I wrote a thousand words the other day

and it was kind of a minor miracle. I used to be a much more self-disciplined writer. I set word count goals--higher than 1000 words--and I always met them. The trick was not really a trick at all. It was

just do it

no excuses. Sit down and open the manuscript I was working on and write. But then, I hit a nasty writer's block, and then, just as I was emerging out of that, along came a global pandemic and a scary slap of a reminder that we live in a broken world. Whatever routine I'd created for myself was gone and each day I would put off my writing, 

finding a million other things to do before sitting down, coping with the global pandemic and the world's precariousness by binge-watching baking shows, impulse-buying miniature book rooms and colorful cereal bowls, and obsessively trying to identify every plant in my backyard. 

Also, worrying over birds.

Amazingly, I finished writing a book and revised it and revised it again, and started writing another book, setting no word count goals because I kept failing at them, and next, simply trying to sit for a fixed amount of time, 

say, an hour? 

Some days even that was too hard. My old bad habits came back, the perfectionism thing where you have to keep writing the same scene, the same paragraph, the same sentence until it feels right and what is right anyway? Which inevitably spirals into the evil twin of perfectionism-- self doubt, 

the Why am I doing this? Who is ever going to read this? Oh, look at those cute cereal bowls online why don't we buy them even though we don't need anymore cereal bowls. 

But then I got vaccinated and suddenly it was spring and I had mapped every plant in my yard and my adult daughter who had been living at home all year moved out and restarted her life and that reminded me that I could restart mine, 

and why not set a word count goal?

I chose 1000 words. For reference, this is roughly 4 pages. Not so much, you would think, right? But it took me an entire day. When I finished, I felt like I'd run a marathon, muscles throbbing that I'd forgotten I had, extreme giddiness, because I could still do this, 

write, 

and somehow I survived this year and how lucky I was, am, to be able to do this, write, despite living in a broken world, both escaping from it and trying to capture it, regardless of whether anyone reads what I'm writing, and so the next day,

I did it again. 

Cute, but not enough to assuage my existential dread

Existential Crisis with a Serving of Oreo Cookie Brownies

Typically, I am not a person who buys Oreos. 

When the kids were little, I wouldn't let them eat them. Something about the partially hydrogenated fat and/or the high fructose corn syrup. I don't even remember now but it was important to me at the time, so in our home we only served the supposedly more nutritious Paul Newman brand called Newmanos. My kids, I figured, would never know the difference. 

(Side note: when my son was in fourth or fifth grade, he came home all excited from a birthday party and asked me if I'd ever heard of this much better tasting Newmano cookie called an Oreo.)

Anyway, the other day I bought a package of Oreos so my daughter and I could make a recipe with some friends. We've been doing this thing where we alternate choosing a recipe and do a facetime-bake together. This week our kitchen smelled like a candy store and I ate my fill of Oreos--partially hydrogenated fat and/or high fructose corn syrup be damned. 

I mean, really. Who cares. 

We are moving through uncharted, inevitably rising, waters. 

My son, who still probably gorges on Oreos because of the deprivation of his childhood, shared a link to an article with me back in March, the gist of which is about how we've lost the narrative thread and without a narrative thread, we can't make sense of what the hell is happening. Remember the morning of 9/11 when the planes crashed into the towers and the newscasters could only express horror in real time? 

That's like now, except the Global-Pandemic/Shit-show-Presidency/Long-Overdue-Collapse-of-White-Supremacy/Looming-Climate-Change-Disaster is still unfolding. Basically, the towers have been falling in slow motion for eight months and there is no end in sight.  

In the meantime I signed up our family for a Cooking-with-a-Chef fundraiser program run by a local urban farm. I didn't even know this place existed, but it's an actual working farm smack in the middle of an economically depressed area near downtown Columbus in what's known as a Food Desert. (My daughter corrects me to say that we should actually refer to these areas where there are no supermarkets/places to buy affordable, nutritious food as: Food Apartheids, because that implies a purposeful, systematic problem and not something that just kinda happened, like a desert.) 

Franklinton Farms has been operating for thirteen years. They distribute food to families in the community and help people start their own gardens and a do host of other cool things, and last night they had a virtual program to raise money that featured Chef Del Sroufe (best-selling author of Forks over Knives: The Cookbook). 

We were not using Oreos (or Newmanos) as an ingredient. My daughter and I went downtown to pick up the bags of farm-grown produce and then we had a blast putting together the meal with the chef and all of the other people who signed up for the fundraiser. 

For the record we were making Black Bean Sweet Potato Enchiladas with Sweet Potato Cashew Cream and a side salad of Wilted Kale. Before the program started my daughter and I prepped all of the ingredients and were feeling very proud of ourselves as the chef began his cooking lesson by slowly peeling a sweet potato. Not that this was a competition, but we were so much further ahead of the people who were just unpacking their produce bags. 

But then suddenly we were rushing around smoking our spices and blender-ing our cashew mixture sauce and lemon zesting our kale and cracking up at the comments, that one poor soul saying, Wait, I'm still peeling my potato, what's this about spices? and someone else, Help! I don't have a third pan!

The dinner was good. 

Maybe not oreo cookie brownie good, but filling and warm and it was nice to sit down and eat it together. 

We can’t see the way ahead. We have no narrative except for what we do now, this moment, the Oreos we line up in rows on our brownies and the lemon zest we toss on our wilting kale. The people we love around our table 

or far away and smiling at us through our glowing screens. 

A Tale of Two Editing Sessions

SCENE ONE

Your lovely critique partner reads your draft and calls you to discuss big picture issues that you might want to look at as you revise. You agree with pretty much everything she says and are excited about digging in. You open the manuscript, taking note of the 160+ comments and questions that your lovely critique partner has helpfully inserted.

You begin work enthusiastically.

The End

SCENE TWO

Your lovely critique partner reads your draft and calls you to discuss big picture issues that you might want to look at as you revise. You agree with pretty much everything she says. Damn it. 

You open the manuscript, taking note of the 160+ comments and questions that your lovely critique partner has helpfully inserted and you are horrified by the amount of work that lies ahead.

But whatever. What else are you going to do with your time?

You begin work. Tightening, reworking, deleting, adding, fiddling--

move this paragraph over here where it fits better. No. Move it back. It worked better where it was originally. Delete the end of this chapter. Rework this scene. What's the timeline here? Does this flashback belong in this chapter? Why does the main character say that? What's the purpose of the scene? What's the MC's friend thinking at this point?

More fiddling and tweaking and shifting, cutting

combining, questioning,

wondering if you're fixing problems or creating new ones. Is this necessary? If you take it out, have you made things more confusing? Wait, why did you think this character was funny?

What's the point of this story? Why did you start writing it in the first place? What if you can't fix this? What if it's unfixable? Why are you a writer? What is the meaning of life? Why are-- what should-- Why didn't you-- Who cares if--

View post on imgur.com

The End

Bonus points if you can guess which scene I acted out yesterday :)

A Bummer of a Writing Day Turns Awesome

Lately I've been struggling with a revision. It's a story that, for whatever reason, I refuse to quit on, and so every other year for over a decade I've been rewriting it.

I've added characters. I've killed characters. I've changed settings and reworked plotlines. I've played around with the voice, the language, the target audience. This used to be a middle grade novel and now it's become young adult. I even changed the title three times. Sad fact: I love the title now, but I'm probably going to have to let it go because I noticed that there's a new YA novel out with the same title.

Darn it.

(just a few of the printed off versions)

I have a nice little writing process that I've figured out over the years, tricks I've learned and methods that seem to work. Every book I've written has been a little different in how it comes together. Thin Space, for all of the work involved (at least five rewrites over two years) was a relatively easy book to write.

This one, obviously, has not been easy. But I press on with it. At the core is a story and main characters and a world that I love, and those aspects have never changed. One of these days, one of these rewrites, I know it's going to click...

That day was not yesterday.

I stared at the computer screen most of the morning and into the afternoon, writing a sentence and then deleting it. There is a part of me that can deal with this kind of cruddy writing day, that thinks: "oh well. I'll figure it out, eventually." There is another part that screams in frustration, that doubts that I will ever get this book "right" (whatever that is), that doubts that I even CAN write anymore, hisses in my ears, "Thin Space was a fluke and who am I kidding? that book isn't even good, quit now blah blah blah."

That part was winning.

And then I had to shut down, at the height of this self-doubting/depressing internal rant, to go give a talk at my local high school. The librarians there and at the public library oversee a joint teen book club every month and they invited me to visit. I gave the school librarian, Laura Piazza, who has been a debut writer's dream by the way, a handful of advanced review copies of Thin Space last fall and she's been passing them around to students and teachers.

Talking to this group made me feel better immediately and reminded me what is at the other end of the sometimes excruciating process of writing a book: if you do keep plugging away, eventually, that finished story will one day make it into the hands of readers.

(I love this picture! First, because these ladies were all so cool and  enthusiastic about Thin Space, and second, because it looks like one of the book clubbers is Hermione Granger...) 

The (seemingly) Endless Verginess of the Verge

Dear Reader,

Take a journey with me.

January, 2000. I had just gotten my first acceptance letter. The story was "The Parade of Princes" and the magazine was Cicada, a literary magazine for young adults in the Cricket group. The kind editor and I shared a few back and forth letters (this was all done in the mail back then) and the story appeared in the Sept/Oct issue. I got paid 25 cents a word. I was thrilled. It really seemed like I was on my way. A few months after the story appeared, Cicada forwarded me a letter from an editor at Viking. She loved the story, she said, and wondered if I’d ever considered writing a novel. I got another letter from the editors at the Institute of Children’s Literature. They wanted to include the story in a book called First-Time Authors that they planned to use with their students. Oh yes, Baby. I was ON MY WAY.

Now digress with me:

Several years later I was working in a fifth grade classroom as the gifted/talented collaborator. The teacher was teaching a cool lesson about fractions and measurements (I think that was the purpose of the lesson. One of the things I realized that year was that I had never really learned fifth grade math.) The gist of the activity was the kids drew rulers on long slips of paper and marked off the segments into inches (or maybe it was centimeters. Another thing that never clicked with me: the metric system) The teacher wanted the kids to note how you could keep dividing a segment in half. There would be a point when you wouldn’t even be able to see it, but conceivably you could continue to break the segment into smaller pieces. Sort of a reverse infinity, if you will.

Back to my point:

The verge. For a long time I measured the verge as a definitive line, the moment when I crossed from Unpublished into the Land of the Published Book Author. In the “Hero’s Journey,” the basis for pretty much every story ever told, including the story of our own human lives, the hero leaves the comforts and/or discomforts of home and sets out on his journey. He leaves the ordinary world and crosses the threshold into the special one, the place where the adventure really starts cooking. He’s tested. He makes friends and enemies along the way. He does battle. Etc. And eventually the journey ends (usually right back where the guy started) but now he’s a changed person, a true hero who’s earned his reward. The end.

So in my journey, I always saw the moment I got my book deal as crossing the threshold into the special world of Book Deal-dom. I imagine this lovely kingdom as a place of books signings and school visits and fan letters and on particularly bright dreamy days, it includes fame and fortune and a gold sticker on a book cover. When I said I was on the verge, I meant that I was steps away from crossing over into this blessed land.

The trouble is the threshold—the verge—is not a line after all. Instead it’s more like those segments on the paper rulers the fifth graders were drawing. It’s much wider and contains many more pieces than I ever suspected. Since January 2000 I’ve had more stories published. I’ve gotten nice rejections to the stories and books that weren’t published. I wrote many manuscripts. Some multiple times. I got an agent. I lost an agent. I found another agent. I have people that love what I write and champion it. And I have people who think it’s “meh” and/or won’t give it the time of day. There are times when I wonder how wide this freaking threshold is. Surely I am about to cross over. Soon? Ever?

Then it hit me.

I already have. The Verge isn’t the moment of the book deal. It's when I began to believe in myself as a writer. That’s when I crossed over. That’s when I left the ordinary world and entered the special one, my own writer’s journey. Along the way, I’ve been tested. I’ve made friends. And enemies. (the biggest one is Self-Doubt. That guy’s a bastard, let me tell you.) And I have truly done battle. Every day with the blaring blank computer screen. It’s entirely possible that I’ll never get The Deal. If it does happen, it may turn out to be the climax of my story. Or maybe it’ll be just another blip of a sub-plot.

Here’s the funny thing: the verge is not an elusive, ever-widening line. It's the journey itself. On this rare sunny day in Columbus, all's right with the world, and I can say without a hint of sarcasm or self-delusion, what a cool up and down adventure it’s been.

Facing Failure A How-To in Three Parts. Part Three: Waiting

So, my blog is called On the Verge, and for those of you who are just now joining me, let me explain why: because I have been on the verge of book publication for what has been a very looooong time. I had this cute little thought back in the fall that maybe I could document my on-the-vergeness in this blog, secretly thinking that what I would really be documenting was my just around the corner book deal(s). Alas, that hasn’t happened and I find myself doubling down on a dream that seems about to come true and at the same time feels as if it is slipping away.

A few months ago I heard one of those inspirational writer/speakers say at a conference that it was amazing to her how many writers quit “right as they were about to cross over.” I nodded smugly and thought, no way was that going to be me. “I will never quit,” I said. “I will keep writing until I take my last breath. Because if there’s one thing I know about myself it is that I never quit anything. And anyway, I love writing for the sake of writing. Blah blah blah.”

Okay, I didn’t actually say the blah blah part. But I should have. I have had many close calls over the years, many moments when it seemed I was about to cross over. And many many more disappointments. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve given myself a version of this buck up/keep writing pep talk.

I do keep writing. But it’s remarkable to me that each day is just as difficult as the day before. I know I’m going to do it, and yet I struggle each time I face the blank computer screen, wavering between self-doubt (that this exercise is pointless and stupid; never mind that this is the worst writing ever) and elation (that what I’m doing is wonderful, amazing, and sure to be published).

And let me say a word here about how I’ve been defining success as being published. I truly wish I didn’t define it that way. But there it is. I want these books of mine to be edited and published and displayed on bookstore and library shelves (and/or zoomed out electronically to people’s Kindles). I want people I don’t know to read them. I want to get paid for my efforts. I want to be (okay, I’ll say it) praised.

None of this is under my control. I get that. Daily I war with myself about why it matters to me to have this outward recognition, and daily (usually) I make peace and decide that writing for the sake of writing is enough.

I am not writing about this struggle because I want people to feel obligated to respond with encouragement. Believe me, I am long past the need for my friends and family to say: Oh, Jody, we love you. Don’t quit now. The truth is I’m trying to figure out myself what has kept me writing all these years. I have a sneaky suspicion lately that THIS may be all there is. That I may never get that book deal. And what am I going to do with that realization? Can I keep writing anyway?

I honestly don’t know the answer.

My son and I have been having these deep philosophical discussions about the meaning of life courtesy of his 11th grade English teacher who seems to be into these things. He had to write a paper about perception of reality in TS Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.” It was my son’s thesis that people make their own realities, perceiving the world through a certain lens, and if that is so, then why not choose an optimistic outlook? If you don’t know that poem, the speaker is a depressed, middle aged guy who at the end imagines these mermaids singing but says that he doesn’t think they’re singing to him. My son said, geez, if you’re going to make up mermaids, why not go all the way and imagine that they are singing to you? It’s your dream, right?

I mentioned in my last post that one of the things that kept me writing for so long was the little bits of encouragement I’d gotten along the way. These were signs, I believed, that I should keep going; that inevitably, if I didn’t quit, my dream would have to come true. Okay, many days that little smidgen of hopeful thought doesn’t work for me. But here’s the strange thing: I write anyway. Every day. I set a word count goal and I reach it. Every day. This may not mean anything. In all likelihood I am a silly person writing sentences with a stick in the sand. But on the other hand, it may mean everything. My stubborn inability to quit has gotten me this far. If can shape my reality any way I choose, here is what I choose—

It’s my dream. And I choose to hear those damned mermaids singing.
I choose to hope while I wait.

Rolling Rocks up a Mountain

Conversation with my seventeen-year-old son:
Son: Mom, have you ever heard of Sisyphus?
Me.: Um, yeah
Son: We were talking about him in my English class today. You remind me of him.
Me: Um?

Now for those of you who don’t happen to have random Greek myths churning around in your heads, Sisyphus was the man the gods forced to push a boulder up a mountain. Every day Sisyphus pushed the rock up and every night the thing rolled down so he’d have to do it again the next day. It’s the very definition of futility, of pointless endeavor. Really, of life itself, if you want to get completely nihilistic about it. (My son’s English class just read The Stranger by Camus and that is exactly what they’ve been talking about. What’s the point?) What my son meant was that it seems pretty pointless for me to write every day when there doesn’t seem to be any external reward (ie payment).

But here’s what I told him: What else was Sisyphus going to do with his time? Stand on the bottom of the mountain and look at the rock? Kick it? Sit on it with his weary head in his hands? Why not push the damn thing? At least you get a change of scenery along the way, some exercise out of the deal, a decent view when you get to the top. And later you can get a little entertainment watching the rock bounce back down again, right?

Seemingly pointless digression:

So the other day I went out and bought a hair dryer. My best writing friend and I have this pact. When one of us gets a publishing deal, that person will buy the other one a hairdryer. We got this idea from Stephen King’s book On Writing. Apparently, he had struggled too in his pre-published days. If I remember right, he and his wife and two little kids were living in a trailer and he was teaching full time and making like 6000 dollars a year in rural Maine. They had a broken down Volkswagen. They couldn’t afford a phone. When he got his book deal, for Carrie, it was some crazy amount of money, like two hundred thousand dollars, and the stunned Stephen King walked around in a daze, his head spinning with the news that his life had just changed. He wanted to buy something for his wife to celebrate and for some odd reason the only thing he could come up with was a hairdryer.

Anyway, my friend and I have this pact but we were having problems with our hairdryers. We were putting off buying them because (and I know this is silly) we kept hoping that a book deal for one of us would come through. Last weekend my husband told me my hairdryer is a fire hazard. This was true. Sparks spit out the back end. Only one setting worked. Finally, I couldn’t take it. I went out and bought one. There was a twingy thought in the back of my head that doing that—taking matters into my own hands—might force a deal for my friend. (Also silly, I know, but I’m operating under the belief in the forces that make it rain right after you wash your car.)

Okay. Nothing has happened yet. My friend bought herself a hair dryer too. She needed one and she was trying to nudge the universe along for me too. (We are both silly like that.) But my point is that we are taking joy in whatever we can as we push our boulders up our respective mountains.

I just finished writing a book today. It's a second draft of a first draft of a version of a manuscript I have literally been writing on and off for almost ten years. WOO HOO. So tonight I’m going to sit back on my rock and enjoy the view from the top of the mountain (really I’ll be sitting next door in my neighbors’ hot tub drinking chocolate martinis, but you get the picture).

In a few weeks I’m going to start writing a new book and push the rock up the mountain again.

Because it’s what I do. Me and Sisyphus. We’re silly like that.