MY OWN POETRY:

One of my initial reasons for my putting up a website in 1996 was the hope that I might learn more about father from someone finding his letters who had known him. Somehow it just seemed right to use poetry on the pages, even though I hadn't written any before. Partly that was because I found the formal poetic structures offputting, and the freely running emotions of structureless poetry didn't appeal to me at all. But rhythm had always been important element in my writing. I read everything I write aloud, and always feel when a sentence needs a syllable more, or perhaps a few less. And so I found myself listening to my own body sense and my own rhythms and, finally, I wrote poetry, too. Mother met father in the shadow of time Cast by permanent stones of cathedral and bells. The building they met in was wood, thin and cheap. I know this because I walked in that place Thirty years from a soldier's chance meeting with fate. So, I guess, in some sense, I'm a child of them all Of mother, of father, of the Humanities hall. She was a journalist trying to find In the day's small events Some explaining of why She was her, Who she was, A girl in the prime Of her green salad days Seen through sea-green young eyes. He was a poet explaining himself In the words of a soldier To any and all Who could hear with deaf ears What it was to be young To be strong and alive And in love with a lady Who saw through your eyes.

TECHNICAL WRITING:
Technical writing is an art form in itself. The design has to fit the way people think about a subject, and the book can't get in the way of transferring the information quickly and easily to the reader. Oftentimes, I teach myself something by writing things down to clarify it in my own mind, and that was how I started doing technical writing.

That task became the basis for an early job I took writing scripts for animated movies about computers. Great fun, with an art department to create cartoons of my ideas, and a boss who would stand on his desk with his foot in a trash can. But at least he taught me to find the rhythm in prose, and for that I'll be always grateful.

Writing language reference manuals and manuals for programmers was wonderful fun at InterMetrics. Some of the nicest people worked there, and certainly the smartest. I truly enjoyed working on government contracts because the company took seriously the high standards of quality requested, if not usually expected. My first book was made the contract standard for later books, and one of the nicest things I remember was asking my boss what he thought of one of my books and his replying that he didn't think about it. When he needed to look something up, he always found what he was looking for. And that was when I realized that the true art of technical writing was to make the writer disappear and the information stand alone.

Writing computer language reference manuals was my entry into learning about computer languages. My manager designed the computer language, and my job was to write up his design. But as changes would be needed, he would toss the change to me, and I came to understand all the modifications that would propogate from that change. I thought of it as knowing my book cold, but my book was the language and so, gradually, I came to realize that I was understanding language changes, rather than book changes.

I was enjoying computer languages so much that I went for a second masters degree in computer science at Boston University. That's how I met my friend Lyn. She taught my first language course, showing me all the glories of finite state automata. Her field was natural language processing and years later, when I was chair of the Programming Languages group, Lyn was president of Computational Linguistics. That's a friendship going back thirty-two years!

FAN WRITING:
Mother pushed me toward writing as far back as I can remember. And I always pushed back. She explained that it was in my genes. As I did with many of the directions in which mother urged me, I dug in my heels and was Mary Contrary. It was almost a year after mother died that I wrote my first story, and it was about her. Of course.

I had gotten into Star Trek following mother's death because the pressure of the grief was almost too much to bear. In the grief of Kirk or Spock over the possible death of their friend, I found a small release for my own. A way to let some of the steam release so that the pot wouldn't explode. Mother had died in a hospital, fighting her leukemia every inch of the way. She wouldn't let me decorate the room because she wanted nothing to say she'd spend much time there. She didn't. I was about to leave for a Star Trek convention later in the day when I suddenly found myself writing a story. I had no intention to write. I had no plan. I simply wrote. It was about Kirk being very old and accepting his death in a beautiful place, something I hadn't been able to give mother. And it was about Spock staying very calm, holding Kirk's hand with a gentle, even pressure while he screamed in his head. And that was me.

I took the story with me to the convention, and gave it to a friend while we waited in line. It was only a few pages long, and she soon burst into tears. Someone else wanted to read it and the story began to pass from hand to hand. But I always knew where my story was by looking to see where people were crying. And that's how I learned that I, too, could create these worlds of words.

I came to fan writing completely untrained, and it was due to the kindness of editors like Vicky Clark and Jessica Daigneau, and other writers like Edi Bjorklund, that I was taught the craft. Edi sent me a single-spaced page of all the rules of grammar I obviously didn't know. It was a godsend. I still broke the rules, but it was important to me to know just what I was breaking. The particular part of fandom in which I write is women writing for other women. It's been a blessing knowing these people. They remind me what a truly great sex we really are!

SCREENPLAYS:
Having become bored with technical writing, and enjoying editing fan videos, I spoke to an IBM Research VP and he was good enough to give me a new direction - a multimedia magazine about computer projects. It was a truly marvelous few years, and I'd crawl over broken glass for the man. My husband built a video studio around my project and we had a great time. I interviewed the projects, wrote the scripts, directed the shoots, shot second camera, and edited the videos. What fun! When Paul and I left IBM on early retirement (we were commuting 180 miles each way), I took a workshop in videoediting and one in screenplay writing. And I was completely lost. A screenplay is the most perfect art form you can imagine. It has a fairly rigid shape, and the joy is that you're writing in isolation for a group of collaborators you'll never meet - a challenge, to be sure.

Since a screenplay maxes out at 120 pages, the whole project took only three months. The pace of a screenplay seems to match my heartbeat, and we raced along together. By the time the dust from our passage cleared, I had sent out 16 copies to agents who asked to read it, and 6 of those came back with offers of representation. It was completely traumatic trying to choose. The agent I finally picked was the NYC book agent for John Grisham. They had an arrangement with Writers&Artists in Hollywood, and I shook vampires out of my head and started living with a werewolf cub and his vegetarian, adopted father, hoping that something good was happening way out west. The second script was pronounced better than the first and it, too, made its way west. And for the next two years, we heard absolutely nothing.

Even though the contract gave me no way out for the full two years, the agency did give me permission to let Brian, one of the agents I had turned down, represent a TV script for me. Brian mailed it to the Forever Knight producer on Tuesday, and the gentleman called him on Thursday to ask about my credits. Needless to say, I had none. Besides, he needed a Canadian writer and had deep-sixed over the summer many of the characters I was using. Sigh.

At the end of the two years, I was told only that the scripts didn't sell. The woman with whom I dealt at the NYC agency was kind, and offered to read a novel if I wanted to send her one, as that she could handle herself, but my novel style is just too slow for my heartbeat, and so I simply thanked her. Then I curled into a ball. With any luck, I should be uncurling one of these years and trying again.

But it won't be with the same joy as before, because Brian won't be there to commiserate with me along the way. I've heard from his daughter that one of his medical emergencies was too much for him, and he's gone now. The lights across the country should have dimmed when his light went out. He's dearly missed.

NON-FICTION:
I must admit that non-fiction writing will never have the magic for me that fiction has, but it still feels good to get ideas down clearly. There's one piece of nonfiction that I wrote in the days before I understood the rigid forms of book proposals and such. It was based on an idea of Paul's about "How to Slow Down Time." As the years whip past, I think more and more about going back and finishing it.

Much of my non-fiction writing has been on the pages of this website, of course, but I have had the joy of writing a small book and holding it in my hands. As the world expert on Henry Livingston, I put out a booklet that combined Henry's poetry with the Christmas poem, and added a section on his life. It was done under the sponsorship of the museum that sits now on Henry's property, a museum devoted to the man who lived there later, who married a great grandchild of Henry's and was the half first cousin of Henry's daughter's husband - Samuel Finley Breese Morse, of Morse Code fame.

I have a larger book on Henry off with an agent and, perhaps, someday something will happen with it. For now, I just use it as a source to help people who are writing about Henry.

From the Preface: The Poughkeepsie Holiday Inn Express is located directly across Route 9 from the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. Normally, this wouldn't be one of the qualities I'd look for in a hotel, except that this particular cemetery used to be the farm of Henry's father, another Henry, and it's where the Livingston clan is buried. Their section is located far from the entrance and shielded from the rest of the cemetery by a stand of tall trees. There, in a small, secluded plot of land, march the gravestones of over sixty of my ancestors, aunts, uncles and cousins. When you stand in any church where your ancestors once worshiped, you can almost feel those long dead men and women there beside you. Marriages, baptisms and funerals - the highs and lows of their lives - all witnessed and preserved by the walls and stained glass windows of that place. Sit quietly, and you can hear the murmur of their laughter and the sobs of their pain. A graveyard is different. There are no walls to hold in the voices of the mourners and their voices would be, anyway, blown away by the wind. And so you're left to listen, instead, to each single voice beneath each separate stone. It was there at his grave, introducing myself, that my relationship with Henry Livingston really began.