why couldn't she keep me?

This morning, my little boy turned 9. Birthdays are a traditional moment for parents all over the world to get reflective and nostalgic. You look back and start asking yourself the questions – 'how did he get so big?' and – 'where did the time go?'

I was having one of those mornings today. But the stories I shared with my kids weren’t typical. Because my kids were both adopted.

I have no labor stories to share. I never felt them move for the first time. I never had a craving. I didn’t get to struggle physically to bring them into the world.

But somebody did.

So this morning, when my son asked me to tell him about when he was born, I got to talk to him about his tummy mummy.

My boys have known from day one all about their tummy mummy. They know her name and her face, they visit with her when we can meet up in Colorado. We’ve spent years sending emails and pictures. I keep her updated on Facebook, so she can see how they’re doing, and that they’re happy. We brought her out for my son’s baptism last year when he turned 8. It was one of the sweetest moments of our lives, to have all the parts of my sons’ family together in one place.

So I told Kaalam today, all about the middle of the night trip to the hospital to see him come into the world. I told him about how beautiful he was. I talked about the three days he got to spend at the hospital with his tummy mummy and her family and how much he was loved by everyone. I told Xander about driving out like madmen from California to Colorado on his due date, scared we’d miss his birth. Then how we sat around at Grandma’s house for two weeks waiting for him to finally come. We told him about the parade of visitors who came to the hospital to see him – her family, our family, and so many friends. The nurses weren’t sure what to do with the genial family atmosphere. I suspect it wasn’t entirely typical for adoptions.

But mostly, I got to tell my boys how much they are loved. And they always have been. By us, but first, by their birthmother.

Then Kaalam asked the question I knew for years was eventually going to come- ‘why couldn’t she keep me?’

So before school this morning, we got to talk about Roni. She loved and still loves her children. I see it in the way she looks at them. I saw it in the heartbreak she experienced when she first said goodbye. Giving away a child is not taking the easy way out. It’s the hardest, most loving, and most self-sacrificing thing a young teen mother can do.

So I tried to explain the nine year old version of Roni’s situation to my son this morning, and he seemed to understand. We focused on how much she loves him. The older he gets, the more we’ll be able to discuss, and I hope, the more he’ll be able to understand. And someday, he might take his questions straight to her. I hope that day is a good one.

So today, I’m feeling nostalgic. But I’m also feeling grateful. I didn’t get to feel my baby’s kick. But I got to hold their birthmother’s hand. And I got to know firsthand that my kids are loved, always have been, and always will be.

Happy birthday, Kaalam. Nine is going to be a great year!

Living in a foreign country is weird

Living in a foreign country is weird.

You go about your day. Your house is all set up to look just like it would back home. The compound is filled with the English language and for the most part, everyone wears familiar clothing and has familiar traditions and habits. There’s variance to that of course, but nothing is so unfamiliar as to seem strange.

You take the bus to the mall, and you shop at H&M, The Body Shop, and Victoria’s Secret. All the women at the mall are wearing black, and a good number of them have their faces fully covered, but you get used to that pretty quickly. It stops being something that you notice. You do your grocery shopping at a real grocery store, set up just like one back home, with a deli and bakery and everything.
And with all this, you get used to just going about your day, and you forget to notice that you aren’t from here. 

Then all at once, the world you haven’t been looking at so closely comes into focus. There’s a man squatting on top of a semi-truck in a dust storm, wearing Pakistani clothing. He’s tying down the top of his load with strips of cardboard. There’s a group of men wearing thobes and keffiyeh (head scarves) haggling over the price of oranges and herbs being sold off the back of a pickup truck and you can’t understand a single word. You pull up at a red light next to a bus with a strip of beaded tassels framing the window. The Arabic script on the store fronts comes into focus. You notice the mosque at the entrance to your compound. You see the blue tile work and the rounded steeple and the crescent moon for the first time in days.

And all of it adds to up to the sudden and shocking realization that you aren’t in Kansas anymore. It’s a surprise every single time it happens. You live in the Middle East, and you wonder, what am I doing here? This can’t be real. I’m not the sort of person who lives in the Middle East, am I?

The answer is yes. You can see the world around you so clearly for the few minutes that this sensation lasts. You can see every difference, every foreign object, and piece of clothing. And it’s all so real.

You turn to your husband and ask, “Are we really here?”

Then the sensation passes and you go back to the compound and hang out with your English speaking friends and clean your house and grocery shop and visit the mall.

It’s another week or two before you have another moment of really remembering where you are, and it’s a shock all over again.

Every. Single. Time.

Tomorrow is a good day for a new start

Tomorrow is NaNoWriMo. (That's National Novel Writing Month, if you don't happen to already know)

I’m particularly excited about it this year.

I’ve landed in Saudi, and I’m finally starting to feel settled. The household has been set up and is starting to flow the way that it should. Brandon’s MBA is done and is no longer swallowing our lives whole like it has for the past two years. In the next week, I’ll be arranging a housekeeper to come in twice a week and do everything for me from scrubbing toilets to washing and folding all of my laundry.

But the very most exciting thing? The boys start school tomorrow.

For the first time in eight years, I will have 7 ½ hours a day to myself without interruption, five days a week.

I will be able to go exercise without arranging a babysitter. I will be able to leave my house without having to hurry anybody up into their shoes or their coat. I will be able to play my guitar without having to fight off little hands. I will be able to make salad for lunch and not hear a single whining complaint from anybody. 

I will be able to think in a straight line, and then go on, and think some more.

I love my kids, but they are a handful. And that’s putting it mildly. They are good boys but socially, they are both extroverts. My oldest especially. He has absolutely no idea what to do with himself in an empty room alone, except to find somebody to be with. It’s painful to him to not spend the day at another person’s side constantly, constantly interacting.

I, however, am quite the opposite of that. I relish solitude. I long for quiet hours and peaceful, silent, unoccupied space. I’ve always been that way.

When I was in elementary school, I used to climb onto the garage roof just to get away from the constant flow and noise of people in my house. I was the second oldest of six children. Five of us were born in five years, one after the other, after the other. There was always a lot of flow and noise. I used to climb on the roof and tell myself stories for hours. It was the ultimate escape up there, with nothing but the clouds and the silence to keep me company.

Tomorrow, I’m going to miss my kids. My little one loves crafts and will sit and color with me all day long. My oldest is funny and has discovered that he’s nearly big enough to wrestle me to the ground. We wrestle a lot.

But having them both in full day school is going to be like getting my garage roof back. I’m going to have hours to myself again to stare at the clouds and dream of hero’s and battles and far off lands, and I’ll have all the time in the world to get it all onto paper. 

I’ve got a Writers of the Future win beneath my belt. I’ve got my kids off to school. I’ve got a housekeeper doing my laundry.

At this point, if I don’t start writing, there aren’t a whole lot of excuses left to hide behind.

Tomorrow I am going to start writing. I’m going to produce novels and short stories, and I’m going to see what I can sell, and learn from what I can’t.

Tomorrow is the day that my career starts.

12 Things I learned while snorkeling in the Red Sea

I’ve been debating for a while now, how best to use my blog. My life is fairly unstable at the moment. We’ve moved to the other side of the planet, and my boys still aren't registered in school. So I have two big fiery balls of energy racing, bored through my only writing space for about 12 hours a day. This, while I also attempt to relearn to cook with a range of ingredients I’ve never heard of before. It’s been a long process to figure out what I can find and what has to be made from scratch and what can be learned and what has to be lived without. I also have to learn at least enough of a new language to be able to maneuver my new city. And set up a household, not being able to find half of what I’m used to living with. And all this after probably the most exhausting six-month period of my married life. I feel as though I’m relearning how to live. It’s a good thing I get the occasional adventure on the weekends.

So I haven’t been writing all that much in the past several months, which means that I haven’t felt like I had that much to write about here either. But I have been learning, and note-taking and storing away for later.

I remembered this weekend that the whole reason I agreed to come here was to learn and to write. So that’s what this blog is going to be. It’s going to be a place for sharing the things that I am learning.
With that in mind, here is a list of things that I learned while snorkeling in the Red Sea. Some of these will end up in stories someday. Some of these will not. All of it has been incredible to experience.

1.    The Djinn – you may know them better by the name of Genie.

We had a wonderful Saudi host named Zuhair, who was more than happy to talk to me about legends, stories, belief, and superstitions.

According to Muslim belief, each time a person is born, their very own Djinn is also born. It's your own personal Djinn. Unlike humans, which are temporary, djinn live forever. So the world is positively filled with them. But while you are alive, the two of you are connected. That feeling you get when you suddenly shiver with fear, and you don’t know why? Your Djinn has seen something that you have not, and you can sense it through them. They also are the conduit of bad dreams and dark thoughts. But they are not necessarily evil. They, like humans, are good, bad or neutral. But they do tend to be tricksters.

A person may be born into a certain religion, but your Djinn does not necessarily share your same beliefs. They may have been born Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or any other religion. Mohamed is famous for having converted his Djinn to Islam. Zuhair tells me that it’s a story that’s written in the Koran. It was one of the miracles that Mohamed performed as a prophet. Not having read the Koran, I’m going to take his word for it.

2.    It turns out I’m not afraid to swim in water that I can see through, even deep water.
I’ve had a lifelong fear of deep water, so I was nervous about this whole snorkeling thing. I’ve even had swimming pools freak me out if I couldn’t touch the bottom. But the waters of the Red Sea are extremely salty, so first off I was ridiculously buoyant. The boys didn’t need lifejackets. If they got tired, they just lay back and rested. They couldn’t sink if they tried. And they did try.

But I was still pretty nervous getting in. We started in an area about 3 meters deep. It wasn’t that deep really, but there are sharks in the Red Sea, and I couldn’t touch the bottom. I started hyperventilating the moment Kaalam shoved me off the side of the boat and into the water. (Yeah, he’s that kid!)

Brandon saw me starting to panic and told me just to stick my face in, look around. I wasn’t convinced, but I obeyed, and the world that opened up was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The coral was brilliant red and purple and yellow, and there were schools of tiny, colorful fish everywhere. There are some sights in the world that are just too beautiful to be afraid of. I spent hours in the water and never wanted to go home. We’ll be starting scuba certification soon. I can’t wait!

3.    I desperately need a GoPro camera.

4.    Zuhair fished for most of the trip. He’s an avid fisherman and shared several fishing tips with us as well. I know nothing about fishing, so I have no way of dissecting truth from lore, but I love the thought process that surrounds it all.

Never expose caught fish to the moonlight. They will go bad immediately. If you go fishing at night, choose only the darkest nights. When the moon is shining the fish see it and swim deep to get away from the light, so you won’t catch anything. But if there is any moonlight in the sky, you have to cover the fish with a blanket or your catch won’t make it home.

He says his blanket has wrapped up his family and his fish, and it all smells the same. It’s the best blanket he’s ever owned.

Fish should always die out of the water, never in.

The Red Sea fish all look like something that belongs in an aquarium. But they’re yummy anyway.
 

5.    At 3 meters deep, a teapot looks an awful lot like a sea turtle until the boat comes to a stop and the waves settle down. But it still makes an amazing treasure for an 8-year-old boy.

6.    Flat fish are a result of the parting of the Red Sea.

There is a kind of flat fish, with both its eyes on the same side of its head. They were in the way when Moses parted the Red Sea and the weird, flat shape of them is the result.

7.    Kites will fly really well off a boat. Right up until they invert and end up in the water. Once wet, they will not fly.

8.    It’s possible to play with a whale shark.

The Red Sea has whale sharks. They’ll come up alongside your boat at night if they see the boat lights. Zuhair says the best way to get rid of them is to lay a plumb line weight on top of their head. They’ll swim down 30 meters to the end of the plumb line when the weight finally comes free. If you’re serious about catching fish, you should turn your lights off and let the whale shark bother some other ship. But if you’ve caught enough for the night, you can do it again and again, until the whale shark grows bored and swims away.

9.    There is an ancient way of rigging up your bait for deep sea fishing that lets you wedge the bait between 2 stones. This protects the bait until it gets to the depth you’re looking to fish and pulls the bait deep without the use of another weight. When it gets to the end of the line, you pull a trigger line, and the stones fall away. Then you can fish for the big fish. Zuhair still does this occasionally. He likes not having to haul the extra weight up along with the fish.

10.    Saudi has a dessert made out of shredded wheat that is to die for.

The shredded wheat is coated in honey and wound into the shape of a tiny little nest. Three shelled pistachios nuts are nestled into the center. Whatever else is in it, I need to learn to make it because it’s amazing!

11.    There are jungles in Saudi. Sadly, I’ll probably never get to see them. They’re in the mountains by the border of Yemen. As adventurous as I’d like to think I am, I’m not going near a war zone. This makes me sad.

12.    Mada'in saleh cannot be camped at.

The Nabateans, the ancient civilization that built the Treasury at Petra, built clear down into Saudi. There are great big structures carved directly into the stone. According to the stories, Mohamed traveled past the ruins with several of his followers. His followers wanted to stop for the night, but Mohamed told them no. The ruins were of a different time, belonging to a different people. Zuhair may have briefly inferred that the ruins were haunted, but I’m still working on fully understanding the accent.

Either way, to this day, the Saudi’s do not spend the night there. No surrounding city has ever been built.

Zuhair really likes us. He’s offered to drive us up, and tour guide the ruins for us. He’s also offered to take us out on the boat again. Once in the afternoon for more snorkeling, and once at night, to do some fishing.

This is going to be the most amazing experience of my life. I can’t wait to start getting it all into a story.

Day One of Writers of the Future

Day one of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. Well, technically day one is today I guess, so I should say that Day Zero of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. When I call it day zero it makes me think that there's going to be something uber-exciting like a typhoid Mary or a zombie apocalypse.  But mostly, all the winners arrived and we had our orientation.

Brandon, Scott Parkin and I were the first to arrive. I'd been warned ahead of time by a previous year's winner to expect cameras. Holy cow, they weren't lying! They filmed us driving up in the car. They filmed my feet as I walked into the hotel. They snapped pictures as we checked in and said our first hello's to the other winners. It felt a little like I'd stepped onto the set of a reality show. Only without having to vote anybody off the island by the end of the week. Which is good. Because I really like everyone I've met. :)

We spent the entire day hanging out in the lobby of the hotel, so we could say hello to everyone as they arrived. At about 7 last night, we were taken upstairs for a run down of the week by Dave Wolverton and Tim Powers. They'll be the main two instructors through the first part of the week. It was really intimidating to be told that we'll be expected to write a completed short story in just 24 hours. Dave is an excellent teacher, I've taken a workshop from him before. Tim seems like he's also going to be a great teacher, and they actually managed to present the idea in a way that took the edge off the fear.

I hope I can hold onto that in the coming days.

We were also handed a beautiful hard cover book about L Ron Hubbard's writing career and his thoughts on how to be a professional writer (our text book for the week), and a magnetic name badge that has our name, the year we won, and the name of our winning story engraved on it.

I have to say, seeing the name of my story, engraved in gold, and absolutely real, actually made me want to cry a little bit. Even though I've been through this process, and I've seen the galleys and I've known for awhile that this was coming, seeing my name and the title of my story actually written down like that, made it all suddenly become very real. That surprised me.

It felt pretty awesome.

Nothing stands still for very long and big adventures are on their way.

Change is hard.

Especially when it’s constant.

I love adventure. I love exploring, and experiencing new things. But I’ve realized in the past few years that I haven’t had a real good adventure in quite a while. I used to go hiking. I used to drive out into the middle of nowhere just to see what I could find. Much to the dismay of my mother, I used to camp all by myself and stay up all night just to watch the stars.

Then I had children and it all stopped. My hobbies faded away and got replaced by ‘mommy-crafts’ and kid science. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t what I’d have picked for myself without the kids to consider. I haven’t played the guitar for years, even though I was starting to get pretty good at it. I haven’t been on a solitary hike in so long it’s been hard to remind myself that I can, when the kids are school.

Now that they are older, I find myself longing to find my adventure again.

My husband and I are in the middle of some very big choices right now, and it’s been hard. Fantastic opportunities are opening up that are going to allow me to find my adventure all over again. But they are so incredibly different. And they are both filled with so much adventure.

I wouldn’t have thought that having to pick just one of the two things you’ve wanted for as long as you could remember could be so difficult.

Either direction we go will be wonderful. My youngest will start full time school soon and I’ll have time to pick up the guitar again, do some yoga without turning into a jungle gym, make a salad for lunch without being whined at because it wasn’t a cheese tortilla. I’ll be able to actually sit down and read a book in silence, instead of squeezing in a chapter or two of audio book while I juggle playdates, laundry and quick trips to Walmart.

It’s all so close I can taste it. And it’s all going to happen soon.

Only it hasn’t happened yet. And I’m currently stuck in a holding pattern of ‘wait, it’s on its way’… Only I suck at waiting and everything in my life has slowed itself to a stand-still. Largely because our choices keep changing. New opportunities keep being introduced. Every time I think we get things settled and I know what to expect next, I get a text from my husband asking, “So what about this…?’’

And the choices keep getting better but I feel right now like my life is balanced on shifting sand and it’s all I can do to keep upright as my world slides around beneath me.

I just want to pick one, so I can be done. So I can know what’s coming next.

It’s the not knowing what’s coming next that’s driving me nuts.

Only I keep saying that I want my adventure back, and change is the only way it’s going to happen.

But man, change is really, really hard.

How to watch Writers of the Future from the comfort of your own home.

One week from today, I head out to Writers of the Future.

I am excited. I am nervous. I'm still in a bit of denial. I still haven't given any thought to what I'm going to say onstage. So I can't promise what I say will be witty, coherent or in any way representative of actual human speech. I have some limited experience of speaking in front of crowds, but never to an audience so large. And never as a guest of honor. I may get to the front and hyperventilate myself into incoherence. I may say something so unforgivably stupid that I'm thrown out of the contest and stricken from the records. But if any of you would like to see me try not to embarrass myself too badly, you can watch the awards ceremony online, Sunday night at http://www.writersofthefuture.com/.

I really do recommend you tune in! I watched last year's ceremony and  I really enjoyed many of the speakers. And if you happen to be entering the contest yourself, watching the ceremony is an excellent chance to dream big. Imagine yourself up on that stage! Write out your own acceptance speech. It's OK to admit that you've written at least one at some point in your life.

Or maybe that's just me. :)

I am not a feminist. But I still hated that shirt.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “Wise Reader”. Years ago, I was able to attend Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. It was a fantastic opportunity and I think that I might have learned more in the one week about writing than I had in all two years of my English degree smooshed together. It was phenomenal.

One of the things he talked about was the “Wise Reader”. He advocated finding one or two people who you really trusted and training them to read your work. This wise reader wasn’t looking for grammatical errors or sentence structure. They were simply being trained to react to your story. Did it make sense? Was it believable? Did they enjoy it? It’s a fairly good way to find the big problems in a story that a reader might not be looking for if they’re focused on grammar.

But the number one rule of this process for the writer is that the wise reader is Never Wrong. Ever. They might not have the same reaction to your story as someone else. They might not have understood something that you thought was pretty clear. And they most certainly don’t know how the story should be fixed. But the reader’s reaction, no matter what the cause, Is Not Wrong. And the reason why, is because once you send a story out into the world, you no longer have control of it. It no longer belongs to you. Their reaction is honest and regardless of whether or not you choose to change the story, you just can’t argue with, “That’s how the story made me feel.”

I’ve been running into a lot of talk lately about sexism online. The Hawaiian shirt worn by Matt Taylor at the announcement that we’ve landed on an asteroid has been one of the many focal points of this discussion. It was unprofessional and immature at the very best, sexist and demeaning at the very worst. People have been making claims that it’s incidences like this shirt that are one of the things that are keeping women from entering the sciences.

This whole discussion bothers me. A lot. I do not consider myself a feminist. I am not a social justice warrior. I don’t just stay clear of these discussions, I usually avoid the people having them. I’m not interested in having to pick a side.

I don’t like the angry, defensive men who lash out with sexist blanket statements about women. They feel they are defending themselves and that to preserve their masculinity from the attacks of the feminists, they must lash out. There is a certain percentage of them that are crude, because they simply don’t know how else to be in the face of being accused of crudeness.

But I equally don’t like the feminists who believe that all men are pigs and must be put in their place. Historically, women have had it hard, but with every group who fights for freedom and equality, sometimes it’s hard to know when to stop fighting. Or even which battles are worth fighting. People talk all the time about things like the “wage gap”, but if you actually look at the way the numbers are calculated, the statisticians are comparing nurses and school teachers to doctors and lawyers. When you compare the wages of the sexes in the same fields, there’s almost no gap at all. What small gap exists (7% - not the 45% usually claimed) exists because of life choices women make, like taking time off to raise their children. This, among a great many other things, makes me distrust the label of feminism deeply. I was once told that what I needed was to align myself with the "good feminists" to help defend myself against the "bad feminists". I'd quite frankly like to stay out of those fights altogether.

Which brings me back around to the stupid shirt that started it all. If you follow the arguments about it all, the shirt is being fought over by the men who feel threatened and the feminists who feel they’ve got proof of man’s debauchery. There’s been almost no discussion about the actual issue. The shirt was inappropriate for a professional context. It’s that simple.

Many women, me included, felt that a shirt with half naked women plastered all over it was inappropriate and quite frankly, it made me uncomfortable. I don’t appreciate pictures of g-stringed women showing up in the Facebook feeds of the people I follow either. Does that make me a feminist? Nope. It makes me a mother of young boys who would have liked to have shown her boys (who are being actively encouraged towards the sciences) a video of a great technological achievement of our day. It makes me a mother who doesn’t want to have to hide my Facebook feed from my kids because of other people’s choices. My plan is to teach my sons to be the kind of men who would never consider the half-naked body of a woman to be either an appropriate fashion statement, or an appropriate picture to share. I’m married to the kind of man who would object to that and that’s the kind of men I intend to raise.

Like Scott’s wise reader, it doesn’t matter if the shirt was his favorite made for him by a friend. It doesn’t matter that it was off hours and he came rushing into work to give the press conference. I was made uncomfortable and that isn’t wrong. It also isn’t feminist. It’s my honest reaction. Is his shirt going to keep women out of science? Probably not. There are more women in the fields of science now than there ever have been. Some estimates at the university level are as high as 60%. It’s more likely just to get him fired when all those young women head out into the field and eventually one of them gets hired as his boss.

Mostly I don’t like that I can’t just not like the guys shirt without having to pick a side. I am the mother of two very active little boys and if you want to talk about sexual inequality, I could really go on about the modern education system’s intolerance of normal boy behavior, due to the overly feminine makeup of educators. There is a reason why so many boys are on Ritalin and it isn’t because they’ll all broken. In the long run, is it going to matter if we get our girls into science if we lose ours boys in the process? That’s not going to fix anything. That’s just going to shift it.

I get that men are tired of being accused of being pigs. A great many of them aren’t. I’ve spent many years building my closest friendships with some of the very best men this world has to offer.

But can’t I not like a guy’s shirt without being labeled a hysterical feminist either? There is a whole lot of room in the middle ground called ‘simple decency’ between those two extremes. All I am is a mom who had an honest reaction to a shirt. You might not agree with me, but you can’t tell me that I’m wrong either.

© Gstockstudio1 | Dreamstime.com - Blaming Each Other. Photo

25 NanoWrimo Story Prompts

Hello again! I’m diving into my favorite month of the year today. It’s NanoWrimo! Lots of exclamation points today!!! Seriously, I have a hard time even calling it November anymore!

I’ve discovered in the last year that I LOVE to first draft stories. I really do! I’ve read a lot from authors lately who say that their favorite part of writing is the rewriting, because they get to polish the story into the gem it was meant to be. Maybe I’m just too inexperienced at rewriting to really enjoy the process, but rewriting is really painful for me. For me, the fun of writing comes in discovering the new worlds that crop up out of nowhere every time I sit down to start another story. I get to meet people and see places and experience things for the very first time and there is NOTHING about writing that can beat that!

 

Last year I did Camp NanoWrimo in April. I decided I was going to focus on short stories. Partly because I wasn’t sure how much time I was going to have. Partly because I struggle to create a cohesive storyline and learning by writing 10 short stories sounded easier than trying to write 10 novels. At that point, I wasn’t entirely sure I even knew how to tell a good story. The writing part has always been easy for me. It’s story that I struggle with.

Much to my shock, I enjoyed the heck out of the month and walked away with 6 short story drafts, all in different worlds. And now I get to do it again! A whole month of short story creation stretching out before me!! I can’t wait!!! (What’d I tell you about the exclamation points?)

So in honor of my month of short story drafting, I’m posting another list of story prompts. Some are more complete than others. Some are bits of dialogue or just an image. Some are sci-fi but most are whatever you want them to be! Use them any way you’d like!

 

25 Story Prompts

1.       A semi-truck high-centered on a boulder.

2.       Even very long hair stands straight up on end before a lightning strike.
3.       Use sound as a weapon
4.       An explorer fabricates evidence to keep the program running.
5.       “Is that still hard you?” “Of course. Always.”

 

6.       A lab tech accidentally tests for something they shouldn’t have. Now they’re caught in the   conspiracy.
7.       “How can you not know what’s in your own museum. And how on earth did it get here?”
8.       The story of a woman doing something alone for the very first time.
9.       Having to apologize for doing the right thing.
10.   A blank message left on a newly occupied hotel room.
 

11.   A disappearance

12.   A prison break
13.   An archeological relic
14.   Human/animal chimera
15.   Sacrifice brings blessings
 

16.   A building site is chosen by shooting an arrow high in the air. It lands in the back of a deer. He runs.

17.   Rumspringa for a king.
18.   Two siblings. One trying to get the other to reconcile with the parent before it’s too late.
19.   What would happen if we managed to sterilize EVERYTHING?
20.   Lost in a corn field.

 

21.   Bridge to nowhere

22.   A technology that’s needed desperately, but it’s too terrifying to use.
23.   Refugees are disappearing
24.   Mining the landfills for plastic because we’ve run out of oil.
25.   Two is one and one is none.

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Finding time to write

Since placing in Writers of the Future, I’ve been in a bit of a panic. That was all I had ready, so now what? I can’t be a writer on just one published story. Shortest career in history.

So I’ve been trying to find ways to slip writing into my schedule more than I have. Which is tricky. I go to conventions and sit in panels filled with men who tell me that finding time to write at home is easy. All they have to do is focus and if the kids act up, they just send ‘em to talk to mom!

Well, that’d be a lot easier, if my name wasn’t mom.

My reality, that I’ve had to accept, is that I simply won’t ever have 14 hours a day for three straight months to focus on spitting out a novel. I just won’t. I’m not the primary breadwinner. I am the primary caregiver. And it's pretty much going to be that way until the youngest leaves home. The best I can hope for is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week during the school year once my little one hits first grade. Only somebody still has to do the laundry.

Anyway, in my quest to find time to write, I bought the NanoWrimo Writing Tools Story Bundle as advertised by Dave Farland. It’s a bunch of e-books about writing, one of which was Million Dollar Productivity by Kevin J. Anderson. In his 25 year career, he’s written something like 130 books or so. I’m assuming that number is higher by now because that man never stops writing!

I was a bit skeptical at first. I was expecting things like, “Think about your story all the time.” That one was in there and it wasn’t a surprise. But do you have any idea how hard it is to follow even the simplest thought from point A to point B with “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!” interrupting your thoughts every 30 seconds? It’s like wearing the thought canceling earphones from Harrison Bergeron, designed to make even the brightest of person below average in less than a day!

But then there were some other suggestions that really caught my eye. Keven J. Anderson hikes A LOT. Which, when he first mentioned I was a little jealous of. I love hiking and it’s one of the things that have given way in the face of all the rest of my life’s responsibilities. But as he hikes, he dictates into a voice recorder. He can dictate several chapters of first draft in a day, then he sends it out to be transcribed. There are times when he employs 3 typist full time to keep up with him. Cool Huh?

Wasn’t sure it’d work for me, but I thought I’d give it a go. For the past 2 days, I’ve turned my phone off and hiked into the nearby national forest. I’ve always talked to myself anyway.

Total breakthroughs on the story that I’m working on! I’ve been stuck for a week. This afternoon, I took my laptop, got as far as a picnic table and pumped out 1200 words of the climax in about an hour and a half. When I got stuck, I got up, hiked around and brainstormed into the recorder. When I figured it out, I sat down and wrote. Not quite his method, and I haven't exactly climbed any 14ers, but 2 days in, it’s working for me.

And bonus, because I was 20 minutes from home, there were no looming chores to bother me. Everybody else’s needs got left behind. All I had to focus on was writing, brainstorming and enjoying an incredibly beautiful fall day. Now all I need to do is figure out where I can go in the winter time where I can walk around, talk to myself and not get kicked out for weird-ing out the other people in the room.  

I’m a fan. Even though I have an office, I’m going to keep leaving the house to write. I’m going to start carrying my voice recorder everywhere I go. And I’m going to keep taking advantage of the little moments I can find in the day. Eventually progress will be made, right?

I’m hoping to get my story finished before NanoWrimo starts so I can spend the month doing first drafts. Only 7 days to go. NanoWrimo has made November the best month of the year!

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Holy Freaking Cow, I still can't believe I've won!

Monday night, I got the phone call I’d been waiting for from Writers of the Future. My short story “The Graver” won second place in the third quarter. I am so excited! Come April, I will be flying to LA for the awards ceremony and book launch. But the real prize is the week long conference leading up to the ceremony where I get to learn from professional editors, agents and authors. From what I've read on other blogs, classes in the past have consisted of things like "how to give radio and television interviews" and "how to decipher contracts". But mostly, I get to network with all those editors, agents and writers!

It’s been a weird couple of days. You enter a contest like this, and you spend a lot of time fantasizing about what winning would be like. At least, you do if you're like me. You picture yourself getting off the plane. You imagine conversations you might have with other winners. You think of questions for the editors and agents that you might not otherwise get the chance to ask. You pre-write an acceptance speech about a billion times in your head.

But then, you make yourself forget everything because entering isn't winning and there are literally a thousand other stories that are bound to be better than yours. And all this is empty fantasy anyway. It's wasting time you could be using to write your next story that might actually have a chance of winning. Because this one was awful and it's a good thing the judging is anonymous because no one wants to be laughed at by a professional.  

Only, since the phone call I've had to put my brain into reverse. I actually get to get off that plane. I have to start thinking about how I'm going to interact with the other winners. Editors and agents will happily answer my questions and Holy Freaking Cow, I actually have to write a real honest to goodness acceptance speech!

So, so weird.

I keep telling myself that it's real. At some point in the next few months, I'm sure I'll come to believe it.

This is the moment when it starts. I'm a Writer. Technically an award winning one. Someone wants to pay me money for my words on paper, for my imagined characters and worlds. And sooner or later, someone else will pay me a second time for the same. And then again.

There will be rejections. This is going to be hard. No writer starts a career with nothing but acceptance. Writers start with 2ft tall stacks of rejection letters and then struggle up from there. But with this first acceptance, it's begun.

The first act of a story has always been my favorite part!

Patience - Not my virtue

It’s been two and a half weeks since finding out I was a finalist in Writer’s of the Future. Sometime in the next week and a half I’ll find out the final results. I’ll have to admit, every day that goes by, I’m a little more nervous than I was.

When Writer’s of the Future posted the names of the eight finalists on their blog, I was excited. I cyber-stalked a few of them. A couple have already published. So you know, I’m like, not intimidated at all, right?

Well I knew intellectually what it meant to get this far in the contest. From what I understand, they have somewhere between 800 and 1200 entries per quarter. So to be at the top of that list is pretty good for the self-esteem. Even if I don’t place, my story made it to the top eight and that rocks! But last night, they posted a list of all the finalists, semi-finalists and honorable mentions. I read down the list and it just kept going, and going, and going… Suddenly I started to realize just how many people 800-1200 must be. And the names on that page that kept scrolling were the very best of all of them – just a fraction of the stories submitted. It sort of made it real, if that makes any sense. I was terribly humbled to be included in that top group of writer’s in any capacity.

So now I wait. And I’m really not very good at waiting. I know so many people who are so good at patience. My neighbor across the street is one of them. Nothing seems to ruffle her. You should see her with kids, she’s amazing. Patience seems to be one of her primary virtues. I’m so not like that. I’ll keep chewing at my fingernails and try not to snip at my poor kids while they just try to get through their own day.

My husband likes to remind me that whether I’m good at waiting or not, the same amount of time will pass. Worry won't alter the time stream. I’ll still have to wait, so I might as well not worry.

Wish I could actually apply that wisdom. :)

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Writer's of the Future Finalist!

As of yesterday afternoon, I am officially a Writer's of the Future Finalist! I'm vacillating. One minute I'm consumed with despair that the other 7 finalists have all got brilliant stories and my inclusion in the group was some sort of Carrie-esque practical joke. The next minute I want to run screaming through the streets that my story was awesome and I'm going to win I just know it!

These next 2-3 weeks are going to be very long. . .

It's finally September though, and my kidlets are finally back to school, which means I can finally get back to writing. I started the summer really believing that I was going to be able to fit some writing in here and there. I was going to submit a story once a month, get ahead on some publishable works. Yeah. Didn't happen. I have two boys. The younger one, I could raise twelve of. He's sweet and adorable and listens to every little thing you ask him to do. Then there's my older son. Who feels very much like twelve children all wrapped up into one. He's sweet when he wants to be and he's incredibly smart, but all the really impressive qualities like independence and out-of-the-box thinking that I hope he holds onto as an adult make him exhausting to raise. He's a perfect personality clone of his dad.

But the summer wasn't a total loss. In fact, it was kind of awesome. We spent time in Colorado with Brandon's family. I took the boys to Ontario for three weeks to see my parents. And I got a surprise trip to London. How awesome is that? I came home with a double decker bus shaped notebook filled with ideas that I'm dying to start fleshing out. Hopefully I can keep my brain busy writing while I wait to hear back from WotF.

Two to three weeks isn't that long right? And even if I don't place this quarter, being able to land a finalist position on the very first story I've ever sent in has to count for something. A lot really. It means I'm on the right track, and this little dream of mine isn't quite the delusion I've always feared. Especially considering that this is the very first story I've ever actually finished. I've written completed first drafts before. Lots of them. But this was the first time I've ever gone through and actually rewritten a story. It's something I'm going to have to practice more of.

Here's crossing my fingers!

Another story sent in

Well, today I sent out my second submission ever. Ah! It was to a writing competition with a word limit of 3500 words. So much harder than I thought it would be!

The story is called 26 Minutes. It's about a girl's who's been infected with a virus that's turning everyone into mindless mutant monsters. She has a baby in her care that might just hold the key to curing everyone. If she can manage not to kill him first.

In fact, when I started the story, I thought it was going to be flash fiction-- just 1000 words. I just barely managed to squeeze the story out to exactly 3500 words. Not a word to spare. When I turned it over to my editor friend, he actually told me not to send it in until I'd fleshed it out to novella length. But, since it was already mostly done, I made what changes would fit and sent it off anyway. The worst they can say is no. And since no won't do any real harm, I can always flesh it out longer and sell it somewhere else later.

I'm pretty good at being tender when it comes to criticism, even when it's not really criticism. A friend of mine once said that writer's were all raving egomaniacs with poor self esteem. I find the statement pretty true. He was probably quoting someone. When I wrote the story, I was sure that I was going to be able to write something super short and when my editor said I hadn't really managed what I thought I had, I was pretty crushed for a few hours. Right up until my husband handed me a calculator and pointed out that right now at 6 cents a word, my story is only worth so much. Is it really a bad thing to be asked to write it out at 5 times the original length and make 5 times the money on it? It's still a good story. I just need more of it.

So, now my kids get out of school in a week and a half and my time to write this summer will be cut back drastically. Which is frustrating, now that I'm actually getting somewhere. But the ideas are still flowing and collecting, so I think I'm still going to be able to make good use of at least part of my time. I've spent the past couple weeks since April rewriting this story and my WotF story and getting them both sent in, plus putting in my garden and catching up on all the household work that's been ignored for too long. It's been amazing how hard it's been to focus on anything since the writing slowed down. I think I might actually get more done when I'm squeezing life in around the writing and not the other way around.

I find out at the end of July how this story did, and at the end of September what came of my WotF story. My fingers are tightly crossed. I guess my next step is to start prepping my next WotF entry. Submission starts in July.

It feels so good to finally be getting somewhere. My husband laughed at me the other for wanting to be a writer. It involves a very large amount of both waiting and criticism. Both of which, I really, really don't handle very well. I guess I'll just to practice, right?

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First submission ever

Today, I submitted my first story. I submitted Writer's of the Future. This is it. Whether the story does well in WotF or not, I have officially crossed over into the world of actual, real-life, trying to sell my stories. I am now a Writer.

How weird is that?

All these years of dreaming, I've never sent anything else off. In fact, I've only ever submitted my work once before. It was in 12th grade. I was sitting in English class and my old English teacher from 10th grade burst into the room with a paper in her hand. She slapped it down on my desk and announced, "You have to submit this to the contest!"

Totally random.

It was an cheesy poem I had turned in for an assignment two years earlier. It was about a unicorn. Yeah. I'm that girl. I still remember most of it. Cloven hooves and golden horn, Wings of sparkling white. She fly's by day to the sun and back, The moon by way of night. I submitted it and ended up winning 1rst place for the whole school. The prize was an expensive bottle of shampoo. I had to spend $20 to get the conditioner that went with it.

Now that I'm actually sending things away, the rewards have the potential to be much better than shampoo. And I'm really excited. It is my intention to start sending one story out each month and continue to do so until the kids are in school and I have a bit more of my life back. Then I'll send out more.

I won't know how I do in WotF until late September and I'm not sure how that's going to be. Patience is not my strong suit, but I guess it's going to have to become so. There's a whole lot of sit and wait involved in writing.

I'm really not very good at it though!

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Life really is good, isn't it?

One day left of Camp Nano and I'm sitting at 53500 words and 5 completed first draft short stories. That's just 1500 words away from finishing. I'll be able to easily pump that out today on revisions and rewrites by the time I pick my youngest up from preschool. And I've got to say, I'm feeling really good about this.

Last year, my husband announced that he was going back to school to get an MBA. It wasn't a surprise to me. We'd talked about it on and off for years and I knew it was a goal that was eventually going to catch up to us. But it was something I'd been dreading. When we got married, we were both in school and it was easy to balance schedules and homework and everything else, because we were both doing it together. But this time around we're balancing his full time job, full time school and two little kids at home. It was not sounding fun to me at all.

But when he started classes in January, I realized his MBA might just be the best thing that's ever happened to my writing career. The boys are in school for a good part of the day, which has opened up all kinds of day time hours for me. But now in the evenings, I'm looking forward to the nights when he's got homework. Because I get to sit down and write for hours without any worry about neglecting kids or husband.

And just so you all know, I have the best husband in the entire world. With the amount of time his MBA program was going to take this year, I was most worried about having time with him as a family. Eighteen months is a long time to not see dad. But he's gone out of his way to make every minute at home count. If the boys are up, he's playing Lego's with them. If there aren't any assignments pressing, he's reserved the evening for me. I think the hardest thing so far this year has been realizing that when he has time between classes, I need to fold the laptop up and make sure I'm making time for family too. I'm determined not to let a fantastic marriage drift apart, just because we're both trying to get somewhere. And it feels good to finally know that we are both getting somewhere.

Last night, we started keeping 'gratitude journals' with our kids. We have one son who simply isn't capable of seeing anything but the sunny side. Our other son is pretty upbeat. most of the time. But when he gets down, his entire world falls apart and there's nothing good anywhere. And there never will be ever again. He can be pretty dramatic. We thought that keeping a daily account of the good might gently help to steer his focus. Remind him of what we have. Our little family has a lot to be grateful for. Brandon and I are keeping these journals too.

My first entry was about gratitude for my husband. He believed in in my ability to write before he ever read a single word I'd put on paper. He encouraged me to seek an education and to think of ideas and concepts that when I was young, I'd have sooner ignored. He's made time for me to write and read every word I've written since I started. He's become a fantastic Alpha reader for me, because he wants to see my writing in print as much as I do. But most of all, thirteen years into our marriage, I still know that he loves me. More now than ever. I was pretty picky when I chose my husband. Turns out it paid off. I wound up with the very best.

And I am very, very grateful.

Wonderfully horrible first drafts

I mentioned in my last post that this month I'm away at Camp NanoWrimo. It's my very first trip to camp and I'm loving it! Things are going much better at this nano than at others. My kids are older and mostly at school all day. I've been more organized which has allowed me to become more focused and I'm not having to squeeze my writing in between Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's definitely been stress relieving.

My goal was originally to write 45000 words by the end of the month. I was hoping that would equate to somewhere between 4 and 6 short story first drafts to rewrite when the month was done.

As of this morning, I'm at 48100 words and have 4 completed first drafts. With one week left that gives me time to hit 55000 words (my new goal as of half way through the moth) and have 5 short stories to clean up and start sending in at the end of the month. And the most exciting part is that the short stories are good!

And when I say good, I mean that the writing is awful, major plot lines don't materialize sometimes until the very end of the story, characters are flat and underdeveloped and at some points, the plot doesn't really make any sense.

But the seeds are there. I've fallen in love with the potential for every one of them. Whole worlds waiting to be explored, characters dying to get out there and do their thing in a much better version in the rewrites. For at least three of the short stories, I see the potential for whole novels following after. I am coming to understand the truth of the statement that you really don't need to be a good writer. You have to be an excellent re-writer. And that's where I get to make these stories shine like they ought to.

I'm quite excited about all of this. I'm finally feeling like my dream of being a writer is phasing into an actual reality.

Before Nano started, I was working on cleaning up a short story that I wrote last year. It was originally a very short, very rushed little story with little to no character development and just about the most depressing ending you could ever imagine. A man's daughter gets killed in front of him and then he accidentally ends up ingesting and devouring her soul, essentially destroying what's left of her forever.

Horrible right?

But the rewrite is awesome. Everybody has a reason to be there. Everybody has a powerful motivation. Sadly, the girl still dies. But I manage to not make it the worst thing that could ever happen. In fact, the ending is infused with hope this time. And that's something I just couldn't see happening the first time through. Hooray for crappy first drafts and the chance to write it all over again!

If writing really is performance art for shy people, then I'm just glad that unlike the stage, we don't have to get it right the first time.

I'm planning on turning my story in to Writer's of the Future this month. Hopefully it does well. I'm realistic enough to realize that chances are astronomically against me winning the first time in. But it's a start. And it's a start with a story that I feel really good about. And that makes it real.

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50 Story Ideas to get You Juices Flowing

Today I start the month long writing sprint that is Camp Nano Wrimo. I'm pretty excited. I started Nano a few years back when my kids were little and I had far less time to write and I was amazed at how well my family adjusted to the idea. I had two little cheerleaders watching the stat graph over my shoulder every day making sure I hit the goal line. And if I didn't there were more than a few times that my oldest son pushed me back into my seat and told me to keep writing. I couldn't just let myself lose! His competitive streak helped me make my goal and feel for at least one brief month out of my year, that I could be a writer.

The hardest thing in the last several years has been just finding the time to write in between diaper changes and playgroups. And Nano has been my one month out of the year when I go to say, you know what kids? I've given you 11 months out of the year. It's your to give me back just one.

This year for the very first time my kids are old enough to allow me two. So this year April, November and maybe July, I intend to write my heart out and get the words down.

My goal this year is short stories. I don't feel like I have the time to novel but I can get out short stories. The ultimate aim is to start having at least 1 story a month sent out for publication and 1 story each quarter sent to Writers of the Future. Which kind of freaks me out in a very grown up it's-finally-time-to-start-writing-for-real sort of a way.

So in honor of short stories, I thought I'd post a few of the story ideas I've collected over the past couple of months. They aren't complete. Mostly they're little story clips meant to be rearranged and smooshed together in a thousand different ways. And they're fun!

But most of all, I'm finding them to be terribly useful.

50 Story Ideas to get You Juices Flowing
A homemade medicine.
The ruins of a temple
A villain who truly loves someone
A hero who breaks
Statue of a God with a scratched out face
The last animal freed from the zoo
A coward who acts bravely
A long sealed library
A tunnel made of light
Chasing seals off a dock

A fall from a window
Dragged by a carousel
Kites like birds swarming
A hot air balloon ride
A locked master bedroom
A phone call disconnected
A homeless man's photograph
Radio that receives only a single station
A car door that lacks a handle
A museum guard who touches the paintings

What does 'fisher's of men' really mean?
Divorce as a literal disease
Talking skeleton
A pet bat
A broken CD
The most important knitted cap in the world
Children sold by their mother
Standing corpses lining a crypt wall
A literal map of the heart
a bridge made out of fabric

Obsessive planner has his plans taken away
Overwhelming tactile sensations
A man with a room covered every inch in stuffed fish
No one is allowed to acknowledge the difference between the sexes anymore
A seamstress needs to sew human flesh
Watching on the day the world's last oil reserve is lit on fire
A character with a lisp who can't stop talking when nervous
16 shipwrecked ships are swept up onto shore on the same day
A woman sews herself into her own burial shroud
A scribe paid to sit on the steps of the courthouse to write letters for the illiterate masses

A baby abandoned because of a harelip
A vampire that sucks your blood through your shadow
A shadow that has turned deadly
A woman marries a convict at midnight through the bars of his cell
Don't step on the cracks
A breath on the back of your neck that changes everything
Seizure dogs
Someone making homemade chloroform
Printed DNA contaminates a crime scene
Why can't you walk by a pond without throwing in a stone?


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