Independence Day

The Country that two hundred thirty years ago declared its independence is not unlike The Kid.

Young. Bold. Rebellious. Sometimes reckless. And more than a little naïve.

This will be The Kid's third Independence Day. But it's the first where he's starting to declare his own independence. Sometimes that's a good thing; other times it's not.

Several weeks ago, for example, he liberated himself from disposable diapers. When your kid tells you that he's ready to free himself from Pampers, you, as a parent, take the news with an equal measure of thrill and dread.

The thrill is for two reasons. One comes from the knowledge that you've taken the worst that his little body can dish out and lived to tell about it. And the other comes from the knowledge that you will no longer be buying disposable diapers and flushing half your salary down the proverbial toilet.

The dread is that there are bound to be accidents. Like when you take him to your neighborhood drug store and he gets so excited over a Power Ranger action figure that he piddles in his pants. And on the store floor.

A few weeks later, he tells you that he's ready to sleep at night without that safety net that is the disposable diaper. And you're amazed that when he wakes up the next morning, his pajamas and bed are dry.

Then a few hours later he's at the grocery store and he tells Mommy that it's potty time and it isn't No. 1. Alarms go off in Mommy's head, knowing that this would be the first bowel movement in over twenty-four hours. Fearing an earth shaker, she frantically scoops him up and rushes him to the loo, where he calmly does his business, as if he's been doing it for years.

Yes, The Kid has come a long way. And in such a short time. But with his liberation often comes exasperation. You see, he also has his own way of doing things now.

Not surprisingly, his way and Mommy and Daddy's way often clash. This extends to his potty training. For example, if he's in the middle of something important, like a Playmobil jousting match between The Evil Knight and The Silver Knight, he doesn't want that to be interrupted. And if you have the nerve to suggest that he might actually need to go because he hasn't gone all morning, he will rebelliously bark back, "No!"

There are times, though, that The Kid is still a kid and is not quite ready to liberate himself from Mommy and Daddy. Mostly this is true with Mommy, to whom he still calls out for when things do not go his way. This we call the "I want my Mommy" whine, which Mommy deals with by indulging in her own brand of wine, called chardonnay.

Sometimes Daddy feels a little left out. Not that he'd want to trade places with Mommy. But it does sting a bit when The Kid runs every time to Mommy. It's a popularity vote that you always lose, no matter how hard you fight it. You're the Al Gore of Parenthood.

The Kid always seems to make up for it when you least expect it, though. Like late in the evening when Mommy's in the shower and Daddy and The Kid are watching "Mulan" and there's a scene where Mushu, the spirited little dragon with Eddie Murphy's voice, hugs Mulan and The Kid turns and embraces Daddy in the same manner and Daddy melts.

Young, bold, rebellious, sometimes reckless, and more than a little naïve.

Is it just me, or do those same descriptive terms still seem to be just as applicable to The Country today as they did in 1776?

And I imagine that, at least in my mind, they'll still seem just as applicable to The Kid ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. Because, to me, he'll still be The Kid.

Best-seller? No. Author? Yes

Hard to believe, but a year ago this week Lost in the Ivy hit the major online retailers. Not by storm. More like a drizzle, I suppose. 

But it was sure fun dancing naked even in that light rain back then.

You can see for yourself the roller-coaster ride my book has taken on Amazon.com in this nifty little graph courtesy of Title-Z, which gives a snapshot picture of the book's Amazon sales rankings over the course of the last year. Although a liftetime sales ranking of 413,452 doesn't sound all that impressive, or impressive at all, keep in mind that there are well over 3 million books ranked by Amazon. 

I must confess, though, it's been a little depressing watching that Amazon sales ranking for my book grow like a weed over the last six months. What that obviously means is that hardly anyone is buying my book these days. Sure, every now and then there's a little bump in its ranking but then a week later it's back up in the 700,000 range again.

Should I be surprised that sales of the book have bottomed out? No. Most books have about a three- to six-month shelf life before sales start to slow and eventually become stagnant. And the reality is that I gave up on the book about six months ago when I stopped pumping money and time into marketing it.

The question is, do sales matter? Of course they do, if you want to make money and make your publisher happy and have any hope of getting other books published. And of course sales equates with readers and you want people to read what you wrote or you wouldn't have put it out there in the first place.

Perhaps a better question, though, is should sales matter? And I guess my answer to that is, it depends. It depends on what you want. If you want nothing more than to be a best-selling author, then the answer is, without question, yes. But if you just want to be an author, and you remove "best-selling" from the equation, the answer is, in my mind, no. You should be happy just to have accomplished what few have accomplished: writing a book and seeing it published, no matter how you got it published.

I can't deny that there is a certain part of me that would want to trade places with Stephen King of John Grisham. But there's another part of me that is content just to be what I am: an author. 

A New Kid in Town

The Toddler has outgrown his name.

A toddler is, by definition, one who toddles. Toddle means to walk unsteadily – that funky Frankenstein walk that little creatures between the ages of one and three do.

The Toddler just turned three, and for the past year and a half, I've been writing about him. And when I've written about him, he's always been The Toddler.

They grow so fast. It seems like it was just yesterday that he was crawling. Then came those first steps. Then those first words. And all of a sudden, he's no longer a toddler. He's the kid that you once were.

On the eve of Father's Day, just two weeks after his third birthday, he wanted his toddler bed removed. He wanted it out of his room. If he was going to go to sleep, it wasn't going to be in a toddler bed. It was as if he knew that he wasn't a toddler any more. So Mommy and Daddy picked it up that night and took it out of the room. He slept on his mattress without the toddler bed frame.

The Toddler stopped toddling some time ago. Actually, he stopped walking. It wasn't that he couldn't walk. Thankfully, he has two fully functional lower extremities. He had learned, however, that there is an easier way of getting around than walking. All he had to do was hitch a ride on one of two buses: The Mommy Express or The Daddy Express.

"Up, Daddy," he cries.

I look down at this little creature with his outstretched arms and pleading eyes and tell him, "No. You can walk. You've got two legs, just like Daddy."

"No, want up," he rebels. I try to move but he's now attached to the bottom of my leg. "Up!"

With a sigh and a shake of my head, I scoop him up and he settles into the little monkey position in my arms.

"Go to video store, Daddy," he says, the tears now replaced with a smile.

The dust kicked up by The Toddler is still thick in the air. But the clock has struck three, and there's a new kid in town. He's just a little quicker on the draw than the cowboy he's replaced. We call him, simply, The Kid.

D-Day is coming!

Okay, so a couple weeks ago I signed up for D-Day, an event sponsored by my friends at the Chicago Writers Association. The "D" is for deadline, and the concept behind the event is that you, as a writer, set a goal to complete a writing project that you've either been thinking about doing or have already started but have stalled out on and need a jump start.

This, I thought, is just the kick in the ass that I needed. For too long I'd been dragging my feet on that next novel. Always, it seemed, there was something else more pressing. So there were stops and starts and the stops were always longer than the starts.

If I couldn't get my own rear in gear, perhaps a little peer pressure would do the trick.

And it would be cool to tell you that it has worked, that the keyboard is steaming from all the activity. But that would be fiction, which is what I'm supposed to be writing instead of this, which is non-fiction. 

Since I signed up for D-day, I haven't so much as opened the Word document that one day is supposed to be that next novel.

Today this reality hit extra hard because it is June 12, which is two short months before August 12, the day designated as D-Day, the day on which I am supposed to stand with my fellow writers and celebrate in the glory of having accomplished what I set out to do.

So what does that mean? It means that in the next 60 days, the novel that is in my head has to start coming out. My D-Day goal was 20,000 words. That's 10,000 words for each of the next two months. Or 333 words for each of the next 60 days.

I can do it. No, scratch that.

I've got to do it. No, scratch that.

I'll do it. There, that's it.

And this blog entry is 333 words exactly to this period. That's my daily measuring stick.

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By the way, today I posted to ChicagoWrites my interview with Alice Maggio, who wears hats as librarian, online columnist, book club moderator and blogger. Please do take a look at Alice's many adventures in Chicagoland. And then if you haven't done so already, check out my interviews with thriller writer J.A. Konrath and with Sharon Woodhouse, founder of Chicago's own Lake Claremont Press.

Bye Bye Binky

I don’t know exactly when it was that The Toddler’s pediatrician first started to prepare The Parents for pulling the plug. Probably it was around age one that he began to gently nudge them.

By doctor’s orders, the pacifier was to be used only to encourage sleep and to calm “stressful” situations. Of course The Parents’ definition of “stressful” was taken probably a little more liberally than the kind doctor intended and became pretty much any time that The Toddler wasn’t in daycare or putting food into his mouth.

As The Toddler began to verbalize, his pacifier became known simply as “Paci” and it became inseparably attached to “Burpcloth,” a raggedy-looking cloth diaper, to the extent that they conjoined and became one word, known affectionately in The Family’s house as “Paciburpcloth.”

It was, if memory serves correctly, at eighteen months and at two years, that The Pediatrician, after seeing Paci being used to mollify The Toddler during booster shot visits, admonished The Parents that they were to say bye-bye to binky by age three. The Parents of course properly assured The Pediatrician during each of these visits that they would start to wean The Toddler from Paci, because that’s what good parents do – they tell the doctor what he wants to hear.

What parents tell a pediatrician and what they do are rarely one and the same. And such was the case with these parents. Although they had the best intentions, it seemed that there was always some reason to delay pulling the plug. There would be vows to cut The Toddler off right after this trip or that trip which were neglected upon returning from this trip or that trip.

Time seems to accelerate when you don’t do something that you know that you’re supposed to do by that time. The Parents swore that The Toddler’s second birthday was just yesterday when all of a sudden the third anniversary of his birth is kicking them in the shins.

And then one day it’s the day before that third birthday and The Parents are breaking the news to The Toddler that on the day he will be showered with gifts and be permitted to eat all the sweets he can stomach, there will be a bittersweet ending because he will have to say good-bye to his dear friend Paci.

The Toddler has all day to digest this crushing news and later that evening, as he prepares for bed and his last night with Paci, he utters out of the side of his pacified mouth something that The Parents never thought they would hear: “I don’t want a birthday.” The meaning of course being that he was willing to give up everything – the presents, the cake, the candy, the ice cream – for Paci.

For much of the next day Paci was forgotten amidst all the joy and celebration that was The Toddler’s birthday. But after the house emptied and all the presents had been opened, The Toddler, nap-less and over-stimulated, had a predictable meltdown to end all meltdowns. If ever there was a time when Paci was needed, this was it. But The Parents held firm, putting up with two hours of whining and crying and kicking and screaming until Mommy negotiated a deal that she will forever live to regret. There would be no Paci but there would be cake and milk, which The Toddler took to like a tiger to raw meat.

Now a chocolate mess, Mommy swept The Toddler from the table and into the bathroom for a wipe down. That’s when Daddy heard from outside the bathroom that unmistakable sound – a burp but not an ordinary one. The bathroom, The Toddler and Mommy – all coated with fresh undigested chocolate cake and milk. The icing on the cake to what had become a bittersweet third birthday.

After his second bath of the evening and a lot of extra comforting, The Toddler finally conked out. And for the first time in his three years, he didn't need Paci.