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It's not easy to measure success. And if you do it in terms of could-I-live-off-my-writing, then no, I'm not successful. I'm on this author FB group where people are measuring and advertising and do all these things I've never heard of and it's good because I get ideas, but then I get intimidated too. By their success measured, I don't think I'd be doing so well. But if you do it in terms of have-I-made-progress and did-this-matter-to-anyone, then yes. I do try the things people on these sites say (some of them anyway.) And sometimes I inch forward. Here's the progress. I saved enough money and paid for a Kirkus review just before Christmas. They feature less than 10% of their reviews in their print media and mine got picked. That's cool. But not as cool as the did-this-matter-to-anyone category.      Yesterday I talked with parents who had adopted their son years ago and have struggled to figure out his behavior ever since. I gave them...

What we lack in our society is not training or education or wealth but the mirror that we hold up to each generation that shows them their worth: the value of youth to bring energy and solutions and push and push until they are realized the value of middle age to see the value of both sides of the coin: young and old, and keep on in the midst of the storm amid all its fury and whorl to see the simplicity of a single moment of abundance the value of old age where vanity takes its leave and we are free to help and simply be with our knowledge. Our youth are without purpose. We don't show them their value and they are left wandering, disconnected from each other and us, without the necessary means to channel their instinct for change. They used to be the risk takers we needed in hunting and battle. Those with the courage to stand up to the group and say "stop." Those who would stand up to a genocide. Those who would encourage us to walk when we're used to driving, ...

I've picked away at the task of networking lately. I fall down a rabbit hole of groups on LinkedIn or I search book lists for similar books. I read reviews and search public profiles and youtube videos to see how people are doing the business of writing. I toss around ideas about redoing the cover, I review other books, I contact folks I think I might connect with. I attempt, again and again, to describe who I am to strangers in the hopes that this will be the right connection to foster good professional development and a network of awesome. I want a network of awesome. Awesome people, doing work of all shapes and sizes to make the world a better place. Among recent friends I have a woman lawyer who does immigration law and a former race car driver who works to make parenting advice accessible to all. These are mostly mommy or skiing friends though. I'm looking for the writers and the readers. I find a writing connection because the person writes about marketing or writes a...

I was bullied as a kid. I'll probably never know why and I am certainly not unique in my experience but I still feel weird about it. Girls from my class would turn and hate me in a minute. No warning, no reason why. They dumped my desk, left it full of notes that said "bitch," pinched me as they walked down the aisles. Then in a second it would be over and I'd have friends again. When in the midst of an incident, I missed school, faking illness. They'd call at all hours of the day and night and hang up and then do it again, and again, and again. At the time it was unsettling and I'd get scared and cry. I'd take the phone off the hook and put it back on a couple of hours later. The first time I considered suicide I was about 9 years old, I think. I think that because I remember holding a butter knife against the pale blue of the veins just under the skin of my wrist and wondering if I could cut them with that knife because I wasn't allowed to use shar...

I like shopping for things online even though it doesn't get me out of standing in line. In the mountains where we live, the post office does not generally deliver to homes. Which means we all have PO boxes and elicit a certain amount of scrutiny from retailers and banks and also have to stand in line for all our packages that don't fit in our letter-sized PO boxes. It's annoying but it's also a nice time for my mind to wander. In stores, I find my need to pay attention to everything exhausting. I get overstimulated from an hour of shopping because I simply must look at EVERYTHING and everyone in the store. This is tenfold more difficult if either, much less, both of my children are with me as then I must also be vigilant for their locations and that's no mean feat. It means that in addition to the lay of the store and its contents and sales and customers, I also keep track of my kids and within 15 minutes I need a margarita. But online, I can focus on just sear...

Cathartic things I've done Chopped down a tree with a chain saw while standing on a chain link fence Taken a hatchet to a tree stump while angry Scribbled furiously on a piece of paper sprinted full speed Proud family moments When my mom and I played swords with the giant dead tree limbs we'd just cut down with the chainsaw Moving my sons' bunkbeds apart the very day my oldest admitted to being afraid of spiders as the reason he didn't like sleeping on the top bunk Watching my son pedal his bike for the first time and letting go knowing he might fall and turning to see my husband walking behind us with my other son on his shoulders. My husband getting a job as the executive director of a victims advocacy agency and doing so memorably by talking about the importance of targeting men and boys to end violence Things that make me happy Watching Aspen leaves flutter Feeling fresh air on my arms Writing Finding out someone liked my book Running Finishing thi...

As I looked up at the clouds turning gray and showing their dust this evening, I wondered at all the incantations of my cells. How many pounds of times I've made myself over and dropped dust here or there? Whether my dust may have had your finger in it writing "you wish your girlfriend were this dirty" on a car. Or maybe I've been in the way of your bustling Eastern European cleaning woman, who hurries me away in a bucket. Maybe I get dumped out on the lawn, only to feed into ... a thistle. The hairs and skin and nails I've lost over the years, how many raised beds would they fill? Where have they gone? Maybe my hair, once tight at the follicle to my scalp, so close to my skull, so close to the buzz of ideas in my brain that simply does not turn off but continues to tell stories as I sleep; maybe that hair has wrapped up in a nest and fed regurgitated ideas to baby doves. Maybe I am part of the cloud I just saw, graying and standing out against the ever bluer...

In 1993, my father came out. It was five years later that Matthew Shepard was murdered. For the first year after my father came out, I didn't tell anyone. I'm not new to openness and honesty so imagine a highly social 14 year old girl who simply does not tell a soul that her father has dropped the biggest shock of her life in her lap. I didn't tell because I was afraid. I was afraid someone would hurt my dad. I was afraid he'd get AIDS and die. I was afraid someone at my school would find out and hurt me or make my life a living hell. I wasn't over-the-top in these fears. At the time, people were permissible hazed for this sort of thing. I was at a conservative school. I was genuinely afraid of the hate that might come my way. But then I was at a pride parade where I thought, I can't be here pretending to be "proud" if there I don't tell a soul. So I went home and said, oh well. If it costs me all the social groups in the world, this is who he ...

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Last week, at a program I teach with childcare, a bigger kid told Magnus that he didn't like him. I was indignant when he told me, "what a jerk!" "He wasn't a jerk, mom. Don't call him that!" Magnus went on to tell me how he'd asked the kid why he didn't like him and the kid had said because he's a little kid. But then said-kid had helped him beat a Mario game and by the end he thought the kid had changed his mind and liked him. That was Magnus-the-great's response to a kid not liking him. "Oh really, why don't you like me?" And then he determined to change the kid's mind. No hurt feelings, no crying, and it had worked. This same child post-anesthesia yesterday had to be kept breathing by being held by his mandible in something called a chin thrust while I held oxygen to his face. Trust me when I tell you this is no gentle hold. A nurse means business if she holds someone this way. She means BREATHE. He spent th...

I was just in the bathroom thinking my gratitude thoughts like a good little bobblehead. I found boots that fit my skinny ankles AND are waterproof and not hideous at the thrift store and bought brand new leggings that are so soft I feel like I'm in jammies and then I looked down and wouldn't you know? A hole in my crotch. No smartass, not that one. My neck's not that long. A hole in the crotch of my leggings. Grrr. Which got me thinking how I complain too much and why do I do that? Sometimes it's because I'm a grouchy pants. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm devolving into a family trait of being negative and complaining all the time and I definitely don't want that. In writing it's more deliberate though. In writing I do it because I hate that fluffy crap that doesn't have the grit and substance of real life with holes in brand new clothes and all the pot holes that get us stuck. The time I don't feel all that gritty? Teaching. Especially te...

One's cheek, so plump, like globular warm Midwest rain drops falling, plop, delicious The other's taut and unforgiving, it wedges itself against my lips, my teeth get conked, demanding. Mama, mama, love! And there are all these kinds of love, folding over and on top of one another, like folded used book art. Magnus love, Gavin love, love of being the mama, husband love, loving husband as father-different-from-husband-love, passion love, all these kinds of love and they fall on me in the night, like stars from the sky, peeeshooo, a meteor shower and I can't sleep. I have to teach in the morning. There's the new love of my students. Each semester I fall in love, like just meeting my grandmother but for the first time as an adult "abuelita" I call her even though I never did. Didn't even call her "mormor" pa svenska it's mother's mother. The love is like meeting my auntie, a new cousin. Brimming with ideas, they leave. But arriving, they...

I love Brene Brown. I am whole-hearted. I lean into the discomfort. I push myself and believe I am worthy of love and belonging. Except sometimes when I don't. Sometimes I'm mean. Sometimes I'm unhappy. Sometimes I'm vulnerable in more than one part of my life and then I fall to pieces and need putting back together again. I'm built like humpty dumpty. Ok, not so much with the last part. So the other night, I had had a really, REALLY busy day. This busy day followed a series of about 12 days where my four-year-old threw screaming fits exactly EVERY time we went anywhere. So this morning, I get up, pack up the kids for tumbling lesson for Thing 1, then put them in the rec center childcare for 45 minutes while I work out, tumbling lesson for Thing 2, then drop off Thing 1 at gramma's, take Thing 2 for errands and napping in the car... I'm going to stop now because I'm sick of this so I'm certain you've begun skimming by now. By the time it...

My older son is into mazes right now. I loved them when I was a kid too. I remember sitting in the back of the room with the other gifted kid who was never doing his work either (we were really terrible students,) making mazes for each other. It was so fast for me to visualize the path through the maze, especially if I started at the end. I don't want to get all self-helpy on you or anything, but I've been thinking about the word "no." And not just because my younger son recently turned two. I've been thinking about it since my novel came out. Since I released the book I've had to do a lot of asking and promoting and tossing ideas out. Nearly all of the time when I've asked things, they've been well-received. But no one's going to hear "yes," all the time. Not every road is a simple direct path, there's bends and turns and sometimes even dead ends. I have this shame though when I butt up against the word "no." As thoug...

If you take a walk on a college campus, do it on a Saturday in June. It's a ghost town then. Students tucked in, no more dressing in stockings to head down to the Student Union for breakfast, with hair fresh out of rollers, the crick not yet worked out. Graduation has moved online. You wear a cap and gown at midnight and Skype in from Greece and Thailand, or work's bathroom if you transferred in from community college. So go to a college campus on a Saturday in June. Sit in a carefully landscaped courtyard, where your thoughts can settle like the dust on a bookshelf far from the honeysuckle smells of the countryside which are souring now, fermenting, dying. Where cottontopped folks sit in rockers and used to give uninterrupted advice, whether it was 140 characters or *gasp* more. In the courtyard, you'll find, along with your dusty thoughts, a concrete fountain turned off and a piano in waiting. Chiseled in the concrete, evidence of the past in block letters...

I've been reading crap I shouldn't read. I shouldn't read it because it clouds my head with bad writing but I miss reading so bad reading is what happens. I can't read books when I'm writing. I can't hear my own voice well enough when I'm listening to someone else's. I read this article I won't cite here because it's not worth you reading it really either. It's a nice idea, I guess. It's a set of photos of moms sitting next to each other. The photos each contain two women each holding a sign that says what two divergent choices they've made as moms. "I had a scheduled c-section. I had a planned homebirth." The idea, of course, being that two women who have made very different choices can find common ground and be friends. And the reason I take offense is NO FUCKING DUH. Of course two women can make different choices and still be friends. We're grown ASS WOMEN. Don't insult us like that. The premise is this...

I'm thinking a lot about giving birth last year since it was a year ago tomorrow that I had Gavin. Here's what I have to say: His birth was such a great experience that it made me understand why people video tape birth. I would watch it again. It was amazing to not know he was coming, be trying not to push, and suddenly have it be over and have this squishy beauty in my arms who latched on for all he was worth. Gavin is the sweetest soul I have ever been attached to. He burrowed in and held tight and I adore him the softest parts of my soul like ... nothing else. Giving birth both times is the closest I've ever felt to Rob. When things are tough, we work things out together. He helps me breathe and focus and I'm so glad I'm parenting with him. We have been through the ringer with him lately. He has a reflux disorder that impacts his kidneys and so we've spent the last 2 weeks dealing with major surgery for him. Much like in giving birth, the support you ...

I wrote a book. I wrote it a long time ago. And it wasn't very good. But then I started getting my master's degree in writing in order to learn how to edit a book. And I learned how to edit a book. Check. So then I went back to my book. And that's how I knew the first draft wasn't very good. It wasn't terrible either. You'd read it through to the end likely. But it needed direction and to be more fluid. Plus, I'm a better writer now than I was when I wrote the first draft. So I tackled a lot of the focusing and rewriting this fall. The book's about a girl who is removed from her home and lives in residential treatment. I wanted a story like this to exist. I felt like people needed it to exist. So I wrote it. But I've felt weird about writing my book. I feel like someone might slap me across the face and yell "IMPOSTER" But the thing is, I believe in the story. And I wrote a good book. Those are important. And while I don't know ...

I made friends with my birthing class teacher. I did it because she is the kind of woman you can tear your pants in front of and not bother to change, the kind of woman you don't have to clean your house to have over, the kind of woman you can give birth in front of. It doesn't hurt that she's beautiful. I like having beautiful friends. And I have a lot of them. I'm spoiled like that. I hate to admit this, but I really like to have good-looking teachers. The truth is, if someone's teaching you, there's a solid chance you're staring at that person's face for a long, long time and it's nicer to do if it's a pretty face. I bet there's no research on that, but I bet it's true that all other things being equal, we like pretty teachers better. So I made friend with this pretty teacher lady and it's turned out really nicely. I also love her daughter who is a special class of spitfire. Anyway, my friend came over the other day to have our...

When I was a little girl, I befriended a little old lady who lived several houses down on our street. She was in her nineties and rarely left her house. I don't even remember how I met her now. I took to heart the lessons I learned in church and checked in on her from time to time. She was on Social Security and barely scraped by. She was very frail and could hardly walk to the end of her driveway and so the mailman came to her door. It was a small town and people did things like that. I remember the trouble she had lifting her arms to comb her long, silver-streaked gray hair. She had crocheted toilet paper roll covers that made her tissue into dolls with full skirts. Once, I "helped" her make pasta. I remember how she stood, her walker next to her and her table before her, and with slow deliberation, cut the layers of pasta. I don't remember how it tasted or what else we did with it. Just the act of her impossibly small frame leaning over the table to cut it. I wan...