Category: Writing
Friday, May 3, 2013 | Good News, Spring, Writing |
And, suddenly, the world is green again.
I’ve got news: I haven’t signed on the dotted line, but my agent tells me the deal is done, and promises that I won’t be jinxing myself by making an announcement.
Deep breath, here goes: I’m going to be a children’s author!
I’ve read a few children’s books over the years. In fact, I’ve done the math and figure that I’ve read at least 7,665 picture books since embarking on motherhood nearly twelve years ago, although I have to wonder how many of those constituted multiple reads. You know, the favourites that got “lost” because the loving parent couldn’t bear even one more read? I also wonder whether there are even that many pictures books at the library? Numbers are not my forte.
Anyway, it’s been an education. And I know what I like. So I wrote a book for children.
The title is The Juicy Jelly Worm.
I was helped along the way by brainstorming with my kids (but of course!). I riffed on plot ideas. I wanted to make them laugh. And in the end, I wrote text that has no moral to the story (gasp!). None. The book is purely for fun. It’s approximately 700 words in length. The publisher, OwlKids, will find an illustrator to bring the story to life, and really, as a neophyte children’s author, I don’t know how the process will unfold, other than it appears to be underway.
A few more details: OwlKids is known here in Canada for publishing the popular kids’ magazines Chirp, Chickadee, and Owl (our household subscribes to all three). And the tentative pub date is 2015.
So there you have it: The Juicy Jelly Worm, coming to a library/bookstore near you, a few years from now.
Meanwhile, I present to you Spring. Appearing right here, right now!
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 | Fun, Publishing, Writing |
writing at soccer practice
This was me, yesterday evening. I was stuck on a plot point that just wouldn’t fix itself, so I took my notebook and pen to soccer practice, rather than taking my running gear (nasty head cold, so that made the choice easier). An hour and a half later, I had the full outline for the second half of the book. It’s a short book, let me add. I still use writing advice bestowed upon our sixth grade class by a teacher I remember fondly: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. I even like the Stupid part of the saying, which would probably be dropped by teachers now (would it?). I’m not that smart when it comes to plot. That’s where I really need to apply the KISS principle.
These photos crack me up because I’m clearly not writing. Pen does not meet paper. I’ve had a few portraits taken by photographers who want me to “look like a writer,” by which they mean, “look like my idea of a writer, please.” I am then instructed to pose with a pen and paper. I can explain til I’m blue in the face that I write my books on a computer. But people want to see their writers writing. (Nancy Forde, you are the exception to this rule!)
Occasionally, apparently, it happens. I write like I look like a real writer. (Now, if only I can decipher my own scrawl …)
see, pen not touching page
Kitten update: Turns out Fooey would be happy with a fish. She just wants a pet of her own. I guess the dogs are too communal as far pets go? We had to break it to her that a kitten would not sleep in her bed, or not for long. I still kind of want the kitten, but I’m not telling her. Maybe I have a diagnosable problem: the desire to collect living beings to care for, possibly in volumes greater than I can actually manage.
Manage. Well, even if I can’t manage them all, I can still care for them all, right? Manage and care not being the same thing, when you get right down to it.
I’ve got some news. It’s small and I haven’t signed on the dotted line, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because it’s really kind of out there news for me: I’ve had an offer for the text of a children’s picture book!!! Details to come, assuming it all works out, and dotted lines are signed, etc. I’m so looking forward to saying, “Why, yes, I do also write for children,” when asked, which is regularly. In fact, the notes, above, are on the plot to a children’s novel I’m in the midst of.
The thing I’ve discovered about being productive is that you just have to sit your butt down and write. KISS. One word after another. And if you get stuck, it’s good to have a few projects spread out and on the go in different stages of completion. It’s pleasant if the projects are quite different in nature, too.
I’ve got my ideas basket over here. My opening paragraphs bin over there. My lonesome disconnected short stories haunting the cobwebbed corners of my office. My research files stuffed into the cupboard behind me. The half-written manuscript that hasn’t found the right structure lying in wait. Meanwhile, the completed manuscript that is looking for a home is not mine to worry about, not right now. Do the work. Let it go.
The other thing about being productive is that it’s nice not to be productive sometimes. To leave your desk and computer (or pen and notebook, as it were), and go have lunch with your husband to celebrate an offer on your first ever picture book. Woot! I’m off!
Friday, Apr 26, 2013 | Dream, Friends, Kids, Writing |
How are you?
I always reply, as expected, I am fine. Most of us do, right? It’s a polite greeting, back and forth, not meant as a deeply searching opening.
But, how are you? No, really, you can tell me.
And then I’ll tell you.
I’ll tell you, in truth, that I am struggling. Fold down the corner on this page. It’s only one page in a whole book. Mark it off. This too shall slip into the past. There is nothing specific to attach my struggle to, and perhaps that is why I am struggling. There is no news. I wait for news, knowing I can’t control when it arrives, nor what message it will bring. If I could learn how to live within this, what a gift it would be. I could learn real peace of mind. But so far, I am struggling.
In my dreams last night I signed a book contract only to discover that there was no editor to help me edit the book, and I would need to go it alone based on a few scribbled notes that included instructions to write “a wedding scene.” My book has no wedding scene, nor any obvious place to include a wedding scene, given that the main character never marries. Also, I wouldn’t get paid until the edits were complete. On the plus side, assuming I could complete the edits, I would earn a healthy sum. On the minus side, my personality in the dream could be summed up as: socially awkward. It’s my second socially awkward dream this week.
What can it mean?
This dream melded with another in which my entire family was riding in a helicopter while I ran in a field underneath them, watching the helicopter tilt and crash-land. But everyone was okay. We went into a nearby house and I realized we’d forgotten to bring the piano books. Crisis in dreamland! How would the children practice the piano?
So, how are you?
Me, I’m flat as day-old soda pop.
But this morning is clear and sun-filled. All of my kids still love to be hugged tight. Tonight is poetry book club. There is the possibility, always, that peace of mind is within, waiting for me to alight upon it. So, just now, I’m going outside, friends. I’m leaving this desk for a little while. I’m going outside.
Sunday, Apr 21, 2013 | Blogging, Driving, Kids, Organizing, Parenting, Photos, Running, Spirit, Swimming, Work, Writing |
all of these photos look even better viewed in full: click on them to see
I ran on Tuesday evening: 10 kilometres. I ran again on Wednesday morning with a friend: 8.8 kilometres. I ran again on Thursday evening, in a light rain: 10.5 kilometres. I ran again on Friday evening, in a wind that took the breath away, cursing with fury the weather: 7 kilometres. On that run, fist at sky, a grin broke across my face somewhere in the second kilometre. Running makes me happy, no matter how irritable my mood, no matter the weather. That’s when it came to me. I had run every day since the explosions at the Boston marathon. I hadn’t chosen to do it consciously.
I have six more kilometres to run, and then I will have completed the marathon distance, spread over six days rather than an afternoon.
It is Sunday afternoon. I have one more indoor soccer game today. I’d like to shut the computer down and run those last six kilometres, but I also want to take time to process photos and to write. I am trying to train myself to be disciplined with my time. On Friday, for example, I had an hour alone in my office, the kids being home on a PD day. I forced myself to turn the hour toward my new manuscript, a children’s novel.
Kevin is playing top forty dance music while he does the dishes.
I took my camera with me this morning when I drove to pick up AppleApple from her swim practice. It was my third trip out already this morning, and I thought, let’s document where I spend so much of my time: inside a vehicle, driving these familiar roads. Seen through the lens, the landscape looks bleak, somehow, empty, under construction. I like the resulting photos. Processing them, with Kevin’s music in the background, has given me a curiously crushing happiness this noon, a demolished happiness, like the happiness I associate with being young, with being alive to a potential and possibility not quite defined but present, a streak of light, a flare of anticipation, excitement mingled with melancholy, premature nostalgia. Nostalgia for a moment already happening.
This is the mood I’m in when I want to play the piano and sing.
This is the mood I’m in when I want to write a new story.
Or create photographs. It’s a happy mood. It’s a split-the-world-open mood. It doesn’t happen every day. I am thankful.
P.S. Just ran those last six kilometres. With love to all the long distance runners out there.
Wednesday, Apr 17, 2013 | Blogging, Books, Reading, Spirit, Writing |
Heavy subjects on my mind, but no clarity. As I don’t feel I have anything to add to the conversation, I won’t talk specifically about what happened at the Boston marathon on Monday afternoon. What felt so very strange was watching the raw photos and eyewitness accounts on Twitter only minutes after the explosions happened, with no context, no analysis, no filter — much like being a witness to something rather than being given a story, or told a story. In the evenings I am reading the Little House on the Prairie books to the kids, and when Pa has to go away to work he walks hundreds of miles, and his family waits for him to come home, with only one letter, months into his absence, to assure them that he is well and alive and will be returning to them.
I wonder if people used to be better at waiting, more practiced at patience.
Now we want to see and know instantly. I can text my husband from the grocery store to ask what’s missing from my list. I can text him a play-by-play description of the swim race my daughter is swimming in, even though we are 100 kilometres apart, and send him photos of the event. I like this. I’m comforted by it.
But I also recognize that I expect it, almost. I feel like I need to know. I also feel like I need to express, immediately, whatever it is I’m thinking. What are we recording in our blogs, in our Facebook statuses, our tweets? It’s the minutiae of where we’re at, in this moment. It’s the stuff of life, the stuff that does not keep, no matter how we mark it, and broadcast it to our friends. This too shall pass.
In the end, I’m not sure our narratives, the ones that are being written now, the stories that matter to us and stick with us, are all that different from the books that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote. She wrote her childhood experiences first as a memoir, but that version was rejected by publishers. Finally, she shaped her memories into something different, going from first person to third, eliding experiences, leaving great swathes out, altering the tone, turning the minutiae, the scraps, into a whole arcing storyline. I feel like I’m telling my story in real-time, here on the blog, but that it’s not the same story I would tell if I decided to write a book about my life. Do you know what I mean? And yet, in both mediums, I am hoping to land on something universal, something lasting, some deeper human connection.
This blog plays the part of witness, I think.
Right now, today, I am suspended. I’m waiting. It feels like I’m waiting to find out about EVERYTHING. No amount of texting and twittering and Facebooking can tell me what’s going to happen. In this way, I’m not so unlike Ma, and Mary, and Laura, and Carrie, waiting to find out what’s happened to Pa, going about their daily routines, keeping busy, keeping their spirits up, hoping for the best. No matter how immediate our access to information, Life remains largely mysterious. The shape of our lives remains mysterious, as it is happening to us. And so we pluck out the scraps and offer them for examination. We photograph our meals and our cups of coffee. We record the kilometres we ran today. But it doesn’t really tell us, does it, where we’re at, and what is happening to us, or, more precisely, what is going to happen.
I suspect that the instantaneous nature of contemporary communication only distracts me from this truth. Patience remains an art that needs to be practiced, and appreciated. And so I wait as best I can.
Saturday, Apr 13, 2013 | Birth, Spirit, Work, Writing |
This morning, at the very moment this blog publishes (9:30 AM), I will be in Hamilton, Ontario at McMaster University starting an interview process known as MMI (multiple-mini-interview) in the hopes of earning a place in their midwifery program this fall. (Unless my carshare car has broken down by the side of the road en route, or I’ve developed a violent stomach flu, or any number of other worst-case scenarios occur that have been plaguing my dreams all week.)
The MMI is an interviewing process that involves, as I understand it, the applicant visiting ten different rooms in rapid succession, and being asked in each room to respond to a new question or scenario. Each room has a different assessor present, and the conversation/scenario ends after ten minutes. And then it’s on to the next room. I wonder whether I’ll agree with this statement afterward, but I’m actually looking forward to the process — to getting in there, digging in, presenting myself, being myself, experiencing something new and different.
I’ve done some groundwork, as best I can. I’ve grilled my friend who graduated from the program two years ago. I’ve read a book of essays on midwifery in Ontario that she recommended. And I’ve written down my thoughts and wandered around the house answering imaginary questions in long rambling mutters.
So here’s what I’m planning to say if asked: “Why do you want to be a midwife?” Which seems like a question I ought to expect and know the answer to.
I want to be a midwife because I want to do work that is practical, hands-on, and meaningful.
I want to work with women, and their families, during moments of profound transition and change, and assist in the process. I want to learn and practice new skills. I want to empower women to make choices about their bodies that bring them health, confidence, and strength.
I would be privileged to become a midwife. I think birth is a life-altering physical experience that has the power to be spiritually meaningful, too.
I have been drawn to midwifery since witnessing (and helping, a bit!) my mother labour and give birth, at home, to my sister, with amazing midwives in attendance. I was twelve-and-a-half and have been fascinated by birth and midwifery ever since. In my early teens I pored over Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. Two of my favourite subjects in high school were biology and chemistry. At nineteen, while a university arts major, I picked up a flier for the then-brand-new midwifery education program in Ontario, but didn’t work up the courage to apply (wisely, I think, as it wouldn’t have been the right moment in my life). I chose midwifery care for my own pregnancies, and was fortunate to give birth at home three out of four times (the hospital birth being due to complications). In the past four years, I’ve been invited to support friends and family through labour and birth, both at home and in hospital.
[Note: my daughter advises me to edit the above paragraph heavily, and not mention why I didn’t become a midwife before — “You’re never going to fit all of this into ten minutes, Mom! And you just have to tell them why you want to be a midwife now.” Excellent point. Glad I rehearsed it with her.]
I want to be a midwife because I believe it combines physical and spiritual work. I want to work directly with people in a way that seems to me quite unique: midwifery care, as I’ve experienced it, is intimate, personal, compassionate, supportive, celebratory, active, at times requiring intense involvement and attention, and at other times requiring deep listening and attention. I see it as a job that is in service to the health and well-being of others. In that way, it’s very much like my writing work, but with an outward pull rather than an inward pull. I see the two being quite connected. Both work requires intuition grounded in knowledge, trust, and a good ear.
I also want to be a midwife because it is my goal, eventually, when my children are grown, to volunteer and serve in areas of the world, or here in Canada, where health care is less accessible, and there is a need for perinatal care.
Why midwifery rather than another health care profession? It could be due to my formative and positive experiences with midwives. It could be because midwifery’s long history and tradition is of women helping women, and I would love to join that tradition. It could be because I’ve got a bit of the counter-cultural in me, as well as an interest in being a medical professional. A midwife, to me, is someone who believes in the fundamental power of a woman’s body, and that ties in to my interest in overall health, fitness, and strength.
I would bring to my practice a belief that we can all live inside our bodies with respect and care. I would also bring the understanding that not everything can be planned. I would bring the ability to be flexible, to be open to what may be rapidly-changing situations, and to be responsive to shifting choices and needs. I know myself to be calm, focused, and decisive when that is called for, but I also have a light touch in weighty matters. I try to read the situation and respond as needed.
Am I totally off-topic? What was the question? [Insert anxiety dream scenario here …]
Please … wish me luck!
