{thanksfully: little victories}

Thank you (and big hearts – mwah! – ♥), to everyone who asked; my Mama is fine-ish. She sort of sounds like she swallowed a frog, but she is surrounded — and I mean surrounded – by family and friends. Her entire book club moved their meeting to her hospital room; that was six women, plus another couple dropped by during, plus our pastor, plus members of her school board. There were six people in her room when I phoned her at lunch. The nurses are Not Amused. As a matter of fact, the last thing my father said to me as he hung up was, “Oh, gotta go. The nurse said…” Click.

Nurse, shmurse. My father is not much for phone calls.

If it seems like I’m stalking Ursula Vernon, I am not (much). It’s just that she keeps saying such great things. I am truly grateful for people who can clearly articulate their respect and affection for traditional publishing. I owe Editor E, Knopf Books/Random House and the whole copy editing team a great debt, and I think they’re brilliant, professional, and amazing. I am all for people self-publishing, but as I am shy, couldn’t sell even wrapping paper for school when my street cred depended on it, and am basically lazy, I can see myself doing it… pretty much never. Self-publishing is A LOT OF WORK. Unless I suddenly start to gain new and exciting personality traits at this late date, I just don’t see it as an option. Traditional publishing is a monolith, and is probably here to stay, and as happy as I am for those who can do it on their own terms, I’m really pleased with what I’ve got, too.

And on the topic of being lazy, I am grateful today for … the complicated things. Well, things which have been complicated for me, anyway. Like long division. And ab crunches.

I am not a natural mathematician, or a natural athlete. I remember being mortified that author Sara Lewis Holmes does a “drop and give me twenty” type of thing with her class visits for OPERATION YES, and girlfriend can drop and give you all twenty. In various ways. Doing jody calls all the while. She loves doing push-ups.

Sara has the sweetest drawl, and is the kindest person, and is a fellow poetry princesses and sister-logophile, yet in spite of all of this, I spent a lot of time being cranky-envious of her push-ups. I hesitate to tell you how long it took me to figure out that I could just, I dunno, try doing my own challenging physical things.

I suck at phys ed stuff (You should have [not] seen me in school). But, I can do some push-ups now. Which is more than I could do before. And I can do a ton of crunches. I’m a bit proud of that.

And as for long division – boy, third grade was tough because of numbers. I wept silently. I sweated. I got yelled at by my Dad. I got glasses – that, at least, helped. But I had fallen behind in math, and I never, ever caught up. Even into college – when I was taking those last required remedial courses – I thought that math was one of those Big Mysteries that Someone Like Me would never get. And then, when I was dragging my little sister through her math homework, which she hated, I started doing her problems with her. It was …relaxing. I started doing it more often, comparing answers, letting my sister see where she’d gone wrong — and suddenly I had this weird idea of doing long division as a kind of meditation… Yeah. Can’t explain that one, but it worked out for both of us. Sometimes just knowing that you survived what someone else is suffering through can give you a moment of Zen about… well, a lot of things.

Ab crunches. Long division. Things which once tripped me up, but which now remind me that I can do anything at all, if I simply chip away at it. Little victories. I remain grateful for those.

My writing group has taken my NaNoFiMo idea and set out rules and built forms and they’re all excited about it. Which means I have to finish my mystery by December 31. Roughly five pages a day, and eighty thousand words…

Oh, dear.