Me to Geoff: I am going to write a story about Jersey cows. Those are the brown ones.
Geoff: Sure. Whatever.
Two hours later.
Geoff: What are you doing?
Me: Writing my story about Jersey cows. See, here’s the word `Jersey’ and here’s the word `Jersey’ and here’s the word `Jersey’. I am showing you because you totally don’t believe me that I’m writing a story about Jersey cows.
Geoff: Well, seriously? Did you expect I would believe you? Who writes a grown-up story about cows?
I’m playing Plants Vs Zombies 2 on the iPad while waiting for Tesfa’s craft class to end.
Kid watching me over my shoulder: I didn’t know there were any grown-ups who played Plants Vs Zombies!
Me: To be fair, I’m a pretty lousy grown-up.
I don’t think he got the reference.
Between super-mom (see my twitter feed for all that nonsense), Tesfa acting out at home because of adjusting to school, and Come From Away criticisms from my course (most justified but I’m not getting a great vibe that it’s going to be a smooth relationship between my mentor and I), I am not feeling very charitable towards the world outside my computer room this week.
The problem with your stories one of those kids who know everything told me in a writing workshop, is that they are hard sudokus. You really have to think to figure them out. But here’s the thing, she leaned forward on her elbows. No one actually does hard sudokus.
I do. I only do hard sudokus when I do sudukos, which, admittedly is not very often since with a background in math, sudukos aren’t so much a relaxation as work-lite. But a hard-suduko story writer, I liked that. The next best thing anyone has ever said about me is Meghan views getting wet as a personal insult, which is also true, but less applicable daily (unless it’s raining).
I got my first critique back for my course. I knew there were issues with Come From Away, but not this many. An entire red pen’s worth for the first twenty-five pages.
You broke the contract, Geoff says. The writer promises to reveal just enough and the reader promises to stick it out until all the pieces are in place. She doesn’t believe you’re going to reveal enough to make it worth her while.
But hard sudoku, I whine. You’ve got to stick with it.
The word hostile is thrown around in the critique. I am not puzzling. I am hostile.
I rewrite the first section.
Well, now you’re explaining too much, says Geoff.
I can’t win.
Tesfa wants to be a writer too, among other things (chef, penguin, mommy).
We can be writer friends! Her excitement is adorable. Did you write something today? she asks.
I told her yes. Less writing than rewriting, but let’s not get tied up in specifics.
Me too! Every non-question sentence Tesfa speaks is in exclamation marks. Mummy, she says, secretly, coming right up to my ear so that Geoff doesn’t hear, what letter did you practice writing today?
T I say. Might as well tell Tesfa her favourite letter. I did type a T today too.
I practiced my A’s! Tesfa shouts, still next to my ear. Writer friends!
At least my four year old is interested in my writing.
I have finished Volume One of War and Peace. That is, I have read approximately three hundred pages of the the thirteen hundred page, tiny nine point font, volume that Geoff purchased at that bookstore on Spring Garden in Halifax that may or may not still be there.
And I think I’m finally getting into it.
Long ago, as a puny undergraduate, I read Anna Karenina and, really, only cared about the personal love triangles and machinations and the people-stuff. Levin’s lengthy digressions about emancipation, I rolled my eyes and scanned rather than read. Philosophy of something also did not manage to stick in my brain. Basically, any time people were lecturing and no one was sneaking off to have sex or throwing temper tantrums or having a party, I ignored. Thus, with War and Peace, I figured I’d be flipping through the war parts and devouring the peace. I even read a book (one of the Anastasia Krupnik books) where a character reveals she never even read the war parts of War and Peace. So I’m in good company, I thought to myself. A fictional character from a kid’s book in the eighties agrees with me.
And here’s my confession though: the war parts are so much better than the peace parts.
Maybe because I am no longer a twenty year old, the gossip and intrigue and general cattiness of the Russian aristocracy no longer hold my attention. Instead, I’m sitting there reading and saying When are we going to get to another cavalry charge? Is this growth? Have I grown as a person?
Maybe I’ve just become more violent.
Starring might be a bit over-the-top, but I’m there – that bit can’t be denied.
I have a flash fiction piece No One Is Going to Steal Your Refrigerator in the new issue of Sassafras Magazine. This here’s the link to the HTML and this here’s the link to the beautifully rendered PDF file (approx 15 MB to download for those with slower internet connections).
It’s a great magazine with lots of great contributors and my piece is short (under three hundred words) so a perfect literary snack in the middle of your workday.
Come From Away is hovering, at last check, around forty-eight thousand words. Forty-eight thousand. Two thousand more words and I’ll have a NaNoWriMo (yes, I had to look that up because I kept simply typing a string of random letters after Na) length novel, albeit one that took much, much longer than a month to write.
Except – I don’t have two thousand more words to say about Come From Away.
This is all I want: I want a fifty thousand word novella. I’m sure that sometime in the past, I read that publishers want a minimum of fifty thousand words, and this factoid buried itself deep in my brain, and now it keeps surfacing to nag me about not writing those final two thousand words. Last week, Come From Away was only forty-five thousand words. So there were three thousand words left via Jane sneaking out to assemble a stroller and Peter dying his hair. I put in their argument to strengthen the ending. Maybe strengthen is the wrong word. Maybe the right word is pad.
Do I really have two thousand more words to say? Should I stop? Should I start putting more energy behind my faerie story?
Two thousand words seems so puny when I’m writing one-off short stories. I can almost never squeeze my stories down to that length. But then, when I need to wring out a bit more action from forty-eight thousand words of action, I’m like a dried out turtle shell in the desert. I got nothing.
New WordPress theme. New kindergarten school. New courses. I spend a lot of time in tears.
We are in learning to read mode here.
Sort of.
Okay, maybe not really.
I am no help. I, somehow, taught myself to read. My parents assumed the school taught me. My school assumed my parents were working with me at home. Apparently great guffaws were had at a meet-the-teacher night when it was determined that neither of them had any influence on me at all. All that I know is that by the time I was Tesfa’s age I could read and since I have almost no memories of not being able to read, I am unclear as to what I should be doing to help Tesfa.
Kindergarten sent home a book yesterday. Tesfa is to know what sound S and T and A make by the end of the week. Firstly, awesome for picking letters in her name. Secondly, she knows that already. So school is a bit behind where she is right now. No help there either.
How did you learn to read? I ask Geoff. This is a waste of time. Geoff has something like four memories of his life before the age of eighteen, all of which involve candy. So Geoff is no help.
Why does my backpack say zoo on it? Tesfa asks.
Hey, I should out. You can read zoo! How exciting! Let’s read some more!
Tesfa stares at me and goes back to colouring her My Little Pony book.
Maybe phonics? My memory of phonics is a grade two poster which told me When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. Tesfa vaguely knows what a vowel is. They’re the red ones in the movable alphabet, except Montessori is over, a fact over which I cry about every day or so while Tesfa tells me We can always go visit. I told Miss Viktoriya I’d come visit. You can come visit with me. And Miss Viktoriya, on our last day of Montessori, told me that Tesfa is past the basic movable alphabet exercises. She has to learn to read.
I spend two hours while watching the worst, rape-culturey show in existence, How I Met Your Mother, making Montessori method phonics-style games. Match the picture, make a sentence, which words rhyme, etc. Tesfa plays with them under duress. Make a sentence works occasionally. We make one each day. Then we draw a picture. My bat gags is our best one yet.
It’s not reading if I don’t know it already Tesfa complains. I read cat because I know cat.
So, we’ll learn how to sound it out together, I tell her. What’s the first letter say?
I just want to colour, she tells me. And I know all the sounds. This is true. She does, except maybe getting caught up a few times on hard-versus-soft g or barely used letters like w.
I have a phonics book from Usborne. I read it all pointing at every word. Ted buys his red bed. Then I go again with Tesfa, sentence by sentence. I say a sentence and point to each word. Then Tesfa reads the same sentence. I make up a sentence that isn’t in the book. Tesfa holds the book open and “reads” it too.
Where does it say that? I ask her.
I said it because you said it.
But you’re supposed to read it.
Shrugs.
Later. Will you read me my book?
You know, if you learned to read, you could read it yourself.
Oh mommy, says Tesfa. Why would I want to do that?