Liz Michalski's Blog, page 6

See you later, alligator

There’s a saying I keep on my bulletin board, the place where all the schoolwork fit for display is hung.  It says “When you’re a parent, the days pass slowly, but the years fly by.”

I’m not a ‘quality time’ parent. I’m in it for the details, not the days at Disney World (although those days have been pretty fine too).  I’m in it for stolen minutes stretched across my daughter’s bed, listening to her talk; for playing catch at the pool or beach with my son and marveling at his reach; for long car rides and afternoon walks and any time I can get them alone and just be.

Summers are the best days for that. Summers are the breath between school and sports and work, the long slow exhalation as we throw off a schedule that’s too tight. I’m off to long hot days, to sticky Popsicles that stain tongues blue and green, to water gun fights and wiffle balls and hermit crabs and fireworks. To sunburns, to too much sand, to chlorine scented hair and water-wrinkled feet. To all the tiny moments that make up these days, to treasures I can hold on to when another year has flown. Because after all this time together, my kids are still some of the most interesting people I know.

See you in September.

How I’ll Be Spending My Summer Vacation

If I squint, I can just see the end of this book I’ve been working on for such a long time.  It’s there, misty and unformed, but close enough to touch — hopefully sometime in the next few weeks. After I’ve written those blessed last words  – The End — I’ll take a week or so off, and then start in on … revisions.

Yep.  ”The End” doesn’t ever seem to mean the end.  It just means the beginning of the next stage. I always find it helpful when other writers share their processes, so here’s what I’ll be doing:

1) This novel has multiple POVs, so I’ll pull each one out, make it a single document, and work on making that voice as strong and consistent as possible. (See more here.) Starting my revision this way has the added bonus of making the manuscript seem fresh and new to my eyes.

2) I’ll put the manuscript back together and face down the abyss with the help of Elana Johnson, who gives my go-to advice on revising here. 

3) I’ve been sending the manuscript to my awesome first reader in chapters all year, and she’s been sending it back with comments. The proper response to anyone willing to help critique your manuscript is a big fat “Thank You!” but sometimes advice is hard to read. So I stick comments I might question in a separate folder and let them simmer there. I’ll do one last read through that folder, and be amazed at how much great advice she’s given me. That means another round of edits.

4) Time to send it out to my regular reader (if she’ll have me) plus a fresh pair of eyes.

5) Repeat.

That’s my summer vacation — what do you have planned?

Think Less. Write More.

After umpteen months, I can finally see the end of this novel. It’s there, just out of reach, perhaps three chapters away. I’ve been writing those final lines at baseball games, at dance rehearsals and while grocery shopping, carving them out of the air, inscribing them on my mind. But I haven’t put them on paper yet.

Why not?

Some of it, of course, is the time factor. It takes time to get in the zone, to set up and immerse myself in a world that’s not this one. But there are plenty of people with much busier schedules than mine who manage to write a book or more a year, so it’s not really a valid excuse.

And then last week I was scrolling through my Facebook feed (see how much time I have??) and Vaughn Roycroft posted a link that caught my eye. It was by Steven Pressfield, and it talks about how resistance is secondary to the dream.  Resistance only exists because of the dream. If you are blocked or stymied when you are writing, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You just need to see past that resistance to whatever dream is on the other side.

This makes sense to me. As writers, there’s so much angst surrounding what we do. Writing is so subjective, and we’re always worried — is it good?  Will an agent like it? Will an editor like it? Is it good enough to publish?  Good enough to sell?  What if it’s not? Can I rewrite it?

Remember the movie Bull Durham? I love that movie.  It’s filled with great quotes, like this one: “”This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

Unfortunately, writing isn’t like baseball. You can throw, catch AND hit the ball, and sometimes you still lose. So you have to be in it for something else. And that’s the dream. The dream of writing well, of creating a world so perfect and true and believable that while you are there, you can forget, at least for a moment, that you created it. You can forget all the noise outside (is it good?  will it sell? what will people think?) and just exist in that world for a while. You have to get out of your head to get into it.

Or, as Crash says, “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.”

Promise

It’s spring in New England, at least for a little while. Summer vacation is right around the corner. I have a lovely craft post all planned — you’re really going to like it — but between baseball and soccer, baseball and recitals, baseball and concerts and more baseball, I haven’t actually written it yet. (Also, the deadlines. I think of Douglas Adams and his quote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make when they fly by” often at this time of year.)

But do not despair! I bring you something else. I went for a hike today with a friend (totally necessary for my sanity) and after I stopped by one of my favorite gardens and took pictures. I am sharing them with you, because next week this garden will look totally different. The peonies and the irises — two of the best spring flowers — will be gone, replaced by other, more heat tolerant plants that are lovely in their own way, but don’t share that sense of sheer, exuberant joy, as if they could not wait to burst open. Or maybe I just feel that way because their life span is so brief.  Either way, here:

 

And here:

These are for you.

Did you know that irises are one of the sweetest-smelling flowers? The name comes from the Greek word for rainbow, and the flower signifies courage, faith and hope — the epitome of spring in New England.

As you rush through your own busy days, remember to breathe. Preferably someplace where you can smell the flowers.

Internal versus External Vision

One of my neighbors is a fireman. I don’t know if it is part of his profession or not, but I’m always amazed by what he sees. We’ll be standing in front of my house, talking, and he’ll reach down to palm a candy wrapper some rotten child has left on my lawn. We’ll stop our cars on the street to exchange news, and he’ll remind me to turn out the mirrors I turned in to squeeze out of the garage. He’ll ask about a tree branch on our property that looks like it is about to fall down, one I pass under every day but never seem to notice.

My neighbor has vision that is all about the external. I have no idea what his inner life is like, but I’m fairly sure he doesn’t spend much time imagining the life of Henry VIII or contemplating how an April snow shower might resemble falling apple blossoms, two ways I find myself spending time. (Although I could be wrong.)

As writers, we tend to spend a lot of our time in our heads, or obsessing over a single external detail. The trick is to find the balance between external and internal vision — between being present and noticing the world around us, and saving a quiet space in our heads for our work.

It’s a balance I still struggle with. How do you manage?

Adjust Your Attitude

The news has been so bleak this year — tragedy after tragedy. It can make you wish for a redo, a chance to go back to December 31st and live it all again with the foresight and strength to make everything better. But that only works in fiction. In real life, the gray cloud of angst and disaster seeps into your clothes, clings to you like dust, stays with you through the day, changing your mood, coloring the expressions you use.

Combine that with a laundry list of trite yet necessary end-of-year chores, plus deadlines, and it has the makings of emotional disaster.

So for today, I’m controlling what I can, even if it’s not what I’d like to be able to fix. I’m changing a simple expression “I have to” to “I get to” and changing my mood as well. It’s a simple thing, but it reminds me of how much I have to be grateful for in this life. I get to make a deadline, and get paid for doing work I love. I get to pick my kids up from school — a school that’s intact, with teachers who care for them – and take them to after-school activities. I get to walk the Slobbering Beast, who reminds me every day to find the joy in my steps.

What do you get to do today?

Don’t forget to smell them.

Shiny

We’re about 6 weeks from the end of school right now, and the activities are crashing over us like big waves at the beach. There’s not a lot of time to catch a breath, and before I know it, this year will be gone. I have mixed feelings about this, but very little time for introspection, which is probably a good thing. But I’ve managed to snatch just a moment to share a few bright and shiny distractions with you. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

 Am I the only person who missed this when it was happening? The coolest astronaut since Tom Hanks in Apollo 13. (Aside from his taste in hockey teams, of course.)
This movie. Crazy good. Made me think again how important character development is.
The Glass Wives.  It’s Amy Sue Nathan’s debut book, and I cannot wait to read it. I’ve parked it next to my bed as an incentive to help me get through the next few weeks.

What’s on your must read or watch list?

Awesome

We had a wedding this past weekend, the pictures of which I’ve plastered across Facebook because it is so rare for the four of us to be in the same place, dressed up, and clean. (We usually manage one out of three.) The bride was my oldest niece, who was five and my flower girl when I was her age. Like all milestones, this one was bittersweet: Watching her, I couldn’t help but remember the tow-headed baby girl who had brought her stuffed bunny to my house for sleepovers, who’d eaten her weight in fresh raspberries when we’d gone berry-picking, who’d let me carry her through Disney for her first time at the park, hot and sticky and smelling like suntan lotion. I watched her laugh with her mom, my sister-in-law, who was laughing at them both for crying as my niece walked down the aisle, and it made me laugh and cry too.

I’ve had a front row seat as my sister-in-law has raised her children, and I’ve been lucky to learn so much. Her babes are all much older than mine, and I may have been a bit smug at times as I watched her navigate the minefields of dating and dress codes, of driving and grades and college and all that comes with adolescence, but those times are far behind me. That future is bearing down too fast, and all I can do is buckle in and prepare for the ride.

I caught glimpses of that future at the wedding — my daughter, looking lovely, dancing with her dad, echoing the dance my brother-in-law had done with his own daughter just minutes before.  My son, fueled by his first Coke, dancing to Shout, fist-bumping the groom’s frat boy friends. My brother and sister-in-law, exchanging glances throughout the night that said Look at our baby, look how beautiful she is, look at what we’ve done together. 

It’s possible I might have gotten a bit teary myself, were it not for the following conversation held over much-anticipated slices of the wedding cake. (The wedding, like marriage, was not without its small disasters — the poor groom, done in by heat and nerves, fainted at the altar.)

Me: I’m so glad it worked out. For a minute there, I thought it was going to be worse.

Small boy: Worse? How could it have been worse?

Me: Well, he could have gotten sick.

Small boy: Really?  Right up there on the altar and everything?

Me: Yup.

Small boy, slowly: That … that would have been awesome!

Cake — small boy guarded it all night.

Hope

It is spring in New England, that brief heart beat of a season that lives between freezing cold and scorching heat.

When pink petals fall from the sky like snow.

Miracles pop up from what was frozen ground only weeks ago.

And for a single shining moment, anything is possible.

All That I Don’t Know

Last Wednesday, halfway through that terrible week, I took my son and his friend hiking. I needed to be outside, to disconnect from the news, to work my muscles and remind myself that this grief, although it felt as though it had landed on my doorstep, didn’t belong to me.

Because it feels as if it does. It feels as if these tragedies that keep happening, keep popping up on the internet, are just a breath away from those that I love. Boston especially — I’ve walked down that street, I know people who were at the Marathon, friends of friends were injured. The muscles of my heart feel as if they’ve been working too hard these days, as if they’re damaged. I understand the definition of heartsick.

Today I went back to the hill where I hike. I went alone, but it was raining and cold, not weather for cheering up. So I stopped in at the preschool at the base of the hill, where my children went to school, and I sat on the floor and I watched the teachers. I watched as they mediated an argument between two children who wanted to play with the same toy. I watched as they explained, over and over and over again, why the blocks couldn’t be stacked past a certain point. The teachers wiped noses. They passed out snacks. They praised the children when they used kind words, and reminded them of those words when they didn’t. They did all these things with patience and grace, in the hopes of making the world a better place one small child at a time.

There was a sign at the door when I came in, a reminder to parents that the school is a safe place for little ones, as much as any place can be these days. It was a reminder for me, as well.

Advice

So here’s what I have for you this week. My family is going through a retro phase for our weekend movie nights. We’ve been watching Leave It To Beaver, a few episodes every time. I thought my children might find it hokey, but they’re fascinated  by the trouble Wally and Beaver find themselves in. And despite the stereotypes on the show, there’s something comforting about a world where parental authority and confidence is so absolute, where no one ever gets hurt and adults know the right answer to every question.

In last week’s episode, Beaver and Wally had a run in with Lumpy, a mean bully of a boy.  Beaver and Wally try to thwart him, to no avail. At the end of the episode, Beaver asks his dad: “So you just can’t beat a guy like Lumpy?”

“Sure you can, Beaver,” the father replies. “Sure you can. You beat him simply by not being like him.”

On this rainy day, it helps to remember that.