29, 2011

Each day as I sit down to write, my Bengal boys remind me with their antics that there is more to life than the driven work-ethic I seem to have inherited from my Victorian ancestors. (And that’s interesting given I’m Swedish and Polish. Hmm.) As I poise my fingers over the keyboard the two of them decide that it’s time to play.

I have one yelling at me from the floor or sitting on top of the back of my chair rubbing and purring into my ear. The other one (Shiva) manages to squeeze himself between my belly and the desk and knead my chest as he purrs. Of course, if that doesn’t get enough of my attention, then there is stealing thumb tacks off my corkboard (so I chase them before they swallow the darn tacks), or just being cute knocking things off shelves. Or, if there is a shadow, chasing their tails.

Kids at Sarahan, Indo-Chinese Border (2000) Photo (C) Karen Abrahamson — Kids at Sarahan, Spiti, Indo-Chinese Border (2000) Photo (C) Karen Abrahamson

Fun all of it. And, if I take five minutes away from the dreaded manuscript, I have fun too, and go back to my manuscript refreshed and ready to play. Which brings me to my topic for this post, which is playing as you write.

I’ve mentioned previously how important it is to listen to your muse and not get caught up in the business of writing, but today I saw a video posted that reinforced something my mentors Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith have said again and again:

Go have fun.

The video presents how having fun encouraged the public to do something that previously they’d avoided doing – climbing the stairs. By making the stairwell into a musical keyboard, people’s behavior changed. So what does this mean for writers?

It means that when we hit one of those horrible twisted parts of a manuscript where we don’t want to sit down at our desk, we need to find the way to have fun again.

Some writers play tricks with themselves, timing themselves to see how many words they can get in the shortest time possible. Some of them reward themselves with chocolate. I prefer to think about the place where I first found the love of writing. I’ll turn on music and just write for fun, writing about the character, the situation, the emotion I want to evoke. I remember that writing is first and foremost for myself. If I’m not entertained, then no one else will be. And often this is enough to break me through.

Having fun means we regain our inner child, and stop telling ourselves we can’t say things this way or do things that way. I’ve been readying the manuscript of Judas Kiss . Reading it over, I was delighted to find I’d had so much fun writing it that the fun came through. I had fun characters, even though the situation I put them in was dire and that made me care about them.

So quit worrying as you write. Just write, have fun, and I’ll bet you’ll find that you get that manuscript moving again. And if you’ve had fun writing, maybe you’ll be ready for more — just like my Ben in the sunshine — still chasing his tail.

Choosing an Agent (Or why any agent may be the last thing you want)

By Karen Abrahamson | January 24, 2011

Okay, I’m headed off to Peru to climb the Inca Trail. The only problem is the Peruvian Government now only allows 500 people a day on the trail and ONLY if with a sanctioned guide. This is a problem. This means I must decide who is going to help me climb that mountain. Do I just go to a travel agent and have them book the trip? Do I just choose the first guide off the internet? Do I talk to one person and make a decision?

No. And no. And no. I want to plan my own trip, so first I have to decide what I want in an agent.

I’ve had this discussion many times with my parents who also like to travel. They like a travel agent who they can visit. They tell the agent generally what they want to do and the agent makes all the arrangements. Which means that the agent also makes all the decisions. Which has resulted in some pretty stupid oversights over the years – like my parents being stuck in veritable monsoons in Portugal unaware that their plane tickets gave them the privilege of escaping anywhere else in Europe at no cost. Or arriving for a second honeymoon in a beachfront hut in Tahiti, only to find that beach front and ocean view are two different things entirely. (They had a lovely view of the manure filled beach stables, however.)

So I tend to opt for taking a little more control in the travel situation.

For a trip of this nature I know there are plenty of agents to choose from. Go on-line and search Machu Picchu Tours and your search engine will indicate there’s 588,000 results. Not exactly how I want to spend my evenings. So I develop criteria. This is where you need to be self aware enough to know what you want. So my criteria are (in no particular order):

1. Experience delivering the service – how long have they been in business.

2. Client feedback

3. Local Peruvian connections

4. Size of group they usually take

5. Type of group they focus on

6. Knowledge of the area and culture

7. They speak English.

If you look at this list you are going to see a lot of similarity to considerations you should make when searching for a literary agent. If you want a literary agent (and this is an ‘if’ in this day and age. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about I direct you to a blog here).

So how long has a potential literary agent been in that line of work? Too long? Are they about to retire? Or are they young and hungry, but likely to drop out of the business when they find out how tough it is out there? You need to balance both these issues to find someone who might be appropriate to represent you. If you want an agent.

What are prior customers saying? Sure, you can depend on what the company posts, but look elsewhere as well. Editors and Predators, for writing, but also search for tour company recommendations.

For this trip I want a company that is locally based, instead of European or American. Yes, an American company may be well established, but does it give back to the local economy? Is it run environmentally and does it help the local people? A company with these sorts of links is also likely to meet my need for the guides to be culturally-based, because this is important to me. I want to hear what they think. I want to hear their stories and hear what they know about the environment I’m travelling in.

From a writer’s perspective considerations of this nature mean does the agent have New York connections? Sure the internet means anyone anywhere can make contact with New York editors, but if the agent is New York based, they are going to know the publishing culture – at least their part of it. (For more on this, see here, and read the comments as well)

Knowing who they usually serve as clients will help you know whether the tour group will fit you. I don’t want to travel the Inca trail with people who want to party all the way, but neither do I want to hike the trail with people who are going to complain it’s too hard. So I need to check the ages of people who travelled with a company. I need to check the photos on their websites.

With agents you need to know whether their model of agency works for you. Are they agents who provide editorial services, or are they agents who focus on sales. Your choice about what you prefer, but be clear about what it is you want and ask about it. (If you don’t understand, why, read that blog I mentioned.)

Size of group gets at whether I’ll be travelling with a group of 4-8 or a group of 17. Guess which size I’d rather travel with as an independent traveler? Smaller group means it might be a trifle harder, I might have to carry more, but it also means more opportunity to do what I want, instead of being dragged behind a larger group.

With an agent, it’s important to know how large their client list is and who their client list is. If they have a large list will they have time for you? If they have a NY Times best seller client, will they have time for you? Think about this. You shouldn’t need to have your hand held, but you should be able to get electronic correspondence from your agent in a timely fashion.

Lastly, I’ve listed English speaker. Why? Because I speak English and part of my reason for travel is to speak to people of another culture and learn. Yes, I should learn Spanish, but I won’t be fluent by the time I leave, so this is the next best option.

For an agent you need to be sure that you speak the same language. You need to be certain that you both have the same understanding of what you want from your agent—or not.

So I’m down to two possible companies to choose from. One is LlamaPath and the other is United Mice. Both fit my Peruvian criteria and both have been around for a few years. Both were professional and sent information to me quickly after I queried. Tonight I make the final decision and commit myself to my faithful guide.

But only because I have to have a guide.

Sustenance

By Karen Abrahamson | January 22, 2011

My two cats have very different eating habits. Ben (or Big Boy, as I call him) weighs fifteen pounds and will eat just about anything I put in front of him. Shiva (aka Little Man) weighs all of 11 pounds soaking wet and after a good meal. I worry about his weight because when you pick him up and he feels like he’s all bones and skin.

Kashgar morning, before market (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

For Shiva it has to be the right food, at the right temperature, at the right age out of the tin, and (I swear) out of the right part of tin, or he won’t eat it. These days it’s venison – yes, venison. Nothing but the best for Shiva, dear. He’s the one who, when given a bowl of kibble with a mixture of the kind he really likes and the kind he tolerates but needs to eat, will, of course, fish the favored kibble out of the bowl and then turn up his nose at the rest. Blasted cats.

Now, while this illustration is indicative of the types of personalities of these boys, it is also a wonderful metaphor for something important in writing, which is feeding ourselves. No, I’m not talking about how some writers can plough through a mountain of food, or how some writers who shall remain nameless will not eat anything green, or anything that has passed within ten miles of a vegetable. No, I am talking about feeding our souls.

The writer’s soul (aka the wily muse) is a creature that requires constant feeding of the kinds of things that make you want to write. For some it’s the anger at some injustice in the world. For some it’s the inspiration of music. For me, the inspiration is travel and other cultures.

I was just reminded by a friend that people might want to know more about my travels in other places, like western China or Northern India. Let me tell you about one such event. It involves food, or at least tea, and is the type of experience that feeds my writing.

Apothecary, Kashgar (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

When, in 1998, I visited Kashgar, the westernmost city of China and an ancient Silk Road caravanserai, the railway from eastern China had not yet been completed and so ancient Kashgar still remained relatively untouched, though the Chinese were moving in, in droves. At the time I befriended a Uigher gentleman (the local, Muslim, Turkic people) and my travelling companion and I spent time with him talking. One evening, after he had learned that I might be interested in a Uigher carpet, he invited my travelling companion and I back to his rooftop home.

When I say rooftop, I mean rooftop. He had a small mud shack at the side of the roof on the top of a flat-topped mud-daub house, and his ‘house’ had interior furnishings that were only bits of cardboard. The rooftop itself was pink adobe that apparently you could fall through during the infrequent rains the oasis town experienced. So there we were, the three of us sitting on his rooftop in the ancient town of Kashgar under a pink evening sky with the distant aspen golden on the hills leading up to the Karakoram pass of the Himalaya Mountains and the smell of bread baking and roasting goat’s heads wafting up from the street. So we sipped bitter tea and talked of the Uigher ‘situation’ (see my travel page on China) and I looked at his rugs. None were outstanding, but one charmed me and my Uigher friend told me how he was trying to earn enough money so that he could get married.

So I bought the rug. I handed over cold hard American cash and my address and the next morning I climbed on the bus to leave town with the foolish realization that I’d probably never see my cash or the rug again.

Imagine my surprise when six weeks later I arrived home and the rug had beaten me there.

The experience left me with a very soft spot for this Muslim man who proved so honest. It also fueled the feelings that led to the writing of Ashes and Light when I read about how the Chinese government used the 911 ‘Muslim crisis’ to round up and execute Uigher men when they rioted over the destructions of their homes.

So just as with Ben and Shiva there are different ways of feeding our souls and so, when the rest of life can suck us dry, we need to undertake those things that fill us up.

The memory of sitting on that rooftop, of my Uigher friend’s utter lack of anything the west would consider household belongings, but his total honesty in the face of being handed a fist-full of American dollars, touched me far more than music or other forms of inspiration ever will. It’s those cross cultural encounters that feed my soul and my muse.

And the fact that my friend may no longer be alive.

Uigher men, Kashgar, (1998) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Finding the Perfect Jacket

By Karen Abrahamson | January 17, 2011

Let me start by saying there’s no such thing. You might get close, but perfect is beyond anyone in my humble opinion.

Searching a Paris shop window for the perfect whatever. Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

I spent a good portion of my Christmas shopping time also looking for the jacket I was going to carry on my trip to Peru. Now I know my trip is three months away, but when you are as tall as I am, finding clothes to fit you is never easy and finding specialty clothes to fit me is even tougher. Shirts and jackets and fleeces that on most women would reach down to the hips, on me barely clear my belly. Trousers—well let’s just say they are never cut long enough.

So finding a jacket that would be very lightweight, but rainproof enough for the rainy season in Peru, warm enough for the mountains, but still breathable enough when I was climbing UP said mountains (probably uphill both ways) was no small task. I needed to start early. I needed to plan where I would go to look. I needed to plan it all and find the perfect jacket.

I didn’t find it.

Everything was either too short or too short in the arms, or it was a man’s jacket and fit like a box. I finally settled on a jacket that they had to order for me and I’m hoping it will do the trick. Not quite as long as I wanted, not quite the fit I wanted, and it has a hood you can’t hide. Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t, but the trick is to try it.

Why am I telling you this? Because finding the perfect jacket is a lot like trying to write the perfect book.

Over the past three and a bit months I’ve been writing another novel, this one a romantic suspense set in Cambodia, that I call Shadow Play. Writing it, and the last three books I’ve written, have been some of the most difficult creative exercises for me. Why? Because I wanted them to be perfect. Because I knew if they weren’t perfect, they wouldn’t sell. Talk about the wrong emphasis (selling).

The result was that I was so caught up on all the qualities I couldn’t seem to find in my own writing, that I couldn’t seem to see anything good, and if there’s one thing that can shut down the creative brain it’s the editor on your shoulder telling you it’s not good enough.

Luckily, I’m immensely stubborn and I have some great writer friends who helped talk me through these crises of faith, but the most important thing was to keep reminding myself it doesn’t have to be perfect. In this day and age of computers you can write the story, like I did, and discover the characters and their background through the writing process. Then you can go back and reshape the manuscript to fit the characters you actually wrote.

As I write this, I am chuckling because of something I tell my students in an investigative report writing course I teach. Of course I forgot to apply it to my novel writing.

Apparently there were researchers looking at people’s styles of writing and where writers placed the majority if their times in the planning, drafting, or redrafting process . The researchers surmised that people would spend most of their time planning and drafting with a small amount of time on redrafting.

What they found was that they were wrong.

There were actually two approaches to writing: one was the person who spent most of their time planning and writing. The other was the person who just wrote and found their report through the writing and redrafting process. These people rarely did planning. Both types of writers came out with a reasonable product at the end of the day, but both had deficits in their writing toolbox.

Why is this important? Because the best writers can use skills in both planning and redrafting.

When I initially read this information I laughed because I had virtually gotten through school with never writing a second draft, but it told me I had a serious deficit in my skill set. Writing novels has changed that.

I’ve spent time learning the skills of redrafting and now I no longer have to write the perfect novel first draft. With Shadow Play, the next few weeks will be spent going back and redrafting the front end of the book to be more compatible with the latter half. Maybe not perfect, but pretty darn good.

If only it were as easy to add four inches of fabric to the not-so-perfect jacket.

Going Places You Never Thought You Could

By Karen Abrahamson | January 15, 2011

The title sounds like it’s one of my travel blogs, but in this case it’s not. Although it could be. I certainly have gone places I didn’t think I could.

But anyway, the inspiration for this blog came this morning as I was stepping out of the shower. So there I am, all naked and dripping wet and there is big Ben, waiting for me—standing on top of the door. Nicely balanced, if I do say so myself. He was actually able to turn around and give me a pained look when I asked him what he thought he was doing. When he leapt halfway across the room to the floor, it was with a cat-shrug as if it was something he has done every day. And maybe he has. Cats make difficult, naughty things look easy.

On a few other occasions I’ve found him busy knocking shells I’ve gathered from around the world off an ornamental shelf I have hung above my towel rack. You know—one of those shelves of mock wood that you hang from the wall. He has to get to this shelf by balancing on my towel rack. Thank goodness I’ve got both rack and shelf screwed into the wall.

Trouble- Shiva and Ben at 6 months Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

But Ben’s absolute fearlessness, and his determination to get wherever it is he sets his mind to, reminds me of the permission we need to give ourselves as writers. When I was working on Ashes and Light, the romantic suspense set in Afghanistan, I had a dickens of a time getting started.

Each time I did, I stopped within the first 20 pages, because I just couldn’t get my head around where I was writing about. I felt if I didn’t know a place firsthand—hadn’t inhaled the spices, felt the grit on my skin, and almost broke an ankle on the uneven pavement—there was no way I could start. This begged the question: Could I only write about places I’d been? Could all those literary fiction pundits be correct when they said that I couldn’t write about a culture other than my own?

That’s a perspective that has slapped me upside the head a few times, and with which I heartily disagree, because if we can only write our own culture, then by extension, how can I write about anyone but me? (A fine idea for those narcissists among us, but….) So if I could reject the second hypothesis, then surely I could reject the first. The only thing getting in my way was my own ability to grasp the greatest truism of novel writing:

It’s Fiction!!

Yes, I had to do research. Yes, I had to recall my travels to parts of the world where Turkic people live, and to the mountains so like those around Badakshan in Northern Afghanistan. I had to find photo books and travel books and contact the Canadian military for information about the landscape. I befriended a local Afghani woman and picked her brain for hours about life as a woman in Afghanistan, attitudes towards woman, and folk stories and sayings.

After all that work and about 450 manuscript pages I still found myself hung up. There I was with my characters crossing a pass in the snow-bound Hindu Kush mountains and they and I were stuck. I couldn’t find anying describing the pass. I knew it was high. I knew it was rough. And Google Earth wasn’t exactly helping with accessing details of the militarily sensitive landscape.

That was when I had the epiphany.

It’s fiction.

It’s fiction and how many people are going to go to that tiny speck of earth to check whether my details are 100% true to life? Besides, in the Hindu Kush mountains, the landscape changes. There are earthquakes.

So knowing it was fiction, I wrote a fictional scene, in a fiction book, and you know, it worked.

I got down out of that imaginary landscape just as slick as Ben got off that door edge.

Biting the Bullet – or the ‘Oh *@#%’ moment

By Karen Abrahamson | January 10, 2011

The other day, in the midst of planning my trip to Peru I had that old familiar rush of anxiety that I’ve had when planning for every other trip I’ve ever taken. It’s what I call the ‘oh shit’ moment.

I first came across this feeling when I was in my late twenties. I’d foolishly decided to relive my teen-age years by climbing onto a set of water skis. There I was at the end of a whiplashing line skimming along the water so fast I thought I was flying. Then the ‘oh shit’ moment arrived and all I could think of was ‘what the heck am I doing???????’ and ‘this is going to hurt like heck if I go down’.

And I did. Hard.

But I walked away with most of my pride. I’d tried it at least.

So planning a trip, or a book for that matter, can be a lot like the anticipation I had waiting to go up on those skis. I want to do it. I need to do it. But darn it, it can be scary.

I knew I was going to be whipping at the end of that line, just like I know I’m going to be stepping off of a plane into some place I’ve never been before. Some place I don’t speak the language or know the culture. Some place I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to get through.

Now that’s deep water. For a lot of people, that’s when they stop.

But that, to me, is part of what travel is all about. I don’t live in the age of exploration and I don’t have the physical prowess to climb mountains—so I do this. Run off to experience other places and the ways that people live. So the ‘oh shit’ moment is something to push through to prove myself.

In that way, each time I start a new book I find there’s an ‘oh shit’ moment. That’s when you open the computer to that blank page and say “okay, hands, start typing”. Like with the travel, I don’t really know where I’m going, the culture, or the characters I’ll meet, or if I’m prepared for the geography. Sure, I have plans, but we all know about plans.

I used to plot out everything just like I’d plan a trip, but what I found was it took the spontaneity out of the whole experience. I’ve actually found that I get frustrated when I plan a trip in too much detail, or when someone plans it for me. Having an itinerary means I can’t stay that extra day or take the time to step off of the beaten path or listen to locals about the road less travelled. The same can be said of a manuscript. Sure, having an outline can give you direction, but does it allow your characters to have adventures you never even imagined?

Travelling alone without any itinerary other than I know I want to go to this list of places (and sometimes I have to choose between them) means that yes, there are frustrations and yes, things might not always go as planned, but you also get some enormous gifts. Like meeting the young woman at Burma’s Schwedagon Pagoda who told me her tragic tale of love gone wrong, or stopping at the side of the road in Cambodia to meet shadow-puppet-making orphans whose story was so sad I ended up crying, or having dinner on the roof of a Rajasthani house with a family I met on the streets of a small Moghul fortress town. I learned so much from those encounters. Things I never would have had if I’d stuck to an itinerary.

And the same thing happens with writing. Yes, there’s the panicked feeling of not knowing where a story is going, and the fear that comes when I think things like ‘Dear god, I have to be coming to a mid-point climax, but I’m not sure what it is’. But I live with the fear and then, suddenly, by magic the driving direction or the climax appears. And it’s usually better than I ever could have imagined.

So when I feel that ‘oh shit’ moment when planning a trip, or starting a manuscript, or even when I’m caught in the middle, I remind myself that the ‘oh shit’ moment is more like the feeling the race horse must get in the gate: anticipation at the race. And wonder at what might be around the first turn.

The whiplash at the end of the line, or the gift of feeling like you’re flying.

And even if you fall, you had fun while you were trying.

Controlling the Muse, and All Cats Have Aspergers

By Karen Abrahamson | January 8, 2011

Ben and Shiva 2008, Photo (C) Karen Abrahamson

My companions at home are two, two-year-old cats, Benares and Shiva. (People warned me about naming a cat after the god of destruction.) I like to think I’ve gotten through the wild and wooly kitten years and on to the years of peaceful coexistence. Except my cats are Bengals. For the first time in my life I didn’t go to a shelter or a friend’s place for a kitten and I didn’t adopt a mature cat. I’d just lost a cat and she had been marvelous. She was gregarious and liked to travel with me when I went on trips. I wanted that in my next cat and had read that Bengals were friendly, attention-seeking cats and I’d met one that was on a leash in a pet store with dogs all around him. The Bengal ignored the dogs and sat there imperiously. So I got my boys.

Since I brought them home my life has been in turmoil, or if not my life, at least my home. I won’t bore you with the destructive forces of kittens (well, maybe I will in a future post), but let me just say that attention-seeking is not the half of it. These boys will practically grab you by the throat if you’re not giving them enough attention. I’m talking the throw books off the shelves, swing pictures off the walls kind of attention seeking. I’m talking about shred the manuscript and steal my pens attention seeking.

It’s a lot like trying to control a muse. Now I’d never actually thought about having a muse until I thought I’d lost her/him/it. Suddenly every word came out harder and with a lot more doubt that it was the right word, in the right place, at the right time in my manuscript. It all started when I became REALLY serious about marketing my manuscripts. Everything was about producing a product that would SELL, the product the reader would love. And the words came out slower, and more doubts crept in, so I held on tighter and harder. And things got even slower and the doubts greeted me whenever I sat down at my computer.

So I tromped down on the doubts and the sense that something was wrong, and focused harder on finding those right words, in the right place, at the right time. I’m frighteningly stubborn, you see.

And it solved nothing. A lot like following the advice I got from a cat breeder that I needed to do something about my cats to make them behave—like take a rolled up newspaper to them when they were on the counters or pulling something off shelves.

I did what the breeder said and my big boy, Ben, reacted exactly as I didn’t expect: I’d swat him with the newspaper and he’d hunker down and purr at me. Hard to swat him again when he does that.

So it was suggested that I treat them as a big cat might a small one and so, when he was creating some form of havoc, I picked Ben up by the scruff of the neck, yelled, and locked him in a room. The results? Well aside from the room taking a beating from the temper tantrum he threw, nothing changed.

So I was stymied. I didn’t know what to do and believe me, my house was getting torn up, big time. And then one night I realized something. All this bad boy behavior was aimed at getting my attention and my reaction was to give negative reinforcement to the bad behavior by giving him attention. I realized that what I needed to do was just give them attention. Spend time with them. Love them.

And you know what? The destruction didn’t completely stop, but it slowed down immensely. (You see I can’t be at their beck and call ALL the time.)

So what I learned with my cats I applied to my writing. I had to get out of sales mode and focus on what made my muse happy—not right words, in the right place, in the right time, but the story I was telling. I met my muse again and spent time with him/her/it. I relaxed and stopped putting rules around my desk and suddenly I was writing again, focused on creation, not selling.

Which puts me in mind of a wonderful little book called All Cats Have Aspergers. It’s a little book, a picture book really, for parents of Aspergers children. (For those of you unfamiliar with Aspergers, this is a form of autism, but the children are higher functioning, just in a different way than most of us. The heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo probably had Aspergers. So did the protagonist of the Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time.) But one of the messages of the book is that Aspergers children (and cats) have their own way of doing things. They want attention when they want attention. They like to play their own games. And they don’t like to be held too tight.

A lot like muses.