Waiting for It

I used to get a feeling when I was a little girl waiting for Christmas morning, a three-bean salad of dread, hope, and anticipation. Would Santa bring what I’d asked for? Had I been good that year, or at least, good enough? Would he leave me rocks in the toe of my stocking because I’d shoved my little sister? I mean, she was in my stuff. It was justified, right?

Many years have come and gone between those Christmas mornings and today, yet at this very moment I find myself holding my breath with that same mixture of feelings. This time, I’m waiting for word from my editor. The one who will tell me whether I have it in me to write a breakout novel that might, just might, grab the attention of an agent and then, God willing, a publisher.

The questions are the same now as when I was a kid. Would Santa give me what I ask for? Was my writing good, or at least, good enough? Or would the editor’s words be the rocks in the toe of my stocking that would bring my dreams crashing to the floor?

I’m not sure why I care so much, except that I want to go the traditional publishing route. To me, that’s a measure of success, that a big publishing house might like my work enough to publish it. I’m not looking for a huge payout. Heck, anymore, advances are a thing reserved for the biggest of the big authors like King or Roberts or Higgins. But just being able to say that I’d been published by Random House or Hachette, that’s my dream. And thus, the editor route. Granted, this is through a class I’m taking. Getting the feedback from this editor, and the last two who had a look at the first part of my newest novel, will not get me a publishing deal. It won’t get me an agent, or a contract, or even a reading of the rest of the manuscript. But it gets me one step closer on my path to the Big Five, and so I sit here, hoping once again that Santa will bring me what I want for Christmas.

Reluctantly Retired

I was furloughed in April of 2020. The time off work was nice for a while, even though I had to ride herd on two kids who thought schoolwork was no longer important. But about six weeks into it, I began planning for a return, first in June, then in July, and finally with a firm date at the end of August. I was a little leery about being in an enclosed space for nine hours a day, but I loved the people I worked with and was looking forward to seeing them again. In early August, however, I lost my job. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, I became a statistic of the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses across the country cut their payrolls to maximize their bottom lines.

I had planned to retire from that job eventually. I had it all figured out – how long it would take to pay off our high-interest bills, retain or find reliable vehicles, get both kids through college. I calculated my various retirement options and finally settled on a way that would allow us to enjoy life with some quality. This termination derailed most of those financial plans, and I was sure it had decimated my retirement completely.  

It’s taken me a while to come to grips with being forced into what is, due to my age, essentially an early retirement. It’s not so much that I’m sorry about not working anymore. I think I’m more pissed that I wasn’t allowed to leave on my own terms. That and the fact that this termination left us scrambling to cope on just one salary and reduced unemployment in lieu of two full-time incomes with benefits.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the freedom. I don’t have to get up at 5:00 a.m. and get ready to go to work. Business casual clothes have been replaced by yoga pants and tees. The morning commute is a thing of the past. I no longer worry about road rage, finding a place to grab lunch, or walking from the parking ramp to the high-rise in the bone-chilling cold or the summertime sauna of Iowa’s sometimes inhospitable weather.

But I found myself floundering for a while after I was fired, even after having all that time off work while I was on furlough. The furlough was only a temporary thing. I could deal with that, but this termination is permanent. And yes, I know it would have become permanent when I retired, which leads me to believe I wasn’t as prepared as I might have believed.

Granted, when I made my retirement plans, I hadn’t counted on having to home-school a ten-year-old or worry about keeping a college freshman safe during a full-blown, world-wide pandemic. My vision of my retirement consisted of seven hours uninterrupted hours to write or plot out new books while the youngest was at school. I’d have time for occasional excursions to take classes (writing-related or otherwise), to visit friends, go shopping, browse the library, cook fantastic meals, or whatever other things I could do without kids at home.

I was fully prepared to bemoan the fact that I could no longer do any of that stuff, and thus because of this termination at the height of the pandemic, my retirement plans were shot. But when I really look at my life at this point, I’m reminded of the movie Under the Tuscan Sun. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, this explanation may not make sense, but for those who have, the heroine got exactly what she’d always dreamed of, although not in exactly the way she thought it would happen.

With the exception of lunchtime, a break I would take each day anyway, I have from 8:30 each morning until 3:30 every afternoon to myself. Online school is in session during those hours, and the ten-year-old is working at her lessons. While she is, I work on my current book or blog posts in my pretty new office. She and I “meet” for lunch and talk about her schoolwork or my writing, and then she goes back to school and I go back to my office.

I’ve been able to take two online writing-related classes so far, one during normal work hours and the other during what would have been my commute home from the office (neither of which I could have done before). On further reflection, I’ve also attended about four free webinars during that seven hours allotted to me, which I would not have been allowed to do at at work.

I may not be able to get any in-person retail therapy (an activity I don’t especially miss) but Amazon, Dell, Target, Best Buy, Hy-Vee, Old Navy, and other retailers are all at my fingertips. We have not been forced to go without something we needed. Buying shoes for the younger one’s growing feet may become an issue, but we’ll figure it out.

Browsing the library online is nowhere near as satisfying as spending a couple hours in the building (an activity I do really miss more than I ever would have suspected), but contactless pick-up allows me to still take out books every week. And cooking, well, don’t get me started on that subject. I find that cooking three meals a day every day has me in a rut, so I’m scouring several websites and cooking magazines for inspiration, something I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise.

We’ve come to terms with the deficit to our income. Other than visiting retired friends (an activity I’m not quite prepared to take up just yet with this blasted virus playing Chutes and Ladders with infection numbers), I’ve actually managed to achieve all of the retirement goals I’d envisioned. Not in the way I saw them happening, and not with the cash flow I had planned for, but nonetheless, in ways that were, and are, pleasurable and fulfilling. Like the heroine of Under the Tuscan Sun, my vision for my retirement did manifest, just in ways I hadn’t foreseen.

School in the Time of Pandemic

At the beginning of August, we packed our eldest grandson off to college amid a perfect storm of uncertainty. The COVID-19 new case numbers continued to climb in Iowa, but our governor continued to push for schools to open, so open they did. The university had a plan in place to isolate the student groups from each other, and each kid had to sign up for a move-in time designed to minimize contact between strangers. Every single student was tested prior to being given the keys to his or her dorm room. So far, so good.

Except…

Once in the dorms, there was nothing for several thousand freshmen to do for two weeks until classes started. So, they did what most other kids their age would do. They started congregating with those in their dorms, or in groups in the dining hall, or at the various fields and courts around campus. Some of them came home. And some of them had friends come to visit, friends who not only had not been tested, but who very likely carried the virus. Within a week, a bunch of the previously negative freshman now tested positive.

Over the next two weeks, the sophomores, juniors, and seniors moved in. Sororities and frats held parties. The bars opened, and the positive-case numbers skyrocketed. Iowa became a hot spot with a place of shame highlighted in the national and world news. In a belated attempt to control the spread, the governor closed the bars down in several counties. The university forbade large gatherings. Blame started to shift to the students, who didn’t obey the rules and thus caused all this panic.

The elementary, middle, and high schools in the local school district opened up on August 27^th for brick and mortar students. On the following Monday, we received notice of the first positive case at the grade school my granddaughter attended last year. No mention was made if the virus victim was a teacher or staff member or student. We’ve received no further word about new cases. Whether that means there have been none, or whether that means we’ve just not been notified, we don’t really know. I’m choosing to believe the former.

The escalating outbreak was inevitable, given the leadership (or lack thereof) from the governor and the encouragement of our state’s senator. No mask mandate. Opening of bars, parks, salons, fitness centers, and other gathering places with no firm restrictions in place and no consequences when someone violates the loosely worded rules. Pushing the schools to open no matter what. No one saw this coming? Really? The expectation that our children will follow direction without question and without error is ludicrous. Especially given that a good number of adults won’t mask or distance themselves to keep others safe.

My college kid texted me a while ago and said he was thinking about coming home. All of his classes are online now, and he’s paying for a dorm room and food plan, both unnecessary. But the penalties for abandoning on-campus living are stiff and will end up costing him more money than what he presently owes for room and board. He has chosen to tough it out where he is, holed up in his dorm room trying to distance himself from the positive cases that have to isolate in his building because the isolation quarters are full to overflowing. I am online-schooling the fifth-grader, which she’s taking with amazing grace and a cheerful attitude. We have it good, relative to many others who can’t be home with their kids and have to send them to school or day care and wait for the hammer to fall. The oldest has of necessity become a hermit, but at least he’s semi-safe. In all this, though, I keep coming back to one thought. Couldn’t we have done all this better?

Bittersweet Anniversaries

It’s been almost two years now since my mother died. I got just a bit of a smile out of the pop-up email reminder from FTD that today would have been her birthday. As if I’d ever forget. Not a morning goes by that I don’t miss her or a night when I don’t send her my love before I go to sleep, especially on her birthday. No matter where in the world I made my home, no matter whether the two of us were speaking or feuding, I never forgot her birthday. There was one time I refused to acknowledge it, done in a mean-spirited attempt to hurt her, but I never forgot what day it was.

I wish I could take back that nastiness now, when I can no longer call her to tell her Happy Birthday. When I can’t make it up to her anymore or tell her that I’m sorry for hurting her. Because I know I did. That’s the kind of family we are. We’re close, and small things make a huge impression, for good or otherwise. That action still makes me cringe with shame, especially since she often told me how proud she was of the person I was becoming. Was I trying to prove her wrong? Or was I just not able at that point to be the person she saw? The regrets are endless, no matter that I felt justified at the time.

On this anniversary of my mother’s birth, I woke up remembering this instance for some reason. The sadness of the day weighed heavily already, and this memory made it just that much harder to set the ache aside. But Mom told me something once after I’d gone through a particularly ugly time in my life. She said there’s nothing you can do about the past except get past it. Regrets don’t help. Anger at yourself, remorse, guilt feelings – none of those will ease your sorrow over what has gone before. You can only go forward. Pretty smart lady, my mom, right?

The more I think about that, the more I see how wise her words were. I can’t change the things that happened, and since she’s gone now, I can’t let her know how much I didn’t like being that person then. But I can sure go forward and stop beating myself up about it. I can resolve to be the “me” Mom always knew I was. This day should be all about the celebration of my mother’s life, not about all the things left unsaid. Remembering the best of her (and of me when I was with her), that’s what her birthday should bring to mind.

So Happy Birthday, Mom. Thank you for being my mother.  I love you so very much.

Quarantine

It seems that’s all anyone is talking about these days – the quarantine and how it’s disrupted our everyday lives. Mine, as well as the rest of the world’s, has changed in ways I never would have contemplated just a few short months ago. I’m no longer getting up at 5:00 to get ready for work. Since school has been cancelled and the kids are home full time, I’ve become teacher and referee as well as parent and chief cook. My teenager worries about graduating this year and college in the fall. His social life, which he’d just discovered he had, is limited to Snapchat and Facetime. My prayers go out silently for my other half, who still has to go to work each day, braving contact with the unknown. I go out only for the necessities – food, gas, medicines. It’s a scary world out there, one of limited supplies amidst rampant infection without a cure. And yet…

Time moves at a slower pace than it did previously. I find myself treasuring the days and hours and minutes with my family. The youngest and I have explored new learning resources, websites we never knew existed. I have the luxury of being able to cook an intricate, time-consuming dish instead of a slap-together supper. The option to spread my household chores over a whole week and not cram them into a few precious weekend hours. There is time for reading and writing during the daytime. We’ve painted a mosaic Easter egg and flowers on the living room window, cut out hearts for the front door. We’ve talked and talked and talked without being rushed into short conversations. Or non-conversations. We are cocooning. We are re-connecting. And I’m learning my family all over again.

Stay safe. Stay in. Find the balance.

With love,

Mica

Lights! Camera! Action!

Ansel Adams is one of my favorite artists. Each of his works is a glorious study in one still moment in time. It takes hours to digest the myriad details of his photographs. The play of light and shadow. The texture. The richness of color you know is there even though the picture is in black and white. Think of these photographs as the freeze frames in your story – a high point or low point that’s significant. But imagine sitting in a movie theatre for three hours studying that one static image. Now imagine reading about that same image for page after page in a book.

Switch to a different scene. The same movie theater but this time on the screen is the latest Mission Impossible. Frames move at lightning speed. Action happens. Details build upon the last and tower into a crescendo, only to fall and rebuild, each time just a bit higher and stronger. You’re on the edge of your seat, nails gouging the arms of your recliner. The hero sweats and you do the same right along with him. Tense. Nerves thrumming. Straight to the end of the movie when you can finally sigh and relax.

Which do you prefer?

Minutia is fine in a first draft of your novel, but it doesn’t belong in a finished product. Every detail, each emotion or description has to move the story along through its low points to its high points. Those details and emotions and descriptions have to grow your character from the book’s beginning to its conclusion. They have to introduce us to the world you’ve created with just enough to keep us interested but not so much that we already know how the story ends.

If your protag hates broccoli, we probably won’t care a whole lot, but if she hates riding in cars or if she’s afraid of three-piece business suits or won’t leave her house before noon every day, we need to know why, and the reasons have to be plausible in your protag’s world. The stakes to reach the goal have to be high. They have to be complicated by what she fears or what’s happened in the past to make her feel what she feels.

This is not to say that you don’t need to show your character and her life and circumstances in living Technicolor. The details you share with your reader have to be just as rich as those in an Ansel Adams photograph, but they also have to be the ones that move your story dynamically from one freeze frame to the next.

 

The Sad and Sober Part

My father died yesterday. It was sudden and unexpected, and I’m still having trouble wrapping my head and heart around it. To understand I won’t be able to call him on the phone and see if he’s over his interminable cold. Or if the sweater I sent him fits, or the pears were good, or the candy something he liked. He’ll never see my next novel or know about the new car we just bought. We won’t get to laugh at his “Now who does she belong to?” as he confuses his great-grandchildren, or discuss the latest book he read or some movie we’ve both seen. I’ll never again hear about my mother from someone who loved her more than life. That bothers me more than anything else, I think.

My brother said things feel weird to him. Things feel weird to me, too. Like it’s not real but instead is only a part of the nightmare I had last night. Except I keep slamming up against it at odd moments, and then it feels real as hell and it hurts. I keep hoping that my mother doesn’t know what’s happened. That she’s forgotten every day for the past two years when at ten a.m., my father would walk across the road to visit her in the unit where people with dementia live.  I wonder if she’ll notice that he doesn’t come to see her anymore. I pray she doesn’t, or that if she does, it’s a brief thought only as long as those misfiring synapses in her brain. Yet a part of me, a selfish part, wants her to know, to acknowledge. To mourn so that I can mourn with her. I want her comfort more than anything right now.

I’ve always carried the people I love within my heart, each of them fitting into the whole like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Some of those are larger than life, some small but infinitely sweet, like a drop of honey on the tongue. All are precious and all leave a void when they are removed. I know that void will not be there forever. The memories will come, and they’ll get tucked into the space where he lived for so long. But his puzzle piece was a huge one and has been with me from the minute I was born, when he and my mother were the only two nestled in my heart. It will be a long, long time before there are enough memories to even begin to fill up the boundaries of his shape.

Hello Autumn

I’m not sure why, but this time of the year has always made me restless. I want to get away, break out of the mold and stretch my wings a little. I long to fly to places unknown, to shoulder a pack and hike across a country with which I’m not familiar, to taste and smell and see things out of my ordinary. The languor of summer dissipates in direct correlation to the advancing numbers on the calendar page. I know they’re coming, those crisp, clear days of autumn, and I want to be a part of something larger than my familiar surroundings.

I’m trying to turn that want into creating the landscape of my work in progress, to become so immersed in it that I can run my fingers over its textures, breathe in its scents, savor its flavors. This is a chance to have my imagination run wild within the confines of my story’s setting.

I grew up in the area about which I’m writing, and it’s those flavors from childhood that I remember and tap into. The video in my mind’s eye colors the images that flow from my fingertips onto the computer screen. Whippoorwills and meadowlarks, family-owned shops, sand in your shoes, snowball fights, firelight, a trip to the bookstore, Christmas trees, milkweed pods and birch bark, homemade cookies, falling in love, wet bathing suits, stories before bed and becoming a family. For this newest book, these are the shutter stops on my camera lens.

Down in the Valley

box can·yon

noun NORTH AMERICAN

1. 1.    a narrow canyon with a flat bottom and vertical walls.

Origin

Spanish cajon meaning a large box

We’ve all written ourselves into one. You know what I mean – that hopeless place where our heroes or heroines are stuck with no way out. With unscalable walls, a rock slide blocking the exit, and not a clue as to how you got here. The spot where your imagination feels like it’s caught in the La Brea Tar Pits and is sinking fast.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. You had a plan. You had direction. Heaven forbid, you might have even had an outline!! Yet somehow, you’re still off track. So what went wrong? As Bugs Bunny used to say, “I knew I should’ve made a left at Albuquerque.”

Here are three of my favorite strategies for fixing a runaway plot. The first one is simple – read your story. From the beginning. Out loud. Pace the floor. Act out the parts. Chances are, you’ll catch where you made the wrong turn that plunged you into the valley.

If that doesn’t work, the second thing to try is to read your outline (if you’ve made one) or the notes you’ve scribbled on various napkins or paper scraps and compare those to your story. Did the heroine zig instead of zag? Should she have been at work but instead played hooky? Did the hero go out with the guys instead of spending the evening washing his car so the heroine could chance across him as she walked her little brother to the playground? Sometimes the smallest thing will send your story in a new direction that seems exciting but ends up with your characters all boxed in.

By now you’ve probably discovered where you took the wrong fork, but just in case you haven’t, the third fix is to have someone else read your outline and story. Another writer is best, but make sure it’s someone who will be objective and tell you where you need to untwist the pretzel. No, your mother is not the person to call on here, unless she can be ruthlessly critical. By having another person read, you’re getting a fresh viewpoint and someone who isn’t involved so deeply in your story that he or she gets bogged down.

Most of the time, one of these three actions will help you dig your way out of any box canyon you encounter. If not, I know someone who has a steam shovel…

Journey Ahead

My sister and niece just came back from Arizona after a visit with our parents. I had been meaning to fly out there myself but kept the trip on the back burner, letting work or the kids or slim finances take precedence. So I was glad that she had gone and asked her how the visit went. Not that I figured my mother’s dementia would have miraculously begun to reverse. Time marches on, to borrow a phrase, in its inexorable fashion. It was rather that, as far distant as I am from the day-to-day caring for either Mom or Dad, I see them as they were, not as they are and certainly not as they’re steadily becoming.

I include my father in this because although he doesn’t have a disease, per se, he is old and becoming more fragile, both in body and in mind. He is no longer the strong but quiet provider I knew in my growing up years, the man who taught me to change a tire, drive a nail straight and true, demolish a wall and rebuild it. He is tired and does little more now than read or watch television, his world shrunken to accommodate his frailty and the burden of his years.

As I talked to my sister, she mentioned my niece saying she couldn’t imagine not being able to talk to her mother. It’s one of the most hideous manifestations of this disease, the inability to communicate with the person lost inside it. The lightbulb went off then. It’s the reason I haven’t gotten on that plane before this, the reason for all the excuses I’ve made over the past year to stay away from the southwest. It makes me cringe to own up to it, but I didn’t want to come back remembering my parents the way they are now. I wanted to remember what was and not what is.

And yet, my sister said, Mom is still there in a small way. In the independence that keeps her trying to get out of the wheelchair and walk. In the way she hums or sings to herself, like she always used to. In the brief flashes of recognition that lit her eyes when she heard my sister’s name and saw my niece’s face. In the trusting way she falls asleep every day on my father’s shoulder. She is still inside this nightmare somewhere.

So I will pay my bills this month and forego a few dinners out each paycheck until I can scrape together the plane fare, and I will go. Because despite what time has molded them into, these two people are still my parents, the core that I’ve built my world around all my life. As they used to be and as they are now. I’ll go and build some new memories, even if they aren’t as wonderful as the old ones. And I’ll keep the memories of all the times, bad or best, for the two people I love the most.