M.J. Pullen's Blog, page 11

Last-Minute Valentine Parenting Dilemma

M.J. vs. the Class Party

There are lots of things I should realize sooner.

It’s a theme for my life in general. But when it comes to kids and special events (especially at school), I am particularly inept at preparing for simple, predictable things. There are Valentine’s parties at both boys’ schools this week (one today and one tomorrow). Hubs was incredibly adroit this year and got the kids to Target to pick out Valentines early in the week. The kids even got started writing their names on the little cards days in advance. We were rocking it, and to be honest, feeling a little smug.

Despite the fact that I ran to both Target and the grocery store two other times after that, it never once occurred to us until Skywalker mentioned it last night that he would also want to give out CANDY. Because the days when first graders can hand out simple cards [“I Choo-Choo-Choose You!”] and the occasional box of message hearts are loooong gone.

So Hubs ran out again last night — my hero, especially since he loathes Valentine’s Day — to pick up Tootsie Pops and meticulously tape them to the little cards. Did I mention he’s awesome? Even as we scrambled for Skywalker’s party today, we both assumed that for Fozzie’s little preschool party (where raisins and carrots are not allowed because they are choking hazards) candy would be out of bounds and the valentines alone would be enough.

It wasn’t until half an hour ago, when the kids were tucked away in bed, that the teacher’s words this afternoon as I picked up Fozzie finally registered in my addled brain. “We’ll have the kids all line up to put treats in each other’s bags…” Treats. Oh, hell.

As I see it, here are my options:

Get out of my pajamas and back into clothes and race to the store before they close to get some crappy candy that the parents of other preschoolers will quietly throw away tomorrow night.
Get out of my pajamas and back into clothes and race  to the store to buy some cutesy plastic party favor things that the other parents will quietly throw away early next week.
Give Fozzie’s friends my stash of individually wrapped Ghirardelli chocolates from the pantry. Yeah, not happening. Next.
Let him hand out whatever else we can find 23 of in the house. So far the options are: rubber bands, corn chips, drained AA batteries or individual playing cards.
Suck it up, endure the idea that Fozzie will be devastated and the teachers and other parents will totally judge me for being lazy and thoughtless, and let the kid take the damn valentines without accompanying “treats.” It’s enough. Right?

Right now I’m standing firm on #5. He wrote his name on all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cards: no easy task at 4 1/2. Neither he nor any of the other Pre-K kids need more sugary sweets or tiny plastic crap. And I have this vague feeling I might be winning some sort of parenting moral victory, though I can’t exactly articulate what it is.

Does that mean I will drop Fozzie off and go straight to work in the morning? That I will not rearrange my day just a little to run out for emergency treats? That I won’t cave to irrational feelings of Mommy Inadequacy?

We’ll see. Like I said, I’m not that great at predicting.

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Make My Heart Skip a Beat

One of the fun things I’ve discovered about turning 40 is that there are always new and interesting ways for my body to rebel against me.

For example, for the end of December and most of January, I got to wear this incredibly sexy telemetry heart event monitor for 30 days, all the time, under my clothes. I guess I am grateful that it wasn’t summertime, but even under bulky sweaters, it’s hard to feel 100% confident when you have a weird gray cord hanging down from your shirt.

Home medical monitoring is TOTALLY hot.

The reason for this questionable fashion accessory is, well, a middle-age mystery. Two years ago I started having these weird heart flutters, occasionally accompanied by mild chest pain. The first time it happened, I absolutely freaked the fuck out and took myself to the emergency room. Tests, tests, tests and… nothing.

I remembered every client I’d helped with panic attacks and tried to just calm myself down, but the fluttery things happened even when I was calm or exercising (highly unusual for panic attacks – exercise tends to prevent them). Two trips to the cardiologist, more tests, a new cardiologist, and nothing. Stress test, EKG, ECG, EPT (just in case) and… nothing.

Lots of googling and WebMD and talking with friends and family with similar experiences and I decided that what I have going on might be PVCs, a common heart flutter that are generally harmless. But no matter how many times I visit the new cardiologist, whatever is going on never seems to go on in the office.

So I wore the damn monitor for 30 days, fiddled with the cords, pressed the little button every time I felt a flutter, reapplied electrode pads every time I showered. The only thing holding me together through the whole pain in the ass experience was the knowledge that I would finally know what was going on.

I called in last week to finally get the results and… NOTHING.

Everything is normal.

WHAT?

Apparently it’s up to me to figure out the common thread of when the flutters happen so I can try to prevent them. Here are some things I’ve found that seem to trigger them:

Being stressed
Being totally relaxed
Caffeine
Avoiding caffeine
Red wine
Avoiding red wine
Being sad about David Bowie
Eating bread
Eating sugar
Thinking about bread or sugar
Acid reflux
Wednesday
January
Forgetting my supplements
Taking my supplements
Exercising
Watching TV
A rough day at work
A great night with the kids
Donald Trump’s hair
Wondering what’s causing the flutters

For now, I guess the mystery has to remain just that. At least most of the information I’ve gathered points to the palpitations being nothing serious. And if nothing else, maybe I have something to learn by paying closer attention to the rhythm of my heart.

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Distracted Writer: Don’t Quit Your Day Job

In my last Distracted Writer post, I talked about the challenges of having a day job and writing at the same time. Let’s be honest, if you’re a writer with a day job, you probably didn’t need me to tell you how hard it is. Duh.

So today I thought I’d try the less-explored angle of how a day job can actually help your writing.

#1: Scarcity of time = Focus. Working full time (or taking care of kids full time) in addition to your writing can drive you crazy. It can also help bring focus, so that all your crazy is laser-tight on a specific target. When you only have a few minutes a day or less to write, it forces you to focus on what’s really important during those few minutes. An hour before the kids get up is no time for procrastination, my friend. Hit the ground running or your writing time is gone.

For me, 4:30 a.m. is the time because I’m often too exhausted the night before to do my best work. I’ve found I can stay focused better if I jot down what I’m planning to write the night before, even if it’s just a few words on a sticky note.

#2: Use your commute. Now that I’m working outside the home, I spend about 2 hours a day in the car dropping off the kids and getting back and forth to work. (Atlanta traffic. Sigh.) But I’m trying to make the most of that time. I listen to audiobooks since I have less  time to read at home. I also listen to writing-related podcasts, which not only help me develop skills, they keep me inspired and in touch with my goals.

#3: Get energy from your coworkers. If you work in an office or facility with other human beings, you can suck the lifeforce out of them be inspired by their energy. I’ve found that I get encouragement from my colleagues who are passionate about what they do — not just for the work we do together, but for my own writing as well.

#4: Your coworkers are also fountains of new ideas. No, you probably shouldn’t run around your office with pen and paper writing down direct quotes and stealing details from your coworkers’ lives. But real people are inspiring in lots of ways.

I love watching how people solve problems, listening to the way their  speech rises and falls, how they talk about their loved ones. It’s all great stuff, not just for connecting in real life, but also creating characters that people can feel connected to.

Manda’s Business Self

#5: Explore your shadow sides. Every personality trait has a shadow side, and opposing traits that balance it. Most of us aren’t the same person all day long. In my head, Writer Manda, Mom Manda and Business Manda must all live in harmony. Writer Manda is like many writers: (somewhat) introverted, creative and ready to roll with whatever comes. These are good qualities for putting 100,000 words on the page.

But there’s another side of me, and my day job helps fulfill it: the extroverted me who needs interaction with people to stimulate and energize, the analytical me who likes logic and structure and saying business things (think Unikitty from The Lego Movie). Allowing that side of myself to feel professionally fulfilled frees me up to be creative and self-energizing in other hours. Assuming I can stay awake that long…

 

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Pardon My French (Why I Shouldn’t Try to Be Fancy)

Maybe it’s turning 40 and thinking it’s time I felt more like a grownup. Or maybe it’s skimming through the Instagram feeds of other authors — with their cozy armchair by the fire pictures (you’re killing me, Mary Kay Andrews)…

 

A photo posted by Mary Kay Andrews (@marykayandrews) on Jan 23, 2016 at 8:41am PST

and mouth-watering food pictures that make even prepping for weekday breakfasts look artistic…

  A photo posted by Rachel Hollis (@msrachelhollis) on Jan 24, 2016 at 3:17pm PST

Or it could be the simple need to feel like an evolved human being, since the mad rush of day-to-day so often leaves me unable to string together more than three words at a time. Whatever it is, I’ve been feeling the need for a little more fancy in my life. A little less complicated and a little more elegant.

I bought my first Mac today. A MacBook Air. I’m calling him Frenchy, but we’ll get to that in a minute. I’ve always, always been an Android/PC person — I like to be able to customize and rig things (one of my techie coworkers called me a ‘programmer’ — like it was a slur, which is weird coming from him — because I’m having trouble adapting to the locked-in-ness of my iPhone). But my fourth PC in the last six years has been so slow to boot up lately that I can’t even use the half hour a day I have to write because my Dell needs 25 minutes of that to think about it all.

Oooh – La – La!

So, yeah. I broke down and went with the simple, elegant solution. The one that costs a little more (three times what I usually pay for a laptop), but it’s so pretty and light and I’m hoping it will last longer and I will spend less of that time wanting to throw it out the window.

While I was on my beautiful MacBook high, and since I’m having some of my close girlfriends over for brunch tomorrow, I thought I’d keep the simple, elegant theme going by picking some petit fours from this beautiful little bakery I always pass but never go in.

I got home with both goodies this afternoon, and after carefully storing the bakery box in a cooler bag so it wouldn’t get tossed around the back of Vaneschewitz, I excitedly unloaded to take everything into the house.

Maybe this is a new era for me, I thought. I should clean out the minivan – this isn’t the right environment for bringing home such a pretty computer and $30 worth of fancy French pastries.

Maybe this is a chance to become a whole new version of myself — a more streamlined, effective version. I could be the kind of put-together, polished woman that everyone turns to for answers. Maybe I’m finally beyond being that awkward-ass redheaded girl who speaks before thinking and is always screwing up —

THUD.

The perfect white pastry box hit the driveway, upside down. Y’all, I was seriously not even three feet from the back of the car. I said some very unladylike things (though to be fair it’s possible some of them were French). I’d love to say it’s that I was juggling too many things, but I don’t even think that was it. Just pure, unadulterated klutz.

I picked up the box, muttering to myself, and decided it couldn’t be that bad. I’ll just get everything into the house and assess the situ -THUD.

I am not even kidding. I dropped the box. AGAIN. On the 20 foot path from the back of Vaneschewitz to the door, I dropped the damn box TWICE. I couldn’t bear to look inside, but I could already see some of the beautiful icing dots smushed into the opening of the lid. Fuck. Does Mary Kay Andrews have to deal with this shit?

Once inside, I assessed the situation, and… it’s not pretty. Or elegant. So I figured I have a few choices:

Race back to the bakery before they close in twenty minutes and buy more petit fours for another $30.
Try to suddenly develop competence with an icing tube and fix the problem.
Throw away the dainty little wrappers and tell my girlfriends that I made the delicious pastries myself and my children iced them. Or…
Take a picture of la petit castrophe and write a blog instead.

Ahh. Thank goodness when you’re a writer everything is grist for the mill. And thank goodness I dropped the cakes and not the MacBook. But most of all thank goodness for girlfriends who love you no matter how wrinkly your face gets or smushy your petit fours are….

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Atlanta Writers Conference – May 7, 2016

For writers and authors in metro Atlanta, I’m honored to be teaching two of the side sessions a the upcoming conference in May. If you’re not familiar with the AWC, check out the Atlanta Writers Conference website. It’s a great resource for writers who want to learn more about the craft, have their work critiqued by experts and connect with editors and agents from all over the industry. My friend George Weinstein organizes the conference and does a tremendous job.

I’ll be teaching two of the seminar-style workshops on Saturday May 7 from 10:15 to 1:00 p.m. The tentative workshop titles are:

Love Raises the Stakes: How a Compelling Romance Can Turn any Story into a Page-turner (Craft)

The Hybrid Author: Creating your Path in the New Publishing World (Business)

Hope to see some of you there!

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Join Me at the Dahlonega Literary Festival March 12-13

DLF: March 12-13, 2016

I’m so excited to be one of this year’s authors at the Dahlonega Literary Festival in Dahlonega, Georgia. It’s an amazing regional festival in one of my favorite towns! Dahlonega is a small, historic town in the North Georgia mountains known for its military college, art and music scene, and wineries.

(Dahlonega also played a small role in THE MARRIAGE PACT — remember the fudge scene?)

The 2016 Dahlonega Literary Festival will be March 12-13, and I will be in tremendous company that weekend. Honestly, I will be going pretty fangirl myself, and I hope you’ll join me!

Here’s the list of authors from the festival website.

2016 Festival Authors will include:

Karen Abbott

Jacob M. Appel

V.L. Brunskill

Jackie K Cooper

Delilah S. Dawson

Molly Harper

Ann Hite

Joshilyn Jackson

Brian Panowich

M.J. Pullen

Jaye Wells

See you there!

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Raising Feminist Boys: Maybe I’m Doing it Wrong

So I was in the car after picking up both boys from school the other day, and we had this conversation:

Fozzie (age 4): When I grow up, I’m going to build a laser gate.

Me: Awesome, buddy. Like the ones on Star Wars?

Skywalker (age 6): Like the ones where they kept Obi-Wan prisoner, right? Those don’t exist in real life. Do they?

Me: I don’t think so. But that just means Fozzie gets to invent them.

Fozzie: Yep. I’m going to invent them.

Skywalker: Wouldn’t it be cool if we invented them together? Me, Fozzie and Daddy?

Me: What about Mommy? I can help invent, too.

Skywalker [without missing a beat]: So, Mommy, I was thinking. Since you love writing books so much, after we invent the laser gate, you can write the instruction manual about how to use the laser gate.

Fozzie: Yeah. I would not want to do that part.

Skywalker: Me either.

*Sigh.* At least I know when my kids take over the world later, I’ll have a cushy job as a technical writer…

“Thanks, Lord Vader, for creating those awesome laser gates. And we really appreciate the easy-to-read technical manual.”

 

 

 

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Distracted Writer: Turns Out, the Day Job is… Work

I talked for a long time last night with a fellow author in another state, one of those great conversations that left me feeling energized and inspired and thinking about my writing career with renewed vigor. There’s not much I love more than a candid, frenzied conversation with another writer. Writers get my special brand of crazy in a way rivaled only by Hubs.

When we hung up, I wanted to pull out my laptop and churn out 1000 words in my WIP. I wanted to outline three other things I’ve been thinking of starting. Schedule that workshop I’ve been wanting to teach. I was not tired. I was the opposite of tired!

Mind spinning with ideas and untapped potential, it finally occurred to me to glance at the time: after 10:00 p.m. How can it be so late when I am the OPPOSITE OF TIRED?!?

But there were several things left to do before bedtime, and Hubs and I had not talked face-to-face for more than 8 minutes that day. Plus, only 6.5 hours from that moment my alarm was set to go off this morning. Then I had to get up and work out (I’ve missed two previous opportunities this week so it was time), get myself ready, kids to school, and off to work.

Ah, WORK. The distracted writer’s old nemesis.

I’ve been working in a full-time corporate communications position (a.k.a, a big girl job) for three and a half months now. And I actually like it. Lots. I like the people I work with, I love the challenge of the job itself, and it turns out I am capable of going a whole week without sweatpants. Who knew???

Working full time after you’ve already committed your heart and soul to being a writer, however, does have challenges. The logistics are settling in more now, but at first the transition was exhausting. We had NO IDEA how much household stuff I was routinely handling during my time at home without even noticing (also, perhaps, one reason I was having trouble getting things done). We have a 1.5 year old puppy who’s used to plenty of activity, so we had to make arrangements so she wouldn’t be stuck in her crate for 10 hours a day. Don’t even get me started about trying to cook healthy dinners at 6:00 for kids who need to be in bed at 7:30.

And at least twice a day, sometimes more, I have the itch.

It’s often when I am driving, occasionally when I’m in a meeting or doing one of the less pleasant tasks at work (hey, every job has them, even the great ones). The itch to pull out my own laptop and sketch out that scene, or explore that character, write a summary for a new concept.

The plotlines where I was blocked in September now look like golden opportunities: shining in the light like the boy you didn’t like until he started dating Mary McMurtry, who sat next to you in U.S. History and for some reason had six middle names and a side ponytail. Damn you, Mary McMurtry.

By the time I finish at the day job, get home to have dinner, do the bedtime thing, handle whatever crisis is at hand at home (or sometimes, finish up with a crisis from the day job), etc. I am EXHAUSTED. By 9:00 or 9:30 when things are setlted, I can no more write that plotline I was so inspired by on the morning commute than I can explain why Mary McMurtry had so many middle names.

Making the most of every day: it’s the challenge faced by so many other writers, artists and entrepreneurs who do other stuff to pay the bills. And I will conquer it. One system, one early morning, one hundred words at a time.

 

 

 

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Is it Sluggish in Here, or is it Just Me?

Don’t you hate this part of the health and fitness cycle?

MJ Pullen.

The Distracted Writer: New Year’s Resolutions

Welcome to The Distracted Writer, your resource for… Ooh! Shiny objects! You can see all M.J.’s distracted (and distracting) writing posts here.

2016 is well underway, and while I don’t know yet if it will be as eventful as 2015, I am super excited about making this a year to find balance as a working mom, continue my fitness journey, and to grow as a writer. First order of business: create an actual time warp machine to add six hours to each day and make it all possible.

ASIDE: Don’t tell anyone, but in high school my friends and I were obsessed with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. We’d sneak out and pile seven of us into a mid-80’s Honda Accord and drive to Hilltop Cinemas in Mableton, Georgia at midnight on Saturday and sing and dance and throw things at the screen. I played Columbia. My friend Nan once accidentally ratted me out to my Dad and I was grounded for six weeks. She’s still apologizing for this.

So, anyway. Writing stuff. Here are some of my writing goals for 2016, I hope other writers might find them useful and encouraging, too.

In 2016, I will write dangerously. This means writing what interests and inspires me, knowing that the right audience will come to it. I will not try to write safely or to please everyone. I am okay with the fact that not everyone will like me or my work. (Mostly.)
I will be truer to my unique voice in everything I write. I will be badass and funny and brave. And if my true voice turns out not to be badass and funny and brave, I will murder it and replace it with Lara Croft. (Or maybe that badass Julia Sugarbaker from Designing Women. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m Lara Croft material.)
This year, I will silence my inner critic during the drafting process. That should be pretty easy once my inner critic sees what happened to my wimpy true voice. And you don’t fuck with Julia Sugarbaker, that’s for sure.
While writing this year, I will not stop the narrative flow mid-sentence to do any of the following: research the application process for astronaut school, try to think of a better name for the secondary character’s dog, or try to remember who .
I will write like I have a week to live, and edit like my books are forever.
I will make time each day to put writing first. And I do think it’s going to require literally making time. If anyone has any experimental technology I should know about, now would be the perfect time…

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