Katherine Center's Blog, page 8

excerpt: Get Lucky

Get Lucky comes out in less than a month!

(And if you live in Houston, save the date for Saturday, April 10, 5:30-7:30: A cocktail-hour book launch party at Brazos Bookstore!)

Here's how it begins:

GET LUCKY: A Novel — Chapter 1

First:  I got fired.  For emailing a website with hundreds of pictures of breasts to every single person in our company.  Even the CEO and chairman of the board. Even the summer interns.

Looking back, I may have been ready to leave my job.  I'd like to give myself the...

road trip

A few weeks back, I got offered a free night's stay at a family resort called Great Wolf Lodge.  Which is in Dallas.  Which is 5 hours from where we live.  And part of the offer was a brand-new Chevy to borrow for the drive up.

And I'm not really a big vacationer.  We go to visit family every summer, but we don't usually take vacations just for fun.  I guess we have enough fun around our own house that we don't usually go seeking it out.

But once the offer was out there, I got to thinking that ...

it turns out, my dad used to be four

I am scanning photos for my dad's 70th birthday.  Which is, actually, impossible–because my dad is 45 years old.  He has always been 45 years old, and he will always be 45 years old.  Period.

Except that here I am scanning his baby photos.  Which means at some point, he must have been four.

The same age my son is now.  And he must have played the same little-boy games and built forts and run around.  My dad at this age actually looks a lot like my son.  And the truth is, even though my dad has ...

art for Mom 2.0

It's been a long month of sick kids (and parents) at my house.  And even though I knew there would be many, many, many of my favorite people at the Mom 2.0 Summit last weekend, I had to scramble pretty hard to get there.

But I made it.  And it was so good in so many ways.

Something magical happens when you get so many amazing people in one place.  And watching my video up on the big screen at the opening of the conference was pretty magical, too.

I love like crazy the theme of Mom 2.o this...

my exhausted heart

We've been sick for two solid weeks around here.

And I am a champion worrier.   I can worry you under the table.  You don't know what worrying is until you've met me.  If I could take my worrying to the Olympics, I'd bring home the gold, baby.  I'd have my own line of sneakers.

Though, sadly, of course, I cannot take my worrying to the olympics.  But I can take it–and my two stuffed-up children–into our bathroom with a box of tissues, run the shower, and call it a "sweat lodge."  Which is what ...

sick

We've been sick for two solid weeks around here.

And I am a champion worrier.   I can worry you under the table.  You don't know what worrying is until you've met me.  If I could take my worrying to the Olympics, I'd bring home the gold, baby.  I'd have my own line of sneakers.

Though, sadly, of course, I cannot take my worrying to the olympics.  But I can take it–and my two stuffed-up children–into our bathroom with a box of tissues, run the shower, and call it a "sweat lodge."  Which is what ...

surreal

Plenty of surreal things have happened in my life.  But I'm not sure I've ever quite felt anything like it feels to look at this:

It's my first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, in Czech.

It is indescribably bizarre to flip through a book that YOU wrote–and not be able to read a word.  Not even guess at what the words might sound like.

The title in Czech translates to "Everything Bad Is Good For Something."  Which I love like crazy and I'm going to print up on a bumper sticker.

And one last...

mine

The images in the Mom 2.0: Defining a Movement video that I made all came from real photographers–women who are working on their craft every day.  I am not a real photographer.  But I did sneak in one of my own photos when I made the video.  Just one.

This one's mine.

It's a heart I made for my daughter on a day when she was performing in an assembly at school, but I wasn't allowed to be there.  (It was Grandparents' Day!  Only room for grandparents!).  I so wanted to be there!  And I was far...

defining a movement

My friend Laura asked me to make a video for the Mom 2.0 Summit art show that's coming up in February.

And here it is!

Many thanks to Shutter Sisters for allowing me to use photos from the site.  And many thanks to the amazing photographers:  Karen Walrond, Jenny Lawson, Tracey Clark, Sarah Ji, Kristin Zecchinelli, Irene Nam, and Meredith Winn.

And here is the essay that I wrote for the video:

WHAT I WOULD TELL HER:  (If I knew what to say.)

You are a miracle.

And I have to love you this...

tracks

My grandparents' ranch is on the Brazos river, a perpetually brown, sandy-bottom river outside Houston.

I've paced around its shores on trips to the ranch my whole life, and now we take our kids there and they do the same thing.  Its amazing to watch history repeat itself like that, and I'm happy to report that fossil-searching, stick-throwing, rock-skipping, shell-finding, mud-smearing, dam-building, and poking at things with sticks are all still going strong.

It's been wet in Texas lately...