Things I Did This Weekend Instead of Writing a Blog

Goal this weekend: Write a blog

(side note, I write four blogs a month. It's a goal I set for myself a few years ago and for the most part I do it. It's a weird goal because I mean, who cares? I don't get paid for these blogs. Nothing bad will happen if I don't post one, but still... it bugs me like a little itch when the end of the month sneaks up on me and I haven't yet written my fourth blog.)

Instead of writing a blog, I did this:

*Made a turtle out of clay

with my friend Natalie at this pottery place where we were supposed to play around with clay and make cups or bowls and decorate them in a whimsical way, and I started getting panicky/perfectionist-y, how I always do when it comes to arts and crafts, but I kept playing with the clay, joking that I'd let it speak to me and tell me what it wanted to be, and weirdly this worked. 

It wanted to be a turtle. 

*Caught the tail end of Mindy McGinnis signing her fifth book

at Cover to Cover Book Store and got my book signed and talked to the owner, Sally Oddi, about how she is going to retire and sell her bookstore!!! --something that is killing me because Cover to Cover is an awesome bookstore (one of the oldest, continuously operated, children's bookstores in country-- 37 years!!) If you want to buy it, please call Sally. 

I'm serious. (614) 263-1624

*Went out to dinner with Natalie because we realized it was our three year Friend-a-versary, and if that is not a thing, it should be.

*Read most of the book Dreamland by Sam Quinones

which is a really horrifying examination of the opioid epidemic and how Big Pharma pushing pain meds and misleading doctors about how addictive these drugs are was happening around the same time a group of men in Mexico started selling black tar heroin in small towns across America.  

*Helped my neighbor paint some trim on his house

Because last summer he helped my husband and me paint our back porch, and I was like, No problem, I can totally climb up onto your roof and paint that small stretch of trim. This was scary but I inched up and down the roof on my butt and fell into a zen-like place of painting and thought about the time when I was nineteen and got hired on by my boyfriend's painting crew to paint the trim of all of the McDonald's in the Central Connecticut area. 

*Tore a hole in my shorts from inching up and down the roof on my butt.

*Mulched my flowerbeds

*Helped my husband lay a brick patio

 Oh. And I guess I wrote a blog. 

The end. 

Battling the Yips

For the past few weeks I've been slogging through my day's writing work-- NO, I DO NOT HAVE writer's block, maybe more like writer's cube if that is a thing. Anyway, each day, as a reward for completing my goals, I've been listening to the Fresh Air podcast.

I love tuning in to hear interviewer Terry Gross talk to actors, artists, directors and authors. The app is cool because you can skip around and choose the episodes you want to listen to. 

I almost skipped today's episode: The 'Phenomenon' That Changed MLB Pitcher Rick Ankiel's Life because I never heard of Rick Ankiel and I'm not much of a baseball fan. But before I could turn it off and switch to another episode, the interview started. Rick Ankiel, apparently, used to be this awesome pitcher and now he's got a new book out, a memoir called Phenomenon. 

When he was only twenty years old, people were raving about how good he was and he knew it. He skipped past college and signed a million dollar contract to pitch in the major leagues. It looked like he was on the road to having a great career, but suddenly, during a playoffs game, he threw the ball and it didn't feel right. 

He had this nightmare game, unable to control his pitches, the ball shooting off in random directions, and all of this happening on live TV, with announcers commenting about it and the crowd booing him. When the game was over, he told himself it was a fluke thing and figured that with a rest, he'd be back to normal. 

But he wasn't. 

He couldn't seem to throw the way he had before. He tried everything he could think of to fix the problem. Going back to the mechanics, he called it. Practicing. Watching what other pitchers were doing and trying to copy them. Resting. He couldn't tell if this was a real physical issue, he said, or maybe it was the yips. 

(the yips?? This was me, listening to podcast and wondering what the heck the yips were. A pause here, while I looked it up:

The yips is the loss of fine motor skills in athletes. The condition occurs suddenly and without apparent explanation usually in mature athletes with years of experience.)

Back to poor Rick Ankiel... 

The yips were destroying his life.

He lost his place in the majors and was dropped back down to the lower levels, whatever they're called in baseball, until he finally ended up on some rookie team, all the while his anxiety about his inability to pitch building and building. He'd drive around watching little kids play baseball and think about how easy they made it look and wondered why he couldn't do it anymore.

Baseball, he said, had been his thing. He'd grown up in a messed up family, his father abusing his mother and eventually going to jail. Baseball was the one thing he really did well. It was his refuge. His escape.

And now here he was hitting this weird psychological wall.

On the farm team, he performed okay. No TV spotlight. No one commenting on his performance for the most part, but he was unhappy. Whatever joy he'd once gotten from baseball seemed gone, and after a while he decided to quit the game. 

Which is when a funny thing happened.

His agent suggested he start playing again in another position. This (I guess?) is not the typical career path of a baseball pitcher? but Rick Ankiel thought about it and said he could envision himself hitting a home run and just the thought of that made him feel excited again. 

He became an outfielder and a good one. He hit 47 home runs before retiring to spend more time with his family and write his memoir. 

So, anyway, this is why I decided today that I am going to quit writing.

Nah. I'm just joking with you. I don't have the yips

I don't have the yips

I don't have the yips.

Ode to the IKEA Catalog

In this world
everything is sleek surfaced and brightly lit,
an array of welcoming rooms
where women dance in kitchens
and children lick wooden spoons
and a man tells us to embrace what's wrong
as he garnishes the clams with garlic
and lemon.

In this world everything has its place.

The children put away their toys
and your friends come to dinner early
and always always help you
bake the meatballs.

They say we can make things better.
They say the days of "have to" are over.
They say that playtime can happen anywhere.

And we want to believe them.

We do.

So we set the sofa in the center of the living space.
We move our backyard inside.

We arrange and arrange and arrange, finding beauty
in a tealight holder
in a bed canopy
in a plant pot
in a clear lacquered bamboo knife tray.

An Interview with Mindy McGinnis

I’m thrilled to have award-winning YA writer Mindy McGinnis On the Verge this week. Mindy, if you haven’t read her yet, (and if you haven’t, I’m not sure why!) is the prolific genre-bending author of the dystopian Not a Drop to Drink, the gothic historical A Madness So Discreet (which won the Edgar Award), and the dark contemporary The Female of the Species, (hands down, one of the best books I read last year).

And now she’s got a new book out, the fantasy Given to the Sea. Last weekend Mindy and I caught up at the Ohioana Book Festival and I had the chance to ask her all of my burning questions.

----------------------------------------------------

Jody: On a recent panel you talked about where your ideas come from. Not a Drop to Drink you had an image of a girl holding a gun and A Madness So Discreet started with your interest in the old insane asylum in Athens, Ohio. I’m curious about your new book—which is the first fantasy you’ve written—about the inhabitants of a dying island world.

Mindy: In a lot of ways Given to the Sea is a montage of many different thoughts that have come to me over a period of fifteen or twenty years.

The first scene that ever occurred to me was a star-crossed lovers type of situation, with an Ivanhoe-esque turn with the female refusing to cave to her own desires to be with the male, to the point that she's willing to pitch herself from a window to save her pride. That scene doesn't actually exist in the book now, but it planted the seed that told me I wanted to write a fantasy.

A combination of many things came together for everything else: an interest in Huntington's disease (also called the "dancing sickness"), the idea of genetic memory, and rising sea levels.

Jody: It just occurred to me that the rising sea level idea is the flip side of your first book. Not A Drop to Drink was a world with no water, and here, with this new book, you’ve got a world with too much water… Was the process for writing these books the same?

Mindy: My process is always the same. I sit down and write the book.

Jody: You make it sound easy.

Mindy. Not easy, but you just do it. With this book I thought I had all kinds of freedom because I was building a fantasy world.

Jody: So, you're thinking anything goes...

Mindy: Except it doesn’t. You have to keep track of your own rules that you're making, because you made them in the first place.

Jody: And sometimes you write yourself into a corner. What do you do when that happens? Any tricks you can share?

Mindy: I think a lot while I'm driving. I live in the middle of nowhere so if I'm on my way to an event I've usually got at least an hour each way, and the drive might give me some room to sort things out.

Jody: You've recently started writing full time. Has that changed how you write?

Mindy: It's harder to make myself write. Before I was on a very tight timetable. If I had twenty free minutes, then I needed to crack out some words. Now, I've got all day... and I know it. I'm learning how to budget my time better, which is weirdly harder when you have more of it.

Jody: What kinds of scenes or stories do love writing most and least? 

Mindy: I love writing biting dialogue, insults, stuff like that. Least, action scenes. Writing a battle scene and trying to keep it as "realistic" as possible while still making it thrilling and fun is challenging.

Jody: You write in different genres... from dystopian to gothic historical fiction to contemp, and now fantasy-- what makes a Mindy McGinnis book a Mindy McGinnis book—besides the fact that at least one of the characters is probably going to die?

Mindy: That, and a definite layer of grit and realism overlying everything. That's my approach with any genre. If this WERE going to happen, how would it unfold? No drama. No fuss. Just, give this thing some room and see what happens. Usually nothing good, because it's a McGinnis. :)

Jody: This is on a totally different note, but I know you've launched a podcast recently. What got you interested in that?

Mindy: I started listening to podcasts while I was running, and I started on the high end of production value - Serial, This American Life, Cracked, etc. I burned through those and started listening to others that were suggested to me and, most of the time, was not impressed. I thought to myself, "I could do better than that." Then I thought I should put my money where my mouth was.

So I did, literally. It's a time investment for me, since one of my biggest complaints about other podcasts was that they needed heavy editing (lots of filler, dead space, inside jokes, side rants).

Jody: And your podcast doesn’t--

Mindy: I don't make my listeners listen to anything I wouldn't want to hear.

Jody: I'm guessing there's some money involved. 

Mindy:  For hosting and distribution. I'm hoping to at least break even with it, if not make it financially productive, by the end of one year (I paid for one year of hosting up front). If it's not lifting its own weight by then, I'll have to pull the plug. At the moment I spend more time on the podcast than I do on my writing, which economically makes zero sense.

Jody: True. But hey, what does make sense in this business?

*(Check out one of Mindy's podcasts Here)

Okay, time for the lightning round. What kinds of things do you do for fun?

Mindy: Oh, God. I'm such a geek. Genealogy. Seriously. I found an ancestor (female) that I'd been looking for for ten years a few weeks ago and I almost cried. I also love old cemeteries and will just stop the car and go visit one if I see one that looks interesting to me.

Jody: Last good book you've read?

Mindy: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

Jody: TV show you've binged?

Mindy: Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I'm catching up!

Jody: What's up next for you?

Mindy: Given to the Sea will have a sequel (it's a duology) in the Spring of 2018, titled Given to the Earth. I have another contemporary, This Darkness Mine coming October 10th of 2017 from Katherine Tegen Books.

Right now I'm working on a story I'm mentally referring to as "Drunk Hatchet With A Girl," about a teen lost in the Appalachian region.

I'm sure marketing will retitle that.

Jody: Probably. But wouldn't it be awesome if they didn't? Hey Mindy, thanks so much for chatting with me today! And dear readers, if you'd like to know more about the dark and brilliant mind of Mindy McGinnis, see below:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mindy McGinnis is an Edgar Award-winning author and assistant teen librarian who lives in Ohio. She graduated from Otterbein University with a degree in English Literature and Religion, and sees nothing wrong with owning nine cats. Two dogs balance things out nicely.

Where to find her: 

Website: mindymcginnis.com

Twitter: @MindyMcGinnis

Where to find her books: 

Indiebound

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

I don't have writer's block I don't have writer's block I don't have writer's block I don't have

writer's block.

I write these words in tiny script so as not to give them more power.

writer's block

I know what I am supposed to do:

Write.

Put my butt in the chair each day, regardless of whether or not I am feeling inspired, and write. Let the story go where it wants to go without forcing it. Set down some words. Any words. Don't put pressure on myself to make it perfect. It's about quantity not quality, or so says Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way.

And I want to believe Julia. (I do!) But still, no matter how hard I fight it, sometimes my critical inner editor, my demanding annoying former English teacher/perfectionist self takes over and I am floundering once again in Writer's Block land

Writers' guides are filled with helpful advice on how to tackle writer's block. 

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic speaks soothingly to writers, cooing in our ears to be gentle with ourselves. Frustration is part of the process, she whispers. Creativity is wonderfully difficult and you're doing the best you can. There, there, sweetie.

Steven Pressfield in War of Art takes the opposite approach, shouting like a drill sergeant at us to fight Resistance with everything we've got. Quit whining about how tough it is, soldier! Park your lazy ass at your desk and get to work, damn it!

Daily, sometimes hourly, I pinball between the two opposite poles of Liz and Steve. I show up at my desk with the best of intentions. Set a word count goal. Set a timer. Pound out my words with a sledge hammer. Punish myself when I slow down. That's it! No more bathroom breaks until you hit 1000 words, you amateur!

I sprawl out on my bed and doodle with colored pencils in a notebook. Who needs a word count? Why stress myself out with a timer? I know, I'll do a character sketch! No, I'll build a stage set of this pesky scene out of papermache! Forget that. Let's pause to sing Kumbaya.

And then it's back to my desk and a new word count goal, a frenzy of tapping on my keyboard.

I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have writer's block. I don't have-- 

Fun Times at a Meeting with My Congressman

I am way out of my league at this meeting.

The other women carry binders of statistics, folders of research, handwritten letters and testimonials. Me, I've got nothing. 

Until a few months ago, I didn't know who my Congressional representative was. (Steve Stivers) Until a few weeks ago, I didn't know what my district was. (Ohio District 15) Until I programmed the address into my GPS, I didn't know where this office was. (3790 Municipal Way, Hilliard, Ohio, office phone: 614-771-4968)

Now I'm sitting here in a reception room with a handful of very prepared, professional-looking women, who are waiting to meet with Steve Stivers' District Director. His name's Adam and he's young enough to be my son. He asks us to sign in and one by one we do, with me wondering what they'll do with these names and addresses.

(Hey, I've read a ton of Dystopian fiction! Someone could be building a list of troublemakers in District 15. Next week they'll round all of us up and make us fight to the death in the Hunger Games or dress us like handmaidens in the Handmaid's Tale. 

That, or Steve Stivers' office will email us a bland, yet nice, form letter thanking us for visiting his office.) 

I decide to go with option C.

We sit down in comfy chairs in a room that looks like a boardroom. Again, I am having flashbacks to school board meetings, except this room's got a nice picture of Steve Stivers on the wall. He seems like a nice guy. Adam seems like a nice guy too. He opens the meeting by asking us to go around and introduce ourselves and share our concerns and he'll gladly pass those on to the congressman. 

Since I'm sitting next to Adam, I go first. I start out okay, I think, saying that I'm new at this-- the whole activist thing. I don't know the proper way to go about expressing my dissent with the new administration. The letters, the phone calls, the town halls that my representative (Steve Stivers) doesn't attend--these don't seem to be making a difference. 

And you know what? I'm angry after reading in the newspaper that Steve Stivers called me and people who've been writing and calling "paid protesters." It's not true. And it's disrespectful, I say, my voice rising.  I voted for Mr. Stivers and now, truth be told, I'm ticked off at myself for doing that. I don't feel like he's representing me.

Also, I don't know even know why I'm mad, I say. None of this affects me. I'm probably not going to be hurt by whatever new healthcare plan is passed. I don't have to worry about losing contraceptives. My kids are now out of public school.

Other people will be affected, though, and this matters to me.  

My voice keeps rising. I can feel my face burning and my voice getting thick. What the hell is this? Ugh, am I going to cry? 

Adam must think so. He's shifting uncomfortably in his seat. His head's bowed and he scrawls something on his notepad. (Possibly: ooooh kay this one's a lunatic.) But he says, nicely, that the congressman wasn't talking about his constituents when he said that thing about the paid protesters. He was talking about the people in Utah. 

This is  a lie  debatable, and I debate him, but then I quit and let the other women have a turn.

They speak, one by one, as Adam dutifully nods and occasionally writes something on his notepad.

One has just come from the hospital where her husband is recovering from expensive surgery. She's grateful for Medicare and is terrified it will be taken away. She has a letter she reads about the importance of the ACA.

Another woman opens a file and begins quoting statistics. She hopes that Steve Stivers will take a look at her research and Adam assures her that he will.

Someone tells a story about her nephew who was born with a congenital disease, how he suffered and died and this was before the ACA and the family struggled with medical bills. She starts to cry as she speaks about how we can't go back to that as a country, where people go bankrupt and have to rely on charity fundraisers to pay for catastrophic care. 

Adam interjects now and again to explain the congressman's thoughts, that healthcare is not a right but a responsibility, that the Republican goal is to keep costs down, that the new plan will help with that.

A woman points out that we'll save money if we keep the ACA. Isn't it better (and cheaper!) she asks, to pay for prevention-- things like birth control, drug addiction treatment, vaccines, medications, regular checkups with the doctor, rather than expensive trips to the emergency room?

Sure, Adam says, but Steve Stivers thinks people should be working to pay for their own health care.

But the working poor are the ones most using the ACA, the woman with all of the research folders points out. And not everyone can work. Children, for example. And elderly people in nursing homes. And people with disabilities. These are the people who will be most harmed by the repeal of the ACA.

An hour goes by and I am losing my will to live desire to sit any longer at this meeting.

It's such a sad, bizarre mix of passionate anger and boring procedural stuff, so that one moment someone is talking about the raging opioid epidemic in Ohio (The state is tied with Kentucky, in the top three of overdose deaths this year.) and the next moment, we're discussing the protocol for how the office handles constituent mail. Also, how many mean phone calls Steve Stivers gets each day. (A lot, apparently. But Adam assures us that Steve Stivers has a thick skin. Whew.)

After the meeting, the women hand Adam their letters and folders of research. Another office worker takes our pictures with Adam. He shakes our hands and offers us his card. He really is a nice guy. 

And it really is nice that Steve Stivers opened his office up to us, that he pays nice guys like Adam to answer the phones and read our letters, that he gives his constituents an opportunity to vent their anger and terror in meetings like this one. 

Steve Stivers is going to vote for the new healthcare law that guts the ACA anyway.

I know this. The women at the meeting know this too. I drive home from the meeting wondering why I went. I have no idea what to do next.

So I do the only thing I can.

I write about it.

Steve Stivers, the nice Congressperson of Ohio District 15

When you have the attention span of a goldfish, sometimes poetry is the only thing that can save you...

Who knew there were so many poets?

Every day, a new one, a person I've never heard of, pops up in my email and whispers as I blearily brew my first cup of coffee.

These are the first words I hear each day, words that make me smile, words that confuse me, words that crush me. Always they make me pause as I swallow my coffee, make my foggy brain think hard, send me off on wild tangents before I begin my day's work.

Who knew I needed this so much?

A few months ago, drowning in waves of distressing news, caught up in the outrage and fear being shared by friends and strangers on social media, I was floundering around with my own words, struggling to settle down to write.

I was even having trouble reading books.

I heard an interview with Adam Alter, the author of the book Irresistible by Design, that our continual reading of stuff online has changed our brain chemistry. We used to have longer attention spans. Ten years ago before most of us started carrying our phones around with us, the average person could focus for roughly 12 seconds. Now, with our near constant jumping around from topic to topic, we're down to 8 seconds,

which is less than a goldfish.

Wait. Wasn't I just talking about poetry?

haha, so anyway, in December, I made a New Year's resolution to start my day, each day, by reading a poem. Okay, maybe my jumpy anxious mind couldn't handle full-blown novels, but surely I could read a page-long poem! Also, I once worked on an MFA in Poetry and I'd let all of that go and I missed reading poetry and wondered if I even could anymore.

I was thinking, too, that if nothing else, it would be a good way to start the day.

I have tons of poetry books on my book shelves, but seeking an even easier way to fulfill my resolution, naturally, I scrolled around online. Wouldn't it be cool if I could get an email of a poem every day? A poem, right there, in my inbox...

And wouldn't you know it? There IS such a thing! It's called Poem a Day and it's brought to you by the lovely people of Poets.org through the Academy of American Poets (funded, partially, by the NEA, which is on the chopping block by our new regime, but I digress, again.)

Every morning before I read the crap news of the day or check in on social media, I open up my email and read a poem-- or, listen. (Some of the poems have audio files of the poets reading!) These poets are a smorgasbordof diverse voices-- young and old, brand newbys to multiply published, men and women, people of all backgrounds. I had never heard of any of them.

(News flash, and because I think 8 seconds has just passed: most poets are not well known. They play around with their words in relative obscurity, publish poems in magazines few people read, make very little money-- if any)

But I love reading the poems by these people. I love knowing they're out there somewhere writing and thinking and playing with words, sending their poems off to the Academy of American Poets--whatever their submission process is-- and that someone at the Poets.org place is reading and choosing and putting together the email entry, recording the audio file, sending the day's selection off to the subscribers--

and me

so I can face a new day, with new words:

For a moment, I stand with ghosts

and the framed ancestors surrounding me. 

The best movies begin with an encounter 

and end with someone setting someone free. 

how the trash man paused with the storm glass,

holding it, making himself into a frame, a single frame—

all poets wonder if this is enough. 

*lines from poems by Parneshia Jones, Diana Marie Delgado, and Joy Katz