Rita Arens's Blog, page 40
November 2, 2012
How the Hell Is It November?
It was 115 degrees five minutes ago.
I have a rotten jack-o-lantern sitting outside my front steps.
I have made exactly half of my Christmas presents already.
Time is moving too fast and too slow.
October 31, 2012
Caption That Action: Bear School
Happy Halloween! The little angel was a monster trainer. And Tiny (remember Tiny?) was her monster. I made the costume. Took me five hours. It took her five minutes to take half of it off.
After about two blocks, Beloved got tired of doing this when she rang the doorbell.
We just got back. When I went upstairs, I walked in on this. WTF?
October 29, 2012
Riffle: It's Pinterest for Books
Some of you expressed interest in what I'm doing with my publishing interactions with readers and other authors. My motto is pay it forward and hope and also pray hard and row for shore. In other words, while I think there is something to books sell because they are really beautiful or profound or poignant, there's also even more to books sell because people realize they are there in the first place. That's the toughest part of publishing right now. With 235,000 self-published books coming ou...
October 26, 2012
And Just Like That, It's Gone
I did actually manage to pack yesterday. I haven't yet determined how much I forgot, other than my phone charger. But Beloved has one just like it! So, phew. Because even though my phone doesn't get reception here in the hinterlands, I still have to have it with me and charged like a woobie.
So we made it up here, and I woke up this morning all KA-POW! feeling like myself again, thank you Jesus, because wow that really sucked feeling paralyzed! Interestingly, what snapped me out of it was goi...
October 25, 2012
Paralysis
My cousin's wedding is on Saturday, and we need to leave in a few hours. I have tons of work left to do, I'm not packed and someone is coming to watch the cat and the house is a train-wreck of half-finished homemade Christmas presents and school supplies and unsorted coupons and to-be-read books. We are drowning in paper products at Chateau Travolta.
Forcing myself to focus is almost physically painful. I can do it, but only for a few minutes at a time. I'm not quite sure what is wrong with m...
October 23, 2012
I Can't Look at This Without Laughing
October 19, 2012
Parenting a Gifted Child
"Mommy, sometimes I feel like I miss something that isn't even there."
Hormones? Anxiety?
"Well, you're getting to the age when you will start having these suckers called 'hormones.' They help you grow your boobs, but they can be a real pain when it comes to emotions coming out of nowhere."
"Hormones make you feel bad?"
"Sometimes. When I was your age, I started to have anxiety."
"What's that?"
"When you feel nervous or really excited or scared for no reason out of nowhere. If you feel those...
October 17, 2012
The Reading Bench
When I was a kid, there was a bench in my parents' house that was just long enough for a small child to lie down with her head touching one armrest and her feet touching the other. I loved that bench. I still love it -- my parents gave it to me when I moved out. Sometimes I go upstairs and sit on it and realize how totally uncomfortable it is, but I still love its swoopy wooden details. I don't have the house or the budget for the amount of swoopy wooden details I would buy if I could.
I was...
October 15, 2012
I Found a Publisher for My Young Adult Novel!
What an up-and-down month. In the midst of the bad, there is good, and the good is that this past week I signed a contract with indie publisher InkSpell to publish my debut young adult novel, The Obvious Game, in February 2013.
Which is in five months.
Indies! We move fast!
I'm actually thrilled about the pub date, even though it's coming up soon. February is Eating Disorders Awareness Month, and there have been so many people who have emailed me about themselves or their loved ones wantin...
October 12, 2012
Take That, Twenty-Seven-Year-Old Self
Two weeks ago, my husband told me he'd lost his job in a clean, P&L-based cut. And suddenly, that thing I feared ever since we got married and bought a house and birthed another mouth to feed happened, and I wasn't sure if we could live on my salary or not.
Whether or not we should be able to is beside the question. Of course we should be able to. But we weren't. My husband and I earn within a small range of each other's salaries, and we've always been a two-income family. We've both been lai...