Storybelly Digest #4: Paris, Projects, & Rejection

Turning your dreams and memories into stories, finishing projects (or not), and finding success in rejection, revision, & starting over.

Good morning!

How is it Monday again? Not only that, but we’ve leaped forward an hour in time, which always confuses the cat, and me, and my people. You?

This is the Victor Hugo market in Toulouse. I have never been, but I feel I must go, lol, and what is that saying that the mountains are calling and I must go...

I was dreaming of Paris this winter, a dream that got started when I was a fourth-grader, and my best friend’s mother — a WWII war bride from France — wheeled a cart full of French Things into our classroom at Camp Springs Elementary School, taught us to sing “Savez-vous plante les choux” and became our French teacher once a week for the next three years.

I took French for every year of my schooling after that, wrote high school term papers in French, became somewhat fluent, at least in reading French; my mother told me I might want to be an interpreter at the U.N., which makes me laugh today (and feel so tenderly toward her), and so I gave that desire to Franny in Countdown, as I never did become an interpreter, anywhere, but maybe she will. (I suspect she will not, but that’s not my story to tell.)

My French story goes beyond that small sharing, and is a story that deserves its own post someday; meanwhile, I’ve been dreaming of Paris while hunkering, here at home, and cooking up projects I want to do, but not doing them, lol, because winter, stillness, cold, snow (in Atlanta! Twice!), sticking by the fire, getting Storybelly up and running, writing a novel (also known as bleeding profusely), working on a few old projects (see below) and a thousand other things that I also love.

But… projects. They put me in mind of a little girl I’ve been writing about, Cambria Bold, in an unrelated novel, one I turn to when the calamities of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the tragedies of my Charlottesville novel swamp me. I *will* finish Charlottesville this year. I am close. I take breathing breaks, for my wee heart. I visit Cambria’s house. It feels good to create in a different way.

Cambria works with her hands and makes things, like I do. (Maybe you can guess that her father is a letterpress operator.) Everyone in her family is a maker of some kind. Writing about them, their mutual affection, and their hapless wackiness — just naming them all! — makes me laugh, calms my anxieties, lifts my spirits, and satisfies something elemental in me that longs to tackle my endless list of projects here, which include:

the pond project, phase two;
the biscotti project, the meatball project, the pimento cheese project;
the apron project (if you watch All Creatures Great and Small, you know);
the heirloom chrysanthemum project, the herb bed project (all ongoing);
the native plant project, the orchard project, the tree guild project (also ongoing);
the edible yard & garden project (ongoing forever);
the prayer-flag project;
the caramel project, the chiffon cake project, the eggnog project;
the scrap quilt project;
the mayo project (with french fries), the kefir project, the sauerkraut project;

I could go on; I will stop. (Also note here my fondness for the semi-colon. It could even be another project.)

My life has been a series of projects, one after another, still learning, still failing, sometimes succeeding, I mean, what’s so hard about a making a delectable hand pie? Savory or sweet (but I am more in favor of savory, don’t tell Jim). What’s so hard? — a lot. For me. But I persevere. I did, finally, master a pie crust by hand that I love, so there’s that.

And, I have writing projects. So. More on Debbie’s many writing projects, both dreams and ongoing slogs, in the Storybelly Writer’s Lab this week. I got a rejection this past week (with an offer to think about revising), and I want to talk about that, too… it’s part of life, eh? It’s certainly part of a writer’s life.

So that’s “This Week” in the Lab. If you’d like to help us, the intrepid Lab Coats, create a place to talk writing, revision, rejection, success and writing again, join us there; (semi-colon) it’s the only paid part of Storybelly, and we have made it so, so that we have a writing community where we can explore all things personal narrative and fiction together, write together, and Chat together about our work.

You can do it! You don’t have to be a professional writer or storyteller, or even an amateur writer or storyteller. We *are* stories! We live them every day. Come write about those small moments in time where you have attempted a project, have failed or succeeded, have learned something about life and love and sorrow and laughter, and all the messy glory, as Uncle Edisto says in Each Little Bird That Sings.

We’ll explore more of Little Bird, here in the Digest, in an extra this week about Listening. Listening Rock is named so for a reason.

Part of my dreaming about Paris for so many years manifested itself in A Long Line of Cakes, which I call the fourth Aurora County novel, after Ruby, Little Bird, and All-Stars. It’s also about Listening, so watch for that this week in the Listening Extra.

I was looking for a way to write about magical realism for A Long Line of Cakes, as magical realism was new to me as a writer, and I wanted to do right by the story, and by the reader. I remembered a movie I loved that carried that magic in such a quiet, simple, magical way, AND that takes place in France: Chocolat. Anybody know it? (Trailer below; let’s have a watch party):

I took the magic from that movie and infused Cakes with it; now there is a mysterious fog that envelopes the Cake family’s arriving and leaving. The trees seem to sway with messages of arrival and leaving, and change. There is mystery in the air, in Halleluia, Mississippi. Mystery surrounding family and history, that of course Ruby Lavender doesn’t catch a whiff of at all, ha, so straightforwardly does she live and breathe.

But Ruby does recognize a new friend in Emma Lane Cake and she does befriend Emma’s wacky family of five brothers, four dogs, and a baking family that arrive in Halleluia to open the Cake Cafe. Aunt Tot and Miss Mattie and all your favorites from Ruby are back, too.

Chocolat comes to Mississippi. I’ve always written like this and I wonder if y’all do, too. I find my mentors for a writing project, and I borrow a bit from this mentor, a bit from that one, and I fashion my own story with my own voice and plot and characters, taken from my own life.

I digress. I am all over the map today, sorry. I blame the end of winter trying to hang on while the pine pollen of spring is itching to coat everything. It’s kind of crazy, no?

So this week in the Lab we’ll talk about writing, of course, and we thought to have a Lab Coat Zoom on Wed. where we can chat about what we cooked up by doing the assignment, Exercise #16. Is this still a good day and time for most? I’d like a show of hands before setting up the zoom. You can comment here or on the Lab Chat. We are early days with the Lab, and are a small and mighty little cohort… I am so happy to have you there! I want to make sure we’ve got a time that works for most, when we do finally zoom. More on this tomorrow in the Lab. Also, writing projects. And rejections. And eating a whole cake in one sitting.

In history this week with my books:

I’ve been writing and researching for my novel Charlottesville, which involves writing about Civil War history and the Lost Cause. This week marks the anniversary of the Monitor and Merrimack battle (March 9, 1862), and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting death of Breonna Taylor (March 13, 2020), a tragedy and a movement that plays directly into the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

It’s “Women’s Month” (every month), and I write about capable girls and strong women in my fiction. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933.

In personal news, one of my boyfriends, Albert Einstein, was born on March 14, 1879. You’ll see photos of Albert (may we call him Albert) often, in photos I post from inside my home. He lurks in a painting next to my kitchen, and he stands in a life-sized cutout by my front door and scares people who come into my office while I’m working. :>

Two March birthdays: Einstein painted by Kate Fortin and Zach Wiles photographed by Sofia

March 14 is also Pi Day, although it wasn’t Pi Day in 1879, or in 1982, when my ops-guru, Zachary Wiles was born, a mere 43 years ago. He has brightened our lives and this Substack, and we wouldn’t want to do THIS particular project (or life) without him. Happy Birthday, Zach!

I’m proud of the publishing partners who helped give birth to these books, to the teams that have helped them find readers, and I am grateful for every reader who opens these books and sees a bit of history and home, community and compassion. I hope readers connect to their own place in history and home when they read my books. You can find out more about each book, and you can buy them, too, at my website. COMING SOON: My books in a dedicated page at Bookshop.org.

Rebellious writer (and human) that I am, I have always loathed “writing prompts.” I know some people really LOVE them, love them! I am happy for you, I am! It is in that spirit that I offer up this week’s Oh-So-Optional, I’d-Turn-Back-If-I-Were-You Writing Prompt (of sorts), to share, to keep for yourself, or to not do at all:

My writer friend Jane Kurtz reminded me of the time, way back in 1996, when we first met in NYC and went to ALA with new friends Nancy Werlin, Jo Stanbridge, and Dian Regan. We had dinner with Harold Underdown, and at that dinner, this is what Harold imparted to us, we newish writers (I had not sold a book at that time, although I had a busy freelance-writer life). This (above), said Harold, was how to successfully navigate this crazy career we’d chosen. I wonder what y’all think of that, or what you’d make of it inside your own personal narrative — got a “time that” to write about it?

And that’s Digest #4! Have a good week out there, with temperatures warming (at least, here in the South), and fingers itching to garden, to write, to fix something that’s broken, to create something brand new, to reach out and hug somebody who needs a hug… maybe that somebody is you, too. I hope you give and receive in equal measure and call it good this week. I’m rooting for you. Let’s go to Paris.

xoxox Debbie