Syndicated!

I am delighted to have a post syndicated at BlogHer today. You may have read it here already, but click on over and see it in situ - it'll look totally different, honest.

I think this is actually the first time I've been paid real money for something I've written.

I'm hoping it won't be the last.

BlogHer '13: But Maud, how did you FEEL about it all?

View from my room on the 21st floor

Can I squeeze one more post out of the BlogHer experience before you're all sick to death of the subject? It's just that I have more things to say about it. I'm still processing the whole weekend, but I also want to write it all down before I forget.

When people in Chicago heard it was my first BlogHer conference, they would say, sympathetically, "It's all a bit overwhelming, isn't it?" But honestly, I didn't feel overwhelmed. It was exhausting, but I didn't realise that till I came home. I did burn out a bit on sessions, but I could cope with that by simply not attending the last one I'd tentatively put on my schedule for the day.

When I went to University College Dublin (17,000 students) from my high school of 300 (which is a normal/medium size in Ireland but tiny by American standards) the same thing should have happened: I should have been intimidated and overwhelmed by the size of the place and all those people. But I wasn't. I found my place and I slotted in, and it felt right straight away.

Maybe it's because I like big cities or maybe it's because I'm halfway between intro- and extravert, or maybe it's because as an only child you're often plonked into situations among many adults you don't know and expected to just entertain yourself quietly until everyone's ready to go... or maybe it's just me. I'm generally content to quietly put myself somewhere and watch what's going on, even if what's going on is positively enormous.

Day one: Not overwhelmed

And BlogHer is pretty enormous. There were about six thousand attendees this year, I was told. The giant hall at the conference center in Chicago full of round tables did elicit a small gasp when I saw it on the first morning, while juggling breakfast plate and coffee cup and quasimodoed by my laptop in my shoulder bag. Imagine your debs (if you're Irish), or a sit-down dinner at a wedding, and then multiply by a couple of hundred, and you have some idea of the scale.

But after breakfast and the keynote speeches, we all broke off to go to our sessions, as if after an English lecture in Theatre L you went to a Spanish tutorial (if I may continue with my UCD reminiscences), and then you were in a room with only fifty or a hundred or maybe ten other people, depending on what you chose to attend. In fact, the whole experience was a little like university, distilled and then concentrated and then scrunched up into two very fast days.

---------------

I may have arrived with some notion that all the business cards I handed out would translate instantly into new loyal readers, perhaps catapulting me into fame and fortune; but the sad truth is that the "big" bloggers, even the ones who might have my card now, are too busy tending to their own empires, and their own real lives, to take the time to read and love and then blogroll little ol' me.

That's okay. I can't please all the people all the time, so I'd better just please myself. That's why I went to the session called The UnMarketing Manifesto, why I went to the writing panels. My blog's purpose is to make me a better writer; that's why I started it, and I don't want to lose sight of that in all this friend-making kerfuffle.

The truth is that I probably won't end up adding all the cards I got to my blog reader, even though I'm following everyone I met on Twitter. And they won't all add mine. And while it's nice to be told that I'm a nice person, or that I'm fun to hang out with, what I really want is to hear that someone enjoys reading my blog.

Am I weird? Is that not, um, normal? Oh well. Thanks for being one of the ones who's reading.

Agnes, elsewhere

I wrote a teeny piece of flash fiction, once upon a time, and then I sent it to the lovely Carmel Harrington, who just happens to be running a competition for such things right now.

Agnes

My basket held a packet of pasta shells and a jar of pesto along with the bottle of red, only because it’s polite to keep up the appearance of dinner when you invite a friend over to gossip for the evening. I was about to make an offhand comment to the woman in front of me, but somehow the words changed in my mouth.

‘Holy f*ck, it’s Agnes the Bearded Lady!’

Go here to read the rest, and if you like it, I'll remind you to vote after June 1st.

Rule of blog

There's this thing about blogging. A sort of an unwritten rule. If something's going wrong in your life, you're not allowed blog about it until you've fixed it. If you do, you're just a whiner and you're bringing everyone down and that's depressing and nobody will want to read about it.

Or else, which is sometimes worse, you do blog about it, just this once, and everyone thinks you were asking for advice, which you may or may not have been doing but you're going to get it anyway, and nothing makes you feel more of a big fat failure than lots of helpful advice telling you to do the things you know you should do, but the whole point was that you don't want to do them, or you can't for whatever reason that may or may not be basically laziness or disinclination. Like if I said "Waahh, my sentences are too long," and you said, "Well, there's this great thing called a full stop," and I said, "But I don't wanna stop it there, I just wanted to whine for a minute."

So while we all want to remain human and mortal and real in the eyes of our readers, we also want to present our best faces, the public ones - or semi-public - wherein if we get things wrong we then figure it out and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, by jimminy, and our lives get better because we're Doing It Right, and what's more, You Can Too.

It's a bit of a no-win situation, to be honest. You want to be cheerful, you don't want your readers to leave in droves because every time they click over to your blog you're whinging on about that thing again, and if they wanted to hear whinging they could go talk to their own four-year-olds thank you very much. On the other hand, you don't want to be one of those insufferable bloggers who has the perfect decor and the perfect children and the perfect life and the perfect housekeeping skills because we all hate those people. And if you only blog about the perfect and ignore the imperfect, that's as good as pretending to be perfect, which is just as bad only duplicitous as well.

I have nothing wise to say on this subject. It's just something I've thought lately. A blogger narrates their story as they choose, it's our prerogative. We are unreliable narrators, of course, because we can't see ourselves from above, and because we can't tell everything even if we wanted to. As a reader, you takes what you gets, and you build a picture that might be true or false or somewhere in between. You impose your own expectations and assumptions and irrational likes and dislikes on what I've said, and I have no control over what you end up with. That's your prerogative.

And somewhere way back along the line, all we wanted to do was pass the time, writer and reader both. Life is complicated.

Decimal

Dash couldn't sleep last night, so he requested a notebook and a pencil and wrote a book. As you do. Then he fell asleep for a few minutes and dreamed that theives came in and stole his pages, and woke up in a fright. I had to lie down with him for aaages to get him back to sleep, and by then it was my bedtime and the 3:10 to Yuma is going to have to wait for another day. (Which is okay with me. It's one of those "We should probably see it" films. Is it any good, really? Have you watched it?)

Anyway, this is his book, all three pages plus cover:

 Ten is a Grat Nomber by [redacted]

 My favorite nomber is 10. 10 is a good nomb[er] becus it is the first 2 nomberd nomber.

Nombers are grate but i'd say 10 is better out of them all. 1 to 100 is not all.

Nombers go on forever, but I stil think 10 is better.

I can't wait for the next thrilling instalment. I think he displays a grasp of the concept of infinity and a general liking for digits that I find admirable, though I'm not sure why he says "better" all the time instead of "best." I also note that his literary inclination is not towards fiction.

I told him how to spell "favorite" (the American way, to my chagrin) and to put another t in better, but the rest (as you can tell) is all his own work. He has the vaguest of understandings that I used to have a job in the outside world and of what it was, so he asked me, "And tomorrow, will you do that thing you used to do, in the library or wherever it was...?" He meant would I edit it. I said I would.

************

Some time after Christmas, homework stopped being the royal pain in the ass it had been. Mostly because I stopped caring so much, and therefore stopped bugging him to do it when I thought he should be doing it. He does his homework every night, usually not until Mabel has been taken upstairs to bed and is therefore no longer a distraction. It doesn't take long. Then we go through his spelling words either orally or by typing them into SpellingCity.com and letting him take a test on the computer, which is a great attraction. And he does his twenty minutes' reading with us at bedtime, before or after stories.

It's all very low pressure and I'm fine with that. I can see that his writing has got neater, his punctuation is pretty good, and some weeks he gets 100 percent in his spelling test. His reading level has leapt from a 12 (on the DRA scale) at the beginning of the year to a 24 this month. (Which sounded spectacular to me until I heard that some other kid went from 12 to 40. What an overacheiver. Sheesh.) But things are moving in the right direction and nobody is stressed out, and that makes me happy.

So all in all, first grade turns out to have been just fine.

Oral tradition

There are things I say just because my parents said them. If it's foggy outside, I'll announce that it's a mishty moishty morning, as my father would if he saw it. Any mention of Delaware will have me humming "What did Della wear, boys, what did Della wear?" even though I've no idea how the rest of the song goes, because I know that if you say Delaware to my mother, that's what she'll do. (The state of Delaware doesn't come up much in Irish conversation.)

Sometimes I wonder which of my parents' sayings came from their parents. There must be some. I'd like it if I knew, so I could make a point of passing those ones in particular on to my own children. An oral history family-tree, we'd have.

When my parents came to visit us in Texas we took them to the zoo. When I rounded a corner and saw a bison ahead of us, I whispered to B that if he asked my Dad what that was, he'd say it was a biffalo buffalo bison. Sure enough, those were the first words out of my father's mouth when he saw the hulking shaggy brown creature.

My parents regularly employ the following words without irony: wireless, slacks, plimsolls, the mail boat*, hanky, cardi, serviette. I don't say any of these words, even ironically, because they're not things I need to say, or sometimes because I decided I didn't want to be someone who says "cardi." 

Ireland is another country, and so is the past. My children will be at two removes from these words, and since they don't see their grandparents more than once a year, they're unlikely to remember them unless I do it for them. (My granny would offer me a chocolate from her ubiquitous box - people were always bringing her boxes of chocolates, because old ladies don't need anything - and say "Would a duck swim?" That's the only phrase I have that's uniquely hers in my mind. I wish there were more.)

I always feel that my syntax becomes more mobile when I'm in Ireland, my vocabulary a little more vernacular, my pronouncements more colourful. In America I bland it down, even it out, try not to confuse. I'm sure my friends and neighbours here will tell you that I still sound Irish, that I still say things that leave them scratching their heads on occasion, that I'll never just blend in: nor would I want to. But I feel a certain richness - if I ever had it, and I'm a very mild sort of Irishwoman really, from well inside the Pale - is lost, and maybe my new melting-pot land is the poorer for it. 



*The ferry into Dun Laoghaire from Holyhead; it hasn't brought the mail along with its passengers for many a year, and why it's mail not post I don't know, now I come to think about it. Maybe it was used by the Royal Mail, back in the day.

Imprint

I believe in the power of writing things down.

Just like it didn't really happen if you didn't tell someone about it, for me it didn't really happen if I didn't write it down. Because what's in my mind is ephemeral; it could be tipped out at any moment, to be replaced by children's shoe sizes or where I last saw your orange dinosaur. 

Sometimes it's because I need to remember all the things I mustn't forget. Sometimes it's because I need to find out what's inside my head and it won't come tumbling down, like Rapunzel's hair, until my fingers fly along the keys. And sometimes it's because I get overwhelmed by the fact that every few years we lose a generation's worth of stories, of knowledge, of information.

I want to tell my parents' stories, but they're not mine to tell. I'd like them to tell their own stories, but they don't feel the same compulsion I do to send the words out there. They might even feel a desire to keep things quiet, untold; even if that means they're lost forever. Some of their stories are probably lost already. Some of mine are too.

Writing it down makes it real. It keeps it alive. It takes it out of our heads - those amazing, wondrous, unfathomable places that are as fragile as mere skin and bone and grey matter - and turns it into marks on a page that can be deciphered today, tomorrow, perhaps long after we've gone and our bones have nourished a thousand rose bushes.

Point of origin

I forgot to mention it here because I said it elsewhere, but I've been in the US for ten years this month. I think my anniversary was last Sunday, actually. I emigrated without even feeling like that was what I was doing - I was just moving in with my boyfriend. The fact that I had to painstakingly win the visa lottery, go through the green-card process, and move across an ocean to do it was just details, once it was all under the bridge.

For my writing course this morning I had to describe fifteen important minutes of my life. Tricky. I mean, I suppose they had to be minutes in my life, not just minutes that affected my life, because otherwise I'd have been duty-bound to envision my own conception, which is really not something anyone wants to have to put any amount of imaginative thought into. And they had to be minutes that were important to my life, not someone else's - because who knows if something I said offhandedly in a supermarket queue or at a playdate or online had a deep and lasting effect on someone else's life? I mean, it's unlikely, but not impossible.

So I had to come up with a fifteen-minute episode that made a difference to my life. There are the birth stories, of course, but I've already written those. And the thing is, once the baby's in there it has to come out one way or another, so while the births were great and life-affirming, they didn't really change things. Finally, although it's the epitome of cheese and terribly obvious, I found I had to go back to that house party in 1993 when I calculatedly but nonchalantly wandered into the kitchen after the boy who'd gone looking for a corkscrew, because I thought he was cute.

I won't give you the blow-by-blow account here, but it was probably a pivotal moment. It's possible that the same moment could have come later, or earlier, since we had a mutual good friend and would probably have encountered each other again if we hadn't that day - if I hadn't gone to the party, or he'd chatted up the Australian girl for a few more minutes, or he'd been wearing the sweater with the duck, for instance - but that's how it happened.

There were probably lots of other important moments or sets of moments: when we broke up (numerous times), when we got back together (numerous times +1), when I filled in the visa application form, when some random-number-generator or bikini-clad lady pulled my application number out of the hundreds of others, when we dated other people and found them not measuring up to previously set high standards. But the fact stands that if things had gone differently that evening in Rathmines, I very easily might not be sitting here, emigrant, immigrant, runner's wife, mother of these two particular amazing/appalling children. I might be writing somewhere, wherever, but that's about the only thing that would be the same.

I don't think I have to mention, do I, that I'm pretty happy with the way it has turned out so far?

Present disculpatory

Apparently I was a little distracted when putting Mabel to bed last night. She wrapped herself up in my big brown blanket and I totally forgot that we hadn't put a nighttime pullup on her. So at eleven thirty she woke up all wet and it took a long time to get her back to sleep.

My big brown blanket is now in the wash.

I'm busy. Which is good. I like to be busy when it's just the right amount - not overwhelming, not stressful, just busy enough to give me a sense of purpose and a good excuse when the children come wanting me to be a mommy cheetah. (I said "Miaow," but apparently cheetahs don't miaow. They don't roar either. They make a high-pitched chirping noise. I find this hard to believe. I am suspicious of my children's television-acquired knowledge.)

I'm busy getting us back to normal, whatever that is, but also trying to start exercising again - running and yoga, I've decided, this year/semester/term/week - and doing a small freelance job, as well as the writing course I'm taking from Alice Bradley (the wonderful, hilarious Finslippy, and I only partly said that because she might be reading). [Alice Bradley is reading my blog. Hyperventilate, hyperventilate, spend an hour browsing past posts to try to read them with a stranger's eye; fail.]

And then I had to restock our supplies of peanut-butter and tinned tomatoes and boxes upon boxes of Cheerios (they were on special offer), as well as trying to keep the house from falling into a state of absolute squalor (some squalor is fine, just not absolute), and have a cup of tea every now and then and eat a muffin (somebody's gotta do it) and also see above re laundry, and so that, what I'm trying to say, is why I didn't update the blog yesterday.

Biting and writing

Things and stuff, things and stuff. It's nice to be back here with my things and my stuff and all the Christmas decorations put away since I never put any out to begin with. Dash is at school and Mabel is napping, since she woke up at 3.30am thank you jet lag. I think I might bake something soon.

Speaking of which, it is an excellent idea to bake something just before you go away and leave it in the freezer so that when you come back and you're mainlining tea to keep awake, you have something nice and homemade to go with it just 15 seconds in the microwave away. The only thing I did wrong was to leave only six chocolate-chip pumpkin muffins waiting for us, because they didn't last long.

Other things you might have missed because I didn't mention them here include the fact that Dash lost his first tooth (not counting that one he knocked out as a baby, a mere month after it came in, great maternal trauma):

It (the bottom one - the top opposite is the gap he's basically always had) was wobbly, and wobblier, and I thought Santa might be bumping into the Tooth Fairy but it held on a few days longer and then he and Mabel and their dad and their cousins, but not me because I escaped to meet a friend and also had bashed my toe a la Amalah that morning*, all went ice-skating and when they stopped for an ice-cream break his father pointed out that his tooth was gone. And Dash said "Is it?" and so we think he swallowed it but maybe it's out there on the ice somewhere waiting to trip someone up.

Then there were some negotiations and a note was written to the Tooth Fairy (by me, which is a little ironic) explaining that Dash would like dollars, not euros, and also that he had swallowed the tooth, and I had to tell him that the Tooth Fairy had left her dollars in Dublin where we were not at that moment, so also that he would like to get his money tomorrow night instead. I think he was a bit jaded by the whole charade, but he wanted his dollars, dammit, and luckily for him the Metro ticket machine had given me dollar coins just before we left the country, so it all worked out. Though the writing notes to myself was a bit surreal.

........

I did some writing (elsewhere, to which I'd rather not link because it has my real name, but if you came here from there that's lovely and I'm thrilled to see you, please stick around) and got lots of nice comments and some off-the-wall ones that made me think about, well, how you can never tell the full story, I suppose. Maybe what I'm trying to do here is to make you understand me, but that's nonsense because there's always more, there are always qualifications, provisos, quid pro quos (thank you, Genie from Aladdin), ways in which I have to explain that I didn't mean what you thought I meant, I meant something else.

Clarity; I like clarity. That's why I'm an editor. I disambiguate. But eventually you have to just leave it alone and accept that you can't get everything across to everyone, and you wouldn't actually want to.

So I will continue to offer snippets of what the ex-pat experience is for me, and how Ireland feels and how America feels, and try to find words that explain how the cold hard sunlight outside my window parches the grass of the backyard in winter in an entirely different way from the soft air of my homeland, where you don't understand why they talk about how green it is until you go somewhere else and then come back.

........

Other items of note: I now have a Search tool (over there -> under the tag cloud), and you can sign up for e-mail updates whenever I post, if you like that sort of thing. And I made some tabs and put all the links to other people's blogs on one, so you should take a look at that.

And if I can gently remind you here that liking me on Facebook and/or following me on Twitter makes me very happy and gets you extra bits of wit and wisdom and cute photos sometimes, as well as links to new posts, I'll do that too.

........

Time to read a book and bake something and wonder when I have to wake Mabel in order to pre-emptively rescue bedtime.


* My toe was not actually broken. I wasn't limping at all by the next day. But still, ow.

Words per minute

More times than I should admit to, I sit down here and have no idea what I'm going to end up saying. Sometimes it works out, other times not so much. Sometimes just sitting and typing will trigger a thought that turns into a decent post, and then I go back and delete all the drivel at the top that got me to it, and ta-da! it looks as if I had a plan all along.

If you don't know what to blog about, but you're fairly good at typing, I recommend it. (I'm not sure how it would work if I had to hunt and peck for each letter - my brain-to-finger motion is pretty seamless at this point.)

Though really. My mother had 60 words per minute on an old-fashioned typewriter, not even an electric one at first; probably with a sheet of carbon paper underneath and working from shorthand dictation. If I didn't have a Delete key up there within easy reach of my right little finger, this would be a whole 'nother ballgame. She was a proper secretary, like the sort they had in Mad Men. (I wonder if she's ever seen Mad Men? Must ask her. I bet she'd love the clothes but she'd spend her whole time telling me how it wasn't like that in The Bank.) (There is more than one bank in the country, but apparently not when you worked there. Everyone, according to my mother - that is, all the unmarried ladies in Dublin - either worked in The Bank or Guinness's. That's just how it was in the 60s. They were also all in either the tennis club or the golf club.)

I've used one of those old typewriters - my mum still has one at home in its own lovely wooden case. You have to bash down each key with the force of a concert pianist going for broke on Beethoven's Ninth, and you have to sit up straight and hold up your wrists too. None of this slouching over the kitchen table with my elbows all noodly, like I'm doing now. And I imagine it would be pretty hard to take your typewriter to bed with you and type on your knees, cosily wrapped up in a dressing gown, as I have been known to do. The people who habitually blog while on the loo would have a bit of a problem too, even leaving aside the problem of how to connect your manual typewriter to the Internet and how you might insert a hotlink.

I suppose what I'm getting to is that blogging is so much a product of this time, and I imagine it will be superseded by something new and improved in a few years, so that our children will read about it in the footnote of a history book and say "Oh yes, my mother used to do that," and they'll wonder how we managed when life was so hard and laptops were so unwieldy and you had to use all the fingers of all your hands to put words on a screen. Maybe they'll all be vlogging, or they'll attach electrodes to their brains and mind meld, and the whole Internet will be In Your Mind all the time...

If I had lived in any other century - or other few decades, I suppose - I might have filled diaries with my blathering, but I'd more likely just not have bothered. Blogging gives me a tiny, supportive audience - just enough to keep me writing, not so much that they become critical and put me off. The fact that I'm just one of bazillions of bloggers means that if someone doesn't want to read what I'm saying, they can easily go elsewhere. No harm, no foul; no money or time wasted; no skin off my nose. I get the validation that keeps me writing, I get the creative outlet and outside connection I need in these years when former at-home mothers would be isolated and inward-looking (back to Mad Men, and I've only seen the first season so don't go spoiling me). I get to feel like a writer, without all that character-building, soul-destroying rejection that "real" writers have to go through.

Because if you write, you're a writer. If you write for an audience, you're a writer. If you write a blog, or a book, or on the back of a napkin, you're a writer. If you write because there are words inside and you want to get them out, on paper or on a screen, or somewhere in between, you're a writer.

I blog because I want to write, and this is where I get to do it.

Metapost

Normally, I try not to blog about blogging. It tends to send me down a rabbit-hole of introspection, which is very fascinating to me, but not so much to you lot. Maybe. Every now and then, though, I suppose I can get away with breaking my rules.

See, earlier today I wrote a post about going back to work. At least, about how maybe once Mabel is back at school, and five mornings a week this year instead of just three, I might look for some freelancing. Except I took a good six paragraphs to say it. And then I thought, "This isn't very interesting. Why am I writing this?"

So, why indeed? If my blog is just for me, it doesn't have to be interesting to anyone else. This post, for instance, will also not be interesting to many other people. And sometimes I just need to write things out to explain them to myself, or to get to the meat of what I actually meant to say.

In which case, I should then delete the first six paragraphs and then publish the meat, but these days I don't really have time to get there.

Which brings me to the quantity versus quality question. Right now, my fingers are clicking away as fast as they can because the children are upstairs with their father, who is overseeing the bath. Soon they'll be back, and then it'll be bedtime, and then I'll have another little while before I'm distracted by someone watching Star Trek Enterprise beside me, or possibly something else I'm more interested in. (Though actually, Enterprise isn't half bad. Sometimes I get sucked in.)

The way I see it, it's easier for me to update my blog almost daily than rarely. Because almost daily is a habit, and rarely far too easily becomes never. And by writing through the dross we sometimes arrive at the good stuff. I don't want you to have to read the dross, but maybe you don't mind either. Not every post can be a great one, and anyway, sometimes my most popular posts are the ones I thought I just threw up against the wall to see if anything stuck. (The one about packing, for instance, has proved surprisingly well-frequented.)

As an editor, all this dross annoys me, but I'm not going to go back and cut swathes through my archives, because as a writer, each individual piece of dross is my baby. Not my perfect baby, but nevertheless, born of my fingers and brought to the light of screen by nobody but me and the nice people from Blogger.

So what do you think (before they get out of the bath)? Are you willing to put up with the dross to get the meat? Have you a higher dross tolerance than I thought? Would you prefer I posted less often with more focused, pared-down, edited content? And at the end of it all, do I care? Because after all, is this blog for me or for you?

You tell me.

Divulge

But first, a joke:

Two old fellas in a Dublin pub, staring morosely into their pints.
"I'm writing a novel," says the one.
"Neither am I," says the other.

Or maybe it was Brendan Behan and James Joyce, and for all I know it really happened.

So here's a secret. In the past year or so, I have written the grand total of three - count 'em, three - short stories. I know they qualify as short stories because I looked up how many words you need, and we're certainly not heading into novella territory here. They're a little longer than flash fiction, perhaps, but not much.

It takes me a long time, what with not having much of that in the first place, and all this blogging you people demand that I do, and the fact that I have to stop and wait for the muse to tell me where to take things and sometimes the muse is busy washing her hair or touring China so she doesn't get back to me for a while. But I sort of love it. (Or, like exercise, I love having done it.)

The process, though. The process is interesting. Take this last one I finished, for example. I started it on a whim, and loved the beginning. I loved the beginning - the fairytale tone, the romantic setting - so much that I didn't really want to take it anywhere. Because as soon as you start sending a character down a path, you make a change to them. They become someone more concrete, more real and more flawed. The glorious endless possibilities of the blank page are closed off to them one by one, as words fill up the space, making them do specific things. You feel you're not living up to the potential you gave them. How can they be ethereal creatures of delicate magic if they also have to be plodding people who go to school and try to make friends? But I don't want to write elves and sparkles, and I don't want to write tragedy and deep suffering and high literature: I want to write something more like a whimsical take on reality, to entertain and distract.

And then, once it's done, I thought, I'll leave it alone for a while and come back to it with my editor's hat on, and rip it to shreds. When I don't love it so much, when I can see the cracks and the creaks and what I would say to a stranger. Because I'm a good editor, even if I don't have a lot of experience with fiction. I have to trust my own opinion even on my own writing, if I can just get a bit of a remove from it.

It didn't work that way. I re-read the story last night and it was as if every move, every word spoken was carved in stone. It had become history, and to change it would be to betray what had really happened. I couldn't find a thing to rip up. I have no idea if this is because it really is perfect (not so likely) or because no matter how long I leave it, the words came out of some space in me that won't bend to my editorial dictates.

(This is why the world needs editors, people. Stop thinking writers can edit their own work. Two functions. Two people.)

Funny old stuff, writing. I don't know what to do with my stories next. But I should probably start another, just to see if I can do it again.

Fiction, two ways

A friend of mine is writing a novel online, in serial form, just like Mr Dickens in the olden days, except  about a million times more interesting and readable. (Sorry, but I've never been a Dickens fan. Hard Times was just that, Bleak House even moreso.) I am in awe of how smoothly the story flows, how I read it and want more without even noticing, and the fact that - she claims! - she has the whole thing planned out in her head, even if now and then her characters turn around to her and announce that they're just not ready to do that yet. I suspect it's just that sort of easy readability that is in fact very difficult to pull off.

The tragedy is that she has very few readers, so I said I'd give her a plug over here. Go and have a look. Read the Introduction and then start at the Home page, where you'll find the table of contents. Then tell her you're reading and that you'd like some more, please. Because I want to know what happens.

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Mabel has moved on from announcing "Not again!" with as much italicization and eye-rolling as she can possibly inject into a two-word exclamation, to saying, "Forget it!" I think the girl has bershon all sewn up, at the tender age of three.

She got a new baby from the thrift store yesterday after her dental ordeal, because that's where we go when a new baby is in order but I only want to spend two bucks on it. For 1.95, she has a new "baby sister" whom she loves nearly as much as the last one, the one that cost an appalling $40 in FAO Schwartz for her birthday. This morning she staged a baby festival, but I'm not sure if that was a place you could get babies, or a place to bring your babies.

Dash has Santa Claus all figured out this year, which is something of a relief. Worrying about what we would do about Santa took up a good deal of my time even before he was born. In the end, we took a sort of middle path where we didn't push the myth, but didn't exactly explode it either. We had stockings, but didn't make a big to-do about who put the presents in them. In September or October this year, he whispered to me that he thought the parents really brought the presents, and I agreed, but told him we were still playing the game for Mabel and not to let the cat out of the bag.

He doesn't seem scarred for life by the lies we told him, or allowed him to believe, or failed to debunk, so I'm a bit more relaxed with Mabel. She has a vague idea that Santa, who is that guy with the red-and-white suit, is going to bring her presents at Christmas.

- What would you like for Christmas, Mabel?
- I think probably a baby. Because I like babies and puppies.
- So maybe Santa will bring you a puppy*. You have a lot of babies already.
- Yes, but I want a baby, because I like puppies but I need a new baby.

This conversation took place before the advent of yesterday's baby, but I'll wager her position hasn't changed. Because you can never have enough babies.

*Not a real puppy. No way, Jose.

D

Happy significant blog-post number to me, happy significant blog-post number to me... etc. Blogger tells me that this is my five-hundredth post. If anyone out there who is not married to me has read them all, you probably deserve a lot more accolades for hanging in there than I do for blathering on at you.

But seriously, folks. I know you're not supposed to drink when you're on antibiotics, but is it okay to stuff your face with your children's halloween candy? Hypothetically speaking.

I started the blog out of boredom, when I had recently moved to the US from Ireland. I posted sporadically and had no readers. I've gradually upped the posting and come out a teensy tiny bit, first to people I only know on the Internet and then to (gasp) some friends and family in real life, and I'm sort of proud of the fact that I've been posting close to 5-6 days a week for over a year now.

As my life goes right now, this is the thing I do for me more than any other. It's my hobby, it's my release, it's my connection to the Outside, it's keeping my writing muscle flexed just a little bit, even if some days all I do is post a photo or recount something hilarious my kids said (which - be honest - is what you people like best). And somehow or other I get between 70 and 90 readers most weekdays. They can't all be married to me. (Unless B has rigged my stats. Maybe he has.)

So thank you for reading, whoever you are. If you don't object, I'll just keep on blathering.

Bloggity

See, as soon as I take my eye off the (blog) ball for a few minutes and try to write something else instead, in the shape of this crazy short story I'm playing around with that I think jumped the shark the moment I mentioned zombies, but I just ran with it and now I'm really quite enjoying the whole nutbally thing - as soon as that happens, then I have nothing to blog about and it just sits here all day and I realise that while it was extra super-duper nice of me to post on Sunday afternoon so that all those people who are bored at work on Monday morning will have something to read - wasn't it? because I used to be one of those people, so I do feel for you - that it doesn't really count as a Monday post, and what about all those other people who came along looking for something new on Monday and still haven't found it? Well, there's an extra long sentence just for you, that's what.

My most regular source of visitors, according to my stats, is a discussion board I happen to frequent that also has a portal where members can advertise their latest blog posts. Before the advent of things like Facebook, this was totally fabulous, because even people who hadn't bothered to bookmark your blog could go there and find the most recent post. Even now, with things like FB, it still sends me by far the biggest chunk of readers. But right now the portal is broken, so I'd like to extend a big thank-you to anyone who's still coming along to read even though they have to do it by a more convoluted route than usual. I'm really surprised my numbers didn't drop further, so I think some people are actually making an effort. And I do appreciate that.

Ugh. I just accidentally Febreezed my hand. You don't really want to know why.

You know, I'm very happy that the Internet came along in my lifetime, and that someone invented blogging and that it became a thing that people do. Because it's exactly the perfect thing for a person like me: a closet exhibitionist (I do cartwheels in the streets, but only when they're deserted) who used to subject her friends to ten-page letters and, later, e-mails that took way too much scrolling. This way (a) only people who actually feel like seeing me exhibit need to do so, (b) I don't have to write the same news over and over to different friends, and (c) I have an outlet for the constant stream of drivel that apparently comes direct to my fingers, bypassing my brain.

It's also good that I learned to type, disregarding the advice of my uncle who told me that if I did, men would only see me as a secretary. (I've been a secretary, and I was glad of the job and the fingerspeed that got it for me.) Times have changed.

In fact, now my uncle has a blog. I bet he has to hunt and peck to find the right keys.

Things I will do with my seven-and-a-half hours of free time every week starting next Tuesday, not that I'm counting down or anything.

Mabel starts school next week. From 9 to 11.30 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she will be entertained by and entertaining the teachers, co-opping parents, and her classmates; slicing play-doh pizza, painting masterpieces, splashing at the water table, and of course minding the babies. From time to time, I muse on what I will do with the few minutes of extra time I'll have to myself with both children out of the house. And by muse, I mean plan ferociously and count the minutes.

Of course, what I'll actually do is run around like a headless chicken because I can't light on just one thing, and I don't have time to really do anything much. But there are plenty of things I'd like to do.

1. Go to Target. Trawl the aisles slowly, at leisure, without having to recapture an escape artist every five seconds, without having to bribe anyone with chocolate milk at Starbucks afterwards, without buying anyone a pair of conciliatory Hello Kitty sunglasses because it's really hard to visit the toy aisles and choose a birthday present for a friend when you're not getting anything yourself. Try not to spend too much.

2. Go to the outlet mall. Actually try things on. Buy clothes for me, not for the kids. Try not to spend too much.

3. Go to Old Navy, Marshalls, or Ross, and spend ages perusing the sale racks. Hardly spend anything at all, because it's all cheap crap anyway.

4. Clean the house. Hah. Right.

5. Do the ironing. The downside to line-drying like a nice environmentally friendly tree-hugger is that some days I really do need to bust out the iron if I don't want to look like I slept in my clothes. And I actually like ironing - it's soothing, and satisfying, and I can listen to the radio at the same time. Oooh.

6. Listen to the radio. Any time I have tried to listen to music for the past five years, it's been instantly drowned out by the cacophony of my children demanding something else, or not that, or the tv, or attempting fratricide.

7. Read a good book.

8. Write a good book. That would be nice. In my dreams.

9. But more realistically, blog, so that I don't have to do it in the evening.

10. And maybe, just maybe, write a short story. Or finish that one I started.

11. On a more practical note, go to the supermarket without having to take a TV cart and pass out bagels as soon as we get to the bakery section and defuse arguments about who sits on the side with the steering wheel and who put whose shoes on the TV screen. I could even come home with all the ingredients for more than two meals, rather than just half the ingredients for one and a half meals.

12. Or I could just plan the meals at home, and do the shopping later with a properly organised list. But I like to be inspired by what I see in the store, not sit at home waiting for inspiration to strike.

13. Bake a ton of muffins. Eat them in peace with a nice cup of tea.

14. You know, I'm going to do that right now. If naptime lasts long enough. What are the chances? Tell you what, I'll save vital time by not proofing this.

15. Oh, there was meant to be something about getting some freelance editing work and earning a crust of my own. I'm sure I'll get round to that at some point. But if I'm busy working, when would I get to go shopping?

Questions for my father

I had this notion, so I thought I'd write it down.

My dad just turned 80. He's far from feeble but I have to acknowledge that he's getting older and people don't live for ever. I want to ask him to write some sort of memoir, even if it's just a timeline of events that we can fill in bit by bit. Because he lived through "important places, times when great events were decided" (to quote Patrick Kavenagh) and did some cool things, and I don't want to lose that history. Maybe one day one (or both) of my kids, or their kids, will be interested in these things.

So I was thinking, I could send him a sort of questionnaire, to get him started, give him a structure, jog his memory. Then I could ghost write it for him, if he liked. Then we could publish it and make a mint. Or, you know, whatever.

Off the top of my head, some questions:

• Who were your parents? What did they do in the first world war? When did they meet and marry? Do you know the story of how they met?
• What are your memories of the second world war in (and outside) London? What was your dad doing in Germany after that?
• Where did you go to school? Tell me a story from your schooldays.
• And then you went to the polytechnic to study architecture. What was your first job?
• Why did you decide to move to America? What was it like in California in the 60s, for a sheltered Catholic boy from England? Why did you decide not to stay?
• You moved to Ireland instead. How did Ireland become your adopted home?
• Tell me about your two years in Guatemala.
• How did you meet my mother? What made you decide to marry her, and you a confirmed batchelor in your 40s? How do you spell batchelor?
• What happened to your leg?
• What famous people have you met? (Bono, Sir John Betjeman to name an eclectic couple. Probably the Queen, for all I know.)
• What building are you most proud of being involved in the creation of?
• What do you regret that you never got to do, and are unlikely to at this point?
• What do you want to do next?

Randomia

Back to square one and not talking about the children. I want to write. And I need to practice. Which is what this thing is for.

Hmm. Will un-muting James Bond help me craft my words? But it's Daniel Craig. He's bound to inspire.

Of course, what I have to write about is almost always the children, so I lied there. I was putting them both to bed by myself tonight, and it didn't exactly go swimmingly. I've found in the past that the key is to have dinner early, but tonight that just meant that I had more hours of juggling the one and then the other and then the one again while fending off yells from the other and/or screeches from the one.
I have this notion of how I want to write, something about how the style will reflect the content, rather than all "And then she said this and then he said that" narrative. But what the narrative would actually be is anyone's guess.

Must brush my teeth before called back into active service.

Actually, a twofer

It is perhaps the case that I need to write for a while just to get into it. Then I should scrap the first two paragraphs (at least) and go with the rest, by which time I’ve actually arrived at a decent theme for myself. It is also perhaps the case that I should excise the word “actually” from my vocabulary. At least for the time being.

This is pretty much the opposite of my tactic when I need to write a specific piece – a memo or a document or something concrete and work-related. Then, my introduction is always crappy. So I forget the polite introductory stuff for the moment and start straight in at the second paragraph, getting down to exactly what it is I wanted to say (or ask, or describe or whatever). Then, when I can see what I’m saying, it’s much easier to craft the right introduction as a final step.

I’m quite proud of my work memos – I like to think they’re models of diplomacy, cunningly crafted to attain the result I want while making the recipient feel like I’m going out of my way to help them. (My ex-boss once said as much. In that department I think we all enjoyed a little well-written subtle emotional blackmail. For the good of the group, you understand.)

In that vein, I wrote a masterpiece of subtlety today, trying to get my clutches into some work I have an eye on. It did at least get a response, which was the most basic aim since the recipient had been ignoring previous more workmanlike missives, but I didn’t win the war. I hate getting brusque e-mails. I hate people who don’t address me but just start straight into it (unless they’re good friends or it’s part of an ongoing exchange). I really hate people who don’t sign off at all, and just let their signature line (or the From field, for goodness sake) do the talking. Bah. These people, they have no finesse, no ettiquette. She didn’t even bother to Reply All, so I had to forward her reply to my boss, who I’d copied on the original so he could admire my skill and dexterity in handling these delicate matters. (I fear it’ll be lost on him. Not so much with the finesse himself, electronically.)