Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

There are two kinds of people in the world, and I continue to have a blast writing about them. Looking back, I find that 2011 has been like most years — filled with strains and disappointments, hard work and constant struggle, dotted here and there with the occasional bit of good news and a delicious belly laugh or two. It was a year that both crawled and flew by, and I find my sense of time has morphed into a sense of vertigo.

After years of waiting for life to "get better", I think I've finally figured out that it just gets different. Changes come, some welcome, some un.

Catherine Wallace, a frequent speaker at OCWW, my writers' workshop, once explained that the best way to provide feedback to a writer is to ignore less than perfect writing and concentrate on the parts that shimmer. Her idea is that by pointing out what works best, the writer will return to the mental place that produced the good writing and use that to revise and improve the rest.

I don't know that I believe this is always the best method of critiquing a piece of writing, but do I think it is an excellent way to review the outgoing year. By leaving the negative in the past (where it belongs), and dwelling on the parts of 2011 that shimmered, I hope to be able to bring those sparkly bits forward with me into the New Year to make it a better one.

For me, writing is almost always the best part of my year. I learned a lot in 2011 and have many (too many!) projects in the works. Each effort inspired me to become more creative, more open to making connections. As the year progressed, my sense of what is possible seemed to explode. Thanks to people like literary agent April Eberhardt, I began to believe that the changes in publishing were not death throes, but growing pains. Changes and more changes, some wanted, some un. But with change comes opportunity, if you choose to see it that way.

So here are a few of the writing treasures from 2011 that I plan to carry with me to improve my efforts in 2012:

January — Helped launch my client's website for her new business, Where Are We Going. It has been thrilling to work with Karen Gray-Keeler as she has transformed her passion and avocation into a business. Her energy and creativity are infectious.

February 18 — 14,239 people stopped by to read about Isaac and Molly on the Mike&Ollie blog. I started this blog during National Novel Writing Month 2010 to jump start my memoir about raising 24-weeker premature twins. The blog was picked as Freshly Pressed by WordPress and got more than 40,000 hits in five days. The feedback I got was amazing. Now all I need to do is finish the memoir.

June — Designed and wrote the content for a WordPress-based website for a client, micro mosaic jewelry designer Wendy Gray Raven. Trained her and her daughter how to manage the site and developed a strategy for the blog, connecting her website to her Etsy shop. Becoming more expert in the tools available on WordPress.

March 15 — My first post went up on the Garanimals Blog. Now, once a week, I get to write about pets and animals for an audience of moms, working with an incredible group of bloggers and the amazing Amy Zimmerman. Who knew that being a Reluctant Pet Store Owner would lead to such a great opportunity.

May — Proved that relationships built on the Internet can transform into real-life friendships deeper and more important than most people think possible. It's a reinvention of old-fashioned pen pals with the added advantage of instant gratification. Here's a shout out to my girls: Victoria Flynn, Christi Craig, Julie Jeffs and Rebecca Rasmussen. Great writers, fantastic women.

May 12 — Presented at the annual meeting of Fraternity Communications Association on how to improve print communications for membership-based organizations, and critiqued back issues of many of the group's magazines.

June — Taught a creative writing camp with eight young writers aged 7-11 through the Evanston Arts Camp, thanks to Angela Allyn. Their enthusiasm and curiosity inspired my own writing in unexpected ways and I'm looking forward to the sequel in 2012. (Registration is open now for the Writers' Workshop, pg. 5, camp #922213C2)

June 2 — Ran the first of several social networking workshops, this one on Facebook for beginners. Email me for information on upcoming workshops or to set up a private session.

September 19 — migrated The Animal Store Blog over to WordPress in preparation for the launch of the new website (coming very soon). Found a new voice for the blog, Ernie the Giant Gourami, who has lived at the store since before Kenn bought it 20 years ago. I am understanding more and more that writing is all about voice.

November — "won" NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row (see my winner's badge to the right) by pushing out 50,000 words in a first draft of a new novel. I continue to learn the lesson that you cannot, should not, must not write and edit at the same time.

December — Named as a regular contributor to the Write It Sideways blog. Starting in January through June, I'll be posting twice a month about my favorite subject — writing. Along the way to this assignment, I contributed three guest posts to this great writing website: Hearing Voices? Maybe You're a Writer, How to Bring Your Characters into Focus, Writers Write — Creativity Is a State of Mind. Thanks to Suzannah for this exciting opportunity to expand the writing conversation.

These are just a few of the high points for me. I have more projects in the pipeline that promise to make 2012 a year that truly shimmers. I look forward to sharing it with you, and hope your new year shimmers as well. Look for the third annual Two Kinds of People Guest Post Contest to be announced soon. Thank you for reading. Please leave a comment about one or two of the glittering moments from 2011 that you plan to carry with you into 2012.

Strength in Numbers

"You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world." 

— Sheila Graham, writer/performer (1904-1988)

There are two kinds of people in the world: the isolationists and the joiners. This comes pretty close to the crux of my whole Two Kinds of People philosophy. I spent close to 25 years as an isolationist, waiting for the world to discover the greatness of me. Never happened.

In my late twenties, I dibbled and dabbled, taking a class here and there, but still not really becoming part of a community. It wasn't until my twins were born and a neighbor dragged me to a Mothers of Multiples (MOMs) meeting that I finally understood the idea of strength in numbers, in shared experiences and common ground. 

My own mom was never much of a joiner, and I believe my early aversion came from a sense that groups that you had to join were all about exclusion, not inclusion. That can certainly be true. Even in my little MOMs group, if you didn't have more than one baby at a time, you couldn't be part of the group, which is too bad, because I learned most of the good things I know about how to be a parent from that group. 

But joining doesn't have to be about exclusion — it can be about creating and belonging to a community. In thinking about how I changed my joining tune, I turned (as I usually do) to the dictionary and found my perfect definition of community in the online version of the MacMillan Dictionary (definition #4): "the feeling that you belong to a group and that this is a good thing."

It is a good thing to belong. Since I figured that out, I have started a book club, been PTA president, and become a member of the board of a long-running writers' workshop, just to name a few groups. And now … now there is the Internet. Geography is no longer the delimiter in defining community. We can create virtual communities.

There are those (my Dad) who think we've come to far. There are those who doubt the veracity of an online community — isolationists who see the Interwebs as nothing more than a playground for perverts and procrastinators. Not true.

The online writing community, in particular, is one of the most vital. Just spend 15 minutes lurking at #yalitchat on Twitter and you'll discover a worldwide group of adults passionate about the creation of literature for young adults. Or follow #amwriting or #kidlitchat or #author.

Now I'm going to tell you my little story about how virtual became reality. About two years ago, I stumbled upon something called SheWrites.com. I was fairly new to Facebook and brand new to Twitter and trying to figure out the whole social networking scene, which seemed vast and uninviting, harder to crack than even the tightest PTA cliques (you know who you are).

I signed up for SheWrites. I joined a group called Chicago Area Writers. Nothing. Then I joined, on a whim, a group called Mother Writers. The group's "owner", E. Victoria Flynn, reached out to me in welcome. We swapped some info and she became one of my first Twitter followers. On my first "Follow Friday", she sent a shout out to her Twitter pals inviting them to follow me and suddenly I was in.

I've "met" hundreds (probably thousands) of people on Twitter and now have more than 900 followers of my own, but there's a kind of core group that has developed and we've become friends on SheWrites and Facebook, as well as on Twitter. If you're confused by all this tech talk, don't worry; I'm getting the the real part. Over time, my crew has been very supportive of each other's writing efforts and one of us, the beautiful and talented Rebecca Rasmussen has seen her first novel, The Bird Sisters, through to publication. We were all so excited. Really.

Then we heard that she was going on a book tour, just like a real author. And then we heard that she was coming to The Book Stall, a fabulous, still independent, still open book store in Winnetka, IL. And we hatched a plot. Our group would meet at for cocktails and dinner or whatever and go together to hear Rebecca read from her new novel. We would travel from around the midwest: Victoria (of Penny Jar) from Madison; Christi (of Writing Under Pressure) from Milwaukee; Julie (of Beginning a Life at 50) from Nashville; and our celebrity author (of The Bird Sisters Blog) from St. Louis.

Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans and good intentions and all that. It usually doesn't work out. Except when it does. Like this time. Maybe it was because we didn't have to do it, that everyone would have understood if the thing fell apart. But I think it's because we stopped lurking and joined in. We created a real community. It started out virtually and transformed each of us quite literally. I can't wait for our next book launch. Wonder which of us it will be?

At The Bookstall, from left — Rebecca Rasmussen, Julie Jeffs,
E. Victoria Flynn and Christi Craig. (Where am I? Taking the
picture, of course.)

I'd been planning this post for some time, but the writing of it was prompted by the She Writer Blogger Ball Re-Re-Redux, another opportunity to meet and greet and join. Click on the little bookshelf image at the top of this post and join in the fun of a blog hop. No membership dues required, although your comments are always appreciated (here and on the other blogs you visit). 

NaNoWriMo Here We Go

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who do NaNoWriMo and those who do not.

What is NaNoWriMo? I'm glad you asked. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's a voluntary act of craziness whereby participants pledge to write 50,000 original words during the month of November.

What do you get if you "win". The right to say you did it. And you get to change your website badge from "participant" to "winner". That's it. No writing contract. No money. No fame. Just the satisfaction of showing yourself and the rest of the world that you can do it.

In other words, it is the literary equivalent to running a marathon.

Why am I doing it? Oh, well that's a whole other question. First, this is absolutely the closest I will ever get to running a marathon. I don't actually run IRL, but I am happy to take the metaphor and run with it.

Next, I have a project that I've been wanting to get on paper (or on disk, as the case may be). It's a story that I know well and have been meaning to write for a long time. This seems like the perfect opportunity to splatter my shitty first draft all over my screen.

NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality. As their website explains, "The Kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly." For me, personally, it's a chance to tell my extremely vocal inner editor to shove it for 30 days. My goal is to let the writing take me where it may.

Last week, Mary Scruggs, a writing teacher from the famed Second City, talked to us at Off Campus Writers' Workshop (OCWW) about an improvisation game called "Yes, and …." One of the golden "rules" of improv is that you are to take what others say, acknowledge it and build on it. In other words, be supportive of your fellow cast mates and what they want to say. Mary pointed out that writers tend to hear our inner voices and respond with "No, no, no, no, no." What if, instead, we listened to our inner voices — our characters — and responded with "yes, and …"? Where could that take our writing? Would we go places we've never gone before? In other words, be supportive of your characters and what they want to say.

I'm looking at NaNoWriMo as one big experiment in saying "yes, and …" to my inner voice.

A writer friend who I have only met online, the fabulous Lisa Romeo, suggested that we partner up for this year's NaNoWriMo. When she asked, I jumped. First, I respect her as a writer and teacher, and if she thinks it's worth doing, then I believe it is. Second, it's always better to be accountable to someone. Who else would care whether I do this or not (except you, of course, Dear Reader)?

BTW, I won't be posting this month of writing here on Two Kinds of People, or even on my shitty first draft blog — SFD @ 2KoP. The whole point is to create a first draft, for me and me alone, a starting point. Then comes revision, revision, revision, editing, polishing and then … who knows. But first comes the shitty first draft.

So, tomorrow is day one. I've installed a little counter there on my side bar. That way you can all help keep me honest. Scroll back up to the top of this post to see one of the web badges designed for this year's NaNoWriMo. I'm not quite sure how that particular image relates to writing in quantity, but I hope this whole project doesn't make a monkey out of me. Here we go. Wish me luck, or tell me I'm crazy in a comment here.

Ed. note, 11/2/10: Last night, my youngest (12-year-old) son read this post and decided to join in the fun, signing up for NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program. He has pledged 50K words, too. Here's my post about it on SheWrites. Seth does not have his own blog (yet!), so feel free to leave your words of encouragement for him here and I'll be sure to pass them along.

Doing Work You Love

"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work."

— Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love the work they do and those who work to make a living.

In today's economy, it seems greedy and idealistic to talk about finding work you love when so many people are not able to find work at all. This recession has given me a whole new perspective on the importance of work — not just as a source of funding for our leisure activities, but as the basis of self-worth and the true strength behind a healthy family.

In case I haven't made it clear, the work I love is writing. I love everything about writing — reading about it, doing it, talking about it, working at it, teaching it. I'm energized by the burst of creativity that springs from a new idea or connection. Discovering new words makes me unreasonably happy (especially if I can remember them). Editing and rewriting are not burdensome chores, but a joyful honing and polishing of rough beginnings. 

I used to divide writing into that which I did for work and that which I did for fun. As a professional writer since college, for more than 20 years I've done all kinds of business writing. That was work. Then, several years ago I found myself thinking about a children's story. That was fun. When I started listening to the stories within me, it opened the floodgates to a reservoir of creativity that I didn't even know existed. It has completely changed the way I feel about all my writing. 

Now, each new assignment is divine challenge, a chance to practice my craft, to apply a new technique, to draw from my own deep well of inspiration to make the writing at hand the best it can be. My head spins with ideas — snippets of dialogue, themes for an essay, visions of characters. A writer friend and I recently discussed our dismay at the discovery that not everyone walks around with stories and characters buzzing in his or her ears, clamoring to be realized on the page. 

The two halves of me — the professional craftsperson and the creative artisan — are beginning to integrate into a productive whole. My husband wishes this merger would result in a little better return on our investment, but that's coming. I feel it. Or maybe it's just the caffeine.

If there is one rule of writing, it's that thou shalt not plagiarize, but you know what they say about rules. I have broken this commandment by stealing both the title and idea for this post from a new friend, Carolyn Brandt Broughton, who has started an entire blog called Doing Work You Love. For years, Carolyn has interviewed practitioners of all manner of work, the only connection among them being that they love what they do. It's an inspired idea and an inspiring series that she plans to share with us through her blog.

Carolyn and I connected through Off Campus Writers' Workshop, a group of Chicago-area writers who meet weekly during the school year to learn all about writing. Joining a community of people who share your passion is a great way to find inspiration. In real life, I have Off Campus and my critique group. Online, I've been lucky to join the Silicon Valley Moms Group, which operates 11 regional blogs featuring the words, wisdom and experiences of more than 350 writers. I have found gracious professionals in the notoriously stingy world of publishing — people like Lisa Romeo, Nathan Bransford and J.A. Konrath — who freely and willing share their hard-won wisdom with other writers.

Just today, I joined an exciting new online community called She Writes. It's literally emerging before my eyes, garnering 145 new members since I joined earlier today. It's a fascinating social networking experiment and I've already discovered some generous, dedicated writers. 

While doing work you love for a wage-earning living may be a luxury, you can still do work you love even if it isn't your job. This is a lesson I'm trying to teach my oldest boy, who will turn 18 in November. I truly believe if he could find his passion, he would be set and happy for life. Which leads me to my second plagiarism infraction of the day, stealing this cool video from Laura Didyk's blog, outloud. I found Laura over at She Writes, and we both found inspiration in The Beckoning of Lovely video. I hope you do, too.

What lovely have you beckoned into your life? What is the thing you most love to do and do you do it? Click here to let us in on your work loves (or hates).

"My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition."

— Indira Gandhi (1917-1984)

Fun With Google

There are two kinds of people in the world. Or are there? 

Some time ago, a fellow writer from Off Campus Writers' Workshop, Ruth Spiro, told us about a handy little tool called Google Alerts. (BTW, congrats to Ruth on the publication of her fabulous picture book, Lester Fizz, Bubble-Gum Artist.)

The Google Alerts utility allows you to enter a search term, then crawls the Web and sends you e-mail alerts anytime your topic or phrase shows up online. Ruth shared an anecdote about how she set up a Google Alert for her own name, and found out that a magazine had published a story she had submitted (more than a year before) without notifying her or providing appropriate remuneration. Ruth sent a charming letter to the publication, thanking them for publishing her story and including an invoice. They paid her! You can see, in an environment where writer's are being pilfered and plagiarized without being paid, setting up a Google Alert for your name and your work is a practical and vital tool. 

Ruth also suggested that Google Alerts are a good way to help protect our children and their online reputations. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter represent just a few of the more well-known ways of social networking that are spreading online like herpes during spring break. Many people, especially young people, don't understand how important it is to protect their online identities, yet stories abound of lost opportunities due to an ill-considered blog post, an incriminating photo, or even a brief Facebook comment. Just today, there was a tragic story about a teenage girl who committed suicide because, after breaking up with her boyfriend, he sent a nude photo of her out over text messages, which resulted in crushing harassment.  This lovely pastime has now been dubbed "sexting". As my Dad says, we've come too far.

Not wanting my children to suffer these terrible consequences, I immediately set up Google Alerts for each of their names. (No, it's not spying, it's parenting. There's a difference. Hey, did I just hear you mumble "Patriot Act" under your breath. Clearly, you don't have teenagers.) 

I started getting Google Alerts based on these search phrases and discovered that four of our six children have nominal twins. Our last name is not that unusual, but the spelling is relatively uncommon, so I was surprised at this duplication. Turns out our oldest boy at home (who really is a twin) has a name-twin in NY who is a fashion photographer. I actually had a brief, cool email correspondence with this talented young man. Our second youngest is related by name only to a jazz pianist. Our eldest, who works at Microsoft in Seattle, shares his name with a budget coordinator in Canada; and one of our girls has a name-twin in high school in Auburn, Washington.

This gave me a story idea and led me to Google all of our family names.  (No, it was not wasting time, it was research.  Don't you people know anything about writing?) All this information led me to start thinking about identity and individuality and a few other "i" words. When we are expecting a baby, most of us spend hours, days, weeks poring over baby name books, looking for just the right one that will reflect the person we hope he or she will become. You have to take so many things into consideration: 

• initials (while Pamela Madeline Smythe may strike a chord in your head, you must not saddle your daughter with the initials PMS).
• sibling names (once you've gone down the biblical road with a name like Abraham, you can't really name his little sister Tiffany).
• dangerous nickname possibilities. (Here, I must tell you a little story about my closest cousin. She and I grew up together as the only girls on that side of the family, daughters of two sisters who were very close. She gave her first daughter the beautiful name Alexandra and told me in all seriousness that they would call her Lexie, but spell it with an "-ie" so she would never be called "Sexy Lexy". It still makes me laugh.)

In the end, our children are who they are. They either love their names, or they hate them, and there's not a lot you can do about it.

Fiction writers, however, get to relive the joy and angst of naming people every time we create a new character. My daughter, who is doing a creative writing independent study, raises a lot of eyebrows as she peruses her baby name books in the high school cafeteria. Her teacher/mentor has been needling her for some new character names, and she came up with this gem: Iambic Pentameter, III. I wish I had thought of it.

In addition to name-twins, there is the common myth that we all have a physical lookalike somewhere in the world. My creative writer girl recently ran across the following video featuring a British musician named Geraldine Quinn.  My girl said: "This is what I'm going to look like in 10 years. This woman looks just like me. Smiles like me too."

While there are some striking similarities, with no offense to Ms. Quinn, my girl is much more beautiful. (This is a completely unbiased opinion.) In an interesting twist, when we did a Google image search for Geraldine Quinn, we found that her younger pictures look significantly less like the current version of our girl. Those who know MPB will be amused to see this video of her future self (although she assures me that she will never become this intoxicated). Those who don't will just enjoy the fabulous rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah by Tim Minchin with Geraldine.

Let me know if you've had any good Google giggles or revelations by clicking here. And if you have a little more time, click here to read my new post on the Chicago Moms Blog about Obama's gift giving snafu. 

Chain of Fools

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who respond to chain letters and those who don't.

Until just recently, I had not participated in a chain letter since I was a kid. I can't remember the premise of that long-ago letter, but I do remember dutifully copying it in my best handwriting 10 times, getting my mom to stamp and mail the letters, and waiting. The anticipation of literally hundreds of responses was both delicious and excruciating. Back then, getting a letter in the mail was cause for celebration, and I couldn't wait. But I did wait. And wait. And the letters never came.

Disappointment doesn't begin to cover it. I felt devastated, abandoned and totally alone. Skip ahead about 35 years or so.

Email has reinvigorated the chain letter. I try to be judicious about what I pass along, but I'm sure I still forward too often. Imagine my surprise when I recently received an invitation via snail mail from my aunt to participate in a virtual book club. All I had to do was mail one book and 10 letters, and I would get hundreds of books in the mail. I took the bait. In sweet vindication of that childhood trauma, I have actually received two books. How cool is that?

Now it seems I have been snookered into a virtual version of this pyramid scheme. One of my favorite writers, Cindy Fey, tagged me to participate in something called "Six Random Things About Me."  Here goes:

Un: When I read a book, I read everything — the acknowledgements, the copyright, even the part that says "This book was typeset in in 11 point Goudy™ Old Style, originally created by famous type designer Frederic W. Goudy in 1915 …"

Deux: When I die, I want to be reincarnated as Van Morrison, specifically during the "Moondance" years, and more specifically singing "Caravan."  (Click here for a sound clip.

Trois: When I was a kid, we went camping a lot. In recent discussions with my family, I have realized that I have relatively few memories of those trips, as I am extremely allergic to mosquito bites and spent most of the time stoned on Benadryl.

Quatre: I frequently start deep, personal, often intimate conversations with complete strangers in elevators or in line at the grocery.

Cinq: I don't really speak French. In high school, we studied French cooking, listened to French rock and roll (a true oxymoron), and conjugated a few verbs. As a freshman in college, I was somehow scheduled into an intensive French class — two hours a day (starting at 8:00 a.m.), five days a week. The first words out of my Parisian-born teacher's mouth were: "Zees will be the last words you 'ear me speak en Anglais." I raised my hand and said: "I do not belong in zis class."

Six: Though I have a brilliant sense of direction, I have only the barest knowledge of world geography. This is not my fault. When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was still intact and our social studies books printed maps of the USSR all in black (or sometimes red – Communist Red) and labeled it as "behind the Iron Curtain." Since then, borders have moved, whole countries and cities have been renamed (is it Bombay or Mumbai?) and I just can't keep up.

There you have my scintillating six. Here are the rules to this game, as plagiarized directly from Cindy's blog, followed by the six people I have tagged:

The Rules:

Link to the person who tagged you (i.e., me).

Post the rules on your blog.

Write six random things about yourself in a blog post.

Tag six people.

Let each person know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on one of their recent posts.

Let the tagger know when your entry is posted.

My taggees:

Becky (my Becky, not Cindy's Becky)

Critique group buddy Angela Allyn at Domestic Blitz

Ardis at Hilltop: The View from Here and Now (another wonderful writer)

Writer and friend Sue Roupp at rouppgroupink

Another writer acquaintance, Beverly Patt, who's first book is due out from Bloomingtree Press this year. 

Web goddess and OCWW member Helen Gallagher at Release Your Writing.

You all have my sincerest apologies. Feel free to comment by clicking here or email me at 2KoPeople@gmail.com.

Photo credit: Click via MorgueFile.com.

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