Nobody Here

I am finally leaving Virginia. No, my new house isn't done. Don't be silly! But we sold this one a really long time ago now, and the folks who bought it are thinking they'd like to move in.

I'll be heading up to New England to hang out with my in-laws, eat some lobster, and pine for the nice weather I'm leaving behind. No idea when I'll be moving back South. They tell us they really are going to build the house. But my experience so far is that the South is kind of like Italy. They don't have rules, they have habits; they don't have deadlines, they have guesses.

There are things I'll miss here, but there aren't as many as I would've expected. I was excited when I moved to the DC area as a newlywed, looking forward to starting a new life and immersing myself in a new place. But four years later I find I didn't do much in the way of settling in, particularly when it comes to this house, which is odd considering it's the first house I've ever lived in, my whole life, that wasn't rented. The walls are still bare, and for the most part, the movers who come tomorrow will be picking stuff up from the same spots where the last movers plunked it down. I can't explain this with my laziness alone; I just never felt at home here.

I hope I can put down more roots in the new place, assuming there is one, because I'm a Taurus, and we crave that sort of thing.

*Post title ripped off from the poem "Away" by Robert Frost, which is about death, which is kind of like moving.

I'm silly from getting no sleep, but I finished the last major draft. It's with some readers now, but if I've done my job, there won't be any big changes left to make. Once I make the revisions their feedback inspires, this book is done, and it starts going out. Still no title. I've never been good at titles but I've never been this stumped before. I asked my friend Gayla whether she thought Murray would be a good name, and she did, so I may go with that. We figure, who wouldn't buy a book named after the writer on The Mary Tyler Moore Show? After all, he did go on to captain the Love Boat. Who wouldn't want a piece of that magic? You can't argue with good logic.

Hip Liz had a great post about the mind, body, and spirit. I blathered a bit about the connection between the three in the comments to UV’s guest post at Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred’s. Roy says you’ve got to shake your moneymaker. All this talk has got me thinking about how I use the body portion of my system. As my ticket to the physical world, not to its greatest advantage. Sure, I use it for all the usual things, but it’s not often I do anything I’ve never done or go anywhere I’ve never gone. I rarely fully engage in the same-old-places I do go. Physically speaking, my daily walk is mostly going out my front door and taking a series of steps until I’m back again. (And picking up the poop. People, pick up your dog’s poop! What is wrong with you??). Instead of taking the opportunity to rediscover for myself just how exciting a dandelion can really be, I sometimes find myself getting inwardly annoyed when my small daughter is so pokey that the forty-five minute loop takes two hours instead. Unless you want to count a few extra turns on the elliptical machine whenever the scale tips the wrong end of a buck twenty-five, I don’t challenge my body. And while we’re on that subject, how lame is that? Only exercising to stay thin? Talk about not getting it.

Mind you, I’m not suggesting anything crazy, like only eating stuff that’s good for me. This bee in my bonnet is about something broader than everyday maintenance.

Which brings me to the books.

I’m a big champion of reading as escapism, because books have been my drug, drink, and medicine of choice for as long as I can remember. But my dur moment of the day is, at some point, maybe a person ought to use a book as an inspiration for doing things instead of as a substitute for doing things.

At the risk of losing all credibility by quoting the movie You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly really does say it best:

“Why does everything I see remind me of something I read in a book, when, shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

*Post title ripped off directly from Dave Barry

My kid was sick all weekend. I was considering chronicling each vomitous moment for UV, because she loves it when people do that, and I’m sure it would have wider appeal too, because who doesn’t love a good puke story, right? But instead I’m going to talk about how I watched Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood on Sunday. I’ve never read the book. I’d seen snippets of the movie before (by “before” I mean “before I got how really, really scary having a kid can be”), and I was all “eh, whatever,” but this time I watched the whole thing and was all “pass the tissues.”

Some stories are universal. We will never live in Dickens’ London or Huck Finn’s South and will very likely never have to make the choices Sydney Carton or Jim face. But we love those stories nonetheless, and we care about those people, because despite their different circumstances and the fact that they are, in most cases, better than we are, they’re still, sort of, us, and still deal with, sort of, the same things we do.

Other stories are more narrow, and will only appeal to that audience to whom they are relevant. Certainly this makes them more limited.

Does it necessarily make them worse?

When I was a child, the people who wrote the books that meant the world to me were tantamount to angels. As I grew and started to think, as most mortals do, about what contribution I might make with my life, what I might leave behind when I was gone, I could think of no greater calling. The pridefulness of aspiring to join the ranks of my heroes didn't occur to me then. The idiocy of placing on my readers the burden of giving my life meaning didn't either.

When I first started to actually write, though, I almost immediately realized that the melodrama of high purpose is best left to imaginary acceptance speeches composed while on line at the DMV. It has no place in the writing process. As unlikely as it may be that my writing will ever change a child in the way I was changed, it becomes even less likely if that's its intention.

I've found that the thing is, to sit down, and tell a story.

I have a small but excellent writers' group of fellow middle-grade fiction writers. Last weekend I had brunch with them at Clyde's for the last time, because although Georgetown is a bit of a hike for me now, that's nothing compared to what it'll be next month. Or whenever they get around to actually building my house. But I digress.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single writer in possession of a good clue must be in want of a group. As friends, these people have great value. As critiquers? Forget about it. I'd almost trade Pippin. Almost, I said. But the point is, I can't just expect to pick up and move and find people like them in a new city.

Thanks to the wonders of this new-fangled internet thing, which I'm told they have everywhere now, I don't have to. Inside of 10 minutes, I was able to set up a user forum at Xsorbit. No posting work, just email the attachments to each other, then jump up on the forum to critique and discuss. Kind of like misc.writing, except it's about writing, and people are nice, when nice is called for. Password protected, guest access denied, new account registration disabled, so it's as private as a public thing can be. Plus, I got to come up with snappy and amusing titles for all the boards, and show my group how very clever and amusing I can be, because they'd never know that from my actual writing.

Anyway. Cool gadget that makes an online group much more workable. That's all. Carry on.

*Post title ripped off from Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue"

I used to complain a lot about spring ahead. Daylight Savings Time is kind of a stupid idea. As if an extra hour of daylight makes up for losing an hour of sleep. Who thought that would be tempting? Sleep Savings Time, now there's something people would get on board with.

But this year I'm happy about it. Because of the way my particular household, and the person who's really running it, operates, it means I get to stay up an hour later at night, and sleep an hour later in the morning. This I can get behind, because at night I write, whereas in the morning I mostly just stumble around muttering and inadvertantly teaching my kid words that at her age she should not know, because while I think she's watching Elmo she's actually taking careful notes, notes she repeats later to her daddy with alarming accuracy. So this daylight savings thing is actually adding time to what is, by most standards, the more productive part of my day.

Some people get up in the morning and write. I admire this discipline. I have never, in all my life, been able to get myself out of bed even a second sooner than absolutely necessary. I've always been one of those people who makes little time-management deals instead ("If you put your hair in a ponytail instead of drying it, you can hit the snooze button again"). The thought of getting up before dawn doesn't make me think of little birds stirring in their nests and quiet solitude for contemplation. It makes me hate those people who are still sleeping when I'm awake working. Bastards. Bastards!

*Post title ripped off from Laura Branigan's "Self Control"