There's Always a Bear
Last Friday we took our oldest to his first year of college (!!!), and this past Wednesday, September 1, was the first day of school for the rest of my kids. Wednesday was the first day in almost 18 months that I've been alone in my house to work. (I had all of one day, since my high schooler only had school on Wednesday, but starting 9/7, things will hopefully be normal-ish with them going to school, if everyone can adhere to masking and especially when a vaccine for people younger than 12 is approved.)
I honestly thought I wouldn't be able to get anything done. It's been so long. But guess what? I was so productive. It's because of this: I realized there's a huge difference between being in a self-distracted mindset, and being constantly interrupted by outside forces. All of the interrupting of the past year and a half has been like being followed by a bear wearing clown shoes and holding a pie. A surprise. Alarming. Always a little jarring. I'm not saying my kids are scary, just that I was always waiting for that bear.
So when they were all at school (for this one blessed day) and I knew that bear with his a-yoo-ga horn and squirting lapel flower was not about to jump out from behind a corner and startle me, I got a lot done.
But also. Not that much.
Because while I am proud of the work I've done to get back to my own brain's ability to focus and do deep work, I've kind of forgotten how to work in general. 2020 and 2021 have been a lot of being interrupted (that darn bear!) and having the world yell at me by lobbing large parcels of doom and sad news onto my lawn every day. It's been a lot, for all of us.
(I keep seeing articles that are like "the pandemic was really hardest on ________________" with anything from mothers to babies to high schoolers to graduating college students to single people to married people filling in the blank. And I want to say, "Hey, pretty sure there are all these different individual articles because the pandemic has been hardest on all of us. Because the pandemic was hard." This weird human urge to be competitive has led to essays about why the pandemic has been most difficult for one specific demographic, but can we agree that it's been very hard, for all of us, for 1000 different reasons, all valid?)
I used to be open to inspiration and ideas throughout the day, and I'd play around with them mentally or on paper, and maybe 3% would turn into something, and that was a pretty good rate. The pandemic stole my ability to noodle around with ideas, and it also robbed me of my ability to figure out what made a particular story idea mine, so that I could turn it into A Very Julie Falatko story. It's taking me a lot, lot longer to get to that point. I get an idea, and it's this half-formed idea like "Worm? Orchestra?" and I can't remember how to make that into a book.
Also the pandemic stole a large hunk of my sense of humor, and I'm having to relearn how jokes work and remember what it's like to be funny.
I recently recorded a podcast interview (stay tuned!) where I talked about this -- about how 2020 and 2021 have taken away a lot of my writing time, so I no longer had the time to write a lot of words. And when I don't write a lot of words, I can't get to the good ones, and I forget what exactly it is that makes a story A Very Julie Falatko story. So my focus right now is on quantity. I really need to make up for lost time, yes, by writing submittable books, but the only way I can get there is by writing so, so much and not worrying about how perfect the stories are.
The other day I was driving my youngest to the orthodontist and the faintest itch of an idea started to form in my mind. It wasn't great, but it wanted to be listened to. Do you know long it's been since a free-form idea floated by me? A long time. I mean, I've been getting ideas, but it's been by really actively hunting them down, and all the ideas are cornered and anxious as a result. My goal right now is to keep free-form writing, as a siren song to those floating ideas.
Are you in this place too? It's a scary place to be. I feel like I've lost momentum and skills. Well, tough cookies. That's what my inner writer is telling me. She's kind of mean sometimes, but in a helpfully prodding way. Tough cookies, she says. Your job right now is to carve out the time to write as much as you can. It's going to be hard. It's going to be bad. But you've done this before, and the only way to get better is to get the words on the page.
September 21 is coming soon!
This is your reminder that my next picture book, Yours in Books, is coming out on September 21, and you still have time to preorder and register for the virtual Print: A Bookstore event. This book is my love letter to independent bookstores, forest friendship, snail mail, and the magical power of a spot-on bookseller recommendation.Â
Thoughts and Links
I've talked before about how much I love my friend Iva Marie Palmer's 5+1 interview newsletter, where she interviews writers about five non-writing-related things (and one writing-related thing). I am truly honored to be featured this month. Will you be surprised to learn that I said so much in response to her questions that she broke the interview into two parts? Probably not. Installment one is here.
I am such a huge George Saunders fan, and his newest story in the New Yorker, "The Mom of Bold Action," is about a children's book author (among other things) and the beginning part where she is coming up with possible children's book story ideas is almost too on the nose, but also so, so good. I also really enjoyed this interview with Deborah Treisman about how he wrote the story.
I told you in my last newsletter that I had ordered a bunch of zine superpacks from Microcosm Press, and I am working my way through them. My favorite so far is Bikes in Space, Volume II: More Feminist Science Fiction, edited by Elly Blue. I'm not usually a sci fi reader, but something about "there was an apocalypse and the only people left are bicycle-riding feminists" as a specific genre is oddly comforting. I'm a bicycle-riding feminist! I will make it past the end times! (The best book by far in this entire genre is the phenomenal graphic novel Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal, which is on constant rotation in my house because it's so, so funny and good.)
The truth about bicycle riding, though, is I am by far the worst biker in my family. I like it ok, but am pretty wobbly. My 15-year-old is now working as a mechanic in a bike shop, and keeps trying to get me to buy an e-bike. It's tempting. Instead, I'll go in for bagels and iced coffee. Here is a fun news segment featuring Eli (the one with the Goodyear hat and bike mechanic's apron) talking about the company he works for.
My friend Lindsay Eagar had a cover reveal for her gorgeous middle grade coming out next year, The Patron Thief of Bread. "This book probably saved me. It reminded me, many times, that writing should be an escape for me…because then one day it can be an escape for a reader." Preorder it here.
ALSO my friends Carter Higgins and Daniel Miyares had a cover reveal for their 2022 picture book, Big and Small and In Between (Instagram Live between the two of them is here, or just jump to the gorgeous cover here to check it out), and let me tell you, this book is going to knock your socks off. It's storytelling like I've never seen before.Â
I AM SURE you all already know about this, but I recently realized you can group tabs in Google Chrome, and it has made my many-tabs lifestyle a little more organized.
