Christy Potter's Blog, page 16

On illness, family, love, and hope

I haven’t been posting here as often as I’d like, and I’m also disgracefully behind on my podcasts. But I’m getting myself back in the saddle again, and I want to thank you for sticking in here with me. I have some good news coming soon about my debut novel and some fun things to share about my current book, but in the meantime, there have been more pressing things going on.

My family has been going through a rough time the past few months as my stepdad, who has been a central part of my life since he married my mother in 1977,  has been critically ill. He was diagnosed in early March with advanced and fairly aggressive cancer. However, he has a great team of doctors and he is responding well to treatment – well enough that Mom reports he has been foraging in the kitchen for beef jerky.

There is really no feeling quite as helpless as seeing those who used to take care of us become the ones who need care. Dad has always been the strong, quiet cornerstone of the family, always just there, no matter what kind of female cyclone of hormonal insanity my mother, sister and I were stirring up. My three stepbrothers, fortunately, helped balance things out a little.

My hat is off to my mother, who has been incredibly strong through this whole thing, even when I know for a fact she hasn’t felt all that strong. It’s hard on all of us, but I can’t even imagine being in her place. I live in another state now, but I’m doing all I can to offer support and stay in touch to find out what the doctors have to say and how he’s feeling day to day, as well as how my mom is doing.

We’ve lost older family members along the way – I have no grandparents left at all – but this is far and away the hardest situation our family has faced. I haven’t talked about it publicly because while I may write here about some of my own struggles, this is his. I can offer all the love and support in the world, but at the end of the day, this is his fight. The most his family can do is be his corner coaches. And believe me, that’s what we’re doing. He’s a stubborn old Kansan, and we’re all rooting for him.

When you’re a kid, it’s easy to take your parents for granted. You just kind of assume they’ll always be there, keeping an eye on you whether you want them to or not, even when you’re an adult and on your own. You figure they’ll always be the safe nest you can fly back to when you need to – and at some point, you’re going to need to. No matter how old you are, it’s a cruel awakening the day you realize your parents aren’t infallible. That’s also when you realize that every day, every moment, is truly a gift.

So thank you to all of you who have known what was going on, and offered your support and prayers for Dad’s healing. I can tell you this much: if love can save him, at this rate he’ll never die. Thank you, my friends, from all of us.

Happy birthday, America!

It’s early morning on Independence Day and I’m drinking coffee and writing this from under a pile of cats, neither of which is particularly comfortable because it’s already about 85 degrees here and wet-blanket muggy. In a little while, my house will be spilling over with friends and family, while we honor the American tradition of hamburgers on the grill, sweet corn on the cob, and huge chunks of ice-cold watermelon.

It’s nice and all, but I have to tell you… I miss the Fourth of Julys we used to have back home. First of all, fireworks are legal in Kansas, which they’re not in New Jersey. I do understand that, because people out here would be blowing each other’s body parts off in random fits of road rage. But back to my point – when I was a kid, my sister, my youngest stepbrother, Joel, and I would spend all the money we had on fireworks. The louder, the sparklier, the bigger, the more likely Mom’s bushes would be in flames by the end of the night, the better. And after a firework had burned out, leaving just an empty shell and the smell of smoldering cardboard and gunpowder, we’d run into the street, grab it and scream at each other, “LOOK! IT’S YOUR BRAIN!”

Happy Independence Day, everyone! Pledge the flag, hug a vet, and if you live in a state where fireworks are legal, try not to run over Joel’s brain if you see it in the street.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Yeats

Seeing all these pictures of graduation ceremonies is really taking me back. I am a sucker for school, a total sucker. If there was a way to make a living being a professional student, I would be at the top of my field.

I love school. I love the camaraderie among the students, the eye-rolling when 465 pages of reading are assigned, the palpable feeling of tension the day of finals. I love great teachers who are teaching for the right reasons. And I love graduation, but I always wish as soon as everyone tosses their caps up in the air, we could all run back inside and do it all over again.

I recently made the difficult decision to not get my master’s degree after being accepted to my dream school because, quite frankly, I can’t afford the loan payments and since I’m getting out of the journalism game, it seemed pointless to pursue a graduate degree in it. But walking away from grad school, particularly that one, was the single hardest decision I’ve made to date.

Several years back, I promised myself that I would fulfill two key dreams by the time I was 40: I was going to visit England, and I was going to get my bachelor’s degree. In 2009, twenty years to the month from when I received my associate’s degree, I got my BS in communication. I turned 40 in April, and I got my diploma in May. I think that’s close enough.

I’m not sure what it is about school that I love so much, but some days I get so homesick it’s all I can do not to crawl up the street to my alma mater and see if anyone will let me sit in on a lecture. Just a small one, c’mon.

I love that feeling that comes with the first day of classes. I was 38 when I went back to school, and I had a new notebook, new pencils, and lunch money in my bag when I headed out for that first day. All I was missing was a Care Bears backpack and pair of dark blue, stiff new jeans and it would have been junior high all over again. I still had that feeling of uncertainty as I walked up the steps toward my first class. Would I make any friends? Would I be the oldest person in school? And if I was, would they give me a nickname like “Granny McWrinkles” and jokingly pretend to hang out with me, but then laugh when I asked for decaf coffee in the cafeteria? Kids aren’t the only ones with school-related anxiety.

None of that came to pass, and I was actually relieved to meet a lot of people my age who were going back to school for the same reasons I was. I’m still friends with some of them now, and that feeling of camaraderie is always there. We went back to school later in life and we got our degrees while juggling all of the other demands on people our age, and let me tell you something you might not know unless you’ve done it – that’s a big freaking deal. I did it while working full-time, but I am in perma-salute to those of my classmates who did it while working and with kids still at home.

Once this year’s graduation pictures start to fade away, my longing for school will abate a little. At least until fall. That’s when you’ll find me back on campus, wearing a letter jacket and shuffling through the leaves, trying to con kids out of their textbooks so I can feel that sense of academic belonging, just once more.

“Not all those who wander are lost.” Tolkien

I was interviewed this week by a reporter who wanted to talk about my book and also, I suspect, to find out a bit about my exit from journalism. It was weird, really weird, for me. After some 20 years being the interviewer, being the one interviewed was a little unsettling. I suddenly had a whole new appreciation for everyone I’ve ever interviewed, for those moments when you’ve answered a question, and the tape in your head rewinds and you think, “Wait, that sounded stupid, that isn’t what I meant at all…” But she was friendly and easy to talk to and assured me she could make a story out of the mental garage sale a conversation with me generally becomes.

She asked me what my favorite pieces are in the book, and although I should have been ready for a question like that, it caught me a little off guard, like a parent asked which child she prefers. During the course of my answer, I realized that while I do like all the pieces for different reasons, my favorites were absolutely the ones that involve travel. After we hung up, I sat here and thought about that and then I took out my book and reread all the travel-related pieces and now I’ve got the urge to hit the road again so strongly that if this post suddenly stops mid-sentence, you’ll know I couldn’t wait any longer.

I’ve only been out of the US a handful of times – three times to Mexico, once to Canada and once to the UK, but some of the best writing I’ve done came out of those trips. I remember sitting on a flat stone ledge in Victoria Square, at the center of Birmingham, England, with my notebook and pencil, watching the city swirl around me, all the people going about their day to day business, going to their jobs or school, running errands, heading home… and me, sitting still in their midst, absorbing the absolute wonder of being a spectator in their lives, watching what made them different from the life I was used to, and the little quirks we all have in common. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that the most minor, insignificant details in our lives are the ones that actually unite us with the rest of humanity. Tiny, invisible threads that manifest themselves through something as simple as carrying a paper cup of coffee on the way to work. I did some of the best writing of my life in Victoria Square that day.

While travel is a bug that hasn’t bitten me as much as it just endlessly gnaws, I find that I don’t always have to go very far to satisfy it. Some days when I’m feeling penned in, pacing around my writing room, I’ll get on a train and in almost no time, I’m walking through the entrance of Central Park. It’s only a few miles from my front door, yet it’s my favorite escape. I always spend a little time wandering first, listening to the street musicians, the kids playing on the swings, the shouts of the men in the midst of a fierce soccer game. And invariably, I find my way to the giant rocks that jut up from the earth, ancient bedrock that started its formation during the Paleozoic Era. It’s hard to take your life and your problems too seriously once you’ve parked your butt on a rock that’s 450 million years old. I always find a nook in the rock, a place to nestle in and take out my notebook. I’ve spent hours there, writing and watching and listening and just being.

I can’t wait to travel again. The more I write about it here, the more excited I get to pack my bag and head back out. It’s almost like I don

 

Victoria Square, Birmingham, England. Photo by me.

Diagnosis: Mr. Darcy Syndrome

Not too long ago, I finished the book “Starting Over,” written by my now-friend Sue Moorcroft, an English novelist. The hero of this book, a tattooed, long-haired mechanic with a hard exterior but a soft heart, called by his nickname “Ratty,” absolutely had me smitten by about a quarter of the way through the book. By the end, I was full-on in love. For about two weeks after I finished the book, my clandestine love affair with Ratty was my little secret. So you can imagine how devastated I was the day I came across a discussion on Sue’s Facebook page about the book, and about Ratty. All these other women were talking about him, swooning over him. I was momentarily chagrined until I remembered… oh right. He’s a fictional character.

I think what separates good writers from great writers is the ability to create a character you can really fall in love with, like me with Ratty. (Until he cheated on me with all those other readers.) Even characters you hate with a passion, like Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter books, can stir such emotion because they are written so incredibly well.

As a writer, I can tell you that it’s hard to create characters who can make readers feel so strongly about them, but the writers who can do make it look easy. It’s not. I once created a character who was absolutely perfect – really the ideal man. One of my writer friends who read a draft handed it back to me and said, “He’s too perfect. He needs some flaws.” Naturally, I was in love with this character and refused to give him any flaws, any problems, to do anything to make him even remotely human. Eventually I gave in and gave him some weaknesses, some issues – the poor slob. His life had been perfect before, but he wasn’t relateable. Other readers would have shrugged him off like my writer friend did because there was nothing about him that made him seem like someone they could know, be friends with, fall in love or in bed with.

That, I think, is what makes it so much fun to get all emotionally wrapped up in a fictional character. They more real they seem, the more plausible we find it that they really could exist at some level and therefore, could potentially love us back. I know how many women out there have fallen in love with Mr. Darcy, and if he existed in some kind of ageless form in real life, he could have had his pick from women in 48 countries over 200 years. I can see what women love about Mr. Darcy, but when it came to Jane Austen’s work, my heart has always belonged to Colonel Brandon in “Sense and Sensibility.” He’s quiet, sensitive, the deep and brooding kind of guy you want to get to know because you’re sure you can help him with whatever darkness plagues his soul. And God knows we all like a man we can try to fix. In real life, I’d have a chance with Colonel Brandon. Mr. Darcy, not so much.

Incidentally, novelist Trisha Ashley has a knack for creating heroes I can’t keep from falling in love with. If her characters came to life, my reputation would be in the gutter within 24 hours, I’m telling you.

Writer and cartoonist Berkeley Breathed once said “I will go to my grave in a state of abject, endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.” He’s right – we all have it. The comments section is open, so fess up: what fictional character are you now, or have you ever been, in love with? Just don’t say Ratty – he’s mine.

Retreat, regroup, fight another day (or why I just took a nap)

Somewhere along the way, it appears I forgot how to relax.

Well, maybe I didn’t exactly forget, but I definitely no longer know how to do it spontaneously. Now I have “relax” mentally filed under “What To Do On Vacation,” “What To Do on Saturday Night Between 8-10 Unless I’m Working,” and “What To Do When I’m Freaking Out.”

I am exhausted today. Emotionally, mentally and physically wiped out, for a variety of reasons, none of which are important to what I’m writing here. But after working late for several nights running, and pounding through three tight deadlines this morning, I found myself staring down the barrel of some unscheduled time this afternoon, before I have to head out and work again later. I kid you not, I panicked a little. What do you mean I don’t have anything to do right now? Gah!

I have written several essays, some of which are now immortalized in my book, about how to step back, how to recreate without apology, how to breathe, how to be. Just be. But when I fall off my soapbox and into a big dirty puddle of doing, I forget how to just be. This afternoon, my body told my brain to kindly shut up already. And my legs carried me to the sofa, where I laid down. My eyes closed themselves, my brain finally gave in, and I took a nap like I haven’t taken since I was four.

What what?

When I woke up, I made a cup of tea and pulled out my secret stash of emergency chocolate, went back to the couch, and spent another hour eating chocolate and finishing the book of Wendy Wasserstein plays I bought a few weeks back. I don’t know what got into me (besides Toblerone). I don’t do stuff like that. I don’t just not work. It’s working hours, for crying out loud! I have a script on my desk that is due in a week and it’s nowhere near done. What am I doing, napping and reading and eating chocolate?

And yet… and yet… I feel a little like I’ve just had a mini vacation. There’s a sneaky smile on my face as I realize that I’ve been doing exactly what I needed to be doing. No guilt, no remorse, no calculating the time I wasted. Sanity officially saved. It’s just too bad the chocolate’s all gone.

Freeze, yo! It be the grammar po-po!

I admit it: I write grammatically correct text messages.

I’m starting to think I am in the minority, but that’s okay. It’s not the first time the in crowd has laughed at me, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last. I can’t help it. When I see “you” missing the y and the o, it makes my right eye twitch. And before you scroll down to the comments to let me know that such abbreviations are justifiable, even necessary, because text messages have limited characters, you should know that you won’t change my mind. First of all, I’m seeing way too much text spelling everywhere, and second of all, I had to get an unlimited texting plan just because I would rather pay for two texts than rely on a spelling method that looks like you lost half your Scrabble tiles. Being a grammar snob is expensive.

I was having a Facebook conversation with some like-minded friends the other day – we were discussing the comma, because we’re just that exciting – and I rather flippantly said most Americans are guilty of grammaticide. I thought I’d made that word up (although I’ve since found it elsewhere) but it made me realize that I’d concocted a word to suit what I wanted to say at that moment. Language is a living thing, a perpetually shifting entity that evolves as we need it to in order to keep up with our communication demands. So when I look at it like that, who am I to be all sniffy when Webster’s adds “D’oh!” to the dictionary? I will admit, however, to getting what’s been described as my self-righteous smirk when I hear words like “utilize,” “irregardless” and “administrate.” Shakespeare coined words and phrases all the time, but “irregardless” would have made even the Bard want to jam a quill into his eye.

For me, the real rub is in the abuse of language, the deliberate gutterfying of words to be “cool.” I’m not sure when sounding uneducated became hip. And while I notice there’s a revolution starting in which people who don’t know the difference between “you’re” and “your” are starting to rise up and demand that the rest of us turn a blind eye to it, I can’t help but think, “We learned this in first grade. Were you absent that day? Or just eating paste in the coatroom?”

I have many friends, intelligent, well-spoken people, who use text language, both in and out of texts. I overheard a Harvard-educated lawyer call his buddy “dawg” the other day. My ears are still bleeding. What’s going on here? Am I hopelessly snobbish and out-of-touch? Can I still get some of that paste? Do I be hatin?

New news and old news and all the news that is news

I’ll have a new blog post and podcast this weekend, but first…

On the right side of this page, you’ll see a new ad for my book, “The World Was My Oyster But I Didn’t Know How to Cook.” If you click on that, you’ll get the details of a new promotion – one I call the “Show Your Library Some Sweet Oyster Love.” Okay, maybe I won’t call it that because that just sounds like a big sack of wrong. But the promotion is oh so right. If you buy a paperback copy of my book, you can get another one to give to your local library for 50% off. Considering that the list price of the book is only $9.99, I think that’s a pretty inexpensive way to make your local librarian realize how much you and I both rock.

Although the promotion is only for the paperback version, I want to remind you that the book also is available as an e-book, for Kindle, Nook and iPad, and in the e-book format, it’s only $4.99.

And finally, I’ve gotten some great press in the past few weeks. Besides four speaking engagements, I was the featured author on Angela Greenfield’s writing website, www.BecomingaWriterBlog.com and did an audio interview with legendary radio man Bill Thompson on The Bookcast. If you missed either of those, I hope you’ll click on the links and have a listen / read. There’s a tremendous network of people out there who are supporting me and other indie authors, and they’re an invaluable resource for writers and readers alike.

Finally, a request: if you’ve read my book, please consider writing a review on whatever site you purchased it. Amazon and Barnes & Noble both make it easy for you to give your review. I’m also a Goodreads Author, so you can leave a review there as well. It doesn’t have to be long or verbose, just a few sentences about your thoughts on the book. Your reviews help increase my visibility.

When independent authors ask for your support, we are not bragging, or showboating, or gloating about our accomplishments. We are trying to make a name for ourselves, and to sell books. We’re like any other small business – we just want to survive and succeed doing what we love. And we can only do that if our friends and colleagues buy our books, write reviews, and tell their friends.

On behalf of myself, and indie authors everywhere, thanks.

 

 

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Tolstoy

After much soul-searching, I came to the decision recently that it was time for me to step down from my 23-year career as a journalist. It wasn’t an easy decision. Journalism is really all I’ve ever known, ever done, ever been.

I remember walking into the newsroom of the McPherson Sentinel on a December day that was frigid and windy as only winter in Kansas can be, but shaking more from nerves than the temperature. The ink was barely dry on my two-year degree and my resume was written in a really huge font, which I hoped would distract from the fact that there wasn’t anything on it but my name and telephone number.

Of course, now I had this new job to add. Christy Potter, staff writer. I gazed and gazed at those words when I got my first byline. Then I put them on the photocopier, enlarged them, laminated them with Scotch tape, and stuck them to the top of my computer monitor where I could see them every day. I still have it here, in my box of memories. They were so symbolic to me, those words. I had always considered myself a writer, but now I had a place to belong. I was a reporter, and from the moment I sat down at my new desk, I told myself I was going to be a good one. I saw myself as Lois Lane, as Brenda Starr, out to save the world in my never-ending pursuit of truth, justice, and a great headline.

And I was a good reporter. It was more than awards from the state press association that told me so. It was how I felt when I was covering a story, when someone would call me to give me a great scoop. It was the little surge I’d get inside when I’d see someone in a coffee shop reading something I’d written in that evening’s paper. It was the feeling of absolute, perfect peace that would find me when I was on deadline, pounding out a story, one eye on the clock as my editor waited to put the paper to bed … that sense of well-being that whispers in your ear, “This is where you belong.”

I always had a long, narrow reporter’s notebook in my bag or my hip pocket, I always had my “nose for news” to the ground, I loved that when people saw me, they’d say, “Uh oh… here comes the press.” I sometimes worked late into the night when my friends were out unwinding at a local bar after their own long days at work. It was different for me. Journalism wasn’t a job for me, it was me. I was never “off work” for the night because I carried it with me wherever I went. You never knew where news was going to happen, and I was ready for it. I loved it. I loved all of it. I fit. I was happy.

But in recent years, things changed. There was no lightening-bolt moment – it was more of a shift, almost imperceptible at first, inside of me. The once-happy relationship I’d had with journalism had begun to dull. I tried moving around within the field, different positions, different publications, but it soon became crystal clear what the problem was: it no longer felt right and fulfilling to me. I don’t know if something grew, or maybe shrunk, but either way, I was no longer happy. I no longer fit.

The decision to “retire” from journalism splintered into a thousand reasons, all of them valid, all of them staring me in the face, slowly edging closer, unwilling to be ignored any longer. I talked about the gritty side of today’s journalism in my latest podcast, but here, suffice it to say I just felt it was time for a change. I’m 44 years old, and although longevity so ridiculous it borders on cryogenic tends to run in my family, for all intents and purposes I’m middle-aged. Spending the rest of my life doing something that no longer fulfills me is not an option.

Writing, however, does fulfill me. I hope you guessed that at some point. So as of today, I am officially a retired (or “recovering” as one of my journalist friends put it) journalist and am focused entirely on my creative writing. My books, this blog, and my podcast. I’m surrounded by a wonderful network of support, both here and in the UK, and while I may work by myself, I know I’m never alone. I’m at peace, but more than that, I’m happy. I fit again.

I will never regret being a journalist – they were some of the happiest years of my life. I learned so much from so many people, from David Bloom, who took me under his wing during my broadcast internship, to Tom Throne, now the editor of the Weekly Vista in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who was my first boss, my first editor and is still my mentor and friend. I’ve had colleagues at newspapers in three states, and while many of them are still in the business and will be until they retire, I know I have their support as I strike out on my new venture.

As I look back, then train my gaze forward, I realize just how blessed I am. So… here’s to new beginnings, to life, to love, and above all, to writing.

Learning about myself from strangers

I’ve been doing a lot of promotional stuff for my book over the past two months, and I can’t believe how much I’ve learned. Which pales next to how much I still have to learn, but that’s basically my life in a nutshell.

One of things I found out fairly quickly is that while people are interested in my book once they find out it exists, they are far more interested in finding out about me. So while I’ve been focused on promoting my book, what I should be promoting more is myself. People like to know the person behind the words, and even though my book is made up of essays which are largely personal, people seem to instinctively know that there’s more. And there’s always more.

So while no one should put every personal thought and detail on display for the entire world to see (Hi, Facebook!), I’m quickly learning that as a writer, I need to be willing to let people get closer to me as a person. One woman who was at one of my book signings and had already read the book on her Kindle said that when she finished it, she felt like she was my best friend. She couldn’t have said anything that pleased me more.

As a longtime journalist, I’m adept at getting others to talk about themselves. Now I’m learning how important it is to the book promotion process to be willing to talk about myself. When someone who has read about my infertility struggles or my divorce, then sees me at a talk or a book signing and wants to tell me how she related to what I said, I need to be willing to open a little wider.

Meeting people, talking about my book and my life and my writing, has actually opened me up to myself a little more as well. I can write an essay about something personal, publish it, then walk away. When people ask me about what I’ve written, I’m forced to think about it more, to peel off more layers, to get past what I wrote and uncover why I wrote it. That kind of frank openness, the willingness to be a little vulnerable, is what lets people relate to me, to feel like they know me, to read what I’ve written and walk away feeling like they’re my best friend. My goal is to reach the point where, when people hear my name, they say “Oh yes, Christy Potter. The writer. I love her stuff.” That frees me, as a writer, to go wherever the Muse takes me. I’m not a book, I’m not a style, I’m not a genre. I’m a writer. It’s a simple but incredibly valuable lesson I’ve learned over the past few weeks, and I’ve learned it from my readers. Wow. Just…wow.

All that said, I’ve been doing more speaking engagements lately, both at book signings and at group and corporate events, discussing my journey as a writer. I’ve also started a series of podcasts called “Going Gray,” in which I just talk about whatever has been going on in my life. They are companion pieces to this blog, but more relaxed and chatty. If this blog is me on stage, the podcasts are meeting me for a drink after the show. If you click on the button to the right, you’ll pop over to the podcast page where you can listen to them right on your computer. You can also find me on iTunes.

Thank you, everyone, for the important part of my journey that you have been and will always be. I hope you’ll continue to read me, listen to me, and tell your friends about me. Because obviously, I couldn’t do it without you.