Sometimes It Don't Come Easy

I was at a work event until 7pm last night, and then got home, spent some time with my kids, did some Nanowrimo stuff, then passed out. I did not write a single word. I had taken my laptop with me to the work event, even bringing the power adapter that runs off my car battery in case I had some time in the car, but I didn't. I've got one novel to finish in the next two weeks, and another one due by the end of November. And I'm not worried one little bit.

I make the effort to write every day. Not Monday through Friday, not every weekend. Every. Day. And I do that so that on days like this when I have to give it a miss, it's okay. I'm not going to beat myself up, because a year from now nobody's going to say "And things are in the state they're in because YOU WROTE NOTHING THAT DAY." It's just not going to happen. And not beating myself up about it means that tonight when I sit down to write some words, it'll still flow. I'll still be good.

See? Wasn't that easy?

The Guilt of Productivity

Yesterday I managed to do a fairly substantial re-write of about 90 pages of the thing I'm working on now. I have a large amount that I have to do from scratch for the end, and I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to pull that off, but it was a good day for writing.

On the other hand, I ended up in a place that's very familiar to me. If I'm writing, I'm not doing anything else. I'm not washing dishes or folding laundry or going grocery shopping or any one of a thousand things that need doing around a busy house. And for that, I was beating myself up. The irony is that when I'm at my 9-5 job (which is really my 8:30-4:45 job), I'm not washing dishes, doing laundry or grocery shopping and I feel no guilt about that whatsoever. What's wrong with this picture?

So, I have determined that my goal for this November (and hopefully one that I can hang on to for a while) is to let go of that guilt. My writing is just as important to me as that thing that I do to earn a living, just as important as clean dishes or food in the pantry, and about eight times MORE important than folded laundry. There you have my guilty secret. I don't care about folded laundry.

This November, I'm not going to make my family suffer with my angst. I'm not going to beat myself up about what I'm NOT doing. I'm not going to agonize over every decision I make about how to spend unaccounted-for time. And with all that time that I save on unnecessary histrionics, I'll get even MORE writing done!

But When Do You Find Time?

That's the most frequently asked question I get. Yup, I do have a full-time+ job, AND kids, AND a heinous commute, and I've still managed to write at least 50k words each November.

A big part of it is just forcing myself to write a little every day. You'll hear lots of stories about that legendary guy (and I know at least two) who were unable to write for weeks and then sat down and in 1 or 2 days wrote eighty baskillion words. That's fine if you live alone and can do that sort of thing. For the rest of us, that's not always possible.

What I've learned to do instead is to snatch what time I can find from anywhere. Write during lunch. Take a notebook and write in the restroom (and do use a notebook, as it can be disconcerting for others to hear typing in the restroom). I use my phone's voice notes feature and dictate during my heinous commute, and then transcribe it when I have the time later. This morning I found myself wide awake at 6am on a Saturday. Normally unheard-of, but I couldn't go back to sleep because I'm working on another piece of writing and I have solved a key problem. So, on with the bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and here I am, writing away while everyone but the Very Helpful Kitten is asleep.

You have time in your day. I promise. You have those little bits of time that you're currently spending doing sudoku or watching television (all those crappy shows you're watching now? either they'll still be there in December, or they sucked to begin with and you're better off without them) or in one of those meetings where you don't actually have to either participate or pay attention until someone mentions your name (you know you have them. everyone has them).

Okay, I'm winding up this post because the kitten is eating my head, which is even less helpful than merely lying on my keyboard. Ouch!

Heading Into November

When we last left our heroine, she was frantically trying to write the last couple of chapters of that same old book she's been working on for a while now. It's getting serious. If I don't get it done by next Friday, I'll be trying to finish two of the damn things in November, and just the thought gives me indigestion.

The interesting news is that I have given over the first part of my novel to my crit group and they have been instrumental in pointing out where it needs help. Unfortunately, it needs help in a very large and fundamental way. Their advice was something along the lines of "your writing is marvelous but your story sucks." Okay, they were actually tremendously more gracious than that, but emotionally it amounted to the same thing.

On the plus side, I'm heading into Nano this year as the ML for Santa Cruz. That's exciting to me because in the years that I've actively participated in Nano, I've enjoyed great success. Those years where I did Nano but tried to go it alone, I had a much harder time of it. I'm wondering whether being responsible for my little tribe will make things harder or easier.

I have done a lot more outlining and planning this year than I had in years past, so that's one place where I'm ahead of the game. But it's like any sporting event. You can read the team stats and think about their past performance all day long, but in the end, it's still a contest.

Winter is Coming

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and I've started making bad, bad decisions. This is a yearly cycle.

This year, I've decided not only that I will actually, officially participate in Nanowrimo, but I will take up the mantle of ML for the Santa Cruz region. The gap was there, and I (like nature) abhor a vacuum. This explains why I have a cleaning lady.

I am blessed in a way that many writers are not. Both Truman Capote and Fran Liebowitz are famous for having written a very few brilliant things and then sort of just becoming essayists and personalities. They were never visited again with the spark that got them through that initial spurt of brilliance. I, on the other hand, am positively AWASH in fabulous ideas.

1. Trinity of Days
   A play that follows Mary, mother of Yeshua (Jesus, to you White Folks) through the three days between the crucifixion and the ressurection.


2. I Want You to Slowly Fall In Love With Me
   Twelve months in the life of a mediocre aspiring novelist and her transsexual neighbor.


3. Two Women and a Boat, to Say Nothing of Cthulhu
   A novel that follows an intrepid young bird and her headstrong aunt through some of the less glamorous (and therefore less expensive) vacation spots of the world, where they keep meeting mysterious, shambling strangers carrying distastefully ugly tchotchkes and muttering to themselves in the most unmannerly fashion imaginable.


4. R&D: Rule & Dominion
   The galaxy is ruled by humans, and the humans are ruled by greed. There is only one kind of currency in the future: intellectual property.

Those are just the ones that I can recall off the top of my head - the ones that haven't been written yet. My problem has never been a lack of subject matter. It's been a lack of time to sit down and delve into my subject matter in a way that does justice to what's in my head.

For this year, I've chosen #3. I've been spending all my free time sort of idly spinning up individual plots (most P.G. Wodehouse is short stories, and my intention is to copy that short-story style in a way that adds up to a coherent narrative - sort of like a Dorothy L. Sayers piece) and thinking about characters.

In my fantasies, I will have finished all of these pieces (these do not include anything that I'm currently editing) by next November and will have to come up with something entirely new. Wouldn't that be lovely?

When Opportunity Knocks, Put on Your Bathrobe and Open the Door

This happens to me more than I'd like to admit: I'm in bed, just falling asleep. As my brain comes unmoored from reality and starts to float away for the night, images come to me. Sometimes they're amorphous, conceptual images that dissolve like fog in sunshine the deeper into sleep I fall. But at times like last night, they just become more and more concrete.

Two years ago, I took a bunch of the really vivid military battle-tech dreams I had and put them together into a novel. It didn't work. Really, really didn't work. Last night as I was falling asleep, it all fell into place. The key to the whole thing was a dream I had Saturday night (which did not make it in to the Virtual Bank Line) and the correct title. (R&D: Rule & Dominion)

I ended up turning the light back on, sitting up and writing all the salient points down in one of my many journals. I was so pleased at how it had just all come together so perfectly and ended by being so hyped up that after I had written it all down, I had to spend half an hour reading P.G. Wodehouse before I could drop back to sleep.

Oddly enough, I ended by waking up extra early this morning and having a good day. Go figure!

Virtual Bank Line de los Muertos

I was at my parents' house, housesitting. They're due back any minute, and I really have to get weaving on picking up, etc. My parents' house is remarkably unlike real life. In real life their house is decidedly Spanish colonial - chunky wood, leather and tiles everywhere. In my dream, everything was 70s futuristic with black and white plastic and bold geometric shapes.

My parents arrived with my girls in tow and I was forced to sit and look at pictures. There were quite a few taken at night at some kind of party that included tons of dia de meurtos paper skeleton cutouts. I asked about them and was told that they had done a midnight tour of the Palacio Blanco - the White Palace. Everyone (in my dreams) knows that the White Palace is a place where ghosts gather and go dancing every night. I know that, but up until now I couldn't have said what those ghosts look like. I ask if it was at all scary, and my stepmother replied that it was horrifying, although she said it such a noncommital way that I really had a hard time believing it. It was the same tone of voice my kids use when asked "How was your day?" And they shrug and reply "Eh. Fine." "It was horrifying." My daughters couldn't even be bothered to look up from what they were doing as my stepmother talked about it.

I looked closely at the pictures, and I was suddenly inside one of them. Palacio Blanco is on an open plain with cyprus trees lining the walkway that leads from the driveway to the main hall. The trees alternate with benches and I'm sitting on the bench closest to the driveway. Cinderella-style carriages pulled by skeletal horses wearing plumes on their harnesses drive up and disgorge skeleton homres y mujeres dressed in their dancing clothes. But the carriages, horses and people aren't the matte white of paper, nor are they practically two-dimensional. Instead, it looks as though they're made from sheets of sugar - about half an inch thick and glittering in the moonlight. Because they're like cutouts, they're exactly the same from the front as from the back, and as they walk to the hall, they carry on conversations with people behind them as easily as with those in front.

It wasn't completely horrifying, nor was it a non-event. I was riveted. I was captivated. It was beautiful. My dreams are trying to tell me that the season of the dead is starting, and I can hardly wait!

PFC Virtual Bank Line reporting for duty SIR!

At the very tail end of last night's dream, I was going on a business trip to Reno. Not surprising, considering that much of my team is in Reno and yesterday I was thinking about having to go in the next couple of weeks.

I got off the plane and was herded onto a train that let me off in a giant station filled with formations of people marching purposefully here and there. I took an escalator up to an observation deck that looked out on a practice yard. Down below were two men, one of whom was holding something that looked like a polearm, except that it had a huge sort of sharpened claw-looking thing on one end, and a big, curved blade at the other. The man against whom he was fighting wore armor that looked like horizontal sheets of glass held in place with rods. The glass kept the polearm from contacting the man's skin, but he was careful nonetheless.

I went into a room for a meeting with my boss, who was giving me my annual review. The result of my review was that I was being promoted to Lieutenant, and my next duty assignment was learning our company's policies and procedures in Italian.

I'm still a little confused.

Musical Chapters

I've been writing this book for, no joke, about five years. This is the third or fourth iteration, and it's coming back to the spirit of what it was when I first wrote it.

Every time I "fix" it, I end up moving the chapters around. This has made it horrendous for my alpha readers, who receive a new copy and start reading it and marking it up with comments like "Why is this the first time we've heard the name of this town?" when what they're reading is something like the third paragraph of the first chapter, it's just that when they received it, it was actually the third paragraph of the FOURTH chapter, and I took out all the earlier references to the cat.

I'm eternally grateful to my alpha readers, but I have to admit that it's a little taxing to sift through the comments and having to stop and think about whether this or that nitpick is still even relevant. I wish there was a way to instantly and automatically reflow the copies of everyone who's reading it, as I'm updating things.

But there's not. I'm currently working in Storyist, a novel- and screenplay writing software for the Mac. It's got some cool features, like the ability to drag pictures onto your character sheets and then have those character sheets sitting at the edge of your screen so that you can keep track of your characters. It formats everything for you and displays your chapters, sections, etc., in a column on the left. This means that it's already indexed once you're done and you don't have to do anything fancy to be able to move quickly from this part of the book to the next. It exports to Word or .pdf, too. Yay.

Until there's instantaneous transmission, I'll just gratefully wade through the comments and be happy that someone's willing to read my drivel before it's done.

Virtual Bank Line Celebrity Cameo

Last night I was taking the Badb to her father's house, which involved getting in a truck and driving over what looked like the landscape from the beginning of The Chronicles of Riddick where Vin Diesel is running over the frozen planet. It's like a fingerprint magnified a million times into a series of giant ridges. And I was driving on one of them.

I'm sure there's a word for when it's alternately raining and snowing, and the ground is covered in half-frozen slush, but coming from Arizona, I don't know what that word is. I just know that I was driving my pig of a truck through it and I couldn't concentrate. My gaze kept drifting to the back seat where Badb was sleeping, out the passenger window to check out the scenery, anywhere but on the road in front of me. More than once, I nearly drove off the road, off a cliff, and into a deep ravine.

We got to the Badb's father's house, but it wasn't his house. He was living there with his father. It was two in the morning when we arrived, and everyone in the house was up. I think it was because someone had just had a baby, but it wasn't someone related to the family. I started introducing everyone to my friend, Jim Carrey, but got annoyed that nobody seemed to recognize him. The funnier part of that was that Jim Carrey didn't even seem to notice that nobody gave him a second glance.

Then I had to move my truck out, but it was tricky because there were evil men that I was trying to escape. I went back into the house, but the house had turned into something like a convent and the nuns were hiding me from a man who looked like the movie portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, but who was sputtering to me about The Lord of Sweatpants.

Luckily, I woke up soon after that.

Capturing the Essence of Fhtagn

I'm working every spare second I have to finish the piece I'm writing now. It's coming along as quickly as can be expected, and I have every expectation that I'll be done in the three weeks I have.

What's next? Well, my next project centers around the Cthulhu mythos. I knew NOTHING of the entire body of work before conceiving of the project, so I did a little research on the right folks to read (besides the obvious, I mean) and then bought some books.

I'm about halfway through the first collection, and I think I've already boiled the body of work down to its essential tripes:

- non-Euclidean geometry that makes things either hard to see or nausea-inducing
- stuff so old that even the slime on it is older than the oldest thing that was old when the world was born
- things that are evil because they are outside of human morality
- using the word "obscene" to describe things that do not necessarily outrage one's sense of moral decency
- outrageous ignorant bigotry
- exotic, yet not necessarily attractive locations
- really big monsters from space

Man, I can hardly wait to get this baby started!

Moving Through Tumult

I flog myself constantly for not doing as much writing as many of my other writer friends. They all write a novel a week, and here I am still working on the same one that I've been working on for months and months. Sure, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

But in the last two months, my life has had some pretty major upheaval. My household swelled to 7 and has now shrunk to 5 and looks to be holding steady. School has started. I have been the only person in my 3-person department for an entire month. And through all this, I've been chipping away at this monster. A little at a time.

I'm excited. The part of the novel that I was really worried about is really coming together, and I think that it's not only going to work, but it's going to work better than I had imagined.

And, I have my NEXT evil project planned out already.

A Weekend of the Virtual Bank Line

Friday night: I only remember the end of this dream. I had a vegetarian frog. It looked like a tree frog - a big head in relation to its body, but the whole thing was enormous. The size of a dinner plate. Its skin, rather than being smooth like a regular frog, was covered with fine green hair that looked like moss.

As a treat, I had smeared some avocado on a piece of cucumber. I threw it to the frog, who was sitting on a patch of sandy ground. It landed about 8 inches to the frog's left, so when it landed he tilted his big head and looked at it. Then he moved himself to the left to be closer to it.

Re-situated, he looked to the left, but it wasn't there anymore. He looked to the right, and it wasn't there either. He picked up his little froggy hands and didn't see it under them. He picked up his little froggy feet and didn't see it under them either. Because it was under his little froggy butt. I was getting really frustrated because vegetarian frogs are SO DUMB.

Saturday night: I was driving my truck. I don't drive it very often, because it's big and sucks up a prohibitive amount of gas, but on this occasion I needed it. I was coming through a neighborhood and trying to figure out how to from where I was to where I needed to be, and the only way I could figure it out was to drive through the lobby of car wash, then the wrong way down and alley. The alley let out onto a little residential street with gingerbread-looking houses in fabulous colors - mauve with brilliant blue trim or apricot with lavender. The houses themselves were all alike, but the paint jobs were spectacular.

The street was really steep, though, and I had come out onto it going a little faster than I had intended. It ended in a T-intersection, and I was heading right for someone's front yard. I was standing up on the brake, but still going too fast. I swerved left, hit my right-side tires on the curb, and rolled the truck into the yard.

The truck was on its side, and I realized that, while the houses were lovely and the grounds looked well-kept, they were actually quite soft and swampy. My truck was sinking. I jumped up and pushed the driver's side door open so that I could climb out, then stood on the front porch of the house and watched my truck sink out of sight in the lawn, which closed over it with nary a ripple.

A woman, hearing the commotion, opened the front door and saw me standing there in shock.

"My car is in your yard," I told her, staring at the lawn where the truck had been sucked in.

She looked over my shoulder and saw nothing.

"No, it isn't," she said right back. And I realized that it was useless to argue.

Sunday night: I was at a school. Or perhaps it was my job. Either way, there were a lot of people I saw every day, and a lot of them lived near me. There was one house that we had to visit because something awful was happening there. Not law enforcement kind of awful, but the place was neglected and the mail was piling up, even though we knew that someone still lived there.

My companion (whom I never saw clearly, so I couldn't even say whether it was a man or a woman) and I went to the house, and when we walked up to the door, we saw the most extraordinary thing: as we walked up, something that looked like a giant hand retreated through the doorway. The four fingers took up almost the entire doorway, and it was as though the hand were reaching through the doorway as we walked up and was snatched back.

My companion and I left in a hurry and did a little more research. Then, the POV of my dream shifted. I could see another woman, a neighbor of mine, writing a note and taking some things - a pair of glasses, some letters - over to this house. She let herself in with a key and put the things onto a sofa. The house was clean and tidy, and she left because she didn't want to disturb the occupant. It had been her husband, and when they broke up, the woman had left alone, leaving her young daughter with the husband.

But now, something was happening to the husband. One minute he would be a normal man, the next he would be a giant so huge that he filled the entire floor of the place, which was by no means small. His daughter, no more than 10, was doing her best to keep some semblance of normalcy in the house because she loved her father and he wasn't abusive or neglectful. He loved his daughter very much and took excellent care of her when he was his right size, but he never knew when the change would come over him or how long it would last.

It was hard to know the right thing to do.

Worlds Enough, and Time

I'm currently in that pleasant place where I'm working very hard editing one project and starting the wheel moving on the next one.

Whenever I'm in this place, I'm constantly irritated by the fact that I just don't have enough time. I have a job that's fairly demanding. Every minute I'm at work(okay, every minute except this one) is taken up with stuff. My "To Do" list currently stands at slightly short of 100 items, although many are tiny.

I have children who don't raise themselves. The little one, who's been an angel lately, has been wishing for more attention, more snuggles, more Mommy. The older one is trying very hard to assert her independence now that she's got her driver's license, but she's making very 16-year-old decisions that need a lot of guidance.

I have a husband and little doggies and in-laws. I have people who need attention, and I want to give them that attention because it feels good to do it. I'm one of those people who needs that attention. I've been running again, trying to put in an hour a night, but for every hour I spend running, there are sixty little things that I'm not doing.

I'm sure that everyone has this same dilemma. If I do this, I can't do that. It's part of being human, I know.

But if I could just write more, that would really be something. Wouldn't it?

Virtual Bank Line: The Data Thieves

I was at a work offsite, and my co-workers and I were leaving the conference site and walking toward a shuttle that would take us to the airport. As I walked down the hall, my phone rang and I stopped walking and ducked into a doorway to take the call. As I spoke, more people walked by making it hard to hear.

I looked into the room behind the door and, finding it empty, I ducked inside. Just before my conversation was over, I realized that I wasn't alone. In a corner, in a chair behind a large table, was a man in a dark suit. I hadn't seen him because the room lights were off and the dark suit matched the shadows.

"Good, you're here," he said after I hung up. "It's time to go. We have to get started."

He went on to tell me that I would be partnering with another agent, and the two of us had many important meetings to keep with other agents. I got into a sleek, black car with another man in a dark suit and we drove from place to place where the other man talked furtively with other people in dark suits. I never took part in these conversations, and I felt superfluous to the proceedings entirely.

Finally, while my "partner" was busy talking to someone, I took off. I ran through streets that looked like Disneyland - clean and not meant for cars. The buildings were too close together for car traffic and there were lots of tiny alleyways with little shops. I was trying to get my bearings so I could figure out how to get home when I realized that I had to hide. The "partner" would be looking for me, and it would be bad if he found me.

I joined what looked like a large team of women who were walking to practice for some sport. As they walked, they talked about and demonstrated various warm-up exercises for the upcoming event, so to fit in, I went along with their stretching and twisting. We got to the top of the hill, and I looked down to see that the entire hill was made of snow. There was a man at the top of the hill, half buried in the snow. I could only see his dreadlocks peeking out, so I separated from the group and went to talk to him.

This man told me about the data thieves. We all knew that the government had undertaken to control speech on a vast scale. It was the aim of the government to control not just all communication coming from regulated channels (print, broadcast and electronic media, etc.) but all communication everywhere. Conversations between human beings were regulated as well. It was impossible for husbands and wives to have private conversations between themselves without government intervention. The vehicle for the intervention were tiny transmitters hidden in things like both paper money and coins, any plastic card (including indentification cards, credit cards and discount cards given out by stores). They worked in areas about the size of a good-sized room, which meant that even if you put your wallet on the dresser and huddled in the closet to talk to someone, you were still in the grips of the transmitters.

Whenever anyone tried to have a conversation that was "contrary to the interests of government," their very THOUGHTS would be replaced by something entirely different, such that they wouldn't even be aware that the words coming out of their own mouths didn't conform to their original intent. You might have it in mind to tell someone that you saw a policeman beating an innocent bystander, but the words out of your mouth would say that you saw that lambchops were on sale at the market, and you yourself would not know of the substitution.

The data thieves were working to bring down this particularly heinous form of control. Because they had to function in society, they took interesting precautions like keeping their wallets in lead-lined boxes. They were working on ways of both foiling the government AND raising awareness of what was going on. But it was much more difficult than most people realized. Thus far, the only thing that the data thieves had been able to do was to take certain patterns of data out of the stream. For instance, it would be impossible to transmit the letter "T," so hings would come ou jus slighly off, and no make sense. Enough of these tiny gaps in the data and people would become aware that they were not creating their own communications - it was all being created for them, and the system was breaking down.

"So, why are you here?" I asked the dreadlocked man at the top of the snow hill.

"I'm trapped here. I can't get off the hill."

I looked and realized that it wasn't snow. It was more like silicon so fine that it looked like and acted like snow, and it was leaching the strength out of both of us. But it looked inviting and shiny and sparkly, and I turned and ran full-tilt down the hill to the bottom. I got to within a yard of the street, and turned and looked at the dreadlocked man at the top. He was looking down at me with longing, knowing that he had important things to do but couldn't do them. I ran back up the hill, glorying in the work of moving up a steep hill through thick snow. The work itself gave me more energy, so once I got to the top, I grabbed the dreadlocked man's hand and turned, pulling him down the hill after me. As we ran down the hill, the dreadlocked man picked up speed and by the time we got to the bottom, he was in the lead pulling me behind him and shouting about how we were going to help the data thieves.

In Process

Having finished the big edits to my book, it's time to put the spine back in. Originally I'd had the whole thing tied together by the sister of two of the characters, her story going back and forth between the other stories, but it didn't work and when I took it out, I was left with five separate stories.

Now, I'm stitching them all back together with a minor character that runs through all the stories. It's going to take some doing, but writing it in the first place took some doing.

Well, now that I've said it - I guess I should get weaving.

Round One is Over

It has taken me a couple of months, but I'm finally done with the first round of serious edits to my novel. I shaved about 20 pages from the original 250, and it came in at something like 74,000 words. Now that I have it down that far (with expectation that it will be kicked down in word count again during round 2) it's time to put some other stuff in.

- The main character must be expanded, his story encompassing the salient points of life after the Mexican Revolution.
- The story arc needs to be clarified, as each story must make it clear which sacrament it is meant to encompass.

This is where the rubber meets the road, ladies and gentlemen.

Genius in the Making

My younger daughter came home from all her travels yesterday. I was so happy to see her - I'd planned cookie making as a way of bonding when she got home, and the two of us made Thumbprint Cookies out of the wind eggs our chickens laid and homemade blackberry jam from the blackberries in our yard. The cookies are fabulously shortbread-y, not too sweet, so that the jam is a lovely counterpart to the pastry-like cookie part. We don't use nuts because of the Badb's orthodonture.

We were sitting on the couch enjoying cookies and milk when Badb announced "I'm writing a book!" She pulled a tablet from her suitcase and handed it to me. Her irregular printing covered two thirds of a single page and told the story of a little girl named "Lean," (pronounced "Lee Ann") who went first to Phoenix, then Washington D.C., then New York where she was obligated to walk everywhere or take the "sobway." Sometimes, she had to both walk and take the sobway. Then she went to camp, and then to South Carolina. Lean bemoaned the fact that she was never in one place long enough to feel settled, and as a result she was "egsosted."

I read the story, and as I was drying my cheeks, the Pirate read it. Both of us made that "Awwwww!" face at each other.

I was impressed both that my daughter had felt the need to journal at all, and then that she went right for the heart of the matter. Not a dry recounting of the facts and sights - anyone can write that kind of list. My daughter at the age of eight has already stripped away the actual events and gotten right to the place where the writer's value lies. She pulls her own hopes and miseries out of her viscera, pokes through them, and then smears them on paper so that we can all look at it and say "Yes. Inside, I'm like this too."

It's easy to entice children of any age into cookie making. They immediately see the value of it and will participate just for the promise of being able to eat cookies. Writing is a little different. How do you convince your child that her efforts, while not the classic third-grade "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" fare, are more fabulous, more noteworthy? Less chocolate chip with toffee bits and cream cheese frosting, more subtlely sweet shortbread with occasional tart blackberry nuggets? All I can do is continue to consume them with great relish and let her know that, even if nobody else likes them, they'll always be my favorite.

Garden of Earthly Dreams

When I was pregnant with Badb, my husband and I didn't want to know in advance what gender the baby would be, so we had to pick out both boy and girl names. We started out with Celeste and Julian. I wanted the boy's middle name to be Fox, and my husband didn't like Celeste as a first name. We settled on Athena Celeste for a girl, but hadn't quite fixed on a boy's name until well into my seventh month when I decided that it would be Hieronymus Fox. I can tell you two things: the first is that I have never seen a single episode of Buck Rogers and would have been mortified to know that I would be naming my child after a television character played by Gary Coleman. Luckily, I didn't find this out until well after my child's birth. Second, every single person I knew, without exception, expressed a fervent hope that my child would be a girl. Nobody liked the name Hieronymus but me.

Of course the most well known Hieronymus is Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the famous tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights. I myself probably own three or four copies of the painting in one form or another. Maybe I like Bosch because I feel a kindred spirit. His visions and my dreams agree in startling ways.

Last night, my husband and I were at something that used to be a high school. It was no longer used for such, but it was a public space now. We were hanging out by the lockers with about half a dozen other people wearing jeans and t-shirts and carrying manga comics. Everyone had wild, stand-up hair and their clothes and accessories were festooned with likenesses of animated characters.

My husband and his friends were deeply involved in watching the most recent installment of some favorite show, and one of our other friends leaned over and asked me if I'd like to go for a ride. I said I would, and we ended up seated on what looked like a giant cafeteria tray. We gently lowered ourselves into a rushing river...of pasta sauce. It was at least twenty yards wide, and although it bubbled and swirled around our tray, it wasn't hot. All I could think every time our little craft took on "water" and we were splashed was that I would have some intense stain removal to do later.

We came around a tiny isthmus - a little peninsula that held a children's playground, but the players weren't children. They were all animals dressed as children. Two things in rompers with pterodactyl-looking heads hung from the jungle gym as something that looked like the living version of the Montauk Monster walked underneath. The Montauk Monster looked like a large cat with white fur over very red skin and a beak that made it look like an Egyptian carving. The pterodactyl-heads were grabbing at it, biting at it with their larger, more ferocious-looking beaks while the monster stalked by unconcerned.

The playground was bordered by a cinderblock fence, and there was a javelina wearing overalls and a striped shirt somehow pinned to the fence a foot or two above the ground. It was squealing in distress, clawing at the wall with its hooves, rubbing itself bloody against the rough cinderblocks. My skin crawled at the sight of the suffering beast, but the current was taking us away from the scene.

When I woke up, I was thinking about my daughter. I don't think that it would have been so bad if she'd been a boy and have been named for the Dutch painter, who himself was named for Saint Jerome. But instead, she is named after the goddess of wisdom, and is living up to that promise instead. I can only hope that when she gets home, she'll have something wise to say about my dreams.

The Tiny Fan Club

I've been writing to Peaches at camp. They have something called "Bunk Notes" at camp. You send an email, and at dinnertime, the counselors print out the emails and hand them over to the campers with the other mail. I like it because I don't have to leave my house or find a stamp or envelope, and the lag is minimal.

In the first week, I wrote normal letters. "Daddy and I had enchiladas for dinner. The dogs miss you," that kind of thing. At the end of the first week, my older daughter came home from camp announcing that she had been nicknamed "Muffin" by the rest of camp. I'm not the mother of anyone named "Muffin." But if I have to be Muffin's mother, my daughter is going to receive letters from Muffin's mother. Here's a little sample:

My darling Muffin,

Daddy and I went to the theater last night and saw a lovely production of the new play "That One Guy Talked to That Other Guy For an Hour And a Half and Then We All Went Out For Drinks." I just love art that imitates life! Anyway, I saw Mrs. Wellman-Bryson down near the orchestra wearing something that looked like it was made out of meringue and spiderwebs. Honestly, one shouldn't appear in public wearing just whatever rubbed off on one while breezing through the kitchens!

Today has been hectic, hectic, hectic! The Prime Minister dropped in unannounced and asked me if I would be available to be the ambassador to one of those South American countries that begins with...S? R? I don't know. It's a letter of the alphabet, anyway. I said I wasn't terribly keen on moving to a country with spiders the size of briefcases, but he assured me that my impressions of South America were all wrong. So, when you get back, we're all moving to Paraguay. Brush up your Spanish, my darling!

In other news, your winter wardrobe has been solved! The gardeners came rushing into the house (through the FRONT DOOR, no less!) shouting that we were being invaded by bears. Daddy took his musket and took care of the brutes, and the short story is that you will have a lovely new bearskin coat for school this year. You'll look so rugged & rustic, my darling! Let us know if you're in the market for a coonskin cap to go with it. I'm sure we could arrange something.

Well, I should wrap this up. We're expecting the champagne truck to come rattling up any old minute with this month's delivery. We're doubling up this month because we're hosting the Duchess' 104th birthday celebration and you remember how that woman can pour the stuff down! I guess when you're that age, it doesn't matter whether you're asleep and drooling in your chair before dinner. People expect it of you.

Love to all, darling!! TA!

I was flattered to learn that all of camp was reading my letters daily. The woman who was the counselor of Peaches' cabin asked if I would continue to write to her, even while Peaches is out at Yosemite this coming week and won't be getting emails. I told her that of course I'd write. One must support one's fan base, after all.