Making It Up

A few years ago, we had a monster commute to school. From central Philly to Fort Washington, it was about 45 minutes in each direction and I drove there and back in the morning, and there and back in the afternoon. What redeemed it was that for once, Daniel was at a school that didn’t seem to think he was all that bad (‘the complete package,’ they called him), and they didn’t greet me at the end of every school day with a list of my child’s sins. You have no idea what a relief that is until you’ve been the mother  cringing when she sees the teacher approaching, stomach clenched, heart thudding. It’s, well, I was going to say horrible, but it’s actually more like blechy. Something gooier than horrible. So I happily traded that daily misery for three hours in the car every day.

Really, the car ride itself was a sort of peaceful, happy time. We listened to lots of books on tape, lots of music — and we started telling stories. These were narrated pretends, the sort I used to do in the back yard with my cousin when I was Laura Ingalls and she was Jo March (or the other way around) and we’d have adventures.’*

Because we were all in the car (and safely buckled in), we didn’t run around. We just said that we were doing this or that. “So I run to the spaceship door and tug it open and we leap out into a giant space slide that takes us to the surface of Jupiter. Wheeeeeeeee!” Daniel, in his Aspie Master-of-the-Universe sort of way, would treat his sister as a sort of living puppet. “Now you say “Oh no, Alien’s in trouble!” “Oh no, Alien’s in trouble!” she would obligingly say. And I’d be a character or the voice from on high or the mediator. Whatever the story seemed to demand. We wrote books out loud, every day. Nonsensical books, but books nonetheless.

We no longer have quite such a commute, but the stories live on. “Do you want to do a story?” one child will say to the other at dinner table, or in the car, or any time they’re at a loose end. Now, in addition to Alien, Burthlebup and Buthelburp and the Ents (the characters we made up when the stories began), various other pop culture or literary characters will find their way into the stories. Now Harry, Ron and Hermione will team up with Daniel and Helena, and possibly some of the Scooby Gang to rescue Ugly Dolls. There’s a hotel now that regularly features. It’s a million stories and everyone in the world lives in it, and Daniela and Helena run it. It’s next door to the Space Treasure Hunt House, another early invention.

These stories are often interrupted by tears and arguments as the two (or three, sometimes) narrator/writers each tug the thread of the story, trying to make it go the ‘right’ way. They’ll usually work it out. And I’m not usually invited to play any more, which is fine with me because man, it makes my elderly brain hurt trying to keep up with the imaginative inventiveness of an 8 and a 10 year old.

And I get to live in a world of story.

*Neither of us ever wanted to be Mary Ingalls, because she was good and booooring. And Jo’s sisters weren’t all that exciting either. So we just put two of the most adventurous girls we knew together, and sent them out to climb mountains, fight bears or explore caves. Sometimes while wearing sunbonnets.

At the moment I have one manuscript in very final revisions, one in much more major revisions and one that is halfway through the first draft. I feel that I might be losing focus. Just a bit, right?

But balls in the air are par for the course. What worries me is not really the number of balls I have spinning, but the balls I’m spinning that I’ve forgotten about. The ones so high up in the atmosphere that their eventual descent is going to hit me like a penny from the Empire State Building.

Apparently, that’s an urban legend, that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building can kill you, which is both slightly disappointing and a bit a relief because I can stop worrying about my change whenever I’m up there now.

Right now I’m rushing off to the next thing, but just wanted to send a longer-than-140-character shout-out to the interwebs. It’s nice to be here. Glad you’re around too.

Whenever someone writes about (or worse, talks about) his muse, I cringe a little. Then I feel bad. I mean, who am I to turn up my nose at how another human being characterizes the creative process? I mean, it’s just a metaphor, right?

Well, yes and no. The dangerous thing about muses is that no matter how we talk about them, think about them, complain about them, draw them, hate them, loathe them, yearn for them — they are still THEM. Not us. Separate. Distinct. Other. Unownable. They elude us, hide from us, tease us, leave us, love us. They are outside us.

Muses are so bloody Tennyson as well, so draped in chiffon and hair. Very vaseline-on-the-lens. Oh, the artist sighs, if only my muse were with me today! What great things I could have created. Other people seem to have a kind of Kujo muse with lots of needle-sharp teeth and a very bad reaction to being ignored. If I had a muse, that’s what she’d look like because she’d be mean as hell and wouldn’t give a crap how I felt or what mood I was in or whether I had ten hours or ten minutes.

But dressed in silk or dressed in leather, a muse that exists independently of me is just a way of distancing myself from my own creativity, pretending that I am somehow not truly the owner of my own imagination, that it is something with its own agency that I must attempt to entice — or that I can accidentally scare away.

No. It’s up to me whether the next half an hour is productive or not. It’s up to me to sit in the chair, stay in the chair, write when I would rather not. It’s up to me to plan, prepare, work and practice. I never never get to blame my fear or my laziness on my muse’s coy absence. I am my own muse. I am the writer, the artist, the creator. What I need is within me, both inspiration and execution. No amount of lounging around in linen blouses, no amount of red wine or laudanum is going to make me a better writer. Any time spent waiting for my muse to visit is time I could have spent writing. And I know which is more likely to get a book finished.

I don’t care if it worked for Byron. I don’t have that kind of time.

In honor of beginning the querying process…

In honor of figuring out how to put that little Google Friends thingy you see over there on the sidebar…

In honor of succumbing to the lure of social networking…

In honor of realizing that too much time on the interwebs is bad for my brain…

In honor of realizing that everyone loves a contest…

I will have a contest!

To enter, all you need to do is to connect to this blog via the Google Thingy (yes, that’s its official title). Then, let’s see — how about on 28 February, my son’s 10th birthday, I will pick someone and send you  something wonderful which I have yet to decide upon — although, let’s face it, it’ll probably be a book. But a really good book. A really really good book.

If you also do the whole social networking thing of twittering the contest, I’ll stick your name in again for tweeting, but leave me a comment on this post letting me know, okay?

Good luck! And happy writing or whatever it is you do to stay sane.

So among the worthy and interesting contests THIS week are the following:

Elana Johnson, YA writer, is having a contest on her blog with some jolly good prizes such as query critiques and post-it notes! I love post-it notes. Go check it out here: http://elanajohnson.blogspot.com/2010/02/pay-it-forward-query-critique-contest.html

A related contest on Shelli Johannes-Wells’ blog which has daily prizes so get a move on as it’s Tuesday already! http://faeriality.blogspot.com/2010/02/get-ready-for-marketing-mardi-gras-byob.html

Oh, it’s Tuesday! Happy Fat Tuesday, all! I ate FOUR mini Peppermint Patties because I am living on the wild side, single parenting while Ed is away in New Orleans. On a conference. A dull, political science conference in New Orleans on Mardi Gras. Hmmm.

You should also check out Shannon O’Donnell’s blog — she’s celebrating having 200 followers! (I’d  celebrate too! In fact, I’d crack champagne and eat more Peppermint Patties!)

http://shannonkodonnell.blogspot.com/2010/02/200-followers-contest.html

Now go enter a contest and drink something. Or eat a pancake. Mmm. Maybe that’s what I’ll have for supper.

Update:  I have decided that since all the cool kids are doing it, I will have a contest too.

I’ve just figured out how to put that little Google Friends Connect thingy over there and if you friend me between now and say, Sunday night, I’ll stick you in a drawing to win something cool which I will think of later when I am not so tired. I’ll do a proper update tomorrow. Toodle-pip!

There was a bit of snow this week:

Doesn’t it just make you long for hot chocolate and a big blanket?

My virtual crowd read a lot, which is hardly surprising since so many of them are writers and the rest of them are people I like and I suspect it would be hard for me to like someone who didn’t like to read. I’ve been admiring how many of these people are terribly organized! and disciplined! about what they read whereas I take huge stacks of books out of the library, dump them next to my bed and then read them or not depending on what free time I’ve managed to claw back from the week — and if I’m truly overwhelmed I read Terry Pratchett.

However, 2010 is still young, fresh and optimistic and this year I am going to be, if not more disciplined, at least more conscious of what I’m reading, in a zen kind of way.

To that end, I am joining The Story Siren‘s 2010 Debut Authors Challenge, which means I promise to read at least 12 — if not more — MG or YA books published in 2010 by debut (see how this works?) authors. In the next post, I will make a Plan. Or if not a Plan, at least a plan. If you might be interested in playing along — and if nothing else, know that you’d be supporting new writers and filling their days with rainbows and their nights with mariachi bands — then check out the Siren’s posts here and here.

But that is not all! No, because if I’m in for a penny, I might as well be in for a pound and I think I will actually occasionally mention what I’m reading and whether I like it and why. See, a little while ago on the Upstart Crow Blog, Chris Richman asked what we had most enjoyed reading in 2009 — and it would have been really convenient if I had ever made any record of what I’d read rather than trying to dredge it up from the polluted crevices of my memory, which grows ever more unreliable as I soak it in ginger wine and rum.

On the other hand, I believe — as I always have — that we are in some way the sum total of our experiences and those experiences include the books we read.* In that sense, I have never lost a book because it has embedded itself in some small part of who I am. I am the walking library of my life.

*Including some we wish we hadn’t. For instance, if I could carve out the bit of my brain that read Running With Scissors, I would.

I try not to do a whole lot of random web surfing because the internet is a singularity that sucks in time like black holes suck in, well, everything. (Vshump. There went the afternoon. Vshump. Oops, it’s 1.12 in the morning. Vshump. What? The kids are home already?!)

However, poking around the virtual world of children’s writers, editors and agents isn’t random. It’s work! And I’ve stumbled across a few interesting things recently which I will list here, just in case you’re part of that world:

Elana Roth and Caren Johnson are running a one-day pitch fest where you post a 100 word pitch on their forums and they will read them and will request materials as a result. Instructions are here: http://www.johnsonliterary.com/forum/post/982144

Mary Kole, an agent with Andrea Brown, who writes a wonderful blog about children’s books, writing for children and the world of agenting and publishing those books, is running a Novel Beginning contest for MG and YA.

I’m still a devote of www.misssnarksfirstvictim.blogspot.com, which, although I’m sure you know this, is the blog of (you guessed it) Miss Snark’s first victim. She runs monthly Secret Agent contests which are often kidlit in focus because she herself writes YA and they’re always useful and interesting. I did one late last year and found it terribly exciting.

The YARebels are a group of seven new YA writers who are doing weekly vlogs. They are quite entertaining and I have learned some neat stuff from them. You can catch them here on YouTube.

Casey McCormick’s blog has an Agent Spotlight feature with lots of very interesting, up-to-date agent bios, with a focus on children’s literature agents.

I’ll come back with more next week. Right now, though, I have to go polish an entry or two. Enjoy the NYC SCBWI conference if you’re going and if, like me, you’re not (alas) tune into the SCBWI team blog.

I couldn’t resist: it sounded better than nervously optimistic querying, although that’s closer to the truth. I am nervous. I am also optimistic, because as the NY Lotto ad used to say: “You gotta be in it to win it.” And now I’m in it.

I imagine some people move through life in a measured, thoughtful manner. They probably consider their choices carefully. Perhaps they even weigh options and decide what might work best for them in the long run. Only then do they buy the couch, accept the wedding ring, move to Pakistan.

I don’t. I don’t know if I think diving is a good idea until I’ve actually jumped off the cliff. It’s the doing of something that makes me capable of thinking about it, weighing it, adjusting to it.  I was all chirpy and peppy about having a child and only did the ‘oh-my-god-what-have-I-done-can-I-still-return-this-I-have-the-receipt-somewhere’ bit of the adjustment after the poor child was born. At which point (she said wisely, halfway down the cliff and accelerating) there was no convenient way to turn back. This doesn’t mean that I do ridiculous things (on the whole). It just means that I spring forward using only instinct and energy, and engage the rational brain somewhere down the line.

There’s no turning back now. I’m halfway down the cliff and accelerating. Hope the water’s warm and deep.

I once had a professor, Peter Kirwan, who utterly and completely changed my life. He probably never knew that. It wasn’t like he became my mentor or pulled me out of the gutter when I was destitute. Rather, the course of his life took him across my path and my whole path shifted.

He was one of two professors who took a very motley crew of Hunter College students to London, for a course called London in Literature. We would read various things and then go explore the places they described or where the writer had lived. Thus we went to Sissinghurst after reading Virginia Woolf (Orlando, still my favorite of hers). We all piled down the East End after reading Dickens (Oliver Twist, I think). I forget where we ended up after reading The Rape of the Lock and I don’t know why we spent the day in Cambridge, but we did read piles of Andrew Marvell.

Peter had a limp (from the war) but would lead us through stately homes and formal gardens at tremendous speeds, his finger in the air, caroling: Onwards! Ever onwards and sideways! I heard in those words that sometimes the way forward is to slip down a side alley, maybe one you could only see out the corner of your eye.

Peter had gone to Cambridge after World War II, to Pembroke College. He took the whole rag-taggle of us through the grounds, pointing out where he had lived and what he loved about the place. It was small, one of the oldest colleges and so beautiful. More beautiful than anywhere I had ever been.

Pembroke

I was 18 years old that summer and for a native New Yorker, pretty damn innocent. I had had a strange and not particularly happy first year in college and was simply putting one foot in front of the other, doing what I was supposed to do — go to college, get good grades, graduate.

But then I went to England and, for the first time in my entire life, felt at home and felt as if there might be a road I hadn’t seen before, but a road I wanted to take. I fell madly in love, not with a person, but a place and wandered around for almost two months in a gloriously happy daze. After the course was over, I traveled all over the country using a BritRail pass (wonderful thing, like a EuroRail pass only for the UK and it only worked before they broke British Rail up into tiny pieces again). I accidentally ended up in a tiny Cotswold village that would turn out to be where my husband grew up. I staggered through cathedrals, watched Morris dancers, drank beer. And started to grow up.

I came back. I spent a year at Cambridge, at Pembroke, and while there were normal adolescent ups and downs, I remember it as an almost unbearably happy year. I met Ed on the third day I was there and twenty years on, here we are. The friends I made that year are still among the closest I have. I never really made it back to the US, not for long anyway. Not until my English husband took us here to do a PhD.

Because of Peter, I found a place I loved, friends I love, a husband I love truly madly and deeply — and a life I love.

Sometimes the points our lives pivot on aren’t the obvious ones. Sometimes they aren’t clear until later. Sometimes they are never clear. But I do know that Peter Kirwan changed my life, simply by living his. It’s a wonderful and yet somewhat intimidating thought. If I were to be that person in someone else’s life, would I know it? And would I change that life for the better, simply by living mine?

Maybe.