"Maybe We're Crazy Probably" Gnarles Barkley

"They make her heart beat far too fast, all these losses, these holes inside her soul. Lately, every aspect of her life is blowing off like petals in a breeze. She feels as if she's in a constant state of watching them fly away, of holding in her spread arms nothing more than empty stems of missing things." (excerpt from The Pocket Wife)

My novel depicts a woman losing control. Marginalized and invalidated, views of herself and of the world around her begin to blur. Although we're all impacted by the perceptions of others, I think this is especially true for people who don't fit inside the lines.

A cluster of homeless people lives not far from my exit. They sleep under a bridge with their flimsy cardboard shelters and scant belongings – an ancient photograph, a rusty pocket knife, a Bible with ripped pages. They come and go; the faces change from day to day, month to month. For a while there was a woman, pale and thin, with faded hair and vacant eyes. She stood on the corner where the cars stopped at the end of the exit ramp.

On Thanksgiving I brought her two huge plates of food – turkey and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and beans with almonds, hills of pecan pie and cheesecake. There was nowhere to pull over, really. When the light turned red I got out of my car and ran across the street with my foil-covered heaping plates. I wished her a happy Thanksgiving, and the two of us just stood there for a minute with the plates wobbling in the air between us. We hugged. We both cried. Drivers honked and yelled and gestured at my car, at the green light. After a minute, we turned and walked away, back to our own worlds. But something passed between us, some common human thread that told me she was visible and viable and sane. And so, for that small space of time, she was.  

Truth Be Told

The Road to Publication always seemed a little mystical to me, and published authors had a cloud of mysticism draped around them too, like perfume or auras. I learned a lot from what they shared at conferences and book signings. Still there were a handful of common experiences, common perceptions, common truths, things I thought were carved in stone that turned out not to be. Two of these spring to mind:  When an agent turns down your manuscript, give up on that agent and move on to the next one. Also:  Write what you know. 

When Jenny Bent passed on my first draft of The Pocket Wife, she told me if I didn’t find representation for it in its (then) present form and if I decided to make significant changes, she would look at it again. I asked if we could speak on the phone, just so I would know exactly what she had in mind, and we did. Ultimately, I decided to make the changes; she decided to represent the book. 

As far as the second statement goes, what happened to me ran counter to that as well. Men in my critique group complained that there was entirely too much strolling around and sighing and not enough action in my stories. “Fine,” I said. “The next thing I write will start out with a dead body,” which was a total deviation from the tea-drinking and strolling – from what I knew. I was feeling my way along, dancing in the dark. I was totally out of my element and I loved it!

I think authors find their own truths. Follow your instincts and write what you love to write. When your book says what you want it to, when you can turn to almost any page and read aloud to your friend or your spouse or your cat without skipping over half the sentence, look for an agent that will be a good match for you. And don’t give up.  

Christmas

Christmas.  A time of joy and angst, of stress and eggnog, of little voices sharp and near, and of others faint and far away.  It's a time when we wish for snow and ice, but hate it as we slip and slide through Christmas shopping, when we swear this year we'll bake bread and make our cards and have an old fashioned celebration and then run out at the last minute to buy what everybody really wants. We embrace the ones we have around us and miss the ones we've lost, put antlers on our cats and stockings on our walls. We set our jaws and stride gamely into the nearest mall only to hyperventilate because we've no idea what to buy - the people we know best are suddenly complete enigmas. It is the best of times and the worst of times, the season of holly and folly.

Raising the Roof

Writers are by nature introverts, or so I’ve found. I’m no exception. Of course there are the obligatory Christmas and office parties, now occurring with alarming regularity, and dinners with other couples. I'm always up for lunch with a friend or pretty much any outing involving food or drink, especially food. Especially desserts, actually. The Internet expands around me – the tweets and friendings, the blogs and links and likes. Bridges.

But there are limits. Our leaky roof was replaced today, which involved a small army of men in heavy boots clomping around overhead and tossing stacks of tiles that rocked the ceiling. They yelled and nail-gunned and thudded. Lights flashed and flickered. Two gaping holes where skylights belonged left the house freezing and dappled with leaves and dirt, random roofing parts, and eventually faces peering down through the replacement glass. It was like a camping trip gone very wrong.  Oliver the cat flew under a desk, where he sat, clinging to the heater vent until they left, and when I’d had enough, I flew off too, to the closest coffee shop to read, reveling in the solitude and heat – and desserts.

The World As I Knew It - On Being Organized

Today is my husband’s birthday – a date he shares with Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas, which is interesting for me, but maybe a little depressing to actually have that birthday. Anyway, I stuck his present, a book (of course it was a book) out of the way so he wouldn’t stumble across it while I was gone for the weekend. I tucked it under a tiny stack of clothes on a chair, but things being what they are, the tiny stack turned into a huge pile and I couldn’t remember where I put the thing. Finally I found it out of sheer randomness and process of elimination, but the experience reminded me once again that I really have to become an organized person.

I have never actually been organized. I have tried from time to time. I set my watch ahead so I can trick myself into being prompt, which worked fairly well at first, but now I subconsciously calculate my added minutes and still manage to not be places on time. I have a Garmin with a calming voice to direct me to unfamiliar locations, and I am even a little obsessive about writing things in the day planner my daughter gave me. I don’t actually do most of the things I write optimistically on the designated lines, but the items are checked or, often, not checked or arrowed or half checked so I can keep track of my organizational strides or shortcomings.

My Sylvia Plath’s birthday husband once told me in a tirade that it wasn’t fair at all that despite his extreme precision and attention to detail and my totally half-assed, B-Type personality traits we both managed to accomplish things in more or less the same amount of time. Nonetheless, with deadlines to meet, tweets to tweet and all the other parts of life to deal with – the pile of clothes covering the birthday present, for one– I am working hard on becoming organized. Any thoughts are welcome!