This is the first in a series of guest posts while I spend time with our newest member of the family. Please welcome Rachel McCarthy James!
This is the first piece of writing I’ve published in over three months. During those three months, I’ve let languish the very thing I’ve wanted my entire adult life – an audience who likes my writing and want more of it. I’ve probably lost a few existing readers, and I’ve definitely missed out on many opportunities to build my audience.
But this isn’t a mistake or laziness or procrastination – it’s purposeful. And it’s part of my plan to eventually make a living as a writer.
Taking a few steps back to the last Monday in August, we were informed that our appointment would be moved earlier by an hour because our regular doctor had called in sick. So we met with another doctor in the practice. Instead of Sarah Palin’s doppelganger, who I’ve come to really like, we got a woman who looked like a soccer mom of 8 children. All I knew about her before this appointment was that she’s the doctor who does the circumcisions in the practice, and she’s kind of klutzy. Those are two tastes that I’m sure don’t taste great together, but on this day, I could be unconcerned with her gracefulness and focus on Susanne’s internal exam. Had our own doctor Palin been doing the examination, we’d have a clear idea of when to try to induce; as it was, we were going to have to wait for the fill-in to contact Susanne’s doctor, who would then call us, probably on Tuesday.
At writer’s conferences and in critique groups people throw phrases like “social networks” and “platform building” around like cheap confetti. Judging from the glazed look on the eyes of many writers, there seems to be a disconnect between knowing one should work on their online presence, and how to do just that. It’s not enough to tell folks to build a network, because that’s too abstract a concept in a universe of hundreds of social networking Web sites and applications. Worse, all of the jargon is so intimidating many writers begin to justify their absence from the market. “Well, I need to have time to write, not promote myself,” one romance writer told me at this year’s PNWA. Others that I’ve spoken with don’t see the benefit to all of these online sites—it looks to them like a lot of time spent tooling around the interwebs for next to no return on their investment. And that’s a shame.
I will say right off the bat that I’m not the biggest fan of Dancing with the Stars. I like it enough to watch when someone I like—or greatly dislike—is on the show, much like I’ll watch American Idol on only a spotty basis. I really like dancing as an art form, especially given my total lack of physical grace, because I love to see the human form do things I didn’t know were possible, and then whoa, there’s music and lots of feathers to boot! But DWTS sometimes makes me sad, because the “stars” in question often seem to be scrapping for whatever vestiges of glory they can still obtain, and the whole faded Lola a la Copacobana thing is not my speed.
Emerging writers are tired people. We’re working on building our networks, improving our storytelling and writing, marketing ourselves as writers, and fretting over query letters to entice agents to represent us. The idea that novelists sit around eating bon bons and dictating prose into a recorder is a non-author’s fantasy. Real writers wear out their keyboards and keep going.
So many people liken a new arrival to a life-changing event that as a Jersey boy through and through, I plan like a hurricane is approaching. Thus I’ve gotten down to battening the hatches here. Come to think of it, though, I don’t have a lot of experience on ships, so I’m not sure why I think I know anything about hatches per se. The point is, we’re prepping with the idea that soon, preparation ends and the next chapter begins. All signs point to an early delivery for us, due dates and calendar slide tools aside. I am at DEFCON 3. 
It rose out of nowhere, otherwise known as 3.7 miles below ground in a section of Virginia far from DC, but as of this writing, today’s geologic event is being called the “DC earthquake.” In the middle of the working day, government employees, among the last people in the country with jobs, evacuated their buildings in case one of them had a crack after the 5.9-level quake shook the eastern seaboard for something around 10 seconds.
I know I’ve posted before about weak or disingenuous arguments that writers create, articles that take issue with people in the LGB/t community. One one level, I want to know why we’re so willing to cannibalize ourselves before or instead of people like the Koch Brothers, who unraveled collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Glenn Beck and the incendiary statements he makes from his Internet war room, 
A garden variety therapist will tell you, the earliest messages absorbed are often the most powerful. Having gone through 12 years of Catholic school, it follows that my most powerful messages revolve around avoiding Hell. I was preoccupied as a child with the rather significant difference between white lies and worse offenses. “That dress looks nice” might be a non-truth, but in response to someone asking about their fashion, it appeared that Saint Peter would let it go as an infraction.
Trans/plant/portation 