Hey! Look at me! Typing on the internet!
Haven't seen THAT in a while, eh?
So, before I can get to the story of my prolonged absence, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my friend Stacey's new book Good Enough to Eat comes out today.
Here's the thing - this book is certainly Good Enough to Buy on its own merits in terms of plot, characters, and dialogue. Stacey is an accomplished writer and her stories never cease to hold my attention.
What you may not know is that she's my best friend and outside of Fletch, my most trusted adviser. There are very few decisions I make without consulting her and I absolutely didn't choose a house until she saw all the options.
Stacey is my better, more rational me. She's been responsible for talking me off the ledge more times than I care to mention in regard to my writing career. (Stacey, please make note that this year's "I don't want to be a writer anymore" meltdown is scheduled the week before Thanksgiving.) And the few times she's not around, she's the voice inside my head keeping me from doing stupid things, meaning if I DON'T have food poisoning, thank Stacey.
This weekend after diagnosing myself with walking pneumonia, I got the following note from her:
"Dr. Lancaster, step away from the WebMD. You don't have pneumonia. You have a cold."
(FYI, I have an 0 for 100 record of properly diagnosing my symptoms on WebMD.)
Then she went on to tell me if I was a dead woman if I put a tanning bed in my basement after I mentioned I was looking a bit pale.
The way she can connect the dots to the conclusion I hadn't even yet reached is a bit scary.
Or comforting.
Mostly comforting.
Point? Not all of you will be lucky enough to have Stacey in your lives, but you can have a piece of her through her books.
Available at fine booksellers everywhere!
P.S. If you're around at noon today, tune in to see Stacey making her famous Roasty Tomato Soup on WGN's noon broadcast!
Anyway, as I mentioned, here I am on the internet. Although our move took longer than I thought (anticipated, budgeted for, could have ever possibly imagined, etc.) it eventually ended. In theory, I should have been happily banging away in the Word Factory weeks ago. I had my office all set up two weeks ago and I was ready to get to writing, what with my new book being due at the end of the month.
The, um, network fairy had different ideas.
For some reason, Fletch got our internet connectivity to function in every room except the one where I actually work. This sounds like a minor sticking point, but I always write on a desktop because I loathe how all of our laptops have the hypersensitive touchpad instead of the tracking point in the middle of it. Apparently I have lazy thumbs because I'll be in the middle of a paragraph and then I'll accidentally touch the stupid square and suddenly my text is flying all over the page.
This may or may not have resulted in a thrown laptop on three previous occasions.
Anyway, as my due date loomed, my agitation grew as I can't write without an internet connection. I need constant access to an online dictionary, thesaurus, Wikipedia, Perez Hilton, etc. On top of that, the book I was writing wasn't ready to be written.
I've never struggled DURING the writing process before - it's always either in the time leading up to write or after I've finished writing when the niggling self-doubt begins. (See: Annual Late Fall Freak Out, Stacey Fixes.)
I've spent months working on a memoir about doing charitable work. The premise is funny in that I intentionally put myself in situations I know I won't like in the hopes that hilarity would ensue. And in many cases it has, but the thing about volunteering is that the more you do, the more you realize needs to be done. And as I put my stories together, it became increasingly clear that I needed more time to give this book its proper due.
Fortunately, I'm with a publisher who trusts my instincts so we decided to swap some due dates. Now Involuntary will come out late next year and Apocalypse House debuts in May. Somehow writing (thinly veiled) fiction about two city-idiots moving to the suburbs to fix up a house currently makes the most sense.
And I will do that.
As soon as Fletch fixes my goddamned network connection.
The good news is that Fletch now has ordered all the tools to make everything work.
The bad news is said fix precipitated a visit from the irony fairy on Friday morning.
"Listen, I'm really sorry it took so long to get this figured out," he said, standing in the doorway of the dining room.
"Here's the thing, Fletch," I replied. "I think the problem has been that you're too theoretical." I was seated at the big table, waiting to go over a friend's book proposal. Wind started to ruffle the stacks of paper we'd worked all morning to print on our assed-up network so I rose to close the window.
"How so?" he asked.
"You spent your whole career designing networks, but you never had to - Jesus, why is this window sticking so much? - actually build one yourself. See, the problem is you know how everything works on a macro level, but on the micro level? No so much. And, argh. What. Is. Wrong. With. This. Window? Still. Stuck. Argh. In this case, you're like one of those guys who - ARGH - is so convinced that he knows where he's going - OOF- that he refuses to ask for directions and-"
And... then this.
"What just... how did that... Shit! Fletch! Come help me!"
He moseyed over to inspect the damages.
"I don't know what happened!" I cried. "Can you get this damn thing back in?"
He poked his head out the window. "Well," he started. "Theoretically I understand why the window fell out, but in practice I may simply not know what I'm doing. You see, on a macro level I have an idea of where you went wrong, but on a micro level..."
This is the face of smug.
And yes, it took me fifteen minutes of apologizing to get him to fix the damn thing.
Today, should all the parts arrive, he'll do the same for our network and I can go back to work on my computer proper.
Until then, please enjoy Staceys' book... and Fletch's possible upcoming blog post titled Good Enough to Say I Told You So.
