April. Otherwise Known As the Month In Which Martha Presses Her Table Linens and I Scoop Monkey Balls out of My Yard

I didn't know until the April issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine came in the mail that Martha Stewart and I have a lot in common. 

Side note: I am not typically a Martha Stewart Living magazine reader, but a few months ago my husband got an email from our credit card company announcing that if we didn't use a bunch of accumulated points, we would lose them forever, and the only thing that we seemed to be able to use the points for was ordering magazines, and so now we are receiving Martha, Self, Dwell, and Us Weekly in the mail. Side note two: My husband threatened to order more magazines but I told him that four is plenty (see: my recent de-hoarding obsession), and he was forced to order Cigar Aficionado, Wine Enthusiast, and Guns & Garden for our friends, possibly now our enemies. 

But back to Martha. I was joking before when I said we have a lot in common.   

And nowhere is this more starkly clear to me than on page 2 of the April issue which has a feature called Martha's Month: Gentle reminders, helpful tips, and important dates.

Martha's Month

I read this page with interest, thinking that maybe I should put together a calendar page for myself too, and write out my own gentle reminders. I have that vague naggy feeling that April will be a busy one, a mish mash of the writing project that I'm slowly picking my way through, a handful of writing workshops to plan, organizational stuff for my new SCBWI Regional Advisor position, and all of that sandwiched around general housekeeping and yardwork that must be taken care of, ASAP, most importantly, my vegetable garden.

But before I can even begin work on my vegetable garden, my husband and I have to deal with the mud bath that is our backyard. 

(Our backyard, last year, after a rainstorm. This was the
day that my husband and I crafted a shark fin
out of cardboard and set it afloat upon the surface of
our new mudpond, which just goes to show how
artsy-craftsy we can be. Take that, Martha.)

Over the past few weekends, dealing with the mud bath that is our backyard has involved digging a fifteen-foot long ditch and lining it with stones so as to create our own dry creek bed for excess water collection. 

Next up on the To-do list: scooping up piles of dog poop left behind now that the snows and waters have receded. 

And collecting the monkey balls that dot our muddy lawn like landmines. 

Monkey balls, as I am sure you know, are the sharp edged fruits that drop from the monkey ball tree. (I just looked this up for my own edification and because I was wondering if they are really called "monkey balls." Weirdly, the answer is yes. Officially, the tree is the American Sweetgum and the fruit, in addition to being fondly referred to as monkey balls, is also known as "bommyknockers" "sticker balls" and "gum balls."

Whatever you want to call them, I highly recommend that you do not step on them with bare feet.) 

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that, according to our calendars, while I am "picking up monkey balls" and "navigating piles of dog poop," Martha will be "making fresh ricotta" and "going for horseback rides" and "baking homemade treats for the dogs" and "visiting Maine for the weekend."

It should be a fun month for both of us. 

three fewer bommyknockers to pick up

  

Because It's There. Also, a word about SCBWI

I can't remember the mountain climber guy's name. But a reporter asked him why he wanted to climb Mt Everest and the guy answered: "Because it's there."

Side note: I just googled it and it was George Mallory. Side note #2: the George Mallory story is fascinating. In 1924 he tried to climb to the top of Mt Everest and died on the way up, and for 75 years people wondered if maybe Mallory had made it to the top and died on the way down (which would've made him the first to reach the summit, as opposed to Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953). In 1999 a team found Mallory's body and hoped it would settle the question once and for all. But it didn't. You can read all about that controversy here. Side note #3: I know the guy who was on one of teams in 1999 who went up Everest to search for Mallory's body. Andy Politz. (you can read all about him, here)

But I don't want to write about climbing mountains. I want to write about Writing, specifically, my relationship to Writing and why I am in that particular relationship.

I met Writing as a kid, pretty much at the same time I met Reading and discovered that I could use Reading to escape my not-so-happy little life. Writing, kindly enough, gave me the same joy and pleasure as Reading, but with a side dish of power. When you write, I quickly figured out, you not only get to fall into a story, you get to create the story you're falling into.

It was a nice romance for many years. Writing and Me. When I was a kid, a teen, a young adult, I spent a lot of time with Writing. I got good at being with Writing. I was praised, more often than not, and that made me want to keep writing. But mostly, I enjoyed writing for Writing's sake.

Then I went to college and grad school and Writing and I hit our first rough patch. Reality. And reality meant criticism and analyzing and studying and revising and most of all, Writing meant Work. We had a pretty solid foundation though, the two of us, me-n-Writing, and the relationship felt like something I wanted to work on. So I did.

Until I was out of school and long out of the practice of writing for my own pleasure, and without the deadlines and assignments and structure of school, and minus the joy of it, Writing and I broke up for a few years.

We started dating again, on and off. But the emphasis in our relationship had shifted from Pleasure to Work and finally to the Product of the Work, otherwise known as Being Published. After a few years of that, I was published. And that was cool.

But by then Writing and I had a love/hate relationship. It's hit me lately, as I've written four books since publishing one, that maybe Publishing is not the summit of my particular mountain. Which has led me to question:

So, what IS? And why should I continue to climb?

Several years ago I went to the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in LA. It was a month before my book Thin Space came out. Reviews were rolling in and they were good. I was walking around in a glow-y daze of joy. At last my dream had come true and my book, MY BOOK!! would be on library and bookstore shelves and I was ON MY WAY, the culmination-- no, the beginning of my life as an Author-- with more books coming out and critical acclaim and money and fame and woo hoo hoo, etc.

I was happy, is what I'm saying.

One of the speakers at the conference was Matt de la Pena. He gave an amazing speech about writing and his childhood and his late discovery of books and all of the ups and downs in his writing journey. The part of his speech that snapped me out of my glowy daze of joy for a moment was when he started talking about his mission as a writer.

We have to figure out why we're doing this, he said, and he told a story about a kid in a hoodie sitting every day at a bus stop and how the kid was kind of rough around the edges, maybe even borderline thug-looking, and the people in all of the cars going by didn't look at the kid. It was like the kid was invisible. Matt de le Pena drove by every day too and he saw the kid and it made him realize why he was Doing This:

To give kids like that kid a voice, to tell their stories, and to get people to see those kids.

That was Matt de la Pena's mission statement, and he said all of us in the audience should have one too.

I scribbled that down, half thinking about it, but mostly, not thinking about it, because I had a Book coming out!! and that was the important thing to me that day.

Four years later and four potentially never-to-be published books later, I think I get it.

Publishing is not the summit. Publishing was never the summit. Writing is the summit. And I am writing because that's my mountain and it's there and damn it, it's what I do.

It's what I've pretty much always done. I know I will continue to do it regardless of the end product because writing is how I want to spend my time. It's work and joy. It's puzzling things out and sitting on hot painful stoves. It's challenging and maddening and fascinating and boring and heartbreaking and laugh out loud funny.

It gives my life meaning.

Over the past few years it's spread out beyond me as I've been talking at conferences and in classrooms and teaching writing classes and talking to other writers and seeing that they too are struggling with the same kinds of things I've been struggling with.

So this is a long, meander-y, roundabout way of saying I've figured out my mission statement.

TO TELL MY STORIES
and
TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE TELL THEIR STORIES

And to that end, I am writing my way through Book Number 5 and finding it, as usual, challenging and maddening and fascinating and boring and heartbreaking and laugh out loud funny.

Also, I recently took over as Regional Advisor of the Central/South region of SCBWI. I joined the organization in 2005 and the group was there for me as I learned more about the craft and business of writing children's books and now I want to give back.

If you're a writer in our region, look for news and events going on in our area here. We meet at the library in Upper Arlington at 7:00 on the fourth Wednesday of the month (for Columbus area folks) and at 7:00 on the second Tuesday of the month at the library in Sharonville (for Cincinnati area people).

Hope to see you there.

xxoo

Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Doubter

The first rejection derailed her. Maybe it was a sign from the Universe. QUIT, she imagined the Universe shouting. ORDINARY PEOPLE LIKE YOU NEVER BECOME PUBLISHED WRITERS!

(Although, she did reread the rejection letter several times-- true, it was the typical form letter This story does not fit our present needs...--but the editor had scrawled a note across the bottom Nice work! Try us again!...)

She waited six years before she tried again.

Sometimes she missed writing, but most of the time, she was too busy to think about it. She worked full-time as a teacher. She had a two year-old running around at home. Writing was something she'd done as a teenager and in college, but she'd grown up since then. She'd put away childish dreams.

A fellow teacher passed along a brochure about a writers conference in town. Wanna Be a Published Author of Children's Books? Come to our conference! Meet a Real Live Editor!

For an extra fee the editor would critique the first three chapters of a novel.

She had never written a novel. It seemed like a ridiculous idea. When would she have time to write novel?

She paid the fee. She wrote the novel during her planning period. The conference was cool. She ate lunch with the editor who worked at Simon & Schuster and she told him that her toddler's favorite book was Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which was published by Simon & Schuster. The editor told her that he'd just signed a new author and he was so excited about her and her book. It's called Running out of Time, he said. It's by a woman named Margaret Peterson Haddix.

I will have to check that book out, she said.

Later, she read the critique of her three chapters. The voice is strong and the dialogue is realistic and there is some real emotion in the chapters... but (and she knew now there was always a BUT) it is unclear who the main character is. It's hard to tell what the conflict is. Maybe you can try to-- 

Maybe she couldn't.

She read Margaret Peterson Haddix's book when it came out. It was so good. She read other books in the same genre. They were good too. Why did she think she could Do This?

She waited another four years.

Now she had two kids. Sometimes when her son was at pre-school and her baby daughter was napping, she'd work on a story. One of the stories was published in a magazine but she couldn't manage to sell another. To have something to do during nap-times, she signed up for a writing correspondence course. She wrote a book for the teacher, who enjoyed it.

She sent it out to publishing houses and it was rejected.

The Universe was shouting at her again and this time it was saying: THIS IS A SILLY HOBBY!

She sold another story. One day she got two pieces of mail: a check for twelve hundred dollars for the story, and a brochure for a writing retreat that cost twelve hundred dollars.

(the universe?)

She wasn't sure. Should she leave her kids for a week? She'd miss her daughter's birthday, which happened to fall during that time. Also, both of the kids took part in a zillion activities and she was the Carpool Mom. Maybe Writing was a thing she once did and maybe now it was time to let it go?

She went on the retreat. The first night everyone in the small group introduced themselves and talked about what they were working on. When it was her turn, she said her name. She said what she was writing. She realized it had been years since she had admitted this out loud to strangers.  

She felt shivery, shaky. If she was writing, did that mean she was a writer?

Seven years later she sold her first book.

Confessions of an Arrogant Amateur

She was resistant to criticism. Disdainful to those who dared to critique her. Hostile, even.

(Although, she tried to hide it, gritting her teeth, smiling, nodding.)

She was amazed and outraged at every rejection. Why couldn't these people see the brilliance of her work? The humor? The heartbreak? The perfectly constructed, gem-like sentences?

(In her defense she was armed with degrees and experience. She had majored in English, taught writing, had written and published several short stories. Less talented writers than she had snagged publishing deals. She'd read their silly books. If they could catch the attention of an editor, why couldn't she?)

Still, she had to admit that she might be overlooking something important. Perhaps there was some secret to publishing that she had yet to discover. Perhaps, there was an essential element missing from her work...

She said she wanted someone to tell her what to DO with her manuscript. Just tell me what to do, she would lament, and I'll do it! 

(She was lying.)

What she wanted was for someone to tell her that her story was perfect exactly the way it was. When someone pointed out a problem, mentioned an area of confusion, offered--gasp!-- a suggestion, she'd think: Well, obviously they have no idea what I am trying to do here. They haven't read it carefully. This is a complicated, difficult book. They don't understand it! Blah blah blah etc.

But years of writing and submitting and being rejected had started to wear her down. One day, close to giving up, she saw a brochure for a week-long writing conference. She toyed with the idea of signing up, but wavered. Her hesitance was centered around the price tag, two thousand dollars! and for what? Workshops on Setting? Characterization? Plot? She knew all of this already! She spoke to one of the conference organizers on the phone.

I'm not sure if this is worth it, she said. I'm not a beginner. I'm on the verge. 

But even as she was speaking, confidently (arrogantly), a small scared voice in her head whispered:

If you know all of this, why aren't you published? 

She signed up for the conference. This is IT, she decided. A final effort at pursuing a dream. One last outlay of cash, of time. If she didn't get her big break, well, she'd given it her best shot.

She sent the first ten pages of her latest manuscript to be critiqued. The assigned mentor would read it and be blown away by the story. What is there to discuss? the mentor would likely say. This is perfect exactly the way it is. 

They met the first day of the conference. Not surprisingly, the mentor complimented our arrogant amateur on her writing. But then she asked several questions:

Why does your story start with this particular scene?
What does your main character want?
Where are the hints of conflict?
What is the driving question?
What--
Why--
How--
Have you tried--
Do you think--
Could you--

Our arrogant amateur could answer none of these questions. She stumbled back to her room and burst into tears.

Reality was a wave crashing over her carefully constructed wall of delusions, and she had to admit, finally, that she had no idea what she was doing.

But she wanted to learn.

Portrait of a No-Longer-Arrogant Amateur
with her mentor

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?

On Finding Joy inside the Hot Stove

After you purge your house, after you cart the mish mash of no longer loved furniture to Goodwill, the dining room table, the assortment of end tables and throw pillows, the knick knacks and doo-dads, the gifts you never liked but sorta feel guilty about chucking

and you cart off load after load of pots and pans and towels and old toys, the clothes that don't fit who are we kidding, the holey socks, the seventeen random charger cords (WHAT ELECTRONIC DEVICES DO THEY BELONG TO? WHO KNOWS?)

and you shine a spotlight on every nook and cranny and it's become an obsession, picking things up and knowing at once that they mean nothing to you/you won't miss them/they certainly don't give you any joy

and so you toss them away, and slowly slowly slowly the empty spaces of your house appear

drawers and closets, walls and floors, corners

entire rooms

and suddenly you realize that while it's easy to name the things that don't give you joy, it's hard to figure out what things do...

Last year I revised a book about broken people that nearly broke me. To write it, I had to go, as the writer and teacher Jane Resh Thomas said during a lecture at Hamline University-- to the hot stove and sit. I'm not saying that what I was writing was autobiographical. The book is purely fantasy. There's magic and creatures from myth. A made-up, dark and twisted world.

I was in the world for six months, rooting around and digging and churning. The people there were cruel. They betrayed each other. They were afraid.

Most of the stories I've written have been like that one. Dark. Brutal. Sad.

I'm getting to be something of an expert on how to Go In and Come Out without scorching myself. Often this involves copious amounts of chocolate after a long day of writing. Or wine. Fun, mindless TV. For example, I am on the eleventh season of Supernatural.

Anyhoo, I sent my broken people book off and who knows what will become of it and now I am knee deep in a totally different book. It's also about broken people, big shocker. But with a twist.

It's funny. There are entire sections that are... happy.

I am having the hardest damn time with it. It hit me the other day that there's a Hot Stove for Joy too. Going In means reaching back, rooting around/digging/churning in whatever is the opposite of darkness, brutality and sadness.

I guess that would be a Hot Stove of lightness, love and happiness?

So I've been looking around my kinda-on-the-empty-side house and thinking, huh. What kind of place is this? What does the furniture look like? What pictures hang on the walls?

Should there be flowers?

Sometimes I really think you are overthinking things

We Are All Passengers on the Ship of Fools

By nearly all definitions of a good book, this book, Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter, fails.

There is no story arc.

No narrative structure. No building conflict or tension. No main character to root for or care about (in fact, there are more than thirty characters!! and they are all, each and every one of them, a jerk or an idiot or both.) Nobody changes or grows or comes to even a small realization about themselves or the world.

Basically, they're all just biding their time on a ship as it crosses the ocean, doing crappy things to each other, or looking the other way as people do crappy things, or judging each other for doing crappy things. For 497 pages.

And yet, weirdly, I found myself continuing to read about them, the fools on the ship, asking myself my own questions as I read: Would anything actually happen in this book??

I was hoping for a storm at sea. A Titanic-like sinking. Maybe a disease mowing everyone down.

Would anyone figure something out, make a decision, DO something definitive?

Here I was hoping one of them would jump off the ship. And while several did consider this option, none followed through on it.

Unfortunately.

Saddest moment of the book for me was when the two crappy kids of the crappy Spanish dance troupe grabbed a crappy couple's beloved bulldog and threw him off the ship. A man in steerage jumped in after the dog and the crappy crew lowered a lifeboat and saved the dog but weren't able to save the man from steerage and the crappy couple whose dog was saved wasn't even grateful for the man for saving their dog and losing his life in the process.

(the unfortunate dog in the movie version of this horror story)

He probably did it for the reward, the crappy husband said.

There was a funeral for the hero or fool, depending on how you want to look at the dead guy, and a fight broke out in steerage and another guy was beat unconscious and all the crappy first class passengers watched from above and passed judgment.

Side note, lest anyone wonder why this book IS a book and why I read it:

The actual writing is fine (although wordy and overly descriptive in places). The book was made into a movie. It was up for a National Book Award. The writer Katherine Anne Porter was a brilliant short story writer. Her aim was to capture the lead-up to the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930's, and I would say, she succeeded.

There's spot on psychological shit going on in this book, a piercing and squirmy analysis of human nature--what IS it about us, as people, that make us treat each other so cruelly and disdainfully and ignorantly? And why do we notice all of the crappy qualities in other people, but never in ourselves?

I kept reading this book, out of morbid curiosity, latching on to one character or another, hoping she or he would show some moral courage or intelligence or empathy. Several came close and then blew it. One woman, Mrs. Treadwell, one of the few Americans on the ship, offered me a splinter of hope. Age 46 and on the wiser side, she had the decency to feel bad for the dead dog saver, for example.

I followed Mrs. T right up to the end, thinking, YES, here's the woman who's going to learn something, redeem herself, do something kind...

and then she nearly beat to death the scummy lecherous loser from Texas in the hallway with her shoe.

 
So yeah. That happened. And I am not proud to admit I sorta wanted her to kill the guy.

It took Katherine Anne Porter twenty years to write this book. In the note at the beginning she writes:

"When I began thinking about my novel, I took for my own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity. It is by no means new--it is very old and durable and dearly familiar... and it suits my purpose exactly. I am a passenger on this ship."

Spoiler alert: the ship finally makes it to Germany and everyone gets off and goes on with their separate miserable lives, still judging and treating each other like crap and at the same time thinking they are wonderful people themselves.

I closed the book, wishing there were an epilogue, some flash forward into the future, where I could see their silly misguided pathetic illusions crushed in the firestorm that is World War Two.

Is it foolish of me to think that I am not one of the passengers on this sad hopeless ship?