Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

Chapter 1

Before we begin...

2005 was a year like any other year.

On the social front, this was the year that Kuwaiti women were granted the right to vote (yes, in 2005); the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, but with major players like the USA sitting it out; a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Kashmir killed nearly 80,000 people; the IRA officially laid down its arms and declared the ‘war’ it had pursued since 1969 to be officially over. In America, Rosa Parks died, Americans prepared for four more years of George Bush, and the world watched appalled as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina unfolded in Louisiana.

In science, 2005 was the year that surgeons in France carried out the first-ever entire human face transplant; the Huygens probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and at the same time the discovery of a tenth planet, way out beyond Pluto (which would soon enter a critically controversial identity crisis of its own), was finally announced.

In the cinemas, we watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the first Narnia movie, and the tragic conclusion to the ‘new’ Star Wars trilogy. Twilight, the vampire phenomenon, was published in this year, with an initial print run of 75,000 copies and a debut at #5 on the NYT Bestseller lists, but we were yet to find out what ‘Team Edward’ meant; James Doohan, Star Trek’s immortal Scotty, died.

On the Internet, 2005 saw the birthday of the now ubiquitous YouTube.

On the personal front, I had a few books of my own making their way out there in the world. And on May 10, 2005, at what appears to be 1:14 PM local time, I typed these words into my brand-new Live Journal account:

"Looks like I've joined the blogger age. There will be more here in

days to come, but I just wanted to start things off and dip a toe in the LiveJournal waters..."

Seven comments welcomed me into the blogger world. One of them, the last to be posted to that particular entry, was by a cybercitizen going by remus_shepherd, and it read, Welcome to the digital commons, Alma. Don't let it become a timewaster. :)

I had entered the Blogging Age.

I’d kept diaries and journals before, in longhand, sometimes in those dinky little diaries which you could ‘lock’ so that their deeply private contents would never be seen by prying eyes. But that never lasted, somehow. Possibly that was simply because I kept on approaching them as diaries, including beginning at least one notebook with Dear Diary – and there was something in me that rebelled at the twee aspects of that. Besides, I was early on a writer’s writer, and the idea of writing something that was intrinsically written for my own eyes only and that nobody else was even supposed to see was quickly considered and found wanting. Perhaps there is a place for such diaries. But that place was not with me.

I initially approached blogging with a little trepidation, and a strange fear that I would be a failure if I did not Blog. Every. Day. I had a responsibility, right? But I quickly came to realize that the only things I needed to set down in THIS journal – a journal which had a potential audience – were things that were of a bigger appeal than what I had had for breakfast that day. So I began to think about a wide range of things, and my Live Journal blog remained happy, healthy, and growing.

It quickly became only a base of operations from which I would branch out into other arenas. I joined two group blogs–storytellers-Unplugged and SFNovelists. I contributed a writing-related entry on the 30th of every month to SU; on the 5th of each month I wrote a somewhat lighter post to SFN – often on the craft of writing, sometimes just on ideas, or on a more general riff on the writing life.

I began to hone the craft of the essay, the micro-essay, the perfect blog post which said things in a pithy, insightful and focused manner. And in the meantime, back on LJ, I would still allow myself to drift lazily down the stream and out would come blog posts that were funny, or poignant, or reminiscent – about life and times and the people I have loved. I added other blogs – for instance, Red Room – and I also contributed essays elsewhere, on the Web and off, and wrote a number of original ones some of which are published for the first time in the collection which you are holding in your hands.

This collection includes over five years of thoughts and feelings, of laughter and tears, of teaching and of learning, of comedy and tragedy – life, the universe and everything; ships and shoes and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. I wrote about my travels, I wrote about my memories of my grandparents and the places where I wandered during my tumbleweed days on this earth, I wrote about the craft of writing and about the writing life that I was living, I wrote about rivers, and stars, and clouds, and cats, and words, and love, and growing up and growing older.

Some people might paraphrase a certain well known dictum and choose to say, I blog, therefore I am – and certainly it can be like that. But for me it’s always been more along the lines of, I am, therefore I blog.

That’s because blogging is, after all, simply writing, and I have always written, will always write, and if I don’t pour out thousands of words or fiction every day I can usually be counted on to have blogged. Something. Somewhere.

At times it’s pure frivolity – or even just a link to a video, or an article that someone else had written and I had discovered and wanted to share with the world. But more often than not I’ll sit down in front of my computer and something will come – a memory triggered by something unexpected, an essay about faith, an opinion about a current war, a dream of starlight. It’s ideas being shaped into words, it’s the purest form of what a writer does, and this collection of essays is a selection from all of my blogs, from the moment I first began, to the present. This is a book for dipping in, for snatching a moment to smile or to frown, for grabbing at a piece of inspiration if your own flow is stalled. Use it as you will – it’s a window, and for every reader who looks out through this window the view will be different.

And then, perhaps, go click on the blogs from which these essays came, and come visit me there. Because I haven’t stopped writing. The window is still open – it always will be.

I am, therefore I write – come with me on some of the side-roads of the writer’s journey, the slower and more coiled paths which take you through parts of a writer’s world which you might never glimpse if you stay on the straight-and-narrow highways of my published books of fiction. These essays are part of the foundation of a writer’s life and work.

I give you the ultimate writer’s joy and pleasure, the things I write for me, to work out my own ideas and small happinesses and aches, to preserve my own memories like pressed flowers between fragile leaves of tissue paper. I give you myself, and somewhere in there you might find bits of your own self that you might nod at and recognize as you come across them.

You and I may be very different from one another, dear reader, and we might be more alike than we ever knew. The answers to all that … lie on these pages.

Enjoy the ride.

Alma Alexander

Fall 2010

Red Room

Chapter 2

A long overdue letter

June 16, 2010

Dear Lynne Reid Banks,

I have always written. Always.

I've made up stories since I knew what making up stories meant. I've scribbled them down in countless notebooks over the years, in longhand, in pen or pencil, and directly into the hard drives of at least five computers so far. My passion for this, my vocation, has outlasted many a tool used in the creation of the things I do.

By the time you came to my school to talk to my class, I was fifteen years old. I was a stellar scholar in most spheres (well, let's not talk about math), particularly in language - and I was still writing. But things were fairly nebulous at this point when it came to that vast country known as the rest of my life and what I would do when I got there.

You were amongst the first, if not the very first, actual working writer whom I had ever laid eyes on. And you came to talk to us about your life. I still remember that day, when you came to speak - we were in the wood-paneled old library with serried ranks of books surrounding us (how appropriate was that). You stood in front of us, and you told it all.

You spoke about the highs, and the purest joy when something turns out so right often almost by accident - but still, your doing, your touch. You told us about the purest happiness of having a reader, particularly a young reader, come up to you and tell you in an eager rush how much your book has meant to them, about the reader who comes up and confides that one of your characters is her new best friend, about the reader who rails at you if you hurt a character he likes. About the people who follow you into your worlds, and make a home for themselves there. About the people who believe in what you did, in what you are doing, and about the way it gives you wings and lets you soar high above the world in joyous flight.

You also told us about the waiting, about the blood and sweat and tears that went into the making of a book, about the rivers of red ink that go into the editorial process, about the pain of change, about writer's block, about people who don't understand your intentions or your prose and who can be bitterly unkind, about the frustrations, and the failures, and the pain of it all when it goes wrong. But even when you spoke of these things, you spoke with the light of angels in your eyes, the light that told eloquently of your love for your work, for your craft, for your art - that told eloquently of the simple fact that you could not, would not, EVER do anything else with your life.

This was the moment when my fifteen-year-old self sat up and began to pay attention.

I had written all of my life. But this was the moment that I knew without any doubt whatsoever that what I wanted to be was a WRITER. Here was a signpost, clear and unequivocal, into that deep country of the rest of my life. This is what I wanted to do, this is who I wanted to be, this was the light I wanted to come into me, just like it had filled you.

THIS, I told myself, sitting up straight and clutching the arms of my chair, staring at you as though you were a living epiphany, which is precisely what you were. I WANT THIS. I WANT THIS LIFE.

I do school visits myself these days, and every time I face a class of bright-eyed youngsters, I think of you, and of what you have done for me. And I hope that one of those kids watching me talk about my own life and work is sitting up straight, and staring at me with a heart that is suddenly beating harder, and thinking that they have found their dream. I can only hope that the strength and the power of my own vision are as vivid and beautiful and inspiring as yours once was.

I've never written you a letter to tell you all this. One is long overdue.

Thank you. Thank you for my life.

With admiration, respect, and deepest gratitude,

Alma Alexander

Red Room

Chapter 3

Growing older

I used to be, as everyone is when they are young and pretty, reasonably photogenic. Really. I ‘took a good picture.’ I am not, nor ever was, breathtakingly beautiful, nor was I ever a photo-model, but I had a nice face, a good pair of eyes and pretty hair.

These days, I get a little bit of a shock when I look at photos someone has taken of me. I have this odd line that shows up in pictures, which starts at the corner of my eye and then curves out and down, cupping my cheekbone on the outside, and vanishing somewhere at my jawbone. My jawline itself is no longer as firm and smooth as it was - I am developing my Grandmother's distinctive little hamster pouches on either side of a chin which - if not exactly double - is certainly heading for one-and-a-half. There are crow's feet that crinkle my eyes when I smile. My hair is very white.

I am wearing my years. I'm not complaining, much, although I wouldn't mind having that photogenicity having stuck with me. It does, for some people -- they grow from being a beautiful child to being a magnificent adult. Others, like me, develop lines and weird skin sags and snaggly teeth which never saw braces and which now look somewhat strange in open grins. But that's all neither here nor there. I am wearing my years, and that's what matters, in the end - and I am wearing them with a quiet pride.

That set of lines over there - they signify a lot of laughter. I was loved, always. I treasure that.

That line over there was cut in by worry over a loved one - I always had one. I treasure that.

The smile on my mouth, oddly-angled teeth and all, knows how to climb into my eyes - at least the photos show that, and I treasure that. I can smile, and mean it, and it shows.

If you look into my eyes you might think I was staring somewhere else, somewhere other, somewhere far far away - and I am, because I am a storyteller and I can often see more than one world laid out in front of me. And I treasure that.

I lived, and I learned. I still live, and I learn new things every day. It might add another line to my face, somewhere, giving me another gentle shock the next time somebody takes my picture.

But - you know - I treasure that.

Red Room

Chapter 4

Learning to read

When I was just a little girl, my mother used to read to me.

This was not unusual - lots of little girls have their parents read to them when they're about to tuck them in for the night. Stories are so much a foundation on which our childhoods were built, which whole great cities of our adult lives subsequently sprang from. But I was different in one respect. I don't remember having picture books - EVER. I started with words, from the get go, and the book that my mother was reading to me - at age three, and I could not yet read myself - was Johanna Spyri's, Heidi.

I loved it. I loved the story, and even at three years old I found something in it, something richer, than ‘See Spot Run’. I loved it so much, in fact, that when Mum finished reading it to me I squirmed and said, Start it again.

And she said, No, I won't! You've already heard it once. We'll start on something else next time.

But I loved it. I did. And I was not ready to say goodbye.

So I taught myself to read.

It is my first real coherent childhood memory that I can swear to - me somewhere in between three and four years old, walking into the kitchen, clutching Heidi to my chest, and asking my mother if she wanted me to read to her. She, not entirely unexpectedly, heard what she thought she heard - me asking HER to read to ME, not the other way around - and there I was, standing there clutching the self-same book she had already heard me importune her about - and she began to tell me again that no, she wouldn't read to me, not that, not right then, there was dinner, and there would be a new book...

And then I opened the book and started to read from it.

She dropped the pot she was holding.

Granted, I had an advantage - my mother tongue is entirely and completely phonetic and I could figure out the written word from the sounds which I had heard when she had read the thing to me - but still, I had gone away and puzzled it all out, all by myself.

I haven't stopped reading since.

When I was growing up there was no such thing as a YA market. Kids read kids books and then they read adult books. But in my house, nothing on the shelves was forbidden to me. I read the collected works of