Most of the time when you hear news stories about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, it’s because a caregiver is caught deliberately injuring a child or other vulnerable person, such as an elder or someone who is disabled.
But what if the syndrome also affects public health officials — including the person leading the U.S. response to COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci?
I hang out on twitter primarily for the writer community. It can be a lot of fun, but it’s also a learning experience.
For one thing, I encounter quite a few newer writers who have come into “the business” with unrealistic expectations.
Unfortunately, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment.
I know. I’ve made many of these mistakes myself.
So I thought I’d list a few of the ways that writers inadvertently sabotage themselves. Hopefully this will help us avoid at least some of the bumps in the road that we encounter as we write, share, and publish our novels.
One, of course, is to just let yourself be carried (no pun intended) along by a story.
Now that I have a few years under my belt, I also really enjoy reading novels because of the clues they reveal about authors’ minds.
I’ve written, before, about the similarities between writing fiction and dreaming. (My longish essay on that topic, Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness, is available for Kindle here although, full confession, I haven’t looked at it for years. Probably should pull it up and rewrite it!)
I’ve also touched a bit on philosophical idealism, which I think is the most plausible metaphysical framework for describing reality. At some point I’ll post more about that topic (I have a post in draft that riffs off the works of Bernardo Kastrup, who has made the case to my satisfaction for idealism) but the short version is that we humans are participating in an interconnected dream or mental simulation. The seeming “solidity” of reality is a function of how it is generated; even though our interaction with reality is entirely subjective, none of us as individuals “owns” it or controls it. It is generated collectively and that mass attention to “what is real” stabilizes it.
What is fascinating about this, to me, is that “other people” are known to us via an interface between their minds and our own. If I encounter another person, talk to that person, form a relationship with that person, everything I experience is a mix of perception and projection — and probably a lot more projection than most of us realize.
1958 paperback edition of the hardcopy original… a bit worse for wear :)
Not really. In fact, the opposite is true.
Everything about me has already happened, somewhere, to someone else.
That’s just how it is, when you are one of 7+ billion and that doesn’t count the dead.
And yet, as I experience life and interpret the complex events that unfold around me — in my relationships, the accidents that befall me, the consequences of my decisions — it certainly feels unique and new. It feels like this subjective model of reality that my brain-mind builds and that my awareness occupies is “mine” and mine alone.
And so there is this paradox. My experience is unique; my experience is universal. I may not have an exact doppelganger, but if you break “me” down into granular enough pieces, they will each have exact replicas out there, somewhere.
If there’s no one beside you When your soul embarks Then I’ll follow you into the dark
Death Cab for Cutie
Last year was an awful year.
I know, I know: it was an awful year for many of us. Most of us, perhaps. And I am old to enough to know, in my bones, that the man on the screen spoke truth when he said that our personal problems don’t amount to a hill of beans.
They don’t. They really don’t.
But it was a year to me personally, of awful grief: first, my father taken down by Covid in April 2020, and then less than 10 months later, my mother — the woman he loved so much, that he cared for so well — their wedding photo was his Facebook avatar — followed him.
Which wasn’t entirely a surprise. They were married just shy of 60 years. She was already, increasingly, frail (the more frail of the two of them, by a lot, or so it seemed until he got sick); her mind — her memory — was failing her. She was very dependent on him. How it must have terrified her, when he was suddenly gone…
We know these things often happen when two people are married for 60 years and one of them passes.
What we can’t know, until it happens, is the manner of it — the manner of the passing — the suffering. The insanity of the living that surrounds the suffering.
In any case, her time came, and it was over.
She passed in January.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to post about it.
It was a year when so much that I hold dear has been lost. It hurt, terribly. It still hurts. I can’t imagine that it will ever stop hurting.
But I’m not alone, I know. Nothing that has happened to me — to our little family — has not happened already to countless other souls.
And Mom — I’m going to speak these words to you, Mom — as you were dying, I began asking myself. Now that so much of what I held dear is lost, what is left?
And I realized that what I remember from my earliest, earliest childhood is only six things.
Six, really simple things.
You. I remember you, Mom.
And five other things. Dad. Sigrid. Beautiful Oxford, New York. Nature. And God.
And what else I also remembered, finally, in these past few weeks, is that it was you, Mom, who brought me God.
And not as mere ritual. Not as just church on Sundays and grace before dinner and prayers at bedtime, but as a way of being in the world – a cultivated habit of constantly turning inward and talking to God, asking questions of God. Expecting of myself that which God would expect: to live authentically, to be unafraid of even painful decisions, to be unafraid of even suffering – because being right with God is always what is most important.
I turned 60 last March. Fifty nine years with Dad. Fifty nine years with you, Mom. And then, in the span of a few short months, you both passed through that one-way door, and were gone.
And every one of us, if we live long enough, will lose our parents, and know what it is like to lose our parents. It is a shock. A systemic shock.
In his book Hauntings, psychologist James Hollis observes that to lose your parents is to lose your home. That resonates with me. It’s why losing you and Dad felt like the ground was being yanked out from under me.
Losing our parents turns us into wandering souls. And then we have two choices. We either wander, lost, in what’s left of our old world, or we try to find our footing in a different world, where home isn’t a place and it isn’t a person; where families can be destroyed in an eyeblink — where home is defined by our relationship to the infinite itself — with something that can’t be touched or tasted or seen.
Losing Dad was a shock that brought me to my knees . Losing you, Mom, was a bitterly hard aftershock. But also, in a strange way, it cast me back to what you taught me.
There is nothing in this world that does not change. We have nothing in this world to hold onto.
Instead, we have to hold onto God, even when God doesn’t show His face, even when our faith, like the knight said in the Bergman film Seventh Seal, “is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.” Even when, as the Book itself says, everything we puny humans wish to have or be or fight for is really nothing more than striving after wind.
Mom, you taught me that it is the calling that matters, not the answer, because it’s the calling that is our true home.
I confess. I didn’t fully appreciate your gift — the enormity of your beautiful gift to me — until you were dying. Until I knew we were going to lose you.
I did have a chance, thank God, to tell you, before you left, that I finally realized this gift. I got to tell you how grateful I am to you. That the gift you gave me is the most precious thing I own.
The first few words are the hardest to write–and the most important to get right
So as you may know, I am currently living in a tent.
What I’m working on — when I am near an electrical plug :)
Most of the time. The routine my sweetheart and I have fallen into, since we sold our house and moved, is about five days in the tent, then two or three nights in a hotel or AirBnB.
I am loving it. My sleep quality is the best it’s been in years. Not sure if it’s the fresh air or the hours (we are basically sleeping sunrise to sunset) but I am feeling so rested when I wake up, almost every morning.
And being immersed in nature for hours and hours every day is pretty amazing as well.
That said, both of us work, so we need to connect to the Interwebs and recharge our devices every day. So rather than brew coffee in the wild, we’ve been driving into town every morning to one of several different coffee shops.
And as I’ve settled into this routine, in addition to my contract writing work, I’ve been editing Happily Flarey Ever — the third and probably last of my Marion Flarey books.
Specifically, I’ve been working on the first 3-5 pages.
Back twenty years ago or so, when I first settled in and got serious about writing novels, I came across a piece of advice for writers attempting commercial women’s fiction: make it glamorous.
Not the city
Cities. Wealth. Fantastically luxurious homes and fantastically powerful people (meaning rich men and gorgeous women).
The problem is that I’m a country girl.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t like cities. I actually do (although I liked them a lot more a few years ago than I do today). Some of my most treasured memories are from visits to cities: Chicago, London, San Francisco, and of course New York. I love their culture, the pace, the people, the food.
But I’m a country girl. I grew up surrounded by woods.
My brain is steeped in rural landscapes and the people who live there.
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash. This is nothing like the Weekes-Flarey dome. Or the San Antonio family’s dome. But I would definitely camp in it :)
One of the things that is the most fun about writing is when an idea just pops into your head, and the further into the novel you get, the more you realize how well it works.
With my Marion Flarey books, an impulsive idea I came to love was to make her parents’ home a geodesic dome.
Click the link to see the photos. It’s a gorgeous home. (A far cry from Marion’s parents’ rather messy dome with the leaky roof!)
The article also mentions some of the things I’d picked up over the years about the advantages of geodesic domes. They are energy efficient and relatively inexpensive to build.
So, to my point about choosing a dome for my Marion Flarey books:
Marion’s stepfather, Winchell Weekes, is tight with money (a character trait that becomes particular important in the second book, Fo Fum Flarey), so of course he would pick something cheap to build and cheap to heat.
Geodesic domes peaked in popularity in the late 70s or so. Winchell started building his dome around 1987, after the peak, but he’s eccentric enough that the timing makes sense. He’s the kind of guy who would still think domes were cool ten years after the trend had petered out :)
But from my perspective as a writer, the best thing is how I was able to incorporate the dome as an aspect of the novels’ setting. I can “shorthand” the Weekes-Flarey home by calling it “the dome,” and readers know exactly what I’m talking about. Because the interior has an open floor plan, it’s easy to “force” characters into conflict. They can’t easily escape from each other.
And because the dome is fairly unique as a dwelling place, I can create quick visuals to help draw readers into the story. I can talk about the challenges of placing furniture on a wall that isn’t flat — something Marion notes when she tours her tower apartment in Once Upon a Flarey Tale — or the way the shingles have darkened with age, and (hopefully!) readers start to form a picture in their minds of what the Weekes-Flarey home is like. Even the word “dome” is visual. You can’t read the word without picturing the general shape of the Weekes-Flarey house.
This experience has taught me something as a writer that I’ll carry into my future novels: make the buildings unique, in some way that is easy to visualize and easy to shorthand.
How about you? Have you ever set a story in a building that you could use in this way?
And have you ever seen a geodesic dome house — or been inside one? I was, many years ago when I was in my early twenties back in Chenango County… someday I’ll have to see if I can figure out where it is :)
