Gee, No One's Ever Called Me "Rockin'" Before...

Much to my surprise, the lovely lady who runs The Accidental Environmentalist (I'm never sure whether or not to use people's names if they don't have them posted on their blogs, so I'm erring on the side of caution), nominated me for this award:



I was surprised not only because the designation was new to me, but because the nomination came from one of the brightest faces on Blog Catalog--a place full of interesting, nice, and knowledgeable people. She's always one of the first to jump in with encouragement, words of advice, or just a friendly greeting, so a nod from her is a compliment indeed. (Always cooler when the cool kids think you're cool, right?)

Now, if I'm understanding the rules correctly, it's time for me to pass on the mantle (or this nice fuschia logo, as the case may be) to five other Rockin' Girl Bloggers. I would appreciate it if you would all agree in advance to pay no attention to the fact that TWO of my nominees (or 40%) have photographs of their bathrooms on their blogs. I assure you that it's purely coincidental.

First (as always), my good friend Barb Cooper, who manages to spin both a life lesson and laughter out of everything from a trip to the grocery store to knitting a sock. You'll find Barb's blog at So the Thing Is...Blog, but I can't resist pointing you to her website, as well, where she's archived humor columns dating back to 2001.

Gerri at Absolutely True has a humorous (and sometimes cynical) take on news from around the world, and she rounds up some of the most outrageous occurrences from every corner of the (round) globe. You're bound to find something that incites laughter, moral outrage, or a war between the two.

ExtraordinaryGirl is an Augusta, Georgia native living in a village in England. She's an engaging writer no matter what she's writing about, but I especially enjoy her posts describing her new home and the surprising differences (and samenesses). Pay no attention to that giant "BATHROOM" tag in the left margin.

I generally enjoy Thorn's Novelish blog, but even if it weren't on my regular reading list she'd deserve a nod for her excellent (and highly successful) post on duplicate cover art last week.

Finally, a new acquaintance but a great find--Theresa at Sleeping Kitten - Dancing Dog! This is a lady with a kind and encouraging word for everyone who is nonetheless not afraid to speak her mind when there's a wrong that needs to be righted. Her blog includes everything from movie reviews to recipes and food safety tips--truly something for almost everyone.

Can a Grocery List be Copyrighted?

A new book by the founder of the surprisingly popular grocerylists.org proves that there's an audience for everything. Milk, Eggs, Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found is a collection of...grocery lists. Yes, that's right--a hardcover book priced at $19.95 and made up of "found" grocery lists.

Now, it seems unlikely that anyone slaps a little "(c) 2007" on the bottom of his grocery list (though I'm starting tonight), and once upon a time that would have been the end of the issue. But--although the news has been surprisingly slow to spread--copyright notices have been unnecessary since 1989. Now, any original expressive work is automatically copyrighted as soon as it is committed to "fixed format". The definition of "fixed" is extremely broad, including both digital and "hard" copies, sound recordings, handwritten drafts, and more. In essence, for the written word, as soon as you write it down. Or type it. Or word process it. Or blog it. You get the idea.

That means all kinds of things we don't usually thnk of as copyrightable are not only copyrightable, but copyrighted. Email, for instance. I've been told that in Austraila, forwarding an email without permission has been construed to infringe copyrights. That may seem extreme in our free-forwarding culture, but is email forwarding really any different from photocopying someone's handwritten letter and distributing it? Profit, remember, is not a necessary element of copyright infringement.

So what about your grocery list? We know copryight notices aren't required, so the issue seems to be whether a gorcery list is the kind of "creation" that can be copyrighted at all. I assume that the author and publisher considered this before bringing out Milk, Eggs, Vodka. It's entirely possible that the "authors" of those grocery lists aren't protected, because for a work to be copyrighted it must have some degree of originality; there must have been some creative effort. The line isn't clear. Telephone book style listings of information are definitely not copyrightable; stories are. There's a lot of ground in between.

A grocery list seems like precisely the kind of thing that couldn't be copyrighted--just a list of ordinary items.

Except...except...except...if there's nothing unique or interesting about the form of expression--whether it be a comedic combination of items, an outrageous abbreviation system, or the scribbled notes in the margin--then why is there a book?

Read in a hundred thousand disclaimers here, because I haven't read the book, but it seems to me that the author and the publisher have effectively disproven their best defense simply by publishing the book.

So...anyone missing a grocery list?

(c) Tiffany Sanders, 2007

Begin at the Beginning

Well, after a couple of days of good news (writing the way you write naturally is just fine, thank you, and even an assignment without a paycheck might pay off), a reader named Julie left a comment with a very important point. It's a point that I might have been treating as self-evident, and upon reflection I realize that it's probably not--so many thanks to Julie for pointing it out.

You have to do the work.

Making it as a writer first requires writing. I know that sounds silly, but I can't tell you how many people I know walking around with hypothetical books in their heads and big plans for the success of those books and their tours and television interviews and all that but who...um...don't write. You have to write.

And writing isn't enough, either. Writing for a living is a business like any other, and that means parts of it aren't that much fun. It also means that parts of it cut into your writing time. If you want to write and be published you have to research markets. You have to send out tailored queries and submissions. You have to track what you've sent where and what kind of response you've received. You have to think about what rights you're willing to sell and then keep track of that, too, so that you don't end up selling or reprinting something you don't own.

Sometimes, in the beginning, you have to take on assignments that just don't thrill you.

About eight years ago, I had a conversation with another writer. I'd just taken on my first assignments as a newspaper stringer, and was writing a scintillating article about McGruff the Crime Dog. I suggested to her--a recent graduate of a respected writing program--that she might want to contact my editor. She sort of wrinkled up her nose and said that she didn't really care for that kind of writing. She's an excellent writer--far better than I--and she has great contacts, but she's been holding out for her "Oprah's Book Club book" all these years. I've never for a moment doubted that she has the ability to write one. But she didn't. And she didn't accumulate clips, and she didn't use her contacts. Eight years later, I have (without a related degree or any contacts to speak of) published two books, written a third that's out to an agent right now, started a fourth, made my living as a newspaper stringer, a copywriter, a curriculum writer for a national corporation, and now have a full-time, salaried writing job.

It isn't, any of it, Oprah's Book Club. And frankly, I don't care about that--I care about making enough money as a writer that I don't have to eat up writing time earning a living some other way. But what if I did? Somehow, I have a strong suspicion that most best-selling authors have a few regional magazine articles and $50 short stories in their past.

What Does "Free" Really Mean, Anyway?

Imagine that you are an up and coming music writer. Music writing is your dream, and you've had a little success. You're writing music reviews for a few websites and a regional magazine, perhaps, making anywhere from $10 to $100/review, depending on the market.

One day, without ever really entertaining the thought that it might be accepted, you pop off a query to Rolling Stone. Much to your surprise, you get a call almost immediately--the magazine loves your proposal, and they're willing to run it as a cover story. But for whatever reason (this being wildly hypothetical), they can't pay you for the story. Do you write it?

It seems to me that there are only two possible answers to this question:

1. Yes, of course, because once I've written a Rolling Stone cover story I'll have hundreds of markets available to me at good rates that might have been out of reach only yesterday.

2. No, I never really wanted to make it in the music writing business anyway. Better $10 from Ralph's Obscure Newsletter of Indy CDs than nothing from Rolling Stone!

For as long as I can remember, a debate has raged in the writing community about "writing for free". Many writers say, "Never write for free!" while others (myself included) can point to lucrative opportunities that came about as the direct result of something written for "free". It suddenly occurred to me today that we've been asking the wrong question and debating the wrong issue all along. The question isn't whether or not we should write for free. Of course we shouldn't. The question is what "free" means in the context of writing and publishing.

The world is full of publications proclaiming that the only "payment" they offer is the opportunity to "see your work in print" or offer a link to your website. If all you want is to see your work in "print", start a blog. Publications with low quality work and low readership don't provide clips that are going to be of much use to you in advancing your writing career. But what about that link to your website? Is that payment?

The answer is that it depends entirely on where that link will be placed. If the link is on a site with no page rank and 50 visitors a day, it's not likely to benefit you in any meaningful way. If you're a music writer and the link is on Billboard's official site, it's worth a heck of a lot more than the $10 or $100 you might have gotten for a paid article on a lesser site. For one thing, it's likely to bring a lot of relevant traffic to your website. Just as important, it's a link that screams "important music resource this way!" to Google and the other search engines.

People and businesses shell out hundreds of dollars per month to have a single link on a relevant, highly-ranked, high traffic website. So you might not be getting a paycheck, but you may be getting something of much greater value in return.

Sometimes, the "payment" for your work can be even further removed from an editor cutting a check; sometimes, the value truly is in the clip. In the Rolling Stone example above, they "payment" for your "free" story might well be skipping over another two or three years of writing for indy newspapers and regional magazines and moving into the big leagues. It might be commanding much more respect and higher rates that the publications you're already working with. For some, it might simply be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream to write a Rolling Stone cover story.

The right question, it seems to me, is the same one I was suggesting back when we were all asking the wrong one: What's in it for me? There are many, many, many opportunities for "free" writing that not only won't help you or your writing career, but might do it some harm. But the question to ask in making that determination isn't, "Are they going to cut me a check?" but "Is there a tangible benefit in this for me.?" Very often, I think, the answer is yes.

Writing is Easy

Yeah, you heard me right.

I'm sick to death of hearing published authors carry on about how writing is a grueling task on a level with working in the coal mines.

Of course, your experience may differ.

But that's the whole point of this post, really--your experience may differ.

I think it's an important point to make, because novice writers are so quick to believe anything that an experienced writer says. I've been making my living primarily as a writer for about a dozen years. If I can get in a focused 5-6 hours of writing, I generally turn out about 5,000 words in a day, which may require light editing later.

Obviously, it's not like that for everyone--there are very successful writers who claim to hate the process of writing. Even Dorothy Parker said she didn't like writing, she liked "having written". I know writers for whom that's dead on. For me, I have no interest in "having written". The magic is all in the process for me...I lose interest in a work pretty quickly when it's done and only have eyes for the new blank page in front of me.

The single most important thing that a new or aspiring writer can know is that it's DIFFERENT FOR EVERYONE.

• If writing is a lot more work than you expected it to be, don't get discouraged--many very successful authors describe the writing process and arduous and even painful.
• If writing flows out of your fingertips onto the page as if the words had just been waiting, already in order, to be released, don't assume you're a lightweight--many successful authors report that they feel like the words and stories "come from somewhere else".
• If you rely on outlines, great--write an outline. Many authors depend heavily on them.
• If you prefer to just sit down and write and see what happens, go for it. Regardless of what outline-dependent authors preach, you'll be in the company of several wildly successful authors--including Stephen King--if you opt to let your characters lead you.
• If you like to edit each day's work at the end of the day, or first thing the next morning, and that works out for you...do it. If it's more comfortable for you not to look back until you've reached the end...fine.
• Some writers do well with a very disciplined schedule, and some "binge write". As long as you're producing quality work and meeting your deadlines, it's no one's business but your own whether you write for two hours every morning or for twenty straight hours on Saturday.

The bottom line is that virtually every piece of writing advice you hear from a published writer is based on what worked for that writer. You are not that writer. Your mileage may vary. There is a lot to be learned from successful writers, but only if you have the strength and confidence to take what works for you and leave the rest. If you're a free-form writer and that's always worked well for you, it's entirely possible that buying into someone's proclamation that you "can't write a coherent novel without an outline" is going to cripple your writing. If you're at your best in the early morning hours, the fact that some other writer has great success staying up all night writing shouldn't influence you.

Be the writer you are. That's the only "writing tip" that works for every writer.

Cover Art Expose at Novelish.com

I really, really, really need to be asleep, but I couldn't resist a quick note to share this fascinating post about duplicate cover art at Novelish.com. Seems stock photograph has its downsides, and one of those downsides is prominently on display right now, with side-by-side images of various novels with some...err...familiar-looking images on the front!

It's definitely worth a read purely for entertainment value, but it raises larger issues as well. Are these publishers getting sloppy, or is it okay to duplicate cover art? Does the association with one book help to sell a later book that uses a slightly altered version of the same photograph? (And if so, might some of these duplications be calculated?) As authors, how do we feel about stock photography that might be recycled again and again becoming the "image" of our books?

It's a topic we could explore all night, but I'm going to keep it brief for tonight in hopes that some others will weigh in

We're Not Big on Celebrity News Around Here

But we've had enough stories of child-star self-destruction to last several lifetimes, and this story provides a very encouraging counter-point...especially for me, since my daughter keeps asking when her next movie is going to start filming!

Math Wonder

The Sun Also Rises

No, this isn't some big philosophical post about how better days will come. It's literal.

Aw, man. Even that sounds like a pun, in context.

Forget the whole titling thing. I want to talk about The Sun Also Rises, the Hemingway novel. If you've never read the novel and you think you might someday, then I suggest that you stop reading right now, because the rest of this post is about how the last line of the novel changes everything that came before.

That's quite a device today, especially in film. Kevin Spacey suddenly walking upright in the last frames of The Usual Suspects springs to mind, for instance. But in the twenties? It seems to me not so much. Maybe some literary scholar will read this (because all the top literary scholars read my blog, of course), and step forth to tell me how wrong I am and provide a list of other examples--I think I'd be fine with that, and probably run straight out to read those books and analyze the trend. Because what fascinates me is that Hemingway seems to have done it decades before it became a common device and no one seems to have noticed!

I've read a lot of essays on The Sun Also Rises, and engaged in a lot of discussions, some in college classrooms and some over drinks late at night and some on the truly incredible Lost Generation forum, where the knowledge base is dazzling. There's always a lot of talk, of course, about the significance of that last line, but it's always presented as a change, a learning moment, character development.

Nuh uh. I don't think so. (This is the part you won't want to read if you haven't read the book and think you might someday)

I think he knew all along.

I think that famous last line is so very powerful precisely because it shifts the context of everything that came before. He was never fooling himself! He accepts what he accepts and he makes the decisions he makes without buying into the illusion, without believing that if it weren't for his injury, it would be happily ever after.

Even Brett seems to buy into that illusion, and she's the reason it could never be. She'd be the one to find some other reason to stray, to walk away, to come and go, to hold back something...and yet she thinks, "if only". Jake, it becomes clear in that last sentence, doesn't think "if only" at all--or if he does, it's a very different "if only" from the one that's tossed in front of us throughout the book.

I love the book, but that's the thing I love most about it. The thing every other student of Hemingway I've encountered seems to think I've made up.

Easy Options for ESL Writing

A solution fell into my lap this week, not for a problem I have but for one I hear about all the time.

I work in a major metropolitan area with--like any major metropolitan area--a mix of people from all over the world. Just a few weeks ago, in making small talk on the way to the train station, a cab driver asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a writer, he asked me how he could improve his writing skills; English was his second language and he said that he was much more comfortable speaking and writing, but he was working two jobs and didn't have time to take a class.

The conversation wasn't a new one for me, but it's one I've always hated, because I'm a "fixer", and I didn't have an answer. Today, I learned about an online ESL writing class that looks like it might be just the kind of flexible and affordable solution I've never been able to point to before. Best of all, I'm acquainted with the teacher through Blog Catalog, and given the level of energy and willingness to help she shows in that forum (where she has no official obligation to anyone and no one is paying her), I'm very confident about the level of service and attention this program will provide.

I think "meme" is the French word for "same"

Actually, I know it is, but I'm not sure whether or not that's the origin of "meme" to mean something like this thing below. It seems logical, since what you do is take the same questions from someone else, but I'm making this up as I go.

I've never paid much attention to them, but my friend Barb posted this on her blog and she said that everyone who was reading it should do the same. Her instructions were very specific...she even pointed out that we should erase her answers (I can't be sure, but this may have been intended specifically for me, since I would have thought it funny as hell to just repost her questions AND answers if the instructions had been less explicit). There seemed to be no wiggle room, so here goes:


1. Are you taller than your mom?

Oh yeah. And so is everyone else.

2. What color is your car?

Well, white. But I didn't choose that. It's otherwise an exact copy of a RED car I once had, which was much more to my liking.

3. What is the closest thing to you that is red?

Other than that long-lost car? My blouse.

4. What is your ringtone?

Ringtone?

5. Are you sick?

Sadly, yes. But I'm optimistic that a simple surgical procedure is going to fix me right up and change my life.

6. What color is your favorite pillow?

Aquamarine.

7.What is your favorite video game?

Bust-a-Move

8. Had a nap today?

No. I never get naps anymore. I'm always willing, though.

9. Gold or Silver?

Silver.

10.Is there an animal that creeps you out?

Animal? Not really. Spiders aren't animals, right?

11.Who was the last person you rode an elevator with?

If this means people I know, Joel Newton. If it means random people who stepped into the same elevator I did...some random woman who works on the 34th floor.

12. Did you go ice skating as a kid?

Yes, but not often. More on ponds than at rinks.

13. Ever have stitches?

Yes, in my chin when I was three years old.

14. Favorite non-alcoholic drink?

Coca-cola with a lot of ice.

15. How long ago did you kiss someone?

I need clarification of the question.

16. What's something you want to do before you die?

Nap.

No, just kidding.

Well,not kidding exactly. I do want to nap. But I'd like to do something worthwhile, too. After my nap.

17. Have you ever caught something on fire?

If it's my own kitchen, does that really count?

18. Have you ever seen a ghost?

No.

19.Have you ever seen the northern lights?

No. Once when I was very young, one of my neighbors was outside yelling that he could see them, and he woke my father up, but my father called him some choice names and went back to bed instead of waking the rest of us up to share.

20. Do you know how to use chop sticks?

Absolutely not.

21. Name something good that happened today.

I ate Mexican food in brand new white pants and they're still white. (My mother suggested that they must be magic, as this couldn't possibly be attributable to me)

22. What room are you in?

My bedroom.

23. Are you worried about something you can't control?

Yes.

24. Do you take daily medications?

Yes

25. Ever been in a fight?

Fight? As in two sided? No. But when I was 13 and my sister was 6, I knocked a kid flat on his ass after he hit her in the head with an ice ball. His mother stood patiently by and watched.

26. Are you wearing nailpolish?

Yeah, right. I don't even OWN nail polish.

27. Favorite color?

Bright, Irish green, like the green crayon or green poster paints in pre-school.

28. Innie or Outie?

I actually don't believe that anyone is an outie. I've never seen one.

29. Ever used a Ouija board?

Yes, back in my youth, before I remembered that I was Catholic.

30. Sweet or Sour?

Yes.

31. Sun or Moon?

Moon.

32. What shoes did you wear today?

White sandals.

33. Favorite eye color of the opposite sex?

Brown.

34. Most important quality in any relationship?

That inexplicable thing that makes you want to do better and be better even when the other person is perfectly happy with you as you are.

35. Favorite zombie movie?

There is more than one zombie movie?

36 Time of day you were born?

10:41 p.m.

37. Do you know your blood type?

I did once.

38. What would you spend 5000 dollars on right now if you were handed it?

I'd prepay my rent and utilities for as long as that would stretch.

39. Name something annoying in public transit?

Can't. I love it.

Oh, wait. This isn't public transit's fault, but I HATE when the train is so crowded that people are standing in the aisles and there are always those obnoxious few who keep their one little bag on the seat next to them so that no one else can sit down, and stare straight ahead and pretend they don't notice the people searching for seats. I think they should have to buy tickets for their bags.

40. Did you grow up in the city or country?

City, but I thought it was the country. My parents were from Chicago, and my mother always referred to our town (population roughly 80,000) as "out here in the sticks," so I grew up thinking it was a small town in the middle of nowhere.

41. Would you ever consider going on a reality TV show if offered a large sum of money?

I was actually on reality tv once, for a very small sum of money. But I hadn't given much thought to reality tv then. Now that I see how it's contributing to the downfall of western civilization, I don't think I'd do it again.

42. Have you flown in your dreams?

I don't believe so.

43. Hugs or kisses?

No.

44. You have 10 dollars to spend in the dollar store..what do you get?

Cleaning products and paper towels and stuff.

45. Slurpee flavor?

Blue raspberry.

Once Upon a Time This Was a Writing Blog...

So I thought, in honor of those partially-lost days, I'd share this link with you:

Writing Fiction Crawford Kilian has a way of digging right into what someone's written (even if that someone was him) and gutting out what could have been done better in a way that we can all use it to hone our crafts.

Many thanks to Jerry Russell at Please Don't Feed the Writer for outing this little gem.

New Genre, New Territory, New Worries

As a writer, I don't suffer from any kind of angst. I've heard many writers say that writing is hard and painful and it makes me wonder why they write. I write because whenever I pass too close to a keyboard, words start spilling out of my fingers unprovoked and spreading themselves across the screen.

I've written three complete novels (one published under a pen name, one being considered by an agent, one still in the filing cabinet) and two halves. I've written more biographies of Rick Springfield than any one person should be able to make a career of. I've written entire websites covering complex areas of law.

Today, I'm writing something that is either a long short story or a short novella. It's futuristic. It contains no dialogue. It is, in short, entirely unlike any of the many varied things I've written before.

And I'm a little worried about it.

I know it sounds crazy for someone who has been writing since elementary school, but that's never happened to me before. I don't know what this thing I'm writing is, whether it has a genre, whether it's supposed to be dark and dense and more descriptive than active like this. It's almost as if I've found myself giving birth to something that doesn't quite seem like it's going to be a baby.

I keep writing it. But I'm afraid of it. I don't think that's ever happened before.

Featured Blog Catalog Donors Choose Challenge Project of the Day

A teacher in Indianapolis reports that her white boards are literally falling apart. Her modest proposal to replace them has been more than half funded, and a mere $170 is needed to fulfill the project and provide these basic teaching materials.

Please drop by Donors Choose and make a contribution. As this example demonstrates, very small contributions add up to big differences in the lives of our elementary school children across the country. If just 17 people donate $10 to this project, it will be complete. Think about that--you and 16 friends can kick in just $10 and provide white boards for an elementary school classroom. I've paid more than $10 for a single mixed drink! (And I'll bet you have, too)

Yesterday, Total Divorce stepped in with a contribution that matched all of the donations made during the first day of the challenge, but there's still a long way to go...and we can get there one $10 donation at a time, if everyone will take just a moment to participate!

Blog Catalog Community Comes Together to Raise Funds for Education

Bloggers across the country are posting this weekend in a joint effort to turn attention--and dollars--toward Donors Choose, an organzation that brings donors together with public school teachers across the country who are looking for funding for projects and supplies their school budgets can't support.

Because most public schools are funded by property taxes, those in the poorest districts are often lacking in the most basic supplies and equipment, and can't even entertain the possibility of field trips, enrichment programs, or things many of our children take for granted, like a computer in the classroom.

At Donors Choose, teachers describe exactly what they need funding for, and donors can contribute to the specific projects they feel are most important.

Of course, I'd advocate making a donation to Donors Choose at any time, but a donation today will carry the added benefit of demonstrating how effective viral marketing can be in soliciting funds for charities so that similar projects in the future will assist worthy charities in spreading the word for free.

Big thanks to Tony at Blog Catalog for organizing and publicizing this, and to YOU for whatever your contribution might be--donating to Donors Choose, spreading the word through your own blog, or whatever seems right to you.

Home Sweet Home

This evening, my daughter and I walked to the bank. There's nothing spectacular about that, except that my bank is in the very same shopping center that my mother and I used to walk to almost daily back in the late 60s (when I rode in an olive green stroller) and early 70s.

The ice cream shop with the wrought iron chairs and tiny paper cups of sherbet served alongside every sandwich is long gone. So is the Circle E steak place that served a "wranglerburger" I've never tasted the like of anywhere since, and an artificial Christmas tree festooned with balloons "for the little plate-cleaners". And the corner drugstore with its ice cream freezer filled with banana and root beer popsicles, and the grocery store...in fact, there's not one business left in that shopping center that was there in my childhood except for a tiny barbershop with an old-fashioned pole mounted on the wall outside. They've been replaced with Blockbuster and Radio Shack and a big empty space that was a hardware store and then a furniture store and now just serves as home to a childishly optimistic "for rent" sign.

But the sidewalks are the same. The night air is the same. And even though I'm sort of famous for being unsentimental, there's something about walking the same sidewalk with my daughter that I walked with my mother almost forty years ago that puts the world in perspective. I don't know why this struck me tonight, when I've walked that shopping center with my daughter a hundred times, with my daughter and my mother TOGETHER more times than I can count. But it brought back a slideshow of other moments when the past and present have suddenly become overlaid for a moment:

Walking at the drive-in, carrying my daughter and hearing my feet crunch in the gravel as we walked and remembering walking beside my mother as she carried my sister along that same path to the concession stand;

Lifting my daughter onto a picnic table in front of Dairy Queen and remembering taking my sister there--and sometimes a handful of other kids--when I was babysitting for her the summer I was thirteen;

Sitting sideways on the front seat of the car with the door open, pouring a drink for my daughter, and suddenly SEEING my own mother's sun-freckled arm doing the same in Lake Geneva during the summer of 1977.

And now, I suppose, it's time to get to the point, but I don't have one. I'm just enjoying the feel of fitting my sandals into my mother's footprints on an early summer evening.

This is Not a Parenting Blog

This is not a parenting blog. This is not...

Really. I promise.

But sometimes the little everyday moments are so simultaneously dismaying and entertaining that they call out to be shared.

My daughter is 11, and she often goes to my parents' house after school. It's not unusual for friends to visit her or call her there. Today, however, I was working from home and so she wasn't there.

About half an hour after school got out, my mother called and asked, without preamble, to talk to my daughter. I told her she was in the shower and she said, "Well, there's this little boy at my door..." I took the phone into the bathroom and put it on speaker. Turned out the boy had come to my mother's door hoping to find my daughter in order to ask her where another girl lived.

My mother had offered him our phone number, and he'd asked to use her phone.

So she was calling, with this boy she'd never seen before in her kitchen, looking for my daughter's friend's address...which my daughter didn't know.

"Just give him her cell," my daughter said. My mother said okay.

Um. Wait. "Mom, do you HAVE her cell?"

And she said, "I have it written down somewhere." Then she hung up to let the boy use her phone to call my daughter's friend's cell and find out where she lived--but not before she'd plucked our phone number back out of the boy's hand and said, "I'll just take this back in case she doesn't want you to have it."

A short time later, she called back. She said the girl's voicemail had been full, so she'd described to him as best she could where the girl lived. My daughter said, "Ummmm...she's going to kill you."

And then my mother said, "Anyway, I just called to say that whoever this boy is, he's much cuter than the one who came over yesterday."

Now that I think about it, I'm not at all sure whether this is a parenting story or a story about parents.

Do We Really Need to Go FASTER?

I started this as a writing blog, and I hope that it mostly remains one, but every once in a while I have a thought. Well, I have thoughts frequently, but every once in a while I have a thought I'd like to make in public, without having to write a query and seek an appropriate venue, and I think that's mostly what blogs are for.

So here's my thought today: On the way home on the train this evening, I saw a sign advertising Chase's new feature that allows one to set ATM preferences so that you can "get cash twice as fast".

How long does the typical ATM transaction take? I'll admit that I've never timed it (although you can be sure that I'm going to), but I'm guessing less than ninety seconds. So. Yeah. I REALLY need to shave that 45 seconds off my cash withdrawal time. It's going to change my whole day.

I know it sounds like I'm being sarcarstic, but in fact I think that it IS going to change my whole day--and yours too--and the change isn't for the better.

Remember when you had to go to the library and sort through drawers for the right roll of microfiche and pop it into a machine and turn and turn and turn and focus in order to find an old magazine or newspaper article? I'm talking 1988 here, not the forties.

Okay, quick show of hands: how many of you have complained out loud about how long it takes a newspaper article or other resource to load online? We cut out the travel time, we cut out the sorting through the cabinets, we cut out the scrolling, then we even cut out the dial-up delay, and now we're groaning, "this is so slooooowww" when it takes 30 or 45 seconds for a web page to display.

Now, I'm not a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of girl by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to say that I think maybe driving to the library was much healthier for us, as individuals and as a culture. I say that in part because we interacted with live people more, and were less rushed when we did. I say it partly because downtime like that you spend driving alone gives you time and space to think. And I say it partly because I think there's something inherently unhealthy, mentally and physically, about feeling the need to shave that extra 45 seconds off our ATM transactions.

I don't mean to lay this all at Chase's doorstep, though I do think Chase is the root of all evil (we'll talk about that another day). I see it at the gas station where "Speedpass" promises to save me the time it takes to actually INSERT MY CREDIT CARD, since I just have to wave it at the machine. I see it at the grocery store where "one touch" payment is so "convenient" that we've all conveniently overlooked how creepy and 1984 it is. Saddest of all, I see it in the parents who can't let their children tie their own shoes or zip their own jackets because that extra minute or two seems so critical to whatever it is they're rushing off to.

So here's my plan. I'm not signing up for one touch payment. I'm going to write checks just like we did back in prehistoric times, and if that takes an extra 30 seconds I'm going to use that time to wish the clerk a nice evening and smile at the person behind me (whose brain will probably be exploding because I'm writing a check). I'm going to leave my ATM preferences unset and go ahead and take that full 90 seconds to withdraw cash from the machine. I'm never, never, never going to say "let me do that for you" to my daughter just to speed her up. And I could be wrong, but I suspect that all those "wasted" seconds are going to add up and reappear at the end of my life, when I live a lot longer without the pressure of having to complete all of my transactions in under a minute.

Seven Unsolicited Surprises

I just happened to be reading my friend Barb's blog, where she responded to a challenge from another friend to post seven things about her that the friend didn't know. It reminded me pleasantly of a post I'd made several years ago on another blog called "twenty answers". It was simply a numbered list of random information. That post, honestly, began life as an email to a man I probably shouldn't have been telling quite so much about myself, but it ended up on my blog and started a little bit of a trend for a minute or two...twenty answers, no questions.

This one is tougher, though, because it's supposed to be things "you" don't know--whomever you may be. Since I adopted the challenge unsolicited, I can't focus on things a particular person won't know, and have to think about the things that may surprise the world at large.

1. My favorite song is by Aerosmith.

2. I pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every night.

3. My first paid piece of published writing was about McGruff the Crime Dog, and took me more than three hours to write, with a lot of help from my younger sister.

4. I watched General Hospital for years, even taped it when I was working during the day--and NOT when Rick Springfield was on it.

5. I cannot swim, but I love deep water.

6. I finished my first novel in 1993, but I've never shown it to anyone.

7. I like to fish: dig up my own worms, bait my own hook, feel the simultaneous slip and scrape of the scales against my hand--but I always let them go.

A Whole New Can of Writing Worms

Last week, I wrote this post about what makes a writer in response to another blogger's comment on her blog about another blogger's comment on her blog about....well, we've covered all that already. But then a comment to the original post raised yet another question: we've all agreed (I think) that you don't have to be published to be a writer, but does being published make one a writer?

Again, I think it depends wholly upon usage. If "writer" is a state of being, then no, it does not. Or at least, there's a fair argument to be made that it doesn't. But if "writer" denotes a person making a living in a particular profession, then I don't think quality counts. There are good and bad doctors and good and bad lawyers and good and bad waitresses and good and bad mechanics, but we don't quibble about their titles. We don't walk out of a restaurant after getting bad service and say, "she wasn't really a waitress!" Crappy service or not, she's a waitress because it's her job title. The same can be true of a writer.

I don't necessarily think that talent is a prerequisite to becoming a writer by trade. Perhaps there is a line that one can't cross without talent, but with thousands of publications and tens of thousands of Internet outlets and hundreds of thousands of small businesses in need of copywriting services and websites, it's certainly feasible to make a living as a writer without crossing those lines.

In fact, I strongly suspect that many without what some of us would term talent HAVE crossed those lines. I'm not going to name any names, but I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this can quickly call to mind a wildly successful writer that he or she doesn't think can write. I'm not talking about someone whose style you don't care for, someone who doesn't suit your tastes, but someone you truly think is just a BAD writer.

You know you can.

So...if you're a writer...a writer who wants to be published...a writer who wants to make a living writing...maybe even a writer who secretly yearns for fame and fortune...what does that writer have that you don't?

Seriously.

The Great Yahoo Conspiracy?

I recently used the (free) Google information bar to find out how recently Google had spidered a friend's website. Good news--they'd visited just a few days earlier, less than a week after the previous visit.

I cut and pasted the date and time of the visit into an email and sent it to my friend--and that's when the intrigue began. You see, my friend uses sbcglobal as her ISP, and SBC, as you may know, is Yahoo! (or owns Yahoo!, or is owned by Yahoo! or some such--I can't keep it all straight)

SBC sent me an autogenerated email telling me that my email was undeliverable for "policy reasons".

I puzzled over this for a moment, experienced a moment of gratitude for gmail (however creepy it might be that ads relating to the subject of my email pop up up in the margins) and considered sending my friend an invite to get a free gmail account. Then I re-sent the email to another of my friend's accounts.

She replied from her SBC account. That got through fine, trailing my cut and paste along with it, but when I tried to respond, I got another bounce message...policy reasons again. No explanation as to what policy I might have violated, of course. And I can't rule out the possibility that there's some code under that Google information that innocently set off some kind of screening. But I also can't rule out the possiblity that the policy I violated was one against consorting with the competition, and that idea leaves me decidedly uneasy.

The Accidental Grammar Police

Rest assured, I am aware that my grammar is not perfect. Sometimes I make mistakes in haste. Sometimes--though I tremble a little to admit this--I know the proper usage and reject it. For example, I use the word "can" when I should say "may". Every time I do, I hear a taunting little grade-school voice in my head saying, "I don't know...CAN you?", but I do it anyway because "may" sounds so prim and 1950s Miss Manners to me that I just can't bring myself to use it. It's as if my whole paragraph will freeze up, cloak itself in a crisply ironed dress, and start vacuuming the living room in pearls and high-heeled shoes.

Still, I identified with Lynne Truss and fully understood her need to carry spare apostrophes.

There are, really, only two schools of thought about this issue: "Grammar as Religion" and "Oh, Lighten Up--Don't NITPICK"

I'm a nitpicker, and I'm here to tell you, it can't be helped.

Sometimes we can suppress the urge to comment out loud, although if there's another nitpicker in the room it's hard to resist a quick, shared, significant look (a la Charlie's Angels), but we can't help noticing. No, really. I don't mean, "I couldn't help noticing that you've included an apostrophe in 'car's' even though you clearly intended the plural and not the possessive," but we REALLY CAN'T HELP NOTICING.

We don't look for grammatical errors. We don't analyze text. They stand out as if they were a thousand feet tall and flashing neon, surrounded by fireworks...and not just any fireworks, but ARROWS pointing directly to the word or phrase in question.

Twice a month, an email goes out to everyone in my office, and it says, "Paychecks are ready, if your hours are complete."

Twice a month, I think, "Well, no. They're ready whether or not our hours are complete--you just won't give them to us unless our hours are complete."

I like the woman who writes the email. She's nice and she's professional and she seems quite intelligent. She's very pretty, too. I don't WANT to criticize her emails over a little technical point like that "if", and I don't do it out loud. But I can't read that sentence without noting that it's not factually accurate. It doesn't express what she meant. It COULD be factually accurate, but it's not; I know that all of the checks are ready. And so my brain issues the correction, every time. And it's every bit as annoying to me as it looks from the outside, but no more avoidable. Less, in fact, because the vast majority of those observations are never spoken.

Writing about Writing (Wait...Have I Used That Already?)

Well.

There's a whole new state of affairs around here, and I don't know what to do about it.

You see, I've been happily writing along assuming that no one was reading a word of this and I could say any damned thing I pleased, and then suddenly, Barb Cooper blogged about one of my recent posts (in the same post where she showed us the scars from the reconstructive surgery on her foot--I'm just sure that was a coincidence. Really.) and then this lady I don't even know apparently read Barb's post and followed the link to my post...and the next thing you know it's like BLOGGING or something.

It got me thinking about terminology. "Writer" is a funny word, because it can denote both a profession and a state of being. Other professions aren't like that; I was a writer long before I was published, but I wasn't a lawyer or a teacher or even a hostess in a restaurant until I was hired into those positions. I certainly thought of myself as a writer back in the day when no one--and I mean no one--ever saw a word that I wrote. Back in the days before email and blogging, before I was making my living as a writer, I just wrote and wrote and wrote, and when I finished something I tossed it in my desk drawer (I didn't even have filing cabinets back then) and started something new. And I defined myself as a writer not because I made my living that way--I didn't even have a living to make, back in high school and then college and then law school. I thought of myself as a writer because it was who I was, how I thought, what was most natural and elemental about me.

All I really wanted to do in life was write. That's what made me a writer. I'm also a writer by profession now, and when I wrote this post about blogging being dangerous for writers, I meant (though didn't specify) writers who wanted to write professionally. It's hard for me to imagine that any writer wouldn't want to write professionally, but that's not because I have any desire for fame or fortune or to be "heard" or anything like that. It's simply because I forget that some people have the luxury of time to write WITHOUT using it to support themselves.

I've been writing since I was six; I started publishing because it was the only way I could buy myself time to write. I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that most writers are like me in the sense that there's virtually nothing they'd rather be doing than writing, and that a lot of other necessary activities in life feel like time stolen from writing. Since the realities of life required me to be doing something lucrative 50 or more hours a week (feeding my kid wasn't one of the things I was willing to sacrifice in order to find time to write), I had a choice--give up the vast majority of the time I could be writing, or make writing pay. I'm no more a writer today because I have a full time writing job and a few freelance gigs on the side than I was when I was seventeen and I was writing short stories no one has ever read to this day. But I'm MUCH more a writer today than I was when I was practicing law 60 hours a week and didn't write for months on end, and I'm much more a writer today than I was when I was teaching and training and doing admissions consulting around raising a child alone and I didn't write for months on end.

For anyone who has the luxury all the time he or she wants to write without having to make a living at it, I can't think of a reason in the world that publishing is better than not. But for anyone who, like me, has to make a choice among giving up writing, giving up sleep, or finding a way to make it pay, I stand by my original thoughts. Put your effort where the opportunity is. There will be plenty of time to blog when the money is rolling in.

The Downside to Blogging

Two things I saw this weekend converged in my mind and set off some flashing lights and sirens about the danger of blogging.

One of them was the description section on a blog I tripped over through my Google alerts. As is often the case, one of my alerts took me to a blog that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject I'd set up the alert for, but had somehow by chance combined the right words to get tracked. The author of the blog, the name and location of which I've already forgotten, said that she (or maybe he) was a writing teacher, and encouraged students to write often and dig deep, and the blog was an effort at doing just that. Or something similar.

The other was a very long poem on a blog with no page rank, one I never would have seen had a friend not sent me a link. Here's the thing: it was good. I don't like poetry all that much, and you've already heard my thoughts on how scintillating blogs are--I'm convinced you're not even reading THIS, because who would, and why? But this poem...I didn't do anything else while I was reading it.

If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm a chronic multi-tasker. When I'm emailing or IMing with a friend who says, after a time, "I have to get off of here and get something done" or some such, I'm always surprised. That might be a sign that I'm a very slow learner, considering how often it happens, but there it is. I'm shocked anew every time. Because I'm ALWAYS "getting something done" while I'm at the computer. I screen Google alerts and print articles for work between emails; I fold laundry and sort papers and pay bills while I IM; I have thirty or forty windows open on my computer at all times. So when I say that I sat here at my computer and read this whole very long poem without doing anything else, with a basket of clean laundry at my feet, without clicking the send/receive buttons on any of the three email accounts I had open or taking a quick peek at my bank balance to see whether the book order check had gone through yet, it means something. Nothing empirical, of course, but something about the impact of that poem on me, personally.

And that made me think that it didn't belong buried on a blog that wouldn't be easy to find if you didn't know the author. And that combined in my mind with that writing teacher's comment and made me think that maybe having such an easy outlet isn't such a good thing, not if you're a real writer. Because if you have a place where you can just write, straight into the template, and "publish" and be done with it, doesn't that sort of decrease the incentive to seek out a wider audience? Isn't there something more gratifying, in a backward kind of way, about just posting something on your blog than there might be about sending it out over and over again in hopes that maybe, six months down the road, someone will buy it and then publish it another three or six or nine months later?

There's definitely something to be said for writing more, in whatever forum. It's definitely habit forming, and the more you write the more it feels natural to write and the more you WILL write--or so I believe, anyway. But suddenly I'm wondering whether blogging doesn't provide something of a disincentive to publish, an easy way to dash off one's thoughts and make them available to the world without any extensive editing, without worrying about word counts and fonts, without research and rejection and (maybe most of all), without waiting.

Show of Hands...Who Remembers Bruce Cockburn?

I know that opening line is going to bring some angry commentary--or would, if anyone were reading this--because I remember how I felt when people made similar comments about Rick Springfield while I was writing my book, even though Rick Springfield HAD, in fact, taken a few years (or maybe it was a decade or so) away from the music industry.

Rick Springfield played something like 188 live shows that year, and the world seemed to believe he'd drifted away after "Jessie's Girl". Even now, I'm having a hard time steering myself back to the point without telling you all just exactly how many Top 40 songs Rick Springfield had after "Jessie's Girl".

Rick Springfield is a fairly prolific musician--I've lost count now, but he has 114 or 15 albums, I think, not counting comps.

Bruce Cockburn quietly blows him out of the water with 49. Yes, 49. So, "I remember him!" is a strange reaction, even to my own ears. But it's the one I had. You see, Bruce Cockburn is a landmarker in my life. I think that many musicians play that role for us. Bruce Cockburn isn't just a great musician and political activist, he's a symbol of vinyl LP's on my roommate's stereo after dinner in college and political debates far into the night, of speaking on campus and--just once--closing down a state highway.

He's a symbol of the instant connection I felt when my ex-fiance (a man I dated for five years but have now been friends with for 19) said women didn't know anything about music and I said, "My college roommate knows more about music than any man you know" and he said, "Does she know Bruce Cockburn?" I'm pretty sure I yelled "Bruce Cockburn is my favorite musician!"

I only saw Bruce Cockburn live once, at a little theatre-style place called The Riviera on the north side of Chicago. I was in law schoo in Champaign at the time, and I was in a little street-front record store (remember record stores?) buying "Big Circumstance" and the clerk said, "We're going to have tickets". Champaign was about 150 miles from Chicago, but I went right home (or back to the tiny twelfth story room that passed for hom at that point) and called my college roommate. It was an amazing night...the first concert I'd ever been to, I think, that made me turn to her and say, "I don't think I would have changed anything." She responded that she wished he'd done "Nicaragua," and he came right back out and did it.

That was life in the Bruce Cockburn days. Singing by the lagoon at night, covert political meetings, dinner always ready in the cafeteria and pre-paid. Even now, if you ask me at the right moment I'll name "Stealing Fire" as my all-time favorite album, but it's not in the CD player in my car.

And then last night, I sat down to watch a movie with my daughter--some cute little movie about a bunch of teenagers who set out to save burrowing owls from an evil corporation--and with the opening credits they served up "Wondering Where the Lions Are".

"This is 'Wondering Where the Lions Are'!" I said.

My daughter said, "Oh."

I sat up straighter, scooted toward the edge of the couch. "This is Bruce Cockburn!" I said.

She said, "Oh."

"Bruce Cockburn used to be my favorite musician," I tried.

She nodded.

"He's a big political activist. That's probably why he's in this movie." My daughter is all about charity and animals--I thought that might impress her. She nodded again and looked meaningfully at the television, where the movie had started.

"Tomorrow, I'll play 'Stealing Fire' for you," I promised. And she said, "Oh, good."

Googling, Alerts, and Our Own Personal Clipping Services

Google is not a verb...Google is not a verb...

Sorry. Just felt the need to atone for a moment, for using Google as a verb RIGHT IN MY SUBJECT LINE.

Google hates that. And they're so right. As a lawyer, a person who makes her living based on intellectual property rights, and a staunch opponent of evolution in our language, I'm entirely, 100%, completely, without reservation against the misuse of Google as a generic verb. So much so, that I'm willing to commit radical redundancies in the previous sentence.

Here's my excuse: I really meant "Google", not "search" in a generic sense. And I always really mean Google, because the one and only occasion on which I lowered my standards to use a different search engine was the day my company's server couldn't access Google for a few hours, and then I complained loudly and often about how I couldn't Google and was forced to use Yahoo's search engine instead.

And, of course, I also share the same excuse employed (usually implicitly) by the rest of the population. "Google" is just a much cooler, clearer, more concise, more to-the-point term than "conduct an internet search".

Anyway, I do it a lot for work. All the more, I work to make sure that when other people do it, they find the many websites for which I write, edit, and plan content. I've also recently been encouraging a friend who has a very popular email humor column that she archives on her website to start thinking more about marketing and about getting her website noticed and her column more widely circulated.

With my mind so thoroughly in that groove, it came as a great shock to me the other day when my stepdaughter Googled "Tori Sanders" and "Switch" together and popped up a film trailer starring my daughter (this is great stuff! I know it's an unlikely combination of terms, but no one even TRIED to optimize this!) and my daughter was...outraged.

That's right. No one said "they could put her on Google!" She was dismayed to find that any old person could type in your name and FIND you. She knew the movie trailer was online, and that was fine, because no one saw it unless you sent them a link...or so she thought. The very thing that keeps most businesses from operating successfully online had apparently been her unconscious safety net.

And it is, indeed, a different world when you can "Google" an eleven-year-old and turn up results. I had another taste of that same "different world" phenomenon when a friend recently suggested that everyone should have Google alerts set up in his or her own name. With all the time I spend thinking about internet marketing and search and...well...Google...THAT had never occurred to me. I have several dozen Google alerts set up to come to my mailbox daily, still others as the items appear throughout the day. But none of them had my name on them.

I listened to all the reasons I should have a Google alert in my name. They made no sense to me. I couldn't see why anyone would need a Google alert with her own name on it.

But I set one up anyway.

So it Turns Out My Sister Likes Us

I wasn't sure for a long time. I'm not sure why. It might have been the way she walked around singing that old Juliana Hatfield song, "I hate my sister" under her breath. And not so under her breath. It might have been the way I'd send her email back when we were both on AOL and you could see whether or not mail had been opened, and it would eventually drop off her her "new mail" list after thirty days without ever having been read. It might have been that comment she made to her ex-boyfriend about how she didn't want to hang out with me and my friends because we "talked about square roots and laughed".

I'll have you know that radicals can be very entertaining in their place.

Anyway, she started a new job a few months ago, and this past week it happened that she needed a ride to pick up her paycheck. Imagine my surprise when I saw a photograph of her and my daughter prominently displayed on her desk. Imagine my even greater surprise when her co-workers asked my daughter knowledgeable, targeted questions like, "How did your speech contest go?"

Okay, okay--I realize that all of the evidence thus far indicates only that she likes my daughter, but trust me. It's close enough. And she showed us all of the best art, the sacred old books (sacred not because it's a Catholic college library and many of the books actually ARE sacred, but because they're more than a hundred years old and demand reverence in handling even if they happen to be about the newly discovered health dangers associated with the common house fly), and the window from which you can allegedly see Chicago on a clear day. It wasn't a clear day, but it was a spectacular view nonetheless.

It was a little reminiscent of...well, actually I can't say exactly what it was a little reminiscent of. Was looking out the tower window into the distance a bit like climbing the art building on my old college campus twenty years ago? No, not at all. And yes. Did the old first-edition Mark Twain (who knew there were OTHER Tom Sawyer stories?) remind me that I'd put the first "classics" into her hands while she was still in elementary school? Not really. And kind of. Did watching her show my daughter her domain remind me of touring my own undergraduate campus with her? I'll bet you can guess the answer to that...or both of them.

I guess most of all it was a little reminiscent of being sisters, something we don't do enough of these days, while she's busy being a librarian and a girlfriend and I'm being a writer and a mother and the world keeps moving at such an amazing pace. But the truth is, I like her, too.

What Exactly IS a Good Deed, Anyway?

It's a funny question, I know. We probably recognize good deeds in other people all the time. But it's a nebulous concept, at least in my mind.

Recently, I was charged with "doing a good deed for someone". The open-endedness of the mission troubled me from the outset.

That was more than a week ago, and I still haven't done it. I think.

You see, since that day I have given money to at least one homeless person, driven my sister 25 miles to pick up her paycheck when she was having trouble with her car, given away a reference card I've been carrying in my purse for years to a stranger, taken someone else's child to two half-day events at my own expense, bought clothing for a friend of my daughter's, and made a pie for my father. There may be more, but the problem is, I was going to do all of those things, anyway. Or at least, I didn't do any of them with the conscious thought of doing a good deed.

I think an actual "good deed" requires conscious thought, though that troubles me because I think the people who do the most good deeds are least conscious of them and find them almost automatic. And I don't seem to know how to plan one. I don't know the definition. I don't know where the line is. Does family count? How much time and effort does it have to take? Is it measured by what you put into it, or what the recipient gets out of it?

It seems to me these are exactly the kinds of things we're not supposed to be thinking about--and yet, catchphrases like "do a good turn daily" are with us as early as Brownies. Why didn't anyone ever tell us what a good turn WAS?

Why I'm Madly in Love with My Kid, Part 7648.3

After reading the comment to my post from a couple of days ago, I realized that I did, indeed, have something worth saying, "Listen up, world!" about.

It's not about my daughter's speech-giving abilities, though I'm more than happy to talk about those. It's about the "all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten" kinds of lessons that came out of my daughter's speech team experience.

You see, there was no "speech team". It was a competition. First, the competition took place in each classroom, and then the winners went on to compete against each other to see which one child would go on to the district speech competition. Only one of them would go on to the next level.

The very wise teacher who was in charge of helping them prepare not only worked with them on research, writing, and presentation skills, but she chose to work with them in a group. Before long, the kids were referring to themselves as "speech team", although no one had used that phrase TO them, and in fact, they weren't on the same team at all...they were each other's competition.

My daughter didn't win. She did a great job, but she didn't win. When one of her friends was announced as the winner, my daughter put her hands over her face and screamed liked the winners of the Miss America pageant used to do (is that still on?). When one of her friends walked away crying because she didn't win, my daughter followed her and came back holding her hand.

The principal gave a nice speech at the end about all of the skills these kids had learned--research and public speaking and all of that--but later in the evening my daughter said to me, "I thought of something Mr. P didn't mention about what we all got out of this. The best part was how we all became so much better friends and we all wanted each other to do good."

I was so overwhelmed I didn't even say "do WELL."

Blogging about Not Blogging

Blogging about not blogging, as I mentioned in my last post, has become very common. I'd be interested, actually, to obtain some kind of count on how many blogs out there are sporadically maintained primarily with posts about how long it's been since the blogger posted.

This morning, though, I had a revelation about the motivation not to blog (sometimes mistakenly interpreted as the lack of motivation to blog). I thought about a writer friend of mine--one who sends me a dozen or so funny emails a day--saying that she had nothing to say on her blog. I thought about the fact that I'm happily blogging nearly every day on my fake anonymous blog, and I never blog here. That I have a few topics to choose from every day over there, and have to think about what to write here.

Why is that?

Once upon a time I thought that the anonymity of the web allowed people to say things they couldn't back up or didn't want to take responsibility for or were afraid to admit in public, and I think to some degree that's true. But I think the anonymity does something else, too...something I hadn't considered. It removes the question "what was the point of that story?"

That question might be looming larger than usual in my mind right now, because recently a very close friend pointed out to me that my stories were always much longer than they needed to be. Undoubtedly true. I'm a writer. I stop and think during the stories that I tell--I suspect that I often digress into related 'backstory' I think is necessary to really paint an accurate picture, and so on.

But there's nowhere in the world that "why are you telling me this?" becomes more relevant than on a blog. On a blog, the story didn't arise as a part of a conversation. It isn't an answer to a question, or even just a means of passing time while sitting next to someone on an airplane. It's the blogger sitting down at his or her computer and saying, "Listen up world! I have something to say!"

Well, hell.

I don't have anything to say that's of that much interest, really. The early posts on this blog were observations that I thought might be useful to beginning writers, mostly. But I (like most bloggers, in my personal view) have nothing to say that warrants grabbing myself some cyber real estate and telling people I have something to say to them.

Why, then, am I such a prolific blogger on the secret anonymous blog? I think it's not so much that I don't want to be associated with what I say there as that I can't really see any purpose in saying it. Over there, I'm experimenting with search terms and traffic and linking--it's a learning experience, and the "purpose" for every blog post is that I have to keep it active and keep the topics varied in order to learn what I need to learn from it. I'm not writing for anyone to read, and I don't think about whether or not anyone IS reading it. I don't need to wait around for something that's worth saying, "Listen up, world!" for, because I'm not writing to be read, I'm writing for data.

And if you weren't doing that, weren't trying to market something, weren't relating a rare experience or a critical warning...well, how often do any of us tens of thousands of bloggers really have reason to say, "Listen up, world!"?

I Just Posted Yesterday! Honest!

Okay, we all know I'm lying. And for anyone who just stumbled upon this page and didn't already know I was lying, a quick glance at the previous post will quickly reveal that I haven't posted since January 1. But since I (like so many other non-bloggers with blogs) begin so many posts with "I haven't posted in months...", I thought I'd hit hard on the denial this time and pretend I was a regular poster.

I have, in fact, been blogging pretty regularly, if you take into account my secret fake test blog for work, the seven actual blogs I and my contractors maintain for work, and my two religious blogs. We'll ignore the MySpace blog, since I only signed up for a MySpace account because my sister told me to, and I think I posted exactly four times on that one, all years ago.

This, however, is my "real blog", the one that's associated with my own name, the one that my friends know about...now that I'm writing all that, I'm wondering whether that's why I never blog here! Writing on my fake secret blog comes pretty quickly and easily because--um--well--I don't have to think about whether or not I mean what I'm saying. It's more like thinking out loud, with some targeted keyword usage along the way.

So what, you ask, am I doing here today? Well, okay, I suspect that you're not asking that, because I suspect that you're not READING this, but if you were, you would undoubtedly be saying, "What in the hell is she doing? We're about three hundred words in, she hasn't said anything yet, and she just told us all the reasons she never blogs here."

Good points all.

Here's what happened, though.

Someone linked to this blog today. And I thought...well...if people are going to LINK to it, then I'd better WRITE on it.

Next time, I'll think up something to say.

For Mothers Only

RockStories

Well, not ONLY, really, but if you're a mother this is an absolute must-read: www.sothethingis.com

While you're there, buy the Navajo Quilt edition of The Mermaid's Purse, quite possibly the only book you'll ever buy that will be MORE fun for having missing pages (and they're readily accessible online when you get to that point).

Words in the World

RockStories

A friend asked me recently whether I was "really satisfied" with what I'd written. What he meant, I think, was that I should be producing something a bit more signficant than romance novels, not to mention some of my earlier works. The question took me by surprise because I don't give my words much thought once I've put them down on paper. Because I've written in so many different genres and under so many different arrangements (freelance, stringer, on spec, on assignment, as an employee), the circumstances are always a little different. Sometimes I write something knowing that it will be published and I'll be paid a particular amount and that's the end of it. In others, I create something unprovoked and then have to decide whether or not I want to take the time and effort to try to sell it, or whether giving it away will help me sell something else later on. There's a whole spectrum in between, but no matter how it goes, one thing is consistent: once something is written, it's pretty much over for me.

That surprised my friend, who was thinking (and had assumed that I'd be thinking) more in terms of the work created than the process, of the words that I was sending, for better or worse, out into the world.

I tried to think about whether this might have been something that changed when I started making my living through the written word, but it seems like maybe not. It seems like it's always been about the process of writing for me. I'm not sure that I was ever concered about "having something to say". Sometimes I DO have something to say, but I believe those things emerge best when left to their own devices. Many writers too focused on sending a message forget to tell a story or to weave their words in ways that wander and whisper on the wind.

Still, the words do take on a life of their own once we open the window and let them fly. There's obvious black and obvious white in that. If you write, convincingly, "How and why to murder your mother" and send it out into the world, you've clearly done some harm. And if you write, convincingly, "How and why to love your neighbor better" and send it out into the world, you've almost certainly done some good. But what if you've written a story about your first car? A fluffy little romance novel? An essay about what makes grass green? For better or worse, they go on living without you, like grown children who have left the nest, but who are to a great extent what you made them.

What does that mean for the way I write, the way I publish? I'm not sure. It instills a sense of responsibility, perhaps, one that I've previously considered only at the blackest and whitest ends of the spectrum, where a clear "message" was sent. But it doesn't, for me at least, instill any greater interest--at least, not yet.

And yet, even as I say that, I'm conscious of the fact that when I write for work, it bothers me that more people (by a factor of 100 or more) will be reading the post about Nicole Richie's DUI than about a state Supreme Court ruling that allows police to enter your house without a warrant if someone has called in a tip that you were driving drunk and your car is parked in front of your house. Only one of those things is information I really feel compelled to convey to the public, and it's not Nicole Richie's DUI. But I think that in my mind, they're different issues. Writing is writing. Period. It's probably most powerful when it intersects with that desire to convey information and insight and all that, but that's not necessary to the process. The process is about the words, and the way they fall out of your fingertips unbidden and become an essay or a story or a book or a poem, almost without your participation.

Blogging

Blogging

As I've contemplated the New Year, these neglected blogs have nibbled at the edges of my brain, compelling me to keep up with them better.

Why?

I don't know.

I'm relatively certain that no one is reading them anymore, if anyone ever was.

And that's not an issue I ever gave much thought to, anyway. I do a lot of writing with the search engines in mind by day--I know how to attract them when that's the goal, but I can't think of any real motivation for wanting to draw strangers to my blog. I don't have anything to sell, and since I've been making my living as a writer for several years, I don't usually have trouble finding a forum for what I want to say.

For me, it's always been more about writing than being read. For the first couple of decades that I wrote, I happily tossed finished products in my desk drawer and went on to the next. The magic is all in the writing for me, and once it's done, it's done. That's not the quickest path to financial success, though.

For instance, I wrote a romance novel on the train in November. I did it because it was National Novel Writing Month, though I didn't officially participate in NaNo, and because hearing about NaNo from friends who were participating made me realize how little creative writing I'd done since I started working full time. So I wrote a novel. I sent it to two friends, who came back with the same criticism--I needed a final chapter to "tie up loose ends". I wrote that, did some additional editing, sent it off to the man who inspired it to make sure he wasn't going to freak out, and..

Well, actually, nothing comes after the "and". What I didn't do was submit it anywhere. Or query agents. Or join the Romance Writers of America in hoeps that their resources might help me do one of those things. Or, to be completely honest, even print it out. It inspired me to finish another novel I'd had sitting around for a long time, so when the first one was done, I pulled the second one out, re-read what I'd written, and got back to work. So I have a novel and a half now, and no plans.

Of course, the world is full of people who have written novels and don't or can't or won't or don't know how to do anything with them, but I don't have any of those excuses. I've made my living writing for several years. I know what to do next. I even think vaguely about doing it. But I'm a mom with a full time job, a nearly 3-hour round-trip commute, and stacks of boxes still to be unpacked from my move over the summer. I have a VERY limited amount of time in which to do something with my writing, and when I do, I want that something to be...writing.

There's a Downside to Everything

There's a Downside to Everything

Back when I first started this blog, I wrote a post called "The Danger of Positive Feedback". It was all about how, when you're a writer, it's great to have someone read your work and say, "oh, that's great!" and "I loved it--write more!" but it's not really helpful.

Recently, I finished a novel in a new genre for me, and I handed it off to two friends who are both writers and avid readers, and they both said it needed another chapter. One of them also said one of my secondary characters needed more backstory. I was overjoyed; I love clarity. It was also convenient, because I was 4,000 words short on the target length for the genre, and those two things together put me right in range.

But in my day job I'm doing an entirely different kind of writing these days, and search engines play a much bigger role in my life than I would ever have thought possible. Yesterday, I had my first experience in THAT arena with being thwarted by success.

I sent out a time sensitive press release on the Friday before New Year's Eve and then went home. When I got home at 9:00 on Friday night, I found an email from our press release distribution company requiring documentation of several items in the release.

They were high profile events, so I figured it would be easy to find major news sources to document them, and I sat down (at 9:00 on Friday night, remember) and started poppping relevant terms into Google. And I got...my company website. For the most important term, THREE of the top ten results pointed to my website. If you're not familiar with the search engine game, let me tell you that that's a coup. 30% of the "real estate" on the first page of search results generates a lot of traffic, especially since I had the # 1 and # 2 slots.

I know you're not feeling very sorry for me right now (and I'm not either), but it did present an unanticipated problem. I was looking for a credible source of documentation for a large number of related items, and it turned out that source was...me.

My Baby's Film Debut

Okay, I know I haven't posted in eons and probably no one is even reading this at this late date, but I had to take a shot. My daughter is in a short independent film that will be making the festival rounds this winter and I couldn't resist sharing the trailer.

The Switch Trailer is also available on YouTube--feel free to drop by there and give it a nice rating!

RockStories

Just Checking In

So it seems that every post here begins with a note like, "It's been months since I posted here..." The truth is that I don't have much time to blog, and when I do, I'm focusing on two Catholic blogs. Today, though, a friend referred me to her blog and it reminded me that this one was just sitting here, idle, and I thought that surely I must have a little something to say.

I'm discovering that I was wrong.

Since January I've been working full time in a writing job. After nearly ten years of freelancing, I'm showing up to a job every morning and staying all day. I thought it would be a tough adjustment, and in practical terms it is, especially with travel and child care, but the days go fast. The atmosphere in my new office is....well, let's just say that several of my friends have taken to referring to my office as "The Gulch."

A writer friend (the very one who triggered my visit here today, actually) once told me that when she was writing full time for work, she never wanted to write outside of work. For me, it's been just the opposite. The more I write, the more I want to write. And so I'm writing all day and then writing on the train, writing after my kid is in bed at night if I can find the time.

Back to work now, but I'll try to drop by more often.

Oh. Wait. This is MY blog, isn't it?

RockStories

It's been a long time since I posted anything here, but I discovered this morning that C.S. Lewis had a position on the No Child Gets Ahead Initiative.

Of course, that's not technically true since:

1) There's no official platform RECOGNIZED as the "no child gets ahead initiative," and

2) C.S. Lewis died in 1963, long before the No Child Left Behind Initiative came to pass.

In response to the first point, I can only say, "Call it what you will." I live in Illinois, a state that responded to the dictates of the No Child Left Behind program by deleting it's gifted education budget. Not reducing. Not reapportioning. Eliminating. There is no longer state funded gifted education in the state of Illinois.

Now, this serves two purposes, though only one is acknowledged. The obvious goal is that the moneys taken from the gifted programs can be re-routed into meeting the NCLB requirements. But there's an invisible benefit that's even more powerful--it slows down those pesky smart kids! And, of course, if you slow down the whole pack, then it's MUCH easier to make sure that no one gets left behind.

Now, before you start kicking and fussing about how the gifted kids will be okay anyway and it's more important that everyone can walk than that some children can run while others crawl, let me tell you a little secret: a lot of gifted kids can't walk. It's run or sit down. Now, this shouldn't be a secret, since there are reams and reams of research proving it, but somehow it seems to have escaped the attention of...um...everyone except the parents of those children who are being asked to slow down and do work they already know how to do for six hours a day, 170 days a year, and to REMAIN ENTHUSIASTIC AND ENGAGED while they do so.

Yes, I'm one of those parents, but I'm a lucky one. I work for a national educational corporation and, because of the unique nature of our business, am surrounded by highly gifted teachers from a wide variety of fields. I count among my colleagues doctors from several countries, lawyers, business executives, teachers at all levels of the public and private school system, and one rocket scientist. I don't need the public school system to challenge my daughter. Not every parent has those resources.

I must admit, though, that I've always thought in terms of the needs of the child. C.S. Lewis's posthumous position on the initiative broadened my perspective this morning. Here's what he said, in 1960:

Unfortunately, it is almost equally possible to break your mother's heart by rising above the homely ethos. It can be a domestic counterpart to that nationally suicidal type of education which keeps back the promising child because the idlers and dunces might be "hurt" if it were undemocratically moved into a higher class than themselves.

Idlers and dunces may be harsh, but it was the "nationally suicidal" that caught my eye. If the best and the brightest of our next generation are encouraged to tune out and sit quietly instead of engaging their minds, who will have the initiative and analytical skills and knowledge base to lead us to the one after?

The Best Christmas Present Ever

RockStories

I gave myself a new life for Christmas. I was pretty excited about it, too. It was a kind of make-over, but it was completely different from those New Year's resolutions we all tend to make and break before January sees its first new moon. You see, my new life was going to be for MY benefit...not to make me a better person or to get me to do any of those things that I SHOULD BE DOING, but simply to remind myself to do what was necessary to make my life what *I* wanted it to be. Sure, sometimes that might mean doing a little work, but it wasn't because I shouldn't let papers pile up on my kitchen table...it was because I love to sit down at a clean, empty table before I go to bed at night and drink my orange spiced tea (or whatever the flavor of the moment might be) and write in my big, heavy old journal. In pencil.

I gave myself this new life, and I was excited enough about that, but an interesting thing happened. Quite by accident, I gave it to OTHER people, too. First, my friend Barb told me that she liked the idea so much that she was designing one for herself, too. Then my best friend said HE was giving himself a new life for Christmas, too...but his came with seven day free trials, because he hadn't worked out all the details yet.

I've mentioned how I love ripples, right?

Just when I was thinking how cool it was that this great feeling I had was spreading to my friends and hoping it worked for all of us, Barb emailed me and told me she wanted to use the concept in her column, which goes out to hundreds of readers--and she did. Here it is: http://www.sothethingis.com/Christmas%20Present.htm

Take a look, try on the idea...it's not too late. Some people give gifts on New Year's Day, some are after-Christmas bargain shoppers, some arrive late by mail. Give it some thought, and wrap up your own gifts to yourself. It's amazing how a simple idea like "I really need to clean that counter" looks different when it's wrapped up in shiny paper and phrased like this: "I'm really going to be a lot happier when that counter is clean."

And while you're there, browse around and read some more of Barb's columns, maybe subscribe to her newsletter. Those little monthly insights and motivations might be a great addition to your new life!

Teaching a Man to Fish

RockStories

If you've ever been in the pages of my email address book, you've likely already read this, but I want to take a minute to encourage anyone who might happen by here to check out www.modestneeds.org

This organization provides one-time grants to WORKING people derailed by unexpected expenses like major car repairs, unexpected need for child care, illness, etc. The key factor in determining eligibility for a grant is that this one time gift will allow a household to remain (or become) self-sufficient where that might otherwise have been impossible.

The average grant from Modest Needs is only $180, but allows the recipient to obtain transportation, equipment, child care, etc. necessary to begin or continue to work. The fact that $180 can make that difference means that if you spread this message to seventeen of your friends and relatives, and each of you sends this organization a mere TEN DOLLARS, you will have single-handedly changed the course of a family's life.

It might be hard to imagine that $180 could be life altering--but aren't we LUCKY that it's hard to imagine that? In today's economy, a job lost due to loss of transportation or child care might not be replaced for months...months during which that family will be forced to subsist on public assistance. That lowered standard of living will make it even more difficult to find alternate employment, since the family will likely be unable to maintain telephone service, obtain substitute transportation, etc. In the end, the lack of that one week's child care payment or a relatively minor car repair can mean months of unemployment, the start of a vicious cycle that's difficult or impossible to break, AND thousands of your tax dollars being paid out to support someone who was willing and able to support herself.

If you've been reading the other entries here, you know how I've been thinking about ripples lately. Think about the ripples keeping just one family self-sufficient will set in motion...better lives for the adults and hope and better health and a positive work ethic for the children...and that's before we even begin to consider the ripples they might themselves set in motion, one day, because of that opportunity.

17 emails and $10 can set those ripples in motion. Don't you think it's worth it?

(if you choose to make a contribution, or to solicit your friends and family, please post a comment here and let me know...I love to watch those ripples)

Giving Thanks to a Stranger

RockStories: "t"

Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday, and taking a moment to count the blessings in my life always reminds me of how richly rewarded I've been. It isn't something, though, that I usually do in public. This post is something that, under other circumstances, I would never write in a public place. All efforts to locate--or even identify--the person it's directed to, though, have been in vain, so on the eve of Thanksgiving I've decided to send these particular thanks out into the universe and hope that somehow, someday, they find their way into the hands of the young doctor who was interning in the maternity ward at Jackson Park Hospital on the night of June 4, 1966.

The story of the night I was born probably isn't an unusual one in most ways. My mother, 21 years old and pregnant with her first child, appeared at the hospital on her due date. A jaded nurse told her that being due didn't necessarily mean the baby was coming, and largely dismissed her complaints. My mother's doctor was advised that he had plenty of time to go out to dinner before I made my way into the world. This was, remember, in the days long before cell phones and pagers.

The doctor was a warm, wonderful, conscientous man who cared for my family for decades without a glitch, but he took the nurse at her word and went out to dinner. Minutes later, my mother said that she had to go to the bathroom and the nurse lost her lackadaisical outlook. When the intern entered the room she commanded, "Try to hold her back until her doctor gets here!"

In the cold light of 2004, of course, every layperson knows what happens when a baby is deprived of oxygen in those critical moments. That intern knew it, too, whatever the nurse had said to him...he turned to my mother and said simply, "Push."

As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more about the ripples we cause in the world and never even notice. I think about the differences I've been able to make, in volunteer work, in my law practice, with the words I've written and the students I've worked with, and the way that those contributions might carry forward, the gifts that others might one day pass along because of some small thing that I gave to them. And lately, I've been thinking about that doctor, and how all of those ripples can be traced back to him, how a moment or two of hesitation on his part would have robbed me of the gifts of language and analytical insights that have defined my life.

And so, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I want this year to give thanks to a young man who had the courage and the confidence to trust his own judgment when it counted, 38 years ago. I want him to know--and everyone who has ever made a split-second decision that made a difference and then simply gone with his life to know--that the ripples go on forever.