I’ve always kept a paper journal in addition to my blogs. I just finished filling up one of these, so upon starting a fresh one, I thought I would take a peek through the old one and share some things that never made it into the blog. It seems it takes me about two years to make it through one paper journal. That’s probably only interesting to me, lol.

So, some random thoughts on motherhood, writing, and life in general…

6/7/07: Dylan was about 11 months old.

Where did you come from? How did you get here? I ask him this and he smiles back - he answers back sometimes to whatever question he thought I was asking in his Dylan-language.

I can hardly remember being pregnant now. There was vomiting and then there was swelling, and that was nine months. Then he was here, and his birth to me now is nothing more than a surreal dream. If someone tried to convince me that the stork really does drop off babies at the hospital, I might be inclined to believe it.

This is how women manage to have more than one baby, lol!

6/25/07:

What the hell kind of word is “inasmuch,” and how is it any different than “in as much?” It looks ridiculous, and I promise myself I will never, EVER, use it!

LOL, literary rant?

10 favorite short stories (in no particular order):

1. “Snow,” by Julia Alvarez
2. “Hills Like White Elephants,” by Hemingway
3. “Mines,” by Susan Straight
4. “Screenwriter,” by Charles D’Ambrosio
5. “People Like That Are The Only People Here,” by Lorrie Moore
6. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” by Sherman Alexie
7. “Greasy Lake,” by T.C. Boyle
8. “A Small Good Thing,” by Raymond Carver
9. “The Only Signal on the Reservation…” by Sherman Alexie
10. “How Far She Went,” by Mary Hood

These still stand!

11/21/07: (Dylan would have been about 16 months old)

Dear anyone who ever wrote me an e-mail,

If I didn’t reply to you, please know that it’s not because I wasn’t interested, or don’t like you, or think you smell kind of funky. You all smell just fine. It is just this thing called “mommy brain.” The baby happens, and when he does, every thought I had processing is thrown immediatley into the toilet! This is especially problematic if I happened to be reading an e-mail, which is then marked as “already read,” and new e-mails are piled on top of it. And before I know it, it’s pushed off the page, not to be found for weeks, and then when I do find it, I think it’s been too long to reply, so I don’t, or do, with some lame and whiny explanation of how the baby happened. Babies happen, like headaches, like accidents, like shit. They happen, people, they do.

*Insert the obligatory mom disclaimer: but oh, how I love him, my little bundle of joy!*

11/22/07: (I can’t believe I never posted this one!)

A post for Thanksgiving

- This is an eating holiday, so wear something comfortable and stretchy. Not your hot pre-preggo jeans that you can finally fit into. No one will notice that you lost 15 lbs anyway.
- Try to think up some witty comebacks, even though you can’t even imagine the kinds of wrath-inducing things that will be said yet. This is the price you pay for living across the globe from your in-laws, you get a step-family. Nobody gets off that easy.
- It’s 10 a.m. and you’ve already had three fights with your husband.
- It’s 12:30 when you realize that even vegetarian turkeys need to be defrosted over night.
- Eat some pie and try not to feel too guilty about it. Don’t eat the whole pie.
- Holidays are stressful, drink some wine.
- After you’ve got a buzz going, you might be able to relax enough to think about what you’re thankful for.
- Before you get stressed again, take a moment to give hubby a hug and tell him you are thankful for him, because you are.
- You are also thankful the baby is still napping.
- You are thankful for your second glass of wine.
- At 4:30 p.m., your step-mother really does try to tell you what your dead actual mother would have wanted in regards to how you should raise your child. Oh yes, she really does! These were the kinds of unimaginable things that you were trying to imagine earlier. And no, you never managed to come up with any witty comebacks.
- Start a third glass of wine, and you realize, this Thanksgiving, you are thankful for wine.

2/6/09:

When I have a Sim I don’t like, I kill them off. Maybe storytelling isn’t any different.

I could never deal with Danny’s father - I could never get a hold of him. So in this new version, I killed him off. He’s dead from the very start of the novel. I gave him a horrible cancer and he died.

I’ve since considered that maybe it was Danny I couldn’t relate to having two live parents. Death issues much?

So a funny thing happened (not so much funny-ha-ha, but funny, as in weirdly fateful).

I started a new novel back in December, except I didn’t know it was a new novel when I was writing it. It was right after NaNoWriMo, where in the space of a month, I wrote almost 38,000 words for some ambiguous version of that bumbling first novel I was working on. And immediately after - seriously, like four days later - I got up out of bed in the middle of the night and I wrote the Story That Killed My Novel, the story that blew my novel into a million pieces and a big fat fiery ball of flames. The reason being, even though I was using the same characters for both stories, the two worlds simply could not coexist. And this very short story, just four pages, was so much more important (one of those impossible conflicts that no matter what choice they make changes their whole world) that I just couldn’t look back at my silly little attempt at a story with any seriousness.

That first novel was, in fact, called The World Could Explode. How prophetic.

It was astounding timing! Seriously just four days after wrapping up NaNoWriMo. It was as if I had just finished purging every trace of that first sad attempt at a novel out of my system, and was ready to start fresh. And I started. More than anything, I started because I simply couldn’t go back.

Almost everything has been scrapped. Their names are the same, but their characters are completely reinvented. Looking back on it, maybe they didn’t even have fully-fleshed characters in that first attempt. Maybe that was part of the problem. The fun thing is that the actual Story That Killed My Novel will show up as a chapter in the new novel, and I even know where it goes.

I don’t know what makes me think this attempt will be any different, but I do think I’ve learned quite a bit from that first failed novel. Don’t they say that the first novel you write is just for practice? If not, I’m just going to keep telling myself that because otherwise I would have to feel like a big fat loser for spending a year on something that ended up going nowhere.

I’ve been writing a lot in these six months, even if it is just play-writing. Maybe no writing is bad writing. I feel like I’ve grown. Maybe I can’t know it, but I think I feel it. And for crying out loud, I DO finish things. I’ve finished lots of things before. I am not a failed novelist, I am NOT.

(Sorry, giving myself a pep talk here…)

Anyway, I’m back into it again. A lot of crazy business went down around the turn of the new year, and then there was a big fat move, and it seems it takes about six months to recover from such things. I’m recovered. I’m all plotted out and ready to dig in. And I’m already loving novel #2. I love my characters (they’re still called Danny, Lexi, and Hannah, by the way). They’re spunky and sarcastic and big-hearted and tragic and off their rockers some of the time. I’m only about 14 pages into it, but you know, new novels have to begin somewhere

Okay, not that it’s really a secret or anything (it’s been linked right there in my “about” box since forever), but I write this silly little neighborhood story about my Sims characters. And what sparks this discussion is that everybody LOVES Dallas and Lucy, a young couple in high school - it’s impossible not to love them, they’re adorable, lol! I identify best with Dallas, who is right on the cusp of eighteen, consumingly attached to this girl (as is she in return), but has to decide if he has enough faith in their relationship that he could go away to study abroad for two years while she finishes high school, knowing that at their age, it’s likely she may not be waiting for him when he gets back.

Apparently, I get teenagers. I’ve heard this too many times to even count. I don’t know how, since I never even considered myself one - and perhaps this has something to do with how my husband claims I never grew past the maturity level of a seventeen year-old? But when I write about young people, I’m told they’re convincing and true. So why then do I feel this VIOLENT opposition to admit that I’m writing YA fiction?

And please, no offense to YA writers, I’m really just trying to understand where I’m coming from on this. Why does it feel like a dirty word? It feels like settling, to be bluntly honest. It feels like I would be doing it because I’m not good enough to write mature grown-up fiction. Or maybe the fact of it is I’m only twenty-eight, and NOT mature enough to write grown-up fiction?

The thing is, I want to be read by adults, and while I believe that some older teenagers might really enjoy my stories, my favorite age to write aren’t actually teenagers at all. This is where I get confused. I honestly think I tend to poke fun at my teenage characters until they reach about the age of seventeen or eighteen, where then, I’d honestly consider them little adults. Literal, young adults.

These are usually college kids, or the older high school kids - the 18-24 year olds. They’re out on their own (or almost), taking care of themselves as best they can, making their own mistakes and dealing with their own consequences. What I LOVE about this age is that they’re really making their very first life-altering decisions (and life-altering mistakes), and they’re having to do it all on their own.

Is that YA? Yes, they are young adults, but adults still. And almost entirely not teenagers. I always thought YA fiction was meant to be read by teenagers (I’m thinking 13-16 year-olds). And to be quite blunt, you probably don’t want your thirteen year-old reading about the kinds of things real eighteen to twenty-somethings say and do and think. So is there a category of fiction for the quarter-life crowd? Can I invent one?

But then, I do feel better about being lumped in with youth writers when I find that wonderful (and very mature) books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital are classed as YA. And two of my very favorite books, A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules, both revolve around young people growing up. So maybe my books will be called YA? Maybe it doesn’t matter? Maybe I should just write the damn thing?

Friday ‘Fess Up:

I’m still digging and trying to get my hands into this new version of my novel. Not another new version, but the same new version I’ve been brewing for a few months now. But this came to me yesterday, in Lexi’s voice as if she were speaking right to me (don’t you love it when your characters speak right to you?) - Lexi, by the way, is twenty years-old, married (!!!), and a biology major in college:

“I think it’s best you know that I’m the sensible one of this little trio. Danny and Hannah, as much as I love them, they’re quite honestly from the moon.”

I love Lexi!

In lieu of having anything of significance to say…

A quiet time fort.

I can still see him, how about you?

Ni Hao Kai-Lan wins this morning. Nick Jr. is running most mornings around here, but he never actually watches it the whole time - which is a healthy thing, I suppose, because then he would be a couch potato. But for the moment, with Dylan engrossed in his cartoon, with twenty minutes of peace tops, just for the heck of it, I reread my opening scene from my first chapter. I read it out loud, which made it feel actual, and different than the way I’ve skim-read it recently.

Oh, how I miss Danny and Lexi, and their ridiculous best friend/lover antics, trying to negotiate if they should or shouldn’t do it before going to his father’s funeral. I mean, really, how funny is that?

If my novel could talk, it would say, “Please write me!”

It’s hard to say how much of it I actually finished, before everything fell to pieces back in December. I think maybe about 48%. And that is certainly not solid from the beginning. But in pieces, here and there, random scenes and some completed chapters, and a good solid outline. I’m looking forward to everything settling back to normalcy again, and I hope when it does, when I get my brain back in my head, the story will come back to me. I really hope. I think it was a good story - or at least not any worse than some stuff out there, lol.

But first it has to be given life, and I guess I’m the only one who can do that. This particular story, in my head, nobody else can finish but me.