Author: Bekki

Orange Tangerine Pearl*

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

I’m writing this with a baby on my lap. My baby. She is a week old, and she’s perfect.**

I’m not going to go into all the labor details here, but there were a couple of things that happened during the birth that really interested me from an information processing point of view.

The first is that, according to my husband and our doula, I didn’t start talking about an epidural until after the anesthesiologist came in. My recollection is that I started talking epidural when the contractions became unbearable – query whether there’s any link between what I was experiencing before and after the hospital reminded me the epidural was available.

The second is that I wanted to do a natural childbirth because I thought it would lead to the best outcome for me and Zed. Everything I was reading and hearing pretty much said the less interventions you do, the better – less chance of a C-section, better breastfeeding, etc.

Suffice it to say, I ended up having two interventions – I got an epidural, and the OB broke my water. Both were exactly the right moves at the time, and both made the labor much shorter than it would have been otherwise.

The thing is, I was so focused on the potentially negative effects of interventions, that I hadn’t bothered to consider the positive. Although the teacher in my birthing class discussed pros and cons for everything, I didn’t really pay attention to the pros because my mind was already made up.

I didn’t do this consciously. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as very open-minded. But when I was thinking about the way labor had gone post-birth, I realized that I hadn’t really factored in the potential benefits of interventions.

It made me wonder what other things I might have missed because I only paid attention to the information that supported my point of view. And I’m hoping, as A and I confront the myriad of choices and decisions that is child-rearing, I’ll remember to pay afternoon to all the information out there.

*The color of our new car. Also our code word for “I actually mean that I want the epidural now”.

**In case you’re wondering, you didn’t miss the pregnancy announcement. A and I decided that we’d like to keep little Zed off the internet for the most part. So I probably won’t be talking about her here very much.   Incidentally, Zed is also the reason I haven’t posted much – for some reason, pregnancy has been my main focus for the past nine months.

Also, if you’re doing the math, by the time this goes up Zed will be about 2 weeks old. We call this the newborn effect – everything takes twice as long as it does in normal time.

To Ben McCoy, Wherever I May Find Him

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An old friend of mine from summer camp died unexpectedly a few weeks ago.  I found out through Facebook, of course, where his sister had asked people to upload their old photos of him.  It wasn’t until I had all my old summer camp albums stacked on the dining room table that it hit me that he was gone, really gone.

I always thought I’d run into him again.

Sometimes, people come into your life and they change you, indelibly, unexpectedly.  I remember the music, the way it infiltrated those liquid summer nights, spiraling into the warm night air and settling around my shoulders like a hug.  I remember sunlight hitting bleached blond hair, and I remember summer girls in tank tops and denim shorts, and I remember a smile that went on forever, a smile that was yours, always and only.

I remember two questions.  Questions that book-ended the years I knew him.  Questions asked carelessly, in the middle of a crowded room.  Questions that still cut to the heart of who and what I am.  I never answered either.  I didn’t understand, until many years later, that I wasn’t meant to.

You could say I had a crush on him, but that wouldn’t quite be right.  I had a crush on the idea of him.  I was too shy, too awed by his popularity, too afraid of rejection to get to know him.  When I came across him on Facebook a few years ago I friended him, but I left it at that.  I didn’t think there was enough of a connection left for us to have any kind of conversation, for me to try to meet up with him when I passed through Boston.  I wish now that I had tried.

Because most of all, I remember a boy with mischief in his smile, and love enough in his soul that it was yours for the asking.

“The Whooshing Sound They Make”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

The revisions have been going slowly. So slowly that I’d begun to think I’d set an impossible deadline for myself, that there was no way I was going to have the second draft of this ready by the beginning of August.  It was really starting to make me crazy.  After all, when I was doing revisions to Pomegranate House in January, I was blowing through pages and pages of material in each sitting. I didn’t get why I was having such a difficult time here.

Then, about a week ago, I finally figured out what was going on. I’m not revising, I’m rewriting.*  There’s a few parts, like the opening, that I’ve left largely intact, but almost everything else has gone straight to the chopping block.  Truth is, it’s been so long (over 6 years!) since I’ve worked on the second draft of a novel that I forgot what it was like.  And because this first draft was good — not great, but good — I somehow thought that would translate to less rewriting.

This new draft? It’s really good. Still not great, but it’s starting to sing. It’s also falling into place plot-wise.  There’s a big chunk near the end that I’ve been worrying over, because I knew I would need to cut out or completely re-write most of it.  It’s that chunk, in fact, that put me off revising for so long, because I simply had no idea what to do with it.  Now?  I’m not so worried by the fact that most of it is going to hit the cutting room floor and stay there.  In fact, I think the book will be better for it.

What does all this mean for my deadline?  Well, after seven weeks I’m about a third of the way through the original novel, but I’ve written an extra 10,000 words.   I also think my pace is going to pick up a bit, now that I’ve made my peace with the fact that this is a rewrite.  There’s no way I’ll have a completed draft in two weeks, but mid-end August might not be too far outside the realm of possibility.

 

_________

* I see rewriting as the thing that happens when you take your original scenes and rewrite them completely, adding or subtracting characters, text, dialogue, plot points, etc.  I see revising as the thing that happens when you tweak a word here or there, or maybe sprinkle in a few additional scenes, but otherwise leave the thing mostly intact.  I’m sure different people call these different things, or the same things, but it’s what I mean here, for purposes of this post.

As You Do

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I can tell already that it’s going to be a lazy Sunday, the kind where I stay in my pajamas most of the morning and a good portion of the afternoon.  I’m okay with that.  I woke up and made biscuits, and strawberry coconut popsicles, too.  (As an aside, that link goes to one of my favorite baking sites.  Her pictures are scrumptious, and I’ve yet to try a recipe from her that didn’t work.)

Today is also a closing tabs sort of day, which means you get a couple of little snippets of things that have been going on rather than a single topic blog post.

Neil Gaiman Signing

Tuesday,  A and I went to go see Neil Gaiman reading from his new book, The Ocean at the End of the Land.  It seems like a wonderfully magical, creepy, utterly Mr. Neil type of book.  I’m holding onto it until I have the time to read it with the attention it deserves, rather than in snatches on the subway.  It’s the kind of book I want to dive into and not come up for air until I’ve turned the final page.

The reading was wonderful, and Neil brought Amanda Palmer out to play a song and ask him questions.  Every time I see the two of them together, I’m struck by how palpable a thing their love for each other is.  Not in an on-stage-for-the-fans kind of way, but in a genuinely fascinated with each other kind of way.  (By the by, if you’re interested in ART and the making of ART, Amanda’s blog about the book is worth reading.  Some great thoughts in there about the way we incorporate ourselves into our art.) 

At the end of the night, Neil signed books, and I asked him if, since I’d rather run out of books for him to sign, he’d sign my back instead.  He very sweetly said yes.

Now that it’s gotten warm, A and I have been spending most of our time out in the backyard.  I’m still in a bit of shock that we now own a house, in New York City, with a backyard large enough for a grill and patio furniture and a garden.  A and I do most of our cooking out there.  Everything from pizza to burgers to pork shoulder to smoked duck.  With no AC in the house, being able to cook outside makes such  difference.

The garden’s done up in milk crates, a la Riverpark Farm.  We have corn, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, peas, lettuce, arugula, radish, broccoli, basil, parsley…  The squash are in full blossom, and the peas and tomatoes are starting to flower as well.  It’s the first time I’ve grown my own food, and there’s something magical about watching it grow.

Backyard

Finally, I’ve been seeing a great deal of talk online recently about the fact that there is a group of men out there who are apparently still living in some 1960’s, Mad Men era world where it’s okay to publicly evaluate women based on physical characteristics and otherwise treat women as less than equal.  (I’m not going to put up links – if you’re curious just search Google for the SFWA debacle or the Kickstarter rape-book incident.)  If you’ve been following my blog, then you probably already have a good idea of my views on the subject.  Which is why I wasn’t going to post on the subject.   Then I saw something on the subway the other day that was simply too incredible not to share.

It’s morning, and the 5 train is packed, standing room only, so I’m standing and reading my book and generally ignoring everyone else around me.  As you do on the subway.  Then I hear a kid sounding out letters, like he’s learning to read.  Cute.  So I look over, and this adorable five year old is sitting on his dad’s lap, reading from dad’s magazine.  Super cute.  Then I realize there’s a large picture of a mostly naked woman taking up a good chunk of the page, and the kid is reading the headline from a sex advice column.  Yeah, you read that right.  The phrase the kid has been laboriously sounding out for the last five minutes is “blow it”.

I didn’t say anything.  I wanted to, but didn’t even know where to start.  Dude, that’s creepy?  Dude, totally inappropriate for a kid? For a public place?  Does your son’s mother know what he’s reading?  Have you considered what you’re teaching your son about the way he should be treating women?

You see my dilemma.  Plus, who wants to get into an argument with the creepy guy teaching his kid to read from Playboy on the subway at early o’clock in the morning?  Suffice it to say, I feel kind of sorry for the kid, who will probably turn out to be the kind of guy who can’t ever get a date and doesn’t have a clue why.

On that note, I’m heading out to the garden.  In my pj’s.

When the Words Won’t Come

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

For the past few few weeks – the past few months, really – I’ve been having trouble writing.  It came on bit by bit, manifesting itself first in an uncertainty about how my current WIP was going to unfold, then as a somewhat scatter-shot attempt to work on other projects while I let the WIP alone, and now as an inability to make myself sit down and write in the mornings.  Those of you who are writers have probably been here (or some version of here) before.  For those of you who aren’t, I can’t even begin to describe how it feels.  Equal parts frustration and misery, with a dash of fury for seasoning.

It took me 6 years from starting the Persephone novel to querying it.  A good bit of that time was letting the novel sit in the back of my head while I thought about where it needed to go.  At the time, I thought it was because I was busy with law school.  Now, I’m wondering if the sit and stew period is part of my writing process and, if it is, what to do about it.  I don’t want to sit on this novel for another three years.  I also don’t want to find myself writing utter rubbish simply to put words on the page.  I’m not sure yet if the solution is to turn to another project for a time, or to go back to outlining and plotting this one, but neither is going to happen unless I can get myself back into the habit of sitting down to write every morning.

Mostly, I’m trying to be California Zen about it all.  Trying to be okay with my limitations, and with working within those.  Trying to be okay with the fact that I’ve gotten a lot of rejections lately, because that’s what happens to writers, even good ones.  Trying to forgive myself when I don’t sit down and write in the morning.  Because life isn’t going to get any less busy or less crazy, and re-working the balance now doesn’t mean I’m not going to have to do it again in six months, or six months after that.  And, above all, remembering why I write in the first place – for those moments when everything clicks, and the words do come, and everything is golden.