FAQ: 'Twas the Night Before... (Silent Night? NOT!)

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original posting: Sat, 4 Dec 1993 18:35:01 JST

FAQ: 'Twas the Night Before... (Silent Night? NOT!)

It's beginning to look a lot like ...

Hi! Oh, you're here for the holiday play? Sit down, it's starting right now. The old saloon is packed, and here come the words...

'Twas the Night Before... (Silent Night? NOT!)

It was quiet on the net, not a piece of mail in sight, so you prowled through the lists, and you hung your name out there in a North Dakota lodge.

Then you closed your eyes and waited.

And it happened.

Creeping down the keyboard to your PC (Mac, Sun, or other terminal), peeking through the mailings, you couldn't believe your eyes! What a pile of mail had gathered in the twinkling of an eye!

If you squeeze your eyes shut, and blink away the dust, you may think you see a most absurd character at work there, stumbling over his fingers as he sets a pile under the tinsel, whistling half-cracked tunes as he slips messages into your socks and shorts, and laughing quite inanely as he ponders over the words.

Then he turns and looks right at you, and you surely have to say, "Just who are you and why are you handing out mail without pants?"

He grins and chuckles, rubs his belly and wrinkles his face, and then in complete disgrace, he says, "Why, tis plain as the nose on my face, which I very rarely see, that I'm Insane Clause, here with mail for every ghoul and ghoy, just to make writing your joy!"

Then he slaps you on the back, and introduces his elves, brings the reindeer inside for a snack, and sets your mind a whirl.

Then you blink again, press a key or two, and he's gone - but he'll be back!

It certainly wasn't what you might have thought you'd find, but it may be just the thing to keep your brain alive, this list with its Insane Clause, and elves, and trees, and piles of exercises stretching, subs gaily diving, crits scratching itches, fillers gurgling merriment, and all the other fine surprise packages tumbling down the chimney to your electronic home. Don't shut the door, don't go back to bed, just read and enjoy, and...

When you are ready, with or without pants, feeling or romance, give old Clause a rest and tell us of your plants. Sing us of your prose, punctuate us with rhyme, give us of your time. For the fact of the matter is that Insane Clause is in his workshop, fiddling with the plots and pants, trying to cover up the invisible with strings of words and cloth of holes, and he'd dearly appreciate some company.

Join in?

tink - scribe to Insanity!

Jingle bells, jingle bells... oh what words we mock and pun a writing here tonight! writing through the snore, with a pun or two to ignore, over the net we go, writing all the way!

Hey! Grab hold, 'cause its time for hot words roasting in an open plot, and other seasonal variations on a tale! Enjoy yourself, and don't sit under the misty toes of the muse with anybody else but us, anybody else but us... "Bah. Humbug." Not bad, but would you like to elaborate your story a bit, Mr. Scrooge? Go ahead - we're waiting to read you!

FAQ: A Living Tree

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original posting: Sat, 8 Jan 1994 18:35:03 JST

 FAQ: A Living Tree

[Please feel free to print and keep this, especially anyone new to the list. There is some helpful information. But before we get to the facts...]

Do not adjust your terminal...

you have entered...

THE WRITERS ZONE!

(please adjust your seatbelt now, the trip is about to begin!)

A Living Tree

As mists bubble and thicken, filling your email, if you are lucky and sick, you may be graced with glimpses, tantalizing, incomplete, and partially obscure, of the tree.

Watch for it.

It is an odd tree, multiple trunks thick, twisted, and vanishing into ancient pits of deception, and with branches, so many branches, all kinds and sorts, wrapped here, grafted there, working and jerking all the times and places anyone can dream of and some unimagined.

Those branches are so varied, so laden, so bent, that you know at one glimpse they've come from too many places and times to account. There are thin ones, whipping in non-existent breezes, with light green slivers of leaves shivering, quivering, and dripping. Others thickly poke out, slow growth of decades, almost decadent with age, bearing huge palmate fronds, or waving careful five-pointed outlines, or slowly baring ragged feathery glories of autumn.

Amongst the leaves, if you peek quite cautiously, and the wind teases just right, you may find strange fruits, huge berries, or sometimes popcorn! Go ahead and try that one, watch out for the thorns, but you might have, well it looks like, no I guess it isn't really the fruit of knowledge, just a tart little taste of unwilling extension of belief. Still, those fruits are varied, keep looking and you'll find.

Under the tree, where the passerby walks, is a mulch of drying leaves, thick, absorbent, and rich. For those who may dig in that mulch, they may find poetic whimsies, long tangled tales, and deeper, still deeper, a rich bed of past soils, mixed and enriched with the lighter leaves of today.

And up from that bed, through the roots and the branches, rises a potion quite heady and strong. That sap, driving up, into every branch, distills poisons and brews wines, sugars trunks, and slickens slides of such flowers as the tree sometimes shows.

Here, in one nook somewhat sheltered, out of the furies, yet quivering to their stormy blasts, with some sunshine, some rain, and even some winds, cluster some branches with intertwined twigs. Their leaves have yet to drop to the littered mould below, or to flutter free on the wind startling walkers and chased by snapping dogs. Yet they let each other see some of the patterned smoothness, or the prickly edges, or even the ragged roughness of leaves battered and torn, and in that sharing there is shelter and comfort sometimes from the worst of the dry sunshine or the snap of the lightning.

Where you are, reading this, one branch thrusts up strong. Lean back in the embrace of the tree, little bud, and shake a few leaves in the nook for us to see, to share the triumph of spring growth, the fullness of summer shades, the falling bittersweet red-gold frosts, or even the delicate chill traceries of winter.

And enjoy the fruits, whether true taste of knowledge, sweet grapes of disbelief, or unknown wobbling globe of imaginary bursting joy.

For the tree of the writers always has room for another bud.

This one's on me!

Don't let your leaves disappear in the dark! Stick some out in the sunshine and let us admire the dance of sunshine and shade on your writhing veins and tender green webs, the living words of the tree.

Who knows, we might get a wood nymph to help you...

EXERCISE: Rub Two Quotations Together

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. . . and call me when you have a fire?

"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." William Dement

"Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey." Cynthia Ozick

Dreaming lets us be quietly insane at night, while writing allows us that same freedom in our daily life. Daydreams, imagination, role playing -- being more than we can be any other way. What's writing to you?

Now add in that notion of awesome unfamiliarity. At the end of a journey, when we look around, even the well-worn bits and pieces of our home often seem brand-new and surprising. And maybe sometimes in the morning, after we've been insane all night?

Go ahead. How does that license for freedom and the awesome unfamiliarity at journey's end go together?

Write?