I’m over on Family Circle’s Momster blog today.
Click this link to go check it out.
There’s also link there to my essay, “Reality Check” in the May issue.
I especially liked the essay on page 90. Can you please make the pulled pork now?
Posted in Interesting Places I Went, Puppies
Tagged accidentalstepmom, essay, Family Circle, JM Randolph, parenting, reality check, step parenting, writing
Right after we opened my current show, over seven years ago, I took a creative writing class in the city. It was the first time in my adult life that I knew I would be in the same place for the next ten weeks and available every Monday night, so I took advantage of it.
There was a woman in the class who had one of the best short story opening lines ever:
It did then and continues to now serve as the basis by which I measure good dialogue in fiction.
Good dialogue in fiction comes from real life- our instructor, author Matt de le Peña taught us that. A statement like the one above can only come from someone stuck in a situation with another person that feels so interminable that they’re either going to kill the other guy, escape in the dead of night, or sell their soul to Satan to make it stop. It immediately sets tension and speaks volumes, with very few words.
When you’re with someone your whole life- or what feels like your whole life- you can fixate on the way they take their socks off, the sound they make before they answer the office phone, how they always move your coffee mug. It can make you crazy.
I hate the way you lay on my tiger. Just to mock me. Not even playing with it.
Here are your links.
My favorite description of a first encounter with foie gras: Duck, Duck, Gross on Friday Night Casserole.
A courageous post about mental illness: The Clothespin Theory on Going Round and Round.
I love this. From the about page: Honoring natural selection’s most baffling creations. Go home, evolution, you are drunk. WTF,Evolution?
I dug this post about taking a couple of teenagers to NYC for their first trip, and losing an audition: You Can Learn a Lot From Losing on Running On Wine.
Heart Disease is the number one killer of women. February is National Heart Month. This is a great post from Darla about her mother: What the Heart Knows on She’s a Maineiac. Please do also watch the really eye-opening and funny video at the end of the post from Go Red For Women.
Happy Sunday.
Posted in One and Done Sunday
Tagged accidentalstepmom, auditioning, dogs, evolution, family, food, heart disease, JM Randolph, kids, parenting, pet peeves, step parenting, stepmom blog, writing
Somewhere at the very end of May, it came to my attention that there was such a thing as Camp NaNoWriMo. You probably know, National Novel Writing Month is November. Affectionately referred to as NaNoWriMo, participants commit to writing 1667 words per day to have a novel of 50,000 words at the end of the month.
Quantity, not quality, folks. Well, at least for mere mortals like me.
I made one attempt at NaNoWriMo a couple years ago. One way of looking at it is that I failed. I didn’t even make it to the half way mark. But I prefer to look at it as I got a good chunk of raw material towards what has become my work in progress.
For some reason, when I saw “Camp” in front of NaNoWriMo, I was thinking, Camp must be shorter somehow. Camp must mean a smaller word count. Camp sounds like something I could do!
So I Tweeted my friend Erin, who writes the blog MomFog. She has five kids too- and she actually gave birth to all of hers, leading me to believe it was at least somewhat intentional. Erin completed her first NaNoWriMo this past November and I asked her if she was doing Camp.
To which she replied, well I guess if you’re doing it, I’m doing it. And because I’m a Twitter NitWit and don’t have a smart phone and am not on it all the time, the next Tweet I got from her said she was signed up.
So I signed up. Because at this point, I had to.
Turns out, “Camp” is still 50,000 words.
I did a bit of a cheat. I am bogged down at a place in my work in progress where I have a crapload of backstory. Way too much. I don’t know how to work it in, I’m not sure if it fits. I’ve been struggling with moving forward. What happens next. So I decided that for CampNaNoWriMo I would simply write what happens next. No building on back story, nothing in the past, only forward motion allowed.
I did really well for a while. I was even getting up extra early to write and I was totally on target.
Right up until the week that the kids got out of school.
Which is the week that CC started working a second job during the day, prepping the next tour to go out.
Which is the week that camps started and the chauffeuring began.
Which is the week that my show posted the closing notice.
It came down to the last day of June and I was 8,000 words short. My plan was to finish, even though we had a two-show day. I would finish between shows.
I’ve been on shows closing before where the atmosphere backstage is a total downer. But this is such a great bunch of people that it was total party time. All kinds of people were stopping in to say goodbye, the head carpenter brought in a bunch of food, the ushers made a bunch of food. I typed about three sentences and finally decided I would really rather enjoy the time.
And so I did not complete CampNaNoWriMo. But I have 42,000 words of what happens next. And I don’t regret either my decision to start it, nor my decision to not complete it.
Also, I can’t wait to start revising. There’s some serious crap that should never see the light of day contained in that 42,000 words.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged accidentalstepmom, Camp NaNoWriMo, family, JM Randolph, kids, parenting, step parenting, writing
I'm JM.
Blogger, YA author, custodial stepmom of five, and stagehand.
I write to keep the crazy at bay.
Sometimes it even works.
