Writing: I wrote a lot in Iraq. There are several completed first drafts of novels that will never see the light of day. By comparison, 2010 was not a productive novel year in terms of quantity. But, I landed a gig with PBS Regarding War and entered into the national dialogue about women in uniform. My positions were in the minority and I caught a lot of heat-rounds but I learned so much from my fellow panelists.
I wrote a book proposal about mothers in the military, in part as a protest against the media portrayal of mothers in uniform as victims, which landed me my second agent. But the military ethics police shot me down and it was back to the fiction drawing board for me.
Oprah called, though she wasn’t looking for me and technically, it was her producer, not Oprah herself. I learned a valuable lesson that when Oprah calls, wait to find out what she wants before tweeting to the world. But it was exciting for exactly one day. And though I didn’t see the entire episode regarding military moms, the parts I did see were very well done.
I went to my first RWA National Conference and had a blast, despite my fear and nervousness. Yes, I meant it when I said it was easier to deploy to Iraq than go to conference but I’ll also say it again: social networking paid off in leaps and bounds during that trip. I learned so much and met some of the most amazing people. And my husband put up with the kids in a cramped hotel room just so my agent could introduce me to people and I could cheer for my friends who won their first RITA!
After the nonfiction project was shot down, I pitched several ideas to my agent—who thankfully did not drop me when the nonfiction got shot down and despite my own neuroses about where I stood as a writer (you know who you are who helped me through this. The guilty shall remain nameless but I owe you a lot!) —and he liked exactly two of them.
So I started working. 2010 was the year I learned to write a synopsis. It was the year I learned to cling to my synopsis as a method and I am so glad I finally learned this daunting task. My agent never saw the first draft of that novel, but he worked with me through four other drafts (which is finally ready to go out to editors). 2010 was also the year I learned to revise without throwing away the entire novel and starting over and even though my fourth is nothing like the first, the process is dramatically improved because I learned to draft a synopsis first.
A lot of authors look at those novels that will never see the light of day as wasted time. I’ll admit I was one of them for a very long time. I spent three and a half years writing all of them and still they sit, never to see publication. And I’m okay with that. I realize that I learned something new with each of them and despite the amount of time I spent on them, I now know it was time well spent. Oh and I’m so glad they’ll never be published. I can only imagine the horror of the reviews if they had been printed.
2010 was a very big year for a lot of reasons, both on the family front, the writing front and the Army front. I look back on everything I learned and I’m grateful I had to go through all of them. I wasn’t at the time, but hey, there’s always that thing called hindsight.
Reaction to the Hunger Games Series
January 10, 2011
I ALWAYS SEEM TO catch book trends after they’re over. I didn’t read Harry Potter until just before the Deathly Hallows came out. I read Twilight, well, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This weekend, I finally read the Hunger Games series. I knew it was a series I wanted to read from the Kindle sample. From the moment Katniss described her relationship with Buttercup, I knew I wanted to learn more about the girl who admitted to wanting to kill the kitten because it was another mouth to feed. It was still months before I carved out time to read this series.
*Spoilers will be discussed so read on only if you’ve already read the books. Otherwise, please stop as spoilers will ruin this series. I read it honestly having no idea how it ended and I am so glad I didn’t know.*
So, Katniss: I read the entire series in a period of 72 hours so I got a good feel for how Katniss changed over the story arc all at once. Katniss was ultimately about holding onto that which makes us human during war so it touched me deeply. Even had I not instantly liked her, I could have related to her, but the very moment she describes her relationship with the cat, I felt like this girl would do anything for her sister and in that, she was a survivor.
I loved the part in Mockingjay when Gale and Peeta are talking about Katniss and they say she will choose whichever one she thinks she cannot live without. I won’t pretend to have guessed how it was going to turn out but I will say that when the person she could not live without turned out to be her sister, I was a goner. I would have forgiven Katniss any crime.
I loved both Peeta and Gale. I honestly felt like Katniss was truly conflicted about how she felt for both of them and had no idea which one she would end up with. For a while, I thought she would be alone and honestly, it would not have changed the end of the book for me in its power. Ultimately, though, I think she had to choose Peeta because Gale came to represent everything that was before the war that she could never return to, and actions taken during the war that she could not erase. For me, there was a difference between Gale collapsing the Nut and Katniss killing in the arena and not for one second did I doubt Katniss’ reaction to the horror of the forced mine collapse.
There are probably folks who have a problem with Katniss killing the rebel president and not the capital president. Once more, Katniss chose based on the one person she could not live without. Snow could have taken either Gale or Peeta and she would have gone on. Sure, she would have been wrecked, but Coin was the person who took away the one person she couldn’t survive without, and Coin represented simply moving the Capitol from Panem to District 13. Why did Katniss fight if it was to only change one dictator for another? She was smart enough to recognize that, despite her grief. Even when she voted for one final Games, I could forgive her because everything she did from the moment her sister died was focused on joining her.
At the end, Katniss did not retain her humanity but she held onto her sense of justice, so maybe she did keep hold of what made her human. She was tormented for the rest of her days by what she did and what she lost, but I did not ever get a sense that she regretted killing Coin. She walked through the abyss and eventually, she put the pieces back together. Patched and scarred but together.
It’s a rare book that keeps me up and keeps hold of me days after it’s ended. I can’t remember having a stronger reaction to a series in a very long time. Even now, I get choked up thinking about the books. They were, in a word, incredible, and will be on my keeper shelf in hardback forever.
I hope you’re only reading this if you’ve read them but if not, please read them. You will not be disappointed.
The Closer It Gets
January 25, 2011
IT’S GETTING CLOSER. THE thought of my husband deploying again and knowing I’m stuck back here, waiting for the phone calls and the emails, is slowly but surely eating away at me. It keeps me up at night, it affects the entire house. It’s like a giant festering sore in the middle of the house that refuses to be covered by any salve.
The fact that this is potentially the last deployment to Iraq makes it worse, not better. I’m more worried about him this tour than any other one since ’04 when the shit really hit the fan. He wasn’t there for most of the Surge, for which I’m thankful. But this, as the potential for him to be some of the last forces over there, is terrifying.
I worry. Then I turn it off and try to go about business as usual when all I want to do is sit in bed and cry. But I can’t because I’m a commander and I’m a mom with two little girls who are going to need to lean on me more than I’m able to lean on anyone else.
It’s damn hard for me to write about this. It was so much easier in ’08 getting ready to deploy myself. I know what he’s going into. I know that he doesn’t want to hear about what the dog chewed up when I forgot to shut him in the kennel or how badly the girls fought yesterday. He wants to hear about the crazy cat a
nd see videos of the cat stealing the dog’s food out of her bowl. He wants to laugh and he needs to know that everything is okay at home.
So I’ll do that. I’ll write and tell him how the stupid cat launched himself off the top of the dresser. About our oldest daughter’s work in school. I’ll make him laugh and I’ll lay awake at night, waiting for the phone call or the email telling me he’s okay. And I’ll get through one day at a time.
Just like the last three deployments.
Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone
January 26, 2011
ONE OF THE COOL things that happened for me at RWA 2010 this year in Orlando was the opportunity to attend multiple publisher’s parties, courtesy of my agent. At NAL’s party, I met Ellen Edwards, who sent me a review copy of Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men are Gone. The whole conversation started when she discovered that I was stationed at Fort Hood, the setting for Fallon’s novel, and asked if I’d like to read it.
True to her word, I received my copy about a week later and eagerly devoured it. I held off on posting about it until it was closer to the release time, so as not to talk about a book so far before it was available in print.
I’ll be honest with you: I don’t normally read about military wives. Even though technically, I’m a military wife myself, I’m much more inclined to read books about downrange. I’m more able to relate to the life of a soldier than a spouse for obvious reasons. But Fallon’s book changed that for me and gave me a great insight into my role as a commander and head of my own unit’s Family Readiness Group.
From the outset, the characters are as real as they come. Many times, you can read a book and like the characters. From the first page, I felt like I was sitting in my husband’s FRG, like I knew women like this, flaws and all. And some of them, I did not like, but I kept reading because I was curious. Why was this spouse so obsessed with her neighbor? Why was this woman so judgmental of this other officer’s wife? It was a fascinating character study in each story and the Army, in and of itself, was a character.
This book was eye-opening for me because it really pulled me into the life of mystery that some wives face. What I mean is that if you’re not familiar with the military, then every conversation you have almost has to occur with a translator because soldiers speak a different language. I had no idea how much easier my life is with my husband because we both speak the same language. When he says he has to pull staff duty, I know what that means. When I tell him I have to go to NTC, he knows what that means. Fallon’s book paints in very real pictures how difficult it was and is for spouses to understand what is going on in their husband’s life, and it gave me a starting point for understanding where some of these young wives who come to me for assistance are coming from.
Fallon’s book made me cry. It was impossible not to feel the alienation, the sadness, the ever-present sense of waiting that never goes away. And as the stories continued to unfold, the links between the stories became clearer, the emotion that much stronger. Some of my emotions were anger at her portrayal of female soldiers in one story. All of the spouses were fully-developed characters but in the one story where a wife suspects her husband of infidelity, the suspected soldier is more of a bogeyman than a character. I completely understand this angle but I still didn’t like it and I still kept reading because for that character and for many military wives, the specter of their husbands going downrange with “us,” the female soldier, is a cause for insecurity. I don’t have to like it to acknowledge that it is a real fear for so many.
Fallon’s book comes out on January 20th and for anyone wondering what life is truly like for those left behind while their families go off to war, I highly recommend it. For me, facing my third deployment as the spouse left at home, it is especially poignant because even though I wear the uniform, I will still be left standing in that gym when my husband slings his rifle over his shoulder and walks onto that bus, heading for the desert one more time.
The Buttons Are Killing Me: iPhone vs. Blackberry
January 30, 2011
THIS POST IS NOT going to be why I hate the new office-mandated Blackberry. I actually really enjoy having the ability to check my work email from home, thereby increasing my situational awareness when I’m out of the office. It makes life just that much easier to be out checking on my troops instead of wondering what grenades are waiting in my inbox for me to discover two hours too late.
All that said, I now carry my iPhone and my Blackberry. Even when I first purchased my iPhone, if I had to answer a long email, I’d wait to do it on my laptop. My fingers just have too much muscle memory built in to be comfortable nailing away at a screen with no response other than an audible click. Even then, I can still type out a response on my iPhone because my fingers have learned the layout so well. So imagine my chagrin when I get back the buttons that I thought I missed. The Blackberry I have has these little tiny slanted buttons. They’re not flat, which means I’m never sure what I’m actually hitting (as witnessed by my multiple wrong password entries).
Bottom line is that while it’s cool to have my email at my fingertips, I’ll pass on even writing a thank you email on this sucker. It is nearly a read-only device for me because it is so difficult to get my fingers to work on the buttons. I suppose with time, I’ll develop new muscle memory to be able to type on it. It will happen eventually the longer I use it. But in the meantime, I really only read the emails. I don’t answer calls on it. I damn sure don’t compose any emails on it.
But I love checking my inbox and keeping the fires of command at bay, even if it’s only a little bit. In this game, every little advantage helps and despite not liking the keys, I’ll take it.
Ebooks or Print or...Both?
February 4, 2011
AS I SIT HERE in my living room with my sleeping, now tonsil-less four year old, I figured I’d share my changed mind on ebooks.
My feelings on ebooks have been ambivalent from the get go. I’d wanted to download a book badly while I was in Iraq, only to be denied by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble and every other site that wasn’t a pirate site. I read The Stand on my iPod but it was really different, not something I was sure I enjoyed. I lusted after a Kindle but never made the plunge, mostly because I couldn’t see buying a single function device where I didn’t actually own the book I’d just “bought.” I mostly still read print books while deployed and since I’ve returned.
Then my hubby bought me an iPad for Christmas. And it was so much better for reading books on than my phone. Sort of. And since getting it, I’ve read at least a dozen ebooks. And here’s the thing: for those books that made it to my keeper shelf, I went out and bought a physical copy, too. I’m not sure how many other people do the same thing but for me, books that are truly awesome, I’ve ended up buying them twice. Is it fair for me to have to do that? Probably not but this post is not the place to dig into the piracy discussion.
Now this isn’t to say that I enjoy reading ebooks more than physical books. The Kindle I just bought my husband for his upcoming deployment is significantly easier on the eyes. I not only wake up if I’m reading on my iPad, but I can feel my eyes getting tired. So, for instance, when I read the Hunger Games trilogy straight through, I had a raging headache for days afterwards. I’ve never had that happen while reading actual books. But had I not had my iPad, I would have had to wait for a trip to the bookstore to continue a great series. I’ve definitely increased my reading since getting my iPad, which is good for authors, I suppose, since buying more has to equal good thing for their bottom line, right, especially if I’m not the only one doing it?
So there are things I truly enjoy about the iPad and ebooks but at the end of the day, I’m still a girl anchored in the physical world and I would hate to accidentally delete a file and lose a new favorite. Plus, in the event of an apocalypse, ebooks are gone into the ether. Convenient, yes. Permanent? Yes. So long as there remains adequate electricity! All that said, I don’t see me giving up my
newest habit just yet. Because if there is one thing I’ve missed since redeployment its having time to read and if carrying around my iPad means I get to keep up with market trends and great stories to boot, then I’m all for it.
Turns out, I’m an ebook convert after all.
Deployment Sucks
February 18, 2011
IT TOOK UNTIL FRIDAY for my daughter to break down. I heard a noise from across the house then nothing. Then I heard it again. I padded across the floor, and heard her heartbreaking sobs. I walk into her room and she’s sitting up in her bed, staring at a picture of my husband the words “I want my Daddy” tearing from her.
If you think I wasn’t crying right along with her, you’re smoking something. This whole week has sucked. As long as I live, I’ll never forget the sight of my husband standing on the front lawn, waving goodbye as I pulled away to take the kids to daycare. We both agreed we simply could not say goodbye to them in the middle of the daycare, so I shuffled them off while he stayed home to shower and put on the uniform that would carry him into the desert for the fourth time.
My husband is not an emotional man but leaving this time has been brutal on him. And me. But as I sit here writing, I reread my journal from my deployment. I was transported back to Kuwait, to the sand and dirt and stress of getting ready to head north. There’s nothing I can do right now but wait for the phone to ring or hope for an email.
I know my daughters are hurting. My oldest is being a real trooper but there’s a sadness about her. I catch her looking into space and I know she’s thinking about her Daddy. The guy who always makes her laugh. And my youngest has been hell this week. She’s had her name written on the board at school twice, screamed every single day I’ve dropped her off at daycare (which is hell on the Mommy guilt) and overall has been really bossy (which is actually kind of funny).
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