Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Read more Katy at...
LateBoomer.net
Most Recent Posts
- In Defense Of Good Old-Fashioned Books
- Things I’ve Said That I’m Happy Someone Else Didn’t Say First, One In An Ongoing Series Of Several
- Do Depression Meds Work For This?
- The T-Shirt Off Our Backs
- For The Fallible Record
- Long Time, No Blog
- Droppin’ Gs
- Help A Sister Out!
- Broke And Broker
- Share Wear
- Buy And Bail, Before It’s Too Late!
- On Bad Behavior And Bailouts
- Fair And Fallible Disclosure
- Classy Men
- Well, At Least I Was WEARING Panties!
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Switching Up The Rhetoric
I’m sure you’ve all heard the age-old wisdom just like we have.
Don’t invest money in the stock market unless you have a five to ten year outlook for that money. In other words, if you’re saving money to purchase a car, and you know you’ll need the money in three years, don’t risk your principal by putting it in the stock market.
Five to ten years starts to sound awfully near when you’re 56 years old, as is my husband, and hope to retire...someday.
But guess what I heard yesterday in a financial news segment on NBC?
Don’t invest in the stock market unless you have a TWENTY to THIRTY year outlook for that money!!!!
So I guess we should cut our losses and secure our Sleep Number mattress?
The Best Writers Conference Maybe Ever!
Well, this is the week I’ve been waiting for! Or, I guess I should say, the week for which I’ve been waiting!
The American Christian Fiction Writers conference convenes on Thursday in Minneapolis. I’ve heard rumors that there may be as many as 500 novelists and wannabes in attendance! It truly is a fantastic conference, and this is my fourth year to attend. My travel buddy is Nancy Moser, a wonderful author I’ve interviewed here, and a personal friend from way back before her first novel came out.
If you are an aspiring author, I can’t urge you strongly enough to start researching the many conferences available to you. You’ll probably find some in your own town, or within easy driving distance. Some are one-day events while others last three or four days.
Through ACFW, I have made so many wonderful friends, at all different stages of their careers. I have tried to be an encouragement to those who are newbies, and without even trying, I have received so much more in return. I have signed up for volunteer positions at the event, and ended up meeting folks who’ve become long-term buddies.
This year is a little different for me. As many of you know, since I have previously declared this news in capital letters here on fallible, now I HAVE AN AGENT!!!! Oh, yeah. It still feels good to write that!!!
I will still be having pitch sessions with several editors who represent publishing houses, but this time, if they are interested in seeing my book, I’ll just be passing that news right along to Rachelle Gardner of WordServe Literary. And she’ll take it from there! I can’t tell you how fantastic that feels.
By the way, you really might be interested in Rachelle’s blog. It was recently included in a Writer’s Digest magazine list of the 100 most influential blogs for writers. She doles out information and inspiration about the publishing industry on a daily basis and also has regular contests with great prizes. If you consider a great prize having her read some pages of your work-in-progress and give you valuable feedback, that is.
All in all, it’s a great day to be an aspiring author! A great week, actually.
Post Hurricane Ike
At around noon today, with untold damage in Galveston and Houston, and with at least three million customers out of power, I decided to click on the Weather Channel online to catch up on the news.
We don’t have cable (a waste of a perfectly good $50/month, in our experience) and the network TV stations all featured Dora and other cartoon characters providing essential entertainment to the children (and yes, the adults) of our fair nation.
I don’t know the name of the weather chick on the Internet, but dear Lord, was she cheerful! Texans REALLY need to find out who does her meds. Maybe they could put together a class-action suit against the doctor and each end up with enough money to buy the gasoline to get back home.
She showed a graphic displaying the information that the Houston area had been about 5” below their average rainfall for this year. And then she smiled hugely and said this, and I promise I am not making this up because, honestly, I’m not that clever:
Hurricane Ike “completely obliterated the area’s rainfall deficit.”
I’m thinking a certain someone could take sensitivity training from, I don’t know--Ann Curry? There’s a time to rejoice, but is it really in the face of such a huge disaster?
The Mondegreen’s English
When thick brogues are an essential element of a wee little first-generation American’s upbringing, it’s not easy to avoid poor Lady Mondegreen.
Never heard of the chick, you say? Never heard of Sylvia Wright, either? Well, neither had I until this morning, when I read my friend Robin Lee Hatcher’s blog post. Now I can’t stop laughing---and remembering.
Sylvia Wright coined the term mondegreen in an essay “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1954. She described how, as a young girl, she misheard the final line of the first stanza from the 17th century ballad “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray.” She made up a last line that made perfect sense to her, though, and recited it with gusto and grief, I’m sure.
I’m betting her mother, who read the Scottish ballad aloud to Sylvia, was from Scotland. How else would the words “laid him on the green” sound like “Lady Mondegreen”?
That’s the deal with those Scots. They get their vowel sounds twisted all to heck and back. An innocent child comes home from first grade with a simple list of three-letter spelling words to learn and her dad can make them sound like words no one else in the class knows. Or wants to know.
And then he’ll criticize the teachers for not educating his child in “the King’s English.” And sometimes, while he’s criticizing, the child picks up a few vocabulary words that shouldn’t be repeated either with or without the brogue.
Little Sylvia Wright was one of the lucky ones. She finally recovered from grieving over Lady Mondegreen and went on to achieve linguistic history. Now the word mondegreen has made it into the dictionary. It means “a word or phrase resulting from a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard.”
Of course, this isn’t all about being raised by brogues. Americans of long standing get tripped up, too. And the results are stunning.
So, you mean Elton John wasn’t really singing “Hold me closer, Tony Danza,” like Phoebe on Friends thought he was? So many dreams shattered!
My kids pulled a million of these, and I’ve written many of them down---somewhere. Carrie sang, “Land where my fathers died, land where the children cried...”
There was a worship song back in the day that went, “It’s beginning to rain, rain, rain. Hear the voice of the Father.” Carrie must have heard that we had serious roof problems because her version went, “It’s beginning to rain, rain, rain, on the house of the father.” She had a haunting lament she applied to these songs, rather Sylvia Wrightlike in its grief.
Perhaps my father, before he died, had whispered “The Bonnie Earl O’Moray” into her infant ear. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Any twisted up words in your mind? Or in your children’s? Give me your best mondegreen. Do it for Tony Danza.
Katy McKenna For President
Look, people. If it’s experience you want, consider this. Barack and Sarah are babes in arms compared to me. I’m fifty-freakin’-four-years old. That extra 8-10 years packs a wallop when it comes to wisdom.
I’ve had political experience out the wazoo. I was elected Secretary (is that how you spell that?) and then President of the Student Council at St. Teresa’s Academy in Kansas City. My responsibilities, which I carried out flawlessly, included reading the names of those staying after school for detention over the PA system every afternoon and lobbying for ever shorter plaid uniform skirts.
I don’t believe in name dropping or anything, but I DID go to the same high school as Kate Spade. I’m just sayin’.
In addition, I think it’s time for the Irish Catholic thing to make a come-back, don’t you? I mean, Kennedy was a LONG time ago and Geraldine had the bad-hair thing going on. But forget Biden. If we’re talkin’ CHANGE, how about an Irish Catholic WOMAN for a change?
I mean, why not kill a WHOLE bunch of birds with one pull of the lever?
Speaking of killing, which--unlike Sarah--I have NOT done, I’ve shot tin cans to heck and back with a real gun and wrapped a boa constrictor around my neck on a dare. I’ve also ridden on a motorcycle from here to Iowa, and if I remember right, it was in one of those ever shorter plaid uniform skirts.
And just in case it’s good looking you’re after, let’s be completely honest here. I AM your woman.
I hereby declare my candidacy:
Unto The Third Generation
A little tidbit I found this morning in the fallible archives, circa March, 2002:
“I just know there’s a book inside of me,” my grandmother said matter-of-factly, when I was a wee girl.
And then we made a fabulous pie from homegrown peaches, which we devoured that night with pan-fried chicken and biscuits and garden-fresh green beans.
“There’s a book in me, waiting to come out,” she insisted, when I was only thirteen, but she was sixty-three. I had to wonder, what’s it waiting for?
And then she taught me how to sew, and to knit, and to embroider, and to paint with oils and watercolors. But she didn’t write a word.
“I’ve got a story,” she said one day, when I was all grown at nineteen, with the beginnings of a story of my own.
And then she died, never knowing how completely she’d written volumes on the pages of my life.
I’ve got a book in me, just waiting to come out.
Feelings, Something More Than Feelings……
Well. I hit send.
After seven entire weeks of non-stop edits on my novel, based on the recommendations of a freelance editor whose opinions I value and respect, that book is out of here. At least, for now.
You may be mystified--as I was--by what’s known as an “editorial letter,” and the accompanying 1500 comments and corrections (give or take) that might appear in “track edits” mode in your Word document.
I’d never seen one of these letters up close and personal and let me tell you, for the first week or so after receiving one, it FEELS personal. But then you settle down to the hard work of deciphering exactly what the editor is saying, and doing your level best to bring your manuscript up to more publishable standards.
It stops being about feelings. You don’t have the luxury for feelings anymore. My editor only used one phrase that made me tear up a little. I hid my emotions from Doug until he started using the EXACT SAME PHRASE when acting as a reader for me.
The phrase? “Is this really NECESSARY?” Okay, call me immature, but every time I saw that phrase, to me it looked like “Are you really NECESSARY?” I finally told Doug to never use that phrase again under any circumstances, even if he was objecting to me spending $5 million on the McMansion in forclosure the next county over.
In the beginning of the seven-week stretch, though, it was all about feelings. My editor started out in the first page of the 22-page single-spaced letter by saying that I have a “FANTASTIC voice!!!!!” My heart swelled with a tad more pride than it had a right to. Several pages into the letter, she indicated that my story would be much better served if I could somehow make MY voice subservient to the voices of the actual characters.
See? There’s always a catch.
I felt quite complimented--and yes, even vindicated (a joyful feeling!)--several more pages into the letter when the editor wrote that my female lead and another female character each had very distinctive personalities and voices. Deflation set in when she added that each of the females had a male counterpart who sounded just like she did!
As I wound up dealing with the 1500 (count ‘em!) edits, I emailed the editor with my thanks for her tremendous help, expressing my feelings of triumph over handling so many changes to my manuscript.
She wrote back, incredulous. “FIFTEEN HUNDRED? I had NO IDEA there were so MANY!”
Which made me feel all, like, “Has any other author on the history of the PLANET faced such a large number of changes?”
Suffice it to say, I survived. And today I feel relief. For the moment, the book is out of my hands.
And now I feel like I’ve missed my fallible readers VERY much. And I feel like I’m going to be blogging a lot more, starting today.
Eau de Sugar-Free Jello
Honestly, O fallible ones. Does the battle of the bulge ever end?
I’ve been completely sugar-free since February of 2000. That’s a LONG time to go without cookies and candy and cake, oh my. A LONG TIME.
But I am used to it, and committed for life. Diabetes has and is taking its toll on several members of my family, and I refuse to go there. By the way, a recent news item absolutely cracked me up. Studies have now shown that if those patients identified as “pre-diabetic” would change their diets and exercise, they could prevent full-blown diabetes from setting in.
This is not rocket science! Type-2 diabetes is PREVENTABLE. And even, in its early stages, largely reversible! It is NOT a forgone conclusion that you are somehow destined to “get” it just because your mom, dad, and younger sister have it. Since this is one of the things I can actually control, I choose to! Every single day of the rest of my life.
But maintaining that tremendous weightloss I achieved beginning in 2000 is so tenuous as to be hilarious.
I’ve kept 50 pounds off, no problem. But the other 18? Let’s just say they come and go.
Currently, my weight is once again tracking downward. How do I know this? I weigh myself approximately every 17 minutes. Yes, you read that right. Here are the occasions that might trigger another step onto the scale:
1. general nakedness, but particularly upon waking, before coffee, and after peeing.
2. after any subsequent trip to the bathroom.
3. after a haircut.
4. after blowing my nose.
5. after filing my fingernails.
6. after removing my diamond earrings for cleaning.
7. after shaving my legs.
8. after having my blood drawn.
9. after sweating.
10. after plucking my eyebrows.
11. after removing my moisturizer.
12. after a button falls off my shirt.
13. after rubbing sleep out of my eyes.
14. after cutting loose threads from my shorts.
15. after losing an eyelash.
16. after using a toothpick.
17. after a filling falls out.
18. after scratching off a scab.
19. after shedding a tear.
20. after popping a zit.
So, here’s my formula for success for optimum weight management and diabetes avoidance: Don’t eat the white stuff (sugar, white flour, rice, potato, and pasta) and make sure your scale is calibrated within 1/64th of a pound.
Oh, and keep your fingernails nice and short.
Our Opening Ceremonies
Doug and I are watching the amazing tai chi choreographed performance with 2000 men taking part. The American announcer explained a bit about chi, but I didn’t really get it.
“Doug, do you think we need to move chi around our bodies?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m going to go move some cheese into my body.”
Let the games begin.
Calling All Writers!
Every once in a while here on fallible, I like to ask about the aspirations of my readers. Today is one of those days!
Particularly, I’d like to know how many of you are interested in becoming writers, and what you’re doing toward that end. Do you have goals you’re working toward incrementally? Baby steps, perhaps? Are you journaling or blogging to keep those juices flowing?
What about networking with other writers? Ever gone to a conference, either local or national? Joined a writers group or a critique group?
Taken any classes to work on your craft? Taken a chance and submitted an article to a magazine or newspaper?
One day soon, I hope to write more about my own journey toward publication. Every one who gets there has a personal story, you know. “The Call” from the agent saying “We’ve sold your book!” doesn’t come suddenly, or overnight. It’s often a process involving years of learning, rejection, dashed hopes and then--wonder of wonders!--acceptance and publication.
Are any of you so far along in your journey that you’re now waiting for The Call? I’d love to hear any bits of your story you’d like to share.
Too Specific?
So, I just spent two hours in the kitchen, somewhat against my better judgment, but you know? People do have to eat.
Of the ten pounds of ground beef I worked with, lots went into the World’s Largest Pyrex Dish of Zucchini Lasagne Ever. (No, I don’t make the kind of veggie lasagne where the veggies replace the meat. I make the kind where the veggies replace the pasta. Now you’re thinking like a low-carber!)
The rest of the meat got made into hamburger patties and cooked crumbled ground beef.
I did almost all the dishes associated with this mess, but then found that--with my back tempting to go out---the pan of lasagne was too heavy to lift.
I went back into our office, fell into a chair, and said to Doug, “Honey, I need you to do three things for me, okay? First, lift the lasagne into the oven. Then, transfer the crumbled meat into a zipper bag and pop it in the freezer. And then, figure out the best way to cover those patties so they don’t get freezer burned and put them in the freezer, too.”
Maybe I forgot to say please, I don’t know. All I know is that several minutes went by and then he stood to his feet and looked at me. I looked back, waiting.
Finally, he said, “Umm, I’m moving something?”
It would have been a good time to get the floor behind the fridge cleaned, but I held off.
Okay, Some Things Are Just Too Freaky For Words, And Yet I Write Them Anyway
Doug and I RARELY watch the national news, on any station.
Tonight I turned it on, and was NOT paying attention as I worked on my computer at the same time. It was purely background noise. Doug was working also, in the same room. I’m not sure he even realized I’d turned on the tube.
I just so happened to land on the CBS NATIONAL NEWS, too unmotivated to even flip channels. Out of the corner of my consciousness, I heard the broadcaster say, “When we come back, we’ll look at how evangelical Christians in a swing state might be voting in the presidential election.”
I thought, “Ho-hum, could I be more bored? OK, I won’t turn it off quite yet.”
After the commercial break, the broadcaster said, “We’re going to take a look at evangelical voters in the swing state of Missouri.”
My ears perked up. I said to Doug, “Hey, they’re going to talk about Missouri.” At which point, he turned around from his desk to watch.
- The next thing we knew, they flashed a picture of the outside of Scott, Brooke, and Kevin’s church, with the name ”Jacob’s Well” underneath. I yelled, “Doug, it’s Jacob’s Well, on NATIONAL news.”
Then they showed the inside of the church, during an actual service, with Tim Keel preaching (the wonderful man who officiated at Scott and Brooke’s wedding).
THEN the camera turned on the congregation and there was our son SCOTT! About six people on the screen and he was right THERE! One of the weirdest experiences I’ve EVER had, since WE DON’T EVEN WATCH THE CBS NEWS!!!!
We immediately called Scott, who doesn’t own a TV, to tell him what we’d just seen. “Well,” he said, ever the philosopher, “maybe you should watch national news more often.”
So I’m here to tell you: If any of you get a hankerin’ to see one of those adult kids of yours, maybe checking out the national news is just the ticket. It worked for us!
The “Pointer Outer” And Me
If any of you are still hanging with me, you might have wondered what the heck I’m doing with my life. In all fairness, I should have warned you this was coming.
The thing is, I didn’t exactly know what “this” was.
As many of you realize, if you read the blogs of authors and aspiring authors---and certainly if you are one yourself!---the road to getting a book published is long and fraught with a bunch of stuff. You read that right: stuff.
My agent and I decided to send my book out to an indy editor before shopping it around to publishers. You may not know this, but an editor doesn’t exactly fix your book herself. She’s not a BOOK FIXER, darn it. She’s a BOOK POINTER OUTER. And she is VERY good at pointing out!
What the indy editor did for me is not unlike what I might expect if the book is purchased and assigned to a publisher’s editor. So I believe I am correct to imagine that in the very best case scenario, I will be repeating this process with another editor down the road.
I’ll just go ahead and say it: I LOVE my Book Pointer Outer. I have met her in person at the American Christian Fiction Writers Conference that I attend every September. But when she finished her edits, she sent me back a TWENTY-TWO page, single-spaced letter to explain the notes that would be scattered throughout the manuscript when I finally had the guts to turn on edit mode and look at them.
Twenty-two pages!!! Now, all is not lost. At LEAST 1/3 of a page brimmed with compliments! No one said this industry was for sissies.
How many comments did she leave in the actual 350 page manuscript, you might ask? A few. LIke approximately 1500. Of those, SEVERAL (and by several I mean, literally, three) pointed to something I’d written and said “LOL” or in one particularly gratifying case, “LOLOLOLOL.”
The other 1497 pointed to, let’s just say, problems. Not terrible problems, for the most part. But stuff that must be addressed. By me.
For, you see, I am the Author! She is the Pointer Outer. Darn. Some days, I think I would make a dandy Pointer Outer. Ha.
I am buried in edits, as writers say. I have a self-imposed deadline of September 1. I really want my agent to be able to shop my book at ACFW on Sept 18. I really, really do.
If you would like to pray for me, I would humbly accept the gift of your prayers. If you would like to leave me a comment to let me know you’re still here even though I’ve been a very, very bad blogger, I would truly love to hear from you.
I’ll be back! I miss all of you! Thanks for hanging with me.
I Lost My Poor Meatball
So I hosted this brilliant baby shower for my niece Erin a couple of weekends ago.
It featured a brunch, and one of the things we served was meatballs. You know the ones: made with bulk pork sausage, shredded cheddar cheese, and Bisquick. Perfect with the yummy egg casserole Bridget made and the strawberry torte Mary made.
Anyway, there were lots of leftovers, and plenty of meatballs ended up in the freezer. Yesterday morning, I pulled out a zipper bag of them.
Late in the afternoon, suffering from a colossal headache and not sure my vision was serving me well, I stared at a glob on the carpet across the room and then said to Doug, “What IS that?”
“Oh, that,” he said. “It’s a meatball.”
“What is it DOING there?” I asked.
“It rolled off my plate.”
Evidently, the man’s plate underwent such an unexpected spasm that SEVERAL meatballs rolled off in one fell swoop. As attentive to detail as he usually is, he missed this one.
Excuses notwithstanding, he got that song in my head and I haven’t stopped humming it ever since.
“On top of Old Smoky...”
Now tell me: Who said marriage was easy?
Happiness
I am in a fortunate position these days. Because I’ve interviewed lots of authors on fallible, I’m now being sent TONS of free books by any number of publishers.
Sometimes, the publisher will send the books without asking and without the expectation that I’ll blog about the story or even post a review on Amazon. Other times, the author’s publicist will contact me, to ask me if I’d be interested in helping get the word out about a certain title.
Nancy Moser’s publicist obviously doesn’t know that we are VERY EXTREMELY CLOSE friends. But that doesn’t matter. When she asked if I’d like an advance copy of a book slated to come out in the fall, John 3:16, I jumped at the chance.
Now, right in the middle of this post, I’m going to tell you a little story. When Doug and I were in Switzerland last summer for Kevin’s graduation, we took a cable car straight up a mountain in Interlaken.
You may or may not know this about me, but I am subject to small bouts of anxiety. Like when I’m near a body of water larger than a jetted tub, or going through the Flint Hills of Kansas and have gotten too far from the safety of that nice Hardee’s travel center, or anywhere (um, Ireland, can you hear me now?) where there’s not a public bathroom.
I also have panic attacks with some regularity in cars on plain old highways, but you really don’t want to know about all that, do you? Or about when I have meltdowns in my kitchen, when I’m exploding eggs? I didn’t think so.
Anyway, cable cars which frequent steep mountains, as you might have guessed, are NOT my favorite thing. But Doug had dreamed of doing this precise thing the moment we found ourselves in Interlaken, and you know, that fellow can be so darned persistent.
Besides, if he croaked and I---because I had the wisdom and foresight to remain on terra firma---lived, I would not be overjoyed. I’d be furious with him posthumously, which isn’t too fair, and would likely contribute overly much to my anxiety quotient. Weighing out the pros and cons, I decided I’d rather kick with him than watch the disaster play out from the ground without him.
I’m just sayin’.
So we got in our car, which was hooked onto, by the sketchiest definition of the word hooked, a number of additional cars. All filled with cheerful riders, thrilled no doubt---folks who thrive on the rickety, clacking sound of a machine on the very brink of careening into the abyss below.
Doug and I were joined by an Indian family of parents, a small girl, and a boy of about ten years of age. The parents spoke no English, but pleasantly smiled as if they were blissfully confident about their eternal destination. The girl was darling and shy, and only marginally afraid. But the boy---who spoke English better than ever I have---was friendly and gregarious and having the absolute time of his life.
For the sake of the little girl, I determined not to freak out, but dear Lord, was I ever losing it on the inside. I clutched Doug and clung to every bar and rail available---and there weren’t many. My weak mental constitution was not lost on the lad, who could not stop laughing at my dilemma. After we’d been creaking up the mountain for too many minutes and I had dedicated my life and death completely to Jesus yet again, I finally turned to the boy and said, “I’m fine, really. I’m even kind of happy.”
I’ll never forget what he said next, because it was one of the most wonderfully profound things I’ve ever heard.
“I’m all the way happy.”
That settled things for me. I realized right then that there are moments in life when we just need to give it up and be all the way happy. Do you know exactly how far happy that is? I’ve decided to stop trying to quantify it. Just be all the way happy----what can it hurt?
Which brings me to Nancy’s book. I opened it a few minutes ago, and lo and behold, she’d written the dedication to ME. I don’t remember telling her about the Indian boy, but I must have. For in her dedication, she wished for me to be “all-the-way happy.”
And you know what? Right now, thanks to my dear friend Nancy Moser, I really, really am.
