Sandi Kahn Shelton

My friend Lynn and I have decided to embark on a new project: giving workshops to help people write their memoirs.

I have taught writing workshops before, but this one already has me jumping up and down in excitement because it’s different. Instead of being for people who already know how to write, we want to invite people who don’t already think of themselves as writers, because they have stories to tell just the same.

These are the really fun stories of our lives, the stories you tell in the car or recount over Thanksgiving dinner, or whenever you get a new close friend. In my family, they are the stories of the time my sister decided to cut off the bumps on her tongue with the scissors, and the day my brother sold his horrible-looking potty chair at the neighbor’s rummage sale. And the tale of my grandmother shooting my grandfather because he came home early from a business trip without telling her–well, that one always gets told too. It’s funny, mostly because she missed.

I think we’re all hungry for stories about where we came from and WHO we came from. We want the details about our parents’ upbringings and the story that would explain whatever made them think they belonged together, and why in the world they chose those jobs they chose, and why do they save string and keep the heat turned down to sub-livable temperatures?

And our kids want to know the same things about us!

I want to encourage people to write about the popular kids’ table in the lunchroom in middle school, and what they thought about when they looked outside their bedroom window, and who did they go to the prom with in high school, and who did they first have a crush on. The stories can go on and on and on: who was your next door neighbor, and your first pet that you truly loved, and when did you know what kind of work you really, really wanted to do, and when did somebody first make you so mad that you stood up for yourself in spite of the fact that you were scared?

See? Isn’t this going to be fun?

So anyway, if you live anywhere near Guilford, Connecticut, and you want to be in the workshop, you need to let us know. Email me right away! Today! The course starts next week.

Lynn and I are psyched about this. She’s a biographer who has written very cool biographies about Gregory Peck and Josephine Baker–the latter which was optioned for film by Diana Ross. She also used to write for the New York Times and worked for Christian Dior in Paris, and she’s gone everywhere and done everything, and is hilarious, to boot.

My contribution is that I write novels and for ten years wrote a column about my family life in the newspaper. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE the little details of people’s lives, the things they might forget. We both can help people shape the stories, get down all the details–and figure out what to write about in the first place.

And even if you don’t live close by and can’t take the workshop, take my advice and start writing these stories down for yourself. Keep a little book, and write down the funny things your kids say. You think you’ll remember them forever, but you won’t.

And like Bernie Siegel, the cancer doc says, just the act of writing down details of your life–even the painful ones–can be as therapeutic an exercise as going to therapy. Writing can heal us all.

I was on the train to New York the other day, to go visit Stephanie and see how she’s settling in to her sophomore year of school–and when I handed my ticket to the conductor, it turned out that I was in the presence of none other than the Conductor to the Stars!

This is a guy my husband wrote a feature story about, because he recognizes EVERYBODY who rides the train! He’s amazing that way. (Full disclosure here: I never recognize anyone. After the Thanksgiving Day Parade one year in New York, our family was walking behind a guy with a funny hair situation going on, and my husband kept poking me and nodding toward the man, trying to get me to realize that we were within 23 inches of The Donald Himself. Ivana and Tiffany were right there with him. Did I know who this was? Any of them? Not a chance.)

Anyway, because my picture used to run in the newspaper every week back when I wrote a weekly column, this conductor (his name is Bobby) recognized me, and for a while, we had fun talking about writing and conducting trains and authors we love, and then it turned out WE BOTH HAVE BLOGS.  

Well, I couldn’t wait to go read his blog. And it has been such a pleasure, going back through his archives and reading old posts, because he’s very funny and warm and has such a good sense of humor.

Here’s the link to his blog. It’s called Bobby Derailed, and you’ll enjoy it as much as I have, I’m sure.

Best of all, though, please scroll down and read what he wrote on the anniversary of September 11, and then go and read his entry from last year, which you can find here: http://bobbyderailed.blogspot.com/2006/09/september-13th-2001.html.

It’s one of the most moving pieces I’ve read about September 11th from someone who was right there witnessing the scene so soon after it happened.

No, what I mean to say is: IAMFINISHEDWITHTHEBOOK!IAMFINISHEDWITHTHEBOOK!IAMFINISHEDWITHTHEBOOK!

I actually wrote the words “THE END” at 6:30 in the morning. (How corny is it to write “THE END”?–but, what can I say, the moment called for it.) I was so tired and shaky that cartwheels were out of the question–as was opening up the bottle of champagne that Nancy had brought over earlier in the week for The Moment of Completion.

It was an odd, but delirious, moment.

The house was quiet. Everybody was asleep, even the Faithful Writing Dog. I had been working all night long…because I needed a long, uninterrupted stretch during which the phone absolutely would not ring, and dinner would not need cooking, dogs wouldn’t need to go in and out, and during which I could carefully listen to what the resolution of this story would be.

I mean, I knew I wanted the end to be. But always there is that tension about the end: will it turn out just right, or will it feel contrived when I get there? Will it make sense, given all that has come before for the characters? Will I get to the end and think, “YUCK”?

Or worse…will it be page 2,460 by the time I wrap this turkey up?

All I felt was a sense of profound relief and happiness. Now, I’ll take a few days off from Jamie McClintock and Sam Goddard and their various children and insecurities and problems. Today I planted petunias and geraniums and pansies and snapdragons everywhere, and then sat in the sun on the lounge chair and just thought about nothing.

Early next week I’ll be ready to go back in and see where just what kind of journey that really was that we were on in this book. No doubt many changes will need to be made.

It’s called “Kissing Games of the World.” I hope they’ll let me keep that title.

And so I have a question for all of you writers who come and visit here sometimes: Is it this way for you, too, when you finish a book? Is it always in the dark of night, after a long stretch of furious, frantic writing–or is it ever broad, sane daylight, after which you go off to resume regular life, the carpool and dinner?

In my experience with my three novels, they always get done in the deep middle of the night, after a push that is reminiscent of childbirth. So my question: How do YOU finish a big project that’s taken a year to work on?

Oh, also–I hope you can come by and visit me at Conversations with Writers where I was interviewed by Ambrose Musiyiwa, a British freelance writer whose blog presents conversations with writers, with a view to promoting writers, reading, literacy, and small press publishers.

I was born right smack in the middle of the baby boom…and so when I first discovered the blogosphere, one of the first blogs that drew me in was one called “Boomer Chick: Musings of an Over the Hill Chick.”

Let’s just say I could relate.

Growing up in both Florida and California in those post-war developments that came about to accommodate the sudden population explosion, I remember thinking that life was just a series of streets with the same kind of cinder-block homes, painted in different colors with perhaps different plantings outside–and scads of kids in every house. I went to an elementary school that was so overcrowded we had to attend in double-session…and there was another elementary school three miles away that was just as crowded!

In my graduating class in California, some 700 kids got diplomas–and I think there were 800 in the class right behind mine, and perhaps 900 in the sophomore class. AND, again, there was another high school within walking distance!

For quite a chunk of my life, I felt as though the entire population was within two years of my age.

And now–well, it seems that most people just aren’t. In fact, my friend Alice (who precedes the baby boom by a few years) said it’s been tiring and annoying to watch how the boomers re-claim and re-create every life stage that she’s just gotten through. She got married…and five years later the boomers had re-done The Wedding. She had her babies–and then the boomers came into parenthood and acted as though they’d pretty much invented the whole concept of reproduction. They redesigned car seats, strollers, came up with Snuglis and backpacks, fixed the wind-up swing so it didn’t wake up sleeping babies, said it was okay for women to work and babies to go to daycare, created new educational toys and TV shows. And on and on.

“I’m so sick of your generation!” she says, laughing. “They can’t leave ANYTHING alone.”

The way she sees it, the only saving grace is that she won’t be around to see what innovations our generation comes up with for funerals.

Today, though, I’m proud to be a guest blogger on the Boomer Chick web site, which I hope you’ll go over to check out. Not just for my post–there you’ll find a whole assortment of interesting posts by Dorothy Thompson, who describes very poignantly and honestly just what it was like for our generation growing up. We were perhaps the first generation in which having divorced parents was almost the norm. Like me, Dorothy was moved all the way across the country to California when her mother remarried…and like all of us, she’s seeking to recreate and connect with that past. Best of all, she writes about it without a trace of bitterness or resentment.

Just a desire to know who she is and a willingness to share that journey with the rest of us.  

I am on the Home Stretch of my novel, which means I am hardly even eating and sleeping. Instead, I mostly just type, and every now and then I get up and let the dog out and then I shuffle around and mumble incoherent things and eat crackers.

But what passes as good news came through today: a letter informing me that I’ve won $950,215.

Oh, I don’t believe it for a minute, don’t worry. I’m busy but not crazy. But it cheered me up just the same. How can you not be cheered by a letter that goes like this:

“Dear Winner,

We Apologies, for the delay of your payment and all the Inconveniences and Inflict that we might have indulge you through.

However, we were having some minor problems with our payment system, which is Inexplicable, and have held us stranded and Indolent, not having the Aspiration to devote our 100% Assiduity in accrediting foreign payments.

I wish to inform you now that the square peg is now in square whole and can be voguish for that your payment is being processed and will be released to you as soon as you respond to this letter.”

Like most good correspondence, this one has helped me identify my own emotions. I realize now what that I have been feeling stranded and Indolent myself, and that for a while now I, too, haven’t had the Aspiration to devote my 100% Assiduity.

But…the novel is going to be done in mere HOURS, and that must explain how the square peg is now in the square whole. What a relief that this can be voguish for me.

And speaking of voguish, I’ve been having a wonderful voguish time visiting on other people’s blogs. Please go check out my blog post at Alison Kent’s Blah Blog and my post at Kathy Holmes’s Fiction with Attitude blog.

Hope all your square pegs are behaving themselves!

I am at the end of my novel…except for one thing. The story won’t stop.

I hadn’t expected this. This is a book that I knew backwards and forwards before I even wrote the first word. I knew where it was supposed to end.

I knew the characters and why they were going to act the way they were. I knew all their troubles and their paranoias and what kinds of things they carried in their pockets, and who gave them their first kiss, and what their parents’ marriages were like, and what color their eyes are, and what kind of cars they drove. These people, I tell you, were like my best friends.

And then–well, now I can’t get them to go away.

It’s a little like houseguests. Rowdy, interrupting houseguests who are constantly telling you more of the story.

But the thing is, I love the things they are telling me. They’ve become deeper and more individualized as they keep explaining more and more. Suddenly scenes that I wrote for them that seemed complete are growing and becoming more multi-dimensional.

I know what you’re thinking. They’re my characters, I invented them, and I could just kick them out. But now I’m curious about them. I want to know more about why Sam hated his father for so long, and whether that hatred really was just a kind of wounded tenderness that he couldn’t express. And why was Harris such a lousy father? Was it really because his marriage was so bad that he couldn’t separate out his love for his son from his dissatisfaction with his wife? Or was he disappointed in Sam’s personality? (He was kind of a whiny wimp when he was a little kid.)

Tomorrow, though, I am going to have to take matters into my own hands. I think I’ll write their very last scene…the one that finishes with the words THE END written just below it. And then I’ll go back to where I am right now in the book, and write up to that last scene. Sometimes that’s the only way to get characters to understand that their story really is, well, done. To just finish it. Give them their closure.

And by the way–Wednesday for my virtual blog tour, I’ve written a post at the Trashionista blog, which is just about the coolest blog going! I am so pleased to be included on their site…and best of all, Diane Shipley, who runs the blog, has told me that she’s going to be posting a review of A Piece of Normal later this week. Please go over and check out Diane’s site. She has interviews and guest blogs by so many good writers! It’s a very fun site.

Technorati tags: Trashionista, virtual blog tour, women’s fiction, A Piece of Normal, Sandi Kahn Shelton, writers

It’s not even officially May first yet (seven more minutes to go!), and already my family is perhaps getting a little sick of me talking about how I’m “on tour.” They are very tolerant people for the most part, but I’m not sure they’re really GETTING IT that I am not officially here, I am touring the blogosphere.

And therefore should not be expected to cook, I think.

Today’s stop is The Writer’s Life, which is a the blog of Dorothy Thompson. I’ll be talking about the release of my paperback, A Piece of Normal, which came out last month, published by Three Rivers Press.

I promise I won’t ONLY talk about my virtual book tour this whole month, but because I get to go on so many fun sites (sites that I’m just discovering, too!) I will tell you where I’ll be appearing each day, and hope that maybe you’ll come on over there, too, just to check it out.

Before I stop talking about the blog tour, though, may I just say that what’s been fun about this so far is that different sites have wanted different things from me, so it’s not like I just got to sit down and churn out some standard-issue info about the book and then send it out in a mass email. In that way, a virtual tour is a whole lot different from the go-into-the-bookstore tour, where you find yourself answering over and over again the following things: (1) where you get your ideas and (2) do you write in the morning or the afternoon, (3) what kind of pen do you prefer to write with, and (4) do you know which way is the restroom.

In other news, spring is officially here. It was 72 degrees with a 35 mph prevailing wind through the maple trees–and I sat on the back porch writing what surely are going to end up being The Last Few Chapters of This Novel…and every time I’d look up, I swear there were more leaves on the trees.

Happy spring! It is hard not to be happy on such a day. (And by the way…I should say that the house in that picture is NOT mine. I could only wish! It’s my friend Nancy’s. She took the picture…)

Technorati tags: virtual blog tour, Sandi Kahn Shelton, A Piece of Normal, Dorothy Thompson, The Writer’s Life blog

Stephanie came home from college for 24 hours because she was sick. This is one of the advantages of living only a trainride from home–you can get a sore throat, a sinus headache, a stomach ache and a bump on your tongue, and you can come home for a good night’s sleep and a fried egg sandwich.

It was lovely. We sat out on the screened porch working side by side on our computers. I was doing–what else?–my novel, and she was working on a final paper for one of her classes.

We were enjoying the companionly silence of staring into space, trying to think of the next thing to type when I heard her say, “Hmm, I should check out how the bump on my tongue is doing.”

And then, to my astonishment, she stuck out her tongue at her computer, clicked a button–and voila! There was a close-up photograph of her tongue filling the entire screen.

“Oh,” she said. “It looks like it’s healing up nicely,” and went right back to work.

A lot of people have to get up and go look in the mirror to get that kind of information.

My husband calls me an Itinerant Fiction Writer. He doesn’t really understand why it’s so hard for me to write at home, where I have a desk, a couch, nice lighting, good music, and a Writing Dog who is always happy to listen to passages.

I can’t explain it. Some days it is possible to write at home, but mostly the phone rings or the Writing Dog is in the mood to chase tennis balls, or I start to think that if I just vacuumed up a few dozen dust balls and threw in a load of laundry, I’d be so much happier.

So today, for the third time this week, I went to the library to write my novel. I think it encourages a novel to be around other books, so every now and then it’s good to take it away from home, let it see a possible bright future for itself. It’s like Take Your Children to Work Day. They could get inspired to be better.

Here are the good things about our local library:

• Good armchairs.
• Many of them next to plugs for your laptop.
• They let you bring tea in.
• If your cell phone rings, they don’t yell at you, or say, “ssssh.”
• There are cold parts of the library and hot parts, so you can choose which temperature you would like, and even move back and forth dozens of times if you wish.
• The tables next to the magazines are in the hot part of the library, where a person should not be hanging out anyway if they are hoping to get any work done.
• If you can stand it, there are even little carrels where you can be totally alone, but it’s a little like sitting in a wooden box. Plenty of time for that when you’re dead, I say.

Today I was sitting in the mystery section, in a very wonderful red armchair. I had my iced tea on the table next to me…and I was typing away very fast on a passage of my novel that I’ve been excited about writing. (Page 380 at last!)

And the nicest little thing happened. A woman came over and started looking over all the mysteries on the shelves. She picked up one book and then another, paged through them, put them back. And then she went right over to where the Sarah Graves books are (Sarah Graves is the pseudonym for my writing friend Mary), and grabbed two of her books off the shelf and went away, looking very happy with herself.

That, I’m sorry, is just something good that can’t happen in your own home.

I am packing my bags to go on a virtual book tour.

I have been on book tours before, the bricks-and-mortar kind–where you go to a bookstore and stand behind a podium and wait for people to come and sit in the metal folding chairs. You are praying that people will come. An icy drop of sweat trickles down your back.  Your mouth grows dry and parched. You realize that you are willing to give anything if there are at least TWO people unrelated to you in the audience, and if one of them does not, in fact, work for the bookstore.

That is all you ask. It is not so much to ask, is it? Okay, could there just even be ONE person? And could maybe you and that person go over to the coffee part of the store and have a cup of something together, and you will thank her for coming and ask her questions about her life and tell her she’s in the running to be your very best friend. And you will try not to feel like a failure.

It is a dicey proposition, bookstore readings. These days, what with 354 television stations and Netflix, hardly anybody wants to to out at night.

The first bookstore reading I did was for a parenthood book that I had published–You Might As Well Laugh–and it was held immediately after an appearance by some humongous creature dressed in a red fur costume and appealing to children. I believe his name was Clifford the Big Red Dog, and he was like the Beatles for the 2-year-old crowd. No, make that a combination of the Beatles and Jesus. 

The thought by the marketing person was that parents and their children would come to see Clifford the Big Red Dog, and then somehow the parents would want to stay after Clifford’s romp and hear me talk about how fun it was to muddle through parenthood. These were people who were ACTUALLY MUDDLING THROUGH PARENTHOOD RIGHT THEN, and they did not need anyone trying to make jokes about it.

Plus, they were there with their children, and it was 7:30 at night, and kids had been amped up to the extreme just by being in the presence of Clifford the Big Red Dog, who was–I can’t stress this enough–an ICON. I don’t know what the children were supposed to be doing while I was supposedly talking to their parents–the marketing people forgot that part. But let’s just say that many children were forced to leave the premises by being carried out screaming underneath their parents’ arms, begging for just thirty more seconds with Clifford the Big Red Dog…while I sat facing a row of empty metal chairs.

I had thought to bring a friend with me, so at least I didn’t look like The Most Friendless, Misguided Person in the Whole Universe. My friend even said I could read to her from my book, just in case I was still in the mood for that sort of thing.

Which I wasn’t.

But then a miracle happened. A mother who was rushing past, on her way out the door with her 2-year-old son, must have felt sorry for me standing there in front of the empty chairs, with only one friend to my name. So she very kindly came over with her toddler and plopped down to listen to my little spiel. She was very polite and sat facing forward with an attentive, encouraging look on her face. I will always be grateful to this woman. She is probably going to be canonized some day.

Unfortunately, not two minutes into my reading, her child (intoxicated, no doubt, with his earlier brush with fame) stood up on one of those metal chairs, slipped, and it folded up with him inside, and he crashed to the floor and cut his lip. He then left underneath her arm, the way all the other children had.

My reading in bookstore days was launched.

But that was in 1997. A whole new century has dawned, and now the internet is here for us to roll around in.

And with my paperback of A Piece of Normal just released, I’m going on a blog tour. I get to write guest posts on people’s blogs and also answer their questions, comment to their readers–all organized by this genius of a woman, Dorothy Thompson, who has figured out blogs that are willing to host writers and just how to do make a tour happen.

Best of all, I’ve had such fun lately writing blog posts and thinking about my book again. And just getting to talk with Dorothy and with the other bloggers she’s introduced me to has been so lovely. I’ll definitely write about where I’m going, so if you want, you can visit those other blogs with me. And if you’re a writer yourself, you may just want to contact Dorothy yourself by clicking on the link above, and see if she can arrange a tour for you as well.

The best part is: you don’t have to pack a suitcase, and Clifford the Big Red Dog will be nowhere in sight.