I finished my final (for now) edit of Apart at the Seams, bid goodbye to Rachel and Adam and Arianna and Ethan, and sent the manuscript to the publisher.  There will be more edits down the road and page proofs, and then the book release next winter (January 2014, I think) and publicity stuff.  We’ve talked about doing an additional short story with these characters.  But for all intents and purposes, I’ve said goodbye to them.

Ending a writing project is like losing your bones.  Your mind suddenly lacks structure.  For weeks/months/years, it has been focused on this one project, writing part of it in your mind before it ever shows up on paper.  And then you go through an amorphous period until you find your skeleton again.

By which I mean that I know what comes next; I know what I’m writing next.  But it’s sort of like knowing you’re going to college in the fall.  You have no idea what college will be like, how long it will take you to settle in, whether the place you picked will be a good fit, if you may need to transfer.  Will I make friends with these new characters and think about them throughout my day?  Or will it feel like work to be with them?

For the last 9 months, I wrote like it was my job.  Which is funny since… you know… writing is my job.  But I finally treated it as such, and perhaps I’m the sort that needs a deadline in order to do that.  I got in the habit of doing 5 pages a day/20 pages per week.  I don’t want to get out-of-shape, though I can’t keep that pace over the summer because the twins are home and we have things we want to do.  I plan to keep a low pace over summer — maybe 5 pages per week? — and then go back to 5 pages per day come fall.

Right as I was wrapping up the book, my friend came back to America after working abroad and then traveling for over half a year.  I asked her about the re-entry because I’ve always felt that returning from a major trip feels much akin to finishing a book.  There’s sort of the let down, and the excitement of wanting to relive your trip by talking about it with others, and the feeling that life here has continued without you and you need to figure out your way back in.  Because part of me has been away this year, at least mentally, hanging out with these characters.  And I was the only one there with them.

She pointed out that there is a big difference in your mental state when you return because you want to return vs. the times you return but you could have also been happy staying a few more weeks.  The reality is that I’m done with Rachel Goldman and Arianna Quinn.  Don’t get me wrong; I really really love her.  She will always and forever be my first published character, my oldest fictional friend.  But I am ready for all these characters who are standing in the hallway with their stuff, ready to move into my brain and be my new roommate for the next year or so.

So I’m taking a deep breath, opening the door, and letting them in.

And you guys have about six months to read Measure of Love so you follow Apart at the Seams.  Just sayin’.

For anyone who say blogging can’t make a difference, I offer up my life because it sure as hell has changed mine.  And no, I’m not talking about publishing or the friendships I’ve made or meeting the president.  I’m talking about shaving my legs.

In the shower.

Until this blog post, I shaved my legs as a separate activity.  Sometimes I shaved pre-shower, but most of the time, I shaved at night and showered in the morning.  Big waste of water, big waste of time.  I hated shaving my legs and would often go days without doing it.  Hence why I would call shaving my legs after one of those periods of time “hacking through the forest.”

I decided to try this newfangled shaving-in-the-shower idea, and though it has taken me about two weeks to fall into a rhythm and decide where to prop up my leg so it doesn’t continue to get wet once I slather on the shaving cream, it has changed. my. life.  I now have silky smooth legs every day without a lot of effort.  I don’t have to tell the kids that we can’t go to the pool because Mommy is rocking a Bigfoot look.  I don’t have to wear jeans in 90-degree heat.  I now do that because I want my pants to stick to my sweaty limbs, not because I feel that I must protect the public’s eyes from my Mediterranean turf mat legs.

Why didn’t anyone share this with me before this point?  We’re supposed to be a sisterhood, a sorority of hair removers, but not one woman has ever floated this idea by me.

I know what you’re thinking: why didn’t this naturally occur to me WITHOUT needing it spelled out?  That is an excellent question, and maybe it goes hand in hand with my inability to pass Candy Crush levels.  I’m just not that bright.  Or, as the woman at my grandmother’s nursing home said, “it’s a different kind of smart.”

Anyway, my life is different now.  And blogging changed it.  So thank you.  Thank you wise women of the Internet.

Uh… and what else are y’all doing that I obviously am not?  Give me your best lifehack.

Mine is that I keep cleaning supplies in every room, so I rarely formally clean.  I just walk in a room, use the supplies, and then sit down to do whatever I was entering the room to do.  Hence why cleaning never stresses me out.

So… a few months ago, I opened up a contest to have a character named after you in the upcoming book Apart at the Seams.  The contest closed this week and I pulled an entry using the Random Number Generator.

The winner of the Say “I Do” to Measure of Love contest is… #30: Lori!

So when you see her name in the book, you’ll know exactly how it got there.

I mostly want to say an enormous thank you to the 73 entries in the contest.  Each of those felt like a little hug.  I am beyond grateful to all of you for the support with the book, Measure of Love: reading it, tweeting about it, reviewing it, Facebooking it.  Every small thing helps.  It’s just a review or a tweet to you, but it is a huge huge huge thing to me.  So thank you.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “We’re Not Just All a Little Bit Racist, We’re Also a Little Bit Hateful” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Cristy
• “The Children I’ve Never Know” (Sydney Morning Herald)
• “The Trouble with (Just) Leaning In” (A Half Baked Life)

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Lady of the Lantern has a tiny post about napping, and I’m highlighting it because she states this truth that I’ve never heard someone say before (and if I had heard it said when I was in the throes of babyhood, it would have saved my sanity).  “Much of the first year of her life, I have waited for Figlia to fall asleep, so that I could x, y or z. Now, I am not so affected by her napping or non-napping. I can engage her in stuff and do some of mine too.”  It’s hard to realize how that will change; that the nap will cease to hold the same importance.  But it will.  So bookmark her post and return to it when you need it.

The Destiny Manifest has a beautiful post on the anniversary of their daughter’s birth and death.  On what should have been her first birthday, a mother reflects on the first year after the loss of her daughter.  And what could have been a day when she felt completely alone, a network of friends came out to light candles, release balloons, and remember with her.  She writes, “It makes my heart sing to feel so much love from friends I’ve never met face to face. I read so many caring messages and saved so many pictures, and every one of them lifted my spirits and made me feel so much better.”  It’s really a post about the power of togetherness.

Lastly, Stupid Broken Eggs has a powerful post about how our words are sometimes read (and affect) another person.  Reading a discussion on an open forum about another person’s weight gain, she points out how her own body changes are tied to stress, and perhaps instead of judging, those people could reach out to the person in question and ask them if everything is okay.  She refrains from joining the conversation: “I don’t need to be jumping into a pot of boiling water head first and full of progesterone and steroids… that’s a recipe for disaster I do believe.”  But her words are just as powerful here, and what comes next in the post is beautiful moment between friends.

The roundup to the Roundup: Winner of the contest. And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 28th and July 5th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I have now hit the moment where I have spent just as much time thinking about Candy Crush as I have playing it.  It’s sort of like attending summer camp.  It looks like fun and games, but I’ve learned a lot of valuable, after school special-type lessons about myself by lining up images of candy on my cell phone screen.  It’s brought out my self-loathing as well as made me understand the joy of playing with others.  And that’s one to grow on.

Poor Lori has already listened to all of this so she gets a pass on this post.  Actually, what am I saying?  You can all take a pass on this post if you wish.  I mean, it’s not as if part of the Candy Crush TOS is that your friends all need to listen to you philosophize about how a game has destroyed your self-worth.

Actually, has anyone read the TOS?  Is that in there?

*******

Sometimes, at night, I dream about combining doughnuts with striped candies.

I dream about boards of candies exploding in orgasmic jelly-blasting shudders.

I’ve never been a gamer unless you count Infocom, and on that count, I’ve never played a game that other people have been playing at the same time.  I am usually so far behind the curve that I only start playing a game once everyone else has already finished the game, or I’m playing a game that no one else has chosen to play.

This is my first time playing a game while others are playing the game, and I have dozens of people around me who are bemoaning the difficulty of the same boards.  I finally get why people like to play things together.  Or, at the very least, adjacent to.  It’s the number one reason why I don’t want to give up the game.  Because I get that giving up the game would be the simple solution.  But I would then miss out on the social part: the texting with friends about that damn multiplying chocolate.

Playing this game is like hanging out with friends while crushing candies with the zeitgeist.

And that zeitgeist is sort of like that roly poly guy everyone had in their dormitory at college who never seemed to go to class but was so much fun to hang around that you helped him out with his term papers because you didn’t want him to be kicked out of university since then he wouldn’t be around anymore to come up with all of those great bat-shit insane ideas.

Didn’t we all have a happy stoner like my Tommy-D* (to distinguish him from some other guy who was a lot less fun but also named Tom)?

Anyway, at the same time, playing the game at the same time as everyone else is making me feel like shit about myself because I seem to get stuck on levels much longer than other people.  I tell you that I’m stuck on Level 70, and then you tell me that you’re stuck on Level 86.  But when I come back and tell you that I’m stuck on Level 86, you tell me you’re stuck on Level 320.  See, I only advanced 16 levels, but you advanced… well… a lot.  And perhaps the fact that I can’t quickly do the math in my head to tell you how much more points to the fact that I’m really not a smart person.

I always thought of myself as decently smart.  Like middle-of-the-road smart.  But Candy Crush is making me think that I’m really really terrible at strategy-based games.  And everyone else is great at strategy-based games.  I feel like I’m failing a basic test of intelligence.

Either that or I’m playing a lot less than everyone else.

On good days, I think that I must be playing less than everyone else.  My friend told me that to boost my self-esteem.  “Mel, you just play it less than everyone else.”  Do I?  Once she told me that I’m playing it less than everyone else, I considered playing it more.  I mean, however much I’m playing, increase it… ten-fold. (Yes, I chose to make the jump a multiple of ten so the math would be easy to do in my head.)  If I’m playing it a half hour every day… I need to increase that to 300 minutes or… crap… there’s that math again… 60 minutes in an hour… so that’s 5 hours.  5 hours.  I need to essentially get a job playing Candy Crush if I’m going to keep up at all since it takes me so much longer than the average human being to pass a level.

I’m only somewhat being tongue-in-cheek about this.

On bad days, I think that I must be playing it the same amount, except I am stupid.

Today is July 4th, a day of freedom (at least here in America).  I’m going to spend it relaxing.  Which means reading books and going to the park with the kids and maybe… just maybe… beating Level 92.  Because by fuck I am stuck on Level 92 and I really really really can’t figure out how to solve this one — if you have any ideas, please tell me.  Just don’t tell me that you’ve jumped to Level 920**.

* I just Googled Tommy-D, whose name has been changed to protect the not-so-innocent, and he looks like a really successful, smart guy now.  Not like an embodiment of the zeitgeist at all.  I think it’s because he’s shaved off his straggly, pot-leaf-studded beard.

** Please also don’t tell me that Candy Crush only goes up to 300-something levels.  It was just so much easier, mathematically, to stick a zero on the end of 92 and make your hypothetical level 10 times mine.  Take pity on my feeble mind.

There is actually a reason why I asked you yesterday about how late you’d call someone.  A week or so ago, I texted a friend at midnight.  I didn’t expect her to be awake; I just wanted the question to be waiting there on her phone first thing in the morning.  And then, after I hit send, I realized that — and I should preface this with the fact that I am a neophyte with texting.  I didn’t send my first text until this year — I may have just woken her up with a random pinging of her phone at 12 am.

We have a land line, therefore, we turn off our phones before we go to bed.  You can send me emails or text messages all night — I won’t know until I take my phone off airplane mode in the morning.  So I should actually correct that: I put my phone on airplane mode; I don’t actually turn it off.  But it’s off for all intents and purposes.

If it’s an emergency, people can still get a hold of me via my land line.

But I know a lot of people who have cancelled their land line and only use their cell phone.  And in that case, I don’t know if they turn their phone off at night.  If they do, how does someone get through to them in an emergency?  But if they leave their phone on, and I’m sending text messages at midnight, isn’t their phone pinging while they’re trying to sleep?  And in that case, is it rude to send text messages at night?  All this time, I’ve been treating texts like email, but they’re really not like email.  They’re sort of like dialing someone’s phone.

Right?

So… do you have a time you stop texting someone?  And do you turn your cell phone (or put it on airplane mode) at night, or if someone texts you at 2 am, would you hear your phone ding or buzz at 2 am?

And an open apology to anyone I inadvertently pissed off by texting while you were trying to sleep.