El Segundo Author Fair  

Have you ever had a month, a week, or even a year where nothing seems to go right. Well this month has been particularly bad. My sister-in-law (one of two) died at the beginning of the month, and then my aunt, the last of my father's siblings passed two weeks later. I came down with a nasty sinus infection and then yesterday I decided it was nice to re-twist my foot. Luckily, thanks to the quick thinking of my friends it didn't end up nearly as bad as I expected, and can walk on it pretty good today. My chiropractor Dr. Nania, may think differently once she adjusts me. I will be very musical!

And it wasn't just me, two friends husbands were laid off after years at their jobs, my daughter's brother-in-law was in a terrible car crash and almost died, and one of my good friend's nephews committed suicide just last week. Why do patterns like this exist? Is it bad Karma? A glitch in the rotation of the earth, or just something that seems to all happen at one time and it is all simply coincidence?

It makes me think of fiction. We take an incident we have experienced or heard of from someone and make it into a story. We want to take that tragedy and repeat it in a story for others to read. Why? Why would we want people to re-live something like that, or to even experience that in any way? Isn't life difficult enough than to read about a suicide and it's repercussions on a family; or a car accident that takes a life and how the family struggles through the aftermath; or the death of a loved one - short or prolonged - and how people must accept and move on?

What happened to the humor in life? Just laughing for laughing's sake. Enjoying a moment because you can?

I guess it's because it is life, and like reality TV it makes a good story and it sells. Maybe writing a mystery isn't much different. I mean usually someone dies, right? Most times it someone who people really hated and meted justice, and then sometimes it's someone who didn't deserve it and the killer needed to be punished.

That's when I realized we can't escape any of it. A good story is a good story no matter how we might feel or react. It may not be a story for us in particular to read, but it is still good. Like "A Million Little Pieces.; yep - it's been beaten to death. But it was a good story. The mistake the man made who wrote it was that he pitched it the WRONG way. He didn't want to send a million pitches out to get a bunch of rejections, so he changed it. If had been fiction would we have looked at it the same way?

I sat at home with sinus infection for two days and watched HGTV because the last thing I wanted was reality TV. I wanted to see people happy at the end of an episode. People who actually got what they wanted. There wasn't much pain involved unless it was a splinter or the repairman's bill.

What this month taught me is that sometimes you just need a break from both the fiction and non, and that's okay too.

There are so many books that take on the topic of character naming. Make it catchy, make it memorable - I guess Dickens did a good job with that one. I have Muriel, and Julia, both names that are from times past (Lydia and Faye) and maybe I made my younger characters take on older name, but then tough: I was  Laurie and my best friend was a Lorraine. Can't do much better than that.

Now you might ask, where is this going. I got my DAR newsletter today and my youngest daughter's name was misspelled. Now mind you I was a Laurie in a sea of Lori's, or I was mistaken for a Laura (our old custodian called me that for the entire 10 years he worked on my office). I decided when I had children of my own that I was going to give them unique names (not Apple or Moon Unit mind you...) that way they wouldn't be in a sea of Lori's, Ann's, Lisa's and such.

So my oldest is Lessa - not Lisa. It is pronounces Less-ah. Everyone calls her Lisa. If it were Lisa it would be Leesa (kinda like Leeza Gibbons). It has a double S.

Lessa is the name of a very prominent character in Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider's series. The first and last Science Fiction book I took to. I collected the whole darn series. I loved her power (Lessa's that is) in critical situations, taking the matter into her own hands and dealing with it, not letting a man tell her what or how to do it, and becoming a strong leader!

My son Alec is not named after Alec Baldwin. You have no idea how many times people ask me that. He is named after the British actor Sir Alec Guinness, who was a fine actor before Star Wars sent him into the force. As a matter of fact while I was in labor with him an old Guiness movie was on called the Mudlark. It sealed my fate and his.

But besides the Alec Bladwin thing, they also love calling him Alex (Alexander) - even his grandfather. His boss calls him Allan (that's his uncle). So much for choosing a simple name.

Lastly my youngest is named Alyse. It is pronounced like Elise but it has the A instead of an E. It is not Alice, Alyssa, or any other of the derivatives that people so happily try to tack on. It is actually Old English from the 1500's or earlier and I had chosen it as my SCA name 20 years ago (yes, for a time I was one of them. Like so many of my friends. lol)

So why as a culture, with so many names in this world do we not take the time to correctly learn someone's name and use it properly? I think some of it is how we hear things, some of it is the popularity of the time (Alexander, Lisa, Alyssa), substitutions or familiarity with a name can cause confusion, and some of it is simply we as humans are just too darn lazy to take the time to really learn someone's name right.

So FYI it's Lydia Proctor (not Lidia); Faye Carter (That one you can't mangle too much); Muriel Grant (Not Miriam, and Grant like the tomb and the former president) and Julia Franklin (not Julia, or Juliette).

Sigh...