A Rorschach Test for You

What Do You See?

Yeah, so did my son.

 

Saving Real-life Memorable Characters

My son asked me this week, “Are you still writing?” Oh yes, always writing, but in the collecting/research/learning stage. Books are still in progress. Part of my process is collecting characters.

When developing characters, I like to pull from people I’ve observed when I’m out and about. This morning…I found a gold mine!

It was 9:00am, and I was watching the news, eating breakfast, and totally forgot about an appointment. A calendar reminder flashed up on my laptop, I had an “oh crap” moment, then took a shower, dressed, put the garbage out, and made it to my appointment in 20 minutes. Definitely a hectic morning, until I spotted a woman walking down the sidewalk. I was transfixed!

This woman was heading towards downtown, barefoot, with feet blackened enough to let me know that this wasn’t her first trip. She was wearing thin purple workout pants that hung loosely on her slender frame, and some old hat over her hair, which hung in grayish brown dreadlocks almost down to her waist, and right away I wondered what lived in there. She was also smoking with one hand, and carrying a 1/2 empty container of instant coffee, you know, like the kind you used to see years before designer coffees were so popular (do they really call them “designer” coffees…I don’t know).

Several questions came to my mind. Where was she going? How far would she go barefoot? Would she ride public transportation that way? Why the coffee? Was she on a quest to find a styrofoam cup and some hot water? How long had she been wearing her hair like that, and why because clearly it was not her best look. What circumstances and choices had brought her to this point? And to me, all those questions confirmed that I had found a very interesting character, that and the fact that other drivers were staring at her, too. She was definitely going to find a place in one of my stories, where I could answer all those questions, and I drove on knowing that, I would be preserving her character beyond her little stroll down the sidewalk this morning.

A Gift That Took Seventy Years to Deliver

The last time I saw my grandmother she was laying lifeless on a high bed in a special room where they took people to die. I wasn’t sure why the nursing home did that. Were they renting out her room already? My mom and I had come as soon as they called. Granny was past knowing us, but she was talking to someone. I wondered if she was getting a glimpse of the other side, talking to loved ones who had gone on before. I leaned in to hear what she was saying. There were words, but none that made sense. She kept rambling on, whispering, talking, trying desperately to say something.

This was going to be a long day. I decided to get some lunch, but when I came back she was already gone. I regretted that nobody was there when she left. I went to find mom, gave her the news, and we went to Granny’s bedside together. I wondered how my mom would respond. I encouraged her to touch her mother’s hand. She didn’t want to. “She’s not there,” she said.

Months earlier I brought my infant daughter to the nursing home for a visit. Granny sat in her wheelchair, her long salt-and-pepper hair hanging with no style, down to her shoulders. The home had controlled her diet, at least. “Not enough butter on the bread,” she complained, but her usually overweight frame was considerably smaller than how I had known her most of her life.

I placed my daughter in her lap, prepared to snatch her up, then make excuses for her sudden fear and crying, but there was none. Instead, my little girl looked up into Granny’s face, then reached up and stroked her scraggly hair. Tears welled up in my eyes over that fleeting moment of tenderness, given by a toddler, to her aging grandparent. There was no repulsion over Granny’s condition, no thought to the wrinkles on her face, her drooping eyelids, or the clothes that hung on her as if they had fit better a year ago. It was a profound moment of innocence that closed the gap of seventy years between two people, and I was the only one who would remember it, a gift that took seventy years to deliver.

(Dedicated to Granny & Shannon)

Christmas Projects

Sketching, When PTSD Takes Hold

Courage, Strength and Love

 

It’s a long story but it involves an ex with a mental illness. He did things like hold a gun to my head, disappear out of state with my daughter, and collude with my current husband’s ex wife in order to fabricate stories in a corrupt family court where the judge made decisions based on her relationships with the attorneys, rather than on what was best for children. I had to have a body guard during my hearings. I had to endure sleepless nights while my daughter went on visitation to her dad’s house, who had his sister living with him that had just been released from prison. It was a mother’s worst nightmare.

I remarried, very happily, nearly eleven years ago. For the first time since I was fifteen, I felt safe and loved. I began to relax during the day but at night, the nightmares increased. My therapist said that happened because I was finally in a place where it was safe to get it all out, but I think the nightmares continued because my daughter was subjected to a cruel father, and I was powerless to do anything about it. My daughter is almost twenty now, and has been diagnosed with PTSD, as well. My worst fears have been realized.

I’d like to say that the nights of sleeping with one eye open have stopped completely but they haven’t. Thankfully, they have lessened in intensity and in frequency, but they still return. They usually awaken me at some early morning hour. They’re vivid, and usually fraught with violence, fear, and anger. When I wake up, it takes me a minute to realize it’s not real. Then I feel angry for what my mind produces. I feel guilty for not having moved past it. I wonder what I’m doing wrong, or what I could be doing to fix it. And then, I ignore it. I don’t tell anybody except my husband, because I am ashamed of it, and even then I water down the details and give a vague response when he asks.

“Why were you up at 2am, baby?”

“Another bad dream.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

When I was alone, and I was afraid my ex was coming to kill me, I would have a glass of wine at night to calm my nerves. Okay, maybe three or four glasses of wine, but I never really liked it and knew that alcohol was not the answer, which left me staring into the dark for hours, listening and waiting. It really screwed up my sleep patterns and to this day I have to work hard at going to bed at a normal hour, and not staying up all night until the coast is clear to go to sleep (crazy people still kill other people during broad daylight but I was hoping my crazy was at work).

My nightmares have decreased from nearly every night, to a few per month, but my current husband occasionally travels for business and I often revert right back to my insomniac nights when he isn’t home. I make sure the guns are strategically placed, so I can get to them quickly. I have my bear spray canister by my bed, because I don’t really want to kill another human being. My car keys are nearby so I can hit the panic button to alert my neighbors. My watch dog is asleep by the front door, and the security camera app is activated on my phone so I can check all four cameras at any hour of the day. Aside from living in a relatively high-crime area, my ex has disappeared into obscurity about two years ago, and is no longer a threat (I hope), but old habits die hard when it comes to PTSD. At 2am, I can still be found, wandering around the house, looking out windows or turning lights on. I get sick of it so last night, I tried a different approach.

I sketched.

This is my Horse in the Wind

She’s free and beautiful, and creating her took my mind to a new place; a place of freedom, and place of no worry.

I think I’ll be sketching again and hopefully I’ll find a way to do it without staying up until 3am, but for that moment, my mind was free.

Ebba Sage art is created using a variety of methods such as sketching, photography, and digital art. This is my version of Xu Beihong’s Galloping Horse. This is Horse in the Wind during the conceptual stage. I knew I wanted Chinese characters (those are actually Japanese characters shown below), but scaled down, like in the final version. They represent Courage, Strength, and Love.

Thank you, Xu Beihong, for the inspiration.

Xu Beihong, 1948

 

 

Running Naked During the Sermon

excerpt from When War Was a Card Game

Memoirs by Ebba Sage

The church building’s interior had high arching wood beams, with hanging lights that I often found my five-year-old self staring straight up at, and wood pews that were polished shiny from years of peoples’ butts sliding in and out, and polished even more by kids like me, who tried to turn the pews into horizontal slides by tucking my dress far enough under my fanny to lessen the friction before shoving off. On a good day, and with no adults watching, I could master a five foot slide before having to use my feet to push off again for the next pass.

Pew polishing was a good alternative to my other idea of stripping off all my clothes, and running down the aisle naked, right after the pastor had told us, with a mere wave of his hand, to sit down, stand up, sit down, then stand up again, during what seemed like the first hour of every service. Was it boredom, attention seeking, or my inner artist protesting against the status quo? This is my first memory of guilt, because surely there was something wrong with me if I wanted to run naked through the church, not just anytime, but during the most sacred, quiet, meditative portion of the sermon, where I’d be sure that my naked protest would be noticed and a committee would be formed to question the ridiculous formality of the sermon and how cruel and thoughtless it was to make kids sit through them. It was simply too much, but not being confident of the desired outcome, I left my clothes on and am fairly certain now, that I made the right decision. 

 

 

 

 

Alien Queen from an 80’s sketch

Alien Queen was created using the original pencil sketch from the 80’s, and Pixelmator.

Turning a Dust Collecting Award into Art

 

Non-filtered version

Unattributed: A Reading List on Plagiarism — Longreads Blog

About six months ago, I photographed some vibrant purple hydrangeas, in my backyard. Afterward, I uploaded them to my Mac, removed the background with an editing tool, and replaced it with black.

About two months later, I started following an artist who did the exact same thing with the minor difference of adding a filter which gave his rendering a bit of a melting paint effect. Still, side by side, one might be hard pressed to choose between his or mine.

And I hated that! The next thing I knew, I started wondering if this guy was going to accuse me of stealing his idea. I started wondering if I would have to prove that I actually created my flowers-on-black before I even knew of his existence.

Flowers on black backgrounds is not a new concept, but my reaction to this scenario proves how much I hate plagiarism, and how much I love new and creative ideas.

Cake Pops Are Still Just Cake

There really is no new thing under the sun; for instance flour, eggs, sugar, salt, and baking powder combined in a particular way will always make cake. Cake is cake, right? Or is it?

Take a cake from the 1950s, and put it alongside of one of today’s cake trends, and there is definitely a difference in presentation.

The Melania Speech Scandal and Cake Pops

All this talk of plagiarism is of course prompted by the Melania speech scandal. I was blown away with her poise, beauty, and delivery so it pained me to see a word-for-word clip of her, side-by-side with Michelle’s speech the next day. On one hand, speaking about her husband, her childhood, and her hopes for our country is pretty generic stuff, like flour, sugar, eggs and salt, but just think how Melania could have impacted history with a cake pop speech! Surely, speech writers at the top could have come up with something that included all the same sentiments, but presented in a new way.

As an artist and a writer, this is what I strive for in every single piece; my own cake pop moment. Had I been Melania Trump, somebody would be hearing, “You’re fired” today.

In the internet age, plagiarizing has become easier to detect—and harder to resist.

via Unattributed: A Reading List on Plagiarism — Longreads Blog

Blossoms on Cream