Sandi Kahn Shelton

It is summer, and despite the fact that airlines are charging passengers now for the oxygen they breathe and for the right to sit squished into a seat, thank goodness people are still getting on planes and flying around the country.

Two weeks ago, Bloglily, whom I only know from reading her very delightful blog, came to the Northeast on vacation, and we spent a day sitting in Atticus Bookstore near Yale, eating lunch and talking as though we had known each other all our lives. It was a little bit like a blind date–going off to meet after only knowing each other through our written words, but within exactly five seconds of meeting her, I knew we were BFFs. We told each other our life stories…and then we told the stories in the books we’re writing, and then she effortlessly solved at least 13 plot problems I’m having with the novel I’m trying to finish, and then we walked around the town and talked some more. (The hardest part was learning to think of her name as Lily, when to me, she’s always going to be Bloglily.)

Then this week my cousin Jennifer popped in, having gone away to California some four years ago and not managing to get back until now. (Well, okay, she did come back for her grandfather’s funeral that one time, but it was a sad occasion, not conducive to the kind of shenanigans that Jennifer and I used to partake in on a regular basis when she lived in Boston and would come down to visit us for weekends and then forget to go back home.) I could describe all the shenanigans for you, but most of them don’t translate well because they involve laughing so hard that tea would come out of our noses. But suffice it to say that Jennifer, who is the daughter of my late uncle, who was a fabulous hippie rock star back in the 60s–did what a lot of flower children’s children did when they grew up: tried to find sanity in her life by becoming part of Corporate America. She used to dress in suits and pantyhose and go to work for uptight law firms in Boston, where they made her miserable and sad.

Those were the days when she would come to our house, where the standards are decidedly low. We cooked tons of food, listened to the rock star’s old music (except for the times it made us too sad, since he had died by then), and played Double and Triple and even Octuple Solitaire on the living room floor, dragging in whoever we could to make them play with us. We sat up late talking and dancing and singing and trying to figure out her life…and then one day she came for a visit and said she was ready to quit her job and take her chances moving across country, where some friends had suggested she come and join them.

It was the right thing to do, even though it made us crazy to say goodbye. So she left four years ago, and now she has a fun job and tons of friends, and a great place to live, with hiking trails nearby, and a GUY. I don’t think she even owns a pair of pantyhose anymore.  She doesn’t think that playing Double Solitaire with me is the pinnacle of happiness anymore, which is probaby a good thing over all.

Here we are together on the morning that she was ready to leave, when we finally realized we needed to somehow commemorate our visit by taking an actual photograph.  To see us together, you would never know that we are related, but the truth is that we share the same grandmother, and Jennifer has our grandmother’s laugh and her great boobs, and I’ve got her hair color but that came out of a bottle. And maybe a little bit, we both have her smile.

Next month, the airlines are going to bring my friend Diane and her daughter Maisie…and I have about 150 pages of novel to write by then so that I can play without guilt.   

I do not know why it’s so tough to do the things I need to do. (I think we all know what we’re talking about here: settling down to work, performing the yoga stretching exercises, paying bills, cleaning the dehumidifier, weeding the garden, flossing the dog’s teeth, washing the bath towels…that sort of thing.)

I have a sign up over my desk that says: “Hard work may pay off in the long run, but procrastination pays off RIGHT NOW.”

This is a bad attitude, I know. I should take it down and replace it with something like: “What? Do you think time is going to wait for you to get around to the things you need to do?” or better yet, something succinct like: “GET TO WORK!”

There are times when the only way I can get anything done is when I do something by accident while I am procrastinating from doing something else. In other words, I can only wash the bath towels if I’m, for instance, hiding from settling down to work. And the garden is only going to get weeded if I’m avoiding flossing the dog’s teeth. (No, I don’t really floss the dog’s teeth–but you know what I mean.) And as for yoga stretching–that just ain’t gonna happen.

But I hate being this way. I am too damned old to be avoiding things this way. I should have developed some true self-control by now. Shouldn’t I? My yoga teacher once told me that I should see this resistance, as he called it (that’s a fancy yoga word for procrastination) as the same as a paper sheet. All I have to do is press against it a little bit, he said, and I would break through–and find myself doing the downward dog without even a second thought.

Then yesterday I ran across this post by Allison Winn Scotch, about how she has beat procrastination! Her advice seems so simple, and yet so profound at the same time:

Something flashes in my brainscan and rather than waste the energy of thinking of when I could do it another time, I just did it! I wrote three blog posts, I started going through my proof pages, and best of all, I actually sat down – right when the impulse struck – and drafted the first scene for my new book.

It was so energizing! I can’t recommend this more. Normally, I’m a list-maker – I jot everything down and axe it as I go. But right now, it seems like the only way for me to accomplish stuff is to seize the moment. Try it! It might work for you!

Okay, I am so on board with this. I am seizing the moment! That means…writing this sex scene that has been eluding me for days and days. I know. Poor me, having to think up a sex scene. It’s not like I have to go weed the garden or even do the downward dog.

But I’m about 25 pages behind schedule in this novel…and by God, I’m going to catch up this weekend! I am not only going to seize a moment. I’m am seizing the whole entire weekend.

Allison, THANK YOU!

Here it is: the advanced readers’ copy of the new book, which will come out in November.

It arrived this morning, and of course I stopped doing everything else I was supposed to be doing, and just sat down with it and gazed upon it, just the way you’d need to look at your newborn baby if it had somehow just come in on the UPS truck.

I still haven’t finished editing the page proofs, so it felt a bit surreal to see this all bound up like a real book, when there are still about 1,347,523 typos that need to be corrected, but I didn’t hold that against it. Instead, I carried it through the house and sang it a few songs, introduced it to the dog, and set it on the kitchen counter so it could look out over the rest of the house and sort of settle in.

It’s called “Kissing Games of the World,” as you can plainly see, which is the title I dreamed one night, a funny dream really, in which my husband claimed he’d written a book proposal with that as the title. His book was going to be an expose of kissing games, and so far he had thought up two of them: Post Office and Spin the Bottle. As soon as he came up with more, he would get a huge advance.

It hit me that this was a perfect title for the book I was writing at the time…about Nate, a salesman, who travels all over the world having relationships of no consequence. One of the other characters accuses him of just participating in kissing games, as a way of avoiding true feelings.

Naming books is always so hard for me. (The one I’m working on now still doesn’t even have a working title.) My first book was called “The Fortune Teller’s Daughter” in my head, except that it took me so long to finish it that somebody else wrote a book with that title, so we had to choose another. It became “What Comes After Crazy.”

The second book, “A Piece of Normal” was named by a friend of mine who mentioned that one of the crazier characters seemed to be seeking just that–a piece of normal, after her wacky childhood.  

But this book–well, it’s nice when the title just comes to you in a dream, even if somebody else in the dream was about to use it himself.

How do YOU get your titles? Please, please tell me!

“One of the best things about being a novelist,” said my friend Beth the other day, “must be that you get to use up all those names you couldn’t give to your kids. Or your dogs and cats.”

She’s right. Picking a name for a character is even more exciting than picking our child’s name, mainly because when you’re naming somebody in a book, you already know the person. You are the only one who knows at the outset of whether he’s an Alessandro or a Jake, whether she’s a Gwendolyn or a Bertha. And even more wonderful is the fact that people just accept whatever name you pick. Nobody says, “What kind of a crazy name is that? Why did you give him THAT name?” like they do when you’re naming a baby.

When it’s a baby, people feel entitled to having their opinions heard about whatever name you picked. My friend Diane, who named her daughter Maisie (surely one of the best names in the English language) spent the first two weeks of the child’s life politely explaining her decision to people on the phone, and then spelling it for them.

But I digress.

This is all to say that I have reached page 125 of the novel I am writing, and suddenly I realized my characters have the wrong names! Does this ever happen to you? You think you know a person well, and then it turns out they had a different name and personality altogether?

The main character was Cate until Friday when she suddenly became Annabelle, not the same kind of person at all. I don’t know why, but when she was Cate-with-a-C, she was a little bit timid, more likely to be walked over than she is now that she’s Annabelle. Before, when she acted out emotionally, the characters around her just reacted with, “Oh, stop it, Cate! You’re always so exasperating.” And now that she’s Annabelle, the people around her seem to know that she’s a little bit flamboyant and surprising.

Some of the minor characters asked for name changes, too, once Annabelle got her true name. Annabelle’s daughter, Tansy, requested something a little more…ordinary. She’s not as airy and drifty as you’d have to be to wear the name Tansy…so she’s now Sophie, and she’s much happier, thank you. Annabelle’s former lover, Dmitri–he turned into Jeremiah…and the contractor’s baby mama blossomed into a Chantelle.

Even more fun, I looked all these up on The Baby Name Wizard: Name Voyager, which you should go to right this minute and type in your own name, all of your friends’ names, and any name you’ve thought of giving your characters and all your children and dogs. It gives you in marvelous graphic detail all you need to know about the popularity of any given name from the 1890′s to the present.

You’ll learn, for instance, that the name John was in the top 10 of names through every decade until the 1990′s, when it started to slip. It’s now reached a new low of being the 20th popular name for boys in 2006. It’s one of the most fun, time-wastingly addictive web sites you’re ever going to come across…and if, like me, you happen to be writing a novel, you can totally justify being on there for hours because you’re researching your characters.  

Tell me: is naming characters (and children) fun for you, or has it been a major source of stress? And do your characters (or children!) ever insist on new names after you’ve gotten to know them better?

My novel misbehaves in the middle of the night. Last night it woke me up with a start at 2:14 a.m., insisting that I get up out of bed and FIND MY NOTEBOOK and a pen QUICKQUICKQUICK, which are not easy things to locate in the dark at somebody else’s house. (I have been visiting Boston for the past two days, where Ben and Amy live.)

Now it’s daytime, and I’m sitting in Panera with my laptop, and even though it’s waayy past lunchtime–already 2:45–the place is just teeming with humanity! Much of this humanity consists of people under the age of one, all of them munching on pacifiers and flirting, or occasionally flinging bottles of formula to the floor just for the pleasure of seeing perfect strangers react with surprise and then jump up to retrieve those bottles. Again and again and again. 

I have not had much sleep. With a novel waking me at 2:14, and real live adorable children coming in to see me at 6:30, there wasn’t a lot of truly good rest time in the middle.

I awoke this morning to find Charlie (a deep thinker of four years of age) sitting cross-legged next to me on my bed. “Oh, you’re awake,” he said when I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what you think about the light fixtures in here. Are they interesting?”

I looked at them. They were nice, but on the whole, as I told him, I’d rather think about them after 7 a.m.  So then I persuaded him to get under the covers with me and go back to sleep. We got exactly twenty more seconds of shut-eye, and then Josh (ten months old) woke up, and the day had officially begun. We all went upstairs (their two bedrooms and the playroom are on the third floor) where we played drum-like instruments and read stories and changed one person’s diapers and found Mickey Mouse underwear for another person, and got dressed–(“comfy clothes, no pants with snaps today!” said Charlie), and then Ben came and we all went on the Breakfast Train to the first floor, where we cooked eggs and ate pears and waffles and Cheerios. And then Ben took Charlie to preschool, and I put Josh down for a nap, which was THE most luscious time of all. Just sitting in the glider with a fat, cuddly baby drinking from a bottle with his eyes closed, is a divine experience, even when you’re tired. Maybe especially when you’re tired. Just looking upon those plump, pink arms and hearing those wonderful sucking, sighing noises he makes. The lashes on the cheek. And the way he just tucks himself right in, snuggling as close as can be. He drank and drank and drank and then, in his sleep, pushed himself away from the bottle, with milk running down his chin like a drunken sailor…and I reluctantly put him in his crib and went to take a bath.

And now I’m in Panera, and just a moment ago, I dived for my notepad to see what I’d been so driven to write in the middle of the night, since I have absolutely no memory of what was so vital, and here’s what it says, in nearly indecipherable handwriting:

“And you know what? My mother became my real mother again, just a bad year, not w/father but w/__________.

Also, in telling of past, goes on and on. Then talk about Mentor. Way he was at fault somehow. THEN we see Jeremiah. Surprise?”

This, I don’t have to tell you, is Novel Misbehavior of the highest order. The first rule I have for novels (in the middle of the night, or any time) is that they try to make some sense. And if they have to wake a person up for some all-important news flash, they need to phrase it in something approaching coherence. Something one can find the way back to, eventually.

The sun is shining on me here in my armchair here in Panera, and I see the way this could so easily go…Maybe this is the kind of message from the subconscious that will make more sense to me if I just go back to sleep for a moment or two more before I head back home to my Real Life, where there are no babies with fat arms and children who want to discuss the interestingness of the light fixtures with me, or any other deep subjects.

Yesterday when I picked up Charlie from preschool, he stared off into space in the car, clearly lost in thought.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

“Well, I’m thinking about blame,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.”

Yeah, me too.

He may end up writing novels, himself. I just hope his novels let him sleep through the night.

Here’s a poem sent to me by my friend Karen, and sent to her by her friend Charlie Harper. It’s called ‘The Puppet’ and has been attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Some say he wrote it when he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and that it was a farewell poem that he wrote to his friends. Others say that it was, in fact, written by an obscure Mexican ventriloquist named Johnny Welch, and not Marquez at all, and in fact, that Marquez has never claimed credit for the poem.

Neverthless, it’s beautiful.  

“The Puppet”

If for an instant God were to forget that I am rag doll and gifted me with a piece of life,
possibly I wouldn’t say all that I think,
but rather I would think of all that I say.
I would value things,
not for their worth but for what they mean.
I would sleep little, dream more,
understanding that for each minute we close our eyes we lose sixty seconds of light.

I would walk when others hold back.
I would wake when others sleep.
I would listen when others talk,
and how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream!
If God were to give me a piece of life,
I would dress simply,
throw myself face first into the sun,
baring not only my body but also my soul.
My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice,
and wait for the sun to show.
Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh dream a Benedetti poem,
and a Serrat song would be the serenade I’d offer to the moon.
With my tears I would water roses,
to feel the pain of their thorns,
and the red kiss of their petals.

My God, if I had a piece of life…
I wouldn’t let a single day pass without telling the people I love that I love them.
I would convince each woman and each man that they are my favorites,
and I would live in love with love.
I would show men how very wrong they are to think that they cease to be in love when they grow old,
not knowing that they grow old when they cease to love!
To a child I shall give wings,
but I shall let him learn to fly on his own.
I would teach the old that death does not come with old age,
but with forgetting.
So much have I learned from you, oh men…

I have learned that everyone wants to live on the peak of the mountain,
without knowing that real happiness is in how it is scaled.
I have learned that when a newborn child squeezes for the first time with his tiny fist his father’s finger,
he has him trapped forever.
I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help the other get to his feet.
From you I have learned so many things,
but in truth they won’t be of much use,
for when I keep them within this suitcase,
unhappily shall I be dying.

~GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ~

I am pleased to tell you that I have yet another person willing to come on my blog and entertain you. I am always seeking fresh voices to amuse you.

She is Eileen Cook, who clearly knows how to use a vintage typewriter to great effect. She has written Unpredictable, which has been called “laugh out loud funny” by Romantic Times. And she also writes a blog, called Just My Type, which has led to me not getting work done on many mornings. I have also spit tea all over my keyboard quite a few times, just because I don’t have the sense to read her blog before I take a big gulp of tea.

She is hilarious and so much fun, and I have ordered her book and cannot wait to read it. In the meantime, here is the great cover, and the picture of Eileen herself, and if you can’t see either of these because of my lack of skills at moving things around on the internet, (they’re showing up here NOW, but by tomorrow, the internet, in its wisdom, may snatch them away from here)…well, if they’re not here, just do yourself a favor and go to her blog. And now, scroll down to the bottom, beneath these pictures, and read Eileen’s guest post. Enjoy!

And now here is Eileen:

There is debate on some writer discussion loops as to when you can call yourself a writer. Some believe anyone who has the dedication to write, to focus on their craft, should be able to refer to themselves as writers. Others believe that the term writer should be saved for those that have reached publication.

Here’s my theory, you can call yourself anything you like. Heck, you can call yourself Wonder Woman and run around in your red white and blue bathing suit with go-go boots if you like, but it doesn’t mean other people are going to go along with your idea.

Transcript of an actual conversation.

Other Person (OP): What do you do?

Me: I’m a writer.

OP: Really? What have you written?

Me: It’s a romantic comedy called Unpredictable.

OP (looking distrustful): I never heard of it.

Me: It just came out.

OP: Is it going to be on Oprah?

Me: Um, well she hasn’t called yet.

OP: What about on the Regis and Kelly show?

Me: No plans for that either.

OP: You couldn’t even get on with Kelly Ripa? (should be said with a slight sneer that is insulting to both Ms. Ripa and myself.)

Me: I’m really more of an Ellen fan when you get right down to it, but before you ask she hasn’t called yet either.

OP: (looking around the room for more interesting people) Well good luck with your little project.

Some people are going to say you can’t be a writer unless you publish, or only if you publish with a major house. Someone else is going to weigh in and say it depends on your print run or if you hit any of the major lists. Others are waiting to see if you show up on Oprah (or Ellen or Live with Regis and Kelly) before deciding if your accomplishment should count.

Defining yourself isn’t limited just to writers, I hear the debate about who should get to call themselves a good mom, about who owns the right to say they’re an artist (versus a mere crafter), who is an athlete, who is a success. What would happen if we didn’t wait for others to approve our definition and we decided for ourselves? What if we decided what we wanted to be and pursued it with our whole hearts without waiting for someone to say it was okay?

If you feel like a superhero, then I say throw on the cape and get going. The world could use more saving and you look fabulous in Spandex.

eileen@eileencook.com

• News

  The first review for Unpredictable appeared in Romantic Times.

  “Cook’s debut novel seems destined to climb to the top of the bestseller lists. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will immediately fall in love with her style. This book reaches a new level of comedy with its hilarious heroine, exhilarating plot and fresh new approach to this well-loved genre.”

Well, okay, so it’s not exactly “starting off the New Year” if it’s going to January 5 in 30 minutes, but still…

This will make all you writers out there nod in recognition, and can be shown to your non-writing friends and relatives who don’t understand why we have to do this crazy thing.

And it will make you laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4_twvj5HJg

(See? I know other bloggers know how to embed youtube videos right into their posts, complete with little screens that people can click on. And truthfully, I was going to put this post on back on January 1st, except that I’ve spent the last three days arguing with WordPress about how to do this on my own blog. It has refused to post it…not only refusing to post it, but changing the whole configuration of my banner and everything. If you see a car in a green tunnel at the top of this blog, you know that things are not going well. But I will win! I will figure this out.)

It is the last day of the year, which is as good a time as any to look at the present moment.

So here it is: a moment.

It’s 1:45 on a Monday afternoon, and I am sitting at my desk in the family room, with my laptop in front of me, and I am listening to a Nellie McKay song called “Gladd.” I just heard an interview with her on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross while I was in the car, and so I came home and downloaded some of her songs on iTunes. (When my New Year’s resolutions kick in tomorrow, I will not be downloading quite so many songs on iTunes.) I’ve just realized that this song is from someone who died–it’s kind of a hymn of comfort, the type of thing a dead person might want to say to those left behind…and since this has been a year in which a lot of people close to me died, it seems particularly fitting to listen to right now. You can listen to it for free on the npr website…here’s the link, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6719830, and then you click on Listen. (I promise you: it’s not a sad song. It’s really beautiful and comforting.)

Anyway, back to the moment. (This is why I can never be a Buddhist; I can’t stay in any one moment.)

It’s now 2:26, and I’m just back from making a pot of white needle tea, which is wonderful–warm, light and delicious. The dog is stretched out asleep next to me, but you can see by his flickering eyelids that he’s not deeply asleep. His feeding time is officially 4 o’clock, but he gets ready by 2, and so any time I shift in my chair, he comes to hopeful attention.

Outside it is sunny although we were supposed to have a snowstorm today, so the sky–which is a delicate egg-shell blue with little white wispy clouds–seems like a particular blessing today. One of my children is snowed in in Boston; another had snow yesterday in Pennsylvania, and the third has gone off to meet New Year’s Eve in New York City. The house still looks like a post-Christmas apocalyptic catastrophe. I managed to get the wrapping paper out of here for the garbage pickup today, but there are still stockings lying around, looking indolent and self-satisfied, and a few stray boxes that should either go up to the attic or politely out with next week’s trash.

If I were to make a list of all the things I should be doing, it would be long indeed.

• I should be interviewing the subject of my next newspaper story, a 16-year old boy who will tell me why he believes exercise saves him. (I did try to call him; he’s not home. No doubt he’s out being saved by exercise right now.)

• I should call Jennifer and Stacy and Alice and Butch and wish them all Happy New Year, because it’s been too long since I’ve checked in with the extended family, and I would actually LOVE hearing what they’re all doing.

• I need to make an appetizer for the New Year’s Eve party we’re going to tonight with friends. While I was upstairs waiting for the tea to brew, I read the Cook’s Illustrated cookbook and thought for a long, hard moment about launching into a huge cooking project, and then decided, “Nah. I’ll go buy some shrimp and make shrimp cocktail. Everybody likes that, and why wreck the moment of being alone in the house listening to music by myself?”

• I could do laundry. I think it’s been weeks.

• Empty the dishwasher–those dishes in there have been clean for a few days, I think.

•  Go the gym and see if exercise saves ME.

• Send out Christmas cards, which now would be called New Year’s cards and may yet have to turn into valentines.

• Make some more New Year’s resolutions, along the same lines as STOP DOWNLOADING ITUNES.

But you know something? This day is just too marvelous the way it is. Just a perfect moment in time–the heater roaring softly, the music, the taste of the tea, the knowledge that soon I’ll have to go out and buy shrimp and cocktail sauce. I will go back to reading my novel and making the last little tweaks, the last Ridding of the Adverbs as I think of it.

Nellie McKay is singing her last line: “It’s been a long time coming, but all the pain has passed and there is peace.”

To all of you who stop by for a visit, Happy New Year…and may 2008 bring you much joy and peace.

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.