My New October Life

 So now it's October, the most autumnal of autumn months, "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" (Keats). We made a visit to Munson's Farmstand in an effort to make a small, seasonal beautification of our beloved cottage. 

We are eagerly awaiting the changing colors of the many mature trees on our morning walk down Bluff Street, especially the maples, which have the promise of adding scarlet and crimson to the predominant gold of Colorado's fall foliage. The days are still warm, but the nights are cool. Today, as is fitting for the first day of October, the high is forecast to be 75 and the low to be 42. Bliss!

After a hiatus on my writing project, this morning I returned to the writing nook at 4:15 a.m., settled myself on the cozy loveseat there under a fleecy blanket, and picked up my pen again. 

During August I scribbled some 30-plus pages of notes and wrote 20 pages of actual text, which I shared with my writing group, the Writing Roosters, at our mid-September meeting. They had WONDERFUL comments. There is a magic in a critique group, where each member comes with their own comments and questions, but as we talk together, the interaction produces something new that none of us might have come up with on our own. 

Main problem they identified: this was my first-ever try at writing a book with an omniscient narrator, and I clearly have a lot to learn about how to do this effectively. Readers need to have a wise, trustworthy, insightful, authoritative presence guiding them through the story. All I had was distracting, frenetic head-hopping from one character's point-of-view to another's. But I LIKE learning new things!

Main insightful question they posed: the book is the story of four children during a semi-enchanted summer on a street much like my own Bluff Street, a street filled with whimsy and wonder, where the street itself is going to be a character in its own right. So: "How do the children need the street? And how does the street need the children?" Ooh!!!!!!

I couldn't leap into work on the book right away, however, as a long-dormant academic project reappeared on my desk to command my immediate attention. I sent it off a few days ago, and then gave myself a few days to recover.

Then today, the first day of the month, the first day of my FAVORITE month, I spent a joyous hour this morning, asking myself, "How DOES the street need the children?" I think I have the start of a couple of tentative attempts at an answer... and I have all month, and all year, and the rest of my life, really, to answer it, as ALL I want from writing now, in the eighth decade of my life, is joy, in whatever form it comes to me. And this is the form in which it is coming to me now...

Reunited (with Writing) and It Feels So Good!

Now that we are settled in the cottage (the cottage! the cottage! the cottage I love so much!), it was time to face The Rest of My Life. Which means: if I have this beautiful writing nook, I needed to start actually writing in it. 

So, four days ago, on July 29, I actually did.

I slipped out of bed at 4:30 a.m. and crept up the stairs to the nook. I made myself a pot of tea in my Wedgewood teapot. I curled up on the couch under a blanket. I turned over my beloved hourglass and picked up my clipboard, pad, and pen. And I started to write.

I didn't know what to write, so I just started talking to myself on the page:

WRITING NOOK - DAY ONE! RETURN TO WRITING!

ONLY GOAL: TO WRITE - to play - to explore - to reenter this world and reinhabit this identity

I don't know WHAT I will write, only THAT I will write.

I am always thinking about reinventing myself as a writer, so I wrote a list of possibilities. Try writing - gasp - a book for grownups? Personal essays? Make a serious commitment to poetry? 

But every time I consider reinventing myself as a writer, I always come back to my first and best love: children's books. And now I was drawn to writing a book for young readers set . . . in a cottage! On a street like my new street! I made this goal for myself: to create a fictional world readers will want to live in and never leave, a world filled with whimsy and wonder, like the world I am living in now.

I started making notes... asking myself questions... walking each day on Bluff Street with a writer's eyes alert for story possibilities. I decided right away that this book is going to be, defiantly and unapologetically, just what I want to write, a book with an old-fashioned sensibility (think Maud Hart Lovelace, Eleanor Estes, Elizabeth Enright), a quiet book without a page-turning plot, a book radiating kindness and generosity toward its characters and its readers. 

ALL I want right now is just to LOVE writing this book with all my heart. Then whatever happens is up to the universe. The ONLY point right now is LOVE. 

As of this morning, day four of my return to writing, I have 13 pages in my tiny handwriting of scribbled notes. 

Each one a labor of LOVE. 

If You Have the Perfect Writing Nook, Don't You Just HAVE to Write?

The best thing about my new cottage - the very best thing about my very sweet new cottage - is the little room tucked under the eaves on the upper level, which David has designated as my writing nook.

You approach it up a narrow circular staircase.

And then there it is: a small, snug, cozy room with a loveseat (and I love to write while sitting sideways on a loveseat), and a chair for David if he comes to visit me, and a little table tucked under a window, and a bookcase made decades ago by my father filled with the books I love best with my beloved hourglass perched in the place of honor on top. 

There is even a little sink where I can get water to heat up for tea in my Wedgewood teapot. David just ordered for me the New York Times recommended best water-heating device, and it arrived yesterday.

The nook opens out onto a rooftop deck.

From the deck you can get a view of Boulder's iconic mountains, the Flatirons (the ones that are featured on all the postcards). Here they are!

I have had many pleasant writing spaces in my long life as a writer, but never one as irresistible as this, and one given to me, all to me, by someone who loves me and is rooting with all his might for me to thrive and flourish as a writer.

The only problem is that I haven't been writing this year, recovering from my sequential double fractures (first left elbow, then right arm) and feeling generally discouraged about myself as a writer, given the many changes in the world of publishing in recent years, many of which seem to be leaving me behind (which is fine, it really is, or sort of is, or just has to be). 

But with a writing nook like this, how can I NOT write? 

I just HAVE to write in a nook like this. 

Don't I?

Welcome to My New Fairyland

We moved! My sweetheart and I said our farewells to Rainbow's End, the mountain paradise where we lived so happily for the past two years. It was time to live somewhere in town, closer to public transportation and with fewer (than 34!) steps to shovel in the winter. So we found ourselves a hundred-year-old cottage on quiet Bluff Street in the Whittier neighborhood of Boulder, which has oodles of whimsy and bursts of joy on every block.

First, the cottage itself! Isn't it sweet?

Here are photos from this morning's short walk of exploration. 

A hollow tree welcomes strangers. 

A community fairy garden invites all to linger and play.

Generosity abounds!

A pocket park is hidden up a secret path of steep steps.

And just around the corner:

As I ponder the second half of 2024 and what it will bring, and where my future journey as a writer will take me, it's hard not to think this creative, generative energy is bound to rub off on me. Maybe my next book will feature fairies, elves, and gnomes . . . and ripe cherries for the picking . . . and free seeds for the planting ... and a secret park . . .   

Who knows?!

The First Day of the Second Half of 2024

I haven't written a blog post since early March. 

I haven't written much of anything since early March.

My life has been pretty much on hold since I had a SECOND fall (this time on black ice) and a SECOND fracture (this time a "proximal fracture of the right humerus" - terminology I had never heard of until this unfortunate event) on March 21, almost three months to the day after tripping over an exuberant grandchild and breaking my left elbow. Luckily, I could just switch the cast on my Vermont Teddy Bear from one arm to another.

For what seemed like forever, I couldn't write with a pen (my favorite activity on this earth) or type (my second favorite activity on this earth) or dress myself or use a can opener or scoop out hard-frozen ice cream or drive or . . . or . . . or . . . anything at all, really.

Long famed for cheery resilience in the face of trauma and tragedy, I have to confess I just gave up. I moped. I whimpered, whined, and wailed. I sulked, sniffled, and sobbed. 

I still loved my sweetheart, and he still loved me, but he now had excruciating and incapacitating sciatica pain. At least we had complementary disabilities and could offer compensatory services, he with two functional arms, me with ease in bending and stooping. But it wasn't exactly a season of great joy. Nor did having to shovel the 34 steps into our house after a series of spring snowstorms (one dumped twenty inches of heavy, wet, white stuff) appreciably increase our daily quotient of rapture. 

I published a book but wished it had gotten more effusive reviews. I abandoned the plans I had made (which I probably wouldn't have carried out anyway) to figure out how to promote it on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Why bother? What bother about anything?

Bowing to age and infirmity, my sweetheart and I decided it was time to leave our little lovers' paradise in the mountains for the ease of living in town, and we managed to find a sweet hundred-year-old cottage to which we will be moving next week. It's the right thing to do, but oh, it's hard to leave this place we have loved so much. Will we ever be that happy anywhere else? Will we ever be that happy ever again?

The first half of 2024 has been HARD!!!

But today is the first day of the month. For decades I had the practice of starting a new life on the first day of each month. And it's also the first day of the second half of this challenging year. So it's time to start an EXTRA-new new life, right? A complete restart? A chance to salvage 2024? A chance to salvage everything?

Wish me luck!

The Worst Thing about Being a Writer

The best thing about being a writer is, for me, extremely obvious. It's the sheer joy of writing, of course! 

The worst thing about being a writer? 

Waiting.

And by waiting, I mean, waiting for the world to render its verdict on what I have written. Waiting on the reaction of my writing group, my agent, my editor, the editorial board at my publisher, and (if the book is fortunate enough to be published) for trade reviews, reader reviews, and any kind of nice little fuss that might be made over it. 

I have spent most of 2024 so far waiting re two different projects: first, waiting to see if Book I Just Finished would be accepted for publication, and second, waiting for reviews on Book That Is Coming Out in June. Waiting as the minutes, hours, and days slipped by. 

Now, I do have to acknowledge that I am extremely lucky to be in this position, to have two different book projects that have cleared early hurdles and that I love with all my heart. 

But it doesn't feel all that lucky when I'm waiting. It actually feels more like agony. And it feels hard to do anything else BUT wait, which is the very worst thing an author person can do. 

Everyone says - and it's true - that instead of twiddling your thumbs and checking email on your phone every few minutes and consoling yourselves with nibbling all day long on Easter candy (Cadbury eggs! Russell Stover chocolate-covered strawberry-cream eggs! Jellybeans, the original Brach's ones of my childhood!), you should get busy WRITING THE NEXT BOOK.

But, gosh, that is hard. Because it's a lot more fun writing a book if there is at least SOME chance of its being read by somebody someday. And its chances of being read are greatly influenced by the outcome of the very things you are waiting on. In my long career, I've had one publisher reject a book of mine because of the disappointingness of my past sales - something that would doom the next book, too. And publishers are less likely to want your next book if the current book turns out to be a DUD. And I've had my share of duds.

Waiting for the editorial verdict on Book I Just Finished was complicated by the fact that my agent is currently spending a month in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. As any news from the publisher would go first to him, I looked up the time difference between Boulder, Colorado, and Ho Chi Minh City: 14 hours, so I could time my obsessive email checking accordingly. Plus, it's a very unusual book for the children's book market: a book about an emotionally intense sixth-grade girl who falls in love with - wait for it - ancient Greek philosophy (!) and uses it to navigate various crises at home and at school. The wisdom of dead white men is not a super-hot topic in the publishing world right now.

As the weeks went by, my hopes for the book dimmed even more. When my editor loves a book of mine, she responds right away - last time, it was within FOUR HOURS of her receiving it! When she doesn't love a book, she takes her time to write a long letter laying out the faults of the book in excruciating detail. And "right away" had come and gone. And with it, any hope for the book. 

Oh, well.

But then, last Thursday, Leap Year's Day, as I was driving along, I glanced at my phone at a stoplight, and there was an email from my agent with "Offer" in the subject line. (If it's bad news, or no news at all, he uses the subject line "Update"). Unbelievably, astonishingly, miraculously, they are going to publish my book. 

I was too stunned even to be happy. But my sweetheart, David, was happy enough for both of us (after having been forced to listen to all my weeping and wailing as I waited). Here are the flowers he gave me to celebrate, with the manuscript next to them and some works of ancient Greek philosophy that star in the book.

So now, I'm back to waiting for reviews on Book That Is Coming Out in June. More on that to come...

Just Write the Darned Thing!

Sometime last year a professor friend invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited collection he was putting together on a certain Scholarly Topic. I love to accept invitations like this! I still want to remain professionally active, but I'm sick unto death of submitting articles to journals for the brutality of double-blind anonymous peer review. It's so much more fun to write an article for someone who actually WANTS something actually written by ME. 

I didn't have much of an idea for what I might write, but the deadline to send in an abstract was looming, so I did some pondering and came up with an idea for the Thing I Would Write. I sent it off to my professor friend, and he liked the idea for this Thing. He got a contract for the book, as yet unwritten, with a table of contents that included me as a contributor and my Thing as one of the chapters.

But then, when I started seriously reading up on the Thing, I saw that the main thing I had wanted to say about the Thing had already been said, thirty years ago, by a Brilliant Prominent Scholar - and said vastly better than I was going to say it.

Needless to say, this took a considerable amount of wind out of my sails. But it was too late to back out of the Thing. I somehow had to write the Thing anyway. 

Still, I moped and whimpered and kept wishing I hadn't said yes to writing the Thing. 

Finally, I realized that, as I wasn't going to back out, all I could do, limp as my sails were hanging, absent any stiff breeze to sail me along, was, yes, just Write the Darned Thing.

I plugged along on it diligently for an hour a day, day after day. I found some interesting background information to include about the history of the Thing. I came up with half a dozen fairly worthwhile insights of my own into the Thing. I reframed my discussion so that the part derivative from Brilliant Prominent Scholar was no longer the main point of the Thing, but just one of many points I made along the way, with plenty of effusive citations to her.

When I had done the best I could do, with a sigh I pressed SEND.

And you know what? The editors read the Thing right away and thought it was just fine. In fact, they used the word "great." I don't think it's a Great Thing myself. I think it's a Nice Little Thing. The single best part of it is still the points made by the Brilliant Prominent Scholar. But hey, that's why she's a Brilliant Prominent Scholar, and not me.

There's a ditty I learned as a child, from Henry Van Dyke: "Use what talents you possess. The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best." 

There is room in the world - and in the academic world, too - for lots of voices raised in song. In the end, I'm glad I said yes to singing my own little song and wrote this Nice Little Thing.