Where Was She Going?

New Year's Day was packed at the soup kitchen. Not one table was empty. Every time I looked up from the tray of Sloppy Joes in the steam table, the line seemed to get longer. It was cold outside, and a couple of my friends were giving out winter gloves.

I barely had time to pause, and I had to remind myself to make eye contact. My friend, Phyllis, a Dominican Sister, once told me something that is so important relating to human worth and dignity. Many people out on their own, homeless or transient, haven't heard their own name in a long time. I didn't have time to use names or to even stop the line to chat, but I could definitely exchange greetings and make eye contact.

I had stepped back to let someone refill my Sloppy Joes when I saw them. A mother and a father and a little boy of about two. They were dragging over the high chair and the little boy's smile was as wide as his face. He was thrilled to be there. I ran to fill his sippy cup with some milk, wondering how long it had been since he'd had some. Milk is expensive.

One of the people who helps run the soup kitchen was watching from off to the side of the room. Watching with an accusing eye, to make sure I wasn't giving them something extra. Which made me want to give them all the more. We're not supposed to give out any containers, in case someone wants to take something "to go". But it's not my fault if I happen to drop a sheet of foil as I'm passing a table. I can sort of understand the supervisor's jadedness. He's been burned by the desperate few who are looking to take advantage to get ahead. But today I wasn't playing by his rules. Our church had purchased, prepared and served the food, and if I wanted to give out ten Sloppy Joes per customer, I was going to do it.

There is almost always someone out of the crowd who makes me stop short. This time it was a young woman. It looked as if she had arrived alone, and she stood about a half a step back from the silverware and green plastic trays at the beginning of the line. It wasn't so easy to make eye contact with her, because her eyes were veiled with the hazy cloud of her addiction. My husband asked her how many Sloppy Joes she wanted and she took so long to answer, he had to ask again. Her hair was dirty and her hands were shaking as she took her plate.

I couldn't stop thinking about her. Did she have anyone who cared where she slept, and how had her life gotten to where it was?

I looked for her later, but couldn't spot her in the crowded, noisy room. She was still on my mind as I cleaned up and rounded up my family, driving home in my warm car.

Why Are You So Scared??

Many thanks to Penny, who made me experience waves of heavy guilt for neglecting The Backstory for so long. Actually, Penny, I have a good excuse ... I was writing millions of words for my latest WorkInProgress. I have been doing my own version of NaNoWriMo, I like to call: WriteAsMuchAsYouPossiblyCanAndAttemptToStayOffOfFacebookAndTwitter.

Getting the work done can be daunting for a lot of reasons. But I have decided that the biggest reason has got to be fear. Not the DougCleggDeanKoontzStephenKing-imposed kind of fear. I'm talking about the scaredy-pants kind that is much more terrifying, and comes in a variety of shape-shifting forms.

Writer fears tend to multiply because you have time to sit back on your WriterCouch and let those anxieties swirl about and fester. These can develop into bonafide nightmares.

You have to refuse to let these paralyze your writer selves. I will address some of the most common ones.

One of my favorites is Fear

of Becoming the Crazy Cat Lady. That's a very real fear; I know this from personal experience, because I have been called that by various family members. Writing means you are left alone for hours at a time with no human conversation. But this can actually work in your favor. My cat is awesome. He lets me read my WIP out loud to him and he doesn't check his text messages. Sometimes he even sticks around for the whole chapter.

Another common one is fear of never finishing your manuscript, or worse ... only being able to finish it in TwitterSpeak, which basically amounts to pages of disjointed paragraphs of 140 characters or less. Show up to your WriterCouch. Punch the time clock. It'll get done.

Yet another one that is so unbearable to many writers and would-be writers that it is often uttered no louder than a faint whisper: FearThatSomeoneWillStealMyIdea. Sadly, there are those who find plagiarism to be an acceptable form of behavior/sport. But unless there is some really cool X-Files Mind Feed thing going on, and unless you are actually tweeting your 140 character paragraphs, nobody is going to steal your story. And nobody can ever steal your Voice. It's your writer fingerprint. It's impossible. And as far as I know, Milli Vanilli is long gone, or in some abandoned cave somewhere being forced to listen to a continuous loop of one-hit wonders.

So ... put down that People Magazine crossword, open up that laptop, and punch that time card. Write that book. You. Can. Do. It.

What is your biggest writer fear? Put it in the comment section, and I will round up some of my FabulousWriterFriends to help you chase them away.

I Dare You

My mom and dad taught my brothers and me to love and value books. They read to us, even after we could read by ourselves. We talked about books. We quoted great lines from books. We went to the library once a week.

Oh no, you're probably thinking. They probably ate wheat germ and lived twenty miles down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

Um ... no. We ate Hamburger Helper and ate Kool-aid popsicles, lived in suburbia, and watched plenty of TV, including some heavy doses of All My Children. We could tell you about the latest Pop Tart flavor, what was happening to Erica Kane, and who Marcia Brady's latest crush was.

But we also read. And the best part of it all, was we were allowed to choose our own books. If my brother, Tom, wanted to delve into a little history and memorize all of the presidents in order (at around age six), my parents didn't judge. If Tim wanted to check out six books on football, my mom helped him carry them to the car. And when I wanted to read a book by an author whose work was being challenged, my mom helped me find the book. Some places weren't allowing Judy Blume on their shelves. But my mom made sure to get her books in my hands.

We learned to hear what others had to say. We learned to listen, before we spoke.

It is Banned Books Week. Many of the books that have been challenged over the years are from people who haven't even taken the time to read the book in its entirety. They often take a word or a phrase out of context and decide that nobody else should read the book.

I can't think of anything more terrifying than if book banners ruled the world. What if we'd never been able to see Alice fall down the rabbit hole? What if we'd never been able to Go Ask Alice? What if Alice Walker had never been able to tell us Celie's story?

Go read a little Judy Blume. Go listen to Allen Ginsberg howl. Go read about Scout and Atticus and Boo Radley. Go get a little Annie on your mind.

I dare you.

Mad Men Me, Please

Why did you let me wear that? I can remember asking my mom that question several years after the purple eyeshadow fiasco of my seventh grade year.

She gave a nonchalant laugh. It was in style.

But not the way I applied it. I didn't wear any other makeup, besides Bonnie Bell Dr. Pepper Lipsmacker, so there was nothing to offset that thick stripe of chalky purple.

The eyeshadow,

itself looked like a large, wind-up purple crayon, and I passed it around to share with my friends in front of my locker. I can vividly remember having made one too many applications of the purple mess, and feeling my eyelid actually stick and catch for a second on the skin under my eyebrow.

I had many sad fashion mishaps, where my kindly mother just looked the other way.

A couple of them ended up in class pictures ... like the one-piece floral romper, paired with unfortunate bangs, and finished off with scuffed up orthopedic-strength saddle shoes. But in my own defense, I hated those saddle shoes with a passion. I got my sting-ray going full speed

down sixteenth street and used the toes for brakes, hoping and praying that my mom would buy me new ones. But she'd just hum a jaunty little tune and apply a couple more coats of beige shoe polish. Those things could withstand a nuclear war.

Two years later, I moved up to the suede version of my saddle shoes, and my fashion

forward mom made me the mini dress which had the potential for awesomeness, but ... the hair ... Marcia Brady gone very wrong. And then I had to go and accentuate the ensemble with the thick orange yarn ribbons and the brown stop sign glasses.

Ten years later, you would have thought I would have learned. Or at least

gleaned some of my mother's fashion sense. But I'm pretty sure some synthetic animal

died for this sweater. And

no matter what anyone tells you ...

a mullet is never the right answer for a new

hairdo.

How could someone who dresses like this:

have a mother who dressed all amazing and Mad Men like this?

Sadly, I'm starting to worry that I take more after the Joad side of the family.

Thanks, Great-Grandma. You could write like there was no tomorrow, but I'm concerned about the accessories.

Book Nerd Anxiety

You may have played the game before. It has several variations on the theme: What's the worst thing you've ever eaten? What's the scariest thing you've ever seen? What's your most embarrassing outfit from high school?

Writers love to play this game. It can get really creative and cut-throat, so much more than your average game of Scrabble or Mystery Date.

The last time I played that game was with a group of writers at a conference. Someone asked, If you could only have one book of fiction to read, what would it be?

This created a stressful anxiety cloud over the group. Nobody wanted to be the one to answer first, and the game just fizzled out. I'm pretty sure it was because that question created Book Nerd Anxiety. It's not difficult to raise the anxiety level of a book nerd. All you have to do is to make them recall how they felt when they'd finished all of their library books on Monday and their mom wasn't due to take them back to the library until Wednesday. Noooo!!! My heart is racing just thinking about it. I couldn't re-read one of my Nancy Drews. It just wasn't done! Once I already knew the secret of the old clock or I'd discovered the clue of the tapping heels, it was past news. There is nothing that has lost its magic more than an already-read pile of library books!

I was at Defcon 12 with my book nerd anxiety this week. I was in the Azores on vacation with my family. My husband's parents are from there; it's a group of island off the coast of Portugal and everyone speaks Portuguese. All I can say is yes and no, and a mangled version of thank you. You may see where I'm headed with this ... all the books are in Portuguese.

And I had read all of the books that I had brought. In case you haven't yet grasped the gravity of the situation, I'll say it another way. I. WAS. ALL. OUT. OF. BOOKS.

There was rumored to be a little cafe/coffee shop on the Air Force base on the island, and my husband wanted to go check it out. The thing is, we almost didn't stay, because there was a little boy using a dead cockroach as a soccer ball. I almost didn't discover the magazine rack on the back wall. The magazines were worse than the doctor's office variety, the most recent being from 2010. Just when I was going to resign myself to reading seventy-five different ways to make a chicken casserole, I saw it. It was a bookshelf. A bookshelf full of paperbacks. I could have imagined it, but I was pretty sure there was one of those misty, glowing lights surrounding it.

Before we left the Air Force base, I made my husband go back to that coffee shop. I was on a mission. I had one of the paperbacks that I had brought with me on the trip; the one I had finished reading that morning. I put it in a prominent location on the bookshelf and left. The whole way to the airport, I imagined someone discovering it. Someone who had run out of books to read. It made me nerdily happy.

In Which We Have a Family Vacation in the Logan Airport and I Try to Get Arrested

I think I'm starting to hallucinate. I've had about two and a half hours of sleep. I thought I was going to a little island, in the middle of the Atlantic, off the coast of Portugal. Sounds amazing, right?

But the closest I've gotten is some angry people speaking Portuguese in the middle of Logan Airport.

Our plane is supposedly broken, so a ten o'clock in the evening departure ( last night), turned into a 3:00 a.m. departure, which turned into a 10:00 a.m. departure...which turned into me still here at the airport longing for my Tempur-pedic and making u

p things to do in Terminal E.

I could eavesdrop for ideas for my novel, but that would require my husband to translate for me, and he is, quite frankly, undependable. Portuguese was his first language, and he should have no trouble translating conversations fro

m the homeland, but my husband has been known to tell a few stories, himself.

Which brings me to my new favorite game I like to call, "Will They Arrest Me If? There's still time to join the game--so come on down to Terminal E. Here's what you've missed so far...

My daughter is trying to round up an elderly Portuguese man in a hat to flash mob with her, and she is now planking around the terminal. She'll either get arrested, or end up on You Tube.

I've moved all my stuff to the luggage belt at the check-in counter. They won't give me my luggage back (it's still on the broken plane), so I've made myself comfortable--comfortable enough to take a nap, if they turn off the don't-watch-anyone-else's bags warning and the canned music.

As soon as they open the Duty-Free shop, I'm going to figure out how many perfume and lotion samples I need to apply, before the family of twelve feels the need to vacate their pri

me bench location next to me.

Face it, spend a little sleep-deprived time in the airport and the world is your oyster. It's lunch time on day two and I think I'll go a little crazy and live a little. I'm going to have one of those eight pound Toblerone bars from the Duty-Free. It might cost me a couple hundred, but it'll be worth it.

The One-Up and the P Word

So I'll admit it...I've been known to eavesdrop. But it's okay--I'm a professional. It's part of the job description. Writers have to write authentic, believable dialogue, right? Yesterday, at the soccer field, was a perfect opportunity. At first I thought there was a fight breaking out. But I soon realized it was merely a "one-up". Here is how it went:

Five-year-old #1: "He's Mr. Big Ears!"

Five-year-old #2: "He's Mr. Big Ears Poopy!"

Five-year-old #1 (Determined not to lose): "He's Mr. Big Ears Poopy Head!"

Five-year-old #2 was unable to respond, because he was laughing uncontrollably when the P word came out. He was also looking nervously, and a little frantically over his shoulder for his mom.

There are definite rules and specific game strategies for the one-up. You have less than a second to respond--any delay in action and you forfeit to the other player(s).

If the one-up is of the insult variety, the player has to make sure they drum up the worst word possible, while staying in the safe realm of the Webster's dictionary (the one that sits on the big podium in the library--no online pseduo-dictionary words allowed.) Also, if a parent is within earshot, said word must be strong enough to only get you in the minimum amount of trouble--say, a knock-it-off look from yours, or someone else's parent. (The five-year-olds at the soccer field were definitely riding the line on that one. The P word is not one to be used lightly.)

If the one-up is of the I'm-cooler-than-you variety, player has to make sure they toss out something sort of believable, but not too over the top. If you're not sure what I'm talking about here, just listen in on a conversation between a few of the dads at the soccer field. I'm not talking about the nice, mild-mannered Dads shouting out, "Good job!" from the sidelines. The ones I'm referring to are easy to find. They're standing so close to the sidelines, no one can see past them. They are multi-tasking--carrying on their one-up while barking out "coaching" tips from the sidelines, and offering up friendly advice to the refs. You'll also be able to spot them by clothing. They may have come to the field right from work, but they managed to do a quick change into their soccer shorts from high school, so as to appear more professional in their one-upping and sideline coaching. Unfortunately, they are sometimes still wearing their work socks and shoes.

In case you are still foggy about this kind of one-up, I'll provide an example. We'll use a high school aged girls' soccer game as the setting:

Dad #1 (He toes the sideline and pushes his shorts down a little, because his post-post high school waistline is pressing at the waning elastic. ): "My daughter's looking pretty good out there. She's only a freshman, but as soon as the coach

learns her last name, she'll be off the end of that bench and starting."

Dad #2 (Quick nod, which is the equivalent of the oh, yeah?): I don't think you were here yet, but did you see my daughter at the warm-up? She was really moving that ball. I saw the coach looking at me when she was sprinting up the field. He probably heard about my game back in '87.

Unfortunately, Dad #1 lost by forfeit. He was unable to go on, because Five-year-old #1 chucked a Nerf ball from behind and he was doubled over with a hamstring injury.

Five-year-old #2 clinched the competition when he pointed at Dad #1 saying, "He's Mr. Big Mouth Poopy."