When I am carrying something big and heavy down a flight of stairs, I need to be able to watch my feet carefully. This means that I am not able to carry anything large enough to prevent my being able to look down and instantly be reassured by the sight of my stair-descending feet.
I have tiny weak arms like a T-Rex, and small useless hands, so that even the lightest, most easily gripped furniture slips easily from my clutches. Also, I stop to shift my grip a lot, but I don’t tell YOU that I’m stopping, so you either fall over backwards or slam into the furniture we’re trying to carry. Then I yell at you.
Last night I dreamt that I was in a stand-up comedy competition. I had some great jokes lined up! Except because they were dream jokes, I am now fairly certain that they did not actually make sense. I wish I could remember them. The only one I do remember, went something like this:
“You know those girls who are always looking to their boyfriends like, ‘do I look ok? Is it all right if I do this or that?’ They do this because their boyfriends are jerks!”
That one totally killed! The audience was rolling in the aisles. At least now I know I can always find work in my dreams as a stand-up comedian.
Is there anything better than getting a card from a six year old that says, “I LOVE YOU MOLLY AND YOU ARE MY FREND AND WE ARE BEST FRENDS FOR EVER”?
I wouldn’t know how to beat that. How can you beat that?
After three years in a 3rd floor walk-up apartment with two mid-sized dogs who like to thump around a lot and crash into walls, we’re finally moving to a house with a fenced-in yard! I have been extremely looking forward to this move for roughly eighteen months.
We actually tried to move last year; even went so far as to give notice at our apartment complex, and then chickened out early on after looking at a few particularly unsavory houses and deciding we might as well stay put. I tried to tell myself I liked where I was, but really, I was sick of living in an apartment. It’s one thing to do that in a big exciting city when it’s the only real option, but in Garner, NC you really have no excuse not to have a big ol’ backyard and a garage and a bunch of outdoor space to call your own. There’s just so much of it everywhere and the rents are so reasonable. And this may surprise you, but apartment living in Garner is just not that glamorous.
So when the time rolled around we gave our notice again, but this time we meant it. Our lease was up during the summer, but I started house hunting in around, oh say February. This was hard to do, because people are not generally advertising their rental houses six months before they’re going to be available. I would call real estate agents and let them know when I was looking to move, and they would laugh at me, tell me to call them back in five and a half months, and hang up.
It is scary giving notice that you will not be renewing your current lease without having a firm idea of where you’ll be living next. I worried that we wouldn’t find anything again and would decide in desperation to stick it out in the apartment for another year, only to be told that it had already been rented out from under us, and that we had to move.
But! Instead, we found the cutest house.
We started moving a few things in last weekend, and at one point I couldn’t resist showing the dogs their new digs. For months I had fantasized about being able to boot them out the door and into a yard where they could run and play, without having to worry that Sophie would bolt into the woods for no discernable reason, as is her wont. It can take hours to corrall her back once she gets loose, and the whole time she dances around just out of reach as you scream her name she’s giving you this big droopy and yet strangely vacant stare and having the best time ever. It’s completely infuriating.
Of course, the first thing Sophie DID do when I let her out in the yard was run around to the side of the house and nudge the not-quite-locked gate open with her nose.
That small instant of panic aside, once I’d firmly locked the gate, it was the moment I’d been waiting for, and it was wonderful. The dogs sniffed cautiously, then leapt around with joy and took off running across the wide open expanse of grass…until they reached the eight foot high fence. It was magical. It felt like the ending to that movie Born Free, except for their not being free, or lions.
It was not easy. In fact, it was really really hard. Especially because I had 46,000 words to write during ten days which included the Thanksgiving holiday and during which I had family visiting for a (delightful!) week.
But I got it done, thanks in part to WriteorDie.com , a site which helped me to learn that I am capable of writing approximately 1,200 words in 17 minutes. I am pretty proud of that fact. I’m not saying they were 1,200 of the best words I’ve ever written, but still. That’s some speedy writing.
So, I finished my NaNo novel for 2010 too, by pulling it out in the last few days, and that was an accomplishment.
It’s funny, I am not a particularly competitive person in general, but when it comes to certain things, such as exercising, or making writing deadlines, (situations where you are competitive against yourself) I am a howling BEAST and I REFUSE TO FAIL.
I guess I am pretty stubborn after all. Brian could very likely soliloquize at length about this observation, but I am not going to give him the opportunity.
I’m in the thick of my second National Novel Writing Month this November, and I’m simultaneously having the best and worst time ever, which is pretty much how this project seems to be destined to go.
But really, this year has been a great learning experience for me as a writer– and I feel like I am learning different things from what I learned last year, which is especially rewarding as a second-year participant. In a nutshell, here is what I have learned so far:
1) I am not ready to write a memoir yet. I started out writing one, which is against the rules of NaNo anyway, and started to run out of steam after around 3,000 words. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had no plot. Anyway, I still want to write about what I was writing the memoir about, but I think it’s going to have to wait. It’s just more fun to make stuff up, and NaNoWriMo is all about the fun.
So, I started over on Day 7, which I didn’t think was such a big deal because last year I only LEARNED about NaNo around November 6th, and didn’t really get going until around the 7th-8th. So, I figured that was fine, and I came up with a novel plot that I loved and was really excited about and then around 14,000 words in, around, oh, November 17th or so, I realized that:
2) I can’t write a novel that is too plotted out, because then I have no room to play around and improvise and do those little riffs that are so enjoyable and take you in new directions and that are what makes writing fun and actually good. My novel was feeling stilted and running out of steam already, and this was why. Around the time I realized that, I also realized that
3) My main character was not honest with herself, and I hated her for it. She was in denial about every major relationship of her life, she was whiny, she was lame, and she limped blandly from plot point to plot point, and I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t dump her. I learned that when I don’t respect my characters, because they are not real, and honest with themselves, I can’t write about them. I learned this because:
4) Last Wednesday night the 17th, I opened up my novel from last year. I’m not sure why, but something in my told me that I needed to do that. I honestly hadn’t read it since I finished it last November. So it had been a whole year since I’d even opened the file. I sat down and read the whole thing in an evening, and discovered that actually, it wasn’t horrible, as I’d been convinced it was when I wrote it last year. I was so sure that it was a putrid piece of garbage that I never really wanted to read it again, and when I actually did, I was pleasantly surprised. Really and truly pleasantly surprised. It was really not that bad; in fact, it was relatively entertaining and even made me laugh in certain spots, which is not easy to do.
This made me feel a lot of feelings. It made me realize that what I didn’t like about my novel this year was that the main character wasn’t genuine. It made me realize that when I think I am writing horribly, I am not actually writing horribly. It made me feel sad that I have such a low opinion of my writing that after writing my novel last year I hid it away and didn’t even bother looking at it. It’s sat there for a year, without being touched, when I could have been editing it and working on it and feeling good about it. So, that’s kind of too bad.
Anyway, I need to get over being so secretive about my fiction writing. I need to actually show it to other people so they can help me figure out how to make it better. If anyone wants to read my novel from last year, send me a note to molly.schoemann@gmail.com or leave me a comment and I’ll send it to you. It’s really kind of not that bad.
All right, back to this year’s novel. I have 46,000 words to write in 10 days. Let’s see how that goes, shall we?
Me, Jessica, Howard & Akie had a Seasonal Show-down during this week’s Perpetual Post. My side is below; read the full post here.
I can’t say exactly why Fall is my favorite season, but that almost seems appropriate. Sometimes the things you love the most defy explanation. Sure, I can name many, many reasons why Fall is a wonderful season, but most of those reasons are bittersweet, and tinged with melancholy. Kind of like Fall!
The colors of Fall are beautiful, for one thing—a bright, festive explosion of autumnal splendor. Granted, leaves do turn dazzling right before they die, so that’s a bit of a downer. But they’ll be back. In the meantime, you can console yourself by going apple-picking and drinking cider. Biting into a crisp Fall apple right off the tree in the height of the season? There’s nothing like it.
Then there’s the rest of the Fall palette. October Fest beer comes onto the scene, and pumpkin-flavored beer and pumpkin spice coffee. And if you don’t love pumpkin-flavored things, how do you feel about sweaters? Sweaters are great! And so is wearing cozy socks, and jackets, and leaving the windows open in late afternoon even as the chill in the air gradually becomes more pronounced. Oh, and let’s not forget soup. And hot tea! Suddenly baking becomes fun again, too, which is a relief after spending an entire summer leaving the oven off because it will heat up the house, which is already a sauna. And did I mention chili? Eating warming foods is silly during Spring and Summer, and often not helpful enough in Winter. But in Fall? It’s the perfect amount of comfort.
And can we talk about Fall holidays? Even if you don’t get Columbus Day off (and I’m not saying anything either way about the validity of lauding Columbus, but I really love that holiday Monday), many jobs inexplicably give employees Thanksgiving Day AND The Day After Thanksgiving off. And Thanksgiving itself is a lovely holiday, given that its main focus is getting together with friends and family, cooking all day and then eating lots more food than you really should. And to top it off, there’s Halloween! The main focus of which is dressing up and eating candy!
Plus, if you’re something of a pessimist like me, you appreciate the sweet sadness of Fall. The sky never looks more brilliantly blue than it does in Fall. The days are still fairly long, and the sun still heats things up in the middle of the day, but when the wind blows it brings with it the faint, troubled scent of winter’s approach. I love that smell! The smell of lower temperatures to come; the feeling that Winter is inexorably approaching. Fall is a long, beautiful, resigned shrug. A knowing look in the form of a season. You and Fall both know that harder times are on the way. But that knowledge only makes Autumn’s brief beauty that much more brilliant.
I was inspired by Adrianne’s delightful post to note on my blog that we got a second dog back in March!
It all began when I came down with Puppy Fever last spring. I love our dog Charlie, but for some reason I got it into my head that I wanted to go through the experience of adopting a new pet. Apparently I wanted to hear the pitter-patter of a new animal pooping on the carpet. And I thought Charlie seemed lonely. He wanted a friend!
So I started looking around on the website of the Wake County SPCA, and it was there that I saw ‘Pajamas’, a forlorn, Dalmatian-looking white dog with grey spots. The description read something like this:
HI! MY NAME IS PAJAMAS! I’M A THREE YEAR OLD DALMATIAN/AMERICAN BULLDOG MIX. I’VE HAD A PRETTY HARD LIFE, AND I’M LOOKING FOR A FAMILY THAT CAN GIVE ME LOTS OF TENDER LOVING CARE. I THINK A HOUSEHOLD THAT ALREADY HAS A DOG WILL BE A GOOD MATCH FOR ME AND REALLY HELP ME COME OUT OF MY SHELL.
That’s too bad, I thought. Pajamas looks cute, but we’re looking for a younger, smaller dog. Still, when we dropped by the SPCA one Saturday a week or so later, “just to look”, (which I’m pretty sure is how most people end up adopting new pets) I saw Pajamas in one of the holding pens, sleeping curled up tightly around another dog. The sight warmed my heart.
“Want to look at Pajamas?” I said to Brian. “I saw her on the website.”
When a shy, sad Pajamas was brought into the room to meet us, though, I was unimpressed. She was not a puppy. She was not a smaller dog, either, like I wanted.
Instead she was bony, and she had recently had puppies, so she had those big knobbly dog nipples drooping off her ribcage. (Apparently the Wake County SPCA went down and rescued her from a SC shelter after pictures of her looking extremely emaciated were spotted online, for which we are eternally grateful. Her story up to that point remains a mystery.)
Sad to say, my initial response upon meeting Pajamas was, “Hmm, I’m not sure about this…”
And then I looked over at Brian. He had an enormous, beatific smile on his face and had opened his arms wide to enfold Pajamas.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said tenderly.
“Oh, man,” I realized. “We’re going home with Pajamas.”
Charlie Was Confused
We named her Sophie.
Other nicknames we have since invented for her include Loaf, The Monster, and White Devil.
Here are things that Sophie likes: jumping up on the bed and drooping her jowls over my face first thing in the morning, snorting and huffing around and making hilarious noises, standing utterly still and fixing me with a thousand-yard stare when I’m trying to call her, and being flatulent when we have company.
She has a goofy sense of humor and is a big clown, leaping around with abandon and throwing herself into hilarious antics whenever possible. She’s the perfect compliment to Charlie’s slightly quieter, more subtle nature, and she follows him everywhere like a delighted little sister, which is pretty much what she is.
She’s also incredibly soft, like a teddy bear, and beautiful, with big brown eyes and a graceful gait. She has perfect white toenails and little pink footpads and little white eyelashes and a droopy mouth like a sad melting shovel. Passers-by stare and smile at her; little children say, “Look at the dalmatian!” She is also impressively flexible and can curl up into a tiny, spotted ball.
Sophie Makes Herself at Home.
Sometimes she’ll lie on the floor with her enormous, curtain-like jowls drooped over her front paws, like a muffin top. Then I say, “Whatcha doing, Sophie? Are you making muffins?”
Once Charlie realized she was here to stay, he began warming up to her. Now they frolic and play together, and sometimes he licks her face when he thinks no one is looking.
They're Like Bookends!
Anyway, those are the dogs. Having 2 dogs is definitely twice as much work as having just one. But I’m so glad we found Sophie. She feels like part of the family.
I Heard Tell 