I've been living here every Tuesday. I go up at 11:30 in the morning and come back sometime after dark (usually around 6:30ish, which isn't technically living there, but...close). I take our three-year-old son, and he learns how to play.
It is awesome.
After our Play 2 Learn class (which is, as I just mentioned, awesome), we walk by fences for an hour or so, wandering towards someplace that sells food so that we can eat a snack (pizza, maybe, or a tuna melt sandwich). Then we walk back to the Children's Center for our Wiggly Worms group, which gives me a crash course in sensory integration/occupational therapy. We get to play with floam, and jump on mini trampolines, and make swings for giggling children out of pillows.
Isn't it a cool building? It's a hundred-year-old school with twisted metal-ball statues and toys everywhere.
Here's my confession: I spent months after our three-year-old's diagnosis reading lists, and calling mental health experts, and trying to figure out our (apparently nonexistent) mental health benefits for children through our insurance. I got frustrated. I was glad to know more about how our son thinks, and I'm sure that helped me, but I'm so, so glad I signed up for resources at the Children's Center. We've got the Floortime Method playgroup, the occupational therapy course, a family therapist (who can probably explain autism to our six-year-old, which is trickier than you might imagine!), and lots of people who understand if our middle son starts drawing fences, or running as fast as he can along the walls, or sucking on his fingers.
I was going to write more here about how when you get a diagnosis for autism you get lots of lists, and it's overwhelming, and once you find a reliable wonderful resource it's such a relief, but my sister called, so I shall sum up: yay Children's Center! Yay!
I was born in Utah, moved to Phoenix, Arizona as a baby, got dragged to Seattle as a six-year-old (I went to three elementary schools in first grade), and then came back to Utah for college when I turned eighteen.
That's six years in a super-hot city in Arizona, twelve years in the drizzly green northwest, and thirteen years in Utah.
I bring all this up because we can sell our house this year. We bought with a first time "here's some money from the federal government but if you sell in the first five years after buying you have to give it all back or we will KEEEEL YOU" thing, and since we put all the moneys into carpet and fixing warped water-damaged wooden floors, me and my husband decided that staying put was a good idea. But in August our parole time is up. And so I took this quiz to see where I should live.
The answer is London. Or Paris.
I like the four seasons we get here. But the air pollution in the Salt Lake winter is scary (I like my mountains to not be shrouded in brownish-deadly fog), and there's a part of me that longs for adventure. London or Paris would be an adventure...especially with three kids in tow.
And therein lies the getajob-sellthehouse-findahouse-pack!load!drive! scariness. Yikes!
This is more along the lines of what fog should look like. And trees. There must be trees.
WHEW! I have officially survived my baby's first birthday, my dad's birthday, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Eve (upon which I stayed up until nearly 10:30 p.m.), New Year's Day, and my oldest son's sixth birthday. To celebrate, I shall post this picture:
Christmas morning! Awww. Aren't my boys handsome?
I have been slacking with queries, but shall resume forthwith. Once I recover from all the holidays. Whew!
I really want to see Catching Fire. And Ender's Game. And part two of The Hobbit. I've read all the books, and I would love to watch the movies! But when I had a choice this weekend (and, more importantly, a babysitter), I went with my husband to Frozen. Because of this:
I've been thinking a lot about flawed characters recently. Characters who are jealous, or angry, or arrogant. And so I decided to make a list of flaws I secretly like to see in characters because I've experienced them myself. Because I love lists. And I really should post a bio thingy for Pitch Wars but I don't want to, so a list of dark secrets characterization tips should cover that, right? Right.
1. Jealousy. I'm the oldest of four girls, and my two sisters just younger than me had blond hair and blue eyes. They looked like Disney princesses (who were, excepting Snow White, blond), and I...well, I sorta matched the wicked witches. Oh, and there was the stop-following-me-don't-catch-up-to-me-in-swimming-lessons jealousy, too. I'm sympathetic to jealousy.
2. A feeling of awkwardness/not fitting in. My mom permed my hair in middle school. Like huge, poofy, I-was-struck-by-lightning perms. In middle school. And I wore Winnie the Pooh shirts. And I had braces. I did not get invited to parties until I joined the swim team in high school so the chlorine and wetness could kill all the frizz. I think everyone's felt alienation. But not everyone had to go to school smelling like horrible home-done perm. And that is a very good thing.
3. Overconfidence leading to ruin or humbling failure. Two of my favorite authors growing up were Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (of Dragonlance, Darksword, and Death Gate Cycle fame). I know they're nerdy, but I love a lot of what they write, largely because they're really good at this theme. Truly intelligent, talented characters who know they're intelligent/talented/magically supreme make extremely arrogant plans and end up trapped in the abyss, or leading their people to slaughter on the battlefield, or destroying their entire planet. I suppose I've never done anything that disastrous, but give me time. As a sleep-deprived mother of three young children, a teacher, a writer, a shameless book/video game/animation/MyLittlePonyDr.WhoTheLastAirbenderAdventureTimeJossWhedon geek, there's plenty of stuff (including small humans!) that I could mess up on (especially if I'm overconfident enough to think I know the schemes of my small humans...).
I like crises of faith, too. Oh! And anger while grieving, and humorous revenge (like Fred and George's takedown of Umbrage), and mistakes made in anger and exhaustion. But I've told you enough (yikes! the perms!), and I promised to post a video for my five-year-old if he went to bed well (hooray for sleeping!). So the video below is for him, but feel free to list flaws you like in the comments! I like growing my lists. Maybe that's a flaw, too.
And, just because I like Imagine Dragons (did you hear about what they did?), I kinda like this odd music video...
We've started watching old movies on Sundays with our kids. Stuff like Mary Poppins, Wizard of Oz, and Disney classics. Our five-year-old can get nervous about some of the newer animated films (Mufasa! Nooooo!), but he's really enjoying a lot of our carefully-explained Sunday choices.
So a few weeks ago we watched The Princess Bride. And tonight, whenever I ask him to do something, he's been responding with "As you wish."
I'm sort of nervous. Sort of so wrapped up in real life that maybe I'll be distracted and submitting will be easy. Sort of unsure about everything, except that if I don't send my manuscripts to agents, I won't get an agent. So.
I've actually been taking a break from all submission stuff since the birth of my third son. I couldn't get time off from my teaching job, and, of course, I still had to keep my two older children alive. I needed less stress, and while I couldn't give up writing without going crazy, I could easily give up the submitting process (whereby I send out many emails to agents and get requests and wait and revise and wait some more). So I worked on some agent-requested revisions. And wrote my third book. And kept my kids alive, and taught, and read, and lived...
Now I'm back to the submitting. Back to the Absolute Write Water Cooler forums (once I make another post--I've been a silent lurker for ages now, it seems, and I'm strangely nervous!), and querytracker and contests and all the rest. It's hard and it's scary, but I'm really glad other authors endure it because then I can read their books. And if there's one thing I love, it's reading a good book.
Writing's fun, too. Sometimes.
So if you're submitting, too, I wish you the best of luck.I applaud your courage, whether you get an agent this round or go back to revisions, And for those of you who persevered and got agents, hooray!
Submitting!
From here. I could visit this path quite happily. Mmm...peaceful submitting path...
