Mourning.

I would hardly be the first, and it's hardly the first time I've thought this myself - but the loss, through the 20th century, of traditional mourning practices in the United States is also a loss of an important signal between us as humans. It's been tempting, since my stepfather's death, to find some way to communicate, without having to have awkward conversations with strangers or acquaintances, that I have just endured a loss. With even the black armband all but vanished, mourning itself is an awkward proposition anymore.

There has been an increasing sense, for me, that it's time to move on. Nobody has pressed this upon me, but with weeks passing at a clip (I almost cannot believe it's been nearly three now), there is an inescapable feeling that continuing to Have The Feels about my stepfather's death is already drama-queening. That, to be frank, there is only the briefest of periods we can get away with not being okay and getting on with the day-to-day.

It would be ... if not nice, then certainly convenient, to have an unspoken signal of mourning. If one is to get on with the day-to-day, not having to *speak* about the loss of a loved one would certainly facilitate that. But the human heart is what it is, and it still hurts when people you're not sure even "know about it" register no sympathy. There is confusion - do I tell this person I see every day? Why should I have to do that? It feels like dramatics to lay that on people - particularly when you're not sure whether they know already. Some people won't speak because it's been more than a few days, and the news-cycle of life has sailed. Some people won't speak because they are sensitive to the pain of loss. Some people won't speak because they are awkward with the subject. Some people won't speak because they do not know. As the bereaved, it would be easier to know - is this person in ignorance, or are they being kind? It HELPS to understand.

So much of communication is nonverbal.

And so, if I had a signal, I could at least understand the words that do come toward me. And I could also communicate this important thing about myself, without having to stop time in the workroom to say, "Yeah, my stepfather just died." And leave someone feeling VERY awkward.

My guess is, this is one more gift Americans have accidentally or heedlessly imposed upon the world. In the rush to imprint our informality, nonconformity, and expectations upon human interaction, we have obliterated some forms of signal someone figured wasn't necessary, and over time the social enforcement that is conformity (har) ended up killing off this branch of etiquette. Uncomfortable, restrictive, depressing, perhaps even importunate upon the carefree (har) lives of other individuals.

Goodbye, mourning. Seriously, has anyone seen real mourning since Jackie Kennedy? I can't so much as remember consistently black garb at funerals; my mom, as it happens, wore poppy-red over a red and black dress, to the funeral inspiring me to discuss this whole thing. She is a great believer in the reaffirmation of life in vivid (the word means lively, after all) color.

I wore black. He was a bit more traditional. And he deserves to be mourned.

Indeed, since he died, I have kept my wardrobe more on the sober side ever since. If I can't go around in mourning jewelry (that people will understand as such, as opposed to thinking I just picked coz I'm goth-ly tinged), at least I can calibrate my mien to less flamboyance. And wear *less* jewelry. I actually applied a shot of brown hairspray to cover the blue hair, in fact, before the funeral; and at least once or twice since. I'm not even wearing highlighting cosmetics these days; bright eyes just seem inappropriate. (And the simpler the eye makeup, the less smear when I slip and find myself crying. In the middle of a meeting. Because: dork. In mourning.)

Three weeks. And already, I find myself embarrassed to even SAY "I am in mourning" (except to that one actual human telemarketer who called, and I could not take it). In the culture I've grown up in, mourning itself is unseemly, because it imposes upon those around us the distasteful necessity of sensitivity, or just the reminder of mortality. Mourning for three WEEKS, well. That is just melodramatic.



And yet, I am impelled to say - at least here - he deserves more than weeks. And what he has taught me, perhaps especially in his own final week, which was horrific ... will stay with me for the rest of my life. I still don't understand everything I saw and experienced, and it's both something to process and also to extrapolate from: for all I went through the eternity and power and heartbreak of his deathbed, my mom has been enduring as a caregiver for years now. His decline, in fact, goes back eight years - I still remember the Mother's Day lunch we shared, when we had to hold his arm back out to the parking lot.

Mom is still learning, too. Just how long this road has been. How, bit by bit, her own liberty to move in the world was curtailed - sometimes by my stepfather's will (he developed terrified and aching separation anxiety), and always by his frailty. How she did it all herself, and kept him home.

Six months ago, I was firmly of the belief that I would NEVER die in a hospital. My own dad's death left me sure it was barbaric and awful. My own dad's death came fast, though.

Now, I am not so sure. Being home might be nice, if I could be assured of sudden death (and that The Poobahs would not starve). It has an allure - who would wish to be in a hospital at the end?

But a slow death at home ... knowing that I could be alone, is that something to sign up for in all eagerness? Not that I'm interested in artificial prolongation, but the variables in horror - if I were alone, and broke a hip (my stepfather's final crisis was a break, and this is often a precipitating factor for those already in decline), what would I endure, ensconsed at home yes, but immobilized, in pain ... ?

Even with caregivers, death at home isn't some peaceful slipping away in one's own bed. Indeed, a standard bed is a horrible, dangerous place. Only after a hospital bed was delivered did my stepfather subside from cruel restlessness and the torture of his broken bones. And by "subside" I do not mean he found comfort. Only some respite, and that incomplete itself.

I learned from him; and sat with him, and tried to give him silence. Sound made him uncomfortable, so I stopped even indulging myself telling him how much I loved him. Or that he could go on. We told him that a lot. He didn't need to hear it, he wasn't holding out for permission to die.


And this too, I learned from him ... death doesn't always answer to the pretty stories we apply to it. It's not always a saga of fulfillment, someone waiting until an important figure comes to their side and releases them. It's not even always a question of release. The man my stepfather was? He had life left, and he was going to use it all up. All of it. Where for six years, he literally begged for death, once it announced it was come, he wrung out of his body the last *iota* of life left to him. Death wasn't impatient for him; those of us around him were.

It is a harrowing thing, a week long deathbed. Human chatter becomes intolerable, and I understand his responses when it was pushed on him, or shot over him as if he were barely there. He was there.

Even outside the room where he lay, the prognostications of "when" ... the stories about crows haunting us, or passed family members coming to take him away ... were not merely exhausting, they became irrelevant quickly as he kept on living on ... and we undoubtedly crossed into distasteful territory, more than once. People coming and going, speaking loudly of meals once shared, or playing music he would have hated ... crossing with those who came to sing, to pray, to just be beside him.

I think (and this may just be a story I tell myself) I became more silent as the days passed, simply because that was the only gift I had left to give to him. I stopped typing one day, because I felt the sound of my keystrokes, even, were too much to bear. I didn't hold his hand constantly, I stopped telling him he was the best stepfather ever, or that I loved him, or how much he amazed me.

I just never stopped kissing his head. Breathing the smells of him - not all of them beautiful. And yet, I both miss the scent of him and find myself having a sort of PTSD series of flashbacks to the smell that seemed most emblematic of him in his last year or so. The smell of his death began long before he ever broke a bone.



I miss him, and I love him, and I mourn him, and just thinking it makes me weep silently.

One of the funniest people I ever knew.

Someone who, never having been a father before, took on our whole family when he was not a strapping youth, and who found ways to laugh alongside us. Great G-d, it was not always easy - for him, or for us. The first years were difficult.

But the past eight? The past six? The years since my brother's family moved, and it's been me, mom, and him? The time it took for me to go from reluctance, to content, to tenderness?

I am blessed to have had these years.

Their passing deserves observation.

My stepfather deserves mourning.

Happy Enough Old Year

The evening is underway, as are feline and canine post-supper naptimes. Goss has his front half upended inside the warm curve of his back half, curled in the new chair, and Pen is flaked out on her flank in the floor. I chose "Arrival" tonight; slow-moving and blessedly low on explosions, at least halfway along it is - it's gloomy and murky but not too thinky so far. Seems to be just the ticket for me.

The year has been dwindling down with oddness and pains in my head, a great deal of work around the house, but mostly quiet. It is one of my pensive years, to be rung out alone and contemplating.

Last year was a jangle. Good times with friends, but the car got towed, there was loud music and cigarette smoke. This year, just this; staying in, staying warm. Remembering, and looking forward as as I do: seldom and poorly. The memories are ones which once were so painful, but now only make me who I am. And I am content with that, mostly. Always some work to do.

Life is like homeownership; if you don't have something you think you need to work on, the place'll go to pot.

In two weeks from now, many long months of meeting planning, and two trips to attend them, will be over. I realized this a couple of days ago, to my own surprise. Most of 2017 has been occupied with these events; and now I will be able to just do my day-to-day job. It'll be strange for a little while.

I am as content as the fur-bearing critters, this hour. Never satisfied. But content.



CONTENT NEW YEAR TO YOU, and to yours.

*Raises a glass, be it whatever you happen to like* Cheers!

All the Books

All the books I've bought lately have had their own distinctive, incredibly satisfying feeling in my hands. Of one book, I bought four copies. Its pages enchanted me. The resonance, when you tap the stack of them, that echo inside the minuscule spaces between them, the space inside the books, their universe.

Image: Wikipedia

Of another, I bought two. These are older books, hardcover, each of them with the mylar slipcover. One is a first edition, a gift. The other is for me. The instant I opened it, and my hand touched its cover, and I felt that soft vibration, heard the sound of its thump - that soft thump when you pat a book, that satisfying thump as warm as the thump I give Penelope on her furry, deep chest ...

That book had the best thump I have felt in a long time.

Penelope has good thump.

I knew I had to buy another copy of this book for someone I love. And that one, when I found it - that soft, quiet, warm sound. Of a book.

That glorious sound - when you *have* opened a book, when you've been using it as G-d intended, filling yourself with it - and you have to close it again. That sound, of closing a book. Closing a hardcover. That soft, soft, but definitive closing, the almost invisible sound of the mylar, the indescribable movement of paper against itself, and the covers coming together, protecting it, saving the rest of the pages for you, saving them all for you.

What is the best-feeling book you have held lately?

Work and The Wrong Work

The past three weeks at my job have been busy, productive, and VERY gratifying. I've made great progress on our annual meeting, onboarded a long-awaited exec in the area of my department for which I provide the most support (and I like him!), and finally begun denting a digital organizational nightmare for that department, which is going to a satisfying accomplishment when it is done.

That last one took up a decent part of my day today. Shew, tedious. Not fun, like being ahead of the game on the meeting, and knowing what I'm doing. Or exciting, like meeting someone who looks to be eager to tackle the work I've been trying to get my arms around for a year now.

But I gave it a run for its money today. So.



Oh, and the other part of this post. "The Wrong Work" - what'd she mean by *that*??

Ahem.

Y'all know what a plot bunny is?

Do you ever find a work  you've deliberately planned can be a plot bunny?

It's a funny thing. I'm actually little prone to chasing story ideas around; I seem not to be very promiscuous when it comes to subjects to write about.

All those years ago - when I attended my first JRW Conference with my brother - when I first entertained the delusion I could be an author - when I found, not long after, Clovis I ... Well, not long after *that*, I found a related subject, which is the WIP now.

And I also happened to work on that family history.

And I knew the third novel was going to be that story.

That story has not distracted me, through these years. I still assume it'll be my third novel, in the way you assume the sun will come up in the east. You don't think about it much, but you count on it anyway.



So.

Guess why I'm asking y'all about plot bunnies. Thoughts?

Lookin' Good

Writing has been slow of late. As writers' complaints go, this one is unsurprising in the extreme, but yesterday was a palliative. Yesterday was the first day I took a wide-angle look at the manuscript, a real LOOK - not reading, not stopping in any particular place, but simply running my eyeballs across it not for comprehension but to see where it is blue.

There are authors who outline and authors who have expectations and a set process ... and then there are authors who have nothing but a timeline, and whose expectations change as they undergo the process themselves, the novel working on them rather than the other way around. Some call themselves "pantsers" (seat of the pants writers); I don't gravitate to the term, but when asked I pretty much fall in this category.

This doesn't mean I have no structure. But the scaffold of my WIP is not one many others would feel safe climbing onto.

Research on this novel dates back to the very earliest days of working on The Ax and the Vase; the idea for this work was born of that reading, though it is in no way a sequel (and thank goodness, considering that Ax is languishing inventory). So I found bits and bobs along *that* way that I dropped into a Word doc which someday I would bring off a back burner, and which now has become the WIP.

Research is blue.

While I still acknowledge that at this point, anything "written" (self-generated and not in blue - in short, scenes, sketches, and snippets dealt with and contributory in some way or another to the novel) remains at this point strictly draft work: it is at least written, and folded into the work in some degree.

It's the blue text that hasn't been dealt with, that doesn't contribute yet.



Yesterday: I was pretty gratified with the level of blue, as I scrolled through 234 pages of pants-tastic not-yet-a-manuscript.

And surprised.

For all these years, the WIP being a backburner item, the Word doc nothing but a bin into which I'd toss occasional research and ideas, to be cleaned up "someday" - I have not had the courage to LOOK at it.

Turns out, it's not a bad view.

And now, to dive back into the trees. The forest is not on fire, and I feel safe exploring.

THAT House on the Block

The yard is badly in need of mowing right now - not only has spring finally arrived, but we've had a great deal of rain, so (where Penelope hasn't worn it out running along the fence - which will save me some weed-eating!) it's a bit thick.  I won't say "lush", because what's really thick right now is the early-spring growth of rubbery purple weed flowers, which tend to be clumpy and fail to live up to the suburban ideal of pure green grass.  My neighbors' homes have a lovely growth of Easter grass right now, but my place is not the beauty of the block.

It wouldn't take much work, nor much time - but since Wednesday I've had a fairly severe case of instant allergies, and mowing the grass, no matter how community-minded it may be, just is not on my list, even though in actuality I'd kind of like the time outside in a wonderful breeze, and the exercise.  Note to intrepid suburban kids anywhere:  if you showed up at my door right now, I'd gladly pay you to take care of this for me, providing gas and mower personally.  Just sayin' - if you want a buck, the scruffy house on the block might be for you.

Today is the first day I've had open windows, and I did start the meds on Wednesday night.  I think it's helped, at least as far as beginning to fight the overarching symptoms of seasonal allergies - itchy eyes, SNEEZING - but the more immediate symptoms - sore throat, congestion, laryngitis - are tenacious.  They spawn further symptoms of their own - mouth-breathing, for instance, which then leads to chapped lips and feeling dehydrated, which leads to constant water-drinking, which leads to feeling bloated.  I'm almost fascinated at the daisy-chain of cause, effect, and annoyance - but, honestly, I don't actually feel as rotten as, for instance, I sounded this morning at nearly ELEVEN a.m. when my mom called and I was still half-zonked on nighttime cold/allergy pills.  Oops.

A bit of high-cacao chocolate being my preferred caffeine delivery method, I induced Godiva therapy after talking with her, and have done a lot at least upstairs.  On the main floor, I need to shove enough furniture out of the way to remove The Winter Rug - yes, it's a stupid idea; dusty and heavy-breathing-inducing (and if I can't mow the grass, how can I move a 200-pound rug?), but it's my idea and I'm all into it.

And here we have the point of this post.  I've written here many times about what it's like living alone, but the underlying issue is almost cultural.  The nuclear family ideal, and its analogue, Living Independently, make "going out on your own" sound like the way we're all supposed to structure our lives.  Living Independently, of course - that thing where we're expected to leave the nest at eighteen and live on our own until we create our own nuclear family with McMansion, starter-spouse, 2.38 children, and 2.38 cars - is the shaming device we use against such adults as have to go home to mom and dad for one reason or another.  I internalized Living Independently really early, and am not ready to give it up (the idea of living with my mom if, G-d forbid, she were ever widowed again, for instance, is beyond my ability to tolerate).  But it comes with its price.  And its fears.

It's not just the daily inconveniences, when I have to do EVERY last thing in the world that needs to be done, and perpetually fall short, by the estimation of an awful lot of people who see fit to have ideas about what needs to be done in my house, personal life, etc.  My finances, far from being my own as an Independent Woman, are the subject of MANY people's speculation and advice - and not just people I consider to be close family or friends.  "You should buy a such-and-such car" is the easy expectation of people I hardly know with whom I casually mention I have been looking.  Of course, mentioning such a thing is guaranteed to bring that on, but I don't even have a wife I can hide behind to demur on the more insistent suggestions of people who apparently know my needs better than I do ...

So it's an odd thing.  The more independent we are in the society I happen to have grown up in, the LESS autonomy people ascribe to my way of living.  People give advice to any and all, of course, but it *feels* like the advice to a single woman has a special insistence.

We've created a world in which "failing" to live independently is shamed and unnatural (natural as multi-generational living was for thousands of years before the 20th century), but doing so carries not only its own judgments, but also the fears and perils that go with ageing with no partner, no family, nobody in the home.  It's not a minor price to pay for the pride and accomplishment of living on our own terms, and it's something I wrestle with all the time.  The responsibility is both a matter of pride and chagrin - and, while I think I may be unable ever to be the person who'd blend again with my mom, or a geriatric roommate situation a'la The Golden Girls, I'm hardly gratified by the prospect of the next twenty or forty years of what it *really* means to be on my own.

Pride wins, with me (... apparently ...), but it's not because I never think about whether I could be wrong.  I've fulfilled some of the expectations of my upbringing, and it's beyond me to honestly imagine anything I'd change.  But that doesn't mean I think I've done everything just right.  Life *shouldn't* feel like it's gone exactly right, I think in a way.  If we felt completely righteous and satisfied - what would there be to work on in ourselves, or for others?

And who's going to do the dusting, with me here blogging?  A good question.  And I'm off ...

Complete

Though the "tracking" posts were a tool to keep me working, I will add ... only one more ... just to note that the final polish is finished.

With the Author's Note, word count is now 126,092.  Novel alone:  118,298.

Literalism versus Favoritism

Growing up in my family, it didn't do to be reductive.  Superlatives and absolutes tended to be greeted with deconstructive comments (not un-constructive, but rather debunkingly analytical), and so I learned early to avoid stating many extremes.

Well, I didn't learn not to state them.  But I did learn that if I took anything to a descriptive limit, there would always be someone standing by that boundary to prove it was far more distant than anything I could quantify, or that the very boundary itself was imaginary.

So I began at a young age to take the concept of "favorite", for instance, to its illogical conclusion, and to avoid the idea assiduously.  I can actually recall taking my idea, that green was my favorite color, and lying in the backseat of my parents' very green indeed Plymouth Fury station wagon, peering at the physical greenness of my surroundings, and imagining green as the ONLY color I could ever have, and being disappointed.

It's one of the million ways we affect one another as humans, this sort of tiny influencing commentary of a family, which becomes a very silly part of someone's being, far far beyond any real intention or even expectation.  My parents and brother might have wanted me to become a critical thinker, but to provide me a mild neurosis about favorite things could hardly have been their point.  It means (per my blog's very headline) that I contain multitudes, but it also means I make a rotten interview, because I snark on about how reductive questions are instead of answering them.

And so I am aware that people are capable of feeling that one color is best, or one food is peerless, but the idea of choosing gives me the distantest echo of Sophie's dilemma, in that I despise to pick one superlative because everything apart from "the best" still creates the richness and variety and context that makes anything truly shine.  Intellectually, I can know that loving one thing most doesn't doom all else to destruction - and yet, the only context in this world in which I can honestly say I have a favorite is in Mr. X, who is my most favorite person in the world with whom I don't share DNA.  I peek around from time to time, just to be sure, but at almost eleven years knowing him, it seems reasonable to state he really did ruin me for all the other boys.

It can be bewildering, though, to run across other people's favorite things, because there can be hard lines in this world it's trickier to negotiate if you don't draw your own.  Other people can put you on a path or hem you in with their ability to hold absolutes - in religion and politics, of course, this can get dangerous.  And, at times, it can be more comfortable to be persuasable ("where do you want to eat?"), but of course there are those who see a certain type of flexibility as waffling.

I have my convictions, but I keep them pretty close and refuse to hand them out to anyone I am not pretty intimate with.  Most of my own hard lines took me decades to draw - and, as I have grown older, I have discarded some of those things I thought were non-negotiable when I was a younger person.  Few of my deepest ... expectations (beliefs can be a different thing) ... have ever actually changed - and yet, I have seen my methods of managing their presence adapt in amazing ways over my lifetime.

This calendar year has seen some of the profoundest philosophical changes in me - without compromise, and yet without radical outward alterations.  It is at the deepest level I've let go of certain boundaries, and in the quietest solitude of my soul I have found liberty it astonishes me to have given myself and my heart.

Relinquishing certain expectations has only solidified the power of what drives and matters to me most.  Letting go of certain ideas of practical living, of faith, and even love, has only deepened these things by providing clarity.  There is great peace in the understanding this can give, and such emotional power, and all over again I find myself grateful with the blessings that seem to provide themselves to me, all undeserving.  Paths are easier to follow, fears are fewer.

I don't know a lot of people who can claim the assurance I feel, simply by letting go of certain ideas about conviction, by questioning those things which are supposed to be "given" for us as human beings.


Question something you hate, or love, or fear.  Really let yourself be wrong ... or, more terrifyingly, right.  There's almost no liberty like it.  Almost no power at all.  It is joyous.

Work, With Music on the Side

Today started off with "For Those About to Rock" ...


I had that revolting experience today where something went wrong and there was NOTHING for it but to say I'd screwed up.  We all do it, I know that - but since December or so, at work, I've been trying to improve upon a slump in performance that came after the Summer O' Stress, and what's truly awful is that I feel like I *have* made such strides and that I've been doing well - but hell if any error I make isn't going to be the one the boss has to see.  Simultaneously ameliorating the pain and actually making it worse is the fact that my boss's response today was not "you screwed up" but to address me with the concern that there is too much on my plate, or some distraction causing problems in prioritizing.  I basically said, I don't think there's any excuse to lay this on, this was pure screw-up.  Still, it must be said, "it isn't a problem with attitude or aptitude" is one of the best sentences bestowed upon me for a long time.  I only wish it were really true.  (My attitude is dandy; but I really do question my aptitude.)

Most of the errors any of us make in a day come in little things, miscalculations that aren't disastrous - and even this one we got worked through okay.  But it was a hugely visible problem - not just to my bosses, but to our entire management team.  I *LOVE* my team.  They are smart, good people, some of whom I've come to be friends with on the personal level (not a typical mode of operation for me in any job), and they don't stint in professional recognition, support, and gratitude.  I am blessed beyond my own gratitude that I get to have the job I have.  So when I screw up, it feels almost like INgratitude, and it drives me absolutely crazy.

Also frustrating is that I have BEEN able to do this job.  Even before I'd fully learned it, taking it on was never too much.  Once I felt like I'd come into ownership, the pride of my position never suffered because there was so much to do.  So it irks me that stress has made a dink of me.  I've been trying so hard to put stress *behind* me (at least the particular stress that got me distracted several months back), so evidence there's still some out front makes me mad.

My dad would have told me to take the energy of that frustration and direct it.  The little kid living inside my ageing carcass, however, just whines, "I've BEEN doing that!  It isn't WORKING!" and stomps off impolitely, selfishly.

Inevitably, my performance is always selfish.  Most of us are probably like that.  Yeah, the pride of a job well done.  Well, nobody benefits from my pride but me, so - still selfish, really.

At the end of the day, I got less selfish and just nose-to-the-grindstone.  And, by end of the day, I mean that at the moment I might take off if I had everything done, the phone rang - and it was my boss.  Who had travel tomorrow, taking him into the path of the storm bearing down on such a huge swath of the continent.  Time to look into that.

And time for everyone else to do the same.

The chain of on-hold-ness became pretty hilarious during the course of the hour it took to shift his connection out of the nasty zone (though his ultimate destination may not even escape the issues!).  United had our travel rep on hold, he had me on hold, I was on another line with my boss, who had me on hold trying to call his own colleague ... Or something of that telephonically preposterous nature.  No wonder it took us an hour - and never mind the thousands of other travelers also staring down the barrel of flight cancellations.

My own soundtrack to this - "Let's Go Crazy" by Prince.  If I wrote that in a story, it'd be too on the nose to ever work.

To be truthful - during that hour of fiasco-ery, I stressed pretty seriously.  But, for whatever reason, this afternoon I did remember my dear dog and my kitten, remembered how fortunate I am in my job and my team, remembered those I love (and those I'll never even know) who would be blessed to complain of something at work - if only they had jobs - and was able to relax.

And the drive home was relatively un-crowded and un-stressful.  I put in "The Gathering" on random, and first got the song *I* think of as being deeply tied to me and Mr. X ("Third Chance") and then got the one he first proffered to me as being like us ("Nighttime Birds").  I turned off the stereo after those, and just drove.  I didn't get home until nearly 7:30, but it is quiet here, warm - and life is so sweet.  Kit is on the coffee table, and Penelope beneath it.  A gleaming green pair of widely dilated eyes is glancing my way, as white velvet sneaker-paws play in a stack of papers I have brought out to force myself to deal with some personal filing.  And "Big Bang Theory" was on tonight.

It's after nine, but I get to sleep in a comfortable bed, even if I am the only human soul in this house.  At least I know whom I love; that is blessing and content - even if not the fullness of satisfaction.

Finished

At 9:40 p.m. EST, at 132,596 words (almost 2k shy of the *highest* limit I'd hoped to allow myself in the end!), revisions on The Ax and the Vase are complete.  I have two small repairs to see to, one more scene I may yet delete, and one I think needs the *briefest* building - but the work is at ... satisfaction.

Friday

Work has been fine lately, but a certain intensity of the fire in my belly seems to have been wanting lately, for no particularly good or bad reason; sometimes, you just feel more motivated than others.  I haven't been exceptionally bad, but I do notice in myself that the sense of satisfaction I sometimes get in ticking off a day's accomplishments gives way at other times to a more baseline practicality, which isn't such a bad thing really.  Today, though - maybe it was the fact I allowed myself caffeine (I've given it up almost entirely, which I don't think has hurt a bit in the "I'd have guessed twenty" department when I see a good friend for the first time in a while and she's guessing how much weight I have lost) - maybe it is just because Fridays are my half days, nobody was around (this can be so good for getting a lot of administrivia done), and it's bloody beautiful and not hot outside - maybe I just got sick of myself and threw off self-indulgence for a more constructive indulgence.  I always DO like the way it feels when I can cross off a lot of to-do's in a day, and Fridays are hardly exempt from this spirit and attitude, short though they may be.

At home I'm having a similar outlook.  This weekend's expected plans - since I still haven't found the correct Briggs & Stratton oil cap for my mower online, I'm going to otherwise cover that aperture, and frankly quite enjoy mowing the grass on what is after all a really beautiful, golden, crisp, and breezy day out.  If I can find a utility knife, I will cut the rug Siddy has peed into ruin in half, deposit it in my giant trash thingo, and thumb my nose at the mean sanitation collectors who seem to have a personal grudge against my garbage and its containers, who left the rug this week, and threw the can halfway into traffic, on its nose.  I may even contact the county to report the incessant occurrence of this, which I never see at my neighbors' homes, which is a danger for traffic frankly, and which has given me a complex that somehow these guys actually have it in for me for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.

Also, I'm going to finally make The Call to Verizon, about their craptacularly idiotic billing practices, regarding my FIOS, which may by the end of such call be canceled outright.  They set up a $79.99 package deal which has yet to come in anywhere near $79.99, their customer service is for sh**, and I am sick of the silliness for the sake of cable I didn't especially want in the first place, and can joyously live without in the second place, if they can't get their package deal billing together.  /*grump*

Also on tap this weekend:  deleting that bastard brother (heh) and perhaps some work on Tetrada's subplot, to be sure the continuity maintains.  It would be joy to delete at least 2K more words!  Maybe more than that!  (... readers ... ?  Bueller?)

I am ready, I am caffeinated, and it is the weekend.  Woot and more woot!

Last Week

For the most part, I try to stay sanguine when I talk about Mr. X, but several thousand miles and several years do take their toll from time to time.  This past Sunday, in church, I prayed and just gave up.  I could call it giving it up to G-d, but I just gave up.

The next day, the conversation started.

And today, I am blogging from the hotel in another state, where almost three years ago I last saw X.  Where we met up yesterday for our first date since, and laughed and had a good time.

At first, the thought was that I would come down and help.  He's here unexpectedly, attending to a family issue.  But sometimes when someone is sick, or afraid of how sick they might be - and they don't know - they need the family and nobody else.  So I can't really help ... except to be here for X.

There are times it annoys me how self-sacrificing my relationship with him may appear.  Whatever the choices look like from the outside, they have been mine, and whatever the relationship may or may not be is ours to worry about.

I worry.  If I didn't, I wouldn't give up before G-d Himself.

But nearly ten years on, X and I are here together.  There are many (most) who don't have that much.  And for whatever it is, I have always been grateful.

Rain

The day started off cool and heavy with rain, and by the time I got to work it had begun.  A good, proper rainy day - and we had thunder and deluge off and on too.  By one o'clock, there was a bit of sunshine, and when I left the office at four to go exchange the rental car (and ended up being able to pick up my own **), it was plenty overcast, but not actively raining.

Tonight, though, it is a thick sky.  All the way down to the ground.

It's hot out, for one.  Probably sixty-five at least.  And the rain, so copious has nowhere left to go.  The ground is saturated; a pudding, a morass.  It can't take in any more.  And so the air is left to hold the bag - and it is misty, heavy, almost impossible to see through - almost impossible to walk through.

Breathing it is almost as bad as not breathing.  Suffocating.  It is nasty.

Still, the Lolly needs her walkies - so the air must be braved.  And I need my walkies too, really.  In over a week and a half without enough exercise, the challenges to breathing don't get thinner with poor habits.  I've even put back on three or four pounds, which is frustrating but more a motivator than really dismaying.  Easy enough to rectify.

As to the reason for the decline in exercise, of course my back is finally getting better.  Sadly, still I'm not at my best.  I did notice starting around Sunday evening that the little pains I was noticing were the muscle soreness of new exercise or unaccustomed use - I was feeling, not the pain of my back, but the sore moments of those parts of me which have been compensating for that pain over time.  A good exchange, that.  And encouraging, after cleaning house on Saturday, which wasn't easy (and, since I am a *stupid* and stubborn brat, happened to involve a lot of laundry-lugging).

Less encouraging was my mom's diagnosis with a chronic, incurable disease - and her more immediate, acute issues with a very temporary but still far too impressive illness.  By yesterday, she was sounding subdued, passive, very quiet.  In short, noting like herself.  That was  little sobering, and though she seems to be on the upswing herself from the more immediate illness, the other one is probably going to come into daunting, depressing focus.  It's especially dismaying, because mom has been working so hard for a while now to work out, to lose weight, to eat right.  So to get a bad report makes that seem like wasted effort, and it has been a lot of effort.

Add to this that my stepfather too is not so well these days, and the impotence I feel regarding my loved ones is a bit much.

It's odd, though - this rarefied Leap Day, this heavy weather, this irksome business with my own fallout since the collision - these things with my family, and how hectic work has been - I have been feeling particularly sanguine today.  Not joyous.  But grateful.  Content.  At peace.  Quietude, even if it is not satisfaction, is much to sink into, to enjoy.

So it goes.  And another day almost over ...



**The only problem with picking up my own car was the ding they left on the passenger side - which I was prepared to overlook - and the extreme amount of CREAKING in the read - which I was not.  Even during the couple of days I drove it after the accident, before it could be dropped off, it wasn't sounding like that.  So this is disconcerting.  And disappointing - given that I thought getting to pick it up was finally the end of being stuck in rental cars.  Blah.

The Greatest Love of All

Regardless of the death of Whitney Houston this week, and of the date today, the title is mere smart@ssery, not anything which should be taken seriously.  I never have liked titles ("The Ax and the Vase" being easily and suprassingly the best experience with and inspiration for a title I've ever had; mostly, I am not very good at them), so I fall back a lot of lazy puns, many of which nobody outside my head could nor should even bother registering.  For me, the writing centers on the writing. Also, I am irretrievably and unrepentantly tacky.

Anyway.  So today is Valentine's day, and for a minute there I actually contemplated wearing red or something - then I realized I am not a teacher, nor a grade-school student, and I am free of these conventions.  Nerding out on Hallowe'en weekend I cop to unashamedly - but, as a general rule, when I head to my office, I do so without a lot of costuming involved.

There is one concession, though, and that is around my neck.

...


Mom called me this morning, comically-conspiratorially proclaiming how "YOUR STEPFATHER" is a terrible man, and how she is just absolutely going to kill him because he'd bought her a giant box of chocolates and she still has pounds to lose according to her recent weight loss program.

In the seven years (today) since they began dating, I have come to a pretty good relationship with mom's second husband, but I can admit that the attempt to put arms around "my stepfather" as someone I must claim a filial closeness with, as in the scenario where a mother conscripts her daughter into comic tales of revenge against a father figure ... didn't fit, for me.

The first time I put a coat on Sidney, she was so utterly confused at the sensation of a garment of any kind, she began hopping and twirling around the kitchen.  Not angry, not physically uncomfortable - but so profoundly confused at the presence of an object containing her, other than grabby old doggy-mommy, she proceeded to attempt to dance out of the feeling.

Yeah.  Like that.  I wasn't resentful of the "YOUR STEPFATHER" quip or anything - I just felt utter alienation from the concept of this man in anything remotely like my father's role.  I had a dad.  I like my stepfather - I love him, too.  But see him, in any way, AS a "father" at all?  No.  I was 38 before he arrived on the scene, and it took me years to even be able to use the term at all.  Putting him in certain scenarios, in certain positions, in my mind - probably never happen.


***

My dad hasn't been a part of V-day for a lot of years.  I think that switch actually got flipped, entirely by cruel accident, all at once, the year he died.  Mom gave me the birthday card he'd written before he died on Valentine's Day.  I didn't know what she was handing me - the pain was still SO new - and finding my father's hand on a funny little message almost knocked me flat.  She was a bit distracted herself, during those terrible days of brand new bereavement, but that was a lulu.

As may be clear from the progression noted - my birthday was relatively recently.  Its semi proximity to V-day usually gained me pink cakes as a kid (mom gave me the cake pans a few years back ... I've never used them).  If I had a party, particularly when I was "little", it was likely to be doily'd and red crepe papered.

I never minded this association with V-day, but it may be said that I've never much gravitated to the holiday, least of all for the past nine years, since that card.  I have memories of my First True Love sending me things for "Sweetest Day" (BRAND new, back in 1986) which was simply charming, but left me confused as I'd never heard of this ("holiday"/)marketing gimmick at that time.  I have a particularly scathing recollection of what a wretch I was one year with Beloved Ex - but that's the only V-day I can recall from my years with him, without basically sitting down and working out "how did my life go back then, again?" with a little actual dedication to memory.  I don't think I've spent many V-days with someone I loved doing anything stereotypically (or even uniquely) romantic; X sent me flowers a few years ago, which was nice, but he got seriously gypped by FTD or whomever it was, and the year after that it was an e-card with Hoops and YoYo.  (Strangely enough, that card was a link I was able to access for many years afterward, only finally going defunct some time in the past several months or so - in 2011; the card was by then probably five or six years old.)  I still own the vase from those flowers - and mom gave me a satin box once, I think may have been one of dad's last V-presents for her.  It's in a closet.  I know where.  But I don't, like, bring it out to decorate the house.  Nobody comes over here to speak of anyway - and Christmas trees going unseen can be depressing enough.  Decorating for Easter and V-day is a bit twee for me, and wouldn't probably be part of my personality even if people other than me and Sid *did* see the inside of our house much.

So pink and red, whatever - I don't hate other people for being with the ones they love on this day, and I don't find myself howling with emptiness because I love someone so far away, myself.  I made that choice - and he's certainly made his - and that is what it is.  It'd be stupid to get particularly self-involved about how Very Dreadfully Painful it is for me, as a perfectly intelligent, autonomous person, to dramatically whinge about ... um.  My choices.  Which I made.

I miss Erick.  Sure.  But I miss my dad too.  He's dead, though, and there's not much to be done there - certainly I feel no impulse to join him.  And I don't feel any to join E, either, as weird as people are about that.  'Tis what 'tis.  I learned YEARS ago, I don't need him in front of my face, in order to love him.  And what the love does for me has become almost independent of him (and he knows it).  I admire the man I know him to be, but it'd be pretty silly to look at my life as if it actually predicated on anything but my own free will.  Which I value, and he certainly has never impeded.


The one concession I have made to this day is in gold.

To this day, if I'm honest, I'm not even sure how she did this ... but some years ago, mom gave me the first gold necklace dad ever gave her as a present.  It was too small for her, but to give it to me was a profound parting for her, and a very great gift to me.  I remember back to when he gave it to her:  it was a big deal to us, and dad was VERY much an observer of the V-Day.  This gift was precious for them, and mom's "champagne taste" has always appreciated fine jewelry.  We weren't a wealthy family.  So his giving her a gift of gold - even if it hasn't come to inform my own needs (in love nor in presents) - was a memorable occasion.


Dad and mom were forever kissing, when we were kids.  I understood far later on just how ardent his love of her was - from the moment he met her, to the day he died.  Mom dressed for him even on his last day of life.  He was urgently, romantically, beautifully in love with her all their lives.  As a set of parents in whose home to grow up, the example only seems ever more breathtaking as I grow older.  Few people have ever been so blessed in love.  Few kids get to feel that, either.  And I grew up suffused in not only my family's love, but every day exposed to my dad's passionate, devoted, terribly tender love of my mom.  It just seemed like life was supposed to be that way.  It wasn't showy (though it was plenty demonstrative).  It wasn't dramatic.  But it was bone-deep, heartfelt, and wrackingly beautiful to remember now.

Who needs Valentine's to inspire thoughts about love, when you've seen someone love so unreservedly?

He loved his kids every bit as much.

But that was different.  The way he loved my mom, the older I grew, was the rarest of blessings any human can possibly offer.  It wasn't that it was unselfish.  It wasn't that it was idealistic.

It was that ... dad's heart was convicted.  Committed.  Unswerving, and so strong.

That heart beat, from the first moment he opened it to her, *for* her, for the rest of his days.

I only pray I could ever love so well.  Or have a heart ... so fine.

Dad was a world-beater.



I wore his gift to mom today.  With a pair of gold earrings I once bought for myself.  There is a balance there.  There are two generations of something deeper than gold, but which can be captured - manifested - in it.  Reflected in the gleam.  I touch this thin chain, and it is warm.  Gold isn't a thing I crave, nor am ... greedy ... for, not in itself.

But it is the physical reminder ... of the moment he put this around her neck.  And probably kissed her.  It's a reminder of what made me be.  It's a reminder that pink and red are not the point.  Valentine's isn't a color scheme, nor even a precious metal.  It's that kiss.  Those warm hands on a tiny clasp.  The embrace.  The holding each other ... because nothing - nothing - is finer, nothing is greater.


There are kids I know have never seen such a thing as my dad's love of my mom.  As it breaks my heart to know there are people who will never know him - it breaks my heart to know there are those who live life without that surrounding them.  Blessing, honor - and love.

Happy Valentine's.  Everyone.

Take the Con II

This holiday weekend has been just the concluding part of what has actually been a vacation; I took off on Thursday and Friday too, so am in the midst of five days off and enjoying it very much.  The highlight, of course, has been JRW's conference.

The marquee guest this year, Kitty Kelly, was unable to attend, as her husband was recently hospitalized, which is more than an understandable reason for a change in plans.  One of the agents, too, had a very late-breaking reversal; after already being on his way to come to Richmond, Jason Allen Ashlock learned of a death in his family and had to turn around.  Apparently, he has committed to reach out to each one of us he had been scheduled to meet with at the Conference, to set up a Skype or phone call or some rain-check meeting.  I call that a pretty incredibly generous gesture, especially given the circumstances, and am duly impressed by commitment like that.  It's unlikely I'm alone in wishing peace and sympathy for his family.

And so I started the conference "off the hook" in a way.  My agent meeting was off, one of the other best agents there I've already queried, and the publishing pros there have nothing to do with historical fiction.  In a way, the years the Conference don't offer me any direct prospects are freeing, because they provide all the benefits of the education, support, and enjoyment the Conference always does, and skip some of the stress.  It's always fun to set a meeting, of course, but with as much work as I've been putting in lately - and with the fact that I am working on some revisions for an agent interested enough to put me to work on them (this is me, totally not squeeing and being 100% insufferable that I am working on revisions for an agent, by the way ...) - it was nice to embark on the event without pressure to perform.


I have to say, thanks to a couple of the Sarcastic Broads, to JRW's excellent Administrative Director, to all the volunteers, and of course to the guests, it was a great conference this year, not missing a beat even if it was missing a planned speaker and agent.  It was relaxed and rich, and went off without a hitch.  Smooth as silk - and fun, to boot.

Perhaps the unique feature of JRW's conference is the accessibility of the participants.  Guests who come for this event are asked to stay for all of it, to eat lunch with everyone, to be available in the halls and between their panels:  you don't necessarily need to have an appointment with an agent to have access to them.  Last year when I talked to Michelle Brower and she asked me to query her, it was not in a formal pitch 5-minute meeting, but just a chat about a colleague of hers after a panel.

I've learned that sitting out the panels, too, can be relaxing.  If one of the ones I am thinking about is overcrowded, or in the dark room with the uncomfortable chairs, or if I have just taken SO many notes at the last one and want to decompress (or, on years I am having a meeting, if I don't want to disrupt a discussion by coming-and-going from it), it can be rewarding to stay out in the lobby and chat with people as they're about to meet with an agent, or - amazingly - actually work on my writing!  The venue is a very nice one, and this year the weather was extraordinarily beautiful, so sitting out a period was a bit of a zen relief.

This year, sitting one out, I met Kevin Hanrahan, whose name I advise everyone to remember.  His novel is one I can't wait to read, and suspect an awful lot of us will embrace.  On top of being a likely success as an author, he's also an active service member, a very nice and generous guy (he agreed to read my battle scene!), and a family man.  It'd be impossible not to wish the guy excesses of success, and with the idea he's pitching, he promises to find it.

I also got to chat with Mike Albo, who, on top of being funny, turns out to be ANOTHER one of those friendly, supportive, enthusiastic, and infectious people the Conference is simply riddled with.  Likewise Joe  Williams, who did not have my dad as a professor (hee), and yet somehow managed to turn out to be a dazzlingly smart and also very nice guy nonetheless.

It's almost a bewildering abundance, the talent and charm JRW seems to attract.

The exception to this statement is notable, actually.  There was one guest this year who put on a show such as I've never seen before at any JRW event.  At one of the largest panels I attended, we were treated to a guest literally positioning herself with her back to the moderator, rolling her eyes at said mod, evincing obvious and 100% unnecessary antipathy quite publicly, and making an immense show of both boredom (whenever she was not speaking) and overdramatic snobbery.  It was pretty amazing, and devastatingly ugly.  The moderator largely on the receiving end of this Mean Girls snottiness evinced zero awareness of it, either because she couldn't see the show (this person's back being firmly to her) or because she is, you know, a GROWNUP and not feeling the need to engage pubescent antics.  I always liked this moderator, but am now firmly On Their Side now, and entirely disgusted by a guest I would hardly have guessed to be a petty, clique-ish little wench.  And, yes - I'm aware this succumbs to the clique dynamic.  But she started it!

I wasn't alone in noting her rather stagey antipathy, nor in being throughly put off by the show.  It was the single most revolting piece of behavior I've ever seen at any JRW event - and it was, in fact, the single piece of revolting behavior I've really ever seen at all.  (Poorly socialized people with unfortunate interpersonal skills really do not hold a candle, though certainly there've been a couple of those.)


***


The closing event of the weekend was Pitchapalooza - an event not ideal for the faint of heart or weak of knee.  Like the First Pages Critiques, this challenge asks writers to bare their works.  Unlike first pages - Pitchapalooza is not anonymous ... not done for you by readers onstage ... and is utterly direct.

Also unlike first pages ... it turns out that the likelihood of finding your name drawn out of the box, to present your pitch live in front of everybody, aren't so small.  With First Pages, which take a little while to read, and a little while to discuss, if they get to read as many as ten of them, it's a bumper crop.

With Pitchapalooza, there's a one minute limit on each author.

So there is time for a whole lot of people to read.

So the odds go way UP, that you will get chosen.


All of this is irrelevant to me.  Because the odds of being chosen FIRST out of the box ...

Turned out to be 100%, for me.


Leila tells me the look on my face when they read my name FIRST was worth a million dollars.

I can say this:  being chosen first was pretty painful!  But David Henry Sterry and Arielle Eckstut were remarkably generous - they clearly know what this is like for writers - and asked for a round of applause for me before I even began, and were pretty kind (and VERY HELPFUL!) in providing first-feedback.

I'm glad I didn't have to follow Kevin Hanrahan.

I'm sorry I didn't get to hear some of the repeat comments they gave to most participants, so I could edit briefly and address some obviously typical issues with pitches.

I'm interested by the fact that some of what my work overall needs done on it is common to what they observed about the pitch itself!  (It's well written and *rather* engaging, but needs "lusciousness" and really has to grab its audience harder by the lapels.)

I'm embarrassed that I was a bit disheveled at the time we got started, and didn't have time to acclimate to the event and prepare myself for it, and so stood there looking wildly, NAKEDLY nervous, my hair a bit of a mess, and my entire body shaking while everybody watched and at least two cameras TAPED ... heh.

But I was gratified by the kindness of several folks afterward (see also - the comment on my post below, from my Frank-ophilic friend Jeff Sypeck [this is as distinct from francophilic, fella babies]), which included Mike Albo saying the book sounds cool, and a girl named Cathy who said she missed my actual pitch but heard the feedback and wanted to know about the book, and Joe Williams, to whom I said I liked his pitch better and he said he liked mine (... UM ... and can I just say, the White House correspondent for POLITICO liked my pitch better than his - this, a guy so insanely calm and poised I was wishing I'd taken some sort of drug just so I could have appeared less of a trembling wreck and wondering how he did that).

I mean, I stood in front of Karl Marlentes and gave this speech.  I stood in front of Michelle Brower (ON the judging panel, by the way), who's already (so generously!) rejected my query.  I stood in front of all my Broads, and EVERYONE there (including that one Mean Girl) and shook, and faltered, and had trouble breathing, and managed to get through it.

FIRST.

And took ten minutes to come down.  Hee.  My handwritten notes on what they had to say are hilariously quavering, the pen half-digging through the page in physical translation of the mental pressure!


I have to say - Pitchapalooza?  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.  Woot!

Joe Williams said this, and I will close with it (as we Broads both opened and closed Pitchapalooza itself):  "They say you have to do one thing every day that scares you.  I think we've gotten a month's worth of scare in, doing those pitches."

WORD, Joe.  And a hug and a high five.

Wow II - You Can Boogaloo if You Want To

I got a detailed, thoughtful, engaging request for a full within about twelve hours after the query.

Wow

I just pulled up to an agency on my list with the most intensely well-written and inviting copy I have seen YET on any site in all of the research I have done so far.  And this agency, yes, does histfic - and reps some works I would absolutely WIGGLE to get in alongside.

It can be an incredibly hard job, just finding an agent at all who does my genre, or does my particular type of my genre, or who is open-minded, seems intelligent, and manages a diverse catalogue.  This place is exceptionally intriguing.  Not by dint of their obvious success.  But because it is so obvious how they should have become so.

...

One of the things about age is the inevitability of giving things up. What encroaches on us isn't gain. Oh, there are new things, new additions all the time - increases, accelerations ... But most of what we get isn't gain. Only mentally, only emotionally can we control what everywhere else becomes erosion.

"I am made of hope," I have been known to say.

Apparently, over time, one comes to be made of sadder stuff.

I resent this loss.

And - even so - I content myself with it.



Ah, content. Cold comfort for those of us without satisfaction.

Aww.

How could it be possible not to be inexpressibly grateful for the wonderfulness of a good dog?

The E Thing

The thing about loving someone who's thousands of miles away that's strangest, and so hard to convey, is that ... of all the abundantly generous and loving people in my life, X is the one who supports me most. He never judges, though he's not uncritical in seeing me (he *is* rather wonderfully biased in how he sees me, though; and I secretly love it). He knows more about me than anyone else who's ever lived, and he *loves* what he knows. He responds with more joy to my accomplishments than anyone has since my dad died. He's far away, he's contentious, he's not an easy choice to feel what I do for. But he is more "for" me than anyone who ever lived. Even if, in practical terms, "for" can't mean "together" right now.

He is the best friend I have.

That is not a statement of the slighest sadness, nor disappointment.