Katherine Center's Blog, page 5

interview with Success Diaries

What does “success” mean in Katherine Center´s world?

Success is doing the right thing for who you are.  It’s living a life that matches and supports you.

Do you feel you´ve made it as an author? As a woman? As a mom? What do you feel (if anything) you still need to do in life?

I always try to be careful with my definitions of success—because if success is too far out on the horizon, you’ll never get there.  Our culture often defines success with things like big mansions.  But I don’t think that’s right.  I think the stress of getting those things cancels out the pleasures.

My goal is to try to be as happy as I can going through every day just as it is.

Do I get to do work that I love and that makes me feel proud?  Every day.   Do I have amazing kids who crack me up?  Yep!  Does my husband have a fantastic mustache?  Yes, he does!  That’s how I think about success: using internal measures more than external ones.  I know who I am and what matters to me, and I stay close to those things.  I have people in my life who make me laugh all the time.  I get to do the work I love.  It’s better than I ever could have hoped for.

But it’s not perfect.  The cat wakes me up in the middle of the night. Our upstairs bathub overflowed and now there’s a water stain on the living room ceiling.  I never have enough hours in the day.  It’s a normal life with ups and downs.  But it’s the perfect life for me.

What did you feel when you saw (and felt) your first book in print? Do you get the same feeling with every book since?

Seeing my first book in print was bliss.  It blew my mind.  I didn’t even know what to do with all the excitement.  We found a box from the publisher on the doorstep one evening, and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning reading!  I was like, “This thing’s a page-turner!”

It’s not exactly the same feeling with later books. It’s a good feeling—a very good one—like, “Oh, hello, little book!  I’ve been waiting to see you!”  But it’s not quite as mind-blowing once you’ve done it before.  Because after the first one, it’s not a surprise anymore.  But it’s still totally awesome.

What would you tell aspiring authors who do not believe they can make it? And what would you tell those who believe it is all a question of luck?

I would say that if you like to write stories and you’re finding a way to do that in your life, then you’ve already made it.  And it took me a long time to figure that out.  Just write them.  Write them and show them to your mom or your best friend.  Write them, and put together a writing group to read each other’s work.  Publishing, marketing—those things have their charms.  But they cannot touch the joy of just bringing the stories to life on the page.  That’s what makes everything worth it.

As for the question of luck, I often think luck is all about how you see things.  If you feel lucky, then you are.  I’m not trying to be coy about this.  The vast majority of people never get rich or famous off their writing.  But what they do get, if they really do love to write, is the euphoria that comes from telling the stories themselves.

Why do you write? (Ha, not very original of course) Do you see yourself ever NOT writing?

I write because I love it.  I write because doing it gives me a crazy thrill.  On days that I’ve written something, I walk around with butterflies.  I keep hearing this quote about how writers don’t like to write—they like to have written.  But I completely disagree.  The writing is the one thing about being a writer that’s pure joy.  Other things—the selling, the marketing, the schmoozing—come and go.  They can either make you happy or miserable, depending on the day.  But the writing should be a constant source of pleasure.  And if it’s not, then don’t do it.  Do something that is!

What was your toughest hurdle in life and how did you overcome it?

Seventh grade was the toughest, I think.  Though it’s a tough call.  But that year, my grandmother, who was like a second mom, died.  And my parents got divorced about 6 weeks later.  And my two best friends found other best friends right around that time.  I felt really alone, and I didn’t know who I was or how to live a good life, and let’s just say puberty was kicking me up and down the block.  So I started a journal.  And when I filled it up, I started another.  And did that for ten solid years—all the way through college.  It’s where I learned how to write.

Do you ever reread your books? Why or why not? Why should women read them?

I do re-read them!  Sometimes I’ll be looking for a passage, and I’ll just get caught up in it and have to go to the end.  Or sometimes I’ll hear a comment or read a review that makes me want to go back and take another look.  It is fun to go back and read them.

And why should women read them?  Well, they’re kind of heroine’s journeys.  They’re comic and bittersweet stories of women learning to rise above circumstances and become the best versions of themselves.  They have authentic, flawed, lovable characters who make mistakes and fumble around.  But the novels have wisdom in them, too.  They use comic situations to look at truths about women’s lives.

Your words of wisdom for other women … (one sentence)

One sentence!  Okay, here’s something I tell myself a lot:  Try to look for the beauty in your life and be as grateful as you can.

 

*This post originally appeared at Lorraine Ladish’s “Success Diaries” blog.

interview with Angie Mizzell

I've recently become a raving fan of author

before & after

Our kitchen fell apart last fall.  At Thanksgiving, actually.  There was a leak under the floor that rotted out the whole thing from the underside up.  And as I watched the flooring guys pulling up our kitchen floor with their bare hands like it was a wet paper towel, something great hit me:  We’d hit rock bottom on our kitchen.

It was a 1960s handyman’s special kitchen, anyway.  We’d been limping along with it for the ten years that we’ve lived in this house.  Everything worked–except for the things that didn’t–and we found ways to appreciate all its funkiness and quirks.

But then, the leak.  And it was time to start over.  Re-wire the knob-and-tube wiring, put in a new floor, cabinets, lighting–the whole shebang.

We’ve been without a kitchen floor since Thanksgiving, and without a kitchen at all since January–until last week.  I did pretty well with no kitchen at first–and mostly just felt grateful to be building a new kitchen and excited.  But as the months wore on, and our house started to feel more and more like a hovel, I started to feel more and more like the crazy lady IN the hovel.  And as much as my general take on this whole situation is HUGE gratitude that life insisted we put in a brand-new kitchen, I was starting to go a little nuts, there, towards the end.

Now we have the kitchen back–but it’s not the old kitchen.  It’s a brand-new kitchen!  And I am a brand new person!

So.  It’s time to celebrate with a before-and-after post!  (Even though it’s not really after, because there are lots of little things that still have to be fixed.  Who cares?!  We’re close enough!)

Here we go.  Our kitchen BEFORE:

And our kitchen AFTER:

Yep–that’s a Dutch door!  It’s new, but we’re re-using the handle from our awesome-but-decaying original back door.  It’s off being re-nickeled.  And our great contractor is also going make the old lock work so we can use a skeleton key as our back door key.  (!)

Here’s a little built-in hutch.  There was some debate about whether or not the scallops were hokey, but I am obsessively in love with them.  My mom invented those cool c-shaped side pieces there.

And here’s a panoramic view.  The floor is reclaimed hardwoods from an 80-yr-old cottage.  We added shiplap in the breakfast nook.  The light fixture is an antique olive bucket.  The blackboard came out of the school I went to.  (Not kidding, y’all: The were throwing away the historic 1946 slate blackboards–and my awesome mom nabbed one from the dumpster.)

Did I mention my grandfather had a building materials company?  And I love talking about this stuff?

Anyway!  Just wanted to share.  So glad we are almost done–and so glad to have returned to my excited, non-crazy, and unabashedly grateful self.

“Sweet, smart, and inspiring.”

Excerpt from The Lost Husband

Chapter 1

 

 

My husband had been dead for three years before I started trying to contact him.

By then, our house was long-sold, his suits were donated, and his wedding ring was in a safety deposit box.  All I kept with me was a shoebox full of meaningless stuff: a button from a shirt, an old grocery list, his driver’s license, his car keys, a doodle he’d drawn on a post-it.  That was everything of Danny’s I held onto: a box of junk.

That, and, of course, his children.

Piece by piece, I had left our old life behind—though I suppose you could argue that it had left me first—and now I was in the final stages of starting over, which meant, for my little lopsided family, leaving town.  And so on this Texas-warm New Year’s Eve morning, I was following a ribbon of asphalt out to the countryside, checking and re-checking my directions while my kids poked each other with magic wands in the back seat of our minivan.

“Hey!” I said, catching their eyes in the rearview mirror.  “Those are for spell-casting only.  No poking!  Or else.”

This was about the tenth time I’d threatened to confiscate the wands.  Weak parenting, I knew.  I should have taken them away ten exits back—no second chances.  But I didn’t want to have to take them away and go through all the drama that would follow.  I wanted the threat to be enough.

We were approaching the town square of Atwater, Texas.  A town two hours from Houston at the edge of the Hill Country that I’d never visited or even thought much about.  The speed limit downshifted as we drew closer, and the rolling fields that had surrounded us since we left the interstate now gave way to barn-sized feed stores, cinder-block motels, and fast-food joints.  I glanced down to review my next step:  go around the courthouse—then a right on FM 2237, known to locals, apparently, as Broken Tree Road.

We were beginning, I kept telling the kids in a voice that sounded false even to me, “an adventure.”  Though the truth is, moving to Atwater was much less about starting something than ending something.  Because there were many hardships that followed my husband’s death—finding out he’d spent our savings, for example, and cashed in his life insurance—but the hardest hardship by far, one year after his funeral, was having to move in with my mother.

Since then, we had stayed at her condo for two passive-aggressive years, as I endured judgments on my parenting, my figure, my wrinkles, my grieving process, my haircut, and my “joi de vivre” with no end in sight until, at last, unexpectedly, I’d received a letter from my mother’s famously crazy sister offering me a job and a place to stay.  On her goat farm.  In Atwater.  Somewhere southeast of San Antonio.

Now, less than a week later, we were trading one kind of crazy for another–hoping against hope it was an upgrade.

And so the morning’s drive from Houston was not just the pavement between towns.  It was the shift between our old life and our new one.  All morning, I’d felt it—the big-dealness of it—as a nervous flutter in my chest, and I was sitting straight up in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel with both hands like a student driver at attention.

Or, as at attention as you can be with two children bapping each other in the back seat with wands.  Because just as the road brought us to a stop sign at the town square, and just as I caught my breath at the county courthouse rising up in front of us like a Disney Castle, my son Tank smacked his sister Abby once again on the head with his wand, and when she shrieked, I hit the brakes and turned full around to face them.

“Quit it!” I said, giving them my sternest look.  “The next time I have to say it, I’m throwing the wands out the window.”

They bowed their heads a little and held still.

“Got it?” I asked, and they both nodded.

Just as I was turning back around, I heard a man on the sidewalk shout a desperate “Hey! Watch out!”

I looked up, but it wasn’t me he was calling to.  It was someone in the crosswalk in front of us—and, at the same moment I realized that, I also realized my car was not exactly stopped.  Turning all the way around in my seat had eased my foot off the brake, and we were rolling forward.

I stamped my foot back down in time to see a girl standing in the crosswalk, directly in front of my car.  She had turned her head at the shout, too, and thrown her hands out toward the hood as if they could protect her, just as we lurched to a stop, tires squeaking, less than two inches from her knees.  She looked straight through my windshield and we locked eyes for longer than I’d ever held a gaze before.

I threw the transmission into park, but before I was even out of the car, the man who had shouted at us appeared in the crosswalk and grabbed the girl by the shoulders.  And that’s all I saw as I leapt from the driver’s seat and arrived beside them: her dazed face and a white-haired guy with a mermaid tattoo on his forearm.

The tattooed guy was shouting.  “Jesus, Sunshine!  Watch where you’re going!”

But she waved him away.  “I’m okay,” she said.  “I’m fine.”

Then he turned to me.  “You almost killed her!”

I was out of breath.  “I’m sorry!  I thought my brakes were on!  My kids were fighting! I’ve been up since five!”

“Killed By A Minivan,” this girl Sunshine said, as if she were reading the headline.  “That’s not how I’d prefer to go.”

“No,” I said.  “Of course not.”

“Killed By An Ice Cream Truck, maybe,” she shrugged, as if that suggestion were less bad.  “Or Killed By A Jet Ski.” She looked down at the stripes on the pavement.  “Maybe a paragliding accident.”

My kids were back at it in the car as if nothing had happened.  I could sense the wands in motion and hear squeals.  Cars were lining up behind me.  I was just about to excuse myself when she snapped her fingers, met my eyes, and pointed right at me.

“Shark Attack!” she said.

It felt odd to brainstorm the best headline for this girl’s death.  But it also seemed like it would have been rude to deny her anything she wanted.  So I faked it:  “Yes!”  Then I nodded. “So much better than a minivan.”

But she could tell I was faking.  She let her hand drop and then she stuffed it in her pocket.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

That’s when I realized the tattooed guy was studying me.  “Are you who I think you are?” he asked.

“Um,” I said.  “Who do you think I am?”

“Are you Jeannie’s niece?”

It was so odd for him to know that.  And I had never in my life heard my aunt called “Jeannie,” much less with such affection.  But he had me.  “Yes,” I said.  “That’s me.”

And then he did the strangest thing.  He stepped over and hugged me.  Tight.  A big hey-howdy Texas hug.  “Welcome to Atwater,” he said, when he finally let go.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say.  Sunshine was turning to leave.  We’d been in the road too long.

Just at that moment, the truck behind us got tired of waiting.  He honked—loudly.  The sound startled us all—and something about it woke Sunshine up.  She turned back and seemed to see me for the first time—seemed almost to recognize me, even.  She stepped back my direction, took my hand for a second, and ran her eyes over my face.

“That husband you lost?” she said then, out of nowhere. “I can find him for you.”

 

FIRST first novel

Here’s Katherine telling the quick story of how she wrote her first novel:

The Lost Husband!!

“. . . A sweet tale of creating the family you need.”  –PEOPLE Magazine

“There wasn’t a dull spot in this book–just a really great story about finding home and yourself . . .  It’s really one of the best women’s fiction books I’ve read.”  –Lisa

“. . . a delightful, heartwarming read, and I highly recommend it.”  -Viki

“. . . Uplifting without sugar-coating the complexities of life.” –Jocelyn

“. . . A quick, feel-good read that you can pass on to friends and family knowing that you’re spreading around a little bright spot of happy.” –Stacey

“This compelling story about moving on and self-discovery was just amazing. ”  –Amber

“An original and compusively readable story.”  –Meg

“You won’t be able to put it down, and, long after you have, it will still be on your mind.”  –Tonya

“Beautiful story of reinvention and reclaiming one’s life after loss.”  –Carrie

“A book about love and loss and finding out who you are all over again . . .”  – Rachel

“Highly recommended if you’re looking for a good book to get involved in.”  –BeautifulSunshine

 

 

The Lost Husband — ON SALE May 7!!

“There wasn’t a dull spot in this book–just a really great story about finding home and yourself . . .  It’s really one of the best women’s fiction books I’ve read.”  –Lisa

“. . . a delightful, heartwarming read, and I highly recommend it.”  -Viki

“. . . Uplifting without sugar-coating the complexities of life.” –Jocelyn

“. . . A quick, feel-good read that you can pass on to friends and family knowing that you’re spreading around a little bright spot of happy.” –Stacey

“This compelling story about moving on and self-discovery was just amazing. ”  –Amber

“An original and compusively readable story.”  –Meg

“You won’t be able to put it down, and, long after you have, it will still be on your mind.”  –Tonya

“Beautiful story of reinvention and reclaiming one’s life after loss.”  –Carrie

“A book about love and loss and finding out who you are all over again . . .”  – Rachel

 

 

perfection protest!

I'm not blogging much because I am on fire writing a new book.  I'd write for 10 hours a day right now, if I could.  But, of course, I can't–so I have this crazy feeling every morning of excitement and tension as I wonder how much I'll be able to get down on paper before I have to leave the story and get back to my "real" life.  It's very intense–the longing I feel to just sit down and write for weeks and weeks with no interruptions.  But I also think it's good to be interrupted, too.  That intensity fuels the writing.

All this to say, there's no time for blogging right now, or tweeting, or goofing around online. There's no time for anything except for the bare essentials–writing and playing with my family.

But my pal Brené has a new book that's just come out, and this week she's inspired me to join her protest against perfection.  Of the many, many wise things that Brené says about life, her take on perfectionism–and how it isolates us from each other–really sticks with me. She talked about it in her first book, which I devoured.  Especially since I'm kind of the opposite of perfect.  My house is strewn with toys, my car hasn't been washed in months, and it's a good bet I'll be driving the carpool line in my pajamas today.

I just don't have the time.  Or the interest.  I'd much rather be writing this novel than doing my hair.  I'd much rather goof around with my kids than clean the house.  And Brené says that's a good thing.  Which is one of the many reasons I love her.

SO!  My first blog post in months!!  And my first giveaway ever!  If you want a chance to win a copy of her new book, leave a comment below.

popcorn art

Summer is really not my season.  Or I suppose I should say, Texas summer is not my season.  Or climate.  If we lived in Nova Scotia, I might well love summer best of all.

But down here in Houston, it's hot.  Summer is mostly about coping for me.  Going out in the steamy, hot, mosquito-ridden out of doors as seldom as possible.  Keeping the a/c set at 74.

And it's rained a lot this summer.  Great for plants.  Less great for stir-crazy children.

We've had to get creative.

Like on the day my...

secret mission: Mondo Beyondo

I am lucky in a thousand ways this summer.  And one of them is that I get to help host a Secret Mission for the Dream Lab at Mondo Beyondo.

Here's what it is:  My friends at Mondo Beyondo want to inspire folks to create guerilla goodness in the world–acts of kindness or love that help make the world a better place.

There are some great examples of guerilla goodness.  Hope Notes.  The You Are Beautiful project.  It's people putting a loving message out into the world.

I've always wanted to do...