Casseroles and farm wife GPS

I’ve spent the last two weeks as chief cook and bottle washer, farm Uber driver, agrarian Door Dasher, vehicle ferry pilot, meteorological consultant and occasional finder-of-lost things (the Gator wasn’t actually lost, it just wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Or maybe I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. It’s hard to tell sometimes.) In other words, harvest in the Midwest is in full swing.

Finding the Gator is a popular activity. 
It is usually followed by the four-legged passenger screaming 
all the way home because Gator rides are the Most. Fun. Thing. Ever.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 

My job is simple: keep everyone fed and drive things from Point A to Point B, with or without passengers. This is no small undertaking since farmers and their partners often operate in different dimensions of time and space.

 

Me: Do you need any help this morning?

 

Farmer: Yeah, but first I have to unload the semi at the other farm, then I’ve got to move the grain cart to that other field and fix a tire on the combine, and I’ll need a ride back to get the other pickup, but I have to check the dryer first.

 

Me: 

 

Farmer:

 

Me: Just call me.

Moving from one field to another.
Iowa Township, Iowa County, Iowa.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 Food is a big deal this time of year. The bucolic scene of a harvest meal in the field is one of the iconic images of the American farm family. Everyone is clean and smiling while they enjoy a spread that looks like it was catered by a five-star chef. The combine in the background is polished to a high gloss and the pickups parked strategically to accommodate the photo shoot could have just rolled off the showroom floor.

 

The reality of field meals is trying to park the pickup upwind of the moving dustball that is the combine chewing through dry stalks and releasing a choking cloud of field dust, grain dust, bugs and chaff so thick you can’t see through it. 

Sometimes, the first reality of meal delivery is finding the right place, but once I get in the general vicinity, it’s easy to locate the field crew by the dust cloud. And just forget about anything being clean or shiny. It’s not. Get over it. I call it a success if the paper plates don’t blow away and I remember to bring a serving spoon for the sloppy joes.

 

When the Farmer and I were first married, I lived in terror of delivering food to the wrong farm. It took several seasons to cement in my mind exactly where he meant when tossed out the farm and section names that he’d grown up with but had no meaning to me. There were a few initial hiccups, but we reached an agreement that directions like “east of the pond at the Maas farm” or “west past Immanuel Church and south at the first stop sign” was more likely to yield good results than “down by the creek” or “north of Dad’s 80.” Figuring those locations out was a skill that came with time. By the way, there are multiple fields “down by the creek.” They are in no way, shape, or form close to one another. Ask me how I know. We’re still married.

 

Ditto when it comes to needing a ride. The problem isn’t so much poor directions by either the giver or the receiver, it’s that trying to locate farmers can be like herding cats. Plans change, paths get diverted, and “be there in ten minutes” is a rather liquid interpretation of time. The sense of relief I feel when a rig pops over the hill is palpable, especially when I’ve started second-guessing whether I was supposed to go to the north gate on the east road or the east gate on the north road. Farm wives develop their own GPS after years on the job.

(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 

In terms of food, I’m not of the generation that delivered fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade dinner rolls and pie to the field. (I know ya’ll are out there and I’m seriously awed by the magnitude of your skill, but that’s not me.) Field dining is about convenience and speed for both cook and diner. The food has to taste good and be transportable in a way that ensures it’s still hot when it gets where it's going, or if it has to wait a while when it gets there. My Crockpots are still my go-to favorite kitchen gadget.

 

Best case scenario: hot casserole. The skinny end of things: cold meat sandwiches. Dessert: always. I love this time of year because I get to bake some favorite recipes I’ve put on the back shelf because they’re too much for just the Farmer and I, but work great for field meals. It’s amazing how fast a big pan of brownies or an entire sheet cake disappears.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, things ARE moving forward with “Ghost.” The text is in the hands of the second-to-last proofreader, and my cover designer said he’d have an initial design concept for me this week. I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve!

 

And I’ve had some great authors who were generous enough to write blurbs for me—those little marketing devices on the cover of books that say delicious things like, “This stunning debut novel is a haunting, sensual blend of friendship, love and danger.” Well, okay, none of mine actually say that, but you get the idea.

Thanks for reading!

Time, OCD and waiting for Christmas

Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"
I think we've all felt like this once or twice.

 

It my six decades on this spinning galactic dust ball, I’ve experienced time in multiple dimensions. Before you suggest I step away from the coffee and whatever I’m splashing into it, let me explain. 

Time is an established measure, right? Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four fours in a day, etc. You can’t change it or control it. Some folks are really good at managing chronometry. Others take a different approach. For thirty-five years, I worked with both in a job that lived and died on coffee and deadlines. There was real time and there was reporter time, which is kinda like farmer time. Example—Reporter, “I’ll have that story done by noon.” Um . . . you do mean noon today, right? Farmer, “I’ll be in for supper by 7.” Um . . . is that Central or Pacific Time?

 

When you retire, time takes on a whole new meaning. At first, it feels like there’s more of it than you know what to do with as you explore the concept of having at least forty more hours a week to call your own.

 

As you relax and pursue the interests that you previously had to carve out of barely existent spare time while you worked, you start to wonder, “How did I do all of that—hobbies, volunteering, housework, family stuff—when I was working full time?” It’s a mystery. Perhaps the space/time continuum shifts to accommodate those years so we don’t go completely insane.

 

Time stretches and contracts like a rubber band. Remember when you were seven years old and waiting for Christmas? For many of us "old folks," it wasn’t even mentioned until the Thanksgiving leftovers were cleared away, then December lasted at least three months. Now, Mariah Carey starts singing “All I Want for Christmas” three weeks before Halloween. You can buy trick-or-treat candy and candy canes at the same time. 

 

Everyone knows time goes super fast when you’re working through a training problem with your performance dog and you've entered a bunch of upcoming trials. Three weeks off from the show ring seems like a reasonable amount of time to get back on track, except it sails past in a snap, and suddenly you’re back in the ring with that troublesome exercise that may or may not be new and improved. Where did the time go?

 

Privately, I think people who train and show dogs possess the ability to manipulate some aspects of time in a way normal people don’t. Don’t be offended if you consider yourself normal. If you’re one of my “dog friends,” you’re not, so don’t worry about it.

 

Dog people can look at a judging schedule and immediately start doing math in their head that would escape them if presented in any other way: if I’m the fifth dog in the ring at 9 a.m. and I need to get there by 8 a.m. at the absolute latest, it’s an hour and a half drive to the show site, plus a ten minute stop to grab drive-through breakfast, then factor in construction zones, add a cushion of fifteen minutes so I can get out of the garage and off the farm ahead of the morning implement-moving, grain-hauling, cattle chores mayhem going up and down the lane, how many aliens does it take to make pancakes? This is why sometimes I consider just arriving at a show reason enough to raise the win flag.

 

A number of years ago, I traveled to an out-of-state dog show with a friend. We each planned to drive separately but would go together. I arrived at her house on the day we were to leave, very pleased to be early. I was excited because we were already ahead of the game and winning at the eternal human vs. time battle. I anticipated my friend ready to go, her vehicle idling at the curb in front of her house, and we would sweep out of town like warriors riding into battle.

 

My friend did not share my world view. For some folks, leaving at a specific time means actually leaving at that time. For others, it means it’s time to start getting ready to go. These two types of people should never, under any circumstances, ever travel together.

 

At the appointed time to leave, my travel partner began packing her cooler in the kitchen. This was followed by loading her van with crates, chair, gear bags, article bags, food bags, extra bags, bags containing mystery items, and finally, dogs. Then we had to drive through town to the bank so she could stop at the ATM, followed by a side trip to buy gas. We were an hour late before we ever started.

 

Being the slightly (ahem—cough, cough) OCD person I am, I had done all those things the night before. Well, except for packing the dogs and the cooler. Any obedience exhibitor will tell you the latter takes a stupid amount of time because it’s vital to get the proper balance of water, soda, dog treats and human lunch with ice or freezer packs because nobody wants food poisoning from warm tuna salad. Coolers are always too small or too big to accommodate our needs, but that is a topic for another day.

 

So yeah. OCD me. 

 

A number of years ago, I was hospitalized with a wildly racing heartbeat. Apparently a heart rate of nearly two hundred beats per minute is only acceptable if you are a lumberjack or a fetus. I was neither.

 

The attending ER physician lacked any kind of empathy, along with medical training. He informed me there was nothing wrong with me and I was a Type A personality having a panic attack. (He was partly right – after being hauled to the ER in ambulance complete with lights and sirens and my heart going whacko, I admitted to feeling just a tiny bit panicky.) It turned out I have a form of atrial fibrillation that is hard to detect on a traditional EKG but can accelerate my heart rate and knock it out of rhythm like nobody’s business. In any event, the doctor didn’t believe me when I told him I wasn’t a Type A personality and I’d never had a panic attack in my life.

 

But . . . I am often frighteningly well organized because being organized is my ticket to getting things done on time. We OCD folks are like that. When I plan to leave for a dog show at six a.m., that means the dogs and I are in the car, going down the lane at 5:59 p.m. Not everyone else works that way. I have friends whose approach to most things in life is “I’ll get there when I get there.” And you know what, that’s absolutely fine. I kinda envy them. There’s a lot to be said for refusing to play by the universe’s demands.

 

I’m telling you all this because I’m anxiously waiting the final proof copy of “How to Live with a Ghost,” which is the next-to-the-last step in production before it becomes a real live book. I’m also waiting on cover art, and let me tell you, it is like being a seven-year-old waiting for Christmas.

 

Random ramblings

 Good morning! It’s a short post this week due to the Gypsy experiencing issues with chronology (translation: I forgot what day it was.)

Last weekend I attended the All-Iowa Writers’ Conference sponsored by Our Front Porch Books Publishing Company. The event was held in Montezuma, Iowa, and a panel of speakers shared highlights of their writing and publishing journeys. It’s always fun to emerge from my hobbit hole and enjoy the company of other people who create with words. Except it meant I had to step out of my comfort zone and talk to strangers. I did. No one got hurt.

 

As I listened to the speakers, I realized there is no right or wrong way to write, no matter what your genre. It’s easy to commit writing. All you need is a laptop. Or a pen and paper, if you’re kicking it old school. I’m not sure which is more dangerous in terms of losing your work. You can delete entire chapters with the errant push of a button, then frantically pound Command Z while making desperate promises to the deity of your choice, or you can dump coffee all over your hard copy, which doesn’t come with a backup no matter who you pray to.

 

A fast Wi-Fi connection is handy, too, but unless you’re into a heavy research mode, sometimes it’s more productive not to have internet access. If your Wi-Fi has gone dark, you can’t tumble down a rabbit hole, only to emerge two hours later from a quick check of Facebook (fun fact: there is no such thing), to discover that while now you’re up-to-date on everyone’s latest dramas, your protagonist and her love interest are still stuck in a blazing barn with no escape except to launch themselves out the open loft door in a leap that mirrors Luke Skywalker’s iconic swing across the chasm on the Death Star. Except you haven’t written a word of it.

 

I read a bit of advice that went as far as suggesting writers disable their internet connection before sitting down to work so they won’t be tempted to wander off into the fairyland of cyberspace and return 20 years later, only to find that same damn cursor blinking on a blank Word document. Not a chance. My W-Fi connection is sketchy enough out here in my cornfield without deliberately taking it offline. It’s already looking for an excuse not to work. I'm not about to give it permission.

 

The top five things I find useful as I write are, in no specific order:

 

1. A quiet place. I spent more than three decades writing news stories in a busy newspaper office with phones ringing, customers at the front counter, co-workers causing all manner of chaos and a vast off-set press rumbling on the other side of the wall. My career was nearly over before work-from-home became a thing, and the final years when I carved out a home office from a spare bedroom were a welcome change. Left to my own devices, I am a solitary creature. I love my office at the back of our house, even though it’s about as organized as your average broom closet most of the time. 

 

2. A solid idea/scene/dialogue to pursue. I love to step into the momentum of a story in progress and pick up where I left off. Natural progression builds momentum and makes writing easy. Easier. Okay, not as hard. With that in mind, when I quit writing on the previous day, I try to stop at a point that will be easy to pick up and immediately move forward. Starting from a standstill is do-able but harder. Which means that's what happens 97 percent of the time.

 

3. Sticky notes. So. Many. Sticky notes. You have no idea. They’re everywhere. On my desk. In my purse. In my car. On my end table. On the dog. I’m constantly scribbling ideas on sticky notes. Yeah, I confess to looking at some of them later and having zero idea what I was thinking when I wrote them, but when a story-related idea pops into my head, I know better than to think “Oh, I’ll remember that.” I know from experience that I will not, in fact, remember that.

 

4. Coffee. I’m a morning person. I’m a coffee person. I’m a writing in the morning with my coffee leave me alone person.

 

 

5. Possession of time. Not simply time, but time I possess by wrangling it away from all the other daily demands. It’s easy to say, “I’ll sit down and write when I have time.” Guess what? You’re never going to have time. Work, family obligations, household chores, appointments, prying dead squirrels out of your dog’s jaws (don’t laugh, it was in the dark, before coffee, I was in my pajamas and I assure you it was not funny, not one little bit) will cheerfully occupy every waking moment if you let it. I’ve gotten better at carving out time to write. The rest of the world can just get along without me for a bit. Possessing time is a constant wrestling match that pits a fantasy world against the real one, but the more you work at it, the better you get. It's a helpful skill for whatever hobby you choose.

 

 

Thanks for reading, and again, I invite you to follow me at my author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. 

Another stepping stone

 This week’s topic is cover design, which I know nothing about so you should be able to get on with whatever you were doing in short order.

When you go to the book store, what makes you pick up a book? The cover! 

 

Covers are a marketing device. Like the headline on a news story in the papers (geez, am I dating myself? Anyone still read newspapers?) a cover’s purpose is to make you pick up the book. And let's be honest people, once you have a book in your hand, it can be really hard to put it back on the shelf.

 

Someone once told me she bought a certain brand of dog food because the bag was pretty. See what I mean—marketing. The product on the shelf caught her eye and when her brain started making positive associations between the sparkly pink bag (like seriously sparkly, like a five-year-old's princess-themed birthday party sparkly), it automatically formed a positive association about the quality of food inside. She couldn’t get out her money fast enough. (Forty years of reading dog food labels later, I think we’ve moved past that method of decision making but still, case in point.)

 

When I shop for books by a specific author, I don’t care what’s on the cover design. It’s just icing on the cake. I know John Sandford and Diana Gabaldon and AJ Pearce are going to deliver. But when I wander off into the misty regions of unknown (to me) authors, my hands pick up what my eyes like. 

 

The cover for “Ghost” is currently in the hands of a designer who has not read the book. Don’t panic (says the woman who is routinely panicking about everything connected to publishing this book). This is normal. She doesn’t NEED to read the book. The publisher told her what it was about. Her job is to make YOU want to read the book.

 

To date, I’ve seen one initial mockup for the cover. I liked the type font for the title. Then I went off and quietly had a panic attack. Not to worry. It’s early days. I need more emotional support coffee.

 

Book covers represent the genre of the pages between them. A cover showing a couple walking hand-in-hand along a rainy boulevard in Paris is not likely to be a story about an axe murderer. (Well, it could. But it probably won't.) A cover showing a woman drinking a latte from a to-go cup and talking on her phone as she walks under a ladder with a guy balanced precariously atop is probably not going to be high courtroom drama. 

 

The cover’s sole purpose is to catch the reader’s eye, along with giving you an idea of what to expect inside. And to display the title and the author’s name, but honestly, if you’re a visual person like me, you see the picture first: the cat in the window, silhouetted against a fireplace, or the long, desolate farm lane leading to a house and barn in the distance. Those images make me want to read the book. They are also responsible for my current TBR pile, which I had to recently re-engineer because someone was going to get hurt when (not if) it fell over.

 

There is a caveat. I remember a book I read and loved a number of years ago. The cover showed a young woman wearing an old-fashioned nightgown looking over her shoulder with an expression of terror as she fled barefoot from a castle in the night. I read the entire book, waiting for that scene to take place. It never did. Namely because there was no castle in the story. And the setting was in the 1980s so not many young women were wearing old-fashioned white nightgowns. I suspect the book had been subjected to a stock cover, something slapped on by a publisher who thought—like horseshoes and hand grenades—it was close enough to count. 

 But the point of the cover was to make me get out my wallet. And it worked.

 

Thanks for sharing this journey with me. No idea what’s on deck for next week. I’m headed to the All-Iowa Writers Conference this weekend, harvest is inching ever closer and Raider and I are taking a few weeks off from the show ring to work through some training issues. If Raider wrote a book, I have no doubt the cover art would show a dog frolicking merrily about the ring while the handler throws up her hands in defeat and the judge wonders WTH is going on.

Literary agents and unicorns

Please allow me a bit of self-promotion to kick off this week’s post. It would make me giddy with delight if you would follow me at my newly launched author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. This will be the central clearing house for all things “Ghost,” including release date, cover art, pre-order info, etc. when it becomes available. 

“How to Live with a Ghost” is my Novice A book. All my dog training friends are nodding in total comprehension. For the three readers of this blog who are not part of the competitive dog obedience scene, Novice A is the entry level class every American Kennel Club dog obedience trainer enters when they start their trialing career.  Once you’ve titled in that class, you can never enter it again with any of your successive dogs. You only get one Novice A dog and you never forget them. My Novice A dog was a beagle.

 

Setting out to get my Novice A book published was only marginally more difficult than convincing a beagle not to sniff. One does not simply send a completed manuscript to one of the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) and say, “Here’s my fabulous manuscript that is destined to be a best-seller. Call me and we’ll talk.”

 

Well. You can. It’s a free country. But doing so will get you exactly nowhere because your fabulous manuscript will get tossed into a heap of other unsolicited manuscripts called the slush pile. Someone might look at it before dumping it in the digital trash. But they probably won't.

 

 

To get the Big Five to even spare you a passing glance, you need to hire a literary agent. Such a person is well-versed in the machinations of the book publishing industry. Their job is to pitch your book to the people who might want to publish and sell it.

 

How does one obtain a literary agent? I am the last person you should ask because I am an epic fail in this department. I do not have an agent. Or perhaps I am my agent. Does that make me a free agent? I should refrain from sports analogies since I have never played any variety of sports-ball.

 

You can do an online search for literary agents and find literary services staffed by agents representing all kinds of genres. But be aware, book publishing is a fickle field.

When I was in search of an agent to represent “Ghost,” BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People Of Color) books were all the rage. Agents were screaming for stories with BIPOC characters overcoming adversity. It was also the year of the Me Too movement, and LGBTQ issues were in the spotlight, so if you could combine all three elements, you were an agent’s dream. It honestly felt like those were the only topics they were interested in.

 

I sat at my laptop and looked at my Novice A novel, set in rural eastern Iowa, which is not exactly a seething mass of racial upheaval. I looked at my characters, who are, for the most part, white, straight and untraumatized by sexual assault. Even the agents specializing in the paranormal genre, which was more forgiving than represent-the-world-today general fiction, were looking for sexy vampires and dark shapeshifters. A plain old ghost in a traditional haunting scenario didn’t have them blowing up my phone. But I’d had a lot of fun writing “Ghost.” I wasn’t trying to expose social injustice or create some bizarre new paranormal world. I just wanted to share a story that would let people escape from their day-to-day crazy. 

 

 Literary agents are the gatekeepers of the book publishing industry. So how does one get the attention of a gatekeeper?

 

One writes a query letter. This soul-ripping document boils down the essence of your manuscript into a single page that presents the “elevator pitch” of the story in a style that escalates the drama of the storyline without revealing the ending. It should leave the agent absolutely dying to read the whole thing and share it with the world. What usually happens is, you send it off and if you’re lucky, you get a polite response six weeks later saying “Thanks but no thanks.”

 

As frustrating as that sounds, it’s actually worse.

 

Some agents represent cozy mysteries, cookbooks and young adult novels. Others specialize in historical fiction, Christian fiction and poetry. They have specific areas of expertise and specific themes in the material they are seeking because they know what sells in the current market and what doesn’t.

 

Agents post what they are looking for on their websites. For example: Agent Sue Brown with XYZ Literary Agency is, “Especially seeking stories with female protagonists who run pet rescues by day and ride black unicorns across the countryside by night, turning puppy mill owners into toads with spells brewed by the fairies in her garden.”

 

Oh, yay! You fire off a query letter, extolling the virtues of your female pet-rescuing, black-unicorn-riding protagonist, her spell-brewing fairies and the warty creatures she leaves in her wake. You include the requested first chapter and a synopsis. And then you wait. For. A. Very. Long. Time. Eventually, you receive a painfully polite reply with the inevitable “So sorry. Just not quite what we’re looking for.” 

 

It is my theory the reason you often see authors wearing hats in their publicity photos is because they have gone bald from tearing their hair out while querying. We present agents with exactly what they are looking for, only to be told that’s not what they’re looking for.

 

 I queried. I queried a lot. I got rejected a lot. I also got a few nibbles, with agents asking for a “full,” which meant they want to read the entire manuscript before stomping on my heart with hobnailed boots and the inevitable, “So sorry. Just not a good fit for us at the moment or ever.”

 

Now let’s be honest. Just because you’ve got all the elements the agent is looking for doesn’t mean you have them assembled properly. And that’s a legit point. In the business world time is money, and no one wants to take on a time-consuming project that has to be restructured from the ground up, no matter how wonderful the material is, when another author presents a manuscript that contains the requisite unicorns in the requisite order and actually looks like it’s been through a few serious edits. Looking back, I know my manuscript wasn’t gleaming in full-polish mode.

 

 My querying phase began and ended in 2020. I can honestly say 99 percent of the rejections I received were perfectly polite and ended with the generic but optimistic sentiment, “Good luck with your project.” The final one, however, stood out because it was so truly nasty, I put “Ghost” on the shelf and got on with my life until last fall, when the universe conspired to hit me over the head with the manuscript and whisper, “Do something with this.”

 

I did, and stumbled into a publishing contract in the most wonderful of ways, even though they involved talking to strangers, which terrifies me to this day.

Thanks for reading! Please follow me on Facebook! My publisher assures me Things Are Going To Happen Soon. Please also understand book publishing exists in its own space-time continuum, where hours and days spin endlessly without any visible result, then everything happens at once and needs to get done at the speed of yesterday. Which is exactly like showing dogs.

 

My boy Raider at USASA Nationals in 2024. Go fast!
(Photo by Aaron Gold Photography)

Say cheese

Earlier this week I had a professional head shot taken to include in the book. Horrors. Having my picture taken ranks up there with going to the dentist in terms of anxiety-inducing experiences. It’s awkward. It’s tense. And it often produces an unpleasant outcome.

 

My last “professional” photo experience was back in the day when I worked in a corporate-owned newspaper. The higher-ups decreed everyone on staff would provide a head shot to be included in promotional material, and we were to take said pictures of one another. You would think an office full of newspaper photographers could handle the assignment of taking one another’s picture, but you might as well have given a camera to a monkey.

 

 

Collectively, we had photographed town festivals, high school sports, car wrecks, house fires, political candidates stumping through Iowa County, two-headed calves, the 30,000 people on bicycles phenomenon that is RAGBRAI and pretty much anything that can happen at a county fair. But when tasked with taking photos of one another, we approached it with about as much enthusiasm as convicts being prodded along to the gallows.

 

The corporate office, in typical corporate office style, announced the deadline for submitting the photos  was approximately two hours before we knew anything about them, so there was no time to obsess about wardrobe or hair or makeup. That was probably a good thing. We took each other’s pictures in a mechanical, git-er-done approach that produced predictable results. In other words, our head shots all looked like booking photos at the county jail. 

 

Flash forward 15 years and even the thought of someone taking my picture taken sent me into a panic. You're dealing with someone whose social media profile picture is of her dog. I toyed with the idea of just doing a selfie and calling it good, but experience has taught me I am the world’s worst selfie-taker. I would put the pressure of making me look decent on someone else’s shoulders.

 

Exhibit A: Not a good selfie-er. But I love this pic because Phoenix.

 A friend recommended a local studio photographer, and I made the appointment. Then I spent the next two weeks losing my mind. What to wear? What to do with my hair? Makeup, yes? Makeup, no? Should I buy a new outfit? What kind of outfit? Maybe I should have my hair done. Maybe I should wear a hat. I tore my closet apart and reached the conclusion I had nothing to wear. That is not entirely true. I have plenty to wear. Plenty of hoodies and flannels and graphic T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon dogs and clever sayings like “Haulin’ Auss” and “Total Sit Show.” 

 

I didn’t have a particular “look” in mind, mostly because my natural “look” is jeans with a T-shirt or jeans with a hoodie. I wasn’t about to try re-inventing myself for a picture. So back I went to the closet. I barely had anything resembling a professional wardrobe left from my years at the newspapers. My last five years with the papers were work-from-home, and I’ve been retired for two years so any semblance of dress clothes had long gone out the window. I have the requisite black funeral/wedding pants, a few pair of decent brown slacks for showing Raider and more jeans, cargo pants and hiking pants that should probably be allowed.

 

After much agonizing, I settled on a long-sleeved, button-down teal blouse. Simple. Classic. Also, it fit and it didn’t need fussy ironing.

 

The next problem — um, project — was my hair. About six months ago, I decided to let my very short, very layered, very no-nonsense cut grow out. And it did. It’s kinda fun. It’s also curly. In the summer, with humidity, it’s very curly in a self-styling kind of way that is borderline defiant. I’m okay with that. I did both high school and college in the 1980s. I spent more time conquering my then-long hair with blow dryers, mousse, gel, curling irons and Aqua Net than I did going to class. I’ve paid my hair dues and have reached the point in life where my hair can do as it pleases. That is not a hill I want to die on.

 

 

Except I thought perhaps I should care just a little because this picture was going to be seen by (hopefully) a lot of people, and I didn’t want their first impression to be “Whoa. How did this woman write a book when she can’t even style her hair?”

 

Accessorizing was minimal, although I had nightmares about the earrings I’d chosen. I dreamed I showed up at the photography studio wearing earrings the size of Buick hubcaps, and the photographer found absolutely nothing wrong with that and proceeded to do the shoot, never questioning why I had barrel hoops in my ears.

 

So, off I went on Tuesday morning, feeling nervous and starched in my button-down shirt, my hair more-or-less behaving itself and the proper earrings in my ears, to have my picture made. That’s what my grandmother always called it — having your picture made. 

 

The photographer was wonderful, in the way good photographers can get you to relax while simultaneously asking you to stand and turn and cross your arms and tip your head left (no, your other left), chin down, shoulders back, weight on your right leg, lean in, smile, smile bigger. In some ways, it was akin to having a mammogram. Ladies, if you know, you know. I kept waiting for her to tell me to hold my breath and not move.

 

The only thing she didn’t ask was for me to put my ears up. Dog show folks know what I’m talking about. If a friend had been standing behind her with a squeaky or shaking a bag of treats (i.e., cupcakes), I would have relaxed into the process even more.

 

I haven’t seen the edited shots yet, but she showed me the raw images when we were done. They looked like me, my hair was not totally out of control and I did not appear to be a candidate for Cell Block A. Really, that’s all I can ask.

Writing habits and other madness

Writing a book is a solitary endeavor. It does not lend itself well to a group activity. You can’t do it while delivering lunches to farmers in the field or show-grooming dogs for the weekend trial or agonizing about what colors to choose for a new custom-braided leash. You can think about writing a book during all of those circumstances, but the actual writing requires quality time alone with a laptop and your thoughts.

 

When I started writing “How to Live with a Ghost,” quality time alone was a prime commodity, regardless of what I did with it. I was juggling a full-time job, a full-time dog training addiction and annoying expectations of life like laundry and meal prep and paying bills. Which explains why it took so long to get The Book done, although there is no hard and fast rule governing how long it should take to write a novel. It will take as long as it takes.

 

I feel the orange slice should be substantially larger.

 I started writing “Ghost” about the same time the newspaper industry started going down the toilet. Corporate’s view on news room employees was that they were unnecessary and there was no need to pay a full staff when two people could do what six had previously done. I was one of the chosen two. I spent the next five years feeling like Indiana Jones in the scene where he’s being chased by that big, rolling boulder. As long as I kept moving forward at high speed, I’d be okay. Probably. 

 

So I wrote to escape reality. I created a parallel universe where I could hang out with characters doing fun, flirty things and not worrying about water treatment plants or school funding issues or why a subscriber in Petaluma, Calif., didn’t get their paper last week. This imagination-fueled escapism wasn’t anything new. In elementary school, my friends and I used to pretend we were characters in our favorite books and TV shows, flying starships and riding wild mustangs and exploring abandoned mansions. I never outgrew that.

 

 

I started carving out time every morning before work to write. Some days it yielded multiple pages. Others, I only managed to chisel out a sentence or two. But I wrote almost every day. It started becoming a habit, and in the way of habits, it was self-rewarding because it yielded tangible results. Pages turned into chapters that eventually turned into an awkward, stumbling first draft.

 

 At this point I should note there are two approaches to writing: outline the entire manuscript before typing the first sentence or fly by the seat of your pants. In spite of being mildly OCD (certain friends are laughing, I can hear you), I fell solidly into the latter category with "Ghost," probably because I never really thought I'd finish it.

 

Neither approach is right or wrong, although after struggling through the mayhem of rewrites to create a sensible beginning, middle and end for “Ghost,” I can appreciate the benefits of outlining. My brain just didn’t work that way on this book. Maybe it will for the next one. (Brain is screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WOMAN, PLEASE OUTLINE AND SAVE YOURSELF 5 YEARS OF MAYHEM AND CONFUSION!)

 

I was also not a linear writer who started at the beginning and wrote straight through to the end. The story refused to unfold in my head in a chronological manner, so I wrote scenes as they popped up and sorted them out later, then filled in the things that needed to happen in-between to pull it all together.

 

This is an accurate representation of
writing a novel and/or training a dog.
Except for both, the line should go entirely
off the page and disappear for a while.

 The process taught me a few valuable lessons they probably teach in Fiction Writing 101, which I didn’t take because I was across the hall in News Reporting 101.

 

Mainly, just sit down and write already. Get your first draft on paper, even if it’s awful. (Helpful hint: it will be all kinds of awful. Who cares. Now you have something to work with. You can’t edit a blank page.) Write even on the days when you wonder if you have any business writing. You do. The fact you want to do this madness means you should be doing it.

 

I had a lot of doubt. Like, seriously a lot. Who did I think I was to write a book? What if I spent all this time on a project no one but myself would ever read? What if someone did read it and thought it was terrible? Did J.K. Rowling or John Sandford or Craig Johnson ever feel this way?

 

 

But I kept writing because I enjoyed it, and at the end of the day, it felt like time well spent.

 

Next week: I’m not sure what’s coming next week. Maybe book stuff. Maybe not book stuff. Like writing, publishing is a marathon, not a sprint. My publisher assures me Things Are Happening, and has hinted as soon as the cover design is in-hand, there is possibility of pre-orders. That's all I know. Have a great week.