Since I last posted, I've had a lot of tumultuous change. Suffice it to say my car was totaled, among other things. I'm fine, though, and will continue to be fine, because I'm the protagonist in my own story, and protagonists with no obstacles are boring and nobody likes them. I'm so not boring this month!

Here's one of the reasons! I was chosen as the Missouri chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI)'s September featured author. This is a huge deal for me, as I love everything SCBWI does and so appreciate their efforts to provide education, networking and exposure for their members.

Here's an excerpt of the interview:

Where and when do you write?

There are two bits to writing – the actual writing and the thinking about the writing. When I’m really stuck somewhere in the physical writing, it becomes difficult for me not to think about it incessantly.

I do my actual writing in my local library one night a week after my day job. I usually bring my daughter along so she can do her homework while I write. I’ve tried writing late at night, in the early morning, on road trips, in cafes on Saturday afternoons, and I can’t focus unless I’m in the library and still relatively fresh mentally. This means I don’t get very far very fast, but thinking about writing a lot when I’m not actually in the library helps me to be very ready when the opportunity finally arises.

To read the rest, go to Missouri's chapter page.

Another reason! I'll be speaking at KidLitCon in Wichita, Kansas, in October. And I'm bringing my daughter to a conference for the first time. Moments. Come and see me if you're in the area -- I've seen the tentative schedule and it's fabulous.

Onward.

"Mama," she said, "eventually I suppose I'll have to get SnapChat and Instagram because it would be weird if I didn't have it. But I'm waiting, because I'm afraid I'll get caught up in it."

I looked guiltily at my phone.

"You're wise," I said, wishing I were as smart as she is at twelve. "There's a lot of danger in caring too much whether strangers like you."

Recently someone from Quotes Rain contacted me so I set up a profile. It has a tool that makes creating quotes more top-of-mind. (There are lots of ways to put text on pictures, and I know a lot of them, but it's reminding myself to do such things that is the kicker.)

Anyway, I created two quotes. I will probably keep updating these from time to time, but if you have a favorite quote and would like your name mentioned in the quoteboard (submitted by, etc.), please leave info in the comments! 

I leave tomorrow for New York for Spine Out. So nervous!

Last week I met with my trusted reader, my former thesis advisor, or the guy who I can hear say, "I liked parts of it" without wanting to kill him, about PARKER CLEAVES.

The nice thing about having a good reader is you have someone to draw out of you what you were trying to say (and failing to say) in the first place.

Sometimes I feel like it's pointless to try to write novels with a full-time job and a family, but really, it's the same task whether there are other things in your life or not.

At this juncture, I only really write once a week for an hourish on this novel. I write for work, I'm writing NOW, for God's sake, but that's different. This doesn't even make sense and I'm typing it on an obsolete app that for some reason is still on my phone.

However, I pointed out to my reader and to myself, I think about my books all the time.

Tonight I tried something new. I wrote out the 5-6 problems we identified. I numbered them. I picked (my energy being low) what I thought would be easiest to attack and started going through the ms dribbling sentences here and there like melted popsicles with the corresponding number. (Aided by visuals -- it was an already marked-up draft, so I had to highlight the dribble sentences literally in pink.)

I wrote until the iPhone duck quacked that the little angel's riding lesson was over and it was time to regroup at home for dinner.

I think I wrote maybe 300 words tonight. I'm sure this lame post is at least as long as what I wrote.

This is how it goes sometimes. You fight for the feedback, then you fight for the writing time, then the goddamn duck quacks and you're only organizationally closer to a finished novel.

But I still try. There's that.

Back in the lab again.

What an amazing thing! If you're in New York and want to come, here's an evite for you. Feel free to forward, invite, spread the news. I'd love to see you.

 

I spent the winter full of Library Tuesdays working on revising my second novel, THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, after realizing I hated it and it wasn't ready for query AT ALL. I ended up doing the usual cutting of 10,000 words and rearranged whole sections and considered dumping the entire thing because ohmygodIsuckatnovels.

It's a little short right now, but I'm at that point where I don't know what it needs to edge it into recommended length. And then there's that part of me that wonders why those rules even apply when so many people read books digitally and word count was probably made up by someone more looking for the sweet spot in printing costs rather than pondering how many words it takes to tell a good story. Then my mind goes into an existential crisis about the relevance of anyone's words long-term and it's time for a snack.

Last weekend while we were driving home from my MIL's house in Cedar Rapids, I elected to sit in the back seat, determined to make the final pass through my printed-out manuscript before I hand it off to a trusted reader. I didn't know what I'd find. Before I printed it, I moved so many sections around I wasn't sure if I'd need to write more connective tissue or what. It surprised me that so many scenes that I mushed together out of three or four little orphaned pieces chapters apart made any sense at all. Obviously I kept thinking she should really talk to her dad again more than once but didn't write enough in any one place to have a scene. This writing thing is stupid hard.

I've spent the past three years working on this novel. There are parts I really like, and then I'm certain if I read it in two weeks I'll actually hate it. I think right now there are maybe five good sentences in the whole damn thing. Tonight I'm going to the library to make the final corrections from the backseat and move a few more sections around, then I should let it steep for a few weeks before I read it again.

I don't know if I can bear to read it again.

But I don't trust myself to be even remotely right about anything when it comes to my writing these days. My daughter asked me if I liked revising, most likely catching a glimpse of my anguished expression in the rearview mirror. It's hard to explain. Do I like running, even when it hurts? Do I prefer to have run but hate the process? Writing is kind of like running.

I love it, I hate it, I'm ambivalent about it. Which means it's probably getting close to being done or thrown out.

We moved to this house over Memorial Day in 2007. He looked at the tree. I looked at the lake. We both looked at the deck, and it was good. And we looked at the rest of the four-bedroom bank foreclosure not updated since 1977, and it was bad, but not awful.

We both imagined how things might be. I imagined where the Christmas tree might go inside, and he envisioned hanging lights on the tree outside, the one taller than the house.

The first time he tried it, he used a pole with PVC pipe and a coat hanger duct-taped to it. His contraption refined a bit and eventually I convinced him to just leave the damn things in the tree all year, why risk your neck?

And he persists. He tapes the strings together, he checks the strands. I sigh and shake my head. But when I meet a new neighbor and they ask which house is mine, if they've been here at least one winter, I say the house with the outdoor Christmas tree.

It's hard to miss.

Today we launched #BlogHerWritingLab on BlogHer.com. Every month has a theme and a set of writing prompts. You can join us on Twitter with #BlogHerWritingLab or join our Facebook group. December's theme is tradition.

What end-of-the-year tradition do I look forward to?

I hate the cold. I'm not fond of the dark. I've never understood people who like their sunlight blue. My least favorite time of year is high school wrestling season, when I would stand in the cafeteria after cheerleading practice and the sky through the atrium windows was black before five in the afternoon.

Black in the morning on the way to school, black in the car as I drove home. Chapped palms and dry lips that itched against my sweater as I pulled it off, my hair floating up around my eyelashes and a shock greeting me when I touched the door handle to go to my room for bed.

Somewhere in there, I found candles.

These days I use the LED variety most places in the house because my sister lost everything in a house fire in college and I've always been terrified of big fires in the fields when my uncles burned the terraces, but now I have a brick fireplace with a metal grate, and behind that grate in the place where a fire will live once we can afford to fix the chimney or the gas line, I burn real candles almost every night once the time has changed and the darkness creeps across the sill earlier every day.

Candle flames dance in such a fearless way we use them to symbolize strength and faith and endurance, in religious ceremonies and vigils and at funerals and baptisms and weddings. We use them to symbolize barely contained power that both sustains life and takes it away.

I'm closest to my anxiety in the cold and dark months, and so I light candles until the sun returns to take their place.

{Editor's note: Of course this is about me. This whole blog is about me.}

It started with texts. She held off for a long time, preferring not to pay, preferring email and keyboards, so much easier, especially since she typed more than 80 words per minute, maybe more. (Who knows? It had been over 15 years since her last typing test.) She typed so fast she could drip clauses into sentences the way chefs drizzled cherry sauce over cheesecake.

Texts were, by nature, short. Disturbingly short. Leaving off the niceties of language. She did not approve.

Then came text language. Even when she had to painstakingly punch numbers on her phone's keypad three or four times each to use capital letters and punctuation when the rest of the world referred to her as "U," she still composed complete sentences on principle.

And she noticed something happening. Her insistence on punctuation grew increasingly desperate, as if were she not to end a salutation in an exclamation point the recipient might not read her missive. Everything! Became! Exciting! Or enthusiastic? She didn't know. She just stopped using periods.

She cried the night Facebook stickers appeared, although she embraced emojis with her sister and daughter because they became another form of family language, where chickens meant things are good and cats whistling whispered the mood in the room had turned awkward. She could only accept the substitution of pictures for words if there wasn't a word that meant quite that thing. For everything else? Enthusiastic punctuation.

She didn't even notice she was doing it until she reread a work email to find only one period in a paragraph of six sentences. A paragraph about email newsletters. The email newsletters were not putting out forest fires or rescuing babies. They were just showing up innocuously in people's inboxes, saying hey. Surely there was no need for that much exclamation in such an email?

That was the day she stared at her correspondence, at the mix of frantic punctuation and pixelated turtles that would've been borderline crazy talk in 1999 and threw up her hands. Then she began rereading every email to make sure she was using periods. Because really, she ruminated, most of work talk only requires periods. Unless one is a brain surgeon, but even then, she thought, one might become desensitized to the idea of cutting open skulls and removing things found inside.

As she consciously worked to edit out the unnecessary enthusiasm, she found herself channeling her thesis adviser, whose complete lack of enthusiasm for most things revealed itself to be an extremely dry sense of humor, and she appreciated getting her own jokes. Playing this game with herself was almost as much fun as unsubscribing from PR firms' media lists, and she rode the inside joke with every comma as she attempted to rid her writing of so much unnecessary hype.