Posts from — May 2010

You know when you haven’t exercised in a while and you return to running and you take a few gingerly-conducted jogs in place for a moment, wondering if you’ve still got it?  That’s sort of how I feel about writing the Roundup.  I mean, I wrote yesterday just as I write every day, but I also got my hair chopped off and I usually find that cutting off my hair affects my writing ability–not to be crazy or anything.

But it’s really short.

Like…football-helmet-made-out-of-hair short.

I did some deep breathing on the ride home, wondering why I didn’t give her more scientific instructions on how I wanted the cut to go.  My mother had suggested bringing pictures of hair I like, but that’s sort of the thing: there is no hair style I like that would also go with my hair type.

When I see people later in the day, I’ll ask them to take a picture.  It sort of looks like when-flappers-go-bad.

On the other hand, while I was a sniveling mess on the inside about her haircut, the ChickieNob mounted the salon chair and sat calmly for fifteen minutes, serenely smiling to herself while the stylist trimmed several inches off her hair.  She came out looking adorable and all of my fears were quelled when she returned to being her little spicy self, entertaining the other ladies at the salon with her sassiness.  She still has the personality of a southern-fried Sabra.

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The Weekly What If: what if the greatest hair stylist in the world was willing to cut and style your hair for free for the rest of your life, but you’d have no say in what style she chose for you.  It would never be terrible since this person would be the stylist to the stars, but you’d have to roll with whatever style she thinks works best with your face and trends in the moment.  Would you do it?

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The book finally has a name.  I mean, yes, it had a working title, but now it has a final title–one that is being slapped on the galleys.

Life from Scratch

So…an enormous thank you to everyone who helped name the book.  A specific thank you to A, who threw out “from scratch” and Lisa who suggested throwing the word “life” before that.  I love the new title.  It is cozy and stable and makes me smile.

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And now, the blogs…

Creating Motherhood has a post about that desire to speed up time while simultaneously slowing it down.  It is about being in that uncomfortable panic where you have to sit with the fact that you can’t know the future.  And just trust.  It’s a moving post.

Infertile Follies has a post about a question a friend asked: “is it the lack of a baby, or the lack of control that makes infertility painful for you?”  It is about finding clarity and understanding how much infertility shakes her feeling of purpose.

Bottoms Off and On the Table has a post about rebuilding love.  She begins with the route she thought that renewal of love would take and then veers onto her own road, which she describes as “It didn’t come from a place of joy where love is easy. It came from a place of despair. We had a choice and we chose us.”  It is just a gorgeous post.

Lastly, Two Shorten the Road has an eerie post about a song.  The post gave me pause because I too have a song that keeps popping up in my life.  The title of the song is a family joke of something my grandfather once said to me, and the song has played continuously in moments connected to my grandparents, including the graveyard at my grandmother’s funeral.  I don’t mean that we played this song…but you’ll need to read her post in order to understand.

The roundup to the Roundup: We all survived the Big Cut of 2010.  Answer the Weekly What If.  There’s a title for the book!  And lots of great blogs to read.

The ChickieNob and I are going this afternoon to be shorn.  I am donating my hair yet again, even though when I reread over the experience, I don’t get a warm and happy feeling about losing my Sa.  I remember being sad last time and sort of regretful even though the donation made someone else happy and my hair was so much easier to manage than it is now.

Am I the only person who doesn’t feel like themselves for a few days after a massive haircut?

What is more remarkable is that this is the ChickieNob’s first haircut.  She will turn six this summer, but she has never had so much as a trim.  The tips of her hair have been with her since birth.

Her hair cascades all the way down her back–this is a trait that is uniquely ChickieNobbish and is often remarked on by strangers.  Her hair is long and curly, like a mini Achinoam Nini.  But it’s also a lice-case waiting to happen.  I tie up her hair every day because I live in such dire fear of finding tiny white beings living on her luscious strands.

But there is something bittersweet about losing the ends, taming the wildness.  The ChickieNob always reminds me of a wildflower since wildflowers can grow anywhere and thrive under any condition.  The ChickieNob is definitely a freethinking, creative spitfire.  She is clever, can hold her own in an argument, and gives out her love enormously and fiercely.  To quote Noa, she is the “queen of open fields” and some of that image is tied up in her wild, curly hair, especially when it is encrusted with sand after a day at the beach or flecked with paint from a particularly careless art session.

It’s a lot to put on a haircut, and I know the change is entirely emotionally-based.  I never think about the Wolvog’s haircuts like this, and maybe it’s because he has been cutting his hair since he was little whereas the ChickieNob is nearing on six without a haircut.

But think of all the moments that are still entwined in the hair on her head.  Those ends were with her in the NICU, and when she came home on a heart monitor.  It was with her when she learned how to sit up and reach and hold a toy and crawl and finally walk.  It was with her the first time she tasted food.  The first time she swam in a pool.  The ends of her hair were at my sister’s wedding.  Her first day of school.  The first time she tasted a Cadbury egg.  The day she started ballet.

Her brother still likes to mindlessly twirl her hair when he sits next to her.  It is something that invites touching, like the fur of a lion.  And it is just as soft as you think it will be before your fingers reach it.

I know that a lot of good can come from taming her hair.  That it will be just as lovely tomorrow.  But it’s a little bittersweet today.

I have been reading Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies and even though the book is about her divorce, it has brought me to a place of catharsis and understanding about something unrelated to marriage, maybe because it is set at a university which makes me think about my own experience in graduate school.

During my third year, I was in a terrible situation that I sat through for an entire semester and never told anyone about until the end of the semester.  The situation was bad enough for a department head to come in on a Sunday and meet with me in his office after I told a department secretary about it on Friday night and she called him to tell him that he needed to get involved immediately.  He listened, but at first, he didn’t want to do anything and I started crying because I couldn’t believe that I had finally stepped forward and was being told that nothing was going to be done to help me.

I was about to leave his office and I said something which made no sense to me at the time but makes perfect sense now.  It was as if I was on autopilot, being flown by my mother.  He had pictures of his kids in the office and I pointed at one and said, “imagine I’m your daughter.  Would you let someone do this to your daughter?  I am someone’s daughter–treat me like that.”

And suddenly, stuff got done.  I had unknowingly pushed a button, not even knowing yet how a parent feels about protecting their child.  I didn’t really sense how far a parent would go until I became a teacher and felt that way about my students.  A policeman once came to my external classroom door during my first year of teaching and when he knocked, I opened the door a crack and told him he couldn’t enter my classroom and had to follow campus protocol and sign in at the office.  Then I locked my door and went back to teaching.

The kids were stunned that I’d say that to a policeman and I was sort of stunned too, but again, on autopilot, my instinct was that I would do anything to protect them, with protection being loosely used in this case since there was no danger.  The point was that I wasn’t going to be intimidated or allow a stranger into my room knowing that it was my job not only to teach but to protect.

Which brings me to my current worries–the twins are just beginning to navigate the wonderful and terrible world of personal relationships.  They are making their own friends–ones they choose rather than ones we’ve served up to them as the children of our friends and therefore, they will love them, damnit.

I thought we were pretty much immune to drama until maybe 8-ish.  I thought around third grade, there would be a few tears along the lines of “so-and-so didn’t want to be in my group for the class project” and I thought that I’d continue to cook dinner while they told me about this transgression, and the whole thing would blow over by the next morning.

That’s how I thought it would go.

But we’re already navigating this in pre-kindergarten and my reaction is sort of the one invoked by those fateful words in the department head’s office.  They are my children and I am up worrying about them, knowing full well how much childhood relationships can suck.  I want to protect them.  I don’t listen with half-an-ear, writing off the drama like I thought I would.  It’s like I become a five-year-old myself and  I put down the spoon I am using to stir whatever I am cooking and their world becomes my entire world while they’re dealing with the hurt.  With every transgression, I stroke their head at the end of the discussion and say, “you know, it’s so hard to be little.  It’s hard when you’re bigger, but it’s even harder when you’re little.”  And they get it somehow, that they’ll develop coping mechanisms to deal with other people’s shittiness.

Yes, I am aware that I am carrying my own baggage into their experience as does Josh.  Their experience is uniquely theirs and not a reincarnation of my own.  But still, you can’t help but relive every slight you remember from childhood when you watch your child living through their own (and know full well that they’ll relive these moments too with your grandchildren if they want to parent).

There is a boy at school who tormented the Wolvog all year telling him that he wouldn’t invite him to his birthday party and when the Wolvog would tell me this, I explained that it’s just the sort of shitty thing someone yells at you to be cruel, but isn’t true because no parent would allow a child to act that shitty.  But lo and behold, the child didn’t invite the Wolvog to his birthday party after inviting most (all?) of the class.  I don’t know if the mother is just as shitty as her son or if she didn’t know that her son was yelling these things to other kids and it’s just a convergence of a series of unfortunate events where an exclusive birthday party coincides with the child’s nasty promise.  But at the end of the day, my son’s feelings were deeply bruised.

The title of the book I’m reading–Happens Every Day–refers to divorce, but it has become the mantra of a series of discussions I have had with Josh and my mother and my friends about behaviour.  Things like this, not being invited to the birthday party, dealing with the classroom bullies, having a day when you feel alone on the playground–these are all things that happen every day.  That are part of the childhood experience.  What is so heartbreaking is that you can’t cushion your child from that hurt any more than you can cushion yourself dealing with it in the adult world.  And it is so commonplace that we are expected to just suck it up and deal.

While there is a “blessing of the skinned knee,” that silver lining does little good when you see all that hurt welling up in your child (or frankly, your partner, your sibling, your friend) and you know exactly who caused it.  Because who is a very different thing from what.  Who implies that it was under the control of another person.  And that really sucks.

I’m going to say something that will sound wholly unKumbayalike: people can be shitty.  People can be terrible and thoughtless and cruel, even when they are also wonderful and sensitive and kind.  Sometimes, people say “no” because they’re lazy and self-centered.  Daily, they see someone who needs help and they walk by without offering it because they’re apathetic.  They can eat popcorn through Schindler’s List.  They can find out their colleague is going through chemotherapy and not make a meal.

And once you observe it and see that others often operate this way, even the most kindhearted and clean-living person jumps in the figurative mud puddle where everyone else is splashing around, selfishly having fun but creating a huge mess.  We all figure that if everyone else is being a dick, we might as well be a dick too.  We all–to some degree and for some duration of time–start behaving this way because you learn quickly that being kind doesn’t make you immune to other people being cruel.  You can make three dozen meals for other families at your church and then find yourself in need and have no one step forward.

It’s difficult to get out of the orbit of “why bother” and it’s a terrible cycle that doesn’t serve anyone.  But being selfish is easy and being thoughtful is really difficult.  Still, every once in a while, you come to your senses and wonder why you’re wallowing in figurative mud like a pig, so you pull yourself out of the dirt and vow to make things change–to explain through example that people don’t need to act this way.  And for a while, you truck along, pleased with humanity and then slowly, you start noticing that everyone else is still in that mud puddle and you’re seething because they’re going to track mud and it’s such a selfish thing to create a huge mess that you’re going to have to clean up because you actually care about messes.

So you jump back into the mud puddle with a “who cares” attitude and the cycle continues.  It is hard to put out the effort to be kind when others around you are not extending you any kindness.  It seems to come in spurts, a rash of disgust with humanity followed by a rebuilding of hope which can continue along for a while until you notice that others are in the mud puddle again.

I do try to spend as much time as possible not only remaining clean, but attempting to ignore the fact that the figurative mud puddle exists because I am the product of my experiences (see, that silver lining).  I wouldn’t be quite myself if I hadn’t gone through mourning the birthday party invitations that didn’t come or the playground taunts or even the incident in graduate school.

These things have–hopefully–made me a more inclusive person, one who tries to make sure that people feel a part of something and heard.  I make a meal for a friend who needs someone to take care of her so she can take care of other things.  I’m not perfect and there are plenty of people who don’t get a meal or don’t feel heard and I feel terrible about that, but it was never intentional or if it was done knowingly, it was done because there were other circumstances such as a lack of money or time.  If I am having a party, everyone is invited to the party.  If I am baking cookies for one person, I tend to bake them for everyone else who might notice that I baked cookies for the first person.  I don’t like myself when I’m in the mud because it feels wrong.  I know better than to splash around in there and I blame only myself when I get to that place where my body is figuratively that filthy.  But yes, I too get disgusted with humanity and sometimes end up asking the existential question of why do I bother and act accordingly.

The trick, of course, is that I am in charge of my own body and mind and mouth and I can decide not to wade into that figurative mud and be self-centered.  I can choose to be kind (we always tell the twins, “we want you to be kind because you can be and not cruel because you can be.”  The choice is always theirs how they wish to behave).  What I can’t do is control those other people in the puddle.  They can keep splashing around despite the snarls from those of us on the outer edge.  It is their choice whether they want to be in or out of the mud.  Or in or out of the mud when it comes to me–because they can choose to be kind to everyone else and a dick to me and there is nothing I can do about that except control my own reaction.

This is on my mind (daily, even when it isn’t 4 a.m.) because soon, the twins will be in school full time and the more time they are out of the house and away from family who loves them unconditionally and would go to the ends of the earth for them, the more chances they’ll have of being splashed by mud by those in the puddle when they’re standing on the edge debating whether they too want to get in.

I hope they choose not to join in (not just because I would dread cleaning up the house if they came home after taking an actual mud bath).  But I also know that this decision will need to happen every day because those observations of rudeness will happen every day.

I am terrified of how my children will be treated, that the sweetness will be beaten out of them by what they observe.  I know my mother also stayed up at 4 a.m. worrying about me–and apparently with good cause.  When it is your child, you are willing to stick your hand into someone’s chest and yank out their still beating heart like a ninja (ninjas do this, right?) if they harm your child–physically or emotionally.

I am trying to learn how to let go, knowing full well that I both came through the other side and still observe to this day that adults can be just as cruel as kids.  That we all say thoughtless things, do thoughtless things, that we can even have a mirror held up and our behaviour reflected and still not learn from it because sometimes (perhaps due to what we observe around us) we. just. don’t. care.  And with that fact in place, and the knowledge that how others act is out of my control, there is no point in worrying at 4 a.m. because what will be will be and hopefully, the twins will become better people because of those incidents.

But please, my heart has never listened to my head.

But back to my kumbayaness, I have also have observed how good people can be, and that is the towel I use to clean myself up those times I do wade into the mud.  And I’m always grateful for experiences that remind me to get the hell out of those mucky waters and back on clean land.  It’s not an excuse to act beastly just because others have made that choice.

Enough people have asked me for this information, and since I am in the somewhat unique position from having published both a non-fiction book and a fiction book based on the strength of my blog (and…er…I guess my writing too), I thought I would set it all out here in a multi-part series for two reasons. (1) It’s good information if you have any aspirations of publishing a book and (2) I can’t write this out over and over again for each person. So now I can just send a link and be done with it.

Shall we begin with your Do-it-Yourself MFA?

I should start out by saying that this has been my experience.  My background: I have an MFA in fiction. I published a non-fiction book with Seal Press called Navigating the Land of If in May 2009, and I have a work of fiction being published by BelleBooks for release in December 2010. Other people may have different experiences with publishing that they can add in the comment section below. This information comes from what I’ve gleaned from my MFA program, my agent, other writers, and my own experience.

I should also tell you that unless you are selling movie rights or have royalties coming in from dozens of books at once, it is very hard to support yourself entirely on book publishing. The majority of my income comes from articles and speaking engagements. Very little of it comes from book publishing, but book publishing is unique in that it has a cumulative effect. I do the work now, but I’m paid now and well into the future. Once you have several successful books collecting royalties, it is possible to earn a decent supplemental salary writing books. But most people will need to continue teaching or freelance writing. Sorry if you were going into this to get riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiich. If that’s your reason for wanting to publish a book, you should probably stop reading now.

This is how this DIY MFA program will work: over several posts (outlined below), I will walk you through what you need to do to publish either a work of non-fiction or fiction including what to expect with each leg of the process from idea to holding your book.  Others will chime in with their experience in the comment section below and others will ask questions that I’ll answer in the comment section below.

These posts will never close, so even if you are reading this years into the future (hello 2012! Are we still living above ground?), you can leave a legitimate question below and I will answer it.  Though since this information is spread out over many posts, please place your question on the appropriate post and if that post hasn’t gone up yet, trust that I will get to that topic in the future (and if I don’t, ask your question then).

Before our first class, you should take a look at this list of terms that I’ll be using as I walk you through the process of having an idea to holding your book in your hands.  I’ll be adding terms to this initial list as these posts unfold.

So let’s begin by doing a roll call for this DIY MFA program.  Why?  Because in the future, I’m going to suggest that you hook up with a few other writers and in order to do that, if you don’t have people in your face-to-face world, you can contact someone below who has a different type of blog from your own. 

So, in this roll call, please state your blog name, give the url in the appropriate url space so your name is linked to your blog, and tell us a little bit about what you write (werewolf romance novels, memoir about your year of baking 365 pies, how to book on catching squirrels as pets).  Keep it as general as possible, please.

Heads Up: topics that will be covered in future installments (and this is subject to change as questions are asked and information unfolds):

1. THIS POST

2. Getting Started: what is platform, should you even start down this road, what will agents expect from you in order to take you seriously.

3. How to Write a Non-Fiction Book Proposal and Choose Your Chapters

4. Why You Need an Agent

5. How to Find and Sign with a Reputable Agent

6. Querying Agents

7. What Happens Next–Waiting for a Book Sale

8. No Agent? Other Paths to Publication

9. What to Expect After You Sign a Book Deal

10. Be Your Own Publicist

11. A Mishmash of Leftover Questions and Answers

Okay, now go call your own name in the roll call.

Okay, so it’s final decision time which means it’s also indecision time because damn, it’s a really hard thing to name a book when you’re working on it, but it’s even harder to know that the name you choose is it.  As in, it will be on the cover and in your hands 7 months or so from now, never to change again.  And I need this set by Tuesday morning.

I cannot thank you enough for the first round of input and I have narrowed the list while adding a few more from the suggestions.  Many more were fantastic suggestions, but didn’t gibe with the book (and you’ll see why after you read it) or I couldn’t figure out a way to weave the title into the text in the first edit.  And one suggestion is actually the working title of the next book!  What would help me the most now is for you to choose one from the list below and say why it’s your favourite and choose one from the list below and say why you dislike it.  So one like and one dislike and why.  Unless you don’t like any–and then say that.  I realized that was what helped the most in the first round.

Once again, what you need to know–it’s about a blogger, rebuilding her life in the year after her divorce and can be summed up with one sentence: it’s the story of a woman who stops waiting for happiness to find her and starts cooking it herself.

Here are the key words: cooking…blogging…marriage…divorce…love…

1. Pots and Plans
2. Sunny Side Down
3. Eating Words
4. Eating Her Words
5. Eating My Words
6. Cooking Up Happiness
7. Banana Split
8. Mincing Words
9. Licking the Spoon
10. Life from Scratch