Summer's End

We had lofty plans for the summer. Okay, not lofty. But we had plans. Most of which didn't ever make it out of the planning stage. They didn't include me selling my first novel (The Art of Adapting) to a real, bonafide publisher just as the school year was winding to an end, so some things turned out a billion times better than planned. They also didn't include my daughter needing 8 stitches in her knee and weeks of healing time, and having to cancel several activities as a result. But here's what we did do this summer:

We went to the horse races, and during the intermission, they held wiener dog races, which are just as hysterical as they sound. Some of those dogs really book it on those short legs. Some run in the complete wrong direction. Some get taken out by huge, unexplained dog piles mid-track. The girls loved it. My youngest, who is on a mission to pet every dog in the universe, got several of them crossed off her list that day.

We took a couple of family trips with my mother, sister, and niece. Somehow we have all ended up single at the same time, with only daughters. We are an all-girl family. Which means lots of fun girl-time when we're all together, wherever we are. And you just can't have too much girl time. My daughters call their cousin their "sister-cousin" which shows how close they are. Just watching the three youngsters play together, at 4, 6, and 8 years old, is a joy like nothing else.

We went to the library, a local amusement park, to swimming pools, and had play dates. The usual stuff, and nothing special, except that I was with my daughters, watching them get taller and stronger and less shy about walking up to the girl behind the counter at the frozen yogurt place and asking for a cup of water all by themselves. Small milestones, but milestones just the same.

I wrote. Not as much as I would've liked, because there were these kids around so much, but when your work day consists of jotting down notes for the chapter you don't have time to write, surrounded on both ends by cuddles with your children, telling them stories, watching them do cartwheels and handstands, making homemade snow cones, and taking endless photos of them being their adorable selves, you have a pretty good life.

And that's the difference for me this summer, compared to last. Yes, the book deal helped immensely. Knowing that The Art of Adapting was going to be in print next July took a lot of pressure off me. Knowing that I had an income on the way in the tail-end of my divorce also relieved a lot of stress. Last summer I was still scraping by while chasing the dream, and felt frustrated when I wasn't making any progress. This summer I wanted time to slow down. I want this moment, the butterflies every time I wake up and remember that my novel is actually getting published, to last as long as possible. I want to relish every moment with my girls, because I can see how fast they are growing up. My eight-year-old is already so tall she barely fits in my lap. Which means I need to get those lap times in as often as I can.

My girls know that The Art of Adapting is getting published. They know that it was inspired by their Uncle Michael, who they will never meet, who had Asperger's. They had lots of questions about Asperger's, and about the other characters in the book. My six-year-old had me summarize the entire novel for her, and after three days of recounting it for her, she told me it sounded good to her. But my girls weren't clear on what getting "published" meant. They wanted to know the difference between my agent, my publisher, and my editor. They wanted to know how books are made. How they get to the bookstore. Who decides how much they cost. Who designs the covers and makes the paper and where the ink comes from. They have more questions than I have answers, but it makes this whole journey more fun and meaningful to have them to share it with, to discover the answers with them.

Originally I wanted to put them in summer camp somewhere so I could have a lot more writing time. Another summer plan that didn't work out, for financial reasons, and I'm grateful for that. My writing time will come. Time with my girls is fleeting.

The school grind kicks off next week for us. Back to lunch prep, stirring cranky girls from bed, brushing their hair while they eat breakfast, and rushing off to school always a few minutes later than we meant to get out the door. Back to homework and school projects that end up being more work for the parent than they are for the child. Back to the weekly "your child has been exposed to lice/strep throat/pink eye" notices. Back to the field trips that I always volunteer for then wonder what I was thinking. And back to writing, all day while they are at school. I have two new novel ideas battling it out in my brain, and my editor and I are going to be working on final revisions for The Art of Adapting. I have plenty of work to do, the kind of work that I love so much that it can't really be called work, and the time to do it. And I'll love every minute of it. And I'll also miss the lazy summer days, sitting on the front steps while the girls draw chalk mermaids on the driveway or put on fashion shows that morph into gymnastics performances for me. I'm ready for summer to be over, and I'm not. Which is exactly how it should feel at summer's end.

Dream-Chasers

This whole crazy journey I'm on started when I was about my daughter's age, and had no idea I was even on a journey. I wrote my first short story when I was 8 or 9, and never looked back. I wrote from then on, without even thinking about why. At first I just wrote stories for my sister and step-sister, made them characters in adventures, because while they were hogging the Atari controls, I had nothing better to do. They were experts at Pong and Combat, and I was figuring out the art of storytelling. It was no big deal. Except that it got into my bones somehow, the need to write, to make up stories, to move people with words. By high school I knew that I wanted to be a writer, without having any idea what that meant. Did writing even count as a job? I had plenty of naysayers to inform me that, no, it did not. Writing was a skill all adults needed. It was a fine hobby. It didn't count as a career. But one thing about me: I'm ridiculously stubborn. I mean, most of the time I'm easy-going. I don't care where we go for dinner or what movie you want to see. I'm flexible on that stuff. But when someone tells me I can't do something that I really want to do, that easy-going nature disappears. Give me something to prove or disprove, and you get a whole different girl.

So I went to college and got a degree in creative writing. I loved my program, my professors, my fellow aspiring-writer students. I loved everything except the way everyone kept saying "Yes, but what will you do for a living? A writing degree won't get you a job." So I got stubborn about that, too, and only applied for writing-related jobs. And got one. I started out as an assistant editor just after graduating college. By the time I decided to go to grad school to earn yet another writing degree I was an editor. By the time I finished my master's degree, I was a senior editor. A senior editor with an MFA in creative writing and a head full of epic dreams of publishing novels. But no idea how to make that dream come true.

I started with short stories. I wrote one after another until I felt like they weren't grappling with me for ultimate control anymore. I started sending them out, and got some award recognition, and then I started getting published. I crafted and recrafted them until I'd published almost all of them. I tried my hand at novels, fighting the unyielding beast until I'd figured out the form, the arc, the pacing, the character development, the heart. The first novel I ever dared show the world was a semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I figured I was on the right track. But as I sent that book out to literary agents, I knew something about it wasn't right yet. I started a new novel, with a better understanding of what worked and what didn't. I finished it in a few months, quickly revised it with the help of awesome beta readers, and sent it out to a handful of literary agents. And one of them loved it. A huge agent. One of the big dogs.

So here I am. We're in the revision stage now, where my agent, the amazing Harvey Klinger, sends me challenges for each section of the novel, to make it stronger, deeper, more compelling. He is helping me find the heart of this story, and he is an amazing mentor. I wake up in the middle of the night so excited to wake up and write that I can't go back to sleep. I get up each morning so thrilled with my life that it's ridiculous.

And then I get my girls up, make their breakfast and school lunches, drive them to school, volunteer in their classes, all before getting to tackle those pages that have been calling to me since the moment I woke up. And that is perfect. Because being a writer is my passion, no doubt. But being a mother is just as important. And my joy at being this close to seeing my lifelong dream come true is twice as meaningful because of my daughters. I want them to see this happen for me. I want them to remember back when I got my first story published and we celebrated with sparking cider and cookies. I want them to remember the early versions of my short stories that I read aloud as I worked out the kinks. I want them to remember a mom who had a ridiculously huge dream, the kind that is so big that it shouldn't be possible, and I want them to remember the moment when it came true. I want them to dream their own big, huge, ridiculously impossible dreams, and to know in their bones that with passion, persistence, discipline, and focus they can have it, whatever it is. I want them to be unaffected by naysayers, because they know better. I want this dream for myself, as I have always wanted it. But I want it even more for my daughters.

Daddy's Girls

So, as you know, my girls have a daddy who travels fairly often for work. He works in as much father-daughter bonding time as he can during his time at home, but it can be tough, with household chores, bills to pay, other friends and family to catch up with, to get as caught up with the munchkins as I’m sure he’d like to be before heading back out of town.

This weekend he is in town, and we took the girls over to the local airport, where a touring company of World War II bombers visits every year. The girls have always had a fascination with airplanes, and getting to walk through these aging green giants: a B-17, B-24, and P-51, fills them with a ridiculous amount of joy. The fact that it’s at the small airport down the road, where they can watch small planes and helicopters take off and land during our tour, is also a big plus.

It was a great father-daughter bonding experience, as he’s a tad more excited by the whole war plane thing than I am, and can answer their endless questions about what this is and what that does all over the planes.

We returned home, got two happy and tired girls ready for their afternoon nap, and the two-year-old got a hold of her dad’s sweatshirt, and insisted on taking it to bed with her. She usually has me lay her favorite blankie on my shoulder, then lays her head on the blankie, while we sing a few songs before I lay her down. Today, she wanted the sweatshirt instead of the blankie. After putting her down, I tried to take it back, but she hugged it to her chest and said she wanted to sleep with it. I was a little worried about the zipper scratching her in her sleep, and asked why she wanted it. “Because it smells like Daddy,” she said. And so she fell asleep, hugging not her favorite stuffed animal, but her dad’s favorite sweatshirt, while downstairs, her dad was busy uploading the photos from the day, proudly showing the great shots he’d taken of the kids. I’m grateful for moments like these, when the amount of time spent apart doesn’t seem nearly as relevant as the amount of love shared between this traveling dad and these busy little girls.