2014 END OF YEAR SUMMARY

 Best Writing Conditions? .........NOT

For several months, my plans for various blogs went well. I had lots of fresh ideas, organized plans, motivation and discipline. These plans were completed on a fairly regular schedule. I am thankful for the period of time when these plans were met.

Then life intervened as it sometimes does. I had a series of failures of many kinds of computer equipment. My scanner went down, and my intention was to use my camera to put images into my blogs. This did not work as well as I thought it might. It seemed that trying each new idea to work around the barriers didn’t go as well as I hoped.

Meanwhile, I  was “blessed” with a bumper crop of apples in the back yard.

I tried to repair the scanner, and eventually got it to work. Then getting my images from one older computer image format onto a newer one failed to work. For a while I was moving images via CD discs, with translating between program versions. I kept losing images using a thumb drive. It seemed to lose and even release information into the biosphere. That eventually seemed to have been caused by a faulty hub, but maybe not.

The next thing that emerged were problems with my newest computer, and strange documents I had not created would appear on my desktop, and finally the computer would freeze up altogether, and would not restart or accept my password. I took that to be repaired, and it seems to be working better now, and the repair place found 9 incidents of attempts to get information off my computer. I don’t leave personal info for anyone to find, other than art, email and internet-related material. The problems caused were irritating but not devastating.

During this time, when I could not depend on my computer as much, I tried to work more by hand. But the frustration took its toll in spite of this. Personally I lost momentum and had much less energy for being creative. I lost touch with the former projects I had started. I am not as connected to the flow of information, and materially lost some documents I had saved. At this point I still do not have all my digital imaging capabilities up to speed. I will need to recover a lot of old art and reorganize the work to make it accessible again.

What I have learned? I guess I must not assume I am in control of everything. Another is to make records every day or so and to save them both on CD and on paper, in the right order. I have learned to be grateful when things do go right. Part of letting go of being in control is to enjoy each part of the creative process. Maybe the last thing is to plan projects that are more short term and spontaneous and that come in their own time rather than on a specific schedule.

I just hope that any followers who keep track of my work will understand and accept my more relaxed philosophy in regard to my blogging schedule, as well as toward my art making. 

© Ruth Zachary

STORY TAROT

Two of Swords,  a Tarot Image                                          © by Ruth Zachary

I sometimes take on a Fortune Teller Persona around Halloween, and because it is that time of year, I was reading about the Tarot cards, to be more familiar with card meanings.

When reading the cards, people often lay the cards out in various spreads or arrangements. The spread suggested for use with the Waite deck (1910) was named the Celtic Spread, that started with a Celtic cross, used for answering a specific question. A variation on this ten-card  spread was a layout suggested by Dorothy Riddle, a clinical psychologist from Arizona, which was arranged in a clockwise spiral from the center outward.

Different spreads often use different numbers of cards, which are interpreted according to the way the spreads are arranged. In most variations each position in the lay-out has a particular meaning, such as one position represents the person asking the question,  and other positions represent the past, present and future influences affecting the question. Some spreads use all of the cards, but other spreads use only a small number of cards.

Essentially the order of the cards, which vary according to the order of the shuffling of the deck and the associated meanings, including position in the spread, seem to tell a story. Different authors ascribe different interpretations to each of the cards, and art imagery of different tarot decks suggest multiple associations by readers of these decks. The story or interpretations told are likely to be highly individual and different in the final picture than any other person’s “reading.”

Using cards to reveal a plot of a story, would not be much different than a “reading,” for the purpose of fortune telling.

This suggested actually using tarot cards to work as a framework for storytelling. The number of cards used could be arbitrary. Major Arcana cards (22) could represent main character archetypes, and (16) court cards could represent minor characters. The story telling “spread” would determine plot elements, such as introduction of antagonists, or allies, miscellaneous characters, describing a character, the backstory of a character, the situation at the beginning, the order of events through time. The (40) Minor Arcana suite cards could represent plot elements, situational occurrences, facilitating the development of the story and its outcome.

To try it out, I started a spread  of  40 or so cards, arbitrarily to end when the World card appeared.

There were many ups and downs of fortune for the main character, a woman, and periods implying struggle, and a period of prosperity, which could make an interesting plot. Near the end, a number of cards with negative connotations appeared, such as the Tower card, the Devil card and the Death card. This would imply the story would be a tragedy, or perhaps a murder. The story could  be divided into sections, according to periods of good fortune and periods of struggle. The main character or Narrator could foreshadow the outcome in the beginning, and develop the story to its tragic end.

I invite other writers to try some form of this method of story plotting. I might consider other aspects of Tarot readings that would create a feasible fictional story plot. Such a story would certainly be more unique than some plotting formulas promoted for screen plays and short novels in how- to books. If I find one that works better than my first attempt, I might actually try to develop such a story, and share the method in this blog in the future.

This Writing and the Image above are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary. The Two of Swords illustration was Published in the author's book of Poetry, Spirit Walks Among Us - Xlibris, 2012.

CREATIVITY CAN'T BE CONTAINED IN ONE CUP

 Image -

My Muse Takes Me Out to a Sidewalk Cafe

Focused

This morning, as always,

she pours creamer,

instant coffee and then sugar

into the precise center of her cup,

forming a bullseye in the bottom,

before stirring it all into a morning brew.

This is her cauldron, her ritual

for keeping her life on target.

                          by Ruth Zachary

 

The process of creating art, for me, whether
expressed in visual forms or in words, is an intuitive process,
in which connections between different images
are noticed, and demand to be recorded.
The connections between diverse images seem to
convey meanings beyond those of single images
viewed alone. They become visual metaphors. Often
similar ideas spill over from one medium to
another, as here, in a photo montage to a poem.

This post originally was created in November of 2008 © by Ruth Zachary on a former blog with the same name, but canceled by Google Dec. 2013

THE BEST LAID PLANS

Nature's Bounty                                                 © by Ruth Zachary

Hi Blog Followers!

I am sorry I have not kept up with my usual schedule for blogging… about four times per month.

I have been “blessed” with a bumper crop of apples on my two back yard trees. Usually having an organic approach to harvesting my back “forty,” meant the apple worms got about 90% of the apples. This year, cool Weather not only went just right for only minor freezing, and also eliminated a lot of the worm problems. Rain also filled the branches with glorious fruits, that clung to their mothers tenaciously, until several branches broke off from the trees, and fell to the ground, branches, apples and all. Other branches weighted by fruit hung down to the ground, so that I could mow the grass only witha careful strategy.

I pruned the low hanging branches and salvaged the apples. First I rescued the apples from the fallen and drooping branches, sorting the good from the bad, until I had filled 23 recycled grocery bags with mostly pre-ripened apples.

Not wanting to waste good food, I looked for places to give all these delicious sweet apples, I called the local Food Bank, but they were deluged with apples from other sources who had experienced the same sort of blessings. Finally the Salvation Army, which maintains a kitchen picked up my first shipment of apples.

"First shipment", because the job is not yet complete. There are more apples, now nearly ripe, that I hope to distribute to Orgs that help the homeless and needy. Plus, there will be some for home use,and to give to friends and neighbors.

So I will post my blogs as I am able, and you will know why I have missed a few dates before and after this post.

Image and Writing © by Ruth Zachary

SHORTER IS BETTER

Draft Horses, Watercolor                          © by Ruth Zachary

Noontime Interlude

I don’t remember their names,
those big draft horses waiting
during one of their trips home and
standing by the pump house patiently,

still wearing their collars,hames,

and harnesses as they drank
from the tank. Behind the fence,
their large frames withdrew to
the shade, often resting one foot
at a time on the edge of a shoe,
tranquill in their tedium.

What is
indelibly etched in my mind is the
smell of the clear air, the peaceful
almost-silence just before a breeze
exceeded the resistance of rust,
causing the windmill to start up;
exacting the shriek of metal on metal,
lacking any subtlety, as the blades
gathered speed and faded to a
transluscent gray, against blue sky,
as if protesting indentured labor,
while the horses ignored the noise.

SHORT POEMS ARE BETTER.

In my opinion, poetry is usually better when kept short. Being wordy has always been my problem and it is still true with my creative writing. The challenge for me is to find a way to shorten it.

One way to handle a long poem that  is to break it into shorter poems, each complete in itself. These poems can be identified as a suite of poems under one title.

Think of the passage of time in the poem. Try to focus upon on one small soundbite of time, not an epic. The expressing that moment of  realization stimulated by emotion, is the challenge, and then hopefully will be conveyed to the reader.

Writing Exercise: One good way to begin a poem is to write out the idea in prose. Place the steps in the right sequence. This becomes the framework for the poem. Next, remove all extra words from this structure so it conveys the basic idea.

Read it aloud. Break it up into lines that sound natural.

From there, these building block words are supplemented with ones that offer more intuitive understanding. Usually the additional words are those that appeal to the senses, sounds, smells, images, tastes, the feel of something, like touching it. Write until you feel it is finished.

Much of the content of this post appeared at another time on an earlier blog by the name, R.Z. Writestuff

Writing and Images on this post are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

LIFE ON A MICHIGAN FARM

Country Boy, Vintage Photo Montage                                                        © by Ruth Zachary

In a Pig’s Eye - Forrest 1918

Heart pounding,

he knew the pig knew.

It screamed before

the knife struck its throat.

The pig knew he was the predator,

having already heard

six brothers bellow their last curse

in rage and terror.  

    

   But …this one looked him in the eye

as its blood soaked the ground.

He was the last sight

in the the dying pig's glare.

He saw his own silhouette

fade slowly in its gaze;

felt his own seventeen year old

innocence disappear, deaden.

Work incomplete,

he used the gun on the last two.

Avoided that last accusing look,

But it was too late to escape

the wound inscribed

in his own breast,

scar etched into memory.

That night he wrote,

"Butchered hogs today.

Stuck 7, shot 2."

Photomontage and Poem  Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.