We went camping this weekend

Posted on by Cari — 9 Comments ↓

We went to Cape Lookout, on the coast. I grew up camping in the woods alongside a river. Camping at the beach is completely new to me. You can hear the ocean from your tent as you fall asleep! And you can hear it when you wake up! And then you walk over a dune and down to the water at seven in the morning and you have it nearly to yourself, just you and your family running on the sand and collecting sand dollars and crab claws and explaining that you’re saying “mussel,” not “muscle,” ( “Yes, it’s a muscle, but what kind of animal was it?” “A mussel.” “But a muscle from what?”) and it’s all just…perfect. Best trip ever.

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Writer, with Kids: Emily Gray Tedrowe

Posted on by Cari — 4 Comments ↓

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photo: audrey keller photography

Emily Gray Tedrowe, author of Commuters: a novel

Age of kids: 9 and 6

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

It’s weird—so much of my writing process has been forged in the crucible of having kids, that I can hardly remember what it was like to write before I became a mom. I think back then I tended to write in sporadic bursts, a coffee shop here and a park bench there. Maybe I had the freedom, but I certainly didn’t have the discipline. When my first daughter was an infant, I forced myself to write for every minute of her naps, which wasn’t too arduous—or productive—because her daily sleep habit, in our house, was known as “the thirty minute special.” When she was a few months older and I was teaching, I formed the habit that would carry me through the next years and a first attempt at a novel (not a success) as well as my next try, which became Commuters: I got up at 5 am, every morning including weekends, to write for about an hour and a half before the day started. About as brutal as you’d imagine, especially during those months when I was also up in the middle of the night breastfeeding. Getting my writing in before dawn was how I taught myself to be a writer. Now that my kids are older, and I write in the (later) mornings after taking them to school, I look back at those years with awe and amazement. How did I do it? Lots of coffee. Some bleary pre-writing internet surfing. A fair amount of dogged stubbornness. A great husband who knew he was “on duty” if either of the kids woke up while mommy was writing. It was hard, and I had to give up a lot of things besides sleep (exercise, late night conversation, evening TV). But given the choice between a day of feeling wasted and having written a page or two, or being well-rested but no further along in the work… well, that was easy. (Also, here’s a secret I discovered: far easier to get up at 5 am every morning than to do it once in a while.)

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

Great question. This is really important to me, because although I teach a college course sometimes, my main job, aside from writing, is to be the primary caregiver for our two daughters. I don’t want to space out when I’m with them—even if that was possible, given the sheer volume of their enthusiasms and squabbles—I really want them to know I’m listening, both in the serious moments and in the silly ones. It’s hard for me; a lot of times I’d really prefer to be in my own thoughts. And it’s easy to “mm-hmm” one’s way through the nineteenth minute of a stuffed animal wedding. What helps is that parenting is actually a nicely designed counterpart to the interior, quiet, sedentary world of writing… after writing I love to be at the playground, for example, or to cook dinner and supervise homework. The physical work of parenting, and its (mostly joyful) noisiness, are a good break for me from the quietness of my desk. Another thing I do when possible is to include my girls into my writing world. We do “family reading night” after dinner sometimes—everyone in the living room with a pile of books. We’re heavy users of our public library, where I can fit in a bit of research while they browse. They come with me to museums and book festivals, bookstores and readings. I bring them on “field trips” to locations I want to check out for a current project, and they take lots of photos with my phone. When they were little, they used to love when I’d print out a full manuscript—they would pull out each page as it unspooled, holding it up with delight while I scrambled to keep a minimum of collated order.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

Probably mostly in that if it’s not top priority, I’m not going to spend time on it. If I weren’t a parent, I might be trying lots more book reviews or essays on art and music, or personal essays, or other forms of writing. I might have a currently-updated blog, a super-clever twitter feed, a gorgeous photo tumblr. I love all of these when other people do them, so at times I’m tempted. But because I’m clear on what matters most to me—writing fiction—I hone in on that in the little time I get to be at my computer each day. Reading is also a big part of my life, so if I do have extra time I’m much more likely to be reading rather than anything else.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

For me, it would be the definite lack of long dreamy unoccupied hours in which to think globally about, for example, a novel-in-progress. I know people without children don’t exactly have a surplus of long dreamy unoccupied hours, of course. But one thing about parenthood—as it exists in my house—is that there is constant talking, constant interaction. I can whittle out the bare bones time to sit down and bang out my daily word count, but other than that I’m in a running conversation with two sharp chatty girls all day long. Like, from 7 am until bedtime. It’s a big problem—where can I find the mental space to roam over the novel as a whole, to let it float into view and reveal itself? Not, clearly, during the rat-a-tat back-and-forth of “mom, can I” or “mom, she did this” or “mom, come quick!”

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Make friends with other artists who are parents. It’s helped me so much. One year a filmmaker friend and I traded babysitting once a week to give each other time to get our work done. I also commiserate and strategize with the fabulous friends-who-are-moms in my writers’ group. When you know you’re not alone, it breaks up the pity party. I couldn’t imagine my life without either my children or my writing, and I feel grateful for the problem of how to juggle both.

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Fishing without my father

Posted on by Cari — 10 Comments ↓

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We took the kids fishing for the first time last weekend. Kiddo had spent a week in fishing camp at the beginning of the summer, but this was the first time we all went as a family.

I come from a fishing and camping family. Trout fishing and camping in upstate New York every summer, boat fishing for flounder at home in New Jersey when we weren’t camping, catching sad little sunnies at the reservoir while my five-year-old brother struggled with his new Snoopy spin caster… When I remember my father as happy, I mostly remember him fishing.

I may have built last Saturday’s fishing trip up in my mind ever so slightly. I may have somewhat set myself up.

Kiddo wanted to go to Blue Lake, because it was one of the fishing spots he’d gone to with the camp. We got there and Kiddo cast out, reeled back in immediately, cast out again, reeled back in immediately… He wasn’t satisfied with his casting. Then Girlie had to pee (guess who potty-trained herself last week at 26 months?) and Billy took her so I could stay with the guy, since Billy himself is just now learning to fish.

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Kiddo reeled in again and went to cast out again and somehow got things so horribly tangled that the line was wrapped around the base of the reel about fifty times and all knotted up and hopeless. My dad was the snarl fixer, not me. I sat down on the dock and cried about the snarled reel in my lap, because it felt so horribly lonely to be the adult responsible for fixing the mess, my father not there, not anywhere I could reach him. Then I pulled myself together and cut the tangled line away, and got the rod set back up for the kid, with a nice fat worm on the hook so he could have another go. Because what else is there for it?

It’s hard to predict what will bring that old pain back up to the surface, my dad gone now nineteen years, but I should have seen this one coming.

We didn’t catch anything that day. We went back out yesterday, though, and caught five fish between us. Yesterday was easier, because I knew what to expect. I watched the sadness bubble up, then let it go. Cast my line out. Landed a fat trout.

Today is his birthday. He would have turned seventy.

Happy birthday, Daddy. Your grandson caught his first trout yesterday.
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Writer, with Kids: Elise A. Miller

Posted on by Cari — 1 Comment ↓

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Elise A. Miller, author of: Star Craving Mad, “Forgive Me,” “Some Great Reward”

Age of kids: 8 and 6

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how
has that changed?

I only began writing seriously a few years before I had kids. What had started as an acting and performing pursuit distilled organically into a writing path, which I found a far more efficient and satisfying way to express myself. I include this tidbit because I am still figuring out my writing self as I parent—there was nothing so firmly entrenched in my habits or my body of work, except for loving to write, that anchored me once the kids were born, so I felt shaken pretty hard when I became a mom.

Mostly I wrote while temping in law firms in midtown Manhattan with other aspiring writers, comedians and actors. I hosted and curated a monthly reading series and was surrounded with a great community of writers. I performed readings around the city and when I wasn’t doubting myself I generally felt like an authentic, relevant voice.

When a friend asked me to join her romance writing group, inspired by a call for submissions by Harlequin’s (then) new imprint, Red Dress, I joined for no other reason than I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. A bunch of us met weekly for hummus, mimosas and workshopping. I had great fun writing, loved the camaraderie, healthy competition and audience. This combination of factors kept me going. When my agent asked to represent it, I felt like I’d won an Academy Award. I got a book deal within weeks, which I later learned is a rare occurrence. I said to my husband, probably with tears of joy in my eyes, “Wow, it really is possible to make money creatively, doing something we love! I’ve done it! I’ve arrived! Now we can start a family!”

The baby brought new focus, hormonal surges, a perilous drop in ambition, and of course a time vacuum. Whatever upward momentum I’d gathered as a writer vanished in a sleep-deprived haze. The reading series I hosted became a burden once I was a mom—schlepping to the lower east side from Brooklyn with an infant was no picnic. Our apartment grew too cramped for comfort, especially when baby number two arrived in 2006.

I did manage to write another novel when my son was 18 months old but my agent rejected it. It was not my best work, I admit, but I was proud of the accomplishment. My ambition was stunted; I grew frustrated. It probably didn’t help that my expectations after publishing my novel included a witty televised chat with David Letterman and a Malibu beachfront property—something glassy and white like Jennifer Aniston might rent for forty-thousand dollars a week. None of this came to pass.

Instead I started blogging about my confusion, and shortly after that we moved out of the city back to my hometown suburb in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. Soon my writing contacts became cyber ghosts—Facebook friends.

I beat myself up daily for not writing another novel, cultivating myself a petri dish of self-loathing and isolation. Friends told me to give myself a break, but I found this hard to do when other writers I knew managed to publish novels while their babies were toddlers. Two authors who come to mind had full-time nannies, which I did not. Still, I compared myself to them.

In the meantime I continued blogging, grew obsessed with food and yoga, developed horrible back pain, a subsequent distracting crush on my back doctor, and like a throbbing carbuncle, my second novel burst out of me finally, only six years after the first. It took about five months to write the first draft, which I typed manically during whatever breaks from the kids I could carve for myself.

There is no precious writing spot or time anymore. It took me six years to stop waiting for the sea to part for my creative work, but more, it took that long for an idea to stick. My writing schedule is erratic. The only plan I have is to get some writing done every day, whether it’s a blog post, a journal entry or a story. Sometimes I bring my laptop to the kitchen counter, and write while I make meals for the family. Or I lay in bed with my laptop on Saturdays while my husband takes care of the kids, or I schlep my laptop to some institutional chain cafe on a Sunday and write for a few hours. My husband is very smart. He knows that it’s better in the long run if he cares for the kids while I get some writing done. I’m more prone to ignore the family when I’m in the middle of something like a novel, something with momentum. I’m more likely to leave the laptop alone between projects and spend more time as an engaged mom.

The good thing about short bursts is that I always leave an easy thread hanging. I can slip in and pick up where I left off, in the middle of the action. The bad thing is that sometimes I spend more time rereading what I’ve written to get myself back into the flow than I spend adding new prose.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into
a current project?

It’s hard to be of two minds. When I’d rather be writing, I get irritable and ineffective as a mom and when I’d rather spend time with my family, my writing grows stiff and uninspiring. Mid-project, I zone out, gather a fog around me and drift away. I do sometimes succeed at joining everyone at the dinner table, physically and emotionally, and I’ve been known to strategically enter the topic of my latest project into meal-time conversation. I like that my kids get to see me work, get to see me struggle at a creative task I love, get rejected and then work some more. This is an important lesson to share with them—perseverance.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

My children feature heavily in my latest novel. The problem is, now they can read. I expect to be heavily vetted in the near future. My writing is darker because I am more isolated and lonelier here, so that moodiness inevitably seeps into my work.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Getting paid. Generating work. Cultivating a new and renewed writing community. Casting a wider net for inspiration. Prioritizing my time—good food, tidy surroundings and groomed eyebrows all take time away from writing and being with my kids, but they are all integral to my sanity. And I feel like a failure at times—I’m never totally a writer or totally a mom. But of course I am both of those things and slowly it is becoming enough to be just okay at two things I love. I don’t need to be phenomenal. It’s phenomenal enough living a life I actually choose.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Keep your sense of humor handy.

Ask your kids to help you through perplexing plot-points. If their answers involve poopy, pee-pee, Lady Gaga and/or Bakugans, that’s okay. It’s good to go through the journey together. This way, when you’re being a grouchy yenta at the dinner table, they won’t take it personally.

Don’t expect the transition from writer-head to mom-head to be smooth. Expect rockiness.

Take a hit of accomplishment from the skimpiest chunks of writing time. Enjoy a single sentence. A thought. A word.

Be kind to yourself.

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Posted in Writer with kids

Waiting, again

Posted on by Cari — 5 Comments ↓

I typed the title for this post and my brain served up a memory of Billy doing a godawful Jim Morrison impression. “Way-TING.. WAY-HAY-TING…” (As if the actual Jim Morrison weren’t bad enough. Not a Doors fan. Sorry. I was, but then I turned thirteen and discovered The Smiths.)

Oy. If anyone out there is truly capable of reading minds that must be a terrible curse. In the time it took me to type this paragraph my brain went from my book to Billy to the Doors to Morrissey to a poster in my teenage bedroom to hummus to eyeshadow to parabens.

I came here to tell you something and I’ve gotten terribly off track. It’s been that kind of a night. I came here to tell you that I finished revising The Revolution of Every Day per the editorial notes from the very wise and generous editor I’ve had the good luck to be working with. Today I compiled it from Scrivener into Word. And then formatted it for two hours. I love writing in Scrivener. It’s worth all that formatting work, the few times a year I find myself compiling a manuscript…but, damn. Two hours of my precious childfree time today spent deleting double tabs and correcting chapter numbers because it insists on marking my title page as Chapter One no matter what I do. Even though I use a template that INCLUDES a title page. Yes, I compile to RTF first. Yes, it’s supposed to be much easier than that to compile a manuscript. I have no idea.

The double tab problem I’ve figured out. It happens wherever I’ve copied and pasted text from a Word doc into Scrivener. In later drafts I often find myself moving chunks of text around, using a marked-up Word file of an earlier draft. I guess I need to stop going back and forth between Scrivener and Word, because the double tabs are a serious pain. I have to arrow down through the entire manuscript line by line.

And now I’m off track again.

I just wanted to say that I finished the revisions and turned them back in and now I’ve got to wait as patiently as possible to hear back. Best possible scenario, I get the book deal. Totally okay scenario, they ask for more revisions before an offer. Also entirely possible: they say no. I’m feeling more than a little anxious about it.

After I hit SEND on the revisions, I took my anxiety out to Powell’s and bought it a nice new book I’d been wanting. Bonus karmic points for supporting a fellow Portland author, yes? Yes. Certainly.

I’m going to try to make it through this wait as gracefully as possible. Wish me luck.

(And to the person who found my blog by searching for “little carrots that are easy to draw,” I hope you found what you were looking for.)

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Writer, with Kids: Lisa K. Friedman

Posted on by Cari — 1 Comment ↓

Lisa K. Friedman is an author and essayist. Her work appears in the New York Times and the Huffington Post. Her novels, Cruise to Retribution and Nothing to Lose, are available at Amazon. Lisa lives in Washington DC with her husband and their new, almost-house-trained puppy, Tiller.

I used to meander to my writing desk, long and narrow with a perimeter fence around three sides, used for a variety of tasks including letter writing, bill paying, record keeping and oh, yes, writing. I had two regular writing gigs during my first pregnancy and had never missed a deadline: I had no intention of letting an infant change that. Just in case the other women in my prenatal exercise class were telling the truth (that the baby would upturn my life entirely), I drafted three assignments in advance. I was organized, prepared, ready.

Six months later, I had yet to review and submit my work. I had lost myself entirely. My desk was reassigned as a changing table. A glider had replaced my lumbar-supporting Aeron Chair. The stroller was parked in front of the bookshelf, barring my favorite inspirations from view: Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing. I missed writing. I missed thinking like a writer, musing, wondering, conjuring. One night, late at night, I was sitting in the front window nursing the baby when I saw a light from an apartment across the street. I was feeling terrible about myself – I was unfocused, unproductive, without creative energy – when I realized there was a person in the far window. He was hunched forward, learning toward the light. I couldn’t see his hands or what held his attention. Was he reading? Maybe he was studying for his real estate license, or for the Bar or the medical school admissions test. I realized at once what held me to him: determination. He had the posture of pure determination. I knew exactly what I had to do.

I started keeping a calendar. I marked backwards from deadline dates, noting the hours I had available for research, thinking, meetings, writing, revising. It sounds a little manic now, but at the time I needed the structure of the calendar to keep me focused. I even had an hour allotted for naps! My writing space was cleared and forever sacrosanct, used only for my own writing projects. I had a scant few hours a day when the baby slept with any regularity. I was determined to use them well.

My first novel came out six months late and coincided with my second baby who came out six weeks early. I did my first television interview in an ill-fitting maternity dress, praying throughout that the sitter remembered my two year old was allergic to peanuts. With babies, you are forever torn between work and worry.

When the boys were toddlers I hired college students to baby-sit for four-hour blocks of time, figuring they were less likely to be criminals or child abductors (fiction writers will understand this sort of melodramatic over-thinking). The boys knew what a closed door meant: I was not to be disturbed. Once, my son, who wore a superman costume every day for the better part of a year, asked a particularly dense sitter if she’d like to see him fly and she, trying to be agreeable, said “sure.” We spent the rest of that day in the emergency room. There were plenty of accidents and disruptions. But I remained determined.

When I’m writing fiction, I sometimes bring my characters with me into the real world. I may introduce my real kids to my imagined ones, telling them (the real ones) whom I spent the day with, asking them if they share my angst or concern regarding an errant character or perilous situation. I watch their faces as I explain where and when and what and how. I observe their immediate reactions. It helps me gauge how clearly I know a character, or how adequately I describe him or her. The children’s eyes glow when I engage them, when I tell them what I’ve been working on. They love to be included. And I feed off their energies. They are so enthusiastic, and so relentlessly honest.

I was invited to speak at career day at my son’s school. When he introduced me, he said, “She writes on her computer all day. She knows a lot of words.”

My kids are grown now and come home only at intervals. When they are home, I often open my writing room door to find a note from one of them, letting me know of their plans, their schedules, their needs. To this day, they hesitate to disturb me during my writing time. Even now, when they are busy managing their own lives, they call, after my writing time of course, and ask: “So, tell me. What are you working on?”

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Crazy DIY Hippie Mom Makes (not very good) “Candy”!

Posted on by Cari — 15 Comments ↓

Well, I think I’ve done it. I’ve managed to top my own dear mother’s enthusiastic embrace of carob in the seventies. Damn you, carob! You are NOT a chocolate substitute and I’m still scarred. (Is carob even good for you? I bet it’s not. Kind of like all that margarine we ate because “butter will kill you” and then my dad died of a heart attack at fifty. Yay, margarine.)

It all began with a two a.m. panic attack about radiation from Fukushima. I jumped down the Google rabbit hole in search of ways to protect my family (See this post about my attempts to make my family Death Proof), came across spirulina as something that was used in post-Hiroshima Japan with success, and was reminded that I used to take spirulina all the time, and that I felt great when I did.

Spirulina! Spirulina! It’s going to save us! Okay, great. It very well might. Or maybe I’m once again worried about nothing. Maybe the things that keep us awake at night are never the things that get us; it’s the things that you never even think to worry about that do. Okay, cool. I’ve been known to overreact. I have been accused on more than one occasion of being high-strung. Whatever. Spirulina is good for you. I started taking it. Billy paid some lip service to being willing to take it, though he hasn’t yet. The kids? They won’t touch the stuff and I can’t find it in any kid-friendly formulas.

I had this brilliant idea… I would mix spirulina powder into a sort of healthy candy concoction. I was so sure it would work I blabbed about it on Facebook, with plans to report back and share the recipe.

Yeah.

Coconut butter, peanut butter, unsweetened cocoa, raw honey, and spirulina powder. Sounds pretty good, right? I melted the butters together, mixed in the cocoa, honey, and spirulina, and plunked gobs of it onto parchment paper. I stuck them in the freezer and got these messy sort of homemade chocolate drops. They looked pretty good. They tasted like…Okay–you’ll be shocked to read this, I know… They tasted like chocolate peanut butter algae. Who would have thought that adding algae to chocolate and peanut butter would get you that result? (Hush. Hush now. That’s unkind.)

Do I even need to say that the kids wouldn’t eat them? I had a few, just to prove a point. What point? I don’t know. They weren’t very good and I like the taste of spirulina. I think it didn’t play well with the peanut butter. I still want to get spirulina into the kids, but now I’m not sure how. It has such a strong taste. They would reject it in a smoothie, too, I bet.

Suggestions? Or just want to call me crazy? Because that’s cool, too. But if you could call me crazy and then tell me how to get spirulina into these kids, it would be much appreciated.

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Writer, with Kids: Peter Rock

Posted on by Cari — 3 Comments ↓

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Peter Rock, author of: The Raccoon and the Letter (forthcoming), My Abandonment, The Unsettling, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, This Is the Place

Age of kids: 3 and 5

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

It would be different if only one thing changed at a time, in this life, but it’s all interconnected in a way that can’t be disentangled. That said,

Ideal: Wake up around 5, write until around noon, eat something, swim or run, do some computer work (I don’t write on a computer during the actual writing) to catch up and organize the morning work. Have a drink, read a book, cook, await my wife.

Actual: I’ve always had another job, whether as a ranch hand or security guard in an art museum, or as a temp, or as a teacher, and so my writing has always waxed and waned with various schedules (calving, lambing, the academic schedule). But back before I had kids my wife was in medical school, then doing her residency—that was a period of time where I got a lot of writing done, because I’d often come home from work and she wouldn’t be around for another 36 hours. So I’d say, “She’s working; I’ll work.”

Wisely, she didn’t want to have children while doing her residency. So now if I get home and she’s working, it just means I have two little girls to entertain and feed, etc. They’re not interested in watching me write.

A lot of this and the rest of the questions revolve around money, and time, and how they interact. Which is to say that my wife works harder and longer than I do, and I teach full-time, so we have little time, but sufficient funds to have childcare most days for our kids. For a couple years we had a nanny, now we have daycare. If this were not the case, I think the figuring out how and when to write would be even trickier. But the amount of time I spend teaching (and carting kids back and forth) also cuts into writing in ways temporal and psychic.

So, weekends I hardly ever write at all. I play with the kids, go to swimming lessons, etc, etc.

During the school year, I don’t teach every day, and I try to write a little bit, to stay in contact. I am an insomniac, and tend to wake up in the middle of the night, and so I found myself writing between 4:30-6:30 a lot this year, writing until the girls woke up. I’m a morning writer, not a night writer (and often I’m too exhausted to function once the girls are in bed).

In the summer, when I’m not teaching, I tend to write before the girls get up, take them to school, then write pretty much all day (see “ideal,” above). That’s about 3-4 months out of the year. Not bad. Not ideal.

I had a vision of myself writing with my baby daughter sleeping next to me, many years back. That turned out to not work so well.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

In my case, it’s kind of impossible to figure out how I wouldn’t be present—they don’t really give me the choice. So the fight is always to figure out if I’ll be at all able to be present for my work, or to sink into it (see below). The family always has and demands and deserves priority.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

I guess there are definitely ways that I now have a different kind of experiences to draw on—questions of fatherhood, or of having children, etc, are no longer hypothetical—and I would hope a deeper range of empathy, but that hope is probably delusional. I liked to write about young girls before I had them, and I still do…

The way these children eat clocks is the real force of change. Since my first daughter was born I have been working on the same long novel. At one point it was about 1,000 pages long, and it really took me 1-2 hours just to sit with it and think in order to begin to write or make any changes. Reacquainting myself was hard. And all too often I just didn’t have time to make that effort, to sink in, and so I didn’t do it, I gave up.

So, especially when teaching, it’s important for me to conceive of projects that can be dealt with incrementally, or to break down larger projects in ways that I can attack in smaller pieces of time. Perhaps this is what people talk about when they discuss having children making one more “efficient,” or perhaps my work will just become decreasingly ambitious and successful. We’ll see.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Time, time, time. Sleep. Figuring out how to stay in enough touch with your work that you don’t resent anyone without having anyone resent you for being in touch with your work.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Write when you’re writing. Figure out some time, however small, and don’t let anything stop you. When you’re not writing, don’t fret.

If you have kids, I won’t presume to advise you. If you don’t, go on ahead and have them. You’ll be glad you did. It will exhaust you. And you’ll know that at every stage, in every moment, that it’s more important to be a decent parent, or try to be, than to be a decent writer.

Also, I hear—though can’t verify this—that the period of time when children want or need so much attention actually doesn’t last forever.

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[random]

Posted on by Cari — 3 Comments ↓

1. I finished reading My Abandonment by Peter Rock this weekend. I loved it–it left me gutted. A child narrator is hard to pull off, and Rock does it so, so well. (PS: He’ll be this week’s guest in the Writer, with Kids series. Check back on Wednesday to read the interview.)

2. I’ve passed out of the promiscuous five-books-at-a-time phase into the reading-books-like-chainsmoking phase. As soon as I finished My Abandonment, I started What Happened to Sophie Wilder. So far it feels like reading Henry James (which is a good thing, for me. I love James.). It’s mannered in a way that contrasts nicely with the age of the narrator and the contemporary setting. I suspect I’ll either love it and devour it or throw it across the room. Too early to tell. I promise to report back.

3. Kiddo turned six last week. He looks like this now, such a big boy:

kiddo

4. Revisions on Revolution are going well. The editor who’s kicked my ass in the best way possible has given a thumbs up to my revised opening, and I’m closing in on finishing this draft. I’m chastened by how many passages that I loved fiercely lifted right out without leaving a hole. This is why we have editors, yes?

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Writer, with fetus: Shane Jones

Posted on by Cari — 5 Comments ↓

!shanejones4
Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes, The Failure Six, and Daniel Fights a Hurricane.

He and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall.

What is your writing schedule like now, and how do you anticipate it will change when the baby is born?

My writing schedule is…well, there is no schedule. I work a 9-5 job, so if I have a project going I’ll try to find pockets to write – either before work or after. Right now I don’t have a project, which is great in some ways, and terrible in others. I go a little crazy with guilt if I’m not working on something, but lately my thoughts are consumed with baby. I think those writing pockets start to close more and more as the birth approaches. I can feel it. It’s amazing and terrifying. I have no plans to have a writing schedule after the baby is born because I don’t know what to expect. I imagine the first year will be incredibly difficult to find writing time. I’m going to just wait and see what happens.

Have you and your wife talked about making sure you each get time for your work/creative pursuits after the baby is born? What’s the plan?

I laughed when I read this question. I’m sorry. But I can’t imagine my pregnant wife’s reaction if I brought up the topic of “my creative pursuits after the baby is born.” I don’t think my writing is going to be a real priority after the baby is here. But I do realize it’s important for both of us to have our own time and be individuals, not just parents. I want to keep writing. I think if I’m happy with creating more stuff on the page, that will translate into me being a more aware and attentive father. Does that make sense? Like, if I’m not writing at all, I’ll be thinking about writing. And that’s not good. I’ll be holding this little baby boy and thinking about how to take a pyramid and melt it. I don’t want that. I think once the baby is here, a routine of chaos will be in place and I’ll feel my way around the routine of chaos and see where the pockets are to jump into and write a few sentences, pages.

Has your writing been affected by impending fatherhood? How about your reading preferences?

My writing has been affected in one major way and that’s thinking “is what I’m writing really that important now?” I realize this probably sounds really dramatic, but I don’t know how any writer as a parent can’t think this. The idea that I’ll be raising a child juxtaposed against how to write a graph about a horse collapsing in on itself and disappearing through a portal (just a random example, but something I’d probably write) seems kind of insane. I think it’s a general “what the hell am I doing?” while writing now. I’m struggling with it. My thought process is changing. As far as reading, I’m leaning more towards non-fiction. Some baby stuff online. Did you know they sell something called a “Peepee teepee?”

Do you look at your published work differently now, knowing your son will read it one day?

I have a nightmare vision that my son will grow into a varsity football player bro and find my books. In the nightmare vision he shoves me down a staircase and calls me “balloon man” while tossing my first novel, Light Boxes, on my crumpled body. That’s a worst case scenario that I don’t think will happen. I really hope that doesn’t happen. I’m not going to push my son to read my books. It will just be a simple “this is something your father does” and if he’s interested he’ll read them. If not, that’s fine too. I just don’t want to get pushed down the stairs. That’s really my main goal as a father to a son – not to get pushed down the stairs.

Are you terrified? Admit it. You’re terrified. It’s okay to be terrified. What scares you most about this whole baby-on-the-way thing?

It’s a really weird mix of excitement and terror. So yes, I’m scared. I’m scared to be responsible for a baby. But I’m excited and confident and my mind and heart are fully into it. I also have a lot of support from my wife and friends and family. I don’t feel alone in this. And this is something I want to do. I think a lot of the fear comes from what I call “worried layers.” That is, you start thinking about the birth, and what about the car seat, and what about food for the baby, and what about where the baby is going to go to school and WHAT ABOUT COLLEGE!? and it can feel really overwhelming. So, I think it’s important to stay simple in the fear. I want the baby to be healthy and loved and taken care of. I want the birth to go well without any complications. But so much of this is out of my, and our, control, right? That’s somehow both comforting and scary. I just try and lean into the excitement aspect of having a baby. I mean, I get to show my son what the sky looks like. How exciting is that?

You can ask one question of those writers with kids who’ve gone before you. What do you want to know?

Should I get a Diaper Genie? I have a friend who said it was a must. Another said it’s silly and not to get it. Many people feel very strongly about Diaper Genie.

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