Today my co-worker Denise pointed out this post on the unimportance of stuff. This was my favorite line:

 I chose not to mourn stuff and save all my sorrow for people. 

My family has always been rather divided on the importance of stuff. There are some of us who hold items very near and dear and are devestated if anything happens to them because the stuff reminds them so much of a good memory or a lost beloved. And then there are others of us -- like me -- who delight in getting rid of stuff and actively work toward not forming attachments to it.

I wasn't always like this. I had very stong attachments to stuff as a child and young adult. A few months after my grandparents died, my roommate in Chicago threw away a blanket from their house. (He claims it was an accident; I claim it was part of his oversight issues.) I freaked out on him. FREAKED OUT. I remember spending hours searching through all sorts of apartments and houses when I would randomly remember a possession and didn't know where it was. Oh, how I cried when I couldn't find (insert possession here -- there were many). I was very, very, very upset a few years ago when I lost my wedding ring. I kept my grandmother's extensive shoe collection for years after she died, even though I never wore one pair. I used to carry a day planner around in Chicago filled with quotes and pictures and cards -- one of my friends actually expressed amazement that I would haul around so much with me every day. I couldn't imagine going anywhere without it.

Somewhere along the line, I became concerned about my attachments to stuff, especially my writing. I made back-ups of back-ups (and still do) and worried so much about what would happen if I lost all those poems and short stories and novels. Right now I have all my notes on my next novel in one notebook that I have ferreted away behind my printer. I haven't typed them up anywhere, and it would be pretty bad if I lost that notebook. 

But I'm actively working on not forming an attachment to it, or to those exact notes. I'm not ready to start that novel yet, not when the one I'm on is out with editors now.

I think it was my grandparents' blanket that got me. Before I left Chicago, I sold the antique three-quarters bed of my grandmother's that I'd been sleeping on to a friend. I realized the depth of my despair over the blanket was really my grief for the people I loved so much. Their stuff is just their stuff, even the stuff made by them. I love the stuff, I cherish the stuff, I place the stuff in positions of honor around my house and celebrate the stuff, but I actively work not to get too attached to the stuff, because something could happen. A tornado. A fire. Just an accident in which said stuff gets broken. A robbery. I just don't ever want to feel that hurt by the absence of a thing again. 

I understand this is just me working against my anxiety, and it's  perfectly fine for other people to feel a different way about stuff. My daughter is so attached to her stuffed animals that she mourned a bunny she gave away for months until I finally asked for it back from the neighbor and offered to replace it with something else. She's displaying a super-strong attachment to stuff, and who knows, maybe she will always feel that way. That's not wrong, and I won't discourage her from attaching to stuff. Especially when you're a kid, I think it's really helpful to have comfort objects.

I'm constantly reminding myself every time the sky turns green that the Corolla was just stuff, and now I have Vicki the convertible. If something happened to Vicki, something else would appear in her place. If my computer's hard drive gets wiped or I lose that notebook behind my printer, my writer mind will come up with a new story, maybe a story even better. I can't worry about losing things all the time. I have to trust I can create anew every lost story, I can replace every lost possession, I can grow and change to fit any new scenario. My people have to be the most important, and all my energy is going into them, because they cannot be replaced.

I will save my sorrow for them.

I'm up again to answer a BlogHer.com Life Well Lived question. This one is pretty great.

How do you put yourself first? How does taking time for yourself help make you happier? 

I don't know what the outside perception of me putting myself first is, but I think I do it a lot. I didn't used to -- I used to do whatever I was asked to do, and then a bunch of stuff I thought I was supposed to do and then maybe at the end something I actually wanted to do. 

About five years ago, I started really examining what I could do to better manage my anxiety. I realized that excercise really helped amp down the adrenaline I can get unexpectedly and for no good reason. Now that I work from home, it's not unusual for me to turn to the jump rope or a short workout DVD or even push-ups if I start to feel my emotions spinning and I need to focus. So after spending nearly twenty years exercising for weight management, suddenly I was exercising to access some good dopamine -- which totally changed my attitude about doing it. I stopped resenting it as something I had to do and started looking forward to the feeling I'd get after working out -- something I wanted to feel, so exericise became something I wanted to do. I now look at that time as me time and putting my good feelings first.

I put a lot of time into my writing, in all its formats. I write fiction, here, and on BlogHer.com. Part of it is my job, but there's such a fuzzy line between work and play when you have a job you really love.

I love to sleep. I sleep as long as I can, whenever I can. Other moms are shocked at how late I will sleep on weekend mornings when Beloved and the little angel let me, and they often do. I make no apologies for this sleeping. It helps me rejuvinate from throwing everything at my work week, and I'm a much more fun person when I'm not tired. We've all made peace with that.

I have one child on purpose. When we first made the decision to have a small family, a lot of people got all up in our grill about it, as though not having multiple offspring was somehow selfish or cruel to our daughter. I felt really insecure about it for a long time, but now I'm as unapologetic about having an only as I am about sleeping. Our family of three is extremely loving and extremely agile, and I relish taking off for the zoo spontaneously and without anything but a wallet. I don't like chaos, and it's easier to avoid chaos without lots of kids. There, I've said it. My daughter has voiced both her love of being an only and her regret that she doesn't have brothers or sisters. I'm sure she'll vascillate on her opinion of it from day to day for the rest of her life, but she'll always know we love her unconditionally. I can't do much more: I've tried brainwashing her that my every decision is perfect, and it's not taking very well.

I don't have a dog. The little angel desperately wants a dog. But even if my mother weren't deathly terrified of all dogs, I still would not have a dog. I don't like barking or licking. Aren't I painting an awesome picture of myself? I adore other people's dogs, but like those who don't want children, I really don't want a dog that will need to be walked and have his poop picked up by me on a daily or weekly basis. It interferes with that agility I so treasure in our little family. Thus we have Petunia the cat, who cuddles and then wanders off to reorganize the library without remark when we leave town for a weekend. 

In the past, when I've thought about taking time for myself or putting myself first, I thought about things like getting a pedicure or going to the library alone. Those things are awesome, awesome, awesome, but anything can be putting yourself first if you're thinking about it that way. Every little thing you do to make your environment more comfortable for your particular needs is putting yourself first. I also think to some extent making your family more comfortable is putting yourself first, because the happier they are, probably the happier you are. Nothing makes me happier than my daughter's joy, so I really like having adventures and introducing her to new things. It might look like I'm doing something for her, but in the end, it's for me, too. I get to see the smile.

What do you do for yourself? Dr. Aymee has some tips over at Live Well Lived on BlogHer.com. Or you can skip straight to commenting to win a Kindle Fire, because I will not rest until everyone has an ereader.

---

The folks at Lego reached out to tell me about their new Build Together site. It has instructions for how to build different things with standard lego sets organized by how much time you have and how much skill you have. I thought that was pretty smart, so I'm sharing it with you. I wasn't compensated for that little ditty, I just like legos.

On Monday, I went to hear The Book Doctors (Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry) do their Pitchapalooza for the second year. Last year, I just went and watched, not really sure what was going on. This year, I took along my reframed novel pitch to see what they would say.

It was monsoon pouring that night, and the temperature inside Unity Temple ranged somewhere between moist and sauna. I am terrible at estimating crowds, but I'd say the auditorium was about half full -- and it appeared every one of those people had a book to pitch. I got lucky and was selected as one of the twenty-five people who got to read my pitch and get some feedback on it. (This was really, really lucky, because Arielle and David and the people they pick to be on their panel are always nice. I've been to pitching/querying sessions at writers' conferences in which the panel brought "vindictive" to a whole new level.)

As I waited to see if my name would be called, I studied my audience mates. I was there alone, so I had nothing to do but look around. I myself kept rewriting my pitch over and over in my notebook, changing a few words here and there. It wasn't fully baked and I knew it, but I hadn't had much time to spend on it and when you get a chance to get feedback on your writing, you take it. I saw the man in front of me had his pitch all typed out. He was staring a hole through it. The woman beside me was scribbling in a notebook.

If you could've bottled the collective angst in that room ...

I felt a tremendous sense of empathy toward every person in the room. Even though I got one book published, it doesn't get easier. I don't feel any less angsty about my current pitch than I did about my Sleep Is for the Weak pitch. One thing I am able to do better is recognize that the feedback you need is the feedback that sucks the worst to hear. Identifying the problems is their job, fixing them is mine. 

I hate fixing. I wish it would just come out right the first time.

Then again, if it did, I wouldn't know what to do the first time it came it wrong.

It's sort of a vicious circle.

Some of the other writers had shaky voices. One commented about how nervous she was. Even in such a friendly atmosphere, it's terrifying to say out loud what you've been typing and whispering over and over to yourself for weeks or months or years. 

I got the feedback I needed, went back to my seat and waited for my heart rate to return to normal. I looked over at the woman next to me, and she smiled. I smiled back.

I knew she knew exactly how I felt.

---

Speaking of authors, check out my review of longtime reader Shannon Hyland-Tassava's new book, The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Today I wrote this post over on BlogHer:

Let's say you're walking around SXSW cursing the lack of wifi on 6th Street. And then, suddenly, salvation: You see a woman wearing a t-shirt that says, "I'm Susie, a 4G hotspot. SMS HH Susie to 25827 for access wwww.homelesshotspots.org."

Susie herself is a hotspot, complete with all the necessary equipment. A walking, talking hotspot. A homeless hotspot. Hot damn, aren't you in luck!

Want to read the rest? 

Hello? That is totally correct.

Just as ebooks are heating up after everyone got a Kindle Fire for Christmas, I got a letter this week from the publisher of Sleep Is for the Weak, Chicago Review Press. I don't hear from my publisher very often, as my book came out four years ago, and in publishing dog years, that is approximately What-Have-You-Done-for-Me-Lately-thirty. The letter basically told me why Chicago Review Press's distributor, IPG, got into it with Amazon, which resulted in Amazon yanking the Kindle version of more than 4,000 books off its site. My book was one of those books.

I'm disappointed and not really because I'm upset specifically about Sleep Is for the Weak. I still think it's a great anthology, I'm proud of it and all the great writers featured in it, and there are new parents all the time who might want to read it. Since you can't find it in bookstores any more, online is really the only way to shop. BUT STILL. I intend to write more books. I'm disappointed in principle that it's so hard to get a book in front of readers four years after it was published. 

The publishing industry is the craziest industry ever, and it's the only industry I know of in which a store can buy stuff and then if it doesn't sell, the publisher has to buy it back and the author doesn't get paid -- even though it was initially sold to the bookseller. You don't get paid until Amazon buys your book and Amazon sells your book. Otherwise Amazon can buy your book, you can get super-excited, and then six months later Amazon sends back your book and all those numbers disappear from your royalty statement. It's crazy-making, and I didn't know that's how it worked until after I got my first royalty statement from Chicago Review Press and called them up to get the most frustrating math lesson known to an artist. And though I'm using Amazon as an example, it's not just them -- it's every bookstore. This is how the industry operates. Books get about two months on the shelf, and then if they're not flying off, well, they can and do get sent back. I'm constantly thankful my book was published in an era when the Internet existed to continue to sell my book after it disappeared from bookstores in the teeny tiny little parenting section that has about six shelves for every book ever written on the subject. Or maybe instead what I really find: Three shelves of baby journals, two shelves of books on getting your baby to nurse or sleep and half a shelf of humor books and books written by Jenny McCarthy with maybe one copy of Anne Lamott's amazing Operating Instructions. I totally get shelf space. I also totally get that new books come out all the time, so bookstores have to keep things in rotation. Which is why the Internet is so, so important to authors.

The publishing industry already has incredibly low margins for publishers and authors on top of the crazy-ass sell-back clause. What happened with IPG, again from my letter:

IPG, our distributor, could not in good conscience accept Amazon’s demands to the detriment of publishers and authors. As a result, Amazon is choosing not to purchase our e-books at terms that are in line with the rest of the industry and are acceptable to all our other customers. Amazon has removed our Kindle editions from their site, though the print editions of our books are still available for sale on Amazon. IPG is taking a brave stand against Amazon’s predatory pricing, along with other major players in the industry. We support them and hope that you will too.

But, you know, lest we feel too sorry for IPG, the distributor isn't too focused on ebooks, according to them: 

Some of the small presses that work with distributors don’t sell many e-books. IPG president Mark Suchomel told Crain’s that e-books make up less than 10 percent of IPG revenues. 

I'm glad it's not hurting IPG's bottom line too much, but the authors might feel a little differently about that.

And, since Chicago Review Press published my book, I can't just decide to publish it as an ebook if I want or distribute it in any other fashion. From a letter from IPG to its publishers:

7. Seriously consider the implications of this action for the long run. If we don’t hold firm on your behalf, your margins will continue to erode. IPG will continue to represent you well to those customers that are happy to buy from us at reasonable terms. If you or your authors were working directly with any large vendor, you would not have the opportunity to push back on or even have a conversation about terms. Your continued support is appreciated.

8. If anyone from Amazon calls you, please let them know that you are distributed by and contractually tied to IPG.

According to the letter, you can still get Sleep Is for the Weak in any format other than Kindle, and even if you have Kindle, you can still read it. Side note: you can email yourself almost anything on a Kindle, although a small fee applies. I email myself updated revisions of my new novel all the time because it's easier for me to find problems when it already looks like a real book. Here's how to find Sleep Is for the Weak electronically, from the letter:

All of Chicago Review Press’s titles remain widely available in both print and electronic editions (EPUB and PDF formats). You can find them at your local independent bookshop, www.indiebound.org, www.BarnesandNoble.com, Apple’s iTunes, Google Books, www.ebookstore.sony.com, and elsewhere. The only format you will not be able to buy—temporarily, we hope—is Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format. Although, if you have a Kindle Fire, with just a few steps you can download almost any e-reader app and purchase EPUB and PDF editions that can be read on the Kindle Fire. You can also purchase both print and e-books directly from the IPG website (www.ipgbook.com). 

I'm just disappointed. It's so hard to be an author anyway, and to have your book on the virtual shelves when it's not on the physical ones and then have it removed feels just horrible. I understand why IPG did what it did, and its negotiating power is one of the reasons I wanted to be traditionally published. If it were just me against Amazon, how would any negotiation go? Amazon's not evil, IPG's not evil, Chicago Review Press is not evil: No one is sitting around rubbing their hands together thinking how they can crush the souls of writers. They're making business decisions. Because bookselling is a business. It's tough to have your art be part of a business sometimes.

In the end, books are as good as their distributors. There are many, many incredible books by even well known authors that simply go out of print. I have hope that the increase in ereaders will allow books to stay in print longer electronically and be easier to access years later. The events of this week make me wonder, though. 

As a writer and blogger, I should be against piracy and copyright violation, right? One would think ... but there's a lot more going on with SOPA than appears on the surface. 

And if you think it's no big deal because you didn't see it on TV this morning, think again: 

SOPA would give both the government and major corporations the power to shut down entire websites accused of copyright infringement with neither a trial nor a traditional court hearing. The legislation is aggressively backed by Hollywood movie studios and major record labels, along with several major news providers, including Fox News and NBC-Universal, which have largely shied away from coverage of the bill.

Wonder why big media (record companies, movie companies) is for SOPA while search engines, Twitter and YouTube are against it? The Stop Online Piracy Act sounds really good, right? Who doesn't want to squelch piracy? And I don't disagree that we should squelch it -- but this is so not the way to go about it. The U.S. government is talking about mucking around with the way the entire Internet works and holding social media sites such as YouTube personally responsible for any bit of perceived copyright violation anywhere on its site, meaning it can be blocked from you if some kid in Sri Lanka uploads a dance video with copyrighted music playing in the background. If any editor on Wikipedia mucks up and doesn't make a correct citation. Bye bye, Wikipedia.

If there's piracy or copyright violation, fine them. Don't censor them. Don't shut down the entire site over what could be an accidental oversight. Who do we think we are, China? I'm looking at you, Blunt and McCaskill. (Currently both senators are for PIPA, the Senate equivalent.) 

Guess who might like that to happen? Maybe companies that don't want the competition?

As a writer, I value building on others' work. Often I'm inspired by someone else's post, and quote a bit of it to riff on it. A fair use bit, as defined by the law. How do you riff a little on a video or song? How do you participate in culture when that participation could be deemed harmful enough to block a website for everyone before a trial even happens? Have we all gone insane? There is true piracy and there is misunderstanding the law, and this legislation doesn't give a shit which one you do -- you can have your DNS address delisted without a trial for suspicion of wrongdoing. 

And OH MY GOD HOW MANY TRIALS WILL THIS ADD? What about the people who can't afford to lawyer up? Bye bye, website.

And the scariest part is that the lawmakers voting on it don't even understand how the Internet works. 

If this freaks you the hell out, there's a list of things you can do and even more background up on BlogHer today, which is not blacked out because this legislation is so important to the community's livelihoods and more. Knowledge is power -- please speak your mind today.

I've been including poems with my holiday cards since I was 21 and I sent out Christmas pieces of paper instead of Christmas cards because I was too broke to buy cards. I'm 37 now, so that means I've sent out 16 holiday poems.

And this year, I didn't.

This year, I was working on revisions on my novel and all my creative energy went to that. This year, I sat down at least three times and the words wouldn't come. This year, I wondered if maybe that well had dried up, if I'd said everything there was to say about the holidays and family and goodness and light.

There were a few complaints. And I felt guilty. I'm really pleased people liked them enough to be sad when they ended ... but not enough to try to force something that just wouldn't come. I was telling Beloved about this problem when the little angel piped up that she would be happy to write one. Since I've already sent out my holiday greetings, this year, here are the poems she wrote. I think I'm passing the torch. From now on, there's a new sheriff in town.

Happy holidays to you from the Arens bards!

Snow

Nose

Only

Wow!

Man

Awesome

Nice

Sliding

Lightning-fast

Exciting

Daring

Christ

Holiday

Rejoice

Israel

Stocking

Tinsel

Mary

Angel

Santa

Dreidl

Exciting

Cradle

Elves

Mistletoe

Berries

Embark

Remember

I took the little angel to The Nutcracker yesterday. Since she is still in ballet, I thought it might be time to go view the big guns in their gorgeous new home downtown. I bought the tickets the minute they went on sale, back in November, for the Sunday matinee. Because I've never been to the new performing arts center, I just angled for the closest seat I could find to the stage, even though it was sort of over on the side, which can sometimes suck.

This did not suck.

It was a frickin' box. With five chairs in the whole thing. And a WAITER.

The coat check guy looked at our tickets and mentioned it might just be a box, and I thought, oh my gosh, I have never sat in a box in my life. My child's head will explode.

We wandered through the gorgeous glass lobby so bright I needed sunglasses and wound our way around to the box. 

We were the first ones there, soon to be joined by a sweet family with a little tiny girl who will no doubt demand to be driven to prom in a limo following this experience. My girl and I marveled at the view. We could see the entire orchestra from that angle, as well as almost every single person in the audience. 

"You know, I didn't do this on purpose," I told my girl. "We may never achieve this level of seating here again. Now that everyone's seen it, it's going to be hard to come by."

She grinned ear to ear.

The waiter came by and asked if we would like to order some holiday cookies or drinks for intermission. Why yes, we would! 

"Can you believe it?" she kept asking, echoing me, I'm sure, who probably sounded like the world's biggest hick to the family next to us with enough money to take a two-year-old who had to leave halfway through the second act to watch her first Nutcracker from such an awesome seat. But I didn't care. I'm not wealthy, and I don't get to treat my girl to such things every day. 

As we walked out, I hoped she would remember her first trip to see the Kansas City Ballet, the first time we sat in the new performing arts center and the first time we experienced the glory that is box seats together, just the two of us, giggling like idiots through the whole thing.

I know I will.

---

Read my review of The Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life by Nava Atlas on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!