All posts by vica

“Nothing is As it Seems” Chapter 14 – the last one in this story

March 13, 2016Books I write, Free books and stories, Writing, Writing exercisesvica

Elizabeth sighed. “Thank you,” she said into the receiver, waited for You’re-welcome and pressed red button on the phone.

She put the phone reluctantly into its holder and took the postcard she started writing to Jenny four days before. She could hardly believe that only less than a week passed since she arrived in London. She thought her search would take longer, but now it was over. So she booked a ticket back to Germany.

Elizabeth put the postcard she promised to Jenny onto the desk-table combination in her hotel room and turned the card along its axis several times. Yesterday, on the morning after all the revelations at the house on the Hope street, she attempted to finish the postcard, but in the end she couldn’t. All she managed to write was, “Now I know what happened before my Dad and I came to Germany.” After that she couldn’t find any other words.

All Elizabeth could think of was that the house, the street, both turned rather into a house and street of disappointment than hope. But she couldn’t possibly write this to Jenny.

She stayed at the hotel the whole day yesterday, most of the time looking at the wall remembering the messages the projector in her mother’s room displayed on the wall the day before.

She contemplated to go and wander through London again but she was afraid to meet someone from the house, which was silly to think happening in such a giant city.

But having a PhD degree in statistics didn’t stop the fantasies of sitting in a cafe and having a small talk with two pleasant gentlemen from a table across hers, only to discover that they were Jack and Tim, who helped financing the sheltering of terminally ill patients in the house of her early childhood.

No, she couldn’t risk that. With all the low probabilities it was still possible, and all she needed now was distance. That is why she booked her ticket today.

But she had to let Jenny know. Writing a card was a bad idea, since she was flying back tomorrow.

Elizabeth took the receiver and dialed Jenny’s number, hoping that Jenny was away for groceries as she usually did during this time on a Saturday.

“Liza, is this you?”

No way to escape. Jenny was at home. “Yes, I’m—”

“Are you alright? Did something happen? Please tell me you fell in love and your new charm and you were walking along the Thames all the time. I could forgive that.”

Elizabeth smiled despite her mood. “No, unfortunately not. But I was at the house and met my family.”

“Really? But this is great!”

“I don’t really know. It…”

After a few seconds of waiting Jenny blurted out. “I really can’t wait anymore. Tell me all.”

“Shall I maybe call you later? Do you have to do shopping or something?”

“No, no. No way to escape,” Jenny echoed Elizabeth’s thought from before. “You tell me everything now and I will pay you back for all the huge phone bills you’ll be facing. Don’t leave anything untold. You owe me that!”

“I’m sorry for not calling you the whole week. It’s just…” Elizabeth drew a deep breath and started from the beginning.

Jenny didn’t interrupt. Her gasps and heavy breaths confirmed her presence and attention.

At the end, Elizabeth said, “After that, I couldn’t stay there longer. I had to leave…And today I bought a ticket back.”

“Oh!”

“What?”

“I started fantasizing coming to London and visiting you. You know…I’m still single.”

“Jen, can you think of something else than dating? And my brother is married…” Elizabeth caught her breath as she noticed how she referred to Patrick.

“Well,” Jenny said. “I was actually thinking of Jack and Tim.”

Elizabeth laughed. “They must be ancient now. And you talk like there are only three men in London.”

“No, they aren’t and this is exactly my point. Germany seems not to have produced any suitable candidate for me yet. For you neither. So I will come and ask your family to help us get some royal husbands.”

Elizabeth relaxed. For a second she wondered if calling Jenny earlier would have made the day before easier for her, but then she decided to enjoy her friend now. “So, what you’re saying is that I should stay here and not move from the spot until you come and visit?”

Jenny harrumphed. “I didn’t say that either. Don’t make it sound like I force you doing something. But if you ask me for directions, I don’t think you should stay at the hotel. It’s too expensive.”

Elizabeth held another gulp of the air inside her. She knew what Jenny was getting at. She breathed slowly out and said quietly, “You are right. But please don’t make me say this. I mean, to say what I really have to do. What I want to do, but too scared to. Being sad and melancholic was so normal to me. But that house, even with dying people inside is so full of life. This is so scary. I wish…I wish my father could go back there with me.” She blinked through her with tears swelling eyes. She wiped her tears away with her free hand and said. “Jen, I…I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget to cancel your flight. You’re not allowed to come back before I visit you. And after in neither.”

Liza laughed and let another kind of tears push the sad ones down her cheeks. “OK.”

***

Three hours later Elizabeth set down and supported herself on the intricate fence to the house of her childhood. Her luggage stood at her feet.

Should I have found their number and called first? A varicoloured flock of opposing thoughts and feelings clouded the view on the house. Elizabeth leaned her head on the fence and drew a deep breath.

She blinked several times and decided to look at every turret and corner of the house before going inside. But as she started raising her head she noticed a commotion behind the windows on the ground floor.

Lily’s head with corkscrew curls bounced happily as she turned between glancing outside into Elizabeth’s direction and a tall and pale girl standing next to her, who seemed holding the window sill with her both hands. This must be Lilly’s successor. Another girl with cancer.

In the next window Elizabeth noticed Alice and Ingrid, both smiling widely at her. As soon as Alice caught Elizabeth’s look she pointed up. At first Elizabeth didn’t know what that meant, but then she let her gaze go up the walls until she noticed a movement behind a low set window of the top floor of the house. Claire’s chair moved seemingly by itself and stopped at an angle where Claire’s eyes became visible. Her white keyboard on her lap.

In the next moment Elizabeth noticed Patrick’s shape disappearing from behind Claire. She didn’t notice him until he moved away.

Elizabeth drew a deep breath. He was probably coming downstairs to talk to her. What shall I say? What will happen now?

The front door opened and Patrick came out. He paused after letting the door close by itself behind him, descended the stairs and approached Elizabeth. His eyes glittered with tears as they glanced quickly at Elizabeth, away, then back at her, and away again.

Without thinking, Elizabeth pushed her case away from her with her left foot and looked at the stone base of the fence next to her. Then she looked into Patrick’s eyes.

He nodded and and sat next to her. He lowered his head slowly to hers until they touched, and they both looked up.

Their mother looked back at them.

THE END

Picture: the Spring is coming.

P.S. This was the last chapter of this story. It will be revised, edited and published soon as a permanently free book.

P.P.S. You can find the complete story written in its unedited version at “Free Online Books”. This version will be removed as soon as the edited version will become available.

P.P.P.S. If you think your friends might enjoy this story, then let them know about it and forward it to them.

Review copies for an Easter read

March 12, 2016Books I write, Special Offers, Writingvica

Spring holidays are coming and in case you are searching for an Easter read, I might have an idea.

Jot me a line to vib@optimistwriter.com with a subject “Easter read” until March 21st and I will send you two e-books to read, “A Spy’s Daughter” and “Seven Broken Pieces” (from the series “A Life Upside Down”) in exchange for your agreement to consider writing an honest review for one or both books on Amazon and maybe also on Goodreads (if you are a member there).

When you write me an e-mail, please let me know if you like the e-books in the Kindle format or in pdf.

Let your friends know so that they can use this possibility as well.

Wishing you wonderful unfolding of the Spring and looking forward getting many e-mails. 🙂

An interview: My first appearance on YouTube

March 10, 2016Books I write, Contemplations, Discoveries, Memories, Writingvica

At least I think it was my first one. I don’t know if I appeared on the background of somebody else’s video or if someone found funny and filmed as I frantically tried on a bus trip to finish a sentence of a story I am currently writing, while at the same time preparing to get out of the bus. The latter happened just yesterday. But I don’t think I was filmed. Phew!

But the interview I want to tell you about was intended. It was made in connection with the author talk I gave at the SGS School of Creative Writing, at Trekanten Bibliotek og Kulturhus here in Aalborg, on the 2nd of March.

Samuel Mork Bednarz, or Sam, is a student at the SGS and he is also a part of the SGS Social Media Team, where I also participate.

Sam is responsible for the SGS podcast, and currently he is taking interviews with the authors giving author talks at and for the SGS.

I have given several interviews up to this point (this interview took place about a week before the author talk), two of which were recorded on audio.

It was fun to observe myself, the feelings and thoughts generated by these experiences. During the first interview I felt so unusually that I smiled shyly at the recording smart-hone and said “Thank you!” at and to it before answering the first question by the interviewer.

The interview with Sam was filmed and I watched it last night for the first time. Again managing to observe myself non-judgmentally while watching.

Some automatic thoughts judging my appearance did appear but they were short and fleeting. Instead I had fun watching this person on the computer screen, so differently looking and sounding from what I know when I look in the mirror or hear myself talk. I watched her with curiosity finding the things she said so new, and also laughing along with her and the interviewing Sam.

This experience was so strikingly different from that many years ago in Germany as I watched myself on TV after being filmed in our cleanroom at the Institute of High Frequency Electronics of the Technical University Darmstadt. At that time I had assimilated the cliché that nobody liked watching him- or herself on TV. I followed this tradition and said to anyone who would listen how terribly I looked on the screen, while I secretly enjoyed when people objected. At some point they stopped objecting and listening to my ever returning moans about how bad I was. So at the end I was left with a feeling of having failed and not have done enough.

Now I realize that I was thrilled to see myself on the screen. I looked so different. And yes, surprising.

I am glad that I had this epiphany at this point of my life when my children are small, so that I convey to them these moments of being OK with myself and just enjoying all the surprises my life and my true self bring with them.

I wish you all happy self-discoveries and fun watching my first interview on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5RK8mvmkew

Why is creative writing important in today’s business world?

March 9, 2016Businessvica

Imagine the following scene, in which you play the main role.

Your management decided to introduce a new technical standard into your company’s products. And you have been given the task to research on this standard, approach the community developing it, get involved and introduce this standard to your colleagues and management.

What is your first step? Yes, you research.

Today, most of us research on the Internet. You type in the keywords and get a selection of articles or even books ready for you to read.

You start to read one of them and find an article giving a detailed account of the standard you are interested in. You nod, Yes, I need to read this more thoroughly. You save the article for a later read and move to the next one.

This article talks about advantages and disadvantages of implementing the standard giving some examples of projects and companies, who did it successfully and also those who stepped into traps and lost large amounts of money by implementing it incorrectly. You save this article in the folder titled “Must-Read” and move to the next one.

At some point you rub your eyes from so much information and go to get yourself a cup coffee. Then you sit back at your desk and open the next link.

After a few seconds you laugh out loud at the mishaps and frustration the author of this article tells, how she was frustrated with this standard. How she cursed all those who made her learn it and those who created it, only to find out a few months later that she couldn’t get rid of this thing. And not quite because she had to do it. But because she found herself in the middle of it. She couldn’t stop thinking about the riddles it posed. She started liking it and the people developing it. She found like-minded professionals, who through all the frustration found the fun and multidimensionality of the standard and discovered its power and ability to improve the quality of their products. This standard even allowed to save money, when applied correctly.

After an hour you still read the long article, which hardly tells you the technical details of the standard but rather the human part of it. Then you find yourself researching about this person and the ones she refers to. You find some technical articles by her and start reading them, abandoning those you found in the first place and marked as Must-read.

Did something like this happened to you?

It did happen to me.

After my first maternity leave ended, I was very close to the status of a new employee in the company I worked at that time. Also because I had a new boss. And he had a new task for me in tow. “Learn how to work with XSLT,” he said. “You have about one month to learn it and then you have to develop new stylesheets for our software.”

I knew XML by that time, Extensible Markup Language, a language to capture information in a structured way, where the way can be flexibly defined for the specific context and purposes.

XSLT, Extensible Stylesheets Language: Transformations, is a specific subset of XML, or rather a language in itself, to transform the structure and content of a document from one format to another.

My task was to learn to transform an XML document into HTML format, which is most often used by various browsers to present content.

I love reading books. They are my preferred source of information. So I opened an Amazon window in my browser and search for XSLT books. XSLT 2.0 was latest and greatest at that time (about six years ago) and also applied at our company, so I looked for those. The book by Michael Kay “XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0” was highly praised. So I bought it and a couple of other, which were thinner and less intimidating than over one thousand pages long tome by Michael Kay.

When Michael Kay’s book arrived I was both excited and scared. How am I going to learn all this in one month?

I opened the book, found that some of the examples made me smile (”A Hello World” stylesheet, example on music transformation, an example of displaying a poem”) and I found a lot of valuable and well structured information, written without hurry and with the thought of the reader to understand the given topic.

But the most memorable part of this book was for me, where Michael Kay told the difference about how he felt, when he wrote his first book on XSLT (it was XSLT 1.0) and the one on XSLT 2.0. The difference was that he was an “outsider” when he wrote the first one. He was “just” a user, pointing out along with advantages also disadvantages of this specification as it was defined at that time. He said that with XSLT 2.0 it was much more difficult to be as critical as when he has written the first book. The reason was is that now, with the XSLT 2.0, he was inside the community and not only a part of it but also the responsible editor for the standard.

This resonated with me. I’ve been involved in development of a technical standard as well (S1000D®, International specification for technical publications using a common source data base) and I felt very protective of it when someone criticized it.

So this anecdote stayed with me and Michael Kay’s book became one of the first ones I opened, when I searched for an answer about XSLT. I also followed the e-mail forums he participated in and learned from many examples shared and discussed by him and his colleagues there.

Another book on XSLT drew me to it due its creative title, “XSLT Cookbook” by Sal Mangano, and as creative and honest content of the book.

If I find dialogue in an business article or book, I immediately draw it closer to me and read.

In today’s flooding with information world, we disregard, and also must disregard, a huge amount of the information pouring on us, and find something that captivates us and helps us experience epiphanies on the given topic. We can best memorize the information, which finds its way into our brains through “Aha” moments or those when we smile, when our eyes glitter with curiosity and eagerness to learn more.

But how do you captivate a reader in such a way?

Creative writers know the secret. That’s why they are able to “steal” many free moments from readers’ time, keeping them awake with a book in hand until dawn.

And the secret is not only in their creativity and imagination. The true secret is that they “split open”.

Here is what Natalie Goldberg suggest to creative writers in her book titled “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”:

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

This what happens when you start following a particular author on a given topic. It means that he or she “splits open” on the topic they are passionate about and they sweep you away with their honesty and generosity. They are so passionate about it that they become brilliant in what they do and write about, and because they truly and deeply enjoy what they do and talk about.

They put all their creative force into conveying their passion.

Yes, this is the secret and the reason, why you can’t succeed in sharing information about your business without showing that you are passionate about it, without “splitting open” over it, without being creative when you write or talk about it.

What are your experiences in reading new information? Did you notice the creativity of the business articles in LinkedIn? Which was the one that grabbed your attention, captivated and didn’t let you give it up until you finished?

Picture: some of the textbooks that captivated me.

Happy Mărţişor!

March 1, 2016Books I write, Memories, Writingvica

It is the 1st of March today. The day when in Moldova friends and family give each other a small sweet sign of love and friendship, a Mărţişor (pronounced [mærtsishór]).

Last year, when I posted about Mărţişor and quoted from my very first book “The Truth About Family”, I was yet to publish my books. Now, one year later, I have self-published three books. And tomorrow I will read publicly from them and talk about my way of becoming a writer. Wow, what a year!

Mărţişor was always a special talisman, a sweet sign that made me smile and remember those days when I was in a trolleybus in Moldova surrounded by many people heading to school and work, with these little red-white pins on their jackets, and trying to hide their smiles about something so seemingly ridiculous, but so wonderful. It is still cold in Moldova on the 1st of March. But only according to the thermometer. Whatever the weather is, this is one of the warmest and sweetest days you can experience in the beautiful country I originally come from.

I’ve had a sweet chat with my sister this morning. I wished her Happy Mărţişor. After a small pause I asked her whether one says something like this, and she answered, “Yes. You just invented it.” You can guess that she made my day with this statement. 🙂

That is why I would like to start a new tradition and wish you all Happy Mărţişor, Happy March, Happy Spring, Happy Year and Happy Life!

Picture: my Mărţişor creations this year.