Category Archives: Personal

Mother’s Day

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Food, Personal, Randomness, Self-publishing

≈ 2 Comments

Mother’s Day is hard when you’ve lost your mom and your sole chick is the entire distance of the country away. I should have bought myself flowers. But I made a lovely dinner. This steelhead trout is the first recipe I think I have ever invented completely from scratch and it was just as good the second time as it was the first. Food that comes with a “you thought this up” badge makes me happy. And I ate strawberries that were delicious, so yay!

I spent this morning cleaning out my RSS feed. Obviously, I did this because I have about 20 more useful things to do, including fold the laundry, call the insurance agent, clean out the paper files, organize some tax paperwork, start writing my next book, and so on… but I was glad I did it when I was done. My RSS reader had gotten so full of sites that I’d stopped reading most of it. The slimmed-down version is going to be a lot more usable.

But it made me think about blogging and how it’s changed. So many sites are dead now. And so many sites have turned into simple announcement pages. People who used to tell stories about their lives in their blogs now just announce their books or post book covers. I suppose I understand it, but I still feel like my blog is more of a scrapbook for me–a very long-running easy-to-use journal, maybe. It might be an unprofessional decision, but I suspect I’ll keep posting my random thoughts here. Maybe I’ll make the link in the books link to the business site instead, and that can be the place that I post non-conversational announcements and such. Maybe.

Ran my first paid ad over the weekend. Thirty dollars and… well, I may or may not earn it back. It definitely didn’t cause any great swing in sales. I’m running another–the big one, Bookbub–next Monday. It cost $130, so it’ll be interesting to see if that one’s worth it. Thirty dollars requires some thought, but break into the hundreds and I spend endless mental hours debating.

Hmm, I feel like I’m rambling. I think I’ll go eat some lunch and then get some exercise. Maybe it’ll motivate me to start writing this afternoon. Or at least call the insurance company!

If I were a filmmaker…

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Bartleby, Personal, Pets, Randomness, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

Not really a serious filmmaker, just someone good with a camera, I would make a movie of my two dogs and their styles of playing Fetch. Possibly I should call it playing with balls, rather than Fetch, because the fetching part… not so effective.

Zelda (a fifteen-pound Jack Russell terrier) doesn’t like small balls. She likes basketballs. I think I posted a movie once of her playing with the basketball in the water, but the balls are twice the size of her head. I throw the ball in the water, she jumps in after it, herds it to shore with her nose, corners it and chews it until she succeeds in popping it, and then, triumphantly, brings me the remains. Then we play with the remains for a while.

Bartleby doesn’t know how to play. Not at all. We’ve been working on it, trying to encourage him, being enthusiastic–I actually made him a toy from a couple socks because he won’t go near real dog toys and every once in a while, I can get him to chew on that for a while. But today he was out by the pool with us and I could see that he wanted to play. He kept sort of trying, until finally I got up and found a tennis ball. Tried to get him to take it from me. He wouldn’t. But when I placed it on the ground between his feet, he actually put his mouth on it, then carried it about ten feet away and dropped it. I was so pleased and so proud of him. Yay, Bartleby, you go, you moved a toy! So I went and got it and we did it again. And then again. And then I realized that Bartleby’s version of Fetch requires that the person do the fetching. He does the removing, I do the retrieving. But hey, it’s a game, and he’s playing.

So the movie would be two minutes long, one a super-condensed version of Zelda taking three hours to retrieve the basketball (because she has to destroy it first) and one of Bartleby taking the tennis ball and moving it ten feet away. My dogs. So sweet they are.

In other news, I haven’t written anything for a week. I’m doing a presentation at an Orlando library this weekend and it’s occupying more of my brain than it should. It was meant to be a repeat of a presentation I’ve given before, but I feel like I have new things to say about context and layering and point-of-view. So I haven’t written that yet, but I will and then I have to decide what to write next.

I think one of the reasons that I haven’t moved on is that I really haven’t. I gave ALM to the editor but I have a pretty lengthy list of edits I want to make to it, ranging from stuff like “do I mention cookies too often?” to “make scene x more plausible by adding y details.” Some of them are fairly big edits. I have one idea–courtesy of Barbara (thanks, I think?)–that would mean at least another major chapter/scene to write and more dramatic ending revisions, so I’m contemplating that. Not with a ton of enthusiasm, but if it makes the book better, it’s worth it. But I can’t do anything until I get it back from the editor in June. Writing it was definitely a lot more fun than editing it has turned out to be!

Happy Monday

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Anxiety, Personal

≈ 2 Comments

I was walking the dogs this morning–on a rather beautiful, slightly cool, very green April day–when I realized that my mind was telling me stories again, specifically a conversation between Fen and Javier which is going to make Ch25 so much better. Yay!

For the past few weeks, my brain has been caught on a hamster wheel of college plotting and planning and financial calculations and frustration. In the daydream-y moments when I’m usually lost in my story-world, I’ve been stuck in a not very pleasant set of realities. Most days I still worked on the book, but it’s been slow and painful, the words dragging and dull. Yesterday, though, we paid the deposit for New College of Florida and filled out the financial aid paperwork and stuck the forms in the mail, and now my brain appears to have jumped off that unpleasant hamster wheel and moved back to Syl Var. Whee!

This week, I’m going to finish the revisions, one way or another. Next Monday, the book goes off to the editor. Next Tuesday, I start writing the next one. This month has been a rough spell, but that thought makes me happy!

Parenting 101

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Personal

≈ 8 Comments

Parenting 101: A parent’s job is not to make her child happy.

Apart from the difficulty of making other people happy, anyway–trying to control other people’s emotions is pretty much always doomed to failure–happiness, as a goal, is much too transient, much too shallow.

R was probably no more than two years old the first time I had to suffer through this lesson. He needed to take antibiotics. He refused to. Brute force wasn’t working anymore and was also really, seriously unpleasant. So I waited him out. Sixteen years later it still sticks in my memory as some of the most miserable hours of my life. It took about two, maybe three, hours of me saying, “The next thing that I am going to do is help you take your medicine,” and “no, sweetheart, you may not have a snack (story, playtime, walk, video, diaper change, NAP!) until you’ve taken your medicine,” until it was finally in him and we never had to do it again. I spent a lot of time wondering in the moment whether maybe threatening to spank him and/or actually spanking him would be less like torture, but in the long run, I had no regrets. He took his medicine after that, every time it came up.

When he was nine or so, I got to be the mean parent again. We moved to Florida. I can vividly remember being in the car with him as he told me that Florida was a place where people came to die and that he didn’t belong here. It made me laugh, but I did feel bad. But we didn’t move here because I thought he’d be happier here–I thought he had a better chance of getting a better education in a state where I could afford a private school for kids with learning disabilities. I was right. But he wasn’t happy about it.

And then when we moved to our current house, he told me no. He didn’t want to go to the school I’d found for him. He didn’t want to move again. I told him I was sorry he felt that way. Because I’m the mom and it wasn’t my job to say, “let me give you everything you want, let me do what you think will make you happy.” It was my job to look at the choices and do my best with my adult knowledge to do the thing that would help him most in his journey to adulthood.

All that ought to be comforting. And it sort of is. But sometimes being the parent is really hard. I wish I could just make him happy.

Hampshire College in Massachusetts is his first choice of school. But they didn’t come through with the kind of financial aid that would make it possible without him accumulating many, many thousands of dollars in debt — well over the $20K that might be reasonable and up into the $50K range or higher. Part of me wants to be a wishful thinker about it — someday maybe I’ll start earning serious money again and be able to help him pay off those debts — but a lot more of me thinks bankrupting your future because you liked the college town environment is absurd. And so I’m being the bad guy.

It’s really hard.

But Parenting 101: It *is* my job to raise him to be a smart, responsible, independent adult, capable of making realistic choices. My wishful thinking would not serve him well. I will survive being the bad guy this one more time. I do hope it’s the last, though. I’m sick of being the bad guy.

Saying Good-bye

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Grief, Personal

≈ 12 Comments

I keep trying to let this go without words.

It doesn’t work for me.

The last couple of weeks have sucked. I wonder if they always will? Every day I kept thinking of what was happening two years ago. The arrangements. The plane flight. The car ride. The beach. And then the birthday.

Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t celebrate my birthday.

I thought then that it would be the worst birthday of my life. Yeah, so far, I was right. But two years ago, my birthday came a week after Michelle’s memorial service. I don’t know why her death sent me into such a death-spiral of grief and sorrow. Maybe it was just because it was the fourth death in six months. Maybe if she’d died at some safer time in my life it wouldn’t have hit me so hard. But no. No.

She was–is–the only person that I’ve ever thought truly understood me, down to my core, and loved me for who I am. Lots of people love me for who they think I am. I’ve got plenty of love. (Of course I do–I’m crazily co-dependent, tell me you need something and I will do my best to give it to you, no questions asked. It’s the recipe for love.) But Michelle–she saw all of me. And she didn’t ask for anything. She just loved.

Yesterday was her birthday. She would have been 47. She died when she was 44. Her birthday is 4/4. My birthday is 4/7. I want to believe that it will be a magical year–that my birthday year, my 47th, will be special, crazily wonderful in some way I can’t imagine. On your birthday year, all your wishes should come true. But I sort of think that Michelle would have wished for the cancer to go away, once and for all. And instead she died. And me… well, for the past couple of weeks I have just been captured by the sad. I know that there are worse things in life. Hell, all those people in Syria are pretty damn miserable right now. This week, a former colleague of mine got to tell his five-year-old daughter that the bad rocks in her head were back and she was probably going to die. I have nothing, NOTHING, to be sad about.

But I still miss Michelle. I still wish I could talk to her. I still want her to be here, somewhere. I still want to believe that I could reach out and find her somewhere. I’m still… just so sad.

A season of peace

30 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in Personal, Pets

≈ 4 Comments

I’m sitting on my bed, shivering, because the back door is open and there’s a cool breeze flowing through. I know in most places in the US right now shivering would be an understatement–you wouldn’t have your back door open this time of year–but it’s not comfortable. Obviously, I should get up and close it, but I have one dog on my right, gently snoring, one dog on my left, peacefully curled into a ball, and a third dog on my feet. This is a precarious, precious moment of equilibrium and I don’t want to jeopardize it by moving.

This week has been grueling. I’m exhausted. Major, major, major mistake: making appointments for the dogs to have vet procedures while C was away.

Bartleby, poor boy, finally got neutered. That shouldn’t be a big deal, but he chews on himself. And it turns out that he is very, very familiar with the cone-of-shame and a little bit of an escape artist when it comes to it. He growls steadily the whole time I try to get it on him and when it’s finally on, he wanders off and finds a wall to push it against until he’s getting his head almost out of it. I either need a cone that’s tighter around the neck, but that doesn’t seem possible, or one that’s longer but still just as tight around the neck. I think I’m going to head back to the pet store this afternoon to try again. Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve spent hours chasing him around saying, “No! No chewing!” which he ignores, unless I physically stop him and pet him for a while.

Zelda, poor girl, went in to have her teeth cleaned and wound up having four of them pulled. I can’t say I was surprised–I’ve been worrying about her teeth for years, because several of them were broken. But she’s been in a lot of pain, and a bit of a state of shock. Before she was in pain, we’d established that she was okay with M around (M is C’s dog). For three nights, M slept on my bed with B and Z, and it was crowded–three dogs is a lot–and I didn’t sleep well, but it was okay. After Z was hurting, though, she was no longer willing to let M be in the bed. Or near me. Or in the kitchen. Or on the couch. Z in pain is about ten times more territorial than she is when not in pain and she’s always somewhat territorial.

I wonder if somehow she blames M for the pain? It could be. Her hostility first started when I needed to take M for a walk and Z and B didn’t feel well enough to come along. M has a lot of energy and is bigger than either of the others: she really needs a serious walk to burn off some of her bounciness. Z just wasn’t up for it. We made it halfway down the street and then she stopped walking and just stood and shook. We went home and I took M for a walk on her own, but by the time we came back, Z had gotten growly. And then it rained for two days. M’s opinion of walking in the rain is that we must run, run, run to get home and out of the horrifying WET. B’s opinion of walking in the rain is that we must stand absolutely still and hope it will soon be over. Z’s opinion of walking in the rain is more of a “So? I have things to sniff, who cares about a little water?” Trying to walk all three of them at once… it would be funny if it was in a movie, happening to someone else, but experiencing it is less amusing.

So the last three days, M is her usual bouncy, happy-go-lucky self, only bouncier than usual because she’s not getting enough exercise, and–since her person is away–determined to snuggle with the pack. Z is a grouch, eyes always on M, hackles always on the verge of rising, and wanting to be in touching distance of me at all times. And B can only be stopped from chewing on his stitches when I’m holding him. It’s like trying to watch three toddlers. And with about the same amount of sleep that you get when you’re taking care of babies and toddlers.

Which brings me back to why I’m sitting here, shivering, and writing a blog post instead of doing any of the zillion more essential things that need to be done. Laundry, taxes, filing. Letters to be mailed. Health insurance to be checked on. Grocery shopping. Trip to the pet store. Etc., etc. But for this moment, there is peace.

Happy, peaceful, sleeping dogs.

I think I’ve talked myself into feeling lucky. 🙂

Happy New Year!

Dropout

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Personal, Thought, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Right about now, minus one year, I dropped out of graduate school. If I’d stayed, and stayed on track, I’d be graduating soon, maybe even this weekend. I’m trying to decide if I have regrets. I sort of think the fact that I’d rather go drink a glass of wine and watch Doctor Who then sit with this feeling means that I do, at least a few.

Ostensibly, I dropped out of school to become a writer. Really, I quit because it was increasingly clear to me that I wasn’t healthy enough to be the person on the professional side of the counseling relationship. If it hadn’t been such an incredibly difficult year, filled with loss and pain, I think I would have managed, but in the long run, I don’t think it would have been good for me. The more into it I got, the more I felt like I was wearing a mask and that the mask was part of the job description.

I’m not sure being a writer is going to work out for me either, though. I know how to earn a living as a writer: write fast, write what you think people want to read, write and let go. Write to sell, basically, and produce as much as possible as quickly as possible. It’s basic math. Instead I’ve spent the past year kicking around A Gift of Time, writing and revising and thinking and revising some more and thinking some more. There is no possible way to become a successful writer if I spend a year working on one project and at the end of the year toss everything and start over. (Oh, by the way, I started Time over again this week. Ha. Back to the beginning.)

On the other hand, I felt really pleased to be starting Time over. Thought — well, I had promised to deliver Thought by June 2012 and so I did. And I love parts of it, just the way I love parts of Time. But I also think that it’s not nearly as good a book as I’m capable of. I learned a lot writing it. I worked on action scenes and pace, movement from place to place, descriptions, dramatic tension. But it was never all that clear whose story it was: Dillon’s or Sylvie’s or Lucas’s. I think Lucas is a better character in my head than he is on the page, and I wish I’d had sections in his POV to get him down better. Honestly, Lucas is probably the truly most important character — he’s the one who has the clearest goals — and he’s not nearly as good as he ought to be. The ending should have been his ending, as much as Dillon’s and Sylvie’s and it just wasn’t.

I could persevere with Time. I’ve been doing that for six months. I’m actually at 35,000 words, which is a solid chunk of book. And if I was going to earn a living as a writer, that’s probably what I ought to do: write, write, write, finish it off, accept the fact that it’s not as good as it could be, and move on. But I just can’t do it. I’d rather not earn my living as a writer, but love what I’m writing. Love and be proud of. I want to someday re-read Time and think, ‘oh, I amuse myself’ with a cheerful glow of contentment, the way I do when I re-read some of my best fanfics. That means starting over. That means being profoundly impractical about the hour-per-product investment of time.

I don’t know that dropping out of graduate school was impractical — maybe not nearly as impractical as quitting my editing job was in the first place. But a year later, I don’t seem to have figured out anything at all about my life and how I intend to make it work. Except maybe that doing work that I’m proud of and that I love is more important to me than my long-term retirement planning? Which is a nice thought, of course, but it’s not going to pay the mortgage when I run out of savings.

Meanwhile…back to Time. The nicest thing about starting over is that after a year with these characters, I really know them. I spent six months fighting Natalya’s propensity to be sarcastic and now I’ve given up. She’s the kind of sarcastic person who can usually keep her mouth shut, which is why Akira thinks she’s so serene and sweet, but Akira doesn’t know her insides the way I do.

Existential dread

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Anxiety, Personal, Trill, Zelda

≈ 3 Comments

I’m having a strange month.

The details don’t feel like my story to tell, but my stepmother is on the health roller-coaster, the one that goes slowly up and then much too quickly down, down, down. She’s been sick since we were in Belize and now she’s in intensive care again, or she was yesterday.

As a result, Gizmo is living with me. That’s been 90% pure pleasure. He’s a nitwit, but so sweet. The 10% is that as I have been falling more in love with him, Zelda has been getting a little more suspicious, a little more inclined to shove him out of the way and glare. He’s completely tolerant, he lets her be the boss, but I feel sad for her. Jealousy isn’t pleasant, even for dogs. I’ve been making sure she knows she’s first dog, but Gizmo does need to get brushed and loved, too, and she just has to put up with it.

Requisite cute dog photo:

two dogs

Zelda and Gizmo

One of the positives of having Gizmo is that he’s helped me stop missing Trill quite so much. Ironically, given how often she bit me, her loss has been the hardest pet loss I’ve ever experienced. My childhood dog would have been first, but when we lost him, I’d been gone from home for five years. I sobbed for hours, but he wasn’t a fixture in my day-to-day life, and two days later, it was a sadness, not an emptiness. Trill left an emptiness. A silence. It’s been almost a month and I still miss her every morning. (That’s an improvement, though, over the first week, where I cried every day and felt ridiculous almost every time. She was a bird. A grouchy bird! But she had such a big personality. Ugh, I probably have to go cry again.)

Moving on… worrying about C — and in relation, worrying about my dad, who seems older every time I see him, more tired every time I speak with him — plus all of last week’s horribleness, has got me hovering in a state of existential dread. I want to feel like the world has good things in it, positive outcomes, happiness. Instead, I’ve got that sense of generalized anxiety that grinds away in the back of my head, reminding me constantly that life is fragile, the world dangerous. I’m not enjoying it.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about that, because I don’t particularly want to be reminded of it two or three years from now or whenever I re-read this post, but it’s all a long-winded explanation for this picture:

a big bird

A bird on our morning walk

Seeing birds like this, views like this, when I’m just out walking the dogs, reminds me to be mindful of the magic around me. It’s a reminder I really need at the moment, so I’m going to be trying to post pictures of my morning walk for a while. Probably not a long while, because I’m not that organized, but expect to see some flowers and birds for the next few days.

Motivations

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Anxiety

≈ 2 Comments

The dog is watching me pack. Every time I stop moving, she tries to climb into my lap. She has an opinion about what is happening, and it is very low. Her worried look would be charming if it wasn’t so very worried.

In un-related frustration, writing about a character who knows the future in the same book as a character who has various angelic abilities is somewhat maddening. I’m halfway through and continually stumped by the “well, wouldn’t she know that?” and the “couldn’t she handle that?” type questions. But I’m bringing my iPad keyboard with me because even at my current rate of eking out a few sentences at a time, I really love Nat and I don’t want to leave her behind for ten whole days.

Akira is cautious. Sylvie is a planner. But Natalya is orderly. And having her order messed up is stressing her out. In the sense that all the characters I write are really just parts of me, I’m pretty clearly working out my anxiety issues on paper. (Um, pixels.) But that said, there’s something about what’s happening with Natalya right now — in my head, anyway, if not quite in the pixels yet — that is just plain fun. A long time ago, I had a bumper sticker on my car, selected by R, that read “Not another learning experience!” Nat is having learning experiences and she doesn’t like it. But they’re good for her and she’ll wind up better off in the long run, so it’s okay, and meanwhile, I get to feel both sympathetic and amused.

I’ve already planned out Grace’s story (more or less) so I know it’s not going to have anything to do with anxiety. Grace is not the anxious-type. But eventually I’m going to give an HEA to a character who has full-fledged panic attacks. Maybe I’ll write…oh, no, I won’t. I was going to say that I’d write the first agoraphobic romance, but I’ve actually seen one before. It’s erotica, and I haven’t read it, but for fellow agoraphobes, Escorted, by Claire Kent features an agoraphobic hero. (I think, anyway.)

Moving on, back to the packing. Or maybe back to eking out another sentence or two. It would be convenient for me to be able to post my latest chapter to fictionpress tonight, so that it’s easily accessible from my iPad tomorrow. Hmm, good motivation.

Serendipitous mistakes and chicken soup

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Food, Personal

≈ 4 Comments

On my first mouthful of chicken soup tonight, I said, ‘whoa.’ Five minutes later, R said through his first mouthful, ‘this soup.’

I make pretty good chicken soup. Tonight’s, though, was well beyond ‘pretty good’ and into the, ‘is this the best soup I’ve ever eaten in my life?’ category. R, who is a huge fan of Thai chicken soup, wasn’t willing to go that far, but did agree that it was the best soup I’ve ever made.

I’m about 90% sure that it was accidental. Well, I know it was accidental, in the sense that I didn’t actually intend to make the best soup ever, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t my tossing a few cloves of garlic into the broth or adding a little pepper that made the difference, but accidental in the ‘oh, dear, I burned this, I wonder if it matters?’ way.

My soup starts with home-made chicken broth. I use the bones, a little meat still on, from a grocery-store rotisserie chicken, plus carrots, celery, an onion with its skin on, and sometimes a few other random ingredients that are lying around. This time it happened to be garlic, but I honestly don’t think that made a difference. A little sriracha sauce, some salt, and this time a couple grinds of pepper, and then let it simmer for a few hours. Sometimes I let it simmer for days, but this time I wanted my soup, so I started it in the morning, around 9, and sieved the junk out of the broth by 5.

Then I saute the vegetables, usually just carrots and celery. I saute them because I figured out a while ago that if you cook the vegetables that way, they retain their flavor in the soup. It’s also faster, which was how I learned it, but I do it now because it’s yummier. This time around, I added onion. I don’t know why. Because we had one, I guess? Then I walked away from the stove. Oops. Bad idea. Or so it seemed. When I got back my vegetables weren’t gently cooked through, they were verging on burned. The onions, especially, had made it to browned and shriveled, and the carrots were almost blackened. But you know, I was hungry. And they didn’t look burned to inedibility, they were just darker than I would have liked.

So then toss the veggies in the broth, add some chopped over left-over chicken (what was left from the rotisserie), serve over left-over rice. I keep the rice separate from the soup until the last possible minute so that it doesn’t get mushy.

Today’s soup wasn’t actually that soup, it was the leftovers from that soup. The extra time spent simmering probably made a difference. But I think the real difference was those carmelized onions. The soup was really dark, almost the color of beef broth, even though it was chicken, and the taste was … yum. Just yum. A little spicy, a little sweet, solidly umami. Delicious.

I would go have some more right now if it wasn’t entirely gone. But next time I make soup, I’m going to burn the onions on purpose.

When I started writing, I had some other serendipitous mistake to write about. I’m pretty sure it had to do with WordPress. But my yearning for more soup has completely driven it out of my mind. Oops. Maybe I’ll come back with an update later!