The LadyKillers

A Long Overdue Do-over for the Jewish Mom or How She Stops Kvetching and Loves The Pill--by Honored Guest Jane Isenberg

Please welcome today's honored guest poster, author Jane Isenberg. Jane wrote the prize winning memoir Going by the Book (Bergin & Garvey) and The Bel Barrett Mystery Series (Avon/HarperCollins). She earned degrees from Vassar College, Southern Connecticut State College, and New York University and taught English for nearly forty years, first in high school and later in community college. Now retired from teaching, she writes in Issaquah, Washington where she lives with her husband Phil Tompkins. Visit her web site www.JaneIsenberg.com and her blog www.notestomymuses.wordpress.com.

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I know from Jewish mothers. I had one. I am one, and my daughter is one. And, like other moms, we're all different. And we're different from the stereotypical portrayals of Jewish moms as monomaniacal, over-protective, overbearing, and manipulative that I read about and saw on TV in the Forties and Fifties. Lest you think that tired stereotype went the way of the felt poodle skirt, listen to the gravely rasp of Mrs. Wolowitz, Howard Wolowitz’s constipated and controlling mom on The Big Bang Theory. Today this time-worn trope seems wrong, an outdated “oops” which I point out in the spirit of this week’s theme.

Resolved to avoid perpetuating this stereotype myself, I invented Rachel Mazursky, a Jewish mother who is an individual in her own right as well as a creature of her time. A recent widow, Rachel is one of the narrators of The Bones and the Book. She translates and shares with the reader the Yiddish diary found with the bones of a long-dead immigrant woman in 1965 Seattle. Moved by the murdered diarist’s story, Rachel works hard to figure out who killed her.

At 45 and with her daughter Marsha far away at college, Rachel is no Sophie Portnoy. Rather, she’s an empty nester with an empty bed and a prescription for The Pill. She’s also smart, resourceful, college educated, and eager to return to the classroom where she used to teach history to high school students. Unlike the stereotypical force-feeding Jewish mother, Rachel’s not much of a cook and seldom foists food on anyone. She’s not overprotective either although her husband was. When he argued against his “baby girl” going to an eastern college, Rachel fought him and won. But although she’s not over-protective, Rachel is sensible and makes sure Marsha knows about The Pill before the girl leaves home. In another blow to the stereotype, mother and daughter reverse roles when Marsha discovers that Rachel has a lover. The daughter lays a full-blown guilt trip on her mom for what Marsha sees as a terrible betrayal of her father’s memory.

And unlike the much mocked Jewish mom who threatens to self-destruct if her progeny dates a non-Jew, when Rachel learns that Marsha is involved with a Protestant, she doesn't present any obstacles to the relationship. But although she often works on the Sabbath and eats non-kosher food, Rachel is still close to god whom she questions, prays to, nags, and thanks at her convenience. Living in a time and place where assimilation is a popular option, Rachel is conscious of her family’s gradual departure from the strictures of Orthodox Judaism. As a historian, she’s aware that she’s not an immigrant like her own mother. Rachel is an insider, an American Jew and a modern American woman with a life of her own that includes but is not limited to her family and her faith. She’s got choices. No wonder she doesn't feel like kvetching anymore.

Oops, Sorry about That

I think every writer faces the occasional OOPS moment. In the ideal situation, the mistake is found and corrected before the book is sent off to print, but that’s not always possible. Once the book hits the store shelf, it’s usually a reader who finds the error and lets the writer, or maybe the whole world, know all about it.

I’ve found that most of my oops moments happen when I change my mind about some minor character detail after I’ve already completed the first draft. I then have to go back and correct all references, and that’s where things can get dicey. In Going Organic Can Kill You, my characters originally used flip phones. After my husband went to the store to get himself a new cell phone and discovered that flip phones aren’t nearly as prevalent as years past, I decided to change the sister’s phone in the book to an iPhone. She’s a hip girl. She buys the latest gadgets. That should have been an easy change, but apparently I left more than one reference in the book where Ashlee “flips her phone shut.” Oops. I completely missed that, even though I did a final read-through before the book went to print. So far, only one reader has commented on the error, but I have to wonder how many others noticed.

For my latest book, I’m already worried about another last minute update. After I finished the manuscript and my agent reviewed it, I decided that a couple of my characters were too similar, so I changed one from a female to a male. I searched for every occurrence of the old name and changed all the shes to hes and hers to his, thinking I’d caught them all. Then I read the entire manuscript again and was horrified to find at least half a dozen references to the wrong gender. On the plus side, my editor and the copy editor will both be reading the manuscript soon, plus I’ll get another chance myself, but I still worry that we’ll all overlook an incorrect reference. I can already
picture a day in the future when a reader casually asks, “Say now, when did Marvin get that sex-change operation?”

Hopefully, readers understand that we’re all human and mistakes are a part of life. And if they don’t understand, well, there’s not a lot I can do about that, except say, “Oops, sorry about that.”

The OOPS Cookie

 

There's a Café in Dublin, California, (address on request) that serves great food and even better cookies. Their specialty is their OOPS cookie. How convenient, Camille, you say, that you're eating one right now while the topic of the week for LadyKillers is OOPS. It's true as only real life can be true.

The cookie got its name (say the bakers) from the day the original recipe for peanut butter cookies was ruined when — OOPS — someone dropped chocolate chips into the batter. Eureka! They shouted (okay, here I'm making it up), "This batter is better."

And thus the OOPS cookie was born.

As I munched on the cookie last week at a much needed pre-Thanksgiving lunch at the Café, it occurred to me that a lot of my writing can be described as OOPS writing.   

As often as not, I'm writing along, chatting up a scene and — OOPS — something happens that I hadn't planned for. A character reacts badly to information, and it turns out he was hiding something. From me. Or a plot point turns north instead of south. Or I "see" something in a room I've described, and, lo, it's the murder weapon.

I've learned to not only embrace OOPSes, but to hope for them.

Opps

I am an amateur historian, not a professional. I have oops moments. Am I embarrassed? Look carefully and you will see this is written in scarlet ink. 

To be fair, even the most devotedly thorough researchers have opps moments. One of my favorite authors, whom I have admired for more decades than I dare admit, is still suffering over putting the wrong colored squirrel in an early book. As a lesser writer, however, my posterior is more rightfully and most brightly imprinted with the marks of a shoe size oddly resembling my own. 

What amazes and delights me is the kindness of readers when someone catches an opps. Some time back, a reader sent an email saying that she found Wine of Violence interesting but had never known that Queen Eleanor (Henry II’s widow) and Queen Eleanor (Henry III’s widow) were both buried at Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire. I replied that they were not, only the latter. She responded that I had said they were in Author’s Notes. I checked and had a major opps experience. Reconstructing why I committed an error I knew at the time was wrong would be torturous. What I did do was apologize profusely, do a mea culpa in the next book, and send the very kind reader a  copy of it. I have had a couple of others but that was the most egregious. 

Occasionally, readers have called me on issues that qualified as an opinion difference, more than an error of fact. In each case, after I explained my rationale, the reader has either agreed or concurred that the subject could be viewed from more than one point of view. That qualifies as honorable debate, and that can be fun. 

Fortunately, most readers do respond with grace when you admit the error. Those are the ones to whom I owe an e-hug. When someone opts for over-the-top, vicious criticism, however, they are probably more interested in just bashing something, anything. Does that sort of thing hurt? Of course, but these are the people writers should quickly ignore. They may wish to start World War III over your error, but let them go kick a stone wall instead so they will have something more important to scream about. 

In any case, opps moments will happen to us all even when we diligently try to avoid such things. As long as you are serious about avoiding errors, forgive yourself and move on. It really is OK to be human.

Regarding "Oops" on a non-trivial level...

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

May your Monday hold only small-scale "oopses" of the minor variety...

News and Oops!

NEWS FLASHES!!

• Priscilla Royal announces that the-just-released-absolutely-newest-book in her Medieval Mystery series, The Sanctity of Hate, is out in hardcover, trade paper, and audio. E-book is in the works. Also just got the OK on the premise and synopsis of next book. Sighs of relief from cats who see this approval in terms of little round cans of food...
• Mystery author Jane Isenberg is our honored guest blogger this coming Friday, November 30. Please join us in welcoming her on this special "Fifth Friday of the Month" post!
• Camille Minichino, Ann Parker, Margaret Lucke, and Susan Shea will all be in attendance at a holiday get-together at Orinda Books, sponsored by Northern California Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America chapters. The event is open to the public and starts at 1 p.m. Plenty of goodies, books, and writers will be there!

Oops!

No, it's not a comment on the blog, or the LadyKillers... It's the topic of the week! And what sort of "Oopses" will the LadyKillers discuss? Ooooh, we're all dying to hear! ;-) Please do join us with your favorite cuppa each day this week and leave a comment, if so desired.

Never say, 'oops.' Always say, "Ah, interesting." ~Unknown

Letting Go of Not-Writing Rituals

You know how you eat too much turkey every year, or that third helping of mashed yams? You eat more than you want. You have to spend weeks speed-walking to lose the pounds gained in just a few days...and yet, next year, you do it all over again?

Well, it's possible to replace bad rituals with good, healthy ones. It's easier to replace a bad habit than just stop it--because that bad habit was doing something for you, or you wouldn't bother. I learned that while taking off 50 pounds this last year--white knuckling a problem can't last more than a few weeks, but replacing bad habits and rituals with good ones gets you working for yourself, instead of fighting yourself. 

I've developed a number of non-writing rituals over the years, but thanks to the help of friends, fellow writers and a shrink or two, am moving away from them. Here's some of my biggest non-writing rituals, and how I'm letting go of them.

1. Talking instead of writing. 

There's often a pre-writing period for any project. At this time, various parts of your brain toss an idea around. Your unconscious spits something up into your subconscious mind, manifesting as a vivid dream or 2:00 AM scribbled note. Then your conscious minds shakes the concept, bolts on a few temporary scaffolds, and dumps it back into the nether regions, rather like stones in a polishing barrel. Eventually something comes out that you can't ignore anymore, and you start writing things in permanent files on the computer.

During this vulnerable stage, I would often tell my husband all about my brilliant ideas. This drained my writing energy, and invited unqualified comments at a vulnerable stage. A writing mentor (thank you Mr. Landau!) mentioned this to me, and so now I write my stories instead of telling them. Like with any sudden change in behavior, I warned my husband what I was trying to do. Now he cheerfully busts me when I slip up.

2. Comparing myself to famous authors

This ritual is another way to cripple up my inner artist. Perhaps I was frightened of the commitment of being a writer, or the terror of being a failure, or just not used to how different my dream novel is from the one that ends up on the page. Whatever the real reason for self-injury, comparing myself to Robert Parker or Dashiell Hammett and finding myself wanting was a very effective non-writing ritual. After dwelling long enough on just all the ways I was deficient, it felt impossibly difficult to start a single sentence. 

Nowadays I try to notice if I'm scared, and give myself a mental hug instead of a mental beat-down. On especially bad days, a short stroll through my old writing is enough to convince me that I'm improving--and the only way to get better is to write more. Plus, I'm lucky enough to have friends who will remind me that nobody can be Robert Parker or Dashiell Hammett--and nobody can be me either. Comparisons are odious, as John Lydgate said (and Cervantes and Marlowe and Donne!).

3. Not Writing

This is the most insidious not-writing ritual of all. Every day that I don't write is a ritual exercise in not writing, and ritual can become astonishingly powerful with repetition--that's why we invented them, after all. Now, what "every day" means to you is undoubtedly different than what it means to me, and it is almost never literally seven days a week for anyone. But like any exercise, if you stop for a week--you've really stopped. Not writing has become your daily ritual. Of course there are times in life when you can't write--a sick loved one needs succor, an arduous book tour wakes you up at 6:00 AM and won't let you sleep until midnight, changing jobs eats all your creative and intellectual energy, or moving homes or survivng natural disasters. The big things can occasionally push you into not writing for a bit.

The best way to break out of this most powerful of rituals is, for me, the same way I broke out of a lifetime of poor eating habits. I learned them from the UCSF Nutrition folks. They are the habits of people who've lost 100 or more pounds and kept them off for five years or more, slightly modified for writing:

-- Write it down. Just like NaNoWriMo, log your writing hours, how you were feeling, how easy or hard it was to show up to the keyboard. Not as a form of punishment, but as data. Our memories are too kind, our rationalization powers very great. A good, honest log will help you ask the right questions--what happened last week? What did I make more important than my writing? Can I change that priority? 

-- Measure it. Using the scale regularly fights self-delusion. Check the size of your novel once a week. And don't punish yourself for missing goals, but adjust the goals, look for root causes when you fall short. Treat yourself kindly, like a doctor would. But don't ignore the facts.

-- Plan it. You don't eat healthy by accident. Just as I had to learn to plan a weekly menu, shop for only the things on my list, and develop my "no" muscle when the inevitable temptations arose, I had to plan my writing time. Every life has some complicating factor. For me, it's my challenging, changeable, and surprisingly stressful day job. Step one was that I had to start blocking out my calendar. No meetings before 9am, because I'm home writing from 5-7:30. No mid-week latenight adventures, because I can't get up at 5:00 AM if I went to bed at midnight the night before. 

I'm still getting to "done" with these replacement rituals. And I'm hoping to see my word counts rise just as I've seen my weight shrink and my health improve. If you want to drop-kick your non-writing rituals, try anything in this post and see if it works for you. You'll know when you're on to something. Just don't give up.

During this holiday season, I wish this for everyone--healthier rituals, more love and compassion, and time to enjoy the friends and family whom you love and cherish.

Clothing, Pencils, Music and Booze

By Margaret Lucke

I love the idea of writing rituals. The word ritual suggests something more than just a routine or a habit, like getting up before dawn in order to have time to write, or putting pen to notebook every morning on the commute train. It implies a little bit of ceremony, or the invocation of a morsel of magic that will enable you to craft prize-winning, best-selling prose--or at least get to the end of the first draft. A ritual is something you must have or do in order for the writing process to succeed.

Some rituals revolve around clothing--or the lack thereof. For example, I've read that while writing Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo stripped down to his birthday suit and made his valet hide his clothes. That way he couldn't leave his house until the day's writing was done. John Cheever would put on a suit and tie each morning, take the elevator down to his office in the basement of the building where he lived, take off the suit, hang it up, and write in his underwear.

Other writers can't write unless they have particular tools or supplies. Travel writer William Least Heat-Moon reportedly relied on cedar pencils made by Native Americans, while Philip Pullman insists on using ballpoint pens and lined, two-hole-punched paper.

A lot of rituals involve music, although Katherine Anne Porter insisted she wanted "perfect silence." Novelist Caroline Leavitt has said, "I have to have music, but it can’t be really good music. It just has to have a beat to keep me going. (I'm mortified to admit I have listened to the Carpenters many, many times.)" May Sarton would have disagreed with that choice. When she wrote, she liked to play music from the 18th century; no later time period worked for her. The legendary copywriter David Ogilvie, one of the inspirations for TV’s Mad Men, observed: "If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy."

Which brings us to food and drink as ways for writers to tap into inspiration and keep their noses to their grindstones. Many writers can admit to using caffeine to power them through the day or chocolate to reward them when the writing’s done. Truman Capote (who made a ritual of lying down to write, in contrast to Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, who wrote standing up) depended on cigarettes and a sequence of beverages to get him through his writing day: "I've got be puffing and sipping," he once said. "As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis." Some authors' needs are simpler. Alexandre Dumas stimulated his creativity by eating an apple each morning. The quirky part: he had to eat it while sitting under the Arc de Triomphe.

As I said, I love the idea of writing rituals, I don't have any of my own. Well, not many. I require a mug of hot tea on my desk, and NPR or a bit of instrumental music on my sound system. I sometimes indulge in a bit of solitaire while waiting for le mot juste to bubble up my mind. But I don't burn candles or recite Homer's invocation of the Muse before I get started. Do you think something like that might help? I could use a gush of copy now and then.

How about you? What are your writing rituals?

Writing Rituals?

So, normally, I don't work on holidays -- especially not holidays that revolve around the mass consumption of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Because I already have a Thanksgiving ritual: Wake up. Put the last minute finishing touches on whatever I've been assigned to make (almost always a couple of desserts, as chocolate and butter seem to be my strong points). Lay around a bit. Consider going to the gym. Run out of time considering, so hop in the shower. Gather up my goodies and head out to celebrate, eat, nap, eat again, and finish off with a family poker game which leaves each member thankful that they left anything over a twenty at home. Wait 364 days, repeat.

But this year, there is one new task in the Thanksgiving ritual: work. It's my own fault, of course, for putting things off (because really? Boy Meets World is on and it's way more important I watch that one episode I've seen 47 times where Corey and Topanga get in a fight, then make up with a chaste kiss). But that doesn't mean I still won't lament and complain as though someone suddenly decided this book is due in two weeks. So somewhere between finishing touches and eating again, I'll be tapping away, crying cranberry tears and wistfully thinking of pumpkin pie.

Writing about writing rituals

Instead of actually writing my book today, I decided to write down some ideas for writing rituals that get me into that writing state.  Boy, do I have a lot of rituals to deal with before getting those words on paper. Like:

1.    Begin at a certain time. I’m a morning person so I need to get to work early, before I run out of energy or life gets in the way.

2.    Nest. Instead of working in my office, I cozy up on the family room couch, put my feet up, wrap myself in a blanket, adjust all the pillows, and get to work.

3.    Look out the window. There’s something about gazing into my backyard that seems to help when I’m working on a particular sentence or story. Perhaps I think I’ll find the answer out there.

4.    Clean house. I can’t write if my surroundings are messy. It seems to make my brain messy. Granted, if someone walked in and saw my coffee table full of papers, notes, to-do lists, calendars, pens, and files, they wouldn’t think I had a clean mind at all.

5.    Take a walk. Usually I take a walk around Target or the Mall, rather than just a random walk around the block. I figure I can do some errands while getting some exercise and taking a break to work out a problem.

6.    Listen to music. I can’t listen while I’m writing, but I listen before and after, to get myself in a particular mood – Gangnam Style if I need energy, You Picked Me if I need romance, Zydeco if I need a mental break.

7.    Use a favorite pen. There’s only one kind of pen I like—a fine point marker. I feel like I’m drawing my words rather than just writing them. Love the way they feel on paper.

8.    Drink coffee. When I need a moment to reflect, I like to reach over and sip from my mug of coffee—a mocha, actually. Makes me feel like a writer.

9.    Be comfortable. I have a writing uniform—jeans, soft fluffy socks, and a Life is Good t-shirt. I can’t wear pajamas or I’ll go back to bed. And why dress up when it’s just me and the computer?

10.    Read. When I’m done for the day, I refuel by reading other people’s work. That usually inspires me to write better and keep at it!