Guilty Music

I love music. All kinds, all genres. I can listen to Josh Grobin one moment and tune in to Quiet Riot the next. I think I kept Columbia House in business while I was in college, since they had such great deals on music. The other day I learned that Columbia House was bought out and goshgollydarnit, they had given me 3 free CD’s which I needed to claim. I decided to indulge myself in some Inappropriate Music for 30-year-olds.

My darling husband thought I should buy Bob Seager’s greatest hits or possibly some great 80’s stuff. Nope, not me. My selections included: Usher (Confessions), Gwen Stefani (L.A.M.B.), and Kelly Clarkson (Breakaway). My little tweeny-bopper students would be so proud. I shall learn to Hollaback with the rest of them.

And yes. Darn it. I confess! I do chaperone sixth grade dances for the sole purpose of getting my groove on. I love to dance and I AM NOT GOOD AT IT. You know Elaine from Seinfeld? Yep, that’s me. Imagine them playing a rocking version of “Yeah” and me flapping around like a chicken on crack.

95 pages of revisions completed. 269 to go!

Dot Moms

My Dot Moms column is up today if anyone wants to go leave a comment and say hi.

In other news, I decided to try and resurrect two rose bushes I have. Boneheaded me decided to put them in an area that didn’t get enough sunlight, and as expected, I’ve gotten approximately five blooms in the past five years. Today I decided to move them to a new flower bed we built this year. Full sun! Lots of water! And I even put some fish emulsion on them, which in theory, they like.

It’ll be interesting to see if they survive the move. Some plants do great when you move them, like day lilies. Every time I divide lilies, they love me for it. Other plants, like an inkberry holly that we moved a few months ago, curled up and died. Oh well. Win some, lose some.

Anyone have tips on growing good roses?

Holding Out for a Hero

I love that song “Holding Out for a Hero.” Even if Shrek 2 did steal it. It’s such a feel-good song and it fits my current mood as I’m trying to make my current hero even more manly.

Notre Dame managed to squeak out a victory over Michigan, though it wasn’t pretty. Both teams made a lot of mistakes and it was painful to watch. Yikes. Hope they improve their offense for next week.

I printed out through page 200 of my book and marked up all the places that needed fixing. For my hero, I used a pink highlighter pen to denote where he was being too sensitive. My mantra is–must make him the ultra alpha sexy man. I tend to doodle on the margins of my pages and write–Add more sexy man here. Or, “Cry me a river, wussy boy.” The editor asked me to add more tension to chapters eight through twelve. Um…okay. So I went through and wrote the words tension and conflict! on the margins where I thought it should be added.

Mind you, I have no CLUE what will actually be added to these places. I write by the seat of my pants and I’m hoping that I can find the right words when I get there. Or I’ll do what I usually do and write it twelve wrong ways before I find the correct method.

In any case, I apologize in advance that I’m going to be entering the (echoing voice) Cave of Revisions now. If I’m a little scarce, I’ll be back as soon as I figure out what “Tension!” means.

TGIF!

It’s Friday!

2 days, 2 chapters revised. Hope I’m clobbering these characters into shape. It’s such a hard balance between toning down my Irish warrior to make him more “GRRR!” and yet keeping him a sympathetic character. I think I’m getting there, though.

At school, I’ve had to collect numerous bits of paperwork, each one asking the same information (address, phone, emergency contacts, etc. etc.). While my son isn’t school age yet, I can see the mountains of forms coming. I was thinking it might be just as easy for parents to print out a sheet of large adhesive labels with the information already typed, and just peel each one off and slap them on the forms. It would save so much time. Or they should computerize the process.

Anyway, tomorrow I will be engaged in a religious experience. Notre Dame, my alma mater, is playing Michigan. Kick-off starts at noon. My religious mantra will be prayer for our defense and the hopes of victory. Go Irish!

Are you, or is anyone in your family, a sports fan? What teams do you like to watch?

So You’re Gonna Be Startin’ Something…

I have a couple of theme songs running through my head at the moment regarding the revisions, besides the subject header. “Freak Out” comes to mind along with the “Rocky” theme song. Last night let me tell you I was slicing and dicing words, using what Miss Snark the literary agent extraordinaire taught me. No overwriting this time! I am going to trust my gut 100% on these revisions.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a true test as to when the writing’s good. When I can set my pen down and get caught up in the story without editing, when I’m sucked in, then I know it’s right. When I start nitpicking lines and thinking–this section isn’t working, then I still have work to do. There’s a kind of magic when you find those perfect sections. The trick is sustaining it for 365 pages.

I’m reading Charlotte’s Web to my son right now, and sometimes I get caught up in the language of E.B. White. People sometimes think children’s books are easy to write. Not at all. They’re every bit as complex as adult fiction, but there’s a child as the hero/heroine. Some of my favorite children’s books when I was growing up were: Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. In both cases, the heroine was a writer. Funny how that happens.

Was there a book that influenced you as a child?

Anybody up for Round 2?

I survived the first day of teaching. No children went home sobbing about their mean awful history teacher. Yet. Bwahahaha….the week is young….

So I opened up my e-mail box and saw a note from the editor I’m working with at Mills & Boon. My first reaction was a terror. Stark raving terror. I opened it up, skimmed the first bits about the things they liked about my book, and my eyes zeroed in on the line–”…there were elements that made this manuscript unsuitable for our publication.” :confused2: Thankfully, I read the next line. “However, we would like you to revise this manuscript further.”

All right! I am so incredibly grateful to them for this opportunity. But these revisions will not be easy. They involve increasing the emotional stakes in the book, toning down parts, increasing other areas of conflict and tension. Not line edits–REAL, meaty revisions.

But hey! I’m up for Round 2. This is a golden opportunity for me to face my biggest writing fears and make this book all it can be (why do I have the U.S. Army recruiting song in my head now?). Bring it on! I’m going to whip this book into shape, fix anything that needs fixing, and then (best part here!) I was invited to e-mail it back to her. So exciting! Free postage! I know. It’s the little things in life.

So let’s celebrate! One step closer to publication. (Michelle rolls up her sleeves) Stand back, ’cause I have a book to revise, people!

I shall never be a Fly Lady

About a year ago, I took one good look at my house and thought I’d scream. I am a terrible housekeeper. Don’t get me wrong–I love BEING in a clean house. It’s the scrubbing toilets and bathtubs and cleaning the nasty stove burner parts that get me crazy. I hate the process. I dream of a day when my books will help me live the dream. No, not bestsellerdom (although I dream about that, too). No, it’s the day when I can afford to have someone else clean my house.

I tried to do Fly Lady. She advocates taking baby steps and gradually reclaiming control of your housecleaning. Some people swear by her. Those of you who can handle it, I salute you.

To give you an idea, Fly Lady works like this. Each day you do one or two small tasks and make them a habit. Example:
Day 1: Shine your sink.
Day 2: Get fully dressed down to your shoes, and shine your sink.
Day 3: Start a Control Journal.
Day 6: Clean a Hot Spot (a really messy area) in 2 minutes, then stop.

Boy, this sounded great to me. 2 minutes? Hey, I can do that. But this is what my Fly Lady routine became:
Day 1: Stare at caked on sink goo. Realize that I really should clean it, but I left my Haz Mat suit at work. Will a blow torch get those decaying Cheerios off?
Day 2: Stare at my wardrobe before getting dressed. Realize that all my cute little outfits were all pre-childbearing suits. Curl up in a fetal position and contemplate the euphoric moments when I used to fit into that size without holding my breath, not fearing that I would blind my children should a button spontaneously blast off my jeans and shoot their eyes out.

Go downstairs and ponder whether I have any hydrochloric acid to throw in the sink and eat away at the gray film that’s been there since Thanksgiving.

Day 3: Try to find a spiral notebook to become my Control Journal. Cannot find the file cabinets containing spare notebooks because they’re buried beneath mounds of receipts, old manuscript drafts, coupons I don’t want to clip, and bill stubs. Go back and study the sink. Wonder if homemade explosives might work to chip off the cement of Spaghettios from last Thursday.

Day 6: A Hot Spot? You’re kidding, me, right? The entire HOUSE is a hot spot. Wade my way through the kitchen, trying not to step on the landmines of alphabet refrigerator magnets, wonder exactly what my son was thinking when he brought down his entire collection of baseball bats and wiffle balls, then come face to face with a pile of bills, daycare forms, coupons that already expired because I delayed clipping them, and lottery tickets that didn’t have a single number right. Get a large cardboard box. Dump all paperwork in the box. Contemplate whether a ceremonial burning in the backyard would work.

Stare at the kitchen sink. Decide that it’s just going to get dirty again….but I clean it anyway. And for an hour it stays clean. Thankfully no animals have nested in the garbage disposal.

The Mind of a Child

Yesterday, the moment arrived that I dreaded. Yep, a guppy bit the dust. I was the one who noticed we were one short, and my husband found her body in the plastic plant. This is the first time my son ever encountered death at an age where he could understand it. I wasn’t wanting to hold the conversation at all, since he hadn’t noticed the guppy’s absence. But hubby thought we should have a ceremonial flushing.

So, we huddled around the toilet, guppy floating at sea. I explained that the guppy had been sick and that God wanted her to be better. So he took her to heaven with him. His brows furrowed, and he nodded. “Do you want to flush her?” I asked. He bobbed his head and sent her to the Great Aquarium In the Sky.:shark:

At that point, he said, “Will she be with Grammy?” (side note: my mother-in-law passed away when he was two. I didn’t know he remembered). I nodded solemnly. “Yes,” I said. “She’s with Grammy in heaven with the angels.”

At this point, he studied the toilet bowl intently. “Is Grammy in the toilet?” he asked.

I will not laugh. I will not laugh. I will set a good example.

This was one of those moments when I had to bite my tongue. I have a feeling my mother-in-law was smiling somewhere down on him.

Silly TV Shows

I’m still plugging away at the books, waiting for that “Aha” moment to strike and I’ll know that THIS proposal is THE ONE….got about 2 more pages written on I Dream of Johnny. Contemporaries are such a strange fit for me. I feel out of place in an unfamiliar genre. But we’ll see where this goes.

I was thinking last night about old television shows that are off the air. In the 80’s, I watched two shows religiously. I lived in the UK at that time, and each week I would flip on Robin of Sherwood. It was a mystical show about Robin Hood, complete with sword fighting, magic, and hunky Michael Praed. Okay, so the man had a mullet. I thought he was hot at the time. Hey, I was eleven.

I also watched Dynasty. Oh, the glamor and glitz of that era. I loved hating Alexis Carrington and I thought the character Amanda was the most beautiful actress I’d ever seen.

How about you? What goofy shows did you watch in the 80’s?

Dusting off the Old Lesson Plans

So, today I was looking at my lesson plans for next week and one of my co-teachers came across a fun website for kids. It’s at http://www.coolmath4kids.com. We’re doing a unit on Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the millionaires (yawn). When I get bored with a unit, I KNOW the kids get bored. The last few years, we’ve done a business simulation where the kids would make and sell products using play money. It was fun, but it got a little out of hand with parents buying expensive craft items, despite our warnings not to spend any outside money. So this time we’re going to let them play the lemonade stand game where they have to vary the amount of lemons, sugar, and ice they buy–plus, they can regulate their own prices and try to make the most profit. Hopefully they’ll have fun, and it’ll be a much shorter unit, too! You can check out the lemonade stand game here. There are a few browser settings you might have to tinker with, but it’s a neat game.

I’m still meandering around with the new book…it has now turned into 3 books. Book one is Lady Isolde and the Last Crusader, basically an Indiana Jones style romantic adventure set in medieval times. Book two is not yet titled, but I’m playing around with variations of Lady Warrior or something like that. The gist is a female warrior who raids a castle and conquers the hero…only to find out that she’s conquered the wrong guy. Book three is I Dream of Johnny a romantic comedy which is basically what happens when a contemporary heiress opens a whiskey bottle and a sexy gunslinger emerges, ready to grant her three wishes. It’s Paris Hilton meets Billy the Kid.

But all three are so much fun, I’m waffling around, trying to commit. I think I have commitment problems in the early stages of a book. Usually I piddle around, adding a page here and a page there (and with three going simultaneously, you can bet I have the equivalent of 20 odd pages). Then suddenly, one of them grabs me and won’t let go. That’s how I decide which book to write next. That, or if an editor wants to see it. I’m easy. No word yet on that front, which is good news, I’m sure.

In any case, I’m savoring my last low-key days before the kids arrive on Tuesday. Everyone have a great Labor Day weekend, for those of you about to travel!