One Page at A Time

New Rhythms

2009-06-02T01:07:00.000-07:00

Time passes with a salsa beat -- quick, quick slow. The Z-Baby is now three months going on four, with neck control and a penchant for grabbing things. She has one new cousin, a girl. Her other cousin is now in New Jersey, transplanted from Texas. Quick, quick, slow.

The quick moments whirl around, keeping me on my toes in the dance. It's in the slow moments that I stop, catch my breath, and take a moment to be grateful for my life. Take a moment to pause, marveling at the sweetness of my baby's laugh, the wonderment of her easy smile.

I can hardly wait for her to get older, to see her walk and talk and sleep. Yet I know when those days come I will miss these days, when she cooed at me from my lap, when she fed at 3 a.m., nose buried in breast.

The bittersweet center of parenting is that you wish things would change, that quickly, quickly your child would sleep, would pass the age of SIDS danger, would hold her head up. Then, when it happens, as it happens, you wish your child would stay the same, would slow down, would stay your baby even as you see her down the path to eventual toddlerhood.

Three Months

2009-05-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

... that's how long it's been since the Z-Baby was born. I thought by now we might have a schedule. I thought by now, I would be writing again. I thought.... Well, in the spirit of the Mama Zen book given to me by Mary, I think I thought too much. Motherhood seems to be about letting go of any conception you have, besides the conception that is the baby.

Not a complaint, just an observation. I'm a lucky woman with a privileged life. I have a baby who is bright and smiley and sleeps between 4 and 6 hours depending on the night. For a little one as young as she, that's a full night's sleep.

I usually get between 3 and 5 of those hours myself, plus another 1 or 2 when she goes down at 2:30 to 5:30 a.m. I'm not a morning person, but by 6:30 most mornings, I'm feeding Z again.

In case the sleep portion leads you to think I have a miracle perfect child, I should mention the 30-minute crying session that happens every morning around 8 a.m., right before she sleeps. Norman the cat now joins in, as he sees it as a possible route to attention.

And then there's the daytime naps themselves, which are either almost nonexistent (20 minutes or less), or only last longer if the Z-Baby is sleeping on mama. I have seen so much closed captioned Food Channel while she sleeps that I have their schedule almost memorized. Next week I'm going to try to help her out of this habit. This week, we set the bedtime routine (which so far she is totally OK with).

I never thought I'd be making choices like: should I take a shower tonight or face not getting one tomorrow or should I try to take time to write my blog post or go straight to bed at 10 p.m.? I haven't really taken an afternoon off from Z yet, though I did make a doctor's appointment and a trip to the farmer's market without her last week. This weekend, we're committed to giving me at least a few hours. To be honest, I know all I'll want to do is sleep.

In two weeks, the darling husband is free to watch the baby a few days a week. Then I will be back to writing. At least that's the plan.

Come On Baby...

2009-04-21T00:19:00.000-07:00

Let's do the twist. That's right, I'm at A Twist of Taste again. I meant to have an in-between post at One Page, but the Z-Baby came down with a virus that meant a lot of time spent as baby furniture. I'll be back next week. Meanwhile, this week's recipe is Cumin-Scented Apple Crisp.

A Twisty Week

2009-04-06T23:53:00.000-07:00

This week, I'm at my new blog, A Twist of Taste.

I've decided two blogs every week is a bit much with a newborn, so I will be trading off between One Page and Twist.

This week's Twist recipe is Shell Salad.

Enjoy!

A (Hopefully) Tasty Twist

2009-03-31T10:37:00.000-07:00

Exhausting. Inspiring. The Z-Baby is both. Because of her, I have a new project to work on. Because of her, I'm having a hard time getting much traction on it -- or anything else.

I'm excited to get the project going this week. See, for years I've thought of writing a memoir. I've had an uncommon life, with kidnapping to a foreign country, a twin and a handicapped mother in the mix. However, memoir writing has always seemed the height of vanity to me.

Now I feel the need to write something down for the Z-Baby. I'm a writer. It's what writers do.

Then, I stumbled on an idea... what if instead of a straight memoir, I wrote a series of essay/stories from my life and family history that center around a recipe. Food has always had a huge role in my life. My mother taught me and my sister to cook. I've made food for all the people I love, using recipes passed on from my mom or lifted from cookbooks and fiddled with.

So I've created a new blog -- A Twist of Taste -- as a way of getting myself to write a piece of this every week. My goal is to take what I write and, in a year or so, edit together a memoir/cookbook for the Z-Baby, which I'll get printed for my family. It's a project I'm doing for myself as well as her. A way of making writing fun and doing something I care about.

Which is not to say I'm giving up on my novel. Writing that is a totally different process than this essay-blog and I look forward to getting back to it once the Z-Baby starts to sleep more than 4 hours a night (Month Four?).

An Arms-Free Life

2009-03-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

No, I don't wish for a life without arms. But I have been wishing for my arms to be free more often. Since the Z-Baby came, I've been pinned down by cute babyness. She's still in that little stage, where putting her down only works for short (getting longer) amounts of time, mostly at night.

Meanwhile, she's feeding, needing a diaper change, wants to be entertained or wants to lay on mama or daddy. Ever tried balancing a baby in one arm while doing the new parent sway and bop as you simultaneously try to eat risotto out of a bowl? Welcome to last night.

However, my sister gave me this wonderful invention that is already starting to change things. The Baby Bjorn doesn't work for all babies and it doesn't always work for the Z-Baby, but when it does, it's miraculous. I'm testing it out right now. The baby is sleeping strapped to my chest as I sit in the recliner and write this. It's challenging to type, as I can't see the keys over the baby's head, but I'm getting better at it.

I am starting to have hope that with two hands free, I might be able to start writing again sooner rather than later. Now if only there was a way to get a little more consistent sleep....

All The News That's Fit to Print

2009-03-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

This week my family made a commitment...to a newspaper. Weekend delivery of the Old Gray Lady, otherwise known as the New York Times, began at our house this Sunday.

We've been meaning to do it for ages. There always seemed to be a reason not to: an impending move, an impending baby (who is sleeping on my lap as I write this), trips to take. Then came Thursday. I read the umpteenth account of how newspapers were dying and realized that my daughter might not have the experience I did.

Sundays as a kid I would ruffle through the local paper. The comics were always first. Garfield, Peanuts, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes awaited in technicolor glory. Then there was the arts section. Movies to read about, theater to see. Then came the front page and the opinion section and maybe home and garden.

When I went into journalism, it was in part inspired by my experience as a reader of newspapers. The idea that my daughter's generation might only know the allure of newsprint as a cultural artifact saddens me. The idea that newspapers might disappear altogether, replaced by unedited, even more underpaid citizen bloggers frightens me.

It's not that I think journalists need to have J-School degrees. I don't have one. Some of the best journalists I know came to it later in life from other careers. My fear of what will happen if newspapers disappear is rooted in an understanding of what the process of editing brings to the news. Editors, which most bloggers lack, push good stories to be great stories in both news content (asking reporters to get more sources, finding holes, etc) and in writing.

Bloggers and citizen journalists for the most part have to self censor. Most aren't very good at that, which is how we end up with sp many rumors reported on the internet as news. Also, while individual citizens can be wonderful watchdogs of government and industry, who watches the less glamourous, less "interesting" things. Newspapers -- at least the few community newspapers that still have reporters -- cover everything from sewage treatment centers to the mosquito control boards of this world. And if you don't think corruption is possible at a msoquito control board, I have a story to tell you about misappropriation of funds.

Without community newspapers to cover local governments, so much of what makes a community a community falls through the cracks.

To me, papers perform three basic functions (a belief passed on to me by my former editor, William Lobdell): they serve as community cheerleader, community watchdog and the paper of record. I want my daughter to grow up in a world where that's still true.

Meanwhile, here at the house, said daughter is waking up and looking to me to be her food source. I tell ya, between cluster feedings and growth spurts, I'm starting to feel a little like a dairy cow confined to the milking pen. Moo.

Photo by carlos_seo.

End of the World As I Know It (I Feel Fine)

2009-03-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

As you may have guessed from the photo of the stork, the Z-Baby arrived almost two weeks ago weighing 8 pounds, 4 oz and measuring 20 inches in length. It was a 24-plus-hour labor, painful in many parts and worth every second.

At the moment I have more than 100 congratulatory email in my inbox still waiting to be perused. Between feeding the little nibbler and trying to get a few moments of shuteye when she sleeps, I haven't had a chance to catch up -- yet. But I will. Eventually.

I feel more like myself these days. The pregnancy was long and at times hard. Four months of throwing up followed by moving followed by two bouts of illness and a third trimester during which my back ached so much when I stood that I had to do almost everything sitting. Thank god for my sister's suggestion that I use the kitchen stool to sit while cooking and doing dishes. At almost two weeks post birth, I'm physically much more comfortable and the fog that took over my brain seems to be gone, even in the face of sleep deprivation. In fact, this is the best I've felt for months.

And to top it all off, I have this amazing beautiful child. Seriously, I look at her and want to cry, she's so precious. Of course, some of that is hormones. It's challenging to be constantly attached to the Z-Baby, whose breastfeeding schedule went into overdrive a few days ago. However, the challenge has instant payback in the form of her growing body.

She really is a premium high quality baby, as my brother-in-law would say. And she's waking up, so I've gotta go!

Photo courtesy of Tambako the Jaguar.

'Read the Book!'

2009-02-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

No, that's not an indication that there is a book of mine to read. Instead, that is what my mother says my first sentence was, at the tender age of 2 or so.

While on Baby Watch 2009, I've been gathering books for the Z-Baby. At one point, someone actually questioned why I would buy books so early for the child. I wasn't planning to read to the baby when she can't even grasp a book, was I?

The answer? Yes!! From day one. Okay, maybe day one we'll just concentrate on sleeping and breastfeeding. But that day 2, I tell you, there's a copy of Guess How Much I Love You that's just waiting for her.

A 2006 study conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and published in the journal Child Development showed that parents who started to read to their kids from a very young age had toddlers with higher language comprehension and better vocabulary and cognitive skills.

But that's not why I'm looking forward to reading to the Z-Baby. I love books, and I want to share that love with our child. Books are a gateway to imagination and knowledge. They're a comfort on lonely days when you feel no one understands you. They're a path to discovering new universes and exploring the unfamiliar. Whether you're reading on an e-book reader or paper, stories help us make sense of our world, connect to others and think outside of ourselves.

Here are five of the books I am most looking forward to sharing with the Z-Baby in her first year.

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. Princess Elizabeth's adventures saving Prince Ronald from the dragon was one of my friend Anne's favorites.
Miss Spider's Tea Party: The Counting Book by Kirk and Weatherby. Miss Spider's search for friends combines with fun rhymes that teach counting.
Fifteen Animals by Sandra Boynton. There are so many Boynton books to love, from But Not the Hippopotamus to Barnyard Dance, but this book about pets named Bob is just so cute and silly!
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. Not all of the poems in this book will be appropriate for the Z-Baby's first year, but surely "Love" and "Listen to the Musn'ts" are worth sharing.
Goodnight Goon by Michael Rex. No, that's not a misprint. I actually am not fond of the original Goodnight Moon and much prefer this version with its Monsters and Martians and Black Lagoon. It was the first book we bought for the Z-Baby.

What books do you recommend for a young child? There can never be too many, in my opinion.

Photo courtesy of ukslim.

The Not-Quite-Yet New Mama Brain

2009-02-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

It's official. The household is on Baby Watch 2009, in the four week countdown window that defines the arrival of a full or post-term baby. Our Z-baby, as I like to refer to her here.

Since moving to the Northern California woods in October, life has been...well I'm not quite sure what it's been. I look in the mirror these days at my pale, and growing paler, face and realize how much time I spend in the shade. At our rented house, the sun is rarely glimpsed -- seen only by looking up through the skylights at the tops of the majestic redwoods. Light filters down, but it's not the warm tones of Southern California or Florida. It's a cool blue-white. I'm sure somewhere a dermatologist is cheering, but I miss the warming rays of gold that greeted me in San Diego.

My book has been on the backburner for months, but I managed to help copy edit (on deadline) two of my husband's books, the last of which was sent to the press about seven days ago. We had guests for more than three weeks over the Christmas-New Year holidays. And since coming here, I've caught two nasty colds and two bouts of stomach flu. I don't recommend being sick while preggers. It truly is miserable.

I finished our taxes, but still haven't sent out Christmas-New Year cards. Those are piled on the kitchen counter, a constant source of holiday leftover guilt. Unstable situations in the family have stabilized for now, making everyone happier.

The nursery is finally finished, though there are still a few little things for the Darling Husband to do. He knows what I speak of. Today we are scheduled to get our first load of cloth diapers from the delivery service. I've split the diapering into cloth during the day at home and disposables at night and for travel. I figure this way no one in the diaper debate is happy with my choices, but the Z-baby's bottom will be covered.

We're as prepared as an upper middle class couple expecting their first child can be. I've even socked away at least a week or so of homemade meals in our freezer. Today I'm planning to make vegetarian Cornish pastys. The Food Network inspires again. It really is the safest television watching choice right now -- no worries about violence or language, just nurturing food prepared by endlessly cheery people, some of whom like to use weird euphemisms for normal ingredients (EVOO? really?).

It's a strange place to be, this moment in time of watchful waiting. An in-between place. Not-quite a mom. Not-quite not a mom. The Z-baby has shifted low enough to make her presence felt in position. I've started sitting on her mattress/lap pads, in case my water breaks on the new couch.

I don't know what life will be like after. I'm not sure anyone who's new to this can know. I do hope, however, that Baby will not be my only topic of conversation. Somehow, that seems unhealthy.

As an antidote for that, or perhaps just a stop gap, I do plan to start blogging once a week, on Mondays. Of course, if I'm at the hospital, that won't happen. And, of course, I reserve the right to blog about Z-babyness... at least at first.

Wish me luck.

Photo courtesy of mwboeckmann.

Happy Holidays

2008-12-16T13:52:00.001-08:00

Wishing, Hoping and Believing

2008-11-04T20:34:00.000-08:00

Unbelievable. Over and over again tonight, that is the word floating about in the shock and happiness that Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States in January 2009.

I believed. I believed hard. I believed even when friends expressed doubts. I believed when the polls briefly showed the race going the other way. I believed deep down that this day would come.

But it wasn't Barack Obama that I believed in. No. He's a wonderful candidate, but he's not why I believed.

I believed in the dream -- not the red states or the blue states, but in the United States of America. I believed that people across this nation would look past the color of a person's skin and vote instead on beliefs. I believed in the promise of this country. I believed.

And now this day has come. And for me, a biracial child of an Indian father and a white American mother, raised in her mother's home, it's as if the world I believed in, the world I want for my child, is finally coming to pass.

A world where maybe my child will not have strangers yell at her to "go back to your own country." A world where no one will look twice at my husband and I because he is white and I am brown. A world where when I tell my child they can accomplish whatever they set their mind to, I won't have a niggling doubt in the back of my mind -- doubt fed by knowledge that my father was asked to get off a bus in the Deep South because of his color and that at the time my parents got married, miscegny laws on the books made their marriage illegal in a number of states.

It's hard to describe what this moment feels like as a woman who's always been an "other" in America. Or maybe it's not so hard. It feels like acceptance. At long last.

A Halloween Trick or Treat

2008-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

All Hallows Eve is upon us. It's a good day for new endeavors, which is why you'll find me posting weekly at the group blog Frightening Journeys. I'll be the Friday frightener for this group of unpublished paranormal writers.

Which is not to say I'm abandoning this blog. Actually, now that my move to the north is over, I'm hoping to bring back my weekly ways.

In celebration of Halloween, as a treat and a trick, I present you with the first scene from my novel in progress, Walking in the Dark. The book took third place in the Daphne du Maurier contest for unpublished writers in the paranormal division this year.

Walking in the Dark by J.K. Mahal
(copyright 2008, all rights reserved)

The kitchen felt cold, with a dry chill that made Cassie Davis think her husband had been fiddling with the air conditioning again. The blasted thing was probably stuck. Twisting a knob, she put the tea kettle up to boil.

“Mommy.”

Her little girl’s legs scissored through the air as she lay on her stomach on the white tile. A torn piece of butcher paper served as the canvas for another Crayola masterpiece.

“What, honey.”

The six-year-old carefully peeled the paper coating from a crayon. “I think you’ll like this picture.”

Cassie studied the black scrawls interlaced with red and gray. Years of training in child psychology and she still had no idea what was going on in her own kid’s drawings. Of course with patients she had an edge. An extra skill passed down through generations. Too bad her sixth sense didn’t extend to family. Luke was spending a lot of hours in the lab these days.

"Mommy." The voice whined high, jolting Cassie from her thoughts.

“Sorry, honey.” She looked at the drawing again. Nope. No clue. “Do you want to tell Mommy what it is?”

The crayon slashed black streaks, hard and messy, on the white swatch of paper.

“No,” the voice was singsong. “It’s much more fun this way.”

“Okay.” The sworls and swirls vaguely resembled a mammal of some kind. Maybe a gorilla. Or a flattened cat. “Is it an animal?”

“Nope.”

“How about a vegetable?”

“You’re silly,” the voice giggled.

“That I am.”

Tiny smears of wax migrated onto the tile as the crayon colored in an empty space, turning it to darkness.

Cassie suppressed a shiver. She really should talk with Luke about fixing the AC. If he made it home in time for dinner tonight. It wasn’t as if they fought. They never fought. They just had “disagreements.” Maybe she should just go out for pizza with the kid and screw the Betty Crocker image.

"I want you to see the picture, Mommy." Her little girl looked so serious, holding out the white paper. "You should see the picture now."

"Okay. If you're sure." Cassie smiled. Her daughter was the best gift Luke ever gave her. She reached for the drawing, trying not to wrinkle it.

The keening of tea kettle broke the silence, spewing a white puff of moisture into the air.

"It's time." Mirth flirted across the girl's face, a flash of lightning in the darkness of her countenance.

It took Cassie a minute to recognize what she was seeing in the heavy black scrawls and red smears. Once she found the tombstone, the image decoded. Anna Davis. Beloved daughter. 1990-1996. R.I.P.

"No." The denial came out as a whisper. "No. Please."

She reached out to touch her daughter, to hold her again as reality crashed against the sides of the dream.

"You can't run away forever, Mommy."

With that, the girl crumbled to dust, choking Cassie with the taste of ash.

Photo by Elvis Payne.

Of Difficult Characters and Conferences

2008-10-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Ever read a book and just intensely dislike the main character? In fact you dislike that character so much that, by page 50, you consider putting the book down or throwing it across the room? But then, a few pages later, something changes. There's a hint that perhaps the character is not as unlikable as the author would have you believe. That maybe there's more going on beneath the surface than a quick glance would reveal.

When the writing is excellent -- as it is in Jane Porter's Mrs. Perfect -- you keep reading. At least I kept reading, and I'm ever so glad that I did.

Taylor Young, the protagonist of Mrs. Perfect, now joins Rachel Walsh (Marian Keyes's Rachel Takes a Holiday) and Francesca Day (Susan Elizabeth Phillips's Fancy Pants) on my list of characters that made me want to quit the book, but who eventually won me over.

At the start of Mrs. Perfect, Taylor is a self-involved, shopping-obsessed wife and mother who gives the impression of being materialistic. She seems more concerned with the appearance of her life than with the quality of her life. By the end, everything you think you know about her has completely changed.

It takes an enormous amount of talent to bring a character like Taylor to life and then bring her both to her knees and back up on her high heels, standing tall.

Mrs. Perfect, which I won in a raffle at the Emerald City Writer's Conference, made me want to go out immediately and buy Porter's other novels.

It also made me wish that Porter had been able to attend the conference. She's on bedrest for complications during her pregnancy. As a woman who is five months along with a Z-Baby of my own, my heart goes out to her. I wish her and her baby-to-be the best.

Are there characters who have made you want to quit the book? Why did you stick with it?

Moving gifts

2008-09-29T07:57:00.000-07:00

Sunday, as I boxed up my yesterdays in preparation for a mid-week move to Northern California, I found an envelope of papers from third grade. In it, amidst old report cards and a story written in my loopy childhood print about a time-traveling dragon, were papers chronicling my mother's fight to have my sister and me placed in the gifted program.

Among the filings of My Mother vs. the Board of Education in New Jersey -- oh yes, she filed suit -- there were IQ tests, educator evaluations and notes on the validity of the gifted entrance criteria. My mother, the educational psychologist, left no stone unturned in her efforts to prove that her children were special.

It was a fight she would repeat less than a year later when we moved to California. She was more successful in the Golden State than she had been in the Garden State.

My mother's attention to my education is one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me. I appreciate it every day.

What I have less appreciation for was her need for me to be exceptional. It wasn't enough that I was smart, got As and Bs or read three grades above my level. She needed the world to acknowledge the brilliance of her children.

And when, in junior high, I stopped performing the way she wanted me to, I was relegated to being the "less smart" sibling, the one who would have to rely on beauty rather than brains to make it in this world. The price of not living up to the label.

It didn't matter that my academic performance was affected by a home life many would cringe at. I was no longer quite as exceptional anymore.

Time and age changes a lot, including my mother. She recently told me she has two smart daughters -- and by God, I think she meant it.

Last week, I found out my wonderful husband (WH) and I will be having a daughter of our own. We watched her developing brain on the ultrasound. I later asked my WH how he would feel if our daughter was average instead of a genius. He gave the perfect answer.

"I want her to be happy, healthy and kind," he said.

Everything else is a bonus.

Photo by Erwyn van der Meer

Real and Unreal in America

2008-09-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a long while since I've blogged or been part of the blogging community, but it's time again to take up the pen (or computer as the case may be). So, I'm back.

As I sit here typing, there's an interview on my television screen with Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit. She is emphasizing over and over again how the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, is a real American. That word, real, has been punted around a great deal in the last two days. I heard it more than once in during the Republican National Convention.

Which made me wonder, if Sarah Palin is a real American because she shoots and dresses wild game, has been on a PTA, grew up in a small town and has five children, does that make me an unreal American because I share none of those experiences?

Am I unreal because I went to college on scholarship, made honor roll, paid my student loans off in 10 years, grew up in many large towns whose populations individually are larger than the state of Alaska, worked my way up the salary chain over many years and got married at 32? Am I unreal because I have a mother I love in a nursing home, used birth control until my husband and I decided to have a child, am biracial, have worked at a fast food restaurant and a movie theater in high school and started my career in journalism by answering complaint calls on the circulation desk?

I've never shot a gun, have no idea how to dress a moose and am expecting my first child. Does that make me somehow less real? Would it make me more real if I said I'm a farmer's daughter who knows how to gut a fish and can change a diaper as easily as a bed pan? All of which is true.

I have grandparents who did military service. My Indian grandfather, a career man in the Indian Army, fought for the Allied forces in Burma in World War II. My American-German one served in the Navy between World War I and II. I have photos of him in uniform.

Do they make me more real?

Who gets to decide what a real American is?

Photo courtesy of BostonBill.

On Hiatus

2008-06-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

No, there's nothing wrong. But I will be taking a hiatus from the blog until August, in order to get some pressing work finished.

See you then!

A Touch of Mime

2008-05-17T20:16:00.001-07:00

I don't get nervous at interviews. I've spoken with Broadway stars and government officials, Grammy winners and Olympic medalists, millionaires and homeless children. I'm telling you (with the exception of Bernadette Peters), I don't get nervous.

But last week, I found myself a little butterflied. No flop sweat, but definitely buzzing with jittery energy. Why? Because I interviewed Kazoo.

Okay. The truth is I interviewed Jerry Hager, but for 26 years he was Kazoo at Seaport Village in San Diego. As the resident mime until 2006, Hager put on a show most every weekend, bringing light and magic to the world.

I grew up fast for reasons I'd rather not get into, but during those 1980s summers, watching Kazoo silently tell his stories, I got to be a kid. Just another child, marching along -- tromp, tromp, tromp -- humming a tune on a plastic kazoo, following a friendly mime.

I shouldn't have been so nervous. Hager is a wonderful man and a talented teacher at Grossmont College. His family loves him. He inspires people.

His daughter told me later that I made him cry with my confession of how much his shows meant to me. I didn't mean to bring on tears, honest!

The thing is, though, you never know how you're going to affect people in this lifetime. Kazoo helped me believe in magic when there was precious little to be found. He brought theater to life for me in a real way.

I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to tell him that.

Photo courtesy of jennerally.

A Red Letter Day

2008-05-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

I was late on deadline with my latest feature. The editor said 2 p.m. and it was 4:45 by the time I was preparing to press send. The phone rang. Hurriedly, I typed the last few words and shot the story off. Then I answered the phone.

I expected to hear a male voice asking where my story was. Even when I got a female asking if this was Jennifer, I thought "well, maybe he's out of town and this is the editor who's covering."

Never in a million, jillion years did I expect to hear a lovely lady from the Kiss of Death chapter of the Romance Writers of America telling me I finaled in the paranormal division of the Daphne Du Maurier contest.

I'm still in shock.

Photo courtesy of gnovi.

Why It Mattered to Me

2008-04-23T16:22:00.001-07:00

Last week, I wrote an article for the Union-Tribune about a restaurant in National City that reopened with new owners. It was meant to be an easy story about a place with a Hollywood-linked past that had been beautifully refurbished to reflect its history.

The editors didn't get the easy story I was assigned. Instead I turned in a piece about how history gets lost sometimes. In this case, the restaurant's owners had paid homage to a famous chef that was claimed as the original owner/founder in 1941. The real owner/founder was another man, not famous, whose name disappeared -- through no real fault of the current owners -- from the official history.

A friend asked why the official history mattered. It's only a restaurant. Why not just let the owners have their illusions about the origins of the place. After all, it didn't change whether their food was good or their drinks were strong. The place was still beautiful, the people who loved it still loved it. Why write this story?

Good questions. Ones I'm sure the restaurant's owners want to know the answers to.

So why did I do a week's worth of research, going from the court house to city hall to the library's history room, to discover who the original owner was? Because I believe the past matters. I believe the truth matters. And if I simply repeated their story, especially once I'd found evidence to the contrary, without really looking into it, I would be guilty of bad journalism.

That's right, bad journalism. The lazy kind that takes quotes out of context, doesn't provide background and uses hearsay instead of facts. Sure, it would have been easier. It would have been a pretty story. It even would have made business sense -- I would have made more money per hour if I had simply written a less-researched story.

But it would have been untrue. And the real story of the restaurant's original owner and its history was no less fascinating than the one that was wrong.

The thing is, truth matters. Facts matter. Even the little facts, the ones no one will know (or care) if we get wrong. It's like the saying goes, "the devil is in the details." And once you devil those small details, the large ones are even easier to mistake.

And then you end up in the Iraq War. Think that's a leap? Stop caring about the small things and see how much easier it becomes, over time, to stop caring about the larger things. Once you start taking the easy path, it gets more difficult to take the harder one.

That's why it mattered to me.

Photo by emdot.

Buzzing with Busy-ness

2008-04-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

It's Spring. In Southern California, we're having April showers and flowers. There's the buzz of activity in the air. And I have been busy.

Not a complaint. No indeed. I love it. I've gone from a time of brain stagnation to a major jumpstart (thanks Louise) to running around reporting and writing.

In the past two weeks, I've started restructuring the book and set up interviews for most of the seven articles I'm working on. I've gotten a subscription for Community Supported Agriculture and picked up our first box of organic veggies and fruit (the strawberries are divine).

And I've ordered and received from Amazon.com the most amazing thing -- a songbook of Broadway tunes for Mezzo-Sopranos, complete with piano accompaniment on CD. Where was this when I was in high school? Singing "Tell Me on a Sunday" frightened the cat, though I think he liked "Adelaide's Lament." The Wonderful Husband (WH) is out of the home, so he hasn't heard the tune-i-ness yet.

I'm way behind on reading a close friend's script (a priority over the weekend - mea culpa). But I plan to catch up and then soar ahead.

I feel like that line from Auntie Mame -- "Live, Live, Live. Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death." Well, I'm not starving any longer.

My Six Word Memoir

2008-02-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

Mary Castillo and Erica Orloff recently were tagged to write six word memoirs, a project inspired by the one going on at SMITH Magazine.

SMITH's project was inspired by a challenge posed to Ernest Hemingway, who was asked to write a story using only six words. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” is the tale he chose to tell.

This is my six word memoir for now:

Settling down after soap opera life.

Anyone else want to write theirs?

My Kingdom for a Deadline

2008-02-24T17:53:00.000-08:00

My Wonderful Husband is brilliant. I was moping around this weekend, trying to get back into the novel, when he said (something like): "Well, you've been doing great with those freelance articles and their deadlines. Maybe you should enter a contest and give yourself a deadline for finishing the book."

Instantly, I remembered my plans -- before 2008 went wonky -- to enter Walking in the Dark into the Daphne Du Maurier Unpublished Contest run by the Kiss of Death chapter of the RWA. I have the requisite 15 pages polished to a shine. Now all I need is a one page synopsis.

I like writing with a road map. I started this book the way I start most of my projects, with a chapter-by-chapter (or scene-by-scene) outline. Revisiting that outline, especially in light of all the changes in the past year, and creating a new synopsis sounds like a wonderful way to get back in to the world of my story.

And I always have worked better with a deadline. It's the journalist in me.

God bless my WH. He knows how to stop a mope.

'Fear is the Mind Killer'

2008-02-18T11:58:00.000-08:00

It's hokey, I know, but I love that quote from the movie version of Dune. It probably comes from the book, but since I haven't read the book in years and do remember it from the film, that's how I attribute it.

Today on Erica Orloff's blog, she has a discussion going about nonsensical fears. I have a nonsensical fear going, one that's been holding me back. So I thought I'd share it and see if that helps it to go away.

I fear that something (probably bad) will happen if I start working on my paranormal thriller again.

There. I said it.

It's a paralyzing thing, this fear, born out of 14 months of, well, mostly unexpected and negative things happening every time I start to seriously work on my unfinished book. It's dulled my love of writing and led me to feel apprehensive every time I start to think through the story.

A month ago, I even announced to my friends that I was going to abandon my novel for a while and work on something else just to get away from this "cursed" feeling. The problem is, the novel wants to be written. It wants to be finished. And since I'm a "see-it-through" kind of gal, I want to finish it.

My best friend once gave me a gift that came with a card that said "Courage is not the absence of fear or despair, but the strength to conquer them."

This week, I'm going to start working on that courage thing. And start working on the book again. I just hope the ceiling doesn't fall in.

Not quite back on the horse

2008-02-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

I over did it. I thought by this week, I'd be bouncing around, writing stories, getting the flow of life back into balance. Instead, I went out to do freelance interviews and food shopping (gosh the grocery store is LOUD) for two days in a row and threw myself out of whack.

Of course, the fact I'd been crying for days prior and had driven around with a sick cat probably didn't help either.

When you're feeling mostly okay, it's hard to remember that it's only been two weeks since surgery. Especially since there isn't an obvious reminder, now that the cotton ball is gone, that you were surgicaled. I won't be cleared for exercise or strenuous activity for almost three more weeks.

Sigh. So in light of ongoing ear aches and tiredness, I'm taking a second day off from it all. I feel horribly guilty about this, as I so want to get back to work. I also feel like such a wimp. After all, I used to go to work at a day job when I had feverish temps, whether I wanted to or not. I'm not saying that was healthy, just that I used to do it.

But the WH reminds me that I need to take it easy. So I'm acquiescing. Saturday I will start again on the write path.