Patrick talks to his father every day. Technology is an amazing thing.
It’s Mardi Gras! That means absolutely nothing to those of us with babies, but I do have a few little things to celebrate:
--Patrick is sleeping through the night! I think I can announce that now, since he has been sleeping at least five hours straight every night for the past two weeks. The best part is that several of those nights have been stretches of six hours and two of them were-- gasp!-- seven hours!
--I received my copies of Best of Best Women’s Erotica today. I love getting books in the mail, especially books that include my work. And my story “Call Me” is the second story in the collection, right after Rachek Kramer Bussel’s fabulous “Animals.”
--I’m writing again! Joy! Happiness!
--I have a fabulous part-time babysitter for Patrick now! Joy! Happiness! (And also one of the reasons I’m writing again.)
--I’m officially registered for the RWA conference in Nashville in July. The conference is being held at the Gaylord Opryland Resort. Ahh… a resort with a full service spa. I’m hoping to take a break from the conference madness and indulge in a massage while I’m there.
--Fairy Tale Lust isn’t due out until July (perfect timing for RWA and the literacy signing), but I will be announcing a new call for submissions very soon. 
Happy Fat Tuesday!
A fabulous friend, who happens to also be a new mom, sent me Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood by mother and Zen priest Karen Maezen Miller. (I just Googled her and found her delightfully named blog, Cheerio Road.)
I got Momma Zen in the mail yesterday and have already started reading it. (FYI: I never start reading a book as soon as I get it. This is momentous.) I knew I’d keep reading-- and probably love-- this thoughtful memoir on Zen and motherhood when I read this part:
And then, in a magic moment of old-fashioned fertility, I conceived. I was forty-two. Looking back, I saw that doing nothing to prevent pregnancy was not quite the same as doing something to get there. What I did was simply take my basal body temperature and have sex on cue, but even that required that I discard the ambivalence that I’d long carried about the issue. If it happens, it happens, I had been telling myself with a comfortable dose of confidence that it wouldn’t.
I can totally identify with this. Not only the age at which I conceived (twice, actually) and became a mother, but also the realization that “doing nothing to prevent pregnancy was not quite the same as doing something to get there.” Oh, and the ambivalence. I’m a forty-two year old new mom in large part because of ambivalence, not infertility.
I never really knew whether I wanted to have a child or not-- pretty much up until oh, a few weeks ago. I had more or less talked myself out of having children-- thinking it wouldn’t/couldn’t happen. (And had a couple of people suggest it shouldn’t happen.) The fact that I could so easily envision a life without children made it easy to be ambivalent. (Just for the record: I’m happy with the choice I made to be proactive in trying to get pregnant and the very adorable, if currently exhausting, end result.)
I am far from feeling “Zen-like” about motherhood, but I like Maezen Miller’s voice of experience. It gives me a sense of calm-- something I could really use right about now.
P.S. to Nikki: You’re awesome. Thank you!
A little writing motivation. First, the official announcement of my sale of Fairy Tale Lust to Cleis Press in Publishers Marketplace:
Fiction: General/Other
Kristina Wright’s FAIRY TALE LUST: Erotic Fantasies for Women, a collection of erotic fairy tales, including classic tales with twists and new stories inspired by fairy tales, to Brenda Knight at Cleis Press, in a nice deal, for publication in July 2010 (World).
I made the sale back in May, but it’s nice to see it in print among other book deals.
Then today I received the official news that my story “Chasing Danger” will appear in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s July release from Cleis Press, Fast Girls. How awesome is this cover?
Writing is often it’s own reward, but this doesn’t hurt!
Cecelia Tan, author, editor and founder of Circlet Press, did an interview recently where she talked about working on multiple projects at once.
I told a friend that I was writing two romance novels simultaneously, as well as an erotic serial, and a couple of short stories, all at once (not to mention my baseball blog, tea blog, et cetera...) and she told me her head would explode if she tried to do that. I pointed out, reasonably, that she did quite well in college while taking four classes per semester, and for me that’s a lot of what it is like.
Some days I work more on one project, some on another. The real secret is that whenever I get blocked on one project, I can “procrastinate” writing it by writing one of the others!
I have been thinking about Cecilia’s comments this week as I’ve started opening up files and plotting my writing schedule for the coming months. Like Cecilia, I am usually working on a number of projects at once, all in varying degrees of completion. Of course, this was pre-baby. It’s been awhile since I had my usual schedule, with six or seven Word files opened (at least), flitting from one thing to the next and checking them off my to do list as I send them out into the world. The farther along I got in my pregnancy, the fewer files I seemed to be juggling until I didn’t even have Microsoft Word open for nearly a month. (The first thing I wrote postpartum was Patrick’s one month letter.) It’s only been in the past couple of weeks that I’ve even felt like I could work on more than one thing at a time.
At the moment, I have five files open: two completed stories that have been rejected and need editing and tweaking before I send them out again; a new story I started writing two weeks ago; the beginning/back story to that novel idea I was excited about last week; and a growing list of possible anthology themes to pitch to my publisher. That’s not so much for me, really. A year ago I probably had twice that number of projects going on at once. It’s a fluid process, though. Short stories can often be written in a day or two and then I’ll have fewer projects going. Which is usually followed by a frenzy of activity where I finish one project and start two new ones. Before baby, I might write two or three stories a week and not even break a sweat. (Which is nothing compared to some of my peers who seem to knock out two or three stories a day!) Noveling takes a lot longer, of course, but I keep going back to the longer form because I love it and that’s where I’d ultimately like to stay for awhile. Same with editing anthologies. Fairy Tale Lust was so much fun, I’m really looking forward to doing it again. And-- someday-- I want to get back to writing screenplays.
I really liked Cecilia’s comparison between working on multiple writing projects and taking four classes a semester in college. It is very much like that, especially with longer projects. Short stories are a bit like those weekly essays you have to write in College Composition (says the college instructor). I do well when I have a variety of things to work on and I get a bit panicky when I only have one or two projects (or none, these last few months). So it pleases me to see those open files and to know I have so much writing to do. (It panics me too, but right now it makes me happy.)
I feel a bit rusty at writing fiction, but I’m writing again as time permits. It feels good. Right. I’ve missed it.
What’s it all about?
Life. Love. Writing. Editing. Sex. Books. Romance. Movies. Friendship. Photography. Teaching. Coffee. (Lots of coffee.) Travel. Feminism. Academia. Insomnia. Memories. Experiences. Rants. Raves. Reviews. Chocolate. Mmm… chocolate. Musings of an insomniac writer. Want to know more?
