From the Introduction to  Head in the Sand … and other unpopular positions:

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You don’t have to be a wife or mother, as I am, to identify with the stuff in this book. You just have to know a wife or a mother. That’s close enough.

I’d love to say that everything in this book is completely true . . . or that everything in this book is completely made up. Either way I’m going to be in a boatload of trouble with somebody. So, to keep from being lynched in the restroom of the local craft store, let me assert with unabashed honesty that everything in this book is as true as it needs to be in order to be funny. When starting each of these essays, my goal was to exaggerate when necessary to keep the humor up around belly-button level (because belly-buttons are funny).

Imagine my surprise to find out just how little I had to exaggerate once I really got rolling. These people I grew up with and hang out with and live with are just naturally funny. Well, from a slight distance, anyway. They just don’t know it yet.

Still, I’ll leave the specifics of exactly which parts are true and which merely further the cause of humor up to you, dear reader. Because nobody I’ve mentioned in this book is going to admit to anything. Not without a lot of coaxing and a cashier’s check.

So, now that the legal garbage is out of the way, just who do I think I am writing this stuff? A little background: I was raised in the sixties and seventies by a mother who drove a Fiero in the eighties and listened to Pink Floyd and a father who drove a pickup truck and listened to Johnny Cash. Somehow, all that genetic material added up to me.

Me? I drive cars old enough to vote and listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic. I know, I know. It doesn’t make sense to me, either.

But I take hope for the future of our family—because my kids drive nicer cars than I do . . . and listen to Pink Floyd and Johnny Cash.

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Head in the Sand is NOW available on Amazon.com!

Head in the Sand: … and other unpopular positions

I’m nearly a week into this year’s National Novel Writing Month  and so far I can report more success than I’ve experienced at the start of one of these things in a long time. The story started slowly (in my mind), and I felt as if the first few chapters were being yanked out of me like this wisdom tooth I should have had pulled sometime during the Reagan Administration. But we were all so giddy on capitalistic free love and wishing we weren’t so damned poor and uneducated that I never got the tooth pulled, and once I had the money to get it done and the abiding personal despair necessary to submit oneself to dental torture (this would be during the Clinton years), it no longer troubled me and I moved on to other things, such as weak ankles that turned on me faster than Hillary turned on Bill after the election.

But I digress. Weren’t we talking about my writing? Sorry, I’m in the bad habit this month of dragging every stray thought out until it’s coughed up blood and lies trampled in the streets like a dead–oh, sorry. 

Since I will be out of town for the last five days of November, my personal goal has been 2,000 words per day. So far, so good. In fact, I’ve found that early afternoon is a splendid time for me to write–as long as I leave the house completely. If I stay in the house, I end up continuing the household chores I’d started that morning (which always include leftover dishes, baskets of dirty laundry, and crop harvests in Farm Town). So, my system is this:

– Do mundane chores in the morning (laundry, e-mail, showering, straightening up the house, more e-mail, icing a few people in Mafia Wars, checking the mail for royalty checks for novels I haven’t published yet).

– Pack up the AlphaSmart Neo, the iPod, and the Kindle and head out to one of my favorite places to write (either Cafe Kolache in Beaver, Pa., or a Panera Bread, even though their tables are way too freakin’ high to type at comfortably).

Once I’m out of the house, armed with enough gadgets to make Steve Jobs and Bill Gates fight over which one of them gets to have my baby, I get a lot of work done. A lot. And, it doesn’t feel like work.

Next time, I’ll write about write-ins–those oddly paradoxical gatherings where writers engaging in the most solitary career choice in the nerdy world sit next to each other in public, presumably to write novels, and end up with collective word counts like 300 … or 217 … or 0 … over a three-hour period.

For now, though, I’ve hit my goal again, and I’m up over 12,000 words in six days. (Do the math, people! You can’t ALL be English majors!) And it’s 2 a.m. here (the real 2 a.m., not that fake 2 a.m. referenced in my last post) and I’m ready to hit the bed before my eyelids become as heavy as the cement shoes of Tony Soprano’s  turncoat relatives, where one false move earns you enough ill will from the boss to … oops, sorry.

But I digress … during a month where digressions are our friends. And, I apologize that this post has more links than a sausage factory.