Monthly Archives: February 2009

TGIF Update


I generally don’t blog the Friday post until the night before unlike other days of the week where I might be a week or two ahead. I discovered long ago that to be a (week) daily blog, some advance planning/writing is necessary. If I didn’t do it this way, I wouldn’t get any other writing done and fiction is my main priority.

Fiction is my main priority. I came to that conclusion last week. I am avoiding the hard work by blogging, but since I love to blog – a dilemma. I thought about just shutting down the blog and leaving 50 Something Moms. In the short term, I would have oodles of time for my “serious” writing. But in the near long term, I will lose everything I gained from blogging with the community and friendships I have made being chief on the loss list with no guarantee that I will be any more productive on the fiction front.

So I have decided that 50 Something is going to be strictly a two post a month proposition for the near future. I just don’t have time, and I don’t get the sense that I am in the right company. Perhaps I am too young after all? I hate tweener gaps. The SVM network is, ironically, launching a Canadian Mom site now. I wish I’d had that option last fall. But oh well.

I am instituting a new daily task calendar to go along with my quarterly plans. Perhaps this will keep me on track? I am juggling too many projects and sending out stories that are still in want of revision. Case in point? 2.0 came back from the sci/fi mag for the second time with a very nice rejection letter. It was a second look for them, but they still can’t picture it in their publication. It’s not a total defeat. They liked it. But there are still problems, and when I read it again the other night, I could see them easily which means I am rushing to get this out. It’s a miracle really they considered it once let alone twice because they are probably not the right market even. A testament to the strength of the piece but an indictment of me. I am spread too thinly.

Being in a hurry to get to where I want to be has always been a problem for me. I can see so clearly where I am meant to go and be that I ignore the stuff that is standing in my path.

Okay, ignore is strong. I underestimate the travel commitment. It’s a pantser thing and since I so seldom am wrong when I head out with my lance toward the windmills, I forget about the last battle in the larger war until I am flying bum over head to find myself looking up at the sky again.

“Details. Oh yeah, forgot about them.”

I got too caught up in the platform thing that Christina Katz is so keen on. It does me no good until I have product to “pimp”. Because isn’t that what  a web platform is for?  I have three and a half manuscripts of which one is finished and that includes the memoir. There are a half dozen short stories that need finishing in some way or other. I have another novel idea that is sitting in short pieces.

And I am having trouble with the whole “platform” thing anyway. I can see the point of networking with other writers, but the whole point of blogging is community.

And then there is Rob, BabyD and life in general with myself somewhere down on the list. Did I ever mention my growing interest in becoming a yoga instructor? 

Time, time, time. See what’s become of me.

I am in transition right now. Things might be more me-centric than usual, or not, here for the next couple of months.

In other news?

CB had another break from reality last weekend. I wonder what it’s like to be able to simply discount reality and invent a new one for oneself?

He called our mom to report an attempt on his life by people who have been following him. Mom asked him if he could call her back later as she was late for mass and had a brunch date with a friend. He said, sure, he was just updating her anyway.

Imaginary people stalking CB with nefarious intentions has come to be normal for us.

DNOS called him back while Mom was out.

“I’m expecting a home invasion at any moment,” he told her.

But a few days later, Mom finds a message on her voicemail from CB. He apologized for freaking her out. Everything was fine now.

BabyD has graduated from her remedial reading program and is now in the highest reading group with her friends, which was her only concern during the whole ordeal. I am pleased with her progress, but she is still a haphazard reader who tires very easily. Reading is going to be the straw that breaks her school loving back someday I fear. She is too much like her dad for my liking sometimes.

ED is still in Mexico. And still fine. 

It snowed most of the week. Depressing. But the sun is back today, and we are being threatened by a warming trend for the next week or so.

And that’s it.

I’m A Hummingbird with Pantser Tendencies


When I was a teacher we were continually being led to believe that everyone was a type.  Students had learning styles.  Teachers were concrete or random thinkers and that this influenced their methods. And that we had strong and weak intellectual areas. Anything and everything could be divined through questionnaires and personality testing.

The same holds true for writers, I have discovered.  We are owls or hummingbirds.  Pantsers or Planners.

I am a hummingbird with pantser tendencies. I flit and float and twitter (not literally, I really don’t like Twitter.  It’s writing for the ADHD set),  and though I have a general idea of where a piece of writing is going,  I don’t have a written plan.

I have tried to outline.  God knows that my 11th grade composition teacher, Sr. Mary Catherine, god bless her in whatever corner of hell she is standing in right now, tried to tie me to outlining. I learned how to create one, grudgingly, but never did learn how to stick to it. What happened more often than not was that I would get a better idea and then have to go back and change the outline to fit the paper I was writing for her. This soured me to the usefulness of outlines because they seemed to me to stifle any thought of creative spark and spontaneity and made more detail work for me in the bargain.

Now that I am writing novel length pieces, however, I am beginning to see the point of the owls and the planners. It’s far too easy to get lost in a long story than a short one when you are not a map person. I am actually a “landmark” navigator which amuses my husband to no end.

There is a term for what I do as a writer. It’s called “organic” writing.  Another way of saying that one has no real clue of what one is doing.

But writing is proceeding, people, and decisions about where effort and time are best spent loom large.

The Leading Men Who Made Me the Woman I Am


I could as easily say fictional men who warped my ideas about love, romance and relationships.

A few weeks ago, I talked Rob into watching the old Rex Harrison/ Gene Tierney movie, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. It’s about a young post Victorian widow who falls in love with the ghost of a sea captain who died in the house she rents for herself and her young daughter. Tierney is a cipher. Blank and suitably malleable. But Harrison is a stitch. And a man.

Rob’s favorite line now is from the movie,

“I’ve lived a man’s life, and I am not ashamed to admit it.”

After the movie was over, he pressed me to explain why I would have loved such an odd film. It was a favorite long before I was widowed or even married for the first time. And it’s not really all that hopeful because in order for the characters to be together, the widow has to grow old – alone – and die – alone.

But it wasn’t her. It was him. Unabashedly male and yet in a charmingly rakish way that wasn’t overwhelming and still allowed the tender aspects to show.

Of course he was a later influence. My early teachers were soap opera characters. Like Dr. Jeff Webber on General Hospital or Beau Buchanan on One Life to Live. Good guys if a little bit wishy-washy.

But there is something about the old time movie stars that make those today pale in comparison. Clark Gable. Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant.

Have you ever seen Hellfighters with John Wayne and Jim Hutton? Or the Sons of Katie Elder with Dean Martin? Or how about the final shootout between Robert Mitchum and Martin in Five Card Stud?

Oh, and Yul Brynner!? How could I forget him? When the king and Anna dance, does it get more romantic than that? Or the scene where Ramses informs Nefertiti that she will be his just like his horse but,

“I will love you more and trust you less.”

It a far cry from Tom Hanks and John Cusack. Perhaps we can blame Oprah for that?