Opera In The Park, Palm Springs Style

Palm Springs is too small a town to have an opera house and opera company, but we do have an active opera guild. The guild performs three services to the community.

First, it does outreach to high school students, introducing fourteen-thousand students per year to opera.

Second, they produce an annual vocal competition, which allows young singers to compete for scholarships.

The third function, and the one I personally take part in, is their renowned Opera In The Park put on each year at this time. I attended this event yesterday, and was thrilled and charmed by the music, the singers, and the appreciative crowd.

This was a major event, featuring three sopranos, three tenors, a baritone, and a bass-baritone, all connected to the L.A. opera company. They performed for four hours, singing old favorites written by Rossini, Gounod, Donizetti, Verdi, and Mozart. But they also sang some quite modern numbers as well, including arias from Sweeny Todd, The Mikado, and Nabucco.

This is one of my favorite events that Palm Springs offers. It is free to the public. People bring fine food and wine and blankets and folding chairs. It is a party atmosphere while enjoying talented, young singers and musicians.

I love you Palm Springs.

Writing Tip: Get Your Facts Right

With fiction, you want to absorb the reader into the dream, which is the setting, characters, and plot of your story. You never want them to pull out of that dream, and nothing will pull them out faster than reading something that they know is not true. It not only pulls them out of the story, but it undermines their trust that the author knows what the hell they are doing.

I started reading a novel the other night, and twenty pages into the story the protagonist flies to Bangkok, Thailand, a destination I’ve been many, many times over the past dozen years. I got excited because I love Thailand, and wanted to read this author’s interpretation of that setting.

The author described the protagonist muddling through customs, and then going outside and being smacked in the face with a wall of humid heat. I chuckled because that is so true any time of year.

Then the author described the protagonist seeing a line of tuk tuks waiting at the curb to take passengers into the city. I pulled out of the story and said, “No way!” There are hoards of tuk tuks in Bangkok, but one never, never, sees them at Suvarnabhumi airport, only taxis. That’s because it is a forty-five minute drive on an elevated highway into Bangkok, and tuk tuks never go on the highways, only surface streets. I shook my head, knowing this author had never flown into Suvarnabhumi airport.

Still, I continued reading. The author described the protagonist being taken to a hotel in Silom, the gay district. Then he described the tuk tuk driver pulling the protagonist’s suitcase out of the luggage compartment behind the passenger seat. “NO WAY!” I said again. Tuk tuks don’t have a luggage compartment, or a trunk, or anything other than a bench that customers sit on. The only thing behind the passenager seat is a license plate.

At that point I knew two things: 1. This author had never been anywhere near Thailand, and 2. The author didn’t take the time to do his/her homework.

So twenty-five pages into a three hundred page story, I threw the book in the trash, where it belonged. If the author couldn’t be bothered to do research, I couldn’t be bothered to read their novel. I was not about to get pulled out of the story every other page with more untruths.

So, take the time to research. Always know more than your reader does.

Birthday Week in San Francisco

Herman and I spent all last week in San Francisco. We visited both our families, our friends, went hiking twice, and celebrated my birthday. It was a very busy week; we were on the go every day and night. And as fun as it all was, I’m very glad to be back home in Palm Springs. Thank you Ben Wong, Malcolm and Pic, and several other friends for making that week so special. The following are a few snapshots of our week.

One Of The Hardest Lessons To Learn

I can, of course, only speak for myself, but in my years of practicing Zen, one of the lessons I have to relearn and relearn is that of choosing to stay positive.  Sounds easy, right? Oh so wrong…

We all have many choices to make every hour of the day. What to eat. Who to spend time with. What to wear. How to do our jobs. How we commune to work. Which movie to watch. The list is endless. Hardly a minute goes by without us making some kind of choice.

I’ve heard many people (especially couples who have children) say, “I have no choice but to work where I do, there are no others jobs available.” They complain that they have few choices because need drives every decision, and they must do whatever must be done for the children, or for this, that, or the other thing.

In my view, these people are making excuses in order to avoid taking charge of their lives. 

I am often amazed at how easily people (and I include myself in this) surrender the right to make choices that have a profound impact on their lives. They simply fail to realize that when they give up their right to choose they give up the opportunity to choose their life.

All of the choices that people give up, none is more devastating than giving up the choice of their attitude. Often people let other people and events determine whether they are in a “good mood” or not. Well, folks, “good mood” or bad, what you project looks a lot like an attitude to the people around you.

What I’ve learned is that I cannot control the attitude of others. I cannot always control the events that make up my day. What I can and must control is how I respond to them. THAT will determine my attitude. 

Here’s my choice, and it’s one I get to make multiple times everyday. Will my attitude be a thermostat that sets its own “temperature” or will it be a thermometer that reflects the temperature of those around it?

The most successful people understand this profound fact: No one and nothing can take my positive attitude away from me unless I let it happen. 

It’s my choice. 

The choice to maintain a positive attitude in the face of trying people and problematic challenges does more to improve the quality of my life than any other single thing I can do. 

Some days it is a battle to maintain that attitude, but I’ve found that it’s a war worth fighting because it gives me control of my life. One huge weapon I used in fighting that battle is forgiveness. It’s hard to have a negative attitude toward someone once you’ve truly forgiven them. 

The alternative is to give up control and be carried along by swirling emotions caused by outside forces. The choice is always mine (and yours) to make.

Writing Tip: Building Readership

I belong to several online writing groups where topics about writing/publishing are bantered around endlessly. Most of it is both entertaining and interesting. Yesterday a writer posted his frustrations about not being able to grow his readership. He explained that he writes in a variety of genres—contemporary romance, historical, steampunk, paranormal, etc.—and his readers who like one genre drop him like a stone when they read another genre by him that they don’t like. He posed the question whether he should focus on one or two genres while he builds his readership.

He received an avalanche of advice—everything from narrowing his focus, to publishing many more books faster, to writing a series where the same characters are featured in several novels. I didn’t offer my $0.02 because I’ve not done that great a job of expanding my readership. But the question has been percolating in the back of my head so I thought I would blog about it as a way to clarify my thoughts.

It seemed to me he is focused on the wrong issue. His focus is on how to get more readers. It seems to me his focus should be on writing high quality stories, something that will knock the socks off readers, regardless of what genre it follows.

Admittedly, you can gather what I know about readers into a thimble and you’d still have plenty of room for other things, but I think what readers (at least this reader) enjoys most is: a great hook, fascinating character development, impeccable prose, a captivating plot, and an unexpected yet satisfying ending. Easy peasy, right? (grin)

My point is, in my view most readers don’t care if it’s contemporary vs. historical vs. paranormal. What they crave is a gripping, emotional story with quality writing. They want their emotional buttons pushed, and they want to enjoy the prose while that’s happening. If you can deliver that every time, in my humble opinion, then your readers will not only stick by you, they will clamor for more and tell their friends in the process.

My advice: write the stories you feel compelled to write, but focus on quality. If it takes you three years to deliver a quality product, then take three years. One of my favorite writers, Alex Jeffers, has only written three or four books in the last ten years, and each one is impeccable. I don’t care what genre he writes in, I will read anything he publishes because I know it will be great work. He never releases anything until it is entirely thought out and polished to a dazzling sheen. I have no idea if he has a large following, but I do know that all of the readers I’ve talked to who know him are as devoted as I am to his work.

Please don’t misunderstand; I’m not suggesting that my stories are in the same league as Alex Jeffers and Felice Picano and others of that caliber. What I’m saying is my focus is on improving my craft so that one day, hopefully, I will publish the kind of superior stories of those writers I so admire.

Build a quality mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, or so the saying goes.

Eric and Ray's Wedding

Saturday, Herman and I attended the wedding of our friends, Ray and Eric. We met Eric on the tennis courts about two years ago, and we’ve gotten to know them well. Ray is a cancer survivor, a man with a lust for life. Eric is a great match for him, willing to go anywhere and try anything. They have been partners for over twenty years. It warmed my heart to watch them open their hearts and share their vows in front of all their family and closest friends.

It was an outdoor ceremony, and we enjoyed perfect Palm Springs weather with a nice view of the mountains in the background. Lovely.

I’m not the kind of person who cries at weddings, but it always reminds me of how much I love my own husband, and that is often emotional, especially after two glasses of champagne.

The first picture below is Hermand and I. The one below that is the wedding couple. 

Writing Tip: Secrets

Secrets are at the heart of many plots. In fact, if you study nearly any romantic comedy, you’ll fine that all the comic situations are built on secrets or lies, usually both. 

I have long believed that a good writer will allow his characters to keep secrets, and the secrets must be revealed before the end. But the question is when and why to reveal them. 

Something that I learned in a screenwriting class is, the best way to disclose a secret is when disclosing is the lesser of two evils. That is: if a character reveals a secret, s/he will lose respect or love or something worse. But, if s/he doesn’t reveal the secret, then something far more devastating will happen. 

So characters reveal secrets only when forced, to prevent something horrible from happening. A writer will do this to heighten the drama. 

Also, by having secrets, the reader knows that the truth will eventually be found out. So by introducing these secrets early on, it keeps the reader in suspense of when the truth will be revealed, and what the fallout will be when that eventually happens. 

Once a character withholds information, then the plot should twist the story so that the longer the character holds his/her secret, the more devastating the results will be when the information is finally exposed. It’s like a harmless little white lie that begins to build on itself, taking on bigger meaning and more damaging consequences until it will have a huge dramatic effect over everyone’s lives. 

Like any literary device, characters keeping secrets is a powerful tool in the writer’s hands.