I’m not at all surprised to like The West Wing, as I was a big fan of Aaron Sorkin’s more recent and more short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Though it’s a political drama and therefore deals with heavy, issue-driven storylines, it’s full of the same brand of fast-paced, witty, and often humorous dialogue that drew me to Studio 60.

And likeable characters.  Even if you don’t agree with the politics of the show, you can’t help but care about President Bartlet and his staff.  Why?  Because they’re people. Real, fleshed-out people.

Take, for example, this exchange between C.J. Cregg, White House Press Secretary, and Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn,  which occurs during a walk-and-talk about a press briefing in Celestial Navigation:

C.J.
I have a dentist appointment at noon.

SAM
What's wrong?

C.J.
Nothing's wrong.

SAM
C.J.?

C.J.
I'm experiencing some pain.

SAM
For how long?

C.J.
About a month now, but it'll go away by itself.

SAM
When?

C.J.
When I die, Sam. Carol, cancel the appointment.

SAM
Carol, set the briefing for two o'clock. Keep the appointment.

C.J.
Sam!

SAM
Your teeth are the best friends you got, C.J.

C.J.
They are?

SAM
You take care of them, they'll take care of you.

C.J.
When'd you start talking like this?

SAM
I'm nuts for dental hygiene.

Probably not as funny to read as it was to watch, but Mr. Burt and I howled at that last line of Sam’s, Mr. Burt commenting, “That’s so Sam.”  I agreed.  And even though it’s just a throwaway line with no bearing whatsoever on the story of that particular episode, it so cemented the character of Sam Seaborn for me that I haven’t stopped thinking about what a great example “I’m nuts for dental hygiene” is of an apparently insignificant but carefully-chosen detail bridging the gap between fictional character and fictional person.

It makes me think about my own characters and wonder whether I’ve drawn them out in such a way as to make my readers laugh out loud and say, “That is so John!”  What is John nuts for?

And I realize, as I reflect, that I need to do some more work in the quirks and foibles department.  I flirted with the idea of John being a bit of a technophobe – and yet, as my brother pointed out to me, John engages in a bit of cyber repartee that hinges on knowledge of netspeak a technophobe certainly wouldn’t have. An astute reader might laugh at the banter, but ultimately would say, “That’s not John.”

So, another item to add to the revision list – that is, whenever the Burt Squirt gives me a chance to do anything with the ideas I’ve got bouncing around in my head.  Until then, I’ll keep watching good shows like The West Wing and reading good books like the several I’ve been meaning to review, in the hope that Sam and others will continue to inspire me to be a better writer.

This week, I was leaving Walmart when a voice called, “Ma’am!  Excuse me, Ma’am!”  I turned around to see my cashier chasing me down, waving what appeared to be a packet of seasoning.  “This is yours, Ma’am, you forgot it!”  I thanked her, thinking it was my fajita seasoning, and glad I wasn’t going to have a repeat of last week’s two Walmart trips.

Except that it wasn’t fajita seasoning.  It was buffalo wing seasoning.  Which the cashier insisted I keep, even though I insisted it wasn’t mine.  Maybe I paid for it; I didn’t care enough to check my receipt.

The point of the story:  last week I didn’t get all my groceries, and this week I got extra groceries.  It all evened out.

This wasn’t my only experience this week of situations evening each other out.

Also last Monday at Walmart, I was the victim of parking lot theft.  As in, someone whipped through a row, going the wrong direction, and stole the parking space into which I was just about to turn.  I was incensed!  How could someone be so rude — and to a lady with a baby in the car?!

Later that same shopping trip, I was having some difficulty unpacking my cart to pay for my groceries while holding a Burt Squirt who did not want to be in his carrier.  The man ahead of me in line noticed my struggle and then proceeded to unload my entire cart for me.  (Possibly this explains the lunch meat going AWOL.)

But see what happened?  Someone was rude to me, then someone was extremely kind to me.  It all evened out.

This of course reminds me of the Seinfeld episode “The Opposite” (quite possibly my favorite episode), in which George was down but goes up (by doing the opposite of his instincts), Elaine was up but goes down (thanks to Jujyfruits), and Kramer dubs Jerry “Even Steven” (because he loses a gig and then gets a gig).

That’s me!

(If only blogging about Walmart would reveal my comedic genius and lead to my becoming fabulously wealthy like Mr. Seinfeld.)

Never having read any Stephen King (with the exception of On Writing, years ago), I have no idea whether my style remotely resembles his.  (My previous blog post came up Margaret Atwood – yay! – but the first page of my novel, which I re-wrote yesterday, came up Dan Brown – bleurgh.) Maybe those of you who read King can read this short story of mine and compare.  But do not expect any telekinetic prom queens, freaky clowns, or possessed automobiles.

Dust to Dust

I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly the panic takes me
The sound so ominously tearing through the silence
I cannot move, I’m standing
Numb and frozen
Among the things I love so dearly
The books, the paintings, and the furniture
Help me …
- Abba, “The Visitors”

Two black bags stood packed in the middle of the living room. It was the first time they’d ever been used, purchased not quite three months ago at the J.C. Penney thirty miles away. Their newness was obvious, even jarring, in the midst of all the antique furniture that fitted out the room. A lot of it was Victorian, or Victorian reproduction, and all of it feminine. None of it suited the dark paneled walls and rustic beams in the ceiling, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of furniture to suit the leathery skinned, denim clad cowboy leaning against the kitchen doorjamb staring at the bags (who, if he’d heard himself called a cowboy, would’ve made a gruff sound in his throat; he was far too old to be called any kind of boy). It was the detritus of the grandmother Judith had never known, which always seemed coated in layers of dust no matter how often she took the furniture polish to it, as if the dust were Nana’s presence in the house.

The old cowboy — Papa, he was to Judith — never talked much about Nana, yet to Judith, it somehow felt like he never spoke of anything else. He held her forever in his deep-set, startlingly blue eyes; her name was marked indelibly on his forearm, below the rolled-up shirtsleeve. Once Judith had asked about the tattoo, and Papa grunted and told her that all the guys got them during the war — anchors and eagles and such war imagery, or hearts draped in banners with their sweethearts’ names. It was very romantic, Judith thought, and very tragic. She told her boyfriend Johnny, and for Christmas he got her name tattooed on his bicep for her, which made Judith write in her diary that it would be Johnny her own granddaughter would see forever held in her eyes. Which were green, and not as naturally conducive to tragic romance as startling blue; but she had to work with what she got.

What Papa didn’t tell Judith was that Betty Jean hadn’t been impressed by the romantic gesture. Said she thought love meant remembering a girl’s name without having it written on your arm like a cheat sheet. She’d been that breed of practical Baptist farm girl indigenous to East Texas — the breed of girl Judith had never quite managed to be, even though she wore western cut jeans and shirts and boots.

But then, Judith had been born in San Francisco.

Today she was going off to college, which neither Nana nor Papa had done, and which Papa couldn’t see the purpose of, as her own mama, he’d told her more times than she could keep track of during the college application process, had only gotten an illegitimate child (her) and a drug addiction (and eventual OD) for the cost of tuition. Judith had argued more times than she could keep track of that her mama had gone to Berkeley in the 70s for art, while she was staying local to earn her teacher’s certificate. She couldn’t change that much.

When you lived in the part of East Texas Judith and her grandfather did, “local” didn’t mean there was a college near enough that Judith could live at home with Papa as she had since she was five. Judith didn’t have her own car (this past summer Papa had driven her to and from her job at the J.C. Penney in his battered old farm truck). Johnny, headed to a technical college in the same town as Judith, had gotten a new Ford F-150 for high school graduation, and would drive Judith to the start of the semester and bring her home for Thanksgiving.

So, all her clothes that would get her though the sweltering Texas August and September and the warm October and November (jeans, boots, a variety of short and long-sleeved plaid, striped, solid, and the odd floral shirts, and her letter jacket, in case of the random cold snaps Texas usually got for a day or two before Thanksgiving, before Indian summer set in) were packed in the black suitcase; the matching duffel bag held one of Nana’s handmade quilts and a set of sheets she’d embroidered — and a couple of bath towels, which were new, and had caused a mainly silent quarrel with Papa when she’d come off a shift at J.C. Penney with a shopping bag in hand (as in, he’d looked from beneath his heavy brow, and frowned, while she argued her case). Judith hated old towels, and had gotten these in a buy one, get one for one cent sale, on top of her employee discount. Practically free. In fact Papa ought to save a few bucks returning the suitcase and duffel, which were her graduation presents, and let her re-buy them with her discount. He’d looked insulted by the suggestion, so Judith let it drop. Was he feeling insulted all over again, she wondered, as he stared at her suitcases?

In actuality, Judith mistook insult for chagrin, but Papa’s tan, lined face was a difficult one to read. Had he been too thrifty over the years? Was that why Barbara turned out like she did?

“Thought you was s’posed to meet Johnny out front,” he said.

Judith had been walking slowly all around the living room, running her hands over each piece of furniture and every knickknack, picking up the framed photographs as if to hug her nana, her mama. Most of the pictures in the room were faded to shades of yellow, or black and white, as Papa hadn’t used the camera since Nana passed away. There were a few of Judith — her yearbook pictures, including her most recent in a bright red cap and gown — but none of them were framed, as Papa claimed he “didn’t know nothin’ ’bout that kinda thing”. Scribbled in one of her spiral notebooks she’d bought for her courses and packed in the duffel bag along with her linens was a list of all the pictures of herself and their dimensions; for Christmas she thought she’d frame her pictures for Papa, and maybe buy one of those wooden picture display shelves she’d seen when she was working at Penney’s.

She looked over her shoulder at Papa and lifted an eyebrow. “Thought you hated it when Johnny honks for me instead of coming to the door.”

“Don’t stop you from goin’ out with him.”

Shaking her head, Judith turned away again. “I called him back last night and said he had to come in and get my bags like a Southern gentleman and stand here and say Yessir while you give him hell about not speeding and not being alone in his apartment with me and not going to any parties and getting busted for drinking.”

Papa’s only response was an unintelligible gruff monosyllable. Judith chose to interpret it as a laugh, though if she were honest, she wasn’t sure she’d ever actually heard Papa laugh.

For some minutes they stood silent in the living room, as they’d passed so much of their lives. Gradually Judith became aware of that third-wheel sensation she’d come to recognize in her teen years as Papa having a conversation with Nana. She sat at the far end of the sofa, closest to the TV, and flicked it on with the remote so they could have their privacy. Anyway she always had to sit down when the air became heavy like it was now, as all the unsaid words filled up the space that was already stifling from the mid-August sunlight glaring through the window sheers and the musty, mildewy smell they never had been able to find the source of, which was so much worse this time of year.

The roar of an approaching truck engine told Judith that Johnny was coming up the dirt driveway. She pictured the cloud of dust his tires kicked up since it had been another summer of drought. He’d gripe the whole way to Waco about getting his shiny new black pickup dirty. Shutting off the TV, she stood and thought about what she’d say to shut him up. Probably that she’d take his truck to the damn car wash when they got there. She had lots of quarters in her purse for the dorm laundry rooms.

The putter of the idling engine indicated Johnny was parked in front of the house now. Then the engine kicked off. A heavy door creaked open, then banged shut. There was a jangle of keys, pocket change, and Johnny’s big belt buckle as cowboy boots clopped to the door.

The bell rang.

“You gonna get that?” Papa asked.

Judith nodded, but found she couldn’t make her legs move toward the door. She couldn’t even really think about it. Out the corner of her eye, she saw Papa push off from the wall, his long jean encased legs that ended in pointy-toed boots the color of dust bringing him two steps closer to her.

“You change your mind? You know I won’t object to you staying home and working at the J.C. Panty’s.”

If Judith had been looking at him, she would’ve seen that Papa’s eyes, sunk back under his heavy brow, were twinkling, and that it was her own image wrapped in the startling blue. But Judith was lost in her own mind, and her earliest memory of living in Texas replaying with all the clarity of its having occurred a moment ago.

Papa had taken her to church for the first time in her life, and she’d been awed by the pristine white steeple and the stained glass windows. It was the prettiest building in town (which wasn’t saying a lot). She’d also run, crying, from the five year-olds’ Sunday school classroom when a china doll of a girl with wavy black hair pulled back in a pink hair bow, wearing a pink sundress with a poufy skirt and white patent leather sandals asked her why she was wearing jeans and a Rainbow Brite t-shirt to church.

Mrs. Newsome, the preacher’s wife, had noticed Judith in Papa’s wiry arms, her face buried in his collar, wetting it with tears, and offered to take her shopping after the service. “Panty’s is havin’ a clearance sale,” she said, which only distressed Judith more; it wasn’t her panties Amy had made fun of, although they were probably wrong, too. So she’d let Mrs. Newsome take her to the mall.

Being from San Francisco, Judith knew even at the tender age of five that two department stores that didn’t even have escalators because they were only one storey, and a couple of shoe stores, jewelry shops, and a Wal Mart, wasn’t a good mall. But they got corny dogs for lunch, and when Mrs. Newsome delivered her home to Papa, Judith jumped out of the station wagon and skipped up to Papa with a shopping bag in hand. “Corn Dog 7′s my favorite restaurant and guess what, Papa! Panty’s doesn’t just sell underwear!”

Papa and Mrs. Newsome spent an hour trying to teach her that the store was called J.C. Penney, just like the money, but got no further than Judith saying, “That’s what I said! J.C. Panty!” They thought she was just being a kid, until a week later, when Judith came home from Sunday school laughing about the little boy who’d crossed his legs and squirmed around in his chair and shouted out in the middle of the Bible story, “Tay-cher! I nayed ta go tay-tay!” that they realized Judith’s panty/Penney confusion stemmed from the unfamiliar drawn-out vowel sounds of a Texas twang to her Californian ears. Mrs. Newsome had laughed and laughed in front of Judith, a cackle most unbecoming for a preacher’s wife, which peeled through the tiny farmhouse and hurt Judith’s ears as well as her feelings, and said, “Judy, (Judith hated to be called Judy, though she’d never told anyone) you’re half-Texan. You’ll talk like a native yet.” Papa had laughed, too, though Judith never knew; he’d saved it for the privacy of his bedroom, as he had done when her mama tickled him.

Since then Judith’s speech had, as Mrs. Newsome predicted, relaxed into a drawl. And, ironically, she’d been assigned to the lingerie department of J.C. Penney. Papa had laughed in his room about that, too.

The doorbell rang again. It seemed to have been more forcefully punched this time, and, imagining Johnny sighing and crossing his arms and leaning against the siding, and shaking his head at her when she let him in, asking, “The heck took you so long, Judy?” and “You deaf, woman?” Judith snapped into action.

But her legs did not take her to the door, her hands did not turn the knob to yank it open. She bolted across the living room and threw her arms around Papa’s lean frame. The worn denim of his shirt pressed to her cheek, the wiry softness of his beard tickled her forehead. His strong arms, especially the one tattooed with Nana’s name, held her tightly to him. She almost had an inkling that he loved her and wished to God she wouldn’t go, because she would come back changed; but then it occurred to her it wasn’t her he was sending off to college, but that he was back in the summer of ’76, sending her mama off to Berkeley.

She pulled away. “You bought me suitcases so I could go somewhere.”

And, whether he knew it or not (which he did), so she could be someone. Problem was, neither of them knew who that was, and both were afraid of who it might be.

Judith opened the door, but when Johnny came in saying exactly what Judith had predicted he would, Papa already had her bags in his hands, and he carried them out to the dusty black pickup truck for her.

It was Papa who opened the passenger side door for her as Johnny turned the ignition, Papa who shut it. He said goodbye with a single nod. But as Johnny began to silently back his truck down the long drive, Judith saw through the swirl of dust Nana standing beside Papa. He had his arm around her, and she was waving. Only it wasn’t goodbye; Nana’s hand was somehow connected to Judith’s heart, and there was a twinge, a pull…

Judith turned her head and looked at Johnny. “Just turn the truck around in the yard. Let’s get heck out of Dodge.”

“Yes ma’am.” Johnny threw the shift into drive, jammed his foot on the gas. Papa and the house vanished behind them in a cloud of dust that coated Judith’s new suitcases in the back of the truck.

That wasn’t exactly the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

In fact, simply having a baby, of any size, shape, or color, attracts lots of comments from strangers. Though I still mean people who are strange, and mostly in Walmart.

Take, for example, the woman who meandered over to me one afternoon as I attempted to simultaneously calm a screaming Burt Squirt and find a particular variety of Italian sausage I buy for lasagna (which, of course, Walmart had stopped selling, in typical Walmart fashion).

“Is it a widdle teensy baby?” she asked as she approached the cart.

“Not too teensy,” I answered, slightly embarrassed that my three month-old apparently sounded like he was having a newborn meltdown in the grocery store, and bracing myself to be judged for it.  “He’s about–”

Before I could tell her the Burt Squirt’s age, the woman, peering down into the cart, interrupted, “Oh, yes he’s a widdle teensy boy.”

I heaved a sigh of relief.  No judgment!

Then the woman’s eyes flicked up to me, the haze of baby admiration dissipating abruptly like a summer thunderstorm in Texas.  “He wants you to hold him, Mama.”

My defenses flew up as my mouth fell open.  First of all, how was I supposed to hold my fourteen-pound baby and push a shopping cart full of groceries at the same time?  Second, I was not that woman’s mama!

Alas, neither indignant response emitted from my lips. Quite the opposite, I shrugged, indicating my helplessness in the situation, muttered something about Walmart having stopped carrying the sausage I needed, and pushed cart and screaming child onward.

Though my shoulders hunched under the burden of my inadequacy, my feelings, apparently, weren’t evident enough for the woman.

She called after me, “Where is his paci?”

Pride goeth before the fall — or before the stumble over the grocery cart, in this case.  For, you see, up until then, I’d ridiculously worn it as a badge of pride that my baby didn’t like pacifiers.  He didn’t need them. He could soothe himself without that crutch, and I would never have to go to the trouble of breaking the paci habit. And, best of all, no photos of his cute mouth hidden by a paci.

In that moment, I realized that was a load of utter crap and wished to God my baby was a constant pacifier sucker. That I could whip one out, pop it in, quiet the baby and, most importantly, shut. that. woman. up.

Or, better yet, he’d have had a paci to start with and I never would have had my mothering abilities called into question in the first place.

Things being what they were, I was close to tears as I turned and said, “He won’t take a paci at all.  He hates them.”

Even as I said the words, my brain told me I didn’t owe that busybody an explanation, least of all an apology, for my child’s preferences.  In my head, I knew that. But there’s nothing like unsolicited advice from a strange person in Walmart to break a new mommy’s heart.

Eventually I did resort to taking the Burt Squirt out of his carseat.  In Mama’s arms, his crying instantly stopped. It should have been sweet relief, but instead it was only so much salt in my wounds. Rubbed in deeper when, rounding the corner of the frozen foods aisle, a met the woman again, as she meandered through the bakery, munching on a sticky bun.

“See?” she said around a bite, “I told you he just needed you, Mama.”

As I gritted my teeth, she proceeded to explain to me how I could spare myself future hissy fits by foregoing the carseat and propping him up in the main baby seat with pillows.

Rather than walk away, or at the very least, point out how ridiculous it would be for me to drag a bunch of pillows grocery shopping, on top of the kid and all his personal effects, I listened politely, and even said, with such a show of cheerfulness that I deserve an Academy Award, “He’s eying your pastry.”

Any normal person would know I wasn’t dropping a subtle hint with that comment. But we’re not talking about normal people, we’re talking about strange people at Walmart.

“Would he eat some?” she asked, and broke off a bite-sized portion of her sticky bun.

I gawped at her, and at her sticky bun.

“Thank you,” I managed to sputter after a moment. “But he’s exclusively breastfed. Also, he doesn’t have any teeth.”

I adjusted the Burt Squirt on my hip, wheeled the cart around with my free hand, and proceeded to the checkout, my confidence in my mothering abilities restored.

]]> http://www.lrburt.com/mom-blog/just-trying-to-help/feed/ 2 http://www.lrburt.com/mom-blog/contest/ http://www.lrburt.com/mom-blog/contest/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:19:30 +0000 L.R. http://www.lrburt.com/?p=1375 It’s a prerogative of parenthood to have your child professionally photographed at least once a year — or every few months, if you have a new baby. This can be pricey, but JCPenney meets our needs by offering frequent coupons for affordable portrait packages with no sitting fees. At the Burt Squirt’s last session, the JCPenney portrait staff went above and beyond and let Mr. Burt and me jump in for a couple of family shots without charging us an additional sitting fee.

Of course, that got us to buy more pictures we otherwise wouldn’t have purchased, because we are new parents and therefore suckers. So it was really just a slick business move on the part of JCPenney, but I won’t hold it against them, since I got cute pictures out of the deal.

Or funny pictures, in this case:

When I posted it on Facebook, my mother-in-law commented that it needed a funny caption above the Burt Squirt’s head to reflect his thoughts about his situation.  She’s right.

However, seeing as I haven’t come up with anything cleverer than “Yuck!” or “Bleurgh!” I invite you all to submit your best caption to the very first LRBurt.com contest.  The winner will get a prize, though I can’t promise anything more than a post featuring my favorite submission.  Though that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

Feel free to enter as many times as you want.  You can simply post your caption(s) in a comment (if you followed this link from Facebook, please comment in this post rather than to the Facebook thread).  Or, if you’re Photoshop-savvy, snag the pic and edit away.

The contest will run through next Wednesday.

Tell a friend!

Inspired by Mr. Burt’s sister and brother-in-law, we’ve opted to place The Buddy in whatever activities or social situations arise for us.  In other words, if we want to do it, we do it.  The Buddy comes along for the ride.  The hope is that by the time these settings are actually age-appropriate for him, they’ll be so normal to him that we’ll avoid freakouts and bad behavior.

Also, in becoming Mommy and Daddy, Mr. Burt and I have enough to adjust to without letting go of our normal social lives.

While in terms of physical development The Buddy may not be more advanced than other kids his age (apart from that little thing where he can already sit up unassisted), he’s off the charts in worldly experience.

At two weeks old, he went to a restaurant for the first time.

At three weeks, he had his first Starbucks…

…and spent his first afternoon away from Mommy and Daddy, with Grandmommy and Mimi.

At one month, he tiptoed through the tulips at the Dallas Arboretum…

…and experienced his first Bond family holiday brunch (Easter, at the Gaylord Texan Resort).

At two months, he had his first overnight trip to Grandmommy and Grandaddy’s…

…played at the neighborhood park…

…saw it all happening at the zoo…

…and swam in Damon and TK’s pool on Memorial Day.

At three months, he attended his second wedding (and had a blowout, hence the shirtlessness)…

…helped us celebrate our wedding anniversary at a symphony concert/picnic at the park…

…and  saw his first movie.  (Really — he sat and watched the whole thing.)

He handled it all so beautifully, never once showing any sign of minding being dragged around with Mommy and Daddy, even seeming to enjoy being taken along for the ride.  We never gave a second thought to taking our now four month-old out to family friends’ house for our traditional cookout and fireworks extravaganza.

At twenty-eight, Mr. Burt and I missed the 4th of July fireworks for the first time.

“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.

The Pitch

Once I’ve completed a novel, I must then reduce those 50-100,000 carefully chosen words to 100 or fewer even more carefully chosen words that summarize what my novel is about, capture my tone and style, and make a stranger want to read my book.  Think back cover blurb.

It sounds easy to write a pitch if you’ve already managed to complete a novel, but don’t ever say that to a writer.  Writing a novel is the easy part.  Pitches make writers curl up into the fetal position and wish they’d worked harder at math.

The Agent

If the purpose of the pitch is to make someone want to read my book, then it logically follows that there’s an audience for my pitch.  That would be where literary agents come in.

One upon a time, writers could pitch novels directly to publishers.  In the current economic climate, publishers can’t afford to bank on books that won’t sell.  Since there are thousands of writers trying to get published, the easiest way for publishers to find the novels that will make the New York Times bestsellers list is to consider only work that comes to them via literary agencies.  Agents weed out the drivel and the dreck from  thousands of submissions because they don’t make any money unless publishers pick up their clients.  (An agent typically receives a 15% commission from a book’s total earnings.)

It’s easy for writers to find agents, because we have our own yellow pages of sorts.  The Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market lists the contact info for hundreds of literary agents.  I prefer to use AgentQuery — same info, but free, and also searchable by genre.

The Query

Armed with a pitch and a list of agents, I begin the query process, which consists of emailing and snail-mailing my pitch to agents.  At first contact, most agents only want to see a pitch; a few will, additionally, ask for a detailed synopsis of the entire novel; even fewer will ask for the pitch and the first couple of pages; fewer still ask for a couple of chapters along with the pitch.  Whatever the agent’s submission requirements, I have very little with which to make a big impression!

The Response

More often than not, my queries are met with rejection letters.  That’s something you have to prepare yourself for if you’re going to seek publication:  you will get rejected.  Again and again.  It sucks, but you have to deal with it.

I deal with it by expecting to be rejected; that way I’m never disappointed (well, not much, and not for long), just pleasantly surprised.

So far, I’ve pitched Songs for Piano and Voice to fourteen agents.  Seven of those fourteen agents gave me flat nos (including a few “dear author” form rejections).  Six haven’t responded, though three I don’t expect will at all, as they specify in their submission guidelines that they only respond to projects that interest them.

One agent has responded positively to my pitch.  She asked to read my first five pages to see if my style suited her representation.  Oddly, as I composed this post, she replied to decline my project.

If she’d liked my pages, however, she probably would have asked to read the rest of my manuscript or a chapter-by-chapter summary.  And if she’d liked that, she probably would have offered to represent me.  Then she would have begun the task of shopping my book to publishers.

Rejection stings (content more so than a simple query), but I remain hopeful that someday I’ll tweak the verb tense in the previous paragraph.  Until then, I’ll continue to query.  After all, I’ve only queried fourteen agents out of hundreds.  And I do believe in fairies, and their dust.

And that’s what you do after you finish writing a novel.  Questions?

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.

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.  She did not remember in any detail the nightmares of Soviet hostels that had prevented her achieving rest, but she vividly recalled her previous night’s struggle with disloyalty to Heavenly Cloud, and hated herself a little now for her reaction of dread for her physical comfort when she became aware of her need for the bathroom, which was precisely the terror that had troubled her sleep.  And when she discovered that the first roll of toilet paper had not been an anomaly in the package, all thoughts were forgotten of how she was going to seize her remaining days.

She retreated to bed, curled up in a fetal position, and resisted the temptation to open her laptop and try to restore the document she had deleted last night.

The extraordinary thing, however, was that if you saw her that day, hiding in her bed from herself and her deepest-seated impulses, you would not have thought her pathetic.  And if you’d known her before she thought she was dying of melanoma, you would say that she had never been this passionate, for good or ill, about anything but Heavenly Cloud toilet paper in her whole life to date.  You would choose to be around this version of her rather than the old, because now even though Heavenly Cloud was, once more, the instigator of her passion, something else lurked beneath the surface.  Something interesting and even inspiring.  The very thing, in fact, which John Roberts observed in her when he watched her run riot through the supermarket.  A few minutes with her would, inevitably, have you thinking of an un-hatched egg which, the night before, had an unblemished shell but which, by this morning, had gained a crack from the chick’s first peck of its tiny beak.

By Sunday, the use of Heavenly Cloud toilet paper had caused even more cracks in the veneer.  Unfortunately, the first person who saw her was Mrs. Reverend Green, who mistook them for simply cracking up.

It can hardly come as a surprise to you that someone who purchased her favorite brand of toilet paper for complete strangers in the supermarket also had been known to tell fellow members of her church that if the custodian someday ceased to purchase Heavenly Cloud for the church bathrooms (he thought less about comfort than about the fact that the brand name had a certain churchy-ness about it) she would have to consider changing congregations.  So, after she’d been tortured for two days by the new formula she thought church would give her sanctuary.  The last thing she needed on top of melanoma was a kidney backup.

Good news was, she didn’t get a kidney backup.

Bad news was, she developed a case of adult-onset potty mouth.

Glossing over the exact words she used, we shall simply say that she found no relief in the first stall of the ladies’ room…

…or the second…

…or the third…

…and saw a loathed diamond weave pattern staring back at her with mockery in its pinprick eyes.

For good measure, she told the moron who built the church and hung all the doors so that they swung inward instead of out where he could go.

“Merciful heavens.”

The merciful heavens were quite the opposite of where she had told Gary Burns to go; they were, however, what Mrs. Reverend Green entreated when she entered the ladies’ room with Nola Davies (who was, at age 97, the oldest member of the congregation and, frighteningly, still drove herself to every church service) and heard the un-churchly words echo from the last stall.

Any other church member, having been caught using bad language in front of Mrs. Green and Nola Davies, would have shuffled meekly out of that bathroom stall, red-faced and unable to make eye contact.  Any other church member would have apologized profusely, made excuses, and prayed God was too busy resting on the Sabbath to notice what words came out of one woman’s mouth.

Not her.

She laughed.

For as she emerged from the last stall and saw Mrs. Green standing in the doorway, a fog she hadn’t been aware of previously cleared from her mind.  Once she’d dreamed about saying a bad word at church.  Mrs. Green’s  dream face had looked just like it did now, a caricature of scandalized.  She was tempted to say another one just so she could snap a picture with her camera phone to record the expression.

If you asked her why she wanted a picture, she would tell you so she could look back and find this perfect happiness again when life inevitably made it elude her–which the melanoma she might (or might not) have would do soon enough.

But she didn’t curse again, or get out her camera phone.  If you asked her why, she would have told you that it was because this wasn’t perfect happiness–though she felt closer to it than when she was wreaking havoc in the Though Shalt Not Touch Aisle or writing her complaint letter/horror story.

Now, for the first time, she feared her imminent death.  She wasn’t ready to go yet, not without having achieved perfect happiness.  All her life she’d thought it would come from a European vacation or writing a novel, or, by a very slight chance, from skydiving.  But now she knew the key to that happiness lay within her. There was only one thing she could do to find it.

And she had to do it now.

“I’m going home sick,” she said.  “Melanoma, you know.”

She was out the door and on her way, and so missed Mrs. Green shaking her head and saying that, melanoma or not, there was never an excuse to use bad language, and Nola seasoning her speech with salt in a way the Bible didn’t exactly mean.

“I’d sign up for melanoma if it meant I could do the things I always dreamed of and look that happy,” she cried.  “Now help me wash my hands!”

#

If you asked her how she expected to feel and what she expected to happen when she sent the Heavenly Cloud manufacturer a complaint email about the new toilet paper formula, she would have told you stonily:  “Nothing.  I have no expectations.”

The truth was, before she sent the email, she expected to hit ‘send’ and immediately burst out laughing, her head thrown back as it had been that day in the supermarket when she broke the jars of pickles and realized she’d just given in to a heart’s desire.  There had been glee in punching ire into her keyboard, a heart-pumping exhilaration at clicking ‘send’–but it all fled, and no happiness, not even imperfect happiness, took its place.

This was, of course, because it was the results of these actions, the reactions–the supermarket employee running frantically with mop and caution sign to clean up the spilled pickle juice before someone slipped and filed a lawsuit; Mrs. Green looking so scandalized to hear swear words at church–that she had always longed for, not actually the little rebellions against society in and of themselves.

The truth of this hit her as the message went whizzing through cyberspace, and she let out a cry as though struck in the chest.

A complaint email could only be satisfactory if she got an email back in reply, and whether any such thing would appear in her inbox was highly debatable.  Doubtful, even.  Unlikely, as customer service representatives in general weren’t exactly known for providing satisfactory responses to anything.  She definitely wouldn’t hear anything immediately, as today was Sunday.

Also, there simply wasn’t much you could say back to, “Heavenly Cloud would be more aptly renamed Hell Fire,” especially when it was signed, “a very dissatisfied customer who is dying of melanoma and would prefer her last days to be as blissful as the heavenly cloud she will soon inhabit.”

She held out half a hope that maybe the person in the complaint department would also have recently learned he was dying and answer as an act of impulse.  There was nothing to expect except that this would be out of her system, and she would not die and haunt the world as a ghost because she’d left business unfinished.  Because she knew now that she hadn’t really wanted to travel to Europe, write a novel, or skydive before she died.

There was one thing she was expecting, which she had all but forgotten, and that was that her dermatologist was due to call her on Monday with the results of her mole biopsy.  This was not the sort of thing most people forgot.  Since she had diagnosed herself with terminal cancer from the onset, she had not given a second thought to the fact that nothing about her health was actually confirmed.  Thus, fearful expectation of test results had no part in the despondency that fell over her upon emailing the manufacturer.  Instead, it was pure confusion about her desires and what it meant to be happy.  If it had all only been about getting something out of her system, then why had it made her so deliriously glad, teasing her with the promise of perfect bliss?

She slept badly–again–and woke Monday morning in a worse state than she had even after that first morning of using the horrible toilet paper.  She called in sick from work; if she didn’t really know any more what she wanted to do before she died, she at least knew she didn’t want to be at work.  Though she was not consciously expecting anything from this day, her manager thought she sounded anxious–like she’d received a death threat.  Indeed, if you saw her then, you would inevitably think once more of that hatching egg, the shell no longer smooth, unbroken white, but cracked all over and shifting like a miniature buckling of tectonic plates as the little bird within pecked and flapped with frail, new wings.

And then, just as she was drifting off into depressed slumber, her phone rang.

Her heart began to pound.

“Your biopsy’s negative.  You just have a weird mole.  Or had.  It’s the lab’s now.”

Fifteen words.

Fifteen words from a receptionist were all her heart required to break.

She wasn’t dying.

It made sense, considering she’d never felt ill or displayed any other symptom of melanoma.  Her socially deviant behavior, of course, though uncharacteristic for her, would not have been physically connected to cancer even if her mole biopsy had come back malignant.

But it had not.

She supposed she ought to be relieved and thankful, but she was far from it.  She wasn’t dying, but now that she’d done all she wanted to do before she died, she wasn’t sure she had anything left to live for.

All she had to live with was a lot of guilt that came down on her so crushingly that all she could do was lie prone on her bed.

Up till now, she’d not felt badly for a single thing she’d done, her supposed impending death giving her a sort of immunity.  In this moment of learning that she would live on and on, however, bravado fled, and she was pummeled with accusations from her conscience:  destruction of property, coarse language, harassment…And it made her furious.  She had been duped.  Deceived by that serpent who promised knowledge and happiness.  Suckered into sinning, coerced into criminal acts…

Now, this feeling she was mistaking for guilt was actually sorrow that she’d been caught.  If you were dying, no one could excommunicate you or send you to prison.  And that was really all she was thinking now: what did Mrs. Green think of her now for swearing at church?  And Nola Davies?

(Nola was, in fact, praying not to die before next Sunday so she could again see that young woman who swore like a sailor in front of Mrs. Green and was so happy.)

She even felt sick–irrationally–over what that man who’d asked her out in the Thou Shalt Not Touch Aisle thought of her.  She must have been mistaken about his asking her out; he could only have been trying to mortify her, in some roundabout way, for her rude, crude, and socially unacceptable behavior.

As it turned out, John Roberts was not an irrational thought, as her brain told her, but the key to everything.  The proof that what she was feeling was not guilt, as she erroneously believed, came when there was a knock at her apartment door.

The first thought it prompted was that if there was anything she wanted to do before she died, it was never answer a door again.  But she got up anyway–not really weighed down by immobilizing guilt.

Standing on her tip-toes to look out the peephole, she saw a man in a suit, with his collar open and his tie undone.  On one shoulder he balanced a large, lumpy, blue and white parcel.

Curiosity distracted her from the fact that her heart was no longer in her chest where it was supposed to be, but residing considerably further north, cutting off her flow of air.  When she opened the door the first thing out of her mouth was not, “You’re the handsome executive who asked me out,” but instead was, “Is that…toilet paper?”

It was, and before John could answer, she noted the blue label and told him, “I only use Heavenly Cloud, though I guess I’ll have to switch brands since they changed the formula–”

“Did you buy the Heavenly Cloud in the red package?”

She thought for a moment, more about the fact that she’d previously missed what a pleasantly low, soft quality there was to his voice, than about his question.  It was exactly the male voice she’d always wanted to hear addressing her, pronouncing her name, but had all but given up on hearing, as dates became fewer and farther between.

“Yes,” she answered.

“You should’ve bought the Heavenly Cloud in the blue package.”  John lowered it from his shoulder and held it out to her so that she could see that the plastic wrap read, ‘New!  Heavenly Cloud Ultra Soft.’

“I don’t understand.”  She opened the door a little wider and stepped backward, further into her apartment.  “I’ve always bought the Heavenly Cloud in the red package.  It was always soft enough.”

Beneath his dark hair, his forehead creased.  “I knew the packaging would be confusing.  Our traditional red look went to the Ultra Strong formula.  That’s why it felt like Quilt Thick.”

He tried to press the toilet paper into her hands, and now the twelve-pack fell onto both their toes as she let out a gasp of realization.

“You’re the guy who reads the company’s complaint emails?”  Her face flushed violently hot.

“Not normally.  I’m the External Relations Manager, but I’ve been looking at the complaint emails since we revamped our product.  Yours was the first thing I saw when I went in this morning.”

“Great external relations.”

John grinned.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mary.

Or is it Mary Beth?  And that was a great email.  Instrument of torture in a Soviet hostel, huh?”

She went by just plain Mary, but was too flummoxed to tell him.  “You knew it would be me here.  How?”

“You said you were dying of melanoma.  I saw you buy Heavenly Cloud Ultra Strong.  I knew you were a woman who does whatever you please, even if it’s not a social norm, and that it makes you very happy.”  His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his gaze flicked down to her lips.  His tongue darted out to moisten his own.  “I just knew.”

Mary held the doorknob for support, and she felt herself swaying toward him.  But she held back, a lump suddenly lodging in her throat.  “I’m not.”

“Not what?”

“Not dying and not happy and not doing what I please.  The serpent–”

“The serpent?  Are you sure your name isn’t Eve?”  He grinned; it was a smile she couldn’t help returning.  “No, it was all you, Mary Beth, and you’re definitely a happy woman, and I have to say I’m very, very happy to hear you’re not dying.”  John leaned toward her, reached out as if to touch her, but then withdrew.  “What do you say we go to a fancy restaurant tonight?  You can go in jeans and a t-shirt, and I–well, I’ve always wanted to put ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ to a test.  Haven’t you?”

#

From that moment onward, if you asked Mary Beth Jameson what she wanted to do before she died, she would tell you things surprising and remarkable: not to travel to Europe (though she and John had booked a ski trip to Switzerland for this coming Christmas), not to write a novel, nor to go skydiving, not even if she was feeling adventurous when you asked her.

(Although, that did not mean she was opposed to the idea; in fact, she and Nola Davies had signed up to take skydiving lessons.  But that was Nola Davies’ dream, not hers.)

If she told you what she did want to do before she died, you would not believe her, because these were not the things everyone wanted to do before they died–certainly not the things you yourself want to do before you die.

Or at least not the things you yourself admit to wanting to do before you die.

Regardless of whether or not you believed she really wanted to do these things, if she told you she wanted to, she would be telling you the truth.  Because unlike everyone else who said they wanted to travel to Europe or write a novel before they died, Mary Beth Jameson had actually done the things she had always wanted to do before she died, was doing them on a regular basis, because the only thing she had really wanted to do before she died was to live.

And she began by putting the rest of her package of Heavenly Cloud to good use…

…TPing Reverend and Mrs. Green’s house.