I had a lot of complicated thoughts of fever-induced mom guilt after COVID hit our house, and threw some of them into an essay that I put together hoping to get picked up by Working Mother magazine or something.
I never heard from them, but it was accepted by Moms Don’t Have Time to Write and the post is now live on Medium! This is my second essay to be accepted by them, so I hope that this means I could end up becoming a regular contributor as the one-year countdown to Community Klepto’s release begins.
I recently had an essay get accepted to Moms Don’t Have Time to Write, a new website brainchild of award-winning book podcaster Zibby Owens. A fellow author clued me into their call for submissions, and though I was nervous about submitting since I have never written anything expressly through the lens of being a mom before, I was pleased when they accepted my submission the very next today.
Is today the day that I infect everyone in my life because I dared to leave my own house, Or is today the day that I lose my job because my children interrupted me every 5 minutes?
Maybe you shouldn’t have had kids if you weren’t prepared to take care of them 24/7, But you also definitely shouldn’t have kids if you can’t provide for them financially.
Of course our first solution to this crisis shouldn’t be for all female parents to just stop working, But we can’t really expect both parents to exit the workforce for 18 years, now can we?
You’re selfish if you don’t put the health, safety, and needs of your children first, But you’re also selfish if you expect your work colleagues to pick up your slack.
If you go get your hair done, then everyone around you will die, But you’re on camera a lot more these days, so you should really fix your hair.
Restaurants aren’t safe right now – even if you’re out on a patio, even if you’re getting takeout, But if you don’t support your local restaurants then only Applebee’s will survive.
No one should set foot inside a school building until everyone has had a vaccine, But the first vaccines to reach the market were rushed through trials and can’t be trusted.
A learning pod with people you trust is a great way educate your kids and get social interaction, But these pods are also tools of the elite that only serve to deepen inequality.
Wearing a face mask isn’t political and everyone should just do the right thing for the public’s health, But it’s critical that you vote for someone who’ll mandate masks, or everyone will die.
If you need one hour of quiet just to get through an important meeting, Moana’s got your back, But just remember that the only kids who really thrive are those who never have screen time.
You and your kids can’t wait for all of this to be over so things can get back to normal, But normal was over-scheduled weekends and letting someone else raise them during the week.
Fully vaccinated adults can gather together safely without masking, But your children can’t get vaccinated yet so you better keep them away from unsuspecting adults.
With my first two books, marketing and publicity was hands-down the thing I hated doing the most and also was the worst at. On the other hand, I had a lot more time to devote to things like querying book bloggers and doing guest interviews back then, too. This time around I was not only resolved to let a professional handle all that stuff I suck at for me, I also had a nice list of referrals for good publicists from my publisher.
I queried four of them and had phone meetings with two of them. I would have had three meetings, but they all fell during the week of the freak winter storm we had down here in Austin. I dismissed one of them almost immediately because they put off a very “Publizity” from Kroll Show vibe. What stuck out to me, and ultimately solidified my decision to go with the publicist I did, was that only one of the companies asked to see my manuscript. I know a lot of busy marketing people don’t have time to read everything that comes across their desk, but how do you know if you’re the right person to market the book if you don’t know the book? How do you know who you’re going to sell it to?
After reading horror stories of authors hiring multiple publicists to do multiple things, I was really resolved to only do this once and find someone who really wanted to work with me and wanted to represent my work. And I didn’t want a Liz. So when I talked to potential publicists to represent me, these were the 3 most important questions I asked, and made my decision easier (taken from the larger list from BookBub):
What kind of experience do you have marketing books like mine? This not only leaves room to answer the obvious question, but also lets you know how much effort they put into learning about your book before talking to you.
What kind of promotions would you envision running for my book? This gives you an opportunity to make sure you’re not going to get cookie-cutter promos that don’t fit your book well.
What media contacts do you have that would be interested in my book? One, you get to know what kind of media contacts they have and how many, and two, you can get a good feel of how comfortable they feel about promoting your book where it fits.
Of course the hope is that by June of 2022 I can have a real in-person book launch and sign books face to face after poorly reading from my own novel. But more than anything I am happy that I have someone to handle all the promotional logistics of it for me! Looking forward to a long relationship with Caitlin Hamilton Marketing.
This week has sucked balls. It sucked more balls for a lot more people in this state, but it still sucked for us too. Ice and snow basically trapped us in our home for a full week. We lost power and heat for a total of 8 hours, which was a lot less than much of Austin and Texas at large, and we were lucky to not lose power on the single digit days (SO not fair; I left Kansas City to get away from single-digit temperatures). We lost running water on Wednesday and we still don’t have it back. Rumor is it might be next Wednesday before that happens. I need a shower. I need to wash sheets that have been peed upon (by the 4-year-olds, not me). I can’t wait to wash dishes… which is something I never thought I’d hear myself say out loud, but here we are.
Shittiness aside, here’s what I learned this week:
I write my best poetry when I am pissed off… like, really, really pissed off.
My loving spouse, who has far more doomsday prepper bones in his body than I do, will never tire of hearing “Yes, you were right.”
My children will still want to eat ice cream and wear swimsuits when it is 55 degrees in our house.
People like book publicists are really forgiving about rescheduling meetings when you have no electricity, spotty internet on your phone, and no running water.
No amount of experience of driving on ice and snow (and I have plenty) will make me willing to brave roads in inclement weather with Texas drivers.
One box of wine was not enough.
Little Fires Everywhere was a damn good miniseries, but still a better book.
In a lot of ways it felt like the early days of COVID: daycare was closed, everything was closed, and anything that was open was mobbed and picked over. Luckily no one expected me to be productive this week, otherwise I might have actually had those book publicist meetings with hair that hasn’t been washed since Tuesday, or made more progress on my next novel. But it was survival mode… literally. Survival was easy enough for us because we were prepared for it, but it didn’t bode well for author work. I may write my best poetry during apocalypses, but fiction not so much. Fuck COVID, and fuck once-in-a-lifetime winter storms. I’m over it.
Like most of the country, I didn’t know who Amanda Gorman was before Tuesday, January 20. At any given time I could tell you a few of my favorite poems, a few of my favorite poets, but I couldn’t tell you who the current poet laureate or youth poet laureate is. I couldn’t even tell you who the poet in residence on The West Wing was, and I’ve seen that whole series three times. But I can tell you that despite my best efforts to be nonplussed by everything inaugural, I was legitimately excited to see that the youngest inaugural poet ever was a female person of color, and excited that I identified a lot with her story.
Granted, she is from Los Angeles and I am from about the furthest thing from Los Angeles. She grew up with a single mom; I grew up with a single dad. But like Gorman, I fell in love with poetry from a very young age (although my very young age was much before Amanda’s) because it felt like one of the only ways I could truly express myself. I wrote a ton of (really bad) poems as a kid, as an adolescent, and beyond. I still write bad poems when there’s a really big feeling I have that I don’t know how else to get through. For every poem I have had published, there are 20 more sitting in a folder.
And like Gorman, I have a speech impediment, too. Sometimes my stutter is barely noticeable if I am relaxed, not overthinking my speech, and talking to people I know, like when I read books to my kids. Other times, especially when I am talking to new people or speaking up in front of people, my brain will completely short-circuit my speech and cripple my ability to get through certain sounds without stuttering. And the longer I am away from regularly talking to people, like a whole year working from home in quarantine, the worse my stutter gets. It’s like, 18 months away, but I am already dreading doing book readings for Community Klepto and stuttering over certain words. Good thing I didn’t name my protagonist Millie or Rachel.
Poetry is a very solitary, deeply personal art. For most poets, it’s one of the only ways to express feelings and emotions they may not even consciously know they’re feeling. Refining a poem to use just the right words in a very concise form is long, tedious work. “The Hill We Climb” wasn’t written overnight. I’m no Amanda Gorman, but a poem of that length would have taken me weeks, maybe months. When we see a poem like “The Hill We Climb” read aloud for a few minutes on a national stage for the whole world to see, it’s easy to forget the long, lonely work of turning those personal thoughts into something worth reading. Watching someone who’s fought struggles with speech read her heart’s work so passionately and eloquently in front of the entire world… that’s incredibly inspiring to me.
It’s become part of my weekday monthly routine to listen to a poetry podcast while I walk around the block, drink my coffee, and wake the fuck up. Hearing Padraig O’Tuama read on Poetry Unbound sets the tone for the rest of my day and it’s been a great way to get introduced to new poets beyond the Seamus Haney and Emily Dickinson I had to read in college. Poets, especially modern poets, don’t get a lot of respect. They’re viewed as weirdos (and to be fair, some are – I distinctly remember going to a slam poetry open mic for extra credit and hearing a very hairy dude tell us not to clap for him because he was not a poet, but a conduit for a higher power). It’s easy to see poetry as something kitschy or woke or elitist. But after Tuesday, more people bought poetry than ever, and a 22-year-old poet is going to be taking her kitschy, woke, elitist work straight to the bank. And that’s awesome.
The office for my day job (which has been my guest bedroom since March) was closed for the MLK holiday today. In my mind, I was going to use this unexpected day off to focus on finishing editing Community Klepto and work on some other documents for my publisher, since they’re due at the end of the month. However, because I am a working mom, my day off ended up looking more like this:
Get the children off to school
Take the microvan for an overdue oil change and an overdue state inspection
Finish paperback (Dry) waiting for microvan
Take microvan through car wash because bird shit happens
Vacuum fossilized french fries and Reese’s Pieces out of the microvan
Pick up more Zyrtec-D because it’s cedar season in Austin
Barre class (yay! I usually have to do this before anyone else in my house wakes up)
Take bunch of bags of crap to the Goodwill, also the box spring for old bed, now bungeed to the top of the microvan
Goodwill won’t take box spring – attempt Habitat for Humanity Restore
Restore won’t take box spring – succeed at Salvation army 10 miles away
Start editing, realize I need to start crock pot
Start crock pot, realize I am too tired to stare at computer screen
Finish audiobook (Fight Club) falling asleep
Get up, finish editing book before retrieving children
The reality is that even when I have a day off my day is really just filled with the backlog of things that I haven’t been able to get to because I either can’t do them when I am working during the day or I can’t do them while I’m with my children on the weekend. This is the reality for all working parents, especially moms.
As a mom with a full time job and a book coming out next year, time for writing, editing, or doing author platform building comes at a premium, and often comes after my children decide they’re done jumping off their beds for the night and decide to actually sleep on them. So even when my “day of editing” gets derailed by a jillion other tasks that have to be done, I can feel a great sense of gratitude in actually getting editing time in when the sun is out.
And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that the manuscript is now officially ready for the publisher. And the children loved the crock pot soup.
I started 2020 ready to get busy with a local publisher on getting Community Klepto on shelves. Then of course, COVID-19 trickled into the US and all of a sudden my publisher wasn’t my publisher anymore. Meanwhile, my day job changed to remote in my home, and my kids’ daycare closed down for awhile. Life was unbelievably hard. Every day was longer than the last one and I felt like I was failing at everything. My writing, at this time, was not even on the map. The publisher wasn’t returning my emails or texts and though I knew the writing was on the wall, it wasn’t until they finally responded to me saying it wasn’t going to happen that I accepted it wasn’t going to happen.
By July, I was ready for a win. I made time every night to query at least two publishers or agents about Community Klepto. I followed through, even though many nights I was working on queries while ushering my children back into their room to go to bed (those summer solstice months when it doesn’t get dark til what feels like midnight are brutal for parents with young children). There were nights it took me hours to get those two queries done, but I did it. I knew that if I had already had two publishers interested enough to offer me a deal, even though both of those fell through, chances were that a third one would, too.
I got a fair number of rejections, some coming mere minutes after spending hours working on the query, but one of the bright sides of COVID was that it made me a lot more immune to rejection. One of the first queries I made in July was to She Writes Press, and they accepted my manuscript a couple months later. I still queried up until I signed with She Writes Press, but I slowed down a lot. Now I am working with my SWP project manager on all the business-side things of the book. I won’t get to brag about it until the year-end post of 2022, but things are chugging along.
Despite all the shitty things that happened this year, there was also plenty to have gratitude about, too. I mean, I signed with the 2019 independent publisher of the year, so that’s kind of a big deal. And while my job moved me into my spare bedroom and didn’t give any of us raises this year, I still have a job, which is more than a lot of people can say. My children were able to go back to in-person preschool until the middle of this month. My 15-year-old dog is even still kicking! So what else happened this year?
In reading…
According to Goodreads I read just 24 books this year. It was definitely more than that, but updating Goodreads doesn’t always happen and this year has turned my brain to mush. Here were my top 5 favorite reads of the year, in no particular order:
Educated by Tara Westover A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander Ready Player One by Ernest Cline The Interestings by Meg Wollitzer
The worst book I read all year was American Skin by Don de Grazia, and the fact that it took me months to get through it was a good indicator that I should have put it in the DNF pile.
In writing…
After my summer querying escapade was over, I decided to dedicate a few hours a week to just sitting and writing, even if I had nothing on my mind. I wrote some random things and had a flash fiction piece published by the Rose City Sisters. Right now I am working on something that started out as a romance satire piece, but I’m not sure what it will end up being, only that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written so far (but my opinion could be changed completely once I go back to edit it). Like everything else in my life that is not my day job, my children, or all the other crap I have to do every day, writing must be dedicated focused time, planned and scheduled out.
Favorite things of the year…
Favorite internet thing of the year: Man Who Has It All – the Twitter account, the website, the store – any time I needed a laugh in 2020, Man Who Has It All came through.
Favorite new album this year: Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple – I could listen to “Ladies” on repeat all freaking day.
Favorite new show this year: The Mandalorian – I can’t even stop myself from cooing and doing baby talk when Grogu comes on screen. But I also watched Cheer more times than I am willing to admit.
Favorite game: Blather Round – we spent all the time we would have spent in bars and at people’s houses playing Jackbox over Skype instead.
I’m looking forward to saying goodbye to 2020 by playing Jackbox over Skype with a bottle of 337 cab and doing the diligent work of getting Community Klepto ready for the world – and hopefully by then herd immunity can allow us to have a real book launch party.
My mind, like everyone’s right now, has been a swirling cesspool trying to process everything that’s going on in the world right now. The cesspool, mixed with a recent-ish encounter with my own children in a grocery store, spurned me to write this flash fiction piece which is now featured in the Rose City Sisters short fiction site. It feels so good to be writing and querying in the midst of the world going a new flavor of batshit crazy every day.
This dumb virus has affected everyone differently. For my part, I’ve been working my day job from home since early March, like everyone else, often while one or both four-year-olds comes in to inform me of the latest happenings (someone just pooped, a lego brick got lodged somewhere, Netflix is asking if they are still watching PJ Masks, etc.). I said at the beginning of this quarantine that I was going to do two things: get super fit and get a lot more writing done. Spoiler alert… neither has happened.
It sucks, too, because I have more fodder for my writing than ever before with all the crazy shit and emotional turmoil, but I am so burnt out from being a work at home parent I don’t even have the energy to tell Netflix I’m still watching most nights. A short time after the pandemic took its hold in the US, I reached out to the publisher I had been working with since last summer to get COMMUNITY KLEPTO on the shelves. I figured it would be a good time to get things rolling, since a lot of people stuck at home are reading more, but making manuscripts into books takes resources and capital that the publisher no longer had, so they are shelving all projects until further notice, including mine.
So, it’s back to the drawing board for now. Maybe they’ll come back to the table, or maybe I’ll find a new one. All I can say for certain is that coronavirus sucks, this isn’t the end for my writing, and I’ll probably never fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans again.
