Have Writing Career, Will Travel by Sydney Avey

When the nest empties and the career (the one with the steady paycheck) get’s scrapbooked, some of us boomers pull a latent passion for writing out of the drawer and take it with us everywhere we travel.

Some months I write at a large oak desk in my home office in the lower montane forest of the Sierra Nevadas. Just outside my window, gray squirrel and woodpeckers play with their food in a massive black oak tree, and deer and wild turkeys, fox and the occasional black bear pick their way through oak leaves and pine needles on the path that leads to a dry creek below our property.

My writing studio in the deser

Other months, I retreat to a small place in the desert where my writing studio is the central feature of house. Open and airy, I can look across the living room through a window that frames a desert landscape. Mesquite trees provide shade, rosemary bushes shelter cottontail bunnies from coyotes who hope to do lunch on our patio, and Gambel’s quail run circles around golden barrel, cholla and prickly pear cactus.

Other times, I’m at our daughter’s island home off the coast of Seattle. I set myself up to write in her dining room, where I feel quite at home. The Japanese styled furniture in this serene space used to decorate my mother’s house. A grandchild might wander in and sit down at the Kimball console piano to practice, the very one my mother played when she accompanied young dancers in my grandmother’s ballet and tap studio.

But no matter where I write, the challenge is always the same. I try to write early in the day, when my energy is highest. I try to summon the focus it takes to lose myself in my story. I try to put in the hours to produce the desired word count. I try. I don’t always succeed.

If I stay on the balance beam and work toward health and well being, my days will include morning quiet time, an exercise class tucked somewhere in my schedule, and some meaningful time spent with family and friends. A spiritual insight that informs my work, a yoga class that unkinks my neck and shoulders from writer’s hunch, a phone call from one of the kids, a movie date with my husband, or an evening with friends...in addition to 1,000 words, of course...and my day is pretty perfect. It is a difficult balance to maintain. Too many internet rabbit holes; too much time spent sorting and managing stuff (closets, excel spreadsheets, social media, good intentions); too early a move to the sofa and the TV; I lose my footing.

On the road

These days, home is a highway between the many lives I lead. Writing doesn’t take up much space in my suitcase. A laptop and a notebook, that’s all; the rest is in my head and my heart. What earns me a heavy baggage charge is the bulging distractions.

Headlines vie for my attention with National Inquirer tactics: “What This Woman Did Had Me Sobbing for Days!” Makes me feel like the monkey triplets; don’t want to see it, hear it, or repeat it in a tweet. Invitations to try this, learn that, download, upgrade, or buy proliferate faster than I can hit delete. The cumulative effect weighs heavy.

I imagine we would all like more time to read deeply or write breakthrough prose. I love that these are portable activities. I’m looking for ways to unpack the detractors from the experience I truly desire.

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Sydney Avey lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Yosemite, California, and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifetime of experience writing news for non profits and corporations. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Foliate Oak, Forge, American Athenaeum, and Unstrung (published by Blue Guitar Magazine) and Ruminate. She has studied at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Sydney is the author

of two novels, The Sheep Walker’s Daughter and The Lyre and the Lambs.  She blogs at sydneyavey.com on topics related to loven and mystery, family relationships, conflicts between generations, and how faith functions in real life.

Email: mailto:sydneyavey@gmail.com
Website: http://sydneyavey.com
Blog: http://sydneyavey.com/blog
Facebook: https://www.facebook/sydney.avey
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SydneyAvey  
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sydneyavey
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/yosemitesyd/boards/


Make sure to stop by tomorrow, when you can enter to win a free copy of The Lyre and the Lambs!

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Legendary Writing by Author Sydney Avey

Family legends are precious. Parents caution children with tales of wayward aunts and cousins. They inspire budding talent with accounts of Grandma’s life on the vaudeville stage, and encourage resilience with stories of ancestors who pulled covered wagons over snow banks to start new lives in the golden West. Stories like these bond families together over generations. And if you have a writer in the family, they may pop up in a memoir or a novel.

Both of my novels contain the stuff of family legends. If you want to work a time honored story into your writing, here some points to consider.

Feel free to take liberties. Your account does not need to be told exactly as you heard it. It does not need to align to how others remember it. Allow the legend to serve the story you are writing. You are after emotional truth, not historical accuracy.  I’m writing a novella based on ancestral stories I heard from family members, source material I inherited, and genealogy I’ve researched. I want to include a bizarre tale of a trolley accident and a miraculous healing that is legend in my family.  There are numerous gaps in my knowledge of certain facts, so I’m inventing some of the details. That’s what fiction writers do. 

Consider how other family members might respond. How much consideration you give to friends and relatives who may have a different take on the family legend is highly personal. Frankly, I decided to wait until older family members who would have been offended passed away. I did not want to damage family relationships or feel restricted from telling the story the way I chose. Now, my close family is just as intrigued as I am to release the black sheep from their pens and let them have their say. 

Treat your legendary characters with respect. Families often have whipping boys, an ancestor who gets blamed for every negative character trait that turns up through the generations. By all accounts, my great grandmother was one tough customer. On the face of it, she abandoned a marriage, put her career ahead of her children at a time when most women did not work, and used her high intelligence, quick wit, and acerbic tongue to make life miserable for my mother. How I wish I had asked the questions that might have provided a more balanced picture (or not), but we don’t think to probe until it’s too late. Rather than perpetuating a family tradition to vilify, try seeing the legend from a different point of view. Our legend is not clear on what prompted great grandma to leave her husband and go to work. Therein lies a story. 

Do you have a family story that wants telling? Tell it with creativity, love, and respect and you have a jar of preserves spiced just right to appeal to a reader’s taste, and one that will last in a family’s memory. 

Sydney Avey lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Yosemite, California, and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifetime of experience writing news for non profits and corporations. 

Buy links:

The Lyre and the Lambs by Sydney Avey on Amazon. ISBN 978-1-

938708-31-2 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-938708-33-4 (ebook).

The Sheep Walker’s Daughter on Amazon. ISBN 978-1-938708-19-

0 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-938708-20-6 (ebook). ISBN 978-1-

938708-30-5 (audiobook). 

Contact links:

Email: mailto:sydneyavey@gmail.com
Website: http://sydneyavey.com
Blog: http://sydneyavey.com/blog
Facebook: https://www.facebook/sydney.avey
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SydneyAvey  
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sydneyavey
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/yosemitesyd/boards/

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