Balancing Life? Hardly!

Thank you to Seattle Woman Magazine and Judith Tingly for this article. It tells more truth about this last year than any other interview I've given. Balance? There is no such thing!

http://www.seattlewomanmagazine.com/articles/july09-6.htm

The Tent Camping Book Tour

It's no surprise to anyone interested in books that publishing has taken a huge hit in this economic mess. Big book tours are a rare treat for the biggest stars. I was hugely surprised and honored that Simon & Schuster sent me on a smaller tour for the release of OXYGEN as trade paperback. But I wanted to visit a few more of the fabulous independent bookstores here in the Northwest that I could reach without a plane ticket and hotel room—four children do not travel cheaply. So, we combined a mini-book tour with a family camping vacation—proving that six people can share one tiny tent (with a strategic smudge of flavored chapstick under your nose), and you can use an electric curling iron in a campground bathroom (when the line is not too long). Note that I almost never appear in any family photos, since I’m usually the only one who willing to stop for pictures.

Why I Love Book Clubs

Well, at last a new blog entry—a link to a blog I just posted for Reading Group Guides. I was offered the chance to write a short entry on any topic related to reading groups, and I immediately knew what I wanted to say, (not always true for me!): both a thanks to the groups I’ve already met with, and an affirmation that talking to book groups is the single best way to bring see a book through all the stages of its life. I’m linking to it here (scroll to June 29, 2009): ReadingGroupGuides

Two Perspectives

La Recesion en USA

Came across this video recently. Too funny! But then I watched it from across the border. Could almost be a trailer for my next novel.

Please, Don't Publish My Nightmares

Well, I feel really sad for anyone who has been opening this page looking for a fresh blog. Life has gotten so busy I am more amazed at what gets accomplished than what falls off the list. But that might be good, right? Oh, please tell me that might be good!

I had this dream last night. Now, this was not an MLK kind of dream about equality or freedom. This was a night terror—the kind that is so real you wake up searching the bedcovers for damning evidence—blood, maybe. In the dream it was two AM; screams and crashes were reverberating from the kitchen. I stumbled downstairs and found my older twins making a cake—flour and butter and sugar and egg shells covered the floor, the counters, the stove, and both of their pajama-clad bodies. Every light in the house was blazing—my younger twins were in the living room playing Cranium Cadoo and listening to NSYNC. I wandered around the house in a panic until I found my husband on his computer, cruising Craig’s list ads. And I asked him . . . OK, I shouted at him: Why is everybody awake at two AM on a school night?? And he answered me, cool as cream cheese: Geez, is it that late? Couldn’t tell you! When I went back upstairs I discovered that someone had stolen my bed. Only a pile of cold sheets lay wadded on the floor. So, I curled into a knot and tried to sleep—the alarm was set for 4AM because I had to get to the hospital by 6.

I guess this dream would be scary for any mom, but for me it morphed into a night terror because it is way too close to what actually goes on around here! One cause of the nightmare could be pinned on the Ecuadoran tortillas I had been frying up with my son at 10 PM for his Spanish class project. The fat in one of those things (think hush puppies stuffed with mozzarella cheese) makes Big Macs look like watercress. There’s more of a learning curve to making stuffed potato patties than you might guess—by the end of the first batch the kitchen ceiling was splatted with oil and mashed potatoes had been ground into every crevice between the floor boards. Somebody’s irreplaceable hand-written homework essay had been artfully grease-stained, and there was a raucous fight going on about it. I finally popped in some ear plugs and collapsed into bed, ignoring the laundry flooding down the hallway, generously laced with a box of spilled cat food. All in all, I think the dream was better than the reality.

But good stories need irony, and the irony here is that just the day before this the Seattle Sunday Times had printed a lovely article about me and my family, based on an interview I had given a month or so earlier. You can link to it here: seattletimes.nwsource.com. I bought six copies to ship off to my parents and sisters! The journalist and photographer did such a great job it made me want to be friends with myself! Who is this woman who holds down a responsible job, raises her kids, writes novels, and apparently actually does the laundry and sorts the mail? How could this reporter have printed only half the story—the competent half—and turned such a considerately blind eye to the gritty truth?

Oh, that’s right—she never actually came in my house!

Fifteen Minutes of Fame? Well...

A friend at the hospital heard I was a newly published novelist and asked me if I would be calling in too “Rich and Famous” to work soon. After all, I am on a book tour! I have just published a novel!

Published a novel?? Me?? Who would have dreamed it when I was slogging away in our grungy basement, or local coffee shops with the same fantastical self-image as any middle-aged mother who suddenly decides to reinvent themselves? Was this novelist thing any less outrageous than suddenly taking up yodeling or body piercing? I told my her that I would be happy merely to call in “Out of Debt and Keeping my Same Old Friends.”

Unanticipated as it is, it has been a bit miraculous to be on a book tour, finally holding in my own disbelieving hands the weighty, hard back product of a decade’s worth of silent musing. If I may confess it to this anonymous audience, the only event to surpass this so far is the birth of my twins. Even my wedding paled. (Sorry, sweetie!)

In my fleeting fifteen minutes of fame, I can admit that it has been glorious, and the cause of many deep and soulful blushes, but also comfortingly real. I still look in the mirror after a signing and realize I have lipstick smudged on my front tooth, and I still come home to the same piles of dirty dishes and smelly socks, and my children are thoroughly bored with the whole escapade. Surprisingly, that only makes me more certain they love me for my mediocre cooking and lung-collapsing hugs.

So I am happy to wallow in this fifteen minutes of fame, all the while recognizing that–just like Andy Warhol, the originator of that sweeping anointment–I too shall die and a million more will rise up to replace me. They are nipping at the edges of the bookstore shelves right now, ready to bump me from face-out to spine-out. But I even like that somehow. More books to read in my own future! More reason to keep writing!

In the middle of my tour I ran out of copies of Oxygen and wanted to buy some as gifts. I went to my the nearest big box bookstore, grabbed three off a table and plopped them on the counter.

“Do you have a discount card?” the perky young clerk asked. I gave her my number and she stated my name to verify. She asked for my credit card and photo ID, repeating my name each time, clearly drilled by her manager not to let any identity frauds slip through on her watch. She looked at the cover of my novel and I waited, almost shyly, for her to congratulate me on being the author. “Gee,” she said at last. “I’ve seen this book around a lot lately.” I smiled and started to thank her. Then she continued, “Do you know anything about it?”

She handed me my bag and I shook my head. “I just liked the cover.” Next time, though, I just might flip to the author photo on the flap when she asks for my ID. If I’m feeling bold.

Also Posted on FreshFiction.com at http://freshfiction.com/blog/2008/07/carol-cassella-rich-and-famous.html

The Family Vacation--You've Been There

I am vacationing in the mountains of Colorado with my family, the first true break we have taken in six months. It has been a grueling spring—I have been prepping for my first ever book tour, trying to fish my new novel out of the fast moving river launching my recently released novel, and still practicing anesthesia. My husband is finishing up two houses and taking care of his elderly father. Trader Joe’s is a dinner staple and the kids are rotating KP. To put it bluntly, nobody’s mopping the floors or scrubbing the bathtubs. We need this break.

Now, the one downside to this writing thing is that there really is no break. Your hands may not be on the keyboard every minute but, rather like gestation, if a new novel is in the making, your writing mind is fully occupied and your fingers are itching. The fact that you are always in working mode is definitely mitigated by the requisite writing wardrobe—a bathrobe and coffee-stained Uggs—but I think I’ve given up any memory of a real summer vacation. Oh well, it’s not like motherhood comes with actual time off either.

So the beckoning anticipation I’ve been conjuring for this mountain getaway is time to write: time just after dawn when everyone else is still puffing away in breathless dreams at this unfamiliar altitude, or after dinner when they are all locked in games of Cranium and Apples to Apples and I can sneak away to a back bedroom with my laptop. I want time inside a house that does not require my attention, with no desk covered with unpaid bills and unanswered mail, with no yard to weed or laundry to sort.

We tuck in that first night and I have to force myself not to think about the first words I want to put on the LCD screen in seven or eight hours. Maybe I will dream about the ending to the novel that I don’t yet know. My eyes open at first light and I look at the clock—only five, at least one more hour to go. Now it is six and I slip out from the comforter without waking my husband, pull on the bathrobe and start scooping coffee grounds into the filter.

Then I hear it. Every mother knows it. The low groan followed by the crescendo of a retch—and no, it’s not the dog. I drop the bag of coffee into the sink and I’m in the back bedroom before last night’s dinner can hit the floor. The next eight hours will be spent rinsing pans and washcloths and rocking this child to sleep whenever he can. And then another child will have incubated this virus to personal maturity and we can start again. Another novel put on hold. Another vacation memory made.