The Scribble
— Isabel Tutaine's Blog —
This blog contains excerpts from The Scribble newsletter that I send out once a month. The posts lag a bit behind the latest newsletter. To get the most up-to-date Scribble, along with book club guides, free excerpts and first chapters, opportunities to win an ebook, and updates, sign up at the bottom of this page. In the meantime, enjoy the parts of The Scribble posted here. The Scribble is organized from the most recent to the oldest.
The Scribble
Every. Six. Months. It was like having Hades delivered in a box to my cube.
Understand that I’ve never been a telephone person. When I was a teenager, my friends would call and chat on the phone for hours, and I used to feel as if I wanted to explode. I simply could not chat on a phone for a long time. You want an hour of chat with me? Come over for tea. None of this interact-with-a-disembodied-voice phone nonsense. For me, a telephone is strictly a utilitarian tool. Tell me what you want, and I'll see what I can do.
When we moved to Maine, I couldn’t have a cell phone because reception wasn’t available where I lived. I immediately got used to leaving the house without having a thing the size of a chocolate bar warbling in my pocket to let me know that someone in the world was dying for my attention. IIt was as if I'd entered The Age of Portable Peace.
Now reception has extended to our house, and I reconsidered the option of getting a cell phone. Seems convenient, especially now that I’m involved in a project where I have to be available to several people many times during the day, and doing that from a tethered phone is impossible when I need to leave the house.
Then I got to thinking: I am older and would like medics to find me when I need them. (Like, if I’ve fallen and I can’t get up, I’ll at least have a cell phone on me.) I would also like my husband to find me when he needs me. And I’d like to track our House Beast when he runs away, although he never seems to think he needs anyone.
A cell phone would mean releasing all the carrier pigeons we keep in the barn. (We used to have carrier penguins, but they waddled slowly and the mastodon’s kept stepping on them, so we switched to pigeons. We move slowly with technology. Having worked in high tech for decades has made me skeptical about Technology Urgency the makes people stand in line for hours in the cold to get the latest tech that will be outdated within six months.)
So anyway, cell phone. I got one. I’ve rediscovered that it’s like a toddler who can’t be left at home unsupervised. It bleeps, burbles, and sings. When I set it to silent, it farts by vibrating against whatever surface it’s on to get my attention. It claims it can hold my life hostage. I keep getting texts, emails, and calls from people in a panic that I might have fallen off a cliff or drowned in a puddle on my walk to my mailbox.
A friend chided me, I got worried when you didn’t answer, so I called again.
You called me twice in one minute, I explained. I was still trying to figure out what to press to answer your call. (My cell phone comes loaded with icons, none of which speaks English.)
Because a cell phone gives immediate access to the latest happenings, it has imposed a sense of false urgency on my life.(Wait! It bleebled. What am am I missing? Did someone who’s not me fall off a cliff while walking to their mailbox? Let me see who it is…) And the ease with which people can reach me dupes me into thinking that they all require a response right NOW.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t appreciate people or the worries they bestow upon me. I am fortunate to have people who worry about me. It’s just that…well, I want my head space back and have to figure out how to maintain that while having a thing in my pocket that wants my attention all the time. I want to turn the phone off without turning off my friendships.
Hmmm… Perhaps I can tether my friends so they can’t reach their phones. There’s a thought.
But you can make me drool with an article about how Elvis was abducted by aliens and made to birth lizard triples on a spaceship the government is hiding in a warehouse on Jupiter. Or how Dolly Parton is really a trans dude. (Like Hillary? Remember that one?)
Clapping like a seal, I shout, More! More! Give me more!
Immediately followed by Who the h*ck believes this because this stuff must originate in circus tents. Really, tabloids are an exercise in stretching how far reality can be bent before it breaks. What thread of logic holds Elvis, lizard babies, US government, and warehouse on Jupiter that we can even understand what it means at a glance?
At any rate, I recently read a tabloid article that complained about beautiful actors being cast as physically ugly characters (according to the script). The article raised the question: if you need a person to play a physically ugly character, why not just hire an ugly person and save on makeup? The verisimilitude would rock.
The interesting part is that the article showed picture of good looking actors cast in roles of physically ugly people. But it didn’t post any pictures of naturally ugly actors who could play the parts.
As I stepped away from the tabloid back into my stimulating but unsensational world, I asked myself: Who or what determines who’s ugly? Or beautiful? Is it self-determined? Would the want ad rely on self-sorting by specifying: Naturally ugly person wanted for lead role in Hollywood blockbuster. Must not require makeup. If you don’t crack mirrors, don’t apply.
Where I fall on the beautiful to ugly spectrum hasn’t concerned me since I was in junior high school, desperately trying to get a date while wearing knee socks and brown Oxford shoes. My classmates made known that I was, well, not on the desirable side of the scale, although I ranked high on the dork scale. I took this to mean that I wasn’t popular but never translated their comments into that I was ugly.
Then I graduated from college, and suddenly I could not turn down enough dates. What happened? Did my beauty sprout while I wasn’t paying attention? I have no idea. But what people saw in me did not make me feel beautiful — or ex-ugly, for that matter.
I’ve never met a person who’s made me gasp because they’ve been so ugly. I’ve also never been struck speechless at someone’s beauty. It’s as if these qualities don’t register on me. To me people look like, well, whatever they look like.
I once visited the beauty parlor of a major cosmetic company on Fifth Avenue in New York City and saw top models file into the place. What I noticed about them before the makeup session was that they were all tall, had naturally great hair and very symmetrical faces.
After the make up session, they emerged looking attention-getting stunning. They could have stopped traffic … but in a way that did not translate into beautiful to me. They were, well, flashy in an extreme way (like tabloids).
I suspect this is me, not our standards of human beauty. I’m probably mis-wired. I can appreciate beauty in paintings and music and nature. In people, I think I just don’t think to look for it, and therefore, I don’t see it.
I had a woman inform me with blaring seriousness that she would publish her novel after she inherited her parents’ summer cottage in the woods because she required a “room with a view” to write.
“I see,” I said as neutrally as I could muster without bursting into laughter and politely exited the room in search of wine.
A little later, I ran into another woman who worked in academia. She told me she wanted to take classes about how novels were structured so she could begin to write one. She wanted to know about character arcs, plotting techniques, and other structural bits, without which she was certain she could never write a novel. (An “arc” is a story teller’s word for how something develops or changes in a story. For example, a character starts out being innocent on page one, undergoes a multitude of trials while he hunts for a dragon, and ends up less innocent, wiser, and sexier by the last page of the story.)
So I asked the academic woman what her idea was for writing a novel, and she told me she didn’t have one yet, that she just had an urge to write one. She just hoped knowledge about how they were structured would help her come up with an idea.
“Interesting,” I said neutrally as I scurried out of the room in search of more wine. (No wonder writers are rumored to drink a lot.)
Then someone else mentioned that they had a terrific idea for novel. It involved a house that falls off a cliff into the ocean during a tornado.
“And then what happens?” I asked.
The fellow looked at me as if I had a pointy head, and said. “That’s the story! I mean don’t you think it’s dramatic to have a house fall off a cliff into the ocean because of bad weather?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But does the house then float to foreign shores where it lives happily ever after? Or does it sink into poverty and spend the rest of it’s life being a shadow of its former self under the water? By the way, were there any people inside the house when it fell?”
The fellow blinked at me, then rolled his eyes and slunk off to get admiration from someone else and more wine. (You see, writers aren’t the only ones who drink.)
I’m currently working on my sixth novel, and I have to say I didn’t find it hanging from any part of any landscape or hiding in a book about literary structures. The only place I’ve ever found a novel is INSIDE my head, where they tend to thrive, sometimes in herds.
I don’t say this to brag. I consider this a gift and a mandate from the Universe that I have an obligation to fulfill. As compensation for my ability to write novels, the Universe had removed my ability to balance checkbooks, make change, and use the metric system. (The Universe like to keep things balanced.)
Yes, you need some level of education and comprehension to write a novel, but above and before all that, you need to have an UNQUENCHABLE, UNSTOPPABLE, SCREAMING urge to tell a story. No novel begins without a story or comes to being without an overwhelming desire to tell it. And I mean overwhelming. Urge doesn;t begin to cut it.
After getting the story, the discipline to write it falls into place. For example, the first thing that needs to fall into place is the writer’s butt into a chair because the only people who write novels are those who sit down and close their eyes to see what’s happening inside their heads.
So, yeah. There you go. I’ve just revealed the secret to writing a novel. Now assuming you already know where you keep your butt, all you need is a chair.
“But do you believe in God, right?” she gasped.
When I got over my astonishment at her reaction, I said, “I think that’s the wrong question. All that question does is cleave a population into people who believe and those who don’t, as if the two are fundamentally different and irreconcilable and as if no other possibilities exist. A better question would be: What is human spirituality, and why does it manifest itself? This question, because it is not binary, is more inclusive and makes more sense.”
O.K. O.K. I’ realized I’d just popped opened a Ph.D. level thesis dissertation. Sorry. But it’s still a better question.
To me, “Do you believe in God?” inevitably leads to “What is your religion?” which is the Cliffs Notes version of “What are your dogmas?”
I have a sincere cultural interest in what people believe, but beyond intellectual curiosity, I’m not invested. Jesus Christ? OK by me. Allah? All good. No god? Still fine. Multiple deities? OK with that, too. You do you. Me do me.
Like an archeologist, I want to see how the Romans lived. But I don’t want to live like them.
Religions are important because they provide a vocabulary and a methodology to help a human engage with the divine, however that’s conceived. Dogmas vary. Your deity looks like this. Eat this on that day, but not this day. Pray ## of times a day/week/month. Worship on Wednesday afternoons (or Saturdays or Sundays). Kneel or stand like this when you pray. Dress like this, not like that.
So after dividing people by whether they believe in a god, we splinter them even more with what dogmas they practice to become one with the divine. How exactly are we to become one with a divine if we are so self-divisive? If we pick at one another’s differences as if we have nothing in common?
For the most part, dogmas promote being and doing good. Even when misguided (to my taste), dogmas tip a human toward being beneficial to self and society. I’ve yet to run into a dogma that advocates burning down a neighbor’s house and shooting their dog.
I think problems arise when people begin to mistake the religion for the divine and begin to worship the religion as if it were the divine. This mistake often takes the form of “Our Deity loves me and my brethren, and everyone else sucks and is condemned.” Even at this, I take no offense when applied to me because, well, I’m fine with you doing you. I'm still doing me.
To me, a person’s dogmas are far less important than their behavior. Remember how Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic? Well, so was Hitler. Look at what each did with the same set of dogmas.
I have to admit that as an American, I’m dazzled by British pageantry but don’t quite “get it.”
The pageantry has centuries of history to back it, rather than mere commercial interests and frivolity of the American Macy’s day parade or an NFL Super Bowl halftime show. (OK, OK, the pageantry does feed the tourists, who in turn, feed the British economy.)
The part I don’t “get” as an American is how prevalent pageantry is in British everyday life. Take the Royal Guard, for example. The Royal Guard consists of the reigning monarch's fleet of over two hundred stunning horses ridden by zesty, young soldiers. It was founded in 1658. The purpose of the Royal Guard was/is to protect the royal family and household. Tourists are familiar with them from the changing of the guard at Buckingham Place in London. Yes, those guys.
Back in the day of Queen Elizabeth II, I once heard a little boy ask if the Queen lived at the barracks. The mother had to explain that, no, this was the castle where the Queen’s horses lived; the Queen lived down the street. With Puritan, waste-not-want-not practicality, I wonder why the Queen didn’t simply lock the iron door of her stone house instead of requiring a bunch of people on horses to protect her belongings.
Some tourists don’t realize the guys on the horses are real soldiers. In addition to looking spiffy on horses around castles, they are can also be sent into wars and to help in natural disasters like floods. During uneventful peace time, their roles are mostly ceremonial reinforced with rigid military discipline and a lot of marching. In fact, the barracks are a military establishment with its own set of rules and protocols.
Too many tourists are downright disrespectful and treat the Royal Guard soldiers as if they were Disney props. I suspect tourist do so so because…well, the soldiers are dressed like characters in a Disney movie.
They wear what they wore in 1658 with very few changes—polished, gold helmets with a foot tall spike on which hangs something that looks like a silk broom or foot tall, bear fur hats that resemble oblong Hostess Sno-Ball cupcakes. Their swords, also for ceremonial use, are blunted, more suitable as envelope openers than weapons. The highly polished, gold breastplates are probably as uncomfortable as they look spiffy but wouldn’t stand a chance against a machine gun, god forbid. And then there are the spectacular, red or blue wool coats that they wear even in the summer because cotton did not become easily available in England until the mid 1700s, and one must conform with historical tradition.
The Royal Guards are not the only oddly dressed military sorts. I took a tour of international ceremonial military uniforms in a book and came out wondering if the military instructs their tailors to make the uniforms look as ridiculous as possible so the enemy will burst out laughing and forget to fire. Really, the book had photographs of soldiers wearing things that looked like inverted fruit bowls, tacos filled with turkey feathers, and flat things that elephants sat on. You name it: gold silk telephone coils, skirts over bloomer-shaped-pants, balloon sleeves, epaulets you can scrub a bathtub with—have all have been used in some form by every military group on earth.
I notice British police on horseback wear fairly simple uniforms and no one messes with them. And not because they carry guns or letter openers, I mean swords, because they don’t. To be fair, they also don’t carry history on their backs and no tourist spends a penny to look at them.
Usually unglorified boots-on-the-ground soldiers have uniforms designed to make them invisible (a good trait when people will shoot you if they see you), but boots-in parade uniforms often make soldiers look as if they escaped from a circus. Please! After soldiers come back from battles while the rest of us stayed home all comfy, please give them something decent and comfortable to wear in ceremonies.
“But do you believe in God, right?” she gasped.
After that glitch, both lunch and our friendship continued, but I couldn't help thinking the question was wrong. All that question does is cleave a population into people who believe and those who don’t, as if the two are fundamentally different and irreconcilable and as if no other possibilities exist. A better question would be: What is human spirituality, and why does it manifest itself? This question, because it is not binary, is more inclusive and makes more sense.
O.K. O.K. I’ realized I’d just popped opened a Ph.D. level thesis dissertation. Sorry. But it’s still a better question.
To me, “Do you believe in God?” inevitably leads to “What is your religion?” which is the Cliffs Notes version of “What are your dogmas?”
I have a sincere cultural interest in what people believe, but beyond intellectual curiosity, I’m not invested. Jesus Christ? OK by me. Allah? All good. No god? Still fine. Multiple deities? OK with that, too. You do you. Me do me. Like an archeologist, I want to see how the Romans lived. But I don’t want to live like them.
Religions are important because they provide a vocabulary and a methodology to help a human exercise spirituality by engaging with a divine, however that’s conceived. Dogmas to facilitate this exercise vary. People are taught: Your deity looks like this. Eat this on that day, but not this day. Pray ## of times a day/week/month. Worship on Wednesday afternoons (or Saturdays or Sundays). Kneel or stand like this when you pray. Dress like this, not like that.
So after dividing people by whether they believe in a god, we splinter them even more with what dogmas they practice to accomplish roughly the same thing — becoming one with the divine. How exactly are we to become one with a divine (or anything else) if we are so self-divisive? If we pick at one another’s differences as if we have nothing in common?
For the most part, dogmas promote being and doing good. Even when misguided (to my taste), dogmas tip a human toward being beneficial to self and society. I think problems arise when people begin to mistake the religion for God and begin to worship the religion. This mistake often takes the form of “Our Deity loves me and my brethren, and everyone else sucks and is condemned.” Even at this, I take no offense because, well, I’m fine with you doing you. I'm still doing me.
To me, a person’s spiritual dogmas are far less important than their worldly behavior. Remember how Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic? Well, so was Hitler. Look at what each did with the same set of dogmas.
Wow.
I have to say I love displays of people making art. They provide me with evidence that I’m not such an oddball.
What struck me about this glass blowing demo was that after almost every major step of the process, the audience gave him a hand of applause. Not undeserved, I must say. The guy knew what he was doing, and he was making something absolutely beautiful. All the same, my reaction was: Applause? Really?
Would my equivalent as a writer be getting a round of applause after I finished every chapter? Trumpets and a small parade after I finish the each draft? Fireworks for the final draft? I’m really modest. I’d be happy with a publisher who fulfills its contractual commitments to publish or one who offers a contract Stephen King hasn’t written.
The research part of my creative process can be pretty public, but I can be pretty grumpy when I do it. So much so that librarians have been known to take their lunch breaks the moment they see me coming, quickly crawling out the back windows and down ivy to escape.
But after researching, I go hide in a closet to write, dispelling fogs of Do Not Disturb and seldom emerging except for meals. The writing part isn’t public at all. I’m not one of those writers who write in a coffee shop because I’d spend all my time yelling at other patrons to be quiet so I can get down my thoughts. People would start spilling coffee on me just so I’d leave. Some coffee shops even begin to shut down when I get out of the car. I suspect those shops are owned by librarians.
All this I Need Quiet To Write generally results in one predictable effect. When I finally strut out in public after finishing my Opus Gigantus, wearing a gold cape and a twinkly crown, no one knows who the h*ck I am or why I’m dressed funny. No one applauds, although many have dialed 911.
Instead of holding up a fine painting or a massive glass sculpture, I can only flap yellow-ish, 8.5 by 11 inch, sheets of paper of paper in the air and hope someone will recognize it as at least one year’s worth or work (as opposed to Dale Chihuly’s glass plate that he made in two hours and sells for over two-thousand dollars).
More likely than not, people will just squint at me and ask, What? Me read that? But it’s so long!
Occasionally a cop comes by and warns me to not litter. I tell you, writing is really the art of humility.
I’m loath to break in the new year on a down note, but here we are. Welcome to 2024.
I was reading about a woman in Texas who begged a judge for an abortion because the fetus was unviable and her pregnancy was threatening her life and future fertility. The judge granted the abortion, but then the state court reversed the judge’s decision because the woman had “not sufficiently proven” that she was close to death. (Keep in mind: the fetus was not viable.) As a result, the woman had to leave to abort the unviable fetus in another state.
Apparently some people in Texas are under the illusion that every pregnant woman delivers a healthy baby if everyone who’s not that woman insists that nothing’s wrong. How many people are still out there who still don’t understand that pregnancies often involve miscarriages, unviable fetuses, still born children, infections, unexpected bleeding, and other complications that can kill a woman? How close to death does a woman have to be to be believed that she’s dying?
With a deadly combination of ignorance and self-righteousness, politicians in states like Texas have managed to make it illegal even for God to terminate a pregnancy with unviable fetuses and miscarriages! What an accomplishment for humans!
Because some state politicians confuse medical issues with moral issues, I propose making pregnancy in those states illegal under all conditions. This proposal requires passing a law that ALL WOMEN MUST HAVE ABORTIONS. No exceptions for lack of rape, incest, potential death of mother, fetus unviability, under-agedness, mother’s health, marital status, yearnings for a child, insufficient income, wealth, religious beliefs, not being pregnant, or weather. ALL women MUST HAVE abortions to ensure a complete lack of pregnancies. Preferably even before women know they’re pregnant, just in case.
But wait! says you. Unpregnant women don’t need abortions. And preventing pregnancies would end the human race because men can’t have babies. Well, science sucks, doesn’t it? Disregard it. It’s more important to be righteous than to have someone who’s not you survive a pregnancy.
In a lunge for gender equality, women under this law would instantly become equal to men because, like men, they wouldn’t be able to have babies. (Equality is most easily achieved at the lowest common denominator.) Besides, the human race would continue because there will always be a handful of pigheaded women who will crawl into states that permit pregnancies to have a child. Those radical women can be sent into hard labor camps if they cross back into states where pregnancies are illegal. Their children will have their foreheads tattooed with the letters N/A for Not Aborted and live with stigma for the rest of their lives. (A newly minted form of original sin! How cool!)
Give yourself some time to take to this proposal. It certainly is no more extreme than some of the state laws out there that prohibit abortion under all circumstances or force a woman to be almost dead before they reluctantly say, Oh, OK. You can have one. After all, the fetus doesn’t stand a chance of surviving because it’s already dead. The good news is that you’ll be infertile after this, so you won’t be putting us through this again. As women during the Salem witch trials found out, it’s better to die of nonsense than to not measure up to someone’s else’s sense of righteousness.
And while we’re on a roll, let’s bring back that judicial system where people are hanged after they prove themselves guilty by not drowning. Let’s make sure all our laws are consistently barbaric.
Bonus! Check this out: Here’s a short bit of fluff with a serious edge I wrote that the lovely Andree Bella read on Esoterica (WERU 89.9): https://archives.weru.org/esoterica/2023/12/esoterica-12-3-23-zen-meditation/
1894. After pirates attack in high seas, a socialite struggles to keep the uncouth captain alive. If they can transcend their social differences, they might transform their fears into strengths and survive to thrive as individuals.
People are always asking me where I get my ideas for novels. I don’t usually remember, but in the case of this book, I do. This is exactly how it happened:
It was a dark and stormy night complete with rumbling thunder. I was making a cup of tea when this scruffy dude shows up in my head.
“I’m Captain Littledove. You got to get me off my ship.”
“Why? Can’t you swim to shore?”
“Nay. Not like that. I’m becoming a hermit, and I’m lonely and horny and want something more outta my life.”
“Are you handsome?”
“H*ll, no. Dun got table manners either. You’re lucky I dun have an eyepatch and a parrot crapping on my shoulder. You need to find me a woman who thinks I’s got virtues. Pretty sure I’s got some.”
“Hmmm. Sounds like a challenge. Let me cogitate some. I’ll get back to you.”
“Aye. I’ll be waiting.” Then, Poof! He’s gone.
Well, another cup of tea later, this splendidly dressed woman covered in silk and pearls shows up in my head.
“And why am I here?” she demands, hands on hips. “Do not dare ruin me by putting my name in print! I come from high society and must maintain my reputation.”
“But you’re so unhappy.”
“Oh. I did not surmise you were aware of that detail.”
“Novelist are omnipotent within the pages of their novels. Listen, I have someone you should meet.”
“Is he handsome?”
“Err …”
And that’s how the process of getting Captain Littledove off his ship began and how I ended up with having to write another novel.
Have a question? Send it to me.