Imaginary Writing Process

The talented Jackson Pearce is responsible for this one. I saw it on YouTube (which I am informed by my horrified 14-year-old can never, under any circumstances, be abbreviated as U-Tube, never mind how fast and free modern youth play with other spellings) and felt that it was too good not to be shared with many, many people. So here it is, and if you have not tried to publish a book, stand back in awe at how easy -- and fun -- it is. Go on and give it a try!



Now I'm going back to sorting out dictionaries. Sigh.

And if on the off chance you get a book published right away, please don't ask me to buy it. (Hey, you never know -- it might just happen. After all, I've just learned to embed a U-Tube -- sorry, YouTube -- video.)

Slinging Hash

I am up to my neck in books. I've got books on psycholinguistics, statistics (non-parametric and differential), grammar (standard and transformational), style, semantics, language learning, and God-knows-what-else. Including dictionaries and textbooks and cook books and comic books and silly joke books and crossword puzzle books and coffee table books and those dumb parody books you give people for Christmas when you can't think of anything else to give them. I almost wonder why I'm trying to write books, I've got so many.

I got so tired of packing books that I went outside into my garden and saw that in the past busy, rainy week, a whole slew of weeds has sprung up. Grass has taken root in places it has no business being, creeping buttercup has colonized half of my garden beds, and montbretia is making a triumphant comeback everywhere. This depressed me so much I took a stroll down the block. And met Stanley, our neighbor, a bed-and-breakfast proprietor who runs the equivalent of a small restaurant in his house.

Stanley is one of those neighbors you only get once in a lifetime. He will loan you anything and never need to borrow a thing in return. He is a marvelous cook who has run his own restaurant in the past; at least three times a month, my daughter, who works for Stanley and his equally lovely wife, brings home leftover vol au vents, sweet and sour fish, venison stew, pork-fried rice, barbeque spare ribs, mango and ginger cheesecake, and lemon grass shrimp. Nothing she brings home from Stanley's ever lasts the night in our fridge.

"You're still okay about Saturday morning, right?" Stanley asked me now, and I felt a slow burn spread over my cheeks. I had completely forgotten. In a heady moment after a bang-up meal prepared by Stanley a few months ago, I had agreed to cover for him one Saturday morning in August.

I was up to my knees in books and weeds and moving misery, yet I had to cook breakfast for a bunch of strangers. There are always at least five cars out in front of Stanley's house, so I knew there might be as many as ten people, maybe more. Stanley could cook for fifty people, in the dark with his hands tied behind his back and never break a sweat, but not me. I've cooked for dozens before, but it has been a frantic, hellish business. Short-order cooking, like waiting on tables, is vastly underrated -- especially when you do it right.

"You bet," I said. "I've got it on my calendar." Which was not a lie: I did. The problem is, the calendar is behind a wall of books. It's been hidden for the past week, and I haven't looked at it.

"Good," said Stanley, looking considerably relieved. "We've got fifteen people in on Saturday."

I did it. Six bowls of oatmeal, eight fried eggs, twelve strips of grilled bacon, ten sausages, sixteen roasted tomato halves, thirty-six fried mushrooms, twelve tatty scones, six disgusting grilled black puddings (I almost gagged just touching them), one broiled kipper, four poached eggs (one with broken yolk), and one problematic boiled egg later, but ladies and gentlemen, I am still breathing.

But I've still got a lot of books to pack.

Full-time Jack Of All Trades

My first job was when I was twelve. I deseeded chili peppers, unloaded sterilized soil from a huge oven, and picked peppers and avocados. I worked under my father's supervision, and after one day of this I began to see why he always came home tired. Whoever knew that simply breathing in the air around cut-up peppers would make your eyes tear up and your nose run? That soil could weigh so much or your neck and shoulders would ache after only twenty minutes of picking avocados? There is a challenge in picking avocados. The trees grow to a great height, so you have to wear a pith helmet to protect your head against falling fruit. You also wear a great bag around your waist and carry a telescoping aluminum picking pole with a sharp blade at the tip. When the bag is full, it pulls on your shoulders and they start to ache. Your neck hurts from being bent back, and you have to squint to prevent debris from falling into your eyes. And yet picking avocados is far easier than picking peppers, which grow on small plants low to the ground; you aren't constantly stooping, squatting, then standing up again, but more importantly, you can work in shade. I have seen migrant workers bent over in fields, moving from pepper plant to pepper plant picking fruit under the full blast of the sun. My mind boggles when I consider that there are people who do this for hours a day, week after week, to feed their families. This is hellish work.

My second job was babysitting. I worked in a small day-care nursery that catered to working mothers and students at our local university. I worked twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday, walking two miles from high school to my job. There were eight kids, from ages two through five, and I loved this job. I played with the kids, I sang songs with them, wiped their noses and made them snacks and told them stories. I also learned how to get bubble gum out of hair, a skill I have since put to good use. (Peanut butter rubbed in, in case you're wondering.)

My third and fourth jobs were as a file clerk and clerk typist for insurance companies in Miami, Florida. Filing is deadly boring and I lasted only a short time; they didn't like my attitude. By the time I got hired for my fifth job, I had learned to be more punctual and not to ask questions that people could not answer. I worked as a clerk typist at a large land development company, also in Miami. Ninety nine percent of the management were gay or bisexual, and the other workers were a lot of fun. This is the first job I proudly listed on my resume.

I have almost lost track of the jobs I did after this one. I worked as a dictaphone transcriber, a receptionist, a medical transcriber, a waitress, a cleaner, a babysitter, a unit clerk in a hospital. I painted signs and tutored children in reading and cleaned people's houses and typed out letters, dissertations and surgical operations. I filled orders, bused tables, washed dishes and waited on people, and somehow, I managed to put myself through college and graduate school, but it took ages. Time was money for me, and the work I did to pay my way through taught me a lot. Mainly it taught me that learning to do any job well was a challenge. And it taught me that I didn't want to end up filing or typing for a living.

Since graduating from university, I have worked as a medical secretary, waitress and portrait artist (San Francisco and New York City), potter and dish-washer (Amsterdam and s'Hertogenbosch), translator (Japanese to English), teacher of English and Japanese (California, Japan, The Netherlands, and Wales), and waitress, legal secretary and inn-keeper (Scotland). And of course, I've been a mother too. Am I a jack of all trades? Absolutely. And I've had a blast. Believe me, there are worse things to do with your life. I don't necessarily recommend this way of life, but I'm certainly not knocking it either.

My main line of work has been as a teacher in Japan, where I worked for seventeen years. Then I started doing rewriting, proofreading and translations of short articles and educational materials, all of which I loved. My husband and I got caught up in the yen trap: we earned good salaries, but we were stuck in Japan. Now being stuck in the Japan is not a bad thing per se, but we began to feel that our options were somewhat limited. We also began to worry that our kids, who were as fluent in Japanese as English, were missing out when it came to reading and writing their parents' language. So we moved to the U.K. and started a business.

The business prospered and our kids did well in school; we were miserable. So we sold up, and my husband retrained for a job that no one would hire him to do. Everyone told him he was over-qualified and advised him to dumb down his C.V. My husband is no slouch: in addition to teaching and writing, he has driven a tractor and picked grapes and hauled strawberries to the market. And though he has not been able to work in his chosen field -- English teaching qualifications are not recognized in Scotland -- he has managed to feed his family. My past work experience came in handy too: since settling here I have waited on tables and cleaned rooms and babysat for children. I have typed and filed too, but we live in a stunningly beautiful area and a lot of people have come here for quality of life reasons. Whenever a halfway decent secretarial job comes up, it is immediately snapped up by someone more secretarially qualified -- and more British. I have looked long and hard for a full-time job doing anything more challenging than waiting on tables or wrapping cheese, but I have not found one.

Then something utterly amazing happened: I sent some stories off to a writing competition and won first prize. Shortly after this, I entered a short story competition and won another prize. Someone paid me for another story, then a poem, then an essay. Admittedly, they all paid peanuts, but even a pittance that you earn through writing is huge. One thing led to another, and through writing -- and competing -- I met another writer, Kim Ayres, who encouraged me to start a blog. Until meeting Kim, I didn't even know what a blog was.

Even before that first wholly unexpected win, I was hooked on writing, but after this I began writing non-stop. If I'm ever properly published, I look forward to telling the world I became a writer because I could not make it as a legal secretary.

Now something else amazing has happened: our eldest daughter has passed her higher finals with flying colors and she has been accepted at the university of her choice. Upon learning this, my husband applied to over a dozen overseas teaching posts. Just last week, he and I were tentatively offered teaching posts in a land far away which I will not divulge as I do not want to tempt fate. So now we're packing up and moving away, and he'll take the high road and I'll take the low road, but we're all leaving Scotland together -- even our eldest, who claims this will be a kind of gap year for her. And although I am still bristling with stories, this is why I may not be able to post for some time.

It will be strange to be teaching full-time again, and there will be a lot of challenges getting used to living in yet another country. But I look forward to it too; waiting on tables and typing up depositions is only exciting for the first couple of weeks.

And whatever happens, I'll still be your Resident Alien.

Getting The Joke

My good husband has taken to watching comedy skits on YouTube. He comes home exhausted after a long hard day at work and he and our youngest sit together at the computer and laugh until the tears run from their eyes. Sometimes I even join them.

It has taken me some time, but I get British comedy skits now. At first, I was completely flummoxed by a large number of them, but now I can watch them and laugh almost as much as my husband. In fact, if any uninitiated Americans happen to watch them with us, I can even interpret.

The sad thing is that a lot of the American stuff confuses me no end now. There are cultural references that elude me -- and my husband. "Who's that?" he'll ask, or "What does that mean?" and I cannot answer. The other day, I was thrilled to be able to explain who Tammy Wynette was. He had no idea; the fact that she co-wrote and sang Stand by Your Man made everything clear.

Of course it's hardly news that humor is culturally bound, but one thing I've come to see is that a joke that is shared is far funnier. This must be why they always had canned laughter on the comedies of my youth. I always assumed that this was to prompt the audience to laugh, but now I see it was there because laughter needs to be shared. There is something rather sobering about being the only one who is laughing your head off. When everyone else laughs with you, the joke is better and the whole experience is infinitely richer.

Before I went to Japan for the first time, I went to see the movie Love at First Bite in a Manhattan cinema. There is a scene in which the hero, a Jewish psychiatrist, brandishes a Star of David at a vampire. In New York, this brought the house down, but when I happened to see the same movie about eight months later in Tokyo, you could have heard a pin drop. And suddenly it just wasn't as funny.

Or take the British skit that features a large group of British sub-Continentals who go to an English restaurant and eagerly study the menu. One of them insists that she cannot bear English food; that she must have something spicy. Her friend urges her to at least try something a little mild -- why go to eat English cuisine if you do not at least try? The skit ends with one of the young men bragging that he can take the very mildest dish of all. He gets a bit too exuberant and begins to dance on the tables and behave loutishly. The first time I saw this, I was fresh off the boat and it sailed right over my head. The second time I saw it -- after years in the U.K. -- I could hardly stay in my seat. The fact that everyone else around me thought it was hilarious made it all the funnier.

When you cannot understand the humor because of linguistic and cultural limitations, you are doubly cursed. Once at a friend's house, we played a silly party game in which a series of questions with obvious answers are read out. Everyone knows, of course, that the obvious answers cannot possibly be the right ones: the response to What does a dog do on three legs, a man do on two, and a woman do sitting down? will absolutely have nothing to do with peeing. Everyone knows this, of course, except any hapless non-native English speakers who are present. We'd all had a laugh over the answer (shaking hands) and moved on to the next question when one of the guests, a boy from France, suddenly leapt to his feet, after long deliberation, and shouted "Pissing!" This response made us laugh far harder than the joke itself, and for the life of us, we could not explain to him why it was so funny.

I don't think I could count the times this happened to me in Japan. When all around me, people were laughing themselves silly and I just sat there, aching to understand the joke, but not getting it at all. There is nothing sadder than not getting the joke when everybody else does. I remembered the boy from France and his triumphant "Pissing!" and felt great sympathy. Even if you crack the linguistic code, you've still got the cultural hurdle left to negotiate, and chances are that if you manage both of these against all odds, you'll be too tired to get the joke.

But boy, when you do, it's heady stuff. "What beer makes you smarter?" a beginning EFL student asked me once. I pretended not to know the answer. "Budweiser!" she screamed, and the rest of the class got quiet. Brows were furrowed. Puzzled looks were exchanged and lips silently mouthed the words. All of a sudden there were explosions of laughter as student after student got the joke. I did my best to laugh along with them.

Made For Music

Before we moved into our house, the landlady, who lived next door, told us that her daughter Mizuho was a concert pianist.

"She lives in Vienna," the landlord added. "She's been studying there for twelve years."

"It hasn't been easy for her," his wife put in. "People don't like living next door to a music student; it's too noisy."

"She's been kicked out of her last two flats," the landlord said. "She moves in and no sooner has she got the place all fixed up but they want her out."

"It doesn't help that she's a foreigner," they sighed. "So we can imagine how hard it must have been for you, trying to find a house to rent."

In fact, it had been hellish for us to find a place to live in the suburbs of Tokyo, and our landlady's sympathy was appreciated. Few landlords wanted to rent to a foreign couple with a ten-month-old baby, especially when one of them did not speak much Japanese. The house we were moving into had crumbling plaster and rattly windows. The roof was sound and there was a little patch of garden out in front -- a huge rarity in the Tokyo area -- but it was old and dilapidated. In short, it was nearly perfect for a couple with a soon-to-be toddler.

The house was unfurnished except for a grand piano in our front room which almost entirely filled the space. This room had fake wood paneling and a cracking linoleum floor. With its smooth dark wood polished to a high gloss, the piano looked as out of place as a jewel on a dung heap.

"It's Mizuho's," our landlady told us. "We'll be moving it into our new house, but we've had to hire a company with a crane."

A week later, the piano movers wrapped the piano in a blanket, took our sliding glass windows out of their frames and managed to lever the piano out. We shielded our eyes from the sun, watching its slow progress through the air. There was a lot of salty language as they painstakingly maneuvered it into the upstairs window of the house next door.

For five long years, the piano sat silent. Then one day, our landlady came over, her face lit up with happiness. "Our daughter is coming home this weekend!" she informed us. A week later, she proudly introduced me to Mizuho.

"Will you be playing the piano?" I asked eagerly.

"Yes, but I'll try not to make too much noise," Mizuho assured me, creasing her brow.

"Make all the noise you want!" I told her. "We love piano music!"

For the next four years, we could hear her playing from early morning until around ten at night. She was a fantastic piano player and we never once tired of listening to her, but we learned that we could not tell her this. Just mentioning her playing made her nervous. "I hope it wasn't too loud!" she would say anxiously. Clearly, her experiences in Vienna had made a dint in her confidence.

"It wasn't loud at all -- it was heavenly! You have amazing talent!"

"Really, if it is too loud, you must complain. My father has put in sound insulation, but I can play at different hours if it bothers you."

We finally had to give up complimenting her.

Lying on our futons, my husband and I would smile and sigh as a ripple of chords came wafting across. It made us think of birds singing, water splashing, a sunlit morning. "Debussy, isn't it?" one of us would ask the other.

"I think so. What was that thing she was playing earlier?"

"Tchaikovsky?"

"I thought it was Mozart."

"Maybe it was."

"What was that piece you were playing first thing this morning?" I once made the mistake of asking Mizuho.

She bit her lower lip and clasped her hands. "I'm so sorry! Was it too loud?"

No amount of reassuring could persuade her that it was not.

In fact, it was never too loud. Her music would soothe my headaches. It lulled our kids to sleep. We felt so grateful that we could retire every night to a virtual piano concert. When our eldest was six, Mizuho offered to give her piano lessons in return for English lessons from me. I eagerly accepted, and we got the better deal.

Clearly, Mizuho was a dedicated musician -- almost obsessively so. I marveled that our landlady, who did not seem pushy or academically minded and was by her own admission no musician herself -- should have a girl for whom music was everything. I pictured Mizuho as a small child, forced to practice hours a day. Our daughter had to be pushed; what a lot of patience our landlady must have had!

"I don't know how you did it," I told her once, after we'd pestered our eldest to do her twenty minutes of practice. "But whatever you did, it really worked!"

She stared at me. "I didn't do anything. In fact, I begged her to stop practicing. I had to bribe her to go outside and play with her friends." She sighed. "If I hadn't interfered, she would never have left the piano at all."

That night Mizuho played again. I think it was Vivaldi.

Reading Into It

When our eldest was four years old, we ran into the parents of another foreign child who attended nursery school in a neighboring town. This little girl, also four, was the apple of her parents' eye and, while not necessarily smarter or more accomplished than other children of her age, was widely touted by her proud parents as the brightest infant in Japan. As you can imagine, we got a little tired of hearing about it. Marie could tie her shoes weeks before anyone in her class could. Her hand-eye coordination was a marvel. She could pick out Twinkle, twinkle, little star on the piano like a regular little Rachmaninoff. Whenever we met Marie and her parents, we were invariably treated to a long recital of her various talents and accomplishments.

So we braced ourselves now -- waiting for it. And sure enough, it didn't take them long.

"Marie can already read hiragana!" her father enthused.

"And kanji too," her mother quickly put in.

My husband and I stared at each other in amazement. Hiragana and kanji? Wow.

Written Japanese is different from English in that it that starts off easy and gets progressively harder the longer you study it. Hiragana is a syllabary: one symbol represents one sound, either a pure vowel or a vowel plus a consonant. There are fewer than a hundred hiragana symbols and it doesn't take long to learn them. Kanji, or Chinese characters, are far more complex: each symbol is a pictogram, and there are tens of thousands. It can take you a lifetime to learn them all, and you will probably still find plenty that you don't know.

"Is your daughter reading Japanese yet?" Marie's father now asked.

"No," my husband and I said simultaneously. My husband looked a little peeved; he finds braggarts a sore trial and Marie's parents taxed him beyond reason. "But we're starting to teach her how to read English," he added lamely.

Unfortunately, Marie's parents didn't want to hear about our daughter's progress with English. The mother nodded smugly and smiled. "Our Marie is very advanced, after all."

In all fairness to them, I should point out that Marie's parents were good, kind people. Other than this awful tendency to push their daughter and brag about her achievements, no matter how petty, they were not at all offensive. But every meeting was a challenge for us and to this day my husband and I marvel at our fortitude.

Only an hour or two after this, we were sitting in a restaurant when our daughter picked up the menu and started reading parts of it out to us -- in Japanese. She only knew bits here and there, but it was clear that she knew at least 50 percent of the hiragana and even the odd kanji. We could have gnashed our teeth in frustration. Why hadn't she said anything earlier when Marie's parents were bragging about her so insufferably?

"How did you learn them? we asked. We hadn't taught her.

Our eldest preened and pointed to the hiragana symbol み, reading it out in a clear voice: "'Mi' is from 'Minami,'" she piped -- Minami being her best friend. She went through all the other hiragana she knew and in all cases, they were from the names of friends. The only ones she didn't know were ones which did not appear in her classmates' names. She had learned hiragana from reading her classmates' names printed on labels over their coat hooks and shoe cubbyholes.

We were astounded, but we needn't have been. A lot of Japanese kids pick up hiragana this way -- and the odd kanji too. By the time the going gets tough, the kids are in elementary school and there are teachers to help them learn the really difficult things. Little Marie wasn't necessarily a genius; we just hadn't realized that our kid -- like all kids -- could do this too. Neither had Marie's parents.

A few months later, my husband was sitting in the pediatrician's office with our daughter. He pulled one of the Madeline books our daughter loved out of a bag and started reading it to her. Our eldest has always had a photographic memory and she snuggled up to him happily and began reading out loud with him. She could not follow much of the text, but she knew all the words by heart.

A Japanese mother sitting nearby leaned forward, watching her. "Can your child actually read that?" she asked, her eyes wide.

My husband shook his head. "No way. She's just memorized it," he assured her, but the woman continued to watch, spellbound.

"Your little girl must be awfully smart," she breathed respectfully.

"No, really, she's memorized it. She couldn't read it herself."

When they were called in to the doctor, my husband heard the woman talking to her friend. "That little foreign girl can read English already. You ought to have heard her."

"That's incredible," her friend whispered in awed tones. "English is supposed to be really hard to read at first."

What he would have given to have Marie's parents there.

But Do You Get Paid?

I know this one has been done to death, but I still can't resist it.

This afternoon, our eldest came home from her part-time job as a chambermaid and flopped into a chair. "I'm beat!" she moaned, recounting all her morning's labors. Poor kid: I know she works hard for her money. She has worked part-time for ages now because we don't have the wherewithal to give her a generous allowance, but speaking as an unpaid full-time slavey, it is sometimes hard to be sympathetic.

My husband struggles to find compassion too when he hears her talk about her work-related woes. He comes home from a long hard day at work and has to cook dinner occasionally. When he gets stuck with the dishes as well, how is he supposed to commiserate with a kid who has just made a small killing changing sheets and cleaning toilets, but argues she is too exhausted to do her chores?

Today she passed a weary hand over her forehead and began to sigh about how hard her morning of (paid) employment had been. I had just hung out two loads of laundry and a washed a sinkful of dishes. I'd swept out the patio, watered the plants, fed the cat, made my bed, put away someone else's clothes, taken in the trash, and rewritten a chapter -- all for free, of course! -- and that was just for starters. My kid had cleaned five rooms. I don't deny that this is tough work. I know it is, because I used to do it myself. For a mercifully brief time, I was once responsible for cleaning up to eight rooms and a guest cottage on a daily basis -- in addition to cooking for up to 18, both breakfast and dinner, and doing enough laundry to outfit a small army. I cleaned out so many toilets every day that I used to get dizzy; I'm no stranger to hard work.

"My back's killing me!" whined my girl. "I had to clean out the bathroom of a 95-year-old." She pouted. "Who had a bad aim, if you know what I mean."

"I do," I said. "And so does Dina."

Our friend Dina is a carer. She has cleaned up messes that would make your head swim. Do you ever wonder who cleans up after terrible accidents? Who gets to wipe up after someone's jumped off a building and hit cement? Well, Dina knows people who do this for a living. And she's done it herself.

My daughter pouted. "It's different if you know the people, though!"

I gave her a look. "Dina does it for total strangers. And I've done it for people I didn't know. Remember how I used to work in the hospital? All those bedpans and filthy sheets!"

She frowned. "Did you work there? I didn't realize."

This irked me. I've bent her ear half a dozen times with tales of my fascinating stint as a teenage hospital volunteer. I've been keen to promote volunteer work to the kids. My feeling is that this will earn them valuable life skills and make them look good too. "Of course I did!" I snorted. "I emptied bedpans and cleaned them out afterwards. I changed diapers and braided hair and fed people and wiped their faces and stripped sheets with all sorts of junk on them and--"

She gave me a long-suffering look. "But you didn't work there."

My mouth dropped open. You can probably see where this is going, but I swear I could not.

"Oh yes, I damn well did!"

She furrowed her brow and waved one hand. "But you didn't you paid for it, did you?"

Yes folks, that is what she said: You didn't get paid for it. Which I didn't. And I don't.

And I wonder why I get no respect.