Tag: Love

The hardest prompt: a love letter

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You’d think these would be the easiest, most natural thing on earth, except that they usually wind up being 99 percent cliché and hot air.

Besides, how many times and ways can you express the dirty stuff, if you dare?

(And be prepared to back it all up in person.)

Really!

In addition, the audience of one can be the world’s most demanding, no matter how fond of you they are.

Even more difficult, add to the assignment something I heard a writing prof say, quoting another one: Never revise a love letter.

Nope, let it gush forth.

~*~

For further humiliation, there was an instance when I was living in the ashram and writing a reply to a beloved’s epistle when several of my fellow yogi residents came up and grabbed my effort, grimaced, and declared, “If I received that, it would be the end of the relationship.”

Those girls were so full of helpful insights, as you’ll find in my novel Yoga Bootcamp.

~*~

Well, I’ve never been good at pickup lines, either.

~*~

About a dozen years ago, I had a spree in the loft of our old barn when I went through the remaining letters to me from girlfriends and lovers over the years.

Earlier ones had been helpful when I was drafting my novels Daffodil Uprising and Nearly Canaan. What jumped out at me in this round was their underlying unhappiness apart from me. It didn’t make for a good give-and-take in a relationship. No wonder things didn’t work out in the long run.

The time for the ritual burning was way overdue. It took longer than I would have guessed.

~*~

More recently I came across some surviving letters written on computer, some of them that were then sent by the postal service and others that went by email.

The ones I wrote now embarrass me. As for theirs? A gentleman won’t say, though they reflect a long search for a fitting relationship that never panned out, like panning for gold. My, all the hours I spent writing those and reading the responses!

Once more, though, a purge is overdue.

We could get into a discussion regarding the intimacy of handwritten letters versus legibly typed ones, though that’s largely moot now that the exchanges have shifted to emails and cell phone texts. That topic deserves its own conversation. For now, let me say that the playful back-and-forth with my now wife via America Online when we were getting to know each other is woven into my Prelude & Fugues poems available at Thistle Finch editions.

~*~

Back to the advice about never revising a love letter. I find it useful as an ideal for other kinds of personal writing, too. Just let it pour out, best as you can. Not that it usually proves so easy.

Yeah, yeah, I fall back heavily on the revise-revise-revise emphasis elsewhere, along with the adage, “Talent goes into the first draft; genius comes in the revisions.”

Still, some of those love letters gave rise to the poems in my collections Braided Double-Cross, Blue Rock, and Long-Stem Roses in a Shattered Mirror (upcoming).

Let me add to that the only time – well, just about – that I face the dreaded writer’s block is when having to come up with something spiffy on, say, a get-well card. Like the ones they used to pass around the office. I know of a truly major writer who agrees with me there. Maybe sympathy cards are even worse. You can’t go with “Miss you” there, and nearly everything else is so trite.

~*~

One final concern I’ll raise while we’re circling around the topic involves what would we say to each other now, all these years later. At one time, I tried to find out, thanks to Facebook. It wasn’t encouraging. Some who had been hot on my end barely remembered me.

And while I had tried to be conscious of their objections or potential feelings of hurt in reading the fictional accounts of our lives, I finally had to realize they never read what I had written after our breakups or differing directions.

Ouch! Most of them I missed more than they did of me.

Sound familiar?

~*~

You can find Braided Double-Cross in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your local library to obtain it.

On to the Pacific Northwest via the prairie and Ozarks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My second brace of fiction, ultimately three books in all, addressed the dozen years in the aftermath of the hippie outbreak, though I’ve tried to fudge the era precisely. I do think much of it is continuing.

Naturally, for me, they were semi-autobiographical, even though the protagonist is now a woman named Jaya who winds up with a much younger lover who becomes her husband.

The pivotal piece is Yoga Bootcamp, with her now as a central character, along with the guru they sometimes called Elvis or Big Pumpkin. My residency in the ashram was a transformative period in my life, even in the face of details I’ve since learned. We were a rogue outfit in the period when yoga took root in America. This down-to-earth story will probably scandalize your local yoga studio instructor, but the experience did reshape many of our lives, hopefully for the better. I’ve certainly carried many of its lessons far through some other faith traditions.

The central piece is now compressed into Nearly Canaan, originally an ambitious triptych that comprised the hefty novels Promise, Peel: As in Apple, and With St. Helens in the Mix. At the outset, a sense of place was central as Jaya relocated from a small town on the prairie in the American Midwest to the hardscrabble Ozarks to the apple orchard country in the desert of the Pacific Northwest, but the central theme now condenses as the question of how much influence one person can extend over others, hopefully for the better. I can ask now whether it would have been more compelling if she’d been conniving and manipulative.

The third book, The Secret Side of Jaya, is a set of three novellas, each one set in the places she lived after leaving the ashram. Each one, quite different, is premised on hearing and seeing figures in a locale that others don’t. Maybe you encounter them, too, where you are.

You can find these books in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

Anyone ready for a dark valentine?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Love, if you haven’t noticed, can be very hard to define. Really define.

Here are some examples. Add “Be Mine” at your own risk.

  1. “Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.” – Stephen King
  2. “The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound. – Maureen Duffy
  3. “Love is a hole in the heart.” – Ben Hecht
  4. “Sex isn’t hard, but intimacy is terrifying.” – Tatiana Maslany
  5. “Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.” – Jodi Picoult
  6. “But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” – Khalil Gibran
  7. “You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.” – Franz Kafka
  8. “I will not have you without the darkness that hides within you. I will not let you have me without the madness that makes me. If our demons cannot dance, neither can we.” – Nikita Gill
  9. “Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
  10. “Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.” – Oscar Wilde

As a postscript, let me add this: “If I love you, what business is it of yours?” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So how do you define love?

 

There’s even a Summer of Love

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The places I lived in the settings covered in my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks long ago fell to the wrecking ball, yet the memories live on. The fictionalized story covers friends and lovers, along with near-misses and poverty-line entry-level work life in an out-of-the-way town and surrounding countryside while venturing out on one’s own after college. It had its downs and ups, including a Summer of Love that included a remote mountain lake.

Believe me, you can’t make up details like these, though you can amplify or reshape others.

It’s one of five novels I’m making available for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends January First. The ebook comes in the digital platform of your choice. Do note that it includes adult content, so you may have to adjust your filters when ordering.

Think of this as part of my after-Christmas sale, except that these items are FREE! Remember, you risk nothing in acting now.

For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.

Of housemates, lovers, and friends

 

Back to the last big Turning Point

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The four years covered in my novel Daffodil Uprising brought about tremendous change in the nation and around the globe. In the light of recent events, a fresh overview of the period may provide some essential perspective on current events. For some readers, it may even be a stroll down a Memory Lane of an activists’ protest march. Maybe you remember or maybe you’ve just heard of it as ancient history. In my story, the Revolution of Peace & Love unfolds at the crossroads of the America, where it never got the attention it deserves.

This week, you can still get the ebook for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends January First.

Act now, before the deal ends, and you’ll have Daffodil Uprising to read in the digital platform of your choice for as long as you like.

For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.

The making of a hippie

These were some fun times

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maybe you remember your first year or two after college and trying to get your feet on the ground.

My wild novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks relates, more or less, how it went for me way back when. It wasn’t always high, either, despite the stereotypes. These days, I see the episodes extending into the forties for many younger adults and their friends. Do check it out and see how it relates to your own experiences.

It’s of five ebooks I’m making available to you for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale. You can pick yours out in the digital platform of your choice. Do note that it includes adult content, so you may have to adjust your filters when ordering.

Think of this as my Christmas present to you. In the meantime, be cool and stay warm.

For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.

Of housemates, lovers, and friends

 

Pick up your free copy now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Celebrity writer Tom Wolfe lamented that nobody had written the big hippie novel, something akin to the Great American Novel, but he was wrong. I’ve said so in some previous postings here.

For my part, let me invite you to Daffodil, Indiana, as its tranquil – some might even say dopy – campus goes radical. No outside agitators are needed in the face of the ongoing repression. The Revolution of Peace & Love is its own calling.

Daffodil Uprising is one of five novels I’m making available to you for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale. The ebook is available to you in the platform of your choice.

Think of this as my Christmas present to you. Or, as we used to say, If it feels good, do it!

For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.

The making of a hippie

When passion gets terribly tangled

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever been in a committed relationship, only to be struggling against what you later learn was a triangle? The third party doesn’t even have to be another person, for that matter, but secrecy does tip the balance.

The desire was still there and burning, hoping for reconciliation and renewal. Just don’t call yourself a victim, OK? Not as long as you were actively engaged in the scene.

As for the evidence? In hearing your side, who knows what was factual or imagined, other than the reality of your feelings.

Move on, then, with the memories. Don’t say it wasn’t love, especially of an adolescent sort. Or maybe even your first time.

Having originally appeared in Thistle Finch editions, this collection is now available on your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.

The move makes the poems available to a wider range of readers worldwide.

Do take a look.

It’s as close as I’ve come to a romance novel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The model in the photo I selected for the original cover of the story that stands today as Nearly Canaan was nearly too perfect. I even had to tweak the description of Jaya on the pages inside to make for a better match. Much later, I came across other photos from the shooting and was appalled.

In yoga circles, it’s what we would call Maya.

Apparently, I had shifted Jaya’s spiritual identity from Sufi much earlier than I recalled. Now that I had a solid backstory for her in my novel Yoga Bootcamp, I could turn my attention to the messy trove that had sprawled into three big books. Thanks to Cassia from What’s Next, I was now intent on distilling them back into one. Trying to compress them into the maximum 120,000 upper limit of a big novel meant having to hone more than one hundred pages of manuscript. And that’s before I decided to add a fourth section for fuller closer.

~*~

At heart, I was trying to figure out just what had gone on in my first marriage. I’m still not sure. And note I had said “gone on,” not “gone wrong.”

But I also wanted to say something about the influence of the landscapes where I’ve lived. In fact, I came to think of them as major characters. If only I could have allowed them to speak? The first was pretty bleak and, for a small town, rather petty. The second had its beauty and its rough spots. The third, their intended Paradise, initially appeared desolate and unforgiving.

Place as a character? How about the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn? The story wouldn’t have been the same if Twain had started on the Ohio River, even though it was larger than the Mississippi where he did.

Naturally, I had to abstract real people and events and in doing so, I settled on some big flips. Jaya emerged as the older partner in her marriage, for one, which gave a fresh twist on a December/May romance.

Along the way, the story became one of overlapping couples, a contrast of marriages that were close to Jaya’s home. It’s almost like the mirrors in an amusement park house of mirrors, to my way of thinking, not that the story started out that way.

Yeah, we’re supposed to avoid religion and politics. That leaves some pretty big gaps in the meaning of life and, as I’m seeing, in relationships, too.

If you haven’t noticed, changing the novel’s name from Promise to Nearly Canaan is a Biblical nod. Well, I had previously been calling it their Promised Land.

Developing Pastor Bob and his wife, Wendy, provided a big advance for the revised novel. They might have had serious reservations about her as a heathen, but they were still intrigued and at points even supportive. That marriage also had its problems.

I definitely wanted to avoid having southern Indiana in one more of my books, so I shifted the scene of the middle section to the Ozarks of Arkansas. There are a lot of similarities, from what I’m finding.

In addition, I wanted Jaya’s career to be as volatile for her as newsroom management had been for me. She needed to work weekends and nights, too. Beyond that, I did have an experience of being paid from “soft money,” as grants are sometimes called, and having a very good neighbor work as regional director of a social action agency provided me more inspiration.

By the way, the cover photo I settled on for the revised edition did require some tweaks on Jaya’s physical description on the inside pages.