X-Files

I'm not really big on journaling. I know that many people swear by it, but I find it time consuming and I tend to devolve into a list of what I did that day. I can do that by just keeping my to-do lists from each day. When I was a teen they tended to be focused on the latest boy I had a crush on. While that served a purpose, it wasn't all that helpful to me as a writer.

However, there are three things that I do write down and keep a log of.

One of these is a diary of the odd things that happen in life -- big and little -- that don't fit in to the normal pattern of things. I can go weeks, months, or even years between such things. And I do mean odd. If you have been reading my blog you can probably tell what some of them are. For example, I will write about the time I saw a UFO, found a python in my bathtub, locked my keys in the car while they were still in the pocket of the shirt I was wearing, or was charged by a buck while raking leaves in the my yard. I will also keep track of the cat throwing a dead mouse in my face while I was still asleep in bed and of the past life regression therapy I went through. These things are an important encyclopedia of life.

I don't need to keep track of what I had for breakfast or what I felt about it at the time. I do want to capture those offbeat moments. They can even be the more sedate that getting stung by a wasp on the pussy while in my own bathroom. They can be about the day two friends and I went into the mountains and set my mother's ashes free to return to the Earth Mother.

My journaling is for the extraordinary moments of life. The real keepers. These are the moments I will return to when writing in the future. Those other moments happen daily and I can reach out to them at any moment.

Another thing that I will journal about are dreams. I am not into taking them all down, but the ones that stand out are important. I don't need to make a note of the dream where someone was watering my
piñata, but I will keep track of the one about a girl who lost her memory and was only healed by the appearance of the family cat. That is the stuff of literature. I will also keep track of ones that give me insight into myself and my relationship with myself and others. These can teach me not only about myself, but how to write a meaningful dream sequence.

A recent example would be the dream I had in which I had taken up cohabiting with Patrick Jane (The Mentalist, played by Simon Baker). My father (who passed away 14 years ago) was in our apartment having a fit at me for living with him and not being married. I defended myself to him (which was difficult in real life) and my right to be loved. He finally stormed off and I turned back to Patrick, complete with all of my own insecurities about whether it was really possible for anyone to love me. There was another woman somewhere in the picture so I finally asked him if he really loved me. He looked very deeply into my eyes for a long moment before responding "Yes, I do." I was thrilled.

I awoke from this dream with some warm feelings about Simon Baker/Patrick Jane that lasted temporarily. What was more important was that some part of myself that was represented by him had given myself a level of approval that I was desperately needing -- so much so that I shut down the negative voice (Dad). 

The third thing that I will "journal" is the story ideas that come to me. Sometimes they come fast and furious and other times not at all. This is a way to keep a well of ideas to refer to when I need a new idea. I don't need to worry about not having an idea because I have a large record of them. This is especially important with the approach of each November and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

NaNoWriMo is the annual challenge to writers for them to write a book (50,000 words) in a single month, Many of the writers who do this approach the month of November with trepidation for not having any ideas. This will NEVER be a problem for me. To all of those baffled Nanos out there -- yes, I am willing to share.

Some of these ideas can be kind of strange, but I catalog them all. I will undoubtedly never use them all, but they are there for me should I need them. I do a similar thing with article ideas, but that is recorded by bookmarks for websites.

You will never find me straight journaling about doing the laundry, but you might find me creating a humorous essay about it. That is a different blog post.

Weirdness Rules

People often call me weird. I take that as a compliment and wear it as a badge of honor. It means that I am unique, one of a kind, unusual, entertaining, and my own person. I walk to the beat of a different drum. I dance to music no one else can hear. I am me -- the only person no one else can be.

Most, if not all, my writer friends lay claim to the label weird and also wear it with pride. Some are weirder than others. When you are a writer you spend a lot of time living in your head (and heart) and that is bound to have an effect.

When we get together on Facebook we can get pretty strange. We have one thread with almost 32K comments that is about just about everything. The weirder the better. It started out normally enough, but somehow it took on a life of its own and has been going for almost two years. Some people will just drop by and type in a random word. Others drop in just to say hi. Some complain about their day jobs. It is where many of us compare our weirdness or declare our love of weirdness.

It doesn't all have to be weird. We also accept the labels of geek, nerd, crazy, freak, nut job, dork -- well, you get the point. So why do we accept these?

Well, first of all, few of us were among the so-called "normal" kids in school. We suffered the labels when we were young. We thought that they excluded us. It took us years to realize that those words really exalted us. It meant that we weren't average, boring, one-size-fits-all people. It meant that we had a lot more to offer the world than just joining the ranks of 9 to 5ers.

We aren't special. We aren't better. We are just . . . different. And we have learned to appreciate that about ourselves. It took some serious adaptation to get here though. Perhaps that is why writers have a reputation for being drinkers. I think now we are more likely to have other forms of medication. Like Abilify, Red Vines, and coffee. In my case I often go for the three P's -- Prozac, Pepsi, and popcorn. I would love to add pizza to the list, but then I would also need to add Prilosec.

But I digress. We watch too much television. We read too many books (is that really even possible?). We get into a Facebook thread and get caught up in playing silly word games with each other. Some of them are as simple as word association. Others are like the one I recently got caught up in. We started by discussing the word moist and how much people liked or disliked using it. (Now there is a hot button issue for you! ) The discussion eventually devolved into trading movie and television titles with the word "moist" replacing a word in said title.

As strange as it seems (and believe me it did get strange), we were actually working. Such games with each other works the mind, breaks down barriers, and leads to greater creativity. It is also a great ice-breaker and a way for us to get to know each other.

From there we get into the geek version of trading recipes -- we recommend books, websites, and writing tools to one another. This whole thing is unisex. It matters not the gender. We are writers and all equal under the pen.

As the character of Jenny said in the first season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch said, "But I like weird. I love weird. I bask in the glow of weird!"

Paranoid Prepping

Back in the 50s and 60s people were so freaked out about nuclear proliferation that some were building emergency bunkers in their backyards. They wanted to be prepared just in case the Cold War suddenly heated p. Most of them were more like storm shelters in the Midwest rather than something that would be able to withstand nuclear fallout and "the end of the world." But people felt safer when they had one.

These days bunkers are back in style and they are getting pretty extreme -- not to mention being extremely expensive. However, now people are putting in filters to collect the radioactive fallout, communication systems, arsenals, food stocks, and living amenities knowing that it isn't just about surviving the initial event, but the aftermath as well. They also build with the knowledge that there are any of a number of events that could bring civilization to the brink of anarchy and survival.

I have a friend who is paranoid and is working on her own prepping plan. Not having the money or the land to build a bunker she is doing more of her own thing. She has had no survival training and is in her 70s with some serious health issues, so it would be interesting to see if her plans would ever work. Her basic plan at this point is to have a bug-out bag for herself and one for her cat. A few weeks ago she informed me that she was making me a bug-out bag as well. Somehow I managed not to roll my eyes, and just asked her not to.

I am definitely interested in prepping, but for me it is fodder for the writing grist mill. I like to ponder the possibilities of what it would take to survive and the issues that might arise. When I was 11 I started writing a book I titled "The Day the World Started Over." It was crap, of course, because I had no real notion of what it would take to survive with only a handful of people left on the planet. Nor did I have much of a clue about the things that might lead to such an apocalypse. The subject has always interested me, but I don't walk around with enough paranoia to think that this is something that is likely to happen -- not on that scale anyway. 

It is not that I don't want to have a bag for emergencies, it is just that I would rather create my own. This is because I know her. She gets ideas that she thinks are really good and they may work for her, but they don't necessarily work for other people. If you don't like the idea she gets terribly offended on top of it all.

Another part of the conflict here is that I have had survival training and so I am aware of things that she isn't. So I know what I want in an emergency bag -- like the one I've had in the car for years. Ever since the survival training I have tried to keep a few basics in the car just in case the car breaks down in a tough place.

Since her packing is based on watching television and mine on training I don't know what I will think of what she comes up with. I know that she has been all up in the air over packing paperwork that she thinks she will need.  I have no plans for that beyond what I usually carry in my purse.

The actual emergency planning I have done is having some extra canned goods and water on hand, as well as some candles. Most of what is most likely to happen will not take me out of my home. Same for her, but her head is filled with all of the things that could go wrong.

To me there is one most important thing you need to have to survive and that you have with you all the time anyway -- right between your ears. If you aren't thinking straight you can have all of the tools, food, and arms in the world and still end up as a spot on what's left of the pavement.

So if the worst happens she may be more prepared, but I'm okay with that. I'm more interested in being prepared for today.

Never Forget -- Memories of the Holocaust

Last night I was watching yet another documentary of survivors remembering their experiences during the Holocaust. I know that there are people who are tired of the subject and others who don't believe that it ever happened.

Trust me, it happened. How do I know? Because I am one of the other kind of Holocaust "survivor."

Say WHAT?

You read me. I am a Holocaust survivor. Okay, technically I died in the mud of a prison camp in Poland. I was then reincarnated into this life time. I am not alone. There are many of us out here around the world. Okay, to understand my story, it helps if your believe in reincarnation. Even if you don't you are likely to be entertained.

During World War II my mother was in her formative teen years. As she eventually learned of what had happened to the Jews she wished with all her heart that she could help at least one of these people. She got her wish years later, but hardly as she would ever have expected.

She started by marrying my father, a man who, though all Scandinavian, looked VERY Jewish. During WWII he had been in the army and faced anti-Jewish bigotry himself in the form of another soldier who hated him with a vengeance and went out of his way to be mean to my father. Then one day the guy found out that Dad's last name was Olson. He then apologized to my dad adding "I thought you were Jewish." Because of that Dad could hardly accept any apology.

It was to these two people I was born. Perhaps my soul had chosen these people in part because of these issues. I could be a baffling little kid, too. When I was in pre-school I would demand that my mother explain to me why we weren't Jewish. I would also seek out Jewish children to befriend in the early years of grade school. That was not an easy task back then since there were almost no Jews in Boulder, Colorado at the time. They had to drive to Denver to go to Temple. I still managed somehow.

As I got older I would have dreams I could not explain. In them I would often be wearing a green woolen coat with a yellow star on the breast. I could dream in fluent German, though when I studied it in school I was crap at it while awake. When I finally learned of the Holocaust I was shocked by the accuracy of my dreams.

As an adult I entered psychotherapy to deal with many of the issues that were turning my life upside down. After awhile I ended up asking my therapist if she could recommend a past-life regression therapist after having read about how successful it was and believing that I had been in the Holocaust. It turned out that she was able to do this kind of therapy. We began the next week.

The memories she brought up in me. I now remember at least the basics of more than a dozen lives from the past. Those lives did include an astonishing and, at times, horrifying life under Nazi rule. When we started this therapy I had been suffering from bulimia. As soon as we started that problem vanished, never to reappear.

I won't go into all of the details of the memories, that would take ages, and kind of defeat the purpose of the novel I am writing based on these regressions.

During these years I took on obsessively reading biographies and autobiographies of survivors. I was amazed at what strong and resilient people these folks were, despite still carrying obvious emotional and sometimes physical scars from their experiences. My therapist's office was just a couple of doors down from a large bookstore and if there was time before my appointment I would stop and shop.

One evening I was looking over the books for a new autobiography and there wasn't much of a selection. I finally settled on a slim volume and I started to walk away from the shelves, not terribly happy with my choice. All of a sudden, at about three feet away, I stopped, turned around, walked back and stuck out my hand. Beneath it I found a book I had somehow overlooked. It was Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust by Yonasson Gershom.

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was my subject. I dropped the other book back on the shelf and grabbed this one. It was like I was having some sort of a religious experience.

In that book I discovered that not only was I not alone, I was also right in line with the statistical norm of those who reported these memories and certain behaviors. Rabbi Gershom had noted that most of the people telling him about their experiences were baby boomers and had baffled their parents with unusual questions and/or behavior as children. That was me.

The people who had survived the Holocaust alive are dwindling as the years go by. Many of them have left their stories for us, but we still run the risk of forgetting one of the most regrettable and horrifying events in history. The duty of remembering is falling to those who remember in a different way.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana

Comedy -- Writing Funny

Historically the jester was the only one in the court who could make fun of the king. He was able to do this by hiding it within the jest. By making it funny and couching it in just the right phrase it becomes fairly painless. That doesn't mean that the jester never missed the mark and got sent to the dungeon, but for the most part he got away with murder.

These days comedians like Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart point out the idiocies and absurdities of the moneyed and powerful elite. These guys are at the top of their game because they are so capable of hitting their target accurately. They strip bare the absurdities and juxtapositions down to the bare truth that we really knew was there all along. We laugh because we are surprised that they will say it. We laugh because we understand. We laugh because they are right.

They are funny instead of venomous because they back it up with love. Love? Yes. They aren't spewing angrily about any of these issues. They love the very absurdity they witness all around them. On some level they love the people that perpetrate the absurdities. It is about teasing with the truth.

 The first time I wrote something funny I was not at all aware that I was being funny. I was writing my annual Christmas letter and was relating the story of how I had been charged by a buck while raking leaves that fall. I found out that I had been funny when my cousin later told me that she had nearly died laughing over my tale.

So how do you make your writing funny? I had to go back and look at the story I had told.

First of all you need to go beneath the surface. It isn't enough to say I was terrified. I had to explain how terrified I was in pretty specific terms -- and very human terms. I need to be showing you the part of me that you can identify with. So when I realize that this enormous buck is running across the street and lowering his head at me there were all sorts of things running through my head in the space of a few seconds. I was measuring the distance from me to the front door. Nope. I would be a bunch of little Laurie kabobs on his antlers before I could reach shelter. Could I defend myself? The wooden rake in my hand seemed so tiny compared to him and those antlers that I may as well trying to defend myself with a toothpick.

Second, it is HOW you say things. I didn't just say that I imagined being gored by the antlers. I added to the imagery with an off-beat comment about Laurie kabobs. It made light of a serious situation without dismissing how serious it was. Another part of the story was that he had been tracking a doe that had come running through the neighborhood just seconds before he had shown up. She had dashed between two homes before he came along so she was nowhere in sight. All he saw was me instead and I was not his type and that really ticked him off. Describing the eight point buck as a horny beast allowed me to employ a double entendre.

I was also able to be a bit self-effacing by adding that this was the sort of reaction I got from males -- now apparently of any species.

Third part is how you write. Short, zippy sentences keep the story moving quickly. Take little time describing the scene. How you tell the story should take care of that. I was raking leaves in my yard. That should conjure most of the setting -- grass, autumn, dry leaves crunching, a cool day. It is hard to be funny when you get too verbose. On the other hand, if I had been writing this into a romance I would have gone into the details to set a mood whereupon Ryan Reynolds (or George Clooney for my age group) could sweep in and rescue me from certain impalement. In my version, if either man had shown up, he would have caught his designer sweater in the branches of the wild plum tree and I would accidentally stab him in the eye with the rake.

Ultimately Bucky caught the scent of his lady love again and the valiant ungulate swain took off on her trail again. My knees gave way and I sat down where I was and tried to get my lungs working again. Now that I was safe again I was able to wish them well on their honeymoon.

My second comedy outing was trying to write a funny poem for a contest. I was wracking my brain for what was funny. The answer came to me in the bathroom (a.k.a., the thinking room) when I looked at myself in the mirror. Ah, yes, the bad hair day. So off I went describing how difficult my hair could be, including the fact that it seems to be deserting me. I was stumped for an ending though. I finally remembered a former coworker who used to threaten to shave her head every time she got stressed. Aha! My ending appeared out of the mists of time. I ended up winning third place for my first foray into humorous poetry:

Bad Hair Day (Attitude to Match)

(c) 1996 by Laurie Kay Olson

I have that hair, you know the kind,

It won't settle down and make up its mind.

It flies, it lumps, it bumps, it swirls,

It won't like flat, and it won't go in curls.

I'm getting to work late again this week,

But I hate to go out with hair that's not sleek.

I brush it, I spray it, I comb it and then -

Just one little sneeze and it's hopeless again.

I know that I'm lucky to have hair at all,

I don't have to shop for it down at the mall.

Be that as it may, I just want to yell!

Sometimes I think I'm in follicle hell!

I'm getting so mad, I'm in a huge snit -

I'll just shave my head and be done with it!

 This success led me to apply to write a humor column for the Colorado Daily Newspaper. For samples of my column, click here. The column on sports even garnered me my first piece of fan mail.

I find writing humor and comedy extremely rewarding. I love making people laugh. I love laughing at myself.

Humor is the best medicine and the doctor is IN(sane).

S -- Sisters and the Surprise Stephanie

I started out as a very lonely only child, especially after my parents split up when I was seven. For both parents I ended up being a piece of luggage that they just dragged behind them. I found my mother's life more interesting since she was into art, theater, and music. With my dad I usually found myself wandering after him at the golf course or being baffled by sports on television.

One summer when I was twelve my mother was the make-up director for a play at Nomads, the local amateur theater, The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch. I was used to hanging out around the theater and had spent many hours doing my homework sitting under racks of costumes or at the make-up counters. I don't remember much about this particular play except for one thing. As I was watching the play in dress-rehearsal sitting in the seats I was taken with the young woman playing the part of the preacher's wife.

Every time someone started calling Sneaky Fitch a son of a . . . the preacher's wife would interrupt with "prairie dog" to keep the dialog clean. This was the early 70s and even the toilet flush sound had not even made it onto television quite yet. She stuck in my mind so clearly. I liked her so much.

I didn't see her again until the following April when I walked into the church with my dad as he married my stepmother and the young woman was suddenly my sister.

Betty is five years older than me and every bit of worth that liking that I sensed in her from that first moment she came anonymously to my attention. Decades later I still see her as a wonderful woman and a marvelous mother. I am proud that she is my sister.

The odd thing is that through all of these years I kept having a strange belief that I had a real sister out in the world somewhere. I puzzled over this one for a long, long time. I was sure that my parents wouldn't have given up any other child that they would have had. They were both fairly straight-laced people, even though Mum was a bit of a free spirit. I just couldn't figure out where this feeling was coming from.

Then one day, shortly after my 47th birthday, I had stopped by my mother's house for some reason I no longer remember. In a flat voice she started telling me a story from a time in her early 20s. I had known about this time in her life, but not this particular sequence of events in which she had been out with friends and one of the young men had offered to drive her home. She reluctantly agreed even though she didn't know him very well.

Ultimately he raped her and she ended up pregnant. She interrupted her college career to go live in a home for unwed mothers in St. Paul and that spring she gave birth to a baby girl at Minneapolis  General Hospital -- my real sister. Though she knew that she was giving the baby up for adoption, Mum named her Stephanie.

I was floored. My feelings that I had a sister out there had been real, not my imagination. Not only that, Mum had not led the placid, uneventful, Midwest life that I had always believed. She was suddenly a real person, not some mythical creature. Where my life had always seemed to suck so much, hers had always seemed so textbook. Now I knew the truth. She was just as human.

More importantly, I have a sister! No longer an only child. Not only that I was not crazy for having searched faces around me looking for a sister I supposedly did not have.

Mum swore me to secrecy, still embarrassed by the incident. She also did not want my to search for Stephanie. Now that Mum has passed away I want to find Stephanie so badly. I have made a few internet forays to see what I can find, but have come up empty so far.

Stephanie would be in her early 60s now. I would like to meet her, though I wouldn't expect for her to suddenly become a part of my family at this late date. I just want to look into the face of what might have been, and tell her about the woman her birth mother was and how hard it was for Mum to give her up.

Stephanie Scott Dawson, where are you?

R -- Reality Review

One of the first pieces of advice every writer receives is to "write what you know." This can be extremely frustrating advice as you sit an ponder what it is you actually know and how you turn that into writing that someone would actually want to read.

The first thing to understand is to not to take this advice too literally. J.K. Rowling was not actually a part of a magical wizarding world. Stephenie Meyer is not a vampire. Suzanne Collins did not survive The Hunger Games. Tolkien did not live in Middle Earth. These authors still wrote what they knew.

They took what they understood about human nature and human behavior and created realistic characters and placed them into situations that could plausibly happen in the worlds they created. Collins took what she understood about the need of some sections of human society to subjugate others to demonstrate their inflated sense of importance thus creating a dystopian society in which something like The Hunger Games could flourish. Basing the games on an extreme version of today's reality television shows added a strong sense of reality to the tale. She then placed characters that most people can identify with into the situation.

Realistic characters come from creating people like us, complex combinations of heroism and flaws, happiness and sadness, and hot mess a good share of the time. We identify with these characters because they aren't perfect. Harry Potter would not have been the sympathetic character he was if he had not lost his parents as a baby and been raised in a Muggle household where he was treated unfairly. Frodo Baggins would not have been a sympathetic character if he hadn't been the reluctant hero facing his fears at every turn. These characteristics exist in all of us, both hero and villain.

Last year my mother read the first draft of my first novel before she passed away. She hugged the draft the her chest as she told me how much she loved the book, especially how realistic the characters were.

To put this in perspective, the book is about a small community in Arkansas where strange and often paranormal things happen almost daily. The characters take all of these things in their stride as though these things were completely normal. The characters are not perfect, some are deeply flawed.

I have never been to Arkansas, but at the time I started the book I was on the phone everyday for my day job talking with people in Arkansas. So I got to know the people. I love every one of my characters. They are funny but I do not make fun of them. The funny arises from being human in human situations.

I based the main character loosely on myself, so that I knew. I based my main character's mother on my mother. The other characters were people that took up residence in my head and won't leave. Most of them are rednecks of whom Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy would be proud.

My mother sure was. She was especially proud of how real it is, even though one of the characters gets abducted by aliens and meets Elvis long after he died.

O -- Olson Oddities

Odd things happen to me. It is just a fact of life, and a wonderful one at that -- for a writer or a

comedian anyway.

I had my first out-of-body experience when I was just five years old. I had a fairly severe case of the measles. So much so that my parents had me in their bed. My fever was high enough that I began to bleed from the nose profusely. Lying on my back I began to choke to death on the stuff. I remember watching this happening from across the room. I didn't question what was happening. I was young enough that everything was still new, so this was just another new thing.

I think that this experience set me on a track to be aware of things and not try to explain them away as imagination or coincidence.

By the time I was through college I had found that I could go out of body at will during meditation. How could I be so sure that this was not just imagination? Several years later I was hanging out with the members of a group of people who were followers of a spiritual leader who called himself Rama. They had been taught to meditate with their eyes open so that they could see things.

One evening I joined them in a meditation. I still meditated with my eyes closed, so off I went. I chose to go out of body, but did not stay there. When the meditation ended I opened my eyes and found the young woman sitting next to me looking at me.

"I saw you go," she said. She then told me exactly what I had done out of body. Exactly. If had had any lingering doubts as to the reality of my out-of-body journeys, they were banished forever by the young woman I had met only an hour or so before.

When I was a child I would occasionally have these very intense and real dreams. They were so real that I was certain that I was actually somewhere else. I remember coming back through these dreams, across a border of some sort. I remember because I tried to bring physical objects back with me and they could not make it through this "wall" with me. I was particularly heartbroken when I couldn't bring back a kitten I had been playing with.

When I was a teen my mother took me to see a psychic who, not knowing this story, said that I was a "dream-walker," and that I would travel while I slept. I found this an interesting thing, but didn't know what that would mean for me.

Then one night after I was grown and living on my own I went to bed early feeling strangely tired. I fell asleep immediately and began to dream that I was in a small airplane not far from the Air Force Academy. The plane was in distress and we were about to crash. It was just me and the pilot.  We came down in a snowy field. I was lying in the wreckage watching as the pilot got up and moving. I wanted to urge him to go and get help, not to worry about me, because I knew I would die, but I could not speak.

In the middle of all of this I woke up and went to the bathroom, muttering to myself that there had been a plane crash near the Academy. The dream did not stop while I was awake and it continued when I went back to sleep.

The next morning I got up and turned on the news while I was getting dressed. They teased what was coming up on the news saying something about a plane crash near the Academy. I went cold. "And the pilot survived and the passenger died," I said to the television that was then showing a commercial. I sat down on the couch to wait for the story. Sure enough, they reported the story of my dream, detail for detail. I had dreamed it while it had happened. That was when I remembered the words of the psychic.

So seeing a UFO when I took the trash out one night was par for the course by then. And I had always had a feeling that I would be one of those people who found a snake in the house. So one night a python turned up in my bathtub. One Christmas the police chased a guy who had just robbed a nearby gas station through my front yard and tackled him to the ground in a neighbor's yard. When I was a kid working as a hospital volunteer I got to meet a guy who was out walking his pet lion.

Yup, it is one Odd life for this Olson and it all stands to make my writing that much richer.