Kelly Barnhill's Blog, page 15

“That can’t possibly be MY mom!”

We are counting down the hours until school begins. The clocks have become suddenly sluggish and hesitant. Time has thickened and pooled on the ground. By the time a second passes, it’s been sitting around at room temperature for so long that it stinks of mildew and rot.

The kids – my darling whirlwinds of electricity and light and bright wind – are all elbows and teeth and hot tempers. They erupt at the slightest provocation, requiring an epic intervention on my part – typically involving high-level negotiations and arms-reduction deals. I should work for the friggin’ UN. I have, for example, had to intervene in the case of:

He’s looking at me funny.
She used that voice.
She’s on my side.
It isn’t his turn.
She hit my invisible friend.
He’s singing again.
She said I look like a cartoon character.
His breath smells like cheese.
She said my hair looks like cheese.
She called me a piece of cheese.
He won’t play wolves with me.
She won’t run a race with me.
He’s breathing my air.
She looked at my stuff.
He’s thinking too loud.
This family is weird. Can I go to boarding school?

Yes, yes, for the love of god yes. I’ll help you pack.

(Author’s note: I did not say that out loud.)

So I took them to the water, and it was magnificent. What is it about spending time at the sun-drenched lake that transforms a bunch of children who, just a few minutes before, were at eachother’s throats, and turns them into a slippery school of happy fish, playing and splashing and spurting sweetness into the air?

I swam with them for about an hour, but that was enough for me. I hauled myself onto the beach blanket and watched them through the slick of sun on the water. They had swum out to the far buoys and were balancing on the chain that connects each bobbing red orb to the other. They stood on the chain, held their balance for a moment or two, and fell, screeching into the water. After repeating this approximately nine million times, they settled themselves in on the chain, balancing on their butts and letting their toes float up to the surface of the water, and gabbing about god knows what.

So I took a picture. On my phone. (I know, the quality is terrible and my phone sucks. What?) Because of the brightness, I couldn’t even see the dang picture I took, so after trying to shade it with my hand and then my hat and then my whole body, I draped a towel over my head and tried to see if any of the shots were any good.

And they saw.

“O. M. G.” my oldest said, her voice pealing over the water and the sand. Over the grass and the road and the hillside and the whole world. “Is that…..no!  No, it couldn’t be! That isn’t my mother, is it? With a towel over her head?”

“I refuse to believe it,” the ten year old said – astonishingly louder than her sister. “That can’t be our mother - our mother - in public with a towel over her head.”

“In public! I ask you!”

“It must be someone else.”

(it should be noted here how very very loud these children were. The entire beach had stopped what they were doing to watch them. Children stopped playing. Teenaged couples stopped flirting. Mothers stopped slathering their babes with sunblock. Cars swerved to a stop and pedestrians froze in their tracks. I think people in Texas might have heard them.)

“It has to be someone else. I mean, if my mother - my mother -  was in public with a towel over her head, I might have some kind of psychological break.”

“If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I might stop getting good grades.”

“Oh, forget the grades. You might have to drop out of school. If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I might get into a fist fight. With fists.”

“If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I might joyride a car.”

“If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I might have to start a gang.”

“Only one gang? I’d start four.”

“If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I’d tattoo ‘I Love Republicans’ on my butt.”

“If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I’d join the army.”

“If my mother was in public with a towel over her head, I’d join a cult.”

“I’d pierce my eyebrow.”

“I’d destroy a car with a baseball bat.”

“I’d date a tattoo artist.”

“I’d never leave the house again.”

“I’d drop out of school. And then I’d go back, just so I could drop out again.”

“FINE,” I hollered. I threw the towel onto the ground. “HAPPY NOW?”

They sat in the water, hovering just under the surface, their wrinkly toes wiggling in the waves. They were all slicked hair and akimbo limbs and dripping grins.

“Oh,” they said. “What makes you think we were talking about you?”

Seven more days until school, folks. Seven long days. Will I stay sane until then?

Filed under: Uncategorized

Again, with the Zombies. (Also, gratuitous camping cuteness from the BWCA) (and some thoughts about writing too)

My son has, apparently been infected with some kind of zombie virus, which he did not catch after being burned, drowned, struck by lightning, falling into latrines (likely on purpose), boiled in oil, attacked by cougars, or any number of disasters that could – and have – befallen the Barnhills in their excursions into the woods. Still: he has been zombified, and I have proof:

And then it happened to Cordelia as well:

 Zombification aside, it was, in truth, a magnificent trip. Not that the weather was perfect (it wasn’t) or the condition ideal (are they ever?) but still. Here’s the thing about camping: even what it sucks, it’s still pretty awesome. We faced rain and wind and cold. Bee stings. Busted thumbs. Sore backs. But there’s nothing like carrying a canoe on your shoulders for 3/4 of a mile, lowering it back down onto the rocks without a scratch, and then hiking back down the trail to shoulder your 80-pound duluth pack just to do it again. And there’s nothing like filling a bunch of empty bellies with a bunch of fried dough  or curried rice or pesto on shell noodles. And there’s nothing like watching the space station cruise through a star-ridden sky and seeing every constellation you’ve ever heard of, and inventing some new ones of your own.

There’s nothing like it at all.

Also, there’s nothing like the process of letting go, either. The BWCA is utterly off the grid. Even if you got all fancy and had one of those waterproof solar collectors to shove sunlight into your i-phone, it wouldn’t do you a speck of good. No cell towers. No signals. No phone calls. No email. No tweets. Nothing. This is good for me because social media – while incredibly fun for spending hours and hours dorking around on the internets, are kind of the crack of writing: it feels like writing; it looks like writing; it requires the same attention to language and diction and subtlety that writing does. The composition of a tweet, say, uses much of my skills that I’ve honed as a writer – we make deals with our readership, don’t we? We compose tweets that begin like hello and end like goodbye. We play with words and build with words and suck on words like hard candies. And then we are rewarded with retweets and comments and funny reparte, and whatever.

Social media gives us what our manuscripts cannot.

But it’s the manuscript – not the twitters or the books of faces or the things with pins on them or any other one of the nattering pixellated heaps of ones and zeros that clutter our brains and our screens and our limited thinking – that pays the bills. That feeds the soul. That pulls us toward something large, something beautiful, that brief, ephemeral glimpse at truth. The manuscript can be a jerk sometimes. It can be witholding. It can be prickly. But it’s the important bit.

This is why I like to go into the woods. To get back to the important bit. We turn off. We tune out. We slink away from the endless, meaningless noise (recognizing our own part in it), and we recalibrate.

I wrote thirty longhand pages while in the BWCA. Despite the ache in my back in and twinges in my knees and the endless cricks in my neck. I wrote another fifty since coming home.

It was a good trip. Maybe I’ll go back.

 

(All of these photographs were taken by this guy. Beloved friend, and darling of my heart.)

 

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota, writing

A giveaway? Why yes, I think that would be a good idea.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I came to the stunning realization today, after writing things in the calendar and fretting about how I would afford the shocking price tags on school supplies and school clothes and school shoes and school programs and school activities and all things related to the well-rounded education of my darling children that it hit me.

I have less than seven weeks until this book comes out.

Dear god. Or gods. Or possibly-devine-entities currently peering through the vapors at my lost, lost soul. Whatever.

In any case, I panicked, of course. And then I whined on Twitter and Facebook for a while and got advice from friends much smarter than I am. And while I sit down and actually hatch a plan, I figured, since I have an ARC or two in my possession, that I should organize a giveaway.

So here it is!

Between now and September 11 (which, by the way, in addition to being a Day of Somber Reflection also happens to be the day upon which my other book, THE MOSTLY TRUE STORY OF JACK, comes out on paperback. Yippee!) I’m hosting a giveaway of two copies of the ARC of IRON HEARTED VIOLET. Both of these I will sign and will also include another little goodie inside that is SOOPER SEEKRIT, so you’ll just have to enter to find out what it is.

Enter today, enter tomorrow, enter next week. I don’t want to make a big thing about it – it’s your schedule, after all. But don’t wait too long, otherwise, I’ll just have to give these copies away to myself, and that would stink.

For those of you who look at my situation and laugh and laugh and make fun of how unbearably disorganized I am, I’m curious: How do you ramp up to publication day? What should I be doing to make sure I am not doomed to failure forever? And what do you do to keep the pesky anxiety at bay – because it does not do to be ushering a beloved book into the wide world and suddenly come down with a case of the crazies. It doesn’t do at all.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Childrens literature, fiction is my job, Middle Grade Novels, publication, the writing process

LAKE SUPERIOR ZOMBIES!

The pilot house of the Edmund Fitzgerald rests 530 feet below the surface of Lake Superior 17 miles from Whitefish Bay. (Copyright 1994 Frederick J. Shannon)

I’m home now, after taking the family up north for some Lake Superior/Gunflint Trail/Arrowhead action. We’ll be back soon, this time with canoes on our shoulders and packs on our backs as we sally forth into the BWCAW, but for now we are relaxing and reading and enjoying a bit of summer on the old sod.

I got back from a run this morning, and my neighbor wanted to know how the trip was. “Fine,” I said. “Wonderful. Lake Superior is the most beautiful thing in the wide world.”

“I agree,” he said, “though I confess I’ve been worried about it lately. Global warming and what have you.”

“You and me both,” I said. “We had a picnic at pebble beach and spent half a day out on Artist’s Point in Grand Marais and in both places I’ve never seen so many people swimming in the water. And for long periods of time.”

“And no shrieking? No obvious, flesh searing cold?”

“Nary a shriek,” I said. “The lake’s at record warm temps. It’s worrisome.”

“If it continues like this,” my neighbor said, “we’ll have to start worrying about the bodies.”

“Bodies?” I asked.

“Well, it’s like the song. Lake Superior it’s said never gives up her dead. Well that’s due to temperature. The dead stay down because the water’s so cold. If it gets too warm, maybe the old lake will start coughing up some of the bodies in those many, many shipwrecks.”

And I laughed and he laughed and I told him to have a wonderful day and I went inside. And then my brain exploded.

I have been obsessed for my whole life with Lake Superior ghost ship stories. My short story “The Leviathan’s Teeth” is about a particularly gruesome (and oft seen) ghost ship called The Erie Board of Trade. And I’m working (slowly) on a new YA book about ghost ships and haunted diaries and Lake Superior lighthouses on craggy islands which I’m kinda excited about.

But this.

Hordes of zombie seamen sklurking out of the abnormally warm (but still gale-tossed) waters to feast on the brains of the living? Men with nine-foot muskies under their partially-decomposed arms? The bones of old ships skittering out of the waves? I personally will not write this story because I scare easily and I can’t do zombies, and I might not even be able to read it. But I will likely buy it if one of you people sits down writes it, and I’ll give it as Christmas presents to everyone I know. Because….Come on!

LAKE SUPERIOR ZOMBIES!

I insist that one of you writes that durn book INSTANTLY. This is not a request.

I’ll be waiting with my checkbook.

(sidenote: Yes I already know that “sklurking” isn’t a word. But it should be. I shall start a campaign. I shall also pledge to use it every day, and I encourage you all to do the same.)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: ghost ship, Lake Superior, possibly-animated corpses

The Tale of the Young Man With a Golden Screw In His Belly Button (spoiler alert: his butt falls off)

Surely you’ve heard this one. It was a favorite of ours growing up. Here’s the short version:

A couple has a baby with a strange birth defect – a golden screw stuck in his belly button. Doctors assure them there’s nothing to be done about it. So the couple takes him home and raises him right and proper. The boy, alas, grows up ashamed of his difference and blames it on the fact that he has no friends, can’t get a date, has a crummy job, etc. (In truth, his problems are not due to the golden screw, but to the fact that he is, in fact, a total asshole. But perhaps I am editorializing.) Anyway, he goes to experts around the world to remove the screw, and gets nowhere. He’s told to just live with it. He sees scientists and surgeons and witch doctors and gurus and philosophers and sorcerers of all kinds and descriptions. Finally, he goes to a holy man who lives in a tower in the desert somewhere, who says, “I’ll tell you how to get rid of this thing, but you won’t like it. Maybe you should just accept yourself as you are.” But the guy insists, so the holy man gives him a set of instructions to follow during the next full moon. He follows the instructions to the letter, then lays down on a lawn chair under the moon – naked, of course – and waits for something to happen. Finally, a golden dot on the moon gets bigger and bigger and bigger – and closer and closer and closer. After a time, he realizes that a golden screwdriver is flying through the air, directly toward the guy, and he is powerless to escape. The giant golden screwdriver lands delicately on the golden screw, makes a few quick turns, and flies away, bringing the screw with it. The young man lays there for a long time (did I mention he was nude?) and marvels at what he has seen. Finally he yawns, stretches and stands up.

And his butt falls off.

I think my siblings and I have told different versions of this story to each other like nine million times. My dad – a former Boy Scout and camp counselor – had dozens of stories like this that he poisoned our young brains with during our impressionable childhoods, but this one was by far the most popular.

Because his butt falls off. C’mon, it’s funny!

Anyway, the other day, I went for a hike with three of my four siblings, my mom and dad, various sibling-in-laws and children, up to the top of Eagle Mountain, the highest peak in Minnesota. (Sidebar: at a whopping 2,301 feet, can Eagle Mountain really be called a mountain? Isn’t it more of a gentle hump? Does anyone know the rules of these things?)

I’m side-tracking.

It was a beautiful hike, the kids were mad gnarly and made it up and down without complaining, mostly, and a lovely time was had by all. As we went down, the group started to separate – my brother and his new bride out-pacing the lot of us, my eldest daughter and my husband striding behind, and I ended up with two seven year old boys – my son and his cousin, Charlie – and my ten year old daughter. Their pace started to lag, so they asked for stories.

I told them a scary one – about four kids and a haunted cabin (that was secretly a trap) and a pack of wolves that seemed sinister, but were actually only trying to help them (they were too late) and a very crabby and very old dragon who couldn’t decide if he should help the children or gobble them up (“I’ll decide after you unchain me,” the dragon said. Anyway, the story was so scary (the cabin was more like a spiderweb – it was designed to entice and entrap and entangle) that I kinda scared myself, so I asked the kids to tell the next story.

Charlie led the way.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a boy with a golden screw in his belly button.”

Oh! thought I. That story! Three generations telling that same dumb tale. A marvel!

“You’re telling it wrong,” Leo said.

“No, I’m not,” Charlie said.

“Yes you are. It goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a married couple who desperately wanted a child.”

“It’s the same story!” Charlie protested.

“It’s better with desperately,” Leo said.

“Fine,” Charlie said. “Once upon a time, there was a couple that wanted a baby.”

“Desperately,“ Leo said.

“People don’t have to desperately want things,” Charlie said.

“They do in stories,” Leo said. “That’s why they’re stories. Once upon a time there was a couple who desperately wanted a child. You see? It’s better.”

“FINE.”

“FINE.”

A clapped hand on a forehead.

A great, heaved sigh.

“Once upon a time,” Charlie said slowly. “There was a couple.”

“Yes?”

“Who….”

“Yes?”

“Wanted……”

“Desperately?”

“Who desperately wanted a child.” Charlie closed his eyes and clutched his hands to his heart. He not only said desperately he was desperately. He embodied the mother and father of the ill-fated boy desperately and desperately and desperately wanting him.

Because that is how stories work.

We make an agreement with the listener and an agreement with the story itself. The story is a living, self-replicating thing. It is ever so much like a virus: it inserts itself into our brains and our hearts and our cells and uses us to reproduce it, again and again and again. Even the dumb ones. Like the one about the golden screw in a guy’s belly button and his butt falling off.

“Say it again!” Leo crowed.

“They desperately wanted a child!” Charlie called out to the rocks and the trees and the darkening sky. He threw his arms as wide as the world and leaped onto a fallen log.

“I love this story,” Leo said.

“Me too,” said Charlie.

Cordelia, standing next to me, rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“Am I the only one,” she asked, “in this entire family who isn’t completely weird?”

“Pretty much, babe,” I said. “Pretty much.”

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Gunflint Trail, Minnesota Arrowhead, Nerd mom, Superior Hiking Trail, The Young Man With the Golden Screw in his Belly Button

Give me a pencil, and I will build you a world.

Today’s the day!

I’ll be at Nokomis library from 2-4, teaching a world-building workshop for young writers (ages 8-12). I shall arm them with markers, crayons, pencils and paper. We will map cities, coastlines and mountain ranges, invent religions, build governments, analyze environments, and then shatter them all to pieces. We will discover the undiscovered country and hold whole civilizations in the cup of our hands. Every world has its skin, its muscle, its sinew and its bone. Every world has lifeblood pumping through it. And we’ll come to know the lot of it. And it’ll be awesome.

There are six spots left. You can sign up here. And if you can’t come, you should stop by and say hi. I’ll be the lady pacing the stacks prior, fretting. I’ll also be the lady rehashing the class afterward. Fretting.

Because, yanno. I fret.

In the meantime – happy writing, happy reading, and happy adventures to you all!

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: fantasy novels, teaching writing, Writers Resources, Writing Workshops, young writers

Sometimes, we realize that every teenager-type movie from the Eighties is totally spot-on

Full disclosure: This story contains me ruining things for other people. Because I am a kill-joy. Also, a ruiner.

Second full disclosure: There are some f-words in this piece. Three of them. FYI.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been taking my kids to the west-side beach at Lake Nokomis for swimming lessons. (Side-note: the swimming program at the Minneapolis lakes through the Park system is a fantastic idea: it’s every day; it’s cheap; it’s crazy fun; and the kids stick around for an hour or two afterwards, practicing everything that they learned in lessons, thereby increasing their skills and strength in the water. Side benefit: my wild-child son, at seven, has started napping again. A miracle!)

My kids have done swimming lessons at the Southwest High School pool through community ed for the last few years, which is all fine and good, but there is something completely awesome about the sand and the mobs of kids and the fish swimming by and the regular appearances of visiting waterfowl, that is just spectacularly summery and wildly fun. A magnificent time has been had by all.

Each day, we arrive about an hour early, swim and play, then they are packed off to their teachers for an hour, and then remain in the water for another hour or two. Or, to clarify, they are in the water for an hour or two. I am sitting under an umbrella, chatting with my brother-in-law and some of the other parents, and watching the beach. Specifically, tuning my ears to the kids on the beach – teenager-type kids, specifically – and trying to hook the cadence of their voices into my brain.

The other day, I had this experience, watching these kids, that was so ludicrously cliche, I don’t think I would have believed it if I read it in a book. I would have assumed that the writer had lifted it out of some gloriously cheesy John-Hughes-knockoff movie (of which there are…..many.) But I swear it’s the truth.

Here’s what happened:

On my way down to the edge of the water, where I was staking my claim on the beach territory, I passed a ridiculously pretty girl who was propped up on her elbows on her beach blanket and holding a phone. She was a young thing – fifteen at the very oldest – with long hair and overly large pink sunglasses, like the sort that Jackie Kennedy would have worn, had she ever gone to the municipal beaches in South Minneapolis.

Just as I was sitting down, I heard a voice calling from the other side of the beach. “Julie,” the voice called, a tiny creak in the edge of the voice, like the squeal of a gear as it sticks in its teeth, and then breaks free. “W. T. F.?” He said this deliberately, a noticeable pause in the gaps between the letters, as if he was thinking each period before going on.

Two boys approached, their bodies recoiling each time their bare feet made contact with the hot sand. They winced and persevered. One had a mop of brown hair that flopped over a moon-round face, still squishy with baby fat. He grinned, open-mouthed, like a muppet, and held his hands open at his side (the universal gesture to show that one means no harm). He moved his hands back and forth – jauntily or jazzily? I couldn’t really tell what he was going for. His feet and head were too large for his body and his hands were too broad for his wrists. He was short and thick, his body the color and texture of bread dough. And he was so happy to see this girl, he could hardly believe his luck. His friend, also in possession of the same wide-open muppet-grin, stood a good foot and a half taller. He was brown and reedy – so thin that when he passed the trunks of trees he seemed to vanish. I could tell, just by the way he walked, that he was either midway, or just finishing, a massive growth spurt. His skin stretched over his joints like tissue paper over barbed wire. He swayed this way and that and tripped over his own feet – not once, but four different times on the short walk from one end of the beach to the other.

The girl looked over, slid her hand under her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. She sighed audibly, tilted her face to the sky, and then returned to her phone. She gave a brief wave at the boys. She said hey without looking. She turned toward her phone, and started thumbing the buttons and swiping the screen, over and over and over again.

“It’s us!” the short boy said. “Nate and Hugo. From Health class.”

She gave a small nod without looking up.

“Front row,” the tall boy added helpfully.

They made it across and planted themselves – at great personal risk, I might add – on the hot sand next to her beach blanket. They gritted their teeth as the plopped their bottoms onto the searing heat.

(I wanted to tell them that they just had to brush away the top half inch of sand, and it was cool underneath, but that would have outed me as an eavesdropper. And eavesdropping is fun.)

The muppet-grins returned. The girl didn’t notice.

“So?” the short boy said. “Wassup?” he waggled his head when he talked. He was having the best day.

The girl raised one finger and thumbed a few more lines into her phone.

“Isn’t it weird,”  the tall boy said. “That we’d just be here? On this beach? At the same time as you? Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“Yup,” the girl said. She scanned the beach; she scanned the sky; she scanned her fingers and toes. She didn’t look at the boys.

“So,” the short boy said. “Whatcha been doing? All summer? Did you see I put my phone number in your yearbook? Maybe you didn’t see.”

“Nope,” the girl said. “And I’ve been doing pretty much nothing. Texting.” She held up her phone. She didn’t look at the boys.

“Oh,” the short boy grunted. “I know how that goes. Me too.”

The tall boy rounded on his friend. “You don’t have a cell phone.”

“Well….” the short boy said.

“Your mom won’t let you have one.”

“I know, but….” the short boy said.

“So how can you be texting?” the tall boy said. The girl lifted herself a little higher, pulling herself off of her elbows and onto her hands. She looked at the boys and grinned. She really was – honest to god – astonishingly pretty.

“Good question,” she said.

“Well,” the short boy said. “Not texting, like in the flesh. Mostly it’s, you know, the theory of the thing.”

“There’s a theory of texting?” the girl said.

“Well, yeah,” the short boy said, his doughy face starting to grow an adorable shade of pink. “Well no. Well sorta. It’s yes and no. It’s just, you know, texting, vis a vis doing nothing. If I had the capability of texting while I was doing nothing, then I’d be texting as part of my doing nothing. As it stands, I am doing nothing without texting  - sans texting  – if you will, but it’s still doing nothing.” He spoke fast, as if he had to yank all of his words out at once, like a bandaid that was stuck to his arm hair.

(I wanted to get up right then, walk over, and put my arm around his shoulders. I wanted to explain, in the kindest way that I knew how, that boys who said things like vis a vis and sans, typically don’t date in high school. And often not in college either.)

The girl pressed her lips into a thin line.

“I’m not ‘doing nothing’ when I’m texting.”

“Oh!” the short boy said. “I don’t mean -”

“I’m doing the opposite of nothing. I’m talking to people. Other people. Other than you, I mean.”

“It’s just -”

“That’s not nothing. That’s something.”

“Of course,” he said. “You’re right.” And he shot the tall boy a poisonous look.

“I have a cell phone,” the tall boy said.

“I know,” the girl said, returning to her phone. “You’ve texted me. Frequently.”

“I told my mom about that,” the short boy said. “I mean, if you have a phone and you haven’t turned into a drug addicted zombie, then surely I won’t either.”

“That’s what she thinks?” the girl said.

“She’s crazy,” the boy said, moving his open hands back and forth so fast they looked like a blur. “And she’s – fuckin – I mean, I’m like, ‘fuck, mom. I mean fuck.”

This boy - this boy! Clearly is unaccustomed to swearing. He said each f-word as though he was spitting a tack into his hand and hoping it would stick into his skin. Each one was foreign. His friend stared at him, open mouthed.

And then I stepped in.

I stood out of my chair, looked straight at him, and said, “Young man!”

The boy froze. His friend elbowed him in the gut. All three of them stared at me in shock.

“Language!” I said. “This beach is crawling with kids. Watch your words.”

(side-note: I do this a lot. I’m the person who tells the guy to watch his mouth on the bus because we’re sitting right there and he’s shouting obscenities into his cellphone, oblivious to the wide eyed children on my lap.)

(second side-note: I have a big, broad, booming voice. I’m pretty sure that people across the lake stopped swearing too.)

The girl turned. “Oooooooooo!” she said. “Look what you did. You made the nice mom mad. Nice work.” She looked thrilled.

The short boy hung his head. His face paled to the color of spoiled milk. “Sorry ma’am,” he mumbled. “I’m really, really sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t,” I said. And I returned to watching my kids follow their swimming instructors around like little baby ducks.

Shortly after, the boys went back to their towels on the other side of the beach. They kept looking back over at the pretty girl, trying to catch her eye, but she kept her gaze on her phone, her thumb continuing to press and press and press.

And then, just before she left, she looked over at me, and smiled. She held up her phone. “It’s not even on,” she said. “It ran out of battery power like an hour ago. Do you think they noticed?”

“No, honey,” I said. “I don’t believe they did.”

She slipped on her flip-flops and trekked up the hot sands, toward home.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: art meets life, beach moments, Nerd mom, Summer, teenagers are awesome

My Cover is All Official and Stuff

So, I’ve been far, far away for the last two weeks. We loaded up the minivan with kids and dog and food and gear and went camping in the Badlands and the Black Hills and the Rockies, and Devil’s Tower (we tried to camp in the Laramie Range, but alas, they were on fire). And it was awesome. And I have Much To Say on the subject, but it will take more brain space than I currently have available. So instead….

TA DA!

My cover!

I got the official cover while I was gone, but I never had a solid enough wifi signal to actually compose a post and heave it onto the internets. But now I am home. So here it is!

Isn’t it a pretty thing?

The artist – like the new cover for JACK – is a lovely Italian man named Iacopo Bruno, and I think he is super special. He also made a bunch of interior illustrations, that I can’t show you yet, but I assure you,  are FANTASTIC.

Anyway, what have you people been doing for the last two weeks? Any glorious adventures?

 

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Badlands, Black Hills, fantasy, Iacopo Bruno, iron hearted violet, Middle Grade Novels

Cabin Fever

Well, Leo’s camp this morning was cancelled due to rain, which meant that my jealously-guarded 90 minutes of uninterrupted work time has gone out the window. I was able to work a little bit after I (with theatrics) got him on an imagination-fueled thought experiment about what it would be like to live in a colony on the moon, and what the buildings would need to look like and be made of, etc. He drew about seventeen pictures. Here is one of an observation tower:

“Here are the solar panels,” he said. “For power. They  also double as laser blockers. For aliens. And they also protect people from the radiation bursts from the sun, so it doesn’t destroy the colony. They save the radiation in those batteries underground for power in case the sun burns out. Also, they use them for their energy rockets. For aliens.”

“The aliens might be a problem, you think?”

He looked at me, his face terribly serious. “Well, of course. They will want to take over my lunar colony. Because it’s awesome.”

But after nineteen pictures, he’s now bored, and we have to get out of the house. And I’m not sure where we’ll go. The library for sure. And we might make a trip over to Wild Rumpus to say hi to the chickens running through the bookshelves. Also the rats. Leo loves the rats.

Where else should we go on this dark, rainy afternoon. And how can I keep my perpetually turned-up-to-eleven son occupied so that I can do some revising?

(who am I kidding? I’ll never work again. By the end of summer, my brain will be nothing but an amalgamated goo of popsicles and sunscreen and watermelon rinds and sand.)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: lunar colony, rain, the business of being mom, writing while parenting

Nerd Mom Is Nerdy

Well, I was a total fraud the other day. A baldfaced, unabashed, dirty, rotten liar.

My daughter, DeeDee – my rockin and rollin little intellectual, type-A punkster, really wanted to dye her hair pink for the summer. Since I am equipped to deny this child exactly nothing, I acquiesced. I figured, the poor child spends most of the year in a school uniform, where brazen earring-wearing and glittery nail-painting and eye-shadow sporting are forbidden. In the summer, I thought, let the child go nuts.

So I went to the beauty supply store, looking for the long-term temporary dyes – the ones that slowly come out over twenty washes or so – and we talked about which ones were least likely to cause irritation or harm.

“Is this for you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s for my nine-almost-ten-year-old. She’s super rad.”

“Oh!” she said, clutching her hands to her heart. “You’re Cool Mom! I love Cool Mom! I want to be Cool Mom someday!”

And I smiled and basked. God help me! I basked! It felt so good!

“Um,” said my son. “No she isn-”

“Shh!” I said.

“What?” the girl asked.

“Nothing!” I said, my voice overly bright and brittle as broken glass. “We’d better be off.”

“But mom-”

“Off we go!”

I slapped my hand over his mouth and continued to bask (just keep saying it! I wanted to shout. Say it and say it a million times and then it will be true!) as we hustled out the door. I needed to keep the kid quiet. Because Leo knew – he knew!

“Hush, boy!” I hissed as we scuttled into the blazing heat of the sun-baked parking lot.

“But mom!” Leo said.

“Can it.”

But he was right. I am not Cool Mom.  I wish I was Cool Mom. But I am not, and I never will be. I am Nerd Mom.

Or maybe I’m Dork Mom. The semantics of Nerd vs. Dork always confuse me, and the fact that I have spent any time at all trying to parse out the nuances of meaning between nerd and dork confine me forever to both.

Anyway.

Today, while Ella was volunteering at the local library and DeeDee (pink hair and all) was at two different camps, and Leo, after doing his little golf camp at the municipal golf course, was on his own for the rest of the day. So he and I went to Fort Snelling, and did what all history nerds do when visiting historical sites:

Folks, it was some hard core nerding.

My seven year old son had several in-depth chats with historically cosplayed volunteers in the wheelwright shop and the blacksmith shop and doctor’s office and the kitchens.

“Hmm,” he said, eyeing a nail that was out on a display at the blacksmith’s shop, “I thought the nails were supposed to be square in those days. Why is this one round?”

“Oh,” the smithy said, somewhat embarrassed.

“Your display isn’t right,” Leo chided.

“That’s not supposed to be there.” He pocketed the nail and grinned at the other adults in the room. “Cute kid,” he said.

“I’m not cute,” Leo said. “I’m right.”

Later at the bake shop, Leo and I had Serious Questions about yeast. “People think yeast is bugs,” Leo told the lady, “but it is not bugs.” 

We went into the soldier’s barracks and an actor was showing another child the mechanisms comprising his firearm. Leo put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You shouldn’t touch the hammer. It’s made of flint and it will cut your finger right to the bone.”

The actor was taken aback. “How did you know that, son?”

“Ummm,” I said, not wanting to get into the story of how Leo, at four, had snatched one of those guns (which are heavy, by the way) and ran outside with it, laughing all the while. A guy dressed as the general chewed him out and explained in graphic detail the many things that could injure him forever and ever. I don’t know if it was the graphic nature of the descriptions or the fact that he was in a general’s outfit that did the trick, but the lecture made an impression on Leo.

I looked at the ground and not at the pretend soldier’s eye. “I think we read it in a book somewhere.”

We then went to the general store and Leo explained to an old man all about the manufacture of tobacco.

It was in this moment that I realized that I have permanently ruined my children. My weird obsessions with odd details and obscure facts, my insistence on looking up every dang thing that ever crosses my mind? These things are part of my kids’ psyches. They remember the weird things I’ve told them about ship building and agriculture and government. They remember odd facts about astronomy and transpiration and the role of blue-green algae in the ocean’s ecosystem.

After leaving the Fort, we stopped at the library to return some books and grab some new ones, and also to share a story before we headed across town to pick up DeeDee. Ella was in there somewhere, setting things up, but we hadn’t seen her yet. Leo and I sat down on the floor, with a gorgeously illustrated copy of Melville’s Moby Dick spread out in front of us, as well as one of my favorite books of all time - The Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. We also found a book on the history of ship building. Leo was terribly interested in the boats that had been retrofitted to be able to navigate through ice. He leaned into the pages.

“So,” he said. “It’s oak planks, then tar, then iron. But doesn’t the water get through the iron?” We looked at the descriptions of seam sealing and we imagined the terrible fear that sailors must have had on those whaling ships, surrounded by an enraged, icy ocean with no help possible. We imagined being unleashed into the world on a desperate, futile, and morally questionable task.

Then we heard a gasp.

“MOM?” Ella said, her face positively green.

“Hi, honey!” I said, waving.

She stalked over. “Don’t hi me,” she hissed. “There are people that I know here.”

“Well-” I said.

“And here you are.”

“I-”

“Nerding in public! UGH!”

And she stalked away.

Leo looked at me and patted my back. “Secretly,” he said. “She likes her nerd mom.” He grinned. “And so do I.”

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Dork Mom, family, Fort Snelling, Minnesota Historical Society, Moby Dick, Nerd mom