Hey, there. I'm leaving tomorrow for BlogHer '13. If you are there, I'm speaking on Friday and Saturday on turning your blog post into publishable essays -- if you come to either session, please come up and say hi and be patient with me if I look at you all glassy-eyed because presenting takes a lot out of me but I really like to meet people. Also, I may have met you thirty-five times before but will still ask you your name or your blog because I have the recall of a tree frog.

If you're not there (or you are there and seriously have time to read blogs) and you want to enter for a chance to win a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME, my latest Goodreads giveaway has another two-ish weeks on it.

And my daughter has pneumonia and I have to leave her, so send good vibes toward Kansas City, okay? And also me, because I went to test the thermometer by taking my own temperature and either there is something wrong with the thermometer or I have a low-grade fever, too. I bought three bottles of Purell yesterday and will not touch anyone without disinfecting them afterward.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Obvious Game

by Rita Arens

Giveaway ends August 06, 2013.

See the giveaway detailsat Goodreads.

Enter to win

Next week, the girl (who will hopefully be better) and I are headed to Iowa to hang out with my original nuclear, so posting may be light. I'll try to get some fun pictures from BlogHer for those who can't make it -- it's always a little surreal.

More soon!

I remember a stopwatch in my childhood. I think it belonged to my father, though I'm not actually sure. I got ahold of it one day and started timing how long it took me to do things I normally did. I was shocked to find most of my daily activities took a number of seconds, maybe a minute or two. That knowledge was heavy.

If you think about all the tasks of everyday life in terms of individual actions that take merely seconds each, the day seems to stretch on forever in a ridiculously overwhelming fashion. It takes so many seconds to type each sentence in this blog post, to get a glass of water, to put away the dishes from lunch in the dishwasher. 

Knowing that, too, can be a little intimidating. If it really only takes a few seconds to do things, what the hell am I doing all day?

I thought about that sort of thing last night when I really wanted myself to work on PARKER CLEAVES but I was really tired from a full weekend and doing some work for my job already. I set the stopwatch on my phone for fifteen minutes. I wrote until it went off. I haven't read it over yet. I don't know if it's good. Doesn't have to be -- it's a rough draft. It just has to exist so I can fix it. Thinking about all the little fifteen-minuteses, though, is as overwhelming as the first full day of a new job or a new baby -- wondering how you're ever going to get through so many seconds to the end of the day. That's what writing the rough draft feels like to me. 

I could accomplish so much more if I spent more time realizing how little time it actually takes to do almost anything.

Do you ever look at all the people making sexy fish-faces on The Facebook and wonder how we got here?

Then, in the midst of my judginess, I look at my own damn profile picture, which is one of the only pictures I've ever taken in which I'm not smiling, because I was trying to be serious and authorial and not giddy. Totally no different than The Facebook. I'm guilty.

Sometimes I get so tired of myself and trying to promote my writing and trying to be, just, well, MORE. More as a writer, more as an employee, more as a mother, better, faster, more.

I have plenty of friends who ask me why I feel compelled to write books on top of all the other things I do in my life, and I think the real answer is that I take myself too seriously. When I'm honest with myself, I know there are almost 300,000 books coming out every year and it's a bloody miracle if anyone finds mine, reads it AND likes it, so sometimes it seems very silly to keep trying. And here I am, writing another one, not knowing if this next one will be bigger, faster, more or not.

Then I think, well, if I didn't try, then what point is there in doing anything? I was commenting on a post this week about a woman who doesn't like to make her bed because she doesn't see the point, but I always make my bed and the point is to have a made bed because I take myself and my bed very, very seriously. I take everything seriously, except for The Facebook, because The Facebook depresses the shit out of me and every time I go over there I find myself feeling bad that I'm not doing everything better, faster, more, and I hate feeling like that, like just living without hurting anyone else isn't enough.

I think I might need a vacation. 

Last week while my mom was visiting, she, my girl and I went to Panera for dinner before Ma sweetly took my girl home so I could have a few hours to work on PARKER CLEAVES. As we ate, I found myself completely overtaken with the conversation of the two women behind me, who were filling out some sort of Bible-related workbooks. 

Their conversation was HILARIOUS and not intentionally at all. I sat there, nodding and smiling at my mom and daughter because they thought they were talking to me, but they were not. They were talking at me while I listened with all my might to the women as they discussed their answers to the workbook questions. 

When we were done eating, we walked out into the parking lot and I told my mom and daughter what they'd been saying. My mom laughed out loud. 

Me: "I'm totally blogging this."

My Conscience My Daughter: "Mommy, what if they saw it?"

Me: "How would they see it? They don't know me. Plus, I don't know their names." (fully aware of how completely wrong and backward this conversation is)

My Conscience My Daughter: "MOMMY."

Me: "Twitter?"

My Conscience My Daughter: "MOOOOMMMMY."

Me: "Okay, fine."

So I told the story in my editorial meeting to my co-workers, and we laughed and laughed. And see, I found a way to blog it without violating the spirit of my daughter's wise words. The best part about this story: Right before I started eavesdropping, I was telling my daughter she can't have her own blog until she's 25. 

I'll just find a way to work that conversation into dialogue in PARKER CLEAVES.

I've read more books and articles than I can count about how the brain functions, how negative thinking becomes a very real rut, how worrying doesn't do anything but give you serious health problems. I became convinced that my stress reactions were more harmful to my health than French fries and adjusted accordingly. I'm very interested in being a happy person. It's a personal goal. I'm very goal-oriented, just work with me here.

I read somewhere people are happiest while exercising and something else of course I can't remember. I decided they were happy while exercising because when it's burning you can't think about all your problems -- you're concentrating on breathing through the effort. There's just not time to be sad. Or maybe it's endorphins. I don't know, I just make sure I exercise four or five times a week. 

I read about how when you're younger, you equate happiness with some sort of ecstasy or emotional high, a very RAH RAH LET'S GET CRAZY AT DISNEYLAND kind of happiness, and when you get older it's more let's sit on the deck and chat over a bottle of wine happiness. I look for moments when I'm relaxed in my day. In the summer, it's the drive back from dropping my daughter off at summer camp. The air is fresh, the windows are down, I haven't fully switched into work mode yet, and the day seems very full of possibility. 

---

Earlier this week, I was up for two hours in the night with the little angel and found myself a puddle on the floor the next day. The day after that, I was fine, having had my seven hours of sleep. It's truly shocking how much being tired or hungry or hot or cold or in pain will do to my mood. Part of happiness, I think, is alleviating physical discomfort so I don't concentrate on it -- or even if I don't concentrate on it, it seems to find its way into my mood without my realizing it -- so part of happiness is tending to my physical needs just like you would a toddler's. Eat regularly, sleep regularly, stretch sore muscles, take headache medicine, layer.

Once my physical needs are met, "happiness" is really "interested." I might be relaxed during my leisure time, but it's not really super satisfying unless I feel like I'm learning something or pondering something or hearing a new story about someone or having a good conversation. Watching boring TV can actually make me cranky, because I have so little free time I hate to waste it on something stupid. I realize how snooty that sounds, but I am pretty demanding about plot when it comes to entertainment. Realizing that has saved me hours of Real Housewives watching.

---

Last night I fell asleep in the little angel's bed after we read together and she shut off the light. When I woke an hour later, groggy, my plans for writing seemed doomed. I sat at the table and thought about what I wanted to do. Beloved's traveling most of this month for work, so I have a unique opportunity to really focus on my writing in the evenings. 

I bemoaned how tired I was. I really didn't want to write. I wanted to couchmelt and watch TV. I did that the night before, though, and I thought how once when I bemoaned that I would be twenty-eight when I finished my master's degree (I know, I know), Beloved pointed out that I'd be twenty-eight someday whether I finished the degree or not, and it's shaped my writing life ever since. I wanted to couchmelt, but I also wanted to have written, to be moving forward on my new novel and be closer to seeing the story emerge from the depths of the well. 

So I took out my notebook (longhand works better for me after sitting in front of a damn computer all day) and closed my eyes and pictured the scene. I told myself to just get two handwritten pages. Then the scene became a little clearer and I knew I wouldn't write the whole thing, but I would write to a natural stopping point in the action, and I did, and it was nine and a half handwritten pages, and I was happy.

---

This morning I saw this article about the most common regrets of the dying, and once again, happiness as a choice came up. 

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

I ended up staying up later than I meant to. I'm trying not to get mad at myself for not being perfect -- not eating perfectly, not drinking perfectly, not going to bed on time perfectly, not having my house cleaned perfectly or my yard mowed perfectly. I've found I can't be interesting and perfect at the same time, because doing all those things I just mentioned perfectly takes a tremendous amount of planning and effort. If today were my last day, I wouldn't regret having eaten a peanut butter-slathered bagel for breakfast (which I did), but I would regret it if I didn't write last night. It's the one thing I did all day that was all mine, just for me, and creating something original does, in fact, make me happy.

After I attended RT Booklovers, I came home and plotted out my scenes and updated my long synopsis of the new adult novel I'm working on now. (I've decided it's new adult, not young adult, because the story works better that way. Though I would like to write another YA novel. Really like writing teenagers -- it's such an exciting and also terrifying and also boring time of your life, all at once and every day.

Then I completely stalled out as we started spending every night ripping apart our kitchen and foyer and then slowly rebuilding it and holy hell we're not done yet because the last cabinet is STILL not installed which means the pantry can't be attached to the wall, which means every bit of nonrefrigerated food I own is on the kitchen table and floor. And because I can't control that situation, I turned my frenzied eyes back to a project I can move forward: THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES.

The beginning is so hard. I don't really know Meg well enough yet. I'm getting there, slowly, but most of what I'm writing right now will probably end up chucked and I'm just writing it to get to know Meg and for no other reason. I like the plot so far, which is funny because the plot was the hardest part of THE OBVIOUS GAME. Of course, I didn't really think about the plot in advance for TOG the way I am PARKER CLEAVES. I probably should've done that, but what did I know about writing novels? 

So now I've got a scene list that I like and it's much easier to sit down after my daughter goes to bed and tell myself to just start a scene or add to a scene that's started or just puke out a thousand words somehow and then you can watch TV. I've been doing that and I'm up to about twenty thousand vomit words. This way of thinking makes the process much easier because I have absolutely no delusions about this rough draft being good. No, it's vomit with maybe a few decent sentences sprinkled in there so I don't set my Mac on fire in the end.

The other thing that's different this time around is the pressure I'm putting on myself to move forward. I do want a career as a novelist. I want to write a bunch of books. It seems more likely that I'll get anywhere if I have more than one book. But the first novel is done, I proved to myself I could do it, and that temporarily has muted a huge voice in my head. (There's another one in there pointing to my book sales, but I just shush it by saying DISCOVERABILITY, ASSHOLE, and that works for as long as it takes me to fall asleep at night.)

I haven't added anything to my PARKER CLEAVES pinboard in a while, so I added something today. I'll be adding to the board as I write, for my amusement and anyone else's. I also have a pinboard for THE OBVIOUS GAME.

ONWARD!

When we moved to Chateau Travolta in 2008, the housing market was on the verge of tanking. Then it tanked, and the For Sale signs started popping up like dandelions. Some of those houses took years to sell, which made me realize just how stupid it was to take on two mortgages at once when we sold This Old House to move here.

This week there are ladders all over my neighborhood, as the houses built in 1978 have begun to show their age. Shingles pushed well beyond their limits topple from  roofs. The boards on the sides of houses are torn away and replaced. The aluminium ladders sparkle in the May sunshine. 

As I jogged past a pile of boards pocked with bent nails, I started thinking about the kitchen remodel I've not blogged about. It's not that I'm not proud of it -- I am -- it's so pretty -- but I really only feel comfortable blogging home improvements we did with our own little hands, and though the demolition was difficult and Beloved has been moonlighting as a drywall installer, a plumber and an electrician for the past two months while I just took a crowbar and pried off floor tiles and anything else that pissed me off, for some reason, I just didn't want to blog about it because there were so many parts we paid someone else to do, and then for some reason that feels braggy in a way "look at the pocket door Beloved installed" doesn't. This may be justified only in my head. Or worrying about bragging in a Pinterest world may be ridiculous. Or I may be a huge hypocrite because I brag about my writing here (or at least that's what the About Me page feels like, but dude, I'm a professional writer, not a professional kitchen person). I'm conflicted, clearly.

Anyway, I was thinking about all that stuff while jogging by these piles of wood in my neighborhood and feeling so happy my neighbors were fixing up their houses instead of selling them. And feeling happy they had both the money and the desire to maintain their houses so they don't fall apart. And feeling happy and proud that we are taking care of Chateau Travolta and will leave it a better place than we found it. I wrote on BlogHer earlier this week about not toppling your blocks, and ever since then I've been really focused on how important it is to pay attention to your mind and body and environment and address problems right away, before they metastasize into something more. 

Maybe it came from growing up in a house my father built perched on the edge of land my family farmed. I like taking root, propping up and staying on. I'm glad my neighbors do, too. There is beauty in that. 

It's Children's Book Week! Yay!

And to celebrate, I'm giving away a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME and joining a bunch of other great authors and bloggers on a blog hop. (Although teens aren't really "children," YA falls in this category.)

In order to enter to win, please fill out the form below. Also! If you want to read THE OBVIOUS GAME but don't have a book budget, don't forget to ask your library to order it. Or if you just want to be nice, ask your library to order it. I'm not afraid to beg you to ask your library to order it. All you have to do is go up to the librarian (check to make sure the library doesn't already have it, of course), and ask them to order it! Aren't libraries fantastic? Don't forget high school libraries! And then, once you asked your library to order it, email me at ritajarens(at)gmail.com and I'll send you a signed book plate for your troubles.

Last week, I attended the RT Booklover's conference in Kansas City. I wasn't sure what to expect, as it's primarily a conference for romance novelists, and I quit Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star, because there was too much sex. I'm not much of a romance reader. But, wow, there are a lot of romance readers, and they read a lot of books, so all hail anyone who's supporting authors, right?

This guy? Is a romance novel cover model (Band Name of the Day) and Mr. RT 2009, or so he reported when I insisted he flex while hugging fellow author Jen from People I'd Like to Punch in the Throat. At the welcome party, I noticed a bunch of very fit-looking men walking around with tshirts that said Men of Romance. I asked around only to find a) people like Fabio really exist and b) they are super into being cover models. And some of them are actually 6'3" Adonis-types in real life, too. CRAZY! I always thought, I guess, that those people were drawings.

Examples of cover models. Never wearing shirts. Never, never, never wearing shirts.

At Club RT, a venue in which authors were supposed to sit so readers could find them (I never did see one reader and would not recommend participating -- I sat with plenty of better-known-and-actual-correct-genre authors and they didn't get many readers, either), I met new adult author Lynne Tolles, who packed her own blood in werewolf, vampire, zombie and demon varieties. She was really nice despite having so much blood on her person. I brought bookplates. Que horor.

For some reason, the "A" authors were separated from the rest of the expo by a chasm of shiny cement. It is not at all intimidating to be sitting around with 299 other authors hoping someone will buy your book. Despite having a sad teenager book in a swath of steamy cowboy and werewolf romance novels, I did manage to sell a few -- and I AM DAMN PROUD.

The next day found me at a hotel in the Plaza sitting next to the author of steamy Navy SEALS romance novels. Her son, as she told me, is a Navy SEAL. She also told others. Nobody but me seemed to find that connection disturbing. Very nice lady, though.

When not awkwardly avoiding beefy cover models with waist-length blond hair or watching E.L. James pop out of the woodwork and deny ever self-publishing in the new adult panel (true story -- I was there), I attended most panels in the young adult and new adult tracks, and they were excellent. I met authors whose books I'd read and whose books I'm eager to read and got so much excellent advice about marketing and the writing process and keeping my head up that it made the experience worth it.

But it was still cuh-razy.