Dooley Noted

Daily Typo, February 2

2012-02-02T08:32:00.001-05:00

Because the Small Stones challenge has ended, I've decided I need something else to keep me posting every day. Well, I might not always have a wealth of wisdom or insight to share, but you know what I always have? Typos. So that's what you're getting this month, and I do hope you'll share your own in the comments.

Today's odd typing moment:

I was writing really fast and I needed the character to look at the gas gauge, but I couldn't remember what the gas gauge was called. So I typed, "She glanced at the gas-dometer-WHAT?"

Small Stones, January 30 and 31

2012-02-02T08:30:00.002-05:00

January 30

Underpass
Passes under
tracks that
could take
me away,
but don't.

January 31

I end the month
in a good place:
on horseback.
Where will we ride?

2012-01-29T17:45:00.003-05:00

On tiptoes, my city
reaches for the sun
while night fades
up from below.

Small Stone, January 28

2012-01-28T22:15:00.001-05:00

Why is it that hitting the SEND button is the only thing that lifts the magical cloak of typo invisibility?

Small Stone, January 27

2012-01-27T18:32:00.000-05:00

(If there were snow,
it would fill the gaps
between us)

In this winter that does not feel like winter,
you leave for work before dawn
and I leave for work before dawn
and we come home tired and smelling of rain,
and we leave our muddy shoes
on opposite sides of the door,
and your mud is black city mud
and mine is red country clay.

Oh God,

Honey,
when did we stop walking
on the same Earth?

Small Stone, January 26

2012-01-26T21:02:00.003-05:00

Nonchalant, cool kid that you are,
you lift your hands and sign, "More drink," --

like it is nothing that you have just
produced a two-word request
without the assistance of technology
for the first time.

I flip out --
laughing and squealing and
squeezing you around the shoulders while I
shove the requested drink into your hand,
splashing juice onto the table --

and this time you don't have to sign --
I can see you thinking, "Crazy lady!
What are you shrieking about?
I always ask for a drink
with my baked potato."

Small Stone, January 25

2012-01-25T21:09:00.007-05:00

We walk side by side on our path, knowing that it might separate soon into two paths, and one will go up and one will go down. And if this happens, still we will keep sight of each other through the trees as long as we can. And even when the hills have hidden us from each other, we will each know for the longest time how far the other has got, simply by ingrained knowledge of length of stride, speed of step, strength of will.

Small Stone, January 24 (ish)

2012-01-25T07:16:00.002-05:00

The only true light is the orange slice of sunset watching at the window, cutting a rectangular prism through arena dust onto the dirt. You laugh and look and leap, cling to mane, gasping and giggling, while you pull yourself aboard. I lean over, breathless with laughter, overcome with being exactly where I should be. I feel, pleasantly, like our 30 years are collective rather than respective.

Small Stone, January 23

2012-01-23T08:11:00.005-05:00

The paper says he is survived
by a "devoted friend."

This is like the opposite
of found poetry.

A found-lie, there in print,
on the newstand

Next to where he, brave in the
face of shock and grief

Nonetheless hugs me, and says,
"It's good to see you, hon --"

And it's not hard to see why
his late husband loved him.

Small Stone, January 22

2012-01-22T10:39:00.003-05:00

I find religion, for the first time in a while,
closing my eyes and calling quarters
from that place inside me that still knows how.

When I look up, the cat and dog have
settled at my feet, shoulder to shoulder,
gazing up at me with these matching expressions,
like, We've been wondering when you would be back.

Minutes later, we have returned to life as usual:
tennis balls and catnip toys
and Facebook status updates,
but we have reconnected in some small way
with the world and each other and ourselves.

There is something to this.

Small Stone, January 21

2012-01-21T19:31:00.003-05:00

My sister can text with inflection. Her words are not flat on paper or screen; I can hear them in her voice, exactly the way she is thinking them all those miles away.

Still. I wish I were on a train like in November, drawing closer, waiting for the station escalator to lift me into sight of the top of her hat, the quirk of smile on her face, the scarf, the jacket, the boots, the hug, the homecoming.

Small Stone, January 20

2012-01-20T15:34:00.002-05:00

You, kid, are going to freeze
if you keep refusing to zip your coat.
Your nose is red, but your grin is wide.
You are happy to sit under the branches --

"Zero leaves," you explain, "all gone. Leaves back what time? Spring."

You giggle your way through another chapter
of this book we're reading,
of this life you're writing.

I love that I get to read both.

Small Stone, January 19

2012-01-19T19:43:00.003-05:00

One hot mug of oatmeal. Another of coffee, next to the travel mug, also full of coffee. I am armed and ready.

Small Stone, January 18

2012-01-18T15:37:00.003-05:00

I gather my reins, like taking control of my life: planning a path, choosing the gait at which I will travel.

Then he, also like life, goes his own way: spooks off the fence, bucks and swishes his tail in annoyance, throws a fit, throws a shoe, breaks a rein and ducks into a spin, slips in a puddle, stops dead and refuses to budge. Sometimes I land easy and sometimes not so easy and sometimes I even manage to stay aboard, gripping long strands of mane in white-knuckled fingers, biting my lip, fighting tears, clinging to balance, clinging to hope, daring gravity to mess with me.

Eventually, I get the reins back. Turn. Plan a path. Choose a gait.

Maybe this time we'll canter easy.

Small Stone, January 17

2012-01-17T18:17:00.003-05:00

Storm-sky's so stern it could hang above any of our settings -- the trailer, the cottage, the farmhouse, the balcony -- all the places we've written our story. How do we stop ourselves from turning the page? I want a bookmark, I want to pay the fines and beg for a renewal, I want to hold my thumb in place and reread my favorite passage. I want to lose myself in a run-on sentence and never reach the punctuation. I am dodging question marks. I am clinging to quotations.

(I'm also at Smack Dab in the Middle today.)

Small Stone, January 16

2012-01-16T19:41:00.004-05:00

I always forget, until that first moment when I settle into the saddle -- gathering my reins, picking up my stirrups, straightening my shoulders as if there has never been any weight on them -- how good it will feel to be back home.

Small Stone, January 15

2012-01-15T18:15:00.002-05:00

Garlic breadsticks, 99 cents. Chips, a buck fifty. The second can of chicken noodle soup, a dollar. Flat of water, four ninety-nine. The cashier pops her gum and scans backwards, and while we skim the cream off the groceries, I think of cold metal pails on summer days, not sure whether I'm remembering or dreaming.

Small Stone, January 14 (ish)

2012-01-15T08:42:00.003-05:00

Magnum walks different in his red blanket, like a kid with new shoes, stepping extra high to say, "Look at me!" Of course I do.

Small Stone, January 13

2012-01-13T07:59:00.004-05:00

I was hoping for fluffy, Frosty the Snowman flakes, but what we've got is ice-powder, painted down between the bricks with a fierce wind-brush. Yesterday's puddles are today's miniature ice rinks for the few leaves and twigs that haven't already frozen to the sidewalk. In a single blast of wind, I feel the coffee cup in my hand go cold. I think of horses on mornings like this, of the warm spot between neck and mane, of the ice that clings to the sides of the bucket after I've chopped down through the middle, and the first thirsty sound the horses make when they drink what I've dug out for them. Last night I dreamt of a tack shop, of a floor to ceiling display of halters and gleaming leather bridles. Then you came and opened the door. You led me away.

Small Stones, January 12

2012-01-12T19:00:00.002-05:00

I stroll through settings, breathe in backstory, long for lost characters. There is hardly a step of this city that hasn't been written.

Small Stone, January 11

2012-01-11T19:53:00.002-05:00

I resolve to live in the moment. And then I laugh at myself, because, resolutions are concerned with future, not now. Now, in this moment, there is a cold metal gate latch, and a sherbert-colored sky, and this horse who likes me to scratch behind his left ear. Now is cold fingers and cold toes and a cold nose and a warm horse and a warm heart. Now is good.

Small Stone, January 10

2012-01-10T07:37:00.002-05:00

The outlines of stores and churches
that have stayed the same shape
for at least the last eleven years
are muted this morning by fog,
like paint with too much water,
Grayed to look kind of like memory.

Headlights, brilliant bright,
slice the veil,
Catch reflective stripes and
bring the road to the surface,
So much easier to see than
all the things that are standing still.

Small Stone, January 9

2012-01-09T15:09:00.003-05:00

You finger tap in rhythm with the pulse in my temple,
And your hum is the exact frequency of my migraine.
Child, do you really want to get rid of me?
At least you’ve got this teacher figured out
Down to the last Hot Tamale hiding place.
When I’m half a knot up from the end of my rope,
You catch my gaze and place your finger to your lips,
Then rest quiet hands on the table,
eyes sparkling even as you feign innocence.
I smile and climb back to the top of my rope.

Small Stone, January 8

2012-01-08T09:37:00.003-05:00

January, more on top of things than I am, has repaired its air conditioning. Guess I should call the landlord, let him know he needs to fix the heat, but at the moment I'm content with hot coffee, thick socks, and a warm dog.

Small Stone, January 7

2012-01-07T18:53:00.003-05:00

Today I walked to the gas station wearing track pants, and flats with no socks, and it was too warm even for my sweatshirt, and the flashing sign at the Catholic school said 61 degrees. So why can't I get my head out of winter four years ago, when I couldn't get warm, even with those little heat packs that go in your gloves? When the gate latches froze and the skid steer wouldn't start and the coyote calls got closer to the big warm barn? When I cracked ice on water buckets for horses whose big breath took up my vision so I couldn't see you anywhere?

The door just closed. I get it now. The theme is freeze.

Small Stone, January 6

2012-01-06T22:02:00.004-05:00

Every time I crack my knuckles, hunker down into my chair, and get ready to type my small stone for the day, something interrupts me. It's almost as if I

Small Stone, January 5

2012-01-05T18:43:00.003-05:00

I wish I could write like this kid:
in five kinds of ink, and backwards in the notebook,
scratching out those silly sixth-grade thoughts
and writing in seventh-grade wisdom.

A line at a time, I would revise myself
into the story of my choosing,
with page after page of promise
and a pen still mostly full of ink.

Small Stone, January 4

2012-01-04T19:52:00.006-05:00

This song is:
Rosman Highway in 2007, yellow-paint line, sun burning mist off the mountains, horse waiting in the pasture, friendly crowds of unfamiliar faces, and, through a blanket of grief, a swell of hope.

This song is not:
Medicine, a time machine, the road from there to here, or an answer to the question I can't stop asking.

Small Stone - January 3

2012-01-03T07:38:00.003-05:00

Flake-swirls skate across roof tiles,
Fling figures into empty air.
Baby-flakes drift against chimneys,
Skate mini-steps clinging to brick,
Think someday ...

Small Stone - January 2

2012-01-02T20:29:00.002-05:00

Frost air bites through fleece,
denim, and twenty-five years.
I am five, on the steps,
looking at my breath.

A River of Stones

2012-01-01T02:19:00.005-05:00

1/1/12: Not quite the red plaid blanket I lay on as a kid in the campground. But close.

So what do Pagans do for Christmas?

2011-12-24T10:54:00.004-05:00

"So what do Pagans do for Christmas?"

The question is indicative of deep thought and a willingness to accept. Not the words -- those could go either way -- but the tone, and the fact that he has acknowledged my family's religion at all. Old family friend usually avoids topics like this. I am touched he has asked.

I open my mouth, and I close it.

Christmas is religious, but it is cultural and societal and traditional, too, and I love it. Snow and puffs of cold breath and other people's lights twinkling through the trees, I love.

In my family, traditions are based loosely on survival. Where can we get the best deal for the most of us to be fed and protected and happy? Free continental breakfast and enough room for everyone to sleep. We usually get together at a hotel near my sister's house, and we swim and splash in the hot tub and eat at the Chinese restaurant, and we forget, annually, that nothing is open on Christmas Eve, and me and a sister or two go out looking for anything that's open that sells any type of sustenance, and we come back with gas station food. And everyone is hungry and cold and a touch cranky and this, too, I love.

This is one of those off years when none of us can afford it. A handful of us will gather at my sister's, but when one of us is missing, part of us all is missing, so we won't be whole. My sister can't make it in from the city. We weren't able to bring her here in time.

"So what do Pagans do for Christmas?"

We gather like the rest of you, and be together, and speak our true language, a language of half-quotes and loose references that only family understands. Only together do we not have to explain, to conform, to work at fitting. Only together can we be us.

Before the hotel tradition, back when we were all at home, the tradition was that we put up a tree -- I wonder how my parents always, always made this happen -- and my grandma piled on us a passel of well-meaning presents slightly disconnected from our personalities, and we would find ways to amuse ourselves with them that were not necessarily included in the instruction manuals. My parents gave presents, too, always managing something meaningful and sweet.

Twelve -- they gave me a bucket filled with grooming supplies. Didn't have a horse, just wanted one so bad I couldn't stand it and they got me things to make me feel a little closer to my goal.

Seventeen -- a little red box with a tiny gold cross inside. Yes, a cross, with none of us having figured out what religion we were, except that we all loved the X-Files and Scully wore a cross and damn if we didn't all adopt our mannerisms from television the way the (diagnosed) autistic members of our family tend to do. A little note accompanied the cross: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for."

There are years, like this one, when I have little faith.

But it is a temporary situation, like a waning moon that is sure to wax, to bring new holidays and new rituals and new traditions to blend with the old. A gleam of light on a motel pool and a train drawing ever closer, and a Go-Mart bag full of crackers and cheese. The family will gather and the snow will fall and we are all going to be okay.

"So what do Pagans do for Christmas?"

The best we can.

Gifts. And also, breaks.

2011-12-17T11:22:00.002-05:00

I took a break. Sorry! Sometimes I have to disappear into a cave and do nothing but think about characters and setting, and I don't write a word, even on my blog.

Today I started blogging again, over at Smack Dab in the Middle. The theme is "gifts." You can catch me there today, and I'll try to be back here tomorrow.

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Word Padding!

2011-11-18T18:34:00.002-05:00

You don't want to stop typing. But you've got nothing to say. So what you do is, you start typing anyway and you see where you end up. And the funniest thing happens. You actually figure out stuff to type. Now, don't get me wrong. The stuff you type doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit in your story. It does nothing for your plot, it doesn't build suspense, it does nothing to resolve conflict. More likely, you just let your eyes roam around your writing space while you describe the stuff you see. Like:

Need to clean the litter box after I meet this stupid daily word goal. What is that next to the litter box, is that a candy wrapper? When did I eat candy? Wait, I think a better question is, when did I last eat something that wasn't candy? Also, did I know I had this many coffee mugs? I see three on top of the TV, all in various stages of emptiness. There's mold floating on one of them, that must have been from my first 1,667 words. Which one of these coffees is hot, I wonder? I'd really like a drink of coffee, but I can't pick up my hands from the keyboard long enough to take one because I'm in the middle of a stupid word war and I've only got 45 seconds left and I keep losing and I really need to win this one and nobody needs to know I described my disgusting, filthy living room that has been completely neglected during November. How do they know this isn't what my character's living room looks like? It could be. Nevermind I'm writing a dystopian novel set in 2811 and there are no living rooms anymore. These word war people don't know that! Also, where's the dog? Have I seen the dog today? Have I walked the dog today? Is there a chance the dog has been swallowed alive by that teetering pile of dirty laundry? Dirty laundry! There's still dirty laundry in the future, right? Okay, that's where Joe-Bill and Lucy-Ellen meet, they meet at the laundromat. Okay, I got this. Lucy-Ellen walked into the laundromat (note: figure out what a futuristic washing machine looks like later) and her eyes are immediately drawn to the dark figure folding a pair of (note: figure out what futuristic boxer shorts look like later) in the corner of the (note: are there corners in the future? Maybe all the buildings are round. Like the inside of a coffee mug. Wow, I really wish I could stop typing and drink my coffee. Wait, why do I have a World's Best Grandma coffee mug on my table? Did my grandma come by? I don't remember seeing my grandma. Is there a chance my grandma has been swallowed alive by that teetering pile of dirty laundry?) "Hey, there," Lucy-I-forget-the-rest-of-her-name says.

And that's when the timer goes off and you stop writing and start frantically feeling two dozen coffee mugs until one of them is warm, while doing some exploratory poking of the laundry pile with your toe.

You've just done two things:

1. You've written. Badly. Very, very badly. But a minute ago your character was alone in her (note: decide what houses have instead of living rooms in the future) and now she's in a laundromat meeting her love interest. So, believe it or not, in your caffeine-induced haze of keyboard-vomit, you actually did move your story along a little.

2. You've just added 388 words to your novel.

This is what NaNoWriMo is all about.

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Promise to do stuff

2011-11-17T15:04:00.003-05:00

I know, I KNOW, okay? This NaNoWriMo advice series is supposed to be daily! And it would be! I swear! Except I'm busy -- you know -- doing NaNoWriMo!

And avoiding NaNoWriMo. Okay, fine. (Why does NaNoWriMo make me channel Clementine so often?)

Anyway, today's bad advice is this: promise to do stuff besides NaNo during November. Like posting on your blog daily, dishing out advice even while in the midst of failing spectacularly at meeting your own daily word count. And participating in a group blog (which, by the way, is not really bad advice, and I quite enjoy it -- you can find my monthly post at Smack Dab in the Middle today). And, you know, doing the dishes and going to work and stuff.

But part of the fun of NaNo is figuring out how to squish words in around the edges of your life. How are you all doing so far?

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Autosummarize!

2011-11-15T21:30:00.003-05:00

This is the worst advice EVER if your goal is productivity. But then, if your goal is productivity, I don't know why you're even talking to me. It's November 15 and I'm at 847 words. For those of you keeping score, that means I am 24,153 words behind schedule.

In Microsoft Word, there is a tool called "Autosummarize." This tool will take your novel and boil it down to the key ideas (assuming it has any -- which, it's a NaNo novel, so it's okay if there aren't any key ideas yet).

I think you should go try this tool on your in-progress NaNo novel.

Let me be clear: there is no earthly reason to use this tool on your in-progress NaNo novel. Unless of course you just need a study breaker. And maybe you don't, you with your 25,000 words and your pretty progress bar. But me? I need a study breaker. Or two. Or six.

My current NaNo is only at 847 words, so there's no point in summarizing it; it's plenty brief. Instead, I have asked Microsoft Word to autosummarize my most recently published middle grade novel, Body of Water.

Here is Body of Water in 100 words or less:

Ivy didn't like being called dingbat much. "Hey, Poison Ivy. Stop snotting on Dad. I turned to Mom. Anson was Anson. Mom tugged my shoulder. Ivy and Dad started drifting away. Mom asked, soft. Just Ivy. Even without my pockets, Ivy persisted. 1. Class rings Mom and Dad walked hand in hand, relaxed. Ivy giggled and Mom pasted on a cheerful smile. Mom twitched. What if Ivy has to go?" Hateful, just like Ivy. Ivy moaned. For Anson It started with my grandma, my mom's mom. Trees. 1. Class rings 1. Class rings

For the record, I think "Trees." is really what makes this summary special.

So what does your novel boil down to?

NYT Review

2011-11-14T10:38:00.005-05:00

Oh, by the way. While I was hiding under a rock, pretending NaNoWriMo didn't exist, this happened:

When Ends Don't Meet

Yes. That would be a review of my novel in the New York Times Book Review.

I haven't been this happily hyper since my sister Heather and I went on weekend-long Pixy Stix binge in the late nineties. Let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. There should be a maximum amount of Pixy Stix two teenage girls are allowed to buy without parental consent.

Today's challenge: Work Pixy Stix into your NaNo wordcount for the day.

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

2011-11-14T05:34:00.003-05:00

I'm embarrassed to even show my face.

Remember the last time I blogged my "daily" NaNoWriMo advice? What was that, over a week ago now?

As Clementine would say, "Or ten days. Okay, fine."

Yeah. That's the last time I wrote on my NaNo novel, too.

There was a train, see. And a city. And a sister I haven't seen in a year. And when it was all said and done, there were 11,000 very bad, very boring words of a novel I hoped never to be forced to read, let alone write.

The thing is, when I was writing every day, I could force myself to keep going. And if I had kept going, I probably would have ended up someplace okay. Then I could have revised okay into decent, and decent into all right, and all right into good, and good into great, and great into fabulous, and I would have had a finished novel.

But I stopped.

And when you stop while the novel is still awful, you won't start again.

So don't stop. Don't be like me. Don't do what I did and go from 11,000 words to ... 87.

As for me? The month isn't even half over and I'm not done yet.

See you tomorrow. I mean it!

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo advice: Coffee!

2011-11-04T15:40:00.003-04:00

It's no coincidence that Starbucks releases their winter specialties November 1. They do it on purpose. They know we're NaNoing and they want to provide us with caffeine and comfort in one fell swoop.

It's known as the Peppermint Mocha, and I could write at least a thousand words about it, and most of them would be "love."

Of course if Starbucks isn't your thing, you can always make a cup of tea, or break out the french press, or fire up the coffee pot, or do the Dew. Whatever it takes to sufficiently caffeinate yoruself for the insane and sleepless charge to 50,000.

Because sleep is overrated. Just like spelling, syntax, and all the other things we will be foregoing during the month of November.

How's everybody holding up?

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Forums!

2011-11-03T08:11:00.002-04:00

This is the worst advice EVER if your goal is to stay on task and increase your word count.

If you're looking for a study-breaker, a good laugh, or a reason to feel better about your own mistakes, though, this is a must.

On the NaNoWriMo forums, there is a magical place. A magical place reserved for all the typos, all the mixed metaphors and nonsensical thoughts that occur when you write a great volume of words at high speed.

This magical land of wonder can be found here, in the NaNoisms thread.

But first, a touch of good advice: put put down the coffee. I wouldn't want you to ruin your keyboard.

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Do Not Backspace!

2011-11-02T19:56:00.002-04:00

To paraphrase Yoda, Type or type not. There is no backspace.

The backspace key is addictive. Once you start backspacing, you can't stop. You'll have to fix all of it. The typos. The dangling participles. The disappearing, reappearing, re-disappearing characters. The settings that magically change from the beginning of the sentence to the end of the sentence. The nauseatingly flowery descriptions. The forbidden adverbs. The bad dialogue. The messed-up line spacing. The plain old bad writing.

Do. Not. Backspace. No matter what. To paraphrase Monty Python, the backspace key is no more. It is an ex-backspace key. At least until December first, at which point you'll have 50,000 misspelled, ill-used adverbs of completed first draft to revise.

In other words, don't backspace until after you've written a novel.

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Write First, Caff Second

2011-11-01T06:20:00.004-04:00

When you get up in the morning, write a little bit before you have your morning coffee. You are much less likely to try to stop yourself to make corrections or check for typos.

The flip side? You are also much less likely to remember to turn on the computer before you start typing.

Happy November!

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Wing it!

2011-10-31T07:13:00.004-04:00

Don't spend today mapping out your plot, like you would if you had any sense. Instead, do what I do. Spend it sleeping (because you won't be doing much of that the next thirty days). Eating (like a chipmunk preparing to hibernate. Do chipmunks hibernate?) Buying an extra can or six of coffee, and possibly an extra coffee pot, to hold up to the demands of November. Walking your dogs, who are soon to be neglected. Make sure your laptop's plugged in to charge. If you're one of those crazy people who can write by hand, buy pens.

But don't spend too much time today stressing over your plot and whether it's going to make sense. Leave that for, oh, say, November 25-ish.

So have you signed up for NaNoWriMo yet? Who's with me?

Today's Bad NaNoWriMo Advice: Sign Up!

2011-10-30T12:04:00.006-04:00

It's almost that time again!

If you need bad advice during NaNoWriMo 2011 -- you know, advice like "it's okay to skip class to write" and "Pad your word count by giving every character two middle names and making them insist on being called by all of them" -- I'm your gal. See you in two days!

Wildlife, law enforcement, and other reasons this day stands out

2011-10-25T08:05:00.004-04:00

BODY OF WATER is out today! See?

My release day so far:

I got off the bus to walk to work in the mist just before dawn, and four deer hopped a fence and stood on the sidewalk, not six feet in front of me, making eye contact for a minute before wandering away.

A minute later, I got stopped by the police. Seriously. A police officer stopped me and asked what I was "up to." I told him I'm an autism teacher on my way to the church to meet a student. He looked appropriately chagrined.

I am not making this up.

My plans for the rest of release day include hanging with a cool kid for a few hours, then curling up with Tara Kelly's AMPLIFIED, also out today. Which just proves that this day was worth waiting for!

Guess what tomorrow is?

2011-10-24T08:32:00.002-04:00

Need something new to read? Body of Water will be here tomorrow!

One Week: Journey

2011-10-18T07:41:00.001-04:00

I remember pulling out of the campground, the brown Nissan bumping off the one-lane road onto the two-lane highway, the Battle Run Campground sign getting smaller behind us as we swept through the leaves beginning to scatter on the road.

Up ahead was an apartment that used to be a post office, a mail slot between mine and my sister’s rooms, a rope swing in the back yard, a general store across the street, a horse a mile up the road to visit, a new friend, a new world, a new me.

Behind was summer, sweet honeysuckle and warm sand, lapping water so familiar and soothing, smoke rising, people laughing, dead spots of grass in rings where the tents were. Bike tracks cut into dried mud, extra firewood left in plain sight in case any other scavengers needed to find it, blood spots on the bathroom floor from my sister’s run-in with a bike spoke. Behind were brief friendships, lasting lessons, a separate world, a different me.

Every move was bittersweet, the first half of the trip spent looking back, distant, quiet, melancholy, breathing the air as the scents there changed, grew unfamiliar, drew me away from the most recent version of everything I knew. The second half, looking forward, giggling, nervous, excited, planning new stories, new adventures. Ready for change.

This time next week, Body of Water will be here and that changes things. Today I’m looking back at Livvie Owen Lived Here, thinking of pet mice and pet cats and weathered porch boards and trailer vents and heavy quilts and fish lamps. But long about Friday, it’s going to sink in that Ember’s coming, with her bouncy dog and her Tarot cards and her yellow sweatpants and her spells and her ashes and her hopes and her adventures and her story.

See you when we get there.

Smack Dab in the Middle

2011-10-17T14:13:00.005-04:00

I am THRILLED to be blogging at Smack Dab in the Middle, a group blog written by several wonderful middle grade authors. You can catch me there on the 17th of each month. This month's theme is Inspiration.

P.S. Before you go to Smack Dab, let me direct your attention to the right side of Dooley Noted. Check out the little counter at the top of the sidebar. It's been dutifully counting down to BODY OF WATER since we were 86 days out. Check out how the number is now in the single digits. This is so cool.

TWO WEEKS: Equipped

2011-10-11T17:12:00.004-04:00

Dear Coleman Outdoor Gear Company:

Thanks for the midnight zipper of the tent next to mine. It was only spooky alone in the tent if you forgot there was a sister on each side of you and parents across the clearing. Somebody always had to sneak out for a granola bar or to use the bathroom or to walk around the quiet campground with the embers burning low or to have a last cup of coffee or to check for ghosts. (That last one might have been me.)

Thanks for the wake-up sizzle of bacon over the little camping stove. By fall I would be a vegetarian, but thank goodness I wasn't yet. Something about Dad standing at the picnic table, making a perfectly respectable breakfast that you could have in a kitchen, made me feel whole. When the food came, it seemed to appear overnight and it tasted better because of how happy everyone was that it was there.

Thanks for the afternoon rattle of ice beginning to melt in the cooler. I froze to the wrist pulling out wet soda cans and handing them to my sisters, happy to claim the job that meant I got to play with the ice cubes. Dozens of gnats drowned in that cooler, but the soda tasted so good on a sweltering day that it felt like a lifesaver, so I figured it was a toss-up.

Thanks for the bedtime hiss of the lantern, turned a little lower. Underneath, I could hear the rumble of voices, storytelling from the day, occasional laughter lulling me into a warm, fuzzy, comfortable sleep, glasses still on, flashlight still burning, book still open on my chest, until somebody's tent zipper woke me in an hour or two.

Thanks for the house, minus the walls.

Sincerely,
Sarah

Dear Family,

Thanks for being the walls.

Love,
Sarah

THREE WEEKS: The View From Home

2011-10-04T19:27:00.001-04:00

Here's what I saw when I opened my bedroom door in the summer of 1993:

Four Weeks: Lost

2011-09-27T07:49:00.004-04:00

Around and around the looping roads of the campground, I galloped an imaginary horse, clutching invisible reins in my hands. I was too old for imaginary horses. As a rising seventh-grader, I felt too old for a lot of things. But who cares about convention when you live in a tent? I was happy to stay a horse-crazy kid before school came and forced me to acknowledge those imminent teen years I'd been dreading.

In the lazy heat of midsummer, I stretched out on my red blanket in the shade and I drew several versions of my stable logo, for someday when I would own my own stable. I read SADDLE CLUB books and thought myself into them, and when the time came to get up off the blanket, to gallop my restlessness away, I had the horses pictured perfectly. I knew their names and personalities. I, on my own two feet, spooked at tree branches and gusts of wind. I whinnied and snorted and pawed the earth with my flip-flops. I tossed my tangled mane.

I must have looked plain crazy to everyone except my family. They were accustomed to me. They could see my imaginary horses.

Then one day, out of shy boredom, I silently nodded when a stranger asked me to seesaw. We didn't talk much and the awkwardness grew -- until she said, "This feels like jumping on a horse!" -- and I nearly fell off in shock.

"You like horses, too?!"

There was hardly any silence for a week after that.

We spent the days cantering our bikes side by side along the lake. We swapped favorite horse books and favorite horse tips and favorite horse stories. When she finally had to leave, we stayed in touch for years.

Today is September 27. On this day five years ago, grown, and with the campground the furthest thing from my mind, I knelt in the pasture at the head of a horse named Stuff, who I met and started riding just a year after my campground time. I rode him for three years before I bought him at the age of 16, and spent the next nine years revolving around him like the earth around the sun.

I didn't know, in the campground, that those dreams I wanted so badly I could taste the dust and smell the leather were only a year away. And of course I didn't know how it would end, twelve years down the road. A morning too warm for September, the engine cooling from my long drive home, a breeze stirring wisps of hay that should have already been eaten. Except he wasn't hungry.

In every book I write, there is an animal and it is usually lost. There is Orange Cat in LIVVIE, lost to a car. There is Widdershins in BODY OF WATER, maybe lost to a fire.

I can write about being homeless and I can write about lost dogs and lost kitties and little girls who feel lost themselves. But I can't write about horses yet. Even while I ride my new horse and spend hours at his side, I can't write about horse-crazy little girls, jumping seesaws and cantering bicycles. I haven't found the right words to describe something that isn't there.

Five Weeks: Morning and Evening

2011-09-20T19:10:00.003-04:00

Ember Goforth-Shook, who in a brief five weeks will tell you BODY OF WATER if you let her, worries a lot. She gets that from me, but not twelve-year-old me. I didn't start worrying till a year or so later, older and not quite as wise.

In the campground, what was to worry about? Morning was like this: Weak, early, seven o'clock sun peeking up over the mountain, shadows spilling down the grass. The sun not touching till halfway out to the swim line, so the water out there was lit up orange, still and silent but tossing the sun back up into the sky. Quiet water and quiet minnows and quiet sand, as yet untouched by feet. Except for ours. Special, privileged. The first humans each day to touch the water.

And night was like this: Sun smoking on down toward the mountain, fires springing up, twirling sparks into the sky like stars with every log tossed on. And logs were free. Every family that left, left firewood and we were gatherers. And hunters. We hunted ghost stories along the edges of the friendly woods. We hunted secrets in the warm, soft mud. Found treasures like, literally, a silver spoon -- dug up out of the mud with our toes, the irony was not lost on us. Campfire evening leaned down into cozy-tent night with the crickets and the tree frogs singing, and all at once, shushing each other so we could hear the water lapping, soft, and the rumble of distant thunder.

What wasn't to love?

I mean, there was stuff in the middle. Daytime stuff, like seventh grade and house-hunting and grocery stores. But that isn't the stuff that sticks. For Ember, either, that isn't the stuff that sticks, because, as her time in the campground draws to a close, she stares out across the lake and she starts to feel homesick.

Homesick before you've even left. This makes more sense than you maybe realize, unless you're like us, and you've moved and moved. Unless you've ever stood and wished yourself backward in time, so you could smell the woodsmoke once more, feel the sand and the mud on your feet, grip lost silver with your toes and cup your hands around fireflies.

I don't always drift so far away, but today I am distant like the thunder, spinning toward the sky like the sparks. On this warm September evening in my grown-up town, I am looking back at twelve and it is shining like sun on the water, halfway out to freedom.

Six Weeks: Haiku

2011-09-13T07:41:00.001-04:00

Swimming at daybreak,
we had special privileges.
Forget walls and doors.

Water is warmest
when the air is cool with rain
or with September.

Sand deep and shifting,
We mocked stability, we
Tripped over driftwood.

Seven Weeks: Building Character(s)

2011-09-06T07:40:00.002-04:00

We are on day two of a cold, soaking September rain, the kind that stirs the earliest dead leaves to scatter on the sidewalk, the kind that stirs the earliest embers of autumn and of story. I am close to writing something new. I know because I am vibrating with energy that has nowhere to go, so I am dropping coffee cups and walking into storm doors. I am distracted, half-lost in impatience and anticipation and the hope that the story gets here soon, before I start forgetting to eat and to go to work in the mornings.

Seven weeks from BODY OF WATER, rain makes me think of my red blanket, which is not mentioned in the book but which is pictured in my head. September 1993 was warm enough, from what I remember. But I know it rained. Any time it did, we had to pull our belongings to the center of the tent, to keep them off the nylon walls that would let the water through if we touched them. There was a scramble to close the “skylight” – the removable cover that hid the mesh roof of our dome-shaped bedrooms – and then we would pull in, blankets and tennis shoes and roller skates and dirty clothes pile and ever-shrinking clean clothes pile, gathered to the center as if it were all a part of one big turtle hiding in its shell. Me, I always sat cross-legged on the middle of the pile, ratty red blanket draped over my shoulders. It was my beach towel on warm days and my shawl on cool days. In rain, it was my shelter.

Sitting in the middle of a dome-shaped tent, on top of all your earthly belongings, imagining yourself as a giant turtle while the rain pounds away outside, you can’t help but giggle. And if you’ve ever had, or been, a sister, you know that one sister can’t laugh for no reason without the other sisters joining in. So there we were, three blue and gray tents, giggling in the rain.

The next morning at sunrise, me and Heather went walking, looping the familiar streets of home. The storm-weakened sun was barely up in the sky and was nothing but a faded red ball, so dim we could look straight at it without hurting our eyes.

“It looks like one of those dots,” I said.

And, remarkably, she got it. “On a library book!”

We kept walking, cooking up a whole story about how we were nothing but characters in a library book, and the sun was only red-orange here because we were in the middle grade section, but characters in other books, in other sections, saw their suns in different colors. And maybe one day we would look up and the sun would be a different color and we would know we had been reshelved, and we could spin a whole adventure about trying to get back to our own familiar section.

Every word we thought as children scrawled itself across the pages in our minds. Everything was story. As long as the sun stayed its own familiar color, we could trust, more or less, that we were where we were supposed to be. We could relax and let the story write itself. We could dream up other worlds with different-colored suns, and secretly wonder if the other sections were as fun to write, and live, as ours.

Then the sun rose and yellowed and burned into full daylight, and we ran off to other settings, scaring up new plots and building our own characters.

Eight Weeks - Kindred

2011-08-30T07:41:00.004-04:00

In eight fleeting weeks, BODY OF WATER, which is mostly fiction, will stroll out into the world, and a few of my secrets might seep out. Like, I have washed my hair with apple-scented hand soap and lied to teachers about where I did my homework. Like, I am not above eating fried bologna off a stick. And I sort of have an obsession with fuzzy pajamas.

Want to know what’s crazy? I recently met someone who lived in a tent for six months. Six! We didn’t quite make it to three. She was a little older during her camping time – ninth grade, not seventh – and we are the same age, so it’s easy for me to think back on her camping year.

We were at Herold Court that year, a second-floor apartment where the walls sweated in summer and my best friend wasn’t allowed to visit at first because my parents didn’t quite think about how the “I Heart Herbs” sticker on the car window could be taken if you didn’t know my mother gathered mullen for congestion and burdock for arthritis. The year my friend slept under the twinkle of cricket chatter, I was drenched in the humid hush of the box fan in the window. In winter we went sledding down the yellow line of Kentucky Road until we tumbled, laughing, into snow-filled ditches. I hope my friend was under roof by then. I don’t know which months she camped because she didn’t want to talk about it much.

Some days I feel frivolous, like I don’t understand even the things I’ve done. Like it’s not okay for me to write a book about living in a tent, because, even though I’ve lived in a tent, I was me at the time and not a regular person, and I didn’t get the same things out of it that a regular person would. And then I think, what do I mean by regular person? A person who has never lived in a tent? A person who has only ever washed their hair with shampoo? A person who doesn’t heart herbs and who takes fuzzy PJs for granted?

The kid in me would say there is no regular, everybody is different (because she thought she was pretty deep). But even that seventh-grader who was free of congestion and smelled faintly of apples -- who night after night went to bed wearing something other than fuzzy pajamas -- even that girl wanted to be like other people sometimes.

Which is why I am grateful to my new friend for sharing a touch of her story, even if she didn't want to talk about it much. I can't guess her story, wouldn't dream of trying. I was me, not her, my camping year. But some things -- some things she doesn't have to say. Some things I think I might know.

Nine Weeks

2011-08-23T19:30:00.003-04:00

It's hard to believe school's already back in. Summer crashes into fall without regard for anything. Maybe there hasn't been time for vacation, or maybe you don't have your school clothes out, or maybe you're not quite back under roof just yet, but here it is fall, deceptively subtle with only a yellow leaf or two to show for it.

School bus didn't come out to the campground, so Dad drove us in and I showed up to seventh grade smelling like cigarette smoke and campfire smoke and the early red maple leaves I'd crunched under bare feet the evening before. It was tough to reconcile school breakfast, syrupy French Toast sticks, with the previous day's dinner of hot dogs on actual sticks, blackened till they blistered. It was tough to reconcile school company -- girls with neat hair, teased bangs, and purposely-ripped-up jeans -- with my evening company of sisters in swimsuits and tangles.

My pre-algebra homework was half-finished because other things seemed much more important the evening before. I missed the lake, more than half drained now because of a drought downriver. I missed elementary school, with its neat math problems I understood, printed on wide-ruled paper. I sensed change, something deeper than autumn.

I spent days gazing out of classroom windows, unaccustomed to being indoors. I spent nights under the stars, hazy through the campfire smoke, thinking of better things than math. I was a lucky girl, luckier than my squeaky-clean classmates stuck under ceilings. I knew just enough to know that this couldn't last forever.

Livvie turns one!

2011-08-17T11:32:00.004-04:00

My little Livvie Owen has been out in the world for one year today. In her honor, I will ask you a question.

What would your dream home look like? Feel like? Smell like? Is it a house? A cabin? A mansion? How many rooms? How many people to fill those rooms? How did you come by it and how long will you live there? These are the questions Livvie would ask you if she met you. She wouldn't quite look at you and she wouldn't quite be sure how to word them, but these are the things she would want to know.

Ten Weeks

2011-08-16T07:35:00.003-04:00

Ten weeks now till BODY OF WATER.

Let me tell you about the first week in the campground.

It was only an adventure, only another chapter in our fictional lives. We were raised to believe we were characters in books, taught that adversity was fodder for plot, that conflict kept the pages turning. Most chapters had a happy ending. My parents were still the authors and we kids were in charge of the dialogue and a few of the illustrations. We didn’t have to worry much. My parents would find a way to wrap up this chapter neatly.

That summer must have been so hard for them. There are days I can’t write characters through hardship and my parents had to write three real-life girls through it. But if it was hard, they never let on. If they were scared, they never let on. We were on a camping trip, which we’d never been on before. Tents and campground passes were a luxury we could only afford if we weren’t frittering our money away on silly things like rent. This was a treat, this camping trip. This was a once-in-a-lifetime plot twist.

The first week, everything was new and we couldn’t stop giggling. We walked barefoot on hot pavement. We held our breaths past the big blue dumpsters you could smell for half a city block. We were careful of glass. We swam on the campground side of the lake, not the beach side, just to prove we weren’t afraid of the sucking mud and the hidden marine life. We had splash fights. We ate from the vending machines. We sat on the warm dryers in the laundry room come evening and we watched other campers bed down in their little family groups around their campfires and we scoffed at the ones who brought RVs and televisions. After the first few nights, we felt like old pros compared to the people checking in.

And never mind the people checking out. We didn’t have to worry about that.

They made us switch campsites every two weeks. It was a rule presumably put in place to prevent people like us from living in the campground long term. They had to know. The caretakers of the place, they had to notice that we never left. They had to notice that after the first couple of site changes, we stopped taking the tents down and simply transported them fully-assembled, one at a time on the back of the truck. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed of our brown Nissan, clutching the roll bar with one arm and my tent with the other. We moved from Site One to Site Thirty. Site … 42, perhaps? And 14. I can’t remember them all. And the caretakers of the place, they had to see. But they never said a word, only smiled at us and went on their way.

I wish I knew where those people are now. I would send them copies of BODY OF WATER. And something chocolate. Would S'mores be too much?

I’m supposed to be talking about the first week in the campground, but it’s hard to talk about a single week when the whole summer feels like one sunny blur. I know that the first week, we were still fairly clean and crisp from the luxury of living indoors. We did not miss living indoors. We did not miss beds and chairs and tables. We maybe missed TV a little, but we hadn’t watched that much of it before, and the people at the campground were way more interesting to watch. And maybe, when dusk fell and the sun was still bright enough to dim the campfires and I knew it would be dark soon, it’s possible I missed the nightlight I was embarrassed I had still been using.

But outside dark isn’t scary like inside dark. I slept sound and woke rested, ready for adventure.

Eleven Weeks

2011-08-09T07:34:00.001-04:00

Eleven weeks seems like a strange amount of time to mark, unless that's how long you lived in a dome-shaped tent in the summer of '93. For eleven weeks, my sisters and I roamed Battle Run Campground, swimming, and storytelling, and roasting whatever would fit on the end of a stick.

Little bits and pieces of those eleven weeks are always with me. Of course there is the obvious, the crackle of fire and the green splash of lake water, but there's other stuff, too. Like when I unzip my duffel at the Writer's Conference, the noise is exactly like my bedroom door at the campground. Like any time I see initials carved into wood, I think of the names kids carved into the campground's climbing tower, which they tore down years ago. When I wrote my name there, in blue ink from the pen I always carried, I thought it would stay there forever.

In a way, it has.

Eleven weeks from today, BODY OF WATER will be released, and a kid named Ember will tell you about her summer in the campground, so different from mine – but I hope, just as permanent. Once we get there, if you would, take just a second and turn around and look back to this spot right here, and think about how much time that actually is to live in a campground. By the time we left, the tents were worn through and the fires burned low to embers. We were taller and tanner, older and wiser, and we knew how to make a place home.

It's a skill I've used plenty more times over the years. But that's a story for another novel.

My Not-So-Fictional Characters

2011-08-08T09:01:00.011-04:00

Funny what makes it in, what stays out. Every little animal I've ever kept has made it, or will make it, into a book. Henry's there already, in the form of Orange Cat in LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE.

You can meet Lola this October when BODY OF WATER is released – she plays the role of Widdershins, at least in my head.

And in my third book, which you will hopefully get to read at some point, my sister-in-law's mean and hateful little poodle, Chewbacca, makes an appearance.

I sort of hate that dog. He broke Lola's nose once, but that occurrence did not make it into either novel.

Sorry, I don't have a picture of Chewbacca. If you really want to know, he looks like a dirty cottonball. With fangs.

Buddy Sunshine, my oversized Rottie mix, did make it into a middle grade novel that has never seen the light of day.

And in my most recent novel, there is a cat named Stella who is a lot like my Sage-cat. Actually, Sagey-Boo was also in LIVVIE, in the form of Gray Cat (although she is clearly not gray).

You know who, quite conspicuously, has never made it into a novel of mine?

These guys:

That first one is Stuff, my very first horse. And the second is my current horse, Magnum.

As a kid, all I ever read were horse stories. When I wasn't reading horse stories, I was visiting a neighbor's horse, or cleaning stalls to pay for riding lessons, or, after I managed to get a horse of my own, out playing in the pasture with him. Sometimes I read horse stories and played in the pasture at the same time:

So guess what? For Camp NaNoWriMo, I am finally writing a horse story! Maybe someday some horse-crazy kid can lie on their horse's back and read it. That's the dream. I am super-serious about this. As serious as Magnum:

Also, eventually, my husband's new pup, Oscar, will have to make it into a novel. Because, OMG, cute.

So how's your Camp NaNo coming?

Milestones

2011-08-04T15:01:00.000-04:00

I started seventh grade from a campground. Battle Run Campground in Summersville, West Virginia, to be exact. It's a beautiful place, tree-shaded, lakeside. In fact, it's made up of a sort of sprawling peninsula, surrounded on three sides by shimmery dark-green lake water.

It is the perfect place to vacation.

Up until school started, it was the perfect place to live.

Let me tell you about school nights and school mornings in a campground. Campgrounds are not built for school days. They are built for hazy summer memories of campfires and marshmallows and bathing suits and bicycles.

And, apparently, beer and country music. At least according to the campers at Site 16 next door to me. The campers there stayed up well into the night, blasting Alan Jackson's newly-released "Chattahoochee" over and over.

I'm sure it was shocking to those drunken campers when, at one in the morning, a disgruntled twelve-year-old stuck her head out of her tent and screeched, "Don't you people know it's a school night?"

But it wasn't their fault I couldn't sleep. It was not because of the song.

Up until now, it had been summer. Summer was when you're supposed to stay in a campground, but now it was school time and school time is fall and fall is when you're supposed to rake leaves into neat piles on the flat lawn of your three-bedroom brick ranch-style house with the chain link fence and the one-lane street.

Well, we had the one-lane street. It looped and spun among progressively-empty campsites as September came.

I don't remember being nervous about school, but I do remember being cold. Five-thirty a.m., walking barefoot to the shower house and waiting longer each day for the water to get warm, I cursed the hour and the lack of sun. Why did school have to start so early, anyway? Why didn't they leave time for a swim first?

After school, I came home to the campground and unleashed my stress in the form of a swim, or a gallop on foot around the campground, or a bike ride. It wasn't till darkness gathered, an inch earlier every day, that I remembered about homework. Me and my sisters would stroll down to the shower house, most always empty these days, and set up shop in the laundry room, scribbing in notebooks and watching the storms come, occasionally remembering to do a math problem or to study a spelling word.

It was awesome.

Waking up, and coming home, in a place like Battle Run, well, that was blissful. It was the middle part of the day that stank. Seventh grade was a shock because it was different from anything I had known. People I knew -- a lot of people, since I had attended four elementary schools, two of them twice -- were suddenly taller and meaner. The pressure to conform, to fit in, to be like everybody else was immense, which was a challenge for a very literal kid, since no two people in that school were alike. Everybody had their own problems, their own situations, their own rude comments and their own little hang-ups.

As far as I knew, none of them lived in a campground.

For the first time, I wondered if maybe I wasn't supposed to like where I lived. But I still did.

A while back, I wrote a book about a kid living in a campground. For a lot of reasons, she doesn't love it as much as I did, but a big part of her loves it very much. Which is how most homes are. The book is called BODY OF WATER and it will start seventh grade -- I mean, it will be released -- October 25.

God, I hope it doesn't fit in.

Camp NaNoWriMo!

2011-08-01T07:14:00.004-04:00

This morning, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I managed to post a whole blog that was nothing but the letter C.

Then, just now, while attempting to type "while attempting to type," I typed "tpyed."

Then, while attempting to type "Camp NaNoWriMo," I typed, "NanOwrImo."

Then, while attempting to type, "while attempting to type 'while attempting to type'", I typed "tuyped."

And then at some point -- I'm so lost now that I really don't know WHAT I was trying to type, except it included the word "typed" -- I typed "typied."

Maybe I should NaNo in longhand.

At any rate, it's that time. You in?

http://campnanowrimo.org

Stopping and Starting

2011-07-15T07:37:00.002-04:00

Every time the bus driver slams on his brakes at a stop sign – I don't understand, he drives this route ten times a day, does he not remember where the stop signs are? Do they sneak up on him? Are they camouflaged until the last second, whipping off their branchy costumes and leaping into the street? – my broken computer hinge gives way and the screen falls backward onto my knees so the computer is lying flat, looking up at the WIC ads and stroller guidelines and rate increase announcements on the ceiling.

There are a LOT of stop signs on this route.

So I'm writing and it goes like this:

I don't know what makes Monday different from every other sweat-in-your-butt-crack just-this-side-of-committing-murder-for-a-cold-drink early August day in Delbarton. Maybe it's the heat, which

*thud*

"Crap."

is holding in the nineties even hours after the sun's gone down. Or it could be Hyacinth's ear infection, which has caused her to scream for three straight nights while I have lain awake on top of the sheets, studying the dead bodies of moths in the light cover. Maybe it's the fact that I am

*thud*

"Crap."

halfway through an ice-cold jug bath, pouring gas station water out of a gallon milk container and shocking my system into full alertness, when I remember our water service was turned back on yesterday and I could be taking a piping hot shower.

Maybe it's Lock Rawley

*thud*

"Crap!"

dying.

And this is about the time I remember that I'm on the 6:45 to Barboursville, which is about as crowded as a bus can get, not counting the inbound Walnut Hills coming back from Wal-Mart. I've got headphones in, so I can't hear the repeating litany of thud-crap, thud-crap all the way out Route 60.

Odd, nobody else this morning is wearing headphones. Except for the lady who is asleep against the window with her purse slowly spilling off her lap into the aisle, and the woman with a cell phone pressed to one ear and her palm pressed to the other – presumably to block out the noise of my computer being shaken to pieces -- everybody can hear everything I'm doing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort not to throw a minor hissy fit every time the bus skids to a halt, and it seems to me like the bus driver is making a conscious effort to come to a sudden stop at least once per mile. I think his goal is for my computer screen to detach completely and fly up the length of the bus and shatter on the “Passengers Must Remain Behind The Yellow Line” sign.

I think it is safe to say I'm not going to get much writing done this morning.

This office sucks.

Unpacking

2011-06-14T08:09:00.004-04:00

Things I found in my duffel bag while unpacking from West Virginia Writers Conference:

-Six new pens, three new pencils, and 14 bookmarks advertising every type of book, from romance to murder mystery to picture book

-One of my dress shoes. If anyone at Cedar Lakes comes across a high heel, I ... don't need it back, actually. I had to ditch them halfway to the dining hall anyway. Who wears high heels to a lakeside conference that feels so very much like a dreamy summer campground from childhood?

-My room key, about which the conference center was very gracious in allowing me to mail back to them instead of charging me $10. I thought I'd locked the key in the room. Turns out I had, for reasons that escaped me, neatly packed it next to my toothbrush. (Seven hours sleep all weekend, folks. This is what happens.)

-An unpopped bag of popcorn Julee gave me (thanks, Julee!) at two in the morning when I realized I hadn't brought snacks and I was hungry, but then I fell asleep before I managed to locate the microwave

-Hand-outs from some excellent workshops and classes

-Scribbled messages in notebook margins: "Remember chicken poem." "Open with exercise?" "B-fast 7:30." "Change 'second' to 'last' in final poem in FV." (Which I forgot to do.) And my favorite: "Casualties: 111111111" -- I kept track of all the times somebody likened deleting passages from your book to murder. Twice it was me and I don't even like that metaphor.

-One dirty sock. Seriously, between the shoe and the sock, I feel like I ought to check and make sure I came back with both feet!

-A bunch of beads that fell off my flip-flop. But for every bead I managed to find and bring home, I'm sure I left at least four in my room at the lodge.

-So much relaxation, inspiration, and excitement it didn't fit in the duffel bag and I had to carry it in my feet that won't stop skipping and my lips that won't stop smiling and, most importantly, in my pen that won't stop moving.

I can't wait until next summer!

The Class I Failed

2011-06-08T07:33:00.001-04:00

How many minutes in my life have I spent staring through golden mist on a morning highway? I remember it being the most romantic, intoxicating feeling. At six years old, chocolate milk in one hand and crayon in the other. At ten, Coca Cola and a pencil. Sixteen, coffee and a Bic. Scratching out the story with every mile: where I was going. Or where I wished I was.

When I was a kid, I thought every highway would go exactly where I wanted it to. I thought the mist would always be golden.

This time last year I had a foot on each end of the highway. Sold the house, moved three hours away, two weeks before school let out, and commuted to finish out my contract. Every morning I was in the car by four, driving down and down on roads that crumbled and steepened the further south I went.

This morning, children woke up there, in houses next to the crumbling highway, where the mountains are so tall the sun doesn't rise till eight. The highways run in circles. The mist is gray. I spent a year trying to get those kids to tell me their stories, to dream big, to tell me where they wanted their highway to lead.

They didn't understand the question.

Ten months I taught them and they never understood the question.

It has taken me a year to even be able to look back on those months in the coalfields. My anxiety level ratchets up several notches and my mind tries to change the subject, tries to find something else to dwell on before I have to remember each specific face, so adult, so tired and old, so tragic on a seven-year-old. How I hated that look in their eyes. How I hated that year, trying to teach my kids something that can't be taught. Hope and dreaming and a little bit of peace. How to be a damn kid for a minute.

Some days – every day – I wish I could have another shot. Do better by those children. But this time last year, I couldn't force myself to stay. I put in my resignation and the nightmares stopped. I put a For Sale sign in the swampy yard of the house with messed-up plumbing and locked windows. I jumped on the highway at the first opportunity, drove up and up until the mist turned gold.

Left those kids behind.

Sasha's Voice

2011-04-25T07:50:00.004-04:00

The novel I'm working on now is written partially in verse. More specifically, in incorrect verse. Sasha takes poetry forms and bends them just enough to fit what she needs to say.

HUSH
Here in the darkness,
crickets call and night birds sing.
I know to keep still.

DEAR MR. STONE
If you really tried,
you could be a little more
totally clueless.

TODAY
Window panes rattled
with anger and thunder, till
the sun went away.

JUNIOR'S VISIT
“Sasha, why don't you
talk no more?” he wants to know.
Wish I could tell him.

I don't know much about writing poetry, and neither does Sasha, but I'm having fun learning along with her!

Moving Day

2011-04-12T07:33:00.005-04:00

The prompt (from Writer's Toolkit):
Write about something you did that you didn't want to do.

My response:
I love moving day, and I hate it.

I mean, I know, right? Everybody hates moving day. Everybody hates filling out change of address forms and saying goodbye to the good neighbors. Everybody hates boxing up the big things.

But the little things are worse. The things that are lost until the big things are gone. All these things end up in a box that is impossible to label:

This box contains a half-empty shampoo bottle, five socks with no mates, a plastic horse with a broken leg, four playing cards, and seventeen filthy pennies.

I've moved. I've moved again. Some years it seemed like there was nothing but the moving.

So I know all about the pennies in the carpet after the boxes are gone. I know about things that are impossible to label.

My mother woke us early every moving day, but she didn't have to. We were up. We were going over and over it in our heads: What's going to be next? Will this one have a nice kid next door? Will this one be furnished? Will there finally be a sofa? Which stray cat will find us this time? How will we bear to leave him when it's time to move on?

Then the sun rises, and mom comes in, and we spend the next hour piling a truck's worth of belongings into the car. Deciding what to leave. What to take.

Saying goodbye to this neighborhood's stray cat.

We never think there will be tears. We're six, eight, and ten. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen. Seven, nine, eleven. This never was our cat.

Still, there are tears.

It takes a mile for our eyes to dry, but then we get to the fun part. Moving day is about packing and it is about unpacking, but my favorite is the part in between. The reprieve. The drive, which may be long or short, which may be fast or slow, but which is inevitably full of promise.

The hope is always the same: This place will be different. This place will be perfect. We will have our own bedrooms. We will each have a best friend. We will unpack and unpack and there will still be space. We will finally open the door, bring the cat inside, because this time, we will stay. The cat will be permanent and we will be permanent.

We giggle, on that drive. We make jokes. Even Dad, creased with tension over roads and rent and security deposits, will smile.

I love the drive.

I love the drive so much, I hate arriving.

Arriving to basement apartments with no windows, rooms too small to fill with dancing. Kids who won't be as nice as we hoped. Another stray cat we will love and lose.

Two quick giggles.

2011-02-04T16:31:00.004-05:00

1. "Customers who visited this page ultimately ended up buying ..."

2. "In Gorillas. Edit categories."

Oh. THAT'S what I look like to other people.

2011-01-07T08:34:00.003-05:00

Because my computer isn't working -- and neither is my car -- I've gotten into the habit of waiting for the bus at the local university library, where I can use a computer to work on my writing stuff. I only live a few blocks from the university, so it works out pretty well.

Today, just as I was leaving my apartment, I thought of a perfect conversation for two of my characters to have. My hands were full, and it was snowing, so I didn't stop to write it down. I just repeated it to myself over and over so I wouldn't forget it before I got to the library.

Let me back up. Walking across town, I was carrying:

-a shoulder bag with writing stuff in it -- pages with my editor's handwriting in the margins, pens that rarely get used but often get lost, notes to self on the back of McDonald's receipts -- and random stuff I need for the day, like a hairbrush and Tylenol and half of yesterday's lunch because I forgot to clean out my shoulder bag.

-Another shoulder bag full of school stuff -- data sheets, random sight word cards, a plastic rhinoceros that I think might have come out of a borrowed testing kit that I've already given back, and pre-test materials for a germ unit (which is annoyingly well-timed, since I'm fighting a head cold).

-a plastic bag with my breakfast and lunch in it (today's).

I was bundled up because it's not a long walk from home to campus, but it's a windy one, and I had these bags draped over me like Christmas tree tinsel. I was taking huge gulp of hot coffee every two or three steps, because, did I mention it's windy and also very cold?

And I was talking to myself. Animatedly. With dialogue. Using at least two different people's names. Saying the same thing over and over.

I don't know why people think writers are eccentric. This all makes perfect sense to me.

This time last year ...

2010-12-29T00:06:00.003-05:00

I lived in a rural county and there was a blizzard on. Most of my days were spent in the office with the orange walls and blue gauzy curtains. The view out the window was of the preacher's house, giant metal star above the door, trampoline laden with snow in the back yard. No children ever played there. Stray dogs crisscrossed the highway over and over until they were killed. My fingers stayed on the keyboard, but my mind refused to go someplace else. I was stuck there, frozen like the neighbor's purple asters.

Sometimes I feel like I will never completely leave that room.

But I have.

Blizzard of 09

2010-11-25T10:10:00.002-05:00

Blizzard of 09

bony dog chained by the tracks
ached for comfort
we threw her a bone
behind us in the window
the christmas tree twinkled
rickety and frail
one bulb blew and the whole thing went dark
off in the distance the train moved slow
whistles and lights before anything else
fading in through a blizzard
pushing snow off the tracks
I broke the ice on the trash pile
to search an empty box
for a spare christmas bulb
I knew wasn't there.
I didn't have a whistle
and I didn't have a light
I was uncoupled cars and impenetrable drifts
frozen to metal
trying to gain traction

NaNo Check-In

2010-11-20T21:42:00.006-05:00

Tell me how I'm supposed to get any writing done?

I'm 33,000 words into my NaNoWriMo novel, and because I started it eight days early, I'm supposed to finish it by tomorrow.

It's okay that I'm not going to make it. My definition of a successful NaNo has changed over the years. I now consider the month a success if I manage to NOT change plots 17 times, and if I end up with something I'm actually going to use. This unfinished 33,000-word novel? I am smitten! This, I'll use. Most of it, anyway -- I might cut the part where I went off on an accidental rant about corn.

So how is November treating you?

Revision Checlist

2010-09-29T06:05:00.011-04:00

1. I spelled "revision checklist" wrong. First item on the revision checklist: Revise the spelling of revision checklist.

2. You know how sometimes if you're at the lake, you can watch a storm come across the water, and you can literally see the line on the water where the rain starts, and that line is moving closer to you? Well, I just described that in my book. I said it was like "a deadline moving closer." Whoops, the author is showing.

3. Question. Can my Pagan character feel rapturous?

4. Let's go with euphoric.

5. You know, my editor has a very fair point. If my main character had really written this paragraph on the wall of a bathroom stall, she'd have run out of space in the ladies' room and had to duck across the hall to the men's room. Maybe I should buy her some paper. I'm the author, I can give the kid paper. Be mean not to.

6. Yeah, she's not getting paper. She's just writing something shorter.

7. My editor's penciled note: "No one got hungry?" has me stumped. I've been over and over and over this chapter and I just can't find a way to feed these people. Can this be one of those places where teachers have their students write a missing scene later? "Now, class, you'll notice that the characters didn't eat in this chapter. The author probably did that on purpose to give you a chance to write a missing scene about how the characters find food ..."

8. I, on the other hand, am having no trouble finding food, and eating lots of it, from revision stress.

9. I don't understand. How can my editor write "great" at the end of a paragraph that's more pencil marks than original text?

10. I've been sitting at McDonald's, which was the only place I could find open to sit and work on revisions after dropping my husband off at work at 4 a.m. But now my computer's almost dead and the only outlet here is at an uncomfortable-looking table near the counter, which is like sitting next to the teacher's desk. It's later now. I'm going to go find something else that's open. Something with better coffee and less beeping.

11. If I revise my own setting, does that count as revision progress?

First Few Pages

2010-09-20T05:42:00.004-04:00

I drove Jake to work at 4 a.m. Could have gone home after, but the air was sharp with autumn, and out in the world, there was internet and coffee.

I've got everything I need: a coffee, a laptop, revision notes.

Not doing much, except dreaming.

Revisions. That's what Jake and I have made to our lives. I mean, it sounds cheesy. Obvious, and a little painful, that a writer would draw parallels from revision notes to life. But it's almost six and the number of cups of coffee I've had has now outpaced the number of hours of sleep I got. So it makes sense to me at the moment.

Six years ago, when Jake and I started our life together, there was no wise editor to pencil notes in the margins. Of course we had parents and siblings and friends, but they each had separate chapters. Nobody could step back and look at the plot arc, make sense of the characters and warn us of the plot holes.

Six years ago, just as fall began, we stood on a balcony in our small city and looked down on leaves and people.

But this morning feels more like five years ago, the end of our first year together. Already we'd survived two moves, two kittens, one broken-down truck and the public bus system. But now it was autumn again and we lived in a trailer on a hill. The nearest bus stop was a mile away, but a mile and a half if you walked the long way, the graveyard way, which wasn't as scary as the other way. Better silent gravestones than shadows not quite silent enough, following us through the darkness of the bad neighborhood down by the interstate. Better we walk an extra half mile and make it to our destination.

Jake worked at a pretzel place then. And the fall was long, but the winter was longer. We walked the cemetery way in the pitch-black, frosty mornings, me accompanying him because he didn't like me staying in our trailer alone, and I didn't like him walking by himself.

We were punchy, giggly, a little nuts with cold and tired. He had bronchitis and I had a foul mouth and we stood by the road waiting for the bus to top the hill, hoping the driver could see us in the dark. Christmas lights and balloon Santas decorated the path to work. All morning, he made breakfast for people while his stomach growled, while I sat in the aisle eating the free pretzels he snuck me and scraping up change for coffee, writing on the backs of already-filled pages and hoping this writing thing would take us places someday.

Pages turned a little quicker once spring came. And chapter after chapter went by.

The changes came slowly. Something added here. Deleted there. A few changes of a character's name, a few shifts in setting, a few unexpected plot twists. The notes in the margins weren't the guide for the change, but the record of it. A scribbled year on the back of a photo, a crumpled notebook page scattered with pencil marks and pretzel salt. And the taste of autumn air that can always take me back to the opening paragraph.

I've got to admit, this is a convoluted tale. The plot arc doesn't make much sense and the character motivations haven't always been believable. But I love the suspense, and a lot of the prose. And sometimes, on fall mornings, I like to re-read Chapter One.

Launch Party Recap

2010-08-29T17:05:00.006-04:00

"Emmett, I'm filming you!" my husband sing-songed, joking around with our four-year-old nephew.

"No you're not!" Emmett giggled ... before promptly flipping backward over the arm of his chair and crashing to the floor.

This was only one of the many exciting events that took place during the LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE launch party!

Taylor Books in Charleston, WV, is a wonderful, cozy bookstore. Yesterday, it was packed with people ready to celebrate the release of my new novel. I was touched by how many people came. High school friends. Writing group members. Family, of course. But the coolest thing was when strangers walked up, wanting to talk about, and buy, and read, the book I wrote!

In addition to reading a chapter of LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE and signing the books that were purchased, I also collected books for Hanover Public Library in southern West Virginia. They lost much of their children's section in a flood in June. It was wonderful to see people buying cherished children's books for kids I used to teach. I hope to collect many more books for this library, and I'm really grateful to everyone who already donated.

Oh, and don't worry. After his fall, Emmett bounced back up, ready to take on the world. His plan?

"When I'm a grown-up guy, I'm gonna be a 'offer' like you! I'm going to write a scary story about scary pirates! It'll be scary!"

I can't wait until THAT launch party!

It's launch day.

2010-08-17T23:59:00.002-04:00

LIVVIE is out there now. :)

LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE Book Trailer

2010-08-01T23:59:00.002-04:00

It's August! That means LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE will be released THIS MONTH!

In honor of August, I have immersed myself in Windows Movie Maker for the weekend and created a book trailer. What fun! I'm going to be setting all the family photos to music now using this program! It's my new favorite hobby and procrastination method!

Anyway, here it is -- the brand new Livvie Owen Lived Here book trailer:

LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE

Enjoy!

August, and with it, temptation

2010-08-01T16:45:00.004-04:00

It's that time again. August has rolled around and teachers everywhere are getting back into their classrooms after the floor-polishing and wall-painting and building maintenance that takes place in July.

The posts are already starting to pop up on Facebook:

Got into my classroom today.

And

Starting on bulletin boards, ugh.

And

Anybody know of any good math centers? I'm setting up this week.

Three years in a row, I have quit teaching in June. Two of those years, it only lasted till August. When those "Got-into-my-classroom" posts started cropping up on Facebook, I started opening a new tab. Cruising the local district employment websites. Placing a bid just to see if I'd get it.

Always do.

I'm determined this year not to return to public schooling. Last year, I was off my game. Tired. Negative. I did my best by those kids, but my best wasn't as good last year as it was in school years past. I did not leave with a sense of having done well, of having made lasting changes. I left with the sense that we had, all of us, just barely kept our heads above water.

Bad metaphor, actually, given that the town flooded not two weeks after I left it.

I will teach this year, just not in a public school. I will work with children, but I will not have a classroom. This is both good and bad. It's good because I can focus on the needs of each individual child in the program that's offered me work come fall. It's also good because I won't be staying in public education long enough to completely lose my faith in it. But it's bad because ... because ...

Man, I really like having a classroom.

I'm happy with my choices. This is a good move, mental-health-wise. It's a good move, career-wise. It's a good move, interest-wise. So I'll stay strong as my Facebook friends dangle lesson plans and teacher's desks and literacy centers in front of me. I will pour my creative energy into writing instead of materials creation. I will block the district websites from my computer.

But if anybody needs a bulletin board created? I'm your girl.

My odd computer-geek analogy for home

2010-07-24T11:00:00.003-04:00

It's kind of like a computer game. The menu screen of the computer game. I have this image in my head of a map, and it's full of areas of the game you can visit, but only certain ones can be active at a time. Some of the places on the map are dormant, and when you mouse over them, they don't light up. You can see them, faintly, just the image, just the outline. But you cannot open them and go inside.

I'm back in a town I first lived in a decade ago. I lived here for six years and left for four, and now here I am again, driving familiar streets, shopping familiar stores. It is startling how little changes when you leave a place for a while. How easy it is to slip back into the routine of living there.

On my way to Kroger, I pass the building that once housed the offices of the job I held at the time. Below that building, in the alley out back, is the first gay bar I ever entered, out and proud, and scared to death, at the age of 20. I remember my sister taking me there for my 21st birthday. I remember watching her dance months later with a boy who would break her heart.

I remember dancing there myself with a girl I barely knew, a girl who is now a man named Jakob, my husband. I mean, who could have predicted that, on a dance floor seven years ago? Who could possibly see where the map would lead and which sections I had yet to unlock?

Kroger has great produce, but their freezer section is lacking. Which means I turn around and head for Wal-Mart. And on the way to Wal-Mart, I pass a bus station that used to make me cry. I pass a balcony I used to stand on at sunset, looking toward the horizon, thinking about the future. I pass a college I used to attend, a house, an apartment, a trailer I used to live in. All of these so vivid, so familiar. But I can only see the outline now. I can't click. Although the memories are so vivid I can taste the oatmeal cookies I used to bake and smell the laundry detergent I used to use, these sections of my life aren't active anymore. They don't light up when I mouse over them.

Just past Wal-Mart is a little yellow house. It isn't mine, but I've got high hopes for it. I can't help but look at it and wonder whether it's on the map. Whether the outline is there, waiting to become active so I can click on it, so I can enter. I can't help but hope for oatmeal cookies in that place, for the homey smell of laundry detergent and a headful of memories I've yet to know.

Once, I walked past a kid in a dance club and half-turned, thought, I'm going to know that person someday. And once, ten years ago, I walked around this city fresh, without knowing a single face, a single building.

It's funny how many times you can walk past your home and not know it.

Want a copy of LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE?

2010-07-10T11:43:00.003-04:00

Heather Kelly and P.J. Hoover are both offering LIVVIE as a contest prize!

Also, I'm sorry for not blogging lately. I've been busy:

My sister's tribute to Robert C. Byrd

2010-06-28T21:19:00.004-04:00

I don't often post just for the sake of sharing a link. In fact, the only time I ever do this is to share something one of my sisters wrote.

From Jennifer's blog, a farewell to the senior senator from our home state of WV, Robert C. Byrd:

http://jenjlynch.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/goodbye-senator/

Beautiful.

Three little stairsteps

2010-06-22T12:02:00.008-04:00

It's a bright Tuesday morning, post-rainstorm, in Huntington. Cat's in the window like she's never seen a guy with a shopping cart before, even though the same guy makes his way down our alley every day at about this time.

I haven't found my own routine here yet. Yesterday when the shopping cart rolled by, I was playing with the dogs in the kitchen. The day before, fixing lunch. The day before that, breakfast. Today I'm still working on my coffee and writing, listening to music and waiting for the mail truck to bring me work to do.

What I'm doing most of this morning, though, is I'm missing my sisters. I mean, I always miss my sisters. But today it's at the forefront, heavy in the room. One's 45 minutes away. That's all. Just 45 minutes. But my car won't start and she doesn't have gas money. We post on each other's Facebook wall. We call, once in a while, when there are minutes on our phones.

The other is in Philly. Not sure how far that is, but it feels immeasurable. Haven't seen her in a year and a half now.

We used to hate it when people called us "three little stairsteps." Three little blond girls spaced almost evenly, two years apart. Jennifer, Heather, me. Except eventually Heather and I had to switch places because I grew taller than her. Became the middle step even though I'm the youngest. You could see us around town almost daily, when we lived up that way. Sitting on the stone wall outside the laundromat, outside the courthouse, outside the movie theater, scribbling with our blue pens in our college-ruled notebooks. We were quiet kids in jeans and canvas sneakers and these odds and ends of T-shirts that came from big black trash bags people inevitably handed our parents. Shirts that thought they were clever. "Pobody's Nerfect" and "Never trust a smiling cat." We wrote till we got bored, got free candy from the theater, held contests to see who could suck on a fireball the longest, bought ten-cent cups of ice from U-Save to cool our tongues. Then started writing again, in tandem.

I don't think it ever occurred to me that someday we might live in separate cities, with separate stone walls to sit on.

Heather's got a guy and six cats in an apartment in the city, and Jennifer has a husband and three beautiful children. I'm engaged to be married and I've got this great new place. We have good lives, the three of us. Three separate, beautiful worlds.

But I don't know what kinds of shirts my sisters are wearing today or what color ink they use. And this kind of morning feels familiar, feels old. A little cooler than usual, post-rain. I'm wanting to sit elbow-to-elbow on the wall outside the courthouse in our little small town, tap our heels against the stone, suck on fireballs and write about our futures.

Miss you, Dooley girls. One lone step doesn't lead anywhere.

Recede

2010-06-16T14:04:00.005-04:00

I snuck in between floods.

A couple months after one. You could still smell the mud. Still had to dodge the crumbling edges of highways.

They banded together, those people, in that flood. Cleaned up their school together. Cleaned up their roads together. I slid in late, and, having done nothing to help, became a spectator, pretending to understand the words and looks that communicated whole paragraphs between the people who were there to see it.

I never fit in that school, that county. Never particularly wanted to. I was nervous, anxious, the whole time I stayed. Trying not to say the wrong thing. Trying not to do the wrong thing. No one was unfriendly, but I didn't make friends. Didn't know how to relax into the rhythm of a place that felt so desperate, so distant. I was homesick for any other county, any other school.

My kids were all right. They bounced back. Just, every once in a while, one of them would stop typing or reading or coloring and look up at the ceiling.

"The water came up real fast that day."

Or

"We was out playin' and Mommy hollered for me to get in, it was floodin'."

Or

"This computer won't work. Did it get flooded?" and "My marker's out of ink. Did it get flooded?" and "This rug smells yuck. It musta got flooded."

Sounding every bit like some little old man embellishing the tale for his grandkids. So matter-of-fact. Uphill both ways in those kids' days. They were six and seven and eight years old and they knew more about mud and water and shifting foundations than I ever hope to know.

I loved them, but I couldn't wait to leave. Consumed by the selfish, by the desperate. Eaten up by anxiety and guilt, not about the flood, not about anything in particular -- just the way the gray sky and gritty air down there will make you desperate. I wondered how any of the older kids managed it, the desperation, the will to leave. You could see it on some of their faces as early as fourth grade, fifth grade.

But -- not on as many faces as you'd think. So content, some of those faces. So unaware that the sky could be any color but gray. Or maybe they just saw blue in places I didn't.

Maybe I was seeing gray in places nobody else did. That's part of why I loved those kids, and why I never understood them -- they could see home, shining bright, beneath the tiniest sliver of blue sky, while I couldn't spot home anywhere, even in bright sunlight.

I got out, finally, feeling scarred and still desperate. Glancing over my shoulder, shivering, trying to shake off the grit and the gray. Still not seeing blue. Still not all the way gone.

Then Saturday dawned lovely, if rainy -- a soft, gentle gray I hadn't seen in a while. My best friend took me wedding dress shopping and we put the perfect gown on layaway. Had lunch out. Tried on shoes. I felt good. Distant. Like I'd finally escaped.

That very moment, back down in that county, the creeks were escaping their banks again, claiming gardens and bridges and basements and churches. Sneaking into hallways and whispering down alleys.

Now I'm back in this odd state of being half-gone. In my head I keep seeing hopeful gazes, hearing matter-of-fact little voices. Want to gather them up and rebuild their basements, help them structure their hopes around something dry and solid.

But I'm gone.

And life there continues without me, like it did before me: wet and gray, oddly hopeful in the face of things I've never seen.

Starting to wake up

2010-06-15T14:52:00.003-04:00

I don't post much anymore. Not so much because I don't have anything to say. But because of three things:

1. I have too much to say and I'm too lazy to narrow it down.
2. My dear, sweet old painters-taped laptop has gone to a better place. I've been getting to know my new machine, which sports no tape and not much personality yet.
3. I'm getting married in July. Apparently weddings do not plan themselves.

But those are excuses. The real reason is that I'm tired. Tired from school. Tired from moving. Tired from being tired.

Tired multiplies. If you wake up feeling tired, you're going to feel tired all day. Then you're too tired to sleep. And that causes you to wake up tired the next day. Tired eats up entire hours of your writing time. Deletes passages from your brain before you have the chance to type them.

I've let myself be tired for too long. I'm firing up the coffee pot. Buckling down at this new machine. Remembering why I moved here in the first place.

It ain't to nap. I'll say that, at least. Nap time's over. See you soon.

Call the factory! Brilliant!

2010-05-28T11:38:00.001-04:00

Okay, this is maybe my favorite kid quote ever, and it just happened half an hour ago.

"Miss Dooley? M - O - N - D - A - Y should says 'Mawn-day.' It's s'posed to be M - U - N - D - A - Y, Munday. Call the factory and tell them they made a mistake!"

Quotes speak for themselves.

2010-05-20T12:06:00.004-04:00

Here are a few of the best student quotes that have stuck with me over my four years as a special education teacher:

~*~

"Will you tie my shoe up? It tied down."

~*~

"I wish I had me a pet monkey. The big kind. I wish I had me a pet ... a pet bamboo."

~*~

(Writing on the board) "I hate ... how do you spell Miss Dooley?"

~*~

STUDENT: "I likes dogs. Dogs is good. I likes dogs."
ME: "I like dogs, too, but I like cats best."
STUDENT: (rolling eyes) "Okay, Miss Dooley. You likes cats. I likes dogs eating cats."

~*~

(At the start of geography class) "Look, we can live without them maps, okay?"

~*~

(Upon my return from bus driver training -- the WRITTEN course, not the driving course) "Oh, Miss Dooley! You're back!" (Hugs me) "I was SO worried about you! I did NOT think you were going to make it!"

~*~

"Move moon that-way please!"

~*~

(As I was eating a carrot) "Miss Dooley? Why does old people like carrots?"

~*~

"My grandfather gots penguins on his pond. Or, not penguins. What are those white things?"

~*~

"I saw them squans on my grandfather's pond!"

~*~

ME: (pointing to a picture of a dog in a magazine) "Is that the kind of dog that bit you?"
STUDENT: (looking at me like I am very stupid) "Well, now, he was a hair bigger."

~*~

And, possibly my favorite kid quote ever:

STUDENT: "Is 'dang' a school word?"
ME: "No, honey, we should probably avoid using that word here."
STUDENT: (long, tired sigh) "I wish this was a school where we could say 'dang'!"

The Pledge of Allegiance

2010-05-05T14:43:00.001-04:00

(as recited by one of my second-graders)

"I pedge allegiance to the flag
of the United Stakes of Amer'ca
And to the republic
of which it sands
one nation
ubber God
invisisible
with libbery
and justice
for all."

Rainy spring days in the classroom

2010-04-21T09:36:00.005-04:00

"June and July is brothers, ain't they? I was layin' awake thinking about that last night."

I'm leaving public school teaching. For real, this time. But I'll never stop working with kids completely, and this is why. Nobody but a third-grader would think of something like that -- and not only think of it, but lie awake at night going over it in his head.

What I love just as much is how his classmate understood completely:

"Yep, 'cause they got J's. And April and August is sisters."

"That's right. But February ain't got any brothers and sisters. It's all alone."

"Nah, it's lucky."

Every spring, sometime shortly after I've decided to leave public school teaching (and this is the third spring I've made that decision), I have a rainy morning full of IEP preparations and paperwork and hoops to jump through -- mornings like today, and like the one I blogged about last year -- and on each of those mornings, the kids manage to say something that make the paperwork and the stress and the craziness stop, just for a second. And I remember why I'm here and why I love them. And also why I'm leaving.

What job will let me work with the kids instead of ignoring them for paperwork? Does that job exist? If so, I want it.

Montcoal Mine Explosion

2010-04-07T09:21:00.003-04:00

Two days out from the deadly mine explosion in Montcoal, and here in West Virginia you can still feel it in the air. I don't mean the explosion itself. West Virginia coal towns are thick with a layer of grit and coal dust anyway, but the air here is heavy with more than just the filth of the way our state makes its living.

I keep wanting to write "sadness," that the air is heavy with sadness. But sadness would be appropriate. Sadness would keep family members in their beds -- but sons and daughters and brothers and sisters, they don't have the luxury of sadness. Late last night, three generations of West Virginians got out of bed and trudged off to work just the same as they do every evening, heavy boots clanking down into coal dust, disappearing into the earth.

The children of West Virginia grow up like any other children, planning to be doctors or marine biologists or storm chasers or circus clowns. Then they reach twenty and there is no money and a lot of times, there is a baby on the way. And the flyers go up on all the twisting, knotted back roads: JOB FAIR. The letters look so bright. The pay, the benefits, they look so bright.

And the boys and girls of West Virginia spend the next thirty years under the earth. Or they spend forever there. Whichever comes first.

I wasn't going to write about the mine explosion. I wasn't going to write about the huddle of nineteen-year-old mountain girls with fiery attitudes flaring, then dimming as they huddled next to the fire trucks waiting for word. I wasn't going to write about the quiet boys with their backward caps, good ol' boys who days ago nothing could touch, today so serious, so serious, more serious than we've ever seen them because we raised them to be joyous and full of hope.

Kids that age aren't supposed to be quiet. Not here in the mountains where there isn't much to live on except your own voice and your will to be happy.

Sadness is too clean a word for the coalfields today. The mountain air is heavy with hopelessness. Our children will get out of bed tonight and go back underground and grow up and grow quiet. And we as a state, we just don't know how to stop them. What to teach them instead of what we've taught them.

We do know, this -- and here's another thing that's floating on the air, thick enough to touch. We know there has to be a better way than this.

Perspective

2010-03-31T08:01:00.005-04:00

I spent much of yesterday leaning over the shoulders of my third-graders, trying to telepathically remind them that sentences need capital letters at the beginning and periods at the end. They didn't notice me, though. They were too deeply ensconced in the state-mandated writing assessment, which requires students to read a brief prompt and then respond with their own perspective in five correctly-spelled, appropriately-punctuated paragraphs.

The test was miserable. It was two and a half hours of nervous mumbling and restless shifting and hovering teachers trying to prevent computer glitches. I'll say this for my little troopers: they hung in. For two and a half long, grueling hours, they scribbled, erased, typed, backspaced, searched for commas, searched their souls, and filled up computer screens. I am ashamed to say I wasn't sure they had it in them.

Their teacher, on the other hand, had to pee. Which made two and a half hours seem like five.

Eventually, my little group completed their tests and I was permitted to release them onto the playground, where fingers that only moments ago were "about to fall off" became recharged with spring air and gripped swing chains. Birds sang and pebbles flew from under scuffing sneakers. The kids were once again permitted to be kids. For fifteen minutes, anyway.

And their teacher was permitted to run to the bathroom.

Afterward, I picked up one of my younger, as-yet-un-writing-assessed children and got him ready for inclusion. One of my inclusion periods is a P.E. class in which I provide behavior support, which means I get to watch nineteen first-graders circle the gym at high speeds and bounce basketballs off each other's heads. I'm not exactly sure some days whose behavior I'm supposed to be supporting, but we've all come through it alive and well so far.

Because of make-up picture day in the gym, though, today we were supposed to be going to the art classroom instead. I had my charge next to me and the other eighteen P.E. students behind him in a line. We made it halfway to the art room when their regular ed teacher popped out of her classroom and announced, "The gym's free. They're supposed to be going there now."

"Oh. Okay." So I turned the line around and walked them back up the hall to the gym (which is, of course, at the furthest point possible from the art room). Sneakers squeaked on linoleum and little voices whispered. My own charge walked next to me because he so doesn't do lines.

But there was no gym teacher in the gym.

So I turned the nineteen restless children around and headed them back down the hall. This time, there was a lot more whispering and muttering -- bad, since a few students from another group were still finishing up the writing assessment. I worked on getting the children quiet without raising my own voice -- quite a feat, to telepathically tell nineteen children to quiet down, but it seemed to work -- and took them back toward the art room.

Halfway there, their regular ed teacher met us in the hall again. "The gym teacher's on her way."

Oh. So back up the hallway we went toward the gym. The whispers grew like wind in the trees. My telepathy failed me and I had to clear my throat several times, but we managed to stay quiet, and my own little charge handled this string of changed plans quite well. He was still calm and seemed to think the whole thing was rather funny.

The gym teacher met us in the gym and announced, "I'm so glad everyone's finished testing!"

Uh ...

I broke the news to her, gently, that there were still a few students testing, and she informed me that we weren't supposed to be in the gym if there was testing going on in the building because we make too much noise. So we lined them all back up and we walked them back down the hallway toward the art room. By this time, half the class period was over.

The gym teacher walked at the beginning of the line and I brought up the rear with my little charge. Just as we at the caboose passed the computer lab, the exhausted computer teacher burst into the hallway and announced:

"DONE! Thank God!"

Oh, Lord Jesus.

I signaled the gym teacher and we stopped our line, turned them around again, and marched them back to the gym. The gym teacher permitted them to skip their exercises and just play a well-earned game of duck-duck-goose, since they'd already gotten their workout marching up and down the hallway.

Ten short minutes later, gym class ended and I returned the first-graders to their teacher. My little charge and I retreated to our classroom.

"That was a fun gym class," he said, kicking off his gym sneakers and pulling on his street shoes. "I liked that gym class."

I gave him a smile and sat him down with a phonics box, more than a little tired. At least he enjoyed the confusion! I guess it's a matter of perspective.

My little positive-thinker worked on the phonics box silently for a while, matching plastic objects to the pictures they rhyme with. Then I heard a small, worried giggle, and I approached him.

"Everything going all right?"

He held up a plastic plum and a plastic pear. "What rhymes with mango?"

I don't think I even knew what a mango was till I was twenty, but here this child thought both the plum and the pear were mangoes. Worn out as I was, this struck me as beautiful.

I nudged the plastic ants off of the card with the picture of two people dancing. "Tango," I told him. "Tango rhymes with mango." Because we can work on fruit tomorrow. Today, I'm going to try to see things the way he does.

This is my new shirt!

2010-03-24T11:41:00.003-04:00

Question. Why would you put a snow-white, long-sleeved, brand-spanking-new shirt on your second-grader with autism and then send him into the den of ketchup, chalk crayons, and nose blood that is a special education classroom in springtime?

I have been following this child around all morning with a Shout wipe. Because, here's the thing about second-graders (with or without autism):

1. They are natural magnets for ketchup, markers, mustard, chalk crayons, and the grubby little hands of their classmates.

2. Their noses sometimes bleed during allergy season.

3. They can't stand to have spots on their clothing.

"This is my new shirt." That's the mantra of the day.

"Sweetie," I tell him, "Don't rub at it. Let me get the Shout wipes."

"This is -- this is my new shirt." Followed by a nervous giggle. Which tends to be followed by a mega-meltdown.

Quickly, I drop the third-grade spelling list and swoop in with the Shout wipe. Disaster is averted. For the moment.

I turn back to the third-graders and resume their spelling test. "Setting. The setting of my story is in rural West Virginia in the present day. Setting."

Just as my third-graders, without exception, write S-I-T-T-I-N-G on their papers, I hear a very nervous giggle behind me. I turn to find my second-grader surrounded by markers with no lids. He is a rainbow in shades of green -- lime, forest, kelly. He looks perhaps like he was pleased with himself for a moment. But then it sinks in and the giggle pops out.

"This is -- this is my new shirt."

I am out of Shout wipes. We teeter on the brink of crisis.

"This is my new shirt, too," I lie, tugging at my own worn old green school shirt. "See? We match."

The giggle fades. A true smile blooms.

"We match. We must be best buddies."

Crisis averted. At least until his parents see what's become of his brand-new shirt!

To Orange Cat

2010-03-21T12:25:00.003-04:00

TO ORANGE CAT

Winter held

... and held and held ...

and I was stuck in a snowdrift,
couldn't cut a path
out to find you.

This is wrong.
I was not given the gift of poetry.

I was granted prose instead --
rambling long --
thinking in complete sentences
with punctuation.

But sometimes wrong is all there is.
That winter
didn't end ...
... and didn't end ...
... and didn't end ...

so where would the period go?

No, this has to be a poem
Phrases shattered out of sentences
and scattered across endless snow

White and white and white and white

And one little dollop of orange.

With the spring thaw
came healing
for everyone but you --

found shattered and scattered
on the very first day of spring.

I wish there was no period
at the end of your sentence.

-- To Henry-Cat, who went on his way March 21, 2008

Is it Friday yet?

2010-03-19T14:46:00.003-04:00

I just got hit in the head with the teacher's lounge door.

And I mean, I got hit with some considerable force! The teacher coming out of the lounge was on the run, having dashed to the restroom between classes. She was hurrying back to meet her class of twenty first-graders, and I was walking with a hand on my little repeat-offender runaway's shoulder to make sure I didn't lose him, when I spotted one of my other students hiding behind a door down a hallway.

I knew he was supposed to be with the speech therapist, who was standing nearby, seemingly looking for him. Because this child is also a repeat-offender runaway (I have three runners this year), I knew I needed to check with the speech therapist and make sure she knew where he had gone.

Let me paint the picture for you. Second-grader darts full-speed down one hallway. First-grader hides behind a door down a different hallway. Special education teacher, in heels and a skirt, charges full-speed after the second-grader while looking over her shoulder to check on the first-grader. First-grade teacher bursts from the teacher's lounge at top speed. Speech therapist shouts a belated warning.

Door collides with special education teacher. Door wins. Teacher nearly falls.

Second-grader stops running and first-grader comes out of hiding -- they are laughing too hard to continue plotting escape.

My ears have been ringing ever since. Or maybe they were already. So far today, I've broken up two fights and three screaming arguments, taken the same child to the office twice, been shouted at by an irate parent, kept two kids in at recess to finish a test (which is totally against my religion, so you know I had to be desperate) -- and then watched a third-grader LITERALLY EAT the test paper he'd just stayed inside twenty minutes to complete.

And then I ran into a door.

So let me ask again: Is it Friday? Because I barely know where I am at this point, let alone what day it is! Please tell me it's Friday!

It is? Pshew!

Uh oh, I pshewed too early. Here comes my next group. Too bad that door didn't knock me out!

A little trouble and a lot of fun

2010-03-16T10:20:00.006-04:00

This summer, my partner and I are moving back to the town where I went to college. He's going back to school to study culinary arts -- YUM!

Yesterday was the application deadline for the summer term at this college. Said college is two and a half hours away from our house, so you would think he could just mail in his application.

But. There is an application fee. And we didn't have the money till Saturday.

I had a doctor's appointment anyway, so I took a day off work yesterday and we planned on heading out of town early in the morning to get everything done.

We slid into the car at five and turned the key in the ignition.

Nothing but crickets.

Okay, so we knew this day was coming. For weeks, the car has been refusing to start at random moments, then roaring to life minutes later as if nothing ever happened. You'd think we would have taken the car to the garage at that point to find out what was wrong.

But garages have never been kind to Dooley-Lilly cars. We take our cars to the garage and the mechanic humanely euthanizes them. Our cars do not get clean bills of health. They get the kiss of death. Garages are where Dooley-Lilly cars go to die.

So we tend to procrastinate about seeing a mechanic. Just a little. And if the car was willing to pretend that nothing ever happened, well, then, so were we.

Then last week, the car shut off while Jake was doing 50 on the twisted back roads of our county. Thank goodness there were no speeding coal trucks on his tail. But by then, we were broke and waiting on payday -- no money to take the car to the garage and find out whether or not it would live.

Saturday, there was high water all around us. The creeks and rivers in our county were on the verge of bursting their banks. All over the state, reports came in of floods, of closed roadways and wet basements and flood shelters in churches and fire stations. Facebook was nothing but a constant stream of photos from various corners of the state: "High water in Charleston." "The Greenbrier is up." "Check out my wet basement." "This used to be a trailer park."

We, being us, decided to make a quick run out to see the creek at its highest point. Because we're stupid like that. We also decided to take the dogs, just in case we couldn't get back. We made it just a few miles out of town and realized that more rainclouds had blown in and that if it started raining, the creek that was lying next to the road, touching the bridge and sending small waves across the yellow line, was going to flood the road completely and block our path home.

The first few drops of rain fell just as the car died.

Screeching, laughing, scaring the dogs, we wrestled the car to its senses and zipped home before it could shut off again. We made it just as the storm came.

So we were pretty sure we needed to see a mechanic, and we planned on stopping by the garage on our way out of town early, early, early Monday morning. Which we would have done, had the car started. But it was no longer willing to pretend.

No big deal, we said. We'll call a tow truck, ride with it to the garage, get this handled. We can still get Jake applied to school. We can still make it out of town.

Town. Ah, our little town. There's only one tow guy listed, and apparently, he sleeps late. It all came down to Joe the Tow Guy, who apparently was having a bit of a lie-in Monday morning. He Would. Not. Answer. His. Phone.

At eleven, six hours after we planned on leaving and in utter desperation, we called a tow truck from several towns away and he came as quickly as he could, which was none too quick. While we stood outside waiting for him, something large and red caught my eye for the very first time:

NEED A TOW? CALL US! RELIABLE 24-HOUR SERVICE.

Apparently this billboard has been at the gas station across from my house, facing my front window, for weeks. I swear on all that is holy, this is the first time I ever laid eyes on it -- twenty minutes too late for it to help us!

We rode in the cab with the tow guy while he stopped to run a few errands, finally dropped us by the garage, and charged us sixty bucks for his trouble. The garage guys doubled over in laughter when they found the problem. A loose battery cable. Nothing. They didn't charge us, figuring we'd paid enough for the tow bill.

So, sixty dollars poorer and quite relieved that the car survived its garage trip, we finally dashed across the state to get Jake's paperwork done. The rest of the day went off smoothly. He got his paperwork completed. I got to listen in on a lecture from one of my favorite professors. We had food that did not originate in our remote and limited county. And we got to see old friends we'd missed. Plus, we went to a bookstore and a Starbucks, neither of which we'd seen in months.

The power was off in town while we were there, which was odd, but not unpleasant. It was nice to walk along in our old favorite spot, a riverside park with water so high only the tops of the trees stuck out. It was dusk and there were no streetlights, no store lights, no traffic lights reflecting on the water. The only lights shone from the bridge, way down the river. We stood together and thought about how in a few short months, we will live close enough to visit the park every day if we want.

It can't come soon enough.

Just after nine, we finally headed home. Or, what I mean to say is, we headed back here. Home is where we'll be heading in a few months' time.

I just hope the car keeps working till then. But if not, I know the number of a tow place.

Another Day in Quotes

2010-03-10T14:58:00.002-05:00

TEACHER: "You've only got three problems to finish. Come sit down, okay?"

STUDENT: "Miss Dooley? You know better than that!"
(After which he flopped onto the floor and refused to work.)

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

TEACHER: "Who can summarize what's happened in the novel so far?"

STUDENT: "Ooh! I can! He went to the thing and they said he -- he said he wanted to and they said he couldn't, and then, and then that one guy, he -- he flew back to the place and the one kid wanted taco chips and she got them at the store and he had wings."

(And, so help me, every other kid in the classroom understood what that meant.)

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

STUDENT WRITING: "I aet all the vechfebils."

(I was quite impressed by this try at "vegetables.")

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

And, my favorite:

STUDENT: "Miss Dooley, is it hard being real old?"

My sister blogged about Asperger's.

2010-03-03T06:44:00.003-05:00

Please go read my sister's blog. Oh! It's gorgeous.

I'm a liar again! Only ... not so much?

2010-03-03T05:49:00.009-05:00

On her blog, Cynthia Willis was kind enough to nominate me once again for this award, in which nominees are asked to conceal a single truth in a long list of lies.

While I'm grateful, of course, to Cynthia for passing this along, I do have to wonder. Should I be proud of being honored for my lying skills twice in the space of two weeks?

Well, I am. I was raised that if you're going to tell a lie, you should make it a good one. But it also got me thinking. Are we writers liars, really? I mean, if you read Livvie Owen Lived Here, you'll find that of course it is fiction -- but -- fiction with a lot of fact concealed within, just like the list the Creative (Liar) Writer award asks nominees to compile.

Sure, there is no Livvie (although there is a girl who organizes her kitchen dishes and hums to herself, and there is another who calls her parents by their first names and who used to use third person when she was upset). And because there is no Livvie, there is no way she could have lived in over twenty different places in a single county (although somebody did -- actually, five somebodies, of whom I am the youngest). And none of those places could have been an abandoned Nabor post office (because of course Nabor doesn't have a post office, as it's not a real town -- but Canvas, WV, had a post office-turned-apartment and any little girls who happened to live there really did have mail slots between their bedrooms).

In fact, each of the places Livvie lived in the town of Nabor comes straight from my memory. With some changes, of course. Some fictionalization. Some little lies.

So this Creative Liar award has got me wondering. Am I the only one who hides so many of my truths in fiction?

Surely not.

Maybe "fiction" is the biggest lie I've been telling.

So, this award. I'm supposed to nominate seven people to tell me a whopping list of lies. I nominate YOU. Post a comment in which you tell me something true that you have hidden in your fiction. Make me feel better about not being a very good liar.

Writing Challenge

2010-03-01T06:09:00.004-05:00

March 1! Spring is in the air! (Disguised as snowflakes. Still.)

I just wanted to pop in and mention Denise Jaden's March Madness Writing Challenge. I'm jumping on board to try to add 31,000 new words to my WIP. It's like a mini-Nano, but with prizes -- gotta love that! Anybody else want to come play?

Also, I dreamed about my novel last night. Nothing useful. I dreamed the MC was living in her father's garage, selling paper mache animals at parties, and I think her father might have been Santa Claus. No more lemon pie at bed time. I think those particular plot points can safely be left out of this draft.

Excuses, excuses

2010-02-28T10:55:00.003-05:00

I've been offline most of the week and will continue to be for a little while. I've been negligent in checking e-mail, commenting on blogs, posting on Facebook, and all the other little things I enjoy doing online.

Why?

Many reasons. A bad school week that's left me with a lot of need for introspection, which is hard to do when you're flitting around the Internet. A dog who keeps yo-yoing between sick and well and sick again. (He's well now -- but not quite himself -- still not sure we're completely back to normal. He threw up during the night -- first time in a week. He's going back to the vet in the morning.)

But I won't lie. The main reason I've been offline?

This work-in-progress.

On Throw Momma From the Train (one of the funniest writing movies ever), the main character's advice to the writing class he teaches is, "A writer writes. Always." Which is true, and not true, of me. Sometimes writing means reading. Sometimes it means interacting with other writers. Sometimes it means researching and learning all I can about this craft, this business, or some obscure fact I need for my latest novel.

But this week?

Writing means writing. Writing something very different from what I usually write, something so powerful it has already left me twice in tears and once in a fit of laughter -- and I'm only 10,000 words in. So if you don't hear from me for a while, I hope you'll forgive me. Hopefully someday you'll get to read why.

Two quotes and an award

2010-02-23T15:04:00.008-05:00

STUDENT: "Is it time for snack?"
ME: "Not quite."
STUDENT: "Hey, no fair!"
ME: "Well, don't look at me. Tell the clock."
STUDENT: "I can't! It doesn't even gots ears!"

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

STUDENT: (Looking at an atlas during reading time) "Oh my gosh! Did you know there's a New Mexico?!"

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

Also, Jon gave me an award on his blog yesterday, and I totally missed it! Something about godawful school days followed by parent teacher conferences tend to limit my time online. But what a nice surprise to wake up today to a snow day and the realization that somebody out there thinks I'm a good liar!

The rules of this award are as follows:

1. Thank the person who gave you the award and link them.
Thanks, Jon! Everyone -- go to Jon's blog and follow the drama of the snowflake method. You'll be glad you did!

2. Add the award to your blog.
Ain't it purty?

3. Tell six outrageous lies about yourself and one truth.

1. I am excellent at math.
2. Sometimes I visit friends just to use their shower.
3. I hate brussel sprouts.
4. I don't like dogs. At all. Actually, I'm scared of them and find them quite smelly.
5. My childhood dream was to be a supermodel.
6. When I was four, I swallowed a nickel.
7. My three favorite things are standardized testing, IEP meetings, and diets.

Which one is true?

1. I am terrible at math.
2. TRUE! Shameful. But true.
3. I LOVE brussel sprouts!
4. Buddy and Lola and everybody at French Broad River Dog Park in Asheville, NC, know this one is a lie.
5. My childhood dream was to be an author! (And an Olympic horseback rider. *snort*)
6. Actually, it was a quarter.
7. Shoulda been the word "least" in there somewhere ...

4. Nominate six creative liars ... I mean, writers and link them.

1. Floot -- This lady turns out some seriously frequent writing exercises on her blog. She likes to NaNo, which is cool. Also, she happens to be a stunning writer.
2. Paul Michael Murphy -- Murphblog. 'Nuff said.
3. Bettie Lee -- She sells plumbing parts! How cool is that? She also shares her writing and editing journey on her blog. Plus, she's about the most faithful blog commenter anyone could ever ask for.
4. OgreVI -- One of the nicest people you will ever meet, this guy can also write your socks off. And it's all true. Which is why I want to see him lie.
5. Wendy Allen -- Her blog is fascinating, and I know her lies will be, as well.
6. Granny Kate -- Yes, she's my mother. No, that's not why I'm passing this on to her. Mostly I'm doing it because I want to see her lies. Also because she's the one who taught me to lie, so it's only fair! Her blog is a delight to read. There are poems and observations and runes and sometimes recipes for things like dandelion wine.