King Lear and the Queen Bee

I returned to the old family property--now owned by my cousin. Lovely forest and stream and pond, but lots of mixed feelings. I went to find remnants of beekeeping equipment: supers, frames, and queen excluders.

I'm starting an apiary for a community garden. I say remnants because my father kept bees and like all his tools, anything he owned, he discarded without regard for posterity.

My father dropped things where his mind became bored. His fingers released the level or the hammer, letting it fall to the ground because he saw a piece of plastic in the distance that interested him more. He threw empty paint cans, carburetors, lawnmower engines, water heaters, scrap metal into the forest. Scattered them like seeds.

I found stacks of bee boxes near the pond--all rotted. At one hundred dollars a box, not including frames, about 2,000 dollars worth of equipment discarded. Found some boxes beneath fir trees, stuck together with resin and pine needles. Out of the 35 hives I managed to piece together 2 hives with frames. I had to climb up a pyramid of wood and metal in an old shack, nestled in the forest, to find the queen excluder, which lay dusty and gummed with beeswax on a top rafter.

When I return to the property (rarely now), I'm angry at my father's legacy. He was careless with his life and careless with his relationships. He was a destructive narcissist-- a terrible personality disorder: destructive to spouse, children, even the land. I feel compelled to write a novel about growing up with such a parent so that I can save some future boy or girl from this King Lear.

But I don't know if I will because I'm with Virginia Woolf on this one: Rage can deform and twist books. That's what she thought of Charlotte Bronte's writing, a writer who "had more genius in her than Jane Austen." But Jane Austen was brilliant says Woolf because "Here was a woman about the year 18oo writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote..." (1)

So no bitterness, no preaching. And I'm one who likes a bit of comedy with my tragedy. It's hard to find some comedy in this narcissist's tale. There's a reason King Lear is called a tragedy. It's a heavy burden, like the actual experience and who wants to relive that.

I have to clean and sterilize the bee boxes. It will be a relief to handle the bees myself, no frenetic King around fueling the rage of the Queen bee and her colony.

The Sparrow and the Uirapuru-Laranja

When I lived in Brazil I was asked what birds we have in Canada. I recall one Brazilian asking whether we have these little common brown birds. She was pointing to the ubiquitous house sparrow. Of course, the answer was yes, we have sparrows.

The sparrow made me feel at home in Brazil and that was what he was intended to do. Sparrows are native to Eurasia and North Africa, but during the 19th century, “settlers of European origin intentionally introduced the house sparrow to North and South America, southern Africa, Australia and new Zealand.” Their hope was that the sparrow would control insects and “create a familiar landscape for immigrants."(1)

I mention a sparrow in my novel set in Brazil. He flutters between the delicate black capped heron, the engineering Rufus Horneo, and the squawking Hyacinth macaw.

Yesterday, I found a little children's book about a sparrow written in Ukrainian (I have a few Russian, Ukrainian, German, and French) story books. I read the first page: "The little sparrow sings a little song 'cheev, cheev'.” He has six brothers--guaranteed mischief. I have to read the story to find out more. I'm curious if the illustrator shows the sparrows taking a dirt bath--always amusing.

Sparrows are everywhere. When in Washington D.C. recently, I viewed some Japanese screens at the Freer and Sackler galleries. I was drawn to a one-foot square screen that was originally used as a cupboard cover. With loose brush strokes the artist had recreated the flight of a little sparrow.

The sparrow is plain compared to a cardinal or blue jay here in Canada. And in Brazil, well, the contrast is enormous. Its juxtaposition in that landscape is interesting because it makes me think about my novel. Many years ago, in one of my many drafts, I actually had the metmorph (main character) descend from metamorphs on both sides of her family. It was a little too much, but it's easy to get caught up in an idea. Nino Ricci told me, too many metamorphs diminish the impact of the main metamorph. So I needed a lot of sparrows and one exotic bird.

(One exotic bird: UIRAPURU-LARANJA (Pipra fasciicauda) Band-tailed Manakin. Photo by
Haroldo Palo Jr.)

Another hole?

Tech writers do not hold copyright to the documentation they produce for corporations. Writers can be proud of their work but not attached. To a degree, the same is true for an author producing a piece of fiction. The story is more important than the author. Authors have been told to kill their darlings because these are little side stories, embellishments that add little to the narrative. Readers trip over these like jutting roots of trees across a worn path. Readers are caught up in the story, looking up and around, not down at the path. Trip, tumble, and they've left that imaginative realm. The book closes shut.

Writing for so many years has taught me how to separate from the final product, the final manuscript. When you're working for a start-up company though, you're documenting someone else's creation and creators can be very attached to their products.

Some days, it's very hard to convince owners that their product needs more information associated with it. Strangely, basic documentation like a glossary can be met with unusual resistance. As a tech writer, you're thinking of the customer, wanting to make sure she doesn't trip, or worse, fall down some hole (missing information).

The resistance can last months. Now to an author and writer, this can seem absurd, but to a creative person, it's easy to recognize that attachment. You created the work, only you know what it needs. But the work must stand on its own. No one will be around to explain, except for the documentation.

The White Rabbit of Highly Technical Writing

"The tech writer was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on her feet in moment: she looked up, but it was still dark in her cubicle; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit as still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went the tech writer like the wind, and was just in time to hear the White Rabbit say, as he turned the corner, "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"

In a highly technical environment (with an art history background -- oh my brain!) understanding how the Master product works can be like chasing the White Rabbit. First you're surprised by the rabbit. (Really, a rabbit can do that? Is that useful?) And then you get used to the idea. (White Rabbit, okay.) And when you're ready to understand the rabbit, the rabbit bounds down the hole and so begins the chase. You feel you never grasp the information because you're not an engineer or a computer scientist or even a mathematician. But it's too late, you've tumbled down the the hole.

Welcome to the wonderland of API docs. It's not about simple GUI procedures.
1. From the Grand Duchess menu, select Off-with-her-head.

Your topics can be about multi-core processors, various optimizations, the Kaczmarz method, a simple iterative algebraic reconstruction algorithm. (My recent course in game mathematics has been invaluable.) So you then take an Intro C++ course and install Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and write your first little program and no, it's not “Hello World” because you are a tech writer, it's "Woe Is I."

You try to apply how you study art and literature to understanding technology. You apply how you create your own work (fiction) and essays. You apply your own understanding of Waiting For Godot – your favorite play. You try the magazine writing approach of who when why what where. But with API, these are always surface questions, and the developer tells you something else that is important for the user to know. And then it's back to the audience. My audience needs more details! You think today you've got the White Rabbit by the tail, but he turns down another tunnel, you're bumping behind, having to let go because you're smaller now – you took that pill (Intro C++) and the White Rabbit is stronger than you.
(Just ask Alice.)

Novel Writing

When working on my novel, The Metamorph of Sao Joaquim, (still with my literary agent), I heard the main character's voice only in Portuguese. The setting of the novel is Brazil. So it makes sense that the story could be in Portuguese, but of course, I was writing the novel in English. Every other character I heard was in English. But the main character's voice was so strong in Portuguese that I was worried I'd be translating her dialogue into English. It would sound like that recent film adaptation of novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. Filmed in English, it felt false with the Spanish accents. I would have preferred the cadence of the Spanish language. (And I'm biased because I prefer the stories and style of Pedro Almodóvar films.)

So how did I get my character to express herself in English? Through cutting the first four chapters. The original first chapters were very cinematic. (Ocean at Santos beach, image begins in the water -- little did I know I'd end up liking scuba diving.) The reader at literary agency liked the cinematic opening, but Wayson Choy felt the book was stronger starting at chapter 4. And I felt he was right. This led to a lot of reorganizing and rewriting. And after so many years working on this novel (so many drafts), it was not unusual for me to suddenly cut 5000 words and write something completely new.

Starting the book at chapter 4 provided room for the main character to flourish. Suddenly she was far more integrated and her voice was in English. She became more like the Brazilians I knew when I lived in Brazil in 1983.

Previously I had used the main character as a device to move the story from A to B. I was also afraid to find out who the character really was. I didn't want bits of me in her. If I put myself in, my personality, my reactions would dictate the storyline versus letting the story unfold as it should. And this novel is not about my life in Brazil. It's a twenty year distillation of the red soil, the blue sky, and the desires of the people I knew and cared about in the town called Sao Joaquim.