How High's the Water, Mama?

We slopped into the flotsam and jetsam of discarded things, dead leaves and sewer silt and network cables looped as nooses. Water gurgled from the storm drain like bubbles from a half-open mouth, and it didn't matter how many curse words we filled ours with. It just kept coming. Only a few moments before we'd been filming the hail outside, crouching in the open doorway and scooping the chips of strange ice off of the porch. It was colder than I expected, even for ice. The water in the basement was cold, too, squelching through two pairs of shoes as we swept frantically, first, the books and computer equipment from the drowning carpet. Minutes dragged like trails of sand-thin mud down the drain, strange patterns that tried our patience as we waited for the water to recede, inch by inch.

You emptied drawers of fabric from a rotting-bottomed bureau and I boxed yarn, buttons, stamp ink pads. I carried spiral bound college textbooks, photo albums, paperback novels you'll never read again, and computer manuals up the stairs, emptying them from a water-logged bookcase into stacks I could manage. Twenty times too many I  hobbled up and down. I held my belly when my arms were empty, thinking, I'm not so out of shape for six months pregnant. Thinking, where does all of this crap come from? And can't we just get rid of it?

"This is why I don't like the sound of rain anymore," you say. We used to like storms.

I still try.

Psychosomatic Symptoms

You know the feeling when you finish a really spectacular book and you just can't move on? You're hanging around on the last page, musing over the last few lines, perhaps turning to the mysterious blank pages publishers include and hoping for a secret little bit more. Like when I went to the movies as a teenager and waiting around until the credits had finished rolling rewarded me with an intimate fifteen seconds of something. Good movies don't seem to do that anymore. But that's a story for another day. I've got the book-finishing-psychoses of a rabid reader and a writer working against me. I find myself wishing for more and more and more book and also wondering why it is I think I've got something in me that will make somebody else feel the same way. And what's the point of writing if i haven't? I want to turn pages more than I've ever wanted to turn heads, to facilitate cramped hours in bed ravishing sentences long after bedtime, to fan crushes and crush expectations to finest metaphorical powder.

But I finish something like Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star and I just don't feel like a contender.

A Person's a Person, No Matter How Small

Here are a few things I've cried about lately. A man and a woman laughed at me in the parking lot after work when I politely asked them not to block the driveway. I sobbed like my eyes and nose might run right off my face.

I was short with a bank teller. After apologizing twice, I still felt beyond redemption.

M and I enjoyed a night out and I cried into a paper napkin thinking of how it won't be just the two of us for very much longer. Again, later, when he held my hand and told me about the dream he'd had shortly after we'd found out I was pregnant, how some bodiless voice had warned him I would never be his wife again, only the mother to his child. We're afraid of the same things even as our eyes brighten in anticipation.

To say I'm not excited about this baby, about being a parent, would be too gross an understatement. But for all my thrills over pocket cloth diapers emblazoned with cheerful monsters and a shelf overflowing with library loaned books on pregnancy and parenting, I have no delusions about what starting a family really means, at least for me, for us. I might never have been anyone's mother, but I've been a friend, an enemy, a conspirator. Sure, we're having a baby. But we're also inviting another person to share what we share. We're introducing their likes and dislikes, their intellect, their sense of humor, their wants and needs (beyond feeding, changing, and sleeping) into the cozy routines, the dynamic, we two have tempered for nearly ten years. M and I are happy.

Maybe we won't be recommending books to each other for a few years, but babies are people, too. We'll be meeting someone new. We'll be a family.

I told M that I can't imagine loving anyone as much as I love him. We're sitting outside of a coffee house where I've already imagined myself wearing my baby in a cozy wrap across my chest, the light music of laptop keys a familiar lull for us both. I finished my first novel here. It's a special place.

"It's not like that," he says, and he doesn't have to elaborate. I squeeze his fingers. Love is love. It grows. And the best kind is never in competition.

Secrets are for Suckers

I'm a writer. I don't believe in privacy. This is mostly true. I'll share just about anything if I think it will make a good story, and as some of my favorite stories are of the dangerous and dirty and little human kind, and my life is so very, very mundane, I'll end up confessing everything eventually. A fictional mouth isn't even always necessary, though sometimes, I need two. But, I am at heart a consummate sharer. I can't not. I remember reading as a girl that Libras are particularly good at keeping secrets, and while that may be true for yours, it's never, ever true for mine.

I am a woman of my time, though, and relish, too, controlling the flow of information from me to you. I want to tell when I'm ready to tell. I want time enough to find the best way to say it. So it's entirely possible I have things from my eighth year I might be crafting still for a reveal in my eightieth. Online and on the page I can spill the beans in as careful a pattern as a like, a mess that arranges itself into a silhouette of shame or regret or artless lust, so much prettier than the snotty, pajama-clad mess that holds the pen or punches ragged-nailed fingers against sticky keys. I think you'll like her better. I know I do.

You know what else I like? Little intimacies. Like my husband's hand on my belly when he imagines I am sleeping, when my arrested breath alerts him to the fact that I am not and it's all the change that either of us can feel in my slowly-growing-strange body. I like writing it. It's like we're all closer together. You and me and baby makes three, thirty, a thousand dreams.

But You Don't Have to Take My Word For It

Re-reading has always felt indulgent to me in the best of ways. When I was studying literature it was practically breaking the rules unless I was doing so for comprehension of some unnecessarily overwrought text, when reading for pleasure was worthy of a laugh unless you were arguing that you actually enjoyed imagining the Panopticon into every nineteenth century English parlor (which happened in a class, once, but the tally of incidents in which I felt like a dirty fiction writer daring to enjoy artistry without critical theory are too many for any one blog to recount, and certainly not this one). But I've always done it, and I do it now, too, flying in the face of all of what's great and new and should be read; some books are just old friends.

Revisiting Anne Shirley of late has made me marvel at how little I needed to go on as a ten-year-old reader, how dearly dreaming talks of mischief and the paper-heady scent of apple blossoms could render me. I'll tell you, almost nothing happens on the page. What does is almost always relayed to Marilla over plum cake hours after, unless it's a certain titian-headed someone falling off of a roof, or nearly drowning playing at The Lady of Shalott. I've got a kindred spirit of my own in K, and the wild ramblings of Anne and Diana are just as I remember them, as I remember ours as sweetly.

What isn't the same the second time around is Tolkien. I remember struggling and abandoning the first book after Bilbo's party before I'd seen the films, and only after managing to get through the trilogy on the merits of the cast. I swore Aragorn had no personality and the hobbits little more than appetites, but there's something to be said for re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring with ten years to season the pages and my temperament. The prose at times feels positively lush. If I've told my husband once I've expressed to him a dozen times my shock over how much I am actually enjoying this re-reading, which is a testament, perhaps, to what an unworthy jerk I was at nineteen. But really, who isn't?

Besides, I can't trust anyone who fantasized they were an edgy Elizabeth Wakefield. No matter how cute Conner McDermott was written.

Saturday's Child: Imaginary Lovers

I prefer sexual tension to sex. There's a reason the characters in my novel don't kiss for more than two-hundred and fifty pages, and it isn't because they aren't hot and bothered for each other after a scattering of charged dialogue. One, because it is so much more fun as a writer not to give them the things they want straightaway, and two, as a reader, the payoff is so much sweeter if I've been sucking my own lip for fifteen chapters in hopes they'll get the hell over themselves and shag or snog with the wanton abandon of the young and stupid. Because I've never been (young). I've over thought just about every single thing when it comes to the opposite sex since I was old enough to develop a crush on a playmate in kindergarten over a rousing game of Hi Ho! Cherry-O.

The standard fare just isn't enough to get me hot. It's all bodies; no heart, no brain. Give me Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest or Son of the Shadows, especially, Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen, or of late M.K. Hobson's Native Star. If I've read Dreadnaught Stanton purging himself in blood and desperate clinging to Emily once I've read it twelve times. I don't need or want a love triangle unless it's a reasonable complication (and not something conceived of by editors to drive teenage girls wild; I'm looking at you). And while I want love and my fair share of understated lust, there's got to be more driving the story than the human hyperdrive to procreate.

Some of the best science fiction television programs, especially, do better than throw me a literal bone when it comes to romantic subplot. Farscape had more than Muppets with John Crichton and Aeryn Sun, and Star Trek: Enterprise's third season boasts some of their best writing and more of Trip and T'pol than I thought I'd ever see. Don't get me started on Ten and Rose (and don't watch if you haven't seen the whole of their story).

Suffice to say, I'm a sucker. But you've got to work for it.

Temper Tantrum

I have a temper that's mostly irrational and entirely inherited from my father. Which isn't to say my mom hasn't got a mouth on her, but I'm all short fuses and long strings of curse words directed at ovens/computers/motor vehicles, marketing campaigns, and my husband running the goddamned vacuum at ten to midnight. My dirty mouth is not attractive, and is the kind that's only entertaining in novels. But it's important. I can't take my ire seriously without it. And I didn't swear, not one word willfully, until I read Inherit the Wind.

DRUMMOND. I'm sorry if I offend you. But I don't swear just for the hell of it. You see, I figure that language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we ought to use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damned few words that everybody understands.

I remember citing this play as evidence to my friends in high school, who'd presumably read the same book in the same English class or at least enough to get by, but who likely didn't need the rationale I did to revel in bad words. Perhaps they hadn't let something slip at nine years old without meaning to during a particularly intense game of Super Mario Bros., or perhaps they had but hadn't spend the next hour hiding in the laundry room for fear their little brother would tattle on them to mom and dad. Maybe they didn't grin when late for class one morning and elbow deep in discarded homework at the bottom of their locker, they repeated 'shit' over and over again, rolling the word between tongue and cheek and lips like a dirty pinball.

I toyed with words, all words, because I could. I liked telling people that 'fuck' was one of the few true English infixes, and demonstrating just how versatile an utterance it could be. As a girl, cursing gave me an edge I mostly imagined, but whose novelty provided the very best of outlets for my rage against maddeningly dull teenage boys and government teachers (and let's be honest, machines). (My teenage love affair with RATM and Zack de la Rocha is another blog entirely). As a woman, I'm a little more sensitive, a little more secret, but there are few things that feel better than swearing when I'm hoppin' mad.

But I still won't curse in front of my parents.

Computer Monitors are not Crystal Balls

I was thinking that the good ol' days of my fortune telling was my infantile exploration of the internet at fourteen and fifteen years old: the widgets - did we even call them widgets then? - on personal Angelfire pages that would provide Tarot readings or random sentiments for luck; Ask Jeeves' maternal aunt Madame Jekaterina beseeched in a chat box regarding whether this boy or that one was worthier of my ardent affections or if foregoing AP Biology would really cripple my chances at a scholarship; the notion that the disorderly primeval ooze out of which true randomness slunk could somehow offer me direction and heart, that these things gave me what conversation and real world experience could not. Some other energy that could be heralded or blamed for when things went terribly awry. Or just plain terrible. But it didn't start then. I've liked looking for signs my whole life, though not in any of the usual places. It wasn't only that I enjoyed imagining patterns where there weren't any, or reading into things that probably weren't meant to be read in the first place, it was a comfort that of all the meaningless possibilities, this one was mine. That there were answers I could not find in a book, even if it meant I had to fathom them into existence. When K and I dared to ask Zandar or I rolled a pair of mismatched dice or looked up a dream interpretation in my secondhand almanac, what I think I always wanted was confirmation for the things I already knew anyway. Worst case scenario, the things I hoped were true or real or immediate.

Now I Google the truth. Over and over again until I've got enough right answers to shut up the part of my brain that wants shutting up, that's forever fourteen and in need of daily affirmations. Usually accompanied by the appropriate Yahoo horoscope and a Lisa Frank sticker.

On Magic Lamps: You're Doing It Wrong

There are a few things I take very seriously that are very silly. One of them is wishes. When I was a child I used to become visibly irritated by that joke that people always make when genies or other divine and magnificent dream-makers are mentioned, that if given only three wishes their first wish would be for more wishes. Didn't they understand a single thing about the way these mythical figures operated? Didn't they know that they were defeating the entire purpose of being granted only three wishes, and not being in the least little bit clever? It was the principle of the thing that bothered me, that one person felt they should have unlimited access to whatever they could possibly want, forever. In my opinion they just didn't know what it was to want something so bodily that you wouldn't be able to keep yourself from making a desperate request at the first chance.

And also that in fairy tales your ass was just going to get burned for being greedy, and you really ought to know better.

Even now when it comes to things like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake or breaking the wishbone or plucking a rogue eyelash from a cheek and blowing a breath of hope across a finger or thumb, I feel that the language I use to articulate my heart's desire is very important. I can't leave anything to chance. As a student when I took every opportunity to ask to just graduate already, I had to be sure to specify that I graduate on time, with good grades I'd earned, and without having to jump through the hoops of fire I was sure my African American Studies professor kept in his desk. Of late when I wish for things like babies and book deals, I hope explicitly for a healthy body that can produce both, all seven pounds and one-hundred-seventy thousand words.

It's a manic sort of thing, I know. But I'm just covering all my bases.