Blog

I haven’t been doing a ton of blogging lately. This should be obvious.

What have I been doing lately? I’ve been working. And I’ve been sleeping. And I’ve been doing a lot of lying around (on my side!) doing nothing.

Because I’m pregnant. Eight months pregnant, in fact.

But I don’t write about that online.

Why is that? It’s not because I don’t have anything to say. (Although, this whole thing has been pretty easy on me, relatively speaking, so I don’t have *a lot* to say, even in person.)

It’s just that when every once in a while I go to write a post about this or that or the other and it might involve pregnancy or my child in any way, I immediately lose interest. I immediately don’t want to do it. So I don’t.

After six months of this, I decided there must be something going on in my head beyond blogging lethargy. So I thought about it for a while. And here’s what I realized:

Because of my profession, my blog is a product. It is both an advertising platform and a place for me to present my more casual writing for public consumption. That’s what my product is, and no matter what other intentions I have, no matter how sincere I am or how candid the writing is, I cannot put anything online without it becoming part of my product and my brand.

And I do not feel okay about turning my child into my product. She is not even born yet. (Yes, she is a girl.) As my husband said when I explained this to him, “so many people are going to turn our daughter into an object over her lifetime. It doesn’t need to be you.”

It doesn’t need to be me.

And as soon as I realized that’s how I felt about it, I knew I couldn’t explain it without offending some people. Because the blogosphere is full of people who turn their children into their product. And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that in an abstract sense.

But today, right now, this year, it isn’t me. My inner Marxist can’t blog about my child (even fully from my own perspective and experience) without thinking about commercialization and alienation and feeling wrong about it. That’s the product of my education. It is what it is; I am what I am. Public availability of personal information is something that everyone with a website has to deal with, and this is my answer, at least for now. It’s not about security. For me, it’s about the way I think about my child.

So, hi! Now you know. You probably won’t know anything else on the subject. unless you’re a person I see in real life, or you have my phone number and call me about it. Because that’s all I have to say about that.

(I hope you’ll still read for other things, though. There are likely to be plenty of those, especially once I don’t have to hoard most of my typing-posture time for actual work any more.)

I just finished writing a major action sequence. Dragging myself through the thing was like pulling teeth–I was getting 4 or 5 hundred good words a day, tops.

Just looked at my outline and discovered, yay! now I get to write a couple chapters of dialogue!

I’m not sure what it is that makes me feel that way, besides that dialogue comes fairly naturally to me, and action doesn’t. I think some of it is the pressure to keep up the pace in action sequences–I need to get x amount of information across for the blocking to make sense, I need to plant y and z information as setups for future scenes, I need to describe the setting and the movement in the scene quickly but engagingly, I need the main character to think enough that the reader understands the motivations behind her choices…all while keeping the action hurtling forward at an exciting pace. It’s difficult, and I never get it right on the first try. I rarely have to fully rewrite dialogue scenes. Action…gets gone over many, many times before it all ticks just right.

Still, the scene is written, and while I know I’m going to have to go back and smooth it out, I think all the major pieces are there. This is progress. I can accept that.

Over the last few years, I’ve read a lot of rants about how the world is doomed. We’re in a recession, and people are scared. All around are voices screaming that our country is falling to pieces, that publishing is *over*, that our politicians are destroying us, that we’ll never recover.

I don’t believe any of those things. But in the middle of it all, I so appreciate the quiet voices of hope that I encounter, especially on the internet.

Over a year ago when we moved into our house, I knew some things in my life needed to change. They’d been needing to change for a while, but I’d been ignoring the quiet voices inside me that told me so. But at that point, I’d wound myself into such a ball of stress over the last few years that my body couldn’t take it anymore. In truth, my spirit couldn’t take it either.

So last August I set about the process of letting go. Over a year, I backed out of a lot of my obligations. I stopped doing so much. I put the work I could control at the center of my world–work on the writing in front of me, on my marriage, on church things, on my home, on me. And I let the rest go.

This was hard. The scared little girl in me wants to be in control of everything. She believes that if she doesn’t have control over every aspect of her life, it’s all going to fall to pieces any minute now. I’d been spending way too much time listening to her. Because, in truth, I can’t control most of the aspects of my life. I have to be satisfied with the pieces I have in front of me, and trust that the rest will take care of themselves.

Over a year later, I feel centered in that trust. I still work hard, but I concentrate on the work I have to do today, and not on any other work. I don’t feel stressed or scared anymore. I don’t know how anything is going to turn out in my life, but I’ve discovered that knowing those things isn’t what I needed. What I needed was to let go of the obsession with knowing. I do what I can, and I have the faith that other things will work out.

But more than that, I have the faith that if they don’t, I can still be happy. Because whatever might come, the power to be happy is something that I do have in front of me–it’s a gift I can give to myself every day. It’s not about pasting on a smile and muscling through. It’s about letting go of my need for control over the future–over other people, over my industry, over my health–and focusing on what I have right now. What I have right now, as it turns out, is exactly the life that I wanted. I’ve learned that doing less and worrying less let me love that life, rather than being so obsessed with keeping it that it passes me by.

It’s been a while since I posted about what I’m working on. I tend to talk about my work in terms of “this book” or “my book,” which statements are often about more than one book in the same week, or the same day, depending. I’ve always had many projects going on at once, which I’m finding is a total godsend now that I’ve got various projects sitting on the desks of my agent and editor instead of waiting on me.

The project: SKIPPED
What I’m doing: Waiting on my editor
The book is sold, but it still needs to go through revisions before we’ll have a final manuscript. I haven’t looked at the book in a year and a half, so it’ll be good to get back to it with fresh eyes…once I have notes.

The project: Next contemporary YA novel
What I’m doing: Waiting on my agent
We’ve already done one round of revisions on it. I’m hopeful it’s getting very close to being ready, but, again, I won’t know until I have notes.

The project: An accidental superhero novel
What I’m doing: Waiting on my agent
Same as above. We’ve done one round of revisions on it. Now I’m waiting to hear back.

Sensing a theme? Turns out publishing is full of just as much waiting (or more) after a sale as before. Good thing I have so much practice in that arena. On to the projects I can do something about:

The project: YA Dark Urban Fantasy
What I’m doing: A hardcore structural revision.
Based on notes from my agent and feedback from a writing group, I began a revision, which has quickly spiraled into one of those level-the-building-and-salvage-as-can revisions. The book is going to be so much stronger when I’m done, but it’s safe to say I’ve never done a revision of this magnitude before. It’s intimidating.

The project: A third contemporary YA novel
What I’m doing: Playing with a loose first draft
This project has been rattling around in my head for a while. I’m writing it in snatches as I’m excited about them, on the days when I’m too intimidated by the Dark Urban book to tackle it. I’m excited about how it’s turning out…but it’s in many pieces at the moment (I write out of order, always).

The titles of these projects aren’t so much secret as changing. Frequently. I swear every time I send off a new draft it has a shiny new title to go with it. At least it means I am sending things off. Having so many projects in the air makes me wonder if I’m accomplishing anything…but always having something to work on is what keeps me sane, so I’ll take it.

Because some days just need yellow flowers.

Much of my time and a disturbing portion of my finances this year have been occupied by everything we own deciding to break all at once.  Around the time that the yearly budget for fixing such things ran out (that was, say, May), I started keeping a list.  The writing gets smaller as I continue down the page, trying to make the new additions fit.  The page is full.  I cannot even begin to hope at this point that we are done, because everytime I hope that, something else breaks.  Without further ado, the list:

Things that we have fixed/replaced:

Sprinkler valve (flooded the yard before discovering)
Swamp cooler pump
Swamp cooler hose (watered the roof for who knows how long)
Swamp cooler spider tubes
Swamp cooler floater  (did these swamp cooler parts break all at once?  Oh no.  One at a time.)
Vacuum (thankfully repaired, not replaced)
Crock pot (pot physically cracked in half, not dropped or anything, just sitting there.  Didn’t even know that could happen.)
Garage Door
Dishwasher (also repaired, but by repairman, which is not much better than replacing)
Toilet handle
Furnace valve
Windshield wipers (physically fell off the car after I spun out in the snow and got hit by a van.  I parked the car and walked home.)
Windshield
Car throttle (this is the one and only thing on the list that fixed itself.  Still not sure what was wrong.  Don’t want to know.)
Barbeque fuel valve
Car AC (wouldn’t have fixed it, except the belt that was broken was going to kill the whole car.  Stupid belt.)
Lawn Mower (replaced.  sigh.)
Car battery (mysteriously died the same week as roommate’s car battery and that of said roommate’s girlfriend.  Blame her.)
Refrigerator (replaced.  most recent, but not most expensive.  See Car AC above.)

Things that broke but we have not yet fixed:

East gate (falls off its hinges every time the wind blows.  I want to just take the thing down entirely, because I have no dogs to keep in the yard, etc., but surprise:)
Power drill (battery is dead, discovered while trying to fix the east gate.  New battery is more expensive than a new drill.  With a freaking cord, this time.)
Sewing machine (stupid timing)
Sprinkler programming box  (Whatever.   I can just turn them on and off myself.)
Sprinkler heads  (Happy to report that the grass is nearly recovered from its traumatic July and August.  At least it grows back.)
Tires (the only thing on the list not technically broken, just so worn out we really have got to replace them before it snows)

I can’t complain too much, really.  We’ve had to money to fix it all, (minus those things we haven’t fixed yet, which we can apparently live without) even if it means my precious financial buffer is slowly disappearing.  But really, we’re fine enough that I can laugh about it, which I’m grateful for.  (Except the day the refrigerator broke.  On that day, I was not laughing.)  I love our house, and I’d rather live here with everything falling apart than not live here.  Though, of course, the preference would be to live here with things *not* falling apart, in an ideal world.

Ten years from now, this is going to be one of those stories we tell in church talks about how even when everything goes wrong, things still work out.  Because they do.  I know they do.  Heck, they are.

But I’m still ready for everything to stop breaking.