Lucky 500

Today I stopped by the printers to pick up what will probably be the last batch of issue #1 I'll need. This makes 500 copies created, paid for, and largely bespoken. I was afraid, a few months ago, that I wouldn't be able to find a good home for the 200 I had the nerve to order.

Pathetic, if you compare it to, say, The New Yorker, or even a decent university review. But pretty good for the first issue of a magazine the necessity of which a lot of people still need to have explained to them.

I know that someday I will have a mailing service handling things for me, and there will no longer be this lugging upstairs of bulky boxes; and my back and the other residents of my dinky apartment will be appropriately grateful for the change. But I also know that I should enjoy this stage of the magazine's life, in the same way that I should have savored my son's early babyhood. There's a lot of just plain physical work involved, along with all the thinking and planning and sleepless nights. But once that demanding stage is past, one thing is clear: life will never be so simple and innocent again.

Today was the first time I went alone to pick up a printing. I got to listen to the radio station I like all the way there and all the way back, and I wrangled the cardboard carton out of the trunk and through the security gate and up the stairs and through our front door all by myself into an empty apartment. I set the order down on the first empty chair I could find, and I looked at what I'd managed to do -- bring a much-loved, wanted, and hoped-for magazine into existence -- and just stood there and smiled at it. It has been very much a family endeavor, but it was quite fine to have a spell of unbroken quiet in which to admire it.

And then the moment passed, and I thought about all that I had to do on the next issue while still finding time to get these copies of the current issue out, and I slipped naturally into my accustomed state of frenzied semi-panic. It may not be everyone's idea of a good time, but it's getting the job done for me.

The Bitter Homeschooler's Poster?

Have I mentioned how much I appreciate the feedback I get here?

Have I buttered you up enough to maybe get a little more?

Okay, here's the sitch. A few days ago (which, given how frantically behind on everything I am just this minute, probably means more like a couple of weeks -- sorry about that), I got a lovely letter telling me how much the writer enjoyed the wish list. She wanted to know if it would be all right to make a poster -- just one, for her own personal use -- of the list.

I'm going to say yes. First, though, I'm going to kick myself very very hard several times for not having thought of making such a poster myself.

I've talked to the printer who does the mag, and it looks like we could get these pretty cheaply. So my graphics guy and I were playing with what exactly said poster might look like.

A poster of the whole list as it originally appeared in the magazine is perfectly possible. I worked at a political bookstore for years, and we sold that kind of all-text thing all the time.

It's a busy look, though. My layout guy thinks it might look nicer if there weren't so many words.

Well, I wrote the list. I can edit the list -- tighten it up by keeping the main points, but making them shorter and punchier.
I don't know if that's what people who like the list enough to hang it on their wall would want, though.

What do you think?

A Little List From St. Nick's Day (or, Time Flies When You're Having a Nervous Breakdown)

What I did today:

Woke up on couch and wondered briefly where the heck I was.

Reminded son to check his shoes for St. Nicholas' Day offerings.

Reread son's letter to St. Nicholas, dwelling on his request for "unlimited hugs from Mommy."

Watched numbly as email (not counting that filed in various topical folders) climbed to 1500s. Reminded self that, though rare and horrifying, not unprecedented.

Received advertisement I can't accept.

Received rejection from magazine that held my short story for months and months and months.

Received great quantities of chocolate from husband, friends and family who have been listening to my screams and pitiful sobs for the last few days.

Scrubbed down concrete-dust-infested kitchen in manner of woman hearing that lepers, plague victims, or other perfectly good-hearted but terrifyingly contagious people have been utilizing dishes, stove, etc.

Paid fifty cents to put sofa cushions in dryer in effort to de-concrete-dust-infest them, since threw out washing instructions for them (assuming ever had same) long ago.

Unpacked a few more boxes of books.

Wondered fleetingly what place used to look like with books on shelves and bedrooms not full of stacks of heavy boxes teetering in manner that would be dangerous (could fall and destroy sleepers with bit of help from sudden earthquake, vigorous rolling-over in bed by sleeper, etc.) if bedrooms were not too horribly dusty to sleep in.
 

What I didn't do today:

Allowed myself to feel more than that one inevitable pang -- more of a wrench, really -- about the rejection.

Answer or delete any email.

Get anywhere near the amount of work I wanted to done.

Get anywhere near the amount of work I reasonably thought I might done.

Read.

Write.

Rest.

Think.

This Place Makes Me Sick (or, The Dangers of Book-keeping: A Cautionary Tale)

I need to apologize to all the people who have sent me wonderful letters, as well as the occasional advertisement (more about that in another posting) or manuscript, and haven't heard back from me. I've weathered two catastrophes in a row in the past week, and I'm just now getting back on my feet.

First, my family made me go to Disneyland for a few days. Please do NOT send me letters about how wonderful Disney is in your opinion. Please do really REALLY not send me letters about how much you adore Epcot Center.  Epcot is in Disney WORLD, which is in Florida, which is not in California. And if you're a big enough Disney nerd that you feel a strong urge to correct my spelling or capitalization or word division of Epcot or Disneyworld or anything other Disney terminology I've just typed, please do us all a favor and go measure how high that big golf-ball looking thing is by jumping off the top of it and counting how long it takes you to hit the ground. Thank you.

Anyway. I had to go to Disneyland with my family, because it's a tradition in my husband's family to go to Disneyland every year some time in December, because December is the month when Disneyland is the most crowded and heaven forfend we miss THAT. Just to show you what a joyful holiday mood I was in while I was packing: the reading material I decided to bring included a copy of the book of Job and a biography of the woman Ted Hughes starting making time with when he was still married to Sylvia Plath, which led to their breakup and Plath's eventual suicide, which led in turn to this other woman's eventual suicide in exactly the same manner Plath employed.

My husband knows me well enough that he arranged for me to spend most of our "family vacation" time alone in the hotel room, with the room service and the bathtub and a lot of chocolate and books and my laptop and strict instructions not to combine all of those at the same time. Even I can look forward to a day or two of that.

Except that my husband and his family also arranged for some people to come into our apartment while we were gone to tear up some of our carpeting and replace it with "wooden" flooring. (The quotes are because we actually got laminate. Don't tell my classy friend Siobhan, who actually keeps track of what kind of wood her various floors and doors and closets are made of.) The reason that this construction work wasn't unmitigatedly good news for me is that the flooring was going in our front room and hallway, which contain six full-size bookcases and eight half-size bookcases. The tops of all of these bookcases are also covered with books, and the half-size bookcases in the hall are about six inches off the ground and so also have books stored under them. And all of these had to be packed away so that the shelves could be easily moved around by the guys putting the new floor in.

Look, I like books, okay? You don't have to try them on, you don't need to buy batteries for them, and if you drop one in the bathtub by mistake, the worst thing that happens is you have to buy another copy of the book. Unless you're me and the book is Pride and Prejudice, in which case you already have half a dozen copies and can perhaps spare one or two. Or perhaps not. But I digress.

The point is that I spent the two days before our alleged vacation packing lots and lots of books into lots and lots of boxes. Quite aside from the work aspect of it, this was an emotional experience for me. I hate packing my books away. What if I never see them again? I kept trying to think of ways we could just bring them all with us. I kept hugging them and crying. I kept reminding myself that we were only going to be gone a few days, and I wouldn't be spending all or even most of that reading, so maybe now wasn't the best time to consider starting the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov and maybe I should just put it in a box and get over it, already.

By Sunday afternoon, when my mother-in-law showed up all chipper and excited about driving with us all the way to The Crowdedest Place On Earth, I was an absolute harridan. I kept stumbling across more stuff I had to pack away. I had to make weird babysitting arrangements for our poor pet lizard, who had to stay home, mute witness to the destruction to come. I had to comfort my son, who was crying about leaving his lizard. I had to tell my husband to shut the hell up and stop singing parodies of Disney attraction songs ("There's so much that we share/Even our underwear!") I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a wreck.

Why do they keep bringing me to this place? Even when I haven't been worked into screaming bansheedom, I'm a horrible Disney-goer. I snarl and roll my eyes at everything. I whine. I sneer. I write letters to Amnesty International about the fact that everyone who answers the phone at Disneyland is forced to end the conversation with the phrase "Have a magical day!" I'm as much fun to be with as a six year old in a bank. And yet somehow apparently the trip just wouldn't be right without me.

So. We lived through the vacation. We headed home. I was nervous. I kept trying, in my inimitably chipper fashion, to imagine what the worst that could happen would be. I decided that the workers hadn't managed to get keys from the management company -- they often don't have the keys they should -- and nobody had contacted us, and we were going home to a house full of boxes of books and exactly the same floor we'd left behind.

I'm an apartment dweller. I don't have much experience with home remodeling, because if we could afford that kind of thing, we wouldn't be living in a danged apartment, now, would we? I didn't realize that the worst thing that would happen was -- and those of you who have survived this kind of thing are already nodding and singing along, because you know the words to this particular song -- they hadn't finished the work yet. Of course not. And they hadn't let us know that, since our apartment was torn up and the bedrooms were blocked off and full of everything that usually lives in the living room and hallway and even the refrigerator was utterly inaccessible, we couldn't spend a single night here until they did finish.

I'm tired. I don't have the energy to describe the sleazy-sounding message we had from a man named Stan Levy, who is the manager of A-1 Flooring in Los Angeles (not that I want to warn you away from doing business with him or anything) and who called us ten minutes after they closed (just in case we had any ideas about calling back and asking for details) and left a message about the fact that they hadn't been able to finish the work as they'd expected to, since they'd run long from the very first day of work thanks to the unevenness of our floor. I don't have the strength to wonder yet again why Mr. Levy couldn't have let us know any earlier -- say, before we left our hotel to come home -- that we had no home to come home to. I certainly don't have the gumption to give you an accurate description of some of the messages I left before we left home to find another hotel. And I won't even attempt to tell the tale of smuggling a lizard into the elegant hotel (expenses to be repaid by the management company, who will hopefully tear them directly out of Mr. Levy's anatomy) that was the only place that had any rooms left on such short notice on the first night of Hanukkah. (We brought him with us because Mr. Levy's employees thought that balancing stuff on a glass tank, especially a glass tank with heat lamps on it, was a terrific idea.)

The reason that I'm low on energy is that I've spent the last several days learning what kind of cleanup is required after a job like what was done on our place. Putting the books back, though a major job in and of itself, was almost the least of it. Apparently Mr. Levy's employees -- did I mention that he manages A-1 Flooring, in Los Angeles? -- aren't instructed to treat an apartment in which people are actually living any differently than a vacant one. Our chairs and curtains are saturated in dust, because nothing was covered up while work was going on. The carpeting that we do have left is going to have to be steam cleaned, at least. And after three days of frantically cleaning and feeling horribly guilty about the fact that my son's bedroom was still such a health hazard that he couldn't sleep in it, I got the worst sinus infection on record. I'm in the kind of pain I used to be in all the time before I figured out what I was allergic to and learned what I should and shouldn't do to keep my sinus passages well and happy. You know -- back before we did the one thing that is supposed to help the most with a condition like mine:  tear out the carpeting.

In a year or two, this will all seem worth it. In a day or two, I may even feel better and be able to get back to work. In the meantime, I deeply apologize for being so behind on everything, and promise to catch up as quickly as I can.

Thanks for letting me vent. If I can ever get into my kitchen again, you're all invited over for celebratory three-chocolate brownies.

Nobody told ME!

I'm trying to figure out why the wildfire-spread of the wish list has left me feeling rather dazed and blank.  

Don't get me wrong: I'm happy. Way past happy. Thrilled. It's pretty amazing to have complete and total strangers write to tell you that something you wrote is just the finest of the fine in their modest opinion. Maybe I'm too new at this kind of thing to be talking like I know anything about it, but so far as I'm concerned, that can never happen too often and it's never going to get old.

It's also kind of weird, though. It's almost as if I posted a picture of my son on my blog, and found out the next morning that everyone on the entire Internet had voted him The Cutest Baby Ever. You always think the stuff you come up with is fantastic, but deep in your secret heart of hearts you don't expect huge numbers of other people to agree.

At yesterday's park day, one of the moms asked me if I'd expected anything like the response the wish list has garnered so far. I didn't realize the word "no" could have seven syllables until I heard myself answer her.

The list almost didn't even get posted. I wanted to have a couple of articles from the current magazine up for people to read for free, because nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke and that was the closest I could get to letting people leaf through the thing before they decided to buy it. I wanted to put the Santa Monica College article up because it had been difficult to write; I was proud of it, and I thought that its double message of we-can-do-it and but-first-we-have-to-be-a-we was a good and necessary one.

It's a long article, though, and fairly serious. So I thought having something short and humorous up with it would be a nice balance.

Both the articles being written by me bugged me a bit, because it seemed like such an ego trip. But I didn't have electronic rights to anybody else's work. I compromised by initially not putting my name on the list.

That right there should give you some idea of how little stir I expected it to create. I have a very ancient-Greeks attitude about immortality. Not being at all convinced that my spirit has any chance of carrying on once my body decides to quit all this fidgeting, I have a selfish wish to keep my name aboveground when I take that six-foot dive. If I'd had an inkling that lots and lots and LOTS of total strangers would be reading that piece, I would have signed it right off the bat.

Another reason that I didn't expect any huge response was that I'd mentioned the list to a Yahoo group I belong to. It's a non-religious homeschooling loop that has known about SHM since it was nothing but a gleam in my eye. In an effort to drum up some interest in a magazine that didn't yet exist, I mentioned that as well as serious articles, there would be some humor in it as well, since as secular homeschoolers, we all need a laugh. I mentioned the name of the list and a couple of the bitter wishes.

Nobody said boo. Nobody even posted an LOL, let alone demanded my autograph.

Well, why should they? They didn't know me in person. They didn't know I'm an obsessive redhead who lives in abject fear of being bored to death if I don't have five major projects going on at any given time. For all they knew, this endeavor would fold before it ever really started.

And it's one thing to have the list right in front of you. It's another to see a couple of snippets from the middle. It just doesn't have the same impact.

Still. I put the idea out there and got pretty much no reaction. How was I supposed to know what the difference would be between a test drive and the real thing?

I think the main reason I feel so weird about the whole thing is that I'm still having a hard time believing that it happened. Total strangers quite literally all over the world are reading and passing around my words. And I have to take Google's word for it, because you know what? I'm on easily a dozen homeschooling loops, and not one of them has mentioned the list. If I hadn't written the danged thing, I'd never know it was out there.

Everybody else's group is apparently talking about the list. True tale of terror: one of my best friends in my local homeschooling group is a minister's wife. She's sharp and funny and loves the Brontes -- well, Charlotte and Anne, anyway -- as much as I do. There are certain topics that we have a silent agreement not to discuss. She's not going to change my mind about religion and I'm not going to change hers, so we just don't talk about it. She sort of kind of knows that I must be some kind of unredeemed heathen, especially now that I'm editing a magazine with a name like SHM, but I don't do a lot of talking about the mag or its title with her. Nothing wrong with that. Hey, I've got plenty of friends, on- and offline, who are willing to chat about the trials and tribulations of writing and editing; but how many of my buds have read something by Charlotte Bronte that isn't Jane Eyre?

Anyway. A few days after the list took off, my friend and I ran into each other at a field trip our group had organized. I don't know how it came up, but she mentioned, eyes lowered and eyebrows raised heavenward, that she'd seen the list. A homeschooling loop she was on had passed it around.

I belong to some big loops. Statewide, nationwide, worldwide. My friend belongs to as few loops as she can get away with, because she has three sons and being a minister's wife is pretty much a job description all by itself and she needs to keep her computer time down to a bare minimum. And she heard about the list.

Which I guess should convince me that word has indeed gotten around, in spite of the eerie prevailing silence on the subject on all my own loops.

Instead, I can't help wondering how famous I can really be if I've never even heard of me.