Skipping Town

Tomorrow, I'll be skipping town by myself. To Vermont. For ten days. I haven't been apart from the girls overnight in two years, and aside from my time in the hospital when I was pregnant with Greta, I've only been away from Lucia for one night in her entire life, when I went to a baby shower. Needless to say, I'm freaking out a little bit. A lot. I can't imagine what it's going to be like to be apart from them for so long. I have a good reason for going: the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury, which I applied to on a whim in March. I thought I'd apply just for fun, never thinking I'd really go; but once I got in, I couldn't bring myself to pass it up. So just underneath my jitters about leaving the girls is another jittery layer of anxieties about workshopping a new piece, meeting new people, pitching my work, and being surrounded by full-on literariness for ten days. It's a mix of nerves that has found its focus in organizing ...

It’s amazing how many hours there are in a day when you really need them. My agent has asked for revisions to my novel, hoping to turn the current trend of editors saying It’s great, it’s lovely, but no, into It’s great, it’s lovely, here’s an offer. And she wants those changes by January 10. When she asked what my schedule was like, I just told her I’d make it work. The truth? I have no time. Days, evenings, and nights are occupied with caring for one or both children. Even naptime, a measly one hour each day, has been decimated by my cherished new child who often stays awake while my cherished older child is asleep. Evenings, once my own after 7:30 when Lucia was asleep, are now usually Greta’s fussy time. And then I go to bed, where I alternate sleeping and nursing until I get up and do it all over again the next day. And yet—this project has forced me to find time. I quickly revised my laissez-faire attitude of letting Greta sleep whenever and however long she wanted to during the ...

I never write here about writing. Some of you readers might not even know I’m a writer (beyond the writing-random-freelance-stuff-for-pay kind of writer). But I am, and just usually keep it to myself. But I’m breaking my silence today to announce some good news and to provide a warning about the direction this blog may take for the next few months. The news is that I now have an agent—a good one, from a great agency well-known for its literary-fiction-writing clients. I met her a few months ago at an event I forced myself to go to at Columbia—an alumni/agents mixer. I say “forced” because this kind of event is a pretty perfect combination of everything I hate most in life—small talk; entering a roomful of strangers alone; seeing familiar faces from what seems like a completely different person’s past life; pitching work to steely-eyed professionals, some of whom cut you off mid-sentence; the expectation that you are there to sell yourself as much as anything else. But I practiced my pi...