This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.

Last night I had a meeting across town after work. As usual, I got the time wrong and was late.

As I was driving back, there was a brief moment when I thought to myself, I miss commuting.

And then I pulled over got out and punched myself in the face.

(okay, not really)

But seriously? I hated commuting! Hated it! Like little kid hated it! So why did I think that?

The light was sort of slanty and there was no traffic and I had the windows down. It was a pleasant drive.

So let's leave it at that.

Something can be pleasant without having to miss it, right?

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This post would probably be a wee bit more interesting had I not been so preoccupied with our new section that launched on BlogHer today -- BlogHerMoms! Led by my friend, colleague and Sleep Is for the Weak foreward writer Stacy Morrison. So please excuse my lack of clarity -- I thought about not posting at all because that commuting post could've been good had I a brain cell left in my head. But I'm working on forgiving myself for not being perfect, so there you have it.

I went to see Sapphire read from The Kid a month or so ago. I already had a copy of the book for BlogHer%20Book%20Club, but I got another one to give away on BlogHer.

Here's an excerpt from my post:

Sapphire started out as a poet, and as she read excerpts from her book, her voice changed, her meter changed, rising and lowering, now chummy, now threatening. She's a powerful performer, perhaps as powerful a performer as a writer, or maybe they are impossible to separate. She says she never cared about her poems as much as she does The Kid, though.

"It's going to take people a while to get this, but I know I have done something good, something strong," she said.

(It's a heavy, heavy dark book.)

So, if you're interested, go enter -- there are a few more days before we shut down the giveaway. I'm sorry I forgot to say anything earlier, but I was, um, on vacation. If you've read Push or The Kid, perhaps you'll join me in being somewhat amazed at the sunny nature of her autograph.

On the first day of our family vacation, my husband rented a boogie board and my daughter dug holes in the sand.

I lay faceplanted on a towel for two hours, stress radiating off my body and seeping out my pores. 

As I lay there, scenes from the previous few days played out. Thoughts of things I should've done at BlogHer -- people I should've met, things I should've said, posts I should've written -- rattled around. Every once in a while, my husband or daughter would come up to me, puzzled at my muteness. I'm normally an energetic person. Instead, I just lay there like a beached whale. Every once in a while, tears trickled out onto the sand.

After the beach, we drove an hour and a half up the coast and I fell asleep somewhere near Miramar, the hard, shuddering, paralysis sort of sleep, the sort I had every night during my vacation. Did you hear the people next door slamming doors? No. Did you hear the storm? No. I heard nothing. I slept the sleep of the dead.

Last week, I built a levee: No email. No Twitter. No blogging. No Internet.

I kept it up all week long, even after we came back home. I took my daughter shopping for school supplies. I went sailing with my husband. I sorted through the clothes I'd worn at BlogHer as though they were someone else's from a different lifetime.

While I was faceplanted in that sand on the beach, I asked myself why modern life is so much, why it all never ends. Maybe it's laptops, I thought. No, maybe it's email on our phones. Or the economy. Or the flexible nature of modern work, yes, that's it!

Maybe. But I don't have to have a blog. I don't have to write a novel. I don't have to volunteer on an arts board. I don't have to work beyond forty hours a week.

I don't have to have any friends.

As we were leaving San Diego, I asked my husband about the sea walls. They seemed pretty short to me, fairly useless against an ocean. He pointed out how far they were up the beach. I thought about the flooding along the Missouri River, how difficult it is to contain surging water.

I have shitty levees in my life.

Yesterday I picked back up the reins after a week away. At five I picked up my daughter and took her to meet her new teacher for second grade. We went to dinner. I gave her a bath, complete with a Wizard of Oz Celebriducks singing contest. I called my parents.

I didn't look at my laptop or my cell phone even though it literally made me nauseous not to do so.

I know from looking at my inboxes this morning that the email piled up against that levee last night. Even now -- by taking the time to take my daughter to summer camp and write this post -- it's threatening to spill over.

Should I move it farther up the beach? Build it higher? Take it down and let the world overwhelm me the way it did right before vacation? My sandbags never seem to hold for longer than two days, and I often grow weary of rebuilding.

Fascinated a little by this.

She's okay -- just a little cold.

Awesome dueling My Little Pony unicorns at Sparklecorn 2011.

It was a fun party.

This super-cool art is almost hidden on the way to a parking lot. I can't wait to show the little angel.

The Twizzler artist caught in action. There's also a statue of liberty and a space needle. I asked her how she got this job and she was all, "I have no idea."

The two tattooed men in the pool were not enthused when twenty women took over the jacuzzi area. I was trying to figure out a way to photograph them nicely when Morgan Shanahan offered to pose. Thanks, Morgan.

After a long day of networking and behind-the-scenes BlogHer duties, I wasn't sure I would make it to the People's Party. Until I heard there were puppies.

Had breakfast this morning with Nerdy Apple Bottom. Our view, we agreed, did not suck.

I've noticed in the past few years that my BlogHer conferences tend to have me scheduled within an inch of my life. I confess I did this to myself even before I became a BlogHer employee*, but last year -- my first conference actually working for BlogHer -- oh, Lord, it was even worse. (And I mean BETTER when I say worse, but the scheduling was worse.)

Was this last year? Or two years ago? I don't even know.

Yesterday I laughed until I cried when I realized I tried to schedule taping a two-minute video interview on top of my appointment to give a pint of blood. Can you imagine? Actually, I can imagine, and someone will do it and put it on YouTube by noon on Saturday.

SUSPECT HIM.

So this year, I decided to pour some ethanol on the flames of already the craziest weekend of 2011. I'm bringing not only Beloved but also the little angel. We're taking our family vacation in California starting Sunday, so what the hell? Why not have them show up right in the middle of 3,000 bloggers? Yo, ho ho!

 

'Cuz I always miss these.

Though the little angel begged to go to Sparklecorn wearing the high-heeled wedge sandals the neighbor gave her that I refuse to let her out of the house wearing, though she whined and complained that she wanted to eat CheeseburgHers at midnight, though she insisted she absolutely needed to inhale her way through the free samples of the expo, I did not buy her a ticket. She and her father will be mailing home my swag visiting the seals and the tide pools and frolicking about San Diego while I work hard meet everyone update the website  speak on a panel about owning your beauty go to parties see old friends -- but the one thing I won't be doing this year is missing my family. We'll see how that works. Because every year, that's the only bad thing about BlogHer -- by the third day I'm literally aching for my other two people.

So if you are at BlogHer and you see this wee one wandering about the lobby, give her a shock and tell her you know her mommy.

Stay classy, San Diego.

* I have never regretted running myself ragged at BlogHer. It got me a job, a book, and numerous other writing gigs and contacts. It's totally worth it to treat this conference as the business opportunity of your life.

My flight out to LaGuardia was delayed by three and a half hours on Tuesday. Two hours in the Kansas City airport, forty-five minutes on the tarmac in Kansas City, and the rest sitting on the tarmac in New York. By the time I found myself in the taxi line, it was 1:30 a.m. and the line was at least sixty people deep. The temperature congealed above ninety degrees. I watched some people ahead of me laughing to each other, and despite my intention of keeping a good attitude, I couldn't wrap my head around how anyone could laugh at that point in the trip. I stumbled into my hotel room at two bells, texted Beloved and fell into bed.

The next morning I felt much better, despite having way less than my requisite amount of sleep and a half-functioning window unit air conditioner on the 16th floor. I even figured out in my haste booking the trip last week, I'd confused Midtown East with Midtown West in my favor and instead of having a twenty-minute walk, I had a ten-minute one. Two days flew by.

My story really starts when I tried to leave on Thursday afternoon at five. I walked out into a sweltering New York afternoon. The heat index was well over a hundred, and the haze seemed to be leaking out of everyone's pores. I found myself nearly in the street trying to catch a cab at West 43rd and Fifth Avenue, along with every tourist in New York City. I expected it to take a while. I've been to New York before; I lived in Chicago for fifteen months. I forgot, though, the helplessness I would feel when I realized after fifty minutes of standing on that street with my arm in the air that I might not get a cab, that I might not make one of the last flights back to Kansas City, that all the adrenaline I'd used up powering myself from the moment I found out last week I had to take this trip until that very minute might be for nothing if I couldn't get myself home in time to get up, unpack, repack and drive to my in-laws' house in Iowa on Friday morning.

I started to sense my defenses crumbling a little. Then I felt someone staring at me and looked over my shoulder to see a small blond woman with a very large camera click-click-clicking away. I scowled at her and turned my back on her, waving my arm harder, thinking if I could just get a cab I could get away from this weirdo taking my picture. She kept circling around me to get different angles as I tried to ignore her. Finally I looked right at her as she pointed her camera at me. "You aren't putting these on istockphoto, are you?" I asked in exasperation, pissed that talking to her required me to take my attention away from the cabs that kept rushing by with other people inside them.

She smiled. Her accent was thick, European. She tried to show me the photo. "It's just so typically New York," she said, as though that meant I should be happy to be featured. "These are really very good." I saw the desperation on my face in the photo. Yes, I thought. That is typically New York for me. Every time I am here I am worried I will never escape. I want to like New York and Chicago, I really do, but I am accustomed to big sky and big horizons, and the street feels so confined to me, so crowded. Instead of seeing it as a challenge, I always end up seeing it as an ant farm.

I abandoned my spot on the street and tweeted my desperation. My friend Karen told me to find a hotel and get in their cab line. I couldn't find a hotel. I was by the library. As I tried to cross the street, a cab finally slowed, and a minute later the cab driver was berating me for my stupidity in apparently not allowing twelve hours for myself to catch a cab and get to the airport at rush hour.

"What, you thought you'd just walk onto the street and get a cab?" he said.

"No, not exactly. I admit I was surprised it took 57 minutes."

"You're going to miss your plane, you know." I'd told him my flight was at seven. It was at 7:40.

We drove in silence for a little bit.

"Okay, it's not really at seven. It's at 7:40."

He laughed. "Oh, you thought you'd make me go faster?"

"Well, you thought I was stupid, anyway."

He laughed and laughed. "I think you will make your flight."

We cleared an accident -- lightssirenscarspeoplewavingarms -- and barreled over a bridge. We arrived at the airport at 6:30. I would've made the plane probably even if it was at seven, ironically. I made it through security faster than I thought I would, all of us stinking and sweating in the cattle line. I stood behind one of those ethereally thin young women who turns to the side at the last minute and you are shocked to realize she is at least eight months pregnant and you can't tell from behind.

The flight back home left on time from LaGuardia for the first time in my fifteen-year business traveling history. When I got back to my car at 10:15, I actually had to sit in the seat and pump myself up to drive the 45 minutes home, the last leg, I told myself, you can do this. It's the last part.

When I walked in the door at 11 on Thursday night, I thought of that woman and her camera and wondered if my photo would remain in her private collection or find its way onto the Internet, forever marking me as a cog in the New York machine, a typical scene.

If that was a typical scene, it makes me sad. Because I was nervous and annoyed and very, very sad at that moment, thinking I might miss my plane despite all my planning and three days of carefully orchestrated timing, despite the extreme energy it had taken me to plan the trip at the last minute, pull myself through the meetings with good cheer and quick decisions, navigate unfamiliar subways and streets late at night, sweat with the rest of the city -- that I might be undone after all that by the lack of a taxicab ... I hope that kind of quiet desperation is not stereotypically New York.

I went out to look at my flowers and tomatoes when I got home, even though it was dark. They bloomed quietly, the only sound the cicadas and tree frogs. Despite the oppressive heat, I could see stars. No one tried to take my picture. And I went back to being my kind of anonymous. The kind in which I realize people might try to take my picture if I go to BlogHer '11 or stand on a street corner in New York, but no one will here, because I am just not that interesting, not part of the scenery, and that is absolutely fine with me.

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Ever since I started working on my YA novel (I'm still plugging, still plugging -- querying is The Suck), people have told me I should read Sarah Dessen. So I did -- see what I thought of What Happened to Goodbye at BlogHer Book Club!