Mother's Day (or, Remembering The Day The Whippets Became Risky)

Happy Mother’s Day to those of you who are moms.

That said, I will now confess that I don’t care for Mother’s Day. I feel sorry for the husbands and kids who are expected to send flowers and make breakfast and provide chocolates and clean up. Clean up! There are all these expectations swirling around an arbitrary day where we’re supposed to remind ourselves that mothers are special. I believe the intention of the consumer (never mind the financial beneficiaries of this Day of Appreciation) is sincere. But the whole thing just feels so artificial, and for the last few years I’ve really felt sorry for my kids as they try to figure out how to stay out of trouble.

Yes, trouble.

Because if you do nothing on Mother’s Day, you are in trouble.

If you sleep in past when Mom is hungry, you are in trouble.

If your dad rouses you at an ungodly hour and makes you set the table while your mom is pretending to be asleep but isn’t and can hear that Dad is the one making you do all the things you’re supposed to intuitively do even though you haven’t done them since last year when he roused you from bed at an ungodly hour and made you do them, you are in trouble.

It’s a very unnatural “holiday” with high expectations and misunderstandings because boys will be boys and moms don’t know how to be gracious about breakfasts delivered with a still-sleepy grunt.

Maybe your Mother’s Days are nothing like this.

Maybe you are (or have) a girl.

Sorry to be sexist, but it’s just different.

Anyway, my forget-chocolates-and-flowers-and-trying-to-cook,-all-I-really-want-is-a-homemade-card-where-you-tell-me-why-you-appreciate-me phase ended a few years ago when I told my husband to NOT DO ANYTHING or make the kids do anything. They were old enough to do something on their own and anything they were forced into wasn’t something I wanted anyway.

Mark had to work that Sunday and he was very nervous about this.

“Don’t say a word” I told him. “They know.”

So off to work he went.

And in they slept.

Until noon.

Because who was I to wake them up and tell them to fix me breakfast?

And then…well, whoops. They hadn’t made me a card. Or bought me chocolates. Or flowers.

“Uh…where’s Dad today?”

“At work, remember?”

They recovered not so quickly by offering to take me out for sushi.

It was 3:00.

Not wanting to be the Mother from Hell, I put on a smile and said, Great! So we piled into the minivan, and I drove us to the restaurant.

But I knew.

Neither had brought their wallet.

Before we went inside I asked, “You sure you have enough to cover sushi?”

They looked at each other and slowly an Uh-oh spread across their faces, fingers pointed at each other, and finally my younger son said, “But sushi’s expensive!”

Right.

Next door, was Taco Bell. They raided the change drawer in the van and managed to scrounge up about four dollars. Enough for some bean burritos.

Not wanting to be the Mother from Hell, I agreed to consume a gross bean burrito and I did it with a smile on my face.

It wasn’t easy.

On the drive home I tried to have a gentle talk with them about the small things that make a big difference to a mom. They said they got it.

And then we arrived home.

The first clue that this really was the Mother’s Day from Hell was the puddle of dog pee in the entry hall. It was pooled all over and around the beautiful antique petticoat table that I wrote about in an earlier post.

The dogs—Bongo and Jazz—who are sweet, wonderful whippets (and on this day became Risky Whippets), are only bad when they’re desperate. And since the boys hadn’t put them outside before we left for sushi (they are the boys’ dogs and have access only to the laundry room, the boys’ rooms, and the kitchen—they’re cordoned off from the rest of the house by a ‘baby gate’), and since they became desperate in our absence, they jumped the gate and raced around looking for an exit so they could do their business outside.

There was no way out.

And male dogs being leg-lifters proceeded to tag the entire house with their ample supply of stinky yellow liquid.

And, no, they weren’t just desperate to pee.

They laid logs.

And when I found some on an antique couch by a big window (which was as close to outside as the poor dog could get) I screamed. Like in an old fashioned movie, I held my face and screamed.

But wait!

There’s more!

In the process of cleaning up this disaster, my son, completely wigged out by what had happened and frantic to help fix the situation, accidentally sprayed me in the eye with Lysol.

Yes, I screamed again.

It’s been a few years, and although it will live on in infamy we now laugh about the Mother’s Day from Hell. But it served to create a shift in our family. I want daily hugs. Daily thanks. And on Mother’s Day, I want to go out for brunch (which we did today) and have nothing more than my boys beside me, happy to be with me.

Here’s hoping your Mother’s Day involved lots of hugs, love, and absolutely no Lysol spray.

Sammy’s Birthday

Thanks to everyone who sent in answers for the Second Chance Contest. There were a lot of close-but-no-cigars.

And six right-on-the-money!

Or, you know, date.

At first I thought there would be no problem having only 2 ARCs to give away because on Wednesday there was only 1 correct entry. Silly me! There was a big flurry of correct entries the last two day so once again we had to resort to drawing names out of a hat. 

So get on with it already?

Okay, okay.

From the day that Halloween landed in Skeleton Man and the day that it landed (the following year) in Night of Skulls, it could be deduced we were not dealing with a leap year.

So the descriptions of days in Psycho Kitty Queen (between Halloweens) which gives the day of the week and the week in April of Sammy’s birthday allows you to figure out that Sammy’s birthday falls on a Monday this (her 8^th grade) year and that her birthday is…

April 6^th

Mark your calendar, ‘cause next year we’ll celebrate!

Of the 6 correct entries, 3 of you will receive signed ARCs (I got my hands on one extra). The extra is going to the first person to submit a correct entry, the other two were drawn from a hat. I have sent e-mails to winners, so if you haven’t already, check your box! My sincere apologies to "empty boxers"…especially since I checked and saw that all 6 correct entries were from people who'd also tried the Elvis contest.

Congratulations to winners, and thanks to everybody who tried!

See you next week. (Or, more likely, in the comments!)

Second Chance Contest!

Good news!

I got my hands on two more ARCs for Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack, and I have come up with a fun challenge for any of you wanting to try to win one. (If you won one during the previous contest, please let others have a chance. It’s okay to submit an answer, but type JUST FOR FUN instead of your address in your entry, okay?)

The contest idea is based on something people have been asking via e-mail, so I know at least some of you want to finally get your answer.

And it requires a little Sammyesque sleuthing!

Clues can be found in Skeleton Man, Psycho Kitty Queen, and Night of Skulls. (And probably elsewhere, but this is all you need.)

Ready?

Here we go!

Tell me the Month, Date, and Day-of-the-Week of Sammy’s birthday in the current (her 8^th grade) year.

(For example: July 22, Thursday)

DO NOT put your answer in the comment section here. Instead…

1) e-mail me at  mail@exercisetherighttoread.org

2) Put SAMMY’S BIRTHDAY  in the subject line (yes, use all CAPS).

3) Underneath your answer, type YOUR NAME and MAILING ADDRESS (no worries, it's just me handling the ARC contest mail) unless you are a JUST FOR FUNNER, then put that instead of your address.

Send me your entry NO LATER THAN MIDNIGHT on SATURDAY, MAY 5^th (2012).

Answer and winners will be announced next Sunday.

Good luck and happy sleuthing!

Beyond Thunder & Lightning

That dark cloud kept storming this week but these blasts of sunshine helped me see beyond thunder and lightning:


* The Sammy Keyes producer dude touched base this week with good feedback. We are nowhere near full steam ahead, but I hear a chug-a-chug-a coming down the track.

* Killer Cruise is off to a killer start! (The cruise director’s name is Noah—how funny is that?) (Please tell me you get it.)

* A famous movie star sent me flowers.

   Yup, really.

   (A she-star, silly. Mark’s fine with it  )

* Plus two people this week thought I was my son’s sister. Crazy! It must be my new David Cassidy (circa 1969) haircut. (No, I didn’t ask for it, but that’s how it came out.)

* AND I planted tomatoes.

Rain water’s excellent for gardens, right?

Give that cloud something useful to do.

See you with a mo' better post next week :-)  As always, thanks for your sunshine and for checking in.

A Little Confession

A little confession:

I seriously considered giving the advance money back for the last two Sammy Keyes books.

I thought maybe writing more after Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City would be a mistake.

It has such a beautiful ending.

Really, it could be The End.

And I started wondering, would more be less? How could I write an ending that wrapped the series up better than the ending of Sin City.

What was the purpose?

I talked it over with Mark. I talk everything over with Mark. And he got it, and in a way he agreed. But his advice was to take a little time. He pointed out that I’ve been on a very rigorous deadline schedule. and that the confluence of that and other unrelated but very draining pressures probably just had me exhausted.

Which is true. I try to keep a sunny outlook, but thunderclouds keep storming the castle! Back, you ominous blobs of darkness! Back!

And I have been working very hard to meet my deadlines and NOT SLACK OFF with the writing. It is so important to me that the quality of each Sammy Keyes book is at least as good as, if not better than, the previous one.

I keep raising the bar on myself.

Because I think it’s important!

So…what was the purpose in continuing? If everything’s wrapped up so great at the end of Sin City, shouldn’t I just stop? Who needs a really intriguing final mystery on a cruise ship (my intention for the penultimate book), or to have Sammy…well, I can’t tell you what I’d planned for the last Sammy. I’ll start to cry.

Why not just stop?

I thought about talking to Nancy about it, but didn't. Instead, I went through the motions, hoping I’d get inspired. I did research, came up with a family tree for the cruise ship characters, gave them names, personalities, nailed down the basics of the mystery, conflicts, motives…

And I wrote nothing. Oh, I opened a Word doc and named it Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise. I put in the header and wrote Prologue across the first page. But whenever I’d open up the file I'd just stare at it. Or find something to clean. It wasn’t writer’s block. I just wasn’t sure I should write another book.

And then one morning Mark brought me my laptop and said, “Sammy time”. And, I don’t know. After staring at “Prologue” for about five minutes, out of my fingers came:

I look back on things I’ve done and wonder…why didn’t I see that coming?


Why didn’t I know that was a bad idea?


Why didn’t someone warn me?


Grams would tell you she does warn me and that the question should really be, Why don’t I listen?


Which, yeah, I admit, is usually the case.


But not this time. This time I thought it was a bad idea. This time I warned Grams and my mother and Hudson and anyone else who told me it was a good idea that it was a bad idea.


This time they didn’t listen.


Which is how I wound up on a cruise with a dad I barely knew, an endless buffet of party animals, and a family of creepy millionaires.


Happy birthday to me.


And that was all I needed.

To have Sammy appear.

And yes, we've set sail.

See you at the next port!

Now Entering Smartsville

Have you checked your e-mail? Winners were notified (about 30 seconds ago). If you did not get an e-mail, I’m SORRY!

I couldn’t believe how many people entered. And how many people got them all right! (More on that in a minute.) Last time when I did a simple ‘pick a number’ giveaway I had lots of entries, but this time…it was crazy! I felt like I was back grading papers (which was weird)…and there were a few, Oh, hey, s/he’s got a point! situations. (More on that in a minute, too.)

There wasn't a "B" in the bunch--"A" and "A-" grades across the board.

Which meant I had to draw names of those who got them all right from a hat.

First, I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to do the crazy Elvis challenge, and I’m SORRY to the vast majority of you who got all the answers right but won't be receiving an ARC.

Next I want to say how totally COOL I think you guys are. And smart. And nice. This has got to be the nicest group of people on the internet. Everyone’s always supportive of each other in the comments, people thank me and compliment me and never snipe. Sniping is rampant on the internet. It’s a coward’s playground. But there’s never even a hint of mean spiritedness here. I really appreciate this “secret community” and the personalities that pop in and out and make me laugh and go, Awesome! Like the five factorial note– thinking that the little parenthetical exclamation point in the Contest Time text was more than humorous styling; that it was a mathematical equation—that “5!” meant 5x4x3x2x1 … which it does (but not here) and would have meant 120 ARCs to give away! This factorial thought only flashed through her mind before she realized that couldn’t be the case, and she apologized for being dopey. But see, that’s not dopey! The fact that it even crossed her mind was awesome!

Anyway, I love you guys, and I respect you, too. And I was sweating out the entries because, yes, there were some one word titles that I hadn’t even considered—specifically, “Almost”, “Something”, and “Don’t”. Only one of those (“Almost”) was a legitimate hit because it was the only one that appeared in Elvis’s dialog. There was some confusion with the rules and let me assure you that if you indicated titles that were NOT in Elvis’s dialog you were NOT marked off. But what I was looking for were the words that Elvis speaks that were Elvis song titles. And the title “Almost” near the end of the excerpt IS present in his dialog, but I had not counted it. So ch-ching! Up to 45. (Which suddenly seems very appropriate—wasn’t that the RPM of Elvis singles?)

(See, who but you guys would go, Yeah! That’s right!)

(You are saying Yeah! That’s Right…aren’t you?)

Also, there was the question of double-ups. A legitimate question, but no, I didn’t break the titles into titles and “subset” titles (going with the factorial / mathematical theme). For instance, I didn’t count [When] “My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again” and its subset “Blue Moon” as two song titles (but there’s no way I would count you off for pointing them both out, especially in your nifty multi-color coding). Same with “Honky Tonk Angel” and its subset “Angel”.

Finally, I just want to mention that it was very interesting to see how far and wide ya’ll are scattered. Lots of you in Canada! But my favorite city was “Smartsville”.

Smartsville!

I think that represents this group perfectly.

Punked!

Happy is not what I'm feeling right now.

I have spent more than an hour writing an entry about my sons and the April Fool's pranks we've had going back and forth over the years, with a gleeful slant on my clever paybacks.

It was a really funny entry!

And I saved it, like seven times as I wrote it because I've had bad experiences with Blogger freezing up or dumping my work in the past. The post was spell checked and everything, and as I went to add the graphic I got an error.

No problem! I had saved it right before, so when the program dumped me, I was not worried.

Well, Blogger pulled a righteous April Fool's on me--only the first sentence was there!

I just do not have the time or fortitude to re-do the whole thing.

Plus, I am TICKED OFF!

I do remember my last sentences. They were...What's the best April Fool's joke you've played (or have had played on you)? (I hope it's nothing like the one Blogger has played on me!)

And ...

See you next week for the results of the Justice Jack ARC contest!

So I'm sorry about the Lost Post. I have to face it--I've been punked.