I know it’s been a long time since my last post – a lot has happened since then. Much has changed and it has been a pretty rocky summer for me and my family. But I will get to that here in a little bit. What’s weighing heavy on my mind right at this moment is the death of Steve Jobs, and my reaction to it. Granted, if my family had a common religion, it would be Mac. In our household alone, we have a total of four “living” Macs, two iPods, three Nanos, three iPhones (soon to be four next Friday, when my younger son gets his), one Apple TV, and several “vintage” Macs in our basement. My mother is on her third Mac. My dad and brother both have Macs and iPhones, etc. Over the years, we’ve watched Steve’s keynote speeches as if they were sermons, waiting to be amazed and delighted by his newest idea. We were never disappointed. One example that comes to mind is the emergence of “FaceTime” on our iPhones last summer. I will never forget the first time I used it to see to my sweet baby niece, face to face, across the miles, and watch her crawl across my brother’s kitchen floor. I missed her so much, and there she was in the palm of my hand. I was smiling so hard, my cheeks started to hurt. It meant the world to me. Only one of the many, many things I have to thank Steve Jobs for.

Nonetheless, I didn’t actually know the man, so I couldn’t understand why when my 14-year old came down to tell me the news last night, I burst into tears as if I’d lost a close family member. Even this morning, I’m tearing up at the thought of it. But after watching the video of his commencement speech to Stanford several years ago, and pondering the above quote from that speech, I’m starting to realize that the death of one of my family’s heros is more or less a culmination of all the changes that we’ve gone through this summer and now we’re left with, well, connecting the dots.

At the end of June, we shut down our business after nine years. The time had come to move on. We could no longer compete with the online companies, and we were sick of killing ourselves trying. What’s more, we found that we had changed, and we need to shake free of the shop in order to move on to bigger and better things. But that didn’t make it easier when we were packing up the place to move out. I found such items as coloring books, old gameboys, grade school worksheets, and Legomen – reminding me that my boys had grown up there as we struggled to run a business. And as it so happens, my older son was starting his senior year in high school and my younger one was going to be a freshman. My babies were all but grown up. Would it have gone any slower if we didn’t have the shop, if I’d stayed home baking cookies? Absolutely not. But it still felt like (and FEELS like) time had somehow run away from me while I wasn’t paying enough attention. In the all the activity and chaos of raising a family, running a business and trying to stay somewhat sane, I’d forgotten how quickly things could, and would, change. Businesses shut down. Children grow up. Goals change. Nothing stays the same.

Heroes don’t live forever.

So – what’s next? I made a promise to myself when the business closed, I would focus more on my writing. I took the summer to decompress, but now I’m ready to make that happen. There are a lot of dots in our life that still need connecting, but I’ve chosen to trust the Universe and know that we will figure it all out exactly when we are supposed to.

In the meantime, I will take Steve’s advice. I will not settle. I will stay hungry, and stay foolish. And someday, I’ll be able to connect the dots.

Thanks for everything, Steve. We will miss you.

Louis and Charlotte Foley-Poulin, Circa 1857

In my husband’s family, legend has had it for years that, although their last name is “Foley”, they are not actually Irish because my husband’s Grandpa Foley was adopted.

I never bought it.

You see, one look at my husband’s boisterous clan will convince you that there has to be at least some Irish in them. Besides, who’s to say that just because Grandpa Foley was adopted that he wasn’t Irish himself? And why in the world would an Irish family adopt, when they usually have so many kids in the first place?  So when my dad introduced me to ancestry.com, one of my first quests was to prove once and for all that my husband, and thus my children, had Irish genes. And I did.

Louis Foley, my husband’s great-great-great grandfather, was born in about 1800. When he was 17 years old, he and his family set sail to Canada. It was common for the Irish to immigrate to Canada during that time, as the fare was much cheaper, and the Irish were notoriously poor. Unfortunately, the waters were much more treacherous further North, and shipwrecks were also very common. This ship that carried Louis and his family shipwrecked off the coast of Nova Scotia. Louis was the only one of his family who survived. He was alone, at 17, in a strange country. He somehow ended up in Quebec, working for a man with the last name of Poulin, which was a name of fairly high status in Quebec at that time. When he was nineteen, he desperately wanted to marry a young woman (my husband thinks he probably knocked her up, but I prefer to think he fell head over heals in love) named Charlotte Ganthier, whose family was also of very high status, but he didn’t have the name or means to marry her. He begged his employer to adopt him and give him his name, and his employer did. So he became Louis Foley Poulin. However, when the children started coming, he insisted that they all have the last name of Foley. Louis and Charlotte’s son, William, named his son after Louis. That Louis Foley was the father of James William Foley, who is the father of my father-in-law, James Foley Jr.

So there was some truth in the family legend, but it got a little muddled in the retelling over the generations, as family stories often do. There is also a legend that Grandpa Foley had Native American genes, which I have also discovered is accurate, but I need to do a little more research.

The thing that fascinates me the most while I explore our family’s history is the young people who single-handedly brought an entire branch of family to this country. My ancestor, Ada. My husband’s ancestor, Louis. Both of them were 17, the same age as my older son is now. I can’t imagine my son traveling all by himself from Nova Scotia to Quebec — I wring my hands and pace the floor when he’s driving by himself across town. And yet, the entire branch of my husband’s name comes from this one 17-year old boy. And the entire branch of my mother’s maiden name comes from a 17 year old girl who sailed across the ocean all by herself. It boggles my mind and inspires me, which is probably why I’ve become so addicted to genealogy and the stories still waiting to be uncovered.

Writing Progress: Slow, but steady. I’ve been working each morning on my character sketches, which has spurred several ideas for new scenes, so that’s a positive.

Other Stuff: We’ve actually got a little busy at the shop, which is encouraging after a very long dry spell (as in MONTHS). It’s only my hubby and I at the shop, so we’ve been hopping. Plus, corporate taxes are due this Tuesday.

More later …

As I watched this story I’d never heard before (if I’d been taught about it in school, I’d forgotten — the most I previously knew about the history of unions was from watching Sally Field in Norma Rae, so for all I knew, that’s when unions were started), I began to think about my great-great grandmother. Recently, I’ve become intrigued with genealogy, so I’ve begun relating events in history back to what my ancestors were doing at the time. It occurred to me that the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike took place around the time my great-grandfather, H.B. Williams Sr., was born. His mother (my great-great grandmother) was a dressmaker. Her name was Ada Williams. I haven’t been able to find out a lot about her, other than she came over on a ship from Wales at the age of 17, apparently alone. Her maiden name was “Scarlet” which I thought was unusual, but it turns out that it is a very common surname in Wales. However, when she stepped off the ship, her last name was “Williams”. I don’t know if she was widowed back in Wales, or if her husband died on the way to America. At any rate, the next time I found her was in the Minnesota Census, living in a boarding house with her young son, Henry. Her occupation was listed as “Dressmaker”.

Up until last night,  I’d romanticized my great-great grandmother as a tragic young widow, with her own little shop where she sewed beautiful custom gowns for the rich ladies in Minneapolis, her young son by her side. But last night I realized that it was more likely that she had worked in a similar factory as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, working hideously long 12-14 hour days in a hot cramped room with dozens of other young women like her. What is amazing to me, is that she somehow raised her son by herself, a foreign young widow all on her own, and that son grew up to found a successful furniture company that was later taken over by my grandfather, H.B. Williams, Jr.

Someday, when my current novel is finished, I plan to write a story about Ada. I will have to make up most of it up, as I know only what the passenger lists and censuses tell me, the rest my imagination has filled in. She remarried when her son was a young man, and my mother remembers her as “Grandma Tripp”.  Out of all the old family photos I’ve gathered over the years, I don’t even have a picture of her. But one thing is for sure, she had to have been an extraordinarily strong woman, like so many other women I’ve found in my family tree. I’ve never really considered myself what you’d call a feminist, but ever since I’ve started researching my family history, I’ve been particularly proud of the women that I come from. It inspires me to know that I have their blood flowing through my veins, and their spirit in my heart.

Okay, so it’s been awhile. Again. But I am happy to report that I am checking in here with a plan and some enthusiasm to boot, so go me.

This past month, I’ve been working on getting back into the writing groove and finish my novel THIS YEAR once and for all. I’ve never been very good at goals, or deadlines for that matter, and I very rarely make New Year’s Resolutions for that reason, but this year, Scarlett O’Hara style (With God as my witness!) I WILL finish this book. As a started rereading my first draft for the umpteenth million time, I realized (or rather RE-relized) that although I still think with all my heart it’s a fantastic story, I only skimmed the surface of what I wanted to convey through the story. There is so much more emotion and meaning to mined from it. Part of that, I think, is because I never really did any character sketching or story discovery (something I learned about AFTER I wrote my first draft). So, I’ve decided I’m going to backtrack and do that now. I know a lot in my head about my characters, but I’ve never really wrote it down, so that’s what I’m going to do over the next couple of weeks along with some collaging of the scenes and characters so I won’t only have a picture in my mind of what they look like, but I will have some actual visuals of my characters and the made up Colorado town where the story takes place. I think that this process will help me achieve the depth I’m looking for while I do my final revisions. It’s also kind of a fun way to ease myself back into the story and back to getting this thing done.

I’ve tried to cast out my characters before, but the only one I was very clear on was the character of Julian, who I chose the very sexy Eric Bana to portray:

I struggled with who would play my main character, Carly, but I finally stumbled upon this picture of Erin Sanders which is almost exactly how I imagine Carly:

I’m working on finding pictures for some of my other characters, including Carly’s mom, Paula, who is about 35 years old, blonde and very ill, but you can tell that she used to be beautiful. Oddly enough, I’m leaning towards Gwyneth Paltrow for her, but I’m up for suggestions. Also, I need a picture of Ida – who is an older granola hippy type lady, about 55ish, with long graying hair. I’m kind of at loss for that one, so I’d appreciate any ideas if you have them.

I’ve come to realize that the town itself has become sort of a character, so I plan to put some pictures of the town together in a photoshop collage with pictures of my characters. To give you an idea of the town, it’s sort of a mix between the real-life towns of Silver Plume and Idaho Springs (not as small as Silver Plume and not as big as Idaho Springs). Thus the name – Silver Springs.

My next post will be my collage, so stay tuned.

Baby steps … Baby steps.

But as far as the novel I’ve been working on for … oh, only about a quarter of a century now (you think I’m over exaggerating, but sadly, I’m not) … I’m stuck in the mud.  The story is essentially all there, all written down. I’ve made one round of very rough revisions, I kinda sorta know where all the problems are, and how to fix them. But there’s something missing that I can’t put my finger on exactly, and that’s what has me a bit paralyzed.  The whole thing isn’t geling the way that I’d like it. I’ve been waiting for it to come to me, and I can make out a form in the distance, but every time I grasp at it and try to write it down it disappears. Now it’s been so long since I’ve worked on or mentioned my novel, people have quit asking me about it. Not that I WANT anybody to ask, necessarily. It’s just that it makes it easy for me to ignore it and put it off that much longer. Countless times over the past few months I’ve toyed with the idea of officially giving up on the whole idea. I mean, who am I kidding? I don’t have the time, and when I do have the time, I don’t have the creative energy. And truth be told, I probably don’t have the talent. But the thought of giving up always depressing me to the point of wanting to hide under my covers and never come out. This is what I have that is mine. Something that has nothing to do with anybody else. My thing. For me.

But I didn’t start this post as a pity party. What I wanted to say is one thing that every writer needs is just one person … just one … who keeps needling at you. One person who keeps asking. Not in an accusing, scolding kind of way. Not even necessarily in an encouraging kind of way, really. Just asks. Now, before all of you who haven’t asked start feeling guilty, don’t. I really don’t want everybody in the world asking me about it. No, that would surely drive me crazy. You see, I think that person also needs to be writer. Someone who understands that just finding the time is only a small percentage of the battle. Someone who knows what it’s like to sit down at a blank page and hope the girls in the basement talk. Someone who has pages of pages of brain barf in front of them with the daunting task of shaping them into something coherent.

That person for me these days is my faithful Wiffer friend, Cynthia. I don’t think there has been a week that’s gone by for the past year that she hasn’t poked at me. Some of those weeks were weeks that I’d completely forgotten my story. And when I come back with, “nothing this week” she always understands, but she never ever stops asking. And for that, I am so grateful.

So when Cynthia recently came up with the idea of a September challenge, my first reaction was honestly not a positive one. I wasn’t sure if I was up for a challenge. My track record on challenges lately has been dismal at best. But since it was Cynthia, I felt obligated to give it some real thought. I started thinking about how I got my first draft done in the first place – by sitting my ass down and opening up Scrivener and just writing. What a concept, eh? Some days, the words didn’t come, or if they did come they were crap, but little by little the story started to flow and I found out I couldn’t wait to get back to it, to see what happened next. It was sort of like falling in love. And that’s what I need, to fall in love with the whole process of writing again.

And that, my friends, means I have to have an affair.

No, no. Not THAT kind of affair. I need to cheat on my current novel a bit, and take on another story. I’m not sure what it’s going to be about. I have a few pages of a story I’ve been toying with I might continue, or I might just start something else. The point is, I’m going to come the computer sit my ass down, open Scrivener, click on File, scroll down to New Document, and WRITE. Every day of September starting today (yes it’s the second, but that’s okay). It might be two words a day (like, “this sucks”) or it might be 200, or if I’m lucky, 1000. But it will be words. Kind of a NaNo sort of challenge but without a hard word count. And then maybe (I’m hoping) I can go back to my finished draft, and, well, finish.

Because I’m not giving this up. So there.

As I alluded to in my last post, oh so many weeks (months) ago, I went through a little bit of a writing slump. I generally don’t like to talk about my problems, but our business was hit pretty hard by the economy, and we’ve been more or less treading water, gasping for breath, trying to ride out the storm, so I literally had no creative energy left after work and cooking dinner each night, which is when I generally have time to write. So I succumbed instead to sacking out in front of the boob tube every night, and letting myself get lost in, appropriately, the show Lost.

That, and I found out revisions are REALLY EFFING HARD. Harder than actually writing the damn thing, especially since I pants the entire first draft without any thought of, you know, STRUCTURE and PLOT. So I’ve had to do a bunch of rewriting and even more cutting to patch things up. My first set of revisions that I did just before the new year were half-assed at best. So now, I finally feel ready to tackle a second set of revisions, this time with very fine tooth comb.

I asked my faithful friend, Cynthia, to keep my on track, and she led me to another Wiffer’s June challenge, Sleepy Jean’s MyNoEdMo. So I’ve joined up with that. My goal for June (and continuing through the summer) is one chapter a week. Currently, I have 15 chapters, so if I keep up with my goal (which I think is pretty doable), I will have a completely revised draft by the end of September and I’ll be ready to pursue some agents.

Right now, Chapter One is kicking my ass, so I’m thinking I’ll turn in what I have to Cynthia and move on. I’ll revisit it again when I’m done with all the rest. I seem to be overwhelmed knowing that the first 3-6 pages have to be enough to spark an agent’s interest, and I can’t get seem to get past that. So my only solution is to keep going and come back to hammer at it some more later.

I’d like to promise to post more often, but we all know how that goes. So let’s just say I will try harder to keep you up to date with my progress, and if you come back here and there are no recent posts, it most likely means no progress is being made. Fair enough?

So, of course, the point of the whole talk was that you’ve got to take time out for yourself in order to “fill the pitcher” in order to be able to fulfill your families needs.

Yeah, right.

Probably one of the biggest reasons I remember that talk (other than the obvious fact that it struck a chord) was that I won the door prize that day (there was a door prize every meeting related to the topic). It was the book “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy” by Sarah Ban Breathnach. Some of you have probably heard of it — it was a pretty popular book back then (1997ish?). I think Oprah featured it or something. It has a year’s worth of daily entries you’re meant to read each day to reflect on life’s simple joys and blessings. When I got it, I managed to read the first few entries and that was about it. The problem was that I got it in the middle of the year and it starts with January 1st, and even though I suppose you could start any time of the year, I’d skip a few days, forget where I was and it just felt like one more thing I had to do. In other words, at the time, it wasn’t doing much good in helping me to “fill the pitcher”. So, I put it away, figuring that “someday” I’d start it at the beginning of the year as intended. But of course, I eventually forgot about it.

Fast forward to this beginning of this year when my older son asked me if I had a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” because he had to read it for his English class. Well, of course I had it. Somewhere, anyway. I dug through some books under my bed, and along with the book my son needed, I found the “Simple Abundance” book and thought about that talk from all those years ago. I knew I was supposed to fill my pitcher, I really meant to fill my pitcher, it was on my list of things to do, really it was. Honest. But truth be told, I never did. And now my pitcher was not only dry, I didn’t even know where the pitcher was. I must have left somewhere on my way to a parent-teacher conference, or maybe it was at some business network meeting, or perhaps I lost it at the dentist office when Jake was getting a tooth pulled. At any rate, it was long gone and I was feeling bone dry. And here it was, only January 4th, so I only had to read four entries to get caught up. So I took it as a sign from the Universe that I really did have to focus a little bit on myself and my spirit, even though it felt just a little bit (okay A LOT) selfish. And you know what? It’s really good. Exactly what I needed right about now.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I haven’t been writing a whole lot, because as I said, the pitcher was dry. So I’ve needed this last couple of months to sort of step back and regroup and take a long, cleansing breath. I’ve got another full set of revisions to do on my novel and another story waiting impatiently off stage. I’m feeling ready now, so my tentative goal is to tackle two chapters of revisions a week. There are fifteen chapters, so if I have my math right (and I’m horrible at math) that should put me somewheres around April with a completed novel, ready for beta-readers and querying and all that goodness. And stay tuned for this new story because it’s a little different, a little OUT THERE and a little scandalish. To be honest, I’m not quite sure if it’s going to shape into a novel or not, but we’ll see.

It’s weird, because I’ve never been what you’d call an organized person, and list-making seems to be one of those things associated with highly effective, highly organized types. Not me — not by a very, very loooong shot. Maybe it’s that making lists makes me FEEL as if I’m organized. Who knows.

Nowhere is my love of lists more apparent as my iTunes. A few months ago, I shared my soundtrack playlist for my novel, but I have playlists for everything: housecleaning songs, workout songs, cooking songs, Christmas songs. I have playlists for special people in my life, especially people I’ve lost, like my Grandma, or people who are far away, like my best friend –songs that bring that person’s essence to me when I’m missing them.

Currently, I’ve been working on a list of songs that are sure to lift my spirits no matter how down I am. It’s best when these kinds of songs just happen to come up on the car radio — happy things are that much better when they’re a surprise. But sometimes I have to seek them out for myself. I have a feeling this playlist will get pretty long, because there’s a lot of songs that make me happy, but here are the first thirteen for today’s “Thursday Thirteen”:

1. Jack & Diane – John Mellencamp
2. All You Need is Love – The Beatles
3. Morning Has Broken – Cat Stevens
4. Rocky Mountain High – John Denver
5. Smile – Uncle Kracker
6. Here Comes the Sun – The Beatles
7. Come Sail Away – Styx
8. You Shook Me All Night Long – AC/DC
9. Joy of Life/Trout in the Bath – The Corrs
10. Red, Red Wine – UB40
11. We Are the Champions – Queen (Also on my “Best Friend” Playlist
12. Piano Man – Billy Joel
13. Don’t Stop Believing – Journey (I also love the “Glee” version – Also on my “Brother Mike” Playlist)

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was feeling pretty down and disconnected coming into the new year. I’ve also mentioned (in my 100 Things list) that I have a lot of strange beliefs and superstitions. One of my beliefs is that the Universe sends messages to me through songs I happen to hear at different times in my life. (I think I also mentioned in my 100 Things list that I’m a spiritual person, not a religious one, which is a topic I’m thinking of tackling in a post sometime in the near future, if I can get over the fear that someone will find my blog and take it upon themselves to “save” me. I don’t need to be saved, but like I said, that’s for another post.) Anyway, shortly after New Years, I heard “Diamond Road” by Sheryl Crow on the radio, and it made me realize I’d been forgetting to appreciate those “Diamonds Along the Way” — the little things in life that put a smile on my face and remind that life is truly a good and beautiful thing. So here are thirteen of my diamonds:

1 ) Kissing the little fuzzy spot on my dog’s nose.

2 ) A pink sunrise

3 ) When one of my kids hugs me for no apparent reason

4 ) The sound of rain on the roof

5 ) The first sip of coffee in the morning

6 ) Wool socks on a cold day

7 ) The last run of a long day skiing, know there’s a thermos of hot chocolate waiting for me in the car

8 ) A long, hot bubble bath with a good book

9 ) The sound of cicadas in the late summer.

10 ) Looking up through the leaves of an aspen tree at the sunshine

11 ) Hearing one my favorite songs on the radio when I’m alone in the car and singing along to it at the top of my lungs

12 ) Drinking cold water right out of the hose on a hot summer day

13 ) Watching the snow fall on a quiet morning before everybody else is awake

What are some of your diamonds?