The Sad End

While you’re reading this blog, I am standing under an umbrella, watching the somber procession of fire trucks down Main Street, and hoping that the two wives who lost their husbands last week are somehow holding up.

This wasn’t the blog I’d intended to write. In fact, I had the other one all ready to go. But in light of our community’s recent tragedy, it just didn’t fit. As I was finishing my YA novel on Thursday, my husband returned from a search and rescue mission with heartbreaking news: two of his firefighting brothers died in an ATV accident.

Previously uncertain how to end the book, I scribbled the last page and a half that night, not with giddy redemption or sticky optimism, but with self-realization, and a hint of hope.

Life goes on while we write. It doesn’t stop – not even for conclusions. It influences plot, characters, even blogs.

If I have to, on a better day, I’ll rewrite the end of the book, redeeming my troubled boy.

But for now, I’ll keep it as it is – preserving the spirit of the moment: the loss of two beloved men, and the families and brotherhood of firefighters they left behind – raw and imperfect, but true.

John and Gale, rest well…

Powerful Paintbrush Visualizations -Kerry

"Creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed, or specifically imagined," Julia Cameron, "The Artist's Way."

I pondered that phrase this morning as I navigated a crowded aisle and honed in on a small turquoise pillow for $3.99 that I had been imagining, well, more like obsessing, about at the new Ikea store in Portland. It had to be that exact turquoise pillow, nothing I could find at Target or Fred Meyer in Medford would do. For two months now I have been visualizing color schemes and furniture layouts for our new vacation rental house project. My forays into Craigslist and Goodwill were reliable (this week's score was three bamboo bar stools), but I needed something more.

Since I currently reside in a place with a limited shopping selection , compared to, say, Portland or San Francisco, I have taken up visualization and imagination as the next best thing. I visualized redoing our vacation house rental in Palm Springs Chic or Zen Retreat. Then I moved onto completely white and black furnishings (stark, but hip), and then onto sort of a 1960's cocktail lounge look. Of course, these scenes all existed in my imagination, give or take a few pieces of bamboo. In short, I have been so focused in my mind with pictures of well-coiffed rooms ripped from the latest copy of Wallpaper Magazine that I have almost driven through stop signs (thank God for screaming children as an alarm) and nearly backed over our cat as I daydreamed about paint chip colors.

Clearly, for the safety of all involved, I needed to gently bring myself into the present moment and get on with the project. Which brings me to where I find myself now, firmly ensconced at my parents' home with my youngest daughter where I am literally yards away from the house. Most of my writing lately has taken the form of extensive to-do lists I prepared with phrases like, "Paint wall mustard yellow like the room in Sunset," followed by a page long detail of how and what I will need to achieve this effect. The visualization of the room seems to be the primary goal here for me, whether or not I actually achieve it seems to be irrelevant, since I've already achieved it in my head. However, because I have a timeline that includes when I have to complete the project, these powerful visualizations must give way to powerful paintbrush strokes. Which is fine with me, because that gives me more time to imagine.

Notes on a Chair -Marcia

My mother is coming this Thursday. It could be a quick visit, just long enough to hear Daniel’s chicken-sneeze solo in the Discovery Chorus concert at the Craterian this weekend. Or, it could be something longer... Depending on whether or not we’ve improved our standard of living. She let my husband know on the phone one night that her decision would be based on the state of the boys’ bedroom. She did the makeover when she was here in October, and it damn well better look as good as it did when she left. So the hefty bags are out, the garage is being fully utilized, and the spring air smells like Mr. Clean Organic Orange spray.

In a more recent phone call she announced that she purchased an armchair for us. It was a deal too good to pass up.

“It goes perfectly in your front room,” she said.
“Mom, I have two couches in my front room.”
“Well this one goes in the front room. It has green and blue flowers."
“I already have a green and blue flowered chair.”
“We’re going to repaint that front room. This will go perfectly.”
“Mom.” (It’s taken me eight months to recover from the boys’ room project.)
“I’m bringing it up for one of you then. You and your sister can fight over it.”

Always a healthy suggestion.

Two days later she calls again and states that she has just finished redecorating HER front room instead. She is keeping the flowered chair and bringing the blue and white striped one for me.

“If it was good enough for my grandmother, and good enough for me, then it will definitely be good enough for you.”

So...we are getting a new armchair--one to go with the other two that don’t match anything in the house. I had a nice Queen Anne style out on the patio so long it rotted. I threw away the body and kept its pretty wooden feet. The thing is we live in an 1800 square foot ranch house. You can’t just squeeze a big old armchair in anywhere. It’s like trying to force a puzzle piece, you jam it and the whole thing buckles up and comes apart.

So writing this week is not a possibility, I am far too busy moving bookshelves, pushing end tables around, making room for an overstuffed blue and white striped chair, and trying to achieve perfection...all before my mother arrives.

On Why I Write -Julie

I am the daughter of two extraordinarily mid-western people. Nicest people you’d ever want to meet, and unassuming? Hoo Boy! I was raised in a quiet house, where we did not toot our own horns, or anyone else's horn, and we mostly tried to find ways to not call attention to ourselves. I was once overlooked, gift-wise, when Santa came to my preschool. I waited until after Christmas to tell Mom. Sometimes I wondered if perhaps we were in the Witness Protection Program.

So I went to school, did my work, did not get in trouble, did not do much of anything in fact, and my 2nd grade teacher called in my parents to voice concern about my shyness. Yes, that’s how you help a shy girl, tell her you’re worried about how shy she is.

Then in 4th grade I wrote a story inspired by a science fiction book I had read. The story was really good. And long. And the teacher called my parents to say that she thought I was a good writer.

In high school I wrote a memoir about visiting my grandma in Nebraska in the summer and spending nights on her sleeping porch with the scent of lilacs drifting up from the yard. It was published in an anthology of student work designed for teachers of writing (published by Boynton/Cook Publishers, look it up if you don’t believe me).

In college I wrote a little dialogue between Plato and Socrates that had my stodgy old Rhetoric professor giggling.

Six years ago in a continuing education writing class I wrote some vignettes about a particularly pathetic year I spent in Portland as a twenty-two year old and I had a whole room full of very good writers laughing so much I sometimes had to pause for a moment so they could hear what came next.

I had discovered the secret of getting attention without costumes or loud noises or singing or performing or even being there, necessarily. If people don’t want to read what I write, they don’t have to. Not like the sitar player downtown, who forces his music on everyone who passes, and even expects coins in his music case – so unseemly!

I try to be as funny and fluent and poignant as I can be, all by myself, quietly, not bothering anyone, at my computer or notebook. So that when somebody reads it, I might get a smile, or a nod, or hear a thoughtful, “hmm.” Or, the best prize: a full-on guffaw. For a moment I’ll have someone’s complete attention, and they’ll really understand how it is, or how it was, or how I imagine it to be, because I’ve written it.

On Being Edited -Christy

After college I moved to Seattle, into a two-bedroom apartment with three girls from school (one of whom slept on the couch in nothing but nylons every night, but that’s another story). At first, life was bleak, and not just because of the cramped quarters. I didn’t have a car and the only job I could find was as a sales clerk at Victoria’s Secret. Taking the bus to downtown Seattle to spend the day re-folding undies and bras plucked off the dressing room floor was not, I thought, a good use of my shiny new degree in Journalism.

Then one day I got a break. My roommate, an intern in the PR department at Microsoft, landed me an interview with the Copy Chief of Corporate Communications—the head of all the marketing and communications writers. Despite the fact that I took the wrong bus and arrived late and, perhaps worse, wore a really bad hound’s tooth suit, Tony and I clicked. He had done his graduate work at the same School of Journalism and we shared (and loved) the same advisor. Tony made a call to Dr. White; I'll admit I had been a bit of a teacher’s pet so he gave me a stellar recommendation. I got the job in December of 1988 and thus began my lifelong love of being edited.

The department consisted of six writers and six copy editors; nothing ever went to print without your editor scrutinizing it several times. This was the best education in writing that I ever had. These people were serious. These people earned their money on my crappy copy. But I loved it. When I’d get a piece back that had been routed through editorial I’d grab a fresh cup of coffee, close the door to my office and pore over the red hieroglyphic marks. Then I’d open the document, make the corrections, and print my deliciously flawless pages.

Until then, I’d never had the pleasure of being edited on a regular, daily basis. I miss it terribly. This piece could definitely have used an editor. To me being edited is like scratching a mosquito bite, the way it feels good and bad at the same time. Sure you feel like an ass for being caught making dumb mistakes, but reading that freshly edited page, free of errors…well, I guess you might have to be a writer to appreciate how that feels a lot like getting into clean sheets that someone else has washed and put on the bed.

Every Wednesday night the Lithia Writers critique group gathers. I love Wednesday, love the writing group, but if I’m honest about what I love most it it’s not the discussion about what I’ve brought, the talk about content, momentum, tension, and all that. No, it’s about Thursday morning when I get a fresh cup of coffee, close the door to my office, and pore over the four new sets of marked-up pages. It’s about scratching that mosquito bite.

Words of War -Jennie

While the rest of the world was at work last week, I smugly stirred cinnamon into a decaf Americano at a swanky little coffeehouse. My husband was at work, the kids were at school, and although I don’t drink coffee, it seemed like a very writer-ish thing to do.

So there I am, stir, stir, and this smart-looking stranger sidles over to me at the “bar,” and slides me the front page of the New York Times. “What do you think of this?” he asks.

It’s a half-page photo of an American soldier, dead on a street in Iraq.

I push it back. “I don’t look at that war stuff,” I say. “I don’t read about it or watch it on TV. It makes me too sad.”

Suddenly my coffee looks like mud.

The stranger sizes me up through his smart glasses. “What do you do about it, then?”

I stir and stir and think for a minute.

“Well,” I tell him. “I teach writing. And I’ve had quite a few veterans in my classes. They write and write and write about the war.”

I don’t tell him, but there have been stories about the sewage stench of Kandahar, a Taliban ambush on Valentine’s Day, the helicopter ride home with a body-bagged buddy.

“I listen,” I tell him.

He nods, satisfied, and leaves.

It’s a small part, listening. But maybe it’s important. Maybe if we were all better listeners, there’d be fewer wars in the first place.

To get into flow I… -Kerry

-have to drink several cups of boiled water with one green tea bag (organic, because I am in Ashland) that I leave in the bottom of the cup, hoping it will give me somewhat of a caffeine buzz since I’m officially “off” caffeine.
-have completed my workout, on most days this translates to walking my children a mile to school (a very long, arduous mile in their definition).
-have complete quiet, which means that all three kids are in school and day care.
-have ritualistically eaten breakfast (egg and veggie omelet) and taken my list of worries out of my head and onto paper.
-wrestle with the distraction of the internet, which is readily available to me on my laptop as I write. I am seduced momentarily by a local news article, then I check my email, look at my bank account, read about a new diet, then suddenly flagellate myself for getting off course. I’m supposed to be writing a query letter, instead I’m websurfing.
-Finally, when I do start to write, my head fills with thoughts so quickly my fingers can’t fly fast enough. I am finally hooked, eyes on the screen, absorbed, happy for now….

The Art of Being Consistent - Marcia

Monday through Friday between 1:00 and 1:15 an angular old gentleman, heavily stooped, headed at a determined pace down the sidewalks of East Main Street, over the Bear Creek Bridge, to his lunch spot—my husband’s restaurant, Deli Down. On the rare occasion that he drove, he selected a beater, mud-clotted Datsun pick-up. He wore pretty much the same attire year-round, adding a v-neck sweater in winter to his khakis, button down shirt, and sensible brown shoes. His name was Dunbar Carpenter. He was 92 years old. He was my husband’s customer for twenty years.

His order was always the same: veggie sandwich with mustard, lettuce, tomato, and cheddar, fruit salad, and milk. On Fridays he whooped it up a little bit by adding bacon to his sandwich.

Fruit salad is not on the menu. But after ten years of eating his greens, either Dunbar got bored, or his doctor told him to up his fiber. Somehow it happened that for the last decade Dunbar’s fruit salad got made fresh every morning. His white soup bowl mounded with mango and honeydew was stored in the walk-in near the wrapped packets of mozzarella and smoked cheddar until the bandy-legged man appeared in the doorway with his Harvard Review tucked under his arm.

Dunbar never placed an order. As soon as his name was called out in greeting the crew set into motion putting his lunch together. My husband usually carried out the tray both as a sign of respect, and to banter with him about pollinating our pears, weird fungus on the Sweet Millions, and how far apart to plant the corn.

Up and Comers, Movers and Shakers eyed Dunbar’s fruit salad with envy and understood why he went straight to his table without needing to stand with the dozens of others at the counter. The unknowing were clueless as to who the quiet old guy with the newspaper was, and why he was treated with almost hushed reverence by those who wished they had the nerve to “network” with him. This was just not done. He had a trusted circle, and it was accepted that they could talk across tables with him if the Deli wasn’t too crowded.

Dunbar was one of Medford’s, if not the valley’s, heaviest hitters. The Carpenter Foundation or Carpenter Family name is inscribed on everything of significance in this region. I’m not kidding, everything. His property, comprised of pear orchards, grape vines, and pastures, cuts a wide swath through what used to be the outskirts of Medford. It now delineates the old rich from the new, now housed in their McMansions on the petticoats of Roxy Ann Peak.

There was no denying Dunbar’s influence, but for us he was mostly part of our “Deli family”-- One of those customers that over time just became part of the fabric of our lives.

The beauty of the daily ritual, the ordinary schedule, the simple routine is that mountains can be made, friendships can be forged, old vines can bear their fruit-- Dunbar’s greatest lesson for a serendipitous gal like me.

One of our favorites died this week. I’m sure for some time to come I’ll imagine I see him walking bent and bandy, over the Bear Creek Bridge. I know my husband will pause in his morning routine as he automatically starts to pick out a good melon for Dunbar.

One Writer, One Character, No Imagination

I’ve been rooting through old writings of mine, dusty notebooks in slightly unfamiliar handwriting, documents in ancient computer font, and I’ve discovered that apparently, I’ve just got the one protagonist. And man, is she busy. She appears in a story about a run-down apartment in Cincinnati overrun with cockroaches; she’s in a halfway finished novel about a girl who thinks she has met Nancy Drew in real life; she goes to Portland after college to establish her new life in a positively gripping coming-of-age novel; and, imagine my surprise when she pops up in the book I’m now writing about a teenage girl forced to moved to a cohousing development.

She’s white, middle class, relatively smart albeit naive, dry sense of humor, a bit in her head, a bit insecure…hey, wait a minute, she sounds strangely familiar…

How do people do it? How do you write a character that is not you? Am I so egotistical that I cannot put myself in someone else’s shoes long enough to write a five fricking page story?

But, really, if good writing is authentic detail, the ring of truth, then writing someone who is different from you is just guesswork, shots in the dark, right? I think this character would like a blueberry muffin for breakfast, but I KNOW that I like Raisin Bran, and could describe the perfect ratio of crunchy flake to sugary raisin, and how disappointing it is when you take a bite and realize too late that there are about four too many raisins. I don’t know the ring of truth for a muffin. I guess I could make one up, but it sounds like a lot of work.

An agent once told me that every writer’s first book is in some way autobiographical. I nodded; I said, “Mmmm sure that makes sense;” I made a note in my spiral. I didn’t think it would all of a sudden be ten years later and I would not have been able to shake my doppelganger protagonist.

Maybe she has something to tell me that I still haven’t gotten. Maybe once a story of mine reveals that I actually understand her, I’ll be able to move on. She’ll just disappear, walk into the light like the ghosts do after Jennifer Love-Hewitt helps them cross over in The Ghost Whisperer.

Seeing Red - Jennie

My college writing students blink at the “red” on their papers.

No, it isn’t the ink color (I always edit in green). It is the abbreviation for “redundant,” and it demands omission.

Last Wednesday, I blogged about being cut. A top agent had passed on my middle grade manuscript – “for now” – with a list of practical suggestions. In essence, I was the cut-ee.

This was karma, because mostly, I am the cutter. I draw green lines through my students’, private clients’, and the Lithia girls’ words, paragraphs, pages, or – ouch! – entire chapters.

It even extends to leisure reading. I would have shaved off the last 151 pages from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. There was something so visual, so tight and (ironically) clean, about the women sloshing through mud and mosquitoes on their exodus from Africa. It was satisfying enough – without having the next 25 years plotted out and crammed in the conclusion.

I would have nixed the first few chapters of the 2008 Printz Award-winning The White Darkness. Those extra 3,000 words derailed the reader’s interest, and, frankly, were irrelevant.

At the 2007 Big Sur Children’s Writing Conference, Nancy Lamb, author of The Writer’s Guide to Crafting Stories for Children, gave it to us straight: “If it doesn’t move the story forward, it goes out.”

Thank you, Nancy; more is not more. (By the way, Lamb’s literary bible is a succinct 232 pages.)

Before you submit your work, ready your “red.” You may be among the writers who win contests, who get agents, who publish, not for what they wrote, but for what they didn’t write.

Writing Reality -Kerry

One of my biggest dreams when I was editor of the high school newspaper was to be a published author. As soon as I saw my name in print in my first article for the paper titled, "Places to go for off-campus lunch" I was hooked on this writing thing. As I pasted up the print for the paper with a glue gun over a light table, I dreamed of being an author of my own book, a reporter for the Associated Press and maybe even a freelance travel writer. I fantasized about my life as an author, how it would feel to sign books and see my name on the cover. Of course, I still had to pass my sociology final and take a few other credits before I could advance to this next level.

When my book made it onto the shelves at Powell's Bookstore in Portland a few years ago, I realized that although I had attained a long held dream, it didn't feel exactly like I thought it would. Don't get me wrong, it felt great, and I cried openly in the aisle when I saw the book on the shelf for the first time. But there were other feelings involved with this author thing, too. I kept thinking, "so this is what it feels like?" followed by "now what do I do?"

I realized that seeing my name in print, whether it be a byline in a newspaper, magazine or book, will always be thrilling. I also realized that my dreams of being a writer really all boil down to one thing, writing because it makes me feel good to practice my craft every day. And that's enough of a dream for me right now.

My Brilliant Career - Marcia

Cynthia Ringer was my first boss after college. She was a big woman in a blue polyester suit with a white blouse and mock tie. Sometimes she wore a little jabot. Her hair was completely shorn at the back with a bristly red cockscomb at the top to maintain a semblance of femininity. I worked in the copy room. Sometimes she made me sharpen her pencils.

On one of my pencil-sharpening days, she took a quiet moment to appraise me. I was wearing my favorite red paisley genie pants, red deerskin booties, and a blue ruffled Pony Express shirt. My massive head of hair was spouting from a pony tail like a volcanic eruption—only brown.

“If you’re going to make it,” she said, “You’re going to have to cut your hair and wear a suit.”

It was about this same time that my well-intentioned mother dragged me off to a seminar called something like, “Your Future as a Woman in Business.”

“But Mom, I don’t want a future in business,” I said, buttoning up my red ruffled Pony Express shirt and dusting off my open-toed gold leather shoes.

We did the Myers Briggs test. I’m an ENTP. I can’t remember what that means except that I’m extroverted. (In recent years I tested out as an ENTF) It turned out that day, that I should have headed toward being a film director or an attorney. Spectacular choices. Who doesn’t want to be a movie director! Not me. Stuuuuuubbbborn. I wanted to be a writer!

Our hostess that day guided us through an exercise.

“Close your eyes, and imagine yourself ten years from now. What do you see?”

The vision was immediate. Me at my typewriter, in my beautiful, sunlit studio, looking down on the phlox and delphinium in my English garden, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I’m skinny, about six inches taller and look like Jane Fonda. (I’m sure I’d read “Pentimento” by then, and had probably just seen “Julia.”)

Whatever the woman was saying about computers and banking went right over my head. I wanted that window, that ocean. That cool empty room. A life where I could sit and spin, weave and imagine--Words. My first love.

Funny, as I was leaving that copy room job to head off for a year in Europe, the director of the company asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him.

“Well, then,” he said, “you better marry rich.”

Director, attorney, rich husband . . . All good choices . . . Not me . . . I’m stubborn.

But, I am a writer.

On the Stalking of Peers -Christy

If you are lucky enough to secure representation by a big-time Literary Agent, here are three things you should never do:

#1 Never put your Literary Agent’s name on Google Alerts so that you can be notified every damn time they make a sale or sign a client.

#2 Never collect a list of other writers they represent, either culled by disregarding my #1 piece of advice or by typing the agent’s name into Amazon to see which authors thank her/him in their acknowledgments, or by any other cunning method yet unknown to me.

#3 If you’ve already gone as far as #2, for God’s sake do not, for any reason, spend an evening web-hunting the writers who have made it on this list. You must realize that writers will only list successes on their blogs/websites, which, after reading, will lead directly to some serious self loathing.

There’s a reason most agents don't tell their clients the names of their other clients. Because reading the chipper websites and blogs of writers recently signed to your agent, all full of hope and promise and – ugh – good news, can do nothing positive for your writing. If you’re looking to get a bleeding ulcer they’re top notch, other than that there’s no reason to do this kind of stalking research.

Maybe this whole path to publication, which for me has been one gigantic, slowly meted dose of discomfiture, is designed to toughen you up for when your manuscript is published and gets reviewed. Maybe it’s like how being unable to sleep well while pregnant prepares you for the next decade of sleep deprivation. Or maybe my manuscript just sucks.

I don’t know much but I do know this: Google Alerts is a gateway drug to full-blown peer stalking and the inevitable ego mangling that it induces. I wish I’d never taken that first hit, because now I can’t stop...

Box Score - Julie

About a year ago I bought a little green steno pad at the grocery store. See, my life felt like it was whizzing by at an alarming rate, days melting into weeks, weeks into months and what? My son is 8?! I needed a way to make time stand still for a bit, so I could see what it was all about, keep track of it, not lose it as quickly as I lived it. And since I am a lazy photographer…and since I fancy myself a writer…enter the steno pad.

I write two steno pages every Sunday, and have for ten months, without fail, feet tucked under me, coffee balanced on the arm of the chair. I start with the previous Monday, and sift through the days, see what my mind catches, remembers, what gave shape to that particular day. Not everything makes it. The steno is small.

These are words that my writing group will never see; nothing from these pages will make it into any work of fiction or otherwise that I write for public consumption; I’m sorry, Natalie Goldberg, I will never go back through and highlight passages that are good. There is nothing ‘good.’ It’s a record.

There’s an X-Files episode where Agent Mulder is trying to explain to Agent Scully why he’s obsessed with reading the baseball box scores in the paper.

You’d like it, Scully. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of baseball into one tiny, perfect rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me.

A trip to the beach, a tense situation with a student, worries about Sam, trying to get three pages of something to take to writing group, Christmas present nightmares, contempt for yardwork, conversations with Miles, trying to eat better, in-law gatherings, drinks with friends, gum surgery...on Sunday, coffee balanced on the arm of the chair, it all gets sifted and acknowledged, and reflected upon, and distilled into one tiny perfect rectangular sequence of words.

Writing the Wrong - Jennie

I did everything I was supposed to do.

I drafted a manuscript, revised, attended a conference, re-revised, hooked up with a respectable agent, re-re-revised, submitted, and waited… for a rejection?

The agent passed with a lengthy list of suggestions for – you guessed it – revision. Basically, only three things were wrong: character, setting, and, oh, yeah – plot.

Consolations from the Lithia girls flooded my inbox. Family and friends asked, “Are you okay?”

Like them, I had thought I would die. I thought I would cry. I thought for sure I would stuff myself silly with rocky road fudge.

But none of this happened.

Because that rejection was actually an amazing event.

Columnist Bob Greene knows what I mean. Cut from the seventh grade basketball team, he writes: “…For all of my life since that day, I have done more work than I had to be doing… put in more hours than I needed to be spending… never to allow someone to tell me I’m not good enough again.”

I hear you, Bob.

On Rejection Day, I did what I said I would never do: I started another book. I’m working harder, writing better.

I’ll re-re-re-revise that first manuscript this summer. After I finish this current book. Because I owe it to the new character who saved my life – or at least my Body Mass Index.

Blogs and Births: Shaken, But Not Stirred -Kerry

I gave birth to a book and a baby on the same day. I started writing that book, “Vineyard Memoirs”, when I was three months pregnant with the aforementioned baby, a girl, our third and last child. I have a picture of myself laying in the hospital bed in my blue and white flowered hospital gown about to start my inducement (my babies, like my books, never seem to come quickly or on time). I am cradling the fed-ex box filled with my manuscript with a loopy grip on my face.

Birthing both of these things on one day was a fine example of how I lived my life.

“What doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger,” said one wise, ancient Greek philosopher. Or, in my words, the words of a mother of three children in 2008, “what doesn’t destroy me still makes me exhausted.”

During the gestation of both the baby and the book, I often felt fatigued but determined. I doggedly decided that since I had not choice in delivering the baby, I could give myself no choice in delivering the book, too.

I hired a sixth-grader named Lauren to babysit while I wrote, while I could still sustain a thought that wasn’t clouded by seriously climbing estrogen levels. I figured the more I accomplished in the second trimester, the better. Lauren worked out for about a month, while I typed away she took the kids on fun picnics in the field down the street and played with them on the slip n’ slide. The downside came when my daughter told me, “Those guys that come to meet Lauren on our picnics are funny.” Enter writing plan B.

Plan B entailed shuttling the kids to my in-laws house, my parent’s house, and anyone I’d called a friend in the last twenty years. Surprisingly, the pregnancy exhaustion card played well in these situations, as I my ankles were truly starting to swell and I had to sit down, conveniently. Why not make it a writing session while I was resting with my feet up, doctors orders?

By the ninth month, I was having serious shortness of breath due to the fact that my waist and ribcage had merged into one giant belly. This made for interesting telephone interviews, during which I sounded like a wheezy chronic smoker or a 1-800 sex talk applicant.

Of course, this experience also made me elated, to have given birth to yet another beautiful, healthy child and finished a manuscript that had been twenty years in the making. I can’t think of another twenty-four hour period in my life, save the births of my other children, my wedding or graduation from college in which I felt such almost unbearable lightness. Except perhaps now, with the encouragement of the four talented writers in my writing group, as I give birth, so to speak, to my first blog, ever. Whew.

Sometimes I Pretend It's Seaweed - Marcia

I have let the roses grow up over the window where I sit to write. The big climber blocks the view of Jerry’s driveway and Earl’s garage. This way I can’t watch George making his way past with Lucy the beagle, Beth walking by with Bailey the corgi, or sullen teenagers in black hoodies and cigarette-leg jeans, moping along wishing they were smoking and could actually ride the skateboards they carry under their arms. I like the emerald green lozenges of light, and the way they juxtapose with the bare branches of the Liquid Amber. Sometimes I pretend it is seaweed and I am underwater.

Any writing I do now is fragmentary, like the small green rose leaves. Bits of beautiful spangled foliage, but mine aren’t attached to any stem, they flutter around and disappear. But just writing helps me feel connected to something greater than myself.

I have about ten minutes before my horde comes home. I have to decide whether to eat a taco, try to write my blog, go to the gym, put in a load of towels, or head to Safeway to buy the New York Times Review of Books. Every Sunday I say I’m going to do this. I never do. I decide on the taco.

My young writing was all angst and sex and the desire for love, my writing now is all neighborhood and kids, and in some way is less embarrassing. I write directly from life. I don’t have time to invent anything.

I am the techno-tard in this group. I never read email, have only checked out one old flame on My Space, have no idea who to Google, and have never sent a text message.

I am being forced into this century by my persistent writing group. Secretly, though, I still write on an old Underwood. It is my favorite thing to write on or with. The feel of the keys is so silky and cool and solid. I love the ratchet and ding of the return. Results are immediate, concrete, black and white. Work never disappears, is accidentally deleted, or eaten by a virus. The shadows of the rose leaves fall across my black and chrome baby. Saying come to me, be writerly. It makes me want to write just to feel the keys beneath my fingers, and watch the inky letters punch their way onto the paper.

It's Just That Good - Christy

I’m the kind of person who never misses a meal, even if I have to take beta blockers in order to deal with the social anxiety of sitting with hundreds of strangers. So last year at a writing workshop that I attended without the camaraderie of my writing group, I tried to time it so I’d arrive for dinner right as the dreaded “wine reception” was ending. Unfortunately, when I got there it was in full swing so I had to grab a drink and make a few laps, hoping for someone to grab my arm and say something, anything, to me. While social, even gregarious, in many ways, I am absolutely incapable of walking up to a cluster of strangers and joining in the conversation, especially if the topic is oneself and one’s writing.

Dizzy from my fruitless laps, I took my wine and slipped out of a side door into the wet, black night where I found a fellow writer having a smoke—a very bold choice at a Children’s Writing Workshop. I liked her instantly and we struck up a friendship that lasted through the conference and even beyond; we emailed for awhile and she sent me some new work to edit and I felt like we had a good thing going. Until I sent her a book. It was my absolute favorite book on writing, a gem that I reread at least once a year—Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life. And then I never heard from her again. Not a peep.

I feel weird about it, and I think about her and the book every now and then and get that icky cringe sensation. But I can’t stop giving that book away. If anyone within earshot mentions that they’ve thought about writing, I note their address and send it off. In fact, I sent one off yesterday to a woman I met on my trip to Palenque who is full of stories waiting to be set free. When I was checking out of Amazon I looked through my account history and saw that I had given the book away 16 times—four of those even after it ended a relationship! It’s just that good.

If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to order it in hardcover so you can reread it yearly as I do. Or, if you’re at a Writers Workshop and see a woman walking laps and trying to look as if she has a destination, for the love of God grab her arm and introduce yourself! You might find a box from Amazon on your porch not long after.

-Christy

Willa Cather, Natalie Golberg and Carolyn Keene -Julie

Last night was writers' group. We all bring a few pages of something we're working on, with copies for all, and after the not-writing-related but oh so necessary venting, whining, and general getting-up-to-date-ing, we get down to it. Each person reads, then we give feedback.

I'm working on a little YA novel, centering around a co-housing community. I brought three pages I hated. Well, not hated exactly, but pages which made me question what the hell I think I'm doing, writing. It just seemed flat, forced, uninspired. I blame Willa Cather and Natalie Goldberg. There, I've said it. I was rereading Writing Down the Bones to possibly use in the creative writing class I teach at our high school (and I must stop here to recall the Fancy East Coast Editor I met at a conference who said never to mention in any submission that you are a Teacher and a Mom, like it not only reveals what a cliche you are as a writer, but also as a human being, but this may be another blog...). So I'm reading Natalie Goldberg who is all about filling up those notebooks -- one a month! -- and writing from your gut and cutting through the crap to get to what's true and real and in my twenties I was like yeah, exactly, that's so right on, but now I'm like, who has the time? And yet, my three pages? Flat, forced and uninspired.

Then I read a story by Willa Cather, "Paul's Case." And she writes sentences like this (many, in fact, in a row):

After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colourless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.

Sheesh. That was neither flat, forced OR uninspired. I could go my whole life and not write a sentence that cool.

Which brings me to Carolyn Keene, that nom de plume for all the capable writers churning out safe, predictable mysteries for young readers. I honestly like these books and went through a period in my thirties when I reread about 20 of them. But I also enjoying saying to myself, on my way to the coffeeshop to meet my friends, my writers, my three pages are definitely better than a Nancy Drew, right?

That's the real Secret of the Wooden Lady,

Julie