I know what Angelou means.

I wanted to write my novel for years and it took me a long, long time to do it. But I did and now the book is sitting on my desk. In the past year, I’ve been to book festivals, spoken and read in many great places, been interviewed on radio and live, had parties, visited all sorts of cool bookstores, met many wonderful writers and readers, had a great time on Goodreads, and entered the book in contests.

Last Thursday Lisa Tener and I talked about thow you can be in that same place by this time next year, having written your book in our 8-week Bring Your Book to Life Class. I have worked with Lisa for years, taken the class myself, and taught it last summer. Lisa has won several awards for this program and has helped many people write a book, find an agent, get the book published, and use it to increase their visibility and business.

 http://www.lisatener.com/2013-summer-school-for-book-writers/

What a lot of rewards for having gotten that story told!

Here is how I did it, slowly:

I had an idea, wrote an outline, filled in the outline, sent it to agents and publishers, published it, and marketed it. It took me 30 years. I started the process in graduate school, finished when my kids were in college.

One thing that slowed me way down was that I wrote most of the book and did all the marketing AFTER graduate school, when I wasn’t supported by a group of people working on books.

The Bring Your Book to Life program will speed up the process for you in every way–from giving you the specific information you need to figure out your audience, tone, and market to how to manage your time to get it done to the ongoing support of a community and an experienced writer-teacher to having a proven program for success.

http://www.lisatener.com/2013-summer-school-for-book-writers/

What are you waiting for? Dive in! It’s summertime and the time is right to write your book!

http://www.lisatener.com/2013-summer-school-for-book-writers/ 

He went to live with his father. I would say he went to his home with his father, but he had never lived there. His father had left our home when the boys were three and four years old, had erratic contact with them for 10 years, then sued me for custody when he remarried.

My story, which seemed so shockingly unique at the time, is sadly played out every day, even among celebrities like Kelly Rutherford. Who knows why my ex-husband sued for custody. Maybe he longed for the kids in ways that didn’t manifest in staying in touch with them. Maybe the new wife wanted them in addition to the three boys she already had or perhaps the child support their father paid me for raising our boys was needed in her house.

However it played out in my ex and his wife’s calculation, it was the court that surprised me most. Steeped as I was in the lore that mothers get custody unless they have been on bath salts (and I don’t mean Calgon) or performing unnatural acts in front of the kids, I spent most of the custody battle poleaxed by disbelief. I was a working mother with a Ph.D. from a very respectable family and I’d been stone cold sober for many years. What was more, I’d raised those kids by myself for 10 years.

But, I learned after a long incomprehensible court battle and a lot of tedious legal study, that last–the fact of who has done the actual child care–is the element that, nonsensically enough, matters the least in domestic law in all states in the US but one.

There are reasons for this that are rooted deeply in good intentions and which I examine in depth in my as ytet unplished memoir, The Courage of Your Fear.

But the upshot was that my son, longing as he was for the ghost of a father past, anxiously desiring to please the elusive man, and highly susceptible to illusion, said he wanted to live there. And that was that, except for when he changed his mind at which point that was no longer that. The court doesn’t allow second thoughts.

He lived at his dad’s three hours away through high school, then he went to college, and now he is graduating.

I’d like to pretend, as I have with my mother and my invisible son, that he is still with me, or at least was through high school. But he wasn’t. He had his own path and it deviated from mine before its time.

And losing your child in a custody battle, my friends, is a grief irredeemable, a loss unfixable. That’s another darkside of motherhood, along with mother loss, pregnancy loss, mother failure–that is just simply dark. As the main character in The Algebra of Snow discovers, darkness can be a cover up for more darkness.

The brightest side of it I can come up with is that, as Bruno Bettelheim would have it in his brilliant defense of frightening and violent fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, the fearful, unaccountable, devouring behavior of adults is an aspect of life not to be denied or covered up. It is the stuff of legend.

He’s older than my older visible son by three years. I got pregnant by accident on a first date while in creative writing graduate school and what can I say? The evening involved a good Merlot, Leonard Cohen, and a cockeyed diaphragm. We’d stopped dating before I found out I was pregnant.

I lost that baby. Everyone was urging me to deliberately abort except my gynecologist who gestured to a photograph of her three kids when she asked me what I thought had inspired her to go from UPS driver to med school. I ended up spontaneously aborting at maybe 10 weeks and it was painful, lonely, epiphantic.

Like my main character in The Algebra of Snow who lost her baby, I grieved and grieved, my body and spirit unannealed until I had the two sons that you can see, now in college.

Turns out there are many pregnancies that end the way my first one did–as many as 20% that are recognized and probably many more that just seem like heavy periods. I had a mammogram before I knew I was pregnant and that may have had an effect. Or the fact that I was 36 and pregnancy is tricky at that age might have been to blame.

It also turns out that my generation sold the next a bill of goods–it really isn’t a good idea to wait for everything to fall into place–degrees, careers, perfect marriage–before having a baby because our bodies are pretty much the same way they were even if the culture has changed–primed to reproduce in our 20s. Divorce is another bad idea–so there really isn’t time to waste in college and just after.

I was fantastically lucky that I was able to and did have two successful pregnancies and that my two boys are in the world.

But that other one–and I knew he was a boy too–lives in my heart, a spirit child whose July birthday I acknowledge each year though it never happened, who progresses through life just a little ahead of my guys, able to tell them things, a comfort to his mother–like my visible boys, splendid.

But that also meant that Mom ended up without her mother’s toughness–and, in my imagination, her capacity to sacrifice her own fears to save her children. My mom flopped in some critical moments–teaching me as a young child to hide my wild self from the disfavor of the matriarch of my father’s family, with whom she ended up living–the absolute worst mother-in-law/daughter-in-law combination imaginable. My tough-ass, independent, other grandmother didn’t like anyone much, except her first born son, my father, and she held onto him fiercely, manipulated all her children, while she abandoned her house for the gardens she chose over humanity. My mother preferred her flowers delivered.

My lovely mom, who believed that people loved her because she was beautiful, was taken down by the old way breast cancer was handled–brutally, without support or discussion–and ended up abandoning herself and thus also the daughter she had bred to be dependent on her, yours truly. Her bout with breast cancer when I was six was a secret she kept until I was 22 and found out by accident from the family doctor during a school physical.

She abandoned me the several times my dad–whom I also loved and who loved me, it turned out later–took notice of me enough to punish me ferociously for my wild ways in high school and college.

None of this was meant–and yet it left the kind of scars she never would have intentionally wanted me to carry. A tendency to abandon myself, an attraction to unreliable, enchanting people who cannot for the life of them see the actual me. A lifelong habit of holding back, afraid of the treachery of connection, standing at the mouth of a cave, hand on the head of the wild wolf beside me, reluctant to cross the radioactive land between me and, well, people. A wish, a desperate wish, that I be wrong about what I’m feeling.

Like the main character in The Algebra of Snow, I live in a frozen land, part of me like the boy in The Snow Queen living with a chip of ice in my heart.

But that is also piffle–no way to pass a life. So I have done my best to come out of the tundra, like Amelia, fighting our way across the frozen landscape, back to humanity.

I’ve spent years in therapy and I am so incredibly grateful to the people who have put their energy into my energy. The book is dedicated to the man who spent years and years listening to me, gave me his time when I had followed his advice about becoming a starving artist and give in to the great need to write, to create. It’s dedicated to the wonderful couple who took the book on as a dissertation advising project and who are now divorced but, hey, they are extraordinary people no matter what form they are appearing in. And it is dedicated to my real parents who, astonishingly enough just like me, were flawed and amazing parents.

Here are some other methods I’ve used to cross the radioactive ground:

Reading Alice Miller’s books and everything I could get my hands on about narcissism, working with another therapist who verges on shamanism in a good way, parenting–good Lord, what have those boys NOT taught me?–having amazing friends and assistants, relying on people who are carrying the light for many–Danielle Laporte, Marie Forleo–connecting with astonishingly generous mentors like Lisa Tener, and currently working my way through Martha Beck life coach training which is filled with so many generous, experienced people that it’s making that trek across the radioactive, frozen ground look downright attractive. There are real people on the other side.

But I CAN start planning my campaign to get a good Mother’s Day gift out of my boys. They are wonderful boys and they love giving their mom presents—but they might not QUITE remember, so I start dropping hints early. Who cares if they are involved in the end of the semester rush? What is more important—their future or their mom? There’s no real debate, right?

Which sort of heads me toward thinking a bit more about the topic I’ve been brooding on lately—the downside of mothering. Don’t get me wrong—I’m going to be out there celebrating with everyone else by the time May 12 arrives and I will welcome with open arms the flowers and candy that comes along with the gifts. And by then maybe I will have finished brooding on the downsides—but, until then, I’m  planning to brood. Beats calling the utility company.

My mom was a great mom and we loved each other. We also had a lot of trouble getting along. I told one of my friends once, when it was clear that I wasn’t going to have any daughters, that I was really sorry that I wasn’t going to have a child I could have a dark and twisted relationship with—because (and life proved me right on this one) it’s not really that easy to have one of those with sons, who pretty much are a matter of keeping them on the go, loving them like crazy, then getting ready to let go of them.

My mom was ill when I was young and that ended up being problematic for me because it was all a big secret. We’re Southern and you don’t say words like sex, money, or cancer. She survived, which was a great thing, although she might not have thought so when we fought our way through my adolescence. I honestly couldn’t believe my karma-debt-relief of not having to pay back for that (boys are pretty easy in adolescence, or mine were).

In my novel The Algebra of Snow, the main character’s mother dies when she was young and Amelia spends her childhood and then later the length of the book connecting where her again.

My own mother died when I was 40, a new mom of my second boy, and I was pretty much knocked out by losing her. We had spent years talking to each other on the phone probably once a day. I spoke to her one more time before her last hospital admission and I can’t talk about that call today, 20 some years later, without tearing up.  I was in Tennessee with two young children and couldn’t get home that time. I came home for her funeral. Everyone talked about what a nice person she was—and she was—and I felt moved to add that she was also extremely silly (no one ever could make me and my brother laugh like she could).

I’m not sure people ever get over losing their mother and, at this point, I don’t plan on getting over losing mine. I have read Hope Edelman’s great book on losing your mother—Motherless Daughters—and plan to interview her soon.  I’ve also heard that people call for their mother as they are dying—mine did—and I plan on that too. I hope we get a lot of good belly laughs in Heaven because I haven’t had quite enough of  them down here.

So on Mother’s Day this year, in my new house, I’m going to be celebrating my motherhood and my mother. I’d better get the lights on for that!

I am doing my finances the way I’ve been doing them for most of my single parent life–the overwhelmed way. I have a few solutions up my sleeve this year, though.

When I was newly married, newly a mother, I discovered Quicken and thought I’d found the answer.

My husband and I were academics and he was still in school while he trailed me to my tenure-track jobs. We had my modest salary, what he made as an adjunct (read “slave”) instructor, two rapid children, and, soon, a mortgage and homeowning expenses.

I had already gone from one job to another when the first college declared financial exigency and released its nontenured faculty and I didn’t have tenure yet at the place I’d landed.

In other words, we were on shaky ground.

But that fact didn’t stand a chance against the headwind of my desire to own a home. Call it nesting, call it the DNA  of formerly landed gentry. I was going to own property.

I’d always been good with finances, had worked since I was 12, and had no debt beyond a small student loan, a car payment, and, well, a family that included two dogs–and a house.

That may have been the beginning of overwhelm.

I thought Quicken would solve all the problems–a budget, an electronic ledger, a bill paying system, and plenty of reports.

But even Quicken was powerless in the face of a long separation, a divorce, a move, the death of both my parents, another house bought entirely on my salary and child support, a four-year custody battled that deleted the child support, and then supporting two kids through college.

All of that time I used Quicken, then Quicken Essentials, which turned out to be disastrous.

Here is how I survived: I worked hard, negotiated a higher salary, cut expenses, stuck it out at an unsuitable job, explored  and started a new business at the same time, hired a financial advisor who was very good at telling me the age I will have to taken out back and shot when my retirement funds run out.

Finally I hired a Daily Money Manger (thanks to a tip from The Value of Simple) who was helpful in sorting out the great tangle of present time, pre-retirement money issues.

The upshot: soon I will own two houses, one of which I will be renting out. Like I said, I’ve done my taxes and financial aid application. Finances the overwhelmed way and my DNA have joined forces.  And any minute now I’m going to have filed all that paper mess.

 Lisa: Birth Your Book in 2013: 5 Keys to Write Your Bestseller At Last is for people who are writing nonfiction, particularly self-help, how-to or memoir, and who are either at the very beginning of the book-writing process or who started and got stuck and want to move ahead with more ease–and write the right book.

Ginger: What is special about your approach?

Lisa: A few things: One is the way I help people discover the book inside them. As you know, my signature exercise is what I call my “Meet Your Muse” visualization. People often find they write a much better book because of the work we do in this exercise and we’ll cover a shortened version of this on the call on March 19.

Ginger: Great. What else?

Lisa: The creative aspect is one crucial part of it. As someone who’s won awards in marketing, I bring to the table the understanding of how to write a marketable book–that doesn’t mean writing a book that’s inauthentic in any way–it’s about writing a book that will more deeply resonate for your market–the specific people who are going to buy your book because of what they realize it can do for them. And it also means the book is more likely to be effective for them–and have the kind of impact an author wants to have on people and their lives.

Ginger: How do you teach that?

Lisa:. I have a system that can help people write a book rather quickly–even novices. You can have a first draft in as little as 8-12 weeks. And we’ll cover some of my tips on that initial teleseminar on March 19. It’s not about writing a cookie cutter type book and we don’t sacrifice quality for speed. It’s just that the approach is really systematic and it works!

Ginger: I can say from first-hand knowledge–you help people write high quality, marketable books and the track record to prove it. You have clients who are first time authors getting six figure book deals.

Lisa: That’s true and I try to bring that same kind of quality and marketability to authors who self publish, too.

Ginger: What might someone expect to learn from the call on March 19?

Lisa: We’ll cover some of those things that are critical to getting started and staying motivated and in action: motivation to prioritize the book, clarity about how they’ll make the time–and some fabulous tips on how to stick to it–because that’s where people often trip up.

We’ll also cover some of the critical questions that will help you shape your book concept.

And I’ll help people on the call connect with their own deep wisdom about the amazing book inside them.

I’ll share keys to writing a high quality, unique, marketable book quickly—and with ease.

Ginger: And I hope you’ll share the secrets that help your clients snag five and six figure book deals with top publishers!

Lisa: Of course!

Ginger: Realistically speaking, what can people expect from joining your award winning Bring Your Book to Life Program–I know lots of people think it’s completely impossible to write a book in 8 weeks….

Lisa: I should start by saying that this model works really well for self-help and how-to books. Memoirs tend to take longer and I let people take the class a second time in the fall if they are writing memoir.

Ginger: Having taught the class for you last summer, I’d agree wholeheartedly about the types of books that work well. Also, I would also point out that the program is best for books that do not require extensive research.

Lisa: Yes, that’s true. I recommend leaving holes in the book for research–that can be done later if you know your subject well, but ,as you said, if you need to do lots of research for the book, it’s not the best fit.

Ginger: So, could you take readers through the process:

Lisa: As soon as someone signs up we start working on their book concept and the structure of their book. They get some fabulous materials–a workbook and CDs to walk them through exercises that bring clarity and ease to the process–and fun, too. And then I work privately with them to refine the book concept–vision, goals, audience, features, content and structure.

Once they complete that pre-work, they can start working on the actual book. So that may be well before the April 23 class actually begins–because they’ll have all their course materials and access to me–or they can wait until class starts.

Generally, you’d write about a chapter or a bit more per week–and can have a first draft by the end of class. And that includes feedback on up to 30 pages of their writing and a customized editing plan from me. It takes some commitment and they get profound support every step of the way. Some people work on a book proposal in the class instead of a book, but most write a first draft of their book.

Ginger: I had some of the best fun I’ve ever had as a teacher working with the class last summer.

Lisa: You know, I’d like to mention to that if readers are interested in working directly with you they can also request to work with you as their guide for the one-on-one work, since you’ve taught the class and I have sent you many clients.

Ginger: Where can people sign up for the call?

Lisa: Right here:

http://bit.ly/Mar19Call

Ginger: Thanks, Lisa. I look forward to hearing the call on March 19!

I loved my mother in ways that I understand many women don’t love theirs. I have friends whose mothers were distant or–I can’t imagine the pain inflicted by this–relentlessly critical.

My mother was beautiful–feminine, soft, a dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty whom my father, I feel sure, identified immediately as the earthly incarnation of the Snow White Disney had just created. She was also wicked funny and to this day no one can make my brother and me laugh like she did.

More, she was my biggest cheerleader. She loved me like crazy,  the daughter she could hold close without fear of turning me gay, a common fear among mothers of her day about loving their sons too much. She gladly dressed me in girly clothes, let me play with her makeup, and washed my long hair in the kitchen sink. She was more often a playmate than an authority figure.

She had been unable to see to see that her absence or withdrawal could be so profoundly impoverishing to the world–particularly to her dependent daughter–that it was like a loss of oxygen. When she got breast cancer at a relatively young age her upbringing as a Christian Scientist dictated that she take responsibility for having allowed the disease to take root and all her systems shut down. Though she survived the cancer, unlike my main character’s mother in The Algebra of Snow, becoming whole herself many years later with pioneering reconstructive surgery, her withdrawal in my young years left a crater that was in some ways more mysteriously wounding than a death, unexplained and chimerical as it was. As I got older she took no stand separate from my father’s so that my adolescent misdeeds went doubly-punished: once by his stern judgement and secondly by her failure to defend me.

I suspect she secretly loved my rebellions–she certainly loved my bad-boy husband and she heartily endorsed the somewhat risque ending of a story I published in a journal all her very respectable friends read. “That’s the way it had to end,” she said when I belatedly asked if she might be embarrassed by it.

We had many years of practically daily contact–many fights, many, many laughs and glasses of wine. My mother loved to move and could be relied upon to show up with a headscarf and a willingness to fill an empty box for her gypsy daughter. She was still buying my clothes for me when she died, her last gifts being maternity clothes and those huge, unimaginably comfortable boats of maternity underwear that rise up over your big belly.

She died of congestive heart failure, the disease taking her down in spirals. I was with her when she spiraled up from the next to the last coma. The first thing she wanted was for me to put her makeup on. When the nurse commented somewhat patronizingly that my mother had been admitted so many times she must have stayed in every room, my lovely genteel, dying mother said, “Yeah, I’ve really slept around.”

The nurse wasn’t sure she’d heard right–did this elderly, well-educated, well-spoken woman just say that?

But I knew she had–and we shared a good laugh at the absurdity.

Right before she died we talked on the phone. I was in Tennessee with my young family and she in Virginia nd we knew I couldn’t be there that time. I said I was sorry and she said she knew and it was okay in such a way that we both knew it for everything. I was sorry for everything. She forgave me for everything.

When it came down to it, she loved me like crazy  As I have slipped and slid my way through mothering my own boys–whose naughtiness my mother would have so profoundly understood–I have gone back again and again to that well of love, drunk of her adoration of me, able then to share my adoration with my own babies.

How have your parents affected your parenting? Did you have an easy or a complicated relationship with a parent?

In fact, I’m nowhere near the end of the road, but I’m far enough down it to know that I have survived creatively.

There were times it was in doubt. I was an academic mom with two little kids when my husband decided to leave–and I mean really leave. As in not move across town but move 600 miles away. An academic as well, he had shared kid care since the boys were born and sometimes done more of it than I. My career came to a screeching halt about then–limited traveling, no late afternoon meetings, severe cut back in brain cells as I juggled and coped with an entirely different, radically unplanned twist in my path.

I figured out how to get the kids taken care of, with a legion of helpers many of whom were my fabulous students. Then there were the friends’ families who rescued me more than once when I honestly thought I couldn’t take one more second of single parenting–the friend who showed up when I was dying of the stomach flu and the kids were digging in the garden soil amendments in the back yard. He gave them a bath and a waffle for dinner and I straggled out in my ratty pink bathrobe and haggard face and asked him to marry me.

Then I moved back home and had the pleasure of reacquainting myself with my hometown and my lovely family, all of whom were terrifically helpful and supportive. That included my elderly dad who drove my younger one down the hill to the bus while I took the older one to school–even though the old dude was dying of cancer. He was under my wing too while the kids grew and he died. It was a hard time, a challenging time–and a huge, huge gift to me to be close to him, to have my kids know him, to watch the grace and courage of a man who had lived a full life let go of it gladly, with good humor and some really refreshing, colorful cursing.

And, you know, I wrote that whole time too. I got an agent and another one when she retired. I cranked out a mystery novel and had an environmental thriller in the works. I wrote an entire collection of essays on being a single, working mom, many of which have now been published. I was in a writers’ group. I wrote several drafts of a book about custody after my ex sued me for custody of children he had left when they were three and four years old. Such is the court system that we wrangled for four years over that. I worked that whole time too, in a full time academic administrative job. Toward the end of that period I started coaching people in how to write books. And I published my first novel.

A lot of people have asked me how I did it and my answer isn’t facetious: I don’t remember anyone offering me a choice. I mean: WAS there one? But also I had several tricks up my sleeve, which I will share with you:

1. I had a mission. Which was to stay alive creatively. That was nonnegotiable. Along with taking care of the kids.

2. I had an army of helpers. I had students who babysat and one who took the kids every Sunday morning so I could have a 4 hour block of writing time. I found a woman who cooked 3 meals a week  for us while my father was alive and I froze and then microwaved and served those after work every night so we had family dinner. It was astonishingly reasonable.

3. I went to an artist colony whenever I could. The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, otherwise known as Creative Person’s Heaven.

4. I followed Martha Beck s advice religiously about the tiny tiniest steps being what makes all the difference. I got up at unreasonable hours and wrote two pages a day. Every day. I had a teapot in my bedroom so that the kids might be slightly fooled that I wasn’t up and also my brain might be equally fooled into not realizing that the day and its list of tasks had commenced.

5. I followed Anne Lamott’s genius advice about shitty first drafts. I wrote some really really bad drek. And that was okay.Because that is the only way anything decent will ever come into being. If you want to write and you haven’t read Bird by Bird, you are missing crucial information.

6. I didn’t drink. I’m grateful for that every day. I got it out of the way in my youth and am blissfully free now, when there is no way it would help my failing memory and dwindling energy. I go to the gym and let my hellish trainer torture me. I live gracefully with a few extra pounds–makes the face look not-gaunt, eh?

How about you? What are your strategies for survival?

Then I counseled to add weather. I mean this too. Once you have something going, put some weather in it. That is, get into the place, really be there, feel the wind or the sun or the salt spray. You can only communicate what you are feeling at the time. Sometimes this means you have to relive a hard experience, or make one up with such vividness that you feel as if it did happen. I have a suspicion that when I get dottier than I already am, I’m going to believe that everything I wrote actually happened–When you’ve had main characters who experienced extreme isolation,  having their ex-husband accused of murder, and being frontline on a huge oil spill in the Gulf, that is going to be one exciting life I lived!

But I digress.

Today I’m going to talk about setting–which, in many cases, is almost as important as character. Setting can, in fact, become a kind of character and can move the plot forward just as powerfully. Some writers go so far with it that they create an entire world–take Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings where the world, even though completely fantastic, is so real it comes with a map. Hemingway’s Paris is so compelling that The Sun Also Rises could not have happened anywhere else. Casablanca carries such an overwhelming sense of place an entire movie is named it.

My novel, The Algebra of Snow, takes place in the Adirondack Mountains in winter. The sense of cold and isolation is what we called in graduate school an objective correlative–an outer manifestation of an inner reality–for a woman who is dealing with an ancient grief over her mother’s death and the present loss of her husband, child, and dog. The far counterpoint to that might be Alexander McCall Smith’s First Ladies Detective agency series which is a lovely, quiet examination of life in Botswana through the wise eyes of a Botswanan lady detective. Life there is lovingly detailed and the characters are subtle, real, dramatic in the way real life people are dramatic. The warmth of the setting, again, reflects the warmth of the regard of the point of view character.

So take your choice–chilly psychological drama or warm observation–or have both. But don’t forget to think through your setting very carefully and lovingly–and use it powerfully.

What are some of your favorite novel settings and why?

Where is your novel set?