Enough with the Debates

I’m tired of politics. I never thought I’d arrive at such a statement. Usually, I’m a political person. I love the debates, the political maneuvering, the pundits and yes, even the gossip. I predict the front runners, the candidates and the winners. I check in with CNN every 30 minutes months before all major elections and I’m out there with my opinions, not always the politically correct ones preferred by my Orange County neighbors, but that doesn’t stop me. The whole Washington DC thing fascinates me. Who are these people who allow the media to expose their lives, criticize their friends and families, rip apart their voting records, their income tax returns, and use their words out of context for a job that appears as frustrating as it is temporary?

But, now, I’m done. I have no idea how many debates the republican presidential candidates have had. They’ve had quite a few. I don’t remember who has what tax plan or who has an unpopular religion or if any of them are religious at all. Someone left his wife when she was gravely ill to marry another woman and someone else was accused of sexual harassment. I don’t remember which one of those is which either. I would rather our leaders didn’t do those things but then I wish Al Gore hadn’t left Tipper and I wish Bill had been faithful to Hillary.

The truth is, I’m no longer paying attention because I’m disappointed. I had great hopes for President Obama. He’s a smart man. I liked his idea that a country is measured by how it treats its poorest citizens rather than how it benefits its richest. I liked the idea that affordable health care should be as much a right as breathing or walking the streets safely. I know I’m naïve when it comes to the maze of the political machine. I wrote a book about a vice-presidential candidate who gave up the nomination for the sake of his wife and family. My agent said to forget the book, that men didn’t do that. I’m sure she’s right, but I wish they did.

Meanwhile, kudos to England. Girls, even those with brothers, can be first to inherit the throne. They can be Prime Ministers, too. What about The House of Lords? Can girls be Lords?

Ernest Hemingway, Florida and Digital Publishing

Florida is a beautiful state. This was my first visit, other than Orlando and Disney World many years ago. I'm a native Californian with the smugness that most of us have regarding the climate, lifestyle, recreational opportunities and, of course, our universities, among them Cal Tech and Stanford rated the best in the WORLD, not just among the best, but the best depending on which survey you read.

Until now I'd disregarded Florida believing it to be a poor second to the Golden State. I was wrong. Florida's fall/winter climate is better than California's. The air is a smogless, breezy warm without the slightest hint of chill. Sunsets are brilliant and long, followed by the kind of coppery pink dusk that I thought Hawaii would have and doesn't. Both the Atlantic and Gulf are calm and comfortable enough for swimming, even in October, and clear enough to watch schools of fish circle just out of reach. The sand is cool, sugar white and powdery, the seafood fresh and delicious, the people kind and welcoming, and then there's the pie. Nothing beats the key lime pie. I rarely turn down any kind of dessert, but the tart sweet cream of Florida's traditional state pie is out of this world. I know Florida has hurricanes and floods, but California has earthquakes and fires and, recently, our share of flooding as well. I'd never considered retiring in Florida or anywhere else other than California, but inexpensive real estate, warm nights and that key lime pie just might change my mind. 

The Novelists' Inc. Conference was the reason for my visit. The focus was digital publishing. Until quite recently the organization of published authors frowned on digital publishing, but progress marches on and with the demise of print book stores, eBooks are clearly the wave of the future. Therefore, objections must be put aside. The numbers were clearly explained. Marketing and formatting, social networking and self-publishing were the catch words of the weekend. Industry professionals were eloquent, writers asked pointed questions. I learned a lot. Clearly, those savvy in advertising and promotion will reap the benefits of the self-publishing wave.

I'm still at the overwhelmed stage. Eventually, I expect to make sense of it all. I have a print publisher but I'm anxious to climb aboard the self-publishing bandwagon. It means I'll have to design covers, format text, upload to eBook sites, guest post, compose newsletters and create a fan email list. Interestingly enough, a Twitter or Facebook presence only rates 1.9% as far as bringing in sales, a poor showing compared to Barnes & Noble browsers at 25%, and word of mouth at 14%. (I'm not really sure what word of mouth is if it isn't Twitter and Facebook.)

The good news is self-published authors have control over when a book is published, cover art, marketing and royalties. The bad news is authors must pay for everything up front and hope to recoup their money, much like any other start up business. The other bad news is, what if a writer is good at writing but not so good at cover art and marketing? What if after all that publishing, searching for images, marketing, figuring out finances and working a day job, she falls into bed without a word written?

I visited Ernest Hemingway's Key West house this weekend. Ernest began writing at 6:00 am, fished all afternoon, drank at the local pub all evening and all night wrote impressions of the locals to include in his books. I wonder how he would have handled self-publishing and promotion. Like I said, I'm still at the overwhelmed stage.

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Room

Business and Friendship...to mix or not to mix

This week I'm traveling to yet another writers' conference. But this time I'm not going for the purposes of selling a novel, promoting a novel, praying for an award or scouting for an agent. This time I'm going purely for information. Although there will be a few editors and agents, I won't be sitting in on their presentations. My focus will be the e-book publishers, authors and marketeers, in other words, the do-it-yourselfers who managed to climb out of the ashes of the print book decline and make a living.

It isn't easy making a living as a writer. The average income of a writer hovers somewhere around where it did 20 years ago, about $17,000 a year, not exactly the kind of salary that makes new college graduates line up for interviews. I did a little better than that in the days when advances were the norm and when I published regularly, one novel a year, occasionally, two. Naively, I assumed the golden years would last forever; I would continue to write books that merited good reviews and, in return, my publishers would accept everything I wrote, sign the contracts, and the checks, promote my books and ask for more.

That didn't happen. Publishing houses merged, editors were fired and authors, even those who had at some point in their careers achieved bestseller status, were released when their contracts came up for renewal. It happens to the best of us. Sales are everything. When publishers tighten their belts, shelf space is at a premium. An author is only as valuable as her last few books. Writing may be an art, but publishing is a business and unless an author wants to write without selling, she must embrace a new marketing plan. Hence, those of us who cherish our privacy like priceless jewels, who take deep breaths and give ourselves encouraging pep talks in front of the mirror before every social event, find that we must now not only write, edit and publish our books, we must develop an online presence in order to sell them as well.

I'm not enjoying that part at all. I do like Facebook. I enjoy keeping up with my friends, reading their congratulations in good times and their commiserations when times aren't quite so good. I love the photos, the recommendations, the recipes, the travel suggestions. But I don't love mentioning my books. Maybe it's because my late father once told me that business and friendships aren't a good mix. He was right about most things so I assume he was probably right about that, too. All of which is why I'm heading off to Florida for the Novelists' Inc. Conference to figure out a way to develop that online presence everyone keeps talking about, the one that will develop business relationships, sell my books and not presume upon my friends. No wonder I'm breathing deeply and talking to myself in front of the mirror.

I Don't Know How She Does It

I didn’t see the movie, but I recently finished Allison Pearson’s book, I DON’T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT. It’s written in that British chick-lit-speak that became popular during the BRIDGET JONE’S DIARY years, except that I didn’t find it as appealing as BRIDGET JONES, just snappier and more repetitious. The story of a young mother battling the impossible tasks of her dual careers as an investment broker/wife and mother begins with her smashing the crusts of store-bought mince pies, then sprinkling them with sugar to look homemade at two o’clock in the morning in order to compete with the stay-at-home moms bringing treats to a children’s play. The scene works, but as the novel progresses we find our heroine claiming to love her high-powered job enough to settle for a manipulative, exorbitantly expensive nanny who loses receipts, a long-suffering husband and a boss who disregards the most basic of human needs. How could a woman who managed to claw her way into “a man’s world,” her words, meekly settle for the kind of life that makes the meat-packing factories of Upton Sinclair’s, THE JUNGLE, appear relaxing? I found the book exaggerated and hard to swallow. The author, although a working mom, admittedly, never worked in the field she describes.

I suppose what really bothers me is that my daughter, also the product of a working mother, raved about the book. In fact, it’s her copy that I borrowed. The possibility that my own child related to the attention-deprived children of Kate Reddy, appalled me. I was a teacher for pity’s sake, home after school, on weekends, holidays and summers. I made breakfast, lunch and dinner, volunteered frequently, helped with homework and chauffeured, to and from, practices and games. What more could I have done, I wondered, except not work at all, an option, I believed, wasn’t possible for me? And yet, was it? Could we have lived on less, moved to a less affluent area, shopped more carefully, eschewed the lessons and summer camps, the sports’ fees, vacations and dinners out? Would my children have benefited from a more relaxed mother who didn’t panic when the thermometer pulled out of a protesting mouth read 100 degrees at 8:30 in the morning? I’ll never know. Those days are long gone.

“Mothers have enough to do at home,” my daughter states emphatically.  “Read the book. How can anyone possibly manage a life like that and raise anything but neurotic children?” I stare at her, mutely wondering how she can ignore the obvious. Finally, I muster the courage to broach the question. “Was it really so terrible?” She hesitates, formulating an answer somewhere between her usual brutal honesty and the natural desire of a loving daughter to protect her mother’s feelings. “Summers were good,” she replies, “and holidays were great. You always made holidays great.”

Then my son called from Chicago. “Honestly, how would you rate your childhood experience?” I asked him. He laughed. “Are you serious? I had a great childhood, Mom. No one had it better than us.” My relief was embarrassing.

Two children. Six years apart. One female, one male. The same parents. Go figure.

Teaching Then, and Now

Yesterday, in the grocery store, I reconnected with a former student. Ten years had passed since he was in my class. Ten years is huge in the life of a child. This particular young adult was bright-eyed, conversant, personable and, to my amazement, able to recall quite a few incidents from his 6^th grade year, the year I was his teacher. He told me that was the year he learned to love reading. He asked if students today still read “A Wrinkle in Time,” (not so much anymore) and then, he topped off his walk down memory lane by telling me he still had the novella he wrote in my class. “It was my first book,” he added.

He isn’t the first student who told me he learned to love reading and writing in 6^th grade. I’ve had a few journalists, English teachers and even a novelist come back and report to me over the years. But for some reason, yesterday, the words warmed my heart more than usual. Maybe it’s because this year is particularly frustrating, 39 students in a room designed for 25, old programs thrown out for new ones with structures that appear nebulous and haphazard, the reinventing of a wheel that falls apart upon not too close inspection.

I’ve been around a long time. I’ve seen whole language replace phonics, Anita Archer rise and Madeleine Hunter sink, and cursive handwriting bite the dust. I’ve seen, in an effort to stimulate creativity, grammar and spelling thrown out in exchange for a kind of accepted stream-of-consciousness writing that would make Faulkner and Joyce look like staunch fundamentalists. I’ve seen desks arranged in rows, desks arranged in groupings of four, six and eight only to return to rows again, this time with chairs pushed so tightly together, children sit like cooped chickens counting down to their few precious moments of recess. We wonder why they fidget, why their attention falls short, why they don’t listen. Take a walk through classrooms with desks that can’t be raised another inch, defaced books used years beyond their intended retirement date and air conditioners that, on the hottest of days, blow heat into classrooms without windows.

We fundraise frequently and this year every classroom has a smart board.  I’ve heard that students will soon have Ipads. We test as often as we read, more often now that the teaching of novels, according to the latest round of statistics, doesn’t reap the results that staying within the Language Art’s textbook does. I miss the days when discussion was a part of instruction, when teaching wasn’t quite so regimented, when a student could experiment with an essay without his neighbor bumping his elbow, when homework was reasonable.

I wonder, ten years from now, will anyone stop me in the grocery store and tell me she remembered 6^th grade because she loved reading the state authorized textbook? Will she remember anything of elementary school other than those few precious moments of recess?

Curling Up By the Fire

No one would ever call me a perfectionist. I’m more of a big-picture, good-enough kind of person, but my environment, both writing and living, has always been important to me. My personal space has changed over the course of my career, adapting with the changes in my family and my finances. At first, when my children were small, my “space” was a small computer table and steno chair in the family room. My children played games, watched television and invited friends to play while I created and typed away, oblivious to noise, music and, occasionally, minor wounds.

As my family grew and square footage increased through moves and room additions, I graduated to my own office complete with desk and chair, a comfortable couch and, the most wonderful of inventions, a laptop computer which allowed me to move between desk and couch as the mood struck. Over the years, I’ve done away with the desk and straight-backed chair, choosing to, at first, keep files in a cabinet and, eventually, in bookmarked pages on my computer. I’ve come full circle because, now that I’m an empty-nester, my office has returned to the family room. I sit in a very deep, comfortable chair, usually cross-legged but, sometimes, with my legs stretched out in front of me on an equally comfortable ottoman.

I love color and my space reflects it. My chair and ottoman are a deep garnet-red. A chest hand painted in gold, black and more red serves as a coffee table for my tea habit and the shelves of my bookcases are painted a dark, lacquered green. Even more than writing, reading is my passion. I surround myself with books, hundreds and hundreds of books, written by authors who inspire me, as well as photos of my family to remind me of my focus, and prints of Ireland and Scotland, the settings for my novels.

CATRIONA, my current release, is a story set in Scotland. CATRIONA began at the ruins of Stirling Castle. After exploring the grounds, I climbed the stairs to the watchtower where Margaret Tudor, daughter to Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, waited for her husband to return from the Battle of Flodden Moor. This was a particularly difficult time for her because her husband and father fought on opposing sides. I read in the small brochure handed out, when I turned over my nominal fee for visiting the castle, that Margaret had carved a poem into the stone wall. The poem is no longer legible and no one really knows what her thoughts were, but standing there with a death grip on the parapet because of the terrifying wind, I imagined what they might be.

Jamie Stewart was a handsome, charismatic king who spoke 8 languages, fathered 38 illegitimate children, founded universities and demanded that the nobility learn to read. History tells us the marriage was not a love match. I decided, for purposes of my novel, that it would be. Why not, I thought, create a woman, with ties to both England and Scotland, a woman with a shameful secret who needed Jamie’s protection for her own purposes? Why not pair her with her equal in intelligence, Jamie’s favorite, a powerful border lord, who’d helped him win the crown? Why not set the two of them amidst the intrigue of the Tudor and Stewart royal courts?

Then it was time to create the contemporary plot of my novel: enter Kate Sutherland, her descendent, an American born 400 years later, an educated woman searching for answers to the odd circumstances of her birth and her frightening ability to see what others could not. This part I dreamed up at home, curled up by the fire in my bright red chair, along with the others that followed. There are still, I hope, quite a few more to come.

In Retrospect … Post Wedding Day Thoughts

We celebrated my daughter’s wedding on Friday. It was a beautiful, intimate and elegant wedding. Vows were exchanged without a hitch; the flowers, candles, linens and band, particularly the band, were everything we’d hoped for. Food and spirits were delicious and plentiful, toasts were tasteful and, most important, the bride and groom looked relaxed and happy. All flowed smoothly... I think. If something didn’t, it wasn’t enough to notice, but then, unlike my daughter, details frequently escape me. I’m a good enough kind of person.

I did notice that guests looked comfortable; the dance floor was filled while the band played, plates were emptied and people stayed late, all signs of a successful event. Was it all necessary, I wondered, all the worry and organization, all the hours spent on the smallest of decisions, all the meetings and follow up with professionals who provide the services and products for an industry that has shown no decline despite the economic woes of the past few years? The question intrigued me enough to seriously consider the qualities necessary for a wedding to be deemed successful, what must be included and what can be left out when budgets are stretched, as they usually are.

The unnecessaries, according to Jeanette

Favors are unnecessary. Most people leave them behind.

If wine is served during the meal and champagne for the toast, an open bar for the duration of the reception is over the top.

Expensive flowers are unnecessary. Whatever is seasonal works just as well.

Linens need not break the bank. After all, when the glassware, flowers, candles, china and silver are on the tables, the linens barely show, especially during an evening wedding.

The choice of cake should not take up an inordinate amount of time. Guests are dancing and socializing during the serving of the cake and, frequently, never eat it, which breaks my heart because I am particularly fond of cake.

Stylish and painful shoes are unnecessary, particularly for the bridal party.

Pass on new underwear and expensive jewelry.

If there is a choice between teeth whitening and waxing, always choose the whitening.

If the wedding is outside or at the beach, women should reconsider having their hair professionally styled.  Better yet, wear a hat.

I’m not convinced having makeup done professionally is necessary either, but I’ve become a fan of false eyelashes in place of mascara. All the crying in the world won’t leave raccoon circles under your eyes.

More than four toasts are unnecessary.

The necessaries according to Jeanette

A reasonable schedule and a wedding party who can tell time.

Feed the bride and groom during the day, especially if an evening wedding is planned

Vows should be meaningful but not too humorous or too sentimental.

Candles. There is nothing more beautiful than the glow of candlelight after the sun goes down.

The band. An accomplished and professional live band is a gift for the guests as well as for the bride and groom. Give up whatever you must for this treat.

Flowers, no matter what kind, speak of celebration.

Good champagne, the kind with the smallest of bubbles...enough said.

Guests seated with those they know, and are comfortable with, are happy guests. Smaller table groups encourage conversation.

The bride and groom should know every guest’s name, greet him personally and thank him for coming.

Dancing lessons. Dancing is fun when you’re confident on the dance floor.

One final thought: There is little point in taking people to task for arriving late, failing to schedule a haircut or not bringing a jacket. It’s too late. As long as you’ve invited people you love and the bride and groom show up, all will be well.