A file of all the posts I could not/was too lazy to categorize.

Writing with a four-month-old: a live-blogging experiment

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I'm sure this will go well.

I’m sure this will go well.

Today I’m trying something new. I am live-blogging my attempt to write while home alone with a baby. I’ve read a few things about tactics for writing with a young child, and those articles were not terribly helpful.  So today is an experiment. I’ve got a baby carrier, a bouncy chair, a play-yard and my laptop. All I need now is luck. Wish me that. I will be updating all day.

11:30 am  – My husband has the dog with him today, so I don’t need to worry about walking her. I’ve done a metric ton of laundry. I’ve nursed the bairn into submission and put him into the crib, so I should be able to start… crap. Diaper change. DSC_0018Oh god, no, I was wrong. It’s a diaper blowout. I’ll be back.

11:48 am – Okay. Baby cleaned and put in the play yard. New laundry started. Surfaces Cloroxed. NOW: It’s been a while since I worked on my novel, and I am a little blocked in places, so thanks to some advice I saw from a friend who was in my MFA program, I’m going to journal about the problem. Maybe that will help me write around the block.

12:16 pm – I’ve got to ditch the internet. It’s distracting me. So I’m logging out of Facebook except on nursing breaks. Despite a diaper change and distractions online, I have been journaling about my novel and I’ve made a little progress with character development issues, but now the baby is fussing. He’s probably hungry. And I just realized something. So am I.

1:20 pm – The baby and I are both fed. I’ve realized that although I’ve made some headway with character development, I cannot find the first copy of my manuscript, which is what I was working from. I am giving myself five minutes to find it and if I can’t, I’m winging it.

1:23 pm – Found it. Baby is in the crib. Let’s do this.

Tire yourself out, my child.

Tire yourself out, my child.

2:01 pm – I’ve done 254 words worth of writing. I’ve also changed a diaper, eaten a plum and wandered around for a few minutes Iike a lost soul. Finally I accepted that if I don’t get the baby into the exersaucer soon, he will never go down for his nap and I have hopes for naptime. They aren’t big hopes, but they are hopes. So that’s where he is right now, bouncing in the saucer. The good thing is, although I’m working in drips and drabs and this pace is frustrating, I am working. I don’t know if I’m producing anything of value, though.

2:45 pm – 300 more words written. That’s more than the 500 a day I used to hold myself to, so I guess, technically I could stop now. But I haven’t written at home in a while, and this is an experiment, so I’m going to continue until my husband returns. FOR SCIENCE. It’s time to feed the baby now, though.

3:39 pm – The baby is fed and changed and it could be that most golden, elusive, glorious time of the day: naptime. My son doesn’t like to nap, but sometimes he does actually go to sleep, despite himself. In the meantime, he might at least be quiet for a little while and I may be able to write some more until backup arrives. I hope.

3:55 pm – Naptime turned into an Olympic gymnastic floor routine, and I spent my writing time alternately trying to prevent head injuries and researching crib bumpers, so that didn’t really work out. Now I’m keeping him next to me in the play-yard on the bed, and he’s practicing his vocal exercises instead. These are as distracting as the gymnastics, but not as alarming. Now, to make one final push at writing.

4:42 pm – Feeding the boy again. Between the feeding and a changing, I’m getting less done than I did this morning. This kid is active. How does one tire out a four-month-old? Is it even possible? I’ve written a few words though.

4:54 pm – The experiment has ended: 781 words, three outfit changes (baby’s, not mine) and one load of laundry later, my husband has returned and I’m shutting it down.And what do you know? The baby is sleeping. Because of course he is.

So, after a day of writing alone with baby, what’s the verdict?
The take-away of this experiment is probably that sensible people get babysitters. Well, no. I think the take-away is actually that I produced more today than I did before I had a baby because I was always pushing to get words on the page before he started to fuss. But quantity is not quality — while I got more written than usual, I do wonder if it’s any good compared to my normal output. I can’t tell, because I’m too tired right now to know good writing from bad.

Also, and this is probably open to interpretation, it’s hard to know if my parenting also suffered because I was trying to do two things at once. I mean, I did all the things I’d normally do on a day home with my son, and he was even by my side more than he usually is, but I was focusing on writing rather than housework or walking him at the park. So was I a worse mom because I was working and watching him? I don’t know. Only he knows for sure, and he doesn’t speak English yet.

Well, it’s been real. I’m going to put this baby down, save my work and find the Pinot Grigio.

Want tips for writing with a baby? Check out my next post.

 

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Chapter 5 of DinoLand is live today

The latest installment of DinoLand is up this morning at Geek Eccentric! This month’s installment is a gastronomic one. You’ve been warned.

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Review: The Eagle and the Arrow by A.J. O’Connell

This review of The Eagle and the Arrow made my day! Go check out Ally at Word Vagabond; she’s got one fabulous book review site.

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A list of the links that have been posted to The Eagle and the Arrow, so far.

The Eagle and the Arrow is released today! Links to the book are trickling in.

Here are the links that have been posted so far:

The e-book, on Amazon

The paperback on Amazon

And let us not neglect Barnes & Noble, which has the e-book on NOOK

The e-book on Smashwords.

I’m waiting for the publisher’s website to post the book as well. Also, check it out on Goodreads (another giveaway – this time of The Eagle & The Arrow –  is happening soon.)

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In defense of Amanda Palmer.

Amanda Palmer (she’s a musician and used to front the Dresden Dolls) has recently come under fire for asking volunteers to play horns and strings at her shows on her Grand Theft Orchestra Tour.

This is one of a series of unconventional tactics she’s undertaken recently. She used Kickstarter to great effect this year, raising $1.2 million from fans to independently create an album that was dropped this week.
On August 21, she posted this on her blog: “WANTED: HORN-Y AND STRING-Y VOLUNTEERS FOR THE GRAND THEFT ORCHESTRA TOUR!!!!”

She’s looking for fans who are “professionalish” horn and string players to join her onstage for each night of her tour. The volunteers are asked to commit to a rehearsal, one performance and will be paid in beer and love.

Professional session musicians are outraged. There are posts about their anger in Spin and The New York Times and the Boston Globe. Last time I checked Palmer’s blog, there were 290 comments on that blog post, many of them angry, and from musicians, some claiming that she’s exploiting musicians.  Writes one:

“I’ve been a professional touring musician for 23 years, and I’ve never heard of you until today. With all due respect, your request for free labor sounds like a promotional gimmick dreamed up by a corporate republican who has no concept of the history of working people in this country.”

Here’s my question, though: What’s the big deal?

Palmer is asking for volunteers and is presumably asking her fan base for volunteers. She’s asking the people who will be at the concert anyhow, not professional session musicians who’ve never heard of her.  People ask for volunteers all the time. Churches and schools are always asking for volunteers. Politicians ask for volunteers to run many aspects of their campaigns. Artists are asked to volunteer their skills for many organizations, for-profit and non-profit. Surely, there is no harm in asking people to volunteer. And surely, asking for volunteers is much different than exploitation.

One commenter felt that it was insulting to ask musicians to play for free simply because it’s wrong to assume that working musicians will play just for the love of music. I can kind of relate to that. A while back, I wrote a post about the writing equivalent of that feeling; that I get sick of having to provide copy for birthday cards, poems for anniversaries or whatever simply because I’m a writer.

I think Palmer’s request is different, though. For one thing, she’s not targeting specific musicians and asking them to play for free. Secondly, I think some of her fans will want to jam with her.

Why? Let’s look at a slightly different situation. Say her husband, Neil Gaiman, put out a call on his site for “professionalish” writers to collaborate on a book project for free. I’m a writer. I make my living off my art. But would I do it for free?

Hell yes, I would. I would get right in line. I would do it because I could then say I’d been published with Neil Gaiman. I would do it because I was once a huge fan of his work. Even if he were getting paid for the collaboration and I wasn’t, I don’t think I’d complain, because I would have known, up front, that I’d volunteered.

I should probably mention at this point that I’m not a fan of Palmer’s music; I’ve never given any of it – from the Dresden Dolls to today’s solo projects – a try. But I do feel some affinity with her.

Maybe it’s because when I worked at the Boston Herald, I spent a lot of time in Cambridge, and I think I saw her when she was busking there as the Eight-Foot Bride. Maybe it’s because, at the same time, I grabbed a review copy of American Gods (by Gaiman, who wasn’t married to her at that time) off the features desk’s Free Stuff Shelf and later became obsessed with it. Maybe it’s because I knew a lot of people from Lexington, where she grew up, or maybe it’s because her alma mater was the rival of mine. We didn’t exactly roll in the same circles, but we’ve had a lot of places in common, and probably more than a few people in common. Or maybe, because, as a small author with a small press, I admire her for using the Internet to connect and collaborate with her fans. It’s something I try to do on a very small scale and it’s nice to see her crowdsourcing with such success.

So I’m coming to her defense because I feel like a member of my tribe is under attack, and I don’t feel the attack is just.

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The Home Ec Retrospective

Behold, Frankenshorts! It's aliiiiive! (I think the red box in the sewing basket is my old Home Ec "pincushion.")

This weekend I did a couple of things that I don’t do often. I baked meringues for my husband as part of a you-do-yard-work-and-you-get-cookies arrangement. I also — in a desperate and probably vain attempt to extend the lifespan of my favorite cut-off shorts — sewed a patch and re-sewed a seam.

Both of these activities made me remember my Home Economics classes in junior high. My district called our school junior high, and not middle school then, although by the early ’90s lots of school systems were switching over to the 6-8 middle school format, rather than the 7-8 junior high school model. We were taught Home Economics and Industrial Arts, which roughly translated to Cooking and Woodworking in the seventh grade and Sewing and Printing in the eighth. I knew from books and television and people in other towns that not all schools had these extras, and I remember wondering if we were weird because we did.

I didn’t think I needed Home Ec. I had already done baking projects at home. My mother, an accomplished seamstress and the granddaughter of a professional tailor, had already taught me a little about sewing. She taught me to work with patterns and sewing machines when I was in grammar school. We made doll clothes together during summer vacations.  Like many middle schoolers, I figured I already knew everything when I walked into Home Ec class in junior high school. Yet, today as I finish repairing the seam on Frankenshorts, I find myself tying off the thread with a knot taught to me by my Home Ec teacher, not my mother. I’m even using the same spool of thread and the same box of pins we bought when I started the course in the fall of 1991.

At the time, Home Ec seemed silly to me. I liked the break from regular classes, but I didn’t feel like I was learning anything useful. Our cooking curriculum seemed – except for one notable day when we made pizza – completely made up of cookies, learning measurements, and cleaning up. In our sewing class, we made pillows and stuffed animals from plush “kits” ordered from a catalog. I can’t deny that I enjoyed making pillows and bringing them home, but I still think the course might have been more absorbing if it featured some element of clothing repair. At 13, I was definitely interested in learning how to patch my beat-up denim jacket, in letting down the hems of my pants (I was too tall for almost all my clothes) and in fixing the holes in my favorite shirts before my mom used those holes as an excuse to throw them away. Our teacher had her own methods, and so we made the probably-less-controversial pillows.

Looking back at it, there was a feeling of fiefdom to my junior high school Home Ec classes. When you walked into the rooms on the Home Ec corridor, you were entering the teacher’s world. Sewing machines, mixers and ovens were fiercely protected. Names were assigned to things that didn’t need new names. Baking mix was called Master Mix. Anything that held pins was a pincushion, even if was a box or a bag or anything else that is manifestly not a cushion. There seemed to be this war, waged in semantics, that was constantly being fought, although I didn’t feel like the teacher was struggling against me or my fellow students. As a former schools reporter, I now wonder if that war was being waged against an administration that questioned the need for cooking and sewing classes in middle school.

I could be wrong about this theory. When I check out my old school’s website, I see that cooking is still taught. In fact, the most popular recipe from that course, beloved of even the most jaundiced seventh graders, is posted on the site. Cinnamon rolls. Mmmm.  Click here to download, and enjoy.

Sadly, there are no sewing classes listed. And I didn’t see many sewing classes in other schools when I covered education for the newspaper. As I finish work on Frankenshorts, I can’t help but think that sewing is really a valuable skill for anyone to have. Even if they learn on silly plush pillows. Even if all they know how to do is sew a stupid Band-Aid patch onto a pair of jeans. Sewing and cooking are a couple of useful skills and they will be until we evolve fur or photosynthesis.

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Brother

One of my first memories is of either standing or being carried down a wall of baby toys in Toys R’ Us by my father or by an uncle. I’m two and a half years old. It’s November. I’m staring at that wall of toys because I have a job to do, an honest-to-goodness task, and it’s my responsibility, because I’m no longer a baby. I’m a big sister, and I’ve been charged with picking out my baby brother’s very first toy.

I probably didn’t take too long to do this. Probably just a few minutes. But it seems like I was staring at that wall of toys for hours. I guess that makes sense; child time moves three times slower than time as experienced by adults. (Unless a swimming pool is involved. Then child time moves five times faster than adult time.)

Anyhow, I finally selected a yellow and orange plastic rattle, shaped like a bell. I remember thinking that it seemed like a good toy for a boy, but a little bit different. None of this blue-for-boys stuff. My little brother was special and deserved a special toy. I was very proprietary of him right from the beginning. Mom tells me that on that first visit I informed someone that “we just had a baby.”  I might have just chosen him a new toy, but I was pretty sure that he was my new toy. Mom and Dad had produced this child just for me. I remember clutching that rattle in my sticky toddler hands as someone held me up to the nursery window at Waterbury Hospital and pointed the new O’Connell, Chris, out to me.

He has remained the newest O’Connell for the past 31 years. Tomorrow that changes. My little brother is marrying his best friend, Cayla. And then we will have a brand new O’Connell.

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In which the author is confused by Linkedin

Early this morning, I got my latest invitation to join Linkedin.

I get a lot of these, because I’m not on Linkedin. The very first request came a few years ago, when I was working at a newspaper and an old source sent me monthly requests to join Linkedin. I got one every month for at least a year before either he stopped trying to invite me or I left my job and lost access to that email account. I can’t remember which happened first. Anyhow, since then, I’ve received Linkedin requests from all sorts of people: former co-workers, current co-workers, students, family members, people I’ve met once, people I haven’t seen in years and friends of my family.

It seems like everyone’s on LinkedIn, and since I’m a sucker for groupthink, I’m beginning to wonder: Do I need to be on Linkedin? And if so, why?

I have checked out the site. It looks like a non-scandalous, grown-up version of Facebook, where people use phrases like “communication skills” and “can-do attitude” in lieu of “OMG” or “LOL.”

And although I realize the site is used to network professionals, I can’t figure out if it is useful or not.

It’s not as if I don’t love social media. Those who suffer my Facebook status updates and my Twitter feed can attest to the fact that I love The Network. It’s ridiculous. I’ve been waiting for it all my life:  I write words and people react to (or fail to react to) those words almost instantly. It’s instant gratification. Sometimes it’s instant mortification. And it’s done wonders for my writing — Facebook has honed my comedic skills by teaching me that 80 percent of everything I say is not funny.

Same thing with Twitter, which has allowed me to gradually connect with other writers, and which has also taught me how to craft very, very short sentences while including hashtags and replies.  And these two sites are really just the latest in a series of social media innovations that I’ve loved and abused. Before Facebook, I was on Myspace. Before that, Livejournal. Before that, I was on Friendster. And before that, there were various messaging and file-sharing groups that I can barely remember. ICQ and Hotwire (I think it was called HotWire. It could have been HotLine. Livewire? I don’t know. The software I’m talking about is from 1995. It’s been lost in the mists of time.) Also, AIM and unsupervised chat rooms, and even the old Apple chat software Broadcast.

All of them were useful in their own way, just as Facebook and Twitter are useful to me now, as I build a reader base and follow what’s going on with my friends and in the world. But LinkedIn? How is that useful? Isn’t it just a way to get my resumé online?

And so, because I have no answers of my own, I end this blog with an obnoxious crowd-sourcing series of questions. Are you on Linkedin? Is it useful? How? Have you obtained a job or gained contacts by being on Linkedin? Please, corporate types. Help a sister out.

 

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Free things for Christmas

I keep forgetting to use one of my own photos as a holiday card. So this isn't a holiday freebie, but it could have been.

I love Christmas. I also love free stuff. So putting the two things together always makes my day. And because sharing makes everything better, I want to share my a few of my favorite holiday freebies with you.

1) Free holiday music. Last year, I was in desperate need of holiday music. I had only one holiday CD, and I disliked that album intensely. It had exactly one good carol on it. The rest were second-rate, mid-century carols by mediocre artists. If we lived in a just world, those songs would have been lost in a record company’s basement, but we don’t. Somebody dredged the carols up and stuck them all together on a disc which I got – I kid you not – from a cereal box. Chex, I think. Anyhow, my feelings about the album are beside the point, because I lost it while moving. While I didn’t miss the album at all, I totally missed having Christmas carols. I know I could have turned on the radio and tuned in to any one of the stations that plays holiday music for the month of December – hell, WEBE 108’s signal is so strong that we can actually hear Bing Crosby singing White Christmas on appliances that aren’t radios.  Still, I was so sick of all those songs. I’ve been hearing them since I was born. The last new carol on those stations is probably Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” and that came out when I was in high school.  I wanted something new. Or at least something good. My savior was Amazon’s MP3 store, which gives away 25 holiday tunes during the month of December – one for each day. And for the most part, the music is really good. Yeah, Dan Fogelberg and Carly Simon occasionally sneak into the line-up, and there are at least three versions of “Oh Come, Oh Come Emanuel.” (To be fair, there is a cool metal version this year, by the lead singer of Judas Priest.) But generally, the music is by contemporary artists and there are even new carols. My favorite this year is Winter Hymnal by the Fleet Foxes.

My New Yorker holiday bow prototype.

2.) Home-made paper bows. I got this idea from my brother, who made his own paper gift bow for my mom’s birthday present last week. I think that’s an awesome idea because I never have enough gift bows. Well, I do, but because I scavenge the bows off last year’s unwrapped presents and re-use them, all of my paper bows are smushed beyond recognition. So I’m making bows, using the below video and our pile of old New Yorkers. At left is my first attempt. It’s a one-in-the-morning bow, so it’s not winning any prizes. But it’s still really cool to be able to make them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPEYWjLpluI&feature=related]

3.) Desktop wallpaper. This isn’t actually holiday stuff. But I thought I’d include it because stars are a part of the Christmas story and also a part of the fabric of almost every other religion on the planet. And also because this is just cool. The Hubble Space Telescope posts its best images on its website. Several of those images can be downloaded as wallpaper for your computer. I like the cloud towers in the Carina Nebula best. It’s an awesome way to see the stars, even if you’re staring at your screen.

Happy holidays.

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Home.

Sometimes I still accidentally refer to my parents’ house as home.

I’ve been out of the house, more or less, for a decade but it’s an easy mistake. They still live in the same awesome, 100-year-old house I grew up in. Its silhouette has changed over the years, trees have grown up and come down, and it’s recently been painted yellow, but it’s still the same house I was brought home to as an infant. It provided the setting for all of my childhood dramas, games and fantasy. I spent hours in the backyard. I used to look out my window at the hills opposite and imagine the kingdoms that lay beyond them. (I was disappointed to learn that the hills were only hiding Waterbury.)

I know where everything in this house is, and a lot of the things I used to think of as mine are still here – the mural on my old bedroom wall, the painted rock that serves as a doorstop, the shelves on which my international doll collection used to sit – but recently something’s changed. Read more

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