spring is like a perhaps deluge

Happy Birthday, Jabber!

When he was nearly three, Jabber patted my gigantic belly and said he would share his toys, he would share his bedroom, but he absolutely would NOT share his birthday with his little brother. So how did that work out for him?  Well, I have to admit that he only readily shares the toys he doesn't much care for.  And the two brothers only peacefully share their bedroom for about sixty seconds a day.  But when Monkey was born the day before Jabber's birthday--an act merely the beginning of a long series of "ME FIRST" moments--Jabber handled the situation with a graceful sort of resignation.  He is...to the best of his abilities, a kind and patient and generous big brother. 

One thing Jabber savors is stories.  Over the last couple of nights, we've been telling stories of the kids as babies, and Jabber hangs on every word.  He loves to listen to a book read out loud, especially books about heroes just a teensy bit more adventurous than he.  He feels deeply, right along the characters, his whole body twisting with anxiety when the action gets tense.  For a while he hated reading--cried and freaked out every time he was asked to do it. He could read.  He could sound out the words.  But it was so much effort--how can you enjoy a story when you have to sound it out letter by letter?  I fought him to get the homework done, and I simply hated the fact that our favorite activity, story time, was turning into a stressful battle. 

Finally I managed to get to the bottom of this issue and I talked with him about how, once you get a lot of practice at reading, you can identify whole words or phrases in one glance.  We used the word automaticity, and he giggled as he said it.  We started reading each page in a book in unison, twice, and then he would read it on his own in his "automatic reading voice."  Which meant fast.  Instantly, all our fights about reading disappeared.  Jabber wanted to practice reading so that he could get automatic: he just wanted to move beyond the letter-by-letter decoding stage and back into the enjoying stories stage.

I can't believe how far he has come in the last year, between age six and age seven.  I look at him sometimes, or overhear some tidbit of wisdom he is either mumbling aloud or trying out on me, and I can't even believe he's for real.  He's such a thinker.

This morning we were, as we often are, running late for work.  It was his birthday, and I was trying to go easy on him, to let him enjoy the feeling of waking up with the whole day belonging to him. But the clock keeps ticking, and the van needs scraping, and the younger brother--tired out from his own ME FIRST birthday--is grumpy, and...well.

"Jabber," I said, as he stood in the bathroom with his toothbrush in his hand, in exactly the same position I'd left him five minutes earlier.  "Why aren't you doing anything? Come ON."

"But I was doing something," he said, slowly lifting his toothbrush up to his mouth.

"You were not doing anything," I argued.  "You were just standing there, holding your brush."

"I was thinking," he said.  And of course he was.

(It's a Pikachu cake)

Happy Birthday, my Daydreamer!

Happy Birthday, Monkey!

Monkey is four today, and it's a ridiculously busy week, like it always is on his birthday.  Midterms have gone out, so my inbox is full of dutiful parents checking up on their children's assertions that they have, indeed, completed and turned in all that work that was missing, and the students themselves are in rare, pre-holiday form.  Sickness has trampled its way through the family and back again.  We are behind on every possible mundane task imaginable, and I remember--

--I remember a very similar week, four years ago.  Monkey still wasn't due for several weeks, but I had a feeling he was coming early, so I had been working like a crazy person to get sub plans in place that could be stepped into at any time, and by anyone, in case my sub wasn't ready yet when I went into labor.

Sure enough, I remember one morning--the day before Jabber's third birthday--when I got up and thought, "Oh, no way.  I really cannot see how I am possibly going to keep doing this for the next week and a half." It felt like there was no possible way there was even a millimeter more room in my abdomen to house that lively child, and there wasn't a chance that I was going to be able to find the energy to complete a single thing that evening.  Nothing, that is, except labor and birth.

And then...everything stopped.  Life grew slow and syrupy sweet, and whole stacks of hours passed doing nothing more productive than snuggling and gazing and nursing. 

He's still that person, even at his craziest, most frenetic pace.  He can stop time, for a while--erase obligations--with the magic of his hugs. 

Happy Birthday, Snuggle-Buggle. 

What do you wanna be when you grow up?

I remember when my senior AP English Lit. teacher--a seriously awe-inspiring English teacher and probably the whole reason I thought maybe teaching might actually be an enjoyable endeavor--stood up in front of us all and started talking about what she had wanted to be when she grew up, back when she was a little girl.  Of course she wanted to be an English teacher, I thought.  She was so gifted as an educator; I couldn't quite place her anywhere else, outside of that familiar classroom.

So I was a little shocked when she confessed her dream of being an astronomer.  An astronomer, really?

Periodically, my husband and I discuss what we want to be when we grow up.  He's still deciding, torn between several important but not all that lucrative passions.  I have a lot of careers I dreamed of pursuing when I was younger...actor, fine artist, graphic artist (did that, sort of, and...it was stressful!), heavy metal guitarist (shut up), geologist, a professional book reader (except I was scared of New York City), a Spanish translator, and the ever-present dream of being a writer (except I'm pretty sure I always thought I would primarily write poetry). 

I still can't quite pinpoint the moment I decided to be an English teacher, to be honest.  Like...I know I went into college a declared major, so it was before that.  And I can remember conversations with my mother about "back-up plans" and...you know.  Loan repayment.  So I think it was sort of a practical girl's English major--the practical girl who paid for her own schooling and knew she needed to have a real job like five seconds after graduating.  I think my plan at the time was to keep on going to school until I would be able to be a professor.  Academia seemed like the place for me. 

Reading books, facilitating enlightening discussions, researching my passions, writing and publishing...things (this was about where my imagination failed me), and...

Wait.  Why didn't I get my doctorate?  Oh yeah.  School.  That I was paying for.  With borrowed money.  That I needed a real job to pay back.

So I started teaching high school, and every so often, it was actually like that.  I mean, not the writing and publishing things part, but the reading books and sometimes even having enlightening discussions.  But it was so difficult, all the time.  And I was only twenty-three.  And I was teaching in the same little town I grew up in.  And my boyfriend wanted to take off and explore the country.  And I saw--with not a little fear--my life stretching out in front of me in one small town, alone in front of a never-ending pile of ungraded papers (which were a lot less brilliant than the ones from my imagination).

So I took off with him, and after several months of hiking and camping and wandering around enjoying the view, I found what I hoped would be a shit job at a printing company.  Basically my job was to develop large sheets of film, place a mylar strip on them (part of my job title was "stripper"--so fun to tell my mom on the phone from across the country!), put the film on top of a plate, burn the plate, process the plate, and run it down to the printing press.  Mostly brainless, which was the way I wanted it.  I could read my book or write in my journal in ten second bursts as I moved the plates and labeled them and taped them together neatly. 

In the meantime, I referred to myself as a "Recovering English Teacher" and purchased my first computer so I could write and get published, which I had decided should be my "real" job.

And it's funny, because after about a year of this, someone realized that I was not utilizing all the brain power I could be, and they started having me do other prepress work--typesetting and page layout and simple design and then more complicated design until...TA-DA! My brainless shit job was now a stressful and complicated job.  And I admit, there were occasionally some pretty cool intellectual discussions, but more often then not, there was simply a lot of cursing at computers and a pretty serious case of font-resentment.

Where is this post going?  Ah, yes.  So.  I ended up back in teaching...I'm a little ashamed to admit it was not because I couldn't stay away but because there wasn't enough prepress work to keep me busy in the cruddy economy, and I wasn't really qualified to do anything else anyway.  I interviewed for my current job over the phone WHILE CLEANING OUT MY FRIDGE because I was so nervous I had to do something with my hands, and by some miracle I was hired, sight unseen.

And then I found out that--although we're more likely to have lengthy discussions about the merits of keeping one's rude and disrespectful opinions inside one's head than about the literary merits of several challenging poems--for me, middle school is where it's at. 

At least...it felt right today.  (Which is saying a lot since it was Monday.)

Unless.  I still really wanna be a geologist...

three weeks in three photos?

I'm still here, just so you know.  Most of my online presence in the last three weeks has been something along the lines of fkaosdig;aoinb;aoifaldskfj....or maybe a little less eloquent.  But I'm here.  And even though the last time I posted, it was all about writing difficulties, and even though I've had play rehearsals and book report grading and student learning conferences for my own students and for Jabber...I've managed to get my fake-NaNo MG ghost story up to 15k and also made three pages of revision notes for my Cassandra WIP, which needs...a lot of work. 

(Side note--as though any of this is not a side note--we found out tonight at Jabber's conference that he's doing well in all areas, and though I'm not saying I didn't *believe* Ms. S. when she said he only needed reminders to stop acting silly "every once in a while," I do believe I saw a bit of an eye-twitch when she said it.  Probably blocking out the trauma.  I mean, I'm pretty nice in conferences, too--for instance, usually I try not to say things like, "Well, I kind of wanted to scream at your kid fifteen times in fifteen minutes this morning, but then when I saw him in the hall, he waved at me, and I thought he kind of seemed like he might turn into a fully functional human in about eight to ten years," and besides, sitting there nervously next to their parents, they do actually seem like the sweet, interesting people they someday will become.)

(I also found out in a secret, late-night snuggle-conversation last night the name of a girl of whom Jabber says, "I really, REALLY like her, and I might want to marry her," but I would never tell, even if I did make him show me her artwork on the wall this evening at school--she has quite passable handwriting for a first grader, and she doesn't color too carefully within the lines...)

Oh, dear.  This is what happens when I don't post.  I forget how to be coherent.

So.  Picture number one is from Halloween.  I had a ninja (with a glowing light saber and a cowboy pistol) and a Spiderman (with the mask turned into a hat and a toddler who asked, of his padded muscles, "Mama, does my costume have nummies?")

Picture two is from our 9th Anniversary.  I got a new Day of the Dead ornament from D., and it just may be my favorite one yet.  Luckily my husband remains thoughtful (and a good shopper) enough for the both of us--I gave him a Halloween card and permission to buy himself a new knife.  So romantic.  I'm actually not sure how anything in my real world would get accomplished if it weren't for David, so it's probably a good thing he's been around for the last nine years.  I would be constantly doing things like...oh, driving on a flat tire, serving the children cereal for supper, and getting buried underneath a bunch of snow because I have no idea where a shovel might be.  (These are all just things I have done in the past week.)

The last picture is two of my old journals, which I have been reading my way through lately for some reason.  Actually, both of these are from the months leading up to my engagement and wedding, which was kind of fun to read, so close after the anniversary.  I've learned a lot about myself in this trip down memory lane, but I think I'll sum it up into three neat bullet points.  Maybe I can even avoid using parentheses (but I cannot give up dashes) (okay, starting in the next paragraph!)

• I learned that I've made a lot of progress as a writer, both in terms of craft--I'm a better writer, a more confident writer, especially in fiction--and in terms of business.  A lot of the time that I was writing in these two journals, I was dreaming of being published someday.  Of course, I had hoped at the time it would be soon, but I've been persistent and patient, overall.
• I learned that probably the biggest point of unhappiness in my life had to do with finding a balance as an introvert and as a person who likes the company of interesting, intelligent people.  I still have to work to find the balance between solitude and loneliness, and I still get overwhelmed when I don't have alone-time to recharge, but do better when I'm forced out of that alone-time to interact with others.  
• I learned (and in all cases, "learned" is more of a "reaffirmed my thoughts about") (damn, I got SO FAR without parentheses, too!) that the times in my life that I have taken a big risk, stepped completely outside of my comfort zone and tried something that was really difficult for me, it has turned into a hugely valuable experience for me.  

Okay.  So there was the last three weeks of my life, in which I have failed to blog but only because there are not seventy-six hours in each day, and because sometimes, I need to spend my time lying in the dark next to my nearly seven-year-old son, learning the names of the people he believes he might marry.  (That way I won't have to find out on facebook!)

in the middle

So my computer has been sick (I think it still is, tbh, but since my computer doctor is also sick, I'll wait and see for a few days while religiously backing up everything I do), and middle school has been overwhelming, and the weather has been amazing...all of which leads to one full week without a blog entry.  Again.

I know, that's boring.

Starting over.  So my middle school students are starting a book blog.  And at first, I didn't really think we'd make our own blog.  I thought it would be enough to simply read blogs, comment on them, maybe look at the qualities that make up a good review.  Possibly we would talk about the difficulties of writing a review of a book that isn't the greatest--how do you maintain honesty without being a jerk?  This is a concept that many middle school students (and a fair number of non-middle school students) struggle to wrap their heads around.

But.  On the first day, it became apparent that these students...they are WILD about books.  They are full of awesome ideas and an amazing amount of energy that, if we can focus and harness (and proofread!) it, will result in a terrific chance for them to interact with authors and bloggers and readers not only at our school, but all over the world.  And even though I am in the middle of editing one book and second-drafting another and assistant-directing a play (soon) and playing tooth fairy (Jabber lost another tooth today!) and mentoring a student teacher and checking the dilation of Monkey's pupils (fell off a step stool and cracked his head on the cast iron tub)...I find myself in the middle of another project.  A middle grade/young adult book blog, written and developed by my students!

Aptly, the name of the blog is "In the Middle (of a good book)" and the identity we created for the blog is "inthemiddlereading"--middle schoolers reading.  Our first post went live today, so please come by and share your favorite book with us! 

Middle school is a strange time for reading.  While a sixth grader may still be startled or even outright shocked at the appearance of a minor cuss word, an eighth grader may be devouring very mature books written for adults.  Another sixth grader may read nothing but unabridged classics, while another eighth grader may be just beginning to move from chapter books to middle grade novels. 

However, despite these differences, what has become very clear to me in the last nine years teaching middle school, is that when tweens and teens find a book they enjoy, it can change their whole lives. You can see them become a reader.  They argue passionately about books; they feel personally offended by disappointing movie adaptations.  They love their favorite characters so fiercely that they never want a series to end.  They get so excited about books at times that they will jump about in their chairs, barely able to wait their turn to share their thoughts about books.

And I hope that we'll be able to keep up with this blog, even after my little elective class is over, so that they can continue to have a real audience for their thoughts, and so they can continue to make connections with authors as real people--to read reviews by other bloggers and wait anxiously for new releases and become a part of the literary community in a real, interactive way. 

Thanks so incredibly much to Kari, who gave us links to her favorite blogs, ideas for the class, and a lot of support as I contemplated this idea in its infant stages.  Her book blog, and the others in our blogroll, are an inspiration to my students!

do you ever?

Do you ever look around you and realize that you haven't stopped to take a breath in like two weeks?

This is my deck, which I finally finished painting on Labor Day--also the day I started my second pass of my KtMS manuscript so I can see if the edits I finished two weeks ago actually make sense. 

Today began the second week of school, and I realized around 3:00 that I hadn't stopped to use the restroom all day.  And, since at that time I was besieged by sixth graders (who all wanted to escape Language Arts class to use the restroom, by the way), the realization was once again pushed aside until 4:15, when my own son got off the bus and made his way to my classroom, freeing me to finally leave.

Except by then I was in the middle of previewing an online training module, which I have to present to the staff meeting tomorrow morning at 7:30.  And since I'll be in the meeting tomorrow morning before class starts, and since my sixth grade homeroom needs way more attention and assistance in the morning than my eighth grade homeroom did last year, I decided I'd better get my chalkboards set up for tomorrow as well.  I had two documents open on my computer, and I was pecking away at a lesson plan outline for my boss and a compilation of book blog addresses for my teen book blogging elective, at the same time as I was fixing a snack for Jabber and scheduling a complicated classroom swap with two colleagues. 

Still had not peed.

At last, I realized that I was way too busy to keep poor Jabber at school with me until I was done, so I called D. and asked him to come pick the boy up...annoying to D. as he was in the middle of making an experimental dinner recipe (which turned out to be delicious, when I consumed it out of the microwave an hour or so later!), but I was busy planning and photocopying and distributing files full of links into shared folders while I filed IEP notices, answered emails to parents, and double-checked two of my sixth graders' schedule changes.

I did finally make a trip to the bathroom--at home--and during this activity I was visited by a small child who needed help with putting on his socks.  Also several arguments/wrestling matches broke out at this time, which I broke up.  I heated up my coffee and my dinner while loading the dishwasher and then listened to Jabber read while eating and making out a check for his school photos.

Fixed bedtime snacks.  Signed reading minutes.  Cleaned up snacks.  Wrangled kids a bit.  Cleaned kitchen.  Went to gym and worked out (while reading the book I am going to start teaching on Thursday, which I've only taught once before, years ago), showered, made lunches, and sat down to revisit those edits.

Except, oh crud, I still haven't blogged.

*Breathes*

And now it's bedtime.

first grade!

Jabber started first grade today, and then came home with a fever up over 102.  He's now up in his bed shivering and moaning and fighting dreams in which "terrible things keep happening over and over and I'm afraid they'll become real."  Poor little guy.  He's so tough, even when he's basically miserable.

sucked into a black hole of work? check.

The first full week of work is now behind me (no students until next week!), and I know...I haven't checked in.  This is how my  life works around this time of year:  back-to-school.

• gazing in a stupor at the four walls of my classroom as though I cannot picture them containing any sort of knowledge?  check.
• back-to-back twelve hour workdays during which my children forget what I look like? check.
• never-ending to-do list? check check check...(oh! that wasn't on my list, but I did it so I'm going to write it on my list so I can check it off! check!)

Summer vacation used to be this long stretch of lazy days and reading books and babysitting my little brother and slowly growing so bored that I actually looked forward to climbing on that yellow school bus with its bad shocks and its freckle-faced bullies and its inevitable arrival at school.

I liked wearing my new outfits and arranging my new school supplies.  I liked seeing who got their braces off and who got a bad permanent (um, me...) and who had grown six inches (um, not me...) and who had emerged from the cocoon of summer looking all sexy (um, no comment.)  After that, it was pretty much downhill in my eyes, but at least I was good at sneak-reading and had the ability to do my own thing while absorbing what I needed from the lesson with my spidey-senses.  (I know. I was rude and insolent and snarky and lazy.  I know it was obnoxious of me to still get straight A's.  Believe me, I pay penance for my middle school self every day.)

As an adult, though, summer seems to shrink every year.  I have big dreams that second week of June--all the wonderful things our family is going to do, all that lovely together-time.  We'll go camping; we'll go on amazing road trips.  We'll have fires on the beach and hang out with friends and read giant stacks of delicious books.  I'll paint a masterpiece to hang on my living room wall.  Hell, I'll paint my back deck before it rots right out from under me.  And then, about halfway through July, I realize that I'm only going to accomplish a tiny fraction of those dreams.  The camping/road trip money is spent replacing a dead clothes dryer, and then on replacing the washer, which dies shortly afterwards of a broken heart.  The husband has to go to work in the middle of the night and can't really stay awake for a bonfire or many nights out with friends.  The kids fight each other with tree limbs in the backyard while I wonder if the stain will even stick to the deck in 96% humidity.

So this year summer was simply not quite long enough for me to paint my masterpiece.  (Um, or even finish painting the deck...but before you judge, it's a HUGE deck, with all this underneath stuff and skinny rails that needed three coats and walls of lattice...and I've still got time before the snow flies!)

It was just exactly long enough for me to finish a first draft of my newest novel.

It was long enough (plus one day) to finish my first pass of edits on KISS THE MORNING STAR.  (YAY!)

It was nearly long enough for me to forget all my passwords at work.

It was enough time for me to read somewhere between 25 and 30 books (several of which were chapter books I read out loud to the boys--Oh, how we love Ramona and Beezus, Laura and Mary, Peter and Fudgie!)

And it was just about exactly enough time for me to be able to look out at a crowd of middle schoolers (which I would possibly have referred to as a horde of hoodlums mere weeks earlier!) and think, "Awwwww, look at how cute and shiny they all are!"

So happy back to school season, and I will try to squeeze a little blog post here in between the book reports. 

making a difference

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.  --Elie Wiesel

I'm fifty pages from the end of my first pass of edits for KISS THE MORNING STAR (and six days away from my personal deadline for finishing said first pass), and I thought I'd give you a glimpse into why I haven't been posting very coherent blog posts lately.  I looked up at my screen, and that's really what it looked like:  four documents all competing for my attention on my little monitor, a sixteen-foot-long banner of colorful notes taking over my keyboard, plus the eight tabs of firefox, my itunes, and three more documents minimized at the bottom.  (Document titles:  KTMS August 2010, July 14 melanie thoughts, answering melanie3, Hoole more revision notes, Editing KtMS3, scraps, kerouac quotes and sources.  Tabs open on firefox:  not telling.  :P)

This is exciting.  The yellow-highlighted notes on the document on the left of the side-by-side view (Editing KtMS3) are notes about scenes I've rewritten, progress I've made, additions, subtractions, successes, haphazard attempts, experiments, and in other words (as if that weren't enough words), STUFF I DID TO CHANGE THIS BOOK and, I hope, STUFF THAT MAKES IT BETTER. 

This next fifty pages, I'll admit, need the most work.  The world won't really end if I don't finish before school starts, but I know it would make me feel better overall.  I also know this is only the first pass--the first round of changes I've made for a real, live (and brilliant!) editor.  I know some of what I'm writing will never see the light of day, and in fact, some of it will never even make it through my next pass before going to Melanie. 

I've been approaching these edits with a very open mind, thinking of the whole book more from a "What if this would work?" or maybe a "Hey, maybe I should try that?" or possibly even a "Wouldn't it be sort of crazy if I went in this direction?" kind of mindset, knowing that if this doesn't work, or I really shouldn't have tried that, or yeah, this direction is really crazy and not in a good way...I can always go back a draft or two.  I have at least twenty to choose from, after all!

And now.  Yeah, you know it.  Back to work.

don't get a big head

Monkey: (grins) I'm growing!

Me: Yes, yes, you are.

Monkey:  (grins even wider) I'm going to be big as Daddy soon!

Me:  (grasps at good parenting opportunity)  Yes, someday...that is...if you go to bed nicely every night.

Monkey:  (grin fading)  But MOM.  Is my head going to grow, too?

Me:  Well, yes.  All of you will grow.  You'll be in proportion, don't worry.

Monkey:  (horrified look)  BUT I DON'T WANT MY HEAD TO GET BIGGER!

Me:  (pointing at David)  Look at Daddy, though.  Wouldn't he look silly if his head were little but the rest of him were big?

David:  It happens to some people, you know.

Me:  It won't happen to you, Monkey, don't worry.

Monkey: (wailing and pressing his hands to both sides of his head)  I DON'T WANT TO GET A BIG HEAD LIKE DADDY!  I DON'T WANT TO LOOK FUNNY.

(yes, this is a cheater post.  no, it has no point.  yes, I'm editing like crazy.  no, I'm not getting a whole lot done with these charming and hilarious children around.)

insert post here

Jabber: Mooo-oooom!  Monkey keeps saying our spaceship is a doghouse!

Monkey: It IS a doghouse!

Jabber: It's a spaceship!

Monkey: It's a space-doghouse!

Jabber:  (stomps feet, raises voice)  It is NOT a space-doghouse.  It has WINGS.  It's a spaceship!

Monkey: (draws on wing) I'm coloring this wing purple.

Jabber:  AHHHH!  (tears purple marker away from Monkey)  NOT LIKE THAT.  IT HAS TO MATCH.

Monkey:  No!  (grabs marker back, screeches shrilly)

Jabber: MOMMMMMM!  MONKEY KEEPS WRECKING THE SPACESHIP!

Elissa (through the window, staring at editing notes with hopelessness):  Siiiiigh.  How about if you draw on the left wing, and Monkey draws on the right wing?  That seems fair.

Jabber (in a voice that can be heard several blocks away):  MOM!  WHAT GOOD IS A SPACESHIP IF IT'S NOT SYMMETRICAL?

I know, I know.  This happened like a week ago.  And yes, shortly after this I sent the kids away to their grandparents' houses for the weekend.  A weekend which unexpectedly stretched out into four days.  Yes, I missed them.  No, I didn't blog.  Yes, I've been ensconced in editing thoughts.  No, I haven't blogged.  Yes, I have read like five books in the last week.  No, I haven't blogged.  Yes, I began the tedious project of painting my back deck in the hot sun.  No, I did not get a tan on my legs. (Yes, I did get a smattering of freckles on my nose.) 

Yes, my editing has brought me to tears.  To driving my husband to yard work.  To throwing things.  To giving up.  To starting over.  To getting excited.  To tears again.  To inspiration.  To throwing things again.  To emailing my agent with my crazy showing.  To meeting an amazingly sweet and kind writer who shares my wonderful editor.  To appreciating all the wonderfully supportive people who make it possible for me to even contemplate doing any of this.  To tears again, these of a different sort.  And now to work.

(And no, I didn't blog.)

perfect timing?

One of my goals for the year has to do with how I react to getting feedback on my book.  In fact, the actual words I  used were, "I'd like to remain thoughtful, objective, gracious, and rational about anything that happens with this book."

It's a lot to ask of myself, really, and I was completely nervous about a month ago as I discussed revisions with Sarah.  Anything that happens.  I asked myself, "Can I remain objective and rational and even GRACIOUS if she tells me something that sounds impossible?"  I was so nervous about getting her notes that I didn't even know if I wanted to get notes at all.  Maybe we could just stop here?  I could be like, YAY my book is pretty and unique and someone believes in it, the end.  Every step forward has so many possibilities, about half of them stinking suspiciously like failure.

But of course I'm not going to let a little panic (I mean apprehension, obviously) get in the way of moving forward as a writer, right?  So I read through my manuscript again during the time I knew Sarah was reading it, trying to see it from her perspective, trying to imagine what she was seeing.

And then I got her notes in my inbox (incredibly detailed, amazing notes, btw!).  And then my computer died.  On the same day.  Perfect timing.

At first I thought this was a catastrophe.  I mean, I printed out her notes from my work computer and took them home overnight--I hoped at this  point that my computer might have a little update issue that might take twenty or thirty minutes to fix.  I read through the notes, getting more and more inspired and anxious to dig in.  But it turned out my hard drive had failed, and although I had everything backed up (on paper and electronically), I didn't have my computer for the next three weeks. 

Objective and rational and gracious.  Right.  I was freaking out.

Something about me--even though I had been perfectly patient about doing these revisions earlier, and in fact had been fantasizing about never doing them at all, once I had my notes and my ideas and had spent some time on the phone with Sarah...I was ready.  And when I'm ready to do something, let me tell you, it gets done.  I wanted to work straight through the next week, nailing each change.  But the little table where my laptop sits was empty and forlorn.  Instead I had a monster binder, stacks of paper, two colors of sticky notes, and a birthday journal, mostly neglected in favor of the keyboard, which translates my thoughts into words so much faster, so much more freely...

Thoughtful.  Objective.  Rational.  Gracious.

I took the cap off my pen.  I started making notes.  Two weeks later, my mom lent me her laptop so I could translate all my scribblings into the actual manuscript, and now today I'm reading through again.  And again.

Someday soon I'll send it back, my fingers crossed, my goal in mind.  Maybe it will come back with a new set of notes.  Maybe it will go on to the next stage.  This timing wasn't what I had hoped for, but revising slowly, gnawing my pen cap between my teeth like the days before I had a computer (yes, I do that)--maybe it was better for me after all.  Maybe it really was perfect timing.

Just a little update.  I hope to be done for real sometime this week.  And then...who knows?  My lappy is back with its shiny new hard drive, and I know that once I hit send I'm going to be back to focusing on that goal of mine.  And back to first drafting the next one!  :)

sometimes...

...things are not *quite* what you expected.

and other times...

everything is just the way you like it.

um...

I won a contest...

It's rather exciting.

*bounce bounce bounce*

No time to blog at length tonight, for I must finish reading Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne tonight so that I can see the movie this weekend. I can't remember the last time I went to a movie, to be honest. Sadness.

Tomorrow's my birthday. One year ago tomorrow, I smashed up our car, Zoom-Zip, hitting a deer. David says I probably shouldn't drive anywhere. With that in mind, he is going to bring the kids to the grandparents' house for the weekend. It's too bad about this blizzard that is supposed to come through after we have them up there...I wonder if we'll be able to get them back. Maybe they'll have to stay until spring thaw? :)

kids are disgusting

I mean, really.

to the washerwoman go the spoils

It's an unwritten rule, of course, that the person responsible for sorting and washing and hanging and folding and putting away the laundry gets to keep anything s/he finds in the pockets.

Last week I made $8.00, no lie. Not bad for fourteen hours of work.

Now, I suppose it's the difference between asking David to collect his dirty clothing for me like I did today and simply going into the bedroom and scooping up all of his clothing off the floor (even digging it out from under the bed!) like I did last time, but today the spoils of my labor consist only of one orange toy car, a dime, a rubber wheel, and a pink plastic drink sword.

I'm sorely disappointed.

two tiny updates...

...on my two huge boys.

1. Monkey has apparently perfected what David has referred to as my signature look. "What? What look are you talking about?" I asked him.

"You know. When you lift up one eyebrow and accompany it with that look. The one that says wtf-ever!"

So. A mother feels a special sort of pride and terror when told that her two-year-old has mastered her own unique brand of smart-assery. Yay?

2. Jabber is obsessed with shooting things. "MOM!" he yelled just moments ago. "I JUST SHOT BOTH YOUR LEGS OFF, YOU KNOW!" A pause, and then, "NOW I SHOT YOUR GLASSES OFF, TOO, SO YOU CAN'T SEE WHO'S DOING IT!"

Also, yesterday at daycare he apparently got into quite a scuffle with one of the other children over whether guns have a trigger (demonstrated with a finger motion) or a "Ka-chocka!" (demonstrated by operating something like a pump action shotgun, maybe?)

*is ridiculously ignorant about guns, relative to the rest of this family*

3. In other wild thing news, in the last two days I have seen a coyote and a moose crossing the road in front of lovely daycare provider's home. They were both headed in the same direction--toward her backyard. Wooo, spring!

oh hai!

So I was all set to write this story about how difficult it is to start up something that you stop doing...it was an embarrassing story about me and the gym I once belonged to.

But now I've decided to break the blog silence with a goofy photo instead.

This photograph is titled: "Ooh, Baby is Maaad! GRRROwllll!"


It's even funnier when you can see Monkey staring at this photo on my laptop screen, shouting, "Oh, no! Baby is mad!" and then making his little baby mad faces and noises quite convincingly.

Okay, so I'll maybe post a little more often. 'Cause next time I'll probably be forced to tell the embarrassing story.

Dear Diary Blog-a-Rama

Ah, vacation. Where I get a little glimpse into just how much I can actually get done when I don’t have to spend like sixty hours of each week working. Speaking of which…the two bags full of papers that must be graded this week glare at me from the corner of the couch. “It’s Tuesday,” they say. They have a pretty menacing aura about them, to be honest.

Writing. TDBB is novel #2, and I just passed the 25 K mark yesterday evening. Or maybe it was early this morning. When I don’t have to get to work in the morning, I can stay up until my late night creative streak wanes. I’ve always been a night person. Anyway, in the loosest of senses, TDBB is about two girls who go on a road trip after graduating from high school, and at 23 K, I finally got them to leave for the road trip. I am enjoying my characters and their overall journey, but I was a little curious if they were ever going to actually go on this mythical road trip.

I still have no clue if what I’m writing is YA or adult fiction or what, but I think I’m aiming closer to the 90-100 K mark, so it’s all sort of slow and steady. They are in the Badlands right now, and one of my main characters just pulled a gun on some creepy guys. David had fun filling me in on all the details I might need for that scene.

Writing my secret santa story was a fun detour from the seriousness of TDBB. My prompt was that I had to write fantasy (I don’t think I’ve ever honestly finished a story that was fantasy, at least not since elementary school…although I’ve read a fair amount of fantasy, I haven’t really ever written it.) The other requirements were that it needed to have a strong male character, and there wasn’t supposed to be any romance. That’s sort of an anti-requirement, actually. I had no clue what to write about.

So I started writing about a seventh grade boy named Drew who was a faerie going through puberty. Except that he doesn’t know he’s a faerie. And he has zits that explode all over bullies, turning them into enormous green tadpoles. All in all, pretty silly. As usual, I have a terrible time writing an actual SHORT story. Everything I write seems to want to expand into its own book. I read the story, called “When Puberty Hits,” to my seventh grade homebase, and they laughed at it and asked me when I was going to write the next chapter. And so I have a middle-grade fantasy novel in the works.

And, as though I need more unfinished works-in-progress, I can’t stop working on another little idea, also fantasy, strangely enough. This one takes place in Duluth (or at least, one of the universes resembles Duluth) and has seagulls who can talk. Sort of.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I need to get my new iPod working, figure out my internet challenges, and find something to cook the kids for lunch. It sure would help if I had actually gone grocery shopping last night as I was supposed to, but I did have fun seeing M and L at the Irish Pub! I can’t help it that my car didn’t want to stop at the grocery store on the way home!