Katherine Cowley

The Question of the Meeting of the Myths Contest and the Mormon Lit Blitz

November 17, 2014/0 Comments/in Arts, Commentary, Updates /by Katherine Cowley

I have a short story which will be published on the final day of the Meeting of the Myths contest, currently being held by the Mormon Lit Blitz, and as a result I’ve been thinking about the purpose of the contest. In the introductory essay to all the stories, Nicole and James Goldberg explain that a myth is “a story which humans use to make meaning out of existence.” These myths, whether fact or fiction, determine the way we see the world. The contest “asked writers to take some of the myths that fill their worlds and mix them together into new stories to give us new chances at insight.”

But can different myths be mixed? Is it healthy? Is it wise?

In Blake Snyder’s famous writing textbook Save the Cat, Blake Snyder criticizes M. Night Shyamalan’s film Signs for being guilty of what he calls Double Mumbo Jumbo.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, we are asked to believe that aliens from outer space have invaded Earth. The movie is about Mel Gibson’s crisis of faith in God. Huh?! I’d say proof of an alien intelligence outside our solar system sorta trumps all discussion about faith in God, don’t you think? But M. asks us to juggle both. And it’s a mess. Well, God and aliens don’t mix. Why? Because it’s two sets of different kinds of magic. It’s Double Mumbo Jumbo.

Snyder summarizes:

Audiences will only accept one piece of magic per movie. It’s The Law. You cannot see aliens from outer space land in a UFO and then be bitten by a vampire and now be both aliens and undead.

I admit, an alien-vampire-zombie mix-up does sound like a bit too much for one story. They are each distinct beings–but even more, they each demand their own genre. A good alien movie or vampire movie or zombie movie can take chapters to set up the world building and the rules of the storytelling. And the Double Mumbo Jumbo that occurs when you put them together does seem well worth avoiding.

But back to Snyder’s example, Signs. I actually thoroughly enjoyed the movie. For me, God exists, so I don’t have to suspend any disbelief for that myth or mythos. And I believe aliens could theoretically exist, so the fact that a main character could have a faith crisis concurrently to fighting off aliens seems reasonable to me, and in fact the threat of the aliens helps the character through the faith crisis, and creates several beautiful moments of discovery for the reader.

Yet in other stories, having God and a magic system has created cognitive dissonance for me, and seems like it has a greater risk of damaging faith than promoting it. For example, there are stories all about God and the Easter Bunny, which weave them together for children. Well, the Easter Bunny is not real (sorry, folks) and yet if we connect the Easter Bunny and God, and one is false, couldn’t we just assume the other is a figment of the imagination as well?

From an LDS gospel standpoint, there is also the sense that we must leave our other idols, our other sources of meaning behind, and devote ourselves entirely to God. As it says in Matthew 6:24, “No man can serve two masters.” What then of the Meeting of the Myths contest? Wouldn’t it be better just to leave those other myths behind?

And yet we have other commandments as well. In Doctrine and Covenants 88:118 it says, “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom.” The best books come from people all across the world and time, of all faiths. And in the Thirteenth Article of Faith we read, “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”

There is much that is virtuous and lovely and praiseworthy in popular music, in science fiction, in Hindu poetry, and in the traditions and mythologies of every nation and country. And we should not just tolerate these other perspectives and ideas: we should seek after them.

Perhaps there is a balance. Perhaps we can fix our hearts on God, knowing He is the source of all truth, while gaining knowledge and insight and understanding and beauty from a variety of sources.

I suspect, when I read the stories of the Meeting of the Myths contest, I will have some cognitive dissonance, where I find Double Mumbo Jumbo at play–and I suspect that will be intentional on the part of the writers. I’m sure that some myths will act as foils for each other, while others will complement, while others will build upon each other. The editors of the contest write: “If you join us this week, you will read about tribal shamans and world councils, about zombies and vampires and aliens, about the enchanted ones with the blessings and burdens they carry, about Mormon pioneers in 19th century America and modern Brazil.” If stories from previous Mormon Lit Blitz contests are any indication, I will laugh, I will cry, I will question, and ultimately I will leave the reading experience feeling a little stronger and a little more confident on my path back to God.

I hope that you visit the Mormon Lit Blitz and read each of the seven stories (including mine, “Daughter of a Boto”). Only then will you have a decisive answer on what happens when myths are mixed.
Original image by harold.lloyd, Creative Commons license, adapted by Katherine Cowley.

Hush, Little Baby: A Mildly More Sinister Version

October 22, 2014/0 Comments/in Commentary, Writing /by Katherine Cowley

A lot of nursery rhymes and children’s songs and stories have a sinister edge to them: “It’s raining, it’s pouring” is about a man dying in his sleep, London Bridge falling down typically would involve death and havoc, and Jack and Jill suffer traumatic head wounds. Not to mention what it would feel like to be swallowed by a wolf (Little Red Riding Hood) or locked in a cage by a cannibal (Hansel and Gretel).

“Hush, Little Baby” fits in well–a baby won’t stop crying, so a parent sings, offering rewards if the child would just be quiet, yet each of the rewards goes terribly wrong. (The real question: Is this intentional on the parent’s part, or simply bad fortune?)

Baby Cradle

My problem is that I can never remember the actual words to “Hush, Little Baby,” so when I come up with rhyming disasters on the spot, they tend to be a little more disturbing than the original. I do try to censor myself with my little ones, really. But I see no reason to censor myself on my blog. So without further ado…

Hush, Little Baby: A Mildly More Sinister Version

Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird won’t stop singing,
Mama’s gonna buy you a bell for ringing.

And if your ringing bell calls a ghost,
Mama’s gonna buy you a trip to the coast.

And if at the coast you fall into brine,
Mama’s gonna buy you a silver mine.

And if that silver mine explodes,
Mama’s gonna buy you a treasure trove.

And if that trove comes with bloodthirsty pirates,
Mama’s gonna buy you a friendly primate.

And if that friendly primate bites your hand,
Mama’s gonna buy you a wind-up band.

And if that wind-up band hurts your ears,
Mama’s gonna buy you a box for your fears.

And if that box full of fears weighs you down,
You’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.

Original image by Marle, Creative Commons license

10 Reasons I’m Not Doing NaNoWriMo

October 8, 2014/1 Comment/in Writing /by Katherine Cowley

I spend a lot of time online and in person with writers, and so come October it seems like everyone is talking about one thing: NaNoWriMo. That’s National Novel Writing Month, where writers sign up in mass to write an entire novel, of at least 50,000 words, during the month of November. When I say writers sign up in mass I’m being serious: in 2013 718,982 people signed up for it.

I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo myself, back in 2010. I successfully wrote an entire 50,000 word novel during November. Which was amazing for me, because I’d written so many novel beginnings (maybe 6 or 7) but never finished any of them. I didn’t actually have the least idea of how to write a novel until I wrote one from start to finish during NaNoWriMo.

But I’m going to resist the temptation to join the throng. Despite wanting to be one of the cool kids, the remembrance of the thrill of writing at such rapid rates, and the cool NaNoWriMo sticker charts and paraphernalia, I am NOT participating in NaNoWriMo this year.

These are the 10 reasons why I’m not doing NaNoWriMo:

1. I’ve done NaNoWriMo before. I’ve proved that I can write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Done and done.

2. I’m not at the right point in any of my projects. I’m slogging through a 3rd draft of a novel that has somehow edged up to 110,000 words, and I need to focus on this beast. In February I wrote a first draft of another novel that needs to be revised. And I have a 15,000 word novella that needs to be transformed into a novel. And a number of short stories in various stages of completion. I don’t have room for a new first draft in my life right now.

3. There is a new novel idea I have, one that’s been bouncing around in my head for about a year. But this idea requires heavy research. Making up 50,000 words of crap about the Regency period is a really bad idea for me, given how little I know about the Regency period. I would hate myself during the second draft and have to throw 30,000 (or more) words out.

4. NaNoWriMo is a great way to develop writing habits. But I already have a writing schedule, and I write for at least an hour every day. I’ve already got my motivation.

5. NaNoWriMo is a great way to develop writing community, and a group of people that move you forward. I already have several writing communities, and while I would love more and would love to go to some NaNoWriMo write-ins (some which are being held half a mile from my house), I’ll have to pass on it.

6. My NaNoWriMo novel was so terrible that after November 30th, 2010 (the date I finished it) I have never opened the file again. To reiterate, four years later, I still haven’t looked at my first novel again. It was completely worth writing, because it taught me endless things about writing and made me feel like a writer and showed me I could do it. All of which were worth doing NaNoWriMo for. But the novel is crap. If I were to revise it, I would open an entirely new file and start over. Realistically speaking, I’m actually more likely to borrow the novel’s title and a couple of scenes and turn it into a short story. (I know this isn’t the case for all NaNos–many revise their novels. But I can’t do it.)

7. After doing NaNoWriMo 2010 I decided that I had written a novel and wasn’t interested in writing one again. I was so burnt out that I spent 2011 doing a daily video blog. It took until the beginning of 2012 for me to write fiction again. (As a side note, doing the video blog was actually great for my writing once I came back to it.) I don’t think that I’d get as burnt out if I did NaNoWriMo again, but I really don’t want to risk losing a full year of writing.

8. Once I started writing again in 2012, I learned that I am an outliner. I do lots of “discovery writing” while I’m brainstorming, and I don’t always stick to my outlines (my best scenes are where I depart from my outlines while writing), but I’m an outliner. For the current novel I’m revising I have two sheets of butcher paper as tall as I am filled with charts that outline what every single character in my novel is doing during every single chapter. (I’ve spent so long trying to resist the label of “outliner,” but really, I’ve got it bad. My first draft outlines aren’t nearly that detailed though, lest you be worried for my sanity.) My style of outlining is not the best match for me doing NaNoWriMo, though some outliners pull it off.

9. If I’m writing first draft material, in a normal month I can write about 30,000 words. That’s not 50,000, but I’m satisfied with that speed. During first drafts I often write 1667 words in a day, and I can sometimes do it in just an hour. 1667 is the NaNoWriMo daily word count. Then why don’t I write 50,000 words in a month? I need recharge days. I take a break by working on a short story for a day or two, I outline, blog, and sometimes give myself a full day off. And still end up with 30,000 by the end of a month.

10. I like writing first drafts that are 30,000 words long, not 50,000 words. I drafted a complete novel in February. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a few beautifully crafted scenes that will survive relatively unchanged through the entire revision process. It has every chapter it will need, though some of those chapters are an outline that will need to be turned into 20 pages. Why didn’t I force that first draft into 50,000 words? Because I could tell that those other 20,000 words would be complete B.S., and I would cut them during draft 2. I know enough about my writing and I’ve written enough novels now to understand my writing process. My second draft will take that novel up to 50 or 60,000 words, but it won’t just be an addition of 20 or 30,000 words–it will be a true revision, a re-seeing. I’m currently working on revamping the magic system and tweaking the world and the culture. It will transform, and the parts I skipped are in my head, slowly transforming until I’m ready to put them down on the page.

Participating in NaNoWriMo was the best thing I could’ve done for my writing in 2010. If you haven’t done it then I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve never written a full novel before. But I’m definitely not doing NaNoWriMo 2014, and I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo (especially a second or third time), why are you doing it? And if you’re not doing NaNoWriMo, why not?

Short Creative Nonfiction on the Weather

September 30, 2014/0 Comments/in Writing /by Katherine Cowley

In 2005 I took a college class on writing memoirs. We learned a lot about creative nonfiction, and one of my takeaways, almost a decade later, is that there is so much you can do with words in nonfiction to make something matter. You can take something insignificant and transform it into something significant just with how you write about it.

A lot of my creative nonfiction ends up on Facebook, and I’ve been writing a fair bit about the weather lately. Normally the weather isn’t very interesting in Phoenix, but it has been lately. Here’s a few of my short writings from Facebook that have made me happy lately:

The story of how I got soaking wet

1. I opened the front door so the girls could see the pouring rain.
2. The kids sat on the top stair so they could get a little wet.
3. The kids descended the rest of the steps while I watched, still completely dry, and sang rain songs to them.
4. I took pictures of the girls playing in the rain, but stayed dry.
5. The girls’ friends came outside to play with them and suddenly my daughters didn’t want to stay right next to the stairs.
6. To be a responsible adult and to supervise their fun, I went out into the rain.
7. I realized I was already soaked, so I decided to shed my adult self and play. I jumped in puddles, ran through the “river” on the sidewalk, and skipped rocks. It was freeing to enjoy myself and let my stresses slip away into the water.

I think most adults could use a little more puddle jumping in their lives.

(originally posted September 17th)

On a Day of Flooding and Epic Amounts of Rain

Some places I’ve lived, like Oregon, can handle the rain. In Phoenix it’s not just that the roads and and roofs and infrastructure aren’t designed to handle the rain. The soil, the dessert itself, can’t soak it up.

It’s 9:30 a.m., and we’ve already broken the record of the most rain in a day in Phoenix–the record we broke was set 75 years ago. Freeways are closed, cars are submerged, flooding is everywhere. The roof of a grocery store I sometimes go to collapsed.

Today we’ve received more rain than Phoenix normally gets during the three month period of July, August, and September. My husband decided to skip the class he’s auditing this morning.

Be safe out there, my fellow Phoenicians.

(originally posted September 8th. We ended up receiving more rain in a day than Phoenix normally does in a year.)

Here are a few pictures I took the day after the storm. The pond near us flooded 5 or 6 feet above where it normally is.

A Dust Storm

A dust storm: in moments, the sky turns from light blue to a chalky brown. Teenage boys at the pool grab their towels and dash to shelter. I watch through my window in wonder, as palm trees bend wildly, trying to touch their leaves to the ground.

(originally posted July 25th. This is my attempt at a prose poem.)

How to Create Sugar Cookie Paintings

September 15, 2014/0 Comments/in Arts, Homemaking /by Katherine Cowley

A while back I was in charge of a youth activity, and we decided to do sugar cookie paintings. Luckily I tested it out ahead of time, because the first set of instructions I found on the internet created a complete flop. I did some more searching and my second attempt worked much better.

Step 1: Create sugar cookies and cut them out as canvases.

I like this recipe on allrecipes.com. It has a 4.5 star rating with over 6000 reviews, and it worked really well for cookie painting.

I rolled the cookie dough rather thin–it rises a fair bit while cooking, and if you’re making a large canvas the thicker it is the more likely it is to crack and break.

If you want exact canvas shapes you can measure with a rule and cut. You can also cut your canvas shapes in paper, set it on top of the cookie dough, and cut it. I made squares, rectangles, and circles of various sizes.

Note: Because it rises, the edges aren’t going to be quite as crisp as you originally made them. But that is part of the charm of a cookie painting.

One of the most useful things you can do is roll your dough out on parchment paper. This makes it so you don’t have to peel your cookies off your surface and then lay them back on a cookie sheet (doing so can cause tears or stretching). Once you’ve rolled and cut the dough you just pick up your parchment paper and set it on the cookie sheet. Once you pull your cookies out of the oven you can pick up the parchment paper (with cookies on top) and set it straight on a cooling rack. That way your cookies don’t overbake. If you try to remove a large cookie from a cookie sheet or from parchment paper before it’s completely cooled it breaks pretty easily.

Final note for this step: I baked the cookies for 8-9 minutes. I was less concerned about super soft cookies than with having a canvas that would really hold together.

Step 2: Create paint-like frosting.

A lot of frostings don’t work well for painting–you want the consistency of acrylic paint, that dries fast.

This frosting from bon appetit worked great.

Step 3: Color creation

As with any paint mixing, you can get a full range of colors if you have red, yellow, blue, white and black.

If you’ve made your frosting, you already have white. I bought a basic box of liquid food coloring, with red, yellow, blue, and green. Surprisingly, in my grocery store it wasn’t next to the cupcake holders or the sprinkles–they had the gel food coloring there. The normal box was actually next to the spices. I also bought a box of black, so I could make darker colors.

The Food Network has a great page with instructions on how to make a huge number of colors. You can follow their directions, or just use the page for inspiration. What you’ll notice is that for minor color variations, sometimes you need to work with a large amount of frosting, because a single drop of color will change it drastically. Also, don’t be afraid to add a completely opposite color to create your final color.

When I painted my Van Gogh inspired cookie, I made a bunch of colors, and then to create slight variations in blues I mixed some of my colors together.

Step 4: Create a base for your painting

You need to create a base of paint for your cookie. A white base is a nice standard color, but if you know what colors you’re going to be working in you can use something different. I painted the whole cookie a dark blue since “Starry Night” is largely dark blue. That made it easier later on–if there was a tiny bit I didn’t paint, it was still a good color.

Tip: buy new paintbrushes that have never been used for anything else. Because seriously, you’ll want to eat this.

Step 5: Imitate a famous painting or create your own design.

I had Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” up on my phone. First I made some lines for the major designs, and then I hopped around between different sections of the painting, letting one part dry while I worked on another section.

Tip: Use a toothpick for the super small details.

Most people at the activity created their own designs: a watermelon, a smurf, a quilt, abstract paintings, etc.

My Van Gogh cookie canvas was about 5 inches by 6 or 7 inches, and it took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to do. A less complicated painting will take less time.