…The sound of a robin splashing around in my birdbath.

Usually this sound would make me smile, but in this case it only made me mad; as in angry but also as in a little crazy. “Why aren’t you keeping your eggs warm?” I shouted through the closed window. All day I had watched and
waited for that bird to get back on her nest…. I had only seen her there in passing over the last couple of days and more often I found her hopping around on my grass, sitting on the fence or playing in the birdbath.

What kind of mommy bird was this? I wondered. Aren’t they supposed to stay stationed on their eggs till they hatch? She had certainly seemed attentive for the first few days. But then, as the weather changed to typical May rain, it seemed she gave up on them and now only sits on them when convenient.

Apparently nobody warned Mrs. Robin that mommyhood is difficult. Sometimes we have to deal with awful weather  (metaphorically and literally). My daughter has an unreasonable fear that the rain means our house will flood. Since we are located on a hill, I know this is entirely unlikely. Still, every time it rains, we have to have this same
discussion. This I want to tell the bird, is mommyhood.

In my blog on Monday I wrote about how last weekend our Girl Scout troop took a trip to the beach. After a late night on Saturday, my daughter’s week started out rocky, so that by Tuesday I was on the phone with her teacher talking about how to build her flexibility and resiliency (two buzz words moms do not want to hear from a teacher)… This is mommyhood.

No one would describe my daughter as a cuddler, but as the end of the school year approaches, for some reason she has become extra clingy. She wants me with her all the time and has started having trouble going to school, having a babysitter, or letting me go to the bathroom by myself… This is mommyhood.

Every mother knows that we sign up for the bad weather along with the good. At the same time I know that my daughter’s childhood is short and more important than anything I will ever do. We don’t get to pick and choose what we deal with… certainly we can’t just go off and play around in a pool when things get rough. Thankfully, though, the good times often see us through the bad. 
 
If I could, I would go outside and sit on those eggs myself. But I know nature has its own way, and though confused, I will wait and watch how this plays out. In the meantime, however, I’m moving the birdbath to the garage.

“It’s a fluff book.”

Hmmmmm, as a commercial fiction author something about that overhear rubbed me the wrong way. A patient was reading a book and had been asked by the check-in person what it was about. 

But that’s not what it’s about, I wanted to tell her; That’s just society’s hierarchical placement of Genre fiction. Somehow I think she may have moved to the far side of the room from me though, so I kept quiet.

I, for one, think all books have more value than to be presented as ‘fluff’. The FreeDictionary defines fluff as:Something having a very light, soft, or frothy consistency or appearance. 

It’s true… romance books often take a light, meaning either gentle or humorous, approach to emotional topics. And certainly there are many descriptions of soft things in them; soft fabric, soft spots, soft breasts. And frothy sounds so delicious I would actually like for my books to be described using that term. So, taken apart, the word fluff isn’t entirely out of place. 

It is the idea that fluff is of so little importance that she didn’t even want to describe the storyline that bothers me. Isn’t love the most important thing in the world? And isn’t it beautiful when it is soft and gentle (or better yet, frothy). 

This debate is interesting in that it comes on the heels of a few articles lately debating the hierarchical difference between Genre and Literary Fiction. Lev Grossman has discussed it in far greater detail than I have room for here (see Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology). But one idea which stood out for me in his article was this  –

“There’s more than escapism going on here. Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and claim those disasters as our own. We seek out hard places precisely because our lives are hard. When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality — but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them
more completely, and feel them more deeply. Genre fiction isn’t just generic pap. You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.”

It reminded me of another great article I read recently describing why we cry: Why We Cry: The Fascinating Psychology of Emotional Release. The very idea of escapism takes us to a place where it is safe to explore our
own feelings about our life issues like fear or rejection or love or isolation. When we can’t find that ‘safe’ place in our own daily world perhaps we look to books for it. 

After all, the best definition of fluff takes us directly there…  A covering of soft feathers, like down. To me that sounds like the perfect haven for emotional release.

The sound of screeching tires…

It was the worst sort of overhear for a mom! My daughter’s girl scout troop had headed to the beach for the night, and after packing up to leave the girls were taking a few moments on the rainy Sunday morning to visit the shops near where we had stayed.

I had gone looking for my daughter, and somehow knew, when I heard the screech, she was involved. I ran out the door of the shop and found one of her friends finishing her run across the street toward me and my daughter on the other side of the street… a terrified look in her eyes as she watched the truck slide to a stop near her.

Miraculously, no one was hurt (though my heart stopped beating long enough I thought they may have to take me
to the hospital!)

These are the moments that seem to make sense in our writing but have absolutely no meaning when you are living them. I know some people say time slows down when a crisis occurs, but to me it is more like the moment intensifies so much it overtakes time. What would normally take me minutes to notice blasts at me like a scattergun. I think it is the attempt to process somany details that makes it seem like time has slowed. 
 
It reminds me of a new favorite show I watch, Psych, in which a guy with a photographic memory can pull in all these details and process them so quickly that he appears to be reading the minds of the people involved. I love the way
they zoom into each little detail that he’s narrowed down as being important; a photo… an empty coffee cup… a wet dog. Somehow when put together these things all make sense of the crime.

In my case the images I got, the sound of the tires sliding on the wet pavement… the crooked smile on the face of my daughter’s friend… the huge eyes on my daughter… the arms of one of the other moms reaching out to hold my daughter where she was… all framed a solid impression of what had just occurred. If I had a photographic memory I am positive I would have been aware of the way the drivers hands gripped the steering wheel or the skid marks the
tires made on the cement.

It is these details that create believable, relatable stories. Most of the time we see the huge eyes and know it is fear. We describe it as fear in our conversations…. “I could tell my daughter was scared”. But as a writer, I know my job is to let the readers know by the details what that fear looked like or sounded like. 

Even before I exited the store my brain had processed the single most important detail in this particular story… I heard the screech of the tires; and then silence!

“They told me Fabio was over in the produce section.”

A couple of months ago I wrote about creating great covers for our novels and so my ears were highly tuned in when I stood at the register of my favorite grocery store here in Portland and Fabio’s name was mentioned.

Sadly, he was not actually there in that store. The person was talking about a trip she’d made to Hawaii and a store she had been in there. The rest of the overhear was just as interesting. Apparently Fabio had been surrounded by fans (like, who knew?) and this woman couldn’t even get close.

I’m not terribly good at celebrity spotting; I once walked right by Barbara Walters and didn’t even realize it was her until I heard her voice as I passed. When I lived in London I used to keep my eyes peeled all the time for Madonna or Hugh Grant; and the thing is, I probably went right by them numerous times without even knowing it. 

However, I have to think Fabio I would recognize. He has been so pervasive on covers I can’t imagine any woman, my age, not knowing him. That said… I also can’t imagine making any effort to get near him; unless it was to ask about his experiences as a cover model. Personally, I’m attracted to a more clean cut type, like George Clooney or that model I always see in Vogue or Conde Naste Traveller who is usually shirtless and on a sailboat.

My knight in shining armor is more likely to pull up in a convertible Mercedes than on horseback… and he certainly is not wearing any armor, (unless it is Armani). I suppose that is why I love to write contemporary romance rather than historical… it is far easier for me to associate with modern-day heroes.

What is even more interesting, though, is discovering the type of hero my main character finds attractive. They run the gamut of tall and gangly with sandy colored hair, to medium height, athletic with curly brown hair, to tall, super athletic with straight dark hair and blue eyes. I see each of them very differently and each are uniquely suited to my
main character. Jessica, for example, would never be attracted to my hero in Molto Mayhem but then Lucia would never like Erik, Jessica’s hero.

The main thing though, is even if I could get a picture of Fabio, I doubt he’d be appropriate for any of my heroes. I’ll let you be the judge though…

I can’t bring him to New Seasons for you, but I can bring him (in photos anyway) to my blog.

“This is a topsy-turvy night.”

Hi everyone… I’m Deanne’s daughter and she said I could write this since I am the one who had the overhear (which I am pretty sure is not an actual word since, when I used it in my classroom my teacher didn’t understand what I was talking about).

I thought my mom was really funny when she said this, because we were doing homework and for once I really wanted to keep doing it, but I’m not sure why now, it just was really fun to do my math that night. But my mom said it was too late and I needed to go to bed, and I begged her to let me finish my homework but she said, “No… you can’t do any more homework.”  And we both started laughing.

So I had to put it away and go to bed and now I am still not finished with it, but it’s not really that much fun anymore so now I have to do it when it’s not fun.

So I was thinking about this overhear, because my mom said I needed to have a point to make about it, and I decided my point would be that sometimes something is fun one day and not fun the next and that we should  always finish something when it is fun, because otherwise we might not finish it.

Like we are having the alphabet days of school now because it is the last 26 days and there are 26 letters in the alphabet; so today is day ‘F’ and we are supposed to dress in our fan colors for our favorite team. My dad really loves the Giants, (he said, NY, not SF:>) and so I wanted to dress up in blue and red for them, but then today, when I went to find something to wear it didn’t sound fun anymore and I decided I didn’t want to do it so I wore purple and black instead.

So actually I guess sometimes you can’t finish something when it is fun and then you just don’t do it.

So, that’s all from me because now I have to go to school (which is definitely not fun today, except for sometimes our class bunny is sort of fun) and my mom is going to finish this.

Bye

Note from Deanne: really…. What more is there to say? Right now I am feeling more like playing on Twitter than on writing any more of my blog, so given my daughter’s take on life that is what I am going to do. Sorry. See you
Friday:>)

“How much farther?”

I am clearly no map-reader; because it amazed me how the lines of a trail map could look so flat compared to the reality of the steep hill we were climbing. I was plowing up the hill trying, by sheer force of will, to motivate
my seven year old to follow. She, on the other hand, was lagging behind with her dad, every so often trying to grab the backpack he wore so he could pull her (you can imagine how that went.)

Finally, at a shady spot, we stopped and took a break and after a bit of water and rest we got ready to move again. She told us that this was no longer the “best day ever”… and I told her that in order to have a best day, you
sometimes had to have a worst.

I’m not sure my life philosophy made sense to her, but I have been thinking about it ever since. There are a lot of highs with writing: The moment when my story comes together in the most amazing and unexpected way; the
kudos I get from friends, family or best of all, readers; the completion of a story I thought I would never finish. 

But for each of these high points, writers are overwhelmed with many more low points: characters I can’t seem to make come alive; rejection after rejection from agents; family or friends who focus on the errors in the writing rather than the sweet success of having written at all. Each of these is enough to keep many people from doing the hard dirty work of sticking with it, day after day. 

And, unlike some things which you can’t back out of once you have started (having a child or taking a hike, though not necessarily of the same magnitude, both come to mind here), with writing it is easy to let the manuscript sit unfinished…. Something perhaps to be worked on at some nebulous future date.

So, why do we do it? What keeps an author in her seat (other than the tall non-fat latte) when we are ready to pull out our hair in frustration?

Those moments of high come at a price… and for some are so orgasmically great that they make up for all of the pain we may suffer for the craft. Like raising children, it is difficult to understand the joys until you experience them. But to new writers I would just say, there would be no books if the highs didn’t truly exist. 

The view looking out from behind the waterfalls was spectacular… it was worth the price of the long climb back up the mountain. And today, when I asked my daughter what my overhear should be her answer was:

“Best day ever.”

“They should require everyone to work a service job at some point in their life.”

The barristas were discussing how hard it was to stay friendly and fun in such a fast paced and sometimes stressful environment (anyone who has been to our Starbucks on a Saturday morning knows what I mean.) A very grumpy
gentleman had just left the store, glaring at them for some unknown offense and they were trying to get back to business without letting it get them down.

So, I could relate to their statement, though I have trouble visualizing some people I know serving others… it really isn’t in their makeup. They’d be more the type of person to end up asking “would you like fries with that?” in a bored or annoyed tone. Still, perhaps it might give them a bit of empathy for those who help them at restaurants, banks, stores, etc.

I’m not sure if it is true anymore (and I’d love to hear from any Disney employees out there who might read this), but it used to be that Disney required all management employees to work out in the park in customer facing jobs, before they could work in the office. I think this was their way of ensuring:  1. That everyone understood the needs of the customer and 2. that all employees understood how tough the service jobs were.

Personally, I have always loved service jobs. I like being around people, and I really like problem solving for customers. One of my most favorite jobs was working at an animal park called, Marine World, when I was in high
  school. Of course not all of the guests were nice…. Often they were hot and tired and cranky. But still, I loved to see them smile when I did something unexpected; like offering to take their picture, or finding them a spot to sit
in the shade. 

Service jobs aren’t for everyone… but I think we should be especially grateful for those who choose these jobs and do them well. Tips, of course are a great way to show this; but even a sympathetic smile when things go badly, can make a huge difference. 

Whether it is the teller who counts my money, the flight attendant who ensures my bag fits overhead or the barrista who makes my coffee… I plan today to let them know how thankful I am for the wonderful service they provide.

“Italian and Spanish are related.”

I had ordered a macchiato from the barrista at the Caffe Umbria cart and had tried to say please in something that ended up sounding like half of both languages. It bristled that it hadn’t rolled off my tongue as easily as nine months ago when I was surrounded by the language. At least though, when I closed my eyes and took a sip of the coffee drink, I could imagine even without remembering the words, that for one moment that I was back in Italy.

Reality crashed in again as the sea of people around me nudged me further from the island of my little dream. Share our Wealth is the wonderful organization who sets up this event every year; a chance for the local restaurants to present their food and for attendees to explore different Portland eating options in one spot. The proceeds all go to help children in poverty locally. 

I get the concept and appreciate the intent; but somehow, surrounded by all the food (some of which ended up in the trash as people cleared their plate for a different tasting) I couldn’t help thinking it was just a bit too contradictory.

I am all about patterns and pieces that fit well together. And so I often use related ideas to underscore a theme in my writing or even in my life (décor and food at a party for example). Yet, there are times when relating two things can actually have the effect of contradicting the theme. I suppose this was what I was feeling at Taste of the Nation. Immersed in the scent and scene of food all I could think about was - what a waste.

It depends, I suppose, on how the ideas are presented. Sex and God can go together, for example; but not if either is used gratuitously. It must be sincere and the theme must be made very clear in order for them not to feel in opposition. 

Food used as a theme in Share our Wealth isn’t necessarily bad, but again, it must be used to reinforce the concept of sharing, rather than that of gluttony. This is the fine line that felt crossed as I saw the food pile up on plates and later in the bottom of the trash cans.  

Food and poverty like Spanish and Italian may be related…but the truth is, one can’t be spoken of easily while thinking of the other.

“I told them if they hit 40,000 I’d take them to Italy.”

I couldn’t help myself… I don’t usually interject into the conversations I overhear, but this one was too compelling to pass up.

“That’s a pretty good incentive. Can I join?”

They laughed and knew I was joking; but only just. There are few things I miss about my past corporate life; one would be some of the wonderful bosses and colleagues I worked with. But right after that would be bonus time. 
 
Having studied business I know that the best incentives are tied directly to objective goals within the control of the employee. And yet… as the employee, there is nothing that makes you feel better about a company than when
they give you a bonus you weren’t quite expecting. 

The closest I get to a bonus nowadays is at our monthly writer’s meetings. Each month anyone who wants to can submit a goal and a $1. The following month, if we’ve met our goal, our name goes into a hat for a drawing
of all the money that was collected. The good news is that this incentive activity is both tied directly to a specific goal and also a surprise if you actually win. The bad news is that it’s not a trip to Italy.

All of this has made me wonder, what would my goal need to be in order to earn a big bonus like a trip to Italy? It seems like it would be completely out of reach; which means 

1. I need to go join that guy’s company, or 
2. I need to choose a different incentive, or
3. I need to find a way to bring it within reach

In any case, unless I place my husband in charge of bestowing the incentive, (and really, which of us would want to do that?) the surprise factor is clearly not present in this scenario. 
 
Which may have solved my dilemma…  If I tie my trip to Italy to an unexpected result, like a great, unsolicited book
review in a popular literary magazine, then it meets all of my criteria. It gives me a real incentive to improve my writing and to publish as well as a
little surprise when it’s met.


Granted, the goal is not entirely in my control; but as anyone
who works in corporate America knows… very few bonus goals ever really are.