reconstructive surgery

A few weeks ago, as prelude to reading the pages I'd ponied up for workshop, I realized that I'd reached that point where the information I now have about my characters needs to be woven into the earlier chapters.

Typically, we wait until completing an entire first draft before attempting this, lest we act out of premature assumption. I get this, truly I do. But for me, it's like reaching a plateau on a climb up a steep mountain. You know all about false summits, but still, you stop and admire the landscape beneath and retool for the rest of the climb. Perspectives shift, periodically, and imho it's never a bad time to align oneself with this dynamic, shifting perspective.

Not everyone can or should honor this process, I understand, but I know enough about the peaks and valleys of my own creative sensibilities to listen to this whisper in my ear. I'm at the print-out and rewrite stage, and so my forward progress will come from the center, rather than the end for this next little while. As for the word count? It may shrink. But then again, maybe not.

leftovers, anyone?

Disgusting, right? Far more easier to tolerate when the noodles you throw at the wall haven't been steeped in sauce.

In the world of selling writing, strategizing a home for your pages, then following that up with cover letters and evidence and sparkling opening paragraphs is a bit more complex than hurling pasta against the wall, but the outcome is the same. If it's done, it sticks; if it's not, it slides to the floor.

But the "doneness," well, the criteria for that involves many more factors than the level of durum saturation. First and foremost is a keen sense of who your audience is...what they're reading, what they can't put down. You have to play to that. If everyone's on the South Beach Diet, your pasta's going to wind up in your basement, under your Rubbermaid tub of teenage diaries and art projects. Hypothetically speaking.

The market is fickle. More fickle than ever. Tastes have changed, but the impulse to get lost in story has not. The same themes that have always tantalize, continue to do so.

I wrote a novel several years ago. The character was wrestling with mortality, and the decision whether or not to bear a child. It was birth:death, death:birth, side-by-each, with other Maslow's hierarchy considerations sprinkled about for good measure.

The novel remains unpublished, but recently, whilst cleaning the funnel webs from my basement, there it was! A dampened, mildew-infested manuscript daring me to open it up and re-engage. Oddly, upon reading, I wasn't disgusted. It was relatively serviceable spaghetti, there on the page. Ingestible, even.

I've decided to throw it against a few more walls before tossing it into the dumpster entirely. As a timeless, nourishing read, it deserves at least that.

virally we roll along

A short and rather marginally informative piece appeared in publisher's weekly today about social networking and selling books. The article skimmed the relationship between sites like facebook with POD companies like lulu and Scribd.

The upshot? Book peddlers of the old school, beware! You want to create a buzz, you're going to have to embrace the new way of getting the word out. Whether by twitter, by writing on virtual "walls" or by befriending the entire state of Arkansas via a revved up Internet connection, reaching your audience involves more than just writing a damn good book.

the hospital

The other day, as dusk fell on an unexpectedly mild and sunny day in the Pacific Northwest, I felt eager to get back to work, to sink my teeth into something transformative. I wanted to find out what happened to Frances, and her sister, who I've just left in the ICU, in a coma. I was itching to return to Messmeier clan and all of their conundrums and escapades. Alas, I've been buried with work and a few real-life wrinkles, so Frances is frozen on my hard drive. Her poor sister, still in the coma.

As far as the nature of the aforementioned "wrinkles," in an odd art-and-life coincidence, this past week two people in my circle have been or are in the hospital. One good friend had a hip replacement, and now she's recovering at home, looking forward to increased mobility and lessening pain. The other real person in the hospital is my elderly mother-in-law. LOLFDGB is how irreverent doctors refer to her: Little Old Lady Fall Down Go Boom. Luckily, her children have been by her side every waking minute to advocate in her behalf.

Hospitals have largely become warehouses in situations like this. People, reduced to cruel acronyms and sporadic notes on charts. My mother-in-law's clinical profile has rendered her medication-dependent, and her meds have been given late or not at all. Her assessment by a physical therapist was delayed, and her food also delivered haphazardly.

My hip replacement friend had a similar experience. A candy striper answered her call to use the bathroom after 45 minutes, and then proceeded to assist her while conversing on her cell phone, and in the process ignored the fact that she was an orthopedic patient and swung my friend's leg off of the bed as though it was a door she was slamming.

The system, in a word, sucks. Nurses and doctors as individuals can be amazing, caring people, but the economics of our medical system are so grossly unbalanced and dictated by insurance companies, that "care" has been reduced to insurance codes, billing statements and pressure to free up beds for the next LOLFDGB.

Since TSTL has more than a few hospital scenes, and my main character is a med-student-turned-research-scientist who's husband is the senior cost analyst for a major teaching hospital, this ever-saddening reality of acute treatment is something I need to embrace, penetrate and make issue of within the novel.

It's heavy stuff, and universal. I am very eager to sink into the fictionalization of it all, for it is there, as it always is, that the undercurrent of humanity will begin to bubble up for me.

the Internet Sabbath

Amongst the modern, creative, super-busy folk of my acquaintance, the Sabbath has gone the way of fish on Fridays and cloth scapulars. The separation of life and work for a freelancer is particularly vexing. I turn on my machine, and, voila, my inbox cometh.

A week or so ago I made a decision to mitigate the constant flow of incoming by leaving my laptop off on Sundays. Not just turned off, but off of the dining room table, where it is normally stationed, back-to-back with my husband's laptop.

Today, Monday, I'm happy to report that I resisted the "on" button for the most part. I did sneak a peek at the details of a Super Bowl Party evite (I'd forgotten what we were supposed to bring), but turned the machine off right after that. Put the sucker back in its little black tote.

A few times during the day, and a bunch of times during the evening, I had occasion to be bowled over by the familiar craving: the Facebook posts, the blogs I follow, the fat and sassy inbox! But the day felt, well, saner. Much saner, actually. I've resisted the iPhone, BlackBerry thing for good reason. With my obsessive tendencies, I need built-in respite. Constantly communicating, posting, twittering without boundary, for me, is a ticket to psychic mayhem.

In the interest of reportage, here are the things I did instead of being online:
Wrote a thank you note (on old fashioned notepaper)
Sat with my son while he wrote thank you notes
Took a bath
Took my son to the skate park
Went to the book store
Went to a birthday party
Went to a wedding reception
Went to a Super Bowl party until half time and was mesmerized by Bruce's bouncy joints and energy
Came home for the second half and watched, in disappointment, as the underdogs lost in the last minute
Hung out with Kirk and Carson all evening
Read Carson a really cool book on the French Revolution
Ate a lot of food (too much, truth be told)
Snuggled on the couch with Kirk after Carson went to bed
Went to bed before 10 p.m.

In between, of course, I had to quell the pangs of my addiction, but, on the whole, my day was calmer and more centered than any other that week. I guess that's the point. I'll let you know after I answer or corral the eighty emails in my box.

do Web sites sell books?

Unlike many writers who lament the fact that their work-a-day lives steal time from their novel, poetry and short story writing, I love what I do. Extracting the essence of a person, a service, a product, and being part of a team that comes up with a Web presence for that entity is at least as fun as concocting fake people and perplexing conundrums. That is why I was thrilled to run across this New York Times article on Web sites for authors in my due-diligence perusal this afternoon.

(image is from "Sign Language for Infidels" from Sloan Crosley's Web site)
Seems that the verdict is still out on whether Web sites positively impact book sales, but, more and more, they're becoming a vehicle for setting the tone (or brand, if I may be so brash) that surrounds the gestalt of the book and/or the author. As Internet interactivity becomes increasingly a consumer expectation (and, I think we're just grazing the iceberg on this one), the original object associated with prose will need to evolve in order to compete.

Last week Time Magazine offered some food for thought on the digital age impact on books. It's not just about audience preference. As publishers fight to keep their doors open, they are considering revamping the age-old system of the "author advance," as well as the consignment arrangement publishers have with booksellers, where they finance shipping and overstock. Kindle is gaining traction, as more and more readers opt for immediacy, less bulk and greener ways to receive inspiration and entertainment.

Here's the most frightening (to this writer, anyway), development, the Time article points to ways that novels are being separated from the dollar, meaning, everyone's a novelist! Even if the medium is an iPhone, and even if the price is free. Yikes!

To sum up my thoughts on this, taking into consideration the following (from the Time article):"The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name," and understanding that if it's a choice between commodifying the novel (or short story, or poem etc...) via a stunning and creative Web interface, or just declaring the whole damn channel "open source," and, at the risk of sounding like I'm buttering both sides of my bread, I'm all for sexing up our marketing efforts to ensure that writers aren't forever relegated to the exit ramps of Interstates with their proverbial cardboard signs.

more! more! more!

Five more notable blogs. And, I must warn you, these blogs are included purely for their entertainment value rather than the gravity of their prose or elegance of design.

The criteria here being: voice, humor, originality and reprieve from the doldrums of winter.

In no particular order, five fun blogs:

Chelsea talks smack.

Misconnecting in the city.

Post Secret.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

and my all-time favorite funny blogger, Jennifer Weiner (who, btw, has been blogging longer than almost anyone).

That's all for now!

10 blogs of note

Here are 10 blogs worth following, imho:

Seattle a la mode

Book Square

Ms. Zig Zag

Laila Lalami

Pub Rants

The Gospel According to Marc

cake wrecks

Blue Mouse Monkey

Powell's Blog

Sara Nelson (Publisher's Weekly)

I've been challenged to come up with 15 blogs, actually, but will, for now, leave it at these 10 that I read with relative frequency. I will accept the challenge to find an additional five worthy of note (and time), but for now, above are 10 that I find diverse, entertaining, instructive and full of personality! (And good writing.)

the 44th president takes office

In an hour and a half, we'll all be watching our new president take his oath of office and give his inaugural address. There is a feeling of being on the lip of something—like watching the lunar landing in the late '60's. I was a few years younger than my son, Carson, when we took "one giant step for mankind," but I absorbed the multitude of adult expectation and enthusiasm that filled the air around me, and it is with me still.

Kennedy's assassination and September 11^th were other occasions where the collective consciousness of a people permeated my sensibilities as an isolated figure. Well, maybe not Kennedy's killing, as I was an infant living in a foreign country—but certainly my frame of reference was influenced by that day.

What's different about this event today—than any event I can remember—is that unity has crossed the color barrier. As a six-year-old I joined my mother and younger sister, celebrating the life of a black man who had changed the lives of the people with whom we marched. The people in that marching mass were "colored," according to my father. He did not take part. Having just moved to this country from a very white, albeit internationally so, part of Europe, it was curious to me how people found their way in the pecking order of things. As a foreigner, complete with a Mary Poppins accent, I was keenly tuned to social stratification. Who was "better" than whom? Clearly, the demonstrators were "worse" than the onlookers.

"We shall overcome," we sang along with the colored people. Overcome what? I thought. My accent? My short hair? My smallness? (Having started school a year earlier than my American counterparts, my mother had enrolled me in the second grade, making my scrawniness all the more so.) The blackness of the marchers' skin unsettled me. They, like me, were "different," but I knew that I could lose my accent and grow my hair and get taller. All the things that made me "different" could and would change. I would overcome.

Today, millions of schoolchildren will be watching the Black Obamas as they move into the White House. I doubt that kids are going to feel a sense that the Obamas "overcame." If they feel anything, it'll be good old fashioned envy—like I had for the guy with the giant boots as he placed the American flag in a moon crater. "How cool," I thought—now that my rapid assimilation had allowed me that piece of slang. "How cool would it be to be that guy."

revolutionary road

Since my friend David left for Houston, I'd gotten out of the habit of sneaking off to opening day matinees. Probably a good idea, actually, because Friday is, after all, a WORK day. Well, with the opening of Mendes' version of Revolutionary Road, one of my all time favorite novels, I clocked myself out at lunch time and zoomed off to the downtown theater.

The opening scene was lovely. DiCaprio and Winslet finding each other in a crowded room and connecting deeply, immediately. Perhaps that was the best scene in the film. From there, the movie roared through passionate bursts of emotion and passivity in turn, as the actors wrinkled their foreheads, chain-smoked, drank and generally behaved badly for what was, to me, completely undeveloped and clichéd reasons. Thing was, when Yates wrote the novel in 1961 (the year of my birth btw), questioning the normative world was outré, not cliché. Yates, who suffered from depression and alcoholism, wrote first hand of abject discontent and illusive dreams. DiCaprio, though pretty and functional on the screen, really didn't embody Frank Wheeler the way I'd envisioned the character. And Winslet may have overplayed April, who as I recall, was a bit mousier in the novel.

As I sat there watching the arc play out, I grew anxious. I felt like smoking and sipping a martini and expressing my own angst—which is not where I want to be with my art. Not by a long shot. In the end, I left the theater before the final scene—something I never do. I could guess at the ending having read the book and all, and just talked myself out of enduring it just because I'd paid the $8+ (when did matinees lurch into near double-digits?), and I strode through the clearing, very cool air of January, wishing I could recapture that hour and twenty minutes.

David, when and if the film gets to Houston, give it a look-see and tell me what you think.

aim high

After a tumultuous couple of weather and holiday-challenged weeks, most of us gathered at my house for workshop last night. Because it was the January 1st, the proverbial day of best intentions, we set aside some time to discuss our “writing resolutions.”

Around the table we went, declaring our writing and publishing goals and imperatives for 2009.

Cheryl, Jim, Diana, Chuck, myself, Lidia, Chelsea and Monica all resolved to finish various projects. And, for the most part, sell ‘em.

After our brain dump, Chuck brought up something very important. It’s his opinion that if a resolution doesn’t scare or embarrass you to some degree, you haven’t aimed high enough. You have to open the door to, “Who the hell are you to deign to declare such a thing?”, if you really want to push the boundaries.

I’ve been in workshop with some of these folks for 15–16 years now. Chuck recalled the resolution that precipitated “Fight Club,” when we were sitting around the table at Tom Spanbauer’s house. He was still unpublished, having had “Invisible Monsters” rejected, and he was fueled, rather than discouraged, by a publishing world that declared him too “outre” for the common market. He’d resolved to write and sell a book by year’s end. He claims that his declaration was met by rolled eyes. But then, during the course of conversation, I remember the other thing he resolved all those years ago. It had to do with the meta world of publishing: readers and writers and the power of language.

“I will write something that will change the book industry. I’m going to re-invent language,” he stated. “I want to bring books to a population that isn’t reading.” In retrospect, I think THAT was the object of scoffs all around. The brave statement he made that flew in the face of humility.

But, we all know how that story came out, right? Not only did Fight Club get written and published, but in the year’s that followed, due in large part to Chuck’s hard work and prescience, and a Zeitgeist that formed around his ability to speak to a demographic of non-readers, he set in motion the energy that created a meteoric cult following, and the market for the umpteen books published since.

So. My resolutions: In 2009, I will finish The Secret to Love. I will finish Sustainable Romance. I will build my platform and establish myself as an indefatigable explorer of love on the page.

Happy New Year.

looking into the crackly fire

Ah, the crackle of the fire, the click of the keyboard, the shush of skis on a snowy glade, the fire of whiskey down the throat. It's all good.

Kirk and I have been holed up in Central Oregon, thanks to some very generous folks who loaned us their cabin. We've been skiing, walking, napping. We've made some fabulous meals, relaxed and played and worked a little too. (Where there's wi-fi, there's billable hours).

Last night I dreamt a little bit about my novel. Which is always a good sign, right? When your imagined world enters your nighttime fairy walk? There were vehicles involved, and I think they were driving off of cliffs. Or snow banks.

For years and years, I've wanted and resisted to throw a character into fatal peril via a Christmas tree truck. Seriously, way back in the early nineties, I had this scene all written out. It was near the end of a story, and I'd taken the Christmas holiday and twisted it up with a fatal collision. I deleted the scene, not wanting to tempt fate. After all, I'd foretold several disasters by writing about them: backed up septic systems, marital divide. I wasn't about to ring the dinner bell on a head-on collision with a Christmas tree truck.

But. I must write that very scene. My character who has seizures because of that scene needs her fifteen minutes in ICU. I know all the words, even: she'll have sustained a skull fracture with traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhages, which just so happens to be the cause of death listed on my first husband's death certificate.

My husband wasn't hit by a Christmas tree truck, btw. It was a teenager who'd fallen asleep at the wheel. Decades later, I've still not written a successful scene that captures the mood and the tone and emotion of extreme trauma. I want to do it with this novel. But at the same time, I'm chicken. I don't want the gods to punish me for looking into the fire, y'know? So far in this book there has been a suicide, cancer, stroke, marital infidelity, teenage pregnancy.. oh yeah, and homicide.

One tiny head trauma shouldn't be such a bump in the road with this clan, right? Well, in my novel, the last chapter I wrote ends with "that" phone call. Actually, the phone has merely rung. Nobody's picked up yet. Tomorrow's challenge: the news must be delivered, the siblings must react, the ICU must be visited.

I'll let you know how it goes.

time: quantity, quality and reality

STL update: I'm rounding the corner on 200 pages completed. Which means, I'm about half-done with the third revision of my first draft. (I daisy stitch when I write, always looping back and filling in).

I wish I were further than that, of course. I wish I had completed the third version of my first draft. Alas, it is not so. And tonight, with a prompt from my beloved, I see why. Adding up all the hours in a given week that are "givens": i.e. parenting, income-producing work, bare essential household tasks, all the hours between 6:45 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., Monday thru Friday, are taken up already. And this is without fun stuff or big projects added in. No going to the movies, hiking in the woods, cleaning out the basement.

Thanks to some very generous holiday benefactors, I'm enjoying a rare few days in a cabin. Just Kirk, me and my computer. The kids are elsewhere, and I've reduced my work load to a minimum for this traditional slow down Christmas through New Years, in hopes that I'll produce pages and pages and pages. So far, I've written six. But, the good news is that during the writing of those six pages, I had enough uninterrupted, no distractions time to uncover a big reveal which will tighten the book and meld the characters together in an unexpected and very welcome way. At least that's how it looks at the end of this very relaxed and productive day.

If your Christmas tree lights are on a timer and nobody's there to see them, are they really lit?

Christmas is a stone's throw away, temporally speaking, and we're holed up in Manzanita still, feeling pretty lucky but at the same time, off our pablum in that way that you get when you suddenly find yourself gutted of your routine.

I actually had plenty of time to work and write today, but it came in fits and starts. Most of the day I was being serenaded by my energetic nine-year-old and his friend: toy gun wars, inane sit-coms and action movies, the occasional squabble.

Then there's the food: breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack, snack, snack, dinner, snack. Clean-up around each. The origami attempt (who knew making an iris would be so hard?) The attempt to play Cranium with the youngsters: how could they not know how to make the anagram "Iron Curtain" out of "torn CIA ruin"? C'mon, don't they teach them anything in the 4th grade? (Cranium was the final straw for the husband, whose patience finally ran dry and he disappeared up into the ether of naps and Ann Rice books).

They've closed various highways between here and home. It's wet and cold here, at the coast, but icy, frigid and snow-slammed back in Portland. Our Christmas tree's timed lights are going on and off without us. Our neighbors are graciously filling our cat's food bowl. There's the weird feeling of unearned vacation. The scourge of the self-employed. And my novel not quite halfway done.

Kirk and I ventured into the night, which was actually somewhat starry and Wisemanish. We walked towards the beach, without the aid of the flashlights, which we stupidly left back at the house. Nobody else was out, of course. We stumbled about on the dark sand, narrowly missing the pools of ocean water. The slippery strands of kelp. But I loved the feeling of him right next to me while the enormity of the ocean roared and spit its waves our way. Nature's own timer: tide. Not bound by our work lives, or our prosaic response to the solstice, or the need to have every food group represented in order to call it a meal.

winter solstice treasure-hunting

I am in paradise. Kirk, Carson, a friend of his and myself are holed up at our good friend's beach house in Manzanita while 90 miles to the East ice and snow continue to torment the "so over it" city whence we hail. Even though we're above freezing out on the coast, it's a nasty, cold, wet winter day out here, so mostly, we're inside, nestled near the gas-powered fake fireplace. It's a sort of "I in my kerchief and mom in her hat," vacation. There are videos, puzzles, games and books in every nook and cranny. After dinner tonight we gathered up odd assorted objects and played a homemade version of "blockhead," trying to create precarious towers that wouldn't fall. Kirk and I played a "speed anagram" game called "My Word," which nearly resulted in fisticuffs!

There's lots of food here. And booze. We're set.

Our friends have appointed their house with many a book, and last night I pulled a random one out. A mystery type genre hardcover written by some well known author (well known enough to have her likeness encapsulate the entire back of the cover), and here's a sample of the language describing the main character's viewing of herself on the way to a party:

"As they descended to street level, she assessed her reflection in the metal elevator door and realized that her efforts hadn't been in vain."

It's not that that's a terrible sentence, it's just that it's not that interesting. If this person were in our workshop, we'd probably skewer her for a sentence like that. "Writerly language," we'd scribble on her pages. "Formal tropes."

But, hey, this gal has written, like, 60 books. Who am I to scold her for her received text? But, in my tragically elitist state, sentences like that can keep the lights on in bed for about 5 minutes, and then they begin to compete with other things I might be inclined to focus my attention on.

Ah, but all is not lost with regard to the literary possibilities therein, as we spent a bit of time today in what passes, in Manzanita, for a Goodwill. It's a place called Cart 'em, and it's a treasure hunting venue. Cart 'em is the receptacle for all things no longer desired; a place where locals dump their white elephants and the stuff that doesn't sell at their yard sales, and everything's organized in a 7,000 square foot pole barn. Treasures abound. Kirk gave each of the boys five bucks and turned them loose, giving them prompts to find Christmas gifts and art projects. They returned with armloads of stuff. As for me, I headed to the bookcases. Turns out there were two, count 'em, two copies of Irving's, "A Widow for One Year," a book I'd never read. I yanked it off the shelf, and it delightfully passed my opening sentence litmus test: "One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parent's bedroom."

Provocative, right? Well, it gets better:

"It was a totally unfamiliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with the stomach flu; when she first heard her mother making love, Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up."

Now, how could you not peel off fifty cents after reading that; how could you not buy the book from the junk shop?

Kirk's in bed benext to me with the "Outliers" I gave him as an early Christmas present, and I'm about to find out what awaits Ruth Cole, and I'm hoping that we're settling in for, as they say, a long winter's nap.

take that amazon

Betwixt and between the snow storms, I drove into work today hoping to tip a few windmills, make a little dough and find some time for my novel and/or my nonfiction book.

I did knock some things off my list for sure, but I was quite preoccupied by a situation in the other room. Chuck Palahniuk had arranged to meet the manager of the St. Helen’s Book Shop at the gallery where I work, since it was a half point between the shop and his home, and with icy roads, they split the distance.

Amid several stacks of books, Chuck stood at a cafe table with rubber stamps, ink pads, paint, paint brushes and pens—oh, and sheets of wax paper so it all wouldn’t all smear into oblivion, because when you’re Chuck Palahniuk, and you’re signing stock, and the stock are dozens of hardback Fight Clubs, Rants, Snuffs, Survivors, Chokes etc…you want to make sure that the end recipient knows that purchasing books via an independent bookseller is a good thing.

Chuck was standing at that table for hours, as the book shop manager delivered stack after stack from box after box of his books. 

Chuck is the most disciplined person I know, and his resolve to connect with his readers has paid off.  Go to any country in the world, randomly yank a 25 year-old person off of the street and ask him who Chuck Palahniuk is.  They’ll know, and it’s not just because after he writes a book he throws it off the bridge of the publishing world and waits around to collect his royalty checks.  This writer engages with his fans through his website, where he offers craft classes, and through his readings, where he puts on shows that rival Robin Williams in spirit and energy, and Cirque du Soleil in props.  He sends packages of gifts to fans who write him letters, and he navigates icy roads at Christmas time so his readers can get books that have been signed, sealed and delivered with his very own brand of love—via an independent bookseller in a tiny town northwest of Portland, Oregon.

Avoiding Jacob Marley’s Chain

Looks like the spirit of the season won out after all! Not only that, but we're having a COOKIE MAKING party this evening. God bless us, every one.

grinch mom

As you all know, the holiday season is upon us. This makes it a bit more challenging to follow through on daily word count goals, but I'm determined not to let the distractions of holly and cookies and parties deter me from my plan. Well, most days, anyway.

I'm working on two chapters simultaneously. Chronologically, they dovetail, but in the real life of the characters, the scenes are separated by twenty years. But, as in real, real life, the scenes both take place during the holiday season. The centerpiece of each scene has to do with procuring and setting up a Christmas tree.

Kirk and I agreed that we wouldn't get a tree this year. Well, not a cut one, anyway. I brought home one of those potted numbers they sell at Trader Joe's. The ones small enough to fit in the plastic shopping bags they sell. My nine-year-old looked as though I'd (and I'm borrowing this line from something I read recently) just gave him raisins for Halloween.

"When are we getting the real one?" he wanted to know.

"Um, honey, we're not getting a dead tree this year," I said. I was hoping the word "dead" would conjur up a "green" context and he'd get that this gesture falls into the "recycle," "turn off the water while brushing your teeth," "bike to school instead of taking the car," messages.

But no. He said, his eyes nearly leaking tears, "But we always get a tree."

Not only am I wanting to skip the whole tree thing, but I don't intend on fulfilling his Christmas list, either. For instance, he's not getting an i-touch, nor is he getting a PSP. At least not from moi. Since he confessed to knowing the real deal about Santa, I figure, it's time to interject a bit more home and hearth into the holidays. We'll make cookies, watch old movies, go to the coast and to the mountains. Do things together instead of purchase and fuss and wrap and hustle.

"Well, honey," I said to my son, "You know, there's a recession. That means that we have to be careful about the money we spend. We have to make choices."

"I choose a Christmas tree," he said. "A real one." And by real, he meant cut.

This morning, before he woke up, I was eyeing the corner of the room, weakening my stance. The little Trader Joe's tree does look a little like a potted plant, even with the blue and white lights that weave around it.

Maybe a table top sized tree. One that will go from coffee table to ceiling. In the big picture, what's one more nod to normative tradition?

I wonder how this will play out in my novel.

busy busy busy busy busy busy

If you dialed my number right now, it would go right to voice mail.

Over the past two weeks I've picked up 3 new clients, several more projects from legacy clients, and am still determined to make time each day for my own writing. And then there was the November holiday. And the upcoming December one(s).

Last night, it felt like I ate a bowling ball. Seriously, there was this ache that felt like it had formed around something lead in my upper abdomen. But it went away by this morning, thank God.

Thing is, I thrive on work. The little queue you carry around with you that's filled up the tasks? I love that. Always knowing that there's a new piece of work in line behind what you're attending to at the moment--that's my sweet spot. Right now, that thing is a shower. Alrighty then!

on getting it right

This past week I've had many opportunities to talk about what I do. In a way, I feel like I've been at a trade show, even though I never left Portland. I went to a speed networking event a week ago, then gave a presentation at my small business networking group, PDX Synergy, then met a couple of people at a magazine launch party last night, and today I was on a conference call being introduced as a, gulp, novelist.

My head is spinning with myself. Every time I open my mouth, I feel the urge to reinvent my career. Maybe reinvent is a little strong. Refine, maybe? Or perhaps adapt? Filtering the discussion of what I do with the tools of marketing, occasionally I come up with something new—an invention, you could call it, if you were spinning. Something that hadn't occurred to me before. "I'm the Walmart of words," sprang out of my mouth once. I wish I could press an "unsend" button when shit like that escapes.

But novelist, yes, I like that. What I most like about that is that someone actually sees me as that, even though there are no novels out there by Suzanne Freisinger, Suzy Vitello, or Suzy Soulé, or any of my other monikers. But there will be.

Last night, at workshop, we delved into one of those lamentations that we "novelists" suffer from time to time. One of our members is having, what Tom Spanbauer always referred to as, "failure of spirit." Having spent years on his project, this novelist (who has one published book) is losing heart with his book. The circumstances that propelled the book—the politics and emotions of the day—have changed considerably in the four years he's been writing it. He wants to quit. Not just the book, but writing.

This too shall pass, the group acknowledged. We've all been there. It goes with the territory. There exists for all of us a chasm between our intention and the product. The more time elapses between conception and outcome, the greater the challenge. Especially when we suffer from the effects of our own manic creative drive. Again, I have to reference that Gladwell piece on late bloomers in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. Process is elusive. Trust in our own sense of authority, however, should not be. What allows us to continue to write, to reinvent ourselves vis-à-vis new inspiration, and to fail a heck of a lot of times before getting it "right," is the thing that we must cultivate. This thing lives inside of all artists, and, let me tell you, it's a bit of a tease, and it's very vulnerable. But it has to be, because it's also the thing that will move us toward truth. If we let it.