Frankenstorm... less fun than the name implies.

This Monday showed up just as they said it would... rainy, windy, cold. Frankenstorm is moving into Virginia, and even though we're on the southern edge of the worst of it, we're hunkering down for the next few days.

The kids are home, and even the federal government shut down, so the husband is home. Last night was fun - movies and finishing off the ice cream in the freezer and enjoying a late night knowing we could sleep in today.

We're scrambling this morning, though, to do last-minute things in case the power goes out. Showers and coffee and laptops charging. Tubs are filled with water, a few meals ready to throw on the grill, coolers with ice and fridges cleaned out. My stories are printed out in case I have to revise old-school, and my fingers are crossed that I don't have to.

We are either way over-prepared or smart. I tend to downplay events like this, cynical of the weather reporters who clearly love the hype a good storm brings (and the revenue). But I feel better if I'm a little in control, and if nothing comes of this but some wet weather, at least I have dinners for the next three days already done!

This would be great time to curl up with a book!! Unfortunately, I'm still having to curl up with revisions. Boo.

I imagine with the large size of this storm, quite a few of you are under it as well. Thinking and praying for all you in more direct path of this storm. Check in and let us know how you're doing if you can!

In Transition

I wrote a blog post earlier today and decided to delete it. It was long. And boring. It was about revising and rewriting and the thesis. Did I mention it was long? And boring?

I've been re-thinking my blog - about what I want it to be. Heidi the Hick posted her 7th anniversary blog post last week and it got me thinking about all the years that have passed here at this blog.

When I started, it was a way for me to connect with other writers, to not be alone in this journey that can be so isolating. It was a great place for us - all of us - to share what we struggle with, what we learn, when we meet success.

There was always a splash of me, too. Adventures in family vacations and experiences with diabetes and the occasional what to do when the pellet stove guy takes all day. But mostly, it's been writing.

I thought when I started grad school I'd be here all the time sharing what I was learning, but it didn't work out that way. Part was time, of course. I ran out of it. But there was a greater part where it felt strange writing about that - as though I were saying "This is the way to write well!" when really, I'm still just stumbling along like everyone else.

Now that I'm winding up school, I feel like a new phase is starting - of my writing, of my career such that it is, of my life. I'm not sure what I want this blog to reflect, but I don't think I want to be a blog for writers specifically. I really want it to be for people. Anyone.

So there may be changes here. Same me. But new format. Maybe a new look. I don't want to give up blogging, but I feel the need to shake it up a little. I hope you that read will still stick with me. :)

I'm Not Impressed... Yet

Two years... read eighty books and write one. That's the tag line of an MFA program, and here I am, on my last book. And... like McKayla, I'm not impressed.

When I first started the program, I had to come up with a reading list, and so I asked all of you. What great books are out there I must absolutely know about and read?

I asked my crit group, and the first book one person suggested was A Prayer for Owen Meany. I looked it up on Amazon and saw that the book ran 642 pages and wrote her back, "Are you trying to kill me??"

But I've had many people since then tell me to read it, rave about it, tell me it's their favorite book ever. And since I've read books like Cutting for Stone, Edgar Sawetelle, and the behemoth doorstop A Soldier of the Great War (weighing in at 727 pages), what's one more long book?

So I started it this week as my last book. And I have to say... I'm not feeling it yet.

Okay - I'm not that far into it. About 50 pages, which isn't that far in a book this size. But something my advisor and this program have tried to pound into me is starting in the action, keeping a story in the action, moving things along and not letting the story linger too long on things not imperative to the plot. And this book is just meandering right now, and full of details that don't at all seem important.

I take it it's a character driven story, and since Owen just killed Johnny's mom with a foul ball, I'm guessing things are about to amp up. But still... there's just not the language I love to stew in or the plot compelling me forward. I'm hoping it will get better. I'm expecting still to find some gem in it.

I wonder if all the ravings about it raised my expectations too high? I've found the books I come to with huge expectations of greatness nearly always let me down, and those I don't know or expect much of are the ones that blow me away.

I'll keep plodding on. Maybe by the end of today I'll have totally and completely fallen in love with it. Maybe it will be one of my favorites, too. I'm hoping.. because 652 pages is a lot to not like.

If you've read this book and loved it, what is it that impressed you?

And why does Owen Meany talk in all capitals??

Tell me, blogging friends, have you been disappointed in books that others have hyped up to you? Do you prefer to come to a book with high expectations or none at all?

***UPDATE: I finished Owen Meany and... I'm still not all that impressed. I admit the ending did make up for some of the earlier aspects I didn't love, and it was a more tightly-knit story than it appeared to be during the first 400 pages. But this is not a book I'll be thinking of years from now and want to pull out and read again, I don't think. 

The End of Hiding Out

Almost two years ago to the day I received a call inviting me to join the Pacific University MFA program.

Two years. It's been both a blink of the eye and a lifetime ago. I remember getting the call and thinking life was about to get crazy, change drastically. I remember thinking that two years, 80 books read, a book written, five residencies seemed like an eternity away.

And here it is. Almost done. I've only one book left to read. In six week, my thesis will be signed off on and off to the binders. I will have plane tickets to my last residency, where I'll walk through the Portland Airport one last time, check into the hotel by the ocean one last time, see my amazing friends and writers and faculty members one last time.

It all makes me feel sad and panicky inside - like something truly fantastic is coming to an end.

What will life be like after?

I realized this week that I've used this program in exactly the way I intended to - as an escape from the publishing world for a little while. Funny, you'd think a writing program would put you more in the publishing world. For some, it has. For some who have only written as a hobby, it has opened their eyes to things they knew little about before: query letters and agents and submissions and publishing stats.

For me, I knew all of that. Been burned out by it. Tired by it. Frustrated by it. Disillusioned. There is, at the beginning of a writing career, a dream. Reality is, as it always is, harsher. Still great, but great in different ways than you expect, and not as great in ways you never saw coming.

I needed to get out of that. Needed to stop thinking about publishing and statistics and competition so much and think again about writing.  In a really tough time in my life, I needed to remember why I do this, and give myself a jump start into a new phase.

So I hid out in the program, and poured myself into writing... just writing. Falling in love with writing again. With stories and characters and ideas and the feel of the words on the page. It was hard. Sometimes I didn't love it as much as I thought I should. Growth is like that. Growing pains are... well... painful.

But I've realized lately, especially as I think of this coming to an end, that I love writing like breathing. It has become every fiber of me. It is what I most want to be doing. When I'm not doing it, I wish I was. When I hate it, I still love it. When I am struggling to get it right, it's because I love it so much that I struggle.

Each story I send to my advisor I say, "I really want to get this one right. This one's important to me." And I expect him to write back and say, "You say that about all of them." But he doesn't, and I suspect that's because he feels that too - that every story is important to get right. Every story hits close to home in some way. Every character is part of your heart in some way and deserves a story worthy of them.

And now... now the end is just about here. And it's time to leave the cocoon I've made for myself. Time to get back into reading blogs and articles about publishing and find out what's going on in the world again. It is an entirely different publishing world than I knew two years ago. Big publishers are less in favor, ebooks are sky-rocketing, self-publishing is much more acceptable a path to take, and authors seem to be grabbing control of their destiny more than ever. It boggles my mind. There is so much new to learn - more decisions to make in terms of what I want to do with my writing.

So on that note, dear bloggers, tell me what I've missed. What blogs should I be reading? What news should I know? What are YOU thinking of this evolving world of publishing?

Book Burnings, Technology, and Paying to Write

FAHRENHEIT 451 - ONE BOOK: THREE THOUGHTS

1. From our first long car trip, I've been packing books on "tape" for my kids. Yes, that's how long it's been. We started with tapes. Arthur the Aardvark, Magic Treehouse. They love them, and since I get carsick reading, it's a great way to pass the time and still get reading in.

This month, before heading out on 23 hour trip to the Keys, we stopped by the library and picked up a few books on CD - ones that were more grown up for my more grown-up kids, and ones I hoped I could also count towards my reading list for school. A double bonus!!

So we nabbed The Adventures of Huck Finn and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, classics that are both literary and kid friendly. (Well, Huck had some dialectical and time-driven language that made for interesting conversations...). But it turned out, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde had seen better days, and the CD was unplayable. So the return trip home had NO BOOKS!! Oh no!!!

Enter... technology. I have a phone. I have a library card. My library now has an electronic resource center. In a matter of minutes, I'd found a book and downloaded it onto my phone and played it over the speakers in the car.

BRILLIANT!!!

The book... Fahrenheit 451. A classic I actually own but have never read. And one which, later, I was thankful my kids decided to not to listen to and instead put their own headphones on and read their own books, because they don't get carsick reading, and were currently engaged with Harry Potter (my youngest), Hunger Games (my middle), and John Grisham (my oldest).

So it was just the hubby and I who got to listen to Fahrenheit 451. And we both were totally taken in.

2. Have you read this book? It is FREAKY!! EERILY relevant. Crazy, absurd relevant. I felt the same I'd felt when I'd read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and realized Jules Verne wrote about submarines before there were submarines. Except this wasn't about machinery so much as society.

I've always thought of this book as "the book burning" book. That's what it's about, right? Book burning and censorship? But no. It's really not. In fact, as we listened to the afterward, Bradbury says that's not what it's about at all. It's about technology and media and how people want to be entertained and have no attention span, and how they get their news and knowledge from headlines and sound bites and pieces of information taken out of context and without context.

The characters walk around with earbuds in their ears, listening to radio and music all the time. They sit in their living rooms and watch wall-size TVs in which there is a false sense of interaction with the outside world. They only tune in to the things that please them, the things they agree with. They eliminate that which makes them uncomfortable or that which they don't fully understand.

Holy heck... this was written in 1953!!!! Blew my mind!!

If you haven't read this, you should. It is a book lover's book. A writer's book. If you want to fall in love again with the power of books, the power of the written word, with authors and imagination and knowledge, with what books leave to the world, read this book.

3. At the end, there's an afterward in which Ray Bradbury writes about the process of writing this book. This is essentially what he said:

I was a dad of two little kids. I had no place to write where they couldn't find me and bug me. I tried the house. I tried the garage. They still found me, pounding on the windows, begging me to play. I got nothing done.

So I discovered one day the library at UCLA had typewriters in the basement. For a dime, you could use the typewriter for 30 minutes. So I'd put my dime in the slot, and type like mad for 30 minutes. Then I'd take a break, and walk around the library, running my fingers over the spines of the books and drinking them in, and then I'd go back and put another dime in. 

(If you read the book, you'll see how the fact that he's in a library influences the story.)

It took $9.80 cents to write the first copy of that book.

I wonder, if we had to pay to sit at our computers, if every word cost us to write, would we be more efficient? Would we be producing more stories? Would we be more focused?

Just a thought.

So that was what I got out of Fahrenheit 451. Out of the vacation, I got some time away, a tan, a few pounds (courtesy of Key Lime pie), a new insulin pump, and a shaking away of the cobwebs.

Time to hit the keyboard again, and see if I can make it worth my dime.

Vacation of DOOM

Every year we spend a part of our summer at the beach. It's our family wind-down time. The only week, really, in the entire year that we get away from all the crazy schedules and activities and stress of our lives and just hunker down as a family together. Just us, a sandy beach, and the ocean.

This year we decided to venture away from our traditional beach and try out Key West. We had visions of it, the Hemingway-tropical-beachiness of it all. If there was anywhere to kick back and relax, surely Key West was it.

It wasn't until we started looking at hotels did we realize there really isn't much of a beach in the Florida keys. No, really, there isn't. It's a tropical island with no sand. How the heck does that happen?

But there are reefs! And we love to snorkel! So we set out on a 1250 mile car trip south with a stop in Savannah, Georgia, where my son and I discovered the TROLLEY OF DOOM. Yes. That's what they call it.

We walked around all night, saying in a spooky voice, "the trolley of DOOM! the trolley of DOOM!" and laughing our heads off.

And then he ate fish and got food poisoning and we spent all night up with him sick. :(

And thus began our VACATION of DOOM.

Once recovered, the family found a beach near Savannah to get our sand fix and headed out. We are used to calmer waters than Georgia, apparently, because my son decided to just wade into the shallow water a little, and along came a wave and BAM threw him to the ground, stealing his glasses and taking them out to sea. So we spent the next three and a half hours - nearly the entirety of our day - in a Lens Crafters trying to find a pair of glasses that fit him and get his prescription faxed and waiting for them to be made.

Goodbye Georgia.

Florida will be better, right? 

Well, the hotel... not exactly what the internet said.

Sure... the service was great, the place relatively clean, great breakfast, free wi-fi and parking, and a beautiful pool:

But the "hotel" was really a motel, and the rooms... well, let's just say that calling them a room was a euphemism for "closet." Which, by the way, the room didn't have. No closet, no floor space... just two full size beds, a sink for one, and a bathroom so small one had to stand on the toilet to the door shut behind you.

This was where 5 of us slept.

It was a miracle none of us killed each other. We had to sit on the beds to let someone pass, and to pass you had to crawl over suitcases. Fun times.

But there was still snorkeling, right?

Ahh... Peace.

Usually I spend a good amount of beach time sitting on the sand reading. Especially this year, I needed this time to catch up on reading if I wasn't going to be writing. But there was almost no sand. Just woods and rocks and then, water. And it was hot. Africa hot. Hot with a humidity that beat even Virginia in August. There was no way I was NOT going to spend the entire day in the water.

I get in after I've gotten all three kids geared up in snorkels and fins and as I'm wading in, my youngest swims up and tugs at my swimsuit. She pops her head above water and says, "You're still wearing your pump."

AAARGH!!! I scrambled over the rocks like an idiot, trying to get out of the water. My insulin pump, which keeps me alive, is "dunk proof" but not water proof, and there were some scary moments there were I thought I'd killed it.

But I didn't. Phew.

Then, two days later, we went on a boat trip out to snorkel the third largest reef in the world.

I jumped off the boat. With my pump on.

And I killed it. My $4,000 pump that I need to wear all the time ... was dead.

I swear. You can't make this stuff up.

After getting back on dry land I called the pump manufacturer and they informed me they could have a replacement to my hotel by morning. All I had to do was give myself shots once an hour for the next 18 hours. That was fun. Especially the "during the night" part.

STILL  - They DID get a pump all the way from California to Key West in a matter of 16 hours (earlier than promised) and I was still alive. So yay!!

Friday we woke to head home and my husband's knee blew out. He's now walking like an 89 year old man with bad arthritis, and in a lot of pain. We stopped on the way home in Georgia to break up the trip, went to dinner and my youngest promptly threw up.

DOOM, I tell you. DOOM.

It seems logical that I'd be dying to get home. But right now I am tucked in a beautiful hotel, with more room than my family of 5 can use. There is carpet on the floor and big fluffy duvets on the three beds. My husband is drugged and pain-free for the moment, and asleep, along with my youngest. My two oldest are watching Pirates of the Caribbean and staying up way too late, and I've gotten on the computer for the first time in over a week. I've not thought about the story I'm working on in a week, and I'm hoping the time away has shaken loose the shackles that are keeping me from writing without fear.

We are safe, all five of us, together, having ended our day with a ton of laughing, a week's worth of memories we will never forget, and some great stories.

And really, can you ask more of a vacation than that?