What’s the worst advice you’ve ever got?

That’s the topic for this week’s Blog Gang meme, and you can bet your crazy old auntie I’m going to wade in on this one!

Come to think of it, there’s been one heck of a lot of bad advice in my life – and that’s only counting the pieces of advice I didn’t have quite enough sense (or enough self-confidence?) to ignore.

In rough chronological order, here’s some Really Bad Advice that leaps to memory:

• “Eat this!” ~ my older sister, more than once, when we were kids;
• “When you go over that pommel horse next time, you should try to land in a shoulder roll.” ~ Janet the Jock, in grade 4 gym class;
• “Just shave off the parts of your eyebrows that are outside the arc.” ~ Penny the Prom Queen in Training, when we were about twelve years old;
• “Don’t marry this guy. You’ll be bored to death in a year” ~ an ex-boyfriend, speaking of He Who Hogs The Power Tools, with whom I’ve been happily pulling in double harness for more than 15 years now…

You get the idea.

But then there’s also all the bits of advice that, while not actually totally bad, are not necessarily helpful at all times.

Example: as I’ve mentioned before, my mother’s advice in case of any kind of heartbreak and distress – from a misplaced phone bill to the break-up of a relationship – was always the same:

“Take a deep breath and have a nice cup of tea. You’ll feel better.”

Okay, there’s good sense in Mother’s standard advice: deep breathing does help to chill out the flight-or-flight instinct that’s our human response to stress, and the routine of brewing and sipping that comforting hot beverage is, well, a comfort as well as a distraction. However, there are just some things in life that can’t be fixed so easily – and no, a meditative cuppa doesn’t always make you “feel better” about a crisis in progress.

But I digress.

The very worst piece of advice I’ve ever been given?
This:

“You can’t be a writer – unless you go into journalism, of course. There’s just no way to make a steady living at any other kind of writing. Train for a real job, instead, and you can write for pleasure on the side – or do your writing when you retire.”

Wrong-oh,  Mr. High School Guidance Counsellor!

And if you consider all the monumentally stupid things I’ve done in my life – following bits of advice that my Inner Voice and Common Sense reared up against in horror (to no avail) –  I’m eternally grateful for managing to get up the gumption to ignore that particular piece of career advice, doled out by an unimaginative polyester-clad dillweed drone in horn-rimmed specs, and pursue a freelance writing career.   Because you just know that a “real job” would’ve killed me!  :)

So, it’s your turn now –

What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?
(And did you follow it?)

Blog Gang

Of all the various freelance writing jobs I do in real life, my all-time least favourite task is to write the little blurb for the back cover of a book. Succinct is not my forte. I am a natural-born babbler, as those who move through my life will know (to the detriment of their ears and patience).

Another thing I really strongly dislike is to impose (or attempt to impose) my will upon others. I say please a lot, and thank you even more — the way more forthright souls might sprinkle their conversation with colourful expletives.

Colour me pathetic.

So of course I am vaguely appalled (and yet, truly, flattered) whenever I am tagged for a meme — especially since they do, by definition, tend to require tagging someone else…

I dither.
I procrastinate.
And eventually I fall back on the tried-and-true:

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

And in this case, I save up a bunch of memes and tumble them all together into one big manic bowl of steaming mulligatawny –

1. The Six-Word Memoir

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

Mitch challenged me to summarize my life story in a mere six words. Wow. That’s a tough one! See above, about my lack of self-restraint when it comes to spewing out words words words and more words… It took a long dog-walk and an even longer bubble bath (top two venues for Deep Thought) to come up with this:

But I forgive Mitch, because it was Pinhole who put him up to it.

And both of these fine gentlemen make it to the list of –

2.Five People Who Make My Day

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

There are just too many to choose from, in all conscience, and who ever likes to play favourites? But beadinggem was kind enough to send me the award, and it would be simply churlish not to play on. Besides, I like her.

So…. hard choices… but right off the top of my head, and among the rich treasures of the internet and my subscriptions, I can refer you with confidence to these Day-Brightening Bloggers:

• the aforementioned Mitchell Allen;
• the aforementioned Pinhole O’Rourke;
• Mary Emma Allen (no relation to Mitch) who’s been giving sage advice to craft-business quilters on the LIfestyle Channel at b5media for the past 4 years, as well as blogging Alzheimers Notes from the caregiver’s viewpoint;
• Liz Strauss, who can rock an open mic night like nobody’s business; and
• Claudia, who cracks me up and makes me weep and spits diamonds whenever she feels like it.

But I’m not out of the woods here yet, oh no! On top of all, ever since January I’ve been deep in guilt and meme-debt to Pinhole (poor man) who slathered on the compliments in a shameless ploy to extract –

3. Three Writing Tips

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

and, whew! Thank heavens, an easy meme!

Everything I know about writing, I learned it from my lifelong quest to become a half-decent visual artist. (Yeah, I know… don’t rub it in.)

Here we go, three writing tips:

1. Just because everyone else makes the sky blue and the grass green, that doesn’t mean you have to do it that way. Find your own voice and vision.

2. Sometimes, to get to the good stuff, you’ve got to colour outside the lines. Never mind how you originally planned the piece to go — if it wants to go somewhere different, at least take a moment to explore the possibilities.

3. If you don’t stop talking about it, roll up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty — art just ain’t gonna happen.

And there you go!

Oh and…

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

:D

Originally posted 18 June 2007, but I’ve updated for a new round of tag…
Uhm, that’s not cheating, is it?

Neena (A Mom’s Life) and Julie (De-Clutter It) have tagged me to play the “Seven Random Things About Me” game with them. Updated — and Silly Go Lucky Josey, too!

The Rules: Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog post with their 7 things as well as these rules. You need to tag 7 others and list their names on your blog. Remember to leave a comment for them letting them know they have been tagged and to read your blog.

Random??

My parents claim that I was a “difficult child” right from the moment of birth, and it could be true. I do seem to have a little problem with following the rules! And if you’ve been reading here for a while, you’ll know I’ve got a thing for themes…

So here are Seven Not-So-Random Things about your friendly neighbourhood Domestik Goddess:

1. I once spent the night in a canoe. (Can’t you tell that I’m a Canadian?) It was tied to a tree on the riverbank at the time, so not so much of the drifting downriver like Baby Moses in the baskets of reeds or anything.
2. I once spent the night star-watching on Ben Nevis: more mist than stars, but it was lovely all the same.
3. I once spent the night on the 26th floor of an office building under construction.
4. I once spent the night in a tent in a snowdrift — and I’m not doing that again, thank you very much! The winter camping trip was planned, but the blizzard was a surprise to both me and the Weather Service.
5. I once spent the night underneath a bus. (This is another hardy Canadian taking-shelter-in-a-snowstorm story.)
6. I once spent the night in a gypsy camp, somewhere near the English-Welsh border.
7. I once spent the night not-sleeping on the not-wide-enough granite base of a peculiar modern sculpture in a city park. Because all of the park benches were already occupied. And it was a whole different decade…

And here are the bloggers I tagged in the first go-round…

I’ll spare them the angst of further self-revelation… in fact, I’m going to chicken out and not tag anyone in particular — there’s that rule-bending again! — but if you have a hankering to pick up the torch and spill the beans, yourself, please do consider yourself soundly tagged!

Technorati Tags: Seven Random Things meme

I’ve been dying for an excuse to talk about the book I’m reading right now, but I know before starting that my words can’t do this novel any justice. Today’s gentle prodding by my favourite archivist, however, is motivation to try…

The idea of the 161 Meme is to take the book from your bedside table, open it to page 161, and share the 6th sentence on that page.

I like this!

It reminds me of my grandmother, when she needed inspiration or had a problem to solve — closing her eyes, she opened her Bible at random and dropped a finger onto the page. The verse that was thus chosen became her guidance.

As usual, if you’d like to play along, please do leave a link in the comments and share what you’re reading right now!

Page 161, sixth sentence — okay?

Here’s mine:

The Stone Carvers
Jane Urquhart
2001
trade paperback published 2002
Emblem Editions (McClelland & Stewart)
Canada

In its most simple terms, The Stone Carvers is the story of immigrants and artisans and of Canada before the Great War and in its aftermath.

More intimately, it’s the story of seamstress-turned-stone-carver Klara Becker, her brother Tilman whose soul is tormented by wanderlust, and the small German-settled village in Ontario where they were born to a family with creative talent — the women exercising their skills in fabric, the men creating angels in wood. Tilman disappears; Klara falls against her will in love with a beautiful silent Irish labourer-boy; and the world is plunged into war.

On page 161, the 6th sentence is this:

And then she remembered, crossed the room, and stood for some time staring at the engraved shape of the pattern she had drawn — all that was left of him now — and she recalled what her grandfather had told her about the likeness of medieval knights in full armour being drawn with a chisel on their marble burial slabs.

Jane Urquhart’s darkly beautiful novel speaks of memory and loss, obsession and art, and the human hand upon Nature — creating and destroying, together.

Above all, I’m enthralled by the way that Nature weaves itself into the essence of these characters, who in turn shape the landscape to fit their needs and dreams; and everything that man and Nature created together is blasted apart — then strangely reborn — in that small distant part of Canada in the midst of France, 100 hectares of battlefield ground and a massive white monument at Vimy Ridge.

It’s a compelling story, one of those you can sink into and read compulsively, reading slowly so the story won’t end yet driven to turn the page. But if you’re looking for a Hollywood-style adventure story or breathless bodice-ripper, move on.

The Stone Carvers rises from a tradition of allegory, legend, fable…

The individual characters are less important, in a conventional modern-literary sense, than the roles they inhabit and the images with which they create and are created.

In this world, silence speaks. Physical spaces rather than words define the people who carve out a place in the wilderness, stay and work there, or escape to journey on. Love comes with chains and good intentions. Images are memory. Touch can be dangerous, unpredictable, like a spark to a fuse.

But ghosts and angels walk together, in this many-layered landscape, and magic is made by human hands. There is hope for redemption.