I'm My Own Fan Girl

W00t! This is awesome!

It's been a long time since I was this excited over a writing project.  It's all I can do to tear my fingers away from the keyboard long enough to do things like feed my family and wash some clothes.  Sometimes I have to apologize to my friends and family because my brain wandered off and tried to get back to the book when I was supposed to be with them.

It wasn't like that when I was working on His Other Mother.  There were days that I had to force myself to go back. I'd take a deep breath and dive in and come up gasping a scene or two later. Especially as the end of that novel neared, I procrastinated.  It was hard, following Sherry through all her hard times.  I felt for her so much.  It was like seeing a beloved friend through chemo. Harrowing. Worth it, but harrowing.

In the end, I finished that novel by bribing myself with the project I'm working on now: The Change. I promised myself that if I could put Sherry to bed and get her ready to send out into the publishing world, I could work on something light and fun next.   

The Change is a superhero novel, a genre I didn't even know existed until I met James Maxey at a writing workshop he taught at my local library. His superhero novel, Nobody Gets the Girl, was such fun!  I really enjoyed getting the comic book world feel, but in novel form, where the characters were more fully fleshed out and I imagined the action for myself (as opposed to seeing another artist's vision of it in a graphic novel).

I've read several other great books in the genre since: James's sequel/side-quel Burn, Baby, Burn, Peter Cline's Ex-Heroes, and Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps.

It's my own novel, so it's not like I have distance, but I think it's awesome!  You should see and hear me sitting here writing it.  I laugh, I gasp, I grin maniacally.  Damn, this is fun.  I'm going to go write some more.  I want you to get to read this, too.

Writing about Mental Health

I didn't set out to write a novel about mental health.  But like a lot of my writing projects, at some point the project became what it needed to be, and I was along for the ride.

His Other Mother began as novel about fertility.  Sherry Morgan, my main character, wanted to be a mother, more than anything else in the world. But she and her husband were not having any luck. Then she saw the baby:

Sherry had been watching them for a few minutes now.  The baby had to be about a month old. He was all wide blue eyes and chubby cheeks, riding in his car seat in his mother's grocery cart, not yet big enough to sit up in the built-in seat. Whenever his mother came into view, his face relaxed, and every time she stepped out of view, picking up some broccoli, squeezing an orange, his brow furrowed and he shook his little arms and legs in silent distress.  Oh, how he loved her.
    And she didn't even see it, that mother. Didn't know her luck.  Didn't stop to coo over her sweet one or let him smell the oranges.  She just piled groceries into her cart silently.
    Sherry followed them throughout the whole store, aisle by aisle, picking things off the shelves that she didn't even want or need. From time to time the baby would meet her eye. It felt like the world stopped--no, like it contracted, everything else was gone except the connection between them.  Sherry found herself hating the mother, who could so casually push this little miracle around the store and not even notice him. If that were her baby, she would talk to him as she shopped, showing him the things she chose, letting him touch them. She would pause to kiss his toes. Or even better, she would carry him against her body, swaddled in a patterned cloth sling.  She would be able to feel the warmth of his body against hers, and smell his milk-sweet breath every time she glanced downward.

Her obsession began. When opportunity presented itself, Sherry snatched up the baby and took him home with her.

The mother was on the ground, the grocery cart she had been pushing dented and thrown some distance from her.  A young man was yelling for help.  People were running to the woman from all around the parking lot.  Suddenly there were so many people.  Where did they come from?
    Without really thinking, Sherry went to the Honda.  She reached in to the baby, offering one finger. He grabbed it.  In that one moment, she made her decision. She took the keys from the baby's hand and jingled them at him, smiling.  She put one finger to his impossibly soft lips and said, "Hush now, sweet boy. Mama's here." She pressed the release button between his legs—he had the less expensive version of the car seat Sherry had bought for her sister-in-law at her shower last month—and lifted the seat, baby and all, letting him rock gently and cooing to him as she carried him to her car and buckled him in. She even thought to grab the diaper bag.
    The baby fussed in her back seat and she twisted around awkwardly to stroke his cheek around his backward-facing car seat.  “It's okay, Alex,” she said softly, “we'll go home now.”  She pulled out of her parking place carefully, driving around the back of the store to avoid all the commotion in front.

Mental health is slippery. It's hard to know when something is temporary and when it's a break with reality.  It's hard to know when your fantasy has stepped over into unhealthy separation from the truths of life.

Like my character, I didn't know that Sherry was schizophrenic at first. Writing the novel, I discovered with her that she had a dissociative disorder.  I followed her to her therapy sessions and hoped with her that she would find her anchor in ordinary life, that she would learn to manage her medications without feeling dull and disconnected all the time. She was doing well in so many ways. Then, she saw the child again:

She heard him before she spotted them.  Her head whipped around, just like it did every time she heard a child, but she didn’t expect anything.  She’d almost shrieked when she saw that it really was him, Alex, The Child from That Day.  In all her talk with her therapist, in all her ideas about how to build her life from here, it had never occurred to her that she might see him again.  In all the coping strategies they’d talked through, there wasn’t one for running into The Child, her Alex, at the garden store.
    Sherry felt as though the rest of the world had grown fuzzy and indistinct. The only thing in the room in bright focus was him, the baby. Her heart sped up and she had to restrain herself from running to him, scooping him from his seat and covering him with kisses.  She had convinced herself that she didn’t miss him, since he had never really been hers, but it had been a lie.  Seeing him made her alive in a way she hadn’t been in months.  Her mouth was suddenly dry and her arms ached. She had to be mistaken. It couldn’t really be him. 

 Of course it was him. I don't want to spoil the ride for any future readers, so I won't tell you what else happens now.

I've done a lot of thinking and worrying about mental health.  Several people I know and love have struggled with dissociative disorders, depression or other problems.  I listened. I observed. Autodidact that I am, I read a lot on the subject.

But getting in Sherry's head was a revelation.  As I wrote her story, I was in the experience in a new way. I understood from within.  And I sympathized. 

My subconscious is a wonder, bringing to the surface things I didn't even know I was pondering. The novel is finished now and I'm shopping it around to agents and publishers. But whether I ever see it published or not, I'm grateful for Sherry for helping me understand.

My dentist is a mad scientist!

So, next time you are at the dentist, close your eyes and just listen for a little while. Pretend you don't know where you are.  By the sounds, where do you think you'd be?

I was in the chair earlier this week and I'm convinced now. My dentist is a mad scientist!

She has all these bizarre devices that you can't figure out the use of just by looking.  I mean, I know that the long tubey thing is a suction device and that the weirdly shaped box on a robotic looking arm is the camera for the x-rays.  But, these devices wouldn't look out of place in Victor Frankenstein's lab or Emmett "Doc" Brown's workshop. 

Some of her tools look like devices of torture.  Who doesn't feel something curl up and hide inside when they see the tray of gleaming silver implements? Who doesn't flash on Marathon Man and start to wonder if your dentist might secretly be a Nazi? (Just me? Sorry.)

Then there's her lingo. She tells me what she's going to do, but half the words sound made up or out of context. 

Prophylaxis (so this is safe dentistry?).
Composite (isn't that what my deck is made of?).
Bitewing (is that an incarnation of Robin after he left Batman?).
Calculus (my teeth are better at math than me?).
Scaling (no one said there would be mountain climbing).
Eruption (my six year old has a volcano in her mouth?).
Extraction (we're sending in the CIA?).
Veneer (wasn't he an artist or something?).
Implantation (wait, which doctor am I visiting?).

The angles are straight out of mad science labs, too. Devices you can't quite focus on because they're so close to your face disappear into your mouth.  It sounds like she's operating a saw and mining for diamonds in there. Her hair, which looks normal when you're both standing up, fluffs up around her head in a bizarre wing like Rotwang from Metropolis.  Her eyes are distorted and huge as I look back through her bifocals. The entire bottom of her face is obfuscated by a mask that begs the question of what she is hiding under there.

With the push of a pedal she raises and lowers my seat with a strange hydraulic sound.  She shines bright lights in my eyes and asks me questions that I can't answer because there are strange things in my mouth. She has long scary looking needles and a decidedly Whovian gas mask.

Don't get me started on her laugh.

Sam-I-am-NOT!

Please don't call me Sam.

My name is Samantha. Three syllables. I like all of them.

I can handle shortening of my name by people who've known me since childhood or knew me during a time in my life when I more willingly allowed the nickname.  I don't like it, even from them, but I can handle it. But complete strangers, meeting me for the first time? That's a grit-my-teeth and try-not-to-slap situation.

For example, I made a hair appointment yesterday.  The salon called today to confirm my appointment and asked for "Sam."  I signed up as Samantha.  The salon clerk person has never met me.  What made her think she could call me Sam? If it weren't that the stylist is fabulous and an old friend, I'd cancel the appointment.

Obviously, I am really rankled by having my name shortened.  But even I don't really know why that is.  I didn't have a traumatic experience with someone who called me Sam. It's not PTSD from reading Dr. Seuss as a child.  It's not that the nickname is non-specifically gendered.

I'm starting to think that it's about boundaries, about the license people take, the assumptions they make. 

If you ask me, "Do you go by Sam?" I'll politely say, "No, I'm a three-syllable girl."  I won't be upset with you for asking.  Because, after all, you asked.

If you call me Sam without asking, I'll correct you: "Samantha, please." Then I'll go on with the conversation as if it didn't happen. I won't hold a grudge.  Most people are briefly taken aback by my directness, but then they remember.

Names are very personal.  You don't choose your name initially. Your parents get the credit or blame for that one.  But, by adulthood, we've all chosen what we preferred to be called: our full first name, a shortened version, initials, our middle name, a nickname that doesn't draw from our name at all.  We've chosen.  It's part of who we are.  If you change my name, you are trying to tell me who I am. That's not up to you.

So, a poem about my name:

Someone Called me Sam Today

Women like us are not Pat or Jenn or Sam,

Kat or Jess or Liz.

We’re not Izzy or Mandy,

Cathie or Chrissi (with an i) or Tina.

We won’t be shortened,

made cute, easy, or palatable to the lazy tongue.

We are not here for your convenience.

We are who we are. 

Call me by the full length of my name,

each syllable lovingly pronounced

as it was by my mother

when she named me.

You don’t know me that well—

few do. And if you did,

you would know to love me

fully, in all my syllables,

and not try to change who I am.

My Life in MP3s: edition A

My iPod suffers from the same problem a lot of my life does: clutter. I have this awful habit of adding things and never taking anything out.

Since I was in my car an unusual amount of time this week, I decided to listen to everything on my iPod and decide whether or not to keep it.  So I started at "A" as in "A" by Barenaked Ladies.  I'm still on the letter A a week later (I'm on "Automatic Schmuck" by The Hives). This might take a while.

I realized today that my iPod is a biography of me in songs. 

Little kid me is there in "Adjectives" from the Schoolhouse Rock collection.

There's high school me in "Ask Me Why" by the Beatles and "Almost Paradise" by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson (Footloose!).

There's college me in "Alms! Alms!" from the Sweeney Todd Soundtrack.  The love of musicals continues to more recently in "All I Care About" from the Chicago Soundtrack.   There she is again in "Acony Bell" by Gillian Welch, with that lovely Appalachian sound I came to love attending college in far eastern Kentucky.

There's my early teaching career in Nome, Alaska represented by "Alpha Beta Parking Lot" by Cake, "Americans" by Corky and the Juice Pigs,  "All Cheerleaders Die" by the Switchblade Kittens, "Ayagnera Marualrianek" by Pamyua, and "AM Radio" by Everclear,  songs that came to me from students.  One student wrote a poetry project on the lyrics to "Songs From an American Movie" by Everclear. That remains a favorite album for me to this day.

Here's some of my exploration of my Jewish background in "Araber Tants" by the Klezmatics. Here's me driving back and forth from Kansas to Kentucky over and over as I worked through my divorce with the Bloodhound Gang's "Asleep at the Wheel." There's "Alpha Shift" by Megumi Hayashibara from the anime series that saw me through my botched gall bladder surgery and recovery (Full Metal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop are the ones that linger). Here's me working on my Spanish and finding how clever and funny Spanish language music can be in "Agüela" by Molotov.


Lots of this music came to me through people I love.

For example, "ABCD Medley" by Laurie Berkner Band is on my iPod for my youngest daughter. Laurie Berkner annoys me far less than most kid-oriented music.  "I Know a Chicken" and "The Cat Came Back" are songs I might even listen to without her in the car. "Ain't Got Rhythm" from a Phineas and Ferb soundtrack album is probably the one album we can all four listen to together and all really enjoy fully.

My older daughter is all over my iPod as well.  She's there in "Anyway" by Laura Love. I picked up the CD at a summer music festival during grad school because my then-toddler danced her tiny feet off when she heard her play live. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Diana Ross is a song her first grade teacher used to sing to her class. When M first sang it to me and I joined in, she was astonished to find out that I knew the song.  "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked" by Cage the Elephant and "Amsterdam" Imagine Dragons are more recent finds we enjoy together. 

My mother is there in "Alberta" by Eric Clapton, which we sang repeatedly on our cross-Canadian adventure (driving the Alcan), punchy and laughing near-hysterically. She's also there as a young mother in "Already Gone" by The Eagles. I remember sitting on the floor looking through her 45s in the brightly colored plastic containers that looked like tall cakes.  She'd play them and we'd sing along together while my dad was at work.

My sister is there in "Alone" by Heart and  "All the Small Things" by Blink 182, among the songs we sing to make each other laugh when we play Rock Band.

My husband is there in songs of our courtship like "As Time Goes By" by Dooley Wilson and "All of Me" by Billie Holiday. And in songs we showed each other to find out if the other liked them, too like "After the Fall" by Elvis Costello, "All Alone" by the Gorillaz, "All Wrong" by Morphine and "All I Ask" by Crowded House.  Most recently, there he is in "Anything Goes," the musical he took me, too, because I'm still a band and choir geek in my heart.


Maybe I'm not going to clean out this clutter after all.  There's a lot of me in there.

Flash! Savior of the Universe!

Okay, so you gotta sing this to the tune of Flash Gordon, you know the pulp movie from the 80s, with soundtrack by Queen? Here we go:  Flash! Fiction!  Breaker of the Writer's Block! Flash! Inspiration When You Need it! Flash!

Okay, that's as far as I can remember the song without going to find my red spandex outfit, or maybe a gold lamé bikini. And if I don either my teenage daughter will certainly run away from home.

As you've probably guessed by now, I'm participating in another flash fiction project this month. +Becket Morgan put it together for the +Flash Fiction Project. Here are the images we're using this time (see below the pictures for the piece by me):

It had been that kind of day. Chloë was already running late for school when she found that she had a flat tire. She got the car jacked up, then remembered that the tire she had just removed was the spare tire.  By then, she was all hot and sweaty. Her nice new top that she'd worn hoping to catch Alan's eye was now sticking to her back. Definitely not sexy.

She would've skipped class, but if she missed one more time she wasn't going to get credit and she couldn't afford to take the course again. She decided to leave the car jacked up. At least it was unlikely to get broken into if it already looked worthless. She slung her bag over her shoulder and trudged to the bus stop.  

The bus, of course, took longer to get to campus than it would've taken to drive, but at least it wasn't crowded and she could look out the windows at the changing leaves as she road. When she got to her stop, she hit the ground running. She burst through the door of her class right as the professor was turning on the projector. She smiled at the professor and waved as she worked her way to one of the last available seats. He didn't return her smile, but she felt good nonetheless. She had made it.  

Class was a whirlwind. At least she'd done the reading.  The prof seemed to be out to get her today, but she was fielding all his questions. She gave herself a mental pat on the back. He was one of those professors who seemed to delight in finding the student in the room who was under-prepared and grilling them. Today, that wasn't her. 

As the students filed out of the room, Chloë heard someone call her name. She turned, not recognizing the voice.  It was Alan, the teacher's aide she'd been eyeing.  "Hey, Chloë. A bunch of us are getting together at Spanky's. Wanna go?" 

Chloë considered.  She had never been invited before.  She had all of seven dollars in her wallet, but that would buy a drink.  The bus ran until 11:00.  She smiled.  "That sounds good. Why not? The change will do me good."

On Fatherhood

Becoming a father, in the biological sense, is a relatively simple process. A little fun, and if biology is kind, voilà! It happens to men all the time who weren't ready, who hadn't thought it through, or who didn't even want it.

It's a horse of an entirely different color, tough, becoming a dad. That takes love, patience, hours and hours and hours of investment of time and energy.  If it were a paying gig, it would come with lots of overtime. Of course, it doesn't pay in dollars. In fact, it will cost you many.

But a dad gives gladly. He listens. He learns when to "fix it" and when just to listen.  He demonstrates, he remonstrates. He shows up with his A game.  He's there when he's there, and even when he's not because he's part of who you are.

Each man has to find this path for himself.  Whether you had an excellent example to model yourself after, like my husband did, or a poor model to contrast yourself to, like my father did, in the end, you choose what kind of father to be. And your choices, good or bad, shape the perceptions of the little people in your lives, even after they become grown.

It's a lot of power, gentlemen. Use it wisely.

photo by: Miryam Bryant