Tag Archives: Inspiration

It’s the End of the Year & We’re All Fruit

Life Comments

happy-new-yearIn My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), totally lovable curmudgeon Gus Portokalos says this. “You know, the root of the word Miller is a Greek word. Miller come from the Greek word ‘milo,’ which is mean ‘apple,’ so there you go. As many of you know, our name, Portokalos, is come from the Greek word ‘portokali,’ which mean ‘orange.’ So, okay? Here tonight, we have, ah, apple and orange. We all different, but in the end, we all fruit.

I love this movie as much as I do because I wish I was part of the Portokalos family. Those parents and siblings, those aunts and cousins, the batty grandma who faces down long-gone invaders everywhere. I consigned myself to a long-gone bad marriage in part because he had a family somewhat like this one. Though I don’t recall anyone regaling me with anything like Gus’s cranky-wonderful wisdom.

Segue to the current moment and my own attempt to regale us with some Gus Grace. 2016 was a tough year for many people for many reasons. We are sad about it and/or angry. At least this is what we allow to show on the surface. Examining my own self and being honest, I must admit that beneath the sadness and anger I feel wounded. Why? Because people I thought would agree with my version of truth and rightness did not do so.

I didn’t unfriend anybody on Facebook. At the point of a couple of possible in-person face-offs I said, “We simply can’t talk about this.” Which was graciously accepted because both of us wanted to preserve the relationship. Still, a nasty bit of residue remained and, no matter how small that bit of residue might have been, it was not insignificant. Because we had loved one another on some level. Now that love was tainted and we were mutually saddened and hurt.

I know many of you have had similar experiences on a personal level and on a wider life level as well. For the latter, yesterday we celebrated (if that’s the appropriate term) Good Riddance Day. In Times Square “participants wrote down unpleasant, painful or embarrassing memories from the past year and chucked them into an industrial strength shredder.” Feel free to do the same in your own town square. Otherwise, a back yard bonfire will suffice.

I believe in the power of rituals. Let’s each of us burn or shred or holler our frustrations into the night. Then, could we please go back to being friends together or colleagues or just folks who respect one another as individuals who may differ in some ways? Because if we do not do that, what we sacrifice is the love I mentioned. The world will be worse off for that loss. The world is always worse off for the loss of love.

I understand that our hurt places are still tender to the touch. So we don’t want to touch them. But, in my never humble opinion, we must. We can do it overtly by a phone call or a private online message something like, “Hi. I know we had that thing over you-know-what but I miss you.” Or you can borrow my usual less bold approach and behave as if nothing happened. Smile and chat and hope your missed friend smiles and chats in return.

Why bother? Because the end of a year is an opportunity for new beginnings or re-starts of old beginnings. Because, according to mythology, at the New Year we must do everything we can to summon the return of the light out of winter’s darkness. Maybe, if we adopt that timetable, by springtime we will have salved past hurts with the balm of present friendship. Because what truly matters after all is this. In the end we are all fruit. So there you go.  Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com/

RR

A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Romantic Suspense Book 4 and my other books are available from Amazon HERE. A Wrong Way Home – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 is a FREE EBOOK there also. All written as a peach, I hope.

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Your Brain on Doubt & What to Do About It #MFRWAuthor #Inspiration

Motivation, ,

flat-tire-image“I’ve watched you grow smaller,” an observant friend once said to me. “as if you are deflating.”

I was stuck in a period of deep doubt about almost everything. I didn’t know what to do with my life or my work or me. “I’m between things,” I’d say to anyone who appeared to care. Actually, I wasn’t anywhere. My friend was right. I’d deflated and needed desperately to pump up again.

Unfortunately, a deflated spirit lacks not only air to breathe but the will and stamina to refill its lungs in the first place. Doubt had taken those good things from me. I was a flat tire. More to the point, my brain was a flat tire, and flat tires don’t get us anywhere.

We all end up in the hardly-moving lane now and then, and doubt is often the vehicle that takes us there. Especially doubt about ourselves. Doubting seems to be an inevitable consequence of living. The trouble is it can zap the will to live, and the joy of that life, flat out of us.

I’m re-inflated at the moment. The last thing I want is another blowout, or even a slow leak into a bad-year tire again. How did I get from flaccid to full-up? What can I do next time I misplace my air lock valve? Here are five specific remedies for my self-doubt days and yours.

Specific #1. Get out from under the comforter. My comforter is blue, the color of melancholy. I hide there and bring other comforts with me – unhealthy food, binge TV and the occasional bourbon coke with a splash of lime. I must drag my bemoaning behind from under all of that.

Specific #2. Cut the to-do list to size. Nothing lengthens a ride in the doubt mobile as fast as piled-on expectations. What needs to be done feels like being expected to prepare a holiday feast by suppertime. How about toast instead? I think I can manage a slice, maybe even multi-grain.

Specific #3. Create a feel-good list instead. What makes me feel better? What ACTivities? I must stand up, get dressed and move. Yoga on the purple mat I bought myself last Christmas. Or a walk around a block or two without my comforter, like Linus’s blanket, trailing behind.

Progress Report. I’m out of the bedroom (#1). I’ve been to the kitchen where I consumed some multi-grain nutrition (#2) and came up with a feel-better action plan (#3). Time to suit up, but first a stop in front of the bathroom sink.

Specific #4. Stare straight ahead. What do I see? I see the hero in my mirror. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t already survived many comforter-craving moments. I chose the choices and did the work that got me to this place, which makes me the hero of my own life story.

Specific #5. Produce a memory of the hero in the mirror. Deep breathing in a yoga pose or puffing down the street, I recall a time I lifted myself toward where I needed to be. I watch, hear and, most important, feel the moment. “I did that,” I say, because I did. No doubt about it.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com/

RR

A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Romantic Suspense Book 4 and Alice Orr’s other books are available from Amazon HERE. A Wrong Way Home – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 is a FREE EBOOK there also.

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Binge Watching and Binge Reading – Riverton Road Monday

Storytelling, Writing Tips,

Alice's Nancy Drew TitleI not only love writing series. I also love reading series. This love affair began in my childhood Nancy Drew Books days. Of course reading under the covers with a flashlight. What better way could there be to experience The Secret of the Old Clock?

Did you know I wrote a Nancy Drew once just for the thrill of being Carolyn Keene for a month or two? It went to #2 on the kids’ bestseller list. Talk about fulfilling a childhood dream. I loved doing it. But I only wrote one. I don’t know why since I enjoyed being a teen again.

The title by the way was Danger in Disguise – and I’m flabbergasted to find it still available. D in D is even an eBook though I wrote it long before that format existed. If you don’t believe me – check this out. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HB62LKI.

I digress. Because what I’ve really been thinking about is how binge television-watching may be conditioning all of us to be ripe for binge book reading too. As in series – series – and more series. This is great news for writers. But it’s great news for readers also.

When I get my teeth into a story that carries me along lickety-split and absorbs me with its absorbing characters – it puts me in a foul mood to read THE END. I want to stick with this story. Most of all I want to stick with this experience. I want to be carried along and absorbed some more.

We’re all getting a succulent taste of this these days via television series. Look at the excitement accompanying anticipation of every new Downton Abbey season. In fact some of us have been so afflicted with separation trauma at season’s end that we binge the whole thing again.

We not only binge that preceding season – we often return to previous seasons and binge those too. Some of us even search out full seasons of Upstairs Downstairs just so we can remain in that delicious Brit place of “Blimey” and “Egad.”

We have been captured. We have been seduced. We have been immersed. We have lived in that delightful though obviously idealized milieu for episode after episode and we can’t stand to leave it. That milieu is what I’ve written about in previous posts as “the world of the series.”

We not only want to spend a bit of watcher time there. If the truth were told – many of us would love to live there and fantasize doing so. I’ve heard there are Downton Abbey parties where people dress in pre- or post-World War I posh and affect lock-jawed nasal accents.

My granny was British and tried to make me British as well so I’m all for this. She and I would have tea at four with little sandwiches and cookies – or biscuits as she called them. She taught me conversation. First I’d talk then she’d talk while I listened instead of itching to talk again myself. Those were the rules.

I digress yet again because what I’m really all for is the long game of story-loving and storytelling. This is the antidote to the here-this-nanosecond-gone-the-next attention span. Or maybe it debunks the myth of that phenomenon. Maybe the internet and the screened device haven’t rendered us all incapable of long-haul commitment after all.

My vote goes with debunking the short-span myth and hanging on to my devices too. What glass-half-empty person said we can’t have it all anyway? I’m definitely down with the have-it-all faction – for my stories if nothing else. I say old chap. Might you jolly well feel the same?

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com.

RR

A Vacancy at the Inn  – coming soon – is the first Christmas Novella of my Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series featuring the Kalli family – and now the Miller family too – in stories of Romance and Danger. A Wrong Way Home is Book 1 of the series. A Year of Summer Shadows is Book 2. A Villain for Vanessa will be Book 3.

All of my titles are available at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B000APC22E.