Can Someone Lend Me Some Angst?

by Gigi

When I set out to write a novel, I knew there would be trouble.

Sure, I had so tons of plot ideas, and characters screaming at me to tell their stories. I've never been lazy, so finding the time didn't seem like a problem. And I've always been up for a challenge.

But there was something important missing: Where was my angst? How on earth was I going to write a compelling novel without a deep, driving need to to write a brutally honest, heartbreaking novel?

I'd already figured out that I wasn't cut out to be a lawyer or an academic, and that my true calling was instead in the arts, from design to photography to writing. So why was I lacking that artsy angst?

The answer was staring me in the face: my parents.

My parents, with their perfect marriage coming up on four decades, raised a completely well-adjusted, happy child. Which is all well and good -- until you discover the child is going to be an artist.

I don't suffer from a single childhood trauma. It's great for falling asleep within 5 minutes of lying down, but not so great for coming up with characters as awesome as, say, Lisbeth Salander.

But because I'm so boringly well-adjusted, I approached the problem pragmatically:

Even though my parents raised me to lack angst, they also raised me with a tremendous sense of adventure. I got to travel around the world with them from a young age. As cultural anthropologists, that meant a lot of travel compared to most kids I knew. Because of those experiences, in my adult life I lived in 7 cities in 3 countries before settling down with my house in the Bay Area. If the situation presents itself, I'll go anywhere. If a food is offered to me, I'll eat anything (once).

So maybe I'm not cut out to ever write that deep, heartbreaking novel. Instead, I'll go with my strengths, which also happen to be what I love to read most: mysteries with a strong dose of international adventure. L.G.C. came up with a great phrase that captures up what I'm working on right now: An Indian-American pirate treasure hunt adventure.

I won't be holding my breath for any book reviews discussing my deep prose, but I'm having a hell of a lot of fun.

Martha Parents

I purchased my first lemon tree earlier this year. My husband and I moved a fountain out of the way because we wanted this lemon tree to have the perfect plot in the center of our garden.

The day we brought Little Lemon home, I was so excited. His leaves were perfect. He smelled so good! And he fit right into the little hole we had dug like he was meant to be there.

I had such high hopes. Sometimes I watched him from my office window, just to check how he was doing.

But Little Lemon wasn't performing as I'd hoped. His growth was stunted. He wouldn't produce any buds, much less lemons.

What was I doing wrong?

My husband and I adjusted the watering. First more. Then less. We reconditioned the soil. We wanted to give him the very best after all.

Was it his friends? We'd planted the most advantageous companion plants nearby to discourage pests but maybe there were better options out there. Who knew what kind of effect they were having on him when we weren't watching!

Then there was that issue of where we lived. It wasn't the right kind of neighborhood, not for raising lemon trees. Too much saltwater. Not enough sun. But we loved Little Lemon and gave him every possible thing needed to succeed. Wasn't that enough?

The worst was other owners. The ones with trees with mature branches bowing under heavy fruit. I hid my envy while sipping perfectly tart lemonade as they bemoaned how their lemon tree's production levels meant they could hardly use all the lemons, so why didn't I take a few? As if I wanted their pity lemons from their overachieving tree!

Part of me pretended I was okay with Little Lemon's low production levels. After all, he was still alive and otherwise thriving. He was green and growing. Wasn't that enough? But deep down, for me, it wasn't.

When people asked me how my garden was, I would rave about my potato harvest, my blooming Gala apple tree but skim over Little Lemon, slightly ashamed. Whenever I would confess my worries, the ensuing advice grated my nerves. Everyone had a story about some other person they knew with a poor Lemon Tree. Everyone had some urban legend to share with some piece of advice. Spray the leaves. More mulch. Like we hadn't thought of it already.

I wondered what it would be like if I had gotten another Lemon Tree instead. In my deepest, darkest thoughts, I pictured switching him out with another, more mature Lemon Tree already in the midst of a production cycle.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit I run out every Sunday and check under the leaves, hoping for the best. My husband is convinced he'll pull through, but I've given up hope. Maybe my high expectations were too much pressure.

What if he doesn't want to carry all those heavy lemons? What if he doesn't want to be plucked? He doesn't exist for my own personal tart consumption, after all. He's still a happy little tree, and my selfish expectations aside, he's doing fine.


* These are seriously thoughts I've had about my lemon tree. I don't mean to imply these feelings are in any way comparable to the actual feelings one would have for a child, but I don't have any children, so here you go instead! *

Good Genes

I've got good genes. The kind that seem to weather time well and allow generations of Hugheys and various other surnames to live well into their nineties.



Grandma Nellie's 90th Bday with a bucketload of great-grandkids (the silly face picture)





Grandpa Dick at age 98






I've also had great parental examples.

The kind of marital example that marries and stays happy for fifty or more years. And when they weren't happy they worked through their problems, forgave each other their foibles, and got on with raising their families and extended families. The kind of love that almost hurts to watch when they give each other a peck or or hold hands in their eighties.



Wish I had a picture of either set of grandparents in a smooch

The kind of open-minded example that allowed me to grow up in house untarnished by prejudice and racism and to learn as much as I could about people who aren't just like me.

The kind of parental example that shows you must go to bat for your children even when you have no earthly idea how to overcome a challenge but you refuse to accept the current diagnosis.

The kind of character example that put no limits on what I could do or who I could be. Encouraging me to follow my dreams and not give up.

Which must be why I continue to write books and refuse to give up. One day this dream (with a lot of hard work and perseverance) will come true.



So thanks Mom and Dad, Mom and Pop, Grandpa Dick and Grandma Thelmeta, MaMae, and Grandmother Hudson for being awesome examples and giving me great genes.

Lisa

A Parent and a Kid

Today the Pens welcome Veronica Wolff, who is generous to be giving away a copy of her newest book, Devil's Highlander, to one lucky commenter!

I confess, when the fine Fatales asked if I’d blog and mentioned Parents as a potential topic, I made a little perplexed frowny face. I could opine at length on, oh, food, TV, sex, men. But parents? What have I got to say about parents?

But then I started thinking, just a little, and realized just how much I actually have been thinking about the topic.

For starters, there’s the whole concept behind my latest book: my Clan MacAlpin series follows a family of orphans (what else?!) in seventeenth century post-war Scotland. (Like how I got that bit of publicity out? Clever, huh?) I won’t explore why I chose to take the poor kids’ parents out of the equation—Adrienne already covered the cruel whimsy of authors yesterday, so ‘nuff said there.

But you could argue it’s impossible to think about life—fictional or otherwise—without contemplating parents. It always, eventually, comes up. Whether you’ve lost your parents, are a parent yourself, are estranged from a parent, or, like me, are lucky enough to still have both of them around.

It’s been a very explicit topic for me these past few weeks. I mean, consider my current summertime location. Though I live in San Francisco, the kids and I are on an extended visit…to my parents.

Boom…there’s a minefield of topics right there. Coming home again. When kids become parents. And the dreaded Becoming our parents. Gack.

And seriously. My perplexed frowny face? The lady doth protest too much. Because I am a parent, and honestly, even though my oldest was born nine years ago, it still sometimes wigs me out a bit. I worry I might never get used to the concept that I’m the one in charge. That I’m the one establishing boundaries, and setting examples, and answering questions about God and boys and moral fiber and stuff.

But for now it’s nice to be “home.” Like, at my parents’ home. The home where I can find high school paraphernalia rolling around in old dresser drawers. Where, if I wanted, I could wear jammies all day, because I don’t know the neighbors, or have a carpool to drive, or a dog to walk.

Where, for just a few weeks, I can foist all the hard calls onto someone else. Like, sure we can watch TV till late…we’re at Grandma’s, and it’s her call. Or, we don’t often buy cookies, but Grandma does, so please pass mommy the Oreos, honey.

See where I’m going with this?

So here I am in Florida, with my parents, and I find myself regressing to a different age, one where I sit elbow-to-elbow with my kids, eating Captain Crunch for breakfast (who can resist the lure of the crunchberry?), requesting special mom/grandma-made tuna sandwiches, and watching more TV than is good for any reasonable human.

I miss my husband and can’t wait to get back to my real home, but for now I’m enjoying every minute of being both a parent and a kid again.

Veronica Wolff is an award-winning, bestselling author with a soft spot for kilts and vampires. Not necessarily at the same time. Known for her Scottish time travel series, she's changing gears, launching two new series with the Penguin Group: The Clan MacAlpin Novels, featuring a family of strapping, seventeenth-century Highlanders, and The Watchers, starring a group of vampires and the teenaged girls who train to watch over them.

Just A Little Advice

--Adrienne Miller

There are a lot orphans in the world of romance heroes and heroines. It’s one of our favorite tricks, along with creating enough dukedoms and viscountcies to make a volume of Debrett’s thicker than the unabridged OED. We just love killing off a backstory parent or two. We’re not cruel. It just makes good story sense.

Cut down a character’s parents and you have severed their anchor to the world. Do it before they have established strong roots, and you take away their source for easy answers about who they really are and where they fit into the world. Then just set them adrift on the sea of life and watch them stumble around, pouting and raging. Good fun.

Not a single character of mine has had two, relatively sane and happy parents still living, which is kind of a shame...or would be, you know, if they were real. 

My own mom always blamed me and my sister for her going gray early. She also used to threaten to sell us to gypsies at least once a day, though I can’t imagine the going rate for a couple of suburban low-level miscreants could have been all that high. But they both gave me advice that I’ve tried to follow to this day.

“Swing early and swing often.”  Yeah, I know it’s from the whole Chicago voting style, but this one I know from my dad. My poor dad always ended up as the coach of my softball teams. He never signed up for it, but about three practices in to the season it always became crystal clear that none of these suit and tie dads knew the first thing about playing ball, and in stepped the reluctant hero. I could fill a whole book just with his batting advice.

“Nobody likes walks. They’re boring. So swing early and swing often. Sometimes you’ll strike out and you’ll hit homeruns, but you’ll never be boring.”

“Just tell them to go eat shit and die.” Yeah, that's still my mom’s favorite, and I should mention that for her it was more of a hard earned revelation than a simple profanity. See, all kinds of people tried to judge her for decisions she made earlier in her life, and I think one day she realized that the only person she really had to live her life for was herself and anybody who wanted to give grief for that, well, they could just go eat shit and die.

“Some days are just too nice to be spent indoors.”  I was in the fifth grade when a sorrowful looking secretary came to get me out of class. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, just that my parents had come to get me. My parents, looking terribly distraught, signed me out and walked me to the car. Once we had driven off they told me they had decided that it was too beautiful of a day to be spent inside, so we were off to a baseball game. Turns out, they had told the office that some horrible tragedy had befallen my grandmother--sadly, not the last time my poor grandmother had some terrible and completely fictional accident. 

Caution: Use this one sparingly, but use it.

Parental Contradictions (by Juliet)

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

--Walt Whitman

You know how novelists are always trying to write round, complex characters? Here’s a secret: just try to write your parents.

Parents are complex, contradictory, characters. If you don’t agree, just try cleaning out their closets when they’re old. I guaran-damn-tee you, you will find out things you didn’t know. Maybe things you would have preferred never to know, or things that will charm you. And disarm you. But they will surprise you, one way or the other: Old love letters. Diaries. Receipts. Seductive lingerie.

My Parents (on the left, my dad with my sister in his lap) with friends in
North Carolina, circa 1958. I just had to include this picture...it's SO Mad Men

This person you’ve known for thirty, forty, fifty years…This person used to be a different person.

And if you are lucky enough to have them around while they grow very old, they will, no doubt, transform yet again.

For example: I went to help my dad clean out a whooooole bunch of old stuff and I found an old wallet. Made of red leather, tooled with flowery scroll designs and inscribed with a message:

To My Adirondack Queen, With Love

WTF? My father did crafts???

This was not the father I knew. The father I grew up with was a military man. A jet pilot. A Commander in the Navy. He went in for competitive skiing and motorcycle racing. He owned many guns. When we were children he ordered us about, and though we knew he loved us –completely-- we were all just a little bit afraid of him.

Dad at his dapper best. He was twenty-five and newly married.

These days, he’s gone somewhat sentimental, and even admitted to crying at the end of “You’ve Got Mail” (it was Somewhere over the Rainbow that did him in). But he also talks a lot about welfare cheats and bootstraps and...I really *hate* to admit this…he watches Glenn Beck, and yet doesn’t think the man is insane. For real. I am not making this s**t up.

But…he is also unfailingly polite and kind face to face with just about anybody – from the homeless woman on the street to the mechanic fixing his car to the banker in the three piece suit. He hasn’t got a snobby bone in his body, and is all about the content of a person’s character. In the military he served with all creeds and colors and respected –dare I say loved?—the men who served with him and for him.

He is a walking contradiction.

And Mom? My mother’s adorable. She has a huge, impish grin, a widow’s peak, and honest-to-God dimples in her cheeks. She was a warm, charming hostess – as a child I was accustomed to having people to supper every night, and visitors in the guest room or on the couch every week or so. I didn’t realize how rare that was until I grew up and realized that not everyone’s mom adopted lost souls at the drop of a hat, plying them with cake and tea and a soft shoulder to cry on.

Mom on that same honeymoon trip to San Juan Capistrano -- she was twenty-three

But…she had that Southern Woman thing of never, ever, telling you the truth if it was at all nasty or likely to go against someone else’s wishes. She was never able to simply state what she wanted, much less demand to have her own needs met. She was a martyr through and through, happy to splay herself open for the good of others and to let them take what they needed. And take we did, as children tend to do.

She was a passive-aggressive piece-de-resistance…with a wicked, pitch-perfect, sense of humor.

But, apparently, she was also an Adirondack Queen, wooed by a pretty darned handsome fella...a guy who not only skied and cooked, but also made tooled leather wallets for the gal he loved. Who knew?

They contain multitudes. Oh yes they do.

Rachael's Parents Were Right

When I was kid, I wanted different parents, in a BIG way. I thought I'd been shorted. Mine just weren't normal, I knew it.

Other kids' parents sent them to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on WonderBread. I got cheese and vegemite on brown bread.

Other kids got to eat sugar whenever they wanted to. We got dessert on Friday nights (ice milk, sometimes, or ginger snaps), and the rest of the time it was carob chips, ahoy.

Other kids got to watch TV, all the channels. We got to watch one hour a day, and it had to be on PBS: Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Electric Company, or my personal favorite: 321 Contact.

Other kids got to shoot toy guns. We'd get in trouble for even pointing a stick at each other and saying bang (which made it super fun to do quietly, up on the hill, when they weren't looking).

Other kids' parents took them to McDonalds. Our parents took us on protest marches.

Other kids got money for their grades. We got ten cents per tooth, no exception (except that one time the tooth fairy forgot--I got a quarter the next night. I always hoped she'd forget again.)

Other kids had curfews in the double digits. Ours was nine pm. In high school. I'm not kidding. (Weekends were extended to 10pm, which was still embarrassing.)

But you know what? We got to check out 10 books at once, every week, from the public library. We got to steer the car when Dad drove, and we got to learn to drive (and drive by ourselves!) at fourteen, because they trusted us. We got to watch rated R movies, as long as they were up for an Oscar. We got to jump off the roof of the garage, as long as we landed in the iceplant. We got to make stilts. We got to do scientific experiments in the hobby shop with our chemistry lab, and explosions were encouraged. We got play full-sized arcade video games while Dad was fixing them for a friend. Our cats got to have one litter of kittens each. We got to study astronomy. We got to live on a tropical island and count the geckos on the walls. We got to go snorkeling every day after homeschool let out. We were taught how to play. We were taught how to read.

And we were always, always loved. Our parents did it right, I've decided. I'm sure they were glad when I came around.

*I'm the one in blue, Christy is in gold, and SFA-RWA fellow member and sister Bethany is in red. Oh, wow, and now that I click for embiggening, I just noticed that Mom made her dress, Dad's shirt, and my and C's dresses. (Bethany's red suit is machine-made, I think.) ADORABLE.

Writing Around the Dad-Filter

by Sophie

PARENTS

You all know the old writing advice, right - "Write as though your parents are dead"?

It's good advice. Parents are one of the strongest filters between what's cooking in our brain and what ends up on the page. And that's not always a bad thing, of course - parents are often our first teachers, our value-setters, our moral guides. I'm grateful to mine. But the day came when I had to stick my fingers in my ears and go "blah blah blah I don't hear you, Dad" - figuratively speaking, of course.

(Now I have to pause here and tell you that my dad reads this blog regularly. Hi, Dad! So even as I write about filters, I'm probably filtering. But in the last year Dad and I have had lots of great conversations about a variety of things and I don't think he'll mind me sharing.)

I've written for many, many years, and my dad's always read bits and pieces of what I was working on. My brother's always written too, and Dad read some of his work too. One day we were all talking about writing, and my dad said, "Just don't ever write anything gratuitously violent. There's no excuse for that."

(Pause, again. We have to wait a minute for my dad to say "I said that? I never said that! I don't remember saying that." I'm hoping Mike is reading this too so he can back me up.)

Here's the thing. I wrote lots of stuff for a long time with my dad's words in my mind. I tried to ignore them, but they were just too powerful. So while I wrote my women's fiction and literary fiction and so on, I veered away from violence. Which some of you, those of you who have read my stuff, may find curious. Because I would say that one of the themes uniting all of my recent work - whether it's mystery, young adult, or paranormal - is human violence and where it springs from and what it does to people and how it informs our emotional landscape and visa versa. I'm telling you, it's a *big* deal to me. It might not be going too far to say it's fundamental to my work as a whole.

Now I could wimp out here and go "yeah, but it's not ever gratuitous." The thing is- "gratuitous," I mean really, isn't that a cheat? Who gets to decide? Whether it's sex or violence or wordiness or grammatical liberty-taking, isn't your not-enough often my over-the-top? I reject the non-gratuitous defense.

I write violence. I have my reasons. for some people it's too much, for others too little, and I reserve the right to change course at any time.


I'm going to pause one more time for my dad to say "Dear, I would never dream of telling you what to write" and "You and your brother are my favorite authors." I like hearing that. :) Yeah, he's my dad and all, but I can't hear that enough. If the Nobel committee took notes from people's parents, I expect my dad would write one, and that's nice.

So you know I have my own little writers, right? I tell them all the time that they are brilliant writers, because to me, they are. They shine bright, bright, bright for me, and I know I can't be objective, and I don't care. I'm sure I'm saying other things to them that are messing with their heads, and that thirty years from now I'll hear about it and probably deny it. My niece and nephew are also budding writers. They're also brilliant.

Being the parent of a writer is probably a thankless task much of the time, so today I'd just like to say "Thanks, Dad."

Here's a sample of my nephew's recent work: