Why My Last Year's Goals Failed (and no, it wasn't all because of COVID)

I'm seeing lots of rueful laughter on social media right now about the folly of having bothered to purchase a planner for 2020. This was the year when the best-laid plans of all of us (in a butchering of Robert Burns's famous words) ganged a-gley. 

I launched 2020 with a sprawling, unwieldy, unworkable plan already doomed to early abandonment. Even though I am a veteran life-planner who knows that simple goals are best, I opted for my most complicated and convoluted set of plans ever. Faced with looming family crises, I decided that mere survival was too dispiriting a goal for the year. Instead, I would work on improving my health on EIGHT different dimensions: physical, mental, emotional, social, professional, financial, environmental, and spiritual - with half a dozen activities listed under each heading.

Some of the mandated activities didn't happen because of COVID. Under "social health," I had "Make sure to have one social outing every week" and "Plan SIX special getaways with friends this year!" HA! Under "environmental health," I had "Buy carbon offsets for flights." WHAT FLIGHTS? 

But mainly I didn't do most of the things I said I was going to do because it made my head hurt to look at that long, daunting list. Plus, some of the things I already knew I would never do, even as I dutifully wrote them down in my little notebook. I already knew I wasn't going to follow through on some additional new form of exercise, when for 66 years the only exercise I've ever loved (and do love passionately) is walking. I already knew I wasn't going to make radical alterations in my food intake, when for 66 years I've mainly lived on English muffins with butter and jam and am the healthiest person I know by far. Some of the things I might have done if they were the ONLY thing I asked of myself for the year, but not as one of several dozen!

The items I did succeed in crossing off the humongous list were the one-and-done things. I made a new will from a free online template (financial health): it felt great to know that if I died from COVID, my family would find my affairs in good order. I deleted the Twitter app on my phone, which took ten seconds and greatly improved the quality of my life (emotional health). 

But basically the list depressed me and didn't motivate me AT ALL. 

Looking back at the year, just in narrowly personal terms (i.e., not thinking about COVID, the election, my family, or the fate of the planet), the best part of the year was writing two verse novels for young readers. Every hour I spent on those projects was BLISS, and the two books those hours produced are the two best things I've ever written (according to all readers so far, including me). I also got clarity on the kinds of projects I DREAD: projects that make me feel bad about myself (teaching courses I'm not qualified to teach, and writing articles I'm not qualified to write). 

I'm going to use these twin insights - about BLISS and DREAD - to make my (VERY simple and VERY minimalist) plan for 2021. Stay tuned! 

Lessons Learned from a Project Dreaded

Well, I knew I couldn't live with myself (with my shamefully procrastinating self) if I didn't complete this one long-overdue, mega-daunting, academic assignment by the end of the year. (Details in my previous whiny, whimpering post.) I wasn't qualified to write this thing, I had no idea how to write this thing, this thing wasn't a thing anybody would really know how to write. But I had agreed to do it.  So now it simply had to be done. 

So I did it. I emailed it off on Christmas Eve. It was a huge relief when, for better or worse, I pressed SEND.

Some of the lessons I learned in finally making myself do the undoable-task-that-nonetheless-needed-to-be-done are lessons I already knew, but keep forgetting. Others are new to me, and I'm glad I learned them before the new year begins.

Here they are.

1. The way to eat an elephant really is one bite at a time. When the elephant is overwhelming enough, for me the best way to measure the bites is by the clock, not by the task. The tasks are too awful to think about! But if I turn over my beloved hourglass and sit at my computer for an hour, SOMETHING WILL GET DONE. The Grateful Dead told us to keep on trucking, but I do best when I keep on trudging. 

2. The ONLY way that anything you have to do will get done is if you actually DO it. In real life, sad but true, no elves show up in the night to do your work for you. (Complaining about the work, making social media posts about the work, and blogging about the work are NOT the same thing as DOING the work.) One of my life mantras generally, which also applies here, is "If it is to be, it's up to me."

3. BUT that said, if you show up faithfully to do the work, the elves (or the angels, or the muses, or your sub-conscious) are likely to feel sorry for you, too, and show up with additional assistance. A brilliant insight may pop into your head - well, not brilliant, exactly, but a new idea you didn't have before. As you write, without really knowing what you are going to say, you will start to figure out what you need to say. THE MAGIC WILL HAPPEN. Or at least a glimmer or two of magic.

4. Those people (colleagues, editors, peer-reviewers) who are going to end up reading this disappointing, dismal draft are not your terrifying adversaries; they are actually ON YOUR SIDE. If you are making any terrible mistakes along the way, they will likely catch them and help you correct them. The making of this thing is a collaborative venture. You are not alone.

5. It will feel so good to have this thing done!! You will wish you had just sat yourself down at your desk months ago! But sometimes the time of dread bears unexpected fruit. While I was endlessly deferring the writing of this academic essay, I wrote my first two verse novels for young readers, which I believe are the best books I have ever written. I will never regret that I did that instead. Could I have reversed the order: duty and drudgery first, THEN the dessert of writing bliss? Maybe. But maybe not. I can't be sorry that I chose bliss instead. 

6. MAYBE the fact that you dreaded, feared, and loathed the doing of this thing so much means that in the future you should do less of it??  Maybe it doesn't: some people do dread and fear the work they love. But if you LOATHE the work? Well, maybe that's a sign that it's time to make some different choices. Note to self for 2021!

The Kind of Writing I Hate Most: or The Terror of Having to Write Something You Are Completely Unqualified to Write

I have a writing project I have been procrastinating on for MONTHS. 

It was due October 1, and it's now mid-December.

Every single day I tell myself, "Just write on this project for ONE HOUR." Or "Just write on this project for HALF AN HOUR." Or "Just glance at this project for FIVE MINUTES!"

But every day I don't do any of these things. 

During this extended session of procrastination I have written not one, but two, middle-grade books in the new-to-me-form of the verse novel; one of them is already far along in the production process for publication in the fall of 2021. So it isn't as if the pandemic has made me utterly unable to function (though I certainly have those moments). It is only this particular project that has me paralyzed. 

Why can't I make myself do this perpetually undone project?

It's because it is the kind of writing I hate most. 

What kind of writing do I hate most?

 I hate most when I have to write something I am completely unqualified to write. For me, this is anything where I have to sound like an authority, or an expert, a person who is supposed to KNOW something. Worst is when the thing I'm supposed to know is HUGE, so huge that it's pretty much unknowable by anybody. But particularly by me.

It's all I can to do confide to you what this hated project is. This is partly because the editors who commissioned it might read this blog post, and this would make me LOOK BAD. It's also because when I do, you will all say, "Yup, that is TOTALLY something you are not qualified to do." But I might as well face the worst right here and now. So.... gulp....  I've been asked to write a 7500-word entry on "Ethics" for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Children's Literature in English, Volume 3, 1914-Present. 

"Ethics" is a huge topic. 

 A century is a long stretch of time for anybody to know anything about anything.

Why, you may ask, did I say I'd do this given that I knew it would generate toxic levels of terror and dread? Well, in my career as an academic I figured out right away that in order to get tenure I would have to say yes to many things I knew I was unqualified to do. After all, when I started out, I was pretty much unqualified to do anything. I'd try to reassure myself that it was fine to answer student questions in class with a frank "I don't know," but I wouldn't have been able to keep my job if I hadn't offered actual answers at least occasionally and written the requisite number of tenure-worthy articles trying to act as if I had something noteworthy to say on various topics. 

I finally got tenure - hooray! Then a few years ago I relinquished my tenure and took early retirement from my academic job. So, freed from annual performance evaluations, I truly didn't have to accept this latest assignment. But saying yes to things becomes a habit. I've always taken pride in describing myself as a yay-sayer to the universe. In any case, now that I've said yes to this, for better or worse, I pretty much have to follow through on this commitment. 

Here is what I'm telling myself as I promise the universe that tomorrow I really TRULY will do this thing!! Maybe my wise self-talk will be useful to you, too.

1. MANY people have imposter syndrome, not just academics, and not just me. MANY people are put in a position where they are expected to do something for which they feel woefully unqualified. Decades ago on a Greyhound bus I sat next to a man who covered international affairs for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He told me that after seeing his authoritative articles in print, written just by him, just by this regular guy, he now knew that all journalism was written by regular mortals just like him. Ditto for me writing academic articles: I'm just one more regular mortal who will be pretending to know more than she actually does.

2. I may consider myself unqualified for this assignment, but the people who offered it to me apparently thought I would do just fine. Why should I persist in second-guessing their assessment? In fact, I have my name on the cover of an award-winning edited collection titled Ethics and Children's Literature. I'm sure I was asked to contribute to this book on the strength of that book. Why shouldn't the person who produced a book with that title have at least some authority to write about ethics and children's literature?

3. The very (ridiculous) breadth and depth of the topic means there are at least a million things that could be included within its scope. It is clearly impossible to include them all. Selectivity is needed. Selectivity is desirable. Since I am the selector, I might as well select the subset of things that I do feel somewhat more qualified to write about. 

4. Finally, my piece will go through peer review, so I'm not the only one who bears the burden of making sure the final product is acceptable. Others will be able to weigh in with their comments and suggestions. If they think my piece is truly terrible, they will say so: peer reviewers are not shy! I once had a chapter by me for an edited collection utterly fail in peer review, but only once. I doubt that will happen here. But if it does, it happened once before, and guess what? The world kept on turning.

All right. All this self-talk is only preamble to ACTUALLY SITTING DOWN AND WRITING THE DARNED THING. I have been alive for enough decades that I know from experience that dreading a thing is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS worse than simply doing it.

Dear friends, I am announcing to the universe that I, the Unqualified One, the Terrified One, the One Hopelessly Out of Her Depth, is going to get up tomorrow morning very early and get to work on this thing. (And to be fair to me, and I am always scrupulously fair to myself, I do have notes, and thoughts, and stuff I've read, so I'm hardly starting from scratch.)

 Cue the Little (Completely Unqualified) Engine That Could: "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...."

The Unexpected Difference Our Words Can Make

Writers write for many reasons. Surely one of the most important is to connect with readers: to have our words make a difference to some reader, sometime, somewhere. 

Here is a story of how words I wrote for the most ephemeral of audiences, to be heard for three or four brief minutes and then forgotten forever, ended up having, a decade later, an impact I could never have imagined.

The University of Colorado Philosophy Department hosts a fabulous conference every summer, the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME), billed as "an international conference geared to offer the highest quality, highest altitude discussion of ethics, broadly conceived." Each conference features dozens of submitted papers as well as three keynote addresses by the most prominent figures in the field of philosophical ethics. In 2009, one of these was Prof. Judith Jarvis Thomson of MIT, who happened to have been my teacher when I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s at Wellesley College; Wellesley and MIIT had a partnership, which continues to this day, where students at one institution could take courses at the other.

I asked if I could give the introduction for Prof. Thomson. I had wonderful material in the notebook I still had from that course, as she was such a charismatic teacher that every sentence she uttered was one I wanted to preserve for posterity. 

In the notebook I even preserved her advice to us for our paper on utilitarianism:

If you can read my tiny writing, you'll see that the main instruction to us was "No eloquence!" Prof. Thomson valued crystalline clarity in writing and despised flowery prose. I also remembered many other pithy pieces of writing criticism she gave me during the time of our acquaintance as well as bracing advice from her mentoring as I applied to graduate school.

So I wrote a page and a half of introductory remarks and delivered them one summer day in 2009 to the RoME audience. I was stunned by the impact of that three-minute speech. One colleague, not known for effusive compliments, called it "the introduction greater than which no introduction can be conceived." At RoME conferences years later, strangers would approach me and say, "You're the one who gave that introduction for Judy Thomson!" Of course, the introduction was so wonderful only because Judy Thomson was so wonderful; it was the details about this unforgettable women that were the unforgettable part of my speech.

This past month, on November 20, Judith Jarvis Thomson died. The chair of the CU Philosophy Department asked if I could send him a copy of my introduction for wider sharing, and it was posted here, on the leading blog of the philosophy profession, the Daily Nous.

I started to get emails: from a University of Maryland colleague from decades ago; from a children's literature colleague who attended the same high school as Judith Jarvis Thomson and had seen my post quoted on their website; from a friend who said my post was the subject of their Thanksgiving dinner conversation, as her son had also benefitted from Prof. Thomson's wisdom; and from Judy Thomson's nephew.

I would never have guessed that a three-minute introduction of a speaker would be widely circulated eleven years later. Oh, writers, little do we know what unexpected power our words may have. And, oh teachers, little do you know how much every utterance from your lips may be cherished by hundreds of students a generation later. 

Sparking a Book Idea: Part IV

CONTINUATION OF THE PREVIOUS THREE POSTS IN WHICH I GROPE TOWARD AN IDEA FOR MY LATEST BOOK

I had my idea fairly well worked out on many pages of handwritten notes. (By the time I was done with the entire draft, I had accumulated 28 closely written pages of dialogue with myself.) I had decided on the form for the book before I even began thinking of an idea. It was to be a verse novel, my second attempt at this enormously pleasing literary challenge. For those of you unfamiliar with the verse novel: it's a novel with all the usual requirements of plot, character, setting, theme, etc., told entirely in free verse. Most of the poems in mine aren't longer than a single page; some are just a line of two - a fragment of thought, a single image, a moment captured.

Now I had to write the book.

I write for only one hour a day, timed with my cherished cherry-wood hourglass.

Because I adore writing verse novels so much, when I am writing one I call this my "hour of bliss." On my to-do list for the day, it appears simply as "bliss." My typical daily harvest of words produced for this latest verse novel (written by hand) was three or four poems - some longer, some shorter. Some days, I produced just one poem; other days, perhaps five or six. Then (and this did take an additional untimed half hour or so), I typed them up (doing quite a bit of editing as I typed) and printed them out.

The next day my hour would begin with reading over yesterday's poems and making more edits and corrections. Then I'd write the new poems. With this system, I never lose momentum on a book and also never suffer burnout from overly intense productivity. Slowly, steadily, the pages pile up. 

On some days, I realized that I needed to think more before I could proceed. I NEVER think thoughts about my writing in my head. NEVER! I think them ONLY on paper, with pen in hand. Sometimes it seems to me that I have no inner life at all because I do all my thinking about my life - wrestling with various life challenges - on the page as well. 

I started this new book (working title, The Silent Stars) with notes made on August 14. I see in my calendar records that I spent five more hours on the gathering and groping process before writing the first page of the actual text for the book on Friday, August 28. I wrote the final page of the full first draft on Monday, November 9. There were numerous days I didn't work on it because other projects demanded my attention, such as revisions for my editor on the previous verse novel (working title, The Lost Language). But I logged my hours of bliss with considerable regularity. Toward the very end, I have to confess there were a couple of days when the story was so gripping to me, its author, that I allowed myself TWO hours of writing bliss. But I'm reluctant to tamper with a system that has worked so well for me for decades: an hour a day day, no more, no less, pretty much every day. This first draft ended up at 227 pages and 27, 210 words (a novel not in verse would have more than double that word count for the same number of pages - one reason that verse novels are popular with reluctant readers, as well as with readers who value their more literary style).

Reading it through when the full draft was done, I made only a few changes at this stage, because I rely so heavily on feedback from my writing group. Mainly I pruned early mentions of story elements that ended up not not materializing as significant later on. For example, Clover can't have a dog of her own because of her father's allergies; this is why her relationship with the dog who has a tragic accident in the story is so important to her. In one poem Clover started to have some resentment toward her father for this reason, but this just didn't fit the way their relationship unfolded, so I dropped that poem. Clover's language arts teacher begins every class with a poem, which always resonates uncannily with what is going on in Clover's heart at the time. But I decided to limit myself to mentioning in detail only one of these poems, because it's too expensive and cumbersome to get permission to publish quotations from poems that aren't in the published domain, and I didn't want this teacher to share only familiar chestnuts from the past, so a couple more poems got the axe. Clover and her father are stargazers; now was the time for me to research which constellations would be viewable in the early evening in October and November. 

My writing group will read this tweaked draft at their December meeting. Then I'll make changes accordingly, perhaps a lot of changes (my writing group is loving but TOUGH!!!) before sending the book to my agent to see what he thinks.

It's been a week now since I finished the full draft, and I have considerable post-partum depression. My days feel so empty without my hour of bliss. I have plenty of other work tasks to do, including an overdue academic project; these provide their own satisfaction once completed, but they aren't blissful, and it's bliss I crave. 

So I need to start groping toward my next book. I feel daunted by the task, but I will re-read these four blog posts to remind myself exactly how I did this before and encourage myself to believe I can do this again. 

       

Off to start a new round of musings now....

Sparking a Book Idea: Part III

CONTINUATION FEOM PART II, IN WHICH THE IDEA THAT SPARKED THE STORY ENDED UP PLAYING NO ROLE IN THE ACTUAL STORY AT ALL!

At this point in the process of planning out my book, I had begun with the idea-spark of writing a book about a girl whose family is involved in some way with a Museum of Losers, based on a real-life museum of this name I had discovered in Kansas on a road trip. But as I probed further, the project became a book about a girl who idolizes her father and then learns some dark secret from his past, with the Museum of Losers totally dropped from the story. 

I don't think I can bear to tell you what the dark secret is, because this is truly the only time in my forty-year career that I have ever had such a big OMG moment in one of my books, or really any OMG moment at all. Even though there is close to a zero chance that a single reader of this post will (a) go on to read the book when it's published years from now; and (b) remember details from this post, it seems a shame to give away my one big thrilling plot turn, so here I will just give dark little hints....

I knew the book had to have some fun in it - some lightheartedness and laughter. I knew that my protagonist, Clover, had to DO SOMETHING to drive the story. In the course of DOING this thing (the emphasis here courtesy of editor Cheryl Klein, who in her book The Magic Words insists that characters have to DO THINGS, all-caps), she will discover the dark secret about her dad. I was also wedded to the idea that this girl would have some very confident opinion that she would have to rethink. Another brilliant guru for writing advice, the incomparable Kathi Appelt, calls this the protagonist's "controlling belief," which will be tested at the moment of climax in what Appelt calls "a crisis of faith." 

I decided that this would be what Clover DOES: she starts a dog-walking business with her two best friends, Quinn and Adalee. Adalee is a chronic complainer, a gloom-and-doom Cassandra whose many dire predictions add humor to the book, but also a sense of (I hope!) delicious foreboding. Quinn is a quiet, capable, somewhat nerdy boy, whom I didn't know much about yet; I figured I'd get to know him better when he would emerge on the page. I knew something bad would happen to one of the dogs on one of the walks, and Clover would respond with rage against the person responsible; she would express this rage in a letter to the newspaper, and the publication of this letter would trigger the revelation about her dad. 

I had a plan! I loved this plan!! I loved it so much! 

I followed my usual practice of writing the first page of a new book somewhere special, by sitting with my pad of paper and favorite pen on this bench at the Denver Botanic Gardens. 

But as I wrote the first twenty or thirty pages, I kept wondering what real purpose Quinn served in the story. I had a good sense of Adalee (I think she ended up being my favorite character), but why did I even need quiet, fairly unobtrusive Quinn? Should I just get rid of him? My choice as an author was: either eliminate Quinn or have him play a more significant role in the unfolding events. I rejected the first option: I didn't want to eliminate Quinn because I wanted a boy character in the book, plus a more positive friend to balance Adalee's comic negativity. Hmmm.... what should I do with Quinn?? 

So I sat down, pen in hand, to add to my growing stack of musings, in the form of notes to myself: "What is Quinn's role? in the [dog-walking business] and in the book?"

It was in trying to find an important role for Quinn to play that I came up with an additional plot twist that became, in my view, the best element of the book. This element of the story, which I introduced ONLY to give this secondary character more of a role, ended up giving my protagonist so much more depth, because now (it turns out) SHE herself is in part responsible for what happens to the dog, and she has painful questions about her own wrongdoing to address.

I love how attention to some structural requirement of a book - here, ensuring that every character actually plays a significant role in the story - can lead to uncovering a powerful and deep truth for the story to convey to readers. Oh, Quinn, if I hadn't realized how badly I was neglecting you, how much poorer this story have been!

Of course, however we spark ideas, and however those sparks catch fire in our feverish plotting brains, we still have to WRITE THE BOOK. In the final installment of this blog-post series, I will share the hour-a-day system that led to my writing a full draft of this book from first line on Friday, August 28, to last line on Monday, November 9.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Sparking a Book Idea: Part II

CONTINUATION OF PART I, IN WHICH I GET THE FIRST STORY-SPARK FOR A BOOK!

So I had the teensiest spark of a book idea: I would write a book, a verse novel, about a girl whose family is in some way connected with a Museum of Losers like the one I had discovered in a tiny town along Route 36, which traverses the northern edge of Kansas. I knew that I couldn't write a book about a Museum of Losers without thinking hard about the back story of someone who would create such a museum. What had that person lost that might lead them to empathize with losers?

But before I tackled those questions directly, I started thinking about what my protagonist was like. Because my previous book had been a verse novel, and I was already repeating myself by choosing that same form two books in a row, I wanted to make sure that the girl in this book was very different from the girl in the previous one. That girl was introspective and reflective (qualities that work well for the narrator of a novel in verse), but she was also very passive: dominated by her charismatic but controlling best friend and her charismatic but controlling mother. The book is the story of how she comes into her own. 

I decided that the heroine of this new book, by contrast, would drive most of the plot, something that is widely viewed as essential in a book for young readers, in any case. In her wonderful book on writing for children and young adults, The Magic Words, editor Cheryl Klein uses all-caps each time she reminds aspiring authors that their main character needs to DO THINGS. The character in my new book was going to DO lots of things. Of course, the girl in the previous book DID THINGS, too, but the things she did were small... small but deeply significant... which is actually my favorite kind of thing for a character to do. But this new character would be much more strong and assertive. On my pad of notes, I scribbled as a possible aspect of her character: "someone confident in her opinions who learns to problematize them." 

Also, as the previous book focused on Betsy's relationship with her mother, this book would focus on Clover's relationship with her father, and one of her confident but reevaluated opinions would have to do with him. Maybe Clover would idolize her father and then learn something dark about his past. Ooh! 

But then I needed to figure out: What would that thing be? Hmm.....

Also, where is the mother? Why didn't she tell Clover about whatever-this-thing-is? Is she dead? Are the parents divorced? Did the mother abandon the family (perhaps because of this thing)? Or is she alive and present, but just fiercely protective of her husband? 

And what is the girl herself going to be DOING, this girl who is NOT going to be passive and dominated? What does SHE want, and why does she want it? And how does her pursuit of this thing, whatever it is, lead her to discover the dark secret about her dad? 

I ended up with a sizeable sheaf of narrow-ruled pages of handwritten notes in my tiny, cramped writing.

I kept asking more questions; I kept offering more answers. By the time the full shape of the story had begun to emerge - this is the crucial part - I HAD DROPPED THE WHOLE IDEA OF THE MUSEUM OF LOSERS!

I dropped it partly because I was uneasy that there was a real-life Museum of Losers, and my fictional museum couldn't be held hostage to the actual facts about the museum off Route 36 in Kansas, though I supposed I could include an author's note saying that my fiction museum was "inspired" by the real one. But I just felt guilty about lifting the idea of this real-life museum into my book. I had also gotten discouraged when I started looking up all the losing presidential candidates, thinking I might pepper the story with facts about this gallery of failed presidential hopefuls. They all seemed so boring! Would kids really want to read about why Lewis Cass lost to Zachary Taylor? Or why Samuel J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes? 

The original snippet-of-an-idea that had sparked the story was snuffed out entirely! But it had done what I needed it to do. The musings it launched took their own form and led to their own story - a story that would prove to have further surprises in store for me, its creator. 

TO BE CONTINUED!

Sparking a Book Idea: Part I

I have published sixty books for young readers. This pandemic year I wrote two more - both verse novels, a form I am now enraptured with. Those who have read these two newest manuscripts think they are the best books I have ever written, and I think so, too.

But each time I sit down to start a new book I find myself paralyzed by possibility. How does one select an idea out of all the ideas floating around IN THE UNIVERSE? I also find EVERY SINGLE TIME that I've completely forgotten how I wrote the previous dozens of books. After settling on an idea, how does anybody WRITE a book? How does one DO it?

So here is how I wrote the last one, so that I can read over this post when I get ready to start the next one. Maybe this record of my gropings will be helpful for you, too.

First I look for a spark  - some little tingling something that tantalizes me as a possible spark for a story. Many authors keep notebooks of ideas. I have done this only fitfully, but I wish I had done it steadily. When I was searching for an idea for this latest book, I dragged out an old idea notebook. 

The ideas are mainly itty-bitty snippets that don't even deserve to be called ideas - some just popped into my head unbidden, but most came from somewhere: a newspaper clipping, an overheard conversation, a child I'd encountered, a memorable name, a fragment of experience. Here are a few that I bothered to write down: 

a girl named Sonnet

being rejected for something you didn't even apply for

persimmon pudding

a cookie-cutter collectors convention

newspaper clipping: "Russia regenerates 30,000-year-old flower"

the Museum of Losers on Route 36 in Kansas

Egg Farm Road

little girl giving a tour of the Old Jail Inn

Leap Year Day - an extra day as a gift from the universe

The best idea-spark is quirky but compelling, something a bit offbeat, but that makes me want to get out my clipboard, pad of paper, and trusty Pilot pen and start scribbling some questions. For this most recent book, the idea that most tantalized me was the Museum of Losers that I discovered on one of my long trips back and forth from Colorado to Indiana when I was teaching there for several years. It turned out to be just a wall in a bank on the dusty main street, covered with write-ups of each losing presidential candidate. 

Could I write a book where the kid - it would be a girl - I sensed that it would be a girl - would live in a small Kansas town with a museum like that?

I started scribbling notes....

I asked myself: did her parents create this museum? was it her mother? or her father? had they lost something in the past that would motivate them to do this? what would that be? how would my protagonist find this out? or was she the one who created the museum? if so, what would draw her to this project? what might she lose in the course of the story.... and then perhaps find again.....?

And I started scribbling answers...

TO BE CONTINUED!

The Sweetest Story from My Forty-Year Career as a Children's Book Author

A long time ago - maybe twenty years ago? - I received a letter in the mail from a young reader named Erika who lived near Burlington, Vermont. At the time I kept a standard reply-to-fan-letter template on my computer, which I personalized for each kid.

Well, Erika wrote back, thanking me for my letter, but explaining politely that her best friend had told her this was just a computerized letter and probably the same thing I sent to everybody. (Busted!) She asked if I would write her a handwritten note to silence her friend.

So I did, and she wrote back sending me her school photo and a bracelet she had made, and I wrote back (another handwritten note, of course!), and then she wrote saying how much she would love it if I would come to her school. "I love to go to schools!" I replied. "Why don't you see if your school has a budget for an author visit?"

Naturally, a girl who was persistent enough to hold out for a handwritten letter from her favorite author was also enterprising enough to make this inquiry of her principal. Yes, her school DID have a literacy grant with surplus funds in it. And yes, they would most happy to fly me in for a visit. 

Then the ever-plucky Erika emailed me (we were emailing back and forth by now) and told me I should stay at her house when I came to Vermont: "It's much nicer than a motel, and cheaper, too." At this point I suggested bringing her mother into the conversation; her mother said they would love to host me. Now, everything I had read about author visits advised NOT doing exactly what I was about to do, but I said, "Thank you! I would love to stay at your home!"

The three days spent in Vermont with Erika and her family were wonderful. I spoke at several schools, as well as at the public library, with Erika introducing me at each event and her older sister serving as my chauffeur. I fell in love with her parents, too, over evening wine and laughter. 

In the years following, Erika and I stayed in touch, at first frequently, then fitfully, and via Facebook. Erika is now all grown up and lives with her husband and their four children in Melbourne, Australia. She messaged me last week: her fifth grader, Zoe, loves my books. Might be it be possible for me to ZOOM with Zoe and her sister?

My reply: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!

So that's what I'm doing this afternoon at 4:00 p.m. Colorado time, which is 10:00 a.m. tomorrow morning in Australia. 

I'm actually tearing up as I'm writing this. Erika says she still has my old address memorized: 2575 Briarwood Drive. She says she's sure Zoe would send me a handwritten note if I send her my address! I feel like Peter Pan, at the end of Barrie's beautiful book, when he comes back to take Wendy with him for spring housecleaning, but she is all grown up, so he takes her daughter Jane with him to Neverland instead. 

Dearest Erika, thank you for insisting on that handwritten letter all those years ago. Thank you for so many years of sharing our enchanted world as author and reader, and thank you for our continuing friendship that spans years, continents, and seventeen hours of time zones.

Thank you. 

It's All Right Just to Be the Same Old (Adequately Wonderful) Person That You Are

This weekend I'm speaking at a children's book writers' conference jointly hosted by the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and the Graduate Programs in Children's Literature at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where I am a faculty member. I'm giving a keynote address on my favorite topic - "How to Have a Joyous Creative Career in an Hour a Day" - and an afternoon breakout session on my other favorite topic - "Structure and Sparkle: Writing the Transitional Chapter Book."

I love to speak at conferences, and I've given both of these talks before to appreciative audiences, but this time the conference is via ZOOM. It feels very different to sit all alone at your desk speaking to your computer screen than to stand up in front of a live audience in a chandelier-hung ballroom. And nowadays everybody - as in EVERYBODY - has a PowerPoint to go along with their presentations, and: 1) I barely know how to make a PowerPoint (I did all my decades of teaching via chalk and chalkboard); 2) technology makes me tense and jittery; and 3) I'm already tense and jittery enough presenting via the weird ZOOM format with tight time constraints for each session.

So my dilemma was this. Should I accept that audiences nowadays (especially ZOOM audiences) expect to have some appealing visuals and not just my big round head talking on their screen? Should I face the fact that it is time for me (quite belatedly) to join the 21st century and start making PowerPoints like the rest of the world? Or should I just stick with being my old-fashioned, tried-and-true, Claudia self? Put another way: Would it be good for this old dog to rise to the challenge of learning some new tricks? Or should I just do what I've always done, in the way I've always done it? 

I was bravely leaning toward the first option, but feeling knots in my stomach about the whole thing: not just figuring how to make the PowerPoint, but fiddling with the technology during the presentation itself, struggling to share my screen, having the slides not advance... oh, so many horrors to foresee! But somehow everyone else manages to do it (though not without a good number of snafus). Perhaps the time had come for me leap into these turbulent modern-day waters and hope I would somehow, miraculously, transform from desperate dog paddler to Olympic champion swimmer?

I asked my brilliant and wise friend Lisa, one of the conference organizers, what she thought I should do. Within minutes she emailed back what I was hoping, in my heart of hearts, to hear: "Be your tried and true Claudia Self. There is no question about it." 

Hooray! 

So now, instead of spending today churning my innards with dread about tomorrow's terrors, I can be pleasurably excited, with just the usual rush of energizing adrenaline.

 I can just BE WHO I AM, which is, I've decided, adequately wonderful.

Maybe one of these days I'll have a surge of courage and try out a PowerPoint presentation in a lower-stakes setting, one more suitable for trial-and-error. 

But tomorrow, I'll just be my Claudia Self. 

After all, that's who the conference organizers invited. It might as well be who they get. 

Packing My Bags for Children's Literature Adventures in Sweden

At the start of 2020, I knew the year would be a challenging one for me because of family woes, so I decided I needed not just a bunch of little treats along the way, but at least one HUGE treat. So I submitted a paper to a conference on "Conceptions of Girlhood Now and Then: 'Girls' Literature' and Beyond," to be held at Linnaeus University in Sweden on October 6th-8th. What a wonderful jaunt this would be!

Well, it's still going to be a wonderful jaunt, but now of course, thanks to COVID, the conference is taking place via ZOOM. WAHHH! But also HOORAY, because this makes it even easier for children's literature scholars all over the world to attend. Although many of the presenters are from Sweden, with the USA a distant second, by my count a total of 19 countries are represented. Joining the Swedish and American scholars are scholars from Spain, the U.K., Thailand, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Finland, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Greece, Denmark, and Italy. 

The papers look wonderful. I want to hear them all, but here are a few I've starred on the program: "Black Girls and Their Nineteenth-Century Autograph Albums," "What about the Fat Girl in Fiction?", "Emotional Socialization in Swedish Post-War Literature for Girls," "Meaning of 'Girlhood' in Slovak Children's Literature of Communism," and "Anglophone Constructions of Chinese Girlhood in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century." An intellectual FEAST!!

There is only one small challenge re attending this global conference from the comfort of my home in Boulder, Colorado. The schedule is on Central European time, eight hours later (or is it earlier? I'm never sure how to make sense of these time zones!) than U.S. Mountain Time. This means that the panel I'm on, which is taking place from 9:15-11:45 a.m. Wednesday morning on Swedish time, is taking place at 1:15-3:45 a.m. for me. I am a morning person. I adore getting up early. But 1:15 a.m. is VERY VERY early even for me!

I've decided to consider this a thrilling part of the adventure. So on Tuesday night I'll go to bed at 7:00, just as it's starting to get dark, and set my alarm for midnight. Then - ooh! - I'll wake up when the new day is barely beginning, and be ready to present an hour later. Most of the other panels and talks throughout the conference are at a more civilized time for me: the 1:00 p.m. in Sweden panels will be at 5 a.m. for me, and the 3 p.m. in Sweden panels will be at a most mellow 7 a.m. 

To add to the fun, the conference includes a Pippi Party one evening (well, one late morning for me):  Pippi Longstocking is one of Sweden's national treasures, and one of the the most remarkable girl characters in all of children's literature. The organizers even sent us Pippi candies mailed all the way from Sweden.

So today I'm clearing my desk the way I always do before a big trip. Time to cross off all those pesky little chores so I can set forth on my travel with nothing but eager anticipation of the joys that await me. Because tomorrow morning - VERY early! - I'll be arriving in Sweden!

Keeping the Promises We Make to Ourselves

 I am writing this blog post today for one reason only.

Today is September 30th, and I promised myself I'd write four blog posts this month, and so far I've only written three. So today is the day I have to write blog post number four.

That is to say, I'm writing this blog post in order to keep a promise to myself.

Philosophers debate whether promises to oneself are actually binding. Some philosophers point out that if I make a promise to you, I don't have to keep it if you release me from it. If you say, "Claudia, I've decided that it's fine with me if you don't do that," then, Poof! I no longer have to do that. The promise no longer binds me. So if I make a promise with myself, why can't Claudia say to Claudia, "Dear Claudia, I, Claudia, have decided that it's fine with me if you don't do that." Why isn't this a parallel Poof! moment? No court of law is going to enforce a contract made between me, myself, and I. 

But other philosophers reply that a promise is a promise, and the entire point of promises is to bind. If promises MATTER, why don't promises I make to myself matter, too?

I'm here to say that for me, they do. I don't have a well-worked-out philosophical argument for this conclusion. Mine is more of a pragmatic claim: keeping the promises I make to myself has made a huge difference in my life. 

Now, these are small promises. Or, rather, promises to do small things. The two main promises I've made and (mostly) kept are: 1) write for an hour a day; 2) walk for an hour a day. Yes, I break these promises frequently, but I keep them more often than I break them, and I'm able to keep them precisely because they require only two hours out of twenty-four. But small things done faithfully produce astonishing results.

My literary hero, Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, completed dozens of huge, sprawling novels by keeping the promise he made to himself to write a fixed number of words every morning. In a line I  have engraved upon my heart, he explained, "Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water-drop that hollows the stone." Of course, he was the one who gave himself the law that required his daily writing stint. And I'm the one who has given me the law that requires mine. But obeying these laws produced 60 published books for me and made him one of the greatest figures of English literature. 

Keeping my small-but-mighty promises to myself has freed me to do a better job of keeping the promises I make to others. Somehow life has given me a considerable load of caregiving responsibilities for other people, and I'm not someone who is temperamentally suited to caregiving. (I joke that after dumping me, all the old boyfriends married nurses.) I would start to feel bitter about caregiving, and do it with an even more grudging heart, if I didn't keep these inviolable promises I've made to myself. But once I have kept my promises to me, I can be cheerfully generous for the rest of the day to others.

So here is my fourth blogpost for the month, dear friends. And now I can cross it off the month's to-do list with my trusty red pen and a relieved "Ta-dah!"

Starting Over Again on the Autumnal Equinox

Many of my friends know that I like to start a new life on the first day of each month. A new commitment to fitness! To frugality! To astonishing work productivity! To using my leisure time to read heaps of wonderful books! The new life usually peters out after a few days, but I truly think I owe everything I've ever achieved to those few days of each month's glorious new life.

I'm in need of a new life right now, but it's hard for me to start one on some random day, despite familiar sayings that remind us that EVERY day can be "the first day of the rest of your life." But today is the autumnal equinox, which is a PERFECT day to start a new life. Autumn has always been my favorite season; perhaps it's yours, too. I adore the energy of back-to-school (even if back-to-school was so much less energizing this year, thanks to the pandemic). I envy Jewish friends who get to celebrate the start of a new calendar year with Rosh Hashanah in September. I welcome the briskness of cool mornings, so excellent for equally brisk walks.

But if autumn can feel like the season of new purpose, it's also the season of harvesting the fruits of spring's planting and summer's cultivation, and the season of preparation for winter's bare trees and blustery skies. I've recently seen quoted the sentiment that with its brilliant foliage, "Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go." 

I'm in the processing of harvesting the fruits of spring's blissful writing of my first verse novel, which is now in copy-editing at my publisher, Holiday House, headed for fall 2021 publication. I'm launching my hour-a-day-of bliss on writing a second verse novel. My writing group has read the first twenty pages of the new project, and so far they like it even better than the last one, which early readers have declared to be my best book ever. So hooray for both of these things!

But I'm also letting go of a lot of hopes for how this year was going to turn out. It's been one of the hardest years of my personal/family life, and I'm now facing all the ways in which not only the coming years, but decades, will not be what I dreamed of for my loved ones, and so for me. And don't get me started on THE WORLD!!! I have yet to find a single person who thinks 2020 has been a good year for the world. But it's the year we've been given. As Tolkien wrote:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

This is the time that has been given us.

So let us welcome autumn, which is, according to Keats, "the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." It's the season of purpose, as I'm declaring it to be for me today, but also the season of harvest (sweet and bitter), and above all, the season of learning to let go. 

Book Revisions: From "Impossible!" to "Done!" in a Week

A week ago I was sitting on my friend Leslie's deck, literally sobbing because I knew there was no way I could possibly salvage anything whatsoever from my beloved verse-novel-in-progress after reading the VERY long, VERY detailed, and VERY daunting list of comments from my VERY trustworthy editor. 

Given that the entire storyline was unmotivated, and central characters were too unlikable, and crucial scenes were implausible (plus several hundred other details were inconsistent, confusing, or downright annoying), if I were even to attempt revisions on this scale, there would truly be nothing left of the book as I had originally written it. Nothing at all. And this was the book I had written with the greatest joy and for which I had the highest hopes. Now joy had become misery! Now all hopes were cruelly dashed!

Well, after I sobbed for a while, I started to get some ideas for how I could make a few small-but-significant changes that would fix just about all of the problems my editor had identified. She and I talked on the phone the next day, and when I returned to my desk, I was not only encouraged, but exhilarated. 

I didn't quite LEAP into revision. My revision method is a very bad one, but it's the one that works for me. Ideally, one would fix the BIG things first, and then the middle-sized things, and then deal with the teensy-weensy things last. As I read somewhere, why would you spend a lot of time decorating a wall that is just going to be knocked down? It only makes sense to deal with major structural issues first, right?

My method, however, is the opposite. I have to do the easy things first just so that I can feel less hopeless about the whole project. For this book, my editor had flagged my overuse of several words: "back" (as in "back when we were still friends," "still" (as in, ditto), and "totally." To this I added "really." I did a global search for the overused words and eliminated a huge quantity. Progress was being made!

On I went, to more challenging queries, and then, once the work was 90 percent done, to the biggest story problems - which actually were fixed with just a few judicious cuts and additions. I typed up a four-page single-spaced memo explaining all the FABULOUSLY WONDERFUL changes I had made, and how I had fixed ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING! I attached manuscript, memo, and book calendar to my email, and then pressed SEND. 

From "Impossible!" to "Done!" in a week.

Oh, why do I make things so hard on myself? When this book (as yet untitled) is published, it will be my 62nd book for young readers. Wouldn't you think that by now I'd be used to the many rounds of revision that are necessary to produce a published book? Why can't I just skip over the dark night of the soul and trot straight to my computer and plop myself down to work? 

Well, maybe the dark night of the soul is just part of the process, too - maybe it's a necessary step that can't be omitted. When I write a book, the events in the story seem so real to me, as if this is "how it actually happened." Readjustment of this vision is bound to be . . . jarring. 

But still, here are some things I'm going to work harder at remembering:

1. When an editor (or journal reviewer) asks you to revise something, they really, truly want you to revise THIS, as opposed to ripping it up and starting all over again with something completely new. You are revising THIS book, or THIS article. If they wanted you to throw it away and start all over again, they would have said so. 

2. Editors (and journal reviewers) are on your side. You both want the exact same thing: the best possible book, or the best possible article. 

3. Just as books are written one page at a time, so revisions can be made one problem at a time. Just fix one thing, then another thing, and then another thing. And then twenty or thirty more. And you will be done! (Or at least, done for now.)

4. There is no one way to revise any more than there is one way to write. Find what works for YOU. Once in a while, it's permissible to rethink or refine, but for the most part, if you have a tried-and-true system, rely on it to work its miracle for you this time, too. 

5. Let yourself feel not only the joy, but the wonder, of watching small alterations produce huge effects. Savor the malleability of the clay of your words in your hands. Enjoy the kneading of the dough; marvel at its rising.

6. And when you finally press SEND, give yourself a treat. 

I see some peach pound cake in my future...

 

Some Days (and Weeks, and Months, and Years) Are Just Very Hard

As the child character says in the opening line of Sara Pennypacker's delightful book Clementine, "I have had not so good of a week."

An excruciatingly painful legal case my family has been involved with for the past three years reached its conclusion. I thought this would bring me the relief of closure, but instead it made me all too aware of consequences we will all be living with for the rest of our days.

Then, on an extra-bad morning, my editor emailed me another round of revision notes for my forthcoming verse novel. I had already done two extensive rounds of revision, so I expected the suggested changes to be minor tweaks. But as I read her very long and detailed memo, it seemed as if every single aspect of the story remained problematic: the entire engine driving the plot was sputtering, crucial scenes were implausible, major characters were unlikable. There was NOTHING here that was salvageable at all. The problems in the book that I had written with such joy were simply un-fixable. 

To quote another delightful children's book: like Judith Viorst's Alexander, I was having "a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day."

I started an email to my editor saying that I wanted to withdraw the book from publication, but instead sent her an email asking if we could set up a time to talk through the comments. "Of course!" she said. And when we did talk the next morning, I realized that all of the problems she raised were not only fixable, but could be fixed in fairly simple ways that will make the book I love that much stronger and more compelling. So hooray for that.

But I'm still sad. I'm sad about my family's heartaches. I'm sad about the state of the world right now (who isn't?). Too sad to work, I've been spending endless hours scrolling through Facebook posts. This is not a good activity for someone who is already depressed (oh, those poor teachers, parents, and students trying to figure out how to educate anybody in the middle of a pandemic!). So I retrieved the I-pad I had banished to the garage and started spending endless hours doing online Sudoku puzzles. This, unsurprisingly, did not improve my mood, either. 

Reading good books helped: Ann Patchett's The Dutch House and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and watching episodes of the French detective series Maigret, with English subtitles (I now have a huge crush on lead actor Bruno Cremer). So did walks with the dog, and phone calls and ZOOM chats with friends.

It may just be, however, that nothing will help all that much. My family situation is very sad. The state of the world right now is horrific. We're ALL sad. Sadness is appropriate and justified.

Still, I know the one thing that would lift my spirits is doing the work that I love, which is writing. Even though I feel too sad to write, I know with great certainty that if I could force myself to work on these verse novel revisions for just HALF AN HOUR, it would add a tiny bit of joy to this hard week. Writing this blog post is already giving me an itty-bitty surge of satisfaction: at least I'm doing this. 

So I'm going to try. After I publish this post, I'm going to take a shower, put in a load of laundry (another spirit-booster), pull up my manuscript on the screen, turn over my half-hour glass (the one I use when a full hour is too daunting), and begin fixing the most easily fixable things.

Some days (and weeks, and months, and years) are just very hard. But we might as well do what we can to make them a little bit better. 

My Best Writing Ritual of All

Most writers I know love rituals that summon the muses for the act of creation.

My main one is writing for an hour a day, timed with my beautiful, hand-crafted, cherrywood hourglass, while drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate in a mug given to me years ago by a writer friend. Every once in a while, I amp up the ritual by lighting one of the deliciously scented candles that a high school friend sells in her Etsy shop, and plopping a dollop of Cool Whip into my mug of Swiss Miss. This is pretty much the system that has allowed me to write sixty books over the past forty years. It's an excellent system. I recommend it highly!

But writing the VERY FIRST LINE of a new book, in my view, is such a momentous occasion that it calls for something more. So in recent years I've developed the practice of writing the first line of each new book someplace special - not just lying on the little couch in my upstairs study, but at a cafe with a writer friend, or sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel, or in a friend's sunroom (yes, I'm talking about you, dearest Jeannie!).

For the past few weeks I've been groping toward another verse novel, as I loved the writing of the last one (my first attempt at the form) so much that I'm yearning to try a second one. I have over 20 pages of closely written handwritten notes on every aspect of the story. Groping - and note-taking - and outlining - and planning - only go far, however. Sooner or later comes the fateful moment when I have to start the actual writing itself: facing the first page, which means the first paragraph, which means the very first line.

So this morning I drove myself to the Denver Botanic Gardens, one of my favorite places on earth. It's now reopened from its COVID closure, with timed-entry tickets to be ordered in advance online, masks worn constantly unless eating or drinking, social distancing maintained. Would it still be fun, I asked myself, with all these restrictions? The answer: YES!

The gardens are so beautiful! The weather was cool and sunny after weeks of heat and smoky skies. I found a bench where I'd be undisturbed.

There I pulled out my ancient clipboard-without-a-clip, pad of narrow-ruled white paper, and Pilot P-500 pen.

Then I wrote the title of the first poem. And the first line of the first poem. And the rest of the first poem, and then the whole poem after that.

I won't share these here. They are too new and tender for sharing, and there is no guarantee they will survive all the future rounds of revision to make their way into the final, published book (if there even is a final, published book - one never knows). 

Pleased with my progress, I wandered over to a second bench.

I wrote another few poems, for a few more pages.

Time for lunch! I treated myself to a sandwich and salad at the charming bistro by the Monet's Water Lilies pond (just about all the tables and chairs have been removed for COVID precautions, but it was easy to find a solitary, shaded bench with a good view. I was in the mood for celebrating. 

Even though I've only written a few pages so far, the book is BEGUN. Now I can go back to writing on my couch with my hourglass and mug of Swiss Miss. One by one, pages will accumulate. Characters will surprise me. Storylines will unfold. 

Whenever I look back at that first page, I will remember: I wrote this in the Denver Botanic Gardens on a perfect late-August day.... And that is a memory to cherish. 

Tip for Writers (and Other Humans): You See More If You Look

This past weekend I attended (via ZOOM) a workshop hosted by the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and presented by local author Ellen Orleans: "Bringing the Outdoors into Children's Books: Interactive Nature Activities for Writers and Illustrators."

The ZOOM session was wonderful, but the best part of the workshop was the homework Ellen assigned us to do in advance. Our task was to take a short walk and complete one of three sets of activities: 1. Make It Fresh with New Discoveries; 2. Make It Alive with Sensory Details; and 3. Make It Specific with Nature Names.

I love homework, anyway, and writing homework is my favorite kind of homework. Ellen's assignment might have been my favorite homework EVER.

Leaving the dog at home for a (pleasant!) change, I strolled around the cluster of townhouses where I live, and where I walk with Tanky three times every single day. But this time I was on a mission, to "note what surprises, astonishes, or is a new discovery for you."

In the past, I had truly never noticed ANYTHING. My walking time is my thinking time, my planning time, my time for making long to-do lists in my head. 

So now, charged with the challenge of noticing, I had a new discovery literally every few steps.

Look! A tiny plant valiantly growing from a crack in a boulder!

Look! Pewter-colored lichen! Rust-colored lichen! Tiny golden leaves as harbingers of autumn!

Then I remembered that ages ago I had downloaded a free nature-identifying app on my phone that I had never bothered to use, called Seek. So I started Seeking. I'd snap a picture of a flower, and now I'd know its name: Dotted Gayflower!

I'd find a berry and wonder if I should try tasting it as part of my new sensory immersion in nature, or if that might occasion a painful death from poisoning. But Seek would assure me this was a Chokecherry. 

So into my mouth I popped one.

At the ZOOM workshop later in the day, one fellow author commented on the sheer power just of the question Ellen had posed for us. Just by being asked, "What astonished you?" Katherine set off on her walk with this expectation: "I am ready to be astonished."

I was ready to be astonished, too, and precisely for this reason I WAS astonished: partly (in a shamefaced way) by all I had missed on my daily walks for the past ten years, but also by how thrilling it was to be able to name even a tiny weed growing in oblivion at the edge of a sidewalk - and in seeking for its name, truly SEEING it for the first time. 

Will I make use of the nature workshop in my writing? I doubt I'll ever have one of my characters exclaim  over a "dotted gayflower" in any scene in one of my books. But I can see how my new knowledge of the difference between a spruce and a pine (I truly knew nothing at all about the natural world before!!) might add specificity to some future description. 

Most of all I just learned - what I guess I already knew, but constantly need to make myself remember - that I am vastly more likely to SEE if I take the trouble to LOOK. LOOKING at the world with an attentive, expectant gaze vastly increases my chance of making small, but wonderful, discoveries. 

Thank you, Ellen Orleans, and thank you, SCBWI organizers, and thank you, beautiful, glorious, astonishing world.

A Book-Shaped Hole in My Heart

Life progress report: I finished a full draft of my verse novel. I completed a round of extensive revisions from brilliant writing-group comments. I saw a career record broken in the speed with which it was read by my agent, sent on to my editor, and accepted for publication. It's now on my editor's desk awaiting her unfailingly mega-brilliant comments. 

Hooray!

Or rather. . . hooray? I loved writing that book more than I've ever loved writing anything. Every single hour I spent working on it was an hour of bliss, bliss that permeated the other twenty-three hours of each day, casting a soft radiance over months of COVID isolation and online-teaching frustration.

Now I miss that hour a day of bliss. 

Now I have a book-shaped hole in my heart.

I do have plenty of other projects I can do, of course.  Reviewer comments have arrived on my desk for a children's lit article I submitted back in April. Reviewer Number Two, in particular, suggested plenty for me to do. Here is just ONE ACTUAL REPRESENTATIVE QUOTE from the review, in case any other scholars out there have ever felt discouraged by a reviewer's response to their work: "One of the key issues the author should address in revision is the essay's overall lack of purpose and cohesion" (!!!!!!). 

For some reason, these comments are not giving me a blissful feeling. 

I have two other academic assignments in the works, and an idea for a picture book biography about somebody I adore, but whom six-year-old readers are exceedingly unlikely to care about. I should also do a bunch of pesky promotional stuff to support my two poor little books that are coming out this year in the middle of a pandemic.

These projects have their appeal, but even the picture book biography (where the text would be only a thousand words max) isn't really going to fill a book-shaped hole in my heart. In fact, I'm coming to realize that this hole in my heart has an oddly specific shape: it's not only a book-shaped hole, it's a verse-novel-shaped hole.

It's well known that a hole in one's heart can't just be stuffed full with any old thing. A hole in your heart caused by an absence of love can't be filled by more gin-and-tonics. A hole in your heart caused by a dearth of meaning in your life can't be filled by more Pepperidge Farm apple turnovers. (Even though gin-and-topics and apple turnovers are both highly excellent things.) I don't think there is any hole in anybody's heart that has ever been filled by wrestling with comments from Reviewer Number Two!

So, sad but true, I guess I'm going to have to fill this verse-novel-shaped hole in my heart by groping toward, yes, another verse novel. 

Or actually, not sad but true, but happy and true.

Sometimes, after all, a true thing can be a happy thing, too.

Dealing with Drudgery

Years ago, the chair of the Philosophy Department asked me to serve on a particularly dreary committee. I hesitated: "It sounds like so much drudgery!" Eager to have me - or anyone, actually - take on this chore, he hastened to assure me, "But you're so good at drudgery!"

Indeed, once upon a time I was "good at drudgery" - by which I mean "dispatching distasteful tasks with brisk efficiency." But lately I've become . . . not so good. Each morning I dutifully set down various Loathsome Tasks (LT's) onto the day's to-do list. But at nightfall, those LTs remain undone, and with a sigh, I copy them onto the to-do list for tomorrow.

My current dilemma regarding how to deal with drudgery is this: 

On the one hand, the most sure-fire way to cross off LTs is to leap into doing them as soon as I wake up. But there is only one first, best hour of the day. If I give it to LTs, I don't give it to the work I really care about, which for me is writing. One might think that the relief of immediately knocking off an LT would generate momentum for accomplishing more pleasurable tasks for the rest of the day. But one would think wrong. Even though I love writing, and proclaim each writing hour to be an Hour of Bliss, writing is nonetheless daunting. Strength must be summoned - strength squandered instead on LTs.

But on the other hand, if I give the first, best hour of the day to writing, I'm already so thrilled with the day's productivity that I feel no need to accomplish anything else. "Drudgery can wait!" I chortle to myself. So drudgery waits. And waits. And waits.

It doesn't work to give myself rewards, either. I'm not very good at delayed gratification. Besides, no additional reward will give me any greater happiness than the reward I'd get simply from crossing one more LT off that darned list.

So here is my new plan. (I love trying out different plans!) 

The first, best hour of the day goes to writing, from 5:00-6:00 a.m.

Then: walk, shower, breakfast, teeth-brushing.

Then RESTART the day: declare that the earlier Hour of Bliss was just a extra credit hour, not part of the work day proper. After all, I didn't HAVE to get up at 5:00. A lot of people don't get up 5:00. Such an early hour, according to proverb, belongs rightly to the early bird, to use as she will. But now, at 8:00, the REAL and OFFICIAL work day is beginning. 

Then: set a timer (or turn over my hourglass) and devote the first, fresh hour of the REAL work day to the most urgent of the many Loathsome Tasks facing me. Ta-dah!

"Only ONE hour?" you scoff. "How much drudging can get drudged in one puny, pathetic, pitiful hour?" 

The answer is: more than you would think. The key to accomplishing ANY task is first to face it. Facing it is truly 90 percent of the battle. And it's easier to face a task if I promise myself I only have to devote one short hour to it. Ah, but once the task is faced, I can usually go longer than an hour - maybe even two! Enough to cross off several LT's, especially as many of the tasks on which I've been procrastinating FOR WEEKS are shamefully tiny - some so tiny that it practically takes as long to write them on the to-do list than it would take simply to do them.

So: one Hour of Bliss before the real day begins, and then an Hour of Drudgery to start the real day. 

And then: the reward of feeling obnoxiously smug and self-satisfied till the day's end.  

Seek and Ye Shall Find (Magic)

Today is the final day of the intensive six-week Advanced Creative Writing Tutorial I've been teaching for the graduate programs in children's literature at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. I was heartbroken when the entire summer term had to move online this year because of you-know-what. For there is a rare and wondrous magic in being there on the beautiful Hollins campus, surrounded by fabulously creative colleagues and students, all committed to growing in our craft as children's book writers and illustrators.

I pledged to myself (as I shared in an earlier post) that I was going to do all I could to make the Hollins magic happen anyway.

And guess what? It did.

I saw my students blossoming as they produced thick stacks of truly amazing pages on their works-in-progress. I attended talks that were stimulating and inspiring. I took advantage of the brilliance of this summer's writer-in-(virtual)-residence, Anika Denise, to get her insights into a possible idea I have for a picture book biography.

Most of all, I channeled my students' creative productivity and hurled myself into revisions on my own work-in-progress, my first-ever verse novel, tentatively titled The Lost Language. I pretended that I was at "my table" in the Hollins library.

Or tucked up in the reading and writing loft at the top of this beckoning staircase.

And it worked!

I finished my revisions, and I had the strange feeling that there was something . . . special . . . about this book, that I had made some writing magic happen here that I had never made happen before.

I had a writer friend read the revised book. She said, "In my opinion, this is the best book you've ever written. I think it's absolutely beautiful." I sent it my agent that evening, and he replied before breakfast the next morning (something that never ever happens in the world of New York publishing): "Oh my, this is so beautiful."

The magic . . . happened.

But I realized that it only happened because I went in search of the magic. I believed that the magic could happen if I put my whole heart into making it happen.

In other words, my book didn't revise itself. I revised it, trying to make something as beautiful as what my students and colleagues were making. It was my seeking the magic that led me to find it.

I do believe that if we seek, we will find - or at least vastly increase the chances of our finding!

One of my favorite poets, Sara Teasdale, whom I adored as an adolescent, wrote this:

Stars over snow
And in the west a planet
Swinging below a star -
Look for a lovely thing and you will find it,
It is not far.
It never will be far.

To this I will add:

Look for magic and you will find it,
It is not far.
It never will be far.

When Your Students Are Smarter Than You Are

When I first became a university philosophy professor, almost thirty years ago, by the end of the first week of my first graduate seminar I had realized two things: 1) Some of the students in the class were smarter than I was; and 2) Some of the students in the class knew more stuff about philosophy than I did. 

This was not a situation to inspire a feeling of confidence, let alone competence, in a fledgling professor.

At first I felt that this whole new career had been a terrible mistake. But then I drew comfort from a bumper sticker I had seen: "I may be slow, but I'm ahead of you." There was only one sense in which I was ahead of these smarter and more knowledgeable students, but it was not an unimportant one: I was the teacher and they weren't, simply because I had completed a Ph.D. degree and they hadn't yet.

Being Dr. Claudia didn't mean much in terms of my IQ or store of knowledge, but it did mean that I had jumped through a fairly daunting hoop, so I now knew something about how to be a successful hoop-jumper. I had learned perseverance, and the art of patient plodding, and most of all, I had practice in defeating the demons of self-doubt.

So I think I became a decent enough teacher and also became, if I may say so, an awfully good mentor. My specialty was helping students who were trying to write their dissertations JUST GET THE DARNED THING DONE. It doesn't sound like a lot, but believe me, it is.

Fast forward three decades. I'm now teaching an Advanced Creative Writing Tutorial in children's literature at Hollins University (pictured above because I love the campus so even though the program had to be moved online this COVID summer). I quickly realized that some of my students are better writers than I am, more insightful critics than I am, and (this one is especially sobering) better teachers than I am (I know this because the students are all leading craft workshops).

Once again, I could call on the mantra from that reassuring bumper sticker: "I may be slow, but I'm ahead of you." After all, I've had forty years of publishing experience, with sixty books to my credit. So I can say THAT about myself.

But this time I'm drawing comfort from a different source. My book group recently read The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, but actually written by Douglas Carlton Abrams, who spent a fascinating week with these two deeply spiritual human beings and shared their conversations. In one chapter, Archbishop Tutu says that God uses each of us in our own way: "even if you are not the best one, you may be the one . . . who is there." This leads Abrams to reflect on why, out of all the (many more qualified) journalists in the world, he should be the one conducting the interviews with these two great men. He then decides, "whether I was the best one or not, I was the one who was there."

My current students could each teach their own wonderful creative writing course, and if enrolled in it, I would learn a great deal. But for this particular course, I happen to be the teacher - not because I'm smarter or better or older or wiser-  but just because I'm here: on the Hollins payroll, given the privilege of teaching a class in partnership with these wonderful writers.

Sometimes it's enough just to be the one who's here.

The Post-Book-Revision Blues

For the past few weeks I've been crazed with revising my work-in-progress verse novel from extensive comments given to me on the earlier draft from my writing group, the Writing Roosters.

I wrote the book during the COVID quarantine in what I called my "Hour of Bliss" every day.

It was such a huge gift that I gave to myself to be in the presence of this story, watching it unfold poem by poem.

The revisions were blissful, too, but in a different way. Now I wasn't lying on my couch (and how I love lying on a couch); instead, I was hunched over my computer. And I wasn't working on this for an hour a day, but for two hours, or even three (which is a HUGE amount of time spent writing for me). I was a writer obsessed.

There is something so addictive for me about revision. I'm able to pace myself in a more leisurely way for the initial creation of a story. But once I have a good, clear plan for revision, with a good, clear sense of EXACTLY what has to be done, all I want is to DO IT, DO IT, DO IT! I stop each day only because revision is such intense work that my poor brain is exhausted.

I also wanted to finish the revisions during this six-week summer term of the graduate programs in children's literature at Hollins University where I'm currently teaching (online this year, alas). Even online, Hollins has an atmosphere of such heightened creativity that it makes me wild to engage in my own creative work.

So for the past month, I revised, and I revised, thrilled at the huge improvements I was making on every single page!

And then... and then it was done.

I had done all I knew how to do.

The book is now in the hands of another writer friend who will give it a final read before I send it to my agent to see what he thinks.

I should be relieved. And proud. And amazed by all I accomplished.

And I am. Sort of. But mostly I'm feeling . . . . empty. The project that occupied so much of my joyous labor is out in the world in its own right now. I have no new project under way and will need considerable pondering and musing and groping to find one. So instead of three hours of revision bliss a day, I have three hours of catching up on everything I left undone while in my revision vortext.

Also, now comes the most painful part by far of the writing life.

I adore the initial drafting of a book because, according to Jane Smiley, "Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It's perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist."

I adore revising a book because, according to ME, all a revision has to do is to be better than the previous draft - well, VASTLY better, but believe me, my most recent draft is VASTLY better than the one the Roosters read (precisely because of their Rooster insights).

But at some point, if I want my book to be published, I have to produce a draft that not only exists, and is vastly better than previous drafts, but is actually GOOD. And this is something much harder to achieve. It is something only partially in my control.

Now I have to send my sweet book, the product of so many hours of love and bliss, out into the world, and what the world thinks about it matters now.

This is scary. Or actually, terrifying.

I know the way to deal with this terror. You can probably guess what I'm going to say.

The only way to hold onto the bliss of writing and revising that I experienced with this book is to start writing and revising the next one.

For now, though, I'm going to honor my need to grieve that THESE blissful weeks and months have come to an end.

Oh, little book, how I loved writing you! And revising you!

Oh, little book, I hope the world receives you kindly.