Beth Troy's Blog, page 19

9.18.17 Brainstorm

I volunteered to take my son, Ezra, to soccer practice so I could draft a blog on the sidelines. This is the first sentence I’ve written in 41 minutes and not because I’m captivated by his participation. That’s a train wreck. No, I’ve been busy staring at the treeline – a mix of burgundy, lime, and forest green.

My plan was to draft Lu2 this summer. Like the whole thing. Ha, ha (ha, ha, ha). Ha!

I doubled the honey-lime chicken recipe in the Crock-Pot last week so I could freeze half. It didn’t smell like something I should freeze when I found it in the back of the bottom shelf of the fridge this morning.

My eyebrows needed plucking August 2017. They’re scaring people, and it’s too early to spin them as a home-grown Halloween costume.

“Professor Troy, I emailed you about the assignment this past week, but I never heard back.” You did? Oh yes, I see that now. I’m sorry. That email must have come in when I was busy forgetting about the honey-lime chicken.

Is today Monday? Interesting. So that means the weekend was only yesterday. I have no recollection.

Let’s talk about the 48 hours I didn’t shower, but fit in two runs in the hot sun. No, you’re right. Let’s not talk about that.

The dentist just texted to remind me Tommy’s cleaning is overdue. Please don’t tell the dentist I’m overdue, too.

8:30PM has made for a crazy late bedtime the last 3 weeks.

Our library fine is back to double digits. Matt needs to cut me off.

If we didn’t have a cleaning lady, this brainstorm would never end. If we didn’t take Matt’s shirts to the dry cleaner, he’d be a Chippendale lawyer.

I’m slashing the dry cleaning budget.

I lost my tweezers – that’s why my eyebrows are so weedy! Maybe my Chippendale lawyer can find them like he found my Miami parking pass when I misplaced it in the journey from the envelope to the rearview mirror.

I found $0.41 on my walk home from work today. Maybe I can use that for tweezers. It won’t help the library fine.

I don’t recall the last time I washed the sheets on our bed, but I’m happy to head there after taking these few minutes to write about the random that is my life. Logging it makes me laugh – a last burst of energy before I fall asleep. Maybe tomorrow’s 4AM will look like 4:30, and maybe I won’t finish that Lu2 scene I’ve been snailing through for weeks. Maybe I’ll find more cash on my walk into work tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll find my tweezers! “Do you take walk-ins like Great Clips?” Maybe I’ll ask the dentist that question. No matter. Life is messy. Life is good.

Plus One

I just finished The Writing Life by Annie Dillard – beautifully written and from a perspective that poses book writing as an intense effort that takes 2-10 years and requires a cabin on a remote island.

Writing is outside of life, writing is for the lone artist – that’s one pole on the writing spectrum, and I don’t doubt it can work this way. I just write from the other end. My writing is a part of the life I live and the people I live with. As of today, I’ve sold 415 books, which nets me another beer, according to the binding terms of my book sale bet, but in an act of hope (and a desire not to track these numbers for a little while), I plucked another from the six-pack to share with my husband, Matt.

Interview, Take One

Beth: What’s worse – being married to a writer or a lawyer?

Matt: That’s easy. I don’t really like lawyers.

B: Do you like writers?

M: I only know one.

B: What’s it like being married to the one you know?

M: The writer I know goes to sleep very early and gets up super early. You do make my coffee in the morning, but at 4AM. By the time I get up, I have to microwave it. It’s 60% of what it was.

B: This sounds like a huge hassle for you.

M: It literally doesn’t change my life at all.

B: You’ve read Lu twice. Is it a book for dudes?

M: It has some good tips about what girls like. There’s a couple mentions of double pepperoni pizza. I never thought you’d write about something like that because you don’t like pepperoni. This makes me think that deep down you really do. I’m optimistic that maybe sometime I’ll get you to eat this pizza.

B: Lu is a work of fiction.

M: There isn’t any fiction that’s not inspired by real life.

** At this point, we shut down the interview because I didn’t appreciate Matt’s attitude. It was 10PM, and he reminded me he’d had a full day. I did not accept his excuses. He reminded me he’s an introvert who likes to think before he answers. I did not accept his excuses. He suggested I email him my questions. Fine. **

Interview, Take Two

B: So when you’re married, and one of you does something, it’s like you’re both doing it. This goes back to the “one flesh” bit you’re always harping to me about. I’ll often say “we” went to law school. Do you feel like “we” wrote Lu?

M: I feel like part of my life is in Lu. I believe that I have experienced some of the ups and downs that happened in the book, but as far as actual writing? No, I don’t feel like I did that – because I didn’t.  That was all you on your laptop at your various writing places.

B: I put the book down for several years. Did you think I’d ever get back to it? What, in your mind, did I have to overcome to get back to it?

M: Yes, I always thought you would get back to it. Before we even married I was sure you would accomplish “big” things. So, I was like, yeah, write a book. At the time you weren’t writing, I thought maybe you weren’t working on it because you didn’t believe in yourself – but now looking back, I think the timing wasn’t right. Sometimes God puts a desire into our heart and even shows us a place we will go – but many times, he has a lot of work to do on us before we are ready to go there. The extent of his grace is incomprehensible.

B: What did it look like to help/support me while I wrote Lu?

M: I always believed it was something you would do, so I guess that is some kind of support. Supporting someone who is writing a book is weird though – it’s kind of like a black box. You know something is happening, but you can’t really see it. it’s not like I can just help out. I can’t write a chapter for you on a day when you are sick.

B: Sure you can, so long as you don’t write it like you wrote the Troy Christmas card that one year. What stood out to you when you first read the Lu?

M: Reading the book was fun for me on a lot of levels. Unlike most readers, I could guess at the inspiration for a lot of little parts of the book. Some were not surprising to me, but some things were – just little things really. I was surprised that there was a baseball scene – because you don’t like baseball. I was surprised that Lu likes double pepperoni pizza – because you don’t like pepperoni. I was not surprised Lu is a coffee snob, because…. well… I guess that includes both of us.

B: You’re the original Troy coffee snob. You came into the marriage a french press. I was caffeine-free until I met you. Who’s your favorite character?

M: I will take the surprising answer here – and say John! I can identify personally with pressures going on in his life – I hope his story isn’t done yet. He has an honesty to him that is admirable even though he’s not really the “boy” you are rooting for.

B: Do you have any predictions for Lu2?

M: Oh yeah, I have all kinds of predictions for Lu2. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but I will go on record predicting that there will be a happy ending.

Negative Space

NEGATIVE SPACE

= the white space that surrounds an object in an image. Just as important as that object itself, negative space helps to define the boundaries of positive space and bring balance to a composition

Ask my why I wrote Lu, and I’ll give you the same answer every time: to show that God is real and deals with real people. It’s a good answer, though it’s answering a slightly different question. To show that God is real and deals with real people is why I published Lu. I wrote the book to see whether I could do that. Could I write God real? Could I write people real?

Lu became real to me when she left New York City with only her Crock-Pot. Complex as people are, we have singular moves that define us in an instant. This one’s hers. Bold. Ridiculous. There’s a thousand things a girl can do when she finds her boyfriend has been cheating on her, and hijacking the CP is the best Lu could figure. It’s better than hearing more about the new girl and way better than crying in front of the now ex-boyfriend. She’s out and on her own terms that leave us wondering whether we should laugh or cry.

We meet Jackson in a different way, first as the nameless man in the kiss-cam scene, and second as a label:

“Who was that?” I finally asked Grandma Pat later that evening. 

“That’s Jackson, the new pastor of our church.”

“The divorced pastor,” Nana Bea clarified.”

“You remember him – the pastor’s kid,” Gracie said.

Divorced pastor, pastor’s kid – these are big labels in the Christian world. I knew what I was doing when I wrote them into his character and left both relatively unexplained for the rest of the book. Because that’s real life, too – that you meet people by their labels and never learn their back-story. I knew the words I could have written to make Jackson’s labels easier to swallow, and I knew I could have changed “divorced” to something else and not dealt with it at all. But I didn’t write to “deal” or to “comment” or to “permit” or “not permit.” I wrote to write real, which means that sometimes I wrote events, characters, and descriptions because they exist outside of our pages, too, and for no reason other than that.

A few weeks ago, a Christian bookstore told me they wouldn’t carry Lu based on decisions my main girl makes in the third part of the story. Last week, I received my first two-star review based on my main man’s divorced status. Both rejections were graciously made, and I’m not here to argue with people who aren’t arguing with me. This is not a fight. We are not on opposing sides of the Christian school playground, snapping our fingers to a fighting beat (and this blog post is not a vehicle for inserting that West Side Story reference, though it tickles me to do it).

Not a fight.

Just some thoughts on how I deal with rejection because rejection stinks. I blog for a couple reasons, and one is that by sharing what I do, you’ll be encouraged in what you do. If we put our stuff out there, people will inevitably say, “No, thank you. I won’t carry that. I won’t recommend that.” What do we do then?

Lu has been out for two months, but I’ve been sharing the book for much longer. I shared the book with my writing partner when I was in-draft. I shared the book with 9 women and 1 husband after I was done. I shared the book with two editors before I published. I didn’t share for snaps; I shared for feedback. You’re still five chapters from done, my writing partner told me after I told her I was done. I read the first few chapters because I was your mom and the rest because I wanted to, my mom told me. If you want to keep the final Ecclesiastes sermon as is, you need to earn it, my editor told me. I love all the inside jokes from our childhood. The only one I’m pretty sure doesn’t work is “turd donuts” – that’s too weird for anyone but us, my sister said.

Each piece of feedback left me with the same question: “Would I make the change?” I didn’t answer it immediately, but let the feedback settle until I could deal with it objectively and not like a touchy writer. Then I’d run through the change in my mind, envision how it’d impact the story’s flow and purpose, and adjust accordingly. Most of the time, I revised and am glad to have done it. I’m convinced that one of the reasons Lu has landed so well is because of my year of beta-testing.

But when Lu doesn’t land well?

It’s the same process of settling that ends with the same question: Would I make the change? For this one bookstore to carry my book, would I change the decisions Lu makes in the third part of the book? To get more stars from one reviewer, would I write out Jackson’s divorce? And while I was at it, would I entirely rewrite the relationship between the two of them so that it lands in less of a gray area, and maybe also revise the other details that chaff – that scene where he has a beer, the humor that runs too sarcastic, Lu’s irreverence toward her family’s beliefs?

I would not because hose changes turn Lu into a story I would not be interested in reading or writing. And they’re off-purpose with why I wrote the book: to write God real, to write people real. I wasn’t raised in Christianity; I came to it when I was 18, and one of the first things to ring true were the stories about the people in the Bible. So messed up, God’s people. And not just before God calls them, but after, too. The details in their stories are of the skeleton-in-the-closet variety, and for a long time I wondered, why include them at all? I didn’t understand until it was my turn to believe or not believe. How deep does your grace your go? Can you really wash my sins white as snow? The messy stories of God’s people told me yes, and they also told me God would keep doing it.

These gray areas in our stories – the negative space – they exist, whether we tell them or not. And to tell them isn’t to deal with sin lightly or permissively, it’s to testify to how deep God’s grace and mercy go. Our negative space brings balance to the composition; it draws our eyes to the object, the point of it all. God’s grace is light in the dark, too brilliant to enter into standing, which is why my girl, Lu, hijacker of the Crock-Pot – bold, ridiculous, irreverent, flawed – enters into it at a crawl.

God is real and deals with real people. That was my challenge in writing Lu. That’s the book’s purpose, and you know what? I don’t think the bookstore owner and the two-star reviewer are at cross-purposes with me. I think they’re going about it in a different way. I think it’s also fun to note that in this same time frame, I received another rejection. A reader told me she couldn’t get past Chapter 6 – Lu had all the interest for her as a Hallmark movie. Could I possibly add in some paranormal creatures? No, I’m not going to make that change. But I appreciated a rejection that made me laugh.

I {Heart} Liberty, Indiana

I wrote Lu from three windows. This isn’t strange for a writer. Without a window, where would she look when she puts her chin in her hand to daydream about her story?

But for me, the windows were a camouflage – mostly to hide from myself that I was writing. Again. I’d always wanted to a write a book, and eight years ago, I quit my job and told everyone and their cousin to watch out for it. And then I failed. In four months, I eked out seven chapters – each written under the pressure of whether they’d land me an agent and a publishing contract. Ultimately, I had to shelve the whole thing when the rest of life fell apart, resulting in Matt and I moving into his parents’ house. No book, no jobs, and no money. I was 28, living with my in-laws and #winningatlife.

We rebuilt over the next five years, but the flame of my book’s crash burned bright. The dream to finish it never left, but I was afraid of failing again, and so I kept to the outskirts.

I’m not opening these old chapters to work on them; I’m just looking for something to read during the boys’ naps …

I’m not revising these chapters; I’m just tinkering …

I’m not setting my alarm to write tomorrow morning; I’m just making some time in case I happen to write …

I’m not writing a new chapter to finish this book; I’m just seeing if I can still write …

Even after one chapter turned into five, and it became apparent that, yes, I was writing, I kept to my three windows: my living room window to write before the boys woke up, the window of the coffee shop to write on Saturday afternoons, and the window of the Union County Library in Liberty, Indiana, to write during Ezra’s preschool. I came and went from them like a nomad, careful to clear the traces of what I’d been up to. I didn’t think anyone would notice me, but I suppose if you keep visiting the same places at the same time, the regulars take note.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” a man asked me after several consecutive afternoon writing trips at the library. “My name is Ray, and I work here. Could I get you a cup of coffee? We like to do that for our regulars.”

I suppose if you keep visiting the same places at the same time, you become a regular. It was one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had.

Fast-forward a year and a half. I published that book I’d been writing and was now trucking Lu around to whoever would carry her, which wasn’t many. You don’t have a platform, you don’t have an audience. The reasons for “No” made sense, but that didn’t stop them from landing discouraging. It rained all afternoon on the day I went back to the Union County Library in Liberty, Indiana. My hair frizzed a mile high. “I should have some marketing swag,” I thought, “or at the very least changed into pants without a barbecue stain.” But it was just me, my poofy hair and dirty pants, Lu, and a question.

“Would you be interested in circulating my book?”

The librarian, Karen Kahl, looked at me for a half second before she said, “Oh, I think we can do better than that. We’ll hold a reading and a signing. I’ll bring the cake and punch. You bring the books.”

Just like that, except it ended up being more than that. Last week, the Union County Public Library welcomed me to two events: one where I shared how my grandmas inspired me to write Lu and the other where I shared the building blocks of the story. This second event was held in the room where I wrote the third part of Lu, and try as I could to focus, my eyes kept wandering to the table I used to sneak to every afternoon to write.

I didn’t know if I’d ever finish Lu, especially when I was writing the third part. There was an emotional intensity in that section of the story that was hard for me to tap into every day, and I spent as much time staring at Liberty’s town square through the front window of the library as I did writing. How fun would it be to throw that girl some paper airplanes filled with secret notes? You will finish this book, and right around the time Ezra finishes preschool. You won’t come here to write anymore, but that’s okay because you’ll have finally worked up the guts to claim a space.

It’s a fun thought, but not necessary. I think Ray was necessary – his coffee, his recognition that I was a “regular” when I so often felt like a hack. I think Karen was necessary – her yes, her cake (with whipped cream frosting!) to celebrate a book, regardless of numbers, frizzy hair, stained pants, and a writer who didn’t have a fancy pitch, but a simple question: Would you be interested in circulating my book?”

What I Am

Jesse was a week old when I first noticed the school bus picking up kids on our street. I saw the kids clamber aboard. I saw the parents wave and return to their empty homes as free agents. And I thought it’d be just swell if the public schools opened a newborn class by week’s end.

Of course a girl can’t say this. And if this confession does escape her lips, the moms in hearing distance treat it like a fumble, scrambling to claim it and run with it in the “right” direction … usually to Proverbs 31, which has all the right verses for situations like these. They’ll predict that you’ll miss this time one day. They’ll brand your mothering as the most important work. Some will question the motives behind what you said; others will jump straight to judgment.

And rarely will anyone say, “Tell me more.” And listen. And let it lie.

The moment I saw that bus and wondered when it’d be my turn to wave Jesse goodbye for the day wasn’t a “bad” moment or an ungrateful one. It was honest, and the first of many over the years I stayed at home – a choice of necessity, desire, obligation, and an inexplicable sense of “this is where I am to be.” It was my choice, but nothing in my life prepared me for it and nothing in my life could have predicted it. I’m a rolling stone by nature. My favorite days are the ones that don’t look like any other. I like to try new things and get things done. I dislike repetition. I despise micro-managing.

So a life that bound me to home and required prison break maneuvers to buy a gallon of milk? A life that tied me to a 1PM naptime, lest the gremlins emerge? A life where the mundane saturated the to-do list that I never, ever completed but renewed in full every morning? Repetition on repeat. There are still board books I can recite and nursery songs that play eerily in the back my conscience. I can’t stand the smell of Cheerios. It’s been a few years since those little O’s littered my floor, but they’ve been replaced with Lego shards. I tell the boys to clean them up – I tell them lots of things, the same things, all day long – but they’ve stopped listening to me because I sound like a Charlie Brown teacher.

Wah, wah, wah. Wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah!

Of course I had other moments, too. Tommy’s belly laugh fills the room. Ezra’s humor hits me from nowhere, and he can make me laugh almost as much as his daddy. Jesse is 9, but when I look in his clear blue eyes, he’s still that baby I cuddled on our covered porch when I couldn’t put him on the school bus. Maybe the sound of rain would distract him from crying? It did and lulled him to sleep on my chest. I love these moments. I grab them when they happen. But they don’t erase the many, many, many (many) other moments when I’ve felt like I was the wrong woman for the job.

Of course a girl can’t admit this. Mothering is hard enough, and this suspicion threatened to break me in two in the early years. So I shelved it high where I could ignore it except in the worst of times. And when it’d creep on down, I’d try to push it back up with the mantras. This is the most important work. I’ll miss this one day. These boys are arrows in the quiver … Moms of boys hear this last one, a verse from Psalm 127, a lot. It wasn’t until the birth of Ezra that a friend gave me another:

I Corinthians 15:10 – But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.

So said the Apostle Paul. Probably no one was more surprised than him that he’d ever say such a thing. Certainly when Paul, an Orthodox Jew, was persecuting Christians, he’d never have predicted he’d become one. And the moment God called him, Paul knew his actions deserved death. But by the grace of God the persecutor was saved and not without effect. God didn’t cancel the qualities that led Paul to imprison and murder Christians; God refined them. I am what I am – Paul was a zealot from first to last, but now purposed by God to bring people to life instead of death.

1 Corinthians 15:10 didn’t turn me into Beth, The Apostle of Mothering, but it turned me honest. By the grace of God, I am what I am, and it was time I took that girl off the shelf to face who she was. I started with a question: Was I the wrong girl for the job or was I the right one?

Yes.

Yes, I was the wrong girl for the job so long as I thought all I was didn’t apply to my mothering.

Yes, I was the right girl for the job so long as I handed over all I was to God.

Mothering wasn’t perfect after that – staying at home was never easy for me – but it was real. Maybe it was a higher calling and maybe I’d ultimately miss the at-home years, but I couldn’t carry the yoke of those expectations and deal with the present that brought me to an end of myself every day. So I called a spade a spade. Hard days were hard, no spin. And I was finite. I chose my battles. Sleep trumped diet, which is why my boys sleep through the night and eat pizza like a food group. I drew lines in the sand about what we would and would not do. No more crafting and no more public, organized activities that required my boys to sit still and keep quiet. But most importantly, I found a community of moms – not like-minded in their modes – but in their honesty to return my tear-stained texts with their own.

There’s nothing like the yellow school bus to reveal the mothering spectrum. This week, for the first time in 9 years, my boys go one way to school while I go another to work. We’ll reconvene at 4PM, but then we’ll repeat this pattern through Friday. I am what I am. I’m thrilled. I have another friend who started crying a few weeks ago about this very same bus, and I don’t think she’ll feel whole again until next summer break. She is what she is; she’s sad. And I’m handing her Kleenex while she’s pouring me champagne.

It takes all kinds, doesn’t it? All kinds of moms. But appreciation of another begins with you appreciating yourself. By the grace of God you are what you are. It’s not without effect. Keep this one close to you today. The talented Emily Perry swagged it up for you to print, frame, and hang on your wall. Then hang it on a friend’s wall while she’s looking the other way. That’d be fun that is fun.

Michigan 2017

We don’t change who we are when we go on vacation, though the pictures may say otherwise. Take these three little bears on a log. So cute! Such brotherly affection!

In reality, they can only be that close for the snap of one picture. My boys believe sand was put on this earth for them to fling in their brothers’ eyes and mouths, and Michigan has a lot of sand. Dunes and dunes of it – enough, even, to give my boys other ideas of what to do with it.

And so we happened upon a simple equation: Sand + Water = Vacation Fun

Which helped Matt and I achieve our main vacation goal: rest. How do you vacation? I think this should be a Top Three per-marital counseling question, along with budgeting and family planning. Matt and I have always been in complete sync on our vacation lazy, but this year we downshifted to a new level – as in we purchased our $9 Cherry Hut pie on the way in so the only thing we had to bother with in the mornings was slicing a piece of it to pair with coffee and a book.

More often than not, though, I just held the book. I brought five to read, but only worked through one small one. I also brought a large journal, but I never picked up a pen. Mostly I looked around, listened, and let my mind wander. At first, it stuck on Lu business, but after 48 hours of no email or author dashboards, I shook that off. Sometimes the logistics of what awaited us on our return – school for the boys, teaching for me – snuck in, but it’s not like I was going to Wal-Mart for the school supplies I’d intended to buy before I left. I was too busy traipsing over dunes and dipping my feet in the cold water of Lake Michigan while my boys did their best to run away with the tide.

The days went on. We worked out the kinks of five us sharing 1200 square feet of cabin. Life as usual felt far, far away and so my mind could wander without censor, like what the view over the next dune looked like. And then there was the afternoon I tubed down a river with Tommy curled up on me for a nap. He hasn’t napped with me in years. Was this his last? My mind filled with the wonder of it. One morning we woke up to rain, which could make for a vacation killer, but our cabin had a screened porch. I took my coffee and pie out there to think about nothing other than the sound of rain on the metal roof.

No, we don’t change who we are on vacation. Vacation brings who we are into sharp relief. It reminds us. Sometimes I worry I trade the present for the future, preventing me from really being here, but the blank slate of vacation showed me otherwise. I am engaged with the people and events happening right now, but in my normal present there’s a lot more underfoot to drop it all for a nap or to listen to the rain while I eat my breakfast pie.

Vacation also reminded me of something else, from a Bible study on Ruth I did two years ago. God’s plans don’t center around me; they include me.

I’m writing this on the eve of the week that school starts. I still haven’t bought school supplies or gone to the grocery for lunch grub for the boys’ lunches. There’s laundry to do. The boys need haircuts. I need to update the fall family calendar with all the meetings, clubs, practices, work schedules, and everything else that threatens to carry off this truth. So I’m staving off the present tide for another minute to anchor it on paper. It’s not about me; it includes me. I’m no prophet, but I think this is going to be an important distinction in the coming months.

And now I’m off: to buy tissue and pencils and a dozen other random things, but for one last thing. Michigan you are not my beloved Maine. And you are beautiful. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, and maybe I’ll even return in 2018 to see how far this little love triangle goes.

Of Loons & Pine

In 1951, my great grandpa and grandpa Sawyer built a log cabin on 12 acres next to Kingsbury Pond in central Maine. It was 36 feet square, based on the woodsman-style cabins of the time, and made mostly from the pine trees on the property. One half of the interior square served as the main living and dining area, and they divided the other half in thirds for two small bedrooms and a kitchen.

For you Lu readers, maybe this cabin sounds familiar. In a recent Q&A, I was asked: “You incorporated several things that have special meaning to you when you wrote Lu. Which of those makes you smile the most, knowing it’s immortalized in fiction?” Finally, an answer I didn’t have to think about! My grandparents’ cabin in Maine. Fiction is a range of complete imagination to real-life allusions, but even the latter is modified to suit the story’s purpose. The description of this cabin is the only thing I described as it was, verbatim.

Every summer my family would drive our station wagon on the 14-hour road trip to nowhere. The camp on Kingsbury Pond was 20 minutes from the nearest non-stoplight town of Bingham. Electric and phone lines didn’t stretch that far. Eventually Grandpa added indoor plumbing, but when I was a little girl, it was the outhouse, and my mom would haul water from the pond to bathe me in a tub in the kitchen sink.

Maine was a world away. News came through visitors from town or the mailbox, which was a quarter-mile walk down the gravel drive. Even Grandmother’s New York Times was a day late.

The options were both limited and endless: canoeing, hiking, and reading. Sometimes it took a few days to get in the groove and not say, “Now what?” every hour or “Again?” before our third walk in the woods in a 24-hour period. But the peace that comes from being nowhere would ultimately win, driving away whatever problems I’d packed into the wagon along with my Walkman and mixed tapes. Simply put, we were too far away to do anything about anything. And eventually, my mind focused on other things, like the smell of pine needles. The mournful call of loons echoing across the pond or the steady tap-tap of the rain on the tin roof. I couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, grab one of my grandpa’s homemade biscuits and a book and head to the cane rocking chair on the front porch before the mist evaporated from the pond.

Do I sound nostalgic – like the granny in the grocery who watches you wrestle your tantruming kids with mist in her eyes, saying: “They’re so beautiful; you’re so lucky!”

I am that granny. I am that girl. My husband would want you to know at this point in my reminiscing that there were bats in the camp. Sometimes. And sometimes a whole family of them. He would tell you the indoor plumbing worked only 43% of the time. If he’s in a particularly salty mood, he would also tell you about the time he was enlisted to build a new dock in 100-degree heat – thick and still as anything but for the black flies feasting on man flesh.

And I would agree. I saw the whole thing go down from my cane rocking chair on the porch while I quilted and drank a beer.

Maine: The Way Life Should Be. But it’s not so easy to get to from southwest Ohio, and the camp on Kingsbury Pond is no longer in the family. So Matt and I have rented one on 30 acres in northern Michigan, which I’m desperately trying to tell myself is not Maine’s poorer fifth cousin twice removed that no one ever talks about in polite company.

I’m a Maine girl, but I’m also a tired girl. Wife-ing, mothering, writing, and publishing is enough. I don’t mind working hard, but in the last month, there’s been a work under the work that’s kept me chasing. I only need to empathize with so many verses about “reeds in the wind” and “people are like grass” to know I’m off.

So to Michigan we go – The Way Life Should Be If a Girl Can’t Get to Maine. I’m leaving my laptop behind. After I publish this post, I’m on an email and social media fast, and I plan to limit my phone use for taking pictures. These disconnect preparations have left me wondering for the first time about the choices my mom had to make to take us to Maine – what she had to release and let run itself for awhile. I’m glad she took the risk.

I could bank on loons and pine in Maine. I don’t know the sounds and smells of Michigan. I’ll report back in one week and not one day sooner. But maybe a few days later.

Love Stories

No one is more bored at a baseball game than this girl, so it’s interesting I’ve experienced epiphanies at two.

Baseball Game #1 – Cleveland Indians, and I was 6. I finished my Amelia Bedelia in the bottom of the first inning, and by the second I was facing death by boredom. I vowed never to be caught without enough to read ever again. “It’s true,” my husband, Matt, will tell you. “She takes two suitcases on vacation: one for clothes, one for books.”

Baseball Game #2 – Cincinnati Reds, and I was 21. I hoped that the baseball game 15 years ago would be my last, but I married a baseball nut who thinks the Reds on the Radio makes for the perfect three-season soundtrack. Mercifully, Matt requests my presence at only one game a year, and it was at this, our first as newlyweds, that I noticed MLB had livened it up for the bored, bored, bored with gimmicks almost interesting enough to make me look up from my book (See Baseball Game #1), like a kiss cam. I thought, “Wouldn’t a kiss cam make for a cute start to a love story?” (See Lu, Chapter 4, pages 27-28).

I’m a romantic, though my love of love doesn’t manifest in the usual ways. I don’t like heart-shaped stuff. I hear lyrics like, “I’d catch a grenade for ya,” and change the radio station. If someone laid a trail of rose petals, I’d wonder about who would clean them up, and the day after I returned from my honeymoon, I stuffed my wedding dress in a black garbage bag and took it to Goodwill (not a commentary on the honeymoon, just my lack of romantic nostalgia).

And yet (and yet!) – I’m a total sucker for a kiss cam. A love story. Romance novels were all I read in junior high. Dozens and dozens. This isn’t your missed opportunity because I’m going to tell you all you need to know about them in five sentences. There’s a man: a handsome rake, who’s not to be tied down to any one girl until he meets the girl, a beautiful woman who is in unfortunate circumstances (perhaps a greedy uncle stole all her wealth or maybe it’s the rigid class structure limiting her to two choices: governess or prostitute). How will she ever save herself? She won’t. She can’t. But he can and will, usually with some combination of his vast wealth, superior strength, keen intelligence, and lasso skilz.

I’m not here to discuss the problems with this model, but its impact on my perceptions of:

How I looked. A girl can begin as an ugly duckling, but she can’t end there if she hopes to find love.
How I viewed men. They would always have the edge – be that much smarter, that much more capable, that much more powerful. I would be lucky to have one, really.
How I viewed myself. Lesser. Of little worth. And consigned to roam until a man’s love rescued me.
How I viewed love. Tumultuous. Passionate. How the story must end if it’s a good one.

Oh my poor, poor high school and college boyfriends. This was a bit much to put on them, eh? Such expectations can only end in failure, and we failed without fail. But this post also isn’t about my relationship past, either.

It’s about love stories. I’ve never been that interested in reading a story without one, so I couldn’t write Lu without one, either. But how?

Well, as with anything else about me, I started with what I would not do:

Linger on physical descriptions. Physical attraction plays a key role in escaping the friend zone, but it isn’t narrowed to the coloring and size preferences of the moment. I kept my descriptions nonexistent when I could and spare when they served another purpose or were unavoidable. For example, we tend to look into the eyes of the people we like. It would be strange if Lu didn’t notice Jackson’s were green. But I let the reader fill in the rest of the blanks.
Hoist the man on a white horse. Men and women are different and equal. Put the right two together and each will go farther than he or she ever could have gone solo. It’s not one-sided, and it’s not to be confused with rescue or completion of the other.
Blur the lines of love and romance. It’s not a love story without the thoughtful gesture – in Lu’s case, the plate of expired donuts or bag of hot dogs. And it’s not a love story where someone doesn’t mess up.
Force the Hallmark ending that I – yes I’m claiming this one – wanted more than anyone.

Once I set those boundaries – that no one in my book would land the cover of Vogue, play it perfect and play it right until The End – well, shoot! They started to operate more like real people and less like stereotypes, even though their story started with a kiss cam. They weren’t tidy. Real people aren’t. Their decisions weren’t always above reproach. Real people’s aren’t. But for me, the writer, they were always interesting.

And more than that. Anytime you put something out there – a comment, a post, a song, a picture, a story – it’s consumed. By who and how many, who’s to say? So it’s best to know what you’re about and take care. I assumed my friends would read Lu, but I never presumed they’d give the book to their college and high school daughters. The first time I heard about this, I did the fastest mental rewind of the story I’d ever done, remembering the effect of my reading choices on my adolescent life choices. Would a 14-year-old girl come away from Lu comparing herself to my protagonist and thinking she was lesser? Would she think the answers to her deeper search for love end with a man instead of God? Would she think love stories must look like a kiss cam from start to finish? No. Not perfectly and not above critique, but I’d written a love story – multiple, actually – as I understand them to be.

Matt and I were at the annual baseball game this past weekend. The kiss cam didn’t come for us – it never does. It’s still the only part of the game I pay attention to, but my uncle had arranged and paid for this year’s outing, and it felt rude to read through it. By the bottom of the second, the bases were loaded with no outs, and I was trying not to fall asleep (see above concern about being rude). Matt had everything he needed to be in his zone, but he stepped out of it with a commentary about a background on each of the players on base. That one is from Venezuela and this one is from Texas. Did I know lots of MLB players come from Texas? I did not, and nor did I know about left-handed pitchers and right-handed batters. Or maybe it’s the other way around. On and on Matt went, not offering the baseball stats and theory that geek him out, but the backgrounds and profiles that would catch my attention. Keep me awake. No one could hear us. And no one who could see us would think a thing, but it was a little love story unfolding anyway.

Epiphany #3.

Q&A

I’m a fan of the Q&A, which is the main reason I studied journalism in college. I like people, and I’m nosy. Catch in your mind a vision of a Jack Russell terrier nosing through a mole hole, and you’ll get a picture of me when someone drops a morsel of intrigue. I won’t let up … at least I used to not let up until Matt told me that people accepting a dinner invitation to our home weren’t expecting a side of investigative reporting.

Fine.

I went along with it, but I didn’t agree with the gag rule and I didn’t like until recently when I’ve been finding myself on the other side of the Q&A. The first was with my friend, Joy. I asked her to do this for me (because she’s a former prom queen and knows 20,000 more people than I do), and it started off fine because she asked me how to make pancakes. I have that recipe memorized. But then she asked me questions, like “Why this story?” and “What do you mean when you say …” and “Can you clarify …” and I sort of wanted to chuck those pancakes at her head because how was I to know? I just wrote the darn the thing!

But it all turned out fine and served as great prep for my next Q&A as the Author of the Day at ManyBooks. Why did I pick a small town as the back drop for Lu? What did I do to keep readers hooked throughout the story? Do I have any other secret skills beyond writing? You can read all of my answers to these questions and more over there.

And once you’re finished with that, don’t forget to head to Amazon to score your FREE Kindle version of Lu this weekend, in honor of her one-month birthday! She pairs nicely with a slice of cake.

Lu + Flora = Giveaway

Writing Lu was fun because it’s fiction. In all the other writing I’ve done – journalism, academic, technical communication – you get in big trouble for making stuff up, but in this book I got to pull characters from the clouds and have them say and do whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to footnote one darn thing or run anything by a subject matter expert (except for the biblical bits).

But it’s not all made up. I laid a breadcrumb trail of allusions throughout. Virginia Stanley’s name (maker of Lu’s famous skirt) is a mash-up of my grandma Barovian’s first name and my friend Amber’s last name: two of the most creative girls I know. And the tasty moniker “turd donuts?” My sister and I trademarked that long before Ted and Lu ever came on the scene. The town of Dunlap’s Creek is not a knock-off of the TV show Dawson’s Creek, but named after one of my favorite hymns:

https://bethtroy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/06-Dunlaps-Creek.m4a

 

And Jackson is a family name on my mother’s side that goes back to when our family first crossed the Atlantic … Kidding. My leading man’s name was originally Thomas, but in the interim I bore TroyBoy #3 and named him Thomas, so that was no longer going to work. I gave my writing buddy three choices and let her pick. Jackson it was.

So let’s make a game of it. Give me a sentence, any sentence, and I’ll tell you whether it’s fact, fiction, or somewhere in between.

“Yes, you there on the left. I believe you were the first to raise your hand. That’s a cute shirt you’re wearing, BTW.”

“Thanks. What about Flora, the company that Lu writes about, which funds college scholarships for women in Kosovo through selling floral watercolor notebooks (see Chapter 33, Page 233)? Does that company exist?”

Indeed it does, and I’m so glad you asked because that’s what I’m really here to blog about today.

These notebooks.

And the girl behind them, Ashley VanBuskirk.

I don’t remember much (ask me my boys’ ages and birthdays if you really want to play Stump Beth Troy), but I have a file in my brain titled, “Cool Girls Doing Cool Stuff,” where I mentally pin things, like Flora and its co-founder, Ashley, who I read about a couple years before I wrote about her in Lu.

Here’s the deal with Kosovo:

It has the highest unemployment rate in Europe – over 56% for females
30% of the population live in poverty – 10% in extreme poverty
Women with a university degree are 28 times more likely to be employed than those with basic education

Enter Flora, a non-profit that in the last three years has provided 50 women with 100 scholarships for full tuition, books, school fees, and bus fare through 100% of the proceeds from their notebook sales. The flow goes something like this.

The idea came to Ashley when she went to Kosovo for a journalism internship and met Ema, a college student like her, except not because it was going to take Ema 12 years to finish her degree. Ema’s father had died in Kosovo’s Civil War in the 1990s, and the surviving female family members couldn’t collect the inheritance without a male head of the family. Ema had to alternate semesters on with semesters off to pay her way.

Ashley brainstormed a way to help through selling notebooks, but she was studying journalism and international studies, not business. So she took a class on social entrepreneurship, and to-date, it’s the only “official” business training she’s had.

I don’t know about you, but Ashley’s story has me thinking about a lot of things – how I respond to wrinkles in my plans, whether I act on what I believe, and the barriers I put between me and others who need help.

I never forgot Flora or Ashley’s story, and when it was time in my book for Lu to write something of worth to her, I knew it would be a story like this. I wrote it in the book, published the book, and a couple weeks ago, I finally introduced myself to Ashley to tell her what I’d done. Better to beg forgiveness than permission, right?

Thankfully Ashley was cool with the shout-out and cool enough to partner with me this week in a Lu + Flora giveaway. Three winners will receive one signed copy of Lu + one Flora notebook. They look so pretty together, it’s like Ashley and I had planned this all along!

Just leave a comment on this post to enter. The giveaway ends this Sunday, July 30, 11:59PM (EST), and I’ll announce the winners back here on Monday morning. In the interim, check out Flora’s site. It takes $150 to cover one girl’s college semester in Kosovo. Consider swapping your lattes for some Flora swag this week.