News!! That's Pretty Big!!

I was going to title this post "BIG HUGE LIFE CHANGING NEWS" and then I realized the news is really only big to me, and only life changing to my family, so maybe that's overstating it a little.

The news is that I received a phone call this week that I'd been accepted into the MFA program I'd applied to this summer. Which means, in a scant three months, I'll be a grad student.

Everyone around me keeps saying, "We knew you'd get in," but the truth is that they didn't. No one could tell that. I don't know how many applied, but the fact is that MFA programs in writing are notoriously small. In the single to low double digits small. A school might take as few as seven or eight new fiction writers a semester. I was worried. I didn't apply to a bunch of schools. I picked one. My favorite one. The program that fit me best, that made my heart beat harder every time I thought about it.

And who knows what they're looking for? I was thinking probably not a mom who long ago started losing brain cells and the ability to find a word over two syllables. Will I be the oldest in the class? Will I be the most haggard, least fashionable one? Will I be the only one who has to read a page of classic literature over and over and end up saying, "I don't get it. What am I supposed to be looking for again?" When I write my first critical essay, will it rise above my traditional book reviews of, "It was a cool book. I liked it okay"?

I don't know, but these are questions I'm worth humiliating myself to find out.

Getting a writing degree isn't critical to being a writer. There are plenty of authors all over the internet who will tell you that college only ruins any talent a writer might have. They say it's pretentious. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of time.

I don't agree. I agree that there are great writers who don't ever get a college education, let alone a graduate degree, and they are brilliant in what they do. They are gifted.

But I want the degree. I want the classes and the teachers and the textbooks and the assignments and the fellow students. I want to be a student. I want to be pushed beyond what I'm doing now in my writing, and I think this is the best way for me to do that.

So in January I'll pack my bags and head to Oregon for two weeks, where I'll sit in class and overlook the ocean and have evening bonfires at the beach (they do that!!) and sit around the bonfire talking books and literature and writing with other people who love that sort of thing as much as me. I'll start writing a new book. I'll start making lists of the books I'll read over the course of the next two years. I'll meet my writing advisor, attend lectures, listen to book readings. In essence, begin the next two years with a bang.

I have no idea what the next two years will be like for me. Intense, I'm sure. Busy beyond what I can imagine. Stressful. Tired. Crazy. Wonderful. Bliss. Amazing.

And I imagine this blog will very much become a record of all that. I hope you stick with me for the wild ride.

(Monday I'll post my week writing times, and my observations about it all. I had less time than I thought I would, but writing down how much time forced me to be productive in ways I couldn't imagine. I should be done with this book by the end of the month. Just in time for a short break and a chance to begin all over again!)

Tweet This

My dad sent this to me yesterday. I thought it was really funny until I realized people actually want you to do that, and then I felt panicky. :)

As far as the writing is going, Tuesday was my great writing day: Three and a half hours. Sounds not as good as it felt. I added 2,500 words to my book, and then deleted 500 words of a scene that had to go because it centered around a character I've since gotten rid of. Gotta love revising.

Wednesday was not nearly so good. I had probably less than an hour total, although I knew it would be that way. Wednesday is my tight day, and my scant time was interupted several times. I added a few pages and revised a few more. Overall, passable.

I think what I'm learning is that I'm no where near a full-time writer.

With birthday parties and some other big news I'll share tomorrow, there's not going to be a huge amount of time to make up what I've missed so far. Still, I have less than 60 pages left of this book to revise before another run-through of more detailed editing. Not too shabby.

Oh How I Love to Write; Let Me Count the Hours...

Patti Nielson has challenged writers to keep track of how many hours a day we write for one week. She put the challenge forth this way:

My intention was not to get people to write more, but to see how much time we actually spend and see if everyday we can increase it. Not to the point where it takes over our lives, but to the point where we feel is manageable in our lives.

You can still sign up if you want. Go here and add your name to the list, or just join in.

I'm curious how much I write. Especially days like yesterday, where the beginning of the day seemed to hold so much promise and by the end, it all seemed to have evaporated. Where does the time go? Getting three kids up, fed, packed and off to school, the gym, a shower, writing two blog posts, catching up on blogs I missed, lunch, replying to emails, a half hour left and the kids start straggling back in, piano lessons are on us and homework and dinner and off to bed. The day is done.

Where does it go?

Maybe the better challenge for me is to count the minutes I'm NOT writing and figure out what I'm doing with them!!

It felt yesterday like I hardly wrote at all. 30 minutes before the kids came home, 20 minutes while dinner was simmering and the kids were having down time, and then 20 minutes after dinner and bedtimes. It seemed like not much. One hour and ten minutes. But in that time I added nearly 1,000 words to the novel I'm now revising, and I've done less on days where I had lots of time to write.

Today I'm hoping will be even better. I've got coffee. I'm finishing a Bible study this morning and then cracking open the WIP for more serious revisions. This challenge is a challenge for me to turn off the internet, stop checking emails, and just write.

That's my hope anyway. How's your writing going?

I Survived The National Book Festival!

This weekend was the National Book Festival in downtown Washington D.C. It was a gloriously beautiful, albeit a tad hot, day for book lovers!

This is the tenth year anniversary of the book festival, which was begun in 2001 by Laura Bush as one of her first big initiatives as first lady. Say what you want about her husband's politics, but you gotta love a first lady who loved reading as much as she does, and brings this type of event to D.C.

The entire mall (which is NOT a shopping area!! It's the huge grassy area between the Washington Monument and the Capital Building)  fills with circus-sized tents, each marked with a particular genre. This year there were tends for fiction and mystery, poetry and literature, history and biography, teens and children, children, (Yes, I know some of these seem to overlap...), contemporary life (which this year seemed to consist of mostly cook book authors, although last year hosted the American Idol and now Tonight Show band leader Rickey Minor). I'm sure I'm missing some categories.

There are also tents for buying books, mobile RVs for testing out digital libraries, tents for PBS kids activities (which also boasted several "real" PBS characters to get your pictures with), and tables for author book signing.

Information tables throughout the grassy mall gave away free posters, bookbags, and bookmarks. I loved seeing so many red bookbags everywhere. When we went home on the metro, more than half the people crammed in the cars had red bags. I felt like nodding at each of them, silently telling them, "Yeah, I'm a book lover too."

(And as a total aside, the people working the information booths were TOTALLY cool and let me put out bookmarks for my own book beside theirs!! I was the only non-festival author that did that, and by the time I left all the bookmarks were gone, and I saw not a single one on the ground!  Book lovers love their free bookmarks!)

Can I say there is rarely anything better than being among a huge hoard of book lovers and their beloved authors??  Truly. Fun fun fun. It erases any negativity you might run across online about the demise of the publishing industry, and leaves you feeling nearly buoyant.

The best part, of course, isn't the free bags or the hoards of people (which frankly were all a bit sweaty and larger than the narrow seats they set up way too close together). The best part is listening to the authors.

This year they put all the people I wanted to hear at the same time, in different tents. I suppose that's because they were all the most popular people and they needed to spread out the crowds a bit.

I tried first to make it to hear Laura Bush. How often do you get to hear a former first lady in person? And the founder of the Book Festival to boot? 

Unfortunately, everyone else seemed to have this same idea, so that even though we arrived well before her appearance, the tent was closed off.

For any other author, they don't close the tents. They let you stand 50 people thick behind the chairs if that makes your day; but for Laura Bush, the security was a bit.... zealous. And when I watched her speech on TV (yes, I'm the kind of geek who DVRs the Book Fair on CSPAN 2), nearly everyone in that tent had passes to be there. I did feel a little put out that she was there, but not practically available to listen to. I wasn't the only one either. As we were pushed further and further away, a near-melee occurred between security guards and festival attendees. Poor Laura. I wonder what she thought of the scuffle caused by outraged admirers?

Still, I am not the scuffle-causing kind, so I took advantage of the security guards temporary lack of attention on me and scooted in towards the baffles to get some pictures. I took my very old, not very good camera, but it has a massive zoom lens. Cheers for photography that makes it look like I could actually hear anything she said!

So that lasted about ten frames worth, and then I got booted away as well. I would have been sore but two tents over Suzanne Collins (of the Hunger Games trilogy fame) was still talking. Booyah!

So I got to hear the last ten minutes of her speech, and also the ten minutes of Q&A, which is often the most entertaining time.  What I loved was that the entire line of questioners was all kids. Drooling, swooning, total-gaga kids who gushed about how much they loved her books and begged to know when she'd be writing more. I could completely see why YA authors love their audience. I must say the kids in this tent had energy and enthusiasm that put to shame every other tent.

 So I sort of saw Laura Bush, I caught much of Suzanne Collins, and I totally missed Jonathan Franzen, who was in another tent at the same time. I heard a few sentences of Diane Gabaldon and managed to shoot a few poor pictures of her that were mostly the guy in front of me's head. She's now writing graphic novels. I moved on.

The rest of the day was not quite as exciting, as I didn't know nearly as many authors this year as I did last year, and I ended up in the History and Biography tent much of the day, along with hearing some incredibly talented high schoolers reciting poetry.

By late afternoon, the only person left I really wanted to see was Mem Fox. If you don't have kids, you might not know her, but she's written 36 picture books, one of which (Time for Bed) we read every single night for over two years to our children. Every night. And I not once got tired of it.

So I went to see Mem, and let me tell you, she was not disappointing!! She had the audience laughing so hard tears were rolling down my cheeks. She started by saying, "I'm probably the only author at this festival that will tell you writing is really hard work, and I like to do it as little as possible. Five minutes a year if I can get away with it."

She talked about growing up as an Australian in Africa and learning to write while sitting under a tree and practicing her letters in the dirt as her teacher drew them with his finger in the air. She talked about how she came up with the ideas for some of her books, and why some are so special to her, and then she read some of them for us.

I could listen to her read all day. I wanted to go out, right then, and buy every one of her books, even though my kids are past picture book age. I'll probably do it anyway.

After Mem, we decided it wasn't going to get better than that, and we should pack up and head home. I'd left at 8:30 in the morning and got home about six at night. It was a long day.

A long and wonderful day.

And if any of you live in Texas or are going to be there in October, there's a Texas State Book Festival which was Laura's predecessor to the National one, and should be equally as exciting. And let me tell you, there's nothing to make you so fired up to go home and write as being part of a mass of people who love to read and write.

Cheapest therapy ever.

AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING!!!

I had an interesting conversation over twitter with a mom of a diabetic last week. In a diabetes chat forum, the question was posed: Do you think there will be a cure of diabetes in our lifetime?

I was actually shocked to see that the resounding answer was no.

Have people waited so long, heard so many "We've almost got it," been so beaten down by the day to day dealing with poking fingers and shooting insulin that they've lost hope?

If you ask a group of people with cancer if they think there will be a cure, they will resoundingly say yes.

Why the difference?

Of course, after doing so much research on diabetes cures for Some Kind of Normal, I couldn't help but chime in. There are SO many avenue's being looked at right now, and we really are, truly, so close.

And one of the moms countered back: "Like what? Name one."

Me: "Adult stem cell research is already curing people in other countries."

Her: "I'd never let my son be immunosuppressed."

(Can I break here to say this is the main treatment for leukemia, and has been done successfully for many years with bone marrow transplants?)

Me: "Well, Dr. Faustman has found a vaccine that's worked on reversing type 1."

Her: "Have you seen the chemical in that? They're very dangerous."

Me: "It's a commonly used vaccine."

Her: "Well, they haven't gotten past the mice stage, and everything works on mice."

Me: "Actually, this is the only thing that's successfully reversed diabetes in mice."

Her: "My son is not a mouse."

Me: "Did I say he was? You brought up mice. She's past that and has had great success in the 1st human trials."

Her: "It's a long way from working."

I sighed, because what can you do with someone who doesn't WANT to believe? What I really wanted to tell her was that the question was whether or not we could find a cure, not whether or not she would like any of the cures they found.

Heidi the Hick passed on to me this morning this AMAZING video of a Canadian morning talk show segment in which the host and an actor previously battling cancer explore a lab where adult stem cells are being used to create new hearts (!!!) and produce insulin. The actor herself underwent adult stem cell therapy in which they extracted some of her own stem cells and tweaked them and now she is in a very solid remission. There was a shot of BEATING HEART CELLS!!  Did I say AMAZING!!!?

The host of the show literally had his jaw dropped the entire time. It is that incredible. It is that possible. We are that close to cures.

And they echoed the same thing I say all the time: Why isn't EVERYONE talking about this???

If you want to see the video here is the link. I don't know how long it will be up, but if it's not the top video when you click on it, find the link on the side for "Lisa Ray and Seamus explore stem cells." It was the best five minutes of the morning.

Here is another link I found from the same news program about the success of adult stem cell treatment in reversing MS in a patient. This is especially encouraging to me because I have a very dear friend in the early stages of MS.  Another great five minutes of time.

Because no matter how bad things get, or how long you've waited, there should always be HOPE.

Mommy Meltdown

I am now officially on our third week of the kids being back in school, and I have to be honest: I thought I'd have a lot more time.

Over the summer, the kids were an ever-present pull on my time, and I got nearly no writing done. I juggled the guilt of not writing with the guilt of not entertaining the kids and spending time with them, and the kids won. They won in part because they are just so darn fun, and in part because I know they are growing so fast, and there won't be many summers left when they want to spend time with me.

But when school started, I thought things would change. They'd magically disappear onto the school bus every morning and I'd magically have five full hours to edit and revise my current book.

That was the plan, anyway.

What really happened was more something like this:

1. One child needed books from the library which necessitated a four hour cross-county, multiple branch scavenger hunt.

2. One child needed swim lessons scheduled and another needed evaluations for swim team placement.

3. Orthodontia appointments. Enough said.

4. Groceries. Clean Laundry. Apparently people need that stuff.

5. Friends that I'd neglected long summer months wanted coffee. I wanted adult interaction.

6. Car brakes were recalled, oil change needed, and sliding van door broke.

7. My running shoes fell apart. Literally. I had to hit five stores to find decent replacements I could still afford.

8. The bathroom scale said I desperately needed to hit the gym on a more regular basis.

After school, there's been a barrage of homework, piano practices and lessons, swim team practices, paperwork, choir, Bible studies.... in short... barely time to scrounge dinner and get everyone off to bed.

The nights have been late, the morning early. For the one hour I've gotten to sit and actually write, I looked like that picture up there. I'm exhausted. I fall asleep at the computer.

I've started getting cranky when things pop up to keep me from writing. I threw a pencil across the room yesterday when someone demanded something of me right when I sat to write. I yelled. "I give up trying to make writing a career. I can't have a career. I don't know why you think I should have a full time job when I can't even make a part time job of writing when everyone still just thinks of me as a full time mom with nothing more to do than get everyone else's stuff done!"

It wasn't my finest moment.

I still wrestle with how to get everything done. My stuff and their stuff.

Today I didn't shower, I didn't go to the gym, I didn't do my morning Bible study. I put the kids on the bus, threw my hair in a ponytail, made a huge pot of coffee and sat down to write. Writing first today.

And it's gone really well. I added over 1000 words to a scene I've been writing in my head since summer, and I'm ready now to move on to editing the next chapter. I think things are shaping up really well for this book.

My plan was to go to the gym once I finished that one scene, but now I'm thinking I might just keep writing. The gym will wait. My butt will still be just as big and need just the same workout tomorrow.

Today, no one is home. No appointments are scheduled (until after school). The dog is happy outside in the fall-like weather. And I'm getting stuff done.

Somewhere in here I'll have to fit in the shower, but for now, my computer doesn't care.