Pounding My Breast-Because I Can...

Confession time: I avoid reading/hearing/watching the news. The news coverage often frightens me—and sickens me when responsible reporting is not practiced. I usually watch CNN while I work out. I figure, why not combine both not always pleasant but necessary tasks?  On one particularly stressful day last week, I was in the gym when a report came on regarding an “independent study” which concluded (and I paraphrase):  "mammograms and even self-examination is not necessary in women between the ages of 40 and 49.”  What bull! Who among us doesn’t know women—friends, relatives, neighbors, loved ones—who have battled breast cancer? Many of whom could have been spared if those nodules, lumps, irregularities had been detected earlier… sometimes, say in our loved one’s 40s? And because this “independent study” is hot news, meaning it has people—primarily women—anxious and concerned, it is getting so much airtime? How irresponsible and reckless of the media to televise this report—and worse, of Capitol Hill to give it any public consideration at all?  Certainly “independent studies” by reputable organizations should be read and considered. But shouldn’t that consideration be given prior to the report being publicly broadcasted and possibly misconstrued or interpreted to be “true”? And why now? In the midst of the U.S. health care reform debacle does challenging the need for breast examinations serve any person with breasts or loved ones with breasts best interests?

Yes! This is a “hot button” topic for me. Hotter still because I was viewing the coverage of this report—and the outcry against it by women who have had breast cancer—with my left breast bandaged. Thursday before last I had my usual, routine, annual, covered by insurance and recommended by my doctors—all of them—breast screening. This included a physical examination by my doctor, a mammogram, and because my doctor is cautious and informed, and because I have good health coverage, an ultra sound. During the ultra-sound (to detect irregularities not always detected by the other methods) my doctor noticed a nodule growing between layers of fat. The next day she removed it using vacuum assisted Mammatone.

On the same Friday I was having the nodule removed from my breast, my niece, Claire’s, mother-in-law was also having a growth removed from her breast. Diane is older than I am, and not fortunate to have the lump discovered as early as I did. So, while the procedure to remove the nodule in my breast was in-office, under local anesthetic, and resulted in a small bore hole closed with sterile-strips and bandaged, Diane’s procedure was major surgery, under general anesthetic, while her worried family waited anxiously to learn the results. Thank heaven we both received the screenings needed to find these lumps and we both could have them removed early and we both have good health care coverage.

My biggest concern—and all of our primary concern—should be what are the ramifications of this “study” receiving air time? What if someone hearing it actually take it seriously:  Some insurance company trying to cut costs? Some elected official working on health reform recommendations? Some scared, nervous woman who might welcome any excuse not to have a mammogram…not to make an inconvenient appointment during which she will have to strip down and have her breast painfully squished in hopes of not revealing anything suspicious? Some husband or son or brother who doesn’t want to think about breast health?

Because of these early-detection breast screenings—including mammograms, breast exams and ultra sound—Diane and I, and so many other women, have received the medical treatment we need to remove these growths. But happens if the recommendations of this “independent study” are taken seriously? What about other women—some much younger than either of us--with irregular breast tissue? What will their futures be?

Thanksgiving for Soldiers

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Max is off to Tulsa to spend the holiday with his father and friends; Lexi is heading to Connecticut where she will share the day with Ryan's family; Curtis and I are gathering here in Jakarta for our 4th annual Expat Thanksgiving. Along with other friends living here without children, guests include singles in town for business and non-American friends we think might enjoy the celebration.

Last year, Shona Mason, a South African and first time Thanksgiving ritual participant, did her homework prior to arriving. "What about the Indians?" she asked. "The Pilgrims wouldn't have survived without them. Seems to me on Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims need to treat the Indians." Thus a new Thanksgiving tradition was born. Shona and I cut up papers. We wrote Pilgrim on half of them and Indians on the rest then dropped them into a hat. Because we are who we are by accident of birth, each attendee drew to see if he or she would be a Pilgrim or an Indian.

By way of thanks, the Pilgrims served the Indians dessert and entertained them with an impromptu song called, "No Place Like Jakarta for the Holidays." This small recognition was all in fun, but behind it is truth that should be recognized especially now: We owe so much to those who do for us, give for us, pave the way, make our world comfortable, safe, welcoming. While clinking glasses and gobbling gobblers this Thanksgiving, it feels good to take time to say thanks.

One group who deserve our gratitude are soldiers. Regardless of our own personal beliefs regarding these political conflicts, these soldiers and their families jeapordize their comfort and security for us.

Go to this website and do a great thing this Thanksgiving: www.LetsSayThanks.com. Send a card to those in our military. Whether you support the war(s) or not, these people are miles away from their families on Thanksgiving. Show them some love!

Give Thanks with warm hearts. Happy Thanksgiving, Kelly

International Letter Code-Chapter 3

Languages are not Curtis’s strong suit. But usually, by using a combination of gestures, hand signals, other words and by rephrasing he can make himself understood. Over the phone, names, especially his name, seem to be extremely difficult to get across. In Indonesian, the letter “C” is pronounced “Ch” and the hard “C” sound is indicated by using the letter “K.” If it were me, I would probably settle for having my name spelled “Kurtes” and pronounced correctly. But Curtis, being Curtis--the same Curtis who once told me “no, no one does call him or has called him ‘Curt,’ except for this father, that is, and his father is dead"--is very particular about his name.  So, in his ongoing battle to be understood, and correctly understood, Curtis has copied down the International Letter Code—two versions—and uses them when spelling out names. The other afternoon, thinking himself very clever, Curtis pulled out his International Letter Code to make a dinner reservation. “The name is Curtis. Curtis, as in Charlie-Uncle-Roger… and Bennett, spelled Bravo-Echo…”

When we arrived at the restaurant later, the maître de asked if we had a reservation. “Yes,” Curtis replied. Before he could begin to give his name, the maître de smiled:

“Oh, yes. Mr. Charlie, right this way…”

The International Letter Code worked so well, Curtis plans to use it when making all future reservations. From now on he’s going as Charlie Bravo.

What a Difference A Name Makes

Last Saturday, because I wasn't wearing my reading glasses, I misread a name in a magazine. I though the name was Tru-something. Curtis laughed and corrected me. That was that. I haven't a clue what the correct name was, who it belonged to, or why I read it. But I recall thinking what a powerful name True was. What it said about a parent who would name his/her child True. And what it would be like to have to grow up with and into that name the way the man in the Johnny Cash "my name is Sue/how do you do/you're gonna die" song did. I tucked the name in my I'm-going-to-use-that-someday brain file. Today, this morning, I was milling about, making calls, eating, drinking coffee, printing things, doing everything but pulling up the file with Otter Song to continue revisions, because I really, really didn't want to work on it anymore. I had reached a place where I was just sick of the whole mess. As far as I was concerned Lena, her mother, the otter and aquarium and the entire coast of California could crack off the way everyone is always threatening it will and I would have cheered. Damn the zillion hours and years I have already put into this story.

Finally, when there was absolutely nothing more I could pretend needed doing beside work, I opened the Otter Song file. Nothing had changed. It didn't send me. I had absolutely no desire to read on. I didn't care what Lena wanted or needed. What I really wanted to click the X and do something else--maybe go shopping.

Instead...

I clicked the Find and Replace function and changed the main character's name--in 492 places! (No, I did not go through them one at a time. Yes, I had been looking for ways to keep from working, but really....not even I am that desperate!)

ZIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!  With that click of a button, my main character went from boring to --interesting, exciting, even. It's as though she has suddenly come into her own. True is so much more now. She has a name to live up to. And I am charged with helping her realize her potential.

A rose by another other name might smell as sweet, but that's only if it compels one to sniff it.

It is all in a name.

Some weeks are better than others

Ah, the writing life! It's pure joy when the stars align and all the world is  the next scene and brilliant prose. And then there are weeks like this. I belong to a writer support group comprised of some members of my VC graduating class. Our commitment includes weekly check-ins: group e-mails in which we share: how many pages/chapters/sentences we wrote that week, what we are discovering, problems with our writing, pitfalls and successes. It's a way to stay honest, stay committed, stay motivated, and stay connected. Usually I wait until some of the others check-in before posting my report. This week, I decided to go first:

Hi all,

I'm sitting here with a glass of chardonay and a back of chips, wishing you were here with me. It's already Wednesday and guess what I've accomplished writing-wise this week? Nothing. I haven't pulled out Otter Song to continue revisions. I haven't done my morning pages. I haven't expanded on any of those great picture book ideas or created new ones--which means I have failed at my commitment to generating-picture book-ideas month. I haven't finished reading a book--or read more than 10 pages of anything. What is worse, at this very moment, I haven't a clue when I'll get back in the game. But I am thinking about finishing something--this bag of chips.

You have got to have had more forward motion than I have this week. I'm looking forward to reading about it.

Cheers (raised glass), Kelly

Oh, and since I haven't posted a blog entry for this week, I think I'm going to post this message--that will be 2 things I finish...3:  wine, chips, and a blog posting.

Blog P.S. The chips are gone...

Linked in a Chain of Writing Fools

I’ve been writing and rewriting the same novel, a middle grade novel about a girl who rescues a stranded sea otter pup and it saving it finds herself story, off and on for ten years. The switch had been stuck in the OFF position for the past 2 years because lacking the knowledge, energy and/or talent to do what needed to be done to make it readable, I had abandoned it. It wouldn’t stay OFF though, and so in mid-August, as a birthday gift to myself, I flipped the switch and began revisions with renewed zeal. Up until a month ago, Oct. 15^th, the work had been going beautifully, I was digging deep, re-dreaming and re-visioning the story rather than simply re-writing, working hard and feeling good about my progress. Then I got busy with school visits and festivals in celebration of my new picture book, Dance, Y’all, Dance, and was simply too dog gone busy to work on the novel. Last week my agent, Erin, sent me an e-mail nudge asking how Otter revisions are coming. I ignored it. She sent another oh-by-the-way query in a note today—which I skipped over without responding. (Let her think I haven’t checked my e-mail yet, I reasoned.) I needed time to figure out how not coming Otter was, and how it might never be coming. Not working on the revisions coupled with the doubts that come from reading brilliant debut novels, including Joy Prebles’ Dreaming Anastasia, which left me feeling humbled and awed and like there was absolutely no way I could write anywhere near as well as she and maybe I should quit trying and who the heck did I think I was? had me close to flipping the switch again. And then this article in O about Junot Diaz comes along.

In it Diaz describes how after publishing his first book of stories he wrote 75 amazing pages of a novel followed by 5 years of writing schlock and finally even quite writing and became “a normal. A square,” he notes, “I didn't go to bookstores or read the Sunday book section of the Times. I stopped hanging out with my writer friends.” And slipped into what he calls his “new morose half-life” before eventually, one hot August night, pulling the novel back out of the box. Finally, a decade after beginning he finished it.

Diaz’s story, as published in the O, The Oprah Magazine, was referenced on author Libba Bray’s blog, which eventually reached my VC classmate-sister-mentor-friend, Cindy who sent the link to our VC class list-serv following a check-in during which several of us noted that our current works-in-progress were messy, ugly, unpublishable scribbles—because that’s what we writers do when we are feeling inadequate, we read and share other writer’s anguished overcoming-our-inner-critic-and-pushing-through-to-published stories.

"That's my tale in a nutshell,” Diaz concludes. “Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn't become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn't until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.”

Yeah! Me, too Junot! Me, too! Even if there is not hope, even though nothing I am doing is showing any sign of promise, I’m going to keep writing this flipping Otter novel. The switch is back ON!

Thank you Oprah, Libba, Cindy, and any/all other links who helped bring Junot Diaz’s message to me.

Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Read the whole article: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200911-omag-junot-diaz-writing

Dream Writing About Flat Tires

One of my writer-idols, Sandra Cisneros, says she dreams or day dreams scenes before writing them. I fear I may have taken it one step backward. I thought I wrote a scene but seem to only have dreamed I did. I wrote it sitting in bed in the Royal Plaza Hotel on Scotts Road in Singapore. The memory is so vivid I can picture myself plumping up the pillows—and even stealing one of Curtis’s before settling in to write. My legs are still singed from the heat of the computer on my legs—or at least I think that’s what it is…although it could be prickly heat….. It was a really good blog posting, too. One of my best. A follow up to my stuck-on-the-deserted-highway-with-a-flat story. In engagingly prosaic prose it revealed how I climbed out of my car to walk up the road to read the highway sign facing the other direction even though I know one is never, never, never, ever supposed to leave the car, but rather should roll up the windows, lock the doors and wait for help. In it I brilliantly described how the late afternoon sun reflected off the shiny black pick up that pulled to a stop while I was walking up that lonely road and how I knew, even as I kept walking closer to the pickup that I was signing my own missing persons report and how I hung up on the AAA operator after telling him we would “try to fix it ourselves and call back if we ran into trouble” (the “we” being the stranger  heroic enough, or brazen enough, or demented enough, to stop for a damsel in distress). Those inspired words and phrases I recall typing: the way the condensation on the Pabst Blue Ribbon 12-pack nesting on the passenger side seat glistening in the gloaming, how trepidation about  accepting the curly-haired strangers offer to change my flat was overridden by my fear of missing dinner and drinks with Liz and Dorothy; the way his curls leapt each time his head snapped up to check for oncoming traffic; how for perhaps the first and only time in recorded history, during the entire, seemingly endless, clock-stopping, fifteen-but-felt-like-fifty minutes it took him to change my tire,  not one single, solitary vehicle cruised down that side of I-45, how his teeth glistened as he cranked down on the tire jack, were too vivid, too perfect to be just a dream. The posting was so near perfection I almost cried when I discovered it gone. After searching every file trail I knew to search, I implored Curtis to apply his arsenal of file recovery tactics. All to no avail. My brilliant blog posting may be gone, but the flat-tire-on-the-deserted-highway will never be forgotten, nor will my hero, Rick Rochelle, hopefully not the last man in Texas brave enough and heroic enough and kind enough to stop to help a traveler in distress. Okay, so maybe, after being stuck there on that long, lonely stretch of I-45 far from anything that way and even farther the other way, depending on how long it took the AAA assistance to arrive—despite my way cute short black dress and matching leggings which I thought I looked so cute wearing—I might have unearthed the jack myself and tried changing the darn flat tire on my dang rental car. But thankfully, I never had to try.  Thank you, thank you, Rick Rochelle of somewhere near Fairview, Texas.

Head Bubble Bursts Again

School visits are great for a writer's ego. All that attention: hugs from the kids, applause, praise for my books from teachers and librarians acts like helium. Such was the case yesterday during presentations at Hastings Elementary in Duncanville, an exemplary school with interested, smart students who asked great questions and gave good hugs. In the course of a day’s presentations I was transformed, as I often am during school visits, from lowly, struggling, will-I-ever-write-a-good-sentence writer to ROCK STAR. Overflowing with Sallie Fields-esk “they like me, they really like me” jubilation, I strapped myself into the driver seat of my rented, should-be-a-chauffeured-limo-because-I-deserve-it Hyundai and headed back down the highway toward Houston. Off in the west, the late afternoon sun was shining, the radio was blasting Country and I was feeling quite puffed up and proud—especially delighted with how the impromptu 4th grade lunch-time book club chat had turned out—and looking forward to reaching The Woodlands early enough to enjoy a girlfriend dinner with Liz and Dorothy, when a tire blew out.

Believing the noise coming from the car’s rear end had to be caused by the grated road, I swerved across to the smoother other lane and then back over to the shoulder. This couldn’t be happen to me! Didn’t this car know who I was? People—Fans (aren’t all friends fans?)—were waiting on me. I didn’t have time to mess with a flat. The nerve…and me in a dress!

Nothing like a flat to deflat a swollen head.