Mother's Day, 2012

This is a photograph of me, circa age 6, with my parents. I think it's from a family vacation in Florida, but I'm not sure.  (I suspect my sister, 13 at the time, took the picture.) What I am sure of is how much I was loved.

I've talked about the story of my family on this blog in the past: I was adopted as a tiny infant, just five days old. My parents, for whatever reason, were utterly open about my birth story. I grew up knowing that they had chosen me, had wanted me, had traveled all the way across the country from New York to California to bring me home.

My mother always called me her special order from G-d. My dad used to tease me and call me 'rice-a-roni' because I was the San Francisco treat. (That was their tag line from an old commercial.)

I'm not sure I realized until I was much, much older how unusual their matter-of-fact treatment of my adoption story was.  In college, I met a girl who didn't find out she was adopted until she was a teenager and she struggled with identity confusion and heartache for many years. This was far more common in the 1960s and 70s than my parent's openness.

Back then, there wasn't anything like today's open adoptions. Adoption was a shameful secret, both for the mothers giving up their babies, and the parents adopting. Adoption equaled loss for too many people.

Today, on Mother's Day, I think of two mothers. The woman who bore me, who understood she was too young to be a mother, and the mother who raised me, who cherished me, who only made me feel special and wanted.

Happy Mother's Day to both women, and to all who mother.  May you be loved, may you be filled with lovingkindness, may you know peace.

Deadlines, To Do Lists, and Expectations, Oh My

I'm a compulsive list maker and setter-up of organizational systems to keep track of them that I ultimately don't or can't use.

I fact, I'm probably the most organized disorganized person you'll ever meet.

This is not something I'm proud of and something I've struggled with for my entire life. I was a terribly disorganized student and blew through deadlines (or at least left things for the last minute) more times than I want to admit. It wasn't until I hit graduate school and my student physical therapy placements that I had to learn to deal with deadlines, schedules, and time management.

It was a hard lesson, but ultimately, I developed a system using a Daytimer paper calendar that I ended up keeping for nearly 2 decades. If I didn't always make my deadlines, at least I knew they existed.

Now that I'm no longer in clinical practice and most of my deadlines are self-imposed, it's definitely more difficult for me to stay on task. At any given time, I'll have a scrap paper to do list floating around my office or the kitchen, another one on a white board in my office, still another one on my PDA, synced to my computer.

It's a little crazy making, quite honestly, but it's the best I can do right now.

I've come to terms with the chaos that is my life currently, juggling writing time, managing the promotion of my debut novel, family responsibilities (life with teens is crazy at the best of times), and my elderly parents' health issues. It means that deadlines come in a lot of different flavors.  Some of them are want-to's: revision of an older novel so I can get it on my agent's TBR pile, brainstorming time for a sequel to THE BETWEEN. Some of them are have-to's: upcoming trip to Cleveland with Dad for a medical consultation. Others are routine tasks that seem as if they never quite finish: bills, laundry, returning phone calls.


Because my brain is almost always spinning in too many directions at once, I write down what I need to do and when I need to complete it where ever I happen to be.  Hence the multiplicity of to-do lists.

Ultimately, things get done. Lists get completed, crossed off, thrown out.

It's just not a pretty process.

Today’s post was inspired by the topic “Deadlines: Love’em or hate’em?”– May’s topic in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour — an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. We have all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s something for everyone to enjoy. 

A Multiplicity of Voices

L to R: Wheel thrown mug and bowls, slab built pitcher, hand built salt/pepper shakers

A few years ago, I started to take ceramics classes at a local studio. I've never thought of myself as any kind of artist--my patients used to laugh at the stick figures I would draw to help them remember their exercises.  I don't have a good eye for balance or color and take pretty mediocre photographs. But I've always been good with my hands, so I figured I could take a chance on playing with clay.

I spend all of Monday mornings at the studio getting covered head to toe in terracotta clay. It's taken me several years of classes, but I'm finally at the stage where I can sit down with an idea in mind and create it.

But I don't just do one kind of work.  I'm too scattered for that.  Or maybe I just like to try too many different things. I feel the same way about my writing and working with different points of view and different genres. I'm not sure I'll ever have only one kind of writing voice.

 The photo is an example of some very different work I've done. It represents both hand building and wheel throwing, functional and more sculptural pieces.  Each type of piece takes a different mindset, but what I hope I bring to all my clay work is a sense of playfulness and exploration.

I do the ceramics because I find it meditative and fun, and love the inspiration I get from my fellow classmates.  I'm not interested in selling the work or getting into production pottery.  Mostly, I like to find happy homes for pieces and hope the people I've given work to enjoy using it.

It's also a joy to practice an art form without the kind of pressure I put on myself about my writing.  Precisely because it's simply a hobby, I can be freer with experimentation and not place so much importance on the outcome.

And today, for the first time in years of classes, I reached one of my goals: throw a large bowl starting with 5 pounds of clay. Yay!

Take a Sledgehammer to Social Media Day

Most people I know my age are pretty phobic when it comes to computers and email and social media.  I may be a 'grown up', but I'm no stranger to technology. You could say I grew up as an ultimate early adopter. 

When I was in Junior High, our district was given a mainframe computer from one of the aerospace companies on Long Island. I think the school plunked it in the Junior High because there was no where else in the district that had a big enough air conditioned room for it.

So I joined the nascent computer club. This was in the mid 70s and I learned basic and a smattering of other computer languages, programed silly games on punch cards and generally thought of computers as something to mess around with.

Fast forward to college, where I had the opportunity to write papers in a room full of dumb terminals instead of a typewriter. Mostly, I stayed with the typewriter, because I rarely had my act together to write the paper longhand before heading to the computer lab where there was a time limit on using the terminals.  Then in graduate school in 1984, when I realized a huge part of my program would include writing a thesis based on original research, I persuaded my parents to front me the money to buy a personal computer.  The IBM's were the top of the line, but way too expensive.  Radio Shack has just come out with an improvement to their TRS-80, a model that had TWO 5 1/4 floppy drives, so you could load the program in one and save the files in the other.

 

 

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1083&st=1

Computer, complete with green glowing screen, and a loud dot matrix printer with fan fold pin paper cost nearly $1000. in 1984 dollars. And the "P" the model number stood for PORTABLE. Really.  Stop laughing.

Today, my ipod touch has more computing power and fits in my pocket.

I graduated from the 'trash 80' to a Compaq, to a PC that had a COLOR monitor and ran DOSCommander, a  kind of pre-windows shell to manage commands. Then windows came out and we had a series of windows machines, each with its own quirks and issues.

Now I have an HP laptop, an android tablet, and an iPod touch and I'm always on, always connected with a social media presence I never would have thought possible in the days of dial up modems and TCP/IP.

When I stop to think about it, it's pretty overwhelming, actually.  I can only imagine my 12 year old self looking at me in 2012 and thinking that I live in a Science Fiction universe. Practically nothing happens in our world without telling someone (or many someones) about it. We tweet, we FB, G+, Blog, and Pin. It's like we're never alone anymore.

Hardly 5 minutes goes by without one of my electronic vices beeping at me.  Ray Bradbury has a short story called 'The Murderer' about this. Go look for it, if you've never read it. He was pretty damned prescient about our wired up future. While I may not be ready to take a sledgehammer to my phone or my ipod, I do think I need more time without external distractions for my creative process.

This morning, I did a small thing.  I didn't check any social media with my morning coffee.  Instead, I let the  silence in the house keep me company while I worked on hand writing revisions to a manuscript. 

And then I sat and blogged about it.

:)

Finding my way back to baseball

The sound of a baseball game is something embedded in the deep recesses of my memories.  When I hear a game being called, I am transported to childhood, sitting in the back seat of the car, listening to Mets games on AM radio with my dad.

Some folks find the sound of rain soothing, or the whoosh of wind through the trees.  For me, the crowd murmuring behind the commentators is something like a deep lullaby. 

When we moved to Boston in the 1990s, we didn't realize we'd transplanted ourselves into a crazy baseball town, but we had, and I started to listen to games here in the spirit of my childhood. It didn't matter to me that the Sox were perennial almost-rans. I was used to losing teams.  It was the cadence and rhythm of the games I loved, and I started to get to know players and feel a true home-town connection to my new team.

I thrilled to follow Nomar Garcioparra in his rookie season; thought I wouldn't forgive the team for trading him.  But the lure of the game sucked me back and I kept listening.

Then my sons came along, grew up, and started following the Sox right along with me.  How could they help it? There were games on in the background of their lives on the kitchen radio and in the car.  When 2004 came along, we were all riveted.  The radio was on in one room, the TV in another.  They still laugh at me for my need to stand in the hallway so I could take advantage of the delay--hear the play as it was coming on the radio, then rush into the living room to catch it on the TV.

We shlepped the kids in the cool rain to the victory parade.  Wow, they were little then!

We thrilled to watch the Sox thrive with dynamic players like Yook, Pedroia, and Ells. Gritted our teeth as pitching continued to be a problem.  (Dice-K is probably responsible for taking years off my life in worry alone.)  But we watched, cheered, commiserated, loving the game in all its vagaries.

And then came the 2011-12 season.  The frightening start.  The kick-ass middle.  The implosion of the end.

The scapegoating of Tito Francona and Theo Epstein.

I came as close as I've ever come to hating baseball then.

It seemed full of arrogant and spoiled men, owners and players alike, who had forgotten something important about the game.  That is *was* a game.  Suddenly there was no sense of play in the team. No sense of fun.  It became a corporate win-at-all-costs show and I had no stomach for it anymore.

I didn't follow the team news over the off season.  Didn't count down the days until Spring training.  Didn't watch a single spring training game.  And I realized how sad that made me.  Sad and angry.

I'm not so naive that I don't realize sports is a big business.  That's not the problem.  The problem is in the disconnect between team and fans.  When it gets so big that a passionate, life-long baseball lover turns sour on the game, then something's seriously wrong.

There are games on again on the radio in our house, but I'm not the same person anymore.  I don't feel the pull I used to feel toward the team.  They have lost my trust.  The trust that they will play the game with joy and abandon, play with passion and tenacity, striving to win, and losing with grace.  That they will be a team--that nine men on a field will be somehow one entity, pulling together for a common purpose.

I want to believe that again.  Because I do love this game. 

Keeping it real

Another in a series of keeping it real posts:

Today is one of those days where I have to work hard at staying positive. I'd like to say there was some triggering event or external reason for feeling discouraged, but there really isn't.  The best I can come up with is that I'm between writing projects again.  I think I'm most content when my imaginary friends keep me busy.

Otherwise, I think too much.  I've always envied people like my husband who can fully relax, can let their minds drift. I am not one of those people.

My mind churns and when it doesn't have something to work on, it turns on itself.

Why yes, I *am* my own worst enemy.

So no new reviews for THE BETWEEN means no one will read it ever, not in a million years, not if it was the only book that somehow survived a catastrophic book-eating bacterium accidentally released from a mad scientist's laboratory.

No new sales means the popular books, with their beautiful, model-thin girls in ethereal dresses on the covers will be asked to the prom and my book will be home babysitting the obnoxious twins down the street on Saturday night.

Not hearing from my agent means she loathes the book I just sent her and is printing out all the emails I have ever written just so she can burn them in a cathartic bonfire.

My rational, adult mind knows how silly I am being. But when has logical thought ever beaten pure emotional angst? 

What's nice is that the act of writing all this out helps me exorcise the self-pity demons. I can come back to some kind of balance where I understand that all my fears and insecurities are temporary emotions.  They are not me.  Part of what's so hard is coming to grips with how little control I do have.  How others receive my work is not up to me.  It's not even about me.  Once I've written the best work I can write, I'm essentially out of the equation. 

So, here I am doing what is under my own power:  I am taking a deep breath, laughing at myself, and moving forward.

Ah, the glamorous life of a writer.

Interview! Giveaway!

Apologies for the two exclamation points in the title.  In the past year, I have learned a number of things about myself, including a greater understanding of my strengths and weaknesses.

I may not look like a JRT,
but wait till you see me jump!

First the strengths:

I am really good at learning new things. It's almost a passion, really.  I love to discover the new. 

Perhaps I have a little of my Jack Russell Terrier mix's drive for novelty. :)

I'm also committed to finishing what I start, almost to the point of obsessiveness.  And coupled with that is my drive to do it right the first time.  So I am willing to work hard for what I want.  Sometimes that drives the people around me a little crazy.  (See aforementioned comment about my JRT mix.)

Now the weaknesses:

 

I hate, with a fiery burning passion, promoting myself. It's not that I don't believe in my work--I do--it's that I have been uncomfortable since childhood with being the center of attention.  Too much eye contact is unnerving.  And even though on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, it still feels weird and wrong to attract attention to myself.

So it's been a challenge marketing and promoting my debut novel, to say the least.  What has felt comfortable, is making relationships with book lovers all over the net, and that has taken me full circle to the exclamation marks in my title.

Interview! Giveaway! 

The lovely Megan at Book Brats (a wonderful blog to follow!) has graciously agreed to host an interview with me and a giveaway of two copies of THE BETWEEN, an ebook and a paperback.  So hop on over and enter and read a bit more about me as I sit here and cringe behind my computer screen.  :)

Guest Posts: LJ on the Internet

I've been enjoying the opportunity to network with other bloggers of late and a few of my posts have been out and about on the net.

So for your reading enjoyment:

M is for Metaphor, for the A to Z Blogger's Challenge on The Masquerade Crew

If there's one phrase that every writer has heard ad nauseum, it's "show, don't tell." When I first came across that advice, I understood it in a very narrow context: that I had to describe every aspect of scene, character, and plot, avoiding the use of any sort of exposition.


Eventually, I realized that doing so would result in a very tedious, overwritten story. A more nuanced view of "show, don't tell," is in making sure that the story's language conveys emotion and action without the writer telegraphing it or summarizing it for the reader.  Continue Reading M is for Metaphor. . . 

I've been invited to join a group writing blog called Black Ink, White Paper as a regular contributor.  The lovely folks over there were kind enough to let me guest post with them during my release for THE BETWEEN and subsequently asked me to join their community.  I am pleased to be there and today is my first official post.

Making Room for the World, about travel, exposure to other cultures, and the expansion of creativity.

. . .  The ability to expand beyond your boundaries is a crucial skill for any artist. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of tunnel vision in extrapolating only from what you know. Reading and research helps, but there is no substitute for experiencing life outside of your comfort zone. Read the entire blog post here. . .

 

Lost: A poem for my mother

Photo by Darin House, used under a cc license

 Lost

She scours the woods for a road
to a familiar home, sees the outline
of a door, a mullioned window, can name
the street and number before she stumbles.

Maybe the house is dark, the porch bulb
burned out, flowers in the windowbox
wilted.  Fear howls across the night,
always too close. There is no comfort

in looking back.  She follows lights
bobbing in the distance. Bramble-choked
thicket catches at her clothes. Memories
unravel, the long tangled string of a sweater

unknitting itself.  She finds the cold
no different than the darkness, the empty
promise of strange stars in a distant sky.
The end of a thread slips through her fingers.

--Lisa Janice Cohen, April 2012

Magpie Scribblings (oooh, shiny)

Magpie photo by Mundo, used under a cc license

According to Wikipedia, the Magpie is an "opportunistic omnivore".  That's how I see myself as a writer and a reader.  I'm a collector of interesting facts, information, and stories.  Like the Magpie, if it's 'shiny', then I want it.

When it comes to my writing, I can't point out any one influence that has informed me.  I find inspiration everywhere.  In poetry, songs, news stories, and novels. In landscapes and conversations.  In old, abandoned places and photographs. I read something and I look for what I can take back to my 'nest.'  Sometimes it's the sheer beauty of the language from a variety of sources from Shakespeare to Rumi to Patricia McKillip.  Sometimes it's the character and singular voice from Tamora Pierce's Terrier books, or Mira Grant's Newsflesh series.  Still others draw me to the lush and intricate world building found in Tolkien.

Travel has been a huge influence on my work.  Having access to other cultures and vistas opens me up to different stories, new narratives, fresh ways of combining what I know to what I am learning.  Our family's trip to central Asia several years ago continues to percolate in my imagination and I know that somewhere, it will push my work into new horizons.

That's one of the most exciting aspects of being a writer. 

Ultimately, I am the sum of all that I have read and heard and experienced. 

There is no way for me to look at my body of work and sort out each influence.  Nor do I think that's necessary.  Creativity cannot exist in a vacuum and we build on the work of those that have come before us.  It is my hope that future writers may count me amongst their influences and create magic for the readers and writers who come after us.



Today’s post is my contribution to the Merry-Go-Round from Forward Motion for Writers. This month’s shared topic is “My influences” prompt in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. 

Get to know nearly twenty other writers and find out their answers to each monthly prompt.