A few days ago, motion drew my eye to the window. A bird was hopping around in the butterfly bush. Nothing unusual about that, but this particular bird made me do a double-take:

What was going on? Had I been transported to the Island of Dr. Moreau? Was someone in the neighborhood doing weird experiments on the local bird life? Please tell me that is not really the head of a black finch transplanted onto the body of a cardinal . . . .

A Google search soon informed me I wasn’t the only one who had seen such a sight and wondered about it. The bird in question is definitely a cardinal, but it’s a bald cardinal, with no feathers on its head.

Opinions on what causes cardinals to lose all their head feathers are mixed, but most seem to involve mites and seasonal molting. It is agreed the condition generally takes place after the breeding season, that it isn’t permanent, and that the feathers grow back.

I have to say though, that a cardinal with a head as bald as a vulture’s is a rather disturbing sight.

This is my personal observation on the nutrition/weight-loss wars. To be upfront, I’ve never had much of a problem with weight and I’ve always been fairly physically active, but over time I got to be maybe ten to twelve pounds heavier than I needed to be. No big deal, and I wasn’t emotionally invested in losing the weight, but when I started working out at the gym it seemed logical to think that I would lose some weight— and I did. Maybe three pounds. That was it. And I work out hard. I run the treadmill. I’m the one breathing hard over increasingly heavy weight. Didn’t matter. Two years passed, and I didn’t lose another pound. However, I was only working out two, or at most, three days a week, and continuing to eat as I had for years, which was sort of middle-of-the-road okay.

Then I picked up a terrific book called Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D., which can be summarized thus: “Exercise hard one hour a day, six days a week and don’t eat crap.” So together my husband and I cut down on the crap and started working out more, and lo, I dropped a couple more pounds.

Shortly thereafter we embarked on a deliberately low-fat diet, while continuing the exercise regimen, and after a few months I stepped on a scale and laughed, knowing the damn thing was broken. But a second scale concurred exactly with the first. Those twelve pounds I wasn’t worried about losing? They had just gone away.

I credit it to the diet.** Our focus is on low-fat and high fiber/whole grain, and for myself, I think the food is great. I don’t feel like I’m suffering or deprived, but I will concede it’s challenging to eat out and still stick to the rules. Also, meal prep can take longer, but not all that much longer.

It works for me. Just thought I’d share.

** When I say “diet” I mean “what I typically eat” and definitely not “going on a diet.”

Holy crap!

A few weeks ago I picked up a new CD by The Black Keys. I was rather amused to open it and see that the back of the CD was utterly black. I held it up to the light. I looked around the inner rim. Nope. No writing. No song titles. Nothing. Okay, well I guess this is novel, post-modern, whatever.

So I finally popped it into the iMac this morning, imported the songs into iTunes, and popped it out again. To my *shock* the back of the CD was now gray, with all the usual sorts of black writing on it. Oh cool! I thought. First-use reveals the writing!

But as I sit here the CD, warmed up a bit in the drive, is cooling off and the impenetrable black finish is returning, flowing in slowly from the outer perimeter. I’m entertained.

Maybe this is an old trick to you more worldly types. Then again, you more worldly types don’t buy CDs anymore, do you?

Titles can just be seen behind the black finish.

I enjoyed and admired the movie Inception, and highly recommend it. I also learned a couple interesting things from it, from a writer’s perspective. (I don’t think there are any spoilers in the following, but if you’re like me and want to know as little as possible about a movie once you’ve decided to see it, than come back later . . .)

* The tech doesn’t have to be explained. The script successfully handles lots of tricky concepts, but says not one word (that I can recall) about how the architecture of shared dreams is communicated, and that’s okay. I don’t need to know. I just need the “What if”—what if we could do this. Coming from a hard science fiction background, this was enlightening.

* World building isn’t always necessary. So far as I could tell, the story was set in the present, in the world we live in, except that this dream technology exists. There’s no attempt to extrapolate what the world might look like ten or fifteen years hence when this technology is maturing, or to explore what other effects it might have on society. The story is tightly focused on itself and not at all interested in the world at large, which works great in this movie.

And a minor bonus lesson:

* Titles are tricky. I love one word titles, but “Inception” was hard to get my head around. Exception? Incision? Invictus? What the hell was it again?

If you can remember the title, go see it, and let me know what you think.

I thought that somewhere, somewhen, I had written about the brainstorming method that has served me well over the years, but after spending way too much time looking back over blogs and searching emails, I can’t find it, so I guess it’s safe to talk about it again.

The subject came to mind after reading the blog of a fellow Maui writer, Toby Neal:

At the time I listened to this lecture I’d begun Hawaiian Orchid and was about halfway through it. I was stalled, losing interest and faith I could finish it, and out of ideas. But I wrote a question on a 3X5 card: “Who’s the bad guy?”

It wasn’t two hours later when I had the answer! I ran to my computer and feverishly typed out the entire showdown scene. I’d never been so galvanized. But it was way too soon in the book, so I began writing down other questions, or even just the glimmer of an idea, like, “Gunfight Scene” which I thought would be cool to have but had no idea how to do, write, or work in. The ‘answers’ would appear, almost like magic.

I like the sound of this technique and I intend to try it out sometime soon. The method I’ve used is similar but it’s a step closer to traditional brainstorming. Very simply, it involves sitting down with a pen and paper and writing down questions about the story and the characters, and then trying to answer them. Absurd answers are fine, so long as they are answers. Oh yes–and the pen keeps moving. Try not to stop writing. This is where it becomes the same as traditional brainstorming. The big difference is that instead of writing anything that comes to mind, the mind should stay focused on story problems. If answers aren’t coming to the question just asked, try asking different questions!

This technique doesn’t always work, but when it does, it works really really well. I don’t think I could have written my early novels without it.

Oh–and despite often-heard opinions to the contrary, typing works just as well as handwriting for me–sometimes better.

Yesterday I finished up current changes on another chapter of The Wild, leaving only a couple of chapters to go before the end. But a quick survey of these last pages revealed something I hadn’t quite realized before–or had refused to notice. All the plot devices I used before, all the motivations, even the loose ends that get tied up in the climactic scenes–all of these have to be changed.

The characters will remain the same, as will the location and even the ultimate result, but the details of how it all happens–just about every part of that will need to change.

At first I was extremely annoyed. But then I drew up a list of all the plot elements that now need to be included and it turned out that there was a lot to work with. Next I went on a long walk. I don’t usually get ideas while walking or working in the garden and such, but sometimes it helps, and this was one of those times. Short scenes started coming to mind, events, motivations . . . I even called home a couple times to leave some ideas on the answering machine so I wouldn’t forget them. I’m feeling better about it now. I’m even starting to think I could have a much better ending this time around.

When I was ten years old and living in Waikiki, my school teacher showed us a film about a tsunami in Japan. I don’t remember any details–it might even have been animation–I just remember the lasting terror that film instilled in me. It felt personal, because my Dad was in the process of moving us to the north shore of Oahu, where we would be living in a beach house set back about 12 feet from the sand. It didn’t take much imagination to think that we might all be crushed and swept out to sea–and indeed there were some terrifying moments living in that house, when the surf turned gigantic, running through the yard and throwing spray on the windows–but thankfully the tsunami never showed up.

The danger is real though. Hawaii has suffered severe tsunami events in the past, and statistically we are way overdue for another.

So when a friend called at 6am on Saturday morning to make sure we knew a tsunami warning had been posted, it wasn’t exactly a shock. My husband already knew about it, but I had gone to sleep before the Chilean earthquake. Our own home wasn’t in any danger since we live way up the side of a mountain, but if Maui’s harbor was damaged there would soon be a shortage of supplies and gasoline on our very non-self-sufficient island, and if the power plant was damaged, who knows how long we would have to go without electricity?

So we joined the lines of people at the gas station, made a quick run to the grocery store (rice & spam are golden in our culture if a shortage is expected), and finished our circuit at the ATM machine.

Then it was home to watch the TV and Twitter coverage.

As you probably know, the actual event was anti-climatic, and for that we are very grateful. We know it won’t always be this way–and our hearts go out to the people of Chile, who have suffered so many terrible earthquakes in the past.

There are all sorts of ways–many of them sounding almost legitimate–to persuade yourself not to sit down and spend time actually writing. For example, yesterday I was up early as usual. I had finished my compulsive reading on the Internet and, feeling virtuous, I booted up the laptop fully intending to dive right into the novel. But then it occurred to me that my husband would show up for coffee and breakfast at any moment and then I would be distracted . . . so there was really no point in getting started on writing just yet. I figured I might as well spend the next half hour working on one of the websites . . . and then of course that half-hour turned into the entire day and I never did open up the writing file.

So technique #1: Let yourself be distracted by legitimate, alternate work!

Okay, okay, winter in Hawaii isn’t much compared to most of the mainland, but where we live at 3400’ it gets cool enough that we have a distinct winter that most of the garden recognizes . . . but so far as the plants are concerned winter doesn’t last long.

Years ago we were given a handful of freesia bulbs. Over time they’ve naturalized and multiplied, but they persist in surprising me every year with their sudden appearance in February – and sometimes earlier. These are just the early bloomers. There will be a lot more to come.

My work time lately has been divided between three major projects, the most neglected being the novel. But in the past few days I’ve returned to working on it and have managed some decent progress. Today’s efforts resulted in only a bit of forward momentum because I needed to backtrack (yet again) and lay in some foreshadowing and explanation of a smallish plot point. Hopefully the incident will now be clear to the reader.

It’s really a challenge sometimes to figure out what the reader knows at any given point, as compared to what the writer knows. I’ve got so much extra plot knowledge rattling around inside my head that I have to make an effort to remember that the reader is naturally going to be less informed and things have to be explained on occasion, and clarified. But today’s effort has produced good results, and once again I am poised to move onward.