Writing

Writing Life, Week 2 of August 2019

~ Laura ~ 8 Comments
Random People In Wash Square Park.

I never expected to get much work done in August, but I hoped for slightly more productivity than has actually happened. Wisdom teeth took their toll. Also, Jonah’s comings and goings have wrecked my rhythms. Ah well, family first.

I’ve been reading best seller type books lately to counteract my tendency to overthink my writing and get too esoteric. Nobody wants to read anything from a college professor. So, I’ve been reading Nora Roberts books for the past week. I like her stuff, because she’s so prolific, and I haven’t read her stuff before before, which means lots of backlist. I could go through a trilogy a week and still have more to go. I read Year One yesterday, which was sort of like The Stand and The Road, but with witches.

In response to the recent romance novel plagiarism scandal, she wrote a Facebook post about her writing process, which is super interesting. I always like to learn about how people write. (The best book on the subject is Stephen King’s On Writing).

I admit that I found that Facebook post, because I googled Nora Roberts and ghost writers. How does anybody really write four books per year without a ghost-writer? Well, Roberts explains in her Facebook post.

Roberts may not get help with her books, but other best selling writers do. One of the moms in town told me that her brother is a ghost writer for one of those big named authors. She said her brother has a big house in Connecticut with horses and writes for five hours a day. Would you do that?

Ian’s doesn’t have any camp this week. I’ve got some tutors and playdates scheduled for the next couple of days, when I’ll squeeze out some words, do some virtual meetings, and start some research. But then I’ll walk again from it and probably take him into the city to visit some museums later in the week. We still have several more weeks before schools start around here; until then, there is no routine.

I have to go over to the other blog, the one I only use for professional purposes. People have been leaving me both nice and awful comments over there. I suppose I should handle it. Sigh.

There are some people who read an article that they hate all the way through. Then they find the author and compose a note to the author just to tell them how much they hate what they wrote. Who does that? I should just ignore it, but I felt like someone walked into my house and pooped on my carpet. I can’t ignore it.

I’ll be back later with some links.

Advertisements

On Going Viral, Writing Week, First Week of August 2019

~ Laura ~ 4 Comments

This week, two articles were published. I’m completely exhausted.

I always put a lot of time into publicizing my articles when they come out. I post info on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and two websites. Then I monitor who’s saying what about me and retweet/link/thank when necessary. Those chores are par for the course with any article that I do. It usually takes a full morning to do take care of that business.

On top of those usual publicity chores, this Monday, I had an article go viral. On 9am on Monday, HuffPost published a personal essay about traveling with my kid and dealing with some intolerance about his autism. They put it on their front page under “What’s Hot” for half the day. And they simultaneously sold it to Yahoo News.

It was shared far and wide. It may have been the most shared article that I’ve ever written. (Note to self: personal essays work you.)

I dipped into the long comment threads on both websites and was a little horrified. Yes, most people loved it, but there was some people who thought that I was evil or made up the story. A few people recommended violence to my child. One guy said that I should beat him, another said he should be drowned in a bathtub. Several said that he should have been aborted.

I’ve been writing for the Internet for a loooonnnnggg time, so I’m used to people telling that I’m an asshole. It’s yet another lovely part of doing business these days and doesn’t bother me in the least. But I’ve never had anybody discuss hurting my kid in such graphic language.

I thought I was going to puke.

But I’m not going to stop writing. F@ck ’em. (It does help that my kid has a different last name than me.)

My other article was about students who are completely confused about the college process and don’t get enough help. I really like those kids. We need to do better for them.

It’s a short day for me, because I have to go see Ian’s final computing showcase mid-afternoon; he made the Pong Game, using C++. I have time to do some work on the newsletter. A fellow special ed mom in town is a marketing guru, and she’s going to make a logo for me. When I’m done, I need to use another part of my brain. I’m going to hit some estate sales and look for treasures.

Have a great weekend, y’all!

Work Week, 4th week of July 2019

~ Laura ~ 5 Comments
These guys come to the park every Saturday to take their model boats out on the pond.

Last month, a reporter from the New York Times called. He’s doing a book on college affordability and wanted to pick my brain about one of my articles. It was a great chat and at the end of it, he asked to be put on my newsletter distribution list.

Newsletter? I have a blog and an active presence on four social media platforms. Now, I need to produce a newsletter, too? Sigh. How does anybody find the time to get any paid work accomplished, if we spend all our time creating free content to promote our paid work?

Well, it’s the way of the world. I’ve been thinking about how to do it, so it doesn’t cripple me and helps promote my f@cking brand.

I’m too old for this brand stuff. You can’t be an influencer if your neck sags below your chin. That thought set me into a tailspin last night. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s just say that whiskey was involved.

There was some buzz last week about Graydon Carter‘s new newsletter. Since I don’t have a staff of 30, I’m not going to do anything like that. Do you subscribe to any newsletters? Anything I should check out?

One of the things that I want to do on this blog and on the newsletter is give a little more info about my work week. Well, 90 percent of my work week is boring as hell — read tweet, answer tweet, write a paragraph, find a snack, question my life choices, write another paragraph, read a tweet from a person who causes me to feel deep envy and resentment, eat chocolate, send the six hundredth email to the secretary of a superintendent of a large school district to set up an interview, and so on. You don’t want to hear about that.

But 10 percent of my work week is super interesting. I talk to smart, energetic people who really care about kids and want to make the world a better place. They’re charismatic and charming. It’s truly amazing that I get paid to talk to these individuals. I try to convey all this awesomeness in my articles, but I never can do it justice in part because of space limitations. Maybe I will give more of the backstory of my articles in the newsletter.

Even though I’m not working on reporting gigs this summer, I am doing some prep work for articles in September. This week, I talked with a professor, who specializes in trauma experienced by immigrant children, and a president of a community college, who is setting up a new jobs program for students who are falling through the cracks.

Another fun task that I do from time to time is help out fellow writers. This week, I read a draft of a book and gave input. It was a good read, and led to a whiskey-fueled debate with Steve last night.

As I mentioned, I’m taking a break from reported pieces for the summer and writing personal and opinion pieces about parenting and education. I wrote a personal essay about a terrible experience that we had on the flight home from Europe earlier this month. I slowly edited and tightened the piece throughout the week and sent it to editors on Thursday.

Huffington Post bought it in seven minutes, which is a personal record. The editor and I took care of business — contract, bio, picture, edits, title, essay image — in record time. It’s coming out on Monday at 9am.

Things don’t usually happen this quickly. Two finished articles of mine are on deck for publication I hope sometime this summer . I do enjoy speed. Sometimes when there’s been too long of a gap between reporting and publication, I forget what I was talking about and lose the passion for the topic.

But it’s a Saturday and I really shouldn’t be sitting at the computer. When Steve gets back from the barber shop with Ian, I think I’m going to take the boys for a hike. I need to sweat out last night’s toxins.

Enjoy your weekend!

Conference Culture

~ Laura ~ 11 Comments

Last Sunday, I took a train down to Baltimore for a writer conference. I was already super sick with a head cold, but I thought that with a solid night of sedation with NyQuil, I would be functional for the first panel on Monday morning. I ordered soup for room service that night and downloaded the HBO app on my iPad, so I could watch Game of Thrones in bed.

Soup and drugs weren’t enough. I was pretty much sick the whole week and in danger of public fainting. Luckily, I was staying the same hotel as the conference, so I would take frequent naps in between conferencing. I’m sure I infected half of the writerly community in the country. Oh, well.

This conference was perfectly lovely. Nice people. Mostly women. Lots of POC. It was very relaxed. It was for that niche area of writing that I do, so it was very small.

I’ve been going to conferences since my first job in the late 1980s, when I was a computer book editor at Simon and Schuster. My boss used to put me and the other editorial assistant — a va-va-voom blond with a trust fund — on display at our booth at trade shows to lure the big named computer geeks into writing books for us. We all got drunk at the blackjack table in Vegas and were complete idiots.

Later, I went to a couple decades of academic conferences. Back in the early nineties, the pol sci conferences were a hundred percent old white dudes in tweed jackets, a handful of the up-coming young white dudes in khaki’s talking about regression charts, and me who showed up wearing ripped jeans and combat boots. The next time, I dressed better, but I was always an outsider at those conferences.

When I started leaving academia, I went to some writer and blogging conferences. It was a huge shock, after all the years of stuffy academic conferences. At my first blogging conference, there was a booth where you could take a selfie with Pioneer Woman in front of a butter display. Down the aisle, the Trojan booth caused a stampede when it handed out free dildos and lube.

I’ve always wanted to write an article called, “A Dozen Lanyards,” where I would attend and write about twelve of the wackiest conferences in the country. I mean all conferences are weird to a certain extent. There’s the Queen Bees who are happy to be sitting at the popular table and the insider/niche/nobody-cares-outside-that-conference-room jargon and gossip. There’s the stale air and insulation of the environment. The bad food and the crappy book bags. The bad social skills and gaffs. The billions of dollars generated for the hotel industry.

But, right now, I’m just happy to be home.

Ageism and Sins From the Past

~ Laura ~ 40 Comments

Last month, I went to the dermatologist for the “Redhead Checkup.” Because redheads are so prone to skin cancer, we’re supposed to get a full body examination every year. All those years at Seaside Heights in the 1970s and 1980s, when I lay on the beach covered in baby oil trying to get a “base tan” are coming back to haunt me. One time, my sister’s friend from South Africa, Samantha, convinced me that the best way to tan was to cover myself in melted butter.

I used to get such bad sunburns that I would blister and get fevers. My mother would cover me in a paste made out of baking soda and Noxzema to relieve the heat. The tops of my ears and my feet would burn. The part in my hair. That sensitive spot behind the knees.

So, I go for my check-ups, and they’ve mostly been okay. After my teen years, I spent most of my time in a darkened library, so the damage wasn’t too bad, I think. My sister who liked to sunbathe, once got such a bad burn that she once had a two inch black spot in the middle of her back. It was probably a third degree burn. My dad, a fellow redhead, has had big chunks of the skin on his nose removed. My friend, Suze, another member of the redhead club, was a lifeguard in high school; she’s had a chunk of her forehead removed.

But last time, the doctor found a suspicious mark on that sensitive spot behind my left knee. So, I’ve got to get it removed at 9:00 am today.

Getting chunks of my skin removed is part of the indignity of getting older. There are others.

When I met up with writer-type friends at bars or restaurants this winter, the topic of conversation very quickly turned to plastic surgery. They’re all more highly placed than I am and feel under pressure to look good in front of a camera. Because writing isn’t just writing anymore. It’s also selling your word and your thoughts on cable television. I’ve been getting lots of advice on the benefits of fillers and botox.

Meeting up with my cousins at a brunch in New York City last month, my 40-year old cousin, who isn’t in the industry but lives in a Real Housewives of Florida sort of community, told me about all the work that she’s had done on her face. Her face is as smooth as a baby’s ass.

Many of my friends have kids who are nearly done with high school and are entering college, so they want to go back to work. Because we really can’t have it all at the same time, they did the mom-thing, and now they want to return to work.

Returning to work after years on the school drop off line is brutal. The worse-off ones are those whose prior work and education experience makes them overqualified for basic office or retail work. Also in trouble are those who used their free time to help out the schools and volunteer for parent groups, instead of working part-time. They have nothing to put on their resume. With part-time work, you can fudge your resume enough to make it look like you’ve been working full-time, and might even be able to scrounge together some references.

A former mom is death on the job search world.

And now we are looking at candidates for 2020. I have been sickened by the press’s reaction to the older women in power, like Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. Warren, who was a darling in liberal circles for years, got a big “meh” from liberal pundits when she announced her candidacy. Sure, that Native American DNA video was dumb. But she has tons of experience and real knowledge about Wall Street and economics. She should be HOT, instead she’s a NOT.

Why? It’s because she has wrinkles, and her voice warbles. She’s old. And she’s a woman.

Old guys get a free pass. Biden and Sanders are old as dirt, but the public still loves them. Sanders’ fly-away white hair is just fine. Nobody suggest that he put poisons in his face to smooth out his wrinkles.

Ageism and sexism runs rampant throughout our society, and nobody gives a shit.

Meanwhile, I am growing older. I have to deal with humiliations like spots on the back of my leg and the inevitable questions that a 30-something interviewer is going to ask me about the gaps on my resume. “What exactly were you doing between 2008 and 2011?” I WAS TAKING CARE OF AN AUTISTIC KID AND TEACHING MYSELF HOW TO WRITE IN ORDER TO HAVE A SOME SORT OF A JOB WHEN I COULDN’T PUT MYSELF ON A NATION-WIDE JOB SEARCH FOR AN ACADEMIC JOB, OKAY? CAN I REPORT YOU TO HR FOR ASKING PERSONAL QUESTIONS? No, I won’t be able to say that.

Thirty years later, I’m paying for the sins of my youth.

Hunting Stories

~ Laura ~ 4 Comments

A website that I occasionally write for asked me to do something on special ed. They are particularly interested in the urban school district that I taught at 25 years ago. So, I had to track down possible interviewees who weren’t afraid of a media exposé and were interesting. No biggie!

Also, this outlet likes upbeat stories that highlight innovations, which is cool, so I had to track down someone who had inspiring stories to tell about kids who are desperately poor, probably homeless, possibly abused, with intellectual disabilities, maybe physical disabilities, and definitely emotionally disturbed.

Took a few weeks to find the right person, but I did it. She’s a principal of a public school in the South Bronx that is the home of 600 kids who have gotten kicked out of regular schools, because their needs are so great. She called her students as “her babies.” Woot!

I might have to ask for hazard pay for this article, because I could get assaulted by the students, and my car might get stolen, when I go there to do interviews. (Not joking.) But it sounds fun, so I don’t care.

Because I started work at 7:00am today, I was all done by noon, so I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to get my mother a hard-boiled egg cooker for Christmas. It’s not exciting. But she’s 83 and that’s what she wants. I’m supplementing that gift with some cute dessert plates in a cobalt blue.

Christmas decorations are smeared all over the house, so I tried to neaten up the boxes and ribbons. It was too big of a mess to finish in an hour though, and I had to move on to the next chore… Dinner.

I had some leftover chicken stew, but not enough for a full meal. So, I made some fresh mashed potatoes and added it to the leftover stew along with some frozen peas to make a Shepard’s pie. I’ve got a salad, too.

On Tuesdays, I have to make dinner in the middle of the afternoon, because Ian has a drum lesson between 4:30 and 5:15. Lou the drum teacher just prepped Ian for his audition for the winter musical. I think he’s going to make it. The timer on oven just went off, so I should go and feed him before Kristina does reading tutoring with him at 6:30.

Well, this is a rambling “day in a life of a freelance writer/mom/blogger” blog post. Hope to be back later.

Obligations

~ Laura ~ 3 Comments

I spent two weeks tracking down a story that I heard from a friend. This then led to several conversations with three other people. I’m weaving their stories into an article right now. Today is rough draft day.

Rough draft days are always the worse. Partially, it’s because the writing process is never easy. Collecting information is fun. Editing is a bloodless, mechanical process. But writing that first draft is always tough, and requires many treats to get one through the process.

Also, on rough draft days, I’m weighed down by crafting the story in the right way. Writing up people’s stories is a major responsibility. When I’m interviewing people, I get them to trust me, and they tell me their truths. After twenty minutes, they warm up to me and tell me everything. It’s like a priest’s confessional. There is a vulnerability to the interview process.

Can they trust me? At some point, they decide yes and tell me everything. No money is exchanged. They share, because they feel they must. At the end, I sometimes hear a note of worry in their voices. Did they really tell me all that? How will I tell their story? Will I portray them as a villain or a saint? Subtle variations of language can a picture in twelve different ways.

I sometimes think about writing fiction, but conjuring up alternative realities requires a power of imagination that I don’t possess. But I think that there is less responsibility with writing fiction, than non-fiction or journalism. Nobody can be hurt by your words. No real person at any rate.

So, I have some obligations to this blog and to the unanswered e-mail in my gmail account, but those obligations must wait. I have to do the right thing for people who talked to me and trusted me this past couple of weeks. I have to tell a story.