Nichole Bernier's Blog, page 5

Baby Pool: Kitten edition

Yesterday I got an email through the Animal Rescue League foster group that a pregnant young cat had come in. She needed a foster home, stat, for the delivery and early weeks. We’ve fostered 3 rounds of kittens, starting at about 5 weeks of age, but never been fortunate enough to get the brass ring: the chance to be present for a birth and the early newborn experience. 

I called Tom. The other end of the line went silent, then a wry laugh. “You’re serious.” To his credit, always to his credit, he shrugs and says yes to bringing on more crazy. He didn’t start off as a cat person, and the past year’s revolving door of kittens is not what he signed on for. But he carried the dog’s crate and a whelping box upstairs while I drove with the little boys to pick her up at the shelter.

She’s a sweet anxious youngster and ready to go any time now. Naturally, we named her Juno.

Here’s the skinny (or not so skinny) for the baby pool: she’s a petite pixie with a rock-solid middle but not overly wide. She’s walking around but doesn’t seem agitated. She’s eating and drinking a little.

Person who most closely guesses the:

a) size of litter
b) date/hour, and
c) ratio of boys/girls

wins the paperback of their choice. I’ll buy it from Wellesley Books and mail it to you (within the US). Game on!

In the meantime, keep this sweet girl in your thoughts. She’s got an adventure ahead of her, and she’s gotta do it by herself.

 

Putting yourself on the kids’ flight path

One of the good things about having the laundry on the second floor is that it gives a drive-by proximity to the kids’ bedrooms. I can casually check in. Ask questions and just maybe get a real answer. Sing loudly, terribly, to get a rise out of them.

While I rush through t-shirts and ripped jeans, thinking about where I left off writing and hoping I can pick up where I left off, random gems come their rooms. The 5-year-old talking to the fish. The 9-year-old reading his Valentines aloud.  This morning I overheard the 7-year-old singing “We Shall Overcome” in a soft operatic Ethel Merman.

This afternoon I was folding alongside the 14-year-old’s door. He always goes right to homework after school, but had seemed a little more reclusive than usual. “Hey in there. You solve world peace yet? Cure cancer?”

“Almost,” he said. “I’m on it.”

I didn’t go in, as much as I wanted to, and ask what was up, who he was texting, what he was thinking about trying out for spring baseball. We just exchanged one-liners through the dryer wall.

Next house we buy, second floor laundry is my top priority.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

It occurred to me as I went into my local coffeeshop and place the same order without a word, which was taken without asking my name, that we’re raising an entire generation that doesn’t know the meaning of “NORM!”

Song of the Dustpan People: Are Grammatically Accurate Writers Less Creative?

 

 The other day a friend asked me if I’d help line-edit his manuscript. He’s tight on time and I can barely make my own deadlines, but I agreed—mostly because I like him and his book, but also because proofreading comes naturally to me. I see typos and punctuation errors the way Haley Joel Osment sees dead people.

Copy-editing is a very particular skill like, say, nit-picking. When you need it, you need it. In each, you’re removing tiny pernicious things people may or may not notice themselves, but if seen by others would make them look bad. It’s the kind of skill friends and family find useful for reports and correspondence, though it’s not always fun to live with.

As a writer, it’s good to have a reputation for turning in clean text. This is especially true in journalism and narrative nonfiction. But on the fiction side of the writing life, it doesn’t feel like quite the same asset — sort of like having a knack for hospital corners compared to the ability to do backflips on the bed. Because let’s be honest; clean copy is really not at the top of traits valued in creative writing. It falls somewhere south of imagination and vocabulary, just above penmanship. There are phrases used to describe creative visionaries, people who “think outside the box” and “push the envelope.” People with attention to grammatical minutiae are more likely to be the ones to gently tape the envelope seams back together.

Sometimes when creative writers say they don’t notice their own typos, it has a whiff of, well, humblebraggery. They’re on a roll, blinded by their vision — the fingers cannot be stopped, the whole brain engaged in its art. That’s why God invented proofreaders, right? To straighten up the mess of the visionaries. The people who sweep up the mistakes are valued professionals, to be sure, but they are not the artists. They are the people with the golden dustpan and brush.

I’m being cheeky, but not entirely kidding. If these on-a-roll writers have a certain creative je ne sais quoi, do detail-oriented folks have a…little less? I don’t know much of anything about the way the brain processes rules of language, but it got me wondering. Is there a chance [image error]the creative side of the brain has to pause, even if just for a moment, to let the grammatical traffic cop do its job before continuing on with an idea? That a bit of creative forward momentum is lost when the brain backspaces to correct spelling, or does a track-switch to fix past tense to present? I’d like to think not, but I really don’t know.

The few times I’ve purposely put myself in a situation to write with maximum spontaneity, I’ve noticed an interesting side effect: the typos and punctuation go to hell. But that’s because I created conditions where I literally cannot see them. When I’m writing a particularly troubling and intense scene — the sort of section that somehow calls for me to constantly to check email or put in a load of laundry or refresh my coffee — my avoidance tendencies call for serious measures. I sit at my desk with the lights dimmed and tie a scarf around my head, just able to peek enough to get my fingers on the right computer keys. Then I set a timer, and can’t get up until it goes off or the scene is finished, whichever comes first.

The writing is free-association and messy, but readable (I learned on the old Driver’s Ed model of high school typing, to each key there’s a finger). When I edit the scene I find I’ve rarely capitalized and sometimes skipped punctuation altogether, because I hadn’t wanted to risk getting my hands misplaced on the keys. I also find I’m much more mentally spent after a half hour writing this way — maybe because there were none of those traffic-cop breaks for punctuation, spelling, and so on. The idea is full throttle, no second thoughts, no fixing as you go.

I can’t say there’s much text that remains intact from those scenes. Reading the spontaneous sloppy prose is like chasing a rabbit narrator through the underbrush. But the direction of the idea, the flow, the energy of it, is usually a keeper.

There’s a lovely irony here, of course, that a detail-disciplined person might have to take draconian disciplinary measures like a blindfold in order to let go. But that’s one of the delicious differences I’ve found between journalism and novel-writing. There are any number of messy, sometimes contradictory ways people go about getting their words out of their heads and onto paper. The world of fiction can be full of contradictions. And so can the process of creating it.

Beautiful Little Nonsense #13

The 5yo’s lament upon the changing of the computer password.

“Why can’t things stay the same?!”

Beautiful Little Nonsense #12

The 7yo is miffed that I have a home office and he doesn’t.

“YOURS HAS ALL THESE WINDOWS” — wildly flailing arms — “AND WOULD BE PERFECT FOR ME.”

So he commandeers a closet and puts the antique chair-desk in it.

“Mine, mine, mine-mine mine,” he’s singing happily.

Basically, me in my first rent-controlled apt.

 

Beautiful Little Nonsense #11

 

 

The 5yo: “This is the law of my brain. If you don’t be’s nice to me, you can’t be my best friend.”

Not a bad law as brains go.

Beautiful Little Nonsense #10

Halloween Morning

Costumed kids climb the school bus uncertainly,

searching eyes to see if they’re made of as much awesome

as they think they are.

The Rabbit In The Soccer Net

 

The 7yo ran inside screaming: A RABBIT IS STUCK IN THE NET!

When I went outside, the poor thing was writhing, frantic, the webbing wrapped doubly around its neck. It didn’t fight in my hands any more than my cats getting their nails clipped. The line was so tight against its neck it seemed impossible for it to be breathing.

I sent the 12yo inside for scissors, and I cupped the little body still, trying to create any possible slack in the netting.

She did the cutting, brave girl, shears right against its neck. When it was freed it sat in my hands awhile, heaving. Or maybe it just didn’t realize it was free.

 

Beautiful Little Nonsense #9

Dropping off for the 8-year-old’s soccer practice. The younger two boys need a bathroom; I direct to a porta-potty around the bend.

The 8yo: “Moms always know where the nearest porta-potty is. Even if you’ve never seen it. Because you have it wired in your DNA, like a Mom bathroom GPS.”