First Flight... Safe Landings

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This morning I finally took my first flight into hysteria. I knew it had to happen sooner or later. I've been charged with adrenalin ever since I started on this project; I was bound to overload sooner or later!

The cause of the sudden flight of fear was the fact that, last week, people finally began reading my book. Reading my words. It suddenly made it all very real and very alarming. What would they say? :-\ Well... yesterday three friends finished reading my book and came back with comments. They all said the same thing, more or less - they loved the story, in spite of the errors.

Errors?

That was a shock; I thought I'd cleaned up and edited out most errors. I actually went through the book five times before sending it - twice for word changes (a name and a phrase had to be removed and changed), once with spell check, once more correcting formatting of punctuation (when I upgraded the book to a more modern Word it turned punctuation marks backwards or removed them completely) and then finally once more again, because the publishers wanted a specific format for paragraph indents etc.

So, last night I took out the document and started reading again... Within the first two chapters I found missing punctuation marks, missing words, and two sentences that seemed to have been turned inside out. 

I fled in complete panic and darkest despair. I went to bed and cried buckets, woke up this morning and cried more, then I sent an email to all the friends and relatives I knew had gone off to buy my book. I apologised deeply for the fact they were buying a book riddled with errors.

All of today email replies have been filtering back, all of them consoling and several of them from friends who have also bought and read my book and loved it, warts and all. The compliments have helped, the hugs and sympathy too, but the reply that helped bring me back down to solid ground the best was one from a friend who is also a published author himself.

He said:

Don't beat yourself up about it! I've had to issue an errata sheet for all my books. There are probably several contributory factors:

* I and almost everyone I know, finds it well-nigh impossible to copy-edit properly on a computer screen. It takes a printed copy to have a chance of finding most of the errors.

* Spell-checkers are useful but not infallible; grammar checkers can be worse than useless.
Watt wood eye dew whiff art mice pill Czech air?

* Seamless software upgrades from Microsoft are about as common as hen's teeth.

* Global formatting changes always change more than you tell them to.

And lastly:
* It is a human trait to see/read what we expect to see/read. If we have written something, we tend to see what we intended to write. It helps slightly if things are formatted differently by a typesetter, but the same trait applies to page-proofs.

To quote Alfonso the Wise (1221 - 84): "Unto those Three Things which the Ancients held to be impossible, there should be added this Fourth: to find a Book printed without Errors."

I laughed a lot at the "Watt wood" sentence and somewhere between laughing at that and the Alfonso quote I started to regain my ability to laugh at myself - at my perfectionistic panic melt-down! Others had said similar things, but having friends say that the errors didn't matter, didn't carry as much weight as having a published author of sensible books, come in with such sane, comforting (and witty) observations.

I did something today that, like the song below, made me feel proud. I remembered how to laugh at myself. I'm sure there's a link there... between enlightenment and lightening up! ;-)

So I'm sending a big hug and thank you to all the wonderful kind friends who reached out to grab me today, when I flew off in a panic, but I owe an especially big THANK YOU to Stephen, who helped me land safely.

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Song for the Weekend - Proud

Proud - Heather Small

Capercaillie - Fear A' Bhata

There's a highland coo calf near the end of this that looks like a fuzzy toy. :-) Some lovely photos of the mountains too.

How now, Brown Cow!

Yesterday was the first day of the new Chinese year. We've finally left the frantic finance-obsessed Rat year and have entered the year of the Earth Ox, or Brown Cow, to be more traditionally correct .

To celebrate I'm posting pictures of my favourite bovines - Highland cattle... called Hielan' Coos in Scotland. I suppose that makes this a broon Coo year? ;-)

These are photos of mama and baby coo and baby coo's nose. He looked like a teddy bear, but petting him he felt like straw.

HAPPY NEW COO YEAR!

My Sacred Clown

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An interesting new Blog called Cloister Voices issued a rather unique challenge. You can read the long version on their blog. Here's the short version:

"Meme Challenge: Describe your first encounter with a hermit, mystic, or an unusually eccentric person."

My very first encounter with an eccentric has to be my dad’s father. He was someone I only knew literally between the ages of birth and four, but who came to me a thousand times through my life in the hearts and words of the people whose lives he had changed. He was there, one way or another, my entire childhood. He influenced everything from my sense of humour to my opinions on religion, but how do you describe a man who was so charismatic and yet so elusive?

My grandfather was born as the middle child of a large family in the British African colony of Southern Rhodesia. When he died, at a far too early age, so many people came to his funeral that they had to put chairs outside the windows and doors.

Named Gabriel after an angel, yet never angelic, he was a walking oxymoron – an extrovert who loved being alone. He was a born performer, the charmer and the clown who stood out at every gathering and yet he almost never spoke about himself. He loved to be with people and yet he would sometimes just pick up his gun and gear and vanish into the bush for a week or a day. He knew the land intimately, as only a lover can, and the people of the land loved him in return. He knew every edible and poisonous plant and he knew every stone… quite literally. Geology was one of his passions and he had barrels of agates, amethyst, malachite and tigers eye that he’d collected on his wanderings. He worked as a dowser finding not only water, but minerals and even gold. After he died the barrels came to us and as a child I’d sit in the sand and play with chunks of malachite and agate, pyrites and mica.

If I had to sum him up in one word I’d have to steal it from another culture and another continent. My grandfather was a Heyoka, the Lakota word for a Sacred Clown. I first came upon that idea several years back and the moment I read about it I knew I’d found my grandfather’s true spiritual calling...

Heyoka are thought of as being backwards-forwards, upside-down, or contrary in nature. This spirit is often manifest by doing things backwards or unconventionally.

Their satire presents important questions by fooling around. They ask difficult questions, and say things others are too afraid to say. By reading between the lines, the audience is able to think about things not usually thought about, or to look at things in a different way.

Principally, the Heyoka functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses.

In addition, sacred clowns serve an important role in shaping tribal codes. Heyokas don’t seem to care about taboos, rules, regulations, social norms, or boundaries. Paradoxically, however, it is by violating these norms and taboos that they help to define the accepted boundaries, rules, and societal guidelines for ethical and moral behavior. This is because they are the only ones who can ask "Why?" about sensitive topics... Their role is to penetrate deception, turn over rocks, and create a deeper awareness.

(Quoted from HERE)

Just like the Heyoka, my grandfather poked silly sticks at every “sacred cow” and did everything backwards-forwards. As the entertainer he did vaudeville type shows for the miners and nearly got lynched one time when the miners realised that the “girl” doing a striptease behind a curtain was actually my grandfather wearing false wooden breasts he’d made himself for his act. He played over a dozen different musical instruments, sometimes creating his own “orchestra” recordings by using two reel-to-reel tape recorders to tape himself playing over himself playing. Perfectly able to create beautiful music from a whole range of perfectly normal musical instruments the one he is most remembered for is playing the saw as beautifully as a violin.

How he dressed with complete disregard to fashion in whatever he liked, which included going to town in his favourite pith helmet on Saturday mornings. He never went to any church, yet helped out at all of them.. he also laughed at all of them. He laughed at everything he thought ridiculous or pretentious, nothing was too sacred to be found silly, and yet he rarely angered or hurt anyone’s feelings with his laughter. His comic version of the Catholic Latin Mass has been known to leave good Catholics giggling hysterically. I think it’s because he laughed from love and a pure joy in the silliness of humankind. He was a terrible mangler of song lyrics, making up his own wickedly funny or just plane giggle-silly versions of everything from everyday tunes and classical works to opera and hymns. I grew up singing his versions, always naughty, sometimes rude, but never to the point of offensive or insulting.

I have no conscious memories of him, but he’s there in the sparkle in people’s eyes when they speak of him. Through him, and through his son, I grew up with an abiding sense of silliness and a complete disrespect for anything/anyone pompous. To this day, over forty years after his death, I still sing his song lyrics (as well as make up my own for new songs), I tend to dress with an equal disregard for fashion, and I have an obsession with stones that I think he would have approved of…

and he managed to have the last laugh on us all.

Six years ago my husband came out to Africa to marry me. One morning, a few weeks before we left Africa to return to Scotland, he came through singing. This might not seem very remarkable, except hubby isn’t a sing-out-loud type. He prefers an audience of one, not a kitchen full of people making breakfast. My dad turned to him in absolute amazement and asked, “Why are you singing that song?” Hubby shrugged and admitted he had no idea. He didn’t even know the name of the song he’d been singing, but my dad did. It was one of my grandfather’s favourites - an old song called “Home on the Range.” My dad shook his head in wonder, “Do you know what today is?” he asked us. I didn’t know, only my mom remembered. It was the date of my grandfather’s death.

Only a Sacred Clown could have pulled off a joke like that from the other side. ;-)

Seeing Sunshine

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This is for Daisy of Dancing with Daisy. She's a blogger guaranteed to leave you feeling smiley.
Which is kind of appropriate for a "daisy", since the name means "day's eye" - a little scrap of sun surrounded by petals. That's exactly how I see you, as a blogger who always manages to make her readers' day brighter.

Things that Go Bump...

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Shastri sent me a very interesting link to a video of a ghostly siting. Go have a watch of the guys in the lift. VERY creepy! Having seen so many excellent fakes on YouTube I'm undecided whether this video is the real thing or not, but it did jog my memory about our strange experience earlier this week when my parents and I went shopping.

My mom wanted to buy a new bath mat, so we stopped in at a big DIY/furniture store that sells everything imaginable. While my mom and dad debated the various styles of bath mat I wandered off to look around. I found this photo online of the bath section, I was actually around the corner, but it gives you an idea of the shop. :-)
I stopped first to look at their shower curtains, because the colours were so pretty. They had the plastic bags holding them hanging up on a wall in a wave of colours from pastels through bright to patterned. I glanced behind me, to admire some very fancy bathroom mirrors on the other wall, when a noise and movement made me turn back.

As I watched one of the hanging packets opened by itself and the shower curtain inside slowly slid out. It's hard to explain why that was odd. You could easily argue that the packet was loose and gravity makes things fall, but the way the plastic flap opened out and the curtain came out was too slow. Almost as if an invisible person had opened it and pulled the curtain out. I thought, "Weird!" I walked off and quickly forgot about it - there were too many interesting things to look at.

Later, back at the car, my dad said, "Do you know that place is haunted? We saw it."
I said, "Wow, you saw the curtain too?"
They both looked puzzled and replied, "No, we saw the box... what did you see?"

It turned out that while I was lost between rows of lamps on sale and kitchen goodies my mom and dad had their own weird experience. They were being served when a man who worked in the shop came past. He put a box down on a shelf, then came over to them for a chat (people are very friendly here, everyone stops for a chat). While they were talking the big box he'd put on the shelf suddenly started to move. As all four of them (woman behind the counter) watched the box slowly slid off the shelf and fell BANG on the floor.

The man and woman both laughed. They said it happened a lot as the place was haunted. Things fall off perfectly shelves, things drop, etc. The shop is about forty years old, but before then it was a Mill/factory where lots of people worked. I have no idea how old, I tried looking on Google, but couldn't find anything, but in the shop there are old black and white photos from the days when the place was still a Woollen Mill.

What's really funny is how we both saw something odd, but completely independant of each other. I know next time I'm shopping there I'm definitely going to watch more closely! ;-)