While Not in Rome

Last week my husband met up with our daughter and her roommate in Rome for the girls' spring break. Every day I would wake up to glorious pictures of linguini and gelato, the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum, the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel.

Then I would let the dog out, dart off to work, shelve 400 books, come home and settle in to write.

It was kind of a reverse retreat. The house was quiet, with no reason for me to stop working. I made a vat of potato soup and ate it all week. I read two books, one that was so crappy I wanted to fling it across the room and the other that restored my faith in the power of literature. When I needed to hear another human voice, I listened to a podcast.

(and lest you think I am too highbrow in my entertainment choices, I also binge-watched the raunchy Netflix cartoon Big Mouth and then, of course, took a bubble bath.)

It's strange living alone for a week.

I have never done it for much longer than that in my entire life. My husband and I have been married for 29 years. Before we married, I had roommates, and before that, I was a child living in a loud house with a lock on my door.

At one time I was afraid to be alone at night. My husband's traveled a lot over the years for business and I was fine when the kids were home, but once they moved out, the first time he left for a trip, I was worried that my old childhood fear of the dark would creep back.

It didn't.

Maybe it's the dog. I talk to her when I am alone and I swear she listens to me. When I'm parked too long in one position, she noses me until I get up and take her for a walk. At night when the house is settling and creaking and shadowy, she curls up at my feet on the bed. I know that she would bark away a ghost.

Not that I believe in ghosts, but you never know. I make up stories for a living. And by "a living" I mean, it is what I do. Night Number Eight alone, I mix it up a little. Eat leftover spaghetti. Scroll through the latest Roman holiday pictures. Settle in to write.

Later, I'll reward myself with a bubble bath.

We may never leave this building again (now that we have discovered Uber Eats)

Why didn't someone ever tell me about this?

Okay, my daughter told me about this. This, meaning Uber Eats. It's like ordering a pizza, except it's food from potentially every restaurant in the area. My college age daughter and her friends are huge fans. They say things like, Gotta Go, Mom, Uber Eats is here with my Panera broccoli cheese soup in a bread bowl.

I confess that I would roll my eyes. In my day we picked up food ourselves. In our cars. It was called Take-out, young lady. 

But now, consider me a convert. I am on a weekend writing retreat with my friend Natalie. We have gone on retreats before, productive and rejuvenating and sometimes haunted, but for this retreat we have changed things up. Instead of traveling off to a remote cabin in the woods or to a creepy air bnb in a quaint tourist town, we've settled on a high rise apartment in our own city. Fifteen minutes away from our homes, but it may as well be a million miles.

We have goals.

Natalie has signed up to do NaNoWriMo and she wants to write 10,000 words on a middle grade novel. I want to finish the damn scene that I've been treading water through for a week and break into the next scene.

I know. Natalie's goal is a bit loftier than mine.

But first, we order Uber Eats. A pizza-- I guess we could've just ordered out for a pizza? The difference here is they show you who is driving the food toward you and where his little car is on google maps and no money actually changes hands. It's all done ahead of time and it is so easy that we are already planning our next meal.

Tacos and chips and guac.

Which we eat as Natalie hammers out 5000 words and I write a page that finishes up my scene! Then we stay up late reading each other what we wrote and brainstorming next scenes and snarfing down the rest of the chips and guac.

Morning, I realize that I have no idea how to start my next scene and Natalie is gearing up to write 5000 more words and we're both jonesing for coffee.

Too bad they don't have Uber coffee, Natalie says, and lightbulbs spark in our heads and we both hop up excitedly to look at our phones. Within twenty minutes we are drinking our coffee and eating full blown breakfasts of potato hash and toast and eggs made to order.

Natalie pounds out her 5000 words. I write my way into the next scene.

Thanks, Uber Eats!

On Cakes and Celebration and Community

Last week, as I was putting the final bloody touches on a severed finger cake, I started thinking about writing communities and how I would not be where I am today without mine.

I was making the cake as a centerpiece for my best friend Natalie's book launch party at the local bookstore Cover to Cover. Another writing friend and I drove over early to help the bookstore owner, our dear friend Sally, set up for the party and greet the guests at they arrived, local authors and librarians, friends and relatives, and fellow members of our children's writing group SCBWI. 

Not too long ago I didn't know any of these people.

I'd never heard of SCBWI, the international organization for writers and illustrators of children's books.

I knew approximately one writer, Marsha Thornton Jones, who was my boss when I was working as a teacher in Lexington Kentucky. Turned out she was the best-selling co-author of The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids series. But we never talked about writing in the early years of our friendship.

I "knew" a couple of bookstore owners. But these were bosses too, Karen Davis and Thelma Kidd, the entrepreneurs who started the string of bookstores in Tennessee called Davis-Kidd Booksellers. I met them, briefly, at a company Christmas party when I was working at their Memphis store as a grad student.

The librarians I knew were co-workers, lovely people who talked books and reading with me, but who never knew that I dreamed of being a published writer.

Back then the dream wasn't something I told anyone. It was something I could barely acknowledge to myself. I mean, who the heck was I to imagine my name on a book?

But for years I wrote anyway-- dozens of stories, four novels-- always working on my own--  trying to puzzle out the impenetrable publishing industry, submitting and collecting a growing pile of rejections, celebrating my very few successes with family and close friends, and mourning the many more failures.

Alone.

And then in 2005, I signed up to attend a Highlights Foundation writing retreat. I went because I'd gotten a brochure in the mail and it seemed like a cool idea to have some uninterrupted time to write. What I hadn't counted on was stumbling my way into my first writing community, meeting fellow writers all on various stages of the journey, from relative beginners like me to multiply published authors.

I was star-struck that first morning smearing cream cheese on my bagel as I chatted with one woman (I'd read her book!!) who had an agent and an editor and a looming deadline, but who also seemed like a ordinary car-pooling mom like me.

If this person could do it, why couldn't I?

The other writers were friendly and welcoming too. That week they shared success stories and failures. Book deals and rejection collections. Writing and revision tips and industry secrets. They inspired me to keep writing and to put myself out there. They made me believe that my dream was not some crazy thing but something entirely possible.

That one retreat led to other retreats. I heard about SCBWI from someone along the way. I started attending workshops and conferences. I made more writing friends. I found my long-time critique partner in a line for a port-o-potty at another Highlights retreat. I found my first mentor.

It took me eight years from that first retreat to see my first book on the library and bookstore shelves. And since then I've become a part of-- and a creator of -- more writing communities. I have mentors and mentees. Critique partners and too many writing friends to list here. I lead the Central and Southern Ohio chapter of SCBWI and speak at their conferences.

Sometimes I forget that I was once struggling along alone.

Writing is such a solitary activity. Every day it is just You, at your lap top or sitting with a notebook, facing a blinking cursor or a blank page. The publishing industry-- oh man-- it will eat you up alive and spit you out. The rejections never stop coming. The bad reviews can derail you. Book sale numbers, deadlines, marketing pressures....

Failure and success. Self-loathing and elation.

But I am not alone.

The other night I baked a bloody severed finger cake and brought it to my best friend's book launch party.

I took a seat surrounded by my friends and we all celebrated, together, the success of one of our own.

Passive Aggressive Postcards from the Edge. (The Haunting. Part One)

A few weeks ago I went on a writing retreat with my writing friend Natalie D. Richards (not her real name) because "Natalie" wanted to get new author photos done and her cousin owns a studio in Marietta, Ohio, and so we decided to turn the photo shoot into a longer weekend of writing.

This will be fun, we said. Relaxing and inspiring and productive, like previous roadtrips and writing retreats we've gone on together...

but little did we know that we would soon embark upon a nightmarish horror journey that we are still trying to make sense of to this very day.

Cue: Scream

We found a darling little house to rent (which turned out to be haunted, but we didn't know that yet) and we set our suitcases and laptops and bags of fun food and wine treats down, and because it was a lovely, uncharacteristically sunny day, we left the house to explore the town.

For reasons that aren't quite clear to me now, we thought that the rustic looking barn across the street from the darling little house-- the one with the human skulls propped in the windows-- was funny.

(funny? Or, creepy as HELL. I'll let you be the judge)

Further down the street, we came upon something else that caught our eye, an antique shop with all sorts of fascinating objects outside in the adjacent courtyard. Objects such as a ladder and bicycle sculpture hanging from the trees, and an old wheelchair, and 

an animal skull jutting out of the wall.

Also, a little boy statue standing in front of a washtub.

"Hey! Let's go inside this place!" we said. Because we are stupid.

The store sold old furniture and old photos of people, mostly babies, the kind of old photos where you just know that now all of those people are dead.

We were the only customers.

I gravitated toward a wall of old postcards and found one that I thought was hilarious. It was a postcard with a picture of a crying baby that said "WHY DON'T YOU WRITE?"

"What a perfect motto for our writing retreat!" I said to "Natalie." And I bought it and took a picture of it and tweeted about it, something clever, I thought, about how this postcard made me think of the beginning of a Supernatural episode, and one of my Twitter friends immediately tweeted back, something like GET RID OF THAT POSTCARD NOW! and I thought that was funny too.

I am going to skip over the rest of the weekend--the photo shoot at the Hot Tomato studio and the burlesque show that "Natalie" and I found ourselves going to, dressed in our Hot Tomato costumes and teetery high heeled shoes, and the fun dinners we had and the walks back and forth across the river on a lovely bridge and our talks about writing and major breakthroughs in our respective writing projects, and also, the hellish two nights we spent in the HAUNTED HOUSE,

and return to talking about the postcard.

It was a real postcard, sent on July 28, 1911 in Zanesville from a woman named Mildred to a man named Moody, and on the postcard, Mildred wrote, passive-aggressively:

Hello. Why didn't you write to me? 

I don't know if Moody ever wrote back to Mildred. Or why Moody kept the postcard from Mildred. Or how the postcard ended up, eventually, in the antique shop with the animal skull and freaky child doll in the courtyard. Or, most importantly, why I bought the postcard and carried it around in my purse for three days.

What I DO know is that I got home from my haunted weekend, anxious and exhausted and freaked out, and that night, after telling my husband the entire story, I remembered the silly tweet about the Supernatural episode,

and I put the postcard in the fireplace and set it on fire.

The End.

Or is it?

[tune in next week for The Haunting. Part Two.]

Apparently I am a Hot Tomato

When I was little girl, I loved playing dress up.

My best friend Allison's mother had a trunk full of old dresses. "From the 50's," was how Al described them, with beaded tops and flouncy skirts and lots and lots of crinoline. The movie Grease was big then and Al and I would wriggle into our dresses, add jewelry, long gloves and hobbly high heeled shoes, put the Grease soundtrack on, and dance around the house like fools. We had a pretty good routine going, where I'd run at full speed toward Al and she'd catch me and swing me to one side and then the other.

I haven't thought about playing dress up in years and if you asked me even last week what I thought was fun about it, I'm not sure I would've been able to verbalize it. Let's just say that I am not the type of person who likes to dress up.

I'm more of a pajamas/yoga pants/sweat pants type of girl. I rarely wear jewelry. I never wear heeled shoes.

Which is why I was surprised to find myself, last Saturday night, dressed up in a 1950's style dress and hobbling around in three inch heels. In public.

I blame my writer friend Natalie D. Richards for this.

We were wanting to set up a weekend writing retreat somewhere and Natalie needed to take new author photos for her upcoming book and her cousin Andi is a photographer with a studio in Marietta, Ohio, and we decided that was as good of a destination as any.

Maybe I should mention that Andi's studio is called Hot Tomato and she specializes in boudoir photography.

Hot Tomato reminded me of Allison's mother's trunk. Times 100.  

In addition to the rows and rows of dresses, there was lots of jewelry

And many many shoes

I don't know what came over me but one minute I was walking through the studio wearing my grungy jeans and sneakers, and the next thing I knew someone was throwing a red and white polka dot dress over my shoulders and I was stepping into the highest heeled shoes I've ever worn in my life.

"This is crazy," I said to Natalie, who was twirling around in a black poofy dress and trying on different necklaces. "I haven't dressed up like this since I was eleven or twelve years old."

Natalie handed me a string of red beads. "Look at you," she said. "Having fun."

Well, yeah. I had to admit I kinda was.

It seemed a shame to change back into my old clothes and this was, after all, a writing retreat where one of my goals was to work on a joyful fun happy scene, and what better way to write about joy and fun and happiness than to drape red beads around my neck and wrap a fur over my shoulders and hobble as gracefully as I could manage out to dinner with my lovely friend?

Retreat Retreating Retreated. Why I Love Writing Retreats

This retreat felt different.

It is a place I know--"The Barn" at Boyd's Mill, a retreat facility run by the Highlights Foundation. This was my fourth time retreating with them, and let me tell you, these people are experts.

I am something of an expert now myself on what makes a perfect retreat, and I think what it comes down to is a blend of

• setting (remote countryside/woods in Eastern Pennsylvania) 
• characters (writers)
• plot (extended, unstructured time to write)

Oh, and

• food. In this case, chef-prepared meals, three times a day. Appetizers and wine at night. All you can eat snacks. (I am a sucker for Twizzlers and somehow, they know that.) 

Woods. OMG Do you see a bear?

For this retreat, I'd signed up for what they call an "unworkshop." You get to use the facilities, eat the food, and chat it up with whatever writers happen to be hanging out at the same time.

I was looking forward to the quiet. The walks in the woods. Making real progress on a new manuscript.


I didn't get as much quiet as I'd planned.

There happened to be tons of other writers unworkshopping, as well as a more formal novel writing workshop going on. I know a lot of these people, some in real life (I carpooled to Boyd's Mill with my writer friend Natalie D. Richards) and some from online. The YA book world isn't very large and many of us have bumped into each other at a conference or book signing or virtually bumped into each other on social media. These people are my friends, and I wanted to chat with them-- instead of holing myself up in a quiet cabin and writing.

Someone saw a bear when she was walking in the woods!! So, uh, that put a slight damper on  my wanting to take walks alone goal. I did, one day, take the risk and hiked out into the woods, live tweeting that "event" in case a bear happened to attack me... and I guess a twitter follower might notify the authorities of my death by bear mauling?

And I took lots of walks with other writers. We had conversations that ranged from, oh my God did you hear that? Is that a bear? To working out plot holes in our stories. To freezing and pointing into the dark underbrush at--oh my GOD--do you think that was a bear?

I ate too much food.

It's an issue I have. Throw food at me, particularly gourmet food, food that I do not have to prepare myself, and I will eat it. Also, if you throw wine at me, I will drink it. Luckily, Highlights had purchased lots of wine for me.

I mean, for us.

One day I did the 7 AM yoga. Lately, I get up extremely early. Boom. Six AM and I am snapping awake for no good reason and often I will ponder about that. WHY am I waking up so damn early?? I will think. And why did I not have this particular skill in years past when my kids were young and I was cursing the dawn (and them) and blearily waking to feed them and praying that I could lie back down while they were engrossed in Scooby Doo episodes?

But I digress.

Yoga. It was fun. Just me and one other early riser.

I felt very virtuous that morning and rewarded myself by eating several extra slices of bacon.

The talks we retreat-goers had a dinner were illuminating. Stuff about the writing process and what we are working on and struggling with and excited about. But also stuff about finding balance between writing and life. Spouses. Kids. Book promotion. The Publishing Business.

I don't know how I would've felt about conversations like this on my first retreat. Back then, I was just trying to break in. Publishing was an impenetrable wall and I had no idea how to scale it. Now I'm on the other side.

First lesson: there are more walls.

Most of the people on this retreat have at least one book out. Some have many. One morning the topic veered to money. Specifically: How Do You Make a Living Writing Books When the Reality Is That It's Nearly Impossible To Make a Living Writing Books?

The answer? You do what you can. Teach (like the writers who were facilitating the novel writing workshop). Critique manuscripts. Write in other genres (a popular moneymaking venture, apparently, is writing erotica under a pen name).

Most of the writers have non-writing jobs.

When I wasn't chatting or trekking through bear country or eating, I was writing. The Barn has a loft--a place I'd discovered the last time I was there--and I claimed it for myself again, spreading out my papers and laptop and Twizzlers and tapping away during the afternoons.

My big goal was to input a first draft into a new Scrivener document, but I wasn't quite sure how to set that up and in a moment of pure serendipity, I discovered that one of the other writers teaches classes on using Scrivener, and she got me all squared away. So, HA!

That alone was worth the price of admission.

That and the bacon. And the never-seen-by-me bear.

I am thinking that bear may have been made up. It was a writer, after all, who claimed to have seen it.

portrait of a writer on retreat

On the 8th Anniversary of My First Writing Retreat...

In 2005 I was on the verge of a turning point, but I didn't know it. I was sort of floundering around with my pursuit of a book-writing dream.

I told myself I was working hard. I wrote a couple of days a week. I thought about writing a lot. Truthfully, I thought about being published a lot. I had very vivid daydreams of winning awards and receiving awesome book deal advances. Also, spending book deal advances. Mostly, though, I was spinning my wheels, not making any real progress, treating writing as a hobby rather than as my work.

Then, a very serendipitous thing happened. In the same week I had a story accepted in the magazine Cicada and I got a brochure in the mail inviting me to attend a retreat put on by the Highlights Foundation.

What would you do if you had the time to write... no distractions... no responsibilities... Just you and your lap top. You'll stay in your own cabin and all of your needs will be taken care of... You'll eat delicious food prepared by a chef. You'll meet other serious writers on the same journey...  

I don't remember the exact words printed on the brochure, but it was something like that, and it struck me to the core. Oh, yes, I would like that.

And get this: the cost of the retreat (which was somewhat pricey and hard for me to justify) was EXACTLY the amount of the payment I'd just received for my Cicada story.

I'm no dummy. I know a freaking sign when I see one.

I went. It was my first time away from my family (the kids were 8 and 12 and I was a stay-at-home mom). It was the first time I'd been alone since college.

To say I was anxious is an understatement.

The hardest thing was the first night when our small group made our introductions. Simply saying I wanted to be a writer almost made me start crying. For all of my supposed pursuing of a dream, I hadn't said these words out loud to anyone in years.

The week pretty much changed my life. Not in a magical way. I didn't return home with a finished manuscript that would win an award (although, that particular manuscript is something that I continue to work on, and hey, who knows?) I didn't snag an agent or a book deal right away. In fact it would be many years before this would happen.

What this retreat did do for me was remind me that I was, in fact, a writer. That I was not alone in my quest. That my dream was not some ridiculous thing no matter how impossible it might seem at times.

Here is what I wrote in my journal while I was there:

Seeing these writers and editors makes me so hopeful about what I picture myself doing.  I keep thinking that it is a possible life for me, if I keep pursuing it.  

Tonight I called home and my son asked me if I liked it here or if it was terrible.  I said it was wonderful, that I loved it.  “Are you going to go back there next year?” he asked.  “I’d like to,” I said.  “Would that be alright with you guys?”   

He laughed.  “We’re doing okay, you know. And I like eating poptarts.”

I am thinking about this retreat because in two days I am going back.

I am in a different place now in my writing and personal life. My son is in college--just to put time in perspective. My teen daughter will be off doing her own thing. I am sure they will both be gorging on the forbidden poptarts while I'm gone. I've got my first book coming out this year. I received a nice advance check for that (mostly, already spent). I do think of myself as a writer and I am not afraid to say that anymore. (Maybe I say it too much?)

But here is what is the same: I still feel anxious about what I do. I still have so much to learn about craft and technique and voice and language. I still enjoy connecting with other writers and hearing about their stories and their journeys.

So that is why I signed up to go.

It may be that I am on the verge of another amazing turning point. I'll let y'all know when I come back...