Martha Practices Celebration

I remember back in high school a friend invited me to her graduation party.

Me: What is it?
Friend: A graduation party.
Me: For what?
Friend: Graduating.
Me: Weren't you supposed to graduate?

Ditto college acceptance party. First job party.

I didn't have a crazy strict upbringing but I definitely remember there was no tolerance for resting on your laurels.

No point getting excited about A's until you had straight A's. Straight A's don't matter - do you have the 4.0? Why freak out over the 4.0 until you're in college? College is just a gateway situation until you have the job. Do you have it? DO YOU?

Okay, great, a job ,but is it secure? Have your benefits kicked in? Did you get your first review? What about a raise?

Then at my first job, I met my friend E.

E likes a little celebration in everything.

She had me over for a dinner. Beforehand, I received a hand written invitation. At the event, she had typed up cute menus. Everything was beautifully plated. We said cheers. Cheers! We celebrated the fact that we were having dinner. BIZARRE! And addicting.

Next thing I knew, I would throw out cheers for anything.

Now we've already established from previous posts that I'm not modest and if I do say so myself, I'm intelligent, and I'm also a fast learner. So I took to celebrating like a fish to water.

I ROCKED IT.

Was it 5pm? Cheers.
Did I get mail? Cheers.
Good TV shows on tonight? Cheers and cheers.

I couldn't have learned it at a better time because writers need to celebrate, like Lisa said. There's too much rejection. Too much angst. Too much repeated beatings on your self esteem.

So finished manuscript? Cheers. Who cares if you have the agent.
Agent? Cheers! Who cares if you have the deal.
Book Deal? Cheers!!!! Screw your sales numbers.
Sales numbers? Cheeeeeers! Eff your next book contract.

Cheers to me, cheers to us, and cheers to you!

Lisa is a Celebration Junkie

I love to celebrate. Give me a reason and I’m there. You finished your first manuscript. Hooray, break out the champagne! You took the plunge and started exercising. Let’s take a walk! Your kid passed his driver’s test. Let’s have a glass of wine! You passed your first class. Yippee, here’s a great big hug.

I really do think it’s important to celebrate the small things. Because life throws us so many curves and unexpected roadblocks that when we hit a high, it needs to be catalogued and acknowledged and well, celebrated.

So one of the things that happens once you become a writer is that there are milestones along the way that perhaps really only seem like milestones to other writers. (Or at least that’s what we like to tell ourselves). Seemingly little things that deserve a check mark on a list of actions that make us REAL writers.

Each of these moments are little triumphs in their own right.

Having a plotting breakthrough.








Pens plotting and query reading






Finishing a draft. Crafting a query letter. Hitting send on a manuscript.

Your first rejection.



A good reminder card given to me after a series of rejections

Tackling the revision letter. Re-sending your manuscript.

Your first book signing.



Rachael's first signing

Your first meeting with your editor, agent, publicist. Starting a blog. Starting a grog. Building a website. Your first interview.

Finding your book in a store.





A night of bookspotting (which is NOTHING like trainspotting)







Your first release. Your first award. Your first mention in the NYT Book Review. Your first list.

You celebrate for yourself and you celebrate for your friends. :)

I’ve hit some of these and I’m still waiting on others. But one thing remains constant...each time I hit one, the Pens will be there to celebrate with me.

Happy New Year! May 2011 be the year for you.


xoxoxo,
Lisa

We Can Celebrate -- Yes, We Can!

L.G.C. Smith

When I told my mother that we’re writing about celebration on the blog this week, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wish I’d known how to celebrate and taught you kids how to.”

Sigh. It’s the holidays. Melodrama comes easily.

But it’s also true that my mom and her sisters have a strongly Puritanical streak that makes them suspicious of anything smacking of celebration. Their idea of a good time is pitching in to help clean up after a healthy, low-fat, low-sodium, sugar-free, high fiber dinner. You know. Raw broccoli and cauliflower. Non-fat plain yogurt dip. Boneless skinless chicken breast grilled with one of those unsavory No Salt Herb Blends. Six low-carb vegetables cooked without a single drop of butter or olive oil (or flavor). Unsweetened pumpkin pie in a whole grain crust with no butter, lard, or even organic palm shortening (transfat free!), and the custard made with acorn squash (hubbards are too sweet, don’t you think?) and two drops of blackstrap molasses instead of sugar, tofu for the milk and eggs, and whipped powdered non-fat milk on top.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. My mom never cooked that grimly. There were a few supposedly celebratory meals in my youth that bad, but they weren’t my mother’s fault. Completely. She once talked one of my aunts into using real whipped cream on the pumpkin pie–unsweetened, of course.

A celebratory teeth-baring at Mom's last birthday.

When there was no threat of encroachment by her sisters, my mom cooked normal fat and sugar-laden celebratory vittles. Fried chicken. Chocolate cake with real chocolate (not carob or some other crap substitute). Mashed potatoes loaded with butter and rich gravy. As my sisters and I got older, we made the celebration food better and better. For a while there it was fondue on Christmas Eve, standing rib roast or filet mignon on Christmas day, gluts of champagne, homemade eggnog and lovely snacks on New Year’s Eve, and turkey and all the fixings on New Year’s Day. It all felt very subversive.

Then my dad got diabetes, my niece arrived allergic to beef, I realized I was poisoning myself with gluten, and various other health concerns cropped up. We’re more measured in our celebratory feasts these days, but we always have a few areas of hedonistic excess. Usually these involve champagne, wine, and chocolate. Imported cheese. Sometimes a bûche de Noel.

My sister spent several hundred dollars on fine chocolates this holiday season, and my mother made a few comments. Unsupportive comments. This occasioned further extravagant chocolate purchases and more comments, culminating in the tears over the Pens Celebration theme. My mother has great remorse that we don’t know what to do with a celebration aside from throwing food at it.

At which point I reminded her that her mother hadn’t exactly taught her how to celebrate owing to being certifiably crazy for most of my mother’s childhood. Mom grew up viewing celebrations as potential messes that would need cleaning up, literally and figuratively. Better to ignore the whole business if possible.

My parents whooping it up at a grandchild's bithday last year.

While I will admit to not being much good at celebrating, I have learned that gratitude offers a reliable path in. I’m good at gratitude. I would never take a proper pumpkin pie with lightly sweetened whipped cream for granted, even if I’d rather have half a gluten-free bûche.

Celebration, for me, comes down to letting gratitude gladden my heart. Sometimes it’s the sort of thing Juliet talked about last week, the angle of sunlight in midwinter, or the big changes that Rachael marked this year. It can be a joyful song, even if not always from Kool and the Gang. It might be a party to which I’m grateful to be invited, even if all I can do is quietly panic while I’m there. It might be the small diligence of having written every day for four years, and starting the fifth.

It might be making a gingerbread house with the Leezlet.

As long as there is something for which to be grateful, there is cause to celebrate. Loudly. Quietly. With snacks or without. Alone. With family. With friends. With strangers. It doesn’t matter how.

I’m off to polish off my sister’s Recchiuti Fleur de Sel caramels with my grumpy-gus mother -- with a handkerchief in my pocket and celebration in my heart.

Happy New Year from the Pens!

Hope the New Year brings love, laughter and happiness!!

LOVE, THE PENS

Celebrate Good Times, Come On.

I’m not usually a fan of big declarative statements. Just as soon as they leave my lips something comes along to prove me wrong or shake my faith. But on this I’m pretty sure I can stand firm, no wavering.

If not even the tiniest, most tucked away part of you doesn’t light up at Kool and the Gang’s Celebration, then we probably aren’t going to make it as friends. 

There it is. I’ve said it. It’s out there. No backsies. 

There's a party goin' on right here. 

I’m not saying that you have to love it the way that I do. You don’t have to be instantly transported back to being twelve years old and dancing in the aisles of the Oakland Colosseum as the A’s win another game. You don’t have to remember grooving in the back of your dad’s wood-paneled station wagon as he cranks up the volume on KFRC. But if your head doesn’t start to sway just a little when that horn section starts in, well, the truth is, I feel a little sorry for you. 

Cause that song is joy, plain and simple. I know that moments of joy aren’t really in right now, especially the spontaneous, bubbling over the brim kind. Those times where you laugh a little too loud in a quiet cafe, or can’t keep the smile off your face as you walk down the street. I get that. Times are tough. You don't have to convince m. We’re supposed to be solemn, cynical. We should be contemplating the end of the world and all that. After all, if the Mayan calendar doesn’t get us, then the mutated super bees surely will.

But let’s be honest, 1980, when this song came out, wasn’t exactly the best of times either. There were recessions and gas shortages, middle eastern conflicts and, of course, the killer bees. If we allowed ourselves a little over four minutes of unadulterated joy back then, and it didn’t hasten the end of world, then I doubt it’s going to now. 

So go on. Click the button. Play the song. Groove a little in your own way. You know you want to. If you don’t, it’s like the bees have already won. 

It's a Celebration

Walt Whitman confused me, and a whole lot of other college freshman, with the first line of his epic poem, Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Once I got over the sense that Walt was just a little-- *ahem* --infatuated with himself… once I read on and realized by ‘himself’ he meant the entire world…I decided I could really get behind that concept.

I know, I know, it’s corny to say that we should celebrate ourselves more. But then…we really should celebrate ourselves more.

It's possible I overdo it a little…I know I tend toward the Polly-Anna-ish, “look on the bright side” of things. In fact, I have it on good authority that such an attitude can veer right on over into obnoxiousness. My son makes fun of me: Gee mom, aren't those fluffy pink clouds just the prettiest things you've ever seen? And just look at that flower -- isn't that magenta with orange just amazing?

But the truth is, such things are pretty darned cool.

With the everyday grind of life, the monotonous, never-ending struggle to pay the rent and get the kids to their doctor appointments and keep the paperwork straight and make sure we’re keeping up our end in our jobs and our relationships and our organizations…it is tough to lift one’s head up from the muck and the mire and imagine: What if I knew I was going to die tomorrow? What would I appreciate today? What would I see, and smell, and hear... and know I was going to miss?

None of which is to say that I don’t look ahead and strive for the next challenge, the next adventure. I vow I will not, ever, be lulled into complacency. But while I’m struggling for the Golden Ring, I don’t want to lose sight of the really good stuff along the way.

And I don't just mean the most obvious: Children, friends, wine, food, laughter, love….

How about...

That special shade of green one only sees during spring, in new growth
Commiserating with a dear friend over really good Scotch
The smell of rain when it falls on warm sidewalks
Strings of Christmas lights and the smell of pine in the house
The morning’s first sip of really good, dark French roast
The way loved ones’ eyes crinkle at the corner when they smile
Hitting “send” on a finally-finished manuscript (in which case I simply must dance through the house to Billy Idol, turned up to “11”)

Old Walt had quite a list, himself, but I liked this part especially:

The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs...

It may be corny...but it’s high time to celebrate.

Celebration Changes

When I was growing up, we had a very set method of celebrating Christmas. It didn't ever change, and I reveled in the comfort of it.

We three girls would wake up (or my sisters would, and then they'd jump on top of me in bed, thumping me until I opened my eyes) and remove our stockings from where they hung on the chimney. These we were allowed to open in bed, pawing through the chocolate coins and new socks and silly, fun toys.

Then we'd gather in the living room, all five of us. Someone (usually Dad) would play Santa, handing out our gifts until we had piles stacked in front of us. I had a methodology established for opening: I'd scan each gift, opening what I guessed to be the most boring gifts first, saving the most interesting/exciting for last (a few times I got this wrong, and opened the pajamas or the underwear last -- the feeling of let-down was weighty, even if I'd already received amazing gifts).

Then, one by one, we'd go around the circle opening our gifts. It could take hours, especially since Mom folded each piece of wrapping paper to be saved for future years. Afterward, hyped on stocking sugar, we'd eat homemade stollen and then we'd retire to our various corners to read our new books for the rest of the day. It was a pretty great tradition, culminating in flaming plum pudding for dinner.

This year was our third Christmas without Mom, and it was the first truly okay one. The last two were so painful I could barely breathe through them. But last Sunday, almost a week before Christmas, my sisters and I piled in the station wagon and headed south to Dad's. When we got there, we had a new Christmas. A night celebration with old family friends, we sat in the living room in different places. I'd always sat in front of the fireplace; this year I was on the couch by the window. Dad passed out the gifts, but instead of going around the larger circle one by one, we just ripped into them, like I'd always wanted to do as a kid.

Even the house was different -- Dad's girlfriend Lola moved in not long ago, and it's become (rightly so) her home too. The walls are a different color, a pale sea-green. Her decorating flair is more pronounced than my mother's was. A different smell hangs in the air -- the scent of Mom's house was like rain-washed leaves, while Lola's house smells more floral. I was glad for this -- it made it easier to be there somehow, and even after giving it some thought, I'm not clear why this was true. Perhaps it was that Lola had made it her own, rather than slipping into my mother's place which would have been harder to deal with? Or that there were simply fewer sense-related memories to battle?

But that made it right, and good, and FUN. My mother's best friend Gaynelle was there with a different husband, not the man I'd grown up knowing. Her son Sven, whose diapers I used to change when I babysat him, now looks like his father Rick, and he's just about the age Rick was when we first met him many years ago. But Gaynelle's laughter was just the same and I heard her gift with puns echoed by her other son, Leif, whose two small girls rocketed around the house the way we used to. It was home. (But now, as an adult visiting my old home, I stay in the local Motel 6 down the road, and I have to say, the part of me that pulls out my debit card to pay the room charge celebrates also.)

Then, on Christmas Even, back at home in the Bay Area, my sisters and a couple of assorted loved ones came over for drinks after I got off work. There was almost no prep (I did make homemade egg-nog), and we didn't decorate. We were just together, and I loved that small celebration with all my heart.

Life is so different than it was even just a few years ago, but the feeling underpinning the celebration of it is still love. And I'm grateful for that.

Party On, Gentle Souls

by Sophie

CELEBRATION


I'm not a natural reveler. I confess that with a certain amount of embarrassment - celebrating seems like something that should come as naturally as breathing.

The word "celebration" invokes for me a specific set of images - champagne glasses, confetti, unrestrained laughter. Bright colors, the flash of cameras, hearty voices joined in conversation and song; red lipstick and silvery shoes and dance floors packed with couples.

I don't care for loud noises or crowds or bright colors - I'm hypersensitive to stimuli of all sorts - but it is the whole that is most intimidating, the sense of communal energy, people joining together in an emotional space where I just can't manage to engage.

But despite all that, I don't want to be left out. Introversion is lonely - at least, it is for me - and I long for the company of others. So I find ways of coping. Like my colorblind brother who has adopted a variety of tricks to avoid going out into the world in clothing combinations that clash, buying staples in neutral shades and enlisting the help of his wife to get dressed, I've developed my own tricks and schemes to get through parties and gatherings.

I give myself pep talks in advance ("They're nervous too," and "No one is paying attention at you," I remind myself, like the mother of a nervous middle schooler on the night of her first dance.) I eschew anything eye-catching, anything that might invite conversation, and dress in black and gray. I arrive early enough to scope out the corners and shadows where I can hide. And I find my comfort objects - people who are aware of my flaws and love me anyway - and check in with them from time to time, much like my daughter used to search for me when she was a toddler at the park, climbing into my lap every so often just to reassure herself that I was still there before dashing off for more adventures.

At a recent party, I made a valiant effort for a while, then retreated to a table tucked into a niche. Like a fox in a den, I felt cozy in the little space, armed with my drink and my snacks, observing the glorious melee all around me while I girded myself for another burst of socializing. After a while, a friend slid in across t table from me. "Mind if I hide out with you?" she asked. She's shy too. Of course I didn't mind; like-minded folks understand what you're up to, and make good company. You don't have to explain yourself. LIttle silences feel companionable rather than strained.

Before long another couple joined us, and another, until we had turned our own little party. We laughed and talked and gossiped and drank and, it occurs to me now, did everything that was going on in the big party, but somehow the energy felt a little different. Safer. No one asked me to dance. No one expected me to remember a punch line or sing choruses or regale captive listeners.

Party on, I thought as the evening grew late and I slipped away, leaving the reveling to those hardier stalwarts, the ones born to wear spangles and lead conga lines. I was content - even delighted - to have played my small part. Even the grandest fetes need humble footsoldiers as well as bold captains, and I was happy to be among their number.

Kate Perry's Museum....

Pens are so very pleased to welcome Kate Perry. Kate is the author of the Guardians of Destiny series, a Kung Fu Master, a tango enthusiast, and a cupcake aficionado. Voted by her friends as the woman they'd most want to stroll with down a dark alley, Kate's as likely to be spotted at the opera as she is practicing swordplay in Golden Gate Park.




Glass of wine in hand, Amy sat down on my kitchen floor. “Are you going to get a kitchen table soon? I don’t mind plopping on the floor because you’re making me dinner, but isn’t it time?”

“I just moved in, and I’ve been too busy to go furniture shopping.” I stirred mushrooms into the pan of caramelizing onions.

“Speaking of why you’re busy… I bought TEMPTED BY FATE last week. I’m on the handcuff scene. Hawt. ” She fanned herself. “So how is the new book release going?”



“I have one more guest blog to write.” I turned around, brandishing the wooden spatula. “I’m supposed to write about museums.”

“That’s perfect for you. You’ve been to museums all around the world. Write about your favorite one. Or the city that has the best museums.”

I added cream to my mixture, turned the heat down, and faced Amy. “Actually, I had this other idea.”

“Uh-oh.”

“It doesn’t involve explosives this time.”

“That’s only slightly reassuring.” She sighed in resignation. “Tell me.”

“I’m going to open my own museum.”

Amy blinked. “Just when I think I’m used to your crazy ideas, you spring something like this on me. Where are you going to open your museum?”

“Right here.” I waved at the bare walls of my new apartment. “I have prime real estate, not to mention that parking is easy in my neighborhood and I’m by two major Muni lines.”

“Yeah, but where are you going to get paintings from? I doubt you have a bunch of Chagall canvases hiding in your attic.”

“I’m going to do the paintings myself.”

“But you don’t paint, Kate.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said excitedly. I ran to my bedroom, grabbed my pack of paintings, and skid back into the kitchen. “Look.”

She silently flipped through my informal portfolio.

“And I have all these ideas for other paintings. I’d like to do a series based on my Guardians of Destiny series, depicting my heroines kicking ass. And maybe I’ll do a series on the Chinese elements my Guardians represent. And I’d like to do a series on fruit.”

“Fruit?”



“Like tomatoes on the vine.”

“Oo-kay.” She handed me back the paintings. “I don’t want to be a killjoy, but you write, you study kung fu several days a week, and you have a crazy dating schedule—“

“I’ve also been tango dancing.”

“Exactly!” Amy threw her arms in the airs. “When are you going to fit painting and being a curator in there?”

“I’ll cut back dating to two nights a week. And I don’t need that much sleep.”

Amy opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again to down some wine. Finally, she shook her head. “You do realize that if you turn your apartment into a museum, people will constantly be walking through. Which means you’ll have to clean more often.”

“Oh.” I frowned. “I hate cleaning.”

“I know.”

“Damn.”

She nodded. “I know.”

I brightened. “Maybe I can build a robot to do the cleaning.”

“Around your book deadlines?”

“If I created a heroine who was a painter-slash-inventor, then I could chalk it all up to research.”



“You—I—“ Amy shook her head and held out her glass. “Is there more wine?”


Kate can be found on her website at www.kateperry.com and follow her most excellent posts on Twitter @kateperry

The Theft at the Louvre

by Gigi

I briefly mentioned an eventful experience I had many years ago at the Louvre in this blog post here.

Now that the topic of museums has come up, I'm going to explore this famous museum theft in a bit more detail.

A few days before my 23rd birthday, I found myself aimless in Paris. I'd recently finished working in London on a temporary work permit, and was trying to travel for as long as possible as cheaply as possible. What better way to spend the day than head to the Louvre on the one day a month when it was free?

As it turns out, a lot of other people had the same idea of heading to this free Sunday at the Louvre -- including an art thief.

On May 3, 1998, Le Chemin de Sevres, a painting by Camille Corot worth $1.3 million, was sliced from its frame. No alarms sounded. Nobody even saw the thief.

I don't remember exactly where in the museum I was, because I didn't realize what was happening until we began to be ushered into the mail hall of the Louvre, underneath the giant glass pyramid. (I assume I was looking at sculptures somewhere in the sprawling museum, since stone carvings are my favorite type of art.)

I was staying at the flat of a French friend I'd known when he was a foreign exchange student in California, but I was alone at the Louvre that day. I had my backpack with my camera inside, so alone in the vast crowd, I started taking pictures.


The press reported that when the missing frame was discovered, "exit doors were immediately locked, and every bag carried by every visitor, was checked thoroughly, until the search was concluded, unsuccessfully, many hours later."

Parts of the press reports were true -- but not everything.

While the authorities kept us trapped in the hall for hours, I had a great time observing everything that was going on. Unlike many of the tourists who were scrambling to leave to catch flights, I wasn't in a rush to get out of the museum. When I finally exited, behind most of the tens of thousands of visitors -- I was never searched.

This fact, even more than the daring theft of the painting, has stuck with the mystery writer in me.

Had the thief slipped out before the doors were locked? Or perhaps... could the perpetrator have been one of the faces in my photographs?



I followed the story in the newspapers for a while, including the hard copy clippings above that I saved in my scrapbook. But as I write this, the painting has yet to be found.

I had already been interested in art theft in mystery novels (e.g. Elizabeth Peters' Vicky Bliss mysteries) but this experience cemented my fascination. I was thrilled to discover Hailey Lind's art lover's mystery series a few years ago -- written under a pen name by the Pens' own Juliet Blackwell -- which happens to be how I got involved with these writers who formed the Pens Fatales.

The best art theft thriller I read lately was actually a nonfiction book, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. It's a memoir by a retired FBI agent who spent his career working undercover to rescue stolen art. When I finished the book, I found I'd put at least a dozen post-it notes in the pages to capture details I wanted to remember when working on my next mystery -- which most definitely involves an art thief.