June 4, 2007

Penguin Fillets

“We’re eating sardines and making brownies for a lemonade stand,” Bill reported when he called.

I wasn’t surprised by either activity. Summer is only a week old, and profits and penguins have emerged as the major topics of conversation and activity thus far. The boys have set up increasingly complex lemonade stands each day. Their first endeavor, in which they sold Fresh-baked Pound Cake and Ice-Cold pink lemonade with TONS of Cubes (signs and adjectives courtesy of Finn) garnered each boy over five dollars. The next day they got more creative with their offerings– a little too innovative, if customer response is any indication, and failed to sell much Hand-Dyed Brown Lemonade, although the sugar cookies were a modest hit.

Drew has slept with a stuffed penguin named Lewis for years, and he just added another named Osbert (hero of the book My Penguin Osbert)to the menagerie. Osbert eats creamed herring, and when I got to Publix the other day I discovered “creamed herring” written at the bottom of my grocery list in Drew’s deliberate print. I’ve spent ages training the boys to convey their grocery needs by writing directly on the list. I wanted to fulfill Drew’s request, but I couldn’t find ready-made creamed herring and didn’t have a recipe in my head so I had to return home herring-less.
Drew was disappointed, but I missed the tears because I had to leave town. During my absence Bill convinced Drew that sardines were an integral part of penguin nutrition, and that was enough to persuade all three boys to munch sardines and crackers for lunch. In return, Bill made Fresh & Hot Super Chocolatey brownies and spent the afternoon drinking beer and watching golf while the boys manned the lemonade stand. They’re going to need a license and insurance if they keep up this frantic pace.

Meanwhile, I’ve been in New York attending a writers’ conference and the Book Expo. I met many top-notch literary agents, which is exactly what you need if you have a book you want to sell. I’ve gotten lots of encouragement from you guys (”When are you going to write a book so I can quit snorting coffee onto my keyboard?” has been a common refrain). Additionally, I’ve received positive feedback from a man I’ll identify only as “a publishing bigwig” and so I’ve decided it’s time to quit screwing around with the idea of a book and fish or cut bait. The manuscript, a compilation of the columns that have provoked the most laughter and comments, is ready, so I need an agent and a bit of luck.

Two sessions at the conference were worth noting. One keynote speech is nicely summarized here, and stressed the importance of having an internet presence to market yourself and your work these days. My blog originally attracted iVillage’s attention and led to my writing this column for them for a year, which greatly expanded my readership and ability to churn out two columns a week. I’d consider myself proof that the Internet is a fantastic tool for attracting readers.

I was surrounded by attendees who were mystified by the web, and it was reassuring to know that I’ve watched this site grow for two and a half years, and have ended up with a lot of book material and close friends in the process. I have all of you to thank for that.
Another speaker’s talk was directed primarily to novelists. He urged writers to pay attention to their daydreams, as these out of body experiences convey your innermost fears which serve as the linchpin of your ….. yeah, I didn’t follow it either. It sucked that I seemed to be the only person in the room who wasn’t nodding beatifically. I was busy wondering when the hell anyone has time to daydream anymore. Between the kids, the column, the law practice, and the always nutritious dinners, my brain resembles a to-do list scramble.

Oddly, the speaker emphatically rejected the notion that dreams at night could be of any use, and although I doubt his sanity overall, I was glad to get a solid ruling banning the the use of dreams as a creative catalyst. Drew’s heavy emphasis on penguins combined with a few too many ads for Happy Feet has caused me to have penguin nightmares.

Generally Bill and I wander the Arctic naked and famished, wishing for a down jacket and a hot meal, and all we find is a penguin and a soup pot. You would think we’d clean and gut the animal, but in the nightmare we simply lay the Osbert-like creature on his side and slice him into fillets and then make a foul-tasting penguin soup.

It’s the kind of dream that will leave you craving some creamed herring.

May 23, 2007

Boring Blogger Has Career Day Envy

Getting a compliment from a sixth-grader is the highest form of flattery, so I was thrilled when a close friend’s daughter asked me to talk about writing at her school’s Career Day. Although I’ve never given this type of talk to twelve-year-olds before, I’ve done it in front of several adult audiences, and I figured I would be a huge hit with the preteen crowd.

I like to make sure I have a large film screen set up so everyone can see the screen well. I demonstrate how comments work, and how clicking on the name in a comment will take you to that person’s blog. I show them the back side of the blog where all the coding is and that generally draws a big response and much undeserved respect for my limited coding skills.

It’s also a cool touch to show the audience your stat program at the beginning of the talk so they can see how many readers have checked in, and then look again at the end of the presentation so they can see how many people clicked on the site while they were listening.

I figured I had it made. Internet, cool coding, funny stories, winning personality– I’d be the Career Day Star.

Things didn’t go exactly as I had planned. First, I’d assumed that the other speakers would have boring jobs. A lawyer (I’ve tried to tell my boys what I do in that job and make it interesting and that’s a losing battle), an investment banker, an accountant with a head for numbers and a personality to match.

Sadly for me, the other contestants speakers included representatives of the local NPR affiliate, a chef, an orthopedic surgeon, and a makeup consultant.

The NPR folks brought a microphone and Lord knows what else and let the kids stage a high-energy mayoral press conference. The pastry chef had mounds of fruit and melted chocolate and the students prepared chocolate-covered strawberries. The makeup consultant did a professional makeup application on one delighted sixth-grade girl, and handed samples of Chanel’s Chance perfume to everyone. Most thrillingly, the orthopedic surgeon showed clips of sports stars getting injured, then whipped out models of femurs and vertebrae and showed how he fixed the athletes. Blood, gore, sports– I never had a chance. Or a Chance.

Meanwhile, I was droning, “And after I’ve made sure I’ve used strong, vibrant words, I proofread again to take out all the extra commas that slow readers down.” Ugh.

It’s okay, really. I’d much rather concentrate on writing when I’m not practicing law. After all, I already spend a lot of time addressing blood and gore, though under less dramatic circumstances than the surgeon does. I interrogate my boys on a regular basis, so I have the art of the interview perfected at least as well as the talented folks at NPR. I’ve written plenty about my mad culinary skillz.
Next year I’m bringing sparklers and Pop Rocks for everyone!

May 21, 2007

I Lied When I Said It Would Be Fun

I christened this past weekend The Immaculate Glamore Home Extravaganza! and publicized it well in advance.  I bought real Cokes for the boys to drink in honor of the occasion, although in general I’m violently opposed to the consumption of sugary carbonated beverages.  As a final touch, I rigged up the iPod and speakers to blare the boys’ favorite songs (except those by Weird Al) in the driveway.  There was an undeniable party atmosphere hovering around our house.
Early Saturday morning, Finn, Drew and Porter had been won over by the enormous preparation and my constant assurances that they were about to experience “a weekend you won’t forget.”

But as soon as Bill and I pulled out the pruners, the leaf blower, the ladder, the hedge trimmers, the hoses, the rakes and the wheelbarrow, they recognized the weekend was really about yard work.  Unfortunately for them, the fact that they’d caught on didn’t provide an escape.  We were all laboring together.

Porter derived a modicum of enjoyment from climbing the ladder while Bill held it and poking under the gutters with a stick to loosen the unsightly debris.  He grew pouty when we forbade him from actually climbing on the roof, so we diverted him by letting him use the leaf blower to blow all the gutter trash into a pile.  He spent the next hour sorting through the pile, pulling out legoes, balls, nuts, interestingly shaped sticks, and other treasures, which he set aside until the trash pile was reduced by half.  When he wasn’t looking we bagged his “treasure” and hid it in the neighbor’s trashcan.

Meanwhile, Finn used the electric hedge trimmer to prune the azaleas and Drew piled the cut branches in the wheelbarrow.  We let Finn shear the azaleas however he wanted, figuring that the poorly executed X-treme pruning he favored was better than no pruning at all.  I followed behind them and raked the leaves out from under the bushes so we could fertilize them.

As I raked, I unearthed numerous balls, mainly baseballs.  Together they represented the entire life cycle of the baseball, from brand new to scuffed and worn to decayed.  The squashed piece of corroded leather drew plenty of attention, especially when Drew poked it with a stick and ants scuttled out of it. However, there is a time and a place for science, and the Extravaganza! was not that place.  I ordered them to finish the pruning.
The boys were flagging so we gave them a short lunch break and some Coke.  We headed back outside and I switched the music to U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” thinking that the combination of the caffeine, sugar and a martial drum beat might encourage them to quicken their pace a little.

“Time to wash windows!” I trilled.  “And I bought the FUN kind of window cleaner!”

Finn gave me a sullen look.  “I can’t believe you just used the words ‘fun’ and ‘window cleaner’ in the same sentence,” he said.  “That’s so uncool.”

As a result of his surliness, we assigned Finn the task of removing the screens from the windows, and gave Drew and Porter the privilege of using the Windex Outdoor cleaner.  We set each of them up with a hose and a bottle of cleaner.  The bottle screws onto the hose and has a knob that turns the cleaner on and off.  They sprayed the windows with water, turned the knob and covered the glass with suds, then rinsed the windows.

The beauty of the Windex Outdoor is also its drawback– it works so much like a watergun that if you are an eight-year-old boy in possession of one, and your parents go in the back yard to start working on the windows there, thus leaving you unsupervised, you might forget that your objective is to clean the windows and not to squirt your twin brother in the genitals.

At least that’s the way it happened at our house.

After the windows were done Bill and I let the boys watch a movie, and they promptly fell asleep.  We fertilized the azaleas in peace then woke the guys for a celebratory screening of Shrek the Third.

Our Extravaganza! was a great success.  Rather than counting pruned bushes or cleaned windows, I decided the following was the best measurement of our accomplishments:

Total balls recovered:

From gutter:

8 baseballs

From bushes:

2 footballs

5 tennis balls (2 in advanced stages of decomposition)

3 golf balls

7 baseballs

1 wiffle ball

And three grimy, exhausted boys.

May 9, 2007

Music Festival Review: Top Five Offbeat Observations From My Three Sons

1. Drew: Mom usually doesn’t mind when Porter picks up junk off the ground because he does that everywhere, but she really freaked out when she realized he was carrying this empty bottle.

She told us it was called Jagermeister.  She said Jagermeister is an energy drink for animals and the bottle probably had horse germs so Porter had to put it down immediately.  When she said that Daddy started snorting and I saw a booger moving up and down in his nose.  There was a picture of a deer on the label of the bottle, but I didn’t see any animals at the concert.  Well, I saw crawfish, but they were dead and people were eating them.

2. Finn: My brothers and I were at the Chick-fil-A tent getting dinner while Mom bought our drinks.  I saw her talking to a man while she was at the Budweiser tent buying my dad a beer.   I think the man was trying to flirt with her.  I told Daddy, “That man is trying to put the moves on our Mom.”  We got our chicken nuggets and ran over there and I was right!  I heard the man say, “When you said you were here with lots of baggage, I thought you meant the emotional kind, not your husband and kids.” Mom got all red in the face and looked really happy to see Daddy.

3. Porter:  Mommy took me and Drew way up close to the front of the stage but Finn and Daddy didn’t want to go because there were so many people all squinched together.  The ugly guy who sings for Hinder had ladies’ bras hanging from his microphone.  I asked Mommy why and she said they were decoration.  I thought bras were just to cover up girls’ bosoms.  If they can be decorations I think we should put them on our Christmas tree because that would be funny.

4. Drew:  When we were waiting for Akon to sing this boy and this girl right in front of us started kissing each other really hard.  They were smushing their faces together and sticking their tongues out.  I asked Mom if they were going to make a baby and she said she thought so.  I think they heard us because they stopped kissing and looked at us and said we were cute.  Then they walked away a little bit and I saw the girl smoking a cigarette.  Smoke came out her nose like the dragon in Shrek but the guy kissed her anyway.  He must be her boyfriend.

5. Finn: My dad was really excited to see the Spin Doctors because they were the only band he’d ever heard of, because he’s like, more into sports.  He calls Akon “Acorn” and Mom says, “Honey, you sound like a redneck when you say that.”

When the Spin Doctors started playing the singer starting doing this weird kicking thing with his leg.  My mom said it would have been a better move if he didn’t look so old.  She said if he was going to jump around like he was twenty years old he should at least dye his beard ’cause it’s going gray.  We weren’t that close to him and I could tell he had more gray hair than my dad.

Mom told us we could only write about five things.  But I wanted to say that my brothers and I got to climb up this cool rock wall.

Later I heard Mom tell my brothers that she hoped they had a good time because all she did was hold them up so they could see the stage while she stared at their bottoms.  I think she was getting a little crotchety.

Then we all went home.

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The theme for this post came from ProBlogger’s Top 5 Group Writing Project.  Click over and check it out!

March 12, 2007

Schickel Insults Blogs; Melee Ensues

The last thing I expected to report from the Writing Today conference was that I was lured into a public SMACKDOWN over the value of blogs and blogging by Richard Schickel, film critic for Time magazine and author of many movie-related books.

Mr. Schickel gave the keynote speech during Friday’s lunch. There was a moment of silence during the invocation before his speech, and I prayed the words I customarily pray before I give a presentation because I was scheduled to talk in the afternoon session. I asked God to guide me in my choice of words, for wisdom and self-restraint, and then I prayed that God provide anything else I needed that I’d forgotten to specifically request. That’s my spiritual-legal catchall phrase I tack on just before the Amen which provides an extra dollop of comfort.

Thus armed with the Holy Spirit, I sat back as Mr. Schickel was introduced.

I was gobbling up both my rice pilaf and his words because I’ve been reading and enjoying his movie reviews since grade school. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but when we were growing up Aunt Su and I occasionally resorted to slaps and hair-pulling in our zeal to seize the Time magazine from each other on Tuesday afternoons. We didn’t grow up to be nearly as geeky as you might think given that anecdote.
Richard Schickel began by emphasizing the importance of writing every day, without compromising yourself, and trusting your instincts when you write. This is all extremely valuable advice, and it’s a poor reflection on me that I regularly ignore all of it. I didn’t write yesterday, for example, because Porter threw up on the good sofa and the cleaning cut into my computer time.

Upon reflection, I may have sacrificed my values when I cooked a batch of pancakes and used one to illustrate a story about my tiny bosoms.

If I’d trusted my instincts, I never would have published the story about the time Drew got caught cheating at school, because so many readers wrote in criticizing the way Bill and I had handled it. While I’m usually tough, it was hard not to be affected by such strong words. (That post was published on iVillage, which kept the comments, but feel free to review the column and condemn us. My skin is thicker now.)

I agreed with everything Mr. Schickel was saying although blood, vomit and my exhibitionist tendencies sometimes prevent me from following his good example.

Schickel mentioned that his daughter has published a book, which he described as a “momoir.”

And then suddenly, he veered off course and said that blogging is for idiots. That no one reads a blog except your mother and maybe your cousin, and that it’s stupid to write without getting paid for it. If I heard him correctly, he described blogs as the “near beer” of the writing world.

At first I thought I had misheard him, but then I noticed everyone looking at me. I was already well-known as “the blogger.”
Mr. Schickel finished speaking, asked for questions, and I waved my hand wildly and stood. I was damn glad I had already prayed for wisdom, as I certainly had not prepared to speak to two hundred people in a serious manner.

I addressed Mr. Schickel, but my remarks were primarily directed at the audience, which included bloggers and the conference organizers, who had determined that blogging was important enough to warrant a session during a writing conference. I could tell that Schickel wasn’t the sort of man who was going to be swayed by anything I had to say.

I said that I agreed with most of what he had said, but that he was mistaken in his belief that there are no talented, serious writers on the internet. There are thousands of blogs, but those that succeed do so based on content– the writing. He cut me off by saying that a critic’s job is to criticize, and then announced that he doesn’t read blogs.

A critic may be allowed to criticize, but I’d be compromising myself if I panned books in my Book Reviews without reading them first.

Apparently my remarks garnered applause, but I was so upset by the attitude of a man I’ve revered for so long that I didn’t hear it. I was listening to the Bangles sing “Hero Takes A Fall” in my head.

My session went well, although my audience was made up of people who blog and people who, like Mr. Schickel, have never read a blog, and unlike Mr. Schickel, want to learn about a new form of expression. It was difficult to tailor a class to such varying degrees of expertise, rather like holding a golf clinic and having Tiger Woods and me as your two students.

Later that night I met the charming Gay Talese, who had obviously spoken to Mr. Schickel, as they have been friends for years. We shook hands, and he said slyly, “I understand that you are trouble.”

We briefly bonded over a love of gin and happily, he didn’t challenge me to a smackdown or even a game of tiddlywinks, so I was able to admire his smartly tailored suit, his unexpected yet perfect tie, and his two-toned shoes which would have looked pimpish on anyone with less panache.

The rest of the weekend I was bombarded with supportive comments about the brouhaha. No one seemed to know why Mr. Schickel had made the remark, as there was no reason for him to speak of blogging at all. Perhaps he was busy and hadn’t read the program in advance of his speech. Maybe he was tired. Things could be going on at home. Everyone has off days.

I did a little research today on the book Mr. Schickel’s daughter has published. You’re Not The Boss Of Me: Adventures Of A Modern Mom by Erika Schickel just came out, and ironically, it’s going on a blog tour this week. I thought it worth my time to read several reviews and it looks fun and racy, the sort of book that many of my readers might enjoy.

I encourage you to check it out. I’m a firm believer that the sins of the father should not detrimentally affect his offspring. I’m not always able to prevent that from happening.

Overall my first writing conference was a marvelous experience. Next time, though, when I pack my legal pad and pen, I’ll throw my boxing gloves in my bag, too.

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(Here’s one account of the story, and evidence that the story is making its way around the blogosphere. Mr. Schickel was NOT wearing the unusual hat depicted in the second link, by the way.)