Deja Vu

September 11, 2008 By 119 Comments

“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”

~Diana Scharf Hunt

This morning I sat for my son’s pre-school orientation.

It was the fifth time I’d seen the show.

Last year was the fourth, which is really where this post gets started.

Mia had started Kindergarten a week earlier, and I’d just written her little cupcake of a chapter book.  The only thing I’d laid down besides, was a short story, which I’ve no problem admitting was a spectacular embarrassment to the tongue.

As I sat, trying to remember how things were worded differently the year before, my mind moved to my mental manuscript, and then began to tinker.  

I removed the notebook and pen I happened to have in my lap (a staple now, but a  whim that day) and started to scribble the prologue to what would, later that evening, become the first few pages of my novel.

I’ve been thinking about the novel a lot.  Mostly because that’s what I do when I’m in no way touching it.

It’s true, I’m embarrassed to admit, but I haven’t worked on it in…. oh… about seven weeks.

Since I started Writer Dad, that’s the direction my fingers have danced.

I was in the middle of the third draft, and just kind of left it middling.  I’m tempted to put it aside, so I can write something breezy, which the novel is anything but.  

There are parts that are really good, and parts that are really bad.  

The problem is, I can only sporadically tell them apart.

The book has too many ideas in too little space, and I don’t quite know how to bend them around. 

It was my first attempt at fiction, and I’ve learned a lot since.  

There’s a marvelous gem, but it’s deep in the mine, and I’m unsure if I’m ready to dig.

Sitting in the orientation, realizing that a year had passed since I first put pen to paper for potential, it was clear that I cannot let that world born inside my head, rotate too far from its natural orbit. 

There’s something else too; a steroid to these feelings.

Rita’s getting published.  

That’s BIG time.

There’s been a lot of discussion about her encounter with the publisher.  

I’ll say this.

Imagine we’re holding a bag of five dollar popcorn, watching that scene in the restaurant play out on the screen.  The appropriate music swells the background, and everything’s twinkling and pretty.  

When Rita said, “Oh, I almost forgot to give you this,” then slips the woman her manuscript, we’d feel like applauding.

She handed her words to the right person.  But if they’d been lousy, Rita never would’ve had a deal. 

The lesson here isn’t that publishers can be hornswaggled.  

It’s that when the right person sees the right manuscript, a deal is made.

Which means it’s time for me to get to work.

Writer Dad

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Here is a Macbook, Go Make Your Million.

August 12, 2008 By 99 Comments

Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.

~Vincent Van Gogh

It’s a year and a half ago, on my birthday, and Daisy hands me a box.  It’s rectangle, about the size of a coffee table book.  

I look at the box, pick it up, and measure it against possible matches in my head.  

It can’t be what I think it is.  That’s impossible.

I open the box.

GASP!  

It’s beautiful.

I pet, then remove the gift from its shell.  I place it in my lap.

“We have to return it,” I say.

My heart skips a beat as I speak.  I can tell that Daisy’s has done the same.  

“We can’t afford it.”  I repeat the message in different words, just in case they had fallen out in the wrong order the first time.

Daisy looks at me, silent.  I know that she wants me to be excited.  I can feel her desire to see me jump up and down, and break into a garish smile.  She wants to hear me shouting in glee.

“I have to return it.” My voice is almost a whisper.

Daisy then uses a word said less often between us than the word flabbergasted.  ”No,” she says.  ”You deserve this.”  She takes my hand and places it on top of the gift.

I run my fingers across the lid and then I lift the screen.  Twenty-six letters stare at me from three neat rows.

“We can’t afford it.”

“We can’t afford not to.”  

This is my logic she is using.  Flawed, of course, but I’m listening.

“Go on.”

“Your brain needs to be busy.  This will take you anywhere you want to go.  Please don’t fight me.”  Her sentences are short.  She doesn’t want to argue.  Neither do I.

“Write a book, make a million,” she adds.  She does not say this then with the certainty that she will nine months later, but the seed is planted.  What she means in that moment is that I can do anything I want to and, dollar for dollar, she just handed me the finest tool in the world.

After a brief exchange where I was reminded whose retirement was cashed out (Daisy’s) to buy the house, and who decided how to spend every penny (Writer Dad), I conceded.  It’s eighteen months later, and I am thrilled to report, Daisy was right.  

If I paid two dollars every day from that day until now, the Macbook would be paid for.  That’s less than a cup of coffee.

Today is our anniversary, a perfect time to acknowledge the amazing person who brought us all together.  

Daisy and I have been married for seven years, holding hands for eleven.  It’s a bit of time, but compared to my grandparents who were married for three quarters of a century, it’s really just the first few buds to bloom on the branches of a freshly planted tree.  

In that full year plus a decade, Daisy has never doubted me.  Whenever a crazy idea tumbles from my mind, her first question is always,

“What can we do to make it happen?”  

Most recently, when I said that I thought it was time for us to write full time and take a machete to life’s jungle, she bought fifty spiral notebooks from Target at ten cents each and piled them around every room of our house.  ”Don’t let your ideas get away,” she said, kissing me on the mouth.  ”You’re brilliant.”

 

Pertinent facts – Writer Dad: 7th grade kind of cool, 8th grade really cool, 9th grade total nerd.  Junior year, argument with guidance counselor.  Academic files grow fuzzy after that.

Pertinent facts – Daisy: Master teacher with a specialty in early childhood education.  Multiple recipient of the Teacher of the Year Award.  Has taught on four continents and helped to design curriculum.

Daisy is my biggest cheerleader.  She believes in me with a certainty that could only be described as spiritual. She is always downcast when she believes I’m bored, but I’ve never seen her happier.  This is in large part because, with no less than 1,342 projects swallowing our horizon, my brain has never been this busy.

Thank you Daisy, for conversations that flow like a decade worth of running water.  Thank you for being a tireless mother to our exhausting children.

Parenting well is often rewarding, usually fun, and rarely easy.  Doing it with you is like dribbling a ball.  

Our future has never been more pregnant and, as scary as it might be, there is no one on this Earth I’d rather hold hands with as we jump into the unknown.

Happy anniversary.  I love you.

Writer Dad

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Shocking

July 24, 2008 By 15 Comments

Even when I’m old and wrinkled, lying in bed wanting to do nothing but eat candy and complain about everything, I’ll still consider one of the biggest surprises of my life as the one that happened nearly one year ago:

The shocking discovery that I was writing a book.

Writing a novel wasn’t in my schedule.  In fact, a year ago, I barely wrote down my shopping list.  Last year, with little reason and less warning, I started to write.  The first thing I tapped out was a short story about…well that doesn’t matter.  It was terrible; a real embarrassment to the tongue.  It was about fifty pages long; maybe ten were good.  Of the ten that were good, about three were great.  

Two of those were amazing.  

I remember thinking that, though the story was hideous on every conceivable level, there was some fuse tangled up in the filthy little mess that I wanted to spark. 

So I did. 

I lit it and let it burn for three and a half months, all the way until it detonated in the last week of December.  My short story had grown into a five-hundred page behemoth.  Wow, I thought.  Now what am I going to do with all this?

Back in October, when I first realized that the first short story that I’d ever written was slowly morphing into the first novel I was ever going to write, it was the oddest epiphany, and one I’ll never forget. 

I never planned on becoming a writer, but then there it was in front of me like a color you can’t argue with.  

I took a break in January and wrote a handful of children’s stories, reading them to the children during daylight and to Daisy by the stars.  They were fast, fun, and the total opposite of what I’d been doing.

In February, I picked up the novel and cleaned up the language.  I tend to be wordy.  It’s probably my biggest weakness as a writer, other than having a tendency for truly terrible analogies (I mean terrible, like – I should probably just wipe my hard drive now before I die and someone discovers them and then also dies, but from laughing at my idiocy – terrible).  I added a couple of terrific elements to the draft while trimming it by a neat hundred pages.  I finished the second draft on the last day of March and expected to begin the third on the first day of May.

It’s July and I’m just getting started. 

Instead of starting to rewrite as soon as the April fell from the calendar, I did something I hadn’t yet done.  

I read my book. 

Reading and writing are not the same exercise.  I needed to read my document – straight through, without stopping every two minutes to tinker.

Did I like what I read? 

Sure, some of it.  Some of it I hated, and some of it I thought was immature in an almost staggering way. 

Some of it, though, I thought was fantastic.  

Since I wrote the book on accident, I’d never given thought to an outline, so I’ve spent the last couple of months taking notes and gathering ideas.  I started writing a couple of weeks ago and it feels amazing.  

There’s an old Greek fable about a ship that sails off to War.  The ship is gone for so long that by the time it returns, every sail and board have been replaced.  Is the ship that returns to Greece the same ship that left?  If it has the same frame, designed by the same engineer, and is sailed by the same captain, then I would have to say that it is indeed the same ship.  

The second draft added to the story.  The third cleaned it up.  This one tears it apart sentence by sentence, then strings them back together. 

I can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s all finished.

Writer Dad

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My Heart’s All a Flutter

July 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment

 

I brought coffee to Daisy at precisely 7:00 AM, just like every weekday morning.  As I rounded the corner into our bedroom, I could see Max working on the Mac.  I squinted my eyes, and peered across the room at the little red dot resting just at the bottom of the little blue mail icon.  

No big deal, there’s always a little red dot, resting just at the bottom of the little blue icon.  And I’ve been checking that red dot compulsively, every time it’s colored the dock for a good six weeks, ever since we sent our first query.  

Most often, it’s Apple telling me about the newest version of the ipod, or something else equally frivolous.  Only the tiniest part of my heart even dared to hope that it had anything to do with our now two week old query to the second agent. 

That tiniest part of my heart thudded, then exploded.

I opened the e-mail, and saw the agent’s name staring at me from the sender field.  It was only a few sentences, but that’s all I needed to make my entire week (and maybe the next one too).

The e-mail said, thank you for your query, and for allowing the agency the opportunity to evaluate your work.  It is being seriously considered.  

Yes.  That’s all I wanted. 

I’d be foolish to think that everything will just magically fall into place overnight.  And honestly, I wouldn’t want it to.  Life is an adventure, this is all part of it, and I want to enjoy every second.  The agency we’ve queried, only took on five new clients last year, and they get three hundred submissions per week.

The odds are not in our favor.

But it only takes one yes; I want to know we’re making progress.  This morning’s email did that for me.

Writer Dad

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Shudders of Horror!

June 13, 2008 By 2 Comments

 

Finding an Agent

finding an agentLife’s significant moments need to stop colliding with such unrelenting regularity. Yesterday, Mia left Kinder behind.  Today, Daisy and I finally received a long anticipated email regarding finding an agent.  

Now that it’s here, it’s impossible to ignore the fact it could change our lives forever.

About three weeks ago, we sent out our first query letter.  We sent it to a local agent in the hopes that he could represent some of our already finished children’s stories.  We selected the agent with care, drafted our e-query, and hit send.  We thought it would take somewhere between all week and all Summer to get a response in our new quest at finding an agent. 

It didn’t.  

Precisely ten minutes after I heard the woosh of the query leaving my laptop, I heard the ding of an incoming message.  

It was from the agent, and he did not like our query.

To be more specific, the agent said the query gave him “shudders of horror,” and that, “it did not work at all.”  I made the mistake of writing my query letter in rhyme, as though it were a children’s book; a deadly sin to an agent that I will never commit again.  

We had decent luck in finding an agent, just not impressing him.  Fortunately, the agent didn’t slam the door in our face.  He said with a letter of recommendation from a previously published children’s author, he would accept our query.  Daisy knows a wonderful author, Debbie Yamada, who spoke to her fourth grade class during Author’s Day the year before she left the classrom.  Debbie has written a wonderful chapter book about the Chinese gold rush, called, Strike it Rich!  

We contacted Debbie.  We asked her if she would please look at our material and help us in finding an agent. 

She did; she loved it; she agreed to write our letter.

Debbie’s letter is in my inbox.  All that’s left to do is attach it to our already drafted query and send it to the gentleman who might one day be our agent.  

I’ll keep you posted.  Who knows?  Maybe the task of finding an agent is only just beginning.

Writer Dad

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