This Coach purse might be a little too pink. And a LOT too four hundred freakin dollars.
Maisy is a lollygagger. Maisy is a fibberty-gibbett. Maisy sits at the kitchen table and swings her feet and looks at things with her big blue eyes and accomplishes nothing. She cannot stay on task. She cannot stay in her seat. She gets up and talks to the cat, goes to see if the thing on the floor is a fuzz ball or a terrible insect, goes to get water, goes to pee, goes anyplace just to be going, and comes back and sits and swings her feet more and stares around with her big eyes.
Week one, the child made twenty minutes of homework last THREE HOURS. Then complained she had no FREE TIME. I said, “You had two hours and forty minutes of free time, and you used it to sit and swing your feet and stare at your homework without actually doing any of it.”
I have learned that in order to make her homework happen, I have to police it. We sit down. We pick a task. I set a time. I threaten DIRE CONSEQUENCES. I wait the required time. If the task is incomplete or sloppy, WE THROW IT AWAY, and she redoes the task in the same amount of time.
The first two times, I took her half-finished task away and put it right in the trash. Then she realized I actually meant it. By week three, if I stood over her with blazing eyes and set the microwave timer, we could together finish twenty minutes worth of homework in forty five minutes. Here in week four, I haven’t eaten her yet, and twice we have done twenty minutes worth of homework in under half an hour. I am winning.
I am ignoring the fact that I have spent all morning, ALL MORNING, internet shopping for wildly over-priced orange purses while upstairs, chapter 9 of my WIP lies in chunks on my floor, bleeding out. *swings feet* *looks at purses* *accomplishes nothing*
I am not this plate. I am also NOT the elephant plate.
Today I am over on Five Full Plates telling AWFUL TRUE THUTHS that are true. Even though it is DUMB that they are true. They still are.
In BETTER news, one of my all time favorite writers had one of his books made into a movie…
Barry Munday was purchased by a distributor, Magnolia pictures. It will have what they call a platform release, like lots of movies these days. It will be available for a month starting today on Video On Demand.
Scott and I haveplans to watch it next weekend. We can’t this weekend as I will be Decatur Book Festivaling…..Believe it or not, the Hollywood premiere will be at Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard September 22nd. (!!!!!)
The local premiere is at the little downtown Mobile theater, the Crescent, from October 8-14th. They serve beer, so if you are local, HEAD OUT TO IT! It may not be the champagne you would get at Mann’s, but hey, it has bubbles and alcohol. So.
Barry Munday stars Patrick Wilson, Judy Greer, and Chloe Sevigney..and it features Malcolm McDowell and other cool peeps. The trailer looks great, but fair warning, this is a movie (and a trailer) for grown ups.
My friend’s ten year old is a Lady’s Man. Always has been. Girls just…like him. And he likes girls. Never did that YUCK GIRLS, thing, which is pretty rare. He reminds me of my own son in a lot of ways. For example, they talk (and write) like 40 year old accountants, and they have talked like this since they were 18 months old and started makign sentences. It is a, I think, hazard of having the kind of mother who praises your “meritorious valor” when you eat all your peas and cautions you against “iIndulging in shenanigans, lest you invoke my maternal wrath.”
SO now on his blog, he has written a guide to getting a girlfriend that is SO. FREAKING. FULL. OF. AWESOME. I am sharing it with you.
I present to you THE FOUR STAGES OF HAVING A GIRLFRIEND. By Benny.
Stage 1: SPY
The first step is to spy on your future girlfriend. Find out what she likes, wears, and most important: Her PERSONALITY. A woman’s personality determines how easy it is to get together with her. Study how she acts with friends. Does she have a lot? a few? one? or none? Next what she likes. Study her clothes. Does she wear pink, or red? shirts, or dresses? sandals, or sketchers® twinkle toes? Also study her speech. You can find out a lot by hearing a girl talk to someone else. What’s her favorite color? her favorite movie? who does she know? does she believe in cooties
Also what she does. How she arrives, if she likes to get active, if she already has a boyfriend or not (important.) After you’ve found out enough about her, move on to stage 2
Stage 2: SHOWTIME
Now that you’ve found out everything you need to know about her, it’s time to make an appearance based on what you’ve learned from stage 1. Now try to put everything you learned together like a jigsaw puzzle, like this: Name: Jessica. Favorite color: Blue. Favorite sport: golf. Friends: Alice, Jenifer, Julia, and Marci. Favorite outfit: Blue butterfly dress with 3 yellow flowers on it. Now try to come up with something to do with all this, like starting a mini golf course giving away a free blue golf club with blue ball to the first girl named Jessica to show up. (first make sure there are no other girls named Jessica) and she can bring up to four friends, and she and her optional friends can have ten more runs if she or one of her friends has a blue shirt with yellow flowers on it. (If the plan backfires, let me know.)
Stage 3: A friendly introduction
Now that you’ve made some fame with her, it’s time to introduce yourself. Make it in private, like in the woods or something. Then tell her your name and your interests (e.g. I like dogs, I like pizza, etc.) Then tell her her interests. She should think you’re a psychic or something. Then have some fun! Now once your feminine friend gets used to being with you, move on to
Stage 4: The admitting
Now that you know everything about making a girlfriend, tell everything you know to her, only with boys. Tell her our interests, what we like to do, what we like to wear, eat and drink, where we like to go, etc. So now you should be good, bye for now.
P.S. I have 4 girlfriends
P.P.S. Beware of the smoochies!
I have taken an axe to this novel. It is HORRIFYING. I was almost done, could see the end, and all at once I stopped fighting to make it go how I wanted and am letting it go how it wants to go. Not two voices. Three. THREE! I hacked it open and threw some pink-n-pretty vital organs sideways and am replacing them with pig valves and robot parts, letting the Liza-monster tell her part in it, because you can’t HAVE a Liza-monster and not let it speak. RIGHT? Right.
Right? I hope right. Because otherwise a perfectly good book is in chunks on my floor for no reason. Heh.
This means the stack of Southern Fiction I have been saving up to savor when drafting is done all got shoved back in the closet. I am reading ANYTHING except Southern as I sniff out Liza’s voice, and have found some things you might VERY well like, but be warned, none of these books is what I would call sweet. None of these books are for the squeamish. They are not tuned to the sensibilities of those with delicate constitutions. And they are also not at ALL Southern…
From Baltimore (natch) and the DC area: I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman. Best. Laura. Lippman. Ever. And I think she is a goddess. SO. That’s sayin’ something. Read by Linda Emond, who leans more toward a straight read than an acting job. She lets the language and the story speak, which is never a bad idea when it’s Lippman’s language and story.
From Vancouver Island: Still Missing by Chevy Stevens. A debut that makes me all atwitter to see what she does next. It’s being marketed as a mystery/thriller, but it has a lot of elements of a family drama book club type of book, too. I listened to the audio version, and I think Angela Dawe’s expressive, dramatic style and throaty voice added to my enjoyment.
Meanwhile, across the pond in Ireland: Faithful Place by Tana French. I think her first book remains my favorite, but only because I read it first. All three books in this linked series deliciously chewy and dark. I read this one with my eyes, so no idea how the audio is. I can tell I highly recommend THE LIKENESS audio.
Want less body parts, more South, less mayhem, more sass, maybe some bittersweet humor and a helluva of a voice? Fine. The last southern book I read before I picked the up the axe was TRULY lovely. The Sweet By and By by Todd Johnson. He’s one to watch.
Meanwhile, right after I finished listening to I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE, I went to cyber stalk Lippman in a red wash of fan-grrrrl-nerd-passion, and I found THE BEST MEME EVER (click here to play) on her blog.
You get to put yourself into a Time magazine cover story. I already read all the ones on Lippman’s blog and tons of people I love are playing, to hilarious effect, including crime novelist Cornelia Read. GO PLAY! I played already, and my entry is comment 37. If YOU play, let me know or copy it here, I want to read yours.
Her: Did I mention my latest woe to you? Yesterday, after the school picnic, I looked in the mirror in the car and found a WRINKLE. Right between my eyes!
Me: Oh, I KNOW! I have TWO in that exact place, centered between my brows and they run vertically. They look like ANGRY WRINKLE HORNS. I named them “Sam” and “Maisy Jane.” Now I have a third forming right in between the first two….I think I will name him “Deadline.”
This moose loomed moosily over my hotel's coffee bar...
1) Michigan summers can be QUITE humid.
I suspect that Michigan’s state motto is “the Big Hair state.” The second I deplaned, I felt my hair beginning to rise and puff into billowing humps of fuzzy curlage, and by the time I went to my book event, my hair was of a size to respectably make a showing in ANY suburban mega-mall, Circa 1984.
2) At the Pellston Market, on Highway 31 about 20 miles north of Petosky, you can get a Salmon Sandwich so VERY tasty, what with the fresh asiago ciabatta bread and fancy lettuces and heirloom tomatoes and herb sauce and rich, oily salmon, that you may pull over to eat it undistracted by little things like staying on the road and not ramming into a truck. HUGE thumbs SO up. As a concession to my WW points, I pulled off the thick, cheesy top breads (THOUGH IT KILLED ME) and I only ate the thin, bottom pieces of the bread, and it was STILL a sandwich worth pulling over so as to fully experience it’s myriad mouthly wonders.
3) It’s gorgeous. IT IS GORGEOUS. The chunk of Michigan I was in is GREEN and BEAUTIFUL and it smells like flowers. The incredibly groovy peeps at McClean and Eakin (an A+ Indy, btw, and if you live or vacation in Petoskey —and here I interrupt my own interruption to do my impression of Napoleon Dynomite saying LUCKY!— you should totally go there and buy stuff) took me to dinner at White Caps, where I Weight Watchersly goodishly did NOT eat the Five Cheese Lobster Mac (THOUGH IT KILLED ME) and I almost didn’t mind because the company was so good, and the view was astonishing enough to touch even the ossified raisin that thumps feebly in my chest cavity. They had this panoramic window facing the shore, and the lake decided to show off by throwing me a lightning storm. (I can highly recommend the Shrimp and Scallops with lemon couscous and spinach, sauce on the side, by the way. Just not as highly as I would recommend the Lobster Mac. Because, did I mention five cheeses? FIVE. )
OOOOOOOooooOOOOoooooOOOOooo
4) They have an LSD tube in the Detroit airport. If you are NOT on LSD when you descend, you will feel like you are by the time you get out. I think it is supposed to DE-stress you? But it just distressed me. I had several flashbacks from all that acid I did back at Woodstock. Oh. Wait. I was in diapers when Woodstock happened. I TOLD YOU THAT HALLWAY WAS DISORIENTING!
5) Okay Detroit, with your fancy dope-fiend attracting attractions, I give you props for trying. But no. The airport in Pellston, Michigan hands you your own butt. Pellston wins airports. They win airports FOREVER. Their airport is greater than all the LSD tubes in the world, greater than the African Art tunnel in Hartsfield Atlanta’s A terminal. Greater than the Tube of Lights hall in O’Hare, greater even than the CONSTANT CONSTRUCTION FEST and accompanying eu de Yankee-man armpit that is Laguardia.
RAWR!
Pellston
Has
A
Bear-port!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look.
See.
Believe.
Wonder.
< —That is the luggage carousel. With its attendant fleet of puzzled black bears. And its some-flavor-of-wildcat. There are also two ENORMOUS full antlered bucks, standing taxidermied and tall in the front entrance and MULTIPLE fish trophies.
I SUSPECT (though I cannot in good conscience state it as one of my true things) that IF you purposefully try to take the wrong luggages, those bears come to life and eat you. I also suspect the Pellston Regional Bear-port has a remarkably low crime rate.
Or perhaps the crime rate is low because, in case the bears weren’t WIN enough alone, there is a Sheriff’s office in the Bear-port. I did not realize it was an actual Sheriff’s office at first. In my defense, I’d spent the whole day tearing down moving sidewalks, shoving aside old ladies and cussing like a rabies infested sailor, almost missing connections. I was TIRED. And there was this VIBE going, with the plethora of Taxidermy-friends and the hand-burned wooden signage and the exposed beam
work. You know how, in the kind restaurants that feature taxidermy and fish trophies and beam work, the restrooms will often be called thinks like COWPOKES and SALOON WENCHES? Or MUSTANGS and FILLIES? When I saw the door with the sign on it that said SHERIFF, I subconsciously registered it as a euphemism for the little boy’s room.
I am not sure what the female room would have been called…Sheriffettes? Depu-tants? Depu-teetees? Did not matter. What mattered was, I assumed SHERIFF was for the boys. I further assumed that the VERY next door I came to would be the ladies room. Which means I can tell you a final and definitely true thing that I would not otherwise have been able to confirm:
Julie on a little pregnant has clearly worked out some sort of minor deal with Cthulhu, wherein he gets to spread 1/27th of her soul on a Ritz cracker (EVERYTHING tastes better when its sittin’ on a Ritz. Even the oldest of the Great Old Ones knows that…) and Facebook becomes her love slave. Yeah, you heard me. Facebook is putting out for her. And yet it will not come across for me, and I bought Facebook the NICEST dinner.
How did she work it to have a Facebook LIKE THIS option at the bottom of every entry? Why don’t I? How can I make this happen? I can’t figure it out. Maybe because my blog is linked to my author page and not my me page? Any help appreciated.
Meanwhile, Google is acting like it just bought ME dinner. It is showing up SO VERY uninvited. Every time I launch a browser, it opens my homepage, and then a separate GOOGLE TAB opens up behind it. It is ENRAGING. I don’t WANT two tabs open, and by the way? Google already appears as a box embedded in the dashboard, available to me at ALL TIMES, my default search engine, my way of saying ‘yes google, you are my dear and glorious leader, I will search only with you, always, forever. I will eat the tasty gmail. I will drink the google flavored kool aid.’ But now all I want to say to Google is STOP OPENING YOUR OWN TAB.
It isn’t just the PRESUMPTUOUSNESS (You clicked to make a browser open? AHHHHH, you must need a separate tab for Google. You are welcome!) It is PRACTICAL. I am a fully brain-developed adult human with a clear divide workign between reality and fantasy, and as such, I sometimes enjoy to look at content for adult humans. Let me tell you, if Maisy ever walked in on the wrong second of THIS? or ANY second of THIS???? she wouldn’t sleep for a WEEK.
Kids—my kids anyway—-are not the world’s best remembering-to-knockers, and my office has unlockable French doors. I need to be able to close my browser very quickly should a kid or a pack of them come bursting in.
Or worse, what if ANYONE I RESPECT AT ALL walked in and caught me looking at something TRULY shameful. Sometimes, in unguarded link-following browsing moments, I find myself looking at things NO ONE should ever see with their eyes. Things that no one can unsee. In these moments, sorry, oh so sorry that I have clicked next link in a webcrawl of shame, I find myself wondering how I would feel if say, my mom and my pastor and Harper Lee were out for a drive together, and they chose that moment to drop by. What if my mom and my pastor and Harper Lee burst into my office, and what if I LEAPT to fast close my browser, and what if GOOGLE was open in a secret tab? Do you know what my mom and my pastor and Harper Lee would see?
Something like this:
Right. Because of the secret Google tab, the shameful page would not close in time. I would have to immediately sell everything I owned and hire an elite squad of Ninjas to launch am honor-war on Google, and then I would lie down and quietly perish of shame on the floor.
Anyone know how to make Google NOT do that? Yes, these ARE things I would normally ask Scott. He is working out of town, and my mom and my pastor and Harper Lee could come by ANY SECOND.
Tomorrow it seems likely that we shall have the Wednesday edition of the Monday More Q. But today? Today I am making my preschool teacher proud as I correctly guess the day of the week and tell you I am over onFive Full Plates. Whining. And baking things.
The lunesta moth could be touching my skin with its creepy moth feet ALL NIGHT and I would never know. And I am not even TAKING THE PILLS.
Presurgery, before the months that I call OMGIADLY (pronounced OM-gee-AD-lee, an acronym for “Oh em gee, I almost died last year.”) I had a long standing and profound relationship with Insomnia. On the surface, I flat hated Insomnia, and reviled him and said Very Bad Words Indeed about him. Between you and me? The lady was protesting too much, and the relationship was of course more complicated than that.
At four am most mornings, my brain would spring awake and begin gamboling about and peeing out novel all over the floor like a naughty Labrador retriever puppy. It would be a happy, feckless brain, concerned mostly with sniffing out the right words, not at all interested in the sink full of last night’s dishes.
Insomnia, in this already extended-beyond-all-possible-interest-or-reason metaphor, was the stick that POKED that puppy, that rooted it out of the bed, the LYING SACK OF CRAP STICK that said it was time to get up, and more truthfully told it something rotty-licious was buried deep in the files of my latest novel-in-progress, and the brain should go dig it up and bring it in the house.
I paid for these hours later, with grumpy, bitter black coffee-fueled four PM times, when my brain would have aged all the way from puppyhood to a Schubert-esque old age. My brain would be creaky and foul, and it would direct me to finally tackle the crusted dishes, because that was about all it was good for. I might break a couple fumbling at them with my sponge, I was so clumsy with exhaustion, but they got DONE. By 6 pm, Insomnia would start poking at me again and telling me of COURSE I didn’t need any SLEEP and I should have dinner and chatter at my husband and kids and play games and frisk about, but the afternoons? Were awful. In the afternoons, my old creaky 4 PM Schubert brain would not be interested in novels or pleasantness; it was in charge of autonomic functions and grumpiness only.
DIGRESSION: Speaking of the old fat cat, he will NOT use the old fat cat step. I was up three times last night, setting him ON THE STEPS, and then he would step gingerly onto the bed and flop down in a heap of smugness to nap by me. I am going to season him with oregano and bake him in a pan. I see no other solution. TO UN-DIGRESS, each time he woke me up, I would put him on the step, get back in bed, and fall ALMOST INSTANTLY back into dreamless sleep! INSOMNIA, WHERE ARE YOU?
Post OMGIADLY? Insomnia is nowhere to be found. He has DITCHED me. He is on the fritz. And I MISS him. I MISS my insomnia. I can’t believe I just said that. I can’t believe also, that every time Insomnia does a drive by, and I have a bad night or two, I trumpet about it excitedly to all my friends. I THINK MY INSOMNIA IS COMING BACK, I bellow into the phone, hopeful, as if I am talking about a beloved cousin who has been deployed into a hotzone, and now has orders to return.
Maybe not. But you are ruining my schedule.
Because as much as I used to bemoan my lack of sleep…Let me tell you, there is a fabulous advantage to a nineteen hour day. It is this: You can get NINETEEN HOURS WORTH OF CRAP DONE.
FAQilly speaking, when I teach at writer’s conferences, one question I almost always get is “How do you FIND THE TIME.” The person who asks is almost always a woman, and she will almost always have some sort of a mom-tell. Perhaps something subtle, like one perfectly shaped eyebrow and one bushier one because she got interrupted halfway through to help with a science fair project and never got the time to go back. Sometimes it is plenty obvious, like a toddler’s shaky smiley face drawn in Sharpie on her otherwise nice handbag. But the mom-tell is almost always there in these WHERE DO YOU FIND TIME question askers.
The answer was (yes, past tense) simple—-I had two things going for me; I married the right man, and I am a RABID insomniac. I am still married o the right man. Scott is my go to guy, Mr. Fixit, who repairs everything in the house, from the toilet to my temper.
But I have LOST my other edge. Instead of a week consisting MOSTLY of 19 hour days with one two hour nap somewhere and one night where I pay for up-hours with a ten hour sleep binge…I consistently have days that last about 16 hours.
My afternoons are better, sure, but that means my brain never shuts down and wants to do the dishes. That means, I lose those three SILENT morning hours when no one is up but me, not the kids or the pets or that IRRITATING and apparently IMMORTAL chipmunk has for years now spent his morning hours right outside my office window producing a PIERCING rhythmic CHUP CHUP noise.
I don’t know how to schedule my day. I have to do the writing FIRST thing, but then I am behind the rest of the morning. I never catch up. I get to the end of each day, Insomnia free, yawning and blinking by 10:30 and I have about three hours worth of crap that SIMPLY HAS NOT GOTTEN DONE. Not even the worries over how I am going to find the time to make up for those hours and hours I am losing, get my filthy house under control, finish the book, get my kids to all their activities…not even all that FRETTING can keep my brain awake past eleven pm.
