Anyway. Because I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. watching said movie, I was tired, punchy and groggy all day yesterday. This morning rolls around and my phone rings. It’s a lady from the Iowa Arts Council calling to tell me I’d forgotten something on my grant application, which I’d finished and turned in yesterday, the tired, punchy, groggy, post-Client day. I’d no sooner hung up the phone when it rang again, this time with a friendly reminder from the library that I’d forgotten to return an audio book by its due date, which had been, again, yesterday.

I started a load of laundry because I’d forgotten to start it yesterday and my kids were out of clean underwear. But when I went to make them breakfast, I realized I was out of milk, because I’d forgotten to buy it…yesterday. When I went to switch the wet clothes to the dryer, I realized, after a suspicious sniff test, that while in my flustered state from the two chastising phone calls, I’d forgotten to put detergent in the washing machine. Enter wash cycle #2. As I sit here and type this, I’m looking at a plant in my office that has completely wilted and laid down in exhaustion because I forgot to water it, ahem, yesterday.

 So now, it’s not even noon of National I Forgot Day, and I seem to have properly paid my respects.

 In further celebration of I Forgot Day, I’ve compiled a list of a few personal Hall of Fame I Forgot moments:

 -I once forgot how old I was and spent ten minutes arguing with my husband over whether I was 33 or 34. (He was right, I was 34. Bah! Humbug.)

 -I once forgot how to spell “grammar” while writing it on a chalkboard in front of a classroom of writing students.

 -I once forgot that I’d signed my kid up for an after school basketball clinic and when he didn’t get off the bus, I freaked out and called the school in a panicked snit.

 -I once forgot that my other kid had an after school birthday party and when he didn’t get off the bus, I freaked out and called the school in a panicked snit.

 -I once took my kid to a dentist appointment, only to realize that, after the confused receptionist couldn’t find him on the schedule, he was supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment, not a dentist appointment.

 -I once forgot my husband’s birthday. And let me tell you, I’ve never forgotten it since.

What I’m reading: Tell Me Something True by Leila Cabo

 Best book I’ve read so far this summer: Sarah’s Key by Tatiana DeRosnay

 Words to live by: “The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”     –Nietzsche

Today is a day for peace, love, flowers and birds. (And not birds of the human digit kind, as previously mentioned.) I personally plan to speak to my family members in only calm loving tones, to wave and smile at every person who crosses my path, and rescue a kitten stranded in a tree, should I encounter any small felines in need rescuing.

To assist you in your observance of The Great American Grump Out, I’ve compiled a list of notoriously grumpy individuals to avoid for the next 24 hours:

For more information on The Great American Grump Out, go to:

http://www.smilemania.com/Grump_Out.html

And keep birds in the air where they belong!

Pluck the suckling calf from the mother cow and with mirth and joy, take up your quill and ink well, and so may I. Together, we shall write of stars and paint the moon, ergo, dear friend, ergo, I beseech thee to join the celebration with odes to your lovers, beloved flower, song, chocolate or IPhone.

Nay, ‘tis many a fortnight since thine eyes hath undertook the muddled words of the Bard, and ‘tis prudent to read again his creations, still more fool shall I appear. On a great quest I go to wit, to the library, in search of great works. MacBeth!  Hamlet! Romeo and Juliet! Oh, happy torment. Doth teach me answers for deliverance!

But lo, what sayest thou, sweet Librarian?

“How do you spell Shakespeare?”

William Shakesphere (as initially spelled by said librarian. *Sigh*)

My favorite line of Shakespeare: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” –Lady MacBeth monologue (Which I regularly like to yell while doing the laundry,  just for giggles.)

What I’m reading: THE HEIGHTS by Peter Hedges (Who gave a kick-ass talk at Hoyt Sherman last week!)

Last week while doing research for my work-in-progress, I stumbled onto a great website (www.brownielocks.com) that lists unofficial holidays for every day of the year. I started reading with some amusement until I reached April 7^th, 2010:

No Housework Day.

 SOLD! Where do I sign up and why hasn’t this been declared a national holiday with commerative stamps????

So in observance of this should-be sacred holiday, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite housework quotes:

“Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance?” ~Phyllis Diller

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.”  ~Erma Bombeck

 “Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.” ~Phyllis Diller

 “My second favorite household chore is ironing.  My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.”  ~Erma Bombeck

 “The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up.  The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now.  They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything.”  ~Dave Barry

 “Excuse the mess, but we live here.” ~Roseanne

 ”No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.” ~Betty Friedan

I shall also not interface with a broom, mop, vacuum, washing machine, toilet scrubber, dirty dish, or basket of laundry.  I’ll report back later as to whether or not the Earth stops turning on its axis because I don’s wipe the crummies off my kitchen counter for one day.  My hunch is…it won’t.

 Happy No Housework Day to all!

 Ah, my dear sweet, noisy little urchin. I appreciate you brining this awkward moment to the attention of the dozen or more shoppers around us.

 Humble pie is just a part of publishing. I know this. I accept this. I just wish the servings weren’t quite so big.

 Other humble pie questions I’ve frequently eaten:

 “Are you going to be on Oprah?” (This would be the most popular pie flavor.)

“You won a National Book Award?!” (No, an American Book Award. A National Book Award is a sibling of the Pulitzer. An American Book Award is a second cousin twice removed.)

“You’re from Iowa? Did you attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop?”

“Where can I buy your new book? (Um, as soon as my agent sells it to a publisher, I’ll letcha know.)

 “How much money have you made?”

 Which inevitably leads to…

 “Maybe you should write something like those Twilight books?”

 Which inevitably leads to…

 “Do you think your book will be made into a movie?”

 And lest I forget my favorite humble pie conversation of all time. I was in Florida for a writer’s workshop with a highly acclaimed, much-lauded author. At one point, my recent American Book Award was brought up in the following conversation:

 Instructor: “So you won an American Book Award?”

 Me: “Yes. Last month.”

 Instructor: “I was once nominated for an American Book Award.”

 Me: “Oh, really?”

 Instructor: “I didn’t win.”

 Me: “Umm, oh.”

 Instructor: “But I did win a National Book Award.”

 Can I at least get my slices á la mode?

 Why? This would be why:

Two weeks ago, our mailbox was hit for the FIFTH time in the seven short years we’ve lived here (two incidents were in the same week and two others were by members of the same neighboring family.) The most recent was a vicious attack by a snowplow. Our poor mail receptacle, it seems, has been cursed. Everyone in our family knows the bad mojo it gives off, and we all act accordingly. Run to the box, snatch the mail out, and run away. Fast. No loitering. No dilly-dallying. Wait for the bus on the opposite side of the driveway.

Some days, especially recently, I feel like we’re being smothered by all the broken crap around our house. Like my husband is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I’m Hermey the Elf, and we’re banished to the island of misfit toys (the blizzard outside my window as I type this is a nice touch.)

The evidence of our island existence is mounting.

 RIP dishwasher. You never did live up to your true potential.

Vacuum, while you’re technically not dead, you’ve lost your power to suck. And in a house with three children, makes my life, ahem, suck.

YOU, dear snow blower, have disappointed me most of all. It’s January. IN IOWA. WT*……..????????

I may not be a dentist trapped in the body of an Elf, but I get you, Hermey. I get you…………..

 Totally appropriate quotes for the week:

“There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.” –Kathleen Morris

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.” –Carl Reiner

“I’m not going to vacuum ‘til Sears makes one you can ride on.” –Roseanne

The following is from the article “How to Get Unstuck” by author Dennis Cass in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Poets&Writers:

An experiment: You enter a large room that’s empty except for two pieces of string dangling from different points on the ceiling. Your instructions are to get hold of a piece of string in each hand, but after grabbing the first string you quickly learn that the other is too far away. A scientist comes into the room and hands you a pair of pliers. You try using the pliers to seize the second string, but as much as you lean and stretch, it remains just out of reach.

The solution (and there is one), you ask? Tie the pliers to the second string and give it a gentle shove, walk back to the first string, take it in hand, and wait for momentum to bring the pliers, thus the other string, to you.

Folks, at this very moment, I’m that moron in the room leaning and stretching with the pliers in my hand to reach the other string. In writing circles, this could be a metaphor for an affliction called “writer’s block.” I prefer to call it “the dumb.” As in, I can’t brain today, I have the dumb.

It’s that time of year when I’m most likely to suffer from the dumb. The holidays have sucked me mentally and emotionally dry, my kids have been cooped up with me during their school break, and I haven’t written a word in weeks. I’m cranky, tired and the writer part of my brain has gone rusty. Just today, I sat staring at the same scene of my story for twenty minutes, debating whether or not to write the dialogue of a telephone conversation or just narrate it in a few quick sentences. Dialogue or narrate. Dialogue or narrate.

Who cares. Time for some chocolate and a good Law and Order rerun on cable. 

I don’t get “writer’s block” in the traditional sense. I don’t get to the point where I can’t form a sentence or worse, completely run out of ideas to finish my story. As I said, I suffer from a condition I like to call “the dumb,” which means I’m forging sentences, composing scenes and laying out the plot, but everything just sounds utterly and completely, well, dumb. And I don’t mean dumb in the I’m-having-an-attack-of-confidence kind of way. I mean dumb as in my brain is just engaged enough to move my character from point A to point B on the page, but not engaged enough to make the journey interesting. Or even care if said character makes it to point B. I’m just going through the motions.

It’s like that scene from the movie A League of Their Own where Geena Davis is the catcher of a female baseball team and she goes out to talk to the struggling pitcher during a bad inning. Tom Hanks, who plays the coach, joins the discussion and asks Geena Davis point blank if the pitcher should be pulled. Geena finally relents and says, “She’s toast. She’s throwing grapefruit.”

Yep. That’s how it feels. I’m throwing grapefruit.

A young writer friend of mine came up with a genius recipe for those of us who suffer from The Dumb.

You’ll need:

3 good books

1 piece of paper

2 liters of Coke

1 pillow

1 pencil

3 Hershey bars

1 2X4

Step 1:  Read your first book from cover to cover.

Step 2:  If Step 1 fails, repeat with the other two books.

Step 3:  If Steps 1-2 fails, take the pencil and write every plausible (and implausible) idea that comes into your head on the piece of paper.

Step 4:  If Steps 1-3 fails, eat your Hershey bars and drink at least 1 liter of Coke.

Step 5:  If Steps 1-4 fails, beat yourself in the head with the 2X4.  Repeat until successful.

Step 6:  If all else fails, bury your face in the pillow and scream. 

Sage words, Nathan. Should get my pair of pliers swinging any day now.

Happy New Year All!

My New Year’s Resolution: No more grapefruit! 

Cross mechanical pencils and Bic Atlantis pens

Bright colored post-its and good critiques from friends

Composing a sentence that absolutely sings

These are a few of my favorite things

Cream-colored journals and dark chocolate toffee

Notebooks and datebooks and French vanilla coffee

Royalty checks that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things

Editors in white dresses with “I LOVE IT!” satin sashes

Good reviews that stay on my nose and eyelashes

Productive white winters that write into spring

These are a few of my favorite things

When the rejections come

When the critiques sting

When I’m feeling bad

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don’t feeeeeeeeeeel soooooo baaaaaad!

MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL!

            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!

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