Books by Carma

Sometimes I wake at 4AM with a thought so good I have to get up and write it so I won't forget. Sometimes it is merely three little words. Without a thunderclap. A concept relevant to where I ended a paragraph I wrote last week and where to go next.

A writer's life.

Phrases and ideas. Muddled. Coming at you. Sometimes waking you. Sometimes happening in mid chew. Sometimes while driving, stuck in traffic, frantic because you have no way to jot this down, so you repeat it to yourself over and over and tell yourself not to forget it.

Then you get to your destination late and hurry to check in for your appointment. After which you hurry home, thinking about what you're going to make for dinner. And you get home. Make dinner. Eat dinner. And then your brain says to you, tauntingly, "What was that thing you told me not to forget?"

It is maddening. Because you always think it was alchemy. It was the best way of saying something.

You hate your brain. And you love it, because it feeds you these gilded moments. It is a gift. The human brain, that is.

Mine operates in a mostly abstract way. It sees the big picture. It sees and hears everything in context of its place and magnitude in the big picture. It perceives life in broad strokes. Almost always. Almost all of the time I am conscious, my brain processes input and sorts it into its position and significance within the big picture. And by big picture, I am talking about life, the universe, in all their glorious mystifying dimensions, and basically everything. From a tiny sugar ant stuck in the muck to the probability that dragonflies and everything, with the exception of humans, are telepathic. I already wrote about that, so don't think anyone can steal the idea, it was published in 2009 and the first draft was copyright registered in 1984.

My current project excites me so much, I will not tell anyone what it is about, with the exception of my collaborators -- my husband, who listens to my babble and unconditionally encourages me to babble on, and a friend and former colleague whose humor habit got us through many a team zoom meeting that would have otherwise been insufferable.

Writing is mostly not writing.

What that means is that most of what we call writing is not the typing part, or the dictating part, if you're the kind of writer who uses talk-to-text. Most of what ends up on the page was brewed subconsciously for days, even weeks, sometimes months before it found its way to your fingertips or lips.

It cannot be rushed.

It resists formulaic manipulation.

It insists on an organic uprising. Like magma from deep beneath the surface. Once it bursts out, it flows rapidly and hardens into a shape that becomes iconic to the local landscape.

Much of my writing process could be deciphered by the memes I create.

Here are some recent ones and a few favorites found online and saved, tossed in for fun. I don't tell you to enjoy them. If you can't enjoy them, that's a you problem.

I rescue earthworms

I go for long walks. Solitary long walks. Listening to music without lyrics, so I can think, instead of having memories that we laughingly call the past, triggered by sappy songwriters who languish over not getting what they thought they wanted, only to decide they didn't want it anyway, and assuring themselves that they can do better on their own. Sometimes I walk in the rain. Sometimes I see an earthworm stuck on a sidewalk that the sun quickly dried up, and it is still squirming, it is still trying to get back to a place where it can slither down into wet soil, where it can chomp on dead leaf bits and turn them into organic fertilizer. Sometimes I rescue decomposers. I like earthworms. I wish I could take them home with me and put them in my barrel plant. But I know better than to try to put them in my pocket, or to try to hold them in my wet hand for twenty minutes. So I find a wet leaf, a sturdy one, and use it as a scoop to coax the little thing onto the leaf and quickly set it in the wet grass nearby, from whence it came. Surely it has friends down there that would miss it.

Was that sarcasm? @PuzzleKitty

photo of my cat Bittle and a haiku i wrote

cats are zen masters
full of nothing more or less
than this fine moment
@BittleBueller

cartoon of Saint Peter talking to a cat hesitating to walk through heaven's gate

Make up your mind! Are you going in or not?
(How cats end up with nine lives.)
featured on ifunny.com

The above meme started with a photo of a mural in Long Beach, California. They are everywhere! Thank you, City of Long Beach Artists! I later stylized it, playing around with GoArt. Today, remembering a favorite quote by Douglas Adams, I searched my photos for murals and chose this one to create a meme featuring that quote: "He felt as if his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."

The above meme started with a photo of my shoe print on wet sand, taken in 2022 during an ordinary walk about. Later, I stylized it with GoArt meteor shower. Today, reading "Mostly Harmless", a novel by Douglas Adams, I came upon a sentence that must be shared repeatedly all over the world. Because too many of us are talking about parallel universes as if we know a thing. And the very important fact about parallel universes is -- as Adams bluntly put it -- that they are not parallel! Chew on that!

I turned rotated the photo right, stretched it from a rectangle to a square, altered the temperature and added the text in a free font named Astron Valley.

The above was seen online and saved. It is another favorite quote by Douglas Adams:

THERE IS A THEORY WHICH STATES THAT IF EVER ANYONE DISCOVERS EXACTLY WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS FOR AND WHY IT IS HERE, IT WILL INSTANTLY DISAPPEAR AND BE REPLACED BY SOMETHING EVEN MORE BIZARRE AND INEXPLICABLE.

THERE IS ANOTHER THEORY WHICH STATES THAT THIS HAS ALREADY HAPPENED.

"Originality thrives in seclusion
free of outside influences beating upon us
to cripple the creative mind."
--Nikola Tesla

Found online and saved -- a reminder that uninterrupted solitude is precious commodity and the thing I need most as a creative person. With sadness, I have had to put creative work on the back burner, simmering to a perfect reduction, I hope, while I prioritize healthcare appointments, the prep required before some of them, and the aftermath of learning test results. (Zen and the art of living with cancer)

Yam writing.
Without thunderclaps and the flashiness of lightning.
A mere human brain at play.

Yam. That's my silly shorthand for I am. In my head I hear "I yam." ❤

Albert Loved Sylvia
A Family Love Story by Carma Gagne Chan
Kindle and paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095GQ7DTT

My grandmother's name is Sylvia. It is such a lovely name, I think more people should choose it for their daughters.

I did not get to meet her since her departure from Earth occurred many years before I was born.

During her short life, before illness took over, she was a devoted loving mother of her two daughters, Gloria and Ruth. I am one of four daughters of Ruth and feel very grateful to have had her as my mother.

Besides keeping the home beautiful and tidy, cooking for the family morning, noon and night, baking bread and cookies, sewing on buttons, keeping the children alive and well, they were creative women.

Sylvia enjoyed scrapbooking and she made the most hilarious and marvelous scrapbook. She cut cartoons from magazines, cut heads out of family photos, and pasted them over the cartoon characters. These were 1920s and 1930s cartoons, very high quality glossy pages, beautifully drawn, and most clever. The kind of cartoons published in The New Yorker and Life magazines. It was absolutely hysterical, and oh so charming.

She did a pencil sketch of her president, whom she obviously respected and admired, Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was the man who pulled us out of The Great Depression of the 1930s. He was the leader responsible for many important infrastructure projects throughout the United States. Dams, bridges, highways and more. He established a social security net. The list goes on. His legacy stands as one of the greatest leaders of all time, really, in terms of caring about people.

As my fingers lightly touched her scrapbook, I felt her love for the people who made her world.

I do not have the scrapbook today. It was supposed to be the one thing that I got when our mother died, but it seems to have gotten "lost". I hope that a grandchild has it and that they treasure it.

The book cover at the top of the page represents years of dedication to memorialize my Gagne grandparents. ❤