Category: writing

Other Projects

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“So, what do you do?” God, that question. I never know how to answer that. I don’t have a neat little job description like insurance actuary, doctor, real estate agent. Those would explain in a few words, exactly what you’ve been up to for decades. When people ask me what I do my awkward response usually begins with, “Umm…” It probably leads them to the conclusion that my work involves things that I would rather not explain.

Like my friends who also trip over that question-my background reads like several different people tossed their odd jobs onto a community resume and the amalgamation was used for my new identity after fleeing a war torn nation.   I’ve been a writer, a tour guide, a gift shop owner, a metaphysical counselor complete with tarot card readings, past life regressions and hypnotherapy. Very early on, I was a directory assistance operator (Remember 411? Yep. That.) I was even an airport security person in Phoenix long before a post 9/11 world. I’ve worked as a photographer and assistant and also did design and marketing under contract for a University.

It’s a big old casserole of accepting opportunities because they sounded interesting to me. Because of my willingness to hang my ass out there and learn on the fly, I have been asked to do all sorts of interesting things including script and assist in the direction of a destination promotional film. It was a two week gig with a crew of mostly Spanish speaking editors and long nights in Miami drinking Cuban coffee and surprising the guys when they were tired enough to lapse into Spanish and I could still follow their commentary on the film cuts. I must have been too tired as well to remember that I only have the most rudimentary knowledge of anything but English.

This year, just for the hell of it, get out a notepad and write down all the odd jobs that you could still do in a pinch and all the hobby skills you have acquired in your lifetime. You may be shocked at just how much stuff you actually know how to do. Don’t leave out weird stuff like knowing how to drive a motorcycle. I taught my kid sister how to drive one in a short afternoon. Still drive a stick shift or know how if you had too? Me too. I keep telling people who dismiss this skill that someday when all the computers crash they are going to be staring at the high-tech giant paper holder in their driveway and I will be driving my manual shift car over to rescue them. That’s a skill and one that someone may ask you to teach them so brush up.

I take a lot of photographs. That started with a brownie camera as a kid and graduated through several 35mm models, my favorite being my lightweight and trusty Olympus OM-1. That thing went everywhere with me. Like a cave person, I have yet to purchase myself a decent digital camera. That is on the horizon. For now I have set a challenge to take interesting photos using only my cellphone camera. I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 and it has a pretty decent little system.

Yesterday I found the website YouPic and decided to upload only my cellphone photo portfolio. At first I uploaded a handful of pictures and as the day progressed I continued to toss more out there as I retrieved them from my sd card. When I opened the site this morning to upload a few more photos I saw that I’d gotten 5,229 views. That was shocking. How the hell are that many people enchanted by my cat? Who knows?

The next thing I did was peruse the “fans” I had acquired while I was sleeping and I started to go through some of their uploads. Granted, some are professional photographers with some serious equipment though many are amateurs who managed to capture life on Earth in spectacular pictures. I am blown away by the talent out there. They have skills! I have skills! You have skills! Remember those?

Next time you are tempted to sit your ass on a sofa and stare blankly at a TV screen, take a minute and make that skill list I mentioned. Then get up, off your ass, and do one of those things for at least an hour. Remember some of the thousand things you one day thought that you might be and pick up that guitar, or that cooking pot or paint brush or Bic pen and MAKE SOMETHING. And if you need some inspiration, say hi to my cats at: https://youpic.com/photographer/mimidifrancesca/mimi.difrancesca-from-michigan-united-states

UPDATE: Four days after opening the YouPic site there are now 13,422 views and 252 Followers. Dang. That Lucca is one sexy cat.

Lucca

My Creator of All Things

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After writing a full novel manuscript I find myself only pulling smaller word threads for a while; resting some muscle but keeping it taut with sprints through poetry and essay. It’s another poetry day and I’m feeling like offering up this one to the cyber pyre of anonymous eyes.

 

RS_Eagle_Nebula

 

 

Creator of All Things

 

My Creator of All Things

Is not the playground bully created by religion

Not the God with the small “g” who has a vocabulary

With words like

Hate

Vengeance

Disappointment

Exclusive

Ultimatum

And judgment

~

My Creator of All Things

Needs no words.

To name a thing is to capture it

And stop its evolution towards something more

~

My Creator of All Things

Set a dance in motion a trillion, trillion, trillion years ago

A trillion, trillion, trillion years from now

One second ago

Now

~

Time is a measuring stick designed for tiny human brains

To help us organize events into simple patterns we can understand

~

My Creator of All Things

Swirled the dust of everything into a golden spiral

And I see the signature everywhere

From the perfect turn of my DNA

To the galaxies spinning in dizzying proportions light years across the vastness beyond

~

My Creator of All Things

Swirled the dust of everything

And the dance began, begins, will begin

Throughout the Multiverse

Flung far

Growing

Changing

Evolving-

triggered by possibility

Every possibility

Every choice

Conscious or unconscious

Amongst the sentient and insentient

Everywhere

~

My Creator of All Things

Is the observer

Watching as each speck of dust finds its way around the spiral

And back again to be part of itself

Though it never left

~

My Creator of All Things

Does not require membership

Tradition

Worship

Teams

Armies

Compliance

Sacrifice

Or

Offerings

~

My Creator of All Things

Touches my heart

When I sit in a field of flowers

Looking closely at the perfect design of a

Clover blossom while the bee

moves without hesitation

Knowing its purpose and its path

~

My Creator of All Things rocks me gently

When I feel the earth moving in its orbit

~

I grow

Change

Evolve

And discover the possibilities

Of every choice I make

Consciously or unconsciously

As I dance around the spiral

On my way back to where I began

~

My Creator of All Things is not the school yard bully created by religion

~

My Creator of All Things is the Alpha, the Omega

and everything in between.

~

And I am a microscopic, macroscopic

Vital and relevant part of All Things

∞

Poetry Day: Never

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image

Never

…and if I had never
heard your name
would the sound it makes
still echo
in corridors of memory-
brushing the walls
like velvet and fire-
hammering the soft middle of my heart
where hope lives-
leaving it bruised
and aching
decades later?

Poetry Day: Hearts Come Home … Happy Thanksgiving!

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Hearts come home

On holidays

If only

On invisible wings

So they can whisper

Love

Into the ear

Of dear ones far away

World Angel by Mimi DiFrancesca

mdh 2014

 

 

DONE!

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So, I’ve finished my NaNoWriMo2014 challenge and I’ve written my 50,000 words in 20 days, instead of the 30 we had. That felt good. Wish I could say the same for my ass. Cramping… It’s hard to sit there for that long and squeeze your brain until a story comes out. Not complaining though. I love this story and as I wrote, it kept cracking open into new tributaries that are flowing towards a great ocean of words that need to be said about these delicious characters.

Can’t wait to get this edited and ready for release.

In the meantime, I am a ridiculously devoted music fan. I hear soundtracks behind everything in life. So, of course I heard music as I wrote this. So here’s a link, for you Spotify folks. You can hear what moved my fingers as I wrote about, friends, and loss, betrayal and love, sex and laughter, murder and a woman who is far more than she thought she was.

Use the link for music. Use the other one to read the first chapter of Touching the Bones: Book 1 of The Leelanau Chronicles.

Music for Touching the Bones

Chapter 1 Sneak Peek:  https://wordninjagirl.com/appetizer-menu-a-little-taste-of-touching-the-bones/

And if you want to see the faces and places that inspired or appear in the story, Here’s a link to the Pinterst Book page for Touching the Bones:      http://www.pinterest.com/mimigrace1/the-leelanau-chronicles/

 

NaNoWriMo 2014…DONE!

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DONE!

Well, at least I’m done with the National Novel Writing Month’s challenge of 50,000 words in 30 days.

I’ve written 50,350 in 20 days. So where’s my free ticket to Papeete? There’s a snowstorm out my Michigan window!

I’m having so much fun writing the characters for Touching the Bones that I am going to keep on writing; taking this to true novel length. I’ll be back when I’ve typed- The End.

Winner-2014-Twitter-Profile

I’m A Little Busy

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Participant-2014-Facebook-Profile

What do you do when you’re about to begin a huge kitchen renovation project?

You also start writing a new book. Of course you do.

For the past several years I have been watching from the bleachers as writers got down there on the floor and dug in for the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge: 50,000 words in 30 days. Start day- November 1. End day- November 30. That’s not really a novel at 50G’s. More like a novella. But there’s no rule that you can’t write over 50,000. So I am. Writing over the amount that is.

It’s day thirteen of NaNoWriMo 2014, and I am currently 24,005 words into a brand new, adult paranormal romance novel. It’s happening, Writing in the early morning hours and late afternoons. Touching the Bones, is coming into focus and I am really having fun writing these characters.

It’s happening, in spite of my Olympic levels of distraction; ordering materials, fixtures, furniture and all it takes to transform a 1933 kitchen into something less; Katherine Hepburn stars in Little Women and more, well, me. Right now.

There have been three families before us living in this old house, and we’ve been here twenty two years. We’ve lived with the original pale yellow and black accent tile that looks like a diner Billie Holiday might have frequented for three in the morning breakfast’s with the band members.

A few years ago, an elderly woman and her friend were walking past the house while I was outside. She stopped to tell me that she had lived in our house when she was a child. I invited her in and found myself watching her face as she moved, room to room, lost in memories held in these walls for eighty years. She noted the tile in the kitchen being the same and most of the other features typical in an old Midwestern house; laundry shoots from the second floor, milk door that opens to outside to the drive way, small alcove in the front hall for the telephone-back when folks had only one.

As she stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, her hand flew to her heart and she whispered, “This was my parent’s room.”  My full laundry basket on the floor suddenly seemed to defile the now, sacred space. As she left, she touched the Brass door knocker on the front door. I had painted the old door gold on both sides; for golden opportunities every where you look.She asked if I knew about the knocker. I didn’t. She said that back in the day, door knockers let people know if there was a specific crafts person or professional person living there-like a business shingle. This knocker meant a doctor lived here; her father. I had no idea and I’ve seen that thing every day for two decades.

doctor door knocker

It makes me feel a little bad as we take crowbars and hammers to the pale yellow and black tile that’s stood guard all this time in that old kitchen. But not bad enough to stop whacking it into dust and getting excited about the brand new space that I will [finally} have where I can create my food wonders.

So, as I am writing, writing, writing… I  am also jumping at the loud sound of the doctor door knocker. UPS, delivering my new bronze pendant light.

My cat is hiding a lot. My dog is getting her cardio work in running to the door to greet/interrogate delivery and construction people; and I am falling into a schedule of trying to write before it all begins and after it ends…so… I’m a little busy. It’s a really good busy though.

And like all things that need to be born into the world or transformed, there is disruption. There is chaos. There is pain (hammer…thumb). There is exhaustion. There are tears. And then…there is something worth every minute and every stupid crappy thing it took to get there.

I’m smiling through the plaster dust and typing like a mad woman with band aides on my fingers.

Happy Fall.

Happy everything new.

On wings of words I fly into your heart…

on wings of words I fly into your heart

P.S.: If you want to see a snip of the new novel, go to the home page and on the top you’ll see the appetizer menu- a taste of Touching the Bones. You can read chapter one there.

or click here………   https://wordninjagirl.com/appetizer-menu-a-little-taste-of-touching-the-bones/

 

The Story I Tell

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The story I tell

So, what is the story that you tell?

If, every single day, the story you tell starts with, “You never…” or ” You always…” then THAT is what you create and what shows up, in your face, every…single…day.

Want the world around you to show up differently? Tell a different story; a better story…about good things.

Magically, THAT is what will begin to show up, in your face, every…single…day.