Why Lemony Snicket is my hero

“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.”

If anyone needed it, this quote from Lemony Snicket’s Shouldn’t You Be in School? is proof that children’s books aren’t all saccharine fluff and nonsense.

I know it's been months since my last post: a lot has been going on, and sadly today isn't the day for me to catch you up on it. [Though I did have a heavenly solo writer's retreat last week.]

I will pause long enough to say that over the past week I've been reading two middle grade series that appeal to my twisted and sometimes macabre sense of humor. The first series is Tales from Lovecraft Middle School, four books by the pseudonymous Charles Gilman that are like a cross between Goosebumps and the Cthulhu mythos. Some of my best memories of my late dad are of him telling us spooky stories that I later found out were written by H.P. Lovecraft. So Gilman "had me at hello" just with his titles.

The second series is  All The Wrong Questions, a planned quartet of books in which Lemony shares a pivotal event from his apprenticeship at the age of thirteen in the secret VFD [Volunteer Fire Department]. If the famous Series of Unfortunate Events books were simultaneously an homage to and a parody of penny dreadfuls, then All the Wrong Questions does the same thing for Golden Age detective novels. There is even a noble librarian named Dashiell!

When I got to that quote about not waiting for a wonderful moment, I realized that was the very reason I fled to the mountains for my retreat in the first place. There never does seem to be an untroubled moment in which I can write. If it's not another round of surgery for me, it's needing to leave home to take care of my mother after she's had surgery. The central air conditioning dies and needs to be replaced, trees crash onto all three of our cars, the toilet chokes, the dog needs to go to the vet. And even when things are going well, there is always food to be bought and cooked, dishes to wash, floors to be swept, clothes to be folded, and carpets to be vacuumed. If it's not student or client manuscripts to edit, it's a new educational gig to stress over.

This is true not just for me, but for all of you who are trying to write. None of us has a life filled with untroubled moments. But what I am learning, almost against my will, is that I need to stop waiting for those mythical halcyon times before I sit down to write. As Lemony tells us wisely, it's best to grab whatever moments we can find lying around in the midst of the daily chaos.

That's what I am trying to do today, with rain pouring down in sheets outside and tornado watches pending. Forget about all that, and just write.

I will leave you with another quote from Shouldn't You Be in School, this one by Lemony's imprisoned sister, Kit.

"“If you’re not scared, she told me, it’s not bravery.”

As I sit down to try and find my way back into my middle grade novel, I do feel a little shaky in the knees. Have I forgotten how to write? Is my idea stupid? Are my characters made of cardboard? Will kids find anything to like in this book? Is it worth writing at all?

So like Kit, I will be brave—and like Lemony, I will keep writing.

Why are trees throwing themselves at me?

There goes my writing retreat!

© Photo by Nancy Butts

I am even sadder this morning than I was yesterday evening when I lost my "writing pecan" tree. I had spent several hours yesterday in its shade, blocking out a new outline for the second half of my middle grade novel. Around 5, I ran out of steam, so I packed up my portable office and began to move inside. I had just sat down at my computer to make sure that the day's work was backed up, when out of nowhere the winds started gusting and there was a sudden downpour of rain.

I heard a crack, but it wasn't so loud or so close that I thought it was anything in my yard. One of the neighbors lost a tree limb, I thought.

And then I heard my husband shouting. A microburst had completely uprooted my writing pecan, which had toppled down across all three cars, brushing the edge of the roof we just had replaced last year due to hail damage, and ending up with a few branches on the back porch. And to think that I had just been sitting at that table under the tree, not twenty minutes earlier. Brrrr.

The holly tree took the brunt of the pecan's weight, which saved my husband's car. The lid to the trunk will have to be replaced, but I think that's it. But both the holly and another pecan were severely injured when the first tree fell: hope we can save them, or I won't have any shade in my backyard at all. Where am I going to hang all my ghosts at Halloween?

And where am I going to write now?

My car escaped without damage, but my son's old junker is still buried under the mammoth trunk of the tree. My son launched into lumberjack mode, and the three of us were able to cut out enough of the branches to get my husband's car out and moved to a safer place, but we're now at a place where professionals need to step in. Sigh. We just finished replacing the air conditioning system last week; today we'll be dealing with insurance agents, adjusters, body shops, and tree removers.

This is the second time in six months that a tree has thrown itself at me. In January during the first ice storm, I was out walking—and please don't ask what kind of idiot goes out for a stroll in the midst of an ice storm—when a huge oak at the Baptist church suddenly crashed down just a split second after I had walked past it. It fell only a few feet behind me. I love trees so much I'm practically a Druid, so why do they keep committing suicide around me? :D

But most of all, I'm going to miss that beautiful old pecan.

Good news!

It was a struggle yesterday to get to my desk. I was able to postpone that visit to the vet because Yukon's growth seems to be spontaneously shrinking. But I still had to take care of him, shoo my family down the driveway, finish all my chores and errands, and complete what I've started to call my morning rounds (this means checking and updating all my social media sites).

After all that, it was difficult to switch gears and go from mommy mode to writer mode. And at first I wasn't sure I was going to succeed. But I forced myself not to flee from my desk, not even when the 20,000 words of the book that I've already written seemed as foreign and incomprehensible to me as if someone else had penned them—in Klingon!

This is where the freewriting advice I've heard from so many others saved me. When you get stuck, don't stop—even if it means writing "I'm a worthless hack without a single original idea" over and over. OK, so you shouldn't write that! What I do is insert what I call placeholders into the manuscript. If I'm not sure what a character should say or do at any moment in a scene, I'll write something like, "Arlo has some reaction here." And then I'll move forward to write a real passage about the next thing that I do see clearly. This sounds stupid, but it always works for me. When I come back to that scene the next day, during revision, I will discover that now I do know what the character is doing. Then I'm able to take out that placeholder and weave in a snippet of dialogue, internal monologue, or action.

In the end, I was able to write a solid opening scene for my chapter after all. So now I can lead my characters down the cracked, weed-choked sidewalk and into the haunted house at last. What fun!

I had more good news this morning: I sold an article to the SCBWI Bulletin! Thank you, my dear friend Vijaya, for suggesting that I submit there in the first place.

The bad news though is that it's one of the pieces on my Free wisdom page, which means I have to temporarily take down. So I apologize, but the article about using a Kindle or iPad as a way to get fresh eyes when proofreading a manuscript will have to disappear from the site—just for a while.

However, the good thing about the SCBWI Bulletin is that unlike some other publications, you retain all rights to anything you publish there. So after a decent interval, I will be able to publish the proofreading article again.

While the mice are away...the writer will play

I am going to have the house to myself for 72 glorious hours, so I am racing around this morning trying to get all my chores and errands done; I want to free up every moment of that time to write! For me, this is the best vacation—having the rare solitude to work on my book, a middle grade novel that is my twisted spin on ghosts and haunted houses.

This is the book I've wanted to write since I was eleven, and my father gave me a copy of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. In my book, Spontaneous Combustion, I share this wondrous first paragraph of Jackson's novel.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
 
I can only hope to write something this good, but that's my inspiration for the weekend.

That is, if my dog lets me. A gruesome growth appeared overnight on his face yesterday, looking like a hitherto-unknown species of ginormous tick, or a part of his brain extruding through his Newfish fur. Ugh! It doesn't seem to be causing him pain, and he's not acting sick, but still I'm worried. Of course the vet was closed, but with a huge sigh I made an appointment for today. There goes my writing sabbatical, I thought. I'm going to be nursing a 130-pound dog after cranial surgery instead.

But there's hope! As of this morning, the growth seems to be deflating like some kind of disgusting balloon. So maybe it was just a hematoma; poor Yukon might have gotten bitten by something, or scratched his face when he was nosing around the honeysuckle and getting stuck in my neighbor's bamboo plantation. I'm crossing my fingers that it will heal on his own, I can cancel the vet appointment, and Yukon can go back to being my Muse for my weekend of writing.

Wish us both luck!