Storytellers

Every night when I put my girls to bed, each one gets 10 minutes of uninterrupted, sister-free cuddle time with me to do with as they please. My 8-year-old likes to spend her 10 minutes telling me about her day as she sketches her endless fashion lines. At 8 years old she has more fashion sense and style than I ever will. I've made peace with that. And I'm ridiculously impressed with her skills. She can craft an entire seasonal wardrobe in about ten minutes, from clothes to shoes to accessories. I have no idea where this innate sense of style comes from, but I'm glad one of us has it.

My 6-year-old, insatiable reader that she is, wants a story during cuddle time every night. She's read every book in the house a dozen times, so she wants something original. My task is to tell her a new story every night, developed on the spot, to fit within the 10-minute time-frame. I can get behind that. This child was made for me. I mean, of course she was...I made her. But you know what I mean. The 8-year-old is my physical mini-me. We have the same face. But my 6-year-old is my secret mini-me. She's me on the inside. Only better.

I come into her room at night and find her flipping through books, scouring the wall-stickers decorating her room, the toys strewn about the floor. She quickly picks a few objects/characters, say: this sticker of an apple, this lion puppet, and this Rapunzel book. She steers me onto her bed, climbs in next to me, hugs her pillow, and says: "Okay. Go!"

And in ten minutes I weave a quick tale about a very hungry lion who wants the last apple from the top of a tall tree, and how Rapunzel shows up in the nick of time, using her long hair to hoist herself up and fetch the apple, saving the starving lion and making a lifelong friend. The end. And then I get graded. My little listener will tap her rosebud lips, look up at the ceiling with her big blue eyes. "Good, but I think it needs a better ending. With a witch." So I tack on a new twist that just when the lion and Rapunzel thought they were home free an evil witch appears to tell them it's her apple tree and she will now be keeping them prisoner for stealing her apple. On the way deeper and deeper into the dungeon, which is full of magical creatures the witch has trapped over the years, Rapunzel uses her hair to tie up the witch. The lion frees the unicorn, pegasus, leprechaun, mermaid, and fairy that have been held prisoner. Together they lock the witch in her own jail. When they flee the witch's haunted house, on their way through the barren orchards, the apple trees bloom and fill with apples. Magic returns to the land, and the lion will never be hungry again.

"Better," my critic tells me. When I get a really good one she'll launch across the bed and hug me. "Best story ever!" she'll yell in my ear. Those are the best cuddle times.

I've been through the wringer of grad school writing workshops, so I have a thick skin. I've been an editor for 17 years. I am not thrown by criticism. And yet pleasing this little girl with my tales matters in a way that nothing else has. I spend all day writing, either on the page or making endless notes in my mind for the next time I'm in front of my computer. I eat, drink, sleep, breathe writing. But none of that has prepared me for the joy I feel at making up a story a day, every day, for my little girl. It's good exercise for my writer-mind, to have to come up with a beginning, middle, and end without any prep time. It's great to get instant feedback in that unfiltered ego-free way that only children have. I love to watch her expression as I make it up, to see which parts get her more interested and which ones get less of a reaction, so I can steer it in the direction that makes her light up the most. But best of all, it's great to see that she gets it: what I love about words and characters and settings and plot twists and humor and dialogue. It's great that she understands inherently about story arc the same way her sister gets clothes-as-art.

I'm also pretty proud of her editing and critique skills. I can tell you from years of experience that she knows what she's talking about. When she gets a little older, ready for more grown-up themes, I have no doubt that she'll be my best beta-reader. In the mean time, if any of you ever need a good, honest critique of a children's story, I've got your girl. She's the little blue-eyed pixie, hugging a pillow and waiting for me to come up with an adventure involving a potato, a dragon, and Snow White.

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.

My Wellness Coach: Frances McDormand

So, one thing about being mid-divorce and, ahem, unemployed, is that money can be tight. Like: no we can't get a pizza tonight, but I can maybe make one with these bagels and pasta sauce tight. That's fine. I'm not a materialistic girl, and my kids aren't either. But while trying to find gainful employment, I have been on the lookout for quick and easy ways to make a buck, trying to resurrect my old freelance editing contacts, that kind of thing. When I came across an offer for a "wellness coach" through my health insurance, I jumped at it. Because it paid $75! The wellness coach would be calling me three times over the course of a couple of months, to help set some sort of health goal that I was sure I'd ignore as soon as I had my money in hand.

On our first appointment-call, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my wellness coach sounded exactly like the actress Frances McDormand a la Fargo. She was full of "you betchas" and "dontcha knows" and quirky midwest charm and she instantly made me feel at ease. So I rattled off my various health challenges (stress, divorce, lack of sleep, lack of money) and listened to her sympathize. She'd divorced when her children were young, and understood completely. Then came the coaching. "Ya know, the most important thing to remember in times of stress is to take care of yourself. Ya got kids. Ya got stress. Ya got endless demands. But if you don't take care of yourself first, you're no good to them." And the weird thing was, my Frances McDormand-sound-alike was exactly right. It was the same message I'd heard from my Reiki Master friend Heather. The same thing my doctor had said. The same thing my 8-year-old told me on occasion. But if the universe was sending me the message yet again, then maybe I still wasn't doing it.

Frances wanted me to do one thing: schedule a half-hour of "me" time every single day. She wanted me to tell my kids about it, so they'd (1) hold me accountable to myself, and (2) so they'd see me not just as mom, but also as a human being with actual human needs. She wanted me to set a reminder/alarm on my phone so I'd never forget. She wanted me to spend my half hour doing something that benefited no one but me. And with Frances' permission, I set my reminder. I had lofty notions of hiking and reading and taking yoga classes and doing things that involved not having children around, but that's just not my life. Due to their dad's travel schedule for work, I have my kids about 90% of the time. Daily alone time is a fairly distant memory. So instead, I settled for listening to half hour meditations in my room while the kids watched a half hour of TV and ate their after school snacks downstairs. A totally unproductive half hour for myself every day? Prescribed by someone my own health insurance sent to me? Such indulgence! Frances was my new favorite wellness coach, therapist, best friend, caller, and benefactor, all rolled into one.

About two weeks into it, my six year old came to me as I was working on my computer one afternoon and said, "Shouldn't you go upstairs and rest now?" Because here's the thing: not only is it a half hour of me time ensconced in my bedroom each day, it's also a half hour of kids-behaving-well-unsupervised time. It's a test for all of us. And somehow, we're passing. That's not to say that I never get a kid walking in during my half-hour meditation-time to ask me to open a stubborn package of snacks or wanting to know where her favorite headband is. I'm a single mom. That's the deal. But the fact that I can say to my girls: "Okay, I'm heading to my room for a half hour," and they give me hugs and settle down to do something quiet until I'm done? That's amazing. And the realization that it might not take them 40 years to realize they get to come first, for at least a half hour each day of their lives? That's the best part. Thank you, Frances.

The Next Big Thing

Many thanks to my amazing poet friend Patricia Caspers for inviting me to share about my work in progress through the blog series The Next Big Thing. Here goes:


What is your working title of your book (or story)?
The current working title is "The Art of Adapting" but I'm betting it'll change.



Where did the idea come from for the book?
My uncle Mike had Asperger's Syndrome, and I always knew I'd write a story about a man based on him. It's evolved into its own story, so at this point it's not my uncle's story at all, but he still gets credit for the inspiration.



What genre does your book fall under?
I'd like to say literature, but since much of it comes from a woman's point of view, it seems likely to get shelved under women's fiction.



Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I have no idea. I have clear visions of my characters and no actors look exactly like them. But if I had to choose, maybe Juliana Margulies and Joaquin Phoenix.



What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Lana, recently separated from her husband and no longer the center of her teenage children's world, takes in her brilliant and eccentric brother with Asperger's Syndrome to help make ends meet.



Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I'm going the agency route.



How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The first draft took 3-4 months. The rewrites are taking much longer!



What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I'd like to say it's comparable to Marisa de los Santos' books, because I adore her, but that may just be wishful thinking.



Who or what inspired you to write this book?
It was actually inspired by a movie I saw about a man with Asperger's Syndrome who seems to magically and inexplicably "recover" in the end, finding a way to adapt to mainstream society without any help whatsoever. As someone who grew up around Asperger's and learned to love my quirky uncle on his own terms, I wanted to portray a more realistic vision of a similarly eccentric, beautiful, strange soul who doesn't need to "recover" because there's nothing wrong with him. He just is who he is, the one constant in a family of ever-changing dynamics, and deserves to be loved and accepted as-is.



What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

It's my first time trying my hand at writing from multiple points of view: 4 characters in all. It's been a fun challenge.

An Unwedding Ceremony

My ex and I have started the formal proceedings to divorce. At this point we’ve been living apart for 20 months, so it’s just paperwork and separating our finances. The emotional stuff was all processed long ago, and after years of struggle together, we’re on better terms apart. He texted me yesterday to tell me how his dog is doing. I bought him a Christmas present last week. We are friendly, with boundaries.

I’ve explained to the kids what’s going on, because I don’t lie to my kids, and they wanted to know where I was going when I left them with a babysitter to head to our first mediation appointment. My 7-year-old confided that she was worried her living arrangement would change again once the divorce was final. I explained that she’d still spend the same amount of time between her dad and me, that her two homes would remain unchanged, that everything would look and feel the same to her. We’ve already worked out the custody schedule. We’re just making it legal now. After all of the explanations, her fears were put to rest. Now she wants to know if either her dad or I ever remarry, will she get to be a flower girl? She’s a romantic at heart. Who loves any excuse to wear a fancy new dress. My 6-year-old hasn’t had any questions, and seems bored by the lengthy discussions on the topic that her sister wants to have.

Tonight we were watching a TV show, and there was a wedding ceremony in it. The girls sat down in front of the TV to oooh and aaah over the pretty dresses and flowers and music as the wedding party marched down the aisle. When it came to the exchange of vows, they both looked at me and asked if all weddings were so boring.

“It’s just a lot of talking,” the 7-year-old said. I told her she was right. But that there is a big party afterward.

After the big ceremony-ending kiss, the 6-year-old perked up. “What happens when you get divorced again?” she asked.

“Paperwork!” her sister told her.

She thought about this for a minute, then said, “I think there should be an unwedding ceremony when you get divorced. Where the woman wears black instead of white, and instead of talking about how much you love each other, you talk about why you don’t want to be together anymore.” We all had a good laugh, expanding on the notion. You could ceremoniously give the rings back. Instead of getting wedding gifts, your friends could even help the two of you divvy up what you already have. And then, of course, you’d all have a big party. 

She’s a funny old soul child, my little 6-year-old cherub. She’s a dreamer, who seems to be off in her own world most of the time, until you find out she was listening the whole time, and understood everything, no matter what code you were speaking in. It's the same way I was as a child, which is probably why I love this little streak of hers, even if it means I never get to have any secrets let alone private conversations. I also feel like when she finally gets inspired to share her insights, she's usually right.

I personally like the idea of an unwedding ceremony. Divorce has such negative connotations, creates so much tension not just between the couple, but around the friends and family they share, everyone wondering what it all means, how it will all turn out, whether they have to choose sides. Maybe it’s a perfect idea: gathering all of our friends and family together, explaining ourselves to them en masse, then letting it all go and celebrating the new phase in our lives with a big party. And I bet my 7-year-old would even get to wear that fancy new dress she’s been dreaming of.

The Wake Up Call

Here’s the thing: we’re all busy. It’s so easy to get into the groove of waking up in the cold and dark of early morning, hitting the ground running, and not stopping until you crash late in the night, way past the time when you said you’d put yourself to bed so that you’d be more rested tomorrow when you do it all over again. I was in that same grind. It wasn’t even a bad place to be, it was just life. And then life took a left turn I didn’t see coming.

It started out innocently enough. A week after my first unremarkable mammogram I got a letter saying they needed some extra scans. No big deal, right? I mean, the same thing happened to my sister, and after the additional scans, all was well. So I went in for my extra images of my right breast with my book in hand and chalked it up to an inconvenience that I was going to make the best of by catching up on some reading. As the tech crammed me into the mammogram machine we joked about our kids, the book I was reading, the coldness of the paddles in the machine. She took two quick pictures and had me dress and head back out to the waiting room. Minutes later I was called back in for another couple of images. The tech had me stay in the gown while the radiologist looked those scans over to make sure she had what she needed. When I was called back in for yet a third round of images, I knew something wasn’t right.

The chit-chat had stopped. The laughing had stopped. The tech took image after image and spoke to me in a calming voice that just made me more nervous. Calcification is normal, she assured me. It was my first mammogram. They were just getting an accurate baseline for my body, to compare to all future mammograms.

After the three rounds of scans I met with a very nice radiologist who explained that I had a cluster of calcifications she wanted to check again in six months, to make sure they weren’t anything to worry about. Both the friendly radiologist and my great regular doctor reassured me that all was well and I should put it out of my mind for the next six months. Which I mostly did.

I went in for my six-month follow-up certain that all was well and I’d be sent home after a few quick images. That didn’t happen. Instead, the same very kind radiologist sat me down in a stuffy overlit private waiting room and told me she still wasn’t sure what she was seeing, and that she’d like to do a biopsy. There really isn’t any way to hear that word without taking it to the worst-case-scenario of cancer, but I put on a brave face and told her I wanted the next available appointment. I wanted it over. I wanted a definitive answer as soon as possible. I made my appointment that day, and spent the next week waiting in a stress-hazed fog.

I told my immediate family and a couple of friends, but mostly just went through the motions of normal everyday life swinging between hope and fear for the next seven days. I slept fitfully at night and was exhausted all day. I meditated. I watched a lot of comedies. I cried and laughed and apologized to my kids for being spacy and cranky.

The day before my biopsy I had a powerful and emotional Reiki session with my amazing friend Heather. “This is a wake-up call,” Heather told me. “It’s time to stop putting everyone else first. Get in the driver’s seat of your own life. Be the powerhouse that you are.” This wasn’t new material. We’d covered the same issues in previous sessions. I’m a caretaker. I’ve had therapists, psychics, doctors, and healers all praise and criticize me for this natural tendency of mine. What I need is balance. What I need is permission from myself to just be myself, all the time. I need to learn how to put myself first even when the demands and needs of those around me are hammering down on me. Well, especially then. The difference with this particular Reiki session is that I got it. My body is not taking no for an answer. I love everyone around me and I want them all happy and whole and supported. But it’s not my job to keep them that way. My job is to take care of me, first and foremost.

I went to my biopsy with my boyfriend and my mother at my side, left them in the waiting room and made my way down the hall to meet my fate. During the long and uncomfortable procedure—lying face-down in an awkward position unable to move for a good forty minutes—I pulled out every positive visual I had in my mind. The Reiki session definitely helped: I was perfectly calm, even when they told me I was bleeding more than usual, and would need lots of compression and possibly a trip down to surgery for some stitches afterward. The biopsy itself was painless—I was numb and the team taking care of me was wonderful. The bleeding was an issue, and after the biopsy was over I spent another hour sitting with a nurse’s hand smashing my breast trying to get it to stop bleeding. Eventually my body responded and I was sent home, exhausted and sore but glad it was over. That was on a Friday afternoon. My results were expected on Monday afternoon.

I spent the weekend resting and visiting with family, trying to find a balance between being alone enough to rest, but not enough to let my imagination take off running down the dark alleys of my mind. Monday came, and with it the usual grind: waking sleepy kids, brushing their hair while they ate breakfast, rushing them out the door and into their classrooms in the pouring rain. I came home, changed out of my wet clothes, and spent four hours revising my latest novel. I want to start sending it out to agents by the end of the month, ahead of the holiday rush. It was a good distraction, immersing myself in a world of my own creation, with characters that have come to feel as real to me as anyone.

I called my doctor just before heading out to pick up my kids from school, but she didn’t have my results yet. Her office would be closing soon and I resigned myself to another restless night of waiting. I met my girls at their classrooms, chatted with some of the moms on the playground after school, and as I was leading the way to the parking lot with my kids in tow, my phone rang. It was the radiologist. I can’t recall our exact conversation, but the words “normal” and “no further treatment needed” were all I needed to hear. We were on our way to a dentist appointment for the kids, and they were excited and antsy to get there (Strange? Do your kids get so excited about trips to the dentist?) and I drove there in a lighter, brighter fog. I didn’t have time to sit and process until later that afternoon. It was over. I was fine. The biopsy was negative. I’ve never been so happy to fail a test in my entire life.

Wake up calls are terrifying things. We are never prepared for them. We don’t see them coming, and can’t see our way through them when they come. In the midst of them we lose all sense of control, and that is an awful feeling. But sometimes, they are exactly what we need.

I have a long to-do list in this life. I’ve known who I was and what I’m meant to do here from a very young age. I have a strong work ethic and can be very focused. But I also have a tendency to get pulled away from my various missions by trying to keep everyone around me happy and healthy and calm and focused. I stuff my own emotions to avoid making additional waves. I want to be everyone’s rock. I have a habit of ignoring my own wants and needs as I struggle to maintain a calm environment for everyone else’s benefit. No one gave me this job, I just took it on as a child and have been doing it ever since. And this wake up call has let me know that it no longer suits me.

While I can’t say that I’ll stop caring about the people who matter to me, I can say that I won’t be putting them first anymore, not at my own expense. I have books to write and kids to raise and exotic locations to see and many more amazing people to meet. And I need to take care of myself in order to make all of that happen. We never know what tomorrow will bring, what challenges will arise. So it’s better to get to that to-do list today. Not the one that other people put on you, but the one you made up for yourself long ago. Dust it off and get to work.

Otis

Today should have been my nephew's second birthday. A happy day of balloons and cake and friends and family celebrating. But sadly my dear little nephew Otis, who looked exactly like his father: dark-haired and cherub-cheeked, isn't here with us to celebrate. Otis lived for one tragic and glorious day, then left us far far too soon, changing the lives of everyone he touched in that brief timespan.

As a mother, I can't imagine a greater pain than the loss of a child. My step-sister and her husband are some of the strongest people I know, to have pulled through such a tragedy with grace and fortitude and a love for each other that has not only withstood this horrible blow, but grown stronger in the face of it.

There are no adequate words for a day like today. No amount of sympathy or affection seems like enough. But we try. There is a tightly woven network of love and support surrounding my step-sister and her husband, a vast array of friends and family who have sent them love throughout the day. It has brought me to tears a few times, the kind posts and comments people have shared with them, the reminders of all that they have lost as well as the evidence of all that they have gained in the last two years.

It is an immeasurable loss, but equally impossible to gauge is the impact Otis has had on so many of us. He has created a community around his parents, an unwavering support group to offer up kindness and compassion and warmth and hope on a day like today. His legacy carries on. Otis evokes love, first and foremost, which we so need in this time of fear and hate and political diatribe. He isn't here to see the lasting impression his brief presence has had on the world around him, but I hope it offers some comfort to his parents to see not only that he has not been forgotten, but that the power of his brief time here with us continues to grow.