The To Didn’t List (part whatever part we are on, and also the end)

Remember the To Didn’t list? It got interrupted by little deers and spiritual cleansing, but it was basically a massive effort to clean up my EMAIL FILES, including all the self mailed ones that said ZOMGAH! BLOG ABOUT THIS!!!

And now? I need that TEENY little lady from Poltergeist to come in here…remember her?

Except instead of HOUSE, she would say IN-BOX.

SO here is the last of it, including others that came in while I was shoveling through:

1) Iron Man is supersonic popcorn fun, Robert Downey Jr. is AWESOME, and there is something to be said for casting actors who are capable of Shakespeare in Love and Chaplan in a big boom-filled summer flick, and the something that can be said is this: It makes the movies that are OBLIGATORY VIEWING for the parents of 11 year old boys a pleasure instead of a duty.

(Do you HEAR me POKEMON franchise, you damp floppy animated MISERY? Get ROBERT DOWNEY JUNIOR TO PLAY PIKACHU and MAYBE I will forgive you the 90 minutes of my life I WILL NEVER GET BACK after I sit through you. PS. If you DO snag RD Jr, I think Pikachu should be shirtless. A lot.)

2) SHOULD I HAVE AN FAQ PAGE? Does anyone ever READ FAQ pages? As it stands, I have slowly built up a sizeable file called “ANSWERS TO FAQS.” But put them on a page? Yes? No? FAQ pages always feel distancing and impersonal to me, but are they actually LESS impersonal than having a file with the answers in my MS word and cutting and pasting answers via email? I feel WEIRD and rude doing that, but at the same time, I can’t type out the same answer anew each time someone asks a question I am often asked…

PRO: If I did have an FAQ page, we could do a contest where you send in SUGGESTIONS for questions that should be ON the FAQ, and sending one would put your name in a drawing or something? What do you think?

3) Huzzah! It is more blathering and COMPLETELY unsolicited advice for writers! YOU’RE WELCOME!

On one of my favorite lists, a writer was trying to market her book to small Christian publishers and having little success because of the material---a little dark. At the same time, she has gotten rejections from agents and editors that say things like, “"Though your piece is certainly compelling and worthy of good home, I do not have a place for it at this time...I hope I rue the day I didn't offer you a contract"

I don’t think she realizes how ENCOURAGING that is! I think part of the problem is that she is deciding ahead of time where her book would fit in the industry, but she doesn’t know the industry. Neither do I, quite frankly, and you probably do not either, Oh Faceless Writer Reading This On The Internets, which is why The Lord in his infinite wisdom made agents.

I thought gods in Alabama was Christian fiction. Hee. Yes. Really. That is where I saw myself selling it…Oops, except it also had graphic sex, graphic violence, and a narrator who used the F word in it about umpty hundred times. SO. No Christian press would touch it. With a 20 foot pole. Not even if the pole had a dead possum on the end of it.

They MIGHT have been willing to touch it with a FIFTY foot pole, provided if the pole had had a stick of Zest Soap on the end, and assuming they could use the pole to stuff the WHOLE bar right into my protagonist's POTTILICIOUS MOUTH. I felt then -- I still feel -- that while the F words were plentiful, not a single one was gratuitous. (DIGRESSION BACK TO THING 2 ---A question that would absolutely have to be on the FAQ would be “Did you HAVE to use the F word so bountifully in gods in Alabama? My EYES are Bleeding! Was it REALLY necessary?” Answer: Yes.) I wasn't willing to let Arlene eat the soap and say things NICERLY.

SO--- YOU may think your book is a romance, but actually it s a thriller. Or vice versa. We are not the most objective viewers of our own work. A good agent knows what presses are looking for which sorts of objects, and as writers, we shouldn't have to worry our pretty head about such things. LA LA LA! That's not our job. I wish our job was "eating petit fours and shopping for VERY expensive shoes, " but alas, that ain't it either. If we move to New York and start networking and meeting every editor in town and researching pub lists for five years, who is going to write the next book? That's what we do. We write the next book.

If you are getting the sorts of rejections from agents that say the writing is good, that means you are getting PAST the query stage and having your MS or a partial of your MS read, and then getting GOOD PERSONAL rejections on top of that. That is a message from above! And the message is, "QUERY MORE AGENTS."

Here endeth the in-box To Didn’ts, and they are all TO ALREADY HAVE BEEN DIDS now. I feel we deserve a cookie.

Treat Fell Out. Who was Left? (Hint: Not Pink Socks)

Treat Fell Out. Who was Left? (Hint: Not Pink Socks) is actually Part 2 of yesterday’s entry, titled, “Treat and Retreat (were sitting in a boat?)”
But it is not here. Hee.

Late last night I suddenly REALIZED it was my day to blog at A Good Blog is Hard to Find so you can find the WHOLE entry, both parts molded together into a single story over THERE.

If you missed yesterday’s entry, just hit the link above for the whole thing, OR, if you were here yesterday, go there and just scroll about halfway down to pick up where I left off. It’s awkward, I AM sorry, but some folks who regularly read THAT blog have not have been here FIRST to read the beginning.

Treat and Retreat (were sitting in a boat?)

I forgot to tell you I was going on retreat! I left on Friday…I was feeling all spiritually clogged and barn sour and hatefully weepy and SO SO SO SORRY FOR MYSELF and I think it was sticking out EVERYWHERE. My best friend is being eaten by her children’s SPRING activity flood (as am I, best beloveds, as are all parents) and so we hadn’t talked in a couple of weeks. She called me and said , “WOW I CAN TELL FROM THE WORDS AROUND THE EDGES OF YOUR BLOG THAT YOU ARE ONE RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC AFTERNOON AWAY FROM HEADING UP TO THE TOP OF A WATER TOWER WITH AN OUZI! WHAT GIVES?”

And I was all, “OH! ‘Scuse me! Is my mental illness showing? Here, let me just tug my skirt down…” And so I tried, but I fast realized I didn’t have NEAR enough cloth. I would have needed a hoop skirt to rival Scarlet O’Hara’s at the BBQ to hide all of the FROTHY layers of lacey mental illness I’d wrapped around myself. “WAHHHHH I am a big fat hateful selfish cannibalistic failure with BAD HAIR WAHHHHH! Who is a sad! Sad! Panda? WHO? MEMEMEMMEME.” Like that.

So I headed off to a TV and traffic free woodland spot with a labyrinth and hiking trails down by the Chattahoochee River, and spent three days pretty much alternately marching around in the weeds and praying, and now I feel----retreated. Which is to say “significantly less crazy, with a firmer grasp on my actual priorities.”

The day before I left I thought, “I will go on retreat in the spirit of BABY BIRD! I will hunker down in a nest and scream and peep with an ENORMOUS OPEN BEAK and be stuffed with the worms of calmness and the worms of happiness and I will be given all good worms! ALL GOOD WORMS FOR ME!”

SO I went, and that first day, I was very weepy and stompy, and I missed my beautiful Television, and I missed my patient and beautiful husband, and I thought to myself, THIS IS USELESS! Where are my good worms??? I AM HOOTING AND PEEPING! I DEMAND THE GOOD WORMS! I came out here to the wilderness to find a TABLE in it. A BANQUET of sanity and grace spread just for me, and instead I found a table spread with ACTUAL WORMS, and NOT the kind that secretly mean peace, the damp squirmy kind…and here, you see, my baby bird and table in the wilderness metaphors met up and began breeding indiscriminately and had to be abandoned.

So Saturday morning I got up at 6 and put on my tennis shoes and went stomping down the trails with a map, like a moron. Because when it comes to choosing the correct fork while out hiking, a map is USELESS to me. I do not SPEAK map. I might as well take a bag of chicken bones and rattle them together and toss them to the earth and then see how they mystically fall to decide directions. Chicken bones, a map, magic 8 ball… same, same, all same.

But I took a map, and I headed into the woods.

Now you know I am not a beauty of the earth person. I know some people look at a sunset or a mountain or some flowers or whatever and they go OH! THE BEAUTY OF THE ERF! OHOHOH! And their eyes get misty and the wander off refreshed or whatever. Me? I say, “Dude. It’s a tree with some blooms on it, and come fall someone is going to have to RAKE that up when the tree poops it all off. Can we go watch TV now?”

But I AM an endorphin person. Hard physical work clears my head and makes me cheerful. SO! Armed with my map and a near psychotic level of optimism regarding my ability to use said map, I marked out a three mile course for myself. Then I put my head down and put my back into it. I am sure there were lots of lovely whatnots along the way, but I was looking at dirt and my feet so I could get a lot of speed without getting a lot of “falling onto my face and breaking it.” The trails were hilly and rooty – very satisfying, and soon I was tearing along them like a little steam engine, puff!puff!puff! very earnest.

A MIRACLE began to happen. Every time I STOPPED and checked the map, I was WHERE THE MAP SAID I SHOULD BE. It was BIZARRE! When the map said I would come to the river, I would come to the river. When the map said I would see the fork leading to the tent campgrounds, LO! There was a fork that led to the tent campgrounds. When the map said the labyrinth would be coming up on my left, THERE IT WAS! MAGICALLY ON THE LEFT! As if the WHOLE Labyrinth had grown centipede feet and creeped from where it USUALLY sat to wherever I was inevitably lost and plopped down just as I came around the corner as a gift to me.

THE GOOD WORMS! THE GOOD WORMS ON MY TABLE IN THE WILDERNESS! I crowed to myself, going even FASTER, and taking up my mis-mated metaphors again in the fervent heat of my delight.

And the whole thing was so VERY miraculous that I assumed it was Good Worms, and trusated it and put my head down, and stomped on trusting it, so that when I got to my last HALF mile, I came BACK to the same little rotty-looking plank bridge over a creek THREE times before I realized I was absolutely and hopelessly and finally rightly and justifiably Lost. As usual.

EEP – Must run! LATE. More tomorrow.

The To Didn’t List, part 3

My friend Carmen had the Best Vacation Idea Ever--- remember when Karen and I went to a lit con and on the way we passed the CRIME AND PUNISHMENT museum and we wanted to stop and sit in Old Sparky and learn about guillotines? Except that as usual we mucked it up?

That Blog Entry gave Carmen and her best friend Stephanie the idea to go on a roadtrip wonderland of BIZARRO SOUTHERN TINY TOURIST ATTRACTIONS called Carmanie's 1st Annual Dark'N'Twisty DirtyBackRoadtrip Cruisapalooza. They will be going to off OFF beat and sometimes profoundly disturbing places – the reallife versions of Bernese Frett’s TRULY creepy museum in Between, Georgia

They are having T Shirts made.
They are making COMP TAPES.
They are SERIOUS.

They are even going to Southern Forest World in Waycross Georgia, home of "Stuckie the Petrified Dog!!" This is literally a dead dog who somehow died while “stuck” IN A TREE, and he now is very petrified and very famous. In Waycross. When he was discovered they plexi-glassed him INSIDE the tree and built a whole touristy thing around HIM. Yes, they did. THEY REALLY DID. Of COURSE they did. OH, How I love Georgia!

Here are a few more of their ODD STOPS!

International Towing And Recovery Hall of Fame & Museum <---true! exists! INTERNATIONAL!

-Road Kill Cafe' (White, GA)

-Oakland Cemetery/ and Six Feet Under Restaurant

-Antique Funeral Museum/Margaret Mitchell Playhouse (How can a FUNERAL be antique?)

-Abandoned Insane Asylums at Central State Hospital and the Flannery O'Connor gravesite & memorial in Milledgeville

Winecoff Hotel (the "Titanic" of hotels)

-Warthen (oldest jail in GA - Aaron Burr was imprisoned there)

-Woolfolk Murders Site & Rose Hill Cemetery (Macon)

Corpsewood Manor (Trion, GA)

Bloodstained Crypt of Little Nina Craigmiles

Bud Jones Taxidermy Museum in Tallapoosa (THEY! HAVE! A! WHOLE! ENTIRE! RHINO! Makes that raccoon look like amateur hour…)

Smithsonian Institute Tick Museum in Statesboro (VIVA LA TICKS!)

I wish I was going! SEND PICTURES!!!!

They have a quite a few more stops. But they missed one – Hey CARMANIE – if you guys head into ALABAMA, you should go see the HELL BILLBOARD AND WATERWHEEL that lies midway between Birmingham and Montgomery---it’s been there as long as I can remember, and I feel it is only a hat vendor and cotton candy stand away from being a legit tourist destination...

The To Didn't List. Part 2: Dead Raccoon Wednesday Has Come At Last

Really Actually 1) On Thursday, my post about The Mystery of My Son’s Missing Uniform Shirts was cryptically titled HAPPY DEAD RACCOON THURSDAY in honor of me being a barn sour hateful poohead who was not going to be doing any LURVE bloggin’, even though Love Thursday blogs have become Tradition. As my friend and fellow bloggess Mir put it in Comments, “Love Thursday is a nice distraction from the BLACKNESS OF MY HEART. But, wait. Am I to understand that a dead raccoon stole Sam's shirts? Am confused.”

I admit, that title was not exactly clear. SEE I sat down to blog about a sorrowfully accusing and judgmental dead raccoon I met in a cafe, and JUST THEN my son came in wearing a filthy shirt saying it was the only uniform shirt in existence, and my HEAD popped off and I ranted on about shirts and forgot I already had that dead raccoon with his convicting stare in the title.

(MAY I DIGRESS and say that 14 days ago I went and bought this SAME shirt-eating son 12 pairs of white athletic socks and also some Khaki and Navy and Black dress socks….and I just did his laundry. There was a TOTAL of 1 lonely white sock in the basket, apologetically stinking of boy foot and wondering where its mate and all its many cousins and relations have gone off to. There are no clean socks in his drawers. I CANNOT under stand it. I CANNOT! It has been only two weeks!

HOW? HOW IS THIS HUMANLY POSSIBLE???? Does he peel them off and throw them DIRECTLY into that other dimension? And this ONE sock missed the porthole and is now doomed to wander the house alone while its brethren swim happily about in the primordial soup of Dimension X where socks are the kindly sentient rulers and people have evolved into blobs with 50 or 60 FEET jutting out that the Socks use as seating for large sporting events? Which, now I am sitting here imagining what events would make up the Dimension X Sock-lympics and in another paragraph I will have veered away from the dead raccoon entirely. NO! NO! I SHALL DIGRESS NO MORE.)

SO! I MEANT to tell you about this place I went to eat upstate while giving the keynote speech at The Blue Ridge Writer’s Conference. I WISH I could remember the name of this place, because I ate probably the best pecan crusted trout I have had since Hurricane Katrina, that vicious city ruining horror, took out Bella Luna.

Maybe you know the Georgia place with the amazing trout? Near Blue Ridge? If you do, say the name in the comments. It has a long name, like 5 or 6 words and SOME of the words may be “On the river” or “By the River?” Or it could have been “Someone’s Riverview Something Something Café?” Like that.

I had been warned in advance that the place—let’s call it “Someone’s Something Yummy Trout River Oops! Deer Heads! Yikes! Café” --- I had been wanred that SSYTRO!DH!Y!C is dry, so they could NOT sell wine or beer, but if you bring your own bottle in, they will uncork it for you and let you drink it for a 3 buck surcharge. I was eating with a bunch of writers, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US showed up with a bottle, and one intrepid sort had brought THREE, so there were literally more bottles of wine than PEOPLE at the table.

The upside is the food. The food was just….awesome. The trout came with sautéed spinach that had had something DONE to it that involved oregano and tomatoes and the barest hint of cream, and it was a WONDERFUL thing to do to spinach. The trout was so flakey and light and sweet, and they had removed the HEAD which is important to me. I can’t stand to have my dinner LOOKING at me accusingly.

Which brings us to the DOWNSIDE. They have a lovely enclosed glass patio where you can eat with the burbling river washing past. Alas, that room was FULL. THEREFORE, we were seated in the main dining hall by a picture window that looked down on same burbling, lovely river. SO that was nice. BUT! The OTHER side of the room was practically WALLPAPERED with trophy heads. MANY MANY MANY animals stared blankly down from that wall.

I felt BAD for them, which struck me as ironic: I felt terrible for the bears and the deers, but not the trout I was eating. I did not feel bad for the trout at ALL because if God had wanted the trout to not be eaten, he would not have especially BLESSED that chef with TOTAL TROUT GENIUS so he could make it TASTE LIKE THAT. Also the trout had no HEAD and was not LOOKING AT ME. Also, if those bears had still had bodies and working stomachs, they would have eaten the trout, too.

DIGRESSION: I am not opposed to hunting if you are hunting to eat. I am an omnivore—I can tell by looking at my teeth. Omnivores eat meat, meat comes from animals, meat is very super yummy, circle of life, moves us all, etc. I have to admit the NON-eating style of hunting just to SHOOT something bugs me. If you want to just SHOOT SOMETHING – and I have recently discovered that shooting things is SUPER fun---allow me to suggest a Pepsi Can. And if you want to put the blasted remains of the Pepsi can on a plaque and hang it on your wall, I think THAT would be more charming than a deer head. JUST SAYING. Hanging dead HEADS is WEIRD. I don’t get why you would want to keep the head of a thing you ate (or worse, SHOT FOR FUN) and paste it to the WALL to LOOK at you.

Anyway. I tried to keep my head turned toward the gorgeous river view, so much so that I got a crick in my neck trying to NOT look at the dead animal head wall. It wasn’t IMPOSSIBLE to ignore them. After all, the trout was phenomenal, we had a ridiculous number of open wine bottles and I was not driving. AND the bear and deer were very glassy eyed----they looked extremely FAKE to me, like they had been constructed out of paper mache. I found by the second glass of wine, I did not TRULY believe they were ACTUAL DEERS. Because every actual deer I have ever seen has a BODY. In fact, if I ever saw an alive deer head floating serenely on a legless path through the woods I think I would be screaming SHOOT IT SHOOT IT WHAT IS THAT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY SHOOT IT.

But the raccoon was another matter. Look, this is him:

As you can see, he is a WHOLE raccoon and therefore looks exactly like an ALIVE raccoon, and from where I was sitting he was angled TOWARD ME so that his gaze met mine every time my neck crick made me look away from the river toward Bad Animal Wall. Or maybe he was like a furry, taxidermied Uncle Sam, and I would have felt his gaze no matter where I moved. You can see that this is a raccoon that the world has failed. He was weary and exhausted by the many evils that had caused him to end up on a wall with his feet dandling sorrowfully down. I have never SEEN such a sad face, except perhaps on that craggy looking native American gentleman who did not want us to LITTER. Remember him?

Anyway, all through dinner I would find my hand freezing as it lifted another bite of heavenly trout to my lips, and instead of eating it, I would be staring back at the raccoon, feeling judged, and harshly. That raccoon found me SERIOUSLY wanting. I felt I had FAILED him and by extension ALL animals by enjoying the sweet meaty goodness of trout in his presence. “It’s my TEETH,” I wanted to say to him. “I have evolved as an OMNIVORE. It is NOT PERSONAL. And I never ate RACCOON for the love-a-pete. You probably don’t even TASTE good. Not that I would KNOW because I SWEAR I NEVER ATE RACOON! Or BEAR, for that matter.” I was diplomatically silent on the subject of delicious venison. Er, I mean, beautiful little deers. He was not appeased. Look at the moistness of his sincere gaze! He will never be appeased! He will stare down from his wall, judging us, until the day the lion lies down with the lamb to enjoy some hummus and corn muffins.

The moral here? It may very well be TAXIDERMY IS CREEPY. Or to put it another way, FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS DO TAXIDERMY. Or perhaps it is that we should all become vegans. Or that at LEAST we should only kill what we eat, and NO ONE should under ANY circumstances eat raccoons.

But I think the pragmatist’s moral is this: If someone in the comments can come up with the ACTUAL NAME of the restaurant, and you decide to go there to have that SPECTACULAR trout, do yourself a favor. Wait for the all river-view patio seating.