Nikki Loftin

Archive for the ‘Family News’ Category

Breaking and Breaking Through

Boy, Writer Friends, it’s been a week! My 7 y.o., Hinky Punky, broke his wrist on Monday. We just had the cast put on today, and he’s back to swinging from the chandeliers, or close to it. (Scottish Grandpa arrived Monday as well, for his three week visit.*) Then my husband bought me diamond earrings. WHOA! I KNOW!! The first diamonds – well, pretty much ANY jewelry I’ve seen from the man — in a very long time. A marital breakthrough, if you will.

In writing, I was invited to join a blogging group of writers HERE. (I am so outclassed. Still, I’ll try to rally, and come up with something amazing, and witty, and hopefully not-too-X-rated by February.) Dear Teen Me is a great concept, spearheaded by the amazingly talented and creative E. Kristen Anderson, where authors of books for young readers write a letter to their teen self. What would I tell Teen Nikki? Break up with that guy? Find a better best friend? Eat less ice cream? Read more worthwhile books than this kind of stuff?

Or maybe, just take a break? I was a little too driven back then. I almost had a breakdown my Junior year, would have if Mrs. McGonigal hadn’t floated my academic boat with fake As for a whole semester. Teen Nikki mostly needed a nap, if I recall.

Back to my week.

Yesterday, there was the exciting announcement that I’ll be leading a talk/session at the Houston Writer’s Guild May conference for MG and/or YA writers. (Anyone have any scintillating ideas for me to steal, um, I mean, study?)

Also, I received a tiny little email from an editor wanting a few more thingymajiggys, so I wrote and wrote and wrote. We’ll see. *Nikki skips away to plant a money tree*

A chatty blog post, I know, lots of news, but no big news. But maybe that’s how it works for most writers, most of the time. Maybe it’s all about the small chances, the little breaks that lead to the bigger ones…I read this tonight, and wondered. Do successful writers engineer their own breakthroughs, through persistence, perseverance, and buckets of tears and sweat? Or is there something else – something divine, or sinister, something like luck or fate – in the mix?

How has it worked for you, Writer Friends? Any pointers?

*Don’t judge: tonight’s dinner was pork casssoulet au vin blanc, or something like that. Divine. The man can cook. Also, FREE babysitting.

Optional Pain

I am against tattoos. No, not for you. Go on and ink your little hearts out, Writer Friends. I’m against them for me, and not just because I’m fickle about art in general. No, it’s the whole “optional pain” aspect that turns me off.

I mean, life is full of pain, right? And pain, for me, has always been a bit more… remarkable, I guess you could say, than for many others.When Dave and I were dating, he did not appreciate this fact. I vividly* remember cutting my hand with a paring knife so deeply that Actual Blood Came Out Of The Cut. It wasn’t a stitches situation or anything (Oh, Lordy, I NEVER go for stitches – see Optional Pain above), but it was an adequate amount of blood to panic over, for me. Clueless, young, unmarried Dave didn’t see it that way. He was all, “meh,” about the whole thing, until I Set Him Straight about what pain means to a deep, emotional, overly dramatic soul like mine. (We’ve been married for many years, Friends, so don’t worry. When I accidentally cut myself these days, he cries even harder than I do. And sometimes brings home flowers. Good husband.)

Anyway, life is full of pain, and my goal is to keep my daily quota of pain as low as possible. And yet, Writer Friends, and yet.

I still, every day, write pages and pages of novels that may not ever be published, poems and short stories and essays, too — and then, just when I’m feeling quite good about myself, life, and the universe in general, I send them out. Like tiny, helpless ducklings into the crocodile-infested river of the Publishing World.

And when those rejections come in – and they do, I promise, even if I don’t post about all of them here (and no, I haven’t had any this week, thank you for asking) — it hurts. Like a punch in the gut. Like sciatica. Not as much as labor (except for that one R from Scholastic over a year ago – Lordy, if they made a home epidural kit I would’ve hooked myself up THAT week fersure), but just as horrible in its own way.

Then, when I catch my breath, I straighten up, mentally bark out “Thank you, Sir, May I have another?” and hit send on another submission. After which I cry, eat much, much chocolate, and tap out another thousand words on the Next Novel in Line.

Why? Because I’ve figured one thing out: this pain isn’t really optional, for me. As far as I can tell, it’s the only way I can get to where I want to go.

What about you, Writer Friends? Are you submitting, are you writing, are you finishing those novels/stories/picture books/essays, and polishing them just enough to send them out into the world? Or are you stalling, waiting, hesitating because you know that the inevitable blow is coming?

And if you are hesitating, let me ask a personal question: Do you have a tattoo? Because that’s way more scary to me.

Write well, Friends, finish your Works, and send them out into the world.

* all memories which involve my blood coming out of my body are vivid for me. Seriously, you’re talking to a woman who still doesn’t believe she might not bleed to death every month. I mean, it’s my blood! Coming out! Without stopping! Brrrrr.

Road Trip!

It’s Conference Time again, Writer Friends! I’m off to Houston to attend the Houston Writer’s Guild fall conference. I’ll get to meet Jennifer Mattson, my friend Kim Norman’s agent, and gush about how awesome Kim is. (She is a rhyming genius.) I even get to stay with an old family friend — and take my mom along for the ride. While I’m hobnobbing with the literati glitterati, Mom will be studying for some seriously scary acupuncture finals (she’s getting the equivalent of a PhD in acupuncture for infertility treatment). Of course, we will shop ever so slightly on the way there…

Exciting things have been going on in my life. First, I bought the shoes I have been wanting since I was four years old.* (When my Grandma would take me to Solo Serve in San Antonio for school shoes every August, I would put shoes exactly like this on and teeter around the section until Grandma forced me to take them off, informing me very matter-of-factly that “those shoes were for hookers.” For a long time, hooker was at the top of my secret career list, just for the shoes. I didn’t really get what the rest of the job entailed. )

Second — and speaking of Grandmas — I had a very nice email from the editor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series (the Grandmother edition) letting me know that my essay, Silver Hair and Snickerdoodles, should appear in the March 2011 anthology. (No confetti just yet, these things take time. A lot can happen before March.)

Last, I’m pretty sure I’ll have Holy Toast ready for readers in a few weeks (I slipped a little on the timing due to some work-for-hire for another editor), so get your tickets now! Oh, and I promise to have your manuscripts critiqued very, very soon. All of you, my darlings.

(By the way, did you know I’m teaching Zumba 6 or 7 times a week now? If I keep shaking my booty like this, it’ll fall off!)

Write well, Friends, and wear fabulous shoes while you do it.

* The shoes I got are much cuter, but you get the general idea.

Festival Season Begins!

I’ve lived my whole life within thirty miles of Austin, Texas. My French teacher in high school used to mourn that I’d become one of those insular hick housewives, popping out a half-dozen kids before I turned thirty in a trailer park on the outskirts of town. I’d like to think she wouldn’t be dismayed at the direction my life took ( although she’d probably smack me for turning down that acceptance to UT Law school. Hey, I never wanted to make any money to begin with) but you never know what success means to different people.

Anyway, I love living in Austin, even more since I threw myself into the writing scene. Where else can you casually meet these kinds of authors at a local high school? (I’m totes taking my 15 y.o. niece, who thinks I am some sort of superhero for securing her face time with her idols.) Of course, I won’t bother taking her to the Big Mama of all Festivals, The Texas Book Festival. That’s where I get my fangirl on, with hundreds of the most spectacular authors in the Universe showing up to do small-group panels, talks, signings, etc. If you hang out in the Congressional cafeteria long enough, you can even Watch Famous Authors Order Cheeseburgers.

The coolest part about these festivals? They are FREE. All you have to do is clear your weekend out, and it’s like going to one of the best writing workshops in the country, except this one takes place in a city with good weather, excellent Mexican food, and only a very few trailer parks on the outskirts.

And, no, I do not live in one of those… yet. So, Writer Friends. If any of you can wing your way down here to Austin, and need a non-trailerish launch pad for your Festival Fun… send me a quick note! The guest bedroom is as cheap as it gets.

Sad News: My 12 y.o. terrier Sugar died unexpectedly on Friday. She was a grumpy little dog, fiercely protective of the kids (she guarded their cribs when they were babies) and prone to express her displeasure with well-placed carpet stains. We all loved her so.

If You Starve a Blog, Does it Die?

The answer, it seems, is no. Or this one would have perished weeks ago.

I didn’t mean to leave my Writer Friends hanging. It’s just that I’ve been busy revising novels, writing short pieces, and living a life.

Yes, one of those. I went on a road trip with the kids, and we had a blast. Was it bad that I kept thinking “I’m getting so much MATERIAL here!”every time we stopped somewhere cool? Come on, the World’s Biggest Pistachio? Enormous cave structures (Speleothems, or somesuch) shaped precisely like giant boobies? (According to my 10 year old son, naturally, who giggled his way through Carlsbad Caverns. You’ve never seen the ninth wonder of the world until you’ve seen it with a little boy who keeps whispering “nipples!’ every few minutes To be fair, I was thinking the same thing.)

We saw petroglyphs – which have already made an appearance in a short fiction piece this week — and sledded down the dunes at White Sands. We took pictures of badger tracks, and kangaroo rat tracks, and all sorts of other tracks in the early morning, and watched an evening storm that rolled in all around us, flooding the mountains, while we stood on the dry, silent dunes. Gorgeous.

My favorite moment was watching the “Dance of the Pour” at the bronze foundry in Shidoni, outside Santa Fe. A giant cauldron of molten metal splahing like lava all around? You know that’s going into something I write… someday.

So, that’s what I did on my summer vacation. Now, I’ll spend a few weeks revising some manuscripts I’ve got ready to polish, and send out a thousand small subs so I can get those little ego boo moments every now and again (to offset any possible rejections) and I’ll try to blog a bit more frequently. But who knows when life will start happening all around me again, and I’ll need to put down the keyboard and go build the moments that actually make books wonderful?

So… what did YOU do on your summer vacation?

Embarrassing Yourself (And Your Kids)

Happy Monday! It’s Overshare Day on Nikki’s Blog, so settle back in your comfy chairs and get ready to learn things you never wanted to know about me. Don’t worry, I have an actual reason for the information. Not a great reason, but a reason. So here goes.

One of the joys in my sad, pathetic housewife life is embarrassing my children. I do it as regularly and publicly as I can. (Just yesterday, I sang and danced Lady Gaga’s song Telephone (while on Grandma’s boat on Lake Austin – sound travels better over water) to my two boys and their 10 year-old cousin Josh. They all hid under beach towels, but that did not deter me. No! I made it all the way through to the Beyonce part of the video. Now that’s dedication.) I was deemed the most embarrassing mom in the  universe. Score!

I also do embarrassing things at home, too. And you know what? The boys don’t mind that so much, as long as no one else can hear me. Like, for two or three months last year, as soon as the kids arrived home from school, I got out my guitar and played a made-up song about farting called Bust a Grumpy while the boys danced on the bed.* The refrain was plebeian but, Oh, the verses! Full of all sorts of details describing flatulence. (I am, you know, a published poet. You got mad word skillz, ya use ‘em. LOL)

I digress.Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. Willing to embarass yourself… and those you love. As a writer, you gotta do it. Come on, it takes a pretty thick ego to call yourself a writer, and a thicker one to write a novel that you send out into the cold, hard world. It’s even harder to do something novel with your novel, or whatever you’re writing. To take a risk, to do something not quite like what everyone else is doing? Terrifying. Potentially excruciatingly embarrassing. Build up that ego; you’re going to need it.

There are going to be plenty of people who will tell you that your novel in verse/picture book in emails/YA paranormal romance about sentient cheeses is the worst idea they’ve ever heard. (Hopefully not your beta readers.) But write it anyway. Will it get published? Probably not. Most things don’t. But will you experience an almost transcendent joy in the creation of that thing that your uncool heart/imagination/Dork-Muse called forth into being? Yes, you will. And that’s the real payoff.

When I daydream, I hear children laughing. Sometimes it’s my real kids laughing about the bedtime story I made up for them that night. (Talk about payoff. All my bedtime stories hit the bestseller lists.

Someday I hope it will be the children reading my work. It could be that they’ll laugh at me, instead of with me. So what? I stopped trying to be cool long ago, and I never was very good at it anyway. What I want to be good at is telling my stories in a new way. Even if that means making myself look like an idiot. Even if it means mortifying all those associated with me.

It probably will. Hey, I have a whole lot of kids, family members, and beta reader friends to embarrass. I am so blessed.

Do you ever find yourself worried about what others will think of your work? Do you ever censor yourself to avoid embarrassment… or even hide your manuscripts in a drawer/your light under a bushel to avoid being laughed at/rejected? Don’t we all know writers who do that? Let’s not be that kind of writer, Friends.

Write well, and bravely. Have fun with your work!

News: An editor of a literary journal nominated a short story of mine for an award/competition thingy. I’ll give more details later, if anything comes of it. For now, I’m just feeling all warm and fuzzy knowing he thought my little story was good enough to be sent on!

* They made me swear never to tell anyone about this. What can I say? I’m a fiction writer. I lie all the time.

Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas Eve, Blog Friends!

It’s cold in Texas today and getting colder — beginning to feel (at last) a bit like Christmas. I got a stocking stuffer this week already — an essay of mine will appear in The Ultimate Christian Living anthology, out next March. Yay! (Of course, Santa may have to work a little harder next year — what I asked for was a book deal)

To all my friends, family, and cyber-stalkers: I hope you all get the gifts you asked for. Here’s a little something to read while you’re wrapped in your blanket/Snuggie/arms of a loved one. Grab some hot cocoa, and have fun reading Nikki’s Christmas Letter (as usual, written by Dave. Thanks, Dave!).

Stay warm, sing carols, and hug everyone you can. Tonight’s Little Baby Jesus Night — it doesn’t get any better than this.

No More Books About Toy Rabbits

Okay, children’s book writers out there, I’m giving you fair warning: If you’re planning to write about a stuffed toy that learns to love a child, you’re going to need to make it a bear, or an otter, or a hedgehog or something. My husband has declared a permanent moratorium on stuffed bunny books in our house. And, after wiping the tears last night from the faces of my children, myself, and (almost) one or two from Dave, I have agreed.  No more bunnies.

The Velveteen Rabbit has long been known as the go-to book for sick, evil kids who want to watch their parents cry. (You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen their eyes when you get to those last chapters. They’re watching you try to hold it together, not paying a bit of attention to the story. Little sadists.) Anyway, last night I read the last seven chapters of Kate DiCamillo’s book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (the rabbit in question), to my kids. We’ve been reading a couple of chapters a night, a very Norman Rockwell-ish thing to do, if I say so myself. It was all going very well until the formerly beloved authoress, Ms. DiCamillo, who gave us that lovely little mouse Despereaux, and her new, gloriously magical The Magician’s Elephant — Winn Dixie for crying out loud! — turned on us… and killed off a precious little four-year old character, a wonderful, flaxen-haired girl (there’s illustrations, yanno) who loved the rabbit, and her brother, and Jesus, and apple pie, and ponies (you get the picture) so much. The little girl we all fell in love with, just a little. Until she died. Gone. Kaput. Dead as a wedge. Buried. Worm food.

The tears started then. I kept reading, thinking surely this must have a happier ending. Surely, Kate wouldn’t do this to us! My children kept sobbing, my six-year old asking “Why, Mommy” Why did she die? Can’t she come back alive?” — and I never wanted more than to race down to my computer and revise a book — and I kept reading to find the happy ending, realizing as the pages left to read grew fewer and fewer, down to three, two, one… that it was not coming.

And then — no I’m not going to tell you what happened — a small, joyful burst of “happy tears”at the end, but too little. Too late.

An hour and a half of crying, four lullabies, and a couple of stiff drinks later, we were all able to move past it. (Um, don’t worry, The drinks were for the grown-ups.)

Do I recommend this one? Sure. If you want to weep yourself senseless. Just don’t make it your bedtime read-aloud. The writing was, as usual, glorious, so beautiful that at times I wanted to re-read it just to hear the words again. (Sound of Nikki tamping down jealousy here.)

So, Kate is a master at her craft, but she’s really, really mean, too.

I hope someday I can be just as mean. Now, it’s back to my own manuscript,where no one dies (well, not yet), and my MC has just performed inadvertent CPR on a dying man who was choking on a fishing lure.

A Nice Surprise + Werewolf Abs

A perfect weekend. Yesterday we celebrated Dave’s birthday with a dinner at Eddie V’s and a night in the Hyatt Regency on Lady Bird Lake in Austin — free babysitting courtesy of Aunt Lari. Yay Lari! Yay free babysitting! (Of course, we took a side trip to the Alpha & Omega gallery to see Dave’s and my mom’s photos in their current exhibition. Gorgeous.) Today began with a walk on the Hike and Bike Trail, brunch, a trip to the bookstore, a movie at the Alamo Village and then… contributor’s copies in the mailbox. A short anecdote/essay I wrote about my awesome grandma is in the December issue of Presbyterians Today. A nice surprise!

(What movie, you ask? Um, that would have been New Moon. I have two words for you people: Team Jacob. I have never felt more like a nasty old cougar in my life, and I don’t care. Middle-aged women gasped out loud in the theatre when he took his shirt off the first time, and giggled every time after that. Really, a pretty horribly acted movie, if you were thinking about the acting. Which I wasn’t. I was thinking about the abdominals. Yummy.)

Grounded From Books

I’ll admit: I have a problem. It’s not one of those fashionable ones you can talk about at parties either, or that goes away with diet, exercise, or Botox. I have a book problem.

When I was a little girl, my parents tried just about every punishment in the world (because I was a very naughty little girl, of course), but their fallback was grounding me from books. You see, I didn’t really care all that much about losing TV or telephone. Oh yeah, and this was way before computers, because I’m dinosaur-old. I always swore I would never ground my kids from books, because I think it’s inherently evil, and far too effective. I have a kid who has a bit of a reading problem, too, so I know how tempting it can be.

But I may have to ground MYSELF from books this week. I have so many good books… and the one I need to concentrate on is the one that’s half-delivered, its head on my computer screen, the rest of its little self still lodged in my mind.

Ah, birth analogies. Did I ever tell you about my 23 hours of back labor? Hey, where are you going?

Okay, I’ll stop. I have one piece of very good news today, though, so hang around until you read this: I sold three short stories to a new enterprise. Remember those books your aunts and uncles gave you at Christmastime that had your name typed in them as one of the characters? I had Snow White, the Seven Dwarves, and Nikki Loftin. It was totally one of my favorites ever, and my kids still think it’s awesome. Well, a new business called storysomething is going to do this online — with personalized books you can download to your phone or computer. I can’t wait. But I’ll have to; they’re still in Beta testing.

Still, very cool. Of course, I used my own kid’s name in the drafts I sent them!

Now, I’m off to sign that work-for-hire contract… and then to finish giving birth to another snarky, very naughty MC. If I can stay away from my TBR pile…