Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 78

Dyslexia

Once upon a time, I started this blog to write about dyslexia and learning disabilities. At the moment when I discovered blogging, my whole life was pretty much about being the parent of a kid who had been diagnosed as severely learning disabled.

I never did write about that much.

It’s not that it didn’t affect my life. All of the choices that I made between 2004 and 2013 or so were about what I thought was best for R. Sometimes those choices were really hard. Leaving California — well, I don’t know how many people can really appreciate what it’s like to say that the number one priority in your life, the thing everything else gets subsumed to, is that your kid learn to read. Moving across the country wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t afford the kind of intensive private school that I felt he needed in CA, and I could afford it in FL. It wasn’t an easy decision. I did it anyway.

And making choices that your kid hates — well, that’s not a ton of fun, either. I will never forget the bitterness in his voice when eleven-year-old R told me that people come to Florida to die and asked me how soon I expected that end for him. I mean, I do have to laugh at the memory, but it was pretty darn harsh at the time.

R has always hated, never gentled into, his diagnosis. I can’t blame him — some of the early stuff around his struggle to read was just so miserable. Summer camp one year — ugh, I can’t even go there. We’ve had a bumper sticker on the car, Dyslexics Have More FNU, since 2004, and yet that has always been plainly not true. Also slightly annoying because “fnu” shows dyslexia in its reality but “FNU” does not. Lower-case u and lower-case n are, in fact, the same letter to a true dyslexic because the difference between them is insignificant in three dimensions and yet the same can not be said of N and U. The person who typed the bumper sticker didn’t get it, but hey, I was desperate for a little positivity at the time, so I didn’t argue.

Anyway, last year (hey, this story really is getting somewhere, who knew?), R applied for a scholarship for students with learning disabilities. He discovered it himself, did the work to apply for it, got recommendations from teachers, contacted me to send his test scores to the disabilities coordinator at his school, did the whole thing. I was so proud of him. He’s been tested multiple times over the course of the past decade and every time the results have been the same — wow, this is a seriously bright kid with some severe issues. And you know, when you are that kid, that result kind of sucks.

He… I wouldn’t say he hides it, but he definitely doesn’t talk about it and when I tried to get him to be proactive about working with his college for accommodations, he totally shot me down. Legally, his level of disability entitles him (or at least did in the past) to audio books and I’m sure he could get any accommodation he wanted — more time on tests, an aide to read to him, whatever — he’s got the history and scores to support that. (I’d been warned about how difficult it would be to get him help but literally, on his first IEP, he qualified for an aide in the classroom — that’s how significant his issues were.) He didn’t want any of that and didn’t use any of it.

But he did apply for this scholarship.

We didn’t hear anything. Nothing, nothing, more nothing. Until today.

And it’s weird to talk about money in public and so I’m not going to, but… they gave him our contribution for the year, or close to it. And… I am so incredibly proud of him. I don’t even… it’s not just about the money, although the money is fantastic. Beyond fantastic. But it’s about self-acceptance, about finding the positive side of something that sucks, about making the best of your weaknesses, about compensating… I don’t even know. I do know that I’m super tearful, which is probably silly, but also that this is the reason I have a blog, to save this memory, because ten years from now, I have no idea what book thing might or might not be important, but I do know that remembering this incredibly surreal combination of delight and pride and … well, more pride… it’s going to be the day that I want to remember in 2025.

Way back in 2004, an educational psychologist said to me that it would be okay if R never learned to read, that he was fortunate to live in an age when technology could compensate, and I smiled politely and thought privately, my kid is going to read if I have to sell my soul to make it so. Because I want him to have the joy I’ve had in books more than anything else I could give him. Over the years, I’ve had to figure out that okay, maybe books aren’t the whole universe. Maybe it’s okay if he gets story through television or games instead of text. Maybe it’s okay if he doesn’t love to read. But here we are — and he does love to read. And although he’s still dyslexic to the core, it isn’t stopping him from busily confronting gender inequality in academia and studying medieval Italian city states.

I am so proud of him.

Salad of the day: totally luxe. Mixed greens with dates, goat cheese, pecans, smoked trout and balsamic vinegar. Creamy, crunchy, sweet, tangy, salty. Perfection. Except for the part about me needing to eat less sugar, less dairy, and no nuts. Sigh.

Pottery

Two random stories are percolating* in my brain today, doing that coffee bean and hot water thing where alone each story is what it is but together maybe they make something better, maybe even something caffeinated and delicious.

*Percolating felt like a thesaurus word, the kind of thing I come up with when I’m over-tired and trying too hard, but in fact, in this case, I really mean it. These two stories are turning into coffee in my brain.

The first was Is $500,000 the new midlist? from Rachel Aaron. I know that it’s meant to be inspirational, that it’s meant to drive writers to believe that we can make it, too, that a living wage (plus a whole lot more!) is within our grasp, but… well, I found it depressing.

A short and personal digression: this weekend I had a lovely lunch with R. He has ruled out a semester abroad for his junior year because it will cost too much, making the third time recently where we’ve had a conversation about money where it’s clear that he’s worrying a lot. I said to him, “I could get a real job again,” to which he said, more or less, “No, this is my choice, I’m not willing to spend that much money for that experience,” but this perhaps explains part of why discovering that I’m nowhere close to the “new midlist” was more depressing than inspiring.

The second story showed up on my tumblr feed, and I’ve seen it before, but somehow today it clicked. It’s a parable about quantity vs quality, generally sourced to a book called Art and Fear. I haven’t read the book, although clearly I should, but the short version of the story is that a ceramics instructor splits the class into two groups. One group is being graded on the quantity of their work; the other half is being graded on the quality. At the end of the semester, the best work doesn’t come from the people focusing on quality but on those focusing on quantity. They produced more work and sure, maybe their first ten pots weren’t as good as the single pot created by the quality-oriented students, but their hundredth pot was distinctly better. That’s paraphrased, but the rough idea.

So my coffee thought — I need to go back to writing fast and letting go, the way I did when I was writing fanfiction. Not because I want to deliver dreck into the universe but because I have two goals and those goals — well, they’re the coffee. My first goal is still to improve, to become a better writer, but I need to believe that I’ll improve faster purely by writing more words. The second goal is to be able to learn a living at this, which also means writing faster. The new midlist author has published 12 books in her three years, compared to my three.

Now the question becomes — how do I do that? The first step, I think, should be starting to post my daily work on fictionpress again. It’s not going to be polished, it’s going to be the first outpourings, the 1000 words that circle around what I want to say and fumble toward some action, where the characters babble on and digress and weave back-and-forth. But that’s okay, because the more words I write, the more I learn, and the better the stories become, one way or another.

Yesterday’s breakfast: spinach salad, with chopped-up Gala apple, slices of chicken sausage, roasted brussels sprouts, and shredded Irish white cheddar cheese, topped with balsamic vinegar. I’m paying the price for the cheese in congestion today, but it was worth it.

Marketing hate

I have a thing to do. A very straightforward thing, really. I so don’t want to do it. So much so that even thinking about it makes me flee from my computer.

So Amazon has sort of changed the way that they format book info, making the info put into Author Central far more important than it used to be. The basic marketing blurb that one writes (with pain and difficulty, if one is me) gets hidden and requires a click for the reader to see in its entirety, while the Editorial Reviews section is much more visible.

The smart author — eh, it doesn’t even require smarts, it’s pretty basic Marketing 101 — therefore needs to put some info into Author Central in order to have it show up on their book page. (Grammar alert: I am choosing to use the plural pronoun as a gender-neutral pronoun, even though it causes me to cringe in editorial dismay. I’ll get used to it eventually and the world needs gender-neutral pronouns.) Ergo, I should do that. It’s really not hard — read some reviews, pick out some nice statements that people have said, perhaps write to said people and ask their permission if that’s possible, and copy-and-paste the info into Author Central. Within a couple of days, it shows up on the book page.

Easy.

Simple.

Trivial, in fact.

It requires me to read reviews. I don’t want to. I don’t like reading reviews. I like that they exist — I think it’s lovely that I’ve written things that other people have wanted to comment on, whether good or bad (although good is nicer, of course.) But reading them makes me feel exposed and raw and vulnerable, none of which are feelings that I enjoy, and so…

I can do this. Right? My goal for the day: to add content to the Author Central pages for my books. It’ll be pretty obvious if I succeed or not, since it’ll show up on the book pages, but since even thinking about it makes me want to clean my kitchen, take out the trash, do some laundry, and wash my hair… well, we’ll see.

In other writing news, yesterday was a zero-word day, so today is going to be better. In general, though, throwing out my plot and starting over has been good for me. I think the lesson I need to learn is that I’m not a plotter. The story works best for me when it heads off in its own direction. This one is doing that. I’m very much liking Grace. I thought I knew who she was and I mostly did, but she has more of a sense of humor than I realized before getting into her head. She’s the “good daughter,” but not because she feels the need to please people. She’s much more about taking care of people that she privately thinks are a little too incompetent to take care of themselves, and her family amuses her a lot more than I expected them to.

I’m not going to make myself do the Author Central thing before writing, because I suspect it would be more likely to mean no writing. Ugh, but I do need to figure out how to make myself do it. Bribery? Wine? Some type of reward? Some type of punishment for failure? Maybe an alert on my phone to go off every hour until it’s done… I wonder what I’d come up with after I’d been waking myself up for 36 hours in a row?

I think I’ll flee the computer for a while and think about this later!

Summer’s End

R headed off to school this week. That means summer’s over, right? But the Florida weather promptly rewarded me with the two nicest days we’ve had all summer long. Swimming was finally the kind of joy that it usually is in June, where the water’s warm and the sky’s clear and paddling around aimlessly feels luxurious.

I savored it, because obviously there’s not going to be a lot of those days left this year. Usually sometime in September the bugs get insane–it’s mating season for something we call lovebugs and if you try to sit outside, you wind up with them crawling over you by the dozen. Even when swimming you get bugs in your hair and face. And they die after they mate, so their little black bodies pile up everywhere. It only lasts a couple of weeks, but it marks the end of swimming for the year. This year is the first year that having a pool has felt much more like an expensive burden than a pleasure, so I’m glad to have had at least a couple nice summer days.

And I used them well. I took the computer and my laptop outside and alternated writing sprints with dips in the pool. It reminded me of how I wrote Ghosts, which was mostly written on the back porch, and made me wonder why I stopped doing that. I think because I have a different laptop now and its screen is less tolerant of sunlight than my old computer. And its battery doesn’t last so long. Oh, and for a while back then, I actually had a desk on the porch. Anyway, I don’t really know the answer, but it’s a good way to write. I’ll be headed out there again today, I hope.

The slow progress on Grace continues — still slow, but still progress. I’m at a point this morning where I’m thinking a) so far this book is nothing but conversation, is that a problem? and b) the current conversation that I need to write is really complicated, that’s a problem. But I’m reassuring myself by remembering that my beta readers are terrific and helpful and they’ll be honest with me if it’s too complicated. Not that I’m letting anyone read it at the moment, but eventually I’ll be looking for beta readers.

I released The Wedding Guests as a stand-alone story this week. I’ve got a bunch of bookmarks to give away which I intended to do at the launch, but… I was too busy. Maybe not literally busy, but I read a great article about emotional labor recently and it resonated. Not in that I do a lot of emotional labor in relationships — I think I’m pretty terrible at it, actually — but sometimes doing our own emotional labor is hard work. Anyway, I aspire to get organized about a bookmark giveaway, but I’m not going to think about it again until after Labor Day when the summer is truly over. Today and tomorrow and the next day and the next, my focus is going to be on writing Grace, eating well, doing yoga, and savoring the summer’s last few days of beauty.

Today’s meal plan:

Breakfast: Salad of arugula, avocado, strawberry, and smoked trout, topped with balsamic vinegar.

Lunch: Salad of cabbage, cilantro, red onion, avocado, mango, and garlic-sauteed shrimp, with a dressing made of lime zest & juice, pressed garlic, salt, and coconut oil. Possibly, if I’m feeling daring, a little hot sauce, because giving the shrimp a bit of a kick is sometimes worth the nightshade hit.

Dinner: Salad of mixed greens, orange segments, thinly-sliced pork chop, toasted pecan bits, and goat cheese, with a dressing made of lemon juice, olive oil, chopped mint, honey, and maybe a little white wine vinegar if needed.

Sometimes I think I should eat something other than salad. I did last night: baked pork chop and roasted brussels sprouts. It was good enough, but not great. I wished I was eating salad of mixed greens, honey-smoked salmon, radishes, cucumber, red onion, & kalamata olives, topped with balsamic. Such a specific wish, but while I was eating I was thinking about the perfect salad and that was the one I came up with.

All right, time to write. Grace’s difficult conversation isn’t going to write itself!

Reviews

R and I went to see The Man from U.N.C.L.E. today. Upon exiting the movie theater, I offered the typical, “So, what did you think?”

He replied, deadpan, “Not the best spy movie I’ve seen this week.”

I have not asked him how long he’d planned that line, but it made me laugh out loud.

We also saw Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation this week and that movie, upon leaving the theater, got from me, a “Wow. That was seriously not as mediocre as I was expecting it to be.”

So, two movies, two quickie reviews:

The Man from UNCLE is gorgeously filmed, stylistically beautiful, with set pieces that will make you want to applaud for the cinematographer and the editor and the set designer. And the characters lack charm. A little bit of warmth, a smile that reached the eyes, a few sentences that were self-deprecating instead of arrogant, would have gone such a long, long way to making it a better movie. As it was, eh. It was a pleasant afternoon with my son, but I bet I forget all the details within two weeks.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is your basic summer blockbuster fare, except almost impeccably delivered, and with a female character who is actually interesting and granted agency. Yes, it ran a little long, and yes, it basically suffers from the same old Smurfette syndrome of most action movies (why does Hollywood think the world only includes a single woman?) but the plot was interesting, the action sequences were fun, it made a car chase exciting — ticket to success: add motorcycles — and the payoff of the ending was perfect. Will I remember it? For longer than two weeks, sure. Did I love it? No, not really. But I was pleasantly surprised.

And now a third review… except that I’m not sure I can deliver on it.

Sense8.

OMG, Sense8.

It’s terrible, in so many ways. Really, in so many ways, it is… bad. But then there are all the ways in which it is good. And a fair numbers of ways in which it is wonderful. It took me four episodes to get caught, six episodes to fall in love, and then basically, I wanted to do nothing else but find out what happened next. And since then, I mostly just want to talk about it.

My first words on walking out of UNCLE were “The Russian would have been so much better if the part were played by the actor who played Wolfgang in Sense8. He could have made that role so much more worthwhile.” R, who is halfway through the season, agreed with me.

On the way home, we were talking about something, and I brought up Sense8. This afternoon, he came in my room and asked me a question about my thoughts on the nature of time, and I tied it to Sense8. And now… he just started watching episode 7, so I have to stop writing now and go watch television.

But if you have a choice about watching any of these three things, invest the time in Sense8. The first four hours will feel stupid. Once you’re finished, you’ll want to argue with so much. There are so many things to complain about — so many! Stereotypes and tropes and gratuitous sex and boring background details and incoherent world-building… but I have to go watch television now so that I can see an episode for the fourth time because watching Capheus discover the clouds and hearing Riley talk privilege vs luck is a really great way to spend some time.

Four years

When my mom knew she was dying — early on, like maybe three days after she knew (which was probably a solid ten days before a doctor confirmed what she’d already deduced from a radiology report) — she said to my sister and me, “Your father will find someone, you be nice to her.” My sister said, “Of course.” I said, “No. Absolutely not. You don’t get to decide how I grieve and I am going to be grieving for a long, long time.”

Today is the fourth anniversary of her death and I spent it helping my stepmother unpack and move into her new kitchen. My mother would be proud of me. I know that. I can feel it. But, oh, I miss her.

She was so good at moving. I mentioned it in the eulogy I wrote for her, that was how important it was to who she was. When she moved, it was like a whirlwind of efficiency and energy, invisible 99% of the time, suddenly popped into existence to make the move painless, to turn it into a little subtle transition for her kids instead of the disruption that it really is. We’d move and a week later, it would feel like we’d lived in the new place forever. She was GOOD at moving.

I told someone recently that I’m only good at three things: editing, cooking, and writing (in that order.) And then I threw in a couple caveats about things that I might also be sort of good at. I forgot moving. I am very, very, very good at moving. Sometimes, though, moving and running are the same thing.

Today, I wish I was moving. But mostly, I think it would be running.

For Tim

I threw out my plot this week. Kept the characters, but tossed the outline & most of the ideas that went with it.

Ugh.

I had thought that when I finally got a beginning that satisfied me, I’d be able to use most of the 30,000 words I’d already written. Or at least a lot of them. Instead, I finally got a beginning that satisfied me and it changed everything. I’m simultaneously really pleased — I’d been wondering whether my imagination had just shriveled up and died and wondering what I was going to do with my life if I no longer had an imagination — and dismayed.

But so it goes. Onward and upward, right?

If you’d rather not be spoiled for a book that’s headed back to the drawing board, stop reading now, but for Tim (and anyone else who wants to see a rough draft of the new beginning) …

Chapter One

The voices were driving him crazy.

Crazier than usual, that was. After ten years of auditory hallucinations, Noah already knew he was insane. Today was worse than usual, but it was the circumstances, not the sounds.

He was sitting on a bench in the hallway of the courthouse, waiting for his turn in front of the grand jury. The investigation was calling in anyone who might know anything about AlecCorp, the military contractor owned by the late Raymond Chesney. Noah knew his testimony would be useless—working for a notorious criminal enterprise would be a black mark on his resume, but he’d only been there for a few months. It hadn’t added more darkness to his soul.

Still, he needed to hold it together. If he got confused, answered the wrong questions, the prosecution might get suspicious. He wanted to put AlecCorp behind him, not get dragged into the depths of an investigation likely to go on for decades.

He let his head rest against the wall behind him and closed his eyes. The courthouse was noisy, sounds echoing off the tiled floors, voices carrying. Could he filter the real world from the one his over-active brain insisted on dumping on him?

The woman speaking Arabic wasn’t real. She never was. He’d been listening to her, the little boy, and Joe since The Worst Day Ever, so they were easy to ignore. The worried woman wasn’t real, either. She hadn’t been around as long as the others, but Noah still recognized her voice. He’d heard it before, so he could disregard it.

But what about the other woman, the one speaking in a husky contralto? Noah cracked open his eyelids, peering through his lashes. The crowd mostly consisted of men in suits — lawyers looking sleek and polished, the ex-military AlecCorp staffers looking stiff and uncomfortable. Just across the hall, though, a redhead held a cell phone to her ear. Noah watched her for a minute, his eyes intent on her lips, matching the movements to the murmured words until she caught his gaze. He dropped his lids hastily. Yeah, she was real.

“So you just follow him around?” That voice was young, too young. It sounded like a teenage boy. And it was close, too, as if the teenager stood directly in front of Noah.

A babble of hallucinated Arabic answered him. Noah couldn’t pick out any words from the flow, but his mouth twitched with reluctant amusement when the boy’s voice replied, “That is so weird.”

That was one word for it. Noah might have chosen another. Nightmarish, maybe?

“You need help,” the teenager continued.

Noah didn’t flinch. He’d had the thought himself too many times. It felt like a slippery slope, though — one that led straight to a future of glazed eyes and slurred voice, drugged out on whatever anti-psychotics the VA was in the mood to experiment with. No, that wasn’t for him. Ignoring the voices worked. Or at least it had until there’d gotten to be so many of them. His lips tightened, a muscle in his jaw jumping as he clenched his teeth around the bitterness that wanted to escape.

“I know someone. She might be able to do something.” The kid sounded thoughtful. “Give me a minute.”

Multiple voices answered at once, in Arabic, English, even the mellifluous mystery language that Noah thought was his subconscious attempting to annoy him by pretending to speak Chinese. Noah hadn’t often heard spoken Chinese, but he’d heard enough of it to know that his hallucination was doing it wrong.

Eyes still closed, he raised one hand and rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension. He should think about something else, anything else. Focusing on the voices never helped, but it was impossible to escape from them.

“Excuse me.”

Noah blinked his eyes open. The redhead stood in front of him, her lips curved up but her eyebrows drawn down as if in doubt. She extended her hand to him, a business card in it.

Shit. She’d seen him looking. He hadn’t been checking her out, at least not the way she probably thought, but how would he say so without being rude?

He took the card, forcing a smile. Noah knew he’d gotten lucky in the genetic lottery and he tried not to be ungrateful. Plenty of guys would be thrilled to get hit on by a hot redhead. “I’m flattered,” he started.

Her eyebrows arched. “You are?”

He paused. What, did she have self-esteem issues? She wasn’t really his type – maybe in her mid-thirties, with the pale, almost translucent skin of a natural redhead, minimal make-up and hair drawn back – but the scooped neck of the t-shirt she wore under a suit jacket offered an enticing glimpse of cleavage. She was attractive enough, just not for him. “Of course.”

“Don’t be.” Her smile warmed and she held up her phone. “I’m just following orders.”

His eyes narrowed. “Whose orders are those?” He’d walked away from AlecCorp with no regrets. Taking the job with them had felt like a mistake from the very beginning. He needed to get away from the war, away from the past. But jobs for vets with no experience outside a combat zone weren’t easy to come by and AlecCorp had seemed better than nothing. He didn’t want to get pulled back in, though. He was done with military work.

“That’s a long story.”

“I’ve got plenty of time.” He glanced down at the card, frowning.

General Directions, Inc.

Tassamara, FL

555-347-9779

info@generaldirections.com

He flipped it over. No name, no scrawled phone number or message. So maybe she wasn’t trying to pick him up.

The door to the grand jury room had opened and the last witness was leaving. A woman in the open doorway called out, “Sylvie Blair?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t,” she said as a suit approached her. “I’m up, I’m afraid.”

The suit was expensive. Well-fit. Probably Italian, Noah thought. It looked like something his brother would wear. The guy in it looked like someone his brother would know – also expensive, with the gloss of success over an easy confidence. With tanned skin and dark hair, he could be Italian, too, but something about him said Eastern European heritage, maybe Russian, to Noah. Or Irish, Noah thought, when clear blue eyes took him in with a quick, incisive glance.

“Ready?” the suit asked, touching the back of the redhead’s upper arm with a gentle brush of his fingertips.

The two of them exchanged a long glance, before her lips crooked. “As I ever will be, I suppose.” The intimacy was unmistakable. If the suit was her lawyer, he wasn’t charging by the hour.

“Remember what we talked about with Jeremy. You’ll be fine,” he said.

She nodded, before shooting a last glance at Noah. She gave a flick of her finger in the direction of the card he still held. “You’ll need that,” she said. “Tell Akira that Dillon sent you.”

Akira? Dillon? Noah had no idea who the redhead was talking about, but she was already moving away, the suit walking next to her. And his voices were chattering again, all speaking over one another. Noah couldn’t catch the words, except for Joe saying something like, “How did you do that?”

“Fraternizing with the enemy?” The question sounded disgruntled.

Noah almost ignored it before realizing that it came from the man sitting on the bench next to him. “What?”

The guy nodded toward the doorway. “That’s her. The one who killed Chesney.”

Noah glanced back but it was too late. The redhead had disappeared into the grand jury room. His brows rose. She hadn’t looked tough enough to be a killer. Looks could be misleading, though.

“Lost us all our jobs and put us here,” the guy continued.

“Pretty sure that was our boss working for the drug cartels,” Noah replied. He kept his voice mild. Some of his former co-workers struck him as unreasonably bitter given the circumstances. It wasn’t like they were all innocents. Some of them must have known what was going on.

“Allegedly,” grunted his neighbor.

Noah didn’t answer. The redhead must have confused him with someone else, he thought. He looked at the card again. General Directions. So many rumors had been flying around in the wake of AlecCorp’s implosion. What had he heard about General Directions? But the rumor, whatever it was, wouldn’t come back to him.

It didn’t matter. Whatever the redhead wanted, Noah was done with AlecCorp. All he needed was to get through this day and he’d be moving on. He didn’t know to what, he didn’t know to where, but he didn’t care. Anywhere but here worked for him.

“You should rip that up. Throw it away,” his neighbor said.

Instead, Noah slipped it into his pocket. He wouldn’t call, but he didn’t take orders from ex-AlecCorp employees.

**************

Unedited, obviously, but — compared to how much I have hated every previous beginning — I’m feeling pretty okay with this. Noah feels right to me and the ghost mob comes across as it should, I hope. In other words, not an overwhelming list of characters for a reader to remember but a sense of Noah as a man surrounded by sounds he doesn’t understand. I hope I can hang on to being satisfied with it long enough to move on!

1000 Reviews

I don’t know if those extra reviews came in faster because I mentioned them, but I reached that milestone much more quickly than I expected. Woke up this morning and Ghosts was at 616, and the total for all titles was 1000. I added it up twice to be sure, then — in a ridiculously grade point average motivated spirit of celebration — made a spreadsheet and totaled up the individual ratings. Worked out to 93.5% positive (4 & 5 stars), 4.5% neutral (3), and 2% negative. I hope I can now let go of my numbers obsession for a while.

I’m not sure I can express how guiltily gratified I feel about this — it’s like getting an A when I willfully didn’t follow the instructions. That never happened to me in school, because I always followed the instructions. I would never have dreamed of not doing the assignment exactly as told. The only point was the grade, right? But that wasn’t the point of Tassamara or Fen, not even close, and to have so many people find them and enjoy them … well, it’s a lovely feeling. Thank you so very, very much to all of you who enjoyed the books and wrote reviews (or otherwise told me so) — you’ve brought me much joy and I’m very grateful!

Conveniently enough, today is also B’s anniversary, so we get to celebrate both things at once. I invited my niece over for the weekend, so she’ll get to provide the extra hands helpful for taking two dogs out for ice cream, plus do something fun with me. I’m thinking water, of course — beach, kayaking, inner-tubes? — but she’s not much of an outside sort of kid, so it might be movies instead. I wonder if my son would forgive me if I went to Ant-Man without him?

Today, though, it’s back to Noah. Progress is still ridiculously slow, but at least it’s movement.

Two years

In two days, it will be two years since Bartleby arrived in the backyard. Given that I got to spend $400 last week running liver tests on him because he has some elevated enzymes — liver tests which found basically nothing except, yep, his liver enzymes are too high — the pessimistic vet who predicted that he would be a very expensive dog to own was not wrong.

On the other hand, the ridiculous little dog has brought me joy and snuggles, just the way dogs are supposed to. I’m feeling as if I’d like to celebrate his anniversary with me somehow, but I’m not sure how. He does not need chocolate cake or pizza, my two favorite celebratory foods. Maybe I’ll take him out for dog-friendly ice cream. My only hesitation is that I’d have to bring Zelda, too — no way does B get to come out for ice cream when Z does not — and juggling two dogs and two doggie ice cream cones, while driving the car sounds just a little unsafe. Okay, a lot unsafe. But it’s not until Wednesday so I’m going to figure out a way to accomplish it. It’s a nice plan.

Today’s plan — words, words, words. I took the weekend totally off. Read a lot, swam some, did useful house stuff. I actually felt pretty damn proud of myself yesterday when I’d finally finished dragging all the bougainvillea branches out to the curb. Bougainvillea is such a mean plant. I never manage to cut it back without losing some blood in the process. (Although, as my nephew pointed out last week, if I wasn’t chopping it down, probably it wouldn’t be making me bleed… yeah, point taken. But if it didn’t grow so fast and have such harsh thorns, I wouldn’t have to chop it down!) Anyway, the garbage guys — justifiably — require that it be tied up in neat piles to be disposed of and I’ve gotten satisfyingly good at getting big branches of thorny viciousness out to the curb in neat little bundles. So it wasn’t word count, but I still got to feel accomplished.

Today, though, it’s time to be all about word count. I was looking through past posts, trying to find the exact date B appeared, and then curious about other Julys, and at this point in July 2013, I was 25K words into Time. In 2011, I’d spent months writing the first five chapters of Ghosts, and finally had a first chapter that satisfied me. It was a good reminder that I’ve been stuck before — repeatedly — and still managed to produce a satisfying book in the end. Although I really hope that once I break loose on Grace, I don’t need to agonize quite as much as I did on Time because I remember that autumn as being… difficult.

In entirely random other numerical notices, I added up the number of reviews I have on Amazon.com yesterday because it occurred to me that I was pretty close to a milestone, and my books have received 996 reviews, not including any reviews from the anthology. (The only one of the anthology reviews that mentions Guests, though, described it as “super fun, sassy” which pleased me so, so much – sassy, in particular, is really endearing to me.) Anyway, 1000 reviews also feels like something to celebrate so I’m going to have to think of something nice for me, too, although it probably be another couple of weeks before I get there. Nothing food-related, so maybe I’ll do another kayaking day trip. I bet it’s really damn hot right now, though. Maybe I can steal a kid or two — my niece, maybe? — and go inner-tubing next week. First though, words. Lots of them.

Fingers crossed that Noah is obliging!

Words vs Imagination

Writing today and I got bogged down on the phrase, “opened his eyes a sliver.”

Seriously, bogged down as in staring at the words, wondering what they mean, whether anyone would understand the image in my head, debating other options — peered, peeked, peeped through his eyelashes? Ugh, just stuck in the mud of self-critical English language analysis.

So stuck that I googled and yeah, the phrase has been used 33,000 times so I think probably I’m safe to assume that readers will understand it. But I cannot google every random phrase, because that one line — and not even a very good line — is all I accomplished in my twenty minute writing sprint.

And then I took a deep breath and reminded myself of the author whose books I’ve been obsessed with lately and the reason I’ve been obsessed with her. It’s not because her words are perfect. They are so not. Run-on sentences, sentence fragments, mixed-up which and that, random commas, even the occasional flat-out error. Even the stories–her early plots wander, ideas are introduced and then dropped, characters’ names are too similar and there are way too many of them… But when I’m reading, I don’t care. Because her imagination is incredible.

The words aren’t as important as the story behind them. Noah’s story is great. I love Noah’s story. I love Grace’s role in Noah’s story, I love Rose and Dillon. So it’s time to let go of this crazy perfectionism and just tell the story. I need to trust that the right readers — the ones like me, the ones who are going to love the story — that they’re out there. And if not, that that’s okay, as long as I have fun telling it.

More fun, less perfectionism. My new goal. First draft rule — tell a story that I understand. If it’s missing details, unclear, whatever, trust that beta readers will let me know.