Please hum the theme to the Rocky training montage as you read this
It’s crunch time. I’ve asked Hallie Lord to guest host 7 Quick Takes Friday for February 3, February 10, and February 17 so that I can make a huge final push on the book.
Some folks have asked if there is an email list they can get on to receive an update when I’m back to regular blogging, which is a polite way of saying “It’s really not worth the mental energy it would take to keep up with the intricacies of your writing schedule.” The answer is yes! Sort of! You can sign up to receive my blog’s content by email whenever I write a new post. It’s free, there’s no spam, and you can promptly unsubscribe in disgust if I ever turn this into a Justin Bieber fan blog:
Meanwhile, I have realized that the possibility of hitting this deadline is only barely within the realm of what is humanly possible. So if you want to know what the next three weeks will be like for me, just imagine the training montage from Rocky. It is going to be EXACTLY like that, only without physical activity, interacting with other people, or leaving the house. (Although I may punch some slabs of meat at some point.)
I feel weird asking for prayers, as if no one has anything better to pray for than my word count goals. But if you find yourself scraping the bottom of the barrel of your prayer intentions, getting to the point that you’re requesting God’s intervention with Facebook load times and the plot of Downton Abbey, it would be great if you could throw in a good word for my little project.
I’ll be back on February 21. See you then!
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 162)
For the #1 spot in each week’s Quick Takes, I usually think back and pick out an interesting / funny / bizarre story that occurred within the past seven days. As I sit down to review this particular week, I realize just how nonexistent my life has been. One hundred percent of my energy has been divided between the following three things:
- Feverishly working on the book.
- Thinking about how infuriated I am going to be if I don’t hit this deadline and thus have to wait eight months until my schedule clears up so I can get back to it. (Notice I am beyond the point of even pretending that I might be able to prayerfully turn the timeline over to God. My “patiently accepting endless delays” capabilities ran out sometime between the second time I scrapped a completed draft and the 12 months I had to wait to work on it again.)
- Hanging out with the kids, unsuccessfully pitching a new pretend game called Tortured Artist, where one of us (mommy) sits and types furiously while everyone else stands around and makes comments like “That’s genius!” and “What a brilliant paragraph.”
Have I mentioned that I’m speaking at the Living the Faith conference in Denver? I can’t wait. You can read Julie Filby’s article about it here. I see that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will be giving one of the keynotes. I guess that means that, since I am also a speaker, we’ll pretty much be hanging out the whole time. Justice Scalia (who will probably insist that I call him “Tony”) might have some questions about my blog, and will want to get my take on some of the cases he’s hearing right now. Another keynote speaker, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, will be excited to hear that my husband is coming. My husband established himself as a luminary in the worlds of both philosophy and astronomy after calling out every celestial body in the cosmos and issuing a standing challenge for any of them to go up against him on Jeopardy (as of yet unanswered, I note), so I’m sure that Brother Consolmagno will be anxious to meet him.
As I flail around with my own book project, the good news is that there are other bloggers out who have fancy things like completed books, and I can live vicariously through them. Steady Mom has a new eBook out that promises to be great, and The Bloggess’ first memoir is coming out in April. Prediction: The Bloggess’ book will be in the top 10 of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list within one week of its release. She has what publishers refer to as a “FREAKING HUGE PLATFORM,” meaning that she has tens of thousands of loyal readers who lie awake at night waiting to buy her book, so it’ll be very interesting to see how it does. (As a writing nerd who is also a web stats nerd who used to work in marketing, these sorts of things are fascinating to me.)
You may notice that I didn’t link to The Bloggess’ blog in that last take. I know. Bad etiquette. But I simply don’t have the vocabulary to craft a content warning that would be strong enough to give readers unfamiliar with her writing a proper idea of what they might find there. Ten f-bombs, to be sure. But also discussion of insane taxidermy experiments. Pictures of insane taxidermy experiments. Sexual references that would make Hugh Hefner blush. And that’s just in the first paragraph.
I was going to go ahead and link to it with an all caps warning that clicking through will fling you far, far outside of the Inspirational Christian Mommy blog world, but then I had the realization (that chills me every time I think about it) that some of my dear friends who are Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist occasionally check in on my blog. I had this vision of Sister Elizabeth Ann accidentally clicking on the link, unsure what just happened, and at that moment some of her sisters walk in behind her. Sister Maria Rosario faints, Sister Thomas Aquinas is crossing herself and saying Hail Mary’s. Someone is on the phone to Mother Assumpta. And Sister Elizabeth Ann is frantically closing browsers, crying, “JENNIFER FULWILER MADE ME DO IT!”
Now I feel the need to post something worthy of having deeply devout people read this blog. I have the perfect thing! Check out this super cute four-minute talk by Kimberly Hahn. It’s a really unique presentation that has stuck with me ever since I watched it.
Tucker Max announced that he’s retiring from his hard-partying ways last week (some profanity at that link). I was quite touched by what he had to say about it:
The turning point came when one day I realized, I was a number-one bestselling author, I was rich and famous and I’d done all these things in my writing career that I couldn’t even dream of accomplishing when I’d started. All the things I thought I needed to do to make myself happy, I had done…I thought that would be more than enough to make me happy, and it wasn’t.
Want to hear something eerie? When I found this article I had just finished mentioning him in my memoir, which explores those exact themes. My husband and I used to get together with some friends occasionally to go bar hopping in a yellow school bus while dressed as clowns, and I talked about it because something significant to the main plot happened on one of those nights. Tucker happened to be with us, so I mentioned it. Anyway, it was odd to hear someone who was there that night publicly express the same opinion. I was like, What?? Clown Night didn’t bring you deep inner peace either?! So weird!
Tucker Max (holding up the megaphone) at Clown Night, 2003
Good for you, Tucker, for searching for something more. I pray that your journey may also take you from the clown bus to God.
As I wrap up this edition of Quick Takes to get back to work on the book, I leave you with this fabulous quote that nancyo recently left in a comment:
“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
- Thomas Mann
This makes me think I might be a real Writer after all.
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 161)
Yesterday afternoon, I thought I had found a one-two punch of improving our neighbors’ impressions of The Homeschoolers and getting some socialization for the kids. (Disclaimer: Socialization is not a problem for everyone who educates at home. Many such families have no problem whatsoever exposing their children to the company of other human beings. The stereotype comes from people like me, who were weird to begin with.) Anyway, yesterday I whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies and set them on a stand in our front yard as a lure for the kids who were playing outside after school.
It worked! The warm cookies were like a kid magnet, and within minutes a half dozen children were hanging around our front yard. I pretended to be very busy rearranging the two chairs on the front porch while I kept an eye on the interactions. Just when the older kids got past some awkward hellos and began to chat with potential new friends, my sugar-crazed toddler grabbed two cookies and stuffed them into her mouth with both hands, grunting and smearing chocolate all over her face, arms, and neck. I chirped a polite reminder for her not to eat all the cookies, hoping my calm and classy tone would balance out her behavior, and leave people with the overall impression that we were probably not mountain people who had come in from the hills to take up residence in this neighborhood. Upon hearing my admonishment, she opened her mouth, and let a chewed blob of cookies fall from her mouth and splat onto the middle of the plate. The kids scattered like cockroaches.
Maybe we’ll try again tomorrow.
This is kind of an odd juxtaposition, but here it goes anyway: I’ve been using the book Mornings With Fulton Sheen as meditation starters for my morning prayer time. It’s great stuff. Each page has a reflection from something the late Archbishop wrote, along with a corresponding Bible verse. An example from page 51:
“Man becomes like that which he loves. If he loves gold, he becomes like it — cold, hard and yellow. The more he acquires, the more he suffers at surrendering even the least of it, just as it hurts to have a single hair pulled out even thought your head is full of them.”
Wisdom is worth much more than gold, and understanding should be chosen over silver. (Proverbs 16:16)
There are a bunch of daily meditation books like this (Karen Edmisten’s Through the Year With Mary and Bert Ghezzi’s Breakfast with Benedict are also great). I always find them to be good ways to kickstart my prayer time, especially if I’ve been going through a spiritual dry spell.
I’ve continued my commitment to get up at 6:00 AM (by “continued” I mean “I sometimes get up when the first number on the clock still says 6“) and one of the most exciting parts of each morning is when I put on my slippers. I know what you’re thinking: Wow, that sounds thrilling. Putting on slippers? Tell me more. Can I also get a detailed list of what you eat for breakfast? But wait. This is actually a tension-filled moment of death-defying anticipation in this house, and here’s why:
It occurred to me the other day that these shoes, which are tall and poofy slipper-boots, are a perfect scorpion habitat. I mean, so perfect that the marketing department should throw out all this foot warming mumbo jumbo and just market them as arachnid condos. So when we combine the facts that scorpions like small, warm spaces and are also nocturnal, we see that it is a matter of when, not if, I will encounter one in my slipper-boots at 6 AM. I’ve been shaking the slippers out every morning, but there’s always a chance that one of the scorpion’s claws could get stuck in the furry fabric, in which case the result of my shaking would only be that I now have an extremely angry and alert scorpion waiting for me in my shoes.
I wouldn’t wear those slippers, someone just thought after reading my last take. Believe me, I am sympathetic to this line of thinking. But around here we have scorpions in our beds, our towels, our kitchens, our toy piles, our living rooms. Alas, even our toilets are not outside of the universe of possibilities of where one might encounter a scorpion. If I were to optimize my life on not being stung, I would stand on a stool in my living room and scream in despair all day (though not too close to the air vent, since scorpions fall out of there sometimes). As it is, even my most mundane tasks are packed with the tension of WILL I OR WILL I NOT BE STUNG BY A POISONOUS ARACHNID WHEN I DO THIS? Let it never be said that I don’t have an exciting life.
If you have young children, I think you need one of these. I got it for my two-year-old for Christmas after seeing the reviews on Amazon, which led me to beleive that it is specifically mentioned in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s a glow bug thing that shoots lights from its shell. And it has buttons that change the colors. Okay. Obviously I am up too late to describe this very well, so let me put it this way: It does cool stuff that will get your children to beg you to turn out the lights at night.
I’m speaking at the Diocese of Venice Apologetics Conference on February 7, so if you’re in the area come on by! (That’s Venice, Florida, by the way. Though I am certainly open to the possibility should anyone want me to speak in Venice, Italy. I don’t know Italian, but I do offer a pantomimed version of my talks.)
In what should be a humbling turn of events, the weekend before I’ll be seeing Matthew Kelly speak at our parish. He’s arguably one of the best speakers in the world, and talks like this are why:
Book progress: I have about 48,000 words down. According to my writing schedule, I’m supposed to have about 57,000 by this point. I’m not too worried — if I keep focused and stay off of Twitter, I think I can make it up over the next few weeks.
Writing tip: I’ve tried everything under the sun to keep myself motivated to write, and nothing has worked as well as simple word count deadlines. When I’ve based my schedule on what topics I was going to cover when, I could come up with all sorts of elaborate rationalizations that made it seem like I was doing something, when really I was doing nothing (“I didn’t cover top X per se, but I did research topic Y, which is related…”). Word count deadlines keep you typing.
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7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 160)
Yesterday I turned 35. To celebrate, let’s get all reflective!
- If you are older than 35, tell me about what you were doing at this age. How do you feel about that time of your life? Anything you’d do differently?
- If you are younger than 35, tell me about what you want your life to be like when you’re my age.
My husband and I ended up in a long conversation about ventriloquists the other day (still not sure how that happened). Anyway, the upshot of it was that we ended up rediscovering Señor Wences. I hadn’t seen this clip of him on The Muppet Show since I was a kid, and I was delighted to find that he is every bit as charming and talented as I remembered him being:
After all the drama, the proclamations, the descriptions of not wanting to eat or sleep, the excessive use of caps lock, I didn’t end up watching Downton Abbey this weekend. I was behind on my writing schedule, so I used the time I had carefully blocked out for throwing myself all over the television to write instead. THAT is how seriously I am about this February deadline. (Fellow Downton Abbey fans just gasped and started fanning themselves.)
As I’ve mentioned before, my agent doesn’t want to talk to publishers until we have an A+ draft, so I am not under contractual obligation to have it done by that date. However, I think I’m actually more dedicated to the deadline than I would be if my main pressure were a contract with a publisher. Since our family has made sacrifices for me to get the extra time I need to get this done, I want to make sure I don’t drag this out any longer than necessary. I hate the idea of having to go to my husband and mom and mother-in-law on February 21 and say, “Hey, you know how I made that big pitch about how I could use some extra help for a few weeks? And how any sacrifices would be worth it because it would allow me to wrap up this project by today? I have some bad news about that…” I feel like one way I can show my appreciation for their efforts is to take the deadline I promised them very seriously. And in this house, it does not get much more serious than skipping the first episode of Season 2 of Downton Abbey.
I recently stumbled across a heated discussion where people were asked to state their annual income and then say how rich or poor they felt. (The link is here, but there’s some strong language. To give you an idea: Some people wrote in and complained that they felt very poor despite making high-six-figure incomes. Others were allowed to respond anonymously, with no censoring. You can imagine what kind of commentary that elicited.) So anyway, I was surprised to hear people talking about making $350,000 a year and feeling “so, so, so poor”…but then I wondered if I’d really be as content as I think I would be at that income.
I once read that your desires adjust to your income level, and that “at all levels of income, the typical response is that one needs 20% more to be happy.” I’ve thought for a long time that I wouldn’t need any more income if we just had X amount…and I laughed when I did the math and realized it was 20% more. It made me realize that as long as I’m in the mode of “Coveting Things You Want that You Can’t Afford,” I’ll never feel like I have enough. If we did get more money, I would just buy those things I’d been pining over (larger house, newer car, etc.), and then our budget would be maxed out again and I’d come up with new things that I want but can’t afford.
I know, I know, this is an incredibly obvious concept. I think what shocked me was when I saw that I’m really not all that different than a millionaire who feels poor. I thought of myself as being in a totally different situation than someone who makes a zillion dollars and still wishes she had more…but really, we’re both people who can’t seem to get it through our heads that we have more than enough.
Election season is in full swing! And that’s the last you’ll hear about it from me. I remember back in the Fall of 2008, I would occasionally get comments like, “Umm, you do know that there’s a hotly contested presidential election going on, right? Just wondering since you haven’t mentioned it once.”
I’m naturally apolitical, and I don’t think that it’s within the scope of this blog to talk about politics anyway. So if you’ve been looking around for a blog that can enlighten you with nuanced analysis of the upcoming primary season and its implications for the November ballots, you will find this site to be deeply disappointing. But if you were just sitting there wondering, “What blog could I read in 2012 that will avoid the topic of the election entirely and focus on God and poop fates and scorpions instead?”, drop everything, subscribe to my RSS feed, and prepare yourself to be blessed.
My current read is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It had been on my wish list for a while, but I finally bought it after coming across this fascinating interview about Skloot’s process for writing the book. As a writing nerd, I was dying to see her finished product after reading all the details of how she weaved the different narrative threads together.
The book is wonderful. Very well done. It reminds me of Born to Run, which is also excellent and very similar in structure. It’s made me realize that I adore that particular genre, which I think of as “nonfiction that educates you about an interesting concept while weaving in colorful personal vignettes about the people involved, including the author’s own story of researching the book.” Is there a more concise term for that? It’s a combination of textbook-style info and memoir. Maybe “infoir”? “Memfo”? (Clearly I am up too late.) Anyway, if you come across any other books in that genre, let me know!
I leave you with this: an image of what happens when you’re the fifth baby, and three of your older siblings are little girls:
Have a great weekend!
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