SHARING OUR VOICES- PAULA SANGARE

First let me say a big hearty thank you to Angie for allowing me to partake in SOV on her blog.

What inspired me to become a writer? One thing I have noticed about myself is the things I loved as a child or teenager seem to have gotten lost because life happens.  Let me clarify by giving a little of my back story.

I attended Cosmetology school at  age 18, I obtained a license to be a Nail Technician before I completed because school didn't pay and I already had a son to provide for. Once in the field I was very good at it and made a very good living, needless to say cosmetology school would sit on the back burner for 5 years before I returned because the industry was changing and I knew I had to change with it. I completed Cosmetology school and this has been my profession now for more than 20 years.

I now own The Lotus Salon Boutique. I sell upscale women clothes on one side and perform hair services on the other side. I also sell my own label of an all Natural Bath and Body line, The Natural You.

Is this a plug for my business or does this have something to do with my inspiration as a writer.....YESSSS!

My reason for sharing that story is when Life happens we tend to forget those things we are passionate about  and do what we must do to provide for those we love. By the time I was 19, I was a single mother of 2 and a caregiver to my mother, as well as working 16 hour days.  The things I loved to do and were passionate about were soon  forgotten.

I was good at doing hair and nails (really good) then someone would ask me how did I learn(everyone knows cosmo school teaches the book work not the actual technique) or they might ask if I always wanted to be a hairstylist. These questions made me think back to when I was eight years old and all of my barbie dolls and doll heads (you know the ones without a body) were line up along a wall in my bedroom. Each with their hair completely styled and on display. So my answer became yes I did; although, I forgot. Somehow, God made a way for me to end up here in spite of.

The same was true for my passion of nail artistry. After being asked the same question, I would think back to a time I would sit on my back porch making nail extension out of clay. I would walk around with my fingers spread out before me until my sister slammed a door in my face, causing them to bend back, like the wicked witch of OZ's feet curled up after the house landed on her (my sister was a mean child).

I stumbled on another passion of mine about 2 years ago- writing. After I joined a local writing group someone asked those questions again. I thought back to a time when I had a poetry book I wrote in daily, or when I would sit outside looking at the sky wondering if there were other worlds out there, or what it would be like if I had magic powers. I would make up stories of make believe people and places. I didn't write them all down. Some were just the friends in my head.

The point I'm trying to make is when you can't see the forest for the trees, and you are truly passionate about something, yeah, life may happen.  It may alter your  path, but I believe inevitably we all find our way back to what's in our hearts. Writing is in my heart, a passion that has come back to me. I am inspired to write because it's who I've always been. It's who I am, and who I will continue to be.

Staying true to myself and my passion!
Paula
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Random Post

Yes, this is a random post.

It is to check to see if I fixed the problem of dual posting of my blog on Twitter and Facebook.

Other than that, I don't have much else to say.

Oh, my daughter signed up for the National Novel Writing Month Young Adult Program. So she's NaNoing with me this year. Go, Kiwi!

40 WEEKS OF ME- Week 14, FALL

You may be wondering why I'm showing pictures as a 40 weeks post. Well, I'm sharing my love of nature and my love for photography. Autumn is my favorite season. I took these pictures last Sunday during my bike ride. My father-in-law later complained to my hubby that I stopped to take a picture of every tree in the park. Not true.

As you can see, fall has taken its sweet time arriving in Northern California. Not that I'm complaining. That would be foolish.

5 Mile

This is one of the stops on my bike ride where I get some water and stare out over the creek. Today the Tai Chi group were already gone, so I was able to get a picture. Peaceful.



This is one of the many redwood groves in the park. The branches brush the ground so when you're beneath its cover you're in a secluded hideaway that is infested with mosquitos. Enter at your own risk or spray on insect repellant. Pretty though, so in my opinion a little itchiness is worth it.

The last three pictures I have returned to my favorite Teichert Ponds. I took pictures of the area in July. I wanted to show it to you in the fall. Next week will probably be prettier, but who knows what the weather will be like at that time.

Aren't the colors beautiful? I think this last picture is my favorite.

With this being NaNo month, I won't have time for in-depth posts. I'm pretty determined to get my 50k this year. I'll try to keep up with my blog posting since I'm getting better at not going MIA. If I do disappear for a while, it's because I'm lost in my wip. I apologize in advance.

NaNoWriMo WITH ME?

Are you ready for the 30 day challenge?

 

If you're up for it, let me know. We'll go through this together, motivating each other to the finish. I didn't "win" last year. I tried, but I came in at 46k at the end of the thirty days. If you're interested, here is the link to my 2011 NaNo experience. 

 

I finished QUEST in January, and I'm super excited about how this story came into being. I took risks I wouldn't normally take because it was a NaNo project. I'm so glad I did.

 

 

 This year I'll either be working on the sequel to QUEST or the sequel to Juju's Child. FIXED starts where JC ended, but I think the rollicking fun of Quest II will get me through 30 days. One of the idea's I'm toying with is writing QII through the last book's side characters. I think it's time for Raphael and Dominique to have a voice.

 

As you can see, I'm pretty excited. I have outlines for both stories, so I need to decide which will be my NaNo project.

 

 After spending the last two months editing, I'm ready for the creative spark to shoot lightning out of my fingertips as they fly across the keyboard.  

 

If you're participating this year, please leave me a comment with your NaNo user name, and I'll be Writing Buddy. Also, for those who have read Quest and Juju's Child, maybe help me out. Which story do you think I should write?

Good luck and happy writing.

UPDATE: after brainstorming with my daughter and critique partners, I've decided to go with FIXED:)

 

SHARING OUR VOICES- IAN ISARO

"What is snow like?"

I didn't expect that question, though maybe I should have. I'd just been in the United States, and people who had never left Tanzania were naturally curious. So I did my best. "Cold and wet."

"That sounds great. If you got hot, you could rub some on yourself to get cool!"



That conversation (very loosely translated from Swahili) is one of my favorite demonstrations of worldview. It's the assumptions we don't consider that get to us, limiting what we can imagine of the world. Even though our ability to travel or get information is unparalleled in human history, all too often we don't venture very far beyond what we know and understand.

Books are the antidote for that. They tell us that reality is stranger, more terrible, and more wonderful than we know.

That's why I write fiction. Fiction exercises our ability to consider things that are new and unfamiliar, to reconsider our beliefs, to listen instead of judge. Non-fiction prepares us for specific things that exist, but fiction prepares us for anything that could exist.
 

So when I write, I try to show the diversity of the world. That means I end up writing a wide variety. You can see many different points of inspiration in Sorcery and Scholarships, which is packed with different things. Arguably too many.

One is globalization. The world is increasingly interconnected and I wanted my story to reflect that. All too often, stories about supposedly global conflicts center on one country and the rest of the world just sort of floats in undefined space. It's fine for fey/wizards/vampires/whatever to be based in Europe, but are we supposed to believe that they just ignore rising powers in South America and Southeast Asia? Is it too much to ask for Africa to... well, exist?

Not that stories shouldn't have focus. Two countries in particular fueled mine. One is Japan, which exported many elements of anime and manga to me. The ability to have action without the limitations of a special effects budget is something that it does well, and there's no reason fiction can't do the same.

Another is the cultural perspective of the US. There's something very valuable in the irreverence toward tradition that you find there. Since I assume most of you are Americans, you may take this for granted. In all too many parts of the world, "Why?" is a question that simply isn't asked, and "Because it's always been this way" is considered an adequate explanation for anything. Tradition has much to offer as well, but I find attitudes that question far more fascinating.

One last thing that inspires my writing is the breadth of human morality. We tend to assume that everyone believes what we believe, which makes discussion difficult even within one country, much less between them.

For example, I've commonly heard people say that all human societies believe that murder is wrong. That would be nice, but it isn't exactly true because "murder" has slippery definitions. This can get ethically tricky, so let me skip to one end of the continuum: I know cultures that believe murder is only killing a member of your nuclear family - killing anyone else is fine or even expected. That's not hypothetical, either. Less than half an hour's drive from where I'm typing this, there's an ugly conflict over water rights that has left dozens dead, with no moral judgment from anyone in either community.

That exists. So do hundreds of other things that are important, and in-depth discussion of them would probably make everyone angry eventually. Justifiably so, because our beliefs about the world matter.

Therefore fiction matters. Especially with fantasy, where we can encounter things even more radically alien than anything on Earth. I may have waxed philosophic above, but there's another part of me that just loves writing about crazy new things. You can have everything from fey with slightly different moral codes to creatures that exist in completely different modes from humans and fail to comprehend the difference between a living and dead body.

So for me, the same thing that makes fiction fun makes it important. We spend most of the day within our own homes, cultures, and understandings. But eventually, you'll run into your equivalent of snow, and what you've read will determine how likely you are to understand.

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