Today It Was Me

Today I was the one to cram myself into the white zip-up jumpsuit that made me look like the Easter Bunny's long lost sister. I was the one who slipped on the blue booties and hairnet, and tied on my face mask.

Today I was the one sitting on the bench in the hall while they wheeled my writhing, sobbing partner into the unknown.  I was the one who wondered if the anesthesia would work or if they would need to knock her out and the next time I saw her she'd have a baby in her arms.

An older man sat down next to me on the bench.  "You doin' okay?" He asked, and he genuinely cared about my answer.  I could tell by the way his gentle eyes rested on mine.  My bootie-covered toes tapped the carpet.  "Yeah, I'm good."  Because I was good, protected from terrifying reality by the distance of professionalism.  She was not my blood or my reason for being, but rather someone who knew she would need help when her child was born.  It's easy to be good when you don't stand to risk it all.  Then I asked the concerned gentleman about the newest addition to his family.  It was a granddaughter, his son's first child.  He beamed, then busied himself texting and grumbling at his new-fangled phone.

I wondered if that muffled cry was her.

"I promise they won't forget about you.  It just seems like it," said a nurse who had passed me twice now.

"I'm just hot."  My body heat collected within the kinda-sterile clothing.  The rise in temperature brought my stomach to a boil, a particularly unpleasant feeling for someone about to step foot into an Operating Suite.  Pictures flashed in my mind of passing out on the OR floor, or vomiting on the face of the expectant mother.  I unzipped the bunny suit and fanned the air between my layers.

Eventually they called me back.  I was no longer on the verge of heat stroke--for that I was thankful.

"Sit on the grey chair next to her head," the nurse said.  "Don't touch anything blue."

I sat in the grey chair.  My partner barely acknowledged me.  Almost immediately, the smell of burning flesh filled the air.  Then it was gone.

We don't see a thing, just a giant blue tissue curtain.  Somewhere beyond that the baby floated in a sea of instructions and chatter.

My partner wished to relay a request to the surgeon, the last two items left on an X-ed- out birth plan. Her voice failed from long hours of struggled breathing.  She turned to me to be her voice.  Neither of us knew who was there or who would hear us.  I turned to the anesthesiologist, who clearly didn't want to interrupt the surgical team.  She could see the team, though.  I was just guessing.

"Lots of pressure,"  Someone said.

"You're going to feel some tugging.  Just concentrate on your breathing," Someone else said.

We stared at the blue abyss and waited for the next thing to happen.

The baby cried and gurgled, cut off by someone's bulb suctioning.

"It's your baby!"  I smiled.  Tears filled her bloodshot eyes.  "Congratulations, Mama!"

The baby traveled to another end of the OR, X-ing off the rest of my partner's wishes.  A nurse remarked about what a sweetheart the baby was, and how adorable.  We saw blue while a stranger spent those first precious moments with my partner's baby.  This didn't upset the mother nearly as much as it upset me.  I wanted to brave the gore and hospital policy to grab the little one and put her where she belonged--cheek-to-cheek with the one whose body took care of her for nine months.  But I didn't, because today I wasn't the doula.  I was something else, entirely.

So You Want To Be a Writer...

Photo credit, CreateSpace

I'll start this post by admitting that I am, by no stretch of the imagination, an expert on writing. If you came here looking for a secret formula or the nuts and bolts of wordsmithing, well, I'm sorry to say you've come to the wrong place. Crafting a story, and doing it well, entails a lot more than could ever fit on one lousy blog post. Rules. Punctuation. Plots. Dialogue. So much to know before you can actually write. This doesn't align with our instant-gratification world. 

You should probably stop here. It's too much work.

But what if I told you that you could pick up your favorite pen--c'mon, you know you have a favorite!--or your laptop and GO? You don't have to have the perfect beginning, middle, and end.  It's not likely that you'll sit down with a cup of coffee and plunk out War and Peace on that first go. What stares back at you from the page might suck, and "suck" might be the understatement of the century. But even stories sucky-beyond-all-reason can be shaped into something more. A blank page cannot, at least not until your words end up there.  

Though I've always written for my own enjoyment, I never considered anything would come with it. Writing would be nothing more than a hobby. In 2011, my attitude changed. I wanted to take writing more seriously, to write books instead of rambling blog posts about coffee and kid-induced nervous breakdowns. And then came that day when I said, "Enough! I'm writing a book!" I didn't even have a story in mind, I just followed Chris Baty's advice and wrote the book I wanted to read. My first words after my attitude adjustment were, 

"I'm what you would call a simple girl, a chameleon."

If you think about it, that sentence doesn't make sense at all. Simple girls have nothing in common with ever-changing chameleons. And, if we're being real, it's a bit cliche to call yourself "simple". But those flawed words led to over 200,000 more. With a lot of hard, literally hands-on work, they have grown into stronger, more flexible versions of themselves. That never would have happened if I'd let the blank screen call my bluff. I wade through the suck every time I sit down to write, and you will, too. In the end, it's not about whether the writing is excellent or cringe-worthy. It's about letting the ideas out of your head and seeing what happens. It's getting past saying, "I always wanted to write a book/story/article/whatever" to actually doing it.

I can't read through that first manuscript without feeling sick to my stomach at its sheer awfulness, but I didn't let it stop me. That sheer awfulness became the first of three books in my Hope Creek series, which gained the attention of a publisher. While that might not happen for you, you can't possibly know for sure if you don't write that first word. And then the next. And then the one after that, and so on.

My advice to you? Go forth. Write all the horrible, wrong words. Laugh at yourself, and don't give up. 

That's truly all it takes to be a writer.

Winner!

Just validated my word count for Camp NaNoWriMo. Over 31k words edited and revised in April for my upcoming Young Adult novel, In the Middle.  
Can't wait to share it with you guys!  It's a cool, creepy story... but that's all I'm going to say right now. I don't want to give away too much.  :-)

The Court

This was the other half of the writing challenge for my group.  I'm not on this team, but I decided to give it a half-hearted shot.  For this prompt, we were to write describing setting only.

The Court  

This is a pretty picture that belongs to someone. I just don't know who.

The voice of the breeze carries above all others, hushing the chatter of birds and humming of the insects.  They rush among the crowd and tap each one on the shoulder announcing the presence of the king. Throngs of green bow in reverence to the victorious fingers of the mountains.  The rocks thrust themselves into the blue sky, challenging the threatening clouds.  

The only ones brave enough to stand against the hills are the Juniper trees.  Few they be, they stand straight as warriors.  Wielding their prickles and thorns in gnarled fists, their scarred bodies defy the wind.  They grit their teeth and squint against the rain.  

***

How would you describe this picture?

Lines

In one of my writing groups, we were given a few pictures to choose from and the task to write a story either based on the character or setting to see which stories were more appealing to the readers.  We were asked to keep the story under 1000 words, and told that it didn't need to be a complete story, a scene was okay.

With that being said, here's the picture I selected followed by my vision of this man.

Photo credits to whoever took this picture. You know who you are.  

Lines – Character/Plot

S.J. Henderson

Lines. Ain’t that the story of my life? Always been standing in one line or the other, my whole blasted life.

Today I’m stuck in the soup line behind the old lady with rollers sticking out of her hair like pussywillows and tufts of cat hair clinging to her pink housecoat. Always bumped into by the guy waving his hands like he’s conducting at Carnegie Hall while talking three octaves too loudly about politician so-and-so to his buddy. Who cares about the crooks in office? I sure don’t. All those suits ever done is send innocent people to their death while they’re busy signing ridiculous bills and screwing some floozy on the side.

It was a handful of them crooks who gave me the lines above my right eye--my sightin’ eye. The one that saw every last second. I’d poke the cursed thing out if I thought I had the balls to do it. But I lost those as soon as I let that kid die.

He couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12, the age of my little cousin, Ben. They’d sent a kid into the stinking paddy with a rifle bigger than he was. And now the kid was a murderer. His big black eyes grew wide as he watched my buddy crumple, dead before he even hit the mud. Ray--that was my buddy’s name. Had a girl he planned to marry if we ever made it back home, and four younger brothers and sisters to help care for after his Dad passed.

The Vietnamese boy, the enemy, turned his rifle from Ray to me. The spot where my heart should have been. Truth be told, my heart stopped beating a long time ago, when I took my first step on this blood-soaked ground.

“Do it,” I said, opening my arms to expose my chest. “I don’t want to live another day in this hellhole.”

The boy blinked. His finger shook on the trigger. I may as well have been recitin’ the ever-loving Constitution, for all the English he knew.

I pointed at my heart, my fingers in an L-shape. A gun. “Bang!”

The tiniest bump at his throat bobbed as he gulped. He doesn’t want to kill me or he’d have done it already. I wish he’d make up his mind already, or at least run off before something worse happened. But he didn’t.

Another soldier, a guy named Lou, came around the corner and his boots slid in the muck. When he spied poor Ray on the ground, and me and the boy in our stand-off, his rifle locked on the boy with a click.

“Wait!” I don’t know who I was talking to, the kid or Lou. All I know was that I didn’t want to see another river of blood or another broken body.

Lou grunted then fired a round. The boy was too slow. His round eyes focused on mine as he fell to his knees, and then facedown into the muck. I didn’t cry for him, or for dead Ray who wouldn’t get to marry his sweetheart or provide for his family.

Instead, I stand in lines. Lines for food. Lines for shelter. Lines for everything because I’m not free to be me.

Well-dressed women with their manicured nails and little yappy dogs shrink to the other side of sidewalk when I scuffle by. Men in business suits with cell phones attached to their ears tell me to get a job as they plink pennies at my feet. Problem is, no one wants to hire a ghost of a man who jumps every time a hammer strikes a nail or hits the dirt when someone drops a load of wood.

The lines will take me, though. I blend in here among the outcasts, the forgotten, the spooks.

The Hows and Whys of Daniel

Two weeks ago, nearly to the minute, I made a decision.  A big, scary, and, honestly, ill-advised decision.  I was going to self-publish a silly little story I wrote last fall.  And I was going to do it by the end of the weekend.

There were at least two reasons for this big, stupid goal:

1. My family needed the positive cash flow, no matter how small.
2. I had something to prove.  To my husband, whose favorite greeting is, "You finish that book yet?" (Grr!).  And to myself, who rarely asks myself if a book is done because she knows how annoying that really is.

Let's get one thing straight: I'm not afraid to share my stories.  Against all common sense, I'll type the last words of a first draft and send it off to someone, anyone, who wants to read it.  That's not the way it's supposed to work, so other writers tell me, but it's the way I work.  The excitement of sharing and getting that early feedback from the poor shmoes who have to slog through my typos--well, it's what makes this writer thing feel more like a village and less like solitary confinement.  Not that I have anything against solitary confinement.

Two weeks ago, "Daniel the Draw-er" was literally half the story it is now.  Like, 6k words to its now-finished 13k.  I knew the story needed to be more substantial, size-wise, but I didn't know how to do it. Some friends who read through pointed out some plot issues, mainly having to do with resolution of the various conflicts in the story (Daniel's mom's desire for Daniel to make more friends, Daniel and his best friend Annie's argument, etc.) and how the timing was way off.  Story structure.  It's a thing, apparently.

I would save myself a lot of time if I just learned how to outline.  Know where I'm headed, what needs to happen, that kind of thing.  But nooooooo.  My imagination insists on working free of the constraints of detailed lists, especially when I'm operating as a nine-year-old boy with a magic pencil, where the sky is the limit.  They call someone who doesn't plan out their writing a "pantser", meaning they're flying by the seat of their pants (versus the more serious and responsible "plotter", a. k. a. People I Don't Really Get).  The fun part about zero planning is that every single thing I write is a surprise.  I make myself laugh a lot.  Sometimes my weirdness scares even me.  But, anyway...

For a week and a half I spent night and day working on the story, holed up in my writing room in the basement listening to Bon Iver on repeat and eating cinnamon Fire Jolly Ranchers (!!).  My friend Courtney sat across from me and dished out tough love ("draw a plot diagram," she said. I threw a tantrum like a two-year-old, no lie). I spent almost an entire day working at a Panera Bread.  Two of my doula babies were born.  We said good-bye, for now, to a beloved family friend.  Life happened.  A whole lot of life happened.

This story is important to me in a much different way than my others have been.  "Daniel" came to be when I participated in an online writing course called The Story Cartel.  Our assignment was to identify the audience we felt we were writing to and write a short story with them in mind.  I didn't want to write a short story to teenage girls and bored housewives (you know who you are.  I am one of you!), I wanted to write a book for my boys like Tolkien wrote his classic tales as bedtimes stories for his children.  Like Dav Pilkey without the constant references to bodily functions and underwear. So I turned to my eight-year-old and asked him a good name for a main character.  He picked Daniel.  Then I wrote on, with my son peeking over my shoulder and laughing at all the funny parts.  He soaked up every word, waiting for me to peck them out in my usual slow manner, until it was late and I had to send him to bed. This story is my nod to my boys--the introverted Daniel who doesn't mind having only one friend.  The boy who hates meatloaf but loves pizza.  The boy who fixates on capes (for us, it is hooded sweatshirts).  The endless sketches of made-up creatures.  That's all of them lumped up in one fantastic boy.  That's why.

And now the "how". There are many facets to self-publishing that most people don't fully consider beyond just writing a story. Here are a few major points:

Editing 

Like, thorough editing.  It's best to use someone who edits as their profession, but I didn't have that option (see Reason 1 above).  Instead, I recruited a handful of people to read through and make sure I caught typos, punctuation, that kind of thing.  Then I gave it another read-through right before uploading it to Amazon and CreateSpace.  I'm 100% positive I, and my troop of beta readers, still missed errors.  I take comfort in knowing that even New York Times' bestsellers still have errors undetected by the people paid to do so.

Formatting  

I write most of my novels using Google Drive because I insist on making my friend read along. Amazon and CreateSpace want authors to upload Microsoft Word files (or one of their other preferred file formats).  Most of that formatting process wasn't a huge deal because I've been training myself to be better about indents and all of that mind-numbing detail.  I did spend about three hours one night doing battle with Word 2011 about page numbers and section breaks while my family went to the school carnival.  Bummer.  Although I did hear, in great detail, about my eight-year-old's meltdown while waiting 45 minutes in line for a balloon animal.  So, I'm chalking it up as a win in my column, even though I wanted to hurl my Macbook more than once.

Cover

Not surprisingly, the cover of any book might be the most important thing ever.  I drew what I thought was a pretty cool cover, a cat with a pencil in his mouth.  The charcoal on a plain white page was pretty drab, so I flipped it into a negative and thought it was good to go.

Except it frightened kids and adults, alike, so I had to draw a second cover.

And then I had to bug my brother to do about a million things to it until it was ready to upload at both Amazon and CreateSpace.  Poor guy.  If it had been up to me, the thing would never have a cover.  Never, ever.

Marketing

I'm still in the middle of this, and it's all trial-and-error because I should have done things different, if not for the self-imposed time constraint.  Cover reveal?  Psssh.  Blog tour?  Ha!

BUT, you can buy a digital copy of Daniel the Draw-er here.
You can buy a paperback copy of Daniel directly from CreateSpace here. (In a few days the paperback option will be live on Amazon, just not yet).

Book reviews are very helpful, too.  Even if you didn't buy your copy from Amazon, you can leave a review here for future readers.
If you use the Goodreads app/website, you can leave a star rating or a review for Daniel there, as well.

Side note:  I am open to other methods of marketing, as I'm reaching the end of my friends and family and need to figure out other avenues of getting the book noticed.  If you think of anything, comment here or contact me the way you know how.

So there you have it--a little peek into my hyper-accelerated process for the debut of my novella, Daniel the Draw-er.  While it's certainly no War and Peace or Harry Potter or anything, I'm hoping it leads to bigger and better things in the future.  I'm hoping Daniel is my little bit of magic.  

Daniel the Draw-er Is Alive... I mean, LIVE!

This has been the longest week and a half of my life, but I'm happy to say that my children's novella, Daniel the Draw-er, is now available for purchase as a digital book on Amazon.  Within the next day or so, readers who prefer physical books to eBooks will be able to purchase "Daniel" in paperback form.  

Daniel the Draw-er

About the Book

"This pencil is no ordinary pencil,” says the cat sitting on the end of nine-year-old Daniel’s bed. "It's magic."

Everything Daniel draws with his enchanted pencil comes to life, from a talking cat named Whiskers to a group of pizza-loving aliens from the planet Beezo.  Daniel’s mom said she wanted him to make new friends. This probably isn’t what she meant.

Join Daniel and his fantastic creatures on this fun-for-the-whole-family adventure as he discovers that friendship is the greatest magic of all . . . and that it can be found in the most unusual of places. 

Ways You Can Help

~ Buy the book. If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for free from the Lending Library. I've even enabled lending so you can let a friend borrow it for a couple of weeks at no charge. 
~ Share the link to my book with your friends and loved ones. If you have a blog or some kind of following that would be receptive, share with your followers. 
~ Leave a review on Amazon. Please be honest, and only leave a review if you or your child have read the book. My goal is to help future readers find a book they'll enjoy.


~ If you're on Goodreads, add Daniel the Draw-er to one of your shelves or post a review!
~ If you're on Twitter, follow me - @SunnyJHenderson 
~ If you're on Facebook, "like" my Author Page 

I'll write more about my experience creating and publishing "Daniel the Draw-er" in another blog post. For now, I wanted to say thank you for believing in this little bit of magic... and thank you for passing it on.