Category Archives: climate change

OLVIDALA (Forget Her)

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Journals before 2116 when they numbered 139 or so.

Olividala! Forget her. That girl we hardly knew, the one who kept the daily writings, so she could remember the past and find herself. Let’s send the past to Iron Mountain and look toward the future.

This blog is called 115journals  because that is the number of journals I had when I started it. My idea was that keeping a journal and reading could help us change. Last week I had 150. Most of them have since gone to Iron Mountain.

It is charming to think of the mostly black, hard-covered volumes striking out with backpacks and water bottles into China’s mountain ranges in search a cave-dwelling guru, a Master Journal who would continue their enlightenment.

In fact, Iron Mountain allegedly had a half-price sale, and Mohammad A. brought a trolley and wheeled them down in the elevator,13 stories, and out to his SUV.

They were a weighty lot. Each non-acid sketch book cost me $10 or more . Dating from 1978, the first few were poetry. Most of my days for 42 years began with half an hour journal writing. If nothing else, they were a record of the weather in the world at large and in my mind. They were also clear evidence that I didn’t know what I thought until I wrote it down.

They began, of course, in agony, but this is a happy story.

The trolley trip cost $25 and the cost per pound (what? not per kilo) was $228. Reportedly, I saved $24.96, which is, by no means, 50%. I didn’t question that, anymore than I would have questioned the vet’s price for’ putting down’ a beloved pet.

I have had a very hard week – losing a bag of wine and expensive pharmaceuticals, losing an extremely important e-mail. After embroiling Uber and the e-mail sender in futile searches, I found them both under my nose.

Youngsters would make nothing of such lapses, but really old people line up and bash on the doors of locked wards. ‘Save me. Save me.’

It was a week that could make anyone cry, but I wept non-stop until my new, cataract-free lens swelled up again, and my drooping eyelids dampered my vision. I wasn’t crying about the 42 years of my life, which I now had no way of recalling. No. (I kept saying to me.)

Getting the  150 books out of their bulging bookcase in my bedroom was like selling my low-mileage 2018 Corolla. (Did you know it’s a good year to sell a car.) The Corolla got me out of debt and paid an excellent editor to edit my new novel I Trust You to Kill Me, set in Colombia in 2120.

There will be 2 more books in the series, which will end in about 2180. But how will it end? Optimistically or the other?

I actually didn’t know until I had a house full of visitors. A  bizarre twist and a whole new perspective presented itself. What if there was a third way to end. I hope I memorized the detail.

It is not an S&M book.

Alena, the protagonist is an intelligence agent, who has been taught to say, “I Trust You to Kill Me” to a fellow agent if she is badly wounded, in order to save the mission. It also comes in handy in a dying civilization when you can’t endure further catastrophe.

I don’t have a real file-cabinet anymore. Life has down-sized me to a one-bedroom apartment. I put my research and plan files into boxes I buy in dollar stores. They are now stored on the otherwise empty bookcase in my bedroom.

Don’t cry for me, little black books,
I’ve gone on and
You know that I’ll always love you
Through the all lean years and the mean years
Until we’re make the NY
Times.

joycehowe.com

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Why Colombia?

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Suppose you were told you couldn’t go out of your house, in my case because I was over 70?

Oh, you were told that too?

I had been stocking up my pantry ever since the plague hit Italy. China, that didn’t phase me. I didn’t actually believe in China even though people were literally locked in. Doors were chained shut. But I didn’t worry until they started piling bodies in cathedrals and ice rinks in Italy and Spain.

Then our provincial (state) premier (governor) announced that I couldn’t go out and neither could my sister, who had promised to look after me when I – inevitably – needed looking after. Trouble was she was over 70 as well. So I went to Colombia.

Now don’t make trivial protests about airlines and no-cross-em borders.

I had been to Colombia in the early 70s with Gabriel. I didn’t know him well and I was not sure it was a wise idea, but like him, I fell in love with the Magdalena River. We traveled up and down the river several times, in A Hundred Years of Solitude and in Love in a Time of Cholera.

I know that was a cheap trick, but how else could I convey the idea of that lovely paradise lying across the equator: a jungle, grasslands, hundreds of rivers draining from the second highest mountains in the world into the biggest river on earth, a place of snow and ice and fire, a country with more unique plant life than any other, a place of gold and emeralds, of coca, cocaine, poppy and heroin, of incalculable cruelty and death whose people still sang and danced.

A country where a 13-year-old girl could keep three young siblings, one a babe in arms, alive in the jungle for six weeks.

In March 2020, I read an article about Wade Davis, a Canadian cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist, who had written Magdalena: River of Dreams. That was very early in the Covid Pandemic and it was hard to get delivery, except from Amazon. On that occasion, I had nothing more to read and would have had a full-on panic if my local library had not had the capacity of loaning out e-books. I summoned this book while sitting in bed and was a quarter of the way through it before I fell asleep.

When I finished it. I started it again.

At the end of second reading, grocery stores started opening at 7 a.m. for the elderly. By then, I was sizing up the kitchen chair legs which my long ago Newfie dog had chewed down to their marrow. My stash of frozen bread had given way to boxed crackers and I was eating way too much rice.

I had also discovered The Thief of Memory by Michael Jacobs, another book about the Magdalena River. Once again, the book was readily available over the ether from the library.

We were all sure that by summer the Covid epidemic would be over. I had made face masks from large hankies and the elasticized tops of socks, and I washed my hands like a fiend. Hospitals were more or less holding their own in my area and both Davis and Jacobs had written several books about Colombia. After all, wasn’t it nice not to have to keep appointments. I didn’t dwell on the idea of cavities or cataracts, or fibrillation or the recurrence of diseases that tend to recur. I was so happy reading that I thought that it might be fun to write my own book.

Pretty much everybody was talking about whether pandemics and climate change meant the end of the world. Why not write about that and set the story in Colombia?

Why Colombia? Colombia is lovely and has magic realism.

SOON BY ETHER OR PAPER – I Trust You to Kill Me by J.A. Howe

How to Write a Novel During a Pandemic

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Previously on 115journals.com, I wrote about dreaming the beginning of my soon-to-be-published novel, I Trust You to Kill Me, set in Colombia in 2120. I said that I dreamed the first chapter. Every night I went on dreaming about the place and the people I had imagined. I had cancelled my in cleaner because she was also working in the front lines in Canadian Tire. As I went about my house keeping, the next scene would write itself in my head and I would word process it in the afternoon.

I was so happy. I couldn’t visit anyone. I masked up and scuttled into the grocery store at 7 a.m, senior hours, but I was happy because my apartment thronged with the ever-growing number of characters in the book. They’d get into life-threatening predicaments and then figure their way out. They were contending with the end of the world, or, at least, the end of civilization.

I had given up listening to Canada’s Prime Minister, who had to do his updates on the steps of the house he was living in because he and his wife got Covid. I switched to the Cuomo brothers, Chris in his basement for the same reason and Andrew, somewhere in Albany, looking official, quoting Churchill, “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.” I had no idea these steady, supportive men were actually deeply flawed.

I had cajoled six people to be my beta readers and I shared how happy I was with the book. When it was finished and edited and edited, I had it copied. Each copy cost about $50 and Canada Post earned about half that getting it to far-flung destinations. I suppose monks copying it in calligraphy would have cost more.

Now I was free to start the second book in the series.

But. Hang on. Word came back that it was unreadable. People would add that, no doubt, I had a good book in my head, but I had left most of it out. My friends were at the breaking point. One read me the first 13 pages aloud. Each sentence provided me with half a page or a page of notes. The one writer in the group had put aside her own work to read it. She was the most distraught of all. She sent me a short response, but managed to lose her copious notes. Another one didn’t lose hers, but never intended me to see them.

The trouble was I lost the half the novel. It just vanished from my computer and neither Microsoft nor Apple nor the Geek Squad could find it. That led me to pick up the heavily annotated one from the annotater. Well, she was out, but the door was unlocked. It was mine after all.

Holy Crow! Those comments. They were things I used to think while marking grade nine short stories, but I could never, never give to tenderhearted students.

I sat down at my desk, which looked out high over the neighborhood, all the way to Lake Ontario. It was August. Okay, I said to myselfI’m , I get to do it all over again.

Pandemic psychosis manifests in a multitude of ways. For example, I was pretty sure there shouldn’t be a hard lump just there, but I would get to it later. And I did, several weeks later. Some surgeries go ahead even in the middle of pandemics.

When I glanced up from my computer, I was vaguely aware of the trees turning yellow and orange and the pile of pages growing taller, even taller than before.

It looked as if we could have a smallish Christmas where we actually ate with a few other people. I copied the pages myself this time. The writer gamely offered to read the new version, but I felt I had done her enough harm. The others, great readers and frank critics all got new copies, well, some of them did.

But my chief, reliable critic, received the new, longer, much longer, book and unceremoniously backed out. “But you promised!” Now I’m I actually felt a little down,

I was fooling around on Twitter one day and found a very old DM from a woman who offered to edit my book. It was 2 or 3 years old, but she was still at the job. I sent her a 10 page sample – chapter two – and she sent me back a very competent and encouraging response.

In January, I sent her the whole book. Here was a woman, who didn’t mind reading on line. She was busy though. Of course I got impatient, but her response when it came blew my mind.

Apparently, it was good.

Stay tuned for further adventures of I Trust You to Kill me, even the origin of that very old phrase from a Sufi Master.