Is it too much to ask for there to be jobs for people? I'm picturing a drone attempting to navigate to my house via GPS, only the maps haven't been updated and it's raining and there's a sunspot, and my beautiful books get left on a rock in the middle of the creek a hundred yards to the right where they are eaten by squirrels.
It could totally happen.
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.
Domestic Why Do I Bother #6,000
I have cream-colored carpet. It's really squishy and feels good under your feet. We knew we were taking a risk when we moved here in 2007 and installed light-colored carpeting with small children around, but we thought, you know, maybe it would be different for us. Kind of like how I thought we'd only have educational, wooden toys and watch less than an hour of Nickelodeon every day.
And I know, you're all wondering why we didn't just put hardwood in the living room instead. We put it in the library when we pulled out that awful carpet (and the one time I begged to use the nail gun is the one obvious screw-up in the wood, another Domestic Why Do I Bother). Hardwood is all the rage, you don't have to vacuum, you don't get stains. Yeah, I know, I know. But I've lived with hardwood throughout twice and there are other issues. It gets scratched. Stuff gets embedded between the boards. It needs to be swept almost daily. It fingerprints (and toeprints). Hardwood is not magic, though after this latest cleaning fiasco, I'm ready to rip out the living room carpet and lay pebbles if need be the minute someone hands me $12,000.
I digress. So our cream-colored carpet has suffered eight years of high traffic, children thundering in and out from the deck door no matter how many times I implore them to use the garage door, stay off the carpet, take off your shoes, for the love of all that is holy. Most of it looks okay after I steam it, but there are certain spots on the landing of the stairs, right next to the couch and on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room that have developed a grayish tinge that isn't quite a stain but more the carpet giving up on trying anymore. Steaming doesn't help. The Little Green Machine doesn't help. Woolite doesn't help.
In my desperation, I consulted Jillee and found this post on using vinegar and baking soda to clean your carpet. Last Sunday while everyone else was outside, I tried it. At the very least, it was super satisfying to listen to the whole thing sizzle. I dried everything as well as I could and went on with my life.
Only, it didn't really dry. That was Sunday. Now it's Tuesday. And it's still wet.
Not only is it still wet, my daughter keeps walking through it then walking all over the tile that I mopped to a high shine also on Sunday. I can see her little toeprints glinting in the sunlight. Twice I've scrubbed them off the floor, and twice they've reappeared on her next pass through the house.
I tried appealing to my husband, who thinks putting vinegar on the carpet is up in the top five of stupid things I have ever done. He just shook his head. "This one's on you," he said. "It smells like salad in here."
So now my carpet is less stained but I have little sticky toeprints all over my tile until this fucking vinegar dries.
Why, again, do I bother?
{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.
Today I'm writing at SheKnows.com!
4 hours ago
Image: Rita Arens
Dear James, I can't and won't pretend to understand what it's like to raise a black son ever, let alone in our current 2015.
I'm not sure I can tell you what to tell your son. You're a strong, capable father, and I have faith you will guide him in the best way possible.
Here's what I know: I was once a white person raised almost solely among white people. This became problematic because even though my family and friends didn't talk about other races, their body language suggested that the other was different — perhaps to be feared. Since I grew up in a town of 5,000 people who were 99 percent white, I didn't have to think about race much until I went out into the world.
It might be important to say that many, many white people can live their whole lives without interacting with anyone but white people. There are enough pockets of the country that are mostly white for this to be true.
Read the rest at SheKnows.
At the beginning of the school year, I instituted Library Tuesdays. On Library Tuesdays, I and anyone in my family who wants to (or needs to) come with me heads out to the public library with novel-in-progress or homework or book in tow. I get there, I set the timer on my phone for an hour (longer would be nice, but I have to be realistic about how late I can push dinner since this is after my full-time job), I put on my headphones and I work on whichever novel I'm focusing on at the time.
This is my latest iteration of Project Find Time to Write. Last year, my husband traveled so much I tried instituting Saturday blocks of time for myself, even going so far as to put them on both my and his calendars, but life didn't cooperate. There were always family plans or birthday parties or something that cut into my writing time until I was never getting anything done and feeling more and more lethargic about fiction and guilty about not writing.
The year before that, I tried to have Tuesdays after dinner be my writing time, with my husband taking over bedtime duties for our girl, but then sometimes he had a late meeting and sometimes we ate late and sometimes I couldn't bring myself to sit at the same desk where I spend ten hours a day at my day job and write more.
The year before that, my daughter was still in ballet and I used the hour and a half of her classes twice a week to write, and that was kind of nirvana for writing me, but it was awful for parent me because she ended up hating ballet so much she cried every time we made her go. (Still, writing me was pretty sad to have that custom-carved two blocks of time a week dance away on little abandoned ballet slippers.)
In the eleven years since I became a working parent, I've tried so many things in the name of finding time to write. I've booked meetings with myself in abandoned conference rooms over my lunch hour. I've holed up in Panera for five or six hours at a time while my husband and daughter hit a state fair or lone trip to visit his family. I've written on six-hour roadtrips, headphones planted in my ears while my husband listened to sports radio and my daughter napped or watched a portable DVD player as she got older.
One thing that has never grown easier: finding the time to write. The location changes, but the struggle lives on.
After more than a decade of living this struggle, I've realized finding the time comes down to making necessary changes in two areas: location and methodology.
One: I can't find time to write fiction at home. Some may find this unusual since I work my fulltime job as managing editor of BlogHer at home, but normally during my workday the only folks home are my cat and occasionally my husband, but he is also working and thus not trying to distract me. However, if I try to write on a weekend or weeknight, there is a child who would like my attention, please, but there are also a zillion other chores and events that must be squeezed into nights and weekends in order to keep the house from dissolving under a pile of trash or my child from walking around with her toes sticking out the ends of her too-small shoes.
Two: I can't actually write fiction on a computer anymore. I used to be able to pull out a laptop in the car or what have you, but I just don't have it in me now. After almost twenty years spent sitting at a computer for the bulk of my workweek days, the last thing I want to look at in my copious free time is another damn screen. So, I don't draft on the computer anymore. I type up what I've written after the fact, but I don't compose with a cursor these days.
My current way of separating out Library Tuesdays and my novel writing from the day job is to write longhand in a notebook preferably at the library but at the very least somewhere that is not my house where I am not surrounded by my family.
I've temporarily abandoned my third novel-in-progress to go back to THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, which I realized isn't done yet after seeing a pattern in query rejections and getting some insight from a novelist friend.
A few Library Tuesdays ago, I emailed the manuscript to my Kindle and went through the whole thing making notes, highlighting parts to cut and figuring out what sucked. Then I compared the Word document against my Kindle and cut 7,000 words and made a bunch of notes. Then I printed out the manuscript. And now I haul the printed manuscript plus my notebook and headphones to the library, pick a section I've marked to rewrite, elaborate upon or grow a new head, and write longhand for one hour.
When I first started doing this, it was hard to get to an hour. It felt like a chore. I questioned whether to abandon PARKER CLEAVES altogether. It wasn't until after I made those deep cuts that it started getting fun again and I was surprised when my alarm when off.
The hard part about writing novels on top of a day job (though I'm sure it's hard on top of any sort of life) comes, for me, in finding the pay-off. At first I thought the pay-off would be financial or in reputation. Then when neither of my first two books blew the roof off the publishing world, I thought the pay-off would be social, in that it would be give me something to talk about. Then I realized when I'm in the thick of it, I don't want to talk about what I'm working on at all. Finally, I realized the pay-off comes at the end of Library Tuesday, when I pack up my stuff and count up the new pages and realize that I am four baby steps closer to another finished, published novel.
It comes when I sit down to type what I wrote and think maybe it's a little better than what I cut.
It comes from looking at the stack of paper I just printed and thinking that even though it might be done yet, I did that, and I am doing that, and I'm doing that even though it's not my job to do it, and it's not my public's voracious appetite for my next work to do it.
I'm just doing it because like it.
Remembering you're doing something because you like it makes it easier to prioritize.
See you at the library next Tuesday.
"So it's not your fault?" she asked.
"No. Not really."
"So it's Daddy's?"
"No."
"Your work?"
"No. Work is work."
"So whose fault is it?"
"Well, sometimes it's nobody's fault. Things just don't work out."
"Oh."
"It's harder when there's no one to blame, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
I finally started the newsletter I've been thinking about in my head since I sold THE OBVIOUS GAME. You can sign up for it in my left sidebar. It will only come out once a month.
I do not like to sign up for anything I haven't seen already, so here is this month's issue. I don't plan to deviate wildly from this format. I hope you subscribe!
(I've found I can't copy and paste because it's a table or some such nonsense, so here is the format.)
That's it!
So tonight I was wearing a shirt like this. (I love you, Raygun. Keep it klassy.)
So then we tried to explain Prince to my daughter.
(Cannot be pronounced. Screw you and the contract you rode in on, Warner Bros.)
Then we tried to introduce her to the greatest Prince song of all time, Seven.
Then we tried to explain the '80s phenomenon of Purple Rain.
Then we found THIS.
(hang in until the one minute mark)
And that concludes this evening's lesson on being awesome. Congratulations, Eva. Goodnight, children.
