(Doing my thing at 2 p.m. EST, with my TV family on General Hospital,
the Quartermaines)
Last summer, I started doing this thing. Unconsciously at first, but as the weeks wore on, it became second nature, like breathing. During my one hour of TV time in the afternoon, my soap opera break for General Hospital, I started standing up instead of sitting. My friend Irene does this at the weekly meetings of our Berlin Writers' Group (BWG is the Cadillac of writers' groups; I'm always learning something and leaving there inspired). Irene stands because of comfort issues. I figured I sit enough throughout my days, so why not do something other than plunk my butt on the sofa when I take sixty in the living room. But then something else started developing, and I'm so happy it has. During that hour and other fun, mostly mindless breaks for TV (I'm talking about you, Guy's Grocery Games and the occasional Red Sox outing), what I've done is spend that time attending to the needs of my other family: my writing.
My flash fictions, short stories, novellas, novelettes, novels, teleplays, and screenplays are my babies. I never had the desire or instinct to want human children (feline, absolutely!), so my babies, my legacy, are my stories. And like any healthy familial relationship, it requires maintenance. So, during these little weekly sips of family time with my writing, I spread out my list of as-yet unwritten tales, make sure that new ideas find their way onto note cards, and review the stories that require my immediate and near-future attention.
(A novella that wants to be a novel, a novel presently in the works, and
some insanely gorgeous new designer file folders)
Right now, there are over a hundred and fifty babies in my card catalog of unwritten story ideas -- call me the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe of Writing (emphasis on 'old' following my recent 50th birthday bash, a subject for an upcoming blog story). Like any good parent, I don't discriminate between them. When an idea hits, I jot it down. Are some of my babies better, prettier, smarter than others? Probably, but I've been writing for a long time, and trying to write all of my ideas to completion since I was a teen, after I read an article in an old Writer's Digest about a Science Fiction legend who had abandoned two out of every three of his story ideas, and left the stalled drafts moldering around his office. To this day, all of my efforts are neatly filed away in designer folders (not manila; how bland and colorless!), even my stalled drafts. Some of the completed never leave home for publication. Many others have brought home contracts, awards, and have helped to put food on the table and pay the mortgage over the years. Still others, the ones requiring a little extra attention, howl at me in the night, telling me they require more of my time. I'm trying to be the best 'parent' possible for all my children, focusing on their needs, and feel fairly confident that I'm doing a fine job, with a long way yet to go.
I don't have a lot of great birthday memories from growing up -- those have all come within the last few years. But one that does stand out involves the best chocolate coconut cake with a cherry on top, enjoyed within that magical cottage near the Big Woods in Windham, New Hampshire. I might have been six or seven.
A year ago, I put my fingers to this keyboard and took what seemed a very bold step. For all my love of space opera and science fiction, I resisted a Web-based presence (read: kicking and screaming) until I realized it was an area of my career I could -- and must! -- improve upon. On August 11, 2011 I launched this little blog about my writing adventures, have only advertised it on Facebook and infrequently on a handful of publisher forums, and voila: one year later, it boasts nearly 15,000 hits (even more shocking, I joined FB a month later and have nearly a thousand FB Friends, many of them celebrities from my beloved soaps One Life to Live, General Hospital, and All My Children; numerous of the best designers on Project Runway, a Top Chef or two, various celeb writers like Jane Yolen, Ben Bova, and Peter Straub, actors from Star Trek: Enterprise, a series I pitched to for three years, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).
So to you, dear Bloggy, through which I have opened up my insular little writing world to the vast universe at large, I wish you chocolate coconut cake with a cherry on top for being the wondrous present I didn't think I wanted. These past fifty-eight posts have been my pleasure to create, and I couldn't imagine not having you there for the next five hundred. Happy birthday!
Today, it's all about what was given to me, not taken away (i.e., the Grinch that stole One Life to Live and All My Children). Santa brought me the above T-shirt, dark gray with white writing. It's the most expensive T-shirt I've ever owned, but it sure makes me happy to wear my 'Type Writer' tee. Also given by St. Nick (or his helper) -- fine-point red sharpies for editing, two exquisite Oleg Cassini crystal candlesticks, various designer folders (a dozen in a deep shade of plum with hounds tooth pattern, another dozen in deep primary colors...file folders are my big writerly office supply fetish), and a copy of Sol Stein's fantastic book, Stein on Writing.
The lovely authoress Lee-Ann Vincent gave me a wonderful Christmas Day interview at her blogsite, Writing Commando.
A reviewer at Asylum Windows gave my novella "The Mushrooms" in MalContents by the fine folk at Grand Mal Press a fantastic review. I quote:
Next up is The Mushrooms by Gregory L. Norris. When a crazed woman attacks a celebrity chef over claims of plagiarism, the TV host retreats to an isolated cottage in order to recuperate, only to discover it isn’t the safe haven she thought it was.
This is a very well written story and Norris does a fine job of creating an atmosphere of claustrophobic terror within the cottage. He also displays considerable skill in handling a bizarre concept that could have easily come off as b-grade in lesser hands.
Myself: Last night I gave myself a long-overdue gift. I grew up in a tiny enchanted cottage in Windham, New Hampshire, set before a vast, mysterious wood where, I believe, my imagination was given free reign to explore and grow. In that house on Christmas Eves, my mother routinely set out bowls of mixed nuts (in the shell), grapes and fruit, homemade brownies, and Lebanese meat pies, the triangular kind. With the leftover dough from the meat pies, she made Crispellies -- little fried dough balls with anchovy at the center. The tree would be lit, and our little house would resonate with Christmas music and a sense of wonder. It's been thirty-six years since one of those magical Christmas Eves...last night, I made Lebanese meat pies, Crispellies, homemade brownies, laid out a bowl of mixed nuts and a platter of grapes and fruit and, from the first bite until the last, it was like being a kid again in that house.
From the Muse: For all of 2011, my Muse has been a constant companion -- equal parts taskmaster, lover, brute, and soul mate. In the early part of the year, while battling a bout of creative exhaustion worsened by not one but two visits by a cold-plague that refused to be easily vanquished, the Muse routinely took me to lunch at a local Chinese buffet, where we would sit and write for hours, enjoying a delightful spread with some of the best hot and sour soup on the planet, first-class lo mein and appetizers, and a placid, cozy setting two blocks from my front door. In May, to commemorate my 900th completed work of fiction (short story, novella, novel, screen- or teleplay), the Muse whisked me back through time to my childhood, forward into the future to the wacky world of Lost in Space. My hundred-mark stories have always been fan fiction-based; I put fountain pen to paper and belted out a 12,000-word novella, "Lost and Found," that's been sitting in my card catalog of unwritten ideas since 1982, when a dream about the Robinson clan trapped on an icy, dark planet populated by gargoyle-like creatures found its way onto one of those story note cards. It was my pleasure -- and my audience's, apparently, given their reaction -- to read the effort aloud on Friday nights for the month and a half that followed.
Muse also romanced me (and kicked my butt) during the writing of, appropriately, The Fierce and Unforgiving Muse, my forthcoming monster-sized collection from Evil Jester Press. As of this entry, together we have completed seventy fiction projects, the short and the long. There's a good bet the number will rise somewhat in the next week. And then it's on to the adventures of 2012!
Today, the family is together in our lovely home, the Christmas tree lit, an exquisite feast planned for later this afternoon that includes prime rib, scallops, and mashed potatoes with spinach and garlic. We're also headed to the movies to see The Darkest Hour. Between now and then, Muse and I are having some quiet time with coffee and our annual Christmas Day date, when I pen a full story to completion. We first hung out together and accomplished this in 1980 with "Under the Streetlight," a paranormal tale whose ancient first draft still lurks in the big gray lateral-drawer filing cabinet in my Writing Room.
Happiest of Holidays, all -- and may your presents be as wonderful!
After forty-one years on the air, the once-formidable daytime drama, All My Children, will take a lamentable interlude. Friday, September 23, marks the end of an era, as Erika Kane, Adam Chandler, Tad Martin, et al, bid farewell to fictional Pine Valley, some perhaps forever. In March 2011, ABC's shortsighted and murderous head of daytime programming dropped an ax on AMC and sister soap, the always-engaging One Life to Live, both created by legendary scribe Agnes Nixon. On July 7, clearly listening to the outcries (and the crying from so many loyal viewers whose opinions and passion went otherwise unheard for a medium in jeopardy since a white Bronco sped down a Los Angeles freeway and cheap celeb-u-tard reality programming became the staple of too many TV hours), the fine folk at Prospect Park announced they would launch an entire new network -- online -- and continue both soaps starting in January 2012. While not all of the familiar faces from Pine Valley and Llanview, PA will make the transition, Prospect Park has promised to keep the quality and majority of casts intact. Anyone who's seen the prod. co's movie Unstoppable can take heart that they'll deliver!
I grew up with All My Children and One Life to Live, my mother, grandmothers, and aunts addicted to the exploits of then-mercurial Erika (played by the gorgeous Susan Lucci) and the characters in her exciting make-believe world. Phone lines lit daily to discuss the soap's outrageous and groundbreaking plots. I knew all about Phoebe Tyler's meddling (the town's blue-blooded busybody, portrayed brilliantly by Citizen Kane's Ruth Warrick), but until 1983, when I began to write for longer and longer spells following my escape from high school, the information and experiences came second-hand. In the autumn of '83, buoyed by the return of Genie Francis to General Hospital, I started watching the ABC soaps casually while my fountain pen dragged across the pages of a paranormal romance novel begun three months earlier. Within weeks, I was addicted -- not just to GH but also OLTL, AMC, and the three half-hour soaps preceding: Loving, Ryan's Hope, and The Edge of Night. I watched. I wrote.
In 1993, with some serious publication credits now on my resume, through bizarre circumstances I met with an actor hired for under-five lines on Loving. He invited me to join him in New York City at the ABC daytime studios where Loving was shot, snuggled up against the All My Children studios at 320 West 66th Street. Within seconds of walking to the studios, I crossed paths on the sidewalk with Walt Willey, long-suffering "Jackson Montgomery" on AMC and, though clearly star struck (this was the first time I'd left my tiny corner of New Hampshire, but also the start of my entrance to a much-larger world and the regular rubbing of elbows with celebrities), I mentioned that I was a writer. A published one. I showed Willey the latest issue of Deathrealm Magazine, which bore my byline. Willey poured through the contrib copies I'd brought along, at one point proclaiming: "I love that vampire sh*t!" I felt like a million bucks!
(Clockwise: Me with the late, beautiful Nancy Addison (Marissa Rampal); A pre-NCIS Michael Weatherly (Cooper Alden, Loving); Kelly Ripa (Hayley Vaughen); hunk Winsor Harmon (Del Henry), Debbi Morgan (Doctor Angela Hubbard), Cady McClain (Dixie Martin); me outside 320 West 66th Street)
Over the course of numerous return set visits to both Loving and All My Children, I met and interacted with the casts: at the drinks machine in the cafeteria that linked both shows' studios, I encountered a pre-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar, starring as Erika Kane's troubled daughter Kendall (the story described in the foreword of my book The Q Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer); when Ruth Warrick guest-starred on Loving the same day as one of my set visits and tripped over a cable in the pitch-dark cavern of the main studio, I caught her; Debbi Morgan, whose "Angie Hubbard" had been a fixture during my afternoon writing sessions for a decade-plus, was generous with her time, and delightful to meet, as was the late, great "Palmer Cortland", actor James Mitchell. I had a lovely conversation with a then fresh-faced Kelly Ripa in the AMC hair and makeup room. On another approach to 320 West 66th during several assignments writing for Soap Opera Update Magazine, I spied a long black limo pulling up to the curb, and a lovely La Lucci hopped out. Seeing the First Lady of Daytime was, I remember, like the arrival of Halley's Comet. Rare, elegant, unforgettable.
(Page of script from Jean LeClerc (Jeremy Hunter, both AMC and Loving), with his notes -- featuring the crossover of Ruth Warrick's Phoebe); autograph from the talented William Christian, aka Police Detective Derek Frye)
My favorite memory of that time came in the summer of 1994, when I met Ms. Nixon, that stellar scribe who had created and written AMC, OLTL, and Loving (plus it's short-lived spinoff, The City). In the hair and makeup room, Ms. Nixon and I talked writing, characters, creativity. I will never forget the surge of passion and energy I experienced. The photo of the two of us (with actor Christopher Lawford) sits in the catch-all on my desk, a daily reminder of where I've been and why I write, and a source of continued inspiration.
(Me, center, between Christopher Lawford and Agnes Nixon)
On Monday, September 26, ABC will unveil The Spew -- their cheaper to produce, flaccid food-and-blab replacement for forty-one years of great storytelling. I won't be watching, and am fairly sure that the record books will view the decision to cancel AMC as one of the greatest screw-ups in the history of television. I will, however, log on to Prospect Park's new online broadcast channel in January, where the romance and exciting goings-on in Pine Valley will again pick up for a new generation of viewers bored and disgusted with what now passes on the tube for entertainment. All My Children premiered in 1970 with bold and original storylines, and a fresh take on an established genre, so leaping from the idiot box to the Internet seems only fitting, the next great chapter in a tale that will get its happy-for-now ending in the not-too-distant future.
