C is for Call from Mom at Midnight

(Excerpt from The Lemonade Year, finished novel seeking representation/ fiction)

Mom is calling me after midnight. This isn’t good. I pour a glass of wine and answer the phone.

“I’m that woman again, Nina,” Mom says after perfunctory small talk, none of which address the time of night this call is occurring. “You know what I mean?”

“Not really,” I say and take my glass of false security out onto the balcony.

 “Back then,” Mom continues. “I was the only one of my friends to have kids. Everyone else was pursuing their career and I was home changing diapers.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I ask.

I know I sound like an ass. But the attitude is mostly just a cover-up.  I let high hopes fill a nursery, but had no baby to put in it. Hearing people talk about the trials of motherhood is just salt in the wound.  Mom keeps sprinkling it in.

“I’d see the women in their fancy business suits and smart high-heel shoes buying exotic foods at the grocery,” Mom continues, oblivious to me. “They’d be carrying around that little basket that says I don’t need to know what I’m eating next Tuesday because that’s Jennifer’s birthday and we’re all going downtown to celebrate.”

She says that last part in a fake female voice and I almost laugh at the ridiculousness of a woman faking a woman’s voice.

“I used to be one of them and they knew it,” Mom says recalling a time before I can remember. “But I became a woman with a child, with spit up on her shoulder, with a grocery cart piled for two weeks, because, let’s face it, who knew when I’d get it together enough to go out into the world again to shop for the necessities of life, never mind going downtown to celebrate with whomever Jennifer may be.”

I picture Mom in her kitchen, she’s animated. Waving her arms as much as the constraints of holding the phone will allow.

“Is it so wrong?” Mom asks. “That when the three of you were finally asleep for the night, I’d make myself a drink. Maybe a Cosmo, or a martini, a margarita—and pretend that I had something to celebrate too?”

It’s then that I hear the tinkle of ice in a glass from the other side of the phone line.

“Mom,” I say, but am unable to follow it up.

I can’t ask her to be careful. I can’t preach to her about self-medication with alcohol. I know she knows that she shouldn’t open that door again, but Dad is dead. Thursday is the funeral. I take another sip too.


“Who knows,” Mom says and I feel the end of the conversation coming. “Maybe in this day and age, I wouldn’t have felt so out of touch. People have their texting and tweeting—whatever that is—their Spacebook to let the whole world know that they just did a thousand sit-ups, or that their cat just ate a crayon, or that little Emily has a fever of a hundred and one.”

“Facebook,” I say.

“What?” she says but keeps talking.

 

I hear her voice but my attention wanders. She might be right. Maybe if she had some connection to the multitude of people she once knew and all the people they once knew then perhaps she could have posted on her wall My youngest child, Lola, was just in a horrible car accident and if she lives, she may never walk again. And btw, she has some kind of brain damage that the doctor called the “Swiss Cheese Effect” and I could just punch him in the face WTF.

And people could reply OMG, Cecilia, how awful.

Hang in there.

We love you.

Or perhaps people could “like” her statement, thus validating her outrage and letting her know that they had at least taken the time out of their beautiful life to read her message to the cosmos and click on the little thumb before hoping to a link of a YouTube video of man peeling potatoes and singing the Star Spangled Banner.

 

B is for Box of Tissues, Bottle of Wine and Bird Wings

(Excerpt from The Lemonade Year finished novel seeking representation)

When someone buys two dozen lemons, a box of tissues, and a bottle of wine at midnight, you have to figure something is wrong. The wine is for the minute I walk in my apartment. The tissues are for my father’s funeral. The lemons mean I’m losing my job.  

I’m a food stylist and photographer. One of those people who artistically arranges food and then takes pictures of it. The pictures that make it look like the best damn cheeseburger or almond crusted salmon with blanched baby asparagus that ever was. The pictures that are meant to inspire you to cook, despite the knowledge that you’ll never be able to recreate the dish the way it appears in the book—yeah, that’s what I do. I make it all seem possible.

It’s a ruse.

Right now my publishing house has me working on 32 Ways to Make Lemonade. I think my job may be in jeopardy. But right now I don’t have time to worry about that. It’s past midnight and I’m driving home from the grocery store with a bottle of wine strapped down by the seatbelt on the passenger’s side and there’s a white owl standing in the middle of the road. I get closer and closer and all the bird does is swivel its head around like that kid in the Exorcist and stare at me. I start slowing down, sure that at any moment the bird will lift off like it’s capable of doing. But it doesn’t. I fish-tale to a halt, leaning over the stirring wheel, watching as the front end of the car passes over the owl until he’s out of sight.

I sit there gripping the wheel. Alone on the highway, nearly forty years old, my marriage over, my long fought over career slipping through my fingers, and my father’s funeral two days away. But here I am panicked over the possibility that there may be a dead owl on the grill of my car. So far—so far—I’ve been holding it together. But something about a dead bird with its little hollow bird bones broken against the front of my car breaks me.

I push open the car door in a panic, like I can get there in time to give the little thing mouth to beak and he’ll be ok—he’ll be ok. It’s all my fault. I should have just kept driving and perhaps the car would have just passed over him as he stood there in the middle of the freaking road, but I slammed on breaks and that made the front end go lower, like I was aiming for him for crying out loud. Bitch, I hear him say to me, can’t a bird stand in the street anymore. What’s the world coming to?

I slam my door and wheel around to the front of the car. It’s late at night and I’m on a back road, but still a car screams past me in the other lane and I shudder. My headlights are blazing and I expect to find the owl crushed against the grill, wings spread—trying to take off in the last seconds—to no avail. But there’s nothing. I should be thrilled, but panic sets in deeper. Where did he go? Is he under a tire? Is there still time. Can I save him? I kneel down on the pavement to get a look under the car. Then whoosh—up from beneath the bumper the owl rises and zig zags off—its wings clipping the hood on the way up and off into the black sky—a fluttering white speck headed for the safety of the trees. I sit down in the wash of my own headlights and cry.

Taking the Challenge! A-Z

April is the A-Z Blogging Challenge. Every day in April (except for Sundays) you're supposed to write a blog post with the theme of, you got it, the alphabet. Today is A.

If you go back and read some old posts you'll see that for the most part, I talk about the joys and trials of writing and offer contest info and other links and so forth. For this challenge I'm going to stop talking about writing and post some actual writing. 

My women's fiction novel, The Lemonade Year, is currently open for representation and critique. Thanks for reading!


A: Addled

On the day my father died, the lady sitting next to me at the café across the street from my office had two bites of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich left on her plate. One of the bites had no bacon. The tomatoes were too ripe and the lettuce was the pale green color of giving up.

When the charge nurse called, I excused myself from a lunch with coworkers, saying I needed to get back to the office—that something was wrong with the layout they need to speak to me.

“Who?” the nosey junior copy-editor whose name I can’t recall questioned. “I thought you were working on the lemonade thing. That’s miles from press.”

I’m not a very good liar on the spot.

“No,” I said, standing up, trying like hell to get out of there. “The other one.”

There is no other one. For a while they’ve had me doing “more office admin and graphic design duties” which I know is just smoke up my ass. They haven’t acquired anything new in a while. All we’re doing is catching up on commitments. In my department, this lemonade thing is the bottom of the barrel.  I should have freelanced, but I took the staff position because of the security.

There is no security. And the news in my ear that father had passed was proof of that.

I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready. Not ready.

Like a mantra that will do no good, the words flooded my brain. Who is ever ready? Even through long illness and certain inevitable demise, the heart still hopes, like a child, still believes in magic.

Addled, I left without paying my bill at the bacon, lettuce and over-ripe tomato café. I sent a text to Suzanne to apologize for leaving her with the nosey copy editor and my check. She wrote back to ask if I was ok. I tried to reply, but the whole process of written telephone communication via a handheld device capable of technological tasks of all imagination seemed suddenly ridiculous to me. Everything seemed ridiculous. As if all the effort to create plasma TV screens, three-D everything, cars that can parallel park themselves, phones that can video chat while surfing the net and washing your dog, was just a distraction from the fact that none of it can make you immortal. It’s all smoke and mirrors to hide the knowledge that your heart can still break, you eyes can still cry, and the people you love will leave you.

Divine Deadlines

I'm one of "those people" who works best under a deadline. That's why NaNoWriMo worked for me. That's why I'm participating in WriteOnCon's Luck of the Irish Pitchfest and that's why my newest "Divine deadline" is making sure that I get my new novel finished.

What is this deadline? The miracle of birth. I'm pregnant with child #4. Anyone with kids knows how hard it can be to find time to write. And a newborn baby raises the stakes. So I've got til July 15, thereabout, to get this new book on paper.

I'm set to finish my discovery draft by the end of this month. And then I'll have 3 months to work on edits. It seems like an awfully short time to me and you writers out there know that you can spend years doing rewrites if you want to.

If you're the person who will take all the time in the world if you have all the time in the world, I suggest you get yourself a deadline. It doesn't have to be a baby, but find a challenge online or get together with a buddy and make one up. See how much you can get done when time is running out!

What a few minutes here and there can do

November and NaNoWriMo are over. I didn't make it 50,000 words, but then again, I didn't think I would. Not being pessimistic there, just didn't really have 50,000 more words that I needed to write on this draft of my novel.

I did get to about 35,000 and that's more than I thought I needed. (Maybe I could have gotten that 50,000 after all) What I wanted out of the month was to challenge myself to write more that I usually did. To see if I could "find time" in the day to get more done than I was used to doing.

And I did. I knew that in order to come close to 50,000 words I was going to have to write pretty much every day and not just on my Thursday writing day. So I began writing in the morning while the kids were still asleep and then again in the early afternoon when the baby took a nap.

I got 35,000 words out of that. My goal now is to keep with it. So far so good. I'm about 30 pages from the end of this draft (going back and incorporating a new thread that changes everything) and that's my December goal--to be done with this revision so that I can begin revising again. (Ain't writing great!)

I'll keep you posted.

When Babies Take Naps at 5pm...

Moms have to drink coffee because they're got to be up til 2. It's my own fault really. But this exercise in staying up and being focused--and actually opening the laptop and writing this post might be blowing my "I can't write after 11pm" excuse.

We shall see.,.

I've been doing the NaNoWriMo challenge and having some decent success. I've gotten about 13,000 words written in 10 days, which doesn't really seem like that much I guess, but when you figure that usually takes me more than a month to get that done, I feel like I'm trucking right along.

Because it's a daily writing challenge (50,000 in 30 days) it's gotten me  to alter my usual writing schedule. I usually only write on Thursday. My wonderful husband takes Thursday off, stays with the kids, and I go into his office and spend the day writing. This is wonderful because it gives me hours at a time to review and edit and read through parts that I need that sort of uninterrupted time.

I had let myself believe that with three kids at home all day (I home school) there was no way I could write everyday and I let myself off the hook, so to speak.

But taking this NaNoWriMo challenge calls for more than just Thursdays. So I decided to throw housework to the wind and write everyday.

I have to be ready to roll at the drop of a nap (I write when the baby sleeps and there's no set schedule for that.) It also means I have to toss my excuses out the window.

I can't write if there's a mess in the kitchen.
I can't write if there's laundry to do.
I can't write if the floor needs to be vacuumed.
I can't write if we're not done with lessons.
I can't write if my favorite cooking show is on.

But you know what, it turns out that I can.

I can actually clean later. We can do math after 3pm. I can watch TV some other time. (I probably wasn't going to remember that recipe anyway.)

They say it takes 30 days to make something a habit. We'll see come December 1st.

Until then, I'm off to write...the laundry will wait.