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In author Anne Lamott’s classic book on writing, Bird By Bird, there is a clever and hilarious chapter entitled “Radio Station KFKD.” What is station KFKD you ask? Well, it would channel KF**KED, to be exact. A 24-hours-a-day, nonstop, in-stereo radio voice that, out of the right speaker, sweetly sings our gifted special ness as human beings and the brilliance of our own words on paper, while out of the left speaker, raps of our failings as spouses, parents and just human beings in general. Oh, and that every word of our writing is utter crap. It’s a fairly schizophrenic audio experience and no doubt, any writer reading this is nodding their head in zealous agreement. (“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” –E. L. Doctorow)

            My personal station KFKD comes and goes with some level of predictability. For instance, when I first get an idea for a story, an I’m-on-to-something-big-idea, the right speaker is playing, telling me things like, “Good gravy, you’re so freaking smart! How has no one else ever thought of this before? It will be brilliant. It will be GENIUS! The Pulitzer committee won’t be able to get the prize into your hands fast enough!”

            Then I start actually writing on said story. By page 50, the left speaker has taken over, saying things like, “Good gravy, this story is so stupid. You’re already stuck on chapter seven with no idea what to say next. Your characters are sketchy. Your plot is convoluted. Your prose is stale and unoriginal. You write too slowly. You’ll finally be exposed as talent-less. AND your hair looks like crap today.”

            Then I finish the first draft and set it aside for a mandatory breathing period, in which the right speaker returns for the honeymoon, saying things like, “Well, you saved that runaway train before it crashed into the station! Really pulled it altogether in the eleventh hour! Only a writer with true, raw talent could bring this story to fruition. There may have been some rough patches along the way, but true brilliance such as yours ALWAYS TRIUMPHS!”

            Said mandatory breathing period ends. I return to the manuscript to start revisions. Hello, left speaker, the honeymoon is o-v-e-r. “Oh. My. God. THIS is what I just spent the last year and a half of my life writing?!!! Total drivel? Incoherent, inconsequential, coma-inducing garbage? A monkey could’ve wiped his butt, smeared it on the computer screen and come up with something better than this! AND your hair looks like crap today.”

            This would be the point where I’ve learned not only to switch channels, but shut the radio off altogether. A total survival tactic so I don’t give up and quit writing altogether. I often turn to the wise words of much more talented writers than myself. Some of my favorites:

“When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘One word at a time.’”

—Stephen King

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”—Ernest Hemingway

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of never finishing.”

–John Steinbeck

If giants like King, Hemingway and Steinbeck have listened to station KFKD, then maybe there’s hope for a peasant like myself. In writing and even in life, I can switch the channel or turn the radio off, bravely face the steaming pile of poo that is my story, and take it one word, one page, then one chapter at a time. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find some of that Hemingway luck and write better than I actually can.

What I’m reading right now: Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow

Words that make me laugh: “It’s a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.” –Erle Stanley Gardner

My favorite Thanksgiving quote: “What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets.  I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?” –Erma Bombeck

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

November is National Adoption Awareness Month and November 21 is National Adoption Day—a campaign to raise awareness about the thousands of children, youth and pets waiting in foster care, orphanages around the world, and shelters for permanent loving families. A campaign particularly near and dear to my heart. We are a family who answered the call two years ago when my husband and I adopted our daughter, Gauri, from India.

I’m often asked what made us decide to adopt, and moreover, adopt internationally. I never feel like I’ve got a straight, easy answer. Every family’s decision and journey to adoption is different. Ours was certainly filled with plenty of twists and turns. The summer of 2005, with two healthy biological boys, my husband and I decided to try for a third. Boy or girl, we didn’t care. We just knew we wanted one more to properly fill out the craziness of our household.

Alas, heartbreak and disappointment abounded with two miscarriages, my third overall. It was an agonizing decision, but I couldn’t go through it again. I was done trying. We’d be a family of four. Only…we didn’t feel like a family of four. It was a nagging sense, like an unfinished sentence about our lives. After a time, my husband and I started to talk about how, in the early days of our marriage, we’d both mentioned how much we’d like to adopt a child. I generally don’t like to discuss our three lost babies, but I did, in that moment, have a strange sense that maybe we’d suffered those losses in order to find the child we were meant to have, wherever he or she was.

We quickly settled on international adoption, attracted to the idea of bringing another culture into our family, and simply followed our gut when we chose India. A year later, we had a referral for a little girl in an orphanage in Pune, a city where my husband’s company just happened to have an office. And this little girl just so happened to have the name Gauri—as in Goddess Gauri—a nurturing form of the Goddess Kali. And if that weren’t enough, it just so happened that our Gauri was born July 16, 2005, five days before I lost the second baby, and she was relinquished by her birth mother in mid-September, five days before I lost the third baby. This wasn’t answering a call; it was practically a shovel whack over our heads. And here we are, two years later. As a writer, I sometimes can’t find the words to express what adopting Gauri has been like. Wonderful. Amazing. Frustrating. Fun. Hard. Scary.

But…oh, so worth it. 

In the spirit of National Adoption Month, I recently read two really sweet books about adoption. The first, Red in the Flower Bed: An Illustrated Children’s Story About Interracial Adoption by Andrea Nepa, is a beautifully illustrated picture book about a seed that drops from a poppy flower onto ground too hard for it to grow. Soon the wind and change of seasons carries the seed to a garden where it is planted and soon blooms into a brilliant red poppy—the missing color to finally complete the garden family’s rainbow. (Short intermission as I dab my eyes.) The poetry of Red in the Flower Bed is simple but charming, and an easy way to introduce the concept of family diversity to a little one. An added bonus—a portion of each sale benefits Paul’s Kids Vietnam Children’s Charity.

The next book, Second Chance: How Adoption Save a Boy With Autism and His Shelter Dog by Sandra J. Gerencher, is told through the eyes of Chance, a rescued Rottweiler German Shepherd mix, and the bond he forms with Ryan, an adopted special needs boy who befriends him. Sensitively written with softly blended watercolor photos of the author’s loved ones, the story shows the positive effects of a stable, compassionate and loving home. An added bonus for pet lovers—a portion of each sale benefits the Human Society. Both paperbacks from Tribute Books retail for $12.95 and can be purchased on Amazon.com, and make great gifts for any newly adoptive family.

So here’s three cheers for National Adoption Month—whether you’re in the process of doing it, have done it, are thinking about it, or just plain think it’s great!

And here’s one extra cheer for my little red poppy.

“I got more children than I can rightly take care of, but I ain’t got more than I can love.”

 –Ossie Guffy