Friday, February 22, 2013

Guest Post: Rena Fruchter - Procrastination


So…my next book is due in eight months.  The sequel to this one.

That’s PLENTY of time.  More than enough time to write a book or two.

Let me first take care of the 2,427 emails that have piled up in my Inbox.  Not to mention the mail and bills that are all over the dining room table, with nobody else taking care of them. 

Well, I can certainly spare a couple of weeks, right?

Very important to get things organized first, before plunging into the next book.

My clothes are all over the place.  What?  These clothes aren’t even the right season.  All I have to do is pull out the drawers filled with summer stuff and replace them with winter stuff.

Really…I only need six months to write this book.  I can do it.  I’ve only got two trips to make during that time, two big events that need planning, and a few other projects.

OKAY.  Got to start.  Today.  Should I start at the beginning? Or plunge right into the middle of the book.  Maybe Chapter 23 would be good.  I know what’s going to happen in the middle.  I can always go back to the beginning later.  Then it won’t read like I started at the beginning and it got better later in the book.

I think I’ll have to start tomorrow. I just need to get another dog first.  My dog is lonely.  She really needs a companion.  I’m sure my husband won’t mind.  Well, it might take a little of the time I really need to work on the book, but the new dog can keep my old one company while I’m ignoring them both, locked in my study working on the book.

Argh.  Can’t move into the study just yet.  All my notes from the last book are still taped to the walls, with scribbling all over them.  And the various drafts of the cover, so I could look at them for a few days before deciding which worked best.  Admittedly that was months ago.  All I need to do is go to the store and pick up a couple of plastic storage boxes for all the old notes from the last book.

After I go to the pet store and see if the perfect dog is there.

Do I really need more than five months to write this book?

I’ll write one sentence first! Then at least I will have started this book. 

But what if it’s the world’s worst sentence, as bad as “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Best to wait one more day so I can think of a really good sentence!

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Guest Post: Michael Johnston - Good advice and why I don’t always take it.

Like you, I’m sure, I have friends, relatives and acquaintances who seem to be listening attentively as I tell a colourful story about one of my many exciting experiences but, too late, I realise they are simply waiting and watching for me to draw breath, at which point they will pile in about their own even more colourful and very much more self-centred experiences and, somehow, no matter how closely I listen and watch, they never seem to need to draw breath or pause for dramatic effect.

Well-meant advice from my talented and experienced father seemed to be rejected even faster than any publisher has ever rejected a manuscript.  It simply made me want to do the opposite and then, a week later perhaps, I would find I was doing what he had advised, thinking it was my own idea, until the penny dropped, or my father said something that would send me off into a fit of sulks.

However, if you get hold of a book which was published in 1934, is still in print and offers advice for beginning and sustaining any writing enterprise, you will never think about writing in the same way again.  The book is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (1898-1948) which is still in print.  Brande deals with two aspects of writing: the physical and the mental.  Physically, she believes that it is only by making oneself write a certain number of words every day, ideally at the same time of day, that one becomes, like an athlete, tuned up to achieve the level of performance a serious writer needs.  Accountants, remember, do not put off their work until inspiration strikes and neither should serious writers.  Once you have become fit as a writer, then you need to develop your imagination in the same way as you have developed your writing muscles.  This is not a review of Becoming a Writer but, if you’ll take my advice, now is the time to buy a copy and get started.

Incidentally, while checking my facts about Dorothea, I found out that she also wrote Wake Up and Livepublished in 1936, and which sold over two million copies. It was even made into a musical by Twentieth Century Fox.  I know nothing about it but the title isn’t a bad bit of advice so I shall look it up when I’ve posted this blog.

Another bit of advice was handed out by a speaker at the Writers’ Circle I took part in while living in Harrogate.  Looking us in the eye, she said very matter-of-factly, “A writer is someone who writes”.  Maybe it’s true that everybody has at least one novel in them but, thankfully for the rest of us, few of these ever get written because the hard work involved in writing a book puts most people off.  I think this is simply another way of expressing what Dorothea Brande says in her book.  Unless you find you are writing something every day, you are probably not a writer and might find it better to stick to your knitting, or whatever you find you really like to do.  After all, we writers (I flatter myself) need readers and there are no barriers to entry to that honourable profession.  And no writer worth his or her salt is not an avid reader!

So, you write daily; you have a vivid imagination; you read until you fall asleep; what’s next?  Choose your subject and, ignoring as far as possible, all other claims on your time, just get on with it: and I shall look out for the results in my bookshop.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Guest Post:



My life with Letitia Fairbanks Smoot



Hi,

My name is Kelley Smoot Garrett and I was Letitia Fairbanks' stepdaughter.

My father, Harold (“Hal”) Nibley Smoot, grandson of Senator Reed Smoot (R. Utah, 1903-1933), first met Letitia in about 1938. Fate played a hand in having my father be the stand-in for his sick brother, resulting in his escorting Letitia to a ball in Salt Lake City, where she'd journeyed to be with her maternal grandparents.  My father in his Randolf-Macon Academy uniform cut a striking figure at 6'4” and charmed Letitia, seven years his senior.  This very pertinent age difference was unknown to me until the late 1980s, after my father died.  Only then was Letitia forced to reveal that information, and be traitor to the ingrained Hollywood maxim, “A woman who'd tell her age would tell anything!” due to the persistent inquiries of a hospital admitting nurse, who demanded answers to such impertinent questions. “If only Hal were still were alive! He'd have handled this quietly, and no one would ever have been the wiser, and certainly not the child,” (me.) But discover this, and many other pertinent facts about Letitia's life, was to be my destiny: decoding the mystery creation of “Princess April Morning-Glory” these last 20 years, since Letitia's death.

Following my parents' divorce in Dallas in 1963, my father returned to Southern California where he'd previously worked as an oil & gas land man. It proved propitiously timed on several accounts: he was an originator and original participant in Union Oil's dramatic 1966 discovery of the Whittier Field.  It also allowed him to meet back up with Letitia.

After a year+ long courtship, where my sister Carey and I were brought out to Southern California to meet Letitia during our summer holidays, my Dad proposed, an engagement ring selected, and they were married. Dad & Tish did end up eloping (due to Letitia's mother's continuing objection to anyone her daughter selected as a potential fiancé) and were married in a private ceremony in San Francisco on 25 November 1966. After their return to LA, a reception in their honor was hosted by Letitia's sister Lucile Fairbanks Crump, attended by their cousin Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and dearly loved family friend and former actress Mary Brian, among others.


Letitia (center) with Douglas Jr (right) at my father's and stepmother's wedding reception, Dec. 1966.  Man at extreme left with back to camera is believed to be Letitia's brother-in-law Owen Crump.  Unknown woman in coral-colored dress next to Letitia.


Letitia (l) and my father (c) greeting Mary Brian (r) at their wedding reception, Dec. 1966.

These photos were in my father & stepmother's wedding album, that was always kept in the living room of whatever house they lived in and set the tone for much of Dad & Tish's manner of living: fabulously decorated, elaborate, first-rate cuisine, well-dressed and thoroughly enjoyable.

Once they were married, Carey and I stayed in their house in North Hollywood.  This was my introduction to the world that created “Princess April Morning-Glory.”  On Saturday afternoons the house filled with the sound of music – not much different when I was home with my mother, who primarily raised me and with whom I spent the majority of my childhood & adolescence – but the choice of music! No longer did Mozart & Beethoven fill the air, but the “modern” classical sounds of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his sweeping orchestral scores were the background music to those holiday visits. Severely damaged in the LA earthquake of 1971, the house was sold and Dad & Tish moved to Dallas in 1972.  Letitia often said the day of the earthquake she decided to begin the habit of rising very early in the morning, so she could get more done, earlier in the day. She took the earthquake as personal assurance that sleeping in would be forgiven by the Almighty, as getting up early clearly hadn't worked as anticipated.  She was never a morning person from that point onward.

After my father died, Letitia told me that the years she & my father lived in Dallas (1972 – 1982) were among the happiest of her life as she had finally escaped the confines of her family and the Hollywood social hierarchy into which she'd been born. Her description of it was akin to the saying, “A caged bird doesn't know it's caged, until it is set free.” 

And once set free, did that formerly-caged bird sing!  The paintings, illustrations and needlework that Letitia created during her years in Dallas are exquisite in detail, and prodigious in quantity while rich in high-quality imagery.  Family & friends breathlessly awaited the year's Christmas card from the Smoots: an 8” x 10” glossy photo print mounted on an even larger sized card, and signed by Hal & Letitia. A true Hollywood production, Letitia planned for these cards beginning in July, and as a child and then adolescent, this type of project was something I was always interested in, and would go with her to the photographer's and listen as she discussed how the painting's colors would be better captured if the light were adjusted thus, and the matting and presentation should be altered to a different width, etc.  Much of what I learned about art production, I absorbed without being fully conscious from participation in projects with Letitia.  My husband has been a marvelous second teacher, re-enforcing the same time-honored principles of classic design & styling, favored by Letitia.

In 1982, Dad & Tish moved to Salt Lake City, a place that had been important to both of their families historically, and to which they both had fond memories and family; in short, the perfect retirement setting.  And close to good hospitals, as my father had already been diagnosed and treated for lung cancer, although it was prostate cancer of which he would eventually die, in Salt Lake City, 2 November 1988.

On the night of the 1st November, Letitia had called me, the first time in our then 22 year shared history she had initiated a call to me; from that alone, I knew my father's end was near.  The next morning I caught the 6am flight from Midland, TX to SLC; A taxi took me from the airport to their house on East 2nd Street.  The driver had already pulled away when I realized that no one was home, so I stowed my bag on the back porch, and ran till I was too tired, then walked as quickly as possible up the hill to the hospital.

The scene that greeted me was something out of a Hollywood movie: my stepmother was crying – marking the 2nd time in less than 24 hours, another event had occurred for the first time in my life. My father was not conscious but clearly not comfortable, and a nurse trying to figure out what to say or do next. Letitia looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, you are just like General Custer and his cavalry, riding to my rescue!”  I thought, “Where in the world did that image come from?” In 2009 when I watched “They Died With Their Boots On” I was reminded of this episode.  Another clue fell into place.

Letitia spent the next four years of her life in Salt Lake City, making a final visit to Southern California, to see her son Robert, his wife Judy, and her beloved grandchildren Bryan and Amanda one last time.

I was living and working in Singapore and received news there that Letitia had died the day before. I had spoken to her last about 2 weeks before her death.  She was lucid but tired, as always concerned for her son Robert, and her grandchildren. We talked at length about how things that cannot be changed must be accepted, and how she felt that always lead to growth – a requisite for life.

She painted until her death.  This is her last painting, found on the easel in her back-porch studio that overlooked the valley: an oil on canvas, not quite finished, still with room for growth.




About Kelley Smoot Garrett:
Kelley Smoot Garrett was born in Dallas, raised in Manhattan and has lived the life of a West Texas wildcatter as well that of an IT professional. At one time or another in her life she’s called places as diverse as Scourie, Scotland; Austin, Abilene and Midland, Texas; Singapore; Paris; and Auckland, New Zealand — home. She is proud to be the daughter of Sue Ashby and Harold Smoot and the step-daughter of Letitia Fairbanks Smoot. She currently lives with her husband Danny Garrett, three cats, and one happy only-dog, Moxie in the Texas Hill Country.




About Letitia Fairbanks:
Letitia Fairbanks, the niece of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford, lived a life guided by artistic passions. In 1939, wanting to commemorate her late uncle, Letitia began work on Princess April Morning-Glory, allowing a creative outlet for combining her lifelong loves: painting, writing, and illustration.

Holding firm to her artistic identify, Letitia gravitated toward portraiture, landscapes, and still-lifes. She was also a biographer, co-authoring Douglas Fairbanks: The Fourth Musketeer, with Ralph Hancock. Her marriage to Hal Smoot in 1966 marked the beginning of a particularly joyful and creative period. Needle points and annual Christmas cards, which featured a painting from the previous year, not to mention her role as a wife, mother, step-mother and grandmother brought her much fulfillment. After a life rich in artistic accomplishment, Letitia passed away in September of 1992.


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