Preteens are a trip

Madison and I are in the Rocky Mountains together, in Jackson Hole, WY for the Jackson Hole Writers Conference.

It has been a fascinating trip, for the most part an absolute joy. We love this area. Madison especially loves the area, and has said repeatedly how much she wishes she could live here.

First, we flew to Bozeman, Montana on Monday. The traveling was perfect, an easy connection in Minneapolis. We got to Bozeman within 6 hours of leaving home. We stayed with my colleague Patrick and his family, which consists of 13- and just-10-year-old girls, and 8-year-old and 3-year-old boys. They live at the base of a mountain. They have a birch tree you (that is, the kids) can climb and get up on the roof.

My colleague and his wife have a more laid-back approach than I do to parenting, but they're in a rural area where they can afford to let the kids run wild and explore. Also, both of them work from home, so it's been necessary to train the kids not to bother them while they're working. When they're working, it's close to benevolent neglect, but when they are engaged with the kids, they're really engaged. So it has resulted in a lovely independent family of rugged outdoors-ish kids who are extremely outgoing, polite, and very happily well-behaved. The parents are people who assume that the kids will entertain themselves and be common-sensical about things like putting on sunscreen and eating enough and looking out for one another, and they generally do. Madison is much shyer than they are, but they soon kind of enveloped her in their camaraderie. She spent two days on their roof and up the mountain, getting a bit sunburned, not eating quite enough because they're healthfoodies and we are not, and not sleeping near enough because it stayed light until 10pm Mountain time. I got to work with Patrick...good work, solid work, planning-for-KOA-expansion kind of work (Albany's next! Get ready, Albany!) that solidified our plans for the immediate future.

One thing that David and I noticed independently -- by Monday night or Tuesday morning -- is that when Madison and Ella are apart from each other and getting solid one-on-one time with us, life is radically different. More relaxed. More cheerful. More independent. In fact, they seem much more mature, more... well... themselves.

This phenomenon was so palpable it was startling, and David and I both commented on it on the phone. It continued for me all the way through Wednesday morning. Madison and I left Montana and drove down through Yellowstone (which is about 2 hours from Bozeman, a beautiful drive through Gallatin National Forest).

Almost just as soon as we'd left my colleague's house, Madison CRASHED. It was so weird... she collapsed back into her regular, cranky-ish preteen self. I knew what it was, mostly... it was a sleep issue, and an excitement issue, and the fact that she'd been attentively on best behavior for several days. She was low on sleep -- still is, in fact. It's hard to sleep in unfamiliar beds, in exciting surroundings. But boy, did she crash, so much so that I had to fight to keep the disappointment from manifesting itself in me.

After a beautiful day in Yellowstone (that was punctuated a bit by her deciding that the thermals unnerved her) that involved lots of water, wildlife, gorgeous views, and even a grizzly bear as seen from afar, we wound up south of Yellowstone in the Grand Teton mountains. We stayed in a "resort" on Wednesday night that is really a motel masquerading as a resort. That's a story unto itself, actually. The room looked pretty nice and new, but I found the mouse glue trap in the room disconcerting, to say the least. I woke up at 5am seriously convinced that there was a mouse in our room, but the scratching and snuffling may have been something else, maybe the air conditioning system or pipes. The "resort" didn't really take me seriously about a mouse, as nothing was in the trap. I was kind of hoping for a refund. They won't get a good review when I write them up.

But Thursday morning, we went for a horseback trail ride, just the two of us, a lovely young guide named Sammi, and an eager dog named Tuff. Even though on the way there, she was apprehensive and filled to the brim with negativity (deliberately talking herself into anxiety), Madison loved the ride. Her horse was named Sweetheart and mine was Shilo. We splashed through creeks in Grand Teton National Forest, we saw wonderful views of snow-covered 13-ers, we smelled majestic pine forests, and we were mostly reverently silent.

And then...we rolled into Jackson Hole, got ourselves signed in to the conference, and started chatting with the organizer. I had told Madison that people would take her seriously here; they'd ask her what she liked to write. We talked about what she would say. And sure enough, that's the first thing that the lovely young lady organizer did. And Madison, who was admittedly low on sleep and in need of a solid lunch, got totally tongue-tied. She didn't look Nicole in the eye, she mumbled, she said "like" in the one paragraph she did say more times than I cared to count, and basically came off like an awkward little disengaged kid. She even argued somewhat scowlingly with me in front of Nicole when I said that she'd been writing some great essays ("only one, Mom, and it wasn't great").

Yikeroo.

Anyway, some food cheered her up, and she has generally enjoyed the day-and-a-half we've had in the conference so far. She's glad we're here, she understands the talks for the most part, she thoroughly enjoyed the panel that had some literary agents discussing what they did and the publishing process, and she was FANTASTIC in a small group workshop about finding voice in writing for young adults. (Seriously, her insights were valuable, totally in the same class as the rest of the participants. I was really proud.) But she definitely feels like a fish out of water, and though her disposition has improved, she's just not able to relax in front of other people. And she's oddly silent, even at meals, which are just with me.

Madison has never been great at physical coordination, but it's gone out the window. She wants to hold my hand while she walks along or stands next to me, but it's not simply a friendly thing, it's a draggy thing, as though she can't quite use her own body to keep upright or move along. It's a bit weird, I tell you, and I am hard-pressed not to be annoyed. I know it's because there is so much going on in her head that she's not paying attention to her body. But the fact is, she's got to pay attention to her body, because that's part of being an autonomous human. And also because when she doesn't, she's got almost an autistic-like affect going...and she's definitely not autistic.

Sorry, you're seeing my struggle here. It's unfair for me to be impatient with my lovely child, of whom I'm expecting perhaps more than is in her power to give under the circumstances, and I guess I'm working it through on the page.

Anyway, the writing conference is definitely the right thing to have done. It has stretched her in ways nothing else could, and for the most part she has met the challenge happily. It's the first of what I'm sure will be many conferences, and I'm sure she'll get much more relaxed as she practices and as time takes its natural course.

"Oh, yeah, I've been doing this a long time," she'll say, casually, when she's a famous author in 15 years or so. "My mom started taking me to writing conferences when I was just 10, so it's kind of bred in me. That Jackson Hole trip, that was just the start. Once she won Newbery Medal in 2011, then we really started traveling together. That mother of mine, she showed me the world."

Taking time out from working for the important task of old-age injury

Who blogs when there's work to be done? Oh, right, that would be me. On the other hand, I've been over-the-top busy the last four weeks with the launch of the new KOA site.

But tonight, I blog. Why? I can do nothing else but muse over the following absurd facts:

1) I am 41, and someone ought to have informed me of this important fact because

2) I was utterly unprepared for it this evening when

3) I attempted to play competitive softball on the radio station's team.

I played 2nd base. I love 2nd base. I am good at 2nd base. So there we were, at the TOP of the FREAKING FIRST INNING of the first game of the season, and WARM 101.3 was out in the field. Grounder between first and second. Naturally, I launched myself to the left toward the ball, like any normal person who hasn't played on a baseball team in 18 years. I did not trip. I did not fall. I did not slide. No, I simply went for the ball, and got the ball. Quickly. Calmly. All business-like. The way softball amongst 30- 40- and 50-year-olds is meant to be played.

Now, I told everyone that I had pulled my left quad muscle. This is true, but not the whole truth. The truth is that this normal, everyday launch to the left had sent my left quad, my left gluteal, AND my right quad all simultaneously into spasm. The left quad was the worst, so that's the only one I reported. I literally didn't know where to limp. So I kind of limped left. Now, they needed 5 girls to play on the team for the game to count, and I was the 5th girl. There was no wimping out. So I spent the rest of the 7 innings alternately trying to stretch and pound my various extremities back from the brink, keeping a cheerful face while they (the extremities, not the DJs) screamed at me. But hey, I walked three times and hit a single my last time up, so I didn't do a bad job after all.

There is no crying in baseball, so I saved it for when I got home. David walked in on me. "My god, what's the matter?" he asked, really worried. "I'm F-f-f-forty-one years old," I said, between sobs. He gave me a lot more sympathy than I deserved, considering he's 52.

Four ibuprofens and a hot bath later, I'm feeling better. I crave a single-malt scotch but don't dare try to leave the bed to make its acquaintance personally. I'm not asleep yet because I've convinced myself that if I stay awake, it puts off what tomorrow will feel like. Ya think?

This week in Rochester

I:

Launched the new KidsOutAndAbout.com

Dealt with fallout as KidsOutAndAbout.com crashed due to four times the expected stress on the server

Turned 41

Barely kept up with feeding and clothing the new baby (found lots of niggly little problems with the web site, helped organizations get their listings up and running, sold a couple of upgrades)

Accepted congratulations

Got rejected from a publisher for The Frontier Team

Couldn't sleep

Let the house go to hell temporarily

Let the kids do lots of independent work

Went on the radio twice

Picked up my cello from the shop where it was being repaired

Took a heavenly half-hour with Madison and played cello with her as she practiced viola

Realized that playing cello really is like riding a bicycle, except now I understand what music is about much better than I did 25 years ago.

Breathed sometimes, ate sporadically

----------------------------------------------
It's all in the service of a new and improved work life, but I could never keep up this pace forever.

This week in the Ross house

Ella had two birthday parties. I will try to find some time to write up a review for each of them. Someday. I have lovely photos, I think. At some point I'll download them from the camera.

Ella got reading glasses. She is very happy with them, so much so that she likes to walk around wearing them. Just looking at her doing that makes me dizzy. We'll see if they have some kind of beneficial impact on her desire to read. I'd settle for a psychological impact.

The new KidsOutAndAbout.com (here's a sneak peek of the test site for the five of you who read this blog) has really been coming together. It is a thing of utter beauty. We launch this coming Wednesday, I hope hope hope. I'm pretty sure we will.

I started to sell the web site upgrade space this week. We're accepting "advertising" in the sense that we give everyone a free organization listing, which they can upgrade to 1) Give themselves a lovely web page within the new KOA site and 2) Increase their standing in the search results when they appear. So far, with little effort, I now have $2000 in hand and about $3000 more on the immediate way, including a big contract that I sold to the YMCA. Can't wait really to start selling this thing.

Last night, we went to see the Ying Quartet. We brought the girls. They're our favorite string quartet. It was a lovely concert.

This afternoon was the annual Imagine RIT community event, during which the Rochester Institute of Technology opens its doors to kids and families with hundreds of free things to do that are oriented toward science, technology, math, and culture. A terrific festival, my favorite, I think. I found myself wishing our young friends Max and Henry had been in town, they would have loved it. Though there was so much, and so crowded, that it was absolutely impossible to do more than 1/4 of the festival in an afternoon. Like Epcot Center, only free.

Tomorrow, KidsOutAndAbout.com has a table at Healthy Hero Day at the Rochester Red Wings game; we were invited to participate by the YMCA. Then we zip over mid-afternoon to the girls' concert in which the Bach Children's Chorus sings with the Greece (NY) Choral Society in the the GCS's 40th anniversary concert.

I wonder how long it's been since I actually cooked a real dinner. It's been at least 10 days. Now I know how the Other Half lives -- the half in which both parents work and everyone is running around. I'm glad that for the most part I've been able to keep the girls doing normal schoolwork. Soon, soon, this will be over and we can settle back into a normal pace.

Another agent full MS request

I just hit the Send button on an email to an agent in New York City who requested the full manuscript of The Frontier Team. I found myself wishing there was an atheist equivalent of prayer.

This agent requested not only the manuscript, but also a synopsis, a bio, and a marketing statement. I had the synopsis already, but it took a couple of days for me to whip up and polish a bio and a marketing statement.

I was introduced to this agent by one of her current clients, whose work is also middle-grade (ages 8-12) and whose protagonists are also home schooled. His stuff hasn't sold in the 18 months in which she has been his agent... but it also sounds as though he has laid off on the writing a bit, so it's hard to tell. I like his stuff, though I think my work is marginally better than his. (Of course, who doesn't think that about his or her own book?) More important, I'm a marketing and P.R. goddess, and he's just an insurance agent or something. ;-) In any case, I am a lot more plugged-in and serious about the whole deal than he is, so I think there is a better-than-average chance she will accept me. This is my most solid lead yet.

The other agent who has my manuscript hasn't gotten back to me yet. (This is the guy who graduated from Penn in 1990, the year before I did.) It's been 6 weeks out of the 8 weeks he gave himself, so I hope it's soon. This most recent agent asked for exclusivity if possible, and it felt good to tell her that I regretted that I couldn't offer her exclusivity because another agent was reading the manuscript, but that I would notify her immediately if he offered representation so she could read it and make a decision. Wouldn't it be awesome if I got *two* offers, now?

I went out on a limb a little bit in my cover letter to this second one... I gave her a sense of my other works-in-progress, with a detailed hook for Food Fights:

Fed up with her father’s obsessive control of her diet as he hops from food fad to food fad, 11-year-old Georgia launches her own personal War for Dietary Independence. As she marshals the army of evidence and experts to support her, Georgia realizes that she is fighting not just her father, but a well-armed food culture. As media hype spirals the war out of control and deepens the rift in Georgia’s family, she realizes that most people believe what they want to believe instead of thinking carefully before forming an opinion. Can she focus her father on the facts, or will his food fixations keep them apart forever?

I realize that this agent hadn't requested any of that information; I hope that rather than distracting her from The Frontier Team, it shows that I'm serious about churning out work that will allow her to make money. We'll see if it pays off.

Pre-teen music

Madison has started writing pre-teen love songs about breakup.

There are no boys in the picture, yet, she's only 10, but she's already picturing the angst.

Sample line:

"You're dead, you're gone, you ain't comin' back to me..."

She says she's going to write a whole musical. Oy.

20 years my own me

Twenty years ago this month, I found out I'd received a $3000 grant from the Institute for Humane Studies to be applied toward my senior year of college.

Twenty years ago today, I picked up the phone and told my father that he needn't bother with me again.

Now, I don't advocate just simply, on a whim, telling your parent to take a hike for the rest of his life. But, let's face it, some people are crummy. It is sometimes clear that one's life will be objectively better if one eliminates the poisonous people from it, and that was the case for me. My family were just not the kind of people you'd want to know. They weren't rampantly destructive people, they weren't dramatically evil, no one beat me or anything. But all of them -- father, sister, mother -- were people who just sucked the joy out of life and the energy out of you.

When was just shy of 21, I figured that I had about 80 years left to create good stuff, to make the world a better place while I experience all of the wonderfulness that is possible here on earth. And then I'd die. I realized back then that a life spent bending to other people's negativity is precious, precious time and energy wasted. Did I want to sacrifice that to people who were just, you know, ICKY? Did I want to spend time with them instead of with people who were smart, warm, generous, productive and good? No. I'd had enough of that for the first 20 years.

Fortunately, we live in a free and mobile society where it's possible to have nothing to do with bad people. Nevertheless, it can be a very difficult thing to do if the people are your family. You can KNOW that you shouldn't have anything to do with a person, but lack the strength to unseat yourself.

It wasn't hard to do with my father, as he didn't have actual positive qualities to balance out the negative ones. It was a harder thing to give my sister The Choice 5 years later, to treat me well or not to treat me at all. (Mind you, it wasn't harder in one way: The actual experience of interacting with her was quite miserable. But it was very hard psychologically to accept that there was what Madeline L'Engle called a Might-Have-Been in A Swiftly Tilting Planet: There was a time before my sister got twisted as a result of the worst qualities of my parents and society, a time when she might have grown into a nice and smart person. I mourned that it hadn't happened, and I still do. I'd have liked to have had a sister as an adult.) But my sister chose "Not At All," and my mother did the same thing 5 years after that.

My parents and sister were hostile to the very idea of talking about our problems and the need for them to be addressed. (I really did try with my mother and my sister. My father was too far removed for engagement.) If instead they had been people dedicated to reason, it would have been a different story. Even if I disagreed with them (and goodness knows I disagreed with almost everything those people held near and dear), in that case shunning instead of engaging would have been the wrong move.

So it's an odd set of anniversaries this month, 20 years without my father, 10 years without my mother. It was important to make the breaks before anyone got old or sick -- it had to be a clear choice they were making when they were healthy and vigorous, because obviously I'm not going to abandon someone suddenly in an hour of need. But as a culture, we just don't have a blueprint for doing this. Almost no one does. It's not accepted. It's generated some odd looks when medical professionals have asked, "Are your parents still alive?" and I reply, "I assume so." (Of course, I don't do this with casual acquaintances because I don't want to put them in an awkward position. I just say "yes" because I expect I'd have heard through the family grapevine if my mother had died...one cousin is still in touch with her.)

Anyway, the important thing is that as hard as it was at the time, it was indubitably the RIGHT THING TO DO. I'm pretty good at imagining alternative universes; I can imagine, almost visually and certainly viscerally, the drag on my life and happiness if I were to have had to have these people in my life, and my kids' lives. UGH.

One of the greatest benefits of my having done this, I think, is that Madison and Ella will know, forever and ever in no uncertain terms, that what we do with crappy people is we TURN OUR BACK ON THEM and life gets better. I'm a living example of just how good life can be when we do this. There will be no ambiguity for them about the desirability of doing so, and they'll know they will always have my support when they do. Unfortunately, as we all know, there will be plenty of opportunities for them to practice this principle. We've got their backs.

Those Scholastic people do it right

This week, we visited New York City for a special author book signing. Madison is nuts about the 39 Clues series published by Scholastic, and I heard about a special event at Bank Street Books, a kids' bookstore at Columbia: Three of the authors of this 10-book series (each of these three has written two books in the series) were there: Jude Watson, Peter Lerangis, and Gordon Korman. They each gave about a 10-minute talk that was very engaging for both kids and adults, and then they signed the books.

Also there was Japanese Public Television (apparently there is a big 39 Clues fan base in Japan), and they interviewed Madison, who of course was her articulate self. Everyone there (the authors, the BSB people, and the Scholastic people) was very impressed that we were there all the way from Rochester. Here is a little video clip I took of Gordon Korman:



Here is Jude Watson, author of Book 4 (Beyond the Grave) and Book 6 (In Too Deep), describing the secret meeting where the Scholastic editors first presented her with the proposal to write for the series:




And here are some photos:

Waiting on the floor before the event, Madison made a little friend, Melba, who lives on Long Island:


Madison and Melba each won backpacks in a drawing:


The authors (left to right: Jude Watson, Peter Lerangis, and Gordon Korman) sign Madison's books. Madison talked with Gordon Korman about possibly doing a podcast interview with him.

Everyone experiences this at some point. I guess it was our turn.

We had our first incident today with Madison receiving disgusting email. I knew it was going to happen eventually. Fortunately, she was perfectly calm about it.

Her writing partner friend is a nice 13-year-old homeschooled girl who has a 12-year-old brother who is also a friend of my girls. Both of mine take several classes with both of them.

Madison and Regan, the girl, have been working very hard on a writing project and have been phoning and emailing each other back and forth several times each day. Regan's brother, though a nice enough little guy, is on the ACTIVE end of the ADD scale...even *I* am happy when he has taken sufficient medication; I can barely keep up with him, otherwise. He's been somewhat disruptive of the girls' trying to work together, in that just-turned-12-year-old-boy kind of energetic way.

This afternoon, when I was not home, Madison began receiving filthy-languaged emails from Regan's account. She had never seen some of these words before..."f***face" being among them, to give you a sense of what was being sent. She was appalled, but not particularly excited about it. She really hates foul language and NEVER uses it, and knew that Regan could not have meant to have sent it.

David was livid. He had that "my-lovely-innocent-baby-has-been-harmed-so-someone-should-die" look on his face. They had known it couldn't be Regan, so they thought it might be her brother. David had never met the family, so it was natural for him to jump to that conclusion. But as soon as I came home and read the emails, I knew it couldn't be the boy... TOTALLY not his style, and if he wanted to offend anyone, he would be a lot more creative than that, he has a very active mind. And I didn't think even he would know those words. Plus, it wasn't addressed TO anyone, not Madison or anyone. My conclusion is that it had to have been hacked, so I called the family and left a message to that effect.

They looked into it and came to their own easy conclusion: Regan had been emailing Madison from the YMCA and remembered she had left the account open by mistake. Some idiot teenager then got his jollies by emailing that stuff to the one person on Regan's email address book.

The kids' dad told me that they have a program on the kids' computer which automatically emails everything they type over to an archive. He checked it to be absolutely certain before they called me, but the computer hadn't even been on this afternoon.

David still wanted to put the perp through the wall, but we were both quite relieved that the problem seems to be over, and that it wasn't what David and Madison had feared it might be.

Several milestones for Madison

This is the week wherein Madison

a) Discovered the telephone. She is working on a writing project with her friend Reagan and has been writing with her while they talk on the phone about the project, several times each day.

Sigh. As if the bra last month weren't enough, now she's in the Phone Phase which I assume will last, oh, all her life.

b) Got new glasses. She had had the same purple wire frames for two years, BJ's frames. She had endlessly fiddled with them to the extent that they became crooked and it made her a little odd to look at -- it wasn't significantly crooked so you'd notice directly that something was amiss, but it would give her a slightly goofy cast to her face, and you'd almost unconsciously wonder whether her expression was a little off. Well, she had been complaining that her visual acuity had decreased, so I finally got her to the eye doctor on Monday. Her left eye has caught up with her right eye in terms of how fast it's declining; she's -2.5 in her left eye and -2.75 in her right eye. Sigh. Anyway, it was a good opportunity to get her new glasses, and you can bet that I steered her to plastic frames that can't be bent instead of wire frames that can. She looks pretty cool.

"Wow, you've got J-Lo frames," said the optometrist's assistant when we picked them up yesterday.

Madison looked at her blankly.

"Jennifer Lopez," the woman tried again. Still nothing from Madison.

"She's a famous singer," the woman explained. "She has a line of eyewear like what she wears."

"Oh," said Madison.

c) Discovered that she's going to come with me to the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference in Jackson Hole, WY in late June. Madison is thrilled. The conference has a special price for writing teens who accompany their writing parents; I wrote to them explaining that I had a rising 6th-grader who takes her writing seriously and would like to attend. Here was their note back:

We'd be happy to have your 11-year-old come on the Parent/Teen registration. I wish I'd had the opportunity when I was her age. I think she'll have a great time, being treated as an equal and a professional be other writers. It will make our conference better too. We'll have a couple of students below 15. I'm not sure if there will be any others as young as 11. But, if she takes her writing seriously, she'll learn a lot.
Write if you have more questions.

It was a "yippee" moment. I need to visit with my web site designers in Montana at the beginning of the summer anyway, so we'll fly into Montana on Monday June 21, drive down through Yellowstone to Jackson Hole on the 23rd, and be at the conference for Thursday-Sunday and fly back home from Montana on Monday. A week for just the two of us! I can't wait.

Well, I MUST wait, and that's a good thing, because it means that Food Fights must be complete by June 24th. It will be, I swear it. Just let me get this site launched and I can work on it like hell in May and June. It's written in my head already, just need the last 2/3 of it down on paper.

Getting close to LAUNCH

Have you ever worked on a project for more than 2 years, and then seen it come to fruition? There's nothing quite like that feeling. I'm in the middle of that right now with the new KidsOutAndAbout.com site design and platform. It's scheduled to be launched at the end of April, and I think we're going to make the deadline.

The first 19 months of effort on this 28-month effort had to be abandoned. I went down the wrong path, and wasted a couple of tens of thousands of dollars. I bought the wrong software platform, "worked" with people who couldn't care less and didn't really listen to what I needed, outsourced some of the custom work to India because I couldn't afford it here, went to a seminar in New Hampshire... and got nowhere. That system was really meant for people who had an IT staff.

But last summer, the company that hosts my current site was reorganizing at just the time I needed to switch directions, and offered me the opportunity to hire them to build the site from scratch, in an open-source software platform called Drupal. I have worked with these people for about 8 years. I always liked working with them, but it took a little bit of oomph for me to jettison all that I'd invested in the other project. As soon as I made the decision, I felt that warm glow of relief that told me I'd done the right thing.

This definitely ranks among the best business decisions I've ever made. Planning was in the fall, programming started in earnest in December. I worked like heck at my regular consulting business for the second part of last year and the last several months so that I could put all I made back into this software development. And I am working like heck nowadays with what they've already put into the site, making the content ready for launch. I'm thinking April 28.

We're actually farther along than I thought we'd be at this point. The programming team has taken my ideas and my general logic and made it into so much more than I ever envisioned. Not only will I be able to extend KOA to other cities and manage it all here from Rochester, but it will let me make money almost without trying. Organizations that post their activities or resources to KOA will be easily led through how to upgrade their free listings with graphics, logos, mission statements, Facebook and Twitter links... and they'll be able to see these enhanced listings. They can design their enhancements, play around with them, then if they want that to be what everyone sees, they just CLICK to purchase that enhanced listing through PayPal/credit card, for basically pocket change per month.

I've never before worked with a small, dedicated team of brilliant people who all work fabulously together and will put their brains toward creating something that will really succeed, much less something that I designed. I've always worked alone. Since being burned about a decade ago, I've always thought it was best to work alone. But this...this is an amazing experience. For example, last week, one of the programmers suggested a small alteration that will end up saving me tons of time and reduce the amount we'd have to spend on sales efforts. It will make it much more obvious to the organizations how they can enhance their listings, without needing to get the KOA admins involved at all.

I'd almost pay all of the money I'm paying them for this sort of experience alone, even if it doesn't end up making any money. But it will. Look out, America. First Rochester, then (later this year if all seems to be working well) Buffalo and Albany, then moving onward and outward. There are some great folks I've been talking with casually who are interested in serving as editors, and this excites me. It's an entirely new model for web sites... not just a calendar of events, but a richly guided tour that celebrates the great stuff in each community, that promotes cultural literacy, that gives parents easy access to the tools to help their kids learn to think.

And makes me rich? Maybe. That'd be nice. (Anyway for me, "rich" is probably a lot less than what other people would call rich.) More important, it will be a real positive mark on the world. And, it will be a LOT of fun to manage.

The girls think I have the best job in the world. I do. And I think it's only going to get better.

David's WSJ letter to the editor

David has a letter to the editor in today's Wall Street Journal, responding to Chester Finn's op-ed last week advocating Saturday school and a lengthier school year. Finn is a former assistant secretary at the Department of Education.

Here is the original article.

Outlook for Monday: Death and taxes a certainty

My broker was depressed on Friday, called me, and advised me to reduce the percentage I have in the market because he was convinced this travesty would happen.

I drank too much champagne last night so I would have to go to bed early and be unaware of it all.

Now I'm up.

Now I have to finish doing my taxes.

If you have something to the cheer me up, now's the time, bring it on.

Ode to Joy

The piece, planned in advance was "Ode to Joy." It really was.



Henry, Madison, Max, and Ella

Photos

Today, we went and had "photos with the bunnies," which we did five years ago. I wrote an article about it. Because the photographer does this every year and when I link to it I get a fair number of hits, I thought it would be a good idea to update the article and take the kids this year. The kids get to play with live, snuggly bunnies while being photographed.

The photographer was a little late today, so while Madison was getting changed, I took some very-amateur photos of Ella fooling around on the set -- sans live bunnies, of course. Wish I could have gotten some of Madison, but the photographer showed up before she was finished getting dressed.




Here's a nice photo of Madison with me on the couch:

Quick video: Ella's Birthday of the Day memorization

Yesterday's Birthday of the Day was Gustav Stickley. This is the way Ella chose to memorize her facts. Chock full of personality, that Ella.

Finally, the Penn degree means something

Over the weekend I was doing some research on the literary agent who had just requested the full MS of The Frontier Team, and found out that he went to Penn at the same time I did. I went back and forth over whether I should contact him again and tell him that. I finally decided to do it, and 10 minutes after I sent that email I got this back:

Wow, I wonder if we were in any classes together--­I was English/creative writing and took 19 classes, and grew to have a pretty intense love/hate relationship with Bennett Hall (which I understand has been completely renovated and even has air conditioning now!)…

I look forward to reading your book.

Best,

Josh

To some people, though not to me (wouldn't do it again), it means a lot to have gone to Penn. That's what made me come down on the side of sending the agent a short email to that effect, even at the risk of it seeming that I was bugging him (agents hate to be bugged). So, it was the right decision! My fingers are crossed, although not too tightly because then I couldn't type.

Then something went... BUMP

I have been so busy working on the latest release of KidsOutAndAbout.com, and keeping up the current KOA, and homeschooling, and whatnot, that it would have been tempting to lay aside my fiction projects, both the writing of the new book called Food Fights, and the marketing of my Frontier Team manuscript to agents.

I had been discouraged by the Summer of Rejection 2009, and had done what I thought was the sensible thing (and it was): I essentially laid aside the Frontier Team, stopped working on Book 2 because the agents who had seen the project hadn't been interested, and turned my energy to a new book, a project I love. Here is the one-line summary of that book: Food Fights: An Organic Revolution, about a girl’s War for Dietary Independence from her father’s food fad obsessions. The book is much more hip than the Frontier Team. I had been told by the Hip Agents I talked with that the Frontier Team was "too wholesome" for their lists. Well, this one is anything but wholesome... it actually promotes rebellion. I am enjoying the writing immensely, when I can get to it.

Anyhow, when the New Year turned, I realized that just because I wasn't working on the Frontier Team any more, and just because my new project would be so much more appealing to agents, didn't mean that I shouldn't keep, at least casually, trying to pursue agents for the Frontier Team. So I had lackadaisically been sending out queries, a couple every few weeks.

Well, a query that I sent out the second week of February just paid off: An agent from an old New York firm had read the first five pages and was interested in reading the full manuscript! Now, I had had fulls requested before, but only from agents I'd met in person, none from someone who had actually read the beginning and wanted more. So it looks promising, at least more promising than the rest. The agent's turnaround time is 8 weeks. If it takes that long for him to get back to me, it's likely that I'll have the Food Fights first draft ready by the time he is done.

This means that if life weren't busy enough, I'm now working head-down full-speed-ahead on the Food Fights manuscript... there is a conference in May that I want to attend in Boston if I don't hear back from this agent soon, and it would need to be ready by then. Last night I worked really hard and finished the outline, which is kind of complicated because each chapter title is an event in or aspect of the American Revolution, and metaphorically corresponds to the events in that chapter in the book. (Examples of chapter titles: 1. Lexington 2. Concord 3. The Olive Branch Petition 4. Common Sense 5. Declaration of Independence 6. Battle of Brooklyn 7. Crossing the Delaware ... all the way through Chapter 16, Treaty of Paris.)

So, I'll try to keep up here, especially about stuff the girls are doing, but I'm likely to be in Push Through and Ahead mode for the next couple of months.

And, frankly, any encouraging words would be welcome. What I'm trying to accomplish in the Food Fights book is kind of daunting. It's really ambitious. All kinds of themes and messages are being woven together while I'm keeping the pace and plot fast and the characters engaging... it's the kind of book that I hope kids will find something different in each time they read it. The kind that I'd like sixth grade teachers to assign as book report books because there's just so many nuggets of gold in there. The kind that speaks to both kids and adults and makes them think at the same time as enjoying the characters. The kind that wins the Newbery.

While I am hoping that the plan works, I am not positive it will. So I'm just focused on getting that Perfect First Draft done. (As Anne LaMott says, "Every first draft is a Perfect First Draft.) I have discovered that it's really easy to have my fiction writing enthusiasm squashed, especially when there are all kinds of other things I have to work on. Right now I need cheerleaders rather than skeptics. I love to edit, and I'm sure the second draft will be very different from the first draft, once I see how it all hangs together. But if I lose momentum, I won't have the first draft at all.

Momentum = mass times velocity

Hmmmm. Well, that gives me no insight at all. I'd hoped it would, but it didn't. I had to type it out first and see it there, and then know that I must edit it out.

Momentum = mass times velocity

See? The first draft is a Perfect First Draft. I'll never know how to edit if I don't get it on the page first.

Wish me luck.

Play -- the verb -- in The Balance

It's all a balance, and sometimes I wonder if I'm teetering.

Yesterday, I played in the snow with the girls for over two hours, building a fort/snowslide:



It was tremendously fun. The snow cooperated like no other snow I've seen: It was perfectly sticky, but not slushy. If you needed to scoop up some snow to reinforce up one of your "blocks," well, it behaved like clean, white clay. It wasn't too cold. No one got bored. We all got lots of exercise.

Here's the thing: When was the last time I went out and played with the girls? I can't remember.

We go on hikes, sure. We do projects. We get Out and About as few others do. But we don't play together that much. No, their play time is my work time. And I guard that work time carefully.

I tell myself that this is good, that they have to learn to play together independently, without me. All true. But still, I realize that I have turned away from play. I'm really poor at pretend games, for instance, whereas they are masterful. They have a new fantasy game they play in the car, which they call the Phone Game. They have two of our old, broken cell phones. Madison plays the role of Mission Control giving verbal directions and clues to Ella, who is out in the field in some mystery adventure in a fairyland world. They describe to each other what is happening, as if they were on the phone.

It's an incredible thing to listen to from the front seat. They have such imagination, such mental agility... a facility with making up stuff on the fly that I can't come close to replicating. I even find it arduous to play with them, walking their dollhouse people through an adventure. I remember doing this with ease as a child, but now I think my inhibitions are totally in the way.

I never want them to lose this.

Almost three years ago, I wrote on this blog about how grateful I was that the girls still played "chirp and peep" with me. It's the one pretend game I'm still good at... I'm the Mommy Birdie and they're the Baby Birdies. The mommy birdie says "chirp" and the baby birdies say "peep." And do you know, we STILL do it. Sometimes we have an entire game of it when I'm snuggling them into bed, but sometimes it's just a quick chirp-and-peep check-in when we're out and about. It's our special language. When I want to say "I love you," I whisper to one of them, "chirp" and she whispers back, "peep."

I feel as though I've been too busy to incorporate enough play into what I do with them. Maybe we play "at school" -- and I guess we sort of do, I try to make it fun, and we usually have a good connection. But it's not the same as play-without-a-particular-point, which we did yesterday. I will admit that my mind kept drifting off into "shoulds" -- I should be doing my taxes, I should be reconciling my accounts, I should be writing reports, I should be doing laundry, I should be making dinner -- and I kept having to yank myself back to just BE.

Unscheduled time to just PLAY -- with the girls. It's a radical concept, and I'm not sure where it comes into The Balance.

Really looking forward to this

I played cello from age 8-20. I wasn't very good, but I wasn't bad, either. I certainly was no soloist. It wasn't even that I liked the music I made as an individual cellist; I could see where I lacked in ability and technique even back then. But I loved playing in orchestras. It is one of the few childhood/teen memories I have that remains completely unsullied by crap. I don't think I met one single crappy person who played in orchestras with me. And, I loved, truly loved, what we were able to create by working together. I think I felt this first when I was about 14 and playing Beethoven's "Mount of Olives." When I first read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and my teacher taught us the concept of "epiphany," that was the experience to which I related the word.

Yesterday, I found out about a "string camp for adults" at Roberts Wesleyan College for four days in the summer. SCOR is meant not for performance professionals, but for people exactly like me: Those who either played a stringed instrument as a child but not as an adult, or who play for their own enjoyment as an adult. What a great concept! I love that there is a market for this kind of thing, and I just. can't. wait. Before I checked out the registration form, I thought to myself that I didn't care how expensive it was, I still wanted to do it. Yes, it's pricey, but what is the point of being middle-aged and having purchasing power if you can't put it toward something that makes you count the days between February and July, right? People travel from all over to come to it, and here it is, 20 minutes away.

And, it will make a great article, because, after all, the mission of KidsOutAndAbout.com is partly to inspire parents to demonstrate to their kids that learning and self improvement never stop. Tax deduction, here I come!