Erika Mitchell's Blog, page 26

A Prelude to Shower Crying

Earlier this year, I made all kinds of plans and scheduled all kinds of author-y type events for May and June and August. I figured, “These months are forever away! I’ll schedule them for then, and that way I won’t ever have to worry about them! I’m a genius!”

Alas. Not a genius. It’s May now, and that means I actually have to do one of those author events tonight.

To say I’m nervous is an understatement.

When you’re a new author, you have to resign yourself to the fact that no one knows who you are. No one is going to pre-order your book, you will not have lines out the door at your book signings, and if you manage to sell enough books to cover the cost of your advertising and overhead, you should call it a day and pat yourself on the back.

You will not be Stephen King. You will not buy a fancy Manhattan penthouse with your advances. You are obscure. So obscure, in fact, that the hipsters don’t even know who you are yet.

This means that, unless you have a lot of really longsuffering friends and family, your book events might be a tad…lonely.

I’ve acknowledged this. I’ve prepared myself for it.

Still, I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of sitting in a library by myself on Monday night didn’t bum me out.

Oh, well. This is me paying my dues. I’ll chin up, maybe bring some Bailey’s in a flask, and have a good evening. If I have to, I’ll just play Scrabble on my iPad all night. That, and maybe indulge in a little Tobias Funke-style crying in the shower afterward.

Just like that.

All silliness and pessimism aside, I’m really looking forward to it. If even one person shows up and wants to talk about my book, I’m gonna call that a success. If there’s one thing I can talk about forever, it’s writing.

So, if you care to hang out with me and you’re in the Eastside area of Washington tonight, please come to my Meet the Author thing. I’d love to see you there. I’ll be at the Issaquah Library at 7 PM tonight.

Wish me luck :)

Nothing Fuzzy About It

This weekend I did something I rarely do: I spoke. In public. Such is my overwhelming discomfort at public speaking that I even have a hard time typing it.

Now my blood pressure is going up. Someone grab a paper bag.

You might be wondering why I put myself in that position, knowing in advance how I felt about it. The reason is, I hoped it would be helpful for the girls I was speaking to. My testimony (fancy Christian term for ‘the circumstances surrounding your journey to Christ’) involves lots of issues that people that age are either going through or have friends who are going through, and it was my hope that sharing my story would bring them hope.

It went spectacularly well. There were quite a few people praying for me and, according to the group leaders I spoke with afterward, my story touched a chord with the people it needed to.

As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time thinking about my story in the week leading up to Saturday. It got me thinking about the term “Born Again Christian.”

I’d always thought this term sounded fuzzy and nice, but now that I think about it for a moment I realize it’s anything but. Birth is difficult for everybody. As a mother who’s been fortunate enough to give birth to two children, I can attest to this. It was tough both times. But not just for me.

If you do any research into birth at all, you’ll find that babies have a lot of work to do when they’re born. Taking that first breath, figuring out how to operate in a world that is the polar opposite of everything they’ve ever known. Poor buggers are tired after just a few minutes of that.

I realized it’s kind of the same when you accept Christ, especially if you’ve spent a good portion of your life not believing. There’s nothing fuzzy about it. Up is down, left is right. It’s hard work.

So that was my big revelation this weekend. I think it’s funny that the talk I gave was supposed to be for the benefit of the girls and instead I’m the one who walked away with a new realization. Oops.

What Love Looks Like

Being an ambitious person is a funny thing. It’s a lot like climbing an escalator at a pace roughly equivalent to the rate at which the stairs turn around and start over again. You keep moving forward but you never reach the top because you’re not sure what you’d do if you ever got there.

Wes, bless his heart, knows and loves this about me. He knew it before we had kids, and he really knows it now as I keep taking on more and more projects that keep me busy and slightly stressed out and sometimes make it hard for me to sleep at night.

It’s possible I’d be a better mother if I didn’t have so much going on. I don’t write when the kids are awake, but I have been known to be preoccupied if I’m puzzling through a predicament or more annoyed than usual if I’m interrupted when the kids are supposed to be napping but, for whatever reason, aren’t.

Then again, if I ignored this drive to write write write and focused all this ambition instead on my kids, I doubt very much whether that would be a good thing either. I’m not sure my kids deserve the brunt of my ambition before they’ve even had a chance to develop their own.

I asked Wes the other night if he regretted encouraging me to quit my job so I could pursue writing. Writing is an expensive hobby, and I’d probably be a little easier to live with if I wasn’t constantly tackling bigger, more complex projects.

He looked surprised and replied that no, he didn’t regret it. “You’re a writer,” he said. “That’s what you are. I could never regret encouraging you to be who you are.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, is what love looks like.

Eh, I Never Was Good At Being On a Break Anyway

I’m not very good at relaxing. Wes used to have a hard time with this when we first got married. We’d be packing for a vacation and I’d be like, “So, what are we gonna do on vacation?”

He’d say, “Relax.”

And I’d be like, “That sounds great! So what does that look like?”

He’d usually give me a confused look and say, “Like relaxing. Doing nothing. Taking it easy. You know, relaxing.”

At which point we’d both realize we were in no way speaking the same language.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m supposed to be relaxing right now. I finished the first draft of my next novel a couple weeks ago, an accomplishment brought about by much stress and hard work. It was two months of harrowing suspense and the whole point of the next few weeks was supposed to be me taking it easy and bringing my blood pressure down a few points.

But you know what happens when I relax? I get bored. And then I eat. All the things.

Lucky for me, a friend of mine who has spent the past six years battling cancer in the most heroic way I’ve ever seen asked for help putting a book together the other day. He’s been blogging for eleven years and wants to put his posts together into a book that will tell his story. He asked for some help on Facebook yesterday and before you can say, “But hey, aren’t you supposed to be taking a break?” I volunteered to help.

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Insert obligatory “Friends” joke here.

He did me the very great honor of letting me help him, so that’s what I’ll be working on for the next few weeks. I’ve never put an anthology together before, but this will be a labor of love and I can’t wait to dig in.

This is a biiiiiig project though. We’re talking 1,900 pages of content that I’ll be sifting through, organizing, and putting together in such a way that tells his story as best it can.

Wish me luck!

Steeped in Attitude

I was invited out to coffee by a new friend last weekend, a very nice fellow writer with an interest in North Korea. She’d seen me prattling on about the good ol’ DPRK on Twitter and asked me if I’d like to meet up sometime.

It ended up being a really interesting conversation. She’s American, but has family from Korea and talking to her about North Korea was eye opening in many ways.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway I got from the conversation was when we were talking about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. I made a joke (that was not really a joke) about how he’s the only fat person in North Korea and how that makes me so sad. That he can be living large (literally) while the people he’s responsible for starve.

I got the impression from her that she didn’t appreciate my joke, though she didn’t say anything right out loud about it. She’s no fan of North Korea’s fearless leader, but I think the disrespect was unwelcome. I felt chagrined at my lack of respect and brought it up, and we started talking about respect in America. Or, rather, lack of it.

It’s interesting how we’ve made a culture of disrespect. It doesn’t really matter who we’re making fun of (I can think of only a couple things that are verboten to mock). If we can, we will.

One thing I was wondering about, though, was what is it about Kim Jong Un that is so easily mockable? Is it the fact that making fun of him in his country is enough to send you to one of many prison camps? (Prison camps that his government continues to deny exist even though they’re plainly visible in satellite photos) Is it the fact that his country vilifies us even while it takes our food aid? Is it the over-the-top propaganda that reads like Mad Libs?

Personally, I think it’s the foreignness of it all. I think the idea of a country that forbids its citizens from having opinions contrary to one guy is anathema to most Americans. But, it could also be the Mad Libs propaganda.

Either way, the conversation was illuminating. It gave me pause to try to examine my own behavior in a different way. To look at making fun of Kim Jong Un as something weird instead of something expected.

I think this is the value of traveling and meeting people from other cultures. There’s a real danger, I think, in becoming too steeped in one attitude.

Amend Loudly, and In My Ear

I have just one rule for watching movies with me: Do not, under any circumstances, ruin my cry. If the end of a movie is emotional, and I’ve invested two hours of my life into building enough empathy with the story to be able to feel something at the end, I will freaking cut you if you make a stupid remark or joke that interferes with my ability to cry.

It’s a simple rule. Easy to remember, and easy to respect. All I ask is that you keep your jokes to yourself until I’m done sniffling.

Wes learned this rule when we watched Moulin Rouge together the first time. He made a joke, I couldn’t cry, and I gave him a very intensive introductory lecture to my one movie watching rule. That was ten years ago. He hasn’t screwed it up since.

At least, until last Sunday when he thought the end of Gladiator would be a great time to crack a joke about pooping on the dead bad guy right as the hero is being carried out by his friends.

My cry? RUINED. Three hours of the extended edition built up to a single moment, and Wes just couldn’t help himself.

I was cross. So cross, in fact, that I may have brought it up in loving, shrieky fashion a few times that night after the credits rolled.

So Wes did something curious: He invited me to hit him. On the face.

I considered it, then shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?” and went for what I thought would be a light slap. It turns out, I have no idea how to slap someone lightly and aim it where it’s supposed to go so instead of a light, playful slap, I ended up slapping him on the ear.

(Please note: Wes is not a battered husband. This was a silly slap, we were goofing around, and all is well. Don’t call husband protective services on me, thanks!)

Profuse apologies from me ensued, mostly variations on this theme: “I’m so sorry I hit you! I had no idea it was going to be so hard! Are you okay? I’m so sorry I hit you oh my gosh!”

Wes accepted my apology, we laughed about my terrible aim, and then I apologized again. After the umpteenth apology, Wes said the following to me: “Amend loudly, and in my ear.”

I thought it was a weird request, but whatever, I’m flexible. I walked up to him and whisper-yelled, “I’M SORRY” directly into his ear.

Now, it turns out that what he meant was that he wanted me to amend my apology to denote the force and location of the slap. What I thought he meant was that he wanted me to make amends loudly and in his ear.

You can imagine how confusing it got from there. He ran away from me, convinced I’d lost my mind. I chased him, wondering why he didn’t like my apology. (Please note, we were laughing this whole time. We are silly.)

We ended up in a stand-off in the master closet, where  we figured out where things had gone so gravely, comically wrong.

I will probably never slap Wes again (even if he asks me to) and he’ll probably never ask me to amend my apologies again.

And maybe, just maybe, he’ll remember the slap and the whisper-yelling directly into his ear and the chasing and the laughing, and remember to never again break my one movie watching rule. The stakes, my friends, are far too high.

Giveaways and whatnot

This is just a little update to let Brooke, Delisa, and all my newfound Goodreads friends know that I paid a (costly) visit to the post office today and shipped your books today. I shipped eleven books in total…Whew!

This won’t be the last time I offer free books, so don’t despair. Keep checking in with me here and on Facebook or Twitter.

For those of you who won, congrats! I hope you enjoy taking a tour of my brain.

And the Winner Is…

And the winner of a signed copy of my book and a cameo in my next book is…

BROOKE!!!

For those of you who don’t know Brooke, she loves England and writes a charming blog and I wish she would update more often but she’s busy with her husband and adorable dog and I suppose that’s neither here nor there because we’re talking about how she won the contest, not how much I would like to read more of her blog posts.

ANYWAY.

Look for her in the pages of my new book, which is SO CLOSE TO BEING DONE I ALMOST CAN’T STAND IT. Who knows when it’ll be published though, so nobody hold your breath or anything. I still have to pitch it and get a publisher interested in it and then edit it and revise it and it could be years before it comes out. But still, when it does, Brooke will be in it. Yay Brooke!

In consideration and appreciation for the over-and-above-excellence displayed by Delisa, however, who really made me feel so very special by promoting my book to anyone and everyone, I’ll be sending her a signed copy of my book as a gesture of gratitude.

Thank you to everyone who entered the contest and helped spread the word about my new book. I appreciate all of you!

The Coolest Giveaway I’ve Ever Masterminded

If you’ve “Liked” me on Facebook, you probably already know all about this giveaway. Heck, you might have even egged me on and told me to do it. Yay for you!

If not, here’s the deal: I’m offering a pretty cool contest for a two-part prize. If you win, you get

Your very own signed copy of Blood Money (maybe even the one I’m holding up in the picture above!) AND…
A cameo in my next book. I’m almost done writing the book, which means I want to find this cameo winner pronto so I can add him or her in.

Now, you might be wondering what’s so cool about a cameo. Surely it’ll just be a tiny mention of your name somewhere, right?

Wrong. When I say cameo, what I mean is that you’ll actually be in the book. Characters will interact with you and you’ll have something to do with the plot. I’ll tailor the role you play in the story to your real world interests.

Pretty cool, right?!

So now you’re (hopefully) pretty excited and wondering how to enter. Marvelous! Here’s what I’m looking for:

I want to spread the word about my new book, and the best way to do that is through word of mouth. If you want to enter this contest, tell as many people as you can about the book.

For example, if you’re on Twitter, tweet about my book using the hashtag #bloodmoneycontest. Or you can mention me in the post (@parsingnonsense)

For another example, if you’re a blogger, you can write a post about how you’re blog friends with this crazy writer chick and you’re hoping she’ll put you in her next book. Then, link to my current book somewhere. Bam.

If you tell your friends, recommend it to your mailman, write a post on Facebook about how your childhood friend Erika used to run around the schoolyard pretending to be a horse (true story) and now she’s an author and hey, here’s her book, those all count too.

Now, obviously I can’t verify whether you actually told your mailman, but if you leave a comment here and tell me you did, I’ll believe you. I’ll tally up the entries and assign points and random numbers and then pick the winner using a random number generator.

I’ll give you a week to enter, which means I’ll be picking a winner next Monday, April 1.

In case you’re still curious about how to enter, here are some guidelines:

Make a video of you being goofy in some way (pigtails, costumes, etc.) talking about how you want to read my new book. Post it online. That one’s gotta be worth at least two entries right there. Three if you make me laugh.
Tweet (hashtag #bloodmoneycontest), blog, post something on my Facebook wall (worth one point or maybe two or three depending on how much effort you put into it).
Add my book to your Goodreads or Shelfari list (worth one point).
Recommend my book to your friends, family, and coworkers whenever they ask for book recommendations (worth one point for each recommendation).
Ask you local library system to order copies of my book (surprisingly easy to do. Even still this one’s worth three points).
Buy a copy of my book in either format and gift it to someone you think will enjoy it (three point entry).
Post about this contest on Reddit, if you’re active in that particular online community. You get a half point for every upvote.

Phew! Every time you enter, no matter how you enter, leave a comment on this post telling me what you did. It’ll make my life easier.

I can assure you, the cameo I write for you will be cool, so get after it! Tell the world to buy my book and maybe, just maybe, you will find your way into fiction thriller immortality.

Shiny Apple

A couple months ago, it was time for Wes and I to get new phones. I’d always been wary of Apple products, thinking they were gateway products to sleek, expensive lifestyle I wasn’t sure I wanted.

Then we got iPhones. And I downloaded an app that lets me blog from my phone. It’s pretty awesome.

It’s the beginning of the end, isn’t it?