School's Out For Summer

It’s the last day of school. By the time I post this I will be on my way to pick up my kids up after the final bell, and that will mark the end of my first year of “full time” writing.

As I reflect back on the school year, my first thought is to wonder where the time went. I look at what I have written and I think, “Is this really all I have to show for nine months of work?” Certainly this year has not shaken out the way I imagined it would, and the ferociously ambitious side of me is sorely disappointed in myself for not making the best use of my time.

Fortunately, that impossible-to-please beast within is tempered by a kinder voice, the part of me that excels at identifying and celebrating the smaller victories in life.

So what do I have to show for my time this year?

When it comes to the actual writing itself, there have been two main accomplishments. To start, I finished the first draft of an as-yet-untitled story that I began last spring. When the school year began I already had about 45K words under my belt, and when November rolled around I decided to declare it as my NaNoWriMo project, hoping to write 50K more and end the month with a complete first draft. While I didn’t reach either of those (probably unrealistic) goals, I did still write over 25K that month, and by April I finally decided to call the thing done when, despite it being a bit of a mess, I knew that I had enough raw material to consider the narrative arc complete. I’ve been letting it marinade these past couple of months, but I’m thinking it will be my summer project to reread and re-outline it so that when the kids return to school next fall I can be ready to dive into rewriting.

Next I began work on a new project that for now I’m calling Leviathan. I came up with the idea for the story back in September and jotted down a few notes on my phone so I could return to it later. Over the next several months I would add to my collection of notes as new thoughts struck me, and every time I heard a song that really nailed the vibe of a certain character or scene, I would add it to my playlist for that project. By the time I began writing it, I felt like I already had a pretty idea of where the story would start and where it was going. I’ll close out this year with about 10K words and a working outline for the rest.

But this was also an important year for reasons unrelated to word count.

It was about seven years ago that I realized I wanted to be a writer, and in the years since then I’ve felt often like I’ve been tripping over myself as I stumble clumsily toward the ultimate goal of publication. It’s been a real struggle to establish a writing routine as I juggle my personal ambitions alongside motherhood, marriage, and all the many wonderful responsibilities of adulthood, not to mention the challenge of working out my personal writing style and determining the kind of stories I want to tell.

I used to feel like I couldn’t make any progress if I didn’t have several uninterrupted hours to work at a time. But this year I found that, while those long stretches where the words just seem to flow effortlessly are magical when they happen, most of the time I work best in short spurts, jotting down a paragraph or two between other tasks.

Because of this, I also discovered the joy of writing on my phone. I have always used my phone for keeping notes, but the actual drafting was always done on my computer. This latest project, however, has been written almost entirely on my phone, copied and pasted every few days into the master document on my laptop. It’s been kind of exciting to see how much I can write in stolen moments - waiting in line at the grocery store, leaning against the counter while dinner simmers on the stove, perched on the edge of the tub while my kids brush their teeth, or sitting in the car during my daughter’s ukulele lessons. Even on days when I’ve had a good chunk of time to devote to writing I’ve often found it hard to focus for long stretches of time. So I would go on a lot of long walks, pausing to draft a scene on my phone in the moment it became clear to me, sitting on a bench or on the edge of the jetty leading out to the lighthouse, my feet dangling above the waves, the gulls screeching overhead.

But arguably the most important takeaway for me from this past year is the importance of honesty in writing, by which I mean writing without self-censorship. I think previously I was afraid to write anything too dark or painful or explicit because I worried what people would think if they ever read it. Would they think it was weird? Off-putting? Even immoral? But the more I thought about the kind of books I enjoy the most, the stories I find most moving, the more I realized that what drew me to those stories was the brutal truth of the human experience I found in them, in all of it’s pain and glory. Those are the kind of books I want to write. Stories in which people can see and recognize themselves and walk away feeling like they have been changed somehow, even in some small, hard to articulate way. So I finally said fuck it and started writing what I honestly wanted to write. And it is, in fact, darker and sadder and realer than anything I’ve written before. But most importantly I’m proud of it, regardless of the word count at the final bell.

So bring on the beach days and the water balloons and the campfires. Maybe I’ll sneak in some words while the kids are riding their bikes or playing in the treehouse. Or maybe I won’t, because I’ll be too busy joining them swimming in the lake, running barefoot in the grass, or reading a good book in the shade on the porch. Either way, it will be time well spent.

Photo by Kindel Media

Fifth Time's the Charm

Whatever I may have dreamed my days would look like once both of my kids were in school, it’s safe to say that the reality has not immediately matched that vision. Rather than spending the last several weeks cozied up with my computer, sipping tea and finally finishing this manuscript I started last year, I’ve mostly been scrambling to deal with all the myriad things around the house that have suddenly and inconveniently become urgent. Or with fulfilling the role of nurse to a seemingly endless carousel of kids with sniffly noses and persistent stomach bugs.

But now that I’ve answered all the emails and our immune systems appear to have reached a new, stronger equilibrium, I’m hoping to start making some progress on my writing goals for the year. Or rather, I’d like to actually set some writing goals and then begin trying to achieve them.

I sat down today with my calendar to do that and suddenly came to the realization that there’s only a little over a week left in October. So I added “Decide on kids’ Halloween costumes” to this week’s to-do list and tried to wrap my mind around the fact that another month has somehow slipped by. That’s when I decided to, once again, attempt NaNoWriMo.

I had kind of thought I was done with NaNoWriMo, namely because I’ve accepted that November isn’t usually a great time for me to take on big word count goals. It’s an especially busy month for our family because in addition to Thanksgiving there are birthdays to celebrate, as well as our wedding anniversary. I’ve signed up many times over the years, each time glowing with bright-eyed optimism, but I’ve only ever actually hit the 50K word goal twice, and both times the resulting word salads were…not excellent. (Fun fact, I was working on the same project both of those times, with five years between the two attempts. And now, after many years of beating that dead horse, that project has been shelved.) Last year I thought I actually had a chance because my youngest was in preschool four mornings a week, so maybe I would have time to write that much. But the project I was working on began to fall flat, and then life got complicated, so I closed out that month with a paltry 7600 words.

And yet, despite my dismal track record, I’m signing up again this year for the fifth time. There are several reasons I’m maintaining hope that it will go well. The first is that both of my kids are finally in school full time. I have (in theory) more time to write than I ever have. If I can just get my butt in the chair, I should be able to do it. The second reason is that I won’t be starting from scratch. The project I hope to complete is already clocking in at around 47K words, so with an additional 50K I could actually finish it and it would be another typical-for-me, over-long first draft…provided all those new words move the story forward so it can come to a coherent end.

Finally, and one of the most helpful parts of NaNoWriMo for a recovering perfectionist like me, is that I’m at the point in this project where the remaining unwritten scenes are not so clearly outlined, and I know that writing them is going to be messy as I attempt to unearth what I need from them. I’m hoping that being accountable to a word count goal will give me the push I need to just pinch my nose and get that cringey first draft down on the page. Then I’ll be able to look forward to the real fun of polishing it later.

So here goes nothing. Will I make my goal of 50K new words next month? And if I do, will that translate to a completed draft? Or will this be another in a long string of NaNoWriMo crash-and-burns? Tune back in December 1st to find out.

Photo by Andrew Neel for Pexels

I sent my baby to kindergarten

Last week my youngest started kindergarten. All day long my social media feeds were filled with posts from other parents who were also sending their babies to kindergarten, and nearly all of them talked about how sad it made them. “Devastated!” they said.

After we took the obligatory first-day-of-school pictures and sent the kids off with lots of hugs and kisses, I fixed myself an enormous iced coffee and went for a long walk on the beach, prepared to be bowled over by all the emotions that come with reaching a parenting milestone such as this. And, as expected, there were lots of feelings. I cried three times. But I have to be honest; I can’t say I was devastated.

It’s not that sadness was completely absent. There was a thread of grief running through the emotional soup that morning and all the mornings that have followed, a thread stemming from the bittersweet knowledge that the adorable toddler years are behind me and I can never get them back. The nagging worry that maybe I didn’t appreciate it all enough before I lost those tiny humans to the unstoppable forces of time. But in all honesty, sadness has not been my chief emotion.

The reality is that while it is sad to say goodbye to one season of life as you embark on the next, we - my children and I both - were all very ready for this moment. My kids were excited to start to school, and I felt a tremendous amount of pride watching my daughter take her little brother’s hand and walk him into the building. There was the faintest sting when he didn’t turn around to wave one last time, but it was overshadowed by the pleasure I took in watching him so confidently walk into his classroom and greet his teacher.

At the same time, this is a big deal for me. Namely, the freedom that comes from having both kids in school all day. I’ve shared before about the tension between the desire to be both a fully-present, emotionally available mother, and yet still wanting time to pursue the dreams I have for my life outside of motherhood. And now, after many years of telling myself, “Be patient! Don’t wish this away! There will be time later. Kindergarten is coming,” I am reaping my reward — the gratification long delayed. My favorite little people are off to the sacred halls of learning, and I am off to finally, hopefully, finish this manuscript! I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling positively giddy about it.

When you’re marveling at the wonder of your first, perfect baby sleeping peacefully in your arms, kindergarten sounds as though it’s lifetimes away. It seems impossible that someone so soft and bitty and helpless could become a roaring, hilarious five year old. And then later, when you’re juggling multiple kids and you’re exhausted because one of them isn’t sleeping so you aren’t sleeping and you can’t remember the last time you showered and the soundtrack to every trip to the grocery store is a combination of whining for treats and full-on wailing as you retrace your steps to find the pacifier that got dropped somewhere between the bananas and the dairy aisle, kindergarten feels like a distant sign post, somewhere far, far away, barely visible through the fog of years. But then you blink and here they are, donning their comically large backpacks and marching off to school. They always did say that the days are long but the years are short.

But I think in many ways, for parents of young children in this particular moment in history, the emotional experience that accompanies the moment you first send your kids to school has been somewhat heightened, because recent events made a lot of us wonder if maybe this would never happen at all.

For the last year, the part of me that is prone to anxiety and catastrophic thinking was biting it’s nails, muttering in the back of my mind about all the calamitous possibilities outside of my control. “What if there’s another, more serious strain of COVID and the schools all have to go remote again?” Or “What if there’s another novel virus that’s even worse?” And maybe, just once or twice, “What if all the political strain in our country comes to a head and we find ourselves in the middle of another civil war? Or fucking World War Three?”

The rational part of me knew that all of these things were (mostly) very unlikely, but then it wasn’t like we were all walking around in 2019 knowingly enjoying our last vacations and family get-togethers before the next regularly scheduled global pandemic blew up our lives.

My daughter started school a week before my son, and I joked that she would probably bring home our family’s first case of COVID just in time for my son to miss his first week of kindergarten. (She didn’t, but she did catch a well-timed cold, which she generously shared with her brother. But they both were over it by the end of the long weekend and no one missed any school. Hooray!)

So when I took a break during my walk to sit on the rocks at the beach, as I sipped my coffee and watched the gulls contend with the waves, I realized that the dominant emotion I was experiencing was relief.

Like taking a big breath after staying underwater for too long. Like after a long run; glad for having done it, but also glad its over. Like the delicious feeling of sliding into bed under my weighted blanket at night after a good but very long, challenging day.

Several years ago, before my daughter started kindergarten, when I was still toying with the idea of homeschooling, before we’d actually tried it and realized that at this stage of life it was a terrible fit for all of us, I was a part of a group of moms with young children who planned to homeschool. I remember one of the other moms once said that she wanted to homeschool because she hated the idea of missing out on the best of her children all week, of them coming home from school tired everyday and having nothing left for her. I remember thinking, “Oh god, am I a bad mom? I don’t feel that way at all.” Even though I had joined this group, I hadn’t fully committed to homeschooling yet. Mostly we were considering it because we liked the idea of having the flexibility in our schedule, as well as the freedom to travel and allow our kids to experience different places and cultures. Nearly all of my doubts about homeschooling were centered around whether or not I thought I, massively introverted mama that I am, could handle it. Or if I was even willing to give all those years of my life to educating my kids in that way. I wondered, “Is it selfish of me to consider sending my kids to school in order to seize the opportunity to get a little freedom for my own pursuits? Is it terrible that if I do decide to send my kids to school, I don’t think I’ll miss them every moment of every day?”

Fast forward to present day, when in my first session after the start of the school year I told my therapist how excited I felt about the kids going back to school, laughing about how, at least on social media, everyone else seemed to feel so differently about having reached this milestone. She replied, “What I don’t hear you saying is, ‘Is there something wrong with me that I don’t feel sad?’. So that’s good!”

And it’s true. Somewhere along the way I came to accept that my experience of motherhood will not always match the experience of other women, and that’s okay. I decided not to compare my emotional experiences to what what I perceived to be the emotional experience of others, as if to use them as a litmus test to determine whether I was a “good mom” or a “bad mom.” I came to know that I can love my kids fiercely and not be devastated when they leave me to go to kindergarten. After all, isn’t that the goal of parenthood? To raise our babies into self-sufficient adults? Not that I don’t want my grown children to call me to tell me about their problems, or to feel they can’t ask for my help or advice. But I do want them to grow up and feel the freedom to live their lives without feeling like it’s their responsibility to make me feel needed. Going to school is one of the many baby steps along that road to independence. It’s right to celebrate it for both them and for me.

We’re only just starting the new school year, and while my kids do come home tired and extra sensitive as they adjust to long days in school after a summer without structure or schedules, I can already feel the benefit of what this new season means for us. My daughter has developed a new interest in baking, and I’ve found that because I’m not picking her up from school every day already feeling done, we’ve spent a lot more time making things together. My son has been showering me with so many scrumptious kisses and cuddles and “I love you, mama”s, as if he is trying to give me an entire day’s worth of affection condensed into the more limited number of hours we have together, and I am eating it up. And in the hours that they have been away at school I have checked SO MANY things off my to-do list. And, of course, I  have enjoyed getting reacquainted with the story that I haven’t had time to work on all summer. It’s been really lovely.

So no, I wasn’t really sad to send my kids to school. I love that they are off doing things without me. And I love picking them up at the end of the day and hearing about the new friends they made and the things they learned. And I love that in those hours in between, I am sitting here in a quiet house with a mug of hot tea and some moody music on my headphones, spending my days capturing the specters of my imagination one word at a time.

Photo by Artem Podrez

Well, hello again

About a month ago we moved into a new house. Actually, it’s a very old house, but it’s new to us. To be even more accurate, it’s newly ours but it’s actually very familiar to us because it’s the house where I grew up. When my parents started thinking about downsizing, Josh and I decided to relocate (yet again!), this time to my hometown to raise our kids in my childhood home. It still feels a little surreal; I never imagined that I would end up back here.

One exciting thing about this house, at least for me, is that I have an office space for the first time. And now that we’ve had a few weeks to unpack and the kids are back in school, I’m finally starting to try and get into the groove of a writing routine again. Now coming to you live from my very own office! The wallpaper in here is…not great. And there’s still a stack of boxes behind me that I’m choosing to not think about right now. But an office! With a desk! And a door! Dizzying wallpaper or not, it’s dreamy.

As I’ve sat down to write again I’ve felt like I have to get my bearings a little. For the last nine or so years I’ve been working almost exclusively on the same project. Then, after a brief but enthusiastic affair with a new idea resulted in the birth of a messy and very thin first draft, I wrote almost nothing for the next year. Part of that was due to COVID and having the kids home all day every day again. But a big part of it was also that I had hit walls with both of my other projects. I felt a little lost at sea, unsure of what to do with either of them, so whenever I did find the time to make an attempt at writing I found myself bouncing between efforts to re-outline the old projects and making new outlines for fresh ideas I’d had knocking around inside my head. Surprisingly to me, most of the new ideas were for adult contemporary fiction, a bit of a left turn after spending so many years writing middle grade and teen fantasy. 

One of the biggest issues I had with my other projects was that while I always started with a clear idea about the world of the story or about a character, I never really had a clear idea about what kind of story I was trying to tell. I’ve discovered that for me, the most satisfying books are the character driven ones. The kind of story where I am invested in the people I’m reading about and the journeys they are on, what kind of decisions they make and why, and whether they will be able to solve their problems or not. Of course there are lots of entertaining plot driven stories, where this happens and then this happens and then THIS happens and it’s all very thrilling. But I’ve realized that that isn’t the kind of story I want to write. I want to write stories that make my readers feel like they’ve just gone through something, even if the characters in the story weren’t on some epic journey or fighting a blazing battle with their magical powers. (Though that’s not to say I don’t want to write about magical powers. I still love fantasy, after all.)

So this time when I came up with an idea for a character and a specific situation she finds herself in, I knew I needed to spend more time chewing on why exactly it was I felt the need to tell her story. What is her story about? How will she be different in the end - for better or worse - than when she started? I now have a rough outline for the first five or six chapters of the story, and I know where I’m headed in the end. But even though I love making outlines, I’m resisting the urge to plan out everything beforehand and instead dive into a very rough pre-first-draft and spend some time just getting to know this lady and what makes her tick.

Speaking of character growth, I have historically been very slow to share my writing with anyone. I think it’s the old perfectionist tendencies in me that don’t want to put my work on display until I feel like it’s perfectly polished. But I’m trying to get better about being so precious with my writing, so I’ve joined a local a writers group and have already sent my first scrappy chapter to my husband and writing partner for their initial thoughts. Here’s to this new plot twist in my own story - the unexpected return to my hometown - resulting in some satisfying character development not just my in characters, but in myself too.

Cover photo by Erik Mclean from Pexels

My Year in Reading

My Year in Reading

- A 2020 Wrap Up -

I’m one of those special kind of nerds that sets goals about how many books I will read in a year. And when I set my goal on Goodreads back in January at 60 books in 2020, I thought I was being super reasonable. After all, I read 68 books last year, so 60 should be no sweat, right?

Wrong.

As I write this post, the final 55 hours of 2020 are ticking down and I still have to finish two books to meet my “super reasonable” goal. Color me humbled.

(I mean, it is still technically possible. I’m partially done with two short-ish books, so the optimist in me believes it could still happen.)

But whatever. Even if I don’t read another word this year literally no one but me will care. And, more importantly, I enjoyed myself doing all the reading I did manage.

Some of the most fun I had reading this year was with my daughter. Even though she is getting to the age where she can get lost in a book all by herself for hours at a time (so proud!) I still read to her a lot. Highlights from our time reading together this year included favorite series from my own childhood (The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, and Ramona Quimby), some classics I had somehow never managed to read before (The Wind in the Willows, Heidi), and some contemporary books I loved myself and wanted to share with her (The Girl Who Drank the Moon).

I also spent more time than usual reading non-fiction this year, mainly books about race, and these were some the most important books I read this year. While not always pleasant to read (well, hello there shame, humility, and regret! Nothing like getting corrected when you think you’re already woke, am I right?), I am infinitely glad I went back to them again and again even when it was uncomfortable. Already there are two I plan to reread next year to continue the work of addressing my own racial biases and behavior, and to help me in raising my kids to do even better.

Ultimately, it was a great year of reading both in terms of enjoyment and enrichment. I read books that made me laugh and made me cry. I read books that made my heart soar and books that cut me more deeply than any before. I have learned a lot both about writing and storytelling, as well as what is means to be human and about the responsibilities I bear as a parent, as a spouse, as an American and as a white lady. In so many ways, 2020 has been a real doozy of a year. But when it comes to the books I’ve read, it was actually pretty great. Here are my favorites I read this year in four of my most-read categories:

My Favorite Books I Read This Year:

Middle Grade: Flora & Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo

I didn’t know before I started reading it that this book is a mixture of prose and comic/graphic pages. It was a fun surprise! I found it to be charmingly quirky, unexpectedly relatable, and certainly entertaining. I gave it to my (6 yo at the time) daughter to read when I was done with it, and she also pronounced it Very Good.

Young Adult: Six of Crows duology by Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo always writes such fun stories. I have enjoyed anything I have read by her. Her Grishaverse is so unique and fascinating! But my favorites so far have been the Six of Crows duology. I guess I’m a sucker for an ensemble adventure quest featuring plenty of will they/won’t they tension and a heavy dose of badass, broody antihero. I flew through both (long!) books this summer and loved every page of them. Really fun reads!

Classic: East of Eden by John Steinbeck

East of Eden is hands down one of my all-time favorite books. Now, it was written in the 1950s and as is true for so many classics it is therefore not without its problems (read: notes of racism, sexism, etc.). But the story and the characters get me every time. I have yet to read another novel that captures the beautiful melancholy of the human condition in the way this story does, juxtaposing the glory and the agony we experience in the power of our choices. This isn’t a difficult book to read as far as “classics” go. The writing isn’t so old fashioned as to feel inaccessible. But I wouldn’t call it a beach read, either. It isn’t like junk food that tastes great and goes down easy (though I love that in a book like that every now and again!). This is meat. It’s a fine whiskey. You need to chew it, savor it. I love it every time I read it, and this time was no different. I don’t have any tattoos myself, but I do love the idea of a great literary tattoo, a visual reminder of the deep impression a great story can make on a reader. If I ever were to get one it would say “timshel”.

Non-Fiction: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

If you are white and you have not read anything this year about racism, I am going to ask you right now to please make that one of your top reading priorities for 2021. And this book is a really good place to start. It was written by a white woman whose life work is as an anti-racist educator and I found it to be eye-opening, humbling, inspiring, and very practical in its advice. I highly recommended it. But be warned: You will need to pick it up with an attitude of humility and a true desire to learn. If you have ever bristled when your beliefs about race have been challenged, then I challenge you to read this book. (Also recommended: How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.)

For further reading about the issue of racism, stay tuned for my full recommended reading list coming soon.