Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 67

Playing Favorites

Julianna is in love with Mary Poppins at the moment. She asks for the movie virtually every day the instant she gets off the bus, and sometimes before (although it comes out sounding more like “Harry Potter”). But Mary Poppins is a long movie, and there’s crying and drama every time we have to turn it off to come to the table for dinner. Last night, though, was a leftover pasta night–and fresh gingerbread cookies for dessert–so the drama dissipated quickly. “Hay-ee Pah-ee?” she said hopefully as she nibbled her cookie.

“First we have to write letters to Santa,” I said. “And then yes, you can finish Mary Poppins.”

The squeal of delight took me by surprise. She flung her arms open wide and sat there bouncing in her chair until I came over, laughing, to give her a hug.

It was particularly gratifying because, although my daughter loves everyone in the entire universe with a love that knows no bounds, if you had to put rankings on everyone, I come in somewhere in the bottom quarter.

Parents aren’t allowed to have favorites, but children don’t feel any such compunction. You sort of expect it with babies. Christian always says Michael views him as “That Man.” You know. That Man is talking to me again, Mommy.

My boys are all Mama’s boys to some extent, but they love their daddy and crave his attention and approval too. But Julianna? Julianna’s a Daddy’s girl through and through. In the morning I come in to wake her up. I pull her up onto my lap, and she whimpers, “I wah Dah-ee.” At school, she talks constantly about going to swim lessons with Daddy, even though I’m the one that takes her at least half the time. The day Christian and I went to her school to talk about Down syndrome, I was sitting in her chair when she came back from OT or wherever she was…and she screamed, “Dah-ee! Look evee bah-ee, it’s my Dah-ee!” Then she paused and said nonchalantly, “Ee Mah-ee.” (Ee is “and.”) Daddy got a hug.

Mommy did not.

Not that I’m keeping score or anything.

I keep a sense of humor about it, but like everything else about parenthood, it causes me angst. Am I too grumpy? Is that why she gives me the cold shoulder? Is it because most of the time I spend with her doing homework? Is it because she can sense my impatience when she wants to read an entire book to me? (I know, I know, but she is sooooo slow. And she won’t take turns. She wants to say every word herself, but every word takes two seconds, between pointing to it and saying it aloud. Think about that for a minute. Think about reading Green Eggs and Ham at that rate, for instance.)

The trouble, in part, is that a mom who stays home is tasked with all the taking-care-of jobs. It’s my job to get food on the table, make the doctor appointments and hold her still while she’s poked and prodded. You get the idea. My job is chaufferring and carpool and putting-coats-on and put-those-DVDs-back-where-you-found-them and you-must-eat-your vegetables.

Daddy does those things too, when he’s here, but he’s at work a lot. So he has the advantage of novelty. And although the whining and bickering gets to him as much as it does to me–although he has plenty of his evenings and weekends taken up by grown-up concerns–he’s not emotionally saturated with kid presence the way I am. So he tends to be more the “fun” guy. (Of course, it helps that he enjoys playing more than I do.)

The other factor is the sheer power of her brothers to overwhelm her. She just kind of hangs out most of the time while the boys are pummeling me with their need for attention. It’s harder for her to communicate. I wish I knew what the solution was to that, but I’m always having to yell at some XY in the house to stop fill-in-the-blank or go-fill-in-the-blank-that-I-told-you-three-times-already. I try to take time for Julianna, but I know my relationship with her gets overwhelmed by boys’ needs.

I suspect that Julianna and I will really become close when the boys start separating from home. It makes me wince to think of waiting that long to get close to her, but in the meantime I just have to do the best I can.

Waiting

Waiting………. (Photo credit: davidyuweb)

“Mommy, get me some dessert!”

Nicholas stood at my right elbow. I looked pointedly at the pizza in my hand and back at him, but my coming-up-on-five-year-old is blissfully (or perhaps willfully) immune to messages sent via body language. Time for plan B.

“First of all,” I said, “that’s not how you ask. Second, am I still eating my dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Is Daddy still eating his dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have to wait until we’re done. Sometimes you just have to wait for good things. Now sit down and be patient.”

He sat down, but patience was beyond him. As I returned to my pizza, he wiggled in place and then asked again.

In one way, I can sympathize. Waiting for good things is hard for anyone, and even more so for kids, who don’t have much practice at it. And yet at the same time, it’s a bit exasperating. It’s not as if there’s any question of him getting what he wants, after all. He knows very well that dessert is going to be served after dinner. It’s not like, for instance, the novel query process, where the outcome is far from certain.

Then again, waiting is hard for everyone who anticipates something good. The proof of that just passed us, in the form of Black Friday. I mean, Black Thanksgiving Thursday. All Black Friday’s Eve. Or something.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this annual ritual. Actually, scratch that. My feelings about the nonsense that is Black Friday/Black Friday’s Eve are pretty unequivocal. And yet, for the last couple of years, Christian has actually gone out as early as the stores offer their blockbuster sales, because the system forces the issue:

1. Sales start at a given time and there are limited quantities.

2. If you don’t get there early, i.e. during the Thanksgiving evening hours, the sale price may be valid, but there won’t be any stock to buy.

The choices are, then: go shopping with the madhouse despite the gnashing of teeth caused by your conscience telling you this encroachment on holiday is just wrong; or stick to your conscience and accept that you will pay a lot more for the item you were going to buy anyway, if you can find it at all.

We should wait. But we don’t.

These are good avenues of thought to pursue on the second day of Advent. This is a season given to us to pause and take stock of the state of our lives. Where are we out of balance? What opportunities for rest and quiet are we barreling past with the radio at full volume? And what things desperately needed for our mental and emotional well-being are we losing as a result?

Advent on Pinterest

I’ve set up an Advent board with some (not an exhaustive, but some) resources for Advent. If you know of any good ones, leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to the board!

http://www.pinterest.com/kathleenmbasi/joy-to-the-world-advent-activities-for-your-family/

Thoughts for the First Sunday of Advent

Some thoughts from liturgical composer Rory Cooney for the first Sunday of Advent:

Advent is that place between the Isaian dream of beating swords into ploughshares and training for war no more and the place in which we find ourselves today—still—on the brink of self-annihilation. The thing is, Isaiah and his countrymen lived on the same brink.

Read more at Gentle Reign

Happy Birthday, Boo Boo!

Michael Mayhem is two!

Nov. 30, 2011

and…

 

Vignettes

I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody’s reading blogs today anyway, so I’m going to record a few vignettes for the sake of my own chuckles and family history.

Vignette #1: Michael Mayhem’s Daily Dose of, Well, Mayhem

Channeling Kevin Spacey from KPax

They were all ready for bed before I left to go shopping. Teeth brushed. Jammies on. Christian had even made lunches for school the next day. And then he went down to teach one last piano lesson. When he came back up, he found Michael holding a Jello fruit cup. “Where did you get that?” he demanded. Then he saw Julianna’s lunch bag lying on the kitchen floor, along with a half-eaten string cheese. And one more on the counter, with bite marks in the plastic. So much for made lunches and brushed teeth.

Vignette #2: Eavesdropping

“Can I come downstairs and read?” Alex asked.

“No.”

“Uh!” (You know that deeply-aggrieved grunt.) “Why not?”

“Because Daddy and I need to talk about Christmas, that’s why.”

The attempt at a dramatic sigh caught on a giddy smile. The thought of presents does that. He stayed upstairs. No complaints.

It didn’t take as long as we expected, so we turned on Netflix. The next morning Alex gave me a look. “You guys didn’t talk about Christmas last night. You watched a movie.“

Nice, Alex. Nice.

Vignette #3: Hiding in plain sight

Christian is the finder in our house. I’m bad at finding things; Alex is wretched, and we don’t even ask anyone else. On Sunday we bought marshmallows to use in our Down syndrome presentations, but I didn’t know where he’d put the Target bag and I forgot to look for it. That evening Christian asked where it was and I said I didn’t know. He got up and walked into the kitchen, where he found it sitting right in plain sight on top of a bin of clothes. When he began to mock me, I said:

Let me explain my day to you. I woke up at 3:45 and never got back to sleep. I went to 5:45 Jazzercise, came home to have you running around like crazy trying to get out the door, so I helped with breakfast and lunches. Then I had to take a shower, get my blog up, and get out of the house by 8 with the other kids so I could pick up Uncle J. on the way to drop the boys off. I spent the entire morning at school doing presentations with you, came home with crabby, hungry boys, made lunch, put Michael down for nap, and then I tried to lie down and take a nap myself because I was exhausted. But then Nicholas came upstairs and wanted to snuggle, and then he wanted me to read him a book, and by the time we finished, my sister was here. I had a twenty minute visit with her and then I had to kick her out because I had a Skype interview with an editor. In the middle of that interview Michael woke up screaming and had to spend the rest of it on my lap. That lasted until 3:15, and then the kids were coming home from school, and I taught a flute lesson until 4:30. Then it was time to battle the boys through getting dinner on the table. So you tell me, when did I have time today to look around the kitchen for a bag I didn’t need?

(We were laughing about it, don’t worry.)

Vignette #4: The chaos of Four (as if that last wasn’t illuminating enough)

I did an interview by email yesterday about Joy to the World: Advent Activities. One of the questions was:

Describe the mess of kids’ stuff and toys that, I can only imagine, is strewn across the house. Be specific.

My response:

No kid ever puts their coat away. Michael routinely wipes out on a piece of paper someone has left on the floor. I’m constantly yelling, “Do not step on the ______!” (book, DVD case)–we should buy stock in whatever company makes jewel cases. Michael likes to pull out the DVDs and shove them into the VCR. Yes, I said VCR. At the moment, we haven’t had a chance to clear out Friday’s mountain of paperwork, so Alex and Julianna both have a bunch of papers sitting on the ottoman waiting to be rifled through and sorted. Yesterday I went downstairs (where the toys are *supposed* to be) to practice my flute and spent the first ten minutes sorting the pieces of two different puzzles that had been dumped into a single pile on the floor. Fortunately they were different sized pieces. On saturday morning, after I stripped our bed to wash the sheets, Nicholas came downstairs and greeted us with, “I threw up on your bed!” Why? Because he’d upset his stomach by jumping on it. Does that give you enough?

This is what I’m thankful for this year. My family. Ahem.

Contemplating Crazy (A Christmas Shopping Manifesto)

What it feels like in my house Christmas morning (photo by marco antonio torres, via Flickr

Let’s face it: My house is stuffed with Stuff.

I am engaged in an ongoing war to rid my house of junk (Halloween rings shaped like bats, useless party bag favors, toy airplanes built so shoddily they broke the first day, T shirts, T shirts, T shirts–what is it with the “we must have a T shirt for every possible occasion” thing?), and yet the truth is, a family of six is just going to have a lot of stuff.

We print on the back side of every piece of school communication or homework that has a blank side. (I’m kind of obsessive about that.) We are extremely selective about what schoolwork gets saved. We consider ourselves not big accumulators of kid paraphernalia. Yet we have So.Much.Stuff.

And about this time of year, I start contemplating crazy things to address it.

Because it’s time to shop for Christmas gifts. My husband’s family has always done Christmas big. Mine, not so much. So every year we engage in a (loving) (respectful) battle of tug of war to determine how much is “too much.”

Plus, we have kid birthdays four weeks on either side of Christmas. Julianna’s, in February, isn’t so bad, but Michael’s, which is this week, is a stumper. I mean, what do you give a two year old who doesn’t even get the whole idea of birthdays, and who has two older brothers? Everything he’s interested in playing with we already have! And guess what? We have two occasions to give gifts for!

Then there’s the small matter of how to do the shopping without ruining the surprise for the recipient. Last year, for instance, I thought Nicholas (3 3/4)was old enough to understand the concept of surprise. I thought it would be special for him to get to help me pick his daddy’s gift. I impressed upon him the need to keep it a surprise for Daddy, and we went to Kohl’s and chose two Jerry Garcia ties. That night when Christian got home, Nicholas met him at the door shouting, “Daddy, guess what? We got you TIES!!!!”

Needless to say, Nicholas is not going with me when I shop for gifts this year. And that adds some serious complication to the shopping process. My choices are: go while he’s in school, which is supposed to be my work time; go after the kids are in bed, which guts what little time I have to spend with my husband; or hire a sitter. How much moolah do I have to dish out on babysitting so that I can go spend even more on gifts?

I’m contemplating crazy, people. Here are the ideas I’ve come up with:

The children must each pick two toys to give to charity, to make room for new arrivals.
“Disappear” that train table we gave Alex for Christmas when he was two, and wrap it up as a birthday gift for Michael.
Helium balloons. Because they’ll go away after three days.
Take Michael with me while I go to Target to buy the markers we plan to give him. Because he doesn’t have a clue, anyway.

What crazy things have you done (or contemplated) at this time of year?

Down Time

Semi (Photo credit: justus.thane)

There are days when you can feel it barreling down the highway from behind, like a Mack truck loaded down, an unstoppable force just waiting to flatten you.

That’s how I was feeling last week. Don’t get me wrong; many good things happened last week. I got started querying my novel. I had a flash story published. My new flute collection came out and one of my friends spent the whole week selling it for me locally, because she’s just an awesome person. Christian and I were able to go into both Julianna’s and Alex’s schools to talk about Down syndrome–something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time.

And yet I could feel it coming up behind me, that sense of being overwhelmed, stretched too thin, my nerves drawn so tight they vibrated with every late-afternoon bicker and witching-hour whine.

Burnout.

I’ve been up early and up late a lot lately, wringing every productive moment out of the day. But it’s more than that. I was up early and up late every single day we were in Colorado this summer, and yet I felt energized and alive, awake. Spending the days outside makes you physically tired, but spiritually filled. By contrast, I’ve spent the last several weeks in the car criscrossing town, behind a computer screen, cleaning and cooking and doing all those necessary things that suck the spirit dry, like undergoing a long and futile search for a lost library book.

Then Christian home Thursday evening feeling achy, and I realized burnout wasn’t the only Mack truck barreling down on me. I recognized the faint itchy ache in the junction of my ears and my throat, the general physical sense of being run down. The virus was coming.

Christian spent the evening sitting on the couch with his robe wrapped around him and his fedora on his head for warmth. (He says that’s because Michael put it there, but he left it on until bedtime.) And so I decided to take a couple days off and recharge.

I’ve been pushing hard lately, not because I’m on top of deadlines but because I’m not, and I have the opportunity to work on other projects that have been patiently waiting for attention. But work was beginning to feel like a chore instead of a privilege–draining instead of energizing. And adding things to my “done” list wasn’t energizing me as it usually does.

So Friday afternoon I laid down with Nicholas and amazingly, we both dozed off. Then I went downstairs and turned on Netflix, and spent a relaxing afternoon scrapbooking and watching Mansfield Park and Roman Holiday. Saturday afternoon, when Christian took the three older kids to the basketball game and Michael was napping peacefully, I did it again. It felt a little surreal to spend that much time just relaxing…surreal and luxurious.

And Sunday we had a date: Thor, dinner, and Christmas shopping. One of those three inspired another blog post. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow to see which.

fire (Photo credit: matthewvenn)

So now, on the cusp of another week–a holiday week, no less–I feel refreshed. Ready to rumble. And it’s a good thing, because the schedule’s already full-up. Nose back to the grindstone.

A Collection of Randomness For Your Friday (a 7QT post)

___1___

A bread machine! A bread machine!

Someday I’m going to have a very good household helper in Michael. Someday, when he stops doing things like, oh, I don’t know, using the can opener to try to unpeel a stick of butter.

Someday. Not today.

___2___

In the great days of yore, when I was a liturgy director, I used to put together a children’s choir every Christmas. I took kids from age 5 on up, and not until we’d started did I really connect that five-year-olds can’t read. That made for some interesting rehearsals.

This year, the docket of “choir babies” is at thirteen, ranging in age from eleven, I think, on down to just over one year old. I decided it was time to do a test run on children’s choir. So this Christmas Eve, the choir babies are singing “Away In A Manger” to allow the adults to go to Communion. Assuming it goes well, next year we’ll let them do a prelude or two and lead another something during the Mass.

So for the last couple of weeks, when Julianna gets out of religious ed at 8p.m., I take her over to the nursery where mayhem reigns supreme, and I corral the madness. Or, well, I try. Because there are those two baby/toddlers, who are banging on every known noise-making toy in the nursery and worming their way between bigger bodies to bang on the extreme upper or lower ranges of the piano. And they’re all wound up from group play, so when we start singing, it sounds something like this:

“A-WWWWAAAAAAAY IN A MANGER!”

“Whoa,” I said, diplomatically not mentioning the lack of, er, pitch in their shouted song, “are we trying to wake the baby up or sing him to sleep? Let’s try that again!”

___3___

This week, Christian and I are speaking to elementary classes at both the public and the Catholic schools about Down syndrome. I will have to write a post next week about how kids keep you humble, to wit: Julianna walks into her classroom and sees us both waiting for her, and shrieks, “Da-ee! Look evee bo-eee, my da-ee! And Mah-ee.” Daddy gets a huge hug, and then she goes straight to her seat on the carpet. Ungrateful child. All that energy I put into pregnancy and nursing you, and Daddy is the star? Puh-lease.

___4___

Speaking of Julianna, how can you resist Miss Napkinhead?

___5___

Someone shared this on Facebook last night, and I spent the entire eight minutes with tears streaming down my face, I was laughing so hard.

___6___

This week I finally reached the novel query phase. (Cue angelic chorus!) So far I’ve only sent two–I had both music and nonfiction magazine projects to juggle this week as well–but it feels really good to be here at last. And nerve racking, of course. I bounce back and forth between complacency and, um, Don Music.

(:22)

___7___

Finally, did you hear about the survey the Vatican is asking the laity to fill out? It doesn’t quite read like it’s actually aimed at us, but here it is. Go forth and opine!

Author Interview: Erin McCole Crupp

Today I have a special post–a chance to chat with the author of a new Catholic novel: Don’t You Forget About Me, by Erin McCole Crupp, also known online as Mrs. Mackerelsnapper, OP (how can you resist a name like that?).

Can you start by telling us what the book is about?

Sure, Kate!  Thanks for hosting me.  Don’t You Forget About Me follows Mary Catherine Whelihan, or “Cate,” a successful single woman more than happy to leave her ugly duckling past behind her.  Cate is also one of those “fallen away” Catholics, and incidental to that fact, she has been treating her feminine health issues with hormonal birth control pills since her teens—that’s a long time to be on The Pill.  Well one day Cate gets this cryptic email from her grade school crush, Gene, asking if he’ll see her at their grade school principal’s funeral—because he has a question he wants to ask her in person.  So against her better judgment, Cate goes to the funeral and finds out that she’s not the only one in her graduating class who is sick in some way.  In fact, it looks like the popular, athletic kids have grown up to fare even worse!  Gene is now a doctor—a faithful, Catholic OB/GYN—and he wants to find out why so many of their classmates are sick and dying.  Cate wants no part of it… until she finds herself a suspect in the questionable death of the worst of their class bullies.  Cate and Gene now have to find out who or what is making their classmates so sick.  In the process Cate has to tear down a lot of the walls she has built to protect herself.  After all, why would she even want to help these people who did so much damage to her as a child?

I enjoyed Don’t You Forget About Me for its humor and the vitality of the writing. Your characters are very real. I love how you have an extremely sympathetic lapsed Catholic, a lovable Jewish chemistry-professor best friend, and a sassy, winsome literary agent–all in the first chapter. In fact, the “Catholic” never really takes center stage in this book; it’s a thriller with Catholic elements. How long did it take you to create this world?

Is it too weird to say it took my whole life?  I feel like my brain is just this bucket of random facts and quirks that I’ve picked up from people I’ve met or experiences I’ve lived.  Got made fun of in grade school?  Plink! Into the bucket.  Have to text my BFF with every thought that crosses my brain?  Plink!  Into the bucket.  Endometriosis?  Cheddar cheese popcorn?  A nun who wore black oxfords and prowled the recess yard looking for troublemakers?  Plink!  Plink!  Plink!  Then God comes along, shakes up the basket, and those details and quirks link up where He wants them to.  If I just obey the call to write and keep my butt on the seat and my fingers on the keyboard long enough, a book comes out.  This time it was Don’t You Forget About Me.

Mary Cate’s experience underscores a sad truth: that our Catholic schools aren’t always the haven of holiness we imagine them to be. Children are capable of lot of cruelty. Do you worry about drawing attention to that? How do we, as authors, walk the line between admitting the “warts” in the system and giving fodder to enemies of the Church we believe in?

Joseph Pearce says, “To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong.”   If I point out the window and say, “Hey, the sky is blue!” I’m not drawing attention to anything we don’t already know.  We’re a Church of sinners.  If a wart is there, the only way it will heal is if I give it the attention of a doctor’s visit and some liquid nitrogen.  It might be painful attention, but ignoring it certainly won’t make it go away.  I worry more about not telling the truth in my fiction than I do about making things prettier than they are.  If fiction serves any practical purpose, it’s to teach us how to resolve our conflicts.  When we are afraid to admit there’s a conflict to begin with… “…so your sin remains”  (John 9:41).  Jesus was never afraid of the truth. We don’t need to be either.

All that being said, you mentioned “enemies of the Church.”  I’m fully aware that several of those enemies are more than happy to write of the warts of Catholics but won’t give a second of their time to write examples of faithful Catholics being the love of Christ in the world.  That’s where Catholic writers really do need to come in.  I don’t think anyone is more equipped to write along the whole continuum of human activity more than those people fed frequently and completely with the Real Presence of Jesus Who Is Truth.  So, I beg you, Catholic writers, don’t shy away from writing of human failings, but do show human goodness as well.

That’s such a good word of encouragement. Now, you know I have to ask how much of Mary Cate’s experiences are autobiographical!

Yes, they are completely autobiographical… about the life of a fictional character named Mary Catherine Whelihan!  Oh, you’re asking if I was bullied as a child at a Catholic grade school!  Well… I certainly had a less-than-pleasant experience myself, but I also own that I was a less-than-pleasant child.  There is such a difference between being victims of our childhoods and being survivors.  Which we are is a choice we make.  At the beginning of DYFAM, Cate is very definitely a victim and even relishes seeing herself in that role.  Do her experiences change her?  You’ll have to read the book to see.

Your blog is called “Will Write For Tomato Pie,” and you kept talking about this dish all the way through Don’t You Forget About Me. I was just waiting for that recipe to show up at the end. Do you have a recipe you’d recommend?

On Friday, November 22, our family’s adventure in making tomato pie at home will be up as a Meatless Friday recipe on CatholicMom.com.  I was impressed that I was able to make a tomato sauce for it that had the right consistency—as in I cut into the pie to serve it and ½” of tomato sauce just stood there and didn’t ooze off the crust.  However, the flavor, while good, was not quite the perfection that is Corropolese’s tomato pie.  So I’ll be trying my recipe again, but we’re in no danger of putting Corropolese out of business!

Oh, good! I can now try to make a tomato pie. Now I can move on to other things. Let’s talk publishing biz! I saw in your interview last week at Ellen Gable’s blog that your focus is on story rather than theme. Do you have an overarching “philosophy” that directs your fiction writing?

I just want to rip out your heart, stomp on it, bury it, then give it back to you, healed and with wings.  That’s been my mission statement as a writer, so that even when others haven’t seen value in my work, I still have a great time writing it and can feel the smile of Mary when I do!

Since you said in the Full Quiver interview that you have another manuscript under consideration at a major Catholic publisher, you’re obviously pursuing several paths simultaneously. What makes you choose one avenue over another? What are the differences in the process?

It’s really important for a writer, in order to be of a professional mindset, not to be desperate.  If you know you have a polished, quality manuscript, then approach the publisher who has a better chance of welcoming it.  Don’t just send it out all willy-nilly, hoping for a nibble.  Do your research.  Full Quiver Publishing specializes in Theology of the Body fiction.  My other manuscript, a YA historical about St. Catherine of Alexandria, would probably look pretty weird in their catalog.  Asking them to spend time with an MS that doesn’t fit their mission is kind of insensitive on my part.  It’s just good manners, which makes it good business (in the sense of bringing Good to business, not in the sense of “manipulating people to get what you want”).

I “met” Ellen of FQP during a chat presentation at the 2012 Catholic Writers Conference Online.  I met (no quotes) the representative of the other publisher when I went to a pitch session at the CWG Live conference this past August. The larger house sent a rep to CWG live, who accepted my proposal packet and sent it on to their fiction editor, who has since asked for the full manuscript in order to help them make a decision as to whether or not investing time in this manuscript—not in me as a human being, but in this particular story the way I happen to have told it—would be a good investment on the part of their company.  In other words, if the MS is rejected, I’m not allowed to take it personally.  I did my best with the art, craft and business end of the writing.  The rest is up to God.

In both cases, the editor wanted to see the first three chapters and some sort of summary.  Since FQP is on the smaller side (though I don’t feel right calling them “small” as they grow), the decision-making process was less complicated and only one person had to make the decision whether or not to ask for the full manuscript.  At the larger publisher, there are several levels to go through before they’ll request a full manuscript; in the event they do like the full, there will still be more filters for it to pass before a contract would be offered.

Now, that’s the process for a solicited manuscript—one the publisher asked to see.  The process for an unsolicited MS (meaning you looked up the publisher and sent it to the editor in hopes they’ll consider) is a lot longer and more impersonal.  That’s why I am a huge advocate of attending writing conferences.  Your appearance at one of those is a testament to how seriously you’re taking this.  Conferences also help you build relationships with other writers and editors.  It’s hard to feel bitter about a rejection from someone whose sick grandmother has been on your prayer intention list.

Did you always know you wanted to pursue small/niche press publishing, or did you ever consider traditional or self-publishing? What nudged you this direction?

I’ve just always wanted to tell stories.  When I first started out, of course I wanted to land a huge contract with a big house and get gazillion dollar advances and bazillion dollar royalty checks and be on the front page of the New York Times, and win awards and and and and… See, I considered myself a storyteller years before I considered myself a Catholic first.  Anyway, as my reversion grew deeper and my writing changed to reflect that, I realized that what I write is not so likely to be promoted by the secularly-minded, profit-first world of Big House Publishing. I even tried forming a small press starting with my first novel, Jane_E, Friendless Orphan to create a fresh marketplace for Catholic fiction that would appeal to non-Catholics, but that was at a time that my primary vocation as wife and mother had a sudden increase in demands.  I knew I had to choose my Vocation over my vocation, and my writing went by the wayside for several years.  When it was time to take up the keys again, God led me to the Catholic Writers Guild… and the rest is history above!

I hope this wasn’t too lengthy and that my answers are helpful to others!  Please know that I pray for my readers daily and include them in my intentions at daily Mass.  Thanks again for hosting me, Kate.

You are most welcome! Good luck!