Sandi Kahn Shelton

It should be easy, starting a novel. This one is due in September, so it has the advantage of having very little time to incubate. (I posted a quote by Leonard Bernstein recently in which he said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”)

I definitely don’t have much time, and until today, I didn’t have a plan either.

That’s because my usual way of starting a novel is to meander around with the character, as if I’m in a Polaroid picture that is slowly coming into focus. 

That’s what I’ve been doing. 

I know the main character, Cate. And her husband Grant. And I know what is going to happen to them. I know what Cate had for breakfast this morning and what she said to her daughter on the phone last night, and what she emailed to her son at college…and I know the unspeakable thing she did twenty-five years ago that she can’t forgive herself for, the thing that Grant won’t ever let her talk about.

Cate rides along with me all the time these days, a little companionly voice in my ear. If a song comes on the radio, she’ll say something like, “Oh, that song played the day that Grant and I got married. I listened to it on our way to the hotel, and it’s always reminded me of the way I suddenly looked over at Grant, frowning as he tried to sing along to the words, but he kept forgetting where he was and singing the same verse over and over again. That’s when I realized how distracted he always was, and it hit me what I had just signed on for. I looked at him closely and saw that the pants to his wedding suit were too short, his ankles stuck out…and he’d forgotten to shave on one side, and he was lost in his own little world, squinting one eye and then the other as if he were trying to decide if the whole world was all an optical illusion. I had always thought that the whole Grant shtick was just so adorable, the way he couldn’t be bothered to care about so many things. But now, at that moment, I remember there was this little chill, this one little nagging thought in my head: that this was going to be the thing about him that drove me absolutely insane. The way he was always solving math problems in his head, even on his wedding day.”

Sometimes Cate tells me so many things like this that I have to pull over in the car and write down what she’s saying. I have a whole little notebook now, filled with Cate’s opinions. And I have about twenty pages of the novel that contains her.

Meanwhile, September is like a speeding truck bearing down on us.

THE BOOK, I told her today, HAS TO BE WRITTEN.

And so I am going to try something new. I am going to simply sit down and outline the whole plot of this book, from beginning to end, the way I used to do with nonfiction books.

I am actually going to decide in advance what is going to happen, not just wander through the book waiting for the plot to settle on it like a nice blanket warm from the dryer.

There will be order. And chapter headings. Page numbers. Story arcs.

I have to admit that I am not a huge planning kind of gal. The truth is that I have lived a seat-of-the-pants kind of life, which has been my favorite way to live… but, well, now that it looks like writing fiction might actually become something of a career for me, perhaps I need to figure out a way to do it on my own terms, not just wait for characters to tell me stuff.

It’s going to be interesting. All you writers out there, please tell me if this is how you do it! Do you wait for inspiration, or do you outline and then stick to it? Which way causes the least amount of angst?

Maybe Leonard Bernstein really is on to something: a plan and not enough time. Key to getting anything done.

I’ve been home from paradise for three days now, and I’m still peaceful.

Amazing.

But allow me to explain. A friend of mine turned 50, and instead of just turning to drink and despair as so many of us do at such a milestone, she decided to invite friends of hers to a four-day celebration at a destination spa here in Connecticut.

It was snowing lightly when we set out at the beginning of last week. I was frantic with To Do lists, uncertainties, anxieties and all the rest of that stuff that I carry around most of the time. (I know that good writing demands that I should mention what some of the anxieties are, but to tell you the truth, I can’t much remember them anymore.) I do remember that I barely got out of the house on time to meet the car that pulled up in my driveway to take me there, and that papers and books were flying behind me as I settled in.

But then we drove for an hour and a half through the Connecticut countryside, and then something almost surreal happened. I got there and actually felt an incredible calm come over me.

At first the calm seemed to come from the beauty of the place: huge, welcoming rooms with deep, white chaise longues and soft, knitted afghans. There were floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over snowy fields and a pond lined with evergreen trees draped with snow, and an almost blue, calm sunset shining glowing. There were fresh flowers. Cups of tea, with little triangle silk tea bags and white china cups. Soft music. (I am a sucker for silk tea bags and fresh flowers. And those, combined with a sunset over a snowy field, knock me the hell out…and add to that a chaise with an afghan, and I’m gone, just GONE.)

Everything just felt soft suddenly. As though I’d come to the place where I was meant to be right then.

And then I met the other women, and I realized over the four days that the best part was NOT the perfection of the rooms, the amazing food, or even the wonderful massage treatments and classes in stress relief and hypnotherapy. The best part was the fact that there were 30 women there, all of whom were kind and fascinating and funny and REAL.

Over the four days, we all wore warmup clothing supplied by the spa, and no makeup. And we talked, in both large and small groups, over meals and tucked into corners of the spa and while we swam in the pool or steamed in the warm aromatherapy room. Talked about husbands and kids and jobs and childhood and aging and…well, everything. Real estate. Politics and sex and anxieties. The past. The future. What we’d like to do. We laughed and drank wine and tea and ate amazing food (healthy and delicious, both), and nobody said mean things like, “What did you mean by THAT?” or “Let me tell you why I’m the most important person in the universe.”

Nobody said, “You could really stand to lose a few pounds” or “Why would you ever wear your hair that way?” like sometimes they slip up and say back in real life. 

Everywhere was peace and quiet, an indescribable feeling of having come to the perfect place. It wasn’t like not knowing there weren’t worries; it was the feeling of standing aside from them and knowing they couldn’t swamp you.

The days loped along. I did things I hadn’t done before, drifted in a kind of shelter of myself. And then one day it was time to come home.

I thought coming home would be a shock, but it wasn’t. Maybe I’m just unwilling to give up this feeling. Nothing seems worth giving over this happiness.

Maybe I’m still hypnotized into believing that life can be sweet. Just in case, though, I picked up a little rock I found on the ground outside the place, tucked under the snow. When this blissful feeling starts to wear off, I’m thinking I can hold this little rock and remember some of the feeling.

Or maybe I’ll just go buy some tea in little triangle silk tea bags. That could work, too.   

Today I woke up late, drove 30 miles to pick up a friend to go to a goal-setting workshop that took three hours, (my goals were not to be in such a hurry all the time), then stood in a thirty-minute line for lunch, took her back to her house, drove home, went to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make Thai soup for dinner, rented two movies, drove back home, and then drove 30 more  miles to pick up my daughter from her babysitting job, drove to a second grocery store to get the rest of the Thai ingredients that I couldn’t find at the first store, and then drove home, decided the Thai soup was going to take too long to cook when we were all so hungry so I made chicken curry in a hurry instead, and then washed the dishes, and then came downstairs to work for a little while, sending out a bio for a talk I’m giving in April and tracking down sources for a story I’m working on for the newspaper.

And I came across this quote, which seems to sum why I still feel in such a good mood:

Leonard Bernstein said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

I rarely take on issues in this blog. Mostly it’s just me, talking about my own life, showing pictures, going through the throes of writing and parenting, and talking to my friends about both of those things.

But today I got a comment on a post from Mother Pie, and since it’s always so much fun to meet new bloggers, I went over to her blog and read a few of her posts, which were wonderful…and then I came across this one, a post from a soldier in Iraq, who has been writing a blog for the past five years for the Rocky Mountain News.

Andrew Olmsted lived constantly in the presence of great danger, and so he wrote a very thoughtful, heartbreaking post to be published in the event of his death. Aside from the political ramifications of the war in Iraq (which he asks us not to use his death to talk about), there is something so poignant in being able to read a man’s honest and forthright look at his life. Without even a trace of self-pity, he talks about what he would have done differently and what he will miss and the people he wished he could have met, and then he tells us about his wife and what he hopes for her future. He tells about his feelings for the job he was doing and his country–and says that if he had to die there, he hopes we will all spread the story that he must have died liberating a village and saving innocent women and children, though he admits that probably isn’t the way he died.

It is a beautiful look back at life. And I’ve been sitting inside today, typing away while it is nearly 60 degrees outside…and, well, I just think I’m going out for a walk.

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.

It was a lovely Christmas, really. Besides the usual presents under the tree and stockings hung by the chimney with care, and carols playing on the stereo, we had babies taking baths, crowing at each other, sucking on washcloths, and splashing. As my friend Nancy said, “Now we know why God invented double sinks.”

We had my husband and me, sitting on the kitchen floor with the three grandchildren, laughing. That is Charlie and Josh, measuring each other, while their cousin Miles looks on with envy. He is clearly wondering who you have to know to get your own big brother around here.

And we had the dog posing as William Tell’s son, although I’m happy to report that no one shot an arrow at him.

For a while life was so chaotic here that we all seemed to be doing triage, rushing from one tumultuous situation to another. But there was plenty of food, and laughter, and music–and lots of time to cuddle children and read stories. By the time Christmas was over and we had packed everyone off to their respective homes, we were so tired we had to pretty much take to our beds. The next day I got up and mailed off all the things they had forgotten to take home with them.

Then today, Hospice called.

“Sandi? How are you doing?” the social worker said.

“Well…I’m fine,” I said. The caller ID hadn’t said anything about Hospice.

“Really?” she said. She sounded surprised, like it might not be okay to say you were fine. Not after you lost your mom to cancer just six months ago.

“It was a good Christmas,” I told her. “Of course, I miss my mother terribly, but there were babies here, and my whole family came, and there was a lot going on.”

She was silent, respectful.

I didn’t tell her about the dog with the apple on his head or the double sink, or how I played one of my mother’s favorite songs on the stereo but didn’t mention to anyone that it had been her favorite song. Or how sometimes lately I wake up at night thinking about those Christmases I had a long time ago…when my mother decorated the house with little styrofoam ornaments with toothpicks and sequins, and how she would whip up Ivory Snow detergent into what looked like snow, and have my father coat the boughs of our Christmas tree with it. Bowls and bowls of it. One year she used 24 boxes of Ivory Snow. For years the smell of Christmas was for me the lovely fragrance of laundry soap.

But when I hung up, I sat there for a long time thinking about all of that.

The best Christmases are mixed, I think. The fun of being with little children and seeing family members try to reach out toward each other…all that new bright happiness can’t help but be more lovely when it’s mixed in with the awareness of loss. And the fact that when you look around, you realize that everyone else is struggling with some form of loss as well. No one gets by untouched.

I miss my mother now almost more than I did when she first passed away. As time has gone by, I’ve replaced the memory of those last hospital days with the larger memories of when I was a child and she was the person I depended on most in the world.

It’s a wistful feeling, of course. And fleeting–just like the smell of pine needles drenched in 99 44/100% pure Ivory soap.

It was midnight last night when my husband delivered the news. “The piles,” he said in a low, ominous voice, “are uneven.”

I blanched.

I knew what this meant. I have to go back into…the stores. No matter how you look at it, the presents for the children are unbalanced. And since we’re having a “light” Christmas anyway (read: cheap and stingy), it isn’t going to be good enough to even up the piles by taking some people’s presents away.

Oh, no. This is clearly a day when I have to go shopping once again. On the weekend before Christmas! When people who are crazed will be there, pulling things off the racks, forming long lines to the cash register, snarling with holiday cheer gone bad.

There is nothing worse than holiday cheer gone bad. Trust me, I know.

This year, for the first time in many years, I got in the mood for Christmas right on time. I didn’t kvetch about the decorations going up just before Halloween. I made peace with the fact that a Major American Holiday was coming–and even before I served the turkey for Thanksgiving, I had bought some presents, which is unheard of for me. I’m usually smacking my head on Dec. 15th and saying, “WHAT?!?!? Nobody told me it was Christmas!!”

But there I was, decked out in my holiday spirit and clutching my little overused credit card, clicking away ordering things online. By the time Cyber Monday rolled around, I was nearly done with my shopping.

But then a curious thing happened: the rest of the planet caught up with me, gift-buying-wise, and, I don’t know, I just kept picking out little things here and there. Things I obviously can’t tell you about, but you know what I mean. That for her and oh this is on sale and he would like that, and oh yes, the baby needs this, and yes, the other baby should get one, too. And somehow even though I’ve been proudly done with my shopping for weeks now, I still have to go shopping on Dec. 22 (and maybe again on Dec. 23 and 24, because who knows if the piles will even up and stay even?)

First, though, I’m having a cup of tea and admiring the tree for just a little longer, maybe reading three more stories from the fiction issue of The New Yorker that came this week, playing another round of Christmas carols. (I’m loving the Bare Naked Ladies’ version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” with Sarah McLachlan.) 

And then I’ll go. Yes, and take my place in the long, long lines that by now are surely twisting around the stores, going down the blocks, and heading toward the New Year.

Hope your holiday is a happy one, whatever you celebrate…and that your piles stay even.

I am getting to be quite the party hostess, over here in my little blog. Maybe it’s the holidays, maybe it’s that I’ve learned just how to put out the right tea towels and make the little sandwiches with the crusts cut off…but lately people seem to want to come visit and write things here.

I’m flattered.

Today’s guest blogger is ROBERTA ISLEIB, who just happens to live in the same community I do, but perhaps because we’re both writers who are so self-disciplined that we do not go out in public when we are writing our books, we have rarely had the chance to see each other. Still, she signed on with Dorothy Thompson of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, who so wonderfully managed my own book tour through the blogosphere last May, and now here she is, on my blog.

  Here is a picture of Roberta, on warmer days. (We just had a major ice storm, so even looking at this picture is making me shiver). And here is a picture of her book, Preaching to the Corpse, a murder mystery set right in our own home town. It’s fabulous, believe me. I can’t wait to buy copies for everybody I know.

And here is Roberta’s blog post:

The OTHER advice column novel

About a year and a half ago, a month before I’d turned in DEADLY ADVICE, thefirst book in my new mystery series, I ran into Nancy, a writer friend in town. We exchanged news about our careers and I told her my latest book would be published in the spring.

“What’s it about?” she asked.

“The main character is a psychologist who lives in Connecticut and writes an advice column,” I said. “She’s drawn into the murder investigation of a neighbor who was pegged as a suicide because she feels dreadfully guilty about not noticing anything wrong.”

She congratulated me and wished me luck, as writer friends do. Though maybe her face looked a little funny…

Just a week later I read that Sandi Kahn Shelton would be reading from her new book, featuring AN ADVICE COLUMNIST WHO LIVES IN CONNECTICUT. I realized right then that Nancy had known about Sandi’s book. And she also knew that I’d BUST A GUT once I heard that an ESTEEMED WRITER like Sandi had BEAT ME TO MY OWN THESIS. Every writer’s nightmare. Sigh.

So I went to Sandi’s booksigning, bought her book, asked her to sign it, and slapped it in a drawer where I wouldn’t be tempted to read it and crib every good idea I found. Only after I’d turned in my own manuscript and gotten well along into the sequel, PREACHING TO THE CORPSE, could I allow myself to enjoy A PIECE OF NORMAL. All while trying not to say, “Oh, I wish I’d thought of that” more than once a chapter.

That said, my new character, Dr. Rebecca Butterman is a 30-something, freshly single woman living in Guilford, CT. She has a complicated family history (don’t we all) that colors her reactions to her life and her work.

And she’s still raw from her recent divorce. Which puts her in the funny position of giving advice to the lovelorn in Bloom! Magazine and conducting a psychotherapy practice, while struggling with her own issues. All realistic enough, I hope.

The excitement in the new book begins when Rebecca’s minister wakes her up in the middle of the night, about to be charged with murder. He begs her to join the committee charged with hiring a new minister. There she uncovers cutthroat church politics rather than the joys of the holiday season. It seems that “thou shalt not kill” has been qualified: “…unless thou art eliminating the competition.”

Rebecca has strong relationships with two women friends and her younger sister. She’s an amazing cook and much of her detective work is done while enjoying a good meal, either at home or out with friends. In fact, I can imagine Rebecca and Lily getting together for lunch one day. Maybe Claire’s in New Haven, or the Hidden Kitchen in Guilford. Anyway, I’ll leave that to them. I think they’ll like each other though…

I hope you’ll enjoy reading about her as much as I’ve enjoyed the writing.

Thank you thank you to Sandi for writing wonderful books and being such a good hostess!

Roberta Isleib

http://www.robertaisleib.com

There’s a lot of things to accomplish, especially at this time of year–but I’m happy to say there’s a new thing we can cross off our list.

We’ve worked out a plan to prove our identity to each other should one of us be taken by kidnappers or terrorists.

It was Stephanie’s idea. She’s a sophomore in college and has a lot on her mind, what with final exams coming up and all. But she called me the other night and after we finished with our usual topics which involved travel schedules, untenable homework load, food situations, possible health insurance claims, requirements for new pieces of clothing now that the weather has changed, and computer glitches causing unheard-of troubles, we got down to the Real Business: our emergency management plans.

She’d watched a movie recently which got her thinking how she would ever prove to me that she was REALLY Stephanie, should that ever come up.

“Here’s what I’m going to say, Mom,” she told me. “Remember how when I was little and you were putting me to bed, we would always say to each other, ‘I love you a million dinosaurs on a million mountaintops’? If I ever have to prove I’m really me, that’s what I think I’ll use. You’d definitely know that was me.”

You know, a lot of people don’t think of this kind of thing in advance. And I’m relieved I’m not the only person waking up in the middle of the night worrying about such contingencies.