Erika Mitchell's Blog, page 37

Feast or Famine

When Wes and I first got married, I was committed to being a good cook. I had this vague idea of the kind of wife I wanted to be, one who went to school all day and then came home and made a fantastic dinner for her husband. When asked what was for dinner, I would wipe my hands with a kitchen towel and straighten my apron and reply, "Chicken Bouillabaise with saffron rice and a market berry compote for dessert."

I'd be all poised and unruffled, producing meal after glorious meal in a spotless kitchen while my adoring husband looked on and sipped a martini and thought about how happy he was to have married me.

Part of this rosy little fantasy came true. Even though Wes never did pick up a taste for martinis, I did become a pretty decent cook. I'm adventurous, and will attempt to cook anything once. This led to some epic successes with just enough failures thrown in there to keep me humble.

It also led to Wes and I both gaining around 20 pounds our first year of marriage, but that's another post entirely.

When I graduated and got a job, I had a lot less time to spend on cooking meals. The more time I spent at the office, the less time I spent in the kitchen. Our fare got simpler.

Then, we got poor and so did our food quality. Did you know that you can feed two adults two meals a day for four days in a row with just one pound of ground beef, a can of olives, a box of pasta noodles, and a jar of pasta sauce? And that they will get heartily sick of eating the same freaking thing over and over and OVER?!

Then, I got pregnant. And stopped cooking. Because food (and especially food SMELLS) are abhorrent when you're pregnant. Wes took over the cooking, and we discovered he's a dynamite chef in his own right.

When Aidan was born, we were all optimistic I'd get back in the kitchen like a good housewife. That…Didn't happen. Did you know it's hard to cook when you've got a baby to care for? Babies are no respecters of menus. Neither are toddlers, now that I think about it.

I've recently ventured back to cooking. It all started with homemade chicken noodle soup and then…I couldn't stop. Eggplant parmesan, borscht, roasted chicken…I'm living in my frigging kitchen and I'm exhausted. And well fed. And happy. But so frigging tired of chopping vegetables!

But that's just how I roll. Feast or famine. Couch potato or gym rat. Writing novels or not at all.

Sometimes I feel like I need a moderator for my past-times. Then again, let's be honest. I'd probably never listen to him/her anyway.

The Backyard Burger Murder

I'm sure you all have more important things to remember than me talking about the projects I'm working on, but in case you have an exceptionally good memory: Remember that short story I've been talking about for a couple months?

It's finally done!

And the best part is, it's free for download! That's right, I'm giving my writing away for free because I love you guys. Plus, it's a fun story and I can't wait to share it with all of you.

Here's a synopsis of what it's about:

When a woman falls critically ill during his barbecue (which is a nice way of saying she pukes all over his floor right in the middle of the party), John writes the whole thing off as simple bad luck and leaves it at that. When he learns that she's been poisoned, he decides to solve the attempted murder in a desperate attempt to get his rich neighbors to give him money.

Maybe it's just because he's bored, or maybe it's because attempting to solve an attempted murder beats going door to door asking for handouts. Either way, he's going to get the job done. Even if what he finds turns everything he's taken for granted on its head.

If you want to download it and make it your very own, click here to go to my author website. You can open it in your browser window there and then just save it to your hard drive.

Please enjoy!

Montessori Musings

Am I the only one who thinks of preschool and thinks, "Oh, cool. A chance for kids to learn how to play nicely with other kids, learn some colors and shapes, and figure out life in a classroom"? That had always been my impression…Until I toured a Montessori school.

Wes, being the stalwart Libertarian Constitutionist he is, asked me to look into Montessori education for our son. I took one look at the tuition for Montessori and passed out, then refused to look into it any more.

We saw a booth for a local Montessori at the farmer's market on Wednesday so I stopped by to see what it was all about. They invited me to take a tour, which I did today.

Oh my goodness, you guys. They've figured out a way to civilize toddlers. The toddler room was so quiet, all the little kids just working away industrially on their developmentally-appropriate projects. A few came up to me and were exquisitely polite, and it was astounding to see these toddlers doing stuff like serving their own snacks using tongs and then carrying their plates to the table, where they sat and ate them nicely.

And then there was Aidan, rushing into the fray like a tiny conquering Viking child, messing with the other childrens' projects and making a giant crumby mess of the snack table. I watched a little girl use a tiny brush and dustpan to sweep up the crumbs and could scarcely believe my eyes.

There is something to be said for the Montessory approach to educating children. I have never, in my life, seen children engaged in learning like that. Kids working on numbers and mathematics because they were interested in it, not because a teacher told them it was time to work on math. Absolutely incredible.

Man sakes alive is it expensive, though. I mean, think of a number you would feel extremely uneasy about paying each month for preschool tuition. Then double it. Then maybe double it again.

Is it worth it? Argh, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it? Experts say the most important foundations for how children learn are established from ages 0-6, so maybe. As a parent, you want to provide the absolute best possible start for your kids. Then again, when you're talking these kinds of monthly costs, you start to really wonder how important it is to send your child to the Super Genius Kids' Preschool.

You know what I could really go for right now? A giant pile of money. Or, better yet, a giant pile of gold bricks. Aidan can use them to weigh down his Montessori art projects.

The Prude's Guide to Tasteful Music Videos

Look! Clothes! And ears! We all win!

I'm a huge prude. There's no getting around it. I see teenage girls strutting through Safeway in bathing suits and all I can think of is, "PUT SOME CLOTHES ON, YOU HUSSIES!" I write a scene in which my characters might be, um, intimate, and I get all blushy and flustered and must avoid describing what they're doing entirely.

Seriously? Even writing the word "intimate" makes me uncomfortable. It's a wonder I ever managed to get pregnant, huh?

It's ok, for the most part I'm fine with my prudishness. I figure it'll come in handy when I want to torture my kids someday (especially if I have a daughter. I look forward to using the word "hussy" as often as possible).

I did have occasion to wonder about my modesty, though, when I stumbled across a Lady Gaga music video. It was…Umm…What's a nice way to describe it? Well, let's just say I was shocked I didn't to buy her dinner before watching it. I actually had to turn it off, and check that it was really her music video and not some kind of lascivious wormhole that reached out and swallowed me whole.

Am I behind the times? I mean, even some network shows seem, to me, to be rather more, um, lubricious than I'd always assumed the censors who protect us from naughtiness would be ok with. I mean, Janet Jackson's boob was a national incident, and yet there's just as much boobage on some episodes of Mad Men.

I mean, yeah, Janet Jackson was on the Superbowl and Mad Men is a show intended for adults. But it's not as though kids evaporate after 8 pm and never have access to this stuff. So, really, I see little difference.

Is anyone else shocked by things like how so many music videos resemble soft core pr0n nowadays? Just once I'd like to see a music video where all the people wear clothes.

I mean, isn't that Lady Gaga's thing? Wearing crazy clothes? Her music isn't so bad that she needs to feign relations with people to get us to listen to it, so why bother? Why not just film a tour of your closet, stick a music track behind it, and call it good?

An upside to the Prude's Guide to Tasteful Music Videos is that you have to diet a lot less if the whole world doesn't see you naked all the time. Truffles for everyone! We all win!

I See Smokestacks

Wes and I decided that last weekend would be a good weekend for adventures, so we had them. Aidan and I started things off right by plundering Half Price Books's 20% off sale (Half Price Books is a local used bookstore). We bought twenty books and a couple movies for $30, not bad, huh?

Then, I took Aidan to the off-leash dog park. You haven't lived until you've seen a friendly black Great Dane wander over to your toddler and give him a kiss. I have to admire my son's chutzpah, to stand there mouth open for a kiss while a horse of a dog licks him. Fearless, that one.

On Saturday we took Aidan to the water so he could throws rocks into the lake and chase ducks and seagulls. Of course, I neglected to dress him for the occasion so he had no choice but to stand on the shore and only look at the water. Apparently packing sandals for a kid who's going to the beach is just too much to ask of me.

On Sunday we skirted Seattle Center (to avoid Bumbershoot crowds) and explored Pioneer Square. I love Pioneer Square. It's kinda seedy in some places, and definitely not somewhere I'd ever want to be alone at night, but during the day it makes for marvelous exploration. There are alleys galore, and that's something that suits me right down to my toes.

You see, I love alleys. I have a preoccupation with them, actually. I'd probably get very, very distracted if I ever lived in New York. For me, each alley is a story, and I'm always looking for that story.

For example, we finished our walk down by the pier and turned up one street too early, so we cut across an alley to get back to the street we'd parked on. In that alley was an old door that said "Seattle Steam Corporation." Weird, right? There was a huge old smokestack coming out of the top of the building, and a weathered yellow sign to the right of the front door that read, "Fallout Shelter."

Shoot, that story practically writes itself.

Of course, this weekend wasn't all fallout shelters and friendly Great Danes. There was a crazy homeless guy walking down the same street as us screaming profanities, and an unfortunate nap in the car that resulted in an apoplectic toddler. I think I'm going to blame the crazy homeless guy for that too.

As I said, it was a good weekend for adventures. We might have done too good a job at having them though, because I'm finding it more difficult than usual to focus on getting my stuff done today. Despite what my lazy brain is telling me, I know I will not, in fact, be more productive if I watch a few episodes of Mad Men while Aidan naps.

Oh, shucks. It looks like Don Draper disagrees.

In the Land of Lies and Perjury

I read some of the highlights from the recent Vanity Fair interview with Angelina Jolie and was a tad confused. Seeing as how I skimmed the article, though, I shrugged off my confusion and started worrying about more important things. Like whether or not I could get away with putting onions in the spaghetti sauce without Aidan or Wes noticing.

Then, I ran across this post on Mama Pop. It's perfect. It sums up so perfectly why I was confused by the VF interview. To wit:

[Angelina Jolie is] making her screenwriting and directorial debut with the upcoming film  In the Land of Blood and Honey.  She tells the magazine that the screenplay was the result of trying to cope with a two-day stint with the flu.

"I had to be quarantined from the children for two days," Jolie says. "I was in the attic of a house in France. I was isolated, pacing. I don't watch TV and I wasn't reading anything. So I started writing. I went from the beginning to the end."   Alright.  I'm calling shenanigans on this one.

Who paces while they have the flu?
Can we just cool it with the self-righteous "I don't' watch tv" claims?  WE ALL WATCH TV.
Really?  A first screenplay in TWO DAYS?  Either the story sucks or she has a really talented ghostwriter with a rock-solid non-disclosure agreement.
The attic?

These were my thoughts exactly! I have no doubt (or, well, maybe a little doubt. I don't know her personally, so I can't vouch for her integrity) that Ms. Jolie poured a ton of time and effort into bringing this movie into existence. I applaud her efforts. It's good to have a mother accomplishing such lofty goals. Yay moms!

On the other hand, the longer I work on my writing and the more I learn about the craft of storytelling, the more annoyed by celebrity memoirs, novels, and what-have-yous I get. That Angelina claims she hammered out an entire screenplay in two days with the flu is insulting, really.

I mean, maybe it happened. Maybe she's some kind of a screenplay-writing savant, like a Mozart for screenplays, but I think it far more likely she wrote down a few ideas and scenes while she was sick. Either that or she hallucinated the whole thing (she had the flu, remember).

And yes, she's been an actress for many, many years. Terrific. I've been an avid reader since I was seven, but that doesn't mean I can write a first-draft novel in two days. Telling a story gets a lot more difficult when you factor things in like story arc, character development, and research. I've got to assume she wasn't able to just wing this one spur-of-the-moment because she had the flu. Otherwise, I might cry.

I mean, if celebrities are more attractive than us, and wealthier than us, what is the freaking point if they're able to do things we find difficult quickly and while impaired? Am I to assume Angelina doesn't dissolve into a miserable, feverish pile of nausea when she gets sick?

I agree with Kristen from Mama Pop. I call shenanigans on this claim. I have to. For my own sanity.

The Perils of Being Fast

I read a fascinating Slate article today on how to write faster. This is, either fortunately or not, something I never struggle with.

Blogging helped me learn how to write quickly, for one. Blogging is a terrific way to hone writing skills, because it's almost always really easy to write a blog post when you've got one roiling around in your brain. NaNoWriMo helped too, because you have such a huge daily word requirement that you have no choice but to just get stuff on the page.

So how fast is fast? I'd consider myself a fast writer. I can consistently churn out about 1,000 words per hour, but this number can go up or down depending on how much research I have to do. If writing was all I did every day, I could conceivably write a handful of novels and short stories every year providing my fingers and supply of ideas held up.

Still, there are pros and cons to writing fast. On the pro side, if you have a short attention span (like me, and almost everyone I know who's my age {darn Internet, making it easy to access short, easy-to-digest morsels of information}) it's much easier to stay engaged and interested in a story if you're able to write it quickly. Plus, it's a huge rush to complete an entire novel in a month or two. I met people at the writer's conference earlier this month who'd been writing their books for years. I was almost a little afraid to tell them I wrote my first draft in a month.

On the con side, quantity doesn't always equate to quality. The more I learn about writing, the more I realize this. For example, the value of an outline. I don't outline, as a rule. I like to meet my characters, get them in trouble, and then watch how they get themselves out of it. It's fun to write this way, and can lead to some surprising twists.

However, this also means I end up with some pretty ragged first drafts. Take the novel I'm working on right now, Enemy Accountant. I wrote the first draft last November, and now I'm "revising" it. And by "revising" it I mean I'm rewriting the whole freaking thing because I know I'm capable of telling the story so much better and I'm unwilling to send it off to agents and publishers when it's anything less than the best I can possibly do.

One could argue that my first draft has become my outline. Bob Mayer has a great quote about this, he says, "I would offer that all writers outline. Some just write a really extensive outline called the first draft."

My writing style is consistent with my personality type, though. I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinda person, whose spontaneity works out great sometimes and gets me in huge trouble at other times. I admire people who think things through and have a perfect plan and know exactly where they're going with their writing. That's just never going to be me.

So I guess it's a good thing I write so dang fast. This way I can just proliferate bunches of mediocre first drafts every year, and then spend the rest of my time cleaning those drafts up and rewriting them entirely. This makes me feel like a crappy carpenter who's perpetually measuring once and cutting twice, but hey. It's working for me so far.

Biding My Time

Two weeks from today my left foot will be free from Boot Penitentiary and I'll regain the ability to do cool stuff like walk quietly, sit on the couch without my foot going to sleep, and exercise!

Still, I've been in the boot for four weeks now and I hate it. It was all fun and games when I was all, "Ha ha, this is my first broken bone" but now I just want to be able to walk across the house without feeling like a dang pirate, y'know?

Also, I'm keeping the weight off but I've noticed a gradual…softening…going on. All my hard-won muscles are melting back into chub and it's driving me bananas. I mean sure, I could keep going to the gym to exercise my arms and core, but I very much dislike weight training and it's just too frustrating to go to the gym and only get to do the stuff I don't really like doing.

Instead of going to the gym, I've been waking up early to write. It's been nice. I hobble to the kitchen, brew some coffee, and then write my little face off until 8 AM, when it's time for me to start my day of stay at home mothering.

There's a plus side to everything, I suppose. Flabby arms in exchange for progress on my novel? Meh, I guess I'll take it. I suppose my stomach muscles are going to be destroyed by Future Baby anyway so I might as well get used to it.

This is yet another reason I'm waking up early to write. Newborns don't afford many opportunities to sit down and write, so I've got to do it now while the getting's good. I think it's absolutely realistic to write a novel and finish revising my current book sometime in the next few months, don't you agree?

Feeling-Superior Fail

I have opinions on something I shouldn't have opinions on. I'm irritated at myself for having opinions about it, and I wish I didn't. It's annoys me so much I'd rather be living in a hermetically sealed cavern without Internet access than know enough about it to have an opinion.

Man, think of all the writing I'd get done if I didn't have the Internet. Still, I'd be limited in my research so the writing would probably be a tad shallow.

Anyway, the thing I'm so mad at myself for having an opinion about is the whole stupid Kardashian wedding thing that happened last weekend. Ugh, even just typing in that name makes me feel like bleaching my brain and then reading some Tolstoy.

Angsty teenage Erika (who read Tolstoy for fun) would write some scathing poetry indeed if she knew I knew about anything relating to a reality TV family.

As much as it pains me to admit, I'm curious about the wedding only so much as it pertains to pretty things. I do so love pretty wedding things. It's a holdover love from my job at Bottle Your Brand, when it was my job to research weddings and pretty things.

This wedding, where money was no object, is bound to be full of pretty things. But in order to see them I'm going to have to watch an episode of the reality show it was filmed for. And that will ramp up the self-loathing to a dangerous place. So that's annoying.

I don't really care anything for the people involved. Yes, I think it's awfully vain to talk about your own wedding as the wedding of the century, and then go on to say you're American royalty. Then again, they seem awfully good at talking about nothing but themselves, so in that way I suppose they are American royalty.

But insomuch as they seem well-known, they're well-known for being reality stars. And that makes me uncomfortable. Because people who are famous for having no shame are not the people I want associated with the reigning royalty of where I live.

And yet, as much as my mind quails in horror that I care, I do. Not about the people involved in the wedding, but about the pretty things. And that's not really much different than caring about the people, because when you get right down to it, it all boils down to being interested in pretty things, doesn't it? Pretty things, pretty people. None of it's going to help me write better, or be a better mother or wife, or change the world.

And yet and yet, I still care. Feeling-superior Fail.

A Little Something to Help You on Your Way

There. Now we can have a weekend.

(I know I haven't done Things That Do Not Suck Thursdays in ages and ages, but I categorized this as such because, well, this really does not suck. And if you ever feel hesitant about asking for what you want in life, think about this guy. I promise that whatever you're up against is nowhere near as scary as a hungry Great White Shark.)

(Also? I found this image here. Go there if you want to see lots and lots of funny pottymouth things.)