End-of-semester list

1. Our Christmas tree smells so delicious that I want to eat it. That's probably a sign of iron deficiency, as in when you crave ice. My teeth cringed just thinking about it.

2. The semester is done and I want to sloth on the couch all break with books, movies, a blanket, some popcorn, my family.

3. I want to get my brain back into writing shape. It's in commenting shape, critiquing shape, lecturing shape. I have filled a few notebooks about the different energy needed to teach vs. write.

4. We survived a semester of full-time daycare for two kids. I'm not quite sure how, especially while potty-training the older and breastfeeding the younger. The morning routine was...not pretty. Two nights a week, Dada picked them up, cooked dinner, and put them to bed solo while I taught. Some nights, I'm told, were...not pretty.

5. The kids did great. They love their school. I've missed them terribly.

6. I've enjoyed working and thinking. Teaching new books and learning new things. Trips to the library to write and research in peace.

7. My winter break babyproofing today involved a metal file, a roll of wire, and some all-purpose snips. This business is no joke.

8. I have about a hundred things rattling around in my head right now, like fill out the forms for the pediatric dentist and reply to the email from the department head. Finish your beverage and put away the Goldfish. Go to bed and get the rest you've been promising yourself.

9. OK. OK. OK. OK.

10. New fiction about Indianapolis, in the Mythic Indy series at Punchnel's, called Carpe Lucem. Those from my 'hood might recognize the Monon Trail, Mama Carolla's, Joe V. from Yats in a cameo as the piano store owner.

11. Boy howdy do I love a head-clearing list. This one only scratched the surface. But sometimes that's as deep as the itch goes.

Yes you can

Question. And that's if only I can ask this question. Can I?*

YES YOU CAN!**

Are you free Saturday night? That's my question. Because I would like to cordially invite you to Indy Reads Books on Mass Ave. in Indianapolis. I'll be reading some words at A NIGHT OF WORDS, 7:30 p.m., with UIndy student Elise Campagna. It should be fun. You should come.

*De la Soul lyric

**Reference to Tribe Called Quest lyric within De la Soul lyric***

***Which samples all these other songs, beautifully, including one by Lou Reed, who is referenced all the time, especially this week (RIP).

Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize

Alice Munro: DEAR LIFE. God, isn't it? #fridayreads

— Sarah Layden (@calmoots) April 27, 2013

Uncovering...the cover!

Forthcoming from Engine Books, early 2015.

No. 1 Comedy Duo

The other night, I was setting up the humidifier in our bedroom to combat a little cold. I'm bonking into the (open) closet doors, negotiating my way around the bed, trying not to knock over the Pack n' Play, which we still use in our room for the baby's naps. Space is at a premium these days.

Husband: It's like trying to set up a humidifier in a clown car.
Me: Clowns can get congested.
Husband: Yeah, all that powdery makeup.

Thank you! We'll be here all week! Try the veal!

Forthcoming

What a great word.

Especially when in reference to a book. Mine, that is. I am falling-down thrilled that Engine Books will publish my debut novel, TRIP THROUGH YOUR WIRES, with a launch date tentatively scheduled for February 2015.

This is the novel-formerly-known-as. Read my Next Big Thing post if you want to know more. But I'm training myself on the new title, so it's Voldemort City from here on out.

Did I skywrite the news, or bark a cheer into a bullhorn from the roof of my single-story dwelling? I did not. But those were things that crossed my mind as options, when I imagined what would happen upon the novel's acceptance. I think I'm still kind of processing that this is actually happening. So skywriting/bullhorns aren't out of the question, but they'll most likely occur later. Or my tweets/Facebook status updates will have served as their equivalents.

(I just tried to copy/paste a bit of blog code, and the whole True/False section of the Humanities literature exam I was writing earlier filled the screen. File under: moments you are glad didn't happen in class.)

Forthcoming. A book. My book.

Just the facts

We went on vacation. We drove many miles. We came home and ate taquitos. My oldest friend had a baby. We met him in the hospital. While we were there the security company called and said our alarm was going off. We tried to race home but a slow truck got in our way. We yelled expletives. We honked the horn. The children laughed with glee. At home there was no sign of forced entry. Last time there was forced entry. The house appeared ransacked but it was just the work of toddlers. Nothing was missing. No one was under the bed. The security company said there wasn't a glitch on their end. I did a little laundry but the washer is unbalanced and spun out. Our towels still smell like sunscreen and I don't want to go to sleep. Ten days of so-so sleeping in the same room as the noisily breathing babies and I want them in our room again. The glitch was not on their end, they said.

It's like fireworks, baby

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing is a blog hop, a chance for writers all over the world to talk about what they're working on. When you’re tagged, you answer ten questions about your next book or story, link to the person who tagged you, then tag 3-5 other writers.

I was tagged by Barb Shoup, writer and advocate extraordinaire. I like to refer to her as my literary fairy godmother. (Read her Next Big Thing post here.) And while you're at it, read An American Tune, Barb's new novel from IU Press. Great stuff.

Check out a post here from Sarah White, an excellent writer and all-around person.

Now, the questions...

What is your working title of your book? Sleeping Woman

(NEW TITLE IN THE WORKS! 8/31/13)

Where did the idea come from for the book? When I started my MFA program at Purdue University, I knew I wanted to try to write a novel for my thesis, though I didn't know yet what I'd write about. In my second semester, I began a very short story told in second person, a "you" who becomes very sick while traveling abroad and is sent home. That short piece became a chapter, and ultimately the "you," once a man, turned into a she: Carey Halpern, the main character. Her physical ailments were revised out in later drafts, and it turned out that her real sickness was grief over her boyfriend's murder.

What genre does your book fall under? Literary fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? When my sister read a draft a few years ago, she pictured James Franco as Ben. And look, if this is fantasy, I'll just go ahead and cast Jennifer Lawrence as Carey. Now that she's done blockbusters, perhaps she'll be looking for some indie work. For Mike: Matt Damon circa Good Will Hunting.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Indianapolis native Carey Halpern buries her grief and guilt deep inside when her boyfriend is murdered in Mexico during her junior year abroad; seven years later, her new job among recent immigrants, a familiar stranger online, and a break in the murder case force her to confront the role Ben played in her life – and the role she played in his death.

Do you have a publisher for your book yet? Not yet. It has come close a few times at places both big and small, which by turns gives me dyspepsia and encourages me to keep trying.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? About 2 1/2 years. I estimate that I've written about six or seven more drafts since then.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? Trick question. My work is completely original! But, if you like X, you will love Sleeping Woman! How's this: some books I found helpful while working on this novel were The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers, and Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott. Also, Susan Minot’s Evening, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog and Case Histories. For starters.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I studied in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. It was life-changing, as these experiences are, and I often found myself returning in memory to that trip, particularly a side visit we made to the medieval city of Guanajuato. When I moved back to Indiana for my MFA, I was amazed at how much the Hispanic population had grown in Indianapolis. My study abroad experience came back to me instantly, though my Spanish was a little rusty. The changes in Indy -- and the way memory changes as you look back -- became topics I was interested in exploring.

A few of us from the exchange program recently reunited, and I found myself caught again between the memory of things that happened, and how other people remembered the same events. Small things, small differences, but still important ones. I returned to Mexico in 2005 to research the novel; much had changed, but there were some things I was surprised to remember wholly. They're in the book.

Guanajuato, GTO, Mexico

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest? There's a lot that people might relate to. Things like coping with a senseless death. Understanding yourself and your place in the world. Navigating language and cultural barriers, both at home and abroad. The electronic miscommunications that occurred in the mid-1990s -- the early days of the Internet and e-mail. Tourism, photography, and being socially aware. Immigration and all its risks.

The issues of immigration, forged documents, and illegal drugs are woven into the novel. Last October, The Indianapolis Star reported a record marijuana bust of more than 5.25 tons in an Indianapolis warehouse. The drugs came from a Mexican cartel. Immigration continues to be a hot-button topic, both locally and nationally, as Latinos are the fastest-growing group in the United States. Indianapolis’s Latino population (based on the city’s West side, the setting in the novel) grew 70 percent from 2000-2005; that’s more than any other group. American tourism in Mexico has plummeted, largely due to fears of drug-related violence.

These are current problems, and there are also evergreen themes: loss, grief, regret, and what to do with love when one’s intended will not or cannot accept it.

Surveillance

1. Living in a surveilled society usually puts me on edge, on guard, at the very least wishing I'd employed a comb before leaving the house; I see cameras and screens and think that we are trapped, and we are, on monitors in color or black and white, depending.

2. Today I looked at surveillance video from Monday's Boston Marathon bombing, the two suspects who looked young, like kids (8 year old among the dead, and I can't even let my brain visit that subject, no, I can't, the gap-toothed smile, the birthday hat), wearing caps and backpacks and loping lankily down the sidewalk, and me and my husband speculating on their story, their reason, their M.O., the stories upon stories we are creating from what we see on this screen, the one in our house that shows people from another place on another screen.

3. The cameras did what they were supposed to do, but not in time to prevent. Only to punish.

4. When I enter the grocery store, I look up and see myself on the security camera's screen. I always make eye contact with myself. I imagine this footage of me needing to be released, because this is the footage we see of people, sometimes. Smiling or unaware or sniffing kumquats, being ordinary, being alive. We are being watched, but I want it to be known, now and later if it becomes necessary: I'm watching, too. You, whoever you are, viewing from another location: I cannot see you but I know you're there.

5. Forget obsolete videotape in the digital world: now what we waste is time. How much footage have we sifted through, how many moments must we relive only to discard them? We rewind and fast-forward and make judgement calls about what these images are worth, these images as people were and no longer are, soaked in dumb beauty and exaggerated humanity, o the lives we will never get back.

Listomania

Which is like Lisztomania, as well as Lisztomania. I would like someone to make a list/liszt out of any of the items on this list, in the style of an Onion infographic. Please and thank you.

1. Who's Hiding the Travel Coffee Mug Lids?

2. What Happened to the Leftover Birthday Cake?

3. Why Are We So Angry?

4. Snow in March: Lament of the Crocuses

5. It is Spring, and Other Lies

6. What Bodily Fluids Are We Wearing this Season on Our Unwashed Fleece Sweatshirts?

7. Who Are We Running Into While Wearing Our Fleece Sweatshirts to the Chinese Takeout Place?

8. Sweatshirts: A Love Affair

9. Who Are We Rooting For?

10. If I Could Eat Lunch All Over Again, I'd Order Breakfast

Your Wife's Heart is in My Chest Cavity

...Or as the film is more commonly known, Return to Me. Driver, Duchovny, yeah? A bunch of us were out at The Red Key ages ago and I couldn't remember the title and instead came up with that: Your Wife's Heart is in My Chest Cavity.

"Is that the foreign translation?" a friend asked.

Kinda. It also popped into my head today as people responded to the essay I have in the March issue of Ladies' Home Journal, about going through IVF, and what that was like for me and my husband.

(Photo by the truly nice and truly talented Brian Sorg.)

I'd been really nervous to share this story. It's personal. I wasn't sure how people would respond. For a long time, I couldn't talk about going through infertility. I couldn't write about it. Reading other people's stories helped, reading blogs helped, and I kept hoping that would be the case for someone else if I shared our story. Today, friends and family gave me so much support I felt like my heart was beating out of my own chest cavity.

From my thumping heart to yours, Valentines.

xoxo sl

New Year, Same You

When the calendar flips, you have another chance to be better. It is 2013. You can be better than ever in this year, you learn, in terms of losing weight, exercising more, publishing your novel, landing your dream job, raising your children, being a good spouse, keeping an organized household, mending your own clothes, tending your free range chickens, changing the car's oil in a timely fashion (and mess-free in the driveway, using a funnel made from upcycled dried coffee filters reinforced with papier mache, accented with cruelty-free raffia, as seen on Pinterest), walking three times a day, doing sun salutations between laundry loads, brushing your hair more regularly, creating activities appropriate to your child's developmental level in order to maximize his/her learning potential, boiling down a homemade version of sidewalk de-icing salt that's less corrosive to city cement and better for environmental runoff, handmaking peanut butter birdseed bells for the cardinals and the woodpeckers, and the squirrels, because they also are hungry, albeit obnoxious, and you've already mentioned squirrels a few times in this venue and are beginning to look a little nutty. A-corny. C'mon. Let's try, here. Let's at least put in an effort. Put up appearances. New Year, New You.

The calendar flips with or without you. There you are, on your way to library story time with the kids, and Dunkin' Donuts is not on the way but does have a drive-thru, and it might not the best idea to feed a two-year-old half a glazed donut before story time, but what the hey, he does fine, he likes it, and how about a Boston cream for you? And another cup of coffee? Yes. That third cup of coffee puts you in the zone. Turns you from mediocre to SUPER IDEA PERSON. Clearly caffeine is a drug, and you are going to get all you can before it is outlawed. You went to the gym the other day and burned off last week's pastries along with the intermittent anxiety over cobbling together multiple part-time jobs, returning to work after baby, taking baby to daycare for first time (avoid that thought), of job applications labored over and spinning aimlessly into black holes, the sorting of modern life, the emails that disappear into dusty e-folders, overstuffed and never to be seen again, the sorting and storage of toys with one million parts moved daily in and out of bins, parts that you trip over each day.

You did sun salutations for the first week of the new year, until you forgot or your wrists started aching, or both, wrists that flare with carpal tunnel and the usage of the technology of modern life, that ache from the lifting and nursing and buttoning and caring for two small people dependent largely on you for their survival. The older one turns off the computer with five browser tabs on the screen and three documents-in-progress, an unsubtle opposition to the end of the tractor video on YouTube. (That weirdly passionate song about excavators: rock on, 1988, with your badass synthesizers. This song will be in your head all day.) Everyone says, "Time goes so fast. Cherish this age!" And you do. Or you try. Because you have learned that the months and years go fast. It is the days that are slow. You wonder how it possibly could be just 12:30 p.m. when it feels like you've done enough work for three weeks.

This complaining! Do you think you work in a sweatshop? (No.) Do you think you are paid cruel wages? (Well. Adjunct pay minus the cost of daycare equals No Benefits in most senses of the phrase. It equals anchors aweigh on the S.S. Explore Your Options). Sorting emails, toys, employment, wah wah wah. Complain less in the new year by writing in a handcrafted-by-you gratitude journal, with deckle-edged paper and French flaps. Iron on a tree decal to the 100-percent cloth cover, as a reminder that trees give, just as in the children's book, and you are a tree, sturdy of trunk and long of limb, and your reach extends over many. Do not think about the fact that the tree winds up being a stump, and is all like, I've given, and you've taken and taken, and I would love it if you just sat on me some more!

(You are missing the point of the story. The point is selflessness. But that book has always made you sad in the wrong way. Or maybe the right one.)

Forget where you put the gratitude journal. Pledge to make a new one.

Or not. While the kids nap, dig out a cruddy notebook

last used for a class you taught. Rip out the old pages, the notes you chalked on a board, ideas that students may or may not have copied into their own notebooks. Sit down with your favorite pen, the Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine, black ink. Stretch a little, do a sun salutation or two if you can stand it, knowing that your wrists will hurt only until they get stronger again. Think about your two-year-old's enthusiasm for just about everything: "I love this!" he exclaims daily, about Christmas ornaments and toy trucks. About measuring cups and pine cones and the occasional donut. The four-and-a-half-month-old grins and grins, sighing comically at the end of a sneeze. Write about that, write about anything. Get it published or don't. The caffeine and sugar and pen and notebook and clumsy yoga: these make you you. So many changes, yet this remains. Run a hand through tangled hair. Grin a little. New Year, Same You.