Lisa Writing Wild

  While cleaning up my writing room yesterday (now that bat season is over and I can go back up there), I came across this story I wrote in high school. It's embarrassing now, but at the time I was thrilled with the grade I received. Mrs. Petrie was my favorite teacher and the first person to really encourage me to keep writing. Even after this story. (The assignment was to tell the story that leads up to the moment in the picture. It should also be noted at this time in my life I was fascinated with the police and planned on becoming a cop after high school.) Pictured here is Ralph and Edna, two lonely people who now live in an old-folks home in Brooklyn, NY. Edna is a retired factory worker and Ralph is a retired cop. In this picture, while playing chess, Ralph is telling Edna one of his many stories of when he was a cop. However, this one particular story he's telling was about one of the worst situations he's ever been in.  Out of the thirty years Ralph had bee

I posted on Facebook yesterday about an incident at work concerning a cleaning customer who is lying to her husband about us cleaning the house. That got me thinking about the lies we tell (or don't tell) our spouses. I was shocked at the lady hiring us and keeping it from her husband. In nine years of cleaning houses, we've never come across a situation like this. I couldn't imagine lying to my husband about hiring (and paying!) cleaners. Now I may stretch the truth a bit by telling my husband I spent $20 on jeans when they were more like $29. But I figure there's a "2" in there so I'm not that far off. And in a previous marriage I might have been known to buy clothes or shoes, take them out of the bag before going into the house, cutting the tags and ditching the bags, then putting them right into my closet. When I'd wear them a week later he'd ask if it was new and I'd say no. Well, it wasn't brand new. I'd had it for at lea

I only started reading YA a year ago, but I've read well over fifty books since then. I get a lot of my book recommendations from reading other writers' blogs. There are two series' of books I had no interest in reading, but ended up loving. Ellen Hopkins' Crank  is the first YA book I read.  I didn't think I'd like it since it's written in verse, but the opposite happened. I ended up flying through the novel in less than two days, and went on to the next one, Glass. The third book, Fallout, was just released and I can't wait to read it. Since then I've read Identical, Tricks, and I just got Impulse. If you haven't read any of her books yet, I highly recommend picking one up. The second set of books I had no intention of reading but ended up loving, are Lisa McMann's Wake series. I'm not normally into fantasy novels, but again, I devoured the three books in this series. I was also lucky enough to meet her at a signing and get my book

I made my son cry twice today. That's two times more than he's cried all week. He's a really good boy and almost never gives us any trouble. We don't normally yell at him because we just don't have to. And we never spank. This morning I started his day off on a bad note when I told him he needed a hair cut.  I even offered to let him get a mohawk. He said he "didn't want to go to the hair cut store," and suggested I get mine cut instead. I won that argument. After his hair cut he asked if he could buy Halloween make-up. I took him to four different stores to find what he wanted. He started to throw a fit as we walked to the last store, and I snapped at him telling him he should be thankful I was carting him around trying to find exactly what he was looking for and not whining. He immediately burst into tears and said, "You yelled at me." We hugged it out. Later at home he wanted to put his make-up on, but I had to make us lunch firs

Not all habits are bad. When my four year old is in the car or concentrating on something, he likes to sing. The songs rarely make sense, but he's in his own little world. He's also a head banger (and has been since he could lift his head as a baby) and will watch TV while banging his head back on the couch. It relaxes him. But it has to have the right feel. He's been known to test-bang on a couch or bed to see if he likes it. He'll also bang in his car seat and (face down) when he first gets into bed and in the middle of the night. It's usually accompanied by humming, which is the reason we've never been able to go on a vacation and share a room with him. For the last few nights we've been getting ready for Glee's new season by watching the last season on DVD. Our son  loves the show and we've been letting him stay up late with us to watch. He'll sit next to me and bang his head back on the couch while the Glee members sing. When he get

Creativity is  the opposite  of routine.                                               I'll never be a soccer mom, because I can't guarantee I'll get my son to the   soccer games. I keep our family pretty busy with activities, but most of them are spontaneous. We signed our son up to play baseball with our local homeschooling group, and we made one game. Every Monday night I not only completely forgot about it, but when my son said he'd rather play outside, I let him. We don't eat dinner at the same time every night, I can't stick to a writing routine for the life of me, our four year old doesn't have a set bed time, and if we have parties we wait til the night before to plan our menu. I like that we're spontaneous and we can pick up and leave to do anything. And I think we keep life interesting by deciding to eat hot fudge sundaes before dinner. And we love our house cleaning business because our schedule is wacky. My husband doesn

My husband and I were cleaning a house for a psychiatrist or psychologist or one of those ists the other day. We were talking about my writing and I mentioned that I have a hard time finishing my work. I'll get gung-ho about a new shiny idea and think about it day and night. Then I'll start to work on it, think it was stupid or not be able to come up fantastic ideas, and quit. I don't throw it out, I just put it aside and either move onto the next shiny idea or work on my last shiny idea I'd abandoned. I also have a terrible time making decisions. Which is a major problem when it comes to working on plot points. It's so bad that I can't even decided which project to work on, so I don't work on anything for a while. I'm wasting a lot of precious writing time. Before I even finished talking, she said that she thinks I have ADD . It all made sense when she said that. My dad says he has the same problem with finishing projects and deciding what to work on.

I found out three days ago through a Facebook email that a childhood friend had died. The person who died was a guy I hadn't seen in thirty years (I'm forty). His death unexpectedly hit me harder than anyone's death has (including my grandmothers'--whom I took care of--last year) since my mom died eleven years ago.  I was floored by his death, and not just because he was only thirty-six and had kids. He was best friends with my brother when we were kids, and I was best friends with his sister. Like a lot of neighborhoods in the 70s, us kids were allowed to run around all day going from house to house and came home when the street lights came on. I felt terrible having to call my brother and tell him about his friend dying, even though he hadn't talked to him in years. We still always considered the kids on that street our friends even if we hadn't spoken in years. He was crushed and felt terrible that he hadn't called him when I had given him his number,

I learned something the other day from Darcy Pattison's website,  Fiction Notes . She recommends writing one page a day, five days a week. I'm working towards that goal, but for now I've started doing what she used to do: write for fifteen minutes a day. It doesn't sound like much at all, but compared to getting nothing done, it's a lot. I'm usually home with my four year old all day and our days stay pretty full. We have lots of museum trips, park exploring, games and activities we make up and play dates. In a few days I'll be starting a regular schedule of homeschooling for him. Needless to say, I feel too guilty to sit and write during the day. He's constantly asking me to play with him and I can't say no. Every day I think I'll write when my husband comes home, but it just never happens. My son is glued to me anyway, so trying to sneak off for a while to write almost never works. Last Thursday I hung a calender in the playroom (where my t

I tried. I really tried. I got through Just Listen , then I tried Lock and Key and This Lullaby . And I just couldn't finish the last two. I like the plots of her stories, I just feel like they start to drag about midway through the book. I don't have any time during the day to read, so I read novels at bedtime. I know when I'm dreading going to bed because I don't want to read the novel I have next to my bed, I've got a problem. I'm still at the point where I can finish This Lullaby if I wanted, but it's just not keeping my interest. If I wanted to pick up Lock and Key again I'd definitely have to start over because I've forgetten most of it by now. On another note, I found a great book thanks to someone's blog on here (sorry, I forgot who). Jennifer Brown's Hate List has been keeping me up late at night. I'm halway through it now and hope I finish it soon so I can get some sleep. It can be a little dark and depressing, but it&#