Generation Exhausted

In awe

My teenagers have redeemed themselves and presented me with belated birthday presents - Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep A Secret and the much-anticipated A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon. I finished Secret last week, and have been buried in Snow and Ashes since yesterday evening.

Clearly, this is not going to be a weekend for getting things done. Only 250 pages in, I almost forgot I had a computer or that the Internets even existed.

I simply don't know how Gabaldon does it. Snow and Ashes is some 980 pages long. In spite of it being the sixth book in the Outlander series, in spite of the fact that the heroine has lived through six books, in spite of the fact that I haven't even reached the widely posted excerpt where the heroine cleaerly lives -  I still find myself, at page 170-something wondering if she will live on into the next page.

That's talent. That ability to bring the reader to the edge of the seat, to create such a real sense of drama and suspense - it's remarkable. I'd give my left arm to be able to write like that.

Must continue into the next chapter. More later.

That's my girl!

My baby - not THE baby, but my first-baby baby, the Older Daughter, had her very first book signing today!

Her story, Do Girls Belong, appears on page 34 of the just-released Chicken Soup for the Girls' Soul.  She is published, she is paid, she is wonderful.

I'm very proud.

The store only had a dozen copies on hand, and they all sold. All in all, a good day. Go check it out!

And we're not even evacuating

8 a.m. this morning, a few thousand miles north of where they've shut down the refineries in Texas. All of it sparked by some yahoo fifty miles away who jacked up his gas prices to $1.70 a litre. Scenes like this were all over town last night, and well into today. By this evening, many local stations appeared to have run dry.

The last time I saw a line this long, we were in the middle of a gas price war, and lows dropped to 19 cents a litre for a few hours. I think it was 1984, but don't quote me on that.

Line-ups and traffic jams for a buck a litre. Who'da thunk?

Oh, and the guy with the boot open in the top pic? Was filling three extra gas cans, as well as his vehicle.

Methinks it's going to be a long winter.

Conspiracy Theory #483

Dear Kira -

Please send beautiful stupid Clare. I have work for her to do.

I am trying very, very VERY hard not to draw a link between the fact that three mice infected with the plague escaped from a New Jersey lab and the fact that, as of last week, at least, I've discovered we have a mouse in the house. AGAIN.

Readers may pause a moment while my mother hyperventilates at the realization that I just told THE WHOLE INTERNET that there is a mouse in my house.

This is deja vu all over again. In the early days of our acquantance,  Linda and Kim and I used to commiserate about the joys of sitting at our desks with our feet folded up beneath us, just in case something decides to run out of the shadows.

Short pause while Linda's mom and Kim's mom also hyperventilate, because now I've outed THEIR daughters.

Though, to be fair, Linda has also harboured a snake, and I think Kim found an armadillo or something in her lauindry room once. Ask them about it sometime.

Anyway, seeing the mouse, and then seeing the headline -well, read the post below, and you can probably figure out what I've envisioned. For the record, I believe the only good mouse stands five feet tall and wears a bow tie, and shakes your hand, and signs your autograph book.

The one I saw isn't much bigger than Kip the Cricket. Think there's any chance that crickets eat mice? I've got two traps out, but the damn thing hasn't passed that way again, apparently.

I'm not sleeping well and won't until it's dead. And it better only be ONE. I'm getting too old to sit at my desk with my feet folded up underneath me.

The one where I can see it so clearly

One of the greatest stumbling blocks I encounter in my writing is the frustration I often feel when I'm unable to translate the thoughts in my head onto the page.

Which, duh, is what writers are supposed to be able to do, right?

But so many times I just feel utterly impotent in this process - the thoughts are so clear, up there in my head, that I find myself wanting to just drill a hole behind my ear and lean over a spiral notebook and see what happens.  It's like watching a movie, and then, at the end, someone hands you a pen and says, "Ok, write down what happened."

I imagine things in actual scenes, see? There are pictures, and dialogue, and even background music sometimes. I've talked with Kim and Linda both about this before, and I've often wondered if it means I should be a screenwriter or something. Sometimes, it gets really freaky, and I can actually see lines of text - I can visualize the words I need to write. And then something happens, and somewhere betwixt brain and page, the clarity vanishes.

A couple of weeks ago, we were in the yard getting ready for our backyard Labour Day bash. I was setting out seating areas around the yard, and informed hubby that I needed another table. "Just a little accent-y end table type thing," I told him. "Can you do that with some of the scrap lumber?"

So he hauled out the Workmate, and sorted through his two-by-fours, and plugged in the circular saw.

"WAIT A MINUTE," I said. "You have your sandals on. I'll go get your running shoes."

"Why?" he wanted to know. "This will only take a minute."

"NO NO," I said. "Because you're going to cut the end off the two-by-four there. And the little end piece will fall to the ground. Only it will land on your toe, which is bare because of your sandal. When it bounces off your toe, you will jump, and move your arm, which is holding the saw. Your muscles will tense in refelx against dropping the saw, and squeeze the saw trigger, and you'll cut open the side of your leg. And then we'll have to cancel the party so I can sit vigil at your bedside in the ICU. And then there will be no one to eat the 110 pork kabobs or the taco dip."

He just stared at me, and then said, "Tell me again why you haven't written another book yet?"

I don't know either. Maybe drilling a hole in my head isn't so far-fetched.

Share the love

Since I forgot Linda's birthday, and my rotten kids ignored mine, I've decided to make sure SOMEONE gets a ton of attention.

Go on over and wish Kim a Happy Birthday, would ya?

Go on, what are you waiting for? Go.

This is NOT September weather

Is 34 too young for hot flashes? Three times today I've been seized by the urge to tear off all my own clothes and throw myself in the pool. Somehow, I doubt this has to do with my inner teenager making herself known. It was really only 73 degrees today, but I feel as though I'm about to internally combust.

The problem with having two children more than four years apart is that you have time, in between, to forget what each stage is like. My going-on-nine year old (we call her the baby) is morphing, before my very eyes, into a sulky, snotty, just-call-me-Donna-as-in-Prima teenager.

If she doesn't stop rolling her eyes like that, she's going to have an aneurysm. And the force of her exasperated sighs is enough to knock down a small building.

What happened to my Mommy's girl? The other day, I reached out for her hand, as we were about to cross a busy parking lot. She folded her arms in front of her and stormed past me, pretending she didn't know me.

Was it this bad with the other girls? I can't remember. All I know is, all of a sudden, I know nothing, life is NOT FAIR, and we're thinking of re-naming her Queen Sheba.

Don't bother counting the candles

A tradition, more or less, since 1989, we celebrate this four-day stretch of September together. The 9th was our 16th wedding anniversary. Saturday the 10th was hubby's birthday, and today is mine. So, if you couple the shared cake with the fact that together we're 71 years old, well, you can't really figure out our ages by the candles.

I'm thirty-four today. Last week I found out my thirty-four year old best friend is going to be a grandmother.

Having a child while you're a teenager WILL come back to bite you in the ass, oh yes it will. Let's just say I'm tempted to take my almost-16-year-old and lock her up, just to be on the safe side.

More on that later. For now, I just wanted to stop in and mention that for my birthday, I got the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world:

The motivation to write again.

The words are flowin' and I even resent having to stop to go do school pick-up. Let's hope it sticks with me.

Why we can't stop talking about it

Like other disasters, natural and man-made, Katrina's aftermath has sparked a firestorm of discussion on the Internet, in broadcast news, and in living rooms and coffee shops around the world. And, like other disasters, there are those who would criticize those who won't stop talking about it.

Admittedly, right now, it seems far more important to DO something - donate money, supplies, time. And that is important. VERY important. If you can, DO something. But the talking, and the writing, and the debate and discussion is important too.

When I have a problem that seems daunting, when there is no obvious solution, no magic answer - my tendency is to worry about it later. I can't fix this right now, I think. This is too hard to deal with right now, I think. And so I put it on that mental shelf of mine, and resolve to get back around to it eventually.

And then, I don't. I forget about it until the problem becomes a problem again.

Too often, we do the same thing with the things that happen globally, in society, in government. The issue fades from our TV screens, the blog furor dies down, and it becomes yesterday's news. We turn our too-short attention spans elsewhere, and resolve to get back to those other issues eventually.

And then, we don't. We forget about it until the problem becomes a problem again.

But discussion - asking questions, exploring facts, expressing opinions- keeps us from shelving the things we ought to be thinking about. The pundits, the journalists, and even "regular" people need to keep talking about Katrina's aftermath - what went wrong, what didn't, who did what and who didn't. We need to talk about what's being done now, what can be done next week or next month, what needs to be done a year from now.

I'm not saying it needs to be all Katrina, all the time. I'm just asking that those who would say "enough already" try to understand that putting it on the shelf shouldn't be an option. Otherwise, we'll forget about it until the problem becomes a problem again.

Why try to make it pretty?

I watched Oprah today, and was in tears several times at the sights and sounds of the devastation she saw in Katrina-ravaged areas. At one point, the coverage was so...wrenching...gruesome...we had to turn off the TV.

Since I missed many parts of the show, I checked the Web site tonight, and received a startling reminder of the difference between media and entertainment. Media shows the good, the bad, the ugly. Entertainment...well, they can fine-tune things a bit.

See the picture.

The woman on the left, in the solid black t-shirt? That's not a solid black t-shirt. When that segment was shown on TV today, the t-shirt featured a large green marijauna leaf in the centre of it. Anyone want to speculate on why Oprah's people felt it appropriate to Photoshop that out? Discuss.