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It’s a Mess and I Like it That Way
No, I’m not talking about my closet. I’m taking about my latest novel manuscript. I’m about 50k words into the first draft and I’ve created such a mess, I’m not sure how my characters are going to get out. Poor souls. This is a good thing. Good stories are always messy. And writing them is even messier, especially in the chaos of the first draft, which is not only messy but sloppy (yes, there’s a difference) and relatively crappy—the defining characteristic of first drafts. But hey, there’s nowhere to go but up. You can’t fix what you haven’t written. So. I’m smack dab in my self-inflicted fictional mess and I…
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Eighteen and LIfe (and counting)
I have been married eighteen years. Today. I don’t know everything, I’m certainly no marriage expert, but here’s what I know: Marriage will be great. It will be good. It will be ho-hum. It will be terrible. Repeat, in no particular order, and throw in various other adjectives. It will bring out the best in you sometimes, but more often, it will bring out the worst in you and your fellow “I-do-er” but that’s when love becomes love. When it’s hard. When it’s an act of will. When you and your loved one are not so lovable and you chose love anyway. I do. I will. Everything is better in…
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The Shortest To-do List Ever
I’m finding it hard to write during the summer. There are projects to complete and ice cream cones to eat and things to paint and I’m supposed to be in the “marketing phase” of my recently released novel (which, I’m finding, isn’t like writing and not my favorite cup of tea) and the kids are home and now that my oldest is nearing fourteen, I’m mentally counting down the remaining summers with him. And I just don’t want to miss summer. So. On his first day of vacation, my very sweet husband took the kids out for the day so I could get in some writing. When my daughter realized…
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The Freedom in No
As some of you may know, starting on January 1st of this year, I decided to go on a year long shopping fast and I have reached the halfway mark. In the past six months, I have not bought a t-shirt, a tank, a pair of jeans, a pair of mittens, a purse, or a scarf, and I refrained myself from rifling through the clearance racks or stockpiling at the Land’s End sale or drooling over the dresses on ModCloth. Perhaps I should begin this post with some hugely spiritual life-changing epiphany. Sorry. I just can’t. I have to get something off my chest: I want to shop. In a…
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Dad’s Turn
Dads don’t always get their due praise. Singing the praises of Mom seems to come easier but fathers… Dads… hear me loud and clear: you are irreplaceable. You are immeasurably influential. So for all the dads out there, including my dad and my husband… thank you! Allow me to sing a few praises to my dad: Dad ignited my love for stories. Early on, he both read and made up stories, (his best entitled “The Laughing Dragons”) complete with voices and sound effects. On a car trip once he began telling us a story that went something like this: “Once there was a brother and a sister, and their father…
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Greeting Cards Don’t Say It All
Mother’s Day comes with a difficult mission: finding a greeting card for your mom that falls somewhere between pure sap (You are the perfect mother in every way on every day, and everything you touch turns to gold….) and a groan-inducing, dog-on-the-front brand of humor. Often I forgo Hallmark, pull out the scrapbook supplies, and forge my own. Not only does May hold Mother’s Day, it also contains my mom’s birthday. So in honor of May, in honor of moms everywhere, here’s my tribute to my mom: Ten Really Cool Things About My Mom 1. She let her children be children: Saturdays meant sleeping late and watching cartoons. We did…
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Editors Rock (but I don’t think I’d ever want to be one)
Despite my English degree, I am not the queen of commas nor do I always break my paragraphs in the correct place. By the time I sent my manuscript to my now publisher, a year ago, the thing had been cut, revised, and rewritten countless times. A speaker at a writer’s conference once said editors expect 97% of the work to be done on a manuscript before they take it on. So while I felt my baby had been edited ad nauseam, it still needed some editorial TLC and a fresh pair of expertise eyes. I’m a newbie, so I don’t have all the answers. And I don’t know how…
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Prove You’re Not a Robot
Apparently I’m a robot. At least according to the captcha that forces me to translate a string of numbers or letters to prove my humanness. (I only know that term because my brilliant husband just told me what this annoying test is called.) I usually fail on the first try. Sometimes the second. I think it’s because I’m sporadically, numerically dyslexic, meaning I sometimes switch certain numbers, particularly 3, 6, and 9 but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This come-and-go disability makes balancing the checkbook and doing the taxes loads of fun. Anyway, when I fail the prove-you’re-not-a-robot-test I get a little bit defensive. I mean for Pete’s sake, is…
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Drop the Chicken Bone
My dog ate a chicken bone yesterday on our walk. I don’t know how she found it buried under the stratum of ice, but, presumably, her nose led her to it. She dug it up, ate half of the frozen thing, and growled at me when I tried to take it away. She got half, I got half. I suppose that’s fair. While she was chomping down her half, I stood on the sidewalk shouting things like, “Drop it! You don’t want that! That might taste good now but that’s going to hurt coming up (or out)! You stupid, stupid dog! Drop it!” (Please don’t call The Society on me…
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Ravens, Writing Desks, and this thing called Vanity
“Why is a raven like a writing-desk? Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter. Neither do I yet this riddle from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland remains firmly planted in my mind… and leads to today’s rather random ramble: my writing desk, which, truth be told, isn’t a desk at all but a vanity. Yes, a vanity. Do they make these anymore? I don’t know. It used to belong to my grandma, complete with a mirror (now detached and down in the basement) and a cute…