Last Day of January

On this, the last day of January, I added the final item to my monthly list of "nice things and accomplishments" that I keep in my little life notebook. Usually I average about 10-12 nice things and accomplishments for each month, 6 or 7 on a skimpy month, as many as 13 or 14 on a lush month. For this past month I had 20. Twenty! A record! They ranged from submitting the abstract for my paper on The Secret Garden for the centennial Secret Garden volume to having the abstract accepted, from revising my chapter book and submitting it a possible agent to having the agent accept it, three courses at CU successfully launched, fun in Texas with Gregory, my magical days at the poetry retreat. The best month ever!

But it was also one of the worst months ever: my mother's terrible fall and injuries, the devastation in Haiti. Both of those are so much more hideous than my 20 little nice things are wonderful. They seem to cancel out all my nice things. I would trade all my 20 nice things in a heartbeat to have prevented my mother's fall. It almost seems frivolous to tally "ALA Notable for Oliver" and "delightful and productive meeting with all five of my SCBWI mentees" in a month that has so much pain and heartache in it for my family and for the world.

Except that we can't think that way. We just can't. It doesn't make the terrible things any less terrible to allow them to obliterate all the little lovely things. In dark times, we need our patches of sunlight more, not less, and to honor and celebrate them. Yes, I would trade all my little nice things right now for my mother's good health, but the fact is that I'm not being offered the chance to make that trade. Refusing to celebrate the nice things won't do ANYTHING to help my mother recover or, for that matter, to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Yes, the terrible things are terrible, but the nice things are still nice. The terrible things in their terribleness exceed the nice things in their niceness, but they don't erase their niceness.

The nice things are still nice.

Crabby No More

I actually had about six reasons for being crabby yesterday, only one of which I chose to blog about. But now today everything is better.

My very very bad thing to be sad about yesterday is that while Gregory and I were down in Austin last weekend, my mother fell and fractured her left hip and left shoulder, this two years after a fall in which she fractured her right hip. It was terrible to be so far away when it happened, and she faces a long and uncertain process of rehabilitation. Neither of us knows what the future will bring. But of course nobody knows what the future will bring. That is probably the only thing we DO know: that this we DON'T know. But yesterday she moved from the hospital to a care center for physical therapy as she recovers, and best, my beloved sister and her husband are coming out to visit soon. So I feel cautiously hopeful.

I was also sad yesterday that Gregory woke up sick on the long-awaited day on which he was to head down to Colorado Springs to play tenor sax in All-State Jazz Band. Oh, no!! But he slept through the morning, then returned to school in the afternoon, and now he's down in the Springs beginning two days of intensive rehearsals for the concert on Saturday.

The lovely teacher at the lovely school with the lovely upcoming young authors' event emailed me about the unlovely forms I have to fill out and told me not to stress about them, just to do my best. Okay. I can do my best!

I finally faced the extremely dull and dreary letters I had to write as chair of the Dean's Review Committee for Tenure and Promotion for the University Libraries. If only I had done them sooner! But at least they're done now.

And it snowed last night, just a couple of inches, if that, but oh so pretty outside my window. Christopher's girlfriend, Samantha, came over with flowers for my mother, as well as one single white rose just for me, because, she said, "You deserve it." I don't know if I deserve having such a sweet and caring young woman in my life, but I do love it.

So today, everything is better. Not perfect. It never is. But better.

Crabby Morning

I try not to blog when I'm crabby, because I want my blog to be inspirational and encouraging; I think the world has sufficient crabbiness in it already, and not enough hope and cheer.

But I'm crabby today. And I want to blog today, anyway. So I'm going to try to draw some positive lessons from my crabbiness to forestall future crabbiness.

I am crabby because I am supposed to speak next week at what was to be (and I'm sure will be) a delightful young authors' night at a school in Jefferson County. The event involves proud children sharing their work, and then a visiting author (me) giving a talk to the children and their parents. I agreed to be the visiting author and charged the school $150 for my time. It is about an hour's drive each way, after a long full day of work already, and however rewarding the evening will be, I am still unwilling simply to work for free, any more than the teachers who teach these children are willing to teach for free. Just because something is worth doing, and you love doing it, doesn't mean that you should be expected to do it without any financial compensation. I could tell that the school thought I was a pretty terrific bargain.

So why am I crabby? I am crabby because in order to be paid this small stipend, I have to fill out a whole host of notorized forms to report that I have no criminal record, to waive my right to worker's compensation if I'm injured on the job, to pledge that I will pay my income tax on this money. I can hardly even figure out the various things I'm supposed to check on the forms. The sentences on the forms aren't even grammatical English sentences. The one about my criminal past wants me to sign my name to this statement: "Vendor nor those working for the vendor have been convicted of a felony or other serious offense." Don't they mean "Neither vendor nor those working for the vendor"? Otherwise, isn't it saying that I HAVE been convicted of a felony or other serious offense? And it hardly seems worth $150 to go find myself a notary to witness my waiver of any claim to worker's comp for giving my little talk that evening. It just doesn't feel fun any more, filling out all these tedious and confusing and exasperating forms. I'm leaning toward just telling them that I'll go for free, as a form of community service. But then that seems like rewarding Jefferson County for having such terrible forms to fill out.

Now, I said I was going to try to draw some lessons from my crabbiness to forestall future crabbiness. I think maybe the lesson is that I should have charged more for my time. Other writers charge more for their time. I think I'm really crabby because I undervalued my time in the first place, and now I feel bitter that even to get this very small stipend I'm forced to jump through so many hoops. If I had valued my time more, and charged a more appropriate honorarium, then I wouldn't mind jumping through some hoops to get it.

Though I think I would still mind signing my name to that ungrammatical sentence!

Charmed Lives, Charmed Worlds

I spent the weekend in Austin with Gregory, who was auditioning on jazz saxophone for the Butler School of music at the University of Texas.

We spent Saturday morning at the music school; as Gregory was warming up in one of the hundreds of practice rooms, I could hear the intermingled sounds of violin, voice, trumpet, piano, percussion, played by young people who had come from all over the state of Texas, and from all over the country, to pursue their dream of making music. The lunchtime orientation program featured eight young harpists, performing an original composition for harp written by one of their members. The very air vibrated with creativity and joy.

Then we spent Saturday afternoon with a friend of mine from high school, Phillip Wade, whom I hadn't seen for at least thirty years. He started painting back in high school; I reminded him of how he used to sit in class sketching the back of the neck of the boy in front of him. He painted a wonderful oil portrait of me, titled "Yvonne of Brittany," in which I'm posed wearing a purple dress from his mother's attic and pretending to pick pears from his family's backyard pear tree. It still hangs on the wall in my home office, above the desk where I'm typing this. After earning a degree in English literature, Phillip went to art school in Philadelphia, and is now a successful painter in Austin. I regularly receive announcements of openings for his art shows at various local galleries. That's one of his pictures, "Rabbit in a Hat," above.

It was wonderful seeing Phillip. I love everything about his life. He lives in a small Victorian bungalow with his studio tucked behind it; he drives an ancient red Honda with peeling finish; he spends all day painting whatever he wants to paint, with breaks for bicyling along the banks of the Colorado River, or wandering through town in search of material, or teaching a painting class, or dining with artist friends. His work makes no concessions to fads or fashions; he paints in a realistic style, but usually with whimsy and humor as well. Go to his website and buy something!

So my Saturday had music all morning, and art all afternoon, dreams for Gregory's future in the morning, memories of my past in the afternoon. I call that a good day.

Empty Stomach

I take thyroid medication, and after my checkup and blood work earlier this week, my (wonderful) doctor called me and told me that my thyroid levels are still too low. She suggested a higher dose of the medication, but I thought that first I should try taking it exactly as prescribed: every single day (not just when I happen to remember) and on an empty stomach: either one hour before or two hours after eating.

The only problem with this plan is that, if this is what an empty stomach is, I've never had one. Ever.

I don't have one during the day because I snack all day. I don't have one in the evening because I snack all evening. And I don't even have one first thing in the morning because I wake up every single day to my beloved writing beverage, Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate. I asked Dr. Hrywnak if taking my medication with Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate could count as taking it on an empty stomach. She said no. Tea, yes. But milky, creamy, nice, thick, foamy hot chocolate, no.

So now I've been up for half an hour, with no hot chocolate. I gulped down my pill as soon as I woke up, with water, but I still have to wait another half an hour for my hot chocolate. Part of me - most of me - wants to go back to bed and lie there under the covers until it's time for Swiss Miss. I certainly don't feel like getting out my clipboard, pad of paper, and trusty Pilot Razor Point fine-tipped black marker pen to start writing.

I may have to force myself to stop eating after supper and take the medication before bedtime, which would also have slimming results, I'm sure. The trick there will be remembering to take it, when I'm often so tired I can barely remember to take off my clothes and put on my nightgown, and often forget (or can't be bothered) to floss my teeth. But this early morning vigil of waiting for my Swiss Miss is going to undermine the hour-a-day-first-thing-in-the-morning writing philosophy on which I've based my entire life as a writer.

Oh, I think HALF an hour is long enough to have a stomach SO empty. Don't you?

Not for the Faint of Heart

Last night a dear writer friend and I drove down to Denver to attend an agent panel sponsored by SCBWI, during which two top-notch locally based agents, Kristin Nelson and Kate Shafer Testerman, read first pages submitted by the attendees, responding to them exactly as they would in their day-to-day work as agents: that is, stopping exactly at that point at which they had lost interest, at which they were no longer compelled to read on. The event was held at the darling historic Smiley Branch of the Denver Public Library (an original Carnegie library dating from 1918), but it was not a smiley event. It was mesmerizing - and terrifying. Both agents reminded everyone at the outset of the evening that although they do not consider themselves at all to be brutal people, this kind of session can be "really brutal." Last year, Kate read 3,800 queries, from which she requested 74 full manuscripts, and signed two clients. Kristin, with a similar volume of submissions, signed one.

I didn't want to have my first pages read. And as I had just had an agent agree to represent me this very week, I didn't feel that I HAD to. But in solidarity to my friend, I did. I was the very first to go down to dismissal - thank goodness the readings were anonymous! "I'm on notice," one of the agents said after a few lines, meaning, "on notice to stop reading." "I'm starting to waffle." They did let the reading go to the full two pages, which was either a triumph for me, or because they weren't yet warmed up for the evening. But they both said they wouldn't have read on from that point : "I'd stop here. I'm not interested in the scene. There's nothing wrong with the writing, but there's nothing overwhelming or compelling." Ouch! At least, they said, the writer hadn't committed the cardinal sin of starting with a character waking up a dream (my character was startled out of surreptitious in-class reading).

The next author to be read, poor thing, began with a character waking up from a dream. Double ouch!

Here are some other things I learned to avoid in a manuscript opening:
1. Exclamation marks
2. Name brands mentioned (unless deliberately to establish a certain kind of character)
3. Faux conflict that has nothing to do with the central story line
4. Unbelievable details in the writing: "Darkness crept out of the open doorway." How can darkness creep out of a doorway?
5. A forbidden attic
6. A transparent warning for the character to stay away from the one place she is of course going to go
7. Lack of immediate connection with the characters
8. "Uneven" quality of the writing
9. Too much intensity in description of unimportant objects
10. Need for a clearer sense of exactly where the character is and what she is doing
11. Changing out of one scene too quickly into another scene
12. Focusing too much on the character's quirks rather than on the character herself
13. Too much alliteration
14. Too staccato a rhythm of the sentences
15. Feeling like an adult writing down to middle-graders
16. Sounding too much like "This will be educational for children!"
17. Cliched opening: "If only I hadn't done x, everything would be different."
18. Typos and misspellings
19. Anthropomorphized animals
20. Starting with an action-packed scene and then pulling away for intrusive back-story

I stopped taking notes after that!

I have to say that I agreed with the agents on every point, just about, except that I do think they dismissed a couple of the manuscripts too quickly (including mine, of course!), as not suitable for middle-grade readers, when the manuscripts were clearly intended to be chapter books for younger readers (though this is perfectly appropriate for them to do as agents - they both do represent work only on the older end of the children's spectrum; they had explicitly said ahead of time that they don't do picture books, but hadn't said ahead of time, "or chapter books, either.") I don't think my first two pages that I shared, the first draft of a book I started writing this week, were all that compelling and sparkling.

Whenever I attend one of our philosophy department hiring meetings, I always come away thinking, "How did they ever hire ME?" I came away from yesterday's panel thinking that it is VERY VERY VERY hard to produce writing good enough in the first paragraph or two to take away the breath of savvy agents who read thousands of mansucripts a year. How did anyone ever publish ME?

But - somebody did. And somebody - lots of somebodies - published my dear writer friend, too, even though the two agents made similarly short work of her opening page. At the end of the evening, part of me wanted to go home and write better books; part of me wanted to go up to Kate and Kristin (who were really as kind as they could be through their absolute, uncompromising honesty) and say : "Just to let you know, I found out today that my most recent book, How Oliver Olson Changed the World, was named as an ALA Notable Children's Book of the year."

And it was! As this happened more than a week out from the fairy dust, I'm not attributing this one to the fairies. I'm attributing this one to me.

Last on Fairy Dust - for now

So you may remember that when I had the fairy dust sprinkled on me at Alice's Teacup, I had a double sprinkle: one general sprinkle on me, and one more targeted sprinkle on my new chapter book manuscript. The very day before the sprinkling (just as I was leaving to go to the airport for the poetry retreat), I had sent the manuscript off to an agent. Last Thursday, a week to the day after the fairy dust sprinkling, the agent emailed me to say that he loved the book and was willing to represent me.

I don't want to give details about the agent yet, because I haven't yet received or signed his contract, so it isn't a DONE done deal. But oh, he seems so wonderful; he represents a dear friend of mine, and she said he is indeed wonderful, the best agent she has ever had (and she's had quite a few). After thirty years of working all alone in this business, I think I'm going to have an agent. This is a huge step for me.

Now, I think there is a time limit on the fairy dust. If some good thing happens to me a decade from now, I'm not going to say, "Oh, remember that fairy dust from Alice's Teacup? January 2010?" But if some good thing happens within a WEEK, well, then fairy dust is clearly implicated.

Don't you think?