Erika Mitchell's Blog, page 38

Have You Ever…

…bought a fast food kid's meal for your kid and then, while they ate the nuggets or burger or whatever, started snacking on the French fries, because they shouldn't eat all of them anyway, but then you get to the bottom of the carton and realize you ate them all and feel like a mean parent, so then you give them a few stubby little French fry castoffs and tell yourself you're saving them from fat and crap food but then you hate yourself a little for trying to make yourself feel good about essentially STEALING from a BABY?

Yeah…Uh, me neither. But wouldn't that be a pretty awful thing to do?

Victoria! Victoria!

There are times when three days can seem like an eternity. When you're waiting for the results of a biopsy, let's say, or maybe that's how long it takes you to find food whilst foraging in the wilderness.

At other times, three days will fly by and you'll come out the other end wondering why these wormholes keep happening to you all while those same wormholes wonder why you keep happening to them.

Way back at the beginning of July, Wes and I scheduled a getaway weekend to Victoria, BC. This was to be our first trip away from Aidan and, as such, we decided to make it three days. Three days sounded like enough time to relax while not enough time to reduce me to pitiful, babyless tears. We scheduled. We waited. And then we left.

Now that I'm back, I laugh at the Erika and Wes of a month and a half ago. Fools! Three days is a pittance! You guys can go away for longer than that! Three days will whiz by and by the time you get back your kid will have decided he likes his grandma better anyway so just stay an extra day! You might as well!

My son's betrayal aside, we had a marvelous time. Canadians really are the nicest people. Maybe that's just because the ones we talked to were in the service/hospitality business and were paid to be nice, but I don't think so. My verdict is in: I like Canadians.

One of the things we did was a wine tour of the Cowichan Valley. If you like white wines, the Cowichan Valley is the Promised Land for you. All the Pinot Gris your liver can stand, and not a few other kinds as well you're unlikely to find at a grocery store (which is where I normally buy my wine).

An added bonus of doing a wine tour is a byproduct of having little class. You see, you're supposed to spit your wine out at the tastings into these little buckets they provide. Because it'd be déclassé to get a buzz going at a wine tasting. But no one spits out the wine, and by the end of the tour everyone's having a real good time. Except the driver. Because drunk driving isn't fun for anyone.

For me, though, the highlight of our trip was riding mopeds around the city. I have a lingering mistrust of motorcycles and Wes reckoned the time was nigh for me to just get over it already. We rented two mopeds, I realized I had no idea how to turn when I was halfway across an intersection, I almost got run over by an inattentive elderly woman, and we somehow made it all throughout the city in one piece.

We even did that thing where we sat next to each other at a red light and chatted. Do you ever see motorcycle drivers do that? Don't you ever wish you knew what they were talking about?

I have a pretty good guess. They're probably talking about how much their butts hurt after riding on juddering motorcycles for a few hours.

Now that this trip is in the past, we have no plans from here to forever. That means I'm back to regular blogging, back to editing and revising my novel, and, as soon as this accursed boot is off my foot, back to exercising!

Diversions are fun, but now I'm rested and ready to dive back in. With exceptionally long blog posts, apparently. And a pantry full of wine!

Screw This, I'm Winging It

It's funny, I missed out on all the BlogHer madness this year because I was at a writer's conference but now I'm writing a post-conference post just like everyone else. I'm just so trendy right now I can barely even stand it.

In case you missed my post last week, I've spent the last four days at the Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference. This was my first conference and it was, for the most part, exactly what I expected it to be. I took an obscene amount of notes, learned a ton, felt encouraged as a writer, and met some new author friends. All good times.

What I wasn't expecting was to feel so much ambition thrumming in the air. The other writers at this conference were hungry. I even had one guy say to me, "Are in this for the honor or the money? Because me, I'm in it for the money."  Fancy that.

There were literary agents and editors at the conference, and these poor people had to run around the conference with AGENT or EDITOR written on their name badges, basically turning them into lights at night in the middle of a moth enclosure at the zoo. I can't even imagine how many pitches these men and women had to listen to.

Speaking of pitches, I had no idea how important a writer's pitch is but be ye not so misinformed: A pitch is a big deal. There were three separate sessions at this conference dealing with how to write and deliver a pitch to an agent, that's how big of a deal it is. I wrote my pitch before the conference, then took the sessions and re-wrote it about ten more times.

Imagine this: I have ten minutes before my agent meeting and I'm wolfing down a stale sandwich I bought from Tully's while furiously scribbling all over my notepad, trying to incorporate some feedback I got minutes ago. Five minutes before my meeting I have no idea what I'm going to say so I pop a piece of gum in my mouth and decide, "Screw this, I'm winging it."

And I did. And it worked.

I met with an extremely decent human being who is a literary agent and she was very kind. It set me at ease and I just started talking about my novel (Enemy Accountant, if you're curious) and it came out sounding relaxed and interesting. She gave me her business card and asked me to email the whole manuscript to her. I thanked her and then commenced clutching that business card for an hour straight because I was afraid it would plumb fly away if I didn't.

Just in case you're not of the publishing world, an agent's job is to get publishers interested in buying your book. If they do manage to get a publisher interested, they help negotiate the contract in your interest and advocate for you throughout the publishing process. It's a very, very good thing to find an agent who loves your work.

So, now I have two agents interested in my novel. And a head full of new writing tricks to try. And, oh hey there manuscript I wrote a few months ago. Let's get you spiffed up and ready for your date with these agents who are interested in meeting you…

If you need me, I'll be eyeball-deep in revisions.

Pleased to Meet You

Sometimes you start a blog post and get a few paragraphs into the thing before you realize it's all crap and start over again. That happened just now, but you'd never know it because a blog is very unlike a white board.

I apologize for rambling, I'm just a tad nervous. You see, I'm heading out to a writer's conference on Thursday to rubs elbows and mingle with whole heaping bunches of other Pacific Northwest authors. I'll be in seminars all day every day for three days, pretty much just coming home to shower and sleep.

It's going to be…A lot of work, but hopefully worthwhile. I'm hoping to make some new friends, learn some new tricks and skills, and maybe (just maybe) avoid doing anything I can gleefully blog about afterward (meaning, I hope to avoid making a total donkey of myself).

For now, my whole job is to work on my pitch and find a place to get some business cards printed. I think networking will go a lot easier if I have some nifty business cards printed up. Here are some designs I'm thinking:

Unicorn and a kitten hugging in the background of the card, with my name written in swooping font. Nothing says "Blurb my book someday" like a unicorn hugging a kitten.
Black background with slate gray writing. Because dark colors = serious author.
A white card with just my name and nothing else, ala Daniel Ocean in Ocean's Eleven. It wouldn't be spectacularly helpful, but it would be pretty cool.

How about you? Got any business card or networking tips for me?

I Got the Boot

Let's play a game. I'll tell you three things about me, one of which is true.

I am really good at karaoke
I have never broken a bone.
My least favorite candy flavor is orange, followed closely by grape.

If you had looked at this list on Wednesday, we'd be playing a difference game. We'd be playing "Spot the false statement." As of yesterday, however, now it's "Spot the true statement." That's because Item #2 got downgraded to a lie yesterday, when I found out I had broken my very first bone.

It all started two weeks ago, after a nice long run. I stepped off the treadmill and felt pain in my left foot. The whole top of my foot was burning, and it made unhappy little lightning zips every time I walked on it. I finished my workout, went home, and consulted Dr. Google, who diagnosed me with a metatarsal stress fracture.

I shrugged and tried to stay off it for a couple weeks. When the pain subsided and was replaced by a different kind of pain, I decided to consult a foot specialist, who confirmed the stress fracture and gave me a big fancy boot to wear.

This big fancy boot, pictured on the left, will be my more or less constant companion for the next 6-8 weeks. I already dislike it. How am I supposed to keep my carpet clean when I've got this big Storm Trooper boot tracking who-knows-what in from the great outdoors?

Also, it gives my left foot an extra inch in height, meaning I either have to walk around with my right foot on tiptoe to compensate or else walk like a lopsided freakshow through the house, boot thunking away like some kind of pirate peg leg.

So now my cardio options are limited to the bike (which sounds like so much fun with a gigantic boot!) or swimming (which I love but have no access to). Still, it could be worse. I could have tried to run on the foot, snapped my metatarsal, and needed surgery to repair the horrible, horrible damage.

I was all giggles at the podiatrist's office yesterday, though. I just thought it was so silly, this being my first broken bone. I felt like I was going through a rite of passage, and now that I've bumbled my way through bringing groceries in with a boot on, I can see that this particular rite of passage kind of sucks.

I've got a plan, though, I'm going to mainline calcium, swear undying allegiance to my boot, and rest the heck out of that bone. I'm hoping that at my three week check-up the doctor's going to take one look at my x-rays and ask me where I found adamantium, and then inquire whether it hurt to have it injected into my foot.

I just have to hope that between now and then I'm not require to be nimble.

Oh, and in case you're curious, the only true statement from our game above is #3. I'm actually atrocious at karaoke.

A Preponderance of Rambling

Please excuse the dust around here, I haven't touched my blog in almost two weeks and the neglect is evident. I can barely remember how to type, my laptop is moping, and I'm fairly certain when I publish this post it'll appear on the wrong website entirely because that's how out of practice I am.

Serves me right for unplugging for a week, though. I should have known there'd be a price to pay. A full week of reading, chasing Aidan around, and marveling at the absolute worst July weather I've ever seen (rain! wind! thunderstorms! I even saw a locust, but there was just one of them so it didn't qualify as a plague. Wes says it was a cricket, but I've already established that he doesn't know things) and all I have to show for it is an alarmingly decreased work ethic and the hint of a suntan.

I've had adventures, though! I climbed a very steep hill made of discarded coal (it sat atop the bones of a defunct coal mine) and shared a hiking tip with Wes that my Dad taught me. I did drunken crossword puzzles with my sister-in-law and her husband (I'm decidedly better at crossword puzzles when I'm tipsy). I tried a Bacon Bloody Mary that was absolutely, positively disgusting. I ate approximately four million salted caramel macadamia nut clusters, and I listened to Aidan say, "Water" when we went to the pool.

Admittedly, my adventures are of the tame sort. That's just how married suburbanite mothers roll, though, I'm afraid.

Slightly less tame was the handgun class Wes and I took before we left. We shot a variety of .22 and 9mm caliber semiautomatic handguns, and I learned two things:

The .22 caliber Colt 1911 handgun is my most favoritist ever, and I want to write it pen pal letters I miss it so much.
Glocks hate me. And I hate them. I might as well not even fire them, because I'm fairly certain I'm far more likely to hit the target by chucking the Glocks themselves than by trying to aim and fire them. Ridiculous.

The gun class was odd though. I expected the class to be mostly dudes, but there was an alarming preponderance of women in the class. Pretty women. Like, the kind who wear makeup, do their hair, and wear the kind of pants that sit so low when they sit guys like sitting behind them because then they know what kind of underwear the girls are wearing.

I later found out that the women were all of a group of friends who'd bought the Groupon together, but still. Do attractive women flock together or something? And why do they look so natural holding handguns?

On the writing front, I finished my short story before I left. I'll edit and revise, and then make it available free for download because it's fun and short and good practice for me. I'm scheduled to start writing Novel #3 in September, I'm attending a writer's conference in August, and PWNED is likely going to be available in print format in four weeks or so. Woo hoo!

As for my second novel, Enemy Accountant, I'm still revising it so it won't be available for public consumption for awhile. It's good, though. I'm excited to share it.

And that's about it. It feels good to stretch my neglected blogging muscles, albeit at the expense of a post that has a point. Maybe next time, eh?

No Bleaching the Baby

Sometimes I'm lazy and it pays off, like when I don't feel like getting off the couch and Wes bring me a water refill and then the water tastes better because everything tastes better when someone else gets it for you.

Sometimes, however, laziness bites me right on the meatiest part of my backside. I took Aidan to run a few errands today and we made it to our last stop, Barnes & Noble, without incident (I wanted to pick up a book of crossword puzzles for our upcoming vacation. What has four letters and fits this sentence: Erika is a huge ____. Hint: The third letter is an R).

I was tired from schlepping him in and out of multiple stores, and when I saw that his stroller was way back in the third row seat, just out of reach, I decided to just carry him. It was going to be a quick stop, in and out. No need for a stroller,

Or so I thought.

I decided to make use of the restroom facilities before completing our shopping, so I set Aidan down in the handicapped stall with me and tried to do my business as quickly as I could. Fiendishly fast troublemaker he is, though, he managed to dip his hand into the toilet water of the public restroom in the .00025 seconds it took me to undo the top button on my pants.

His hand. Was in. The toilet.

Public bathroom.

UNKNOWN FECES CONTRIBUTORS.

You know that screen that comes on the television when they're testing the emergency broadcasting signal? That's what flashed through my brain the instant his hand touched the water. It was all I could do not to improvise a Silkwood Shower for him on the spot. My brain was screaming "Bleach his hand! Bleach it! Bleach it good!" But my common sense was there too, so I settled for good old-fashioned soap, water, and some more soap and water.

So now all I can hear in my head is George Bluth's voice telling me, "And that's why you always bring a stroller."

This is Where a Grave-Faced Face Slapper Would Come in Handy

I'm working with a printer to do the layout for my book, and I'm having the hardest time just saying yes to proofs. They look great, and I couldn't be more excited to see my book in print, but it's really freaking hard to tell them to go ahead and print the darn things.

Because then they'll be set in stone done. As in finished. As in, I can't muck around with them any more. Paul Valery once said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." The same can be said of novels!

I think I'll well and truly be done with revisions after this round, though. Honestly, it's not like I have a problem or something. I can stop revising whenever I want to….

Just let me fix one more comma splice! Just one more! Don't cut me off, man, these revisions are all I have left!

This is where it would be helpful to have a grave-faced man spring from the pantry to slap me across the face and tell me, "Get yourself together, woman!"

In other news, now that Aidan is almost 18 months old there's been an uptick in interest in the contents of my womb. Or, rather, the prospect of womb contents. Womb is a weird word.

This could be because I'm not shy about saying that Wes and I will start trying for Future Baby starting next month (egads!). Or it could be because 18 months is one of those milestones where your baby isn't really a baby any more so why not make another one?

Either way, five people have asked me about Future Baby's timeline in the last week. Even I have to admit, I'm getting excited too. My brain knows how all-consuming and exhausting babies are, but my hormones have hijacked the joint so I guess I'll come back to my senses in about a year and a half. I look forward to seeing you then.

Not even the grave-faced face slapper can help me now.

Between now and when a tiny fetus takes over my whole world, I plan to a) go on vacation, b) release a fun short story I just wrote, c) attend a writer's conference, and d) write my third novel during the month of September.

September should be a fun month. I'm doing my own little NaNoWriMo during September because I have no guarantees I won't be in mt first trimester come November and there's no way I'm doing NaNoWriMo during my first trimester.

I guess what I'm saying is that I hope to have a brand new manuscript and a brand new fetus by the end of the year. Plus a printed version of my book. Not for the fetus though. For me. And maybe for you too if I can just bring myself to approve the fracking proof already!

Grave-faced face slapper? Do your worst.

Excitement Fidgeting

Have you ever been so excited you started fidgeting just a little bit? And then felt silly because the thing you're all excited about is still a month away and so now you're all fidgety for no reason? But you're still so excited you don't care as much as you should?

And thus ends my tribute to the hard-working question mark.

The reason I'm so excited is because Wes and I are packing up the baby and some clothes and heading out for a family vacation next week. Man sakes alive, it'll be a good time. Ping pong (I am a ping pong ninja), reading outside in comfy chairs while soaking up sorely-needed sunshine, swimming, eating, and relaxing. It's going to be legen-wait for it-dary.

And then, AND THEN, we leave next month to go to Victoria. Just the two of us. As in, Aidan gets to hang out with his grandparents all weekend while Wes and I escape. Things I am looking forward to most about the first vacation I've taken with just my husband in over three years:

Eating meals for three days in a row without anyone screaming at me/demanding things from me.
Sleeping in every morning.
Being able to pay attention to my husband without also paying attention to a busy toddler.

Things I'm dreading just a little:

How much I'm going to miss Aidan's little face and kisses and hugs. I give me about 24 hours before I start missing him.
How long it'll take him to warm back up to me after we get home. Maybe it'll be an instantaneous, joyful homecoming. But maybe he'll have forgotten me already. Time will tell.

Either way, this trip will be a good thing. Wes and I could both use some down time, and I'm really looking forward to missing my son, if that makes any sense. Absence makes your heart a transponder, or somesuch.

Bye Bye, Big Words

I haven't had a chance to mention this here yet, but I received my very first piece of fan mail last weekend. An extremely nice guy took the time to write me an email after finishing PWNED, letting me know what he thought of it.

You guys. He liked it. He thought I pulled it off. He was a little skeptical when he first started reading it, but he said he enjoyed reading it overall and is glad he bought it!

Do you have any idea how mind-blowingly amazing that is? SO mind-blowingly amazing.

One helpful bit of feedback he gave me is to take a very hard look at the big words I use in my writing, and ask myself how many people will really know what those pieces of vocab mean. He mentioned the word "atavistic" in particular, and after revisiting it I see his point.

This is not the first time someone has noticed this. I wield a formidable vocabulary and sometimes have a skewed perspective on what constitutes a "big word."

At first I rebelled against the notion that I should use smaller words in order to write at a level the general public is comfortable with. Stephen King uses big words! I'm reading a book right now (Cryptonomicon, in case you're curious) that is chock full of big words! Successful authors use big words and no one yells at them for it!

Then something my first-piece-of-fan-mail-writer said caught my eye. To paraphrase, my writing is easy to read and hums right along until a big word drops out of nowhere and cracks the reader's windshield.

If I take an honest look at my writing, I have to agree with the guy. My writing style was born on my blog. If the big words I use on occasion are distracting and annoying to my readers, then it's safe to say my writing isn't an appropriate place to let my fun words loose.

This does give me an excuse to ponder the relevance of the juicy words that are big on nuance and short on fans. Do you think they'll get phased out and become obsolete someday? If no one's learning them anymore and fewer and fewer people are using them, how long do you think it'll take before words like "atavistic" and "pusillanimous" are, for all intents and purposes, extinct? Gone the way of thee's and thou's, and used only when irony or a bit of cheap authenticity are called for.