Let me explain myself

I can't believe it. I'm a blogger. I'm sort of a mommy blogger because I'm a mom to two small kids but I'm really classified as a pining - writer blogger, and I know there are hundreds of thousands of you out there desperate to write but strapped by prior commitments. When you hit an apex in your life and you know your calling is to write and you can't find more than a half hour a day if you are lucky to do it, it is downright depressing. So I am here to lift your spirits which lifts my spirits, and inform you that even though you cannot even fathom more spare time besides flossing, or finally curing that foot arch fungus you contracted the last time you got a pedicure which was about the last time you pampered yourself (double fuck you), you can do it. Hey, I used to wear belly bracelets, drop obnoxious amounts of Ecstasy and live near downtown LA in Echo Park. I used to spend time actually ambling about aimlessly. What I would do now for a crumb of that wasted slacker time!!! Now I prep cucumber slices and baby carrots in tupperware for snack time and most of my Google and Yelp searches are for new playgrounds with cool water and sand features to keep my kids preoccupied.

I posted the short story Pop Goes the Cherry of mine as my inauguration to blogging because honestly, I sat at my desk, exhausted at 10:30 at night, and everything I wrote came off as cute, trite and telling you all about me in a kind of rambling way that only served to expose my true age (always always references to the 80's and 90's... when will that ever end?) Actually at this moment, I have to stop typing in this entry because my pre-schooler is hollering from the other room about getting up on a chair to get her piggy bank down, and is it okay that her baby sister is holding the chair for her? I love that that pre-schooler (almost 5) can sometimes watch her sister for a brief spell while I frantically write something down in my notebook, but I have learned that the baby has become very covert in disguising in her spitty mitt the one piece of sheet rock that the vacuum missed, and the next sound I will hear is a grinding crunching of cement on her front four teeth.

I managed to convince the 5 year old that she doesn't need to take money out of her bank to buy crappy plastic toys from China, but she should be saving to deposit the cash into her savings account so one day she can graduate from high school and see Europe. She is currently processing this information and will surely have a counter argument in about say, ten minutes... So that gives me enough time for the Thought of the Day. If you don't have a home office, make one, out of a box or section of a part of the house or apartment or room and call it your writing space, or go to a coffee shop for only a half hour, and even if that is how long it takes you to set up (like me with an ancient Mac powerbook that grinds like a floppy disk). It is making the act regular and natural that is the key to success. Sounds like the answer to marital sex too! Let me clue you in, it's a close second! I personally went on a crusade when we moved to Berkeley two weeks ago to put the 5 year old and the baby in a bedroom together so I could have an office in the house. It took some toggling, and reminding my husband we would give it two weeks before giving up and now it's like the den of dreams in there when you check on them and I have my writing space. Now that doesn't solve the fact that I currently have no child care to speak of, but at night, I drag my limp demanded upon food crusted self to my desk if only to write a bunch of crap I don't even bother to save. It's the act number one! I really owe it to my mom for the kids sharing a room working out. The minute she gave me body language like only she can that indicated she didn't approve, I was more adamant than ever! Mom gets a byline in the first novel! There are lots of you desperate to write! We hear you in solidarity! (we being me, but I love writing in that voice). God speed!