Writing About Grandma

Last night, my Grandma fell and broke her ribs. Well, only two of them, but that’s enough when you’re 89. This is the Grandma I keep writing picture books and essays about (that’s her with her stapler in this month’s Skirt! essay). We’re beyond close. She taught me to bake cookies, to hang laundry, to cuss for the pure joy of it.  So of course I spent most of the day with her (she’s with Mom in Austin right now, but she had an appointment that couldn’t be shifted).

On top of the painkillers, Grandma has senile dementia/Alzheimer’s, so most of the day was spent in a very short conversational loop. But I had the chance to read my October essays to her — making your Grandma giggle is like making a baby laugh, pure joy — and watch TV with her between catnaps. You’ve never watched the cooking channel until you’ve watched it with Grandma; she kept muttering “I wish she would wash those vegetables she’s using,” and “She’s not going to rinse that fish?”  and “You’d think a professional would know to tie that long hair back.” (You might want to think about that, Sandra Dee. The health department will ding you for the hair.) Lunch was my homemade cajun ham and bean soup, fresh cornbread, and my dark chocolate walnut cookies. I’m pretty sure it tasted better than whatever that Barefoot Contessa was making. At least Grandma said so.

When she napped, I read the perfect book for a day with Grandma — A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck. I laughed, I cried. His Grandma was wonderful and terrible, mischievous, loyal, cussedly mean, and determined to make things right.  It made me wonder how many authors out there are writing picture books and novels about their dear, obstinate, peculiar Grandmas. I know I can’t seem to stop writing about mine.

Make Things Possible

I am home with a sick kid today, like most of the rest of North America, it seems. If you are home, too, or avoiding your writing, or waiting for a phone call, here’s a beautifully written, evocative essay that I found on the Editorial Ass(istant) website. The essay is by Alexander Chee, about his studies with Annie Dillard. Here’s my favorite part, Annie speaking:

Don’t worry about being original… Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. You writing it makes it possible.

I did not study with Annie Dillard, although I read her voraciously when I was at graduate school, flailing about for what it was I was “meant” to write. I had decided creative nonfiction about the Texas Hill Country was what I was meant to write for my thesis, at the very least, and found much to learn from in her work.

To all my writer friends: Go and make things possible today!

How Much Would You Pay A Publicist?

Oh, wow. So, last night I attended the monthly Writer’s League of Texas meeting. This one was  a very good panel, with authors Varian Johnson (a good speaker, and not so hard on the eyes), Stephanie Klein (a hoot!), and some other guy who writes terribly serious non-fiction about oil and energy and seemed very, very intense about the whole thing.

Also, there was a publicist. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m sure she is a very good publicist. She mentioned Oprah a few (dozen) times, and seemed passionate about her work. But the thought of paying between $2,ooo – $10,000 a month to promote a novel is so far out of my realm of perception, it’s like trying to imagine the national deficit.

Yep, you read those numbers right — 2 to 10 THOUSAND a month. (If you clicked the deficit link, you probably didn’t read those numbers right. What comes after a hundred trillion? A squintillion?) When pressed, Probably Very Good Publicist shared that really, anyone can do this whole publicity/social media thing. “It’s common sense,” she said.

On that note, I would like to share today’s post on a favorite website with a cussword in the title. If you read romances, check out their “Best Of” list. Hilarious. Definitely check out their post on social media today, but be prepared to hear a whole lotta cussin’ going on.

Yes, lots of bad language. But I imagine that would be the same kind of language running through my head if and when I ever consider dropping $10,000 a month on promotion.

Never say never, though, right?

A Kinder, Gentler Workshop

When I was in graduate school, every semester the writers were required to take a “workshop” class. This was where you went to have your soul sucked out through your nostrils with coffee straws. Or at least that’s what it felt like. One of the Austin SCBWI members (and a phenomenal writer) Margo Rabb, wrote a piece about this. She tells it like it is/was. I’m with her on the tequila shots.

Today, I had the great good fortune to attend a kinder, gentler workshop at the REI store in Round Rock (yes, strange venue, with constant announcements about sales in the shoe department on the intercom) led by author Chris Eboch. Announcements aside, it was a delight. I went in with no expectations, since this was my first workshop in decades (and I knew that at the first sign of coffee straws, I was outta there), but it was very useful, and not at all painful. I think, in fact, I can use what I did today to dig myself out of the hole I was in last week on my new MG novel…

Plus, my friends Shelli and Lindsay were there, and I went upstairs and bought a new pair of shoes on sale right after the workshop. Those announcements worked!

New shoes make everything better. Now that I think of it,  if they had held our graduate writing workshops in a shoe store, that might have helped…

Nah.

I Would Like To Thank The Academy…

As Gertrude Stein said, “Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anybody.” So I wanted to take a quick moment to thank all my friends, family, and strangers from the Blogosphere for sending your lovely comments about my essays. THANK YOU!

Here’s a little payback for my writer friends: I discovered a writer blog by an Austin YA author, Brian Yansky. Very inspirational. Check it out! (The connection: I was getting ready to teach my Zumba class last week when one of my members, who knew I was a writer, asked if I knew her brother-in-law. Now I do! Can’t wait to meet him at an Austin SCBWI event. He sounds fascinating!

Now, I’m off to write another 2,000 words or so on a novel — and maybe another essay? I had an idea this morning… right after the dream where the aliens had me trapped in an old Victorian-style house, and they were trying to convince me that I really wouldn’t mind acting as one of their mindless Hosts. It’s amazing how effective my dream dead-bolts were against those aliens…

It’s All About Me

Okay, let’s just get this out there: Everything I write is autobiographical. I’m not going to tell the lie I learned in my graduate school writing workshops. I don’t make all this stuff up. Not really.

Well, I mean, of course I make it up. But what I’ve been noticing more and more is the things I write that are at least semi-autobiographical (ie: the characters in them are recognizably me/my family/friends/pets) are the only ones that get published/win prizes. So, sure, I’ve written some cute little stories about bears sailing boats in a regatta, which were unbearably bad, and a few other similar things that will stay moored to my hard drive forever.

Bringing a writer into the world? That’s a fear parents don’t have, but they should. That their children will someday grow up to be writers who love their parents so much they want to immortalize them forever in print (yeah, that’s the angle!), or love writing and being published so much they don’t really care how Mom or Dad feel about it (um, that’s probably closer to the truth).

On that note, here’s this week’s publications: Check out Skirt! magazine, the new essays section. Mine is called Coming Out of the Craft Closet. Also, The Hole Story is out in this month’s issue of Texas Co-op Power, just open the .pdf file to page 25.

Who knew my life was this interesting? Now off to do laundry. (Okay, I’m probably just going to read the Al Capone Does My Shirts book, but it’s laundry-related, right?)

Story in Boy’s Life!

Okay, I know. Two posts in one day? Excessive.

But I had two pieces of good news today! First, I sold another puppet play to another anthology, this time to a holiday-themed book. It will be out in early 2010. Great, right? But then….

I had a short story accepted by Boy’s Life magazine! This is a 1,000-word story called Facing The Panthers, about a fifth-grade soccer team learning to deal with their fear (abject terror, more like!) of the most notorious team in their League. My favorite part? The riff on the Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert’s Dune.

My brother Ryan is going to love this one. We memorized that Litany as teens, and used to recite it to each other at appropriate moments. I think the last time was when I called him over to my house (in my single days) to help boil my dishes clean. Ah, good times.

Nothing Like a Good Book…

What a day! No details, but it was NO FUN until… I got home, walked right past all the dirty dishes and the enormous mounds of laundry, pulled two of my own gigantic homemade chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer, read an email from a sweet editor letting me know that another one of my puppet plays has been accepted for another anthology (this one’s a holiday one) and then I opened up a new book… Al Capone Does My Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko.

You know that feeling you get when you start reading a really good book, and you race through chapter one, two, three, and realize you CAN’T STOP it’s THAT good? Well, I have kids to pick up, so I have to stop. But I know what I’m doing tonight. And it ain’t the laundry.

Thanks, Ms. Choldenko! You saved my day.

Ten Years Later…

Ten years ago today, I ended the longest day of my life — 23 grueling hours of unmedicated back labor — with a plea for an epidural (which made both my mother and husband burst into tears of gratitude for ending my own suffering and theirs) and a few hours later, the birth of my son, Cameron.

That was when my life as a mother began.. and my dreams of writing were in large part deferred. My kids were never the kind to sleep quietly while I wrote. They mostly screamed, and made enormous, staining messes, and when they got old enough fought with each other. I call this part of my life The Decade of Maternal Bitterness.

But this morning, as I shipped Son Number One and his little brother off on the bus to school (yes, he wanted to ride the bus on his birthday — he got a new DS -i he wants to show off) I realized I owed the entire past year of writing success to him. Not only have I written and published multiple essays about the “joys” of parenting, almost every character that pops into my head for my middle-grade books is based very closely on him. If you’ve read my work, you know this means I have a child similar to Raymond Mahaney running around loose in my house. Pity me.

My mom used to say, “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.” It’s true. Writing about Raymond/Cameron, I do laugh, a lot. Now.

But ten years ago, if you said that to me, I would have smacked you with a dirty diaper. Gotta love perspective.

Happy Birthday, Cameron! And thanks for giving me enough material to make a career.

Do Your Characters Pray?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of religion in genre fiction, and more specifically its role in the fiction I write.

I spent most of the last ten years working in churches. I went in a 3/4 time Christian (don’t ask), and came out a 100% God lover who drags her kids to church every Sunday, usually kicking and screaming. I tell them it’s character-building. Check this out: my sweet Hinky-Punky on Sunday. (He’s the one in the front row center, picking his nose.)

I’ll admit, we DO go to one of the most liberal churches in town. (It rocks: Central Presbyterian Church.) For crying out loud, I’m married to a Scottish guy (um, socialized medicine, anyone?), so it had to be Presbyterian and left-leaning.

I’ve written plenty of Christian-ish essays. But now, I’ve noticed the God stuff creeping into my fiction. I wondered if any other writers had the same concerns, and then today I saw this. Anyway, I spent some time editing out some passages that I thought went too in-depth into a character’s mind re: God, even though the views he was espousing were not, um, particularly in line with Christian doctrine. I just thought: Would this passage alienate my kids’ friends? (The atheist ones.) I stopped cutting when I was able to say no.

Maybe someday I’ll go ahead and write that book, the one that weaves God in without worrying about who’s watching… but not today. Comments?