We've Moved!

The black cat has a new home!

Check out my new blog at

http://cariejuettner.wordpress.com/!

Some Distractions are Bigger (and More Terrifying) Than Others

I promise I’ll get back to writing my novel in a minute, but first… AAAAAAAAA!

The world of NaNoWriMo comes with all sorts of support.  There are forums, there are writing groups, there are inspirational pep talks by famous authors, there are meetings, there are apps, and there are at least a dozen tips and strategies for overcoming writer’s block and procrastination.

What there is NOT is any helpful advice about what to do when you sit down to write and see a GIANT SPIDER just outside your office door.

See how it appears to be getting larger in those photos?  Well that’s what it felt like in real life.  (And no, I did not get that close to take its picture, I just zoomed in on the first one I took.)

I know this is not the biggest of all spiders—trust me, I have seen plenty of tarantulas.  But this spider was different from the tarantulas because A) It was in my house, and B) I didn’t know what it was.

I thought for a moment the marking on its back kind of looked like a violin, so I thought it could be a brown recluse.  Then I thought it looked more like a lava lamp, so I thought maybe it was some sort of hippie type of brown recluse. 

Most of you are thinking, Who cares?  Squish it!  I can’t squish it.  When panic overtakes me, the idea of feeling that crunch under my foot or of squishing it but not hard enough to kill it but just hard enough to make it mad or the idea of it jumping at the last second onto my shoe and running up my leg all keep me from being able to move.  Plus, I hate to kill things and then have someone tell me it was harmless.  And, I wasn’t wearing shoes and didn’t think letting the thing out of my sight was a good idea.

When I see scorpions in the house, I put a glass over them and let my husband deal with them when he comes home.  It works for us.  So I decided to try that.  But scorpions are slow and dumb and spiders are fast and (I fear) smarter than I am.  After standing, poised over the thing with a glass in my hand, for several minutes hoping that a UPS guy or a solicitor would show up at my door (I will buy whatever you are selling if you get rid of this thing for me!) I finally trapped the little sucker.  And really made him mad.

However, that was not enough because he has to stay trapped for nine hours.  Sometimes, when I trap a scorpion, the cats play with the glass and scoot it across the floor.  I cannot risk this big, angry, intelligent, possibly deadly, definitely scary spider escaping.  So I put a brick on top of the glass.  Then I put a book on top of the brick.  Then I surrounded the glass with heavy books.   Then I took away the front book because I need to be able to see in to make sure he’s still there.

Well, the closest bookcase to the spider is the one that holds all my horror books.  So… what I made actually ended up looking more like a shrine to the creepy guy than a cage.

Oh well, as long as it works.

And now, I shall get back to work DESPITE the fact that terror lurks right outside my doorway. 

It may only be this:

But it feels like THIS:

[Note:  No one show this blog post to my mom or else she won’t come pet sit for me this weekend.  Also, no one show it to my cousin or I’ll never convince her to come visit me, ever.]

Na-No-I-Must-Be-Crazy-Mo

The first time I heard someone say "NaNoWriMo," I said "gesundheit."  Or pictured a Pokemon character.  Or thought they were having a stroke.  I don’t honestly remember the exact form my confusion took—I just know I had no idea what they were talking about.

So I found out.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month.  And that month happens to be November.

Every November, thousands of people of all ages challenge themselves to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words of it) in 30 days.  It’s free to sign up, and if you do, you become inducted into a club of sorts, a community of writers all striving toward the same goal.  There are online forums in which to discuss issues, in-person workshops to attend in cities all over the country, and various tools, apps, and reminders to help you along the way.

Or so I’ve heard.  I wouldn’t know (yet) because I have never done it.  Until now.

The purpose of this blog post is to announce that, come November 1^st, I will be diving into the world of NaNoWriMo. 

My writing table

For better or for worse, this November I’ve decided to tackle the young adult novel that’s been swimming around in my head for two years.  Even though I’m going out of town twice during the month.  Even though the longest thing I’ve written this month is a 3,000-word short story.  Even though the task of putting-my-butt-in-a-chair-and-writing THAT MUCH scares me a little.  Or maybe because it does.

I haven’t done much so far.  I’ve signed up, I’ve entered the name of my novel (the working title is No Pause Button) and I’ve posted a synopsis and excerpt, all of which you can read here.  Since then I have received a steady stream of emails which have succeeded in making me feel behind in something that hasn’t even truly started yet. 

[Side note:  It reminds me of when my husband and I were planning our wedding.  He proposed to me, and we promptly set a wedding date for six months away.  Then, a week later, we bought a wedding planner, and inside was a list of things I needed to do six months in advance, and seven months in advance, and eight months in advance, and nine months in advance… I’m pretty sure that’s when I had my first wedding-related panic attack.  The next one was in a movie theater during a showing of New Moon (the second movie in the Twilight Saga), but that’s another story.]

This could be a problem.

Anyway, one of these anxiety-inducing emails said, “Keep your friends and family apprised of your progress,” and encouraged me to “establish an inner circle.”  Well, welcome to the inner circle, people.  By reading this blog post, you have agreed to support me, cheer me, hound me, and (anytime you see me Facebook-ing, rearranging my bookcase, or walking the dog more than twice a day) yell at me to get back to work.  However, in order to ensure that we’re still friends after this is over, you should alternate the yelling with the sending of coffee, chocolate, and pictures of kittens dangling from trees with captions like “Hang in there.” 

So… that’s pretty much it.  I am embarking on a literary journey.  If anyone out there wants to participate with me, please let me know!  We can procrastinate together…er, I mean WORK together.  Work hard.

Wish me luck!

[Note:  This blog post is 592 words long, which means in November I just have to do this 84 times and everything will be fine.  !!!]

We, the Poets

One year ago this weekend, I participated in the Texas Poetry Calendar reading at the Georgetown Poetry Festival, held in the beautiful Georgetown Public Library.  Just before the reading began, I was in the restroom, washing my hands and trying to calm my nerves.  (Reading my poems aloud in public still gives me a tinge of fear and excitement, and I am grateful for that.)  The restroom was crowded, and somehow I got into a conversation at the sink with a woman in her sixties.  I asked if she was going to the poetry reading and she said no, she didn’t know about it, and I told her where it was and what it was for.  She wished me luck and then turned to go.

Almost to the door, she stopped, turned and said, “It really caught me off guard when my mother died…” (pause) “…and I found some poetry that she wrote.”  Then she told me the story.  She never knew her mother wrote poetry; she’d never shared it with anyone.  But after her mother’s death, she found a beautiful poem her mom had written about her life.  She said, “We had it read at her funeral.  But it needed an ending and I tried and tried to think of what it should be.  Then one night at 2 a.m. God gave me the ending and I had to get up right then and write it down so I wouldn’t forget it.”

I heard a lot of beautiful poetry that day, but nothing as beautiful as the story I heard from a stranger in the restroom.

This picture of the Georgetown library
does not do justice to how gorgeous it is inside.

Today, I was back at the Georgetown Public Library for this year’s Texas Poetry Calendar reading, and I found myself thinking about the woman I met last year and her mother.

I don’t know anymore what people think of when they picture poets.  I’m fairly certain that the idea of berets and snapping fingers has started to fade by now, but I can’t be sure.   Now that I have joined ranks with the poet world, I no longer even remember what I used to imagine when I heard that word.  Poet.  All I know is that, whatever it was, I was wrong. 

If any specific and clear-cut image comes to mind when you picture poets, then you can be sure that you’re wrong too, at least a little bit.   Because the only one-word description that aptly fits the poet community is people.  Poets are people.  They are everyone.

When I typed "poet" into Google,
this is the first image that popped up.

Today, I listened to over twenty poets read their work.  They were young; they were not-so-young.  They were grandmothers; they were single men.  They wore shorts and t-shirts; they wore dresses and had tattoos.  They read poems about cancer and teen suicide; they read poems about mermaids and cold showers.  They read poems in Spanish and poems about Indian monsoons and poems about cows in tiny Texas towns.  Halfway through the reading, Mike Gullickson, who organizes the Georgetown Poetry Festival with his wife Joyce, stepped up to the microphone and brought the audience’s attention to the tables that had been brought into the room for the luncheon following the reading.  He pointed out how they had been delivered in such silence that no one even noticed their arrival.  He said, “I thanked the guy who brought them for being so careful and quiet, and he said, ‘It was too beautiful to interrupt.’”  Mike’s voice choked with emotion when he spoke.

I don’t know what you think of when you picture poets.  But I’m here to tell you that you might be surprised to find out who we really are.  That woman I met in the restroom last year certainly was.  

How to Get Great Service at Torchy’s Tacos... and Other Things I’ve Recently Learned

 Things I’ve Learned About Solicitors Offering Me Bug Extermination Services:

1.  If you say “We don’t have a bug problem” or “We don’t need exterminators” or “We don’t really mind the bugs”, the person at the door will argue with you and tell you that EVERYBODY has a bug problem and that you may need exterminators more than you even KNOW (suggesting that perhaps you have termites in the attic or a giant wasp nest* or gremlins).  But if you smile and phrase your refusal this way—“No thanks, we live in peace with our bugs”—the solicitor will smile back uncomfortably and say okay and tell you to have a nice day before backing off your porch.  (I can only assume he thought we were Buddhists or something and had nothing in his salesman’s kit to combat religious objection.)

*This is something we may actually have but are afraid to find out.

Scorpion, trapped under a glass,
with cat hair stuck to its tail.

2.  If you decide to humor the guy at the door and let him give you his spiel—“Well actually, yes, we have seen twelve scorpions in our house in the past month and we are slightly concerned that one half of our attic is nothing but a giant wasp hive”—and if you engage his attention with friendly banter long enough, he will eventually tell you things that his boss probably does not want him to tell you.  Such as…

Me:  “I’m definitely not going to buy anything today (or ever) but you can leave me your contact info if you want (so I know what company not to hire).”

Him:  “Ok, but I’ll only be here until August 15^th, so you need to decide by then.”

Me:  “What do you mean?”

Him:  “I don’t live here, I’m from Utah.”

Me:  (Ah-ha, your summer job is to go to Texas and sucker people out of their money, huh?)  “We have better bugs than you do in Utah, right?”

Him:  “You definitely have MORE bugs!  My job is easy down here, I don’t even have to BS people!”

Nice. 

And, for the record, I am not purposely protecting this guy or his company.  I accidently recycled his info and can’t remember who he was.

3.  Despite the fact that it is sometimes fun to reveal solicitors as idiots, I have decided henceforth to stop opening my door to strangers.  Though (and this is a real piece of advice from the police and everything) I will also not take the coward’s way out and pretend to not be home, because that can tell the solicitor-burglar hybrid that it’s ok to kick your door down and rob you.  So from now on, I will say, “Who is it?!” And then if it’s not a friend or a neighbor or a pizza or a puppy or Google Fiber, I will say, “No thank you!  Go away now!”

Things I’ve Learned About Baby Screech Owls:

1.  They are adorable.

2.  They are born with only one emotion:  SURPRISE.

3.  When they are first learning how to screech, they sort of sound like a mockingbird with a cicada stuck in its throat.  Or maybe a cicada with a mockingbird stuck in its throat. *

* In the absence of a video of baby screech owls screeching, I instead offer you this fifteen-second video of a goat at the Capital of Texas Zoo.

Things I’ve Learned About Doing Research For My Writing:

1.  If you are writing a short story with a Chihuahua as a character and you are trying to find out whether or not to capitalize the word “Chihuahua” (the answer is yes) when it is referring to a dog breed and not the place (still yes) and you do a lot of Googling about Chihuahuas, Facebook will decide that you really love (and need lots of) Chihuahuas and will show you several ads like this:

2.  If you decide to mess with Facebook by Googling poisons for fifteen minutes or so (clicking on such links as “10 Poisons Used to Kill People” and “The Deadliest Poisons in History and Why People Stopped Using Them”), Facebook will stop showing you Chihuahuas and will instead start showing you sunglasses and jewelry and Toyotas and swimsuits (all things you have never shopped for online) because Facebook is worried about you and these are the things Facebook thinks might make you happy and pull you back from the brink.  Because people who drive Corollas while wearing swimsuits, sunglasses, and earrings never want to poison themselves or those around them.

 

3.  If a scene in your short story takes place in Torchy’s Tacos and you decide to have lunch there in order to do “research” and you spend your whole visit jotting down notes on a pad of paper, you will get the BEST service anyone has ever gotten at a Torchy’s Tacos ever.

* Number of times an employee asked me, “How is everything?”  =  3

* Number of times an employee asked if they could throw away my trash for me  =  2

* Number of times an employee gave me a nervous smile  =  4

(I was not trying to give the poor guys an anxiety attack—I was just too wrapped up in my note-taking to realize they thought I was a restaurant critic until after I left.  Rest easy, Torchy’s.  I enjoyed my green chili pork taco.)

Looking forward to what this week has to teach me…

Bringing Home the Bacon

My husband is currently the bread-winner in our household.  I used to win bread too, but then I quit my bread-winning job to write.  So now I mainly consume the bread.  The hubby is happy with this arrangement, because even though there is less bread in our house, the house is cleaner and more cheerful.  In short, the bread we do have tastes better. 

Ok, enough with the bread metaphor.  Moving on to bacon.

Being content with our current lifestyle does not keep the hubby from bragging about his ability to provide for our little family.  He regularly tells me as he leaves for work that he's "off to get the bacon" and sometimes when I ask what he did at work, he responds with "made the bacon".  If I cook (actual) bacon for him, he often suggests that I should thank him for bringing it home.

And that is why I am proud to announce that I recently brought home a little bacon of my own.

In January, I earned (hold onto your hats for this one) ONE DOLLAR (!!!) when my poem “My Moment of Weakness” was published on the Every Day Poets site.  (Check it out here.)  I’ll admit, that little accomplishment went to my head and I frivolously spent all of my earnings on gum.

Then, in May, one of my haiku was chosen for publication in Dos Gatos Press’s 2014 Texas Poetry Calendar, earning me a free copy of this gorgeous book: 

Get your own copy here!
20% off until the end of June.

And five of my poems won awards in the Austin Poetry Society’s annual contests, earning me $95 in prize money.

My sonnet, “Lost”, won 1^st place in The Neill Megaw Memorial Award and will be printed in the Austin Poetry Society’s anthology.

My untitled limerick won 2^nd place in The Jilted Award.

My pantoum, “Uno”, won 2^nd place in The Animal Passion Award.

My free verse poem, “Old Soul”, won 2^nd place in The Loyalty Award.

And my free verse poem, “View Crossing Mansfield Dam”, won 3^rd place in The Mary Oliver Award.

Now that's a decent amount of bacon.
About 20 pounds if my math is right.

Speaking of bacon, the rules for The Jilted Award called for all poems to be in limerick format on the subject of rejection.  My FICTION piece (which won second place) was this:

In a delicious little nightgown of red,

I presented him breakfast in bed,

but my heart was achin’

when he chose the bacon,

leaving me alone, hungry instead.

My husband did not know of this poem’s existence until he was seated next to me at the awards ceremony, where all first place poems were being read aloud to the audience by the poets.  He was quite content with my second place prize in this category.  The judge's comment on my poem was, "Bacon?  He chose bacon?  The man is clearly an idiot."  =)

And last but not least, this month, Dark Moon Digest has been kind enough to publish my very first short story in Issue #12, earning me a free copy of this beauty.  (To own your own paperback or ebook version, click here.)

I'm considering framing both covers
 side by side, for contrast.

My piece tells the story of a clown in a jack-in-the-box toy that sends messages to a little girl grieving over a loss.  Fun for the whole family!

So there you have it.  I’m a contributing member of the household again.  If I continue at this rate, our taxes next year are going to be very confusing.