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Prose Was (Almost) Dognapped!

Prose was (almost) dognapped!

Whether they wanted her for themselves or to sell into slavery, I don’t know. I don’t even know for sure that my suspicions are correct. But I feel strongly that they are.

We were on our way home. My mom, aunt, cousin, myself, and Prose. Prose was in my lap, checking out the train for victims to ambush with her cute eyeroll and magnificient tailwag. The seats across the aisle from us were empty except for one young woman. Her multi-colored hair and multiple piercings didn’t matter to Prose or to me. I was hardly noticing as she and Prose began to make squeaky noises back and forth.
Prose is always ready to get into the carrier for another adventure with my mom.

Prose is unusual in Europe. They have not bred poodles down this small over here, and many people have told me that they’ve never seen one like her. So I wasn’t surprised when the young woman asked where she came from, where we were from, etc. I was a little taken aback when she asked how much she cost—never had that question before. She got up from her seat and took Prose off my lap, took her back to her seat. The train was moving, so I wasn’t seriously alarmed, but something began to feel off to me. This woman was too intense. She was asking too many questions. It was like she was writing Prose’s resume.

Before the next stop, I got Prose back and put her in her carrier, where she’s happy to ride if the end is left open. The young woman got up and went to the middle of the car, where she had a long, intense conversation with an older man. She apparently knew him but they weren’t traveling together despite there being three empty seats around her. My cousin observed her and leaned forward. “We’d better watch our dog.” I nodded.


Prose thinks everyone took the train because she did.

The girl came back to her seat and made several telephone calls on her cell phone, talking low. Then she went to stand between the cars, where she had a serious conversation with yet another older man that she knew but was not traveling with. It was beginning to feel like a ring.

Not that I think they were focusing on dogs. I think they were focusing on tourists and whatever they might be able to lift. I zipped Prose into her carrier and slipped the shoulder strap over my head.


Train workers pause for Prose. 

I admit that I haven’t worried much about Prose being stolen. I worry more about our being attacked by big dogs on the loose when she’s out on her leash. Often, when my mom has the walker, we sit Prose in her carrier in the basket on the walker and my mom toodles along. At this moment on the train, I saw how easily anyone could grab the carrier and dash away, immediately lost in the crowd. And there would be nothing any of us could do about it.

Imagining this scenerio gave me cold chills, and I realized that we needed to be cautious all the way home because these people could follow us. Then the girl asked me if she could use my cell phone to call her mother. Again, this has never happened to me in eight months of riding the train with strangers. Now, she’s been talking half the time on this phone, but she explains that she is out of minutes.

I was not so worried about losing the phone as I was that she’d install some sort of tracking app or get my number and be able to do something nefarious with it.  I mumbled some incomprehensible English about why I didn’t think my phone would work for her.  Shortly, she made a call on her own phone.


It’s important not to be so paranoid that I miss moments like this.

At this point, we four old ladies put our heads together and planned a course of action for getting all our luggage off the train without turning loose of Prose or turning our backs on anything.

Of course, it was all a tempest in a teapot. We exited the train with all our belongings intact and never saw the girl or her two shadowy companions again.

There’s a lot to unpack here:
1. Listen to your instincts. Don’t be talking nonstop. You want to hear that instinct when it whispers. That’s how tourists get robbed. Not paying attention.
2. Be aware and cautious but don’t let fear paralyze you and keep you from living your life on your own terms.
3. If you read to this point you are living proof that . . . dog stories are popular. If you have one to write, do it.
4. Stories are everywhere. I could write a whole novel right now about a dognapping. Even though, in fact, the whole thing might have been my imagination.

Finding our stories  . . .  and ourselves.

Alison

The Mind of a Storyteller

My cousin Janice is a surgical nurse. She has worked very hard all her life and still has six years to go before retirement. Until last year, she had never been out of the U.S. She’s a saver—one of the most frugal people I know, sensible in every way. Not what you would call a dreamer.

Several years ago, Janice worked a jigsaw puzzle. The picture was a little village on a bluff above the ocean. Pastel houses clinging to the sides of a steep ravine that ended in a tiny, turquoise harbour surrounded by a rocky coast. The caption read: Cinque Terre, Italy.


The Cinque Terre coast is impressive even without the villages.

Janice wrote to me a few months ago to say that she was bringing her mom to visit my mom. She sent me a list of places she was interested in visiting, and one was Cinque Terre. She had not forgotten it.

I didn’t know about the jigsaw puzzle, but I checked into the area on the Mediterranean coast. Because they would be flying out of Pisa, it made sense to put Cinque Terre as the last stop on our itinerary.

They landed, and we hit the ground running (mostly to keep up with my mom, who can flat book it on her walker). The Leaning Tower, Venice, Naples, the Isle of Capri, Pompeii, even three days in Switzerland. And finally, Cinque Terre.

This is the actual puzzle.

Cinque means “five” in Italian. Five fishing villages lined up the rocky coast. I knew most of them are steep and not handicapped friendly, so I decided that my mom and I would just take a boat ride and see them from afar. Janice and her mom set off to explore by themselves. By now, Janice had told me about the puzzle and even shown me a picture of it. I hoped she would get to see that same view.

She did. But more than that, she spent an afternoon in Riomaggiore, exploring its tiny backstreets, having a pizza with her mom in a little trattoria. She entered into the landscape she had studied so minutely while working the jigsaw puzzle. She told me it gave her chills, that it was the perfect ending to their trip.

This is what she will remember long after the cathedrals and the walled, medieval villages and even the amazing food have faded into one blur.


The puzzle town in real life. Riomaggiore. 

This is a common experience for writers. For we begin with imagination. Sometimes we do the research first, but more often we wait to see if this story idea is going to come alive before we commit to the expense of a trip. I wrote a whole novel set in Strasbourg before I ever saw its half-timbered houses, though I could describe the giant beams held together with wooden pegs, the walls insulated with clay and chopped straw, each one whitewashed and brightened with folk art symbols.

Several writers have told me that when they finally stood before the piece of art, the monastery, the concentration camp around which their story was created, they cried.

You may be a surgical nurse or anything else. But to live in the imagination is to think like a storyteller.


These streets just say, “Wander . . . wander . . .”

To be curious. To embrace mystery. Even to go in search of it, whether it’s across the ocean or around the corner. To look beyond the daily commute and the scrubs in the laundry into a strange little village in a jigsaw puzzle and to imagine what might be down that alley, around that corner, what sights and smells are common to the people who live there and what are their worries and joys and fears.

“Only” the world of imagination, but it is also the beginning of adventure, of reflection, of connection. Whatever your life’s journey, a jigsaw puzzle may turn out to lead to the highlight of your trip.

Finding our stories . . . and ourselves.
–Alison

We Are All Writers

I think we need to pay more attention. As a writer, I should be all about seeing connections, deeper meanings, reflections, allusions. And yet, how often do all of us keep our antennae retracted like a snail half out of its shell?

I have a new mantra:

This is tourist season in one of the most touristy parts of the world. In the winter, in Tuscany, you can go on twenty train rides and not hear any English. In the summer, half the crowded train is American. Even if they don’t talk, I know them by their Vera Bradley and Saks bags.

Most of these people are showing signs of sensory overload. “Americans think we’re such a small country,” my friend who works at the hotel said, her tone a little insulted. “They think they can do Florence and Pisa in the same day.”

I stood up for us. I said it was not easy to get here from the U.S. and that many people consider this the trip of a lifetime. Naturally they want to see all they can.

I believe that’s why we take hundreds of pictures. At some level, we sense that we need to reflect on this moment, to see more deeply into this place, this people, this history, but we don’t have time. So we make the pictures and videos, hoping we will someday will have time.

But how long has it been since you sat down with your vacation pictures and really gave yourself the opportunity to reconnect with that experience, reliving the scents and the weather and the vibe of the place. Never? I spent a small fortune having all my travel videos converted and uploaded to a private YouTube channel so I could watch them over here. Ask me how many I’ve watched.

Most days, my adventures in Tuscany consist of deciphering food labels and fighting mosquitoes. But when anyone visits, I become a tourist, and I look forward to those intervals just as much as if I were making an overnight flight. Maybe more, because I’m not the one making the overnight flight.

Right now, I’m in tourist mode for two weeks with two of my favorite people in the world, my cousin and aunt. My mom and I have looked forward to this visit for months. Janice has never been to Italy, so we’re doing a sweep, though I cut her list in half and vetoed Rome and anything south. For that, she’ll have to come back next year.

Even so, there are many things that I love and want to show her and many things I haven’t seen myself that I want to see with her. So, I guess we’ll make a ton of pictures.

But if half the adventure is in the reflection, then what does it really mean to reflect? Here’s a partial list:

  • To be aware, and amused by, the small, quirky things all around us (such as that guy in medieval dress with the motorcycle tattoo) for we are an eccentric, paradoxical species.
  • To watch how people react (and to learn from both good and bad examples).
  • To have our eyes open to beauty and creativity, even in the poppies in the train tracks or the street art on the sides of abandoned buildings.
  • To understand that everyone has burdens and to cultivate an attitude of patience and compassion, whether it’s the mailman who always leaves your mailbox half open or the French ticket agent who snarled at you because you bought your train tickets in Italy.
  • To look at the deeper meaning of simple things, how a jar of new peach jam or a handmade gelato, speaks of bounty, of tradition, of artistry, of love.
  • To recognize that we are all writers. We are crafting the narrative of our life. We are all painters. We are painting our own portraits as surely as Dorian Gray did. Everyday, we have an opportunity to make our story more thoughtful, more meaningful. Everyday, we can make our portraits wiser and more gentle.

The truth is that we can practice these thought patterns anywhere, even at home—especially at home. Because to a reflective person, life is the adventure.

So whether you have a vacation or a staycation, make it yours in a deeper way—own it— through reflecting on it.

Alison

Just One Aggravation After Another

Did you ever lose your writing or other work because you didn’t save it, your computer crashed, or for no reason that you can see? That’s not a real problem. We know this. Cancer is a real problem. Your house sliding down a hill is a real problem.

And yet, losing those pages feels TRAGIC.

Lately, I’ve been hit with a bunch of–I’m not going to call these problems. Let’s call them “aggravations.” Aggravations that feel a lot like lost pages.

I got robbed in Florence. Very akin to losing pages in that, you know, I simply wasn’t careful enough. I KNEW better. But someone took my cell phone and my wallet, with our passports, my credit and bank cards, and even Prose’s passport! A LOT of hassle, the expense of replacing the phone and documents, and the creepy feeling that someone of that caliber knows where I live.

Then, through some sort of the-computer-program-knows-more-than-you-do weirdness, we lost something very precious to me. Your name. Hundreds of people on the mailing lists for my newsletter and the Village Writing School newsletter were mysteriously unsubscribed. I know I’m not always brilliant, but I can’t believe half my list unsubscribed at the same moment.

We worked with the mail program to discover that it was the result of an of automatic thing ran by Yahoo/AOL and it only affected newsletters coming from a .mac or .me address. It wasn’t just us. There’s lots of discussion on the web about it. But I feel like a peasant whose village is burned because the nobleman on one hill decides to attack the nobleman on the other hill.

Then my own government decided they had misfigured my social security, and I owe them money out of the blue. Aggravations. I’m telling you, they are piling up. It’s enough to get a girl down.

I feel like a deer in headlights or that squirrel crossing the road. Which way do I go, what problem do I work on next, and how do I do it? Here are three suggestions from my own snarly mess for when you find yourself in one and when aggravations feel like tragedies.

1. Roll up your sleeves and slog into the swamp. When you find yourself discouraged and unmotivated, sometimes you just have to go on true grit alone. We are so insecure about our writing that obstacles can feel like a sign from God. Oh, maybe losing those pages is a sign I shouldn’t even be writing. Or that that story was not any good. This is not clear thinking. Never make a decision when you’re beset by aggravations. It’s too easy to quit during times of stress.

2. Sometimes, you have to go back to your first moments of vision to remind yourself of WHY you wanted to do the thing that’s been derailed. I’ve had to do this lately. To focus on the key mission of the Village Writing School, which is that everything we are about is to help you tell your story. To help us find our stories and in that journey to find ourselves, to better know ourselves and our creative purpose. That’s my personal goal and my goal for everyone who has a story to tell.

3. Look for another creative approach. Sometimes when I lose a chapter, rather than trying to recreate what I lost, I just pretend I’ve never written it and I’m starting with a clean page. Maybe I write it anew by setting up a different scene or starting in a different place.

Instead of just digging out from under, you can use the derailment to reconsider your original vision and your approach.

That’s what we’re going to do with the newsletter. I think we all get too much mail. I think we need to get less and better mail. So we’ve decided to send out the same newsletter to my followers and the Village Writing School followers. It will contain my message, the school’s upcoming events, and a useful writing tip from one of our teachers. That’s it. Ok, maybe a picture of Prose.

I can’t express my gratitude to those of you who have followed my journey and written to comment or encourage me. You are so precious, which is why this email thing has me so bummed. But we will build again, better. We will write that chapter we lost, better. We will set up better automatic saves or whatever we need to do to not lose pages. And I will be even more vigilant in crowds of pickpockets.

We will not give these things power over us. We will call them what they are. Aggravations.
–Alison

I Took the Book

Walking home yesterday after buying a toilet plunger for my glamorous Tuscan life, I engaged in one of my favorite pastimes—asking myself irrelevant questions. Suppose I could fall in love with a man who was, say, perfect?

Let’s see. He’s taller than me, which really narrows the field, but, hey, it’s a fantasy. He’s just my age, a little rugged, with a great head of hair. Probably Scots, so he can sound like Sean Connery. He will adore me—literally.

Oh no, I said to my fantasy. Better than fifty percent odds he’ll die before me. No thanks.

No, no, said my fantasy. He’ll outlive you. And you’ll have thirty great years of good health to enjoy the world together. And did I mention he’ll adore you?

But then, the question: What if I could choose between Mr. Scots Great-Head-of-Hair and writing a beautiful book that lived up to my vision for it and—it’s a fantasy—was important enough to win a respectable award?

Girls, I took the book. Not only that, I didn’t even have to ponder. I instantly took the book.

Now, I’m not really sure how sane this is, but I tell this story to make a point.

You should want it. And you should want it because you love it.

Sure, there are days when your story is just a snarly mess. But overall, the time I spend writing is the best time of my life. And the rush, when it comes together, just clicks the whole universe into place in one exquisite moment.

For the second time this month, I told someone, “I’m not here to convince you to be a writer. The Village Writing School exists to help people who want to tell their stories. It’s not about proselytizing for the Church of Writers. There are enough of us already.”

I know that a lot of us have a story we feel we should tell. Or we were once told we were good writers, and that feels like a sign that we should write. Or we are creative people looking for a creative outlet. So we slog forth, and we get some satisfaction from it from time to time, but it’s the satisfaction that comes from doing something we think we should.

Give yourself a break. Set yourself free. There are many people walking around in the world who are not writers, and they are perfectly happy. You could be one of them.

But, if you would trade Mr. Scots Great-Head-of-Hair for your own beautiful book, then you’ve already been bitten by the writing vampire. Give in. The undead have their own pleasures.

And if you know a Mr. Scots Great-Head-of-Hair, you can give him my number. But just make sure he understands, I’m a writer first.

******

Saturday, May 26, I’ll be teaching my online workshop, Thirteen Ways to Make Your Characters Come Alive. The time is Noon, Central, but the class is recorded so you can watch it later. More info and to register HERE.

Character is the most important element of your story. Make sure yours are unforgettable.

–Alison

I’m Going to Make a Fool of Myself

I’m trying to grow as a writer. And I fear I’m just going to make a fool of myself.

Don’t believe me? Watch this one-minute video of my trying to psyche myself up before an interview that I’m about to do with a novelist:

It’s terrible, right? But I keep reminding myself: we takes risks because that’s how we grow. As writers. As people. So I’m pushing myself way out of my comfort zone but for good reasons:

  • To continue to become a better writer.
  • To connect with other writers, editors, and agents to learn from them.
  • To find new ways to teach writers at the Village Writing School.

At the Village Writing School, my mission is to help other people learn to tell their stories because, hey, your story may be way more important than mine. It may inspire more compassion, more true empathy, more healing. So I want to help you tell it.

Which brings me back to that embarrassing video from above.

I have learned so many skills because of my attempts to grow as a writer and ensure that the Village Writing School succeeds. This includes: graphics, social media, newsletters, organizing events, speaking in public, baring my soul in a newspaper column, and now, online interviews.

Am I good at any of those things? No, I’m only passable. But each of these things has helped me grow.

The interviews I’m conducting are a part of a new online conference I have been putting together called the Historical Fiction Online Summit. I couldn’t be more excited about presenting this event at such an affordable price, but it continues to push me far outside my comfort zone.

I try to think of risk-taking as a package. Yes, I’ve fallen flat and yes, I’ve embarrassed myself. But overall, being able to overcome my fear has been worth it.

If there is something that you think you should do to build your platform or to write the story that burns in you, you should do it. Even if it scares you. It gets easier.

Would you rather be a real person, however flawed, doing real things, or a perfectionist, sitting on your sofa, dreaming of doing things perfectly but never actually doing them?

Challenge=risk=growth=satisfaction.

– Alison