For you

Courtesy of tamurello.

My gift to you is this small story about a miracle. I wish you a joyful Christmas spent with those you love. The Slow-Cooked Sentence will return January 11th.

-Rachael

I originally created this story during my summer children's writing workshop, Let's Write! I used it to challenge the kids to write a tiny tale and turn it into a book.

The end (of the beginning)

Courtesy of Gilles Chirolou.

At 5:30 a.m. Sunday, I crossed the 50,000-word finish line.

There were fireworks, cheers, mimosas, and at the winner's table I picked up:

My novel.
All ninety-nine (unfinished) pages.

Five extra pounds.
Thanks to the copious amounts of chocolate I consumed, and the elimination of all exercise that couldn't occur at my desk.

A copy of the First Law of Exuberant Imperfection
"The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy," wrote Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month, and author of "No Plot? No Problem!"

Grit
To continue.

Bleach
To attack the mold that's set up house in the bathroom, which hasn't seen a scrub brush in the past thirty days.

Thank you for your support during this (ongoing) adventure!

Transformation

Photo courtesy of margolove.

It's been three weeks of intensive writing, of getting up most mornings at 4:30 a.m. and sitting down at the computer with nothing but a cup of coffee and my sleepy imagination. By the time I approach the second hour my head's spinning, whether it's from plot confusion or a caffeine buzz or the thumping of Sagebrush Blues in my headphones it's hard to tell. But something magical is happening to this thick, foggy alphabet soup I've been simmering. Words, once sitting flat on the page, are getting up and shaping themselves into a mountain here, an alkali flat there, a dirt road leads to a shack and an old man walks out of it. I'm loving it!

In the process of writing a 50,000-word novel in one month, I'm learning what kind of writer I am, the how of writing, of what my brain does when it's cooking up a story on the spot. The Wall Street Journal interviews a bunch of top writers on this topic in this fascinating article.

Diverted

Courtesy of obo-bobolina.

A niggle of worry has rooted itself in my brain and sprouted out of my ears. Tendrils of doubt wrap themselves around shoulders, snake down arms and twist around fingers, my oh-so-very important writing fingers.

I'm half-way to my goal of 50,000 words -- and my fingers, which couldn't keep pace with the words that were tripping over each other in their eagerness to appear on the page, are slowing, stiffening. Click. Pause. Delete. Click. Click.... Click. ... Cli... ck. The fingers complain about these worrisome vines, the shade they're now working under, how it's making them turn cold and stiff. I flex them, rub them, cup them and breathe warm air on them.

I know just what I need.

Gloves!

Fingerless gloves to wrap around these hardworking fingers that are chipping away at my half-written, poorly planned novel. And because I think knitting is nice, I hop onto Raverly and find many, many pairs of gloves. Too many. I'm overwhelmed and decide to search for hats instead, because really, it isn't the fingers but the old noggin' that's sprouted this doubt. I need a new hat to replace my old chili pepper one, a new hat as orange as the leaves, the pumpkins, the flames in our fireplace, something that will burn away the vines of doubt and worry and hesitation that have wrapped around this half-baked novel of mine.

Courtesy of striatic.

I wander deeper and deeper into the Internet, drooling over balls of wool and silk and start tossing them into a shopping basket. I am minutes away from buying more than $70 worth of yarn before I remember that I own mittens, blue fingerless mittens. I sigh, close one, two, three windows. I shut down email, turn off the Internet and pull the old gloves on. My hands are warm and I kiss the tips of my fingers and return to my story.

Cli... ck ...Click. Pause. Delete. Click. Click.... Click ...

Predawn

Courtesy of John Steven Fernandez.

4:30 a.m.

I'm at my desk with a mug of something hot ... tea, hot cocoa, coffee, chai. The furnace hasn't kicked on so I'm wearing a bathrobe, wool slipper-socks and a fleece snow hat with chili peppers. The hat's band squeezes my head softly, and my brain needs that hug, that massage, early in the morning to get the juices flowing. I write until 6 a.m.

Things I'm learning in the dark hours before dawn: That I can wake and write with sleep in the corner of my eyes, because my head is warm and my brain is yawning and stretching with that first cup of caffeine and forcing stiff fingers to write down what it's thinking, remembering, imagining. So, there's not a lot of good writing going on, and much of it's stiff and awkward or is written in fragments, just fits and bursts of stream of consciousness. But participating in National Novel Writing Month has allowed me to accept that my first draft will be crap, that it should be, and to not worry about it, to not go back and read it, but to just keep shoveling out more and more words knowing that if I do so this month, then I can spend the next 11 months turning all of that raw stuff into a great story.

"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. ”
-- Linus Pauling

"round and 'round" courtesy of Darwin Bell.

What am I writing about so early in the morning? Many of the ideas come from memory, from dry deserts and star-studded skies. I chase after tumbleweeds of tangled story threads, unraveling, recording, and trying not to worry about the thorns being planted because there's no plot or central character out there, just me wandering blindly and happily across the blank page.

Courtesy of Pensiero.

Failure or Alas, I cannot get published

"The blossoming of your words" by psyberartist.

Rejection excerpts:

Thanks so much, but we weren’t able to include this in the November issue. -- Skirt!

Thank you for sending "Creation" to us. Unfortunately, we won't be able to use this piece for Literary Mama. Please know that we receive a tremendous number of submissions, and can only take a small percentage of the fine stories that are submitted. But we are thankful for your readership, thankful that you thought of us and value us enough to submit your work. -- Literary Mama

I was really touched by your piece, and I think a lot of mothers would be helped by it. I don't think it would be retained by the Mothering editorial staff but I do think you should send it to Brain, Child. It reminds me of a lot of pieces they have published, although not on the same topic. -- Mothering

I enjoyed reading your essay and admired your smooth prose. However, I must report that we’ve decided to give it a pass. Please note that this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your work (we receive about 750 submissions for every seven we publish). I wish you the best of luck placing this piece elsewhere. -- Brain, Child

"La tristeza del silencio: Tears" by lord cнernoвιll.

I received five rejection letters last month, three in the final week. I read the last letter at 10 p.m., then I switched off the lights and walked head-on into a wall. Bam! Nose and ego both smarting, I crawled into bed, pulled the covers over my head and cried.

This is (generally) what happens when I receive a rejection letter:

I shut down. Hope closes, curls, crumples inside of me until it's nothing more than a small, hard fist that punches me in the stomach. Pow! Oomph!

I cry. Lip trembles, tears spill while my small son looks on. The toddling mime tries to mimic his mama, but uncertain whether she is laughing or crying, emotions flit across his face like clouds in a windy sky.

I remember. The clenched fist inside me finds scars left by editors who were too harsh, who cut too deep. Pow! Oomph! More bruises, this time self-inflicted.

I search. I open cupboards, find chocolate and eat the equivalent of two candy bars. I drink two cups of scalding tea.

I play a song. "Failure" off Laura Marling's album Alas I Cannot Swim. I pledge to play it every time my writing is rejected.

I read. The rejected piece of writing. Other pieces. Tinker. Email something to a new editor.

I stand. In sunshine, melting like butter.

The fist opens. Hope unfurls.

"Her Hands" by Slaff.

"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."

-- Ursula K. Le Guin: A Few Words to a Young Writer

I spent this weekend thinking about why and what and where I write, and decided that I need to shake things up a bit. So The Slow-Cooked Sentence won't be publishing three times a week during November. I'm going to be busy writing a novel.

"What?!" you ask.

Yep. I've signed up and am participating in National Novel Writing Month, a "fun, seat-of-your-pants approach (that values) enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft." The goal: To write 50,000 words in 30 days, which works out to 1,667 words a day.

The Slow-Cooked Sentence will publish (hopefully) on Mondays and Wednesdays in November. There will be a guest column or two and the occasional update on how the novel writing's going. So keep dropping in. Meanwhile, the gun's been fired, the race begun. I'm off and writing!

The tastes of sickness

Bitter
The ache of an arm from holding a child that will not otherwise sleep.
Salty
A runny nose and the box of soggy, crumpled Kleenex on the floor.
On the coffee table. On the couch. On the bed.
Sour
Scratchy towels laid on top of vomited sheets.
Sweet
Cool skin that earlier burned.
Umami
The whine of a sick child tired of being sick.

A reading reduction

Left to right, from top: Sam tells his joke; Chaja, Sam and Annie read about harpies; Amelia goofs off before taking the stage; Max reads his riddle.

Let's Write poetry slam
Serves five children, plus their families

One chapbook (PDF version)
25 flutes of sparkling juice
2 strings of twinkling lights
40 cream puffs stacked in a small mountain
Two pounds of melted chocolate in a fondue pot
A friendly audience

Simmer for two hours. Taste the sweet success.

All photos by Marcel Levy at Dance in the Kitchen.

Let's write

One of five participants in my writing workshop. Photo by Dance in the Kitchen.

Five kids met regularly at my kitchen table to write this summer. It was a skill swap with a friend: She gave my kids art lessons, I taught hers writing. I seized on this arrangement because she's an excellent art teacher, and I'd never given a writing lesson.

Plunging into uncharted territory, I researched the broad subject of writing with children, and the particular topics of poetry and comic writing. Among the arsenal of books to guide me in developing a workshop, I relied most heavily on "Don't Forget to Write: 54 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons for Students 6-18." Armed with this excellent book, I developed a syllabus. Here it is, along with my class notes:

Message in a Bottle -- For years, desert island poets have sent their deepest thoughts out to sea in bottles. In this workshop, students create postcards and send them out into the world to find their way back.

Kids left their postcards in grocery aisles, tucked into library books, launched them with balloons and dropped them on sidewalks. One postcard made its way home, and, oh, how we cheered when it arrived in the mail!

Tiny Tales -- Celebrate in a small way. Eat tiny cakes, drink tea from tiny cups and write tiny stories that consist of just a few paragraphs. Learn the basics of story-writing on a small, manageable scale.

The most-anticipated class by the students, who gobbled up the petits fours and drank copious amounts of sweet tea. In the future, I'd divide this into two classes: The first focused on story craft, the second spent creating the book. The free tutorial I used is at Making Books with Children.

Weird Science -- Facts take a backseat to fiction in this inventive workshop. Students compose their own wacky faux-science journals.

This class was a hit with my active and younger kids because it involved shorter, directed pieces of writing.

Everyone’s a Comedian -- Introduction to joke writing and puns encourages word play. Leave with your very own riddle book!

The final class was the most challenging. Having never succeeded at retelling a joke myself, I was nervous and relied on the examples of how to write baseball jokes featured in "Don't Forget to Write." But my group of kids (all soccer players) didn't know baseball. Their lack of knowledge about the game made it difficult for them to manipulate language and come up with jokes like this one:

Why is a catcher a good dinner guest?
Because he is always cleaning the plate.

So I quickly moved on to the "How's business?" joke model found in Joanne E. Bernstein's "Fiddle with a Riddle" and met success. Example:

I'm in the diaper business.
How's business?
It stinks.

In addition to these topics, each class introduced a new vocabulary word (all fabulous insults such as popinjay and stinkard) and poetry form (such as couplet and haiku). Two great books I used were "Poetry from A to Z: A guide for young writers" by Paul B. Janeczko and "Poem-Making: Ways to begin writing poetry" by Myra Cohn Livingston. The Shakespearean Insulter was the source of the vocabulary list.

My students will read their poems and short stories at a poetry slam and art exhibition in my backyard this weekend; I'll share sights and sounds from the event in a future post. I believe the energy, time and money spent teaching kids what I love to do was a wise investment. Their art hangs on my wall. Their stories inspire me.

Quid pro quo.

An ending

"Raking walls" courtesy of bricolage.108.

A robin hangs out under the pergola, picking grapes off the vine. Pinch. Drop. Pinch. Drop. But the third grape the robin swallows in one giant, grotesque gulp. The patio stones are littered with rejected grapes in various degrees of decay, which attracts flies. At the feet of the picnic table and under the benches are tangled messes of sticky web that crackle when torn. The widows that spun these webs hide and wait.

But I know that soon: The grape will shrivel. The robin will migrate. The fly will die. And the widow, stiff from the cooler night and maybe a little hungry from lack of flies, will expose herself to the waning September sun to thaw out and warm up.

And I will squash it.

A key

Photo courtesy of alicia rae.

"Memories remain incomplete in your head but sometimes, if the memory is shared, you can pool resources and come up with a version that feels true."
-- Molly Young of Magic Molly.

I'm thinking of a particular memory. We -- me, my brother Joe -- were sitting on the back of the yellow Honda Civic, clutching the metal bumper as the car weaved and hiccuped across ... what? I remember a potted dirt road. Joe swears it was an alkali flat. I was, maybe, 12. Joe, 9. He says we were fighting, and our dad had stopped the car and told us to walk home. But who's idea was it to ignore the order and jump on the back?

I only remember the dust and coughing. Of legs, too long, scraping against bushes. Of feet dragging. I remember my fear mingling with, first, shock that my dad was actually trying to throw us off the back of the car, and, second, determination to not let him succeed.

I think Joe may have fallen off. When I asked my dad about it, he just smiled and denied it happened. But each of us -- Joe, my dad and I -- got a third of the memory. Next time I see Joe, we'll unlock it and fill in the gaps.

Inspired by Molly Young's post "Not a cloud marred the blood-red sun." For more thoughts on keys, visit Sunday Scribblings.

Farewell summer

"A leaf's view" courtesy of Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton.

Watching
yellow leaves fall
in a late summer wind,
my small son looked at the trees and
yelled no.

For more poetry, go to Sunday Scribblings. I particularly enjoyed Quin Browne at a gasping little voice, Dee Martin at Thoughts Have Wings, and the concise piece published at GlowbyWords.

Metamorphosis

In which I compare the life stages of a caterpillar to the development of my children:

Embryo: (Greek meaning "that which grows," "to swell, be full"). The earliest stage of development, from the time of first cell division until birth or hatching.

Each time I discovered I was pregnant I cried.

The first time tears fell for happiness because I was pregnant and had proven the doctors wrong. The second time because I was stunned with the knowledge that I carried not one embryo, but two. The final tears were shed in sadness for the freedom I believed I'd lose with the arrival of yet another baby.

But you know, this final, tiny grub hasn't been the Go-Directly-To-Jail card I feared he would be.

Larva: A young form of animal with indirect development, going through or undergoing metamorphosis.

The door banged open and my 8-year-old son Max bounced into the kitchen, panting for a drink after speeding around the block on his Razor scooter. His body was steaming.

"What's for lunch?" he asked.

"Max, you just finished breakfast a half-hour ago," I replied, wiping the stove clean of globs of oatmeal.

He whined about hunger. I complained about how stinky he was.

"I took a bath last night," he replied.

"Did you use soap?"

He shrugged, noncommittally.

"Smell your arm pits, Max," I said. "You've got stink-waves."

He shoved his nose into his pits, wrinkled his nose, and headed for the shower.

Pupa: The stage when an insect undergoes a complete metamorphosis. Different insects have different names for this period, such as chrysalis in butterflies and tumbler in mosquitoes.

My daughter, Chaja, pulled her shirt tightly across her chest and studied herself.

"When can I get a training bra?" she asked.

"When you need one," I replied.

"But when did you get one?" she insisted.

The gears in my brain halt and grind backward, slowly, reluctantly, to seventh-grade gym class. I can see myself in the locker room, back hunched as I tried to slip on my gym shirt while not exposing my naked chest where small breasts were growing, untrained. The wheels in my mind squeak, turn again, and I remember boys running their hands down a girl's back in search of the bra strap, grabbing hold of it and snapping, and the girl's happily indignant squeal over being singled out, discovered. Memories shift again and focus on me and my mother in a dressing room, teaching me how to put on a bra: Hook it in the front, spin it around and then slip the straps on.

"Mom, Mom! How old were you when you got a training bra?"

My mind's gears chugged forward.

"Twelve, maybe."

She groaned because that is a year away.

Imago: The last stage of development of an insect. It's sexually mature and, if it is a winged species, has functional wings. The imago is often referred to as the adult stage. The Latin plural of imago is imagines, and this is the term generally used by entomologists.

A long-ago conversation, remembered:

"I'm going to be Superman when I grow up," 4-year-old Max said. "Then I'll be able to fly. What are you going to be Sam?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe a fireman," said his twin, Sam. "Or maybe a fairy."

To read others' thoughts on the subject of adulthood, check out Sunday Scribblings.

Crepuscular

kri-pus-kyuh-lur
adjective

In the day, the web is empty.
The spider sleeps, safe and snug, in a crack in the wood.

But in the crepuscular gloom, the spider awakens
and skitters down a long strand of web.





The children watch
it stitch its torn web under the darkness of night.


All photos courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.
Final two photos by Marcel Levy.

1. Of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim.
2. (Zoology) Appearing or active at twilight.

Ephemeral

ih-fem-er-ul
adjective

"Morning kitchen" by Max Levy at Dance in the Kitchen.

1. Beginning and ending in a day.
2. Short-lived.

Three cups and a wicked case of jitters later, the ephemeral taste found in my first morning coffee continues to elude me, and so by the afternoon I've switched to tea.

Insult and injury

Scorpion tail tip courtesy of mohd fahmi.

She asked for my bag to search it for stolen library books, and she wanted me to come back inside too. I refused. As if I would willingly walk back into the library with a toddler throwing a tantrum. Stupid woman.

"Feel free to take it," I spat out, struggling to hold on to my angry son.

She blinked at me from behind her glasses, than picked up the bag and marched back in.

“Are we in trouble, Mom?” my older son asked, shrinking himself into the shadows of the building.

I shook my head, silently willing the small, stiff child in my arms to calm down. Instead, he arched his back into the curve of a scorpion’s tail and wailed.

I’d hunted scorpions as a kid. Armed with an empty mayonnaise jar, I’d wander out into the vast stretch of sandy desert that was my backyard and start kicking over cow patties. Scorpions burrow small holes under the dung, flat as a Frisbee, and hide out during the hottest part of the day.

Sometimes, my brother and I would capture five or six at a time. From pincer to tail some of them were longer than my dad’s thumb. Others were small enough to fit on a dime. Of the hundreds of scorpions we captured, grew bored with and released, I remember two: The one found under plywood, whose body alone measured three inches and whose tail was thick as jute, and the mother with a million babies on her back. She got away.

That’s what I wanted to do now, just crawl into a hole as people gave my toddler and his meltdown lots of space. A bitter, angry brew boiled in my belly. I'd been taking my children to this library long enough for a few of the librarians to know us by name, but I didn’t know this one, nor had I paid attention to her face when she stamped our books. Instead, I studied her hands, studded with rings that squeezed her flesh and forced it to ooze around them. Those pale, sticky hands usually busy with musty books and cups of sugared tea were poking through my things, pulling out water bottle, bike helmet, knitting.

"She's taking out your wallet, Mom," my older son reported from his hiding spot near a window. "She dropped it."

I'd given the wallet to my toddler earlier in the day to amuse him, and when it no longer held his attention I'd shoved it into the bag without snapping it shut, so when the librarian picked it up it fell open, spilling coins. Quarters and dimes bounced across the table, tangled in yarn, rolled under the bike helmet. I shot an angry glance through the window, and my jaw tightened, my head throbbed, my arms ached.

Hiding under the helmet, a dime turned from silver to pale yellow and unfurled. A set of tiny pincers snapped and a tail tucked into the belly of armor curved upward to expose a venomous dagger at its tip. On eight small legs it skittered across the table unseen, grabbed hold of the librarian's dress and climbed. When it reached her neck, it slipped under the fold of her collar, clinging to the fabric as she walked outside.

Outside, my toddler lay limp in my arms, exhausted from his tantrum. My son eased himself out of his hiding spot, and my anger drained away.

"It’s going to be okay," I tell them.

Doors opened. The librarian set down the bag, and silently marched back inside, carrying my revenge. Pincers clicked, dagger poised, it waited.

Washington, D.C.

The Slow-Cooked Sentence will focus on my family's summer vacation
on the East Coast for the next four Wednesdays.

"D.C. dining" by Marcel Levy at Dance in the Kitchen.

Baby + boob + Obama's house = Political expression.

Shell by Dance in the Kitchen.

Other cheap eats:

• Hot-dogs from sidewalk vendors.
• The Waffle Shop a.k.a Lincoln House Restaurant.

Photo by dystopos.

"Hey, that's the back of the penny!" one brother said.

"Huh?" asked the second.

"The penny, that's on the back of the penny."

"Ooooh," replied the second. "Let's ask if we can go back to the motel and watch Sponge Bob."

Photo courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.

Sunday, defined

Photo courtesy of hiromy.

Yesterday was filled with curtains of rain and flash-flood warnings, home-grown plums baked into a buckle, homemade mojitos that knocked me flat, and one beautiful sentence from "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon:

"Something about him reminded me of one of those figures from old-fashioned playing cards or the sort used by fortune-tellers, a print straight from the pages of incunabulum: his presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in Sunday best."

I particularly love this: a curse dressed in Sunday best. Isn't it brilliant? I took this thick library book on vacation, and got so wrapped up in its story of love and mystery, murder and redemption that I didn't have a shred of interest in seeing distant relations at the sea. I ignored everything -- Avalon and aunties, cousins and crabbing -- until I finished the book.

Photo courtesy of _e.t.

But once home and the tale told, I still was loathe to return it the library. I didn't want to part with the meandering story and its inhabitants (like the villain Francisco Javier Fumero, described above). I took the book with me on errands and reread favorite sections, but the library put me on notice and fined me for every day I kept it. So I let it go, and by Sunday all that remained were the words about the curse afloat in my rum-and-lime-soaked brain.

Ululate

ul-yuh-layt; yool-

intransitive verb

Photo courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.

1. To howl, as a dog or a wolf; to wail; as, ululating jackals.

If Ivan's ululating is a foreshadowing of the Terrible Twos, then bury me now.

Tomato seeds

"Tomato" courtesy of eqqman.

More words on the broad subject of tomatoes:

A New York Times article investigates whether the tomato plant -- a member of the poisonous nightshade family -- is edible, plus a leafy tomato sauce recipe. (Thanks to my sister Kyna for the heads-up.)

Then check out "The night my world caved in" at Blog Nosh, which is a round-up of great blog writing. This essay, written by Dawn Friedman of this woman's work, takes on the issue of body image. I liked it.

And finally, a small fact, which I wanted to include in "Summer flesh," but couldn't make it fit, but now I can. ... The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the debate over whether the tomato is a vegetable or fruit. In 1893, it ruled it a vegetable, despite the plant's ovaries, because it's generally served with dinner, not dessert.