Lunch and Lessons

*****

Friend Jane came over for lunch and a visit on Saturday. Jane brought an amazing sun dried tomato and brie appetizer. I did up my usual down home – upscale fusion. As we slathered garlicky brie onto crackers and munched hot beef sandwiches, we chatted optimistically about our writing.

Let me say: it’s amazing how much we writers can learn from one another. Not just about our craft, but about how writing exists as part of our lives. As she always does, Jane gave me a lot to think about. About embracing our roots and using them as a creative force for the future. About finite time and how to be a responsible steward of it. About learning everything we can from the resources around us. And about moving on when we’ve grown beyond them.

After she left, I sat in the quiet space she left behind and considered my situation. It’s clear I have some choices to make. Up until now, I’ve done a rather scattered approach to my writing: throw seeds of myself at every opportunity and see if anything viable takes root. The problem is I now have seedlings growing everywhere. Some are dying. Some are neglected, some overgrown. I’m not doing anything well, because I’m trying to do it all.

Clearly, it’s time to prune.

I spent the rest of the weekend considering options. I have too many things that distract me from my writing, too many things that drain my energy. There are things I invest effort in, but receive only nominal return. And one or two things that are just plain more than I can handle. But they’re choices, which means I don’t have to keep saying yes to them.

So thanks, to Jane, for friendship and good advice. You didn’t know you were giving it, but I’d be smart to take it. And just for the fun of it, I’m going to post my hot beef recipe. Now you can have lunch and Jane's good advice, too :)

Shredded Roast Beef for Sandwiches

2 -1/2 - 3 lbs. boneless beef chuck roast
1 sweet onion, chopped
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 cup water
1 tsp. beef base or 1 beef bouillon cube
1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1 bay leaf
fresh cracked black pepper, to taste
seasoned salt, to taste

Place roast in slow cooker with onion, garlic powder, water, beef base, thyme, bay leaf and pepper. Cook on high for 5- 6 hours, or until tender and meat pulls apart easily.

Remove meat from slow cooker and set aside to cool slightly. Leave juices in slow cooker. Pull meat apart with two forks. Remove any fat or gristle and discard it.

Return shredded meat to cooker with juices. Add seasoning salt to taste. If too juicy, sift 1 - 2 Tbsp. of flour over the meat and stir. Turn slow cooker to low until serving. Serve hot on rolls.

Serves 6 – 8.

On Courage

*****

A month or two ago, I dragged out an old photo album from a 1991 trip to Vail. I was beginning Nick’s story and I wanted to remember exactly what Colorado looked like, the color of the mountains in October, the clarity of the sky, the exact shade of a hot spring new friend, Baxter, had brought us to.

I found much more. Pictures of my younger, faster-running self. Captions written in her stranger’s voice. The look in my eyes and the voice bothered me most. It was like seeing a stranger in my body.

I read them over and over, heard the sarcasm, the immaturity, the brittle, affected cynicism. Who was this creature, teetering over disillusionment, but still clinging to notions of romance? By that Vail trip, I’d thrown myself at life hard enough to cause a few serious fractures. I was toxic back then and this album proved it. I wanted to throw the evidence in the garbage.

As writers, we face this kind of thing all the time. Our early work, our early selves as writers, are so rustically unskilled, sophomoric and boastfully posturing that it can be hard to face them in retrospect. Around the time of the Vail trip, I remember being thrilled with myself because I’d finished writing a dreadful category romance, tantalizingly titled Legacy of Deceit. It’s an eye-roller, not because it’s a romance, but because my heroine was such a tantrum throwing little snot and because my writing was painfully bad. I couldn’t balance the basic elements of narration without tripping; it was like watching Frankenstein’s monster lurch haltingly along.

I run into this now with recent projects. I expect I’ll run into it down the line with the drivel I’m grinding out now. Somewhere on the Road to Me is considerably better than Legacy was, but the initial draft needs such substantial revision, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. And my first short story published, “Beautiful,” makes apologies leap unbidden to my tongue. It’s embarrassing. (I swear, I’m a lot better now.)

So what do we do? Hold our writing close on our hard drives until we reach the lofty pinnacle of skillfulness? That’s like waiting for the polar ice caps to melt—they say it will happen, but who the hell knows exactly when? And that kind of insularity is counter-productive. Our writing should be read so we can glean useful feedback, which in turn leads to further growth.

But that takes guts.

I had an email from a friend yesterday. Let’s call him Bob. He was kicking himself over a blog entry he’d posted. Riddled with errors, Bob claimed. He said he never should have posted it. I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I’d read his blog and gushed over it in my comments. I really felt I’d learned something valuable. I couldn’t believe it was actually crap.

Well, I did what any good friend does: I told him he was full of shit (in a nice way) and that I really liked the post. I mentioned this concept of being embarrassed by our own past work. Email back: Bob wasn’t buying it.

I’ll spare you the ins and outs of our e-dialogue. But I’d like to leave you with this: for all its isolation, writing is a public act. We put ourselves out there when we share what we write. And once it’s out there, we can’t take it back. Just like we can’t take back the words we speak, we can’t erase our published writing. And published writing is worse, because it lives on as written, unlike spoken words which can fade in our memories. It takes a tremendous act of courage to put any piece of writing out there for another human being to read. Courage to face whatever criticism we may be given. Courage to face who we are in this moment in time, knowing we may look back and cringe.

At times, each of us doubts our nerve.

The great writer EB White captured this idea best, so I leave the last word to him:

A writer’s courage can easily fail him . . . I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

Way Out Water Towers!

*****

My daughter is obsessed with water towers. There’s a big one at the top of the hill on our regular walking route. Ever since The Miss discovered it, she’s been fascinated by every water tower we encounter. Plain ones. Fancy ones. Doesn’t matter. On our recent camping trip, she pointed out every water tower between home and Two Rivers, Wisconsin. And there are a lot more than you’d imagine. We’ve become so accustomed to looking for water towers that I find myself calling out, “Water tower!” when she isn’t even in the car. (I recently took a photo of the water tower in Arena because Julia wasn’t there to see it with me.) So it seemed natural to suggest we go to the library and check out some books on water towers. She jumped around the kitchen, yelling “Wat-oo tow-oos! Wat-oo tow-oos!” arms flapping like a baby condor. She was excited; I was excited for coming up with an idea that made her so unabashedly ecstatic. I could hardly drive there fast enough.

Then we hit a bump in the road. Who’d have thunk it, but water tower books are a rare breed.

I won’t bore you with everything I went through, from dealing with a really disappointed little kid to trying to find another source for a water tower book. Let’s just say my efforts were both exhaustive and exhausting. Finally, it occurred to me, after all hope seemed extinguished. Why not write one myself?

Now, let me clarify something before I go a single step further: I have no desire to write for children. Sorry. My work can’t stand up to an audience that sharp. But I can write for the most important kid in my life. I’d written a book for her earlier this year—Little Girl in the Woods, a board book about my sweetie’s passion for camping. So I figured slapping this puppy together this should be a snap, right?

Not necessarily. I’ve learned a few interesting things thus far and thought I’d share them here.

1) MAKING TECHNICAL STUFF EASY ENOUGH FOR KIDS IS A BITCH. Yep, kids are smart little stinkers, but sentence length and vocabulary are an issue. Plus, kids have a limited set of experiences you can refer to in analogies. How to explain hydrostatic pressure to a little kid? Hell, I don’t get it myself! The best thing I can liken it to that she (and I) might understand is the feeling you get when you have to pee. Classy, I know. But I’m at a loss here.

2) YOU CAN BE LAZY AND LARCENOUS WHEN YOU’RE WRITING FOR YOUR OWN KID. I’m talking about pesky little legal landmines like cross-checking information, listing source credits, and obtaining publishing rights to photos. As far as I’m concerned, an initial search on Wikipedia and a cross check with howstuffworks.com is verification enough for me. But I doubt a publisher would think so. And what about all those photos I helped myself to on various websites? Let’s face it, getting rights to all that stuff would be a bear. Not to mention prohibitively expensive.

3) THERE’S NO SLAPPING TOGETHER ANY KIND OF PROJECT FOR CHILDREN. I spent two hours on the introduction yesterday. Yep, two hours to write 93 words. And that’s after the three hours I spent researching and outlining the day before. Had I operated that slowly in college, I’d still be sitting in College Comp. The discouraging part is I still have many sections to write and I haven’t even begun to think about page design. The way this thing is going, I figure she’ll either have lost interest in the entire topic or graduated high school by the time I’m halfway though.

4) I MUST BE INSANE. I add this as the only logical conclusion, considering I’m moving forward on this in spite of the aforementioned points. And I won’t even get into the lack-of-time rant again. My only defense is I love my kid. I guess that’s reason enough.

So Way Out Water Towers moves forward, God help me. It won’t be at a store near you, so don’t look for it. And don’t look for anything else I write, either. I’ll be so busy inventing non-bodily function analogies for hydrostatic pressure that I doubt I’ll have time to work on anything else.

To Submit or Not to Submit

*****

I’ve been encountering an uncomfortable phenomenon lately. It’s called Why the Hell Did I Submit That (WTHDIST) Syndrome. Basically, WTHDIST is a condition where I pray for a rejection on a submitted story because I’ve figured out that it actually sucks.

I experienced WTHDIST just this morning. I’d been waiting on a response from my story, “The Game,” from Espresso Fiction for a few months. And this morning, the response arrived. I can’t describe for you the feeling of dread I had as I looked at the innocent Thank you for your submission to Espresso Fiction subject line. Usually, this is because I love a story and don’t want to see it rejected. But with “The Game,” it was a definite case of WTHDIST. Frankly, “The Game” is a damned stupid story. I’d be embarrassed to see it get published.

I filed away my rejection on Duotrope Digest’s handy-dandy Response Tracker, but a feeling of dread still hung on me. I wandered over to my remaining list of pending responses. And there, in all it’s hideousness, it was: a 118 day pending response entry for a little ditty titled “Nighttime Daddy.” I’d submitted the story to LitBits in a fit of pique after the story didn’t make the cut in a Writer’s Digest’s Your Story contest. 118 days later, this thing was haunting me like the lamb kebabs from my favorite Afghan restaurant. I found myself praying: please don’t let this thing get accepted. Or wishing it was lost in cyberspace.

The whole thing got me thinking: how do we decide what to submit and what not to submit? I’d like to think I can tell good from bad. But, usually, until I get a rejection, I often believe with naive earnestness that even my homeliest, gap-toothed, drooling babies are exquisite and graceful swans. Clearly, my internal editor has a bad wire.

But I think the real problem comes earlier in the process, long before I seek out a market, write my cover letter and send my darlings on their way. Bad stories are born of bad ideas. And bad ideas should be nipped before they sprout. I should dump duds early rather than waste time finishing and editing it. Then I could spend my time on the good stuff.

Easier said than done. Maybe it’s a matter of experience. Or of refining my literary palate. I wish I knew. Time is precious. I don’t want to waste it. And I don’t want to live with any WTHDIST’s haunting me by, somehow, making it into print.

Precious Time

*****

I woke this morning to the dreadful realization that I’d forgotten to write yesterday’s blog post.

It was Memorial Day’s fault, of course. While long holiday weekends are right up there with cookies in my book, I admit they wreak havoc on my sense of time. It’s only Wednesday and I’m already wondering how I’m going to fit my weekly household chores, library visits and play dates into the few remaining days left this week. While relaxation is good for the soul, it’s obvious slowing down comes at a price. I scramble to recover the lost ground.

This concept affects every area of life. It seems like only yesterday I brought Julia home from the hospital, but somehow she’s just a month from turning three. In the same vein, I realize my novel has been waiting patiently for me to finish revisions for six long years. Six years! How did time get away from me like that?

I understand the lesson: slow down for a moment and time rockets by. Yet, as writers, our truth is often found in those things that we see only when we slow down. As writers, we must look closely and then reflect. These carefully crafted details, the artful connections, are where writing transcends from mediocre to well-wrought. Skillful construction creates a work that readers connect with and remember. (I know I, for one, will always remember E.B. White’s outstanding essay, “Once More to the Lake.”) So how do we balance observation, reflection and productivity to create a work that lives in the hearts of readers?

I don’t know. Clearly. I’ve been plugging away at Somewhere for seven long years (a year to draft, six years of sluggishly picking it apart). More than anything, I want to finish this thing, answer the call of Jamieson’s Folly, my next novel project. But I get caught up in wanting to do Beth and Shel justice. I take breaks to write short fiction, to brush the cat, to bake a batch of cookies. So I fumble along in fits and starts, only making progress one lonely chapter at a time.

Some would argue this is still progress. But I’m not so sure. It takes a long time to get back into the groove after one of my short fiction/cat brushing/cookie baking hiatuses. I lose the feel for Beth. Her voice becomes an echo rather than a shout. I have to rummage through the junk in my brain to reconnect. All of that takes precious time.

Time. Slow down for a moment and time rockets by. It’s daunting, perhaps too daunting after this holiday weekend. Perhaps I’ll worry about catching up tomorrow. For today, perhaps I’ll just bake some desperation cookies.


Desperation Cookies*

1 cup butter
1 ½ cups white sugar
¾ cup brown sugar
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 beaten eggs
2 ½ cups flour
1 ½ cups chips **
2 cups nuts ***

** use any combination of regular chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, white chocolate chips, milk chocolate chips, vanilla, cherry, or strawberry chips, or peanut butter chips—whatever you think will taste good. (I use semisweet chocolate.)

*** use any nuts you like, including walnuts, pecans, cashews, almonds, even peanuts. If you don’t have enough nuts, fill in with crushed cornflakes, rice krispies, coconut, raisins or other dried fruit. (I use 1 cup cranberries and 3/4 cup chopped pecans, plus a handful of rice krispies for crunch)

Melt the butter. Mix in sugars and stir. Add vanilla, baking soda, and salt; stir. Then add half the flour, the chips and the nuts. Stir well to incorporate, then add remaining flour and mix thoroughly.

Drop by teaspoons onto greased or parchment lined baking sheets, 12 cookies to a standard sheet. Bake in 350 degree preheated oven for 10 – 12 minutes, or until nicely browned.

Let cool 2 minutes, then remove cookies from sheet and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Makes 5 dozen.


* recipe originally from Joanne Fluke’s Peach Cobbler Murder, a Hannah Swensen mystery. (Note: this is a fantastic mystery series for those who like a good, old fashioned, cozy murder mystery. And these cookies are amazing.)