“You’ve finished your novel,” says a friend or family member to me.  “Now what?”

“Try to get it published,” I reply.

“Well duh,” says the friend or family member, “but how do you do that?”

“Simple,” I say.  “All it takes is faith and trust, and a little bit of pixie dust.”

My friend or family member’s eyebrows scrunch.  “Isn’t that how you fly?”

Oh, right.  I sometimes get mixed up, because getting published can seem about as impossible as flying.

The good news is, while no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to fly (somewhere, a fairy just fell down dead from my implication that there’s no such thing as pixie dust), persistent work may land me a publishing contract.  If I get lucky.  (See, I do believe in fairies, as well as their dust.)

What I’ve discovered inquiring non-writer minds want to know is:  what exactly is that work which, combined with luck, gets a writer published?  That’s what I’m here to tell you. Read the rest of this entry »

The Burt Squirt at 3 months, but looking more like 5 or 6 months. It's the man boobs.

“Can he sit up?” asked Lindsay, the photographer, at the start of our three month-old’s session at the JC Penney Portrait Studio.

“For a few seconds,” I replied, my husband quickly adding, his voice strident with paternal pride, “He did it for a whole minute the other day!”

“We’ll give it a try,” Lindsay said.

Try was the operative word. After a few unsuccessful attempts at snapping a picture before the Burt Squirt toppled over sideways (I think this had less to do with the Burt Squirt not having good balance than with his not wanting to sit up), she asked her assistant for the various tools of the photography trade that keep infants propped up for photo shoots.

She asked us, “How old is he?”

“Three months,” I answered, my husband chiming in again, “Four months on Thursday, actually!”

Lindsay stopped arranging the Burt Squirt and looked him over.  “Seriously?  He’s big.  I thought he must be five or six months.  That’s why I asked if he could sit up.”  She shook her head, chuckled to herself.  And repeated, “He’s big!”

“We get that a lot,” I said, because it was the truth.

A few weeks earlier, a Walmart cashier had clucked her tongue at the sleeping baby in the shopping cart.  “Oo-ee!  He’s juicy! How old that child?”

“Eleven weeks,” I replied, adding, as the cashier furrowed her brow in the effort to convert weeks to months, “Almost three months.”

“Three months!’ the cashier cried, then proceeded to grumble, “Ain’t no way that baby only three months.  Look like he five or six months.  Three months.  Heh.”

She looked up, suddenly, and her grumbles became a shout at a fellow cashier just closing up at the next wrap stand.  “How old you think this baby look?”

The second cashier shambled over and looked the Burt Squirt up and down.  “Five or six months.”

“He three months old!” said the first cashier.

Now it was me who was being looked up and down.  “What you feeding this child?  Cereal?”

“Nope,” I replied, grinning in amusement — and, I admit — a touch of pride, “just breastmilk.”

“Breastmilk.”  The cashier’s eyes dropped a few inches south of my chin.  “Heh.  I never did none of that breastmilk.  Hurt too much.”

I chuckled politely, because, well…what do you say to a Walmart cashier when she tells you about her breastfeeding pain?  She shifted her attention to the still-sleeping Burt Squirt.

“Three months old and he that big…I bet you don’t qualify for wick, do you?”

“Pardon?”  I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

“Wick,” she repeated.

It wasn’t until she explained that she, too, had a baby who was big for his age, and that somehow that had kept them from qualifying for it, that I understood she was asking if I received WIC.

She proceeded to tell me how she’d gotten around the problem of having a big, healthy-looking baby by getting her sister to apply for WIC, while I contemplated how strange this conversation had become.  Never in my life had I been asked if I was on, or had applied for, government assistance.

Did I look poor?  I was wearing my bleach-stained yoga pants and an old t-shirt and had tied my hair up in a quick, sloppy bun.  Then again, you can buy that look at designer boutiques.

Maybe it was because, rather than buy expensive baby formula, I’d resorted to feeding my child from my own breasts.

Or maybe it was just because I was shopping at Walmart.  It was, after all, the very supermarket in which a woman stalked me, offering parenting advice to me and bits of a sticky bun to the Burt Squirt. But that’s another story for another day.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the low low prices that keep me shopping at Walmart.  It’s the stories.  (It’s certainly not the way they randomly stop selling items that are a part of my regular shopping list.)

(Okay, I admit it.  The low low prices are the main reason I shop at Walmart.  But the stories are a bonus.)

I’d say that, as the mommy of a big baby, these stories are my new normal, except that I’ve got lots of strange stories about Walmart, going back long before I was the mommy of a big baby.

But then, doesn’t everyone?

Recently several girlfriends and I organized a book club.  Our first read was Persuasion, which I’ve had recommended to me many times as Jane Austen’s best work.

Having now read it, I must disagree.

The story — a second chance at love for an older couple who just couldn’t make it work the first time around — may be her best.  The style?  In my opinion, not so much.

One of the qualities I like about Austen in general is how accessible her novels are to today’s readers.  Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, for example, read easily, primarily through lots of dialogue that both tells the stories and develops the characters.  It’s the style I’d come to expect from Austen (and, I have to admit, the style of contemporary novel I prefer).

That said, the divergence from the dialogue-heavy style of Austen’s earlier work took me by surprise in Persuasion. While the prose passages are impeccably written and packed with Austen’s wit, they nonetheless exemplify telling versus showing — the ultimate writing mistake, by today’s standards.  I appreciate that the “rules” of writing have evolved over time as the way people live and read has changed, but even bearing that in mind, I found it difficult to connect with the characters of Persuasion because of it.

Much of the crucial action happens off-stage and is merely summarized  in narrative after the fact.  I suppose on one hand this stylistic choice highlights the reserve and compliance of the heroine, Anne.  On the other, not actually seeing Anne’s first encounter with Captain Wentworth undercuts the emotional impact that should be present when a woman meets her former fiance, with whom she is still in love, eight years after breaking off their engagement.  Imagine if Austen had simply recounted the Netherfield ball instead of showing Elizabeth and Darcy’s dance and their glorious UST.  You wouldn’t root for them to get together in the end, would you?  That’s how I felt reading about Anne and Wentworth.  I rooted for the idea of them, but my imagination wasn’t captured by characters I felt I knew; they remained names whose personalities eluded me.

One character in the novel I did feel I saw rather than merely heard about is Anne’s hypochondriac sister, Mary Musgrove.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she also seems to have more dialogue than any other character.  Even though she’s meant to be tiresome and obnoxious with her constant bellyaching and oblivion to her sisters-in-law’s attempts to avoid her company, she became my favorite character purely on the basis that I knew who she was amid a bunch of virtual strangers.

While I’d rank Persuasion as my least favorite Austen novel (though I have yet to read Mansfield Park), I must concede that it contains my favorite line out of all her works, Captain Wentworth’s achingly romantic “you pierce my soul.”  Guh.

I’ll also repeat that I really like the story, especially after viewing the 1995 film, which rights the wrongs of the novel because the media of film necessarily shows instead of tells. Captain Wentworth’s bitterness and inability to get over Anne are so much more clear to me as performed by Ciarán Hinds.  

On a related note, Persuasion must be one of the more difficult Austen novels to adapt, precisely because of the lack of actual dialogue in the book.  Lots of work required on the part of the screenwriter to create Austen-like dialogue.  I want to say that in the Sense and Sensibility commentary, screenwriter Emma Thompson mentioned that she considered adapting Persuasion (though I might be misremembering; she might have mentioned that a Persuasion film came out the same year as her S&S).  In any case, I’d love to see what she could do with it, as S&S is not only my favorite Austen film, but my favorite movie ever!

Austen enthusiasts and Persuasion fans, do comment and tell me why I’m wrong about this book.

In case you missed it last Friday, I posted the first part of a two-part short story.  I’m not waiting until this Friday to post the conclusion, because Fridays are slow days on teh internets.

Her Dying Wish (Part 2)

Normally, Saturday mornings were for her (as they are for everybody–as they are for you) bliss.  Waking up is a delight because you have slept well, your subconscious untroubled in slumber by the unpleasant prospect of being woken by an alarm and having to go to work and finding repose in the freedom of an entire day ahead of you to do as you please–or, if you are dying, an entire day to do the things you always wanted to do before you die.

This Saturday, however, she awoke feeling as if she had never slept at all.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Burt Squirt on the Diaper Deck, which, incidentally, was invented by his grandfather. Because the Squirt's daddy inevitably had a blowout whenever they were out, and in those days there were no such things as infant changing tables. A true family legacy.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating that for my first Mother’s Day, the Burt Squirt gave me eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.  Mr. Burt gave me the day off from diaper duty.  And a new coffeemaker.  All such thoughtful mommy gifts that it’s impossible to say which is the best.

Yesterday was Mr. Burt’s first Father’s Day.

He got a shirt that didn’t fit.

He volunteered to change two diapers.  Both turned out to be horrendously poopy.

Three times he picked up the Burt Squirt and became the target of projectile spit-ups of atomic proportions.

Apart from sounding like the “The Twelve Days of Father’s Day,” this must be proof of something.

Is it that I’m the Burt Squirt’s favorite?  Or does he realize, even at this tender age, the wisdom in not biting the breast that feeds him? Maybe it’s just one more example of the gender disparity inherent in Hallmark holidays.

One thing I’m sure of:  I wouldn’t have had as good an attitude as Mr. Burt if any of these misfortunes had befallen me on Mother’s Day.  He takes the bad parts of parenting in stride, without losing his smile or getting annoyed at the Burt Squirt.  Because he knows that in life, crap happens.  Literally.  And you’ve just got to clean it up and move on without letting yourself get mired in it.

This from the man who swore, before the Squirt was born, that he’d never be able to change a poopy diaper without throwing up.

So Happy Father’s Day to my better half.  I learn more from you about how to be a great parent than I could get any parenting book.  Especially since I don’t have time to read parenting books.

And Liam may only be three months old, but with you for his example, he’s well on his way to being a great dad someday, too.

And, as the poops of the fathers are visited upon the sons, you’ll be vindicated on a future Father’s Day.  What better present is there than that?