Am I a Failure?

This was previously posted on the Chicago Writer's Association Write City Blog.

***

“Mama. I have a question. Four plus six is ten.”

I stare at my four-year-old son for several beats before I say, “That’s right,” and then ask, “Was that a question?”

He trots off. I turn back to my Word document. What was I doing?

Right, I’m doing revisions on my novel. There’s an important theme at the end that isn’t fleshed out well enough at the beginning, so I’m reading through and looking for opportunities to make it more prominent. Several of those opportunities involve adjusting the world-building, so I need to hold it all in my head enough to make sure I don’t contradict myself later.

“Mama.”

“I’m working, sweetheart.”

“I have a question. When caterpillars’ skin gets too small, they build a cocoon.”

I have no idea if that’s how that works. “Okay. Can you go play by yourself?”

He trots off. I open my homeschooling document and add a note that we need to talk about what questions are.

Okay, what was I doing?

Just before the Illinois shelter-in-place order, I launched season six of my short story podcast, meaning I had to write, record and edit audio in order to put out an episode a week for the next few months. I was also outlining in preparation for writing a second draft of a novel for Camp National Novel Month in April. And then I heard back from my agent with what I hope will be the last round of revisions before we begin submitting another novel. Things were busy, yet hopeful. Fulfilling.

And then Covid-19 hit.

In addition to my writing, I’m CFO of a small not-for-profit, which had to close its doors in March. I’m scrambling to maintain payroll while we’re bringing in less income, and I’ve taken over responsibilities I don’t usually have in an effort to keep our more at-risk employees at home. Meanwhile, on top of his full-time job, my husband has a teaching position at the University of Chicago this quarter, which is suddenly all online with pre-recorded videos and extra office hours over Zoom. Both of our workloads have doubled.

All that, and we have no childcare.

“Mama, I need a Band-Aid.”

Suspiciously, I ask, “Why?”

“No reason. Don’t look at my foot.” He tries to hide his torn toenail behind some blocks. I wrap his toe in a pikachu Band-Aid, and he tells me all about pikachu.

No work is getting done.

I cling to my writing. Should I only do eight episodes of the podcast instead of twelve? No, people have told me that they’re looking forward to the distraction, and consistently putting out content helps my brand. Should I not do Camp NaNo? That would throw off my whole timeline for this novel. Should I write to my agent and tell her that the revisions that are so close I can taste them—the revisions about to launch my career—will have to wait? Because I’m busy? Absurd.

How could I possibly justify not doing these?

“Mama, do all animals have eyes?”

Hey, that one is a question! And I know the answer. “Coral don’t have eyes. Or jelly fish. Or some salamanders that live in caves where it’s too dark to see.”

He trots off.

A New Yorker cartoon scrolls across my timeline. There’s man in a small boat, rowing on a troubled sea, a thunderstorm raging overhead. The caption reads, “This is it…The time to finish your novel.”
I stare at it far too long. I print it out and tape it to my computer. I write my agent an e-mail.

It’s so easy to see the ridiculousness in this cartoon. So much easier to see than the ridiculousness of the expectations I’ve put on myself.

“But!” the internet says, “Shakespeare wrote during a plague.” Tolstoy wrote with something like a dozen kids in his house. If I don’t finish these revisions in quarantine, it’s not because I lacked the time, it’s because I lacked the discipline.

Maybe if I stay up late. Maybe if I get up early. Maybe if I’m better at setting limits about not being disturbed while I’m working. Maybe if I do mindfulness exercises before I start writing so I can be entirely focused on it, then I can have a truly productive fifteen minutes before I’m interrupted. Maybe if I drink more coffee so I don’t collapse with exhaustion as soon as my son goes to sleep.
None of these work, because—obviously—I am a failure. I don’t want it badly enough.

And then someone posts an internal memo from the Canadian federal government on Twitter. I read it and cry. Crying is not uncommon these days. I print it off and tape it to my computer beside the cartoon.

It says, “You are not ‘working from home,’ you are ‘at your home, during a crisis, trying to work.’”

I am trying. During a crisis.

It goes on, “You will not try to compensate for lost productivity by working longer hours…Your team’s success will not be measured the same way it was when things were normal.”

“Please don’t worry,” says the reply e-mail from my agent. “You aren’t disappointing me.”

As painful as it is to let go, right now is not the time for my revisions. Right now is the time to fight for my employees’ safety and livelihoods. Right now is the time to check on my mother who had, and then recovered from, Covid-19. Right now is the time to check on my husband, who’s been working in the other room for six straight hours. And right now is the time to be present for my son, who has slept with the light on for the last two months.

“Mama, I want to see a sloth. Can we go to the zoo tomorrow?”

“No, sweetheart. The zoo is closed, and we need to stay inside. Maybe we can go next month. Okay?”

“Okay. Write it on the list.”

I add it to the whiteboard list of the things we’ll do after quarantine: visit the zoo to see a sloth, visit the aquarium to see animals with no eyes, go to the playground, do my revisions.

Totoros Are Everywhere

My son gets stickers as rewards.  He gets them for things like cleaning up and getting in and out of the bathtub without making a fuss. 

I'm the one who picks the stickers, so I got a pack from My Neighbor Totoro a while back.  They're high quality stickers, the puffy kind that have some heft to them, but not the slick puffy kind that are stiff, these are the mat puffy kind that can bend and curl.  We used to put them on a cardboard long box from the comic book store, but lately he's been peeling all the stickers off so that he can give them to himself again.  He sticks these stickers to his shirt and walks around the house.  And while the less hefty stickers get shed all over the place because they're not sticky anymore, the Totoro stickers get peeled off his shirt and put in strange places, where he presses them down enough and they are still sticky enough as to be hard to remove when he's not looking.

The other issue is that he saw My Neighbor Totoro for the first time a few weeks ago, and his little mind was blown at the idea that Totoro exists outside of his sticker collection.  So he's been targeting the Totoro stickers in his re-stickering. 

This is a long way of saying that I've been finding Totoros all over my house, and have consequently started taking photos of them.

The Bathroom Floor

Bedroom

Living Room

My Desk

Inside His Crib

Hiding

My Closet

Not Yet

When I take my toddler to the doctor, I have to fill out pages of questionnaires about his development.  Can he stack four blocks?  Does he point at things?  Can he walk backward?  The cool thing about this is that I can say, "Heck yes!  He walks backward like a champ!"  But the other cool part is that the options for answers are "Yes," "Sometimes," and "Not yet."

"Not yet" is nice.

Is he using a spoon?  Well, not exactly.  We're working on it.  He'll get it.

I got Modern Monsters edited last week to the point where I was ready to send it to readers.  This was a big accomplishment for me, but rather than basking in my greatness, I sat down to send a few of them off to a critique group.  So I went through them and thought, "Which are the five worst ones?" and then made a list of all the stories and all the things I didn't like about them so I could compare their problems and make a decision about which ones to send.  I discovered that they were all terrible and I was a terrible writer and a terrible person.

This discovery rained on my celebratory parade.

I need to change the way I think about it--for my writing and for my life in general.  It's not "Which are the worst?" but it's "Which ones need attention?"  It's not "No" or "Bad" or "Oh God, everything's awful."  It's "Not yet."  It's "I'm working on it."  It's "It'll get there."  Not just the way I talk about it, but the way I think about it needs adjustment.

Rhyming and Opression

In reading to my son lately, I keep coming across couplets that only work if "again" rhymes with "rain."  I slow down and put on a funny voice for one word.  "A Gaaain."  Now, if you ask me, "again" rhymes with "begin," with an emphasis on the "i" instead of the "a."  But then again, I have a horrendous Texan accent and most people do not.

So I have two ways to think about this:
1. The author clearly intended for me to pronounce the words a certain way.  They make that clear.  I wouldn't decide that I didn't like a note in a page of sheet music and I was just going to play something else.  So I can do the funny voice and make it work.  I can bring their vision to life.
2. The author may have intended one thing, but I can reject that.  Don't force your pronunciation of "again" on me.  My dialect is just as valid and saying that yours is better is linguistic imperialism.  And especially don't force that while my impressionable son is listening.

If he starts saying "A Gaaain," I might explode.  I'm all prepared for a Midwestern accent with plenty of "aww jEEze," and "well, oKAY then."  I am not prepared for whatever "A Gaaain" is.

There's too much here to really analyze or make any kind of statement about if poetry is inherently about power or inherently biased, about how to write poetry or read poetry.  I don't know.  I'm not a poet.  But I do have some related antidotes to share.

When I was in junior high I clashed constantly with my English teacher.  (I actually clashed with most of my English teachers, but for the purposes of this story, I'm only talking about one of them.)  The breaking point came during the horrible poetry unit when we argued over how many syllables there are in "chocolate."  I say two: Chock-lat.  She said three: Chock-o-lat.  No amount of arguing or demonstrating got me a better grade on that sonnet.

I do get excited when rhymes get my accent right.  In Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, "aunts" rhymes with "pants."  Heck yes, it does!  Vindication!  This alphabet book gets me and my accent plight!

Read the One about the Witch

When he was two months old, I took the baby to story time at 57th Street Books.  This was part of my initiative to do all sorts of activities that would make him well balanced and educated and sociable from a super early age.  I was going to take advantage of the cultural enrichment of the city, and we were going to go to T-ball and boy scouts and piano lessons and museums and the beach and farmer's markets and volunteering and parades.  Lately this drive to get up and do stuff has turned into a desperate need to kill time for a few hours and absolutely having to get out of the house every day.

The week I picked to start going happened to be Halloween.  A bunch of the kids were in costume, including the penguin sitting next to us that kept trying to sit in my lap.  All the kids were older than my baby, (because I guess people generally don't bring their two-month-olds to story time) and I was starting to get the feeling that this was a mistake and I was once again doing everything wrong.  I mean, he didn't even have a Halloween costume because I had big plans to make him a bee outfit and then never got around to putting it together.

But, oh well, we'd try it.  What was the worst that would happen?

So story time started with going around the circle and handing each kid a cupcake.  (Except my kid.  He wouldn't know what to do with it.)  Then they went around the circle and handed each kid a napkin, but by then it was far too late.  Then they handed every adult a can of Sanpellegrino.  Then they gave each adult a discreet paper bag with Halloween candy that they could later decide to give their kids or not.  They did give me a bag of Halloween candy, and I decided to not give it to my kid.

So far so good, aside from the frosting covered penguin next to me. 

The baby was fascinated by all the kids with their glitter princess costumes and their shouting and their ability to walk.

Story time got started with a brand new book about an elephant and a pig.  The kids perked up, bouncing from their butts to their knees to get closer, whispering about "Gereld."  The adults gave me the impression that the release of this book was an event to be celebrated in the Hyde Park Community because Mo Willems was a friend of theirs.  Maybe he usually came to story time, but just not this week for reasons everyone but me already knew.

This was when I got the inkling that we were in trouble for reasons beyond my social anxiety, because the woman running story time was a fantastic, emotive reader.  This would not be a problem for someone who's not two months old and doesn't have freak outs during hammed up readings of "The Monster at the End of this Book." 

We were already walking a fine line with just a story about a pig sharing slop.  Any second, the pig was going to be too distressed the elephant didn't like his slop or the elephant would be too belligerent about how slop is gross and the baby would respond to these raised emotion by bursting into tears.  Already a little line was forming between his eyebrows.

Ready to snatch him up and comfort him, I gripped my hands into fists and prayed he'd be distracted by the penguin.  I prayed the stories would stay relitively tame.

The minute I prayed this, the story time leader announced that it was Halloween and she was going to read scary stories.

The second book was "Leo: A Ghost Story" about a ghost boy who a girl mistakes for an imaginary friend and they had a great time together.  No incident.  Okay.  We were going to get through this.

Then a kid in the front sat forward.  "Read the one about the witch!"

Oh God.

In her best witchy voice, the woman running story time started to read.  The baby's eyes widened.  Then they scrunched.  His little fists shook.  A high, piercing wail burst out of his tiny body.

We left as quickly as we could, which was not quickly at all given that the penguin had hold of my pants and I had to gather my coat and the diaper bag and the baby and my half finished Sanpellegrino.

"Okay," I told the baby as we walked home, him looking much better now that he had trees to look at.  "That was an adventure.  We get points for trying, and we'll try again in a few months."

Over time, it's turned from a depressing story about how I don't understand age appropriateness because I'm a terrible mother to a funny story about how the baby's scared of witches.  All the Halloween candy I ate as soon as we got home probably helped with that.

He's seven months now and he not only doesn't scream when he hears a dramatic story, but thinks it's kind of funny.  Added to this, he took a really short nap, which threw off my plans for what we'd do that day.  So why not try story time again?  No one will remember our retreat.

There were no cupcakes and no glitter princesses, but there was singing and a discussion about colors.  The baby flirted with the woman behind us and tried to crawl to get the kid's backpack next to us.  I'm starting to relax when the story time leader pulls out

"Leo: A Ghost Story." 

Ha.  Oh man.

Then she looked me right in the eyes, and with sudden dread I knew she remembered us.

"I won't use a scary voice," she said.

"We're those people forever," I thought.  "Okay," I said.

Sixty Thousand Words

Like every Wednesday, we took a family trip to our local comic store to pick up this week's offerings from my husband's pull list.  The guys that work there greet us with "Hello, Rahamans!" and "How's the littlest Rahaman?"  They know that instead of following characters, my husband follows creative teams, like Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen and Nick Spencer.  They know I was burned getting too involved in the X-Men during the 90s and then reading too much manga to fill the Fullmetal Alchemist shaped hole in my heart, and so they don't seem to mind that I never buy anything.

"Do you want paper or plastic?" James asked.

My husband said, "We really like the new paper bags you've got."  They're very nice bags.  Plain brown paper and just the right size to fit too many comic books. 

Then, because my husband likes to brag: "Carolyn's using one to hold the manuscript for her novel."

I actually need a new one, because mine has a tear in it, I've been carrying it around for so long.

"Oh really?" James asked.  "How long's your novel?" 

I appreciated this question, because it's kind of like we were still talking about the paper bags and how much paper could fit in one.  This was a professional question about packaging material instead of asking about my novel.  "Only sixty thousand words right now."

He scoffed.  "Only sixty thousand."

I didn't tell him the second draft would probably double, then the third would be something manageable, or that it was sixty thousand words of garbage that I regularly want to light on fire, amazing paper bag and all.

Sam slipped into the conversation. "You should dedicate it to us, since we gave you the bag that you use to carry it around."

"You'll be in the acknowledgements for sure."

My husband had that anxious bouncing, his mouth open like he wanted to say more about my novel or wanted me to take a more active part in this conversation.  Make friends.  Talk about my interests.  Stuff that I assume those mysterious normal people do.  But no.  The conversation was over and I shuffled him and the stroller out of the store before anyone could ask, "What's it about?"

Because then I'd have two choices then.  I'd either have to say something vague and by extension boring.  "There's a dog?  There's this magician guy, who's under a curse that makes him have anger management issues.  He brings people back to life?  He's got a not-girlfriend.  She's a monster.  And then there's a second dog.  And a serial killer."  Or, I'd have to tell the truth. "I don't know.  It's a first draft.  I'm still feeling it out."

Which is kind of like admitting what I didn't say earlier: I have sixty thousand words, but they're garbage.  Someday it'll be better, but now it's a mess without definite themes or purpose.  And there's no way I've thought about my pitch enough to express succinctly what it's about.

This week's reading gave me some vocabulary to think about this interaction (or lack of interaction).  Since my story is still in the fetal stages, I have the door closed and I don't want to talk about it.  In the next draft, I'm going to bring out the themes and find my story's purpose.  I'm going to find what it's about.

Plan for the Postponed Holiday Trip and Onward to 2016

This week has been chaos with a drawn out illness for our cat resulting in tears and questioned priorities and a postponed holiday trip.  Last night while making a pro/con list of two options I had with respect to the postponed holiday trip, I thought, "At least if we stay here to feed the cat through a tube, the baby can play Jesus in the Christmas pageant."  I can say with certainty that this is a thought I have never had before.  I think if there was a dark humor story in all this, that would be the jumping off point.

In other writing news, one of my New Year's resolutions (which are more Things To Do In January, just like I had Things To Do In December) is to get back to querying.

The complete list looks like this:

• Query
• Finish Draft of Firebird Story
• Sleep Training

Sleep Training, for those of you that don't know, is training the baby to sleep consistently, teaching him to soothe himself back to sleep instead of needing me to sing him progressively questionable lullabies, and breaking him of all the bad habits he's picked up about sleeping on me and sleeping in a swaddler and needing to eat to sleep.  When I think about how much of a nightmare this is going to be, it makes the first two bullet points look easy.  I'm in control of both of those.  I just need to buckle down and do it.

So I have a few prerequisite steps to take before jumping back into querying.  First, I want to re-read my novel and get hyped about it again.  Second, I want a better title.  I have one in mind, but I want to focus in on it and run it past some people.  Third, I want to take another look at my query letter and see how I can make it better.  With this much time away from it, I'm sure something will jump out.

Our holiday trip will be a great time to do these.  It's mostly reading, not a huge time commitment, and I can do them instead of working on my draft of the Firebird story and still make progress.

Guess What

I have not been writing much lately because it turns out the first trimester of pregnancy is terrible.

That's my smooth way of telling you I'm pregnant.

I'll get back to the regular schedule of talking about writing and reading and whatnot next week, and this will hopefully be the only pregnancy post.  But since I haven't been doing much writing, I'm going to indulge today.

1.

I gave up caffeine.  It was terrible.  The week before I figured out I was pregnant, I made a big push to finish my latest novel.  I woke up, had a coke, went to the coffee shop, had a coffee, went to a different coffee place, had two more coffees, went to work, came home, and had another coke.  People keep telling me when I complain about it that I don't have to give up caffeine.  "If you just have one cup of coffee a day, you'll be fine :D"  Like one cup of coffee is a completely reasonable amount. 

As soon as I realized this routine had to stop, I froze and gaped indignantly at my only audience at the moment: the cat.  "I'm not prepared to change my lifestyle that much!"  

The cat stared at me, and I provided his side of the conversation.  "You think that's bad?  You ain't seen nothing yet." 

I hate it when the cat is right. 

So I just quit cold turkey and felt like crap for a while as I went through withdraw.  Or maybe it was the zygote making me nauseous and tired.  One or the other. 

2.

Prenatal vitamins are enormous.  Remember Flintstones vitamins?  You know those chewy vitamins they advertise on TV that look like fruit snacks?  I was expecting those. 

Instead they are horse pills.

My mother cackled when I told her over the phone.  Apparently they have not decreased in size since the 80s.

3.

I called and told my parents when I found out, and told them they could tell whoever they wanted, but they would be responsible for un-telling those people if it became necessary.  Then the other day, now that I'm out of the first trimester, I made an announcement on Facebook, because this is how we pass information these days.

My uncle saw it, and immediately called my dad to be sly.  "So...what's new with Cary these days?"

My dad is a firm believer that nothing is anyone's business.  This character trait added to my warnings, and he shrugged and said, "Nothing."

It made my uncle's day when he got to break the news to my dad. 

4.

Instead of calling the print outs of ultrasounds "photos", they should be called "soundos."  Because no photons are involved.

5.

Ron calls the fetus "Cary Jr." and refers to it exclusively with female pronouns.  Everyone else seems to think this is really funny and it's caught on.

6.

I've gotten aggressive about correcting people when they ask about the baby's gender.  Let me explain it to you.  "Gender" is about identity.  We won't be able to know that until the baby tells us.  "Sex" is about genitals.  The fetus right now has genitals, but you couldn't see them yet on an ultrasound.  And I don't know why everyone keeps asking about my fetus' genitals. 

That Big Table at Starbucks

There's something about the big table at Starbucks.  The one with the power outlets, where you sit with strangers.  It's like a magnet for sketchy people.

The best story is still the guy that sat down across from me without ordering coffee and ate a chicken sandwich from Arby's.  He then stared at me for twenty minutes.  I kept typing.  Then he reached out, ever so gently, and stroked the back of my laptop.

And I kept typing.  Because what can I say to that?  I could smile and ask with endless compassion, "I'm sorry, could you not touch my computer, please?" I could flip the table and scream, "What the hell, dude!?"  I could run away and be shaky and afraid for the next hour.

Or I could sit there.  Because I have as much right as him to sit at that table (I actually had more right, because I was a paying customer.)  So I sat there for another 20 minutes, not letting anything show, and finished off the scene I was writing before hookin' it.

Probably not the best way to handle it, but I convinced myself at the time that I'd won.
The other day I had a student in Evanston, and I figured I could go early, miss the traffic, and then spend a couple hours in a Starbucks up there.  For the first hour, it was fine.  I sat next to a guy with a latte and an iPad he propped up with his wallet, who minded his own business. I got a chapter written, even though it needed some pretty serious editing.

I was going to take a break and read a short story a friend sent me, before I went to work on edits for my chapter.  The guy with the latte packed up and left, and then a woman sat down at the table.

And for a while I thought she was on the phone, maybe one of those ear piece/blu tooth things, and I kept surreptitiously leaning to the side to see if she had one just out of sight.

She didn't.  She was just talking to herself.  Which is completely fine with me.  I talk to myself all the time, and I have a certain level of respect for people who will do it in public.  Like the guy at New Wave who sings.  (Thank you for sharing your song with us, Guy at New Wave.  You have a lovely singing voice.)

But this was not something that could be tuned out, something that faded into the background, and added to the white noise I surround myself with at coffee shops.  Even though the tone was the same, the content snagged like burrs.  She talked about slicing.  And snapping.  And his blood would drip.  And she would make a feast of a man's heart. 

Her words were violence and menace and the sneaking suspicion she was describing the other patrons. 

I packed up, ducked out, and read a novel for a half hour in my car.  I don't think I won that one, but I don't really know what winning would look like.

Books and Moving

These are the books I packed and moved on this last round of uprooting my entire life and moving it down the street and around the corner.

I have a lot of friends who talk about how they go into bookstores and buy everything.  How do they manage?  I haven't bought a hard copy of a book in a year and a half because it's so much easier to hide what I'm reading when it's on a kindle, and I have the vague image in my head of the last time I had to pack up my books.

Funny thing is that the harrowing tower of books in my memories is still not this big. 

Books are flipin' heavy.  This isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that they also fit really well in boxes.  With a little bit of of spatial reasoning, you can really pack them in there.  But then once you fill a box, you go to lift it, only to find that you basically just filled a box with bricks.

So you have to sacrifice efficient packing for not pulling all the muscles in your back.  For some reason, this irritates me, because efficient packing is a beautiful thing.  But that means that the saving grace here is that these boxes are actually only half full of books and half full of outerwear and towels.  This also irks me, because think of how awesome it would be in the packing process to get to move a super light box full of linens.  Especially after you've moved a super heavy box of books.

Back in the Saddle

I had a crazy week last week and fell off the regular blog post wagon.  And a couple other wagons too.  Think of it like the wagons were in a pile and I was on top, but then I rolled down, bouncing from wagon to wagon until I landed in the gravel in a pile yesterday afternoon and decided to watch TV and eat fro yo. 

When I was a senior in high school, I was diagnosed with leukemia.  (Turns out, when I got a second opinion, that this was bogus, but for a while there I was a mess and I was still pretty sick regardless of the diagnosis.)  So I turned in a bunch of things late, including the only English paper I was ever proud of.  I handed it in and said to Ms. MacDonald, "I feel like I owe you an excuse."  At this point someone behind me shouted, "Boo!  She doesn't want your excuses!"  And I figured that was fair, took my A minus, and went about my business.

So again, Boo!  No one wants my excuses!  Bad things happened, I dealt with them at the expense of other things.  Now they're over and it's time to move on.

Today is about getting back in the saddle.  Today is about letting go.

Summer Plans

The school year is ending, which means it's time to set some summer goals.

Little ones

• learn semaphore to impress my friends at parties
• get caught up on comics 
• juggling.  With five balls could be cool.  With things that are on fire could also be cool.
• re-learn a bunch of knots
• haunt the Harold Washington library.  With a sheet over my head.  Walking through the aisles, saying "OoooooOOOOOoooooOOOooo!"  
• Also get a library card.

Big ones

• practice dramatic reading
• learn CSS, because right now when people ask me questions, I make things up.

Huge ones (that won't happen)

• ride a camel
• fire a rocket launcher
• fight an octopus