Next week ends my six month maternity leave.  Maternity leave must be a concept that most first- time moms don’t really get.  First off, I thought my 8 year old yellow lab would love it.  I’d be home everyday, practically all day.  We’d take long walks in Prsopect Park with the baby, everyday- before 9:00 am, when dogs are allowed off- leash everywhere.  Then I thought I’d finish the final draft of the novel I’m working on and submit it to my agent, only to have her fall in love, think it’s publication ready, and start sending it to publishers.  Then I thought I’d fly to the west coast a couple times to introduce the baby to friends and family.  Then I thought Bill, Enrico and I would have a honeymoon- since we got married at 7.5 months pregnant, going somewhere special and far away- Italy was one thought.  I thought 6 months was a really long time.  I’m almost too depressed to finish this blog entry.

The dog, Caleb, didn’t love my leave.  Afterall, there was a newborn babyat home everyday, practically all day.  And the voice I used to use to speak to Caleb, began to be used for Enrico.  I never took Caleb to the park before 9.  Well maybe 5 times in six months.  In fact, I had a cesarean birth, and couldn’t walk Caleb for 6 weeks at all!  (He’s 100 pounds and a puller.)  If you’ve ever read my blog before you know where my current novel is at.  It’s not horrific.  But it certainly isn’t going to my agent again any time soon and she’s not showing it to publishers anytime soon.  Travel?  Well we did just come back from Portland and that was a great vacation, and we went to DC and upstate and to KY too.  But I was sort of thinking bigger. 

Back to work is a strange saying too.  Maternity leave is full of work.  I play a little game at night where I leave on a light in an area that needs cleaning, tidying, poop removal, spackling, power scrubbing.  Then when the whole apartment is lit up like a Chritsmas tree, I fall asleep before washing my face.  This hasn’t been a vacation.  And yet, I want it to go on and on.  And on and on.  I really hoped I’d be a little tired of being at home with the baby when it was time to return to work.  I’m not at all tired of it.  And I know time will rocket ahead once I’m back.  But alas, some good things will come of it.  I will wear leather shoes again.  I can wear pull-over shirts that don’t open in the front.  I will go to Manhattan four days a week!!  I will eat lunch by myself without it being like a speed eating contest everyday.  Soon enough, I’ll eat that lunch outside, in the sun.  I will get a paycheck.  My husband can actually have more time with Enrico and be a bigger caregiver.  I will walk Caleb every morning before 9.  Maybe I’ll get back in the habit of blogging too.

I have an accelerated new pace with finishing this draft of my novel.  My goal this go-around is restructuring, as I’ve said before, and the work is rather mid-range in terms of mental effort.  I’ve re-outlined, losing the chronological order and placing historical scenes in the context of the front story.  So my task at-hand is cutting and pasting and smoothing in, and there are at least two plotlines I’m dramatically changing.  So when those arcs appear, I do some mental heavy-lifting too.  It’s been good work, an enjoyable process and I’m pretty sure I’m seeing positive results.  Honestly, a much better draft.  The process also naturally helped me to cull less engaging sections from the characters’ histories.  There will be yet another comb-through after this, but that thought can wait.  

This draft has been taking quite awhile in and of itself.  I squeeze the work in during baby’s naptimes.  And once a week, I leave him with his dad and go to the library to get a real work session.  I recently had my mom and then sister visit and they both gave me baby-sitting time to go get some work done.  And then in their absence and my looming return to work, something miraculous happened.  Enrico offered to help me finish the job at a faster pace.  I’d been looking forward to utlizing our beuatiful library together, the main Brooklyn branch at Grand Army Plaza, and I had even made a big deal about our first visit there.  I tried to get our librarian friend to join us, but in the end took him alone, and relished reading him his first picture book in the children’s wing.  

But what I’m talking about here is different.  Enrico has agreed to coming along, not to the children’s wing, but to the long tables where mom likes to work and can plug in, and has offered to sleep or quietly read to himself (in his daydreams) so I can write virtually everyday.

And therefore this week alone, I went from 85 pages til the end, to 50, to 30, to 15.  Thank you Library Assistant!  We’ll get the job done together. 

In the surreal, dream-like weeks right after I had a baby this past September, I was contacted by someone interested in making The Sign for Drowning into a movie.  Novelists dream of this, and its the only way a novelist can get anywhere near making a living as a writer.  Or to put it another way, I wouldn’t be opposed to my book being made into a film.  Not at all.  So, this dialogue began in some pretty uncertain terms.  For one, I thought the woman getting in touch with me was a television producer looking for material for her network and interested in buying the rights to “Sign.”  Or to put it another way, I thought I met my perfect match.  Well, I was sort of right.  She is a producer of sorts, but that’s not what she was interested in.  You never know where opportunity will come from; I’m sure you’ll all agree, and I was more than happy to consider various ways a total stranger might help adapt my only novel into a screenplay and have it actually made into a movie.  But this proposal was hard to get a grasp on.  For one thing, I had a brand new baby, and only slept 2-3 hours at a stretch, for another the woman pursuing our collaboration was deaf and we started off by exchanging rather cryptic emails, which finally gave way to slightly clearer phone calls (she turned out to be hard of hearing and a good phone communicator.)  But the problem lay in our differing goals.  She wanted me to write the screenplay with her.  Oh, no problem, I thought, I just have to inform her I’m not a screenwriter.  No such easy exit.  She didn’t care, neither was she.  But still, she thought the two of us were the right team for the job.  The Sign for Drowning is about a girl, Anna, who embraces sign language as away to coomuniacte with her younger sister who drowned.  As an adult, Anna teaches deaf children and adopts a deaf little girl- helping her heal from the loss of her sister.  So my potential collaborator’s thinking was that a lifelong hearing aide wearer (she) and the author of  this novel were the most likely team to make a go of this project–even without the necessary experience.  To be fair, my husband, who is a screenwriter, thought she could be right.  He urged me not rule out the possibility of spending a year or so writing my first screenplay with someone I didn’t know, who had less experience than myself even.  Well in retrospect the way I handled the whole situation was a lot more post partum than I realized at the time.  I was communicating with this potential collaborator before I’d even left the house from bringing home our new baby, and in those first weeks, I got out maybe twice a week.  Everything outside the apartment, including wearing shoes, taking a subway, walking my dog, going out for a pint of beer seemed otherwordly.  So you can imagine how otherwordly I found this unknown woman dropping me notes about potential scenes, extended metaphors, and a mysterious financer seemed.  But what really tipped me off that I was operating from an altered state was that I very outrightly told her I’d be persuaded by money.  I found myself talking like some totally unknown Hollywood player, suggesting that we should both be paid at least $10,000 to even touch the thing.  My own book.  She seemed to like my new sundance kid way of thinking, and we made a clandestine plan to meet at Grand Central Station.  We picked a Starbucks, then a H&M, then another Starbucks.  She said if I couldn’t find her to just keep calling her cell phone, reminding me she was deaf and didn’t always hear it.  We met.  It was maybe the third time I’d left the baby.  We talked about him, and her children, and both our professional backgrounds.  We got along just fine.  If it were a sanity check- which was partially on my mind- we both passed.  We talked about meeting on her next trip to New York- Thanksgiving time.  We talked about working together for a year, every weekend, on Skype, or travelling together to a retreat to outline and write this screenplay.  “The reason she was on the planet,” she said on one phone call, my book as an example- not the literal reason.  We both said we needed to decide if we would take the plunge or not.  Would we go against the odds of our lack of proven ability, of our not knowing each other, of our limited time.  My own desire to finish my second novel while on maternity-leave weighed in heavily.  And then there was the fact that all I’m really doing with great commitment these days is caring for my boy.  Well, the decision went unmade.  We never spoke again.  Perhaps it was another 2010 dream, in a year full of unthinkable and dreamlike happenings.

In July I came to the end of my second novel.  As, I mentioned in another blog entry, Life and Writing Are Different, I had a marathon writing session when my baby was a few days late, where I created a new outline for this novel.  The scoop is the novel spanned from 1976 to 2003, and it’s not titled The Godfather.  One of my writing group friends made an astute comment that sealed the deal for me that I would change the structure.  She said books that span the charcter’s childhood, youth and adulthood are coming-of-age novels.  That seems to pretty much hold up as a rule, and this book is not.  I feel I just needed to write it that way, chronologically and capturing the essence of the main charcters’ backstory and childhoods.  But as any of you could tell me, ‘just cause you had to write it that way, doesn’t mean we have to read it that way.’  So, since Enrico’s been a few weeks old, I’ve been chipping away at reconstructing the book with a different timeline.  It will start in 2001, and valuable backstory will appear as flashback.  There’s a writing expression, “Kill your darlings.”  It means every writer has some material that they adore that doesn’t serve the story- get rid of it.  I did kill some darlings.  And in the light of- dear god please let me get somewhere with this novel while my darling boy naps, kicks on his activity mat, hangs out with his Pa, gradually grows up…those literary darlings that weren’t working didn’t seem so darling.

When I started this blog, two and a half years ago, everyone had a blog.  But now, everyone has a blog.  I don’t mind.  Actually, I want to spend more time reading really good blogs.  They can be inspiring.  They can be about subjects that really interest me.  They can teach, connect and help us with our careers.  But they do even more for the people who write them.  They are a way for us to flex a writing muscle, develop a different voice than we write with in our respective genres, write things that other people actually read in our daily lives, instead of once every 38 years, as in my first novel.  The things we write in blogs are most often read by our friends and family, and they provide a way for us to move them and to let them get to know us better, a part of ourselves that we want to be known.

My husband and I have a an 8 week old son.  So last weekend, my big dream for Friday night, was to get a couple people to come over for a four person card game and cocktails.  This idea felt like it could salvage a pretty claustrophobic week.  So, in the evening, after my husband Bill had visited a friend for tips on his new blog, one friend, Shannon, came over to have a bite pre-cards, and we talked about what she should name her new blog.  Then during our five person card game it came out that all five of us have blogs.  We made fun of each other’s blog’s names.  And still, I’m excited about all these things to read from interesting people I know- who are even willing to play cards with me on a Friday night, while Enrico gets used to living in this bloggy world.

Our son has arrived.  In fact, this Friday he will be one month old.  He’s miraculous and beautiful, consuming and a zen master at keeping my mind in the present at all hours of the day and night.  We’ve noticed many people in our lives are fast-forwarding to when he’s older, when he can go to museums, ride a bike, talk, visit Ireland, and it seems strange that neither my husband nor I are engaged in that kind of thinking.  Until you remember that we are caring for him in his present state 24 hours a day, usually at 3 hour intervals, not having slept more than 4 hours straight in a month.  And yet, I’m enjoying every day and even more so the nights!  These are sweet and inexpicable times; I instinctually get how quickly these days and weeks will pass, and I stay present without effort or choice. 

I haven’t written since Enrico was born.  Not here on this blog or my novel in progress.  Enrico was eight days late and during those eight days I reviewed feedback on the darft of my novel from my husband, Bill, my writing group friend, Anne, and my agent, Joelle.  I had one session of work in the library, about 5 days past due, where I re-outlined the entire novel and felt great- ready to cut and dice, or at least ready to try three more variations on an outline and meditate a whole lot more.  This is structure I’m talking about.  Then the radical, life-altering, and I will confess- nearly unbearable labor happened, and the magnificant Enrico arrived in our open arms.  When he was about ten days old I piled 400 pages of notated manuscript on our coffee table and presumed that while hours floated by in the living room between feedings, changing, sipping 10 times re-heated coffee, I’d look at notes.  I had the sad and amusing experience of noticing a minor character’s name on a random page, and thinking, “who’s that?”  It did come back to me.  It will all come back to me I’m sure.

I discovered a new book blog recently, because, as a treat (pun intended), this blogger discovered me.  A few times I’ve gotten a random email from a reader, often another writer, who wanted to say they enjoyed The Sign for Drowning.  This one intrigued me because he or she, wrote a rather cryptic email about not having time to make the chocolate souffle for bon voyage, but that I should check out their review on Food for Thought- their blog.  Well I did get around to checking out this blog, and I really like it.  The blogger, Jain, takes either a dish or recipe mentioned in a novel and makes it.  Then Jain posts a book review, and beautiful, inviting photos of the dishes she made.  Well The Sign for drowning contains a bon voyage party for Anna and Adrea, who are headed to france for a sumer intensive program for deaf children.  At the party, Maritza, the head teacher, serves up French food for the other children to experience.  There’s several quiches and a chocolate souffle.  Jain made some beautiful spinach and mushroom quiches, and photographed slices of them, with greens of course, on some decorative little French plates.  I like this blog a lot, it made me want to read and cook.

Jain also mentions in her review and blog entry how she goes about choosing the books to read.  And yes, it’s by their cover.  I think Jain doesn’t always judge a book by its cover.  But she mentioned periodic buying sprees on Amazon, where she’ll select a bunch of unknown titles, like a box of candies, and fire away an order of new books.  This reminded me that books really are about one cent on Amazon.  So, I decided to check on The Sign for Drowning, and see how cheaply it could be found there.  Indeed, there are two (hardcover!) copies for one penny.  A few for under three dollars.  And amusingly, two “collectibles” meaning a signed hardcover for $14 and $40.  Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  You should grab up that $14 signed hardcover!

It’s a well known fact that non-fiction is a bigger part of the marketplace than fiction- more sellable.  Well baby books, pregnancy books, parenting books, birth books, and every possible niche of child-rearing books are a huge market.  For the past 9 months, I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy books, books about labor, baby name books and I’m now starting to look at some books about baby care and newborns.  A little a day of this reading is best- and I admit some weeks or even two where I had no desire for this reading.  Isn’t it enough to be growing a baby around the clock- without reading about it!  But I have always had an interest in pregnancy and birth.  I am also a labor doula- so I actually have read a lot in this area, have had training and have attended lots of births.  (Although any day now I will have this experience myself for the first time!)  So I thought I’d mention that not all books are created equal.

A well-known and I’m sure best-selling book for decades is What to Expect When You’re Expecting.  We should all consider this book outdated, even though I’m sure it’s updated all the time.  No expectant parent has ever enjoyed this book and it will focus you on everything that can go wrong.  I’ve found with my nightly or at least two nights a week reading, that I’m enjoying most the Dr. and Martha Sears book on pregnnacy and their Baby Book tomb.  They’re  a pediatrician/RN, husband and wife duo and parents to eight kids.  They have a great attitude toward healthy pregnancy and parenting and speak very plainly and naturally about it.  They wrote their pregnancy book in chapters for each month.  Which made it very digestible.  I read the chapter for the month I was in and then waited to reach the next month.  And best of all, at the end of each chapter is a sweet little worksheet for you to write what you’re feeling, dreaming, stressing about, excited about, etc.  Just the right amount of journaling for a tired, hard-working, reproducing body!

The Birth Partner and the Big Book of Birth are plenty for preparing partners and yourself.  We received a lot of books form other people, had some in the house from my doula training, found some in our basement library, took out some from our local library, and still we probably spent too much on a few more.  These books are very accesible and of time limited interest to you.  I’m imagining as soon as you’ve given birth once, you’re ready to pass along the text books!

This morning I received an email from a reader is Israel.  (Hi Moshe!)  He was kind enough to drop a line after reading The Sign for Drowning.  He also mentioned that he is the cousin of one of my blurb writers.  Blurbs, on the book jacket, are written by other authors, hopefully of similar type work, and are there to help promote the work, especially for a first time author.  A reader might say- oh, I really like this author who wrote the blurb and they really liked this new book/author- I’ll give it a try.  I dauntingly discovered when my book was in pre-production, that first time novelists are asked to track down their own blurbs.  Well, we know other writers to varying degrees.  An ex teacher is easy enough to approach.  Someone you met or even just heard speak at a conference is pretty excruciating to contact.  And writing cold to the agent of an author who’s work you think is like your own- except wildly successful- is horrifying.

Moshe’s cousin is published by my same publisher and thankfully they offered her up to me, and she was a generous and honest reader and blurb writer.  Two other authors I reached out to, were more nerve wracking.  I’d “met” them both at the Pirate’s Alley William Faullkner Literary conference, meaning one I’d sat at a crowded bar table with for 10 minutes, and both I’d heard speak.  But I asked Rosemary, the organizer and major force behind the Faulkner House and conference for their emails to beg for blurbs.  Yikes.

I’m thrilled to report that Julia Glass said yes, although she insisted to wait for the corrected proof- a nerve-wracking process for me since that left me not knowing if she’d write the blurb until quite late- but a practice I would adopt if ever so flattered to receive a request for a blurb.  Glass let me know that her agreement to read my book during a busy time for her was based on her fondness of Rosemary.  Fair enough.

And the other author was Bret Lott.  By the time my request reached Bret Lott through the new university he’d just begun teaching at, he was about to embark on a multi-country tour.  I had grown more assertive in tracking down authors, and sent Lott several emails towards the end, when I did finally hear back from him.  He had actually already read The Sign for Drowning because he had been the final judge in the novel category, who had awarded me second runner up.  So, I figured it was less of an inconvenience to him to write a blurb.  But alas, he wrote me a sweet and thoughtful email, turning down my request due to his busy travel schedule, and that he really would need to re-read the novel.  He mentioned in passing that he would be touring Prague, Jerusalem, and a half dozen other cities I don’t recall.

The funny thing is that the day I opened his email, I curiously saw that there was yet another unopened email from him a day later.  Having read the first rejection, I opened the second.

“Dear Rachel, Guess who I’m sitting here with at the Jerusalem Center?”  Your aunt Linda!”  Bret Lott went on to say that the coincidence was too great, that Linda was his favorite person in Israel, and he would write the blurb.  I was almost as excited by how much my entire family would enjoy this story as I was about getting a blurb from Bret Lott- almost.  Linda is my Uncle Tsvi’s sister and she has some incredible job of hosting visiting VIP’s in Israel among other things.  If you are someone of note, politician, writer, musician, artist, etc. who has visited Israel on official business, you have probably met Linda and she is one of your favorite people in Israel.  Well Linda, being a professional connection maker, innocently informed Bret that he had judged her niece’s novel in a competition that year.  And he probably struck his forehead and said- I just turned her down for a blurb 24 hours ago!

I’m enjoying this story all over a again, nearly three years later.  Hope you did too.  Thanks Moshe for the memories.  Thanks Linda and Bret!

There’s a little known fact about me that most my friends don’t know, that I go crazy for maritime books.  I’m also very fond of maritime films, museums, food, towns!, apparel, art- all of it.  But a great tale from the sea always captures my imagination and stirs deeper feelings than a land-locked story could.  I feel this way in the same way that if the world only contained blue grass and gospel music- I wouldn’t be too miserable.   That said, I probably haven’t read as much maritime literature as some other folks.  Of course I was swept away by Old Man and the Sea, also The Pearl.  Moby Dick didn’t bore me at all.  The Shipping News was a rare treat.  So it’s not just oceans I love, but knots, fish, fisherman and their women, rubber boots, weather, etc.  About a year ago I picked up the Perfect Storm in my basement- and I’m here to tell you that it is a fantastic book.  It’s non-fiction- in case you didn’t know- and it’s truly about the fishing industry off the eastern seaboard, love and alcoholism, as much as it is about that boat and that storm.  A few things I learned in that book, is that it’s not just getting a lot of fish that’s required to earn a living- but who gets back to land first with the haul and sets the current prices.  I was also inspired to write the first poem I’d written in awhile from a tidbit I found in that book.  There are lengthy, detailed accounts of deep-sea fishing- namely swordfish- that hold your attention for more than 20 page stretches.  With swordfish, the adult females are the largest and therefore choicest catches.  But they are the hardest to catch, being the smartest and most experienced of their kind.  The adolescent males are the easist caught, being the opposite.  There’s poetry just in that I think.  But listen to this.  If you go deep-sea fishing at night, on a full moon, you will catch the adult females.  Because they lose their heads.

This weekend, Saturday, the Red Hook Waterfront Museum in Brooklyn is having a Maritme book fair.  The museum is a barge in the NY harbor.  I’m planning to go, and maybe bring a few copies of The Sign for Drowning.  If I’m gonna be a poser ever in life, I think maybe the most dignified thing to pose as is a maritime writer.